The rare things in life

Getting three snail mails in a week, none of them sent from my grandfather (who otherwise is the only guy who sends ’em) is rare. It happened this week.

• Mail 1: A two page hand-written letter from a 61 years old stranger who read about me in newspaper and thought I could help him. I think I can. I will probably put up his mail on this blog and see if the readers of this blog can help him too.
• Mail 2: It contained a T-shirt about which I already blogged.
• Mail3: My new ATM card. I had lost my first ATM card in Bangalore, and finally I have a new one! Yay!

There are rare things. But there are rarer things that happen to you, or you do in life.

I sent a sms to my Dad yesterday, which read ‘love you papa’! I never ever remember putting senti to my dad! I do these things to mom at times, but no, never to dad. But then, there was a reason. Before I talk about it, let me go back a day further in past.

It was a beautiful and lazy Saturday. I decided to watch a movie in the OAT all for the sake of a company that almost always brings an indescribable joy to my otherwise happening yet incomplete life.

In the IIT Madras OAT, under normal circumstances, a movie begins at 8 PM every Saturday, and to enter the theater you have to show a yellow piece of cheap paper which they call a ticket. The students who visit the place regularly, usually keep with themselves a slightly better and thicker piece of paper (the size of an ATM card, and usually pink in color) which comes for something less than hundred bucks and is called the OAT card. They can then get that yellow entry ticket by showing the OAT card. Others (students or outsiders) who need tickets, but don’t have an OAT card, can show up sometime between six and seven in the evening in the OAT office, on the same day of the screening of a movie, pay money and get the ticket (if you are a student, and have your I-card, you are charged twenty bucks for the ticket; outsiders are charged more).

I didn’t have an OAT card. The last movie that I had seen there was a Mallu movie which was free for all (I make it a point not to miss regional movies shown in OAT, as long as they are shown for free). So, for this particular day, I paid twenty bucks to get a ticket to watch a movie sitting in the open air! 🙂

But guess what? 7:50 PM – it started raining. And it continued. Could that really stop me from still convincing her to come along? Heh. I did. But sometimes, you just have to give up. The fuckin movie got postponed! Lovely!

Anyways, the good thing to be talked about is that the movie got postponed only by a day. Yes, finally we watched it yesterday. It was called the Namesake and with my less than two hours of sleeping-time in the past thirty six hours, at one time (read: intermission) I almost dozzed off (could hear Amrit, Amrit, the movie has started… in the background).

By the time the movie was over, I had tears in my eyes. No, I am not promoting the movie. It is not a great movie. I had tears for the sole reason that I realized how much my dad meant to me.

If you have seen the movie, you must have had realized why I say so. If you haven’t seen the movie, here I go.

Ganguli (Irfan Khan) names his newly born (in USA) son Gogol, because he is forced to come up with a name in something like two minutes by the doctor in the hospital (where the delivery of the baby took place). It is decided by the couple (Tabu plays his wife) that they will change the name later when they come with something really nice. They came up with a nicer name, Nikhil, but the son who was four years old then wanted to stick to Gogol (it totally reminded my about the now official name of one of my best friends who at a similar age, didn’t allow her parents to change her then pet-name).

Times change, son grows up to be a young man and slowly realizes that Gogol sucks! It sucks too much not because it sounds funny but because it is the name of a psychotic writer who committed suicide! How could his Dad do it to him?

I can go ahead and write about the entire movie, but let me stop here itself. If whatever little I have written so far about the movie, excites you enough, watch the movie. All I am trying to say is that this movie was so much about a Dad and son (besides life in general of course), that the very fact that yesterday was my dad’s birthday (who by the way has always called me Prince, my pet-name) made me senti.

I was senti. I sent a sms to my Dad yesterday, which read ‘love you papa’!