Total Time Pass

My exam results were declared a few days earlier, and considering I'm still alive and kicking, you can safely assume they weren't that bad. Actually, they weren't bad at all.

So now, I have one full week of lazy holidays till the new session begins. Funny, but just when we're all excited to enter our new class, the creepy teachers give us these free tickets for some vacation to Timbuktu. But when we're dying to revise our syllabus before the exams, a holiday becomes a faraway fantasy. It's almost like offering a free air conditioned room in the winters.

In these hols, my timetable usually consists of munching Lays chips, sleeping for 10 hours, watching TV, gulping down bottles of Coca Cola, feasting on tikki burgers, french fries and ice cream. No wonder people say I've robbed a McDonald's outlet. But it's not as if I eat cuz I want to eat. I just eat to pass time. And cuz it gives me an excuse to sleep, and digest whatever I've wolfed down.

Recently, mum commented I was transforming into some human Garfield. She joked I was some sleeping beauty, who wants to be caged in a castle. (To give you a clear picture of what followed, I would advise you to watch episode 35091 of any of Ekta Kapoor's drama-filled saas-bahu soaps; but just replace the tearful bahu with a sweet, innocent looking kiddo of 13.) At the end of the argument, mum won. Obviously. It's like a nerd trying to defeat Mike Tyson at his own game. So mum dragged me off to go walking, the first step to weight loss, with her.

Walking at eight in the night with crickets adding to the background score might sound pleasant. Very pleasant. But wait. It's also the time the angry office goers return home racing in their Honda City's, and televisions are set at full volume, so much so that poor pedestrians in the middle of the streets can hear Rakhi Sawant's comments on losing Nach Baliye and Dhoni underplaying his recent victory on CNN IBN. Eight in the night is also the time when the vegetable and fruit vendors arrive with their loaded carts, and aunties are burdened with the task of deciding what curry they would prepare for dinner that night. So a peaceful road adorned with flickering streetlights eventually turns into the most happening place in the colony, and walking, the best sport in the world (not that I know many). As we walked, I chatted a lot with mum too, filling her on the latest news from school, and that Kareena Kapoor was actually lighter than me.

Apart from walking, I caught up on some reading too. Well, I'm not the one who crosses the road with her nose buried in a hard bound book and causes a traffic jam, but on the other hand, I don't need an inauguration ceremony when I'm entering a bookstore too. I just read whatever I can find, mostly judging a book by its cover illustrations and other components of the jacket. A good book, for me, refers to anything that can entertain me while nothing's good on MTV. I just read Chetan Bhagat's books-'One night at the Call Centre' and 'Five Point Someone'- and found the latter incredibly boring. I also read 'Interpreter of Maladies', which happily accompanies mum these days to work in her giant office bag , and decided that a short story wasn't my cup of tea.

Well, I've updated you about my activities in the past week, and am eagerly looking forward to my first day in class 9. But now, I gotta go. The pizza (with extra cheese) delivery man just arrived.