I woke up feel­ing slightly depressed on I-Day. A few nag­ging mat­ters refused to leave me in peace, and the best way to tackle this state, I’ve found over time, is to occupy myself with some activ­ity or another.

Geetha and I had noble inten­tions of watch­ing the I-Day parade. Geetha had asked me the night before, “should we not do some­thing patri­otic?” and we agreed that watch­ing the parade would def­i­nitely be along those lines.

Unfor­tu­nately, none of us could wake up on time.

Instead, about 7 of us met up for a late lunch at Indi­joes, which had a spe­cial buf­fet for the day. The place was packed and it was a good half hour before we got a place.

After a long lunch, we moved on to the Café Cof­fee Day at Indi­rana­gar where we chat­ted, debated and argued (Vasu in par­tic­u­lar) till some of us got so loud that it was sur­pris­ing they didn’t ask us to leave. This par­tic­u­lar Cof­fee Day has a really agree­able loca­tion. And with the pleas­ant Ban­ga­lore sun fil­ter­ing through the trees, and a nice breeze blow­ing, it was indeed a lovely after­noon to spend some time catch­ing up with friends.

The next stop was Blos­soms, always a great place to head when you want some com­fort for the soul and mind. Geetha and Suman gave me com­pany and we browsed around for an hour or so. I picked up a whole lot of books to read. Some com­fort books, some for intel­lec­tual stim­u­la­tion and some that will look good on my book­case. You need all kinds.

Not want­ing the day (and the four days of bliss) to end, we decided to do some­thing fun and headed to Zero G.

As luck would have it, there was a pri­vate party going on there and we bumped into a friend who was invited. We didn’t need much coax­ing to move to the pool­side. And there was more good news.

The singer KK (aka Kailash Kher) was com­ing for the party and would be singing a few numbers.

Now, I’ve really liked some of his songs, the num­ber one on my list being Teri Dee­wani. I think I lis­tened to it about 10 times one par­tic­u­lar day.

KK has a very inter­est­ing his­tory and you can read about how he broke into the music scene nearly two years ago with his uncon­ven­tional music style and the hit song Allah ke bande. He’s a small man in stature but packs in a pow­er­ful punch with his voice.

Mean­while, I was absolutely thrilled. Sit­ting there, beside the pool­side, the water shim­mer­ing with reflec­tions from all around, and the lights of Ban­ga­lore glim­mer­ing in the dis­tance and a very cool breeze threat­en­ing to turn us into ice cubes, we lis­tened to KK sing a few of his well-known num­bers. It was quite an unex­pected treat since he didn’t really come to per­form he said later, but to party.

All thanks to the lovely lady who we bumped into by chance!

tere naam se jee loon, tere naam se marr jaaun
tere naam se jee loon, tere naam se marr jaaun
teri jaan ke sadke mein kuchh aaisa kar jaaun
tune kya kar dala . marr gayi main . mitt gayi main . ho ri . ha ri . ho gayi main
teri dee­wani .. dee­wani
teri dee­wani .. dee­wani
– from teri dee­wani, by kk