Weekend Majaa

I have always looked forward to and waited for weekends. Come Thursday and I start making weekend plans for myself. No, no, its not what you're thinking! I'm not a party animal by any standards (my friends will tell you that I'm one of the most boring people my age). But barring this one last year as a "poor graduate student", my weekends have been exactly what they're supposed to be - FUN!

As a ten year old, my only agenda each weekend was a visit to Eloor lending library on Infantry Road to pick up the next batch of Famous Fives, Nancy Drews and Amar Chitra Kathas. The four of us - my parents, Ajay (my b(r)other) and I - used to leave home on Saturday afternoon after a heavy, typical South Indian meal and drive across town to Eloor. I vividly remember sitting in the passenger seat of our Maruti 800 having trivial fights with Ajay about keeping the window open or some such thing. All this while my parents would have discussions, sometimes heated, most times casual, about happenings or developments in the family. Gossip basically. :) My Dad's office was in the same complex as Eloor. So, for more reasons than one, he would encourage us to spend more time reading and picking up books while he caught up on that something he had left unfinished on the previous evening because my Mum had ordered him to leave office immediately. :D

Once in high school, my plans were focussed more on things I could talk about with my friends when I went back to school on Monday morning. Peer pressure indeed! Sometimes we would go watch a movie at Galaxy Cinemas (Its a pity they shut Galaxy down. It was my favourite among all the cinemas in BLR). Chomping on corn puffs and swigging down a tall glass of Mirinda, I would meticulously form opinions about the actors, their costumes, the music and all those things that make or break a movie. Sometimes my cousins would accompany us on such movie outings and it used to be all the more fun then. After the movie there would be a long drawn debate about "Where do we go for dinner?". Most of the time my Dad had his way. Nevertheless, we enjoyed dinner and got back home cribbing that we had a whole week of school to deal with before the next weekend!

Weekends during the four years of engineering were most hectic! We lazed around the whole week attending classes and writing "lab record" and hence had so much fun to catch up on over Saturday and Sunday! :) Another reason why it got as hectic was that now I had to deal with multiple outings - one with family and one or more with friends. Saturday evenings were spent entirely with my Mum. She and I used to go shopping in the most crowded of places picking up a lot of stuff each time, mostly for me. Clothes, shoes, bags, junk jewellery, books, music-you name it, we shopped for it! Alongside, I had a bunch of crazy friends from college who always made the most bizarre plans. Lunch here, movie there and then coffee at CCD somewhere else! Phew! I was mostly reluctant to join them in their escapades since it was likely to create a hole in my Dad's pocket eventually! :) But having said that, I'm not really hard to convince, especially in matters of fun. So I used to tag along after all.

Each and every one of those weekends was thoroughly enjoyable! It was not as though I was toiling during the week so as to crave for them that much. Still, they got me to feel good about life in general :) It is the exact same feeling I'm getting as I wrap this post up. I hope to get back to that kind of a carefree weekend routine soon. And this time its going to be a totally new experience for me since I'm going to be away from home and family. I'm sure I'll figure out something to do! :)

In the meanwhile, hope y'all have a great weekend!