Yesterday, a bunch of people @ office wanted to go to an unknown and untested hotel to get drunk at night. I wasn’t so sure of the idea, I just want to drive home and on the way have something, but those folks wanted to get drunk.

I was in 50-50 mood. A friend of mine had taken me to a tea shop near Zeeshan and I had chicken sanwidch at lunch, I was kind a half to three quarter full, plus the new hotel my friends were calling for a drink was beyond tollgate and I had to waste Rs 54/- for that. Rs 50/- would be equivalent to 10Km of my drive from office.

When I joined this office as a consultant, I was promised work from home, liberal work ethics, but now they seem to suspect me for not working or something. I thought bad times had passed when my wife left me, then I had my partner in Trumatics who started yelling me, so I had to leave that company, and when I thought that I was in a good office at this one, and after few months of working, this boss too gets mad at me, he accuses me of taking more than 15 minutes to drink tea, and when I am not in office at 11 AM he gets upset. I have never seen this behaviour in good I.T company. Later to my happiness I found that he was behaving like this way to many other people, particularly to senior employees. So I am forced to spend a lot on fuel as my consultations is far far off from city and I must be there unless I am ill or something. So spending another Rs 54/- on a toll / travel did not look wise.

But then one of my friends popped in and offered me a bike ride and I was in. No need to pay tolls. The hotel we went was Gokulam Park Sabari. There was a bar at the terrace, the ambience was good and clean. There wasn’t many people there. It was a bar cum restaurant. Out of the dozen of us, only three drank. I ordered a mutton briyani, a tandoori platter, asked the waiter what he would have if he were me, he said chilli eggs and I ordered that one too.

The dish took long time to come, really long, somewhere between 20 minutes to half an hour. the chilli eggs came first and they were good. Then came the briyani, it was kind of tasteless, but you could eat it if you don’t mind rough meat. The raitha was good, it was made of cucumber as onions can be eaten by only the rich in India, the brinjal curry was not good, it was like brinjal’s in some kind of tasteless sauce, but they weren’t too bad either. Then came the tandoori platter, the chicken in it seemed to smell like it was soaked in some kind of medicine or something, it smelled like some kind of chemical. The prawns were okay, and so was the minced mutton tandoori, but the fish smelled, I even thought it was rotten. I just don’t know.

Once eaten, the bad smells stayed in my mouth and it would stick, I just lost appetite for eating and lost happiness. I love real good food and people who make it, but this was hell. I know in pubs attached to restaurants they serve low quality food because people who drink sans the sense of taste and they would eat almost anything without complaint. Here too that seems true, but the taste was real worst.

If you had put some one in prison and want him to suffer, I guess you can serve him this food. One would realise that life has no meaning after eating this one. Well that’s the truth, but realising it mellows your enjoyment. I did not even eat a third of what I should have eaten. I just sat there enjoying the breeze at their terrace pub. Looks like the drunkards in our office did not seem to mind the waste food they were served.

The hard part is not that. I had gone to the hotel expecting to have great food and great time, so I had my hunger raising, when I drove back home beyond 10:30 PM, all others food shops were closed and I had to sleep kind of hungry.