and more chaiiii...

Its a wintry morning, Singhsaab and I have decided to go wild and walk down to Kamal tea stall instead of the pantry for our 11 o clock cuppa. I am in deep in thought about global warming, megan foxxxy and whathaveyou while Singhsaab has just taken a break from building another complex BI query.

We are walking along companionably when singhsaab nods his head vigorously in response to nothing in particular and announces "Medical doesn't cover OPD charges, y'know". "Eh?" I go. "Swines" he carries on smoothly "its all a scam...!" I am now utterly tongue-tied at this scholarly holding of the forth. "you tell me, how many times will you get a brain tumour?" he looks at me and before I turn my fuddled brain to the actual mathematics of the knotty problem, he thunders on "and how many times will you get a viral fever?" I close my eyes and shake my head in amazement at one more of singhsaab's unbelievably profound conversations. I open my eyes to find him calmly looking at me.

"Chai?"

Chai!

Dilli has a vigor and zest all its own, most of which even the sweeping surge of modernity is hard pressed to contain.

Picture this: its about 11 a.m on a thursday morning and my first day in the offices of a busy large corporation (BLC). Hundreds of worker bees hunched over flickering screens and busy excel sheets, the hum of profitable conversations counting millions of rupees of buying and selling, I trundle over to the office table size pantry room where weary old kattoo is hunched beside the coffee machine. I am about to politely interrupt his reverie when something large and busy bustles past me into the pantry room rubbing his hands in utterly undeserved glee and booms "Kattoo , yaar - ek BADHIYA si chai pila de..!"

Kattoo bursts into action as if called by Dalai Lama to invade China and turning purposefully towards the coffee machine, with as much zest as his twenty year old body and 7.2 mm of turning radius will allow, pushes the big red button which says TEA on it, watches intently as weak tepid tea dribbles into a cup and produces it with a flourish. One sip by big bustling man and he erupts "waah kattoo! mazaa aa gaya!!" and trundles away happily.

Its inane - a meaninglessly celebrated and overinvested moment of the day and yeah, its incredibly Dilli!