Chunnu aur Munni - Day 3 in Pondicherry
The third day started with a trip to the Chunnambar Water Sports Centre. Well, in the name of sports, you could play volleyball on the beach, but more about that later. We took a short boat ride to a beach. The boatman kept giving us a few thrills by turning the tiller first one way & then the other, making the boat sway a bit. Near the beach, we saw a few amazing fishes... some were very thin, about 2 inches long & orange in colour. We saw some amazing zebra fishes, I call them that coz they have concentric, elliptical black lines on their white body, resembling a zebra in a crazy way.
On the beach, we joined in for a game of volleyball. Shikhin, being the experienced pro, shone through especially with his serves & took the game to 14 before the rest of us started getting the hang of it. Then we got 8 straight points, thanks largely to my serves (:-)), before we went down fighting. We spent the next hour sitting under the shade, sipping warm beer & generally chatting. We were just warming up for a nice, long discussion on some fact of life when our ferry was announced & we had to regretfully get up.
For lunch, we went to... where else... but Rendezvous! By the time, we got around to ordering, I already had visions of a Veg Sizzler in front of me & they were not at all disappointing. We tucked in heartily & Shikhin devoured his sea creatures with gusto. Dessert was in the form of ice cream with cake. Rendezvous was, for me, the high point of the entire trip & I would strongly recommend it to all future visitors to Pondicherry.
Another quick bath later, we started on our trip back to Bangalore, settling in for a weary ride back home, imagining that all our adventures for the trip were over. How wrong we were!
The short cut that we took from ECR to the National Highway, saved us a few kilometres but we ended up wasting quite a bit of time. The road was non-existent & in the places where it existed, it resembled quite a few of the Bangalore roads.
Thankfully, we reached the National Highway & the drive was serene for a long time. After a few hours, the fun started. We found a few policemen blocking the highway & we were diverted to a branching road, where we found a few people arm-twisting vehicle owners into paying some sort of a tax, before they could carry on. We flared up, turned back & got back to where we were headed on the main road, unmindful of the policemen, calling & flapping their hands. Some time later, we had to take another detour to the left, as this being a Poornima, there was a huge procession of devotees near some temple on the road. We ended up driving for hours through some small towns & a lot of villages, before we came back on the main road. We thanked our stars & picked up speed again.
Now to the finale - Chunnu aur Munni ko aakhir gussa kyon aata hai?
The conversation started veering towards the favourite topic of wives - their husband's habits. Archana & Namrata dived in with gusto and Shikhin & I, being quite used to it now, just kept listening & enjoying. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Munni looking angrily at Chunnu & then at us, as if to say that she knew what the girls were talking about. Chunnu was growing redder by the minute & it took a few winks & sheepish grins from me to calm him down. Archana asked a simple question - 'How did you guys meet?' & the conversation suddenly got very interesting. Namrata & Shikhin have a very interesting story to relate and I'll leave it for Shikhin to mention it in his blog/autobiography. However that story was very absorbing & we spent hours listening to it in rapt attention. Dinner was at another dhaba & there we started off with our own story, which was quite short & not as eventful. I could sense Chunnu & Munni bursting to tell us about their adventures, but we were too tired to concentrate anymore & we slept off, that is Archana & me. Shikhin & Namrata stayed awake till the end & dead-tired, we reached Bangalore, around 1:30 pm.
So, now that you know a little about about Chunnu & Munni, make sure that you do meet them. They'll be hanging merrily in a big, silver coloured car, somewhere in Koramangala. By the way, if you see a couple inside, discussing the merits of washing their feet before sleeping... say a hi to Namrata & Shikhin too...
On the beach, we joined in for a game of volleyball. Shikhin, being the experienced pro, shone through especially with his serves & took the game to 14 before the rest of us started getting the hang of it. Then we got 8 straight points, thanks largely to my serves (:-)), before we went down fighting. We spent the next hour sitting under the shade, sipping warm beer & generally chatting. We were just warming up for a nice, long discussion on some fact of life when our ferry was announced & we had to regretfully get up.
For lunch, we went to... where else... but Rendezvous! By the time, we got around to ordering, I already had visions of a Veg Sizzler in front of me & they were not at all disappointing. We tucked in heartily & Shikhin devoured his sea creatures with gusto. Dessert was in the form of ice cream with cake. Rendezvous was, for me, the high point of the entire trip & I would strongly recommend it to all future visitors to Pondicherry.
Another quick bath later, we started on our trip back to Bangalore, settling in for a weary ride back home, imagining that all our adventures for the trip were over. How wrong we were!
The short cut that we took from ECR to the National Highway, saved us a few kilometres but we ended up wasting quite a bit of time. The road was non-existent & in the places where it existed, it resembled quite a few of the Bangalore roads.
Thankfully, we reached the National Highway & the drive was serene for a long time. After a few hours, the fun started. We found a few policemen blocking the highway & we were diverted to a branching road, where we found a few people arm-twisting vehicle owners into paying some sort of a tax, before they could carry on. We flared up, turned back & got back to where we were headed on the main road, unmindful of the policemen, calling & flapping their hands. Some time later, we had to take another detour to the left, as this being a Poornima, there was a huge procession of devotees near some temple on the road. We ended up driving for hours through some small towns & a lot of villages, before we came back on the main road. We thanked our stars & picked up speed again.
Now to the finale - Chunnu aur Munni ko aakhir gussa kyon aata hai?
The conversation started veering towards the favourite topic of wives - their husband's habits. Archana & Namrata dived in with gusto and Shikhin & I, being quite used to it now, just kept listening & enjoying. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Munni looking angrily at Chunnu & then at us, as if to say that she knew what the girls were talking about. Chunnu was growing redder by the minute & it took a few winks & sheepish grins from me to calm him down. Archana asked a simple question - 'How did you guys meet?' & the conversation suddenly got very interesting. Namrata & Shikhin have a very interesting story to relate and I'll leave it for Shikhin to mention it in his blog/autobiography. However that story was very absorbing & we spent hours listening to it in rapt attention. Dinner was at another dhaba & there we started off with our own story, which was quite short & not as eventful. I could sense Chunnu & Munni bursting to tell us about their adventures, but we were too tired to concentrate anymore & we slept off, that is Archana & me. Shikhin & Namrata stayed awake till the end & dead-tired, we reached Bangalore, around 1:30 pm.
So, now that you know a little about about Chunnu & Munni, make sure that you do meet them. They'll be hanging merrily in a big, silver coloured car, somewhere in Koramangala. By the way, if you see a couple inside, discussing the merits of washing their feet before sleeping... say a hi to Namrata & Shikhin too...
posted by umang at 12:19 PM
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