ArpitGarg's Weblog

Whenever my friends used to tell some interesting incident of their life, I was always like, “O! God Why have you never done anything so cool in my life?” Really people, this has been one of my greatest regrets, I have nothing interesting to tell. I never understood why and how people have so much interesting to tell? Let me jot down a few of such things which my friends told me, that were quiet fun and unique.

• One of my friend never forgets what his dream was last night. He can explain you his dream in such detailed interesting fashion that you feel like “Well dreams are such fun. Why do I never remember them?”

• Many of my friends have interesting tales about the holidays they spent in their ancestral village. I always feel like a “Joey”, whenever some one is telling such a story. The tales of old havelis, bonfires, gang fights. I could never believe that they do happen outside movies. But so do people say!

• One of my friend stopped visiting his ancestral village, coz his parents were worried that his aunt (who lives in village) would feed him poison coz she didn’t have a son. I shook my head in utter disbelief. He said his parents were damn worried.

• Once when I was sitting in a friends room at college. A colleague came rushing in asking us to google out the number of Chapra (Bihar) S.P, coz their has been an attack on his family and he wanted to instruct the SP to take care of the situation till he reaches the home. (Not that I want such a thing to happen to me, but still…something close to that would do)

• A couple of my friends used to play with used contraceptives and fill them up with water and swing them like balloons. (I still wonder, was I so dumb that it never occurred to me?)

• One of my friend used to play with snakes and bats since childhood. I was sure that he was faking, when one day, he caught a flying bat with a towel and put it in a jar in front of us. We were like stunned. Then he captured a couple more.

• One of my friend had very interesting characters in his neighborhood. One was a guy who used to rub under his arm and then smell his palm. Other was a shopkeeper who used to fight with his own children as to who would drink the sip of pepsi that the last customer have left in the bottle. Another one was a African guy, who went mad when people called him “Kaalu”.

• One of my friends had a personal stalker, now would you not long to have one for yourself. How unfair God.

• One of my friends’ family tried to get him engaged when he was in college. The girl’s (with whom my friend was to get engaed) sister who was also married to my friends’s cousin was putting emotional pressure on him (my friend was in first year of bachelors at that time). The need for such a hurry was that the girl was 5’10 or 5’11 something and her family knew that finding well educated suitable groom would be hell of a problem and my friend is 6’2. He had to do something fishy to get out of it. I mean wouldn’t it have been interesting, at least a tale to tell, if it would have happened to me. But shucks, I am not 6’2.

• All of my friends have had atleast one such childhood fight (fight bole to ekdum dishum dishum waali), that they still cherish to remember, but not me. God has been so cruel to me that I never as much slapped someone in my school as far as I remember. No broken tooth, no bruised leg, no black eye, no swollen forehead. Being fat also didn’t help. As they say, “Fat people are very jovial and don’t fight”. Neither can they flight nor can they chase you down.

It’s not that my life has been totally void. It’s not the case. I have had my share of fun, my share of smiles, my share of cries, my share of naughtiness, and my share of tries. But the incidents have been nowhere close to the ones cited above. When my friends used to tell me their stories, they didn’t seem true to me; so much so that I used to think that they are faking most of it. But over the years I have learnt that maybe not having any such amusing incidents in my life at all, makes my life all together differently amusing.