I’ve tried to make it a point that I spend my birthday in Mumbai (except last year). It usually isn’t a big affair. I normally celebrate it with Lil white mouse whose is on 15th. The same was the case this year as well.

Went over to her place a little before lunch. The Bus No. 39 is a blessing since the route is from Seepz to Worli Depot. Lunch was not simple, as is usually the case

Was able to grab some sleep after lunch amidst all the preparations that we were involved in for the small evening party. Unlike last year, the party this year was a small, quiet one.

Lil white mouse had few of her friends over. Lil white mouse had baked her birthday cake, which was an extremely delicious chocolate cake with a white chocolate topping.

Dinner was chicken cheese and macronic bake, Ceasar’s salad and spinach pie, all of which were extremely yummy. This was washed down by liquor.

Did I mention that I munched down on tonnes of snacks before that

Dinner was followed by a trifle, which was put together by yours truly. Let’s just say that I ate well

Had plans of staying over at Lil white mouse’s place itself and so, at 12 o’clock we brought in my birthday by cutting the cake. Chatted quite a bit and finally crashed. Woke up late into the morning, which has become kind of custom for me, and which I desperately need to change!

Spent the rest of the day with Lil white mouse who came over to my place to spend time with me and my family.

Sunday was the quiet day spent at home. Watched something on the computer and got my bags packed for the return journey, which was extremely painful and long!

For those interested, I’ve updated my Flickr account with photos of the birthday, freshers’ party and some photos of us in the Admissions Team.

August is always a high-activity month with a huge number of birthdays and other occasions.

Freshers’ Party

After being postponed several times, the Fresher’s Party finally took place on August 6.

Dance parties aren’t really my favorite and this is usually no exception, especially when the DJ should pay for playing the trash he dished out!

Without doubt, I spent a good portion of my time outside the venue, which was the SIU poolside.

Food however, was better this time, with chicken added to the menu. Needless to say I ensured I ate well.

Below is a photo of me with my date and below that is a photo of five of us in our group.

The Birthday

On 12th, was Sumukhi’s birthday. She threw the party on Tamana rooftop for about 40 of us. Food for me was primarily chicken. (Did I tell you that I avoid vegetarian food?)

Another thing I avoid is dancing free style. I prefer ballroom, the little that I know! Here’s Sumukhi with the three of us roommates.

Anyway, Suchi was the DJ for a good portion of the time until yours truly took over the laptop. Spent the next 45 minutes making people dance! For serious wanna-be deejays out there, Virtual DJ is an amazing software. The demo version works very well for a 21 day period.

Among other stuff

Our area has been facing major power cuts. We had no power this weekend and a good portion of the time the generator was also switched off.

We decided to go off to the city. We had to shop for Sumukhi and also had good time to kill. Went over to Pune Central to shop for the same. IMO, the place is very badly designed and it was horribly crowded being a weekend.

After some shopping, we dropped into Little Italy next door. Little Italy is a completely vegetarian restaurant, but they specialize in pizzas and pastas, so I could survive! The food was decent, service was bad and bill was high

We tramped back into Pune Central after dinner and landed up in Food Bazaar at the top floor. Did some heavy grocery shopping, picking up apples, biscuits, corn flakes and juices. We’re realized it makes more sense to go out there once a week and pickup food instead of regularly visiting Sweety stores in campus.

Ohh, btw, I’m in Mumbai for the next few days

And, have you visited Techtites lately? There’s a new look and regular updates.

Should have posted this a while back, but as usual original posts coming out of a budding MBA student can be rare.

Anyway, I came down to Mumbai on 14th on college work. Our job was to interview an entrepreneur. The problem, he didn’t really have the time. So, this turned out to be a failed project, where the three of us travelled to town, took photographs of a deserted room and then headed home.

Found out that Marol is now connected to Seepz by a flyover, which has cut down my commutation time by over 25 minutes.

The next day, i.e. 15th August is Lil white mouse‘s birthday. Had planned to give her a surprise by dropping in, only to find out that my darling roommates had spoiled it!

The party was good and as expected I helped out. I’m waiting for her to update her blog with her tale of the events. Got home around 12am and awoke by 5.30am to leave for Pune.

Got back in time for my 16th lecture. The class celebrated my birthday with a cake.

Sadly, the jacket which was to protect my clothes from the unnecessary waste of cake wasn’t very useful.

The past ten days have been pretty normal with nothing special under than the normal college life. Have had absolutely no breaks and very little sleep.

The college website work is going well, though it could have been better. Updates on that later.

I also completed judging the WLTC Plugin Competition. The results should be out anyday.

As part of the OSHE program I talked about a few posts back, we had to visit an industry in Pune itself to study the safety measures they have in place.

My batch visited Forbes Marshall in Pune.

The place in around 40 minutes from SCMHRD and the bus ride was noisy (leave a bunch of students in a bus and you will get this), but comfortable.

Forbes Marshall are experts in everything steam. We were allowed to tour their factory on our own and we roamed around gathering information about their processes and more importantly observing things out of place.

The place isn’t too big and we were able to complete our tour rather quickly and so went off to the canteen and “observed the safety” out there. This involved tasting the medu vadas, biscuits and tea. We also checked the table tennis area to ensure that everything was in place.

We ended the session at Forbes Marshall with a brief presentation on their safety plans. We left the place and decided to next survey the safety and McDonald’s and Naturals. This was a little bonus from the Industrial Visit.

If you’re hunting for more photos check out the Forbes Marshall photo album.

August 2nd saw the arrival of the much awaited Freshers’ Party, which ended up leaving much to be desired.

Had mentioned earlier that the juniors had to ask out the seniors as part of “the process”. Clinton found me my date who turned out to be Raghav‘s girlfriend Gandhali.

Aditya, armed with his 7 megapixel Canon Powershot S3 IS, was our chief photographer and went crazy clicking out tonnes of snaps. I’ve filtered out the huge list with some “worthy” ones.

To sum up the Freshers’, the food sucked and the music sucked even more. The only thing good about the event was the icecream. And, as a nice bonus factor I had a long conversation with the cute li’l mouse.

We all went back to the hostel around 2am, which is one of the latest that we have been out so far.

I look forward to such events, though we need to find a better DJ and definitely some better food.

The last week has just flown by with most of my time was spent not studying.

Wednesday – Party 1

On Wednesday, we were singing for a Silver Wedding mass. The mass was held at Atma Darshan and the reception was at Le Royal Meridien, for which the entire choir was invited.

Had just dorned my normal formals for the mass, so went home to pickup my blazer as well as drop off the bike (Never drink and drive my mama said )

U. Conrad picked me up and we were among the first to reach the reception. Ate, drank, danced and feasted on food and desert.

Got dropped home a little after 1.30am and came home and crashed into bed.

Thursday – Dinner 1

Spent the entire day at Melody‘s house working on her blog. Convinced her to add adsense (which is performing really bad overall for me currently). Also added some internal pages and top CSS navigation bar (I’m getting good at this).

We went out for dinner to 5 which is near Yoko’s in Santacruz. The place is posh and the food is good, however the service is simply pathetic. It took us 10 minutes to find someone to take our order and then it took another half hour to get served. In addition he messed up the bill, by not informing us for an extra charge. At the end of it we were pissed off.
Expensive places!

Friday – Party

Saakshi threw a “Welcome Home” party for Melody and invited a good amount of the junta from the Indian Bloggers’ scene and their friends. Met a few of them for the first time, while others for the second… well I’m not a regular.

My phone came handy to click a few photos, though the quality wasn’t too great. Anyway, here are a few: Knocked off on request.

Saturday – Lunch and Dinner 2

Met up with Krupa, my ex-office colleague for lunch and a movie. We went off to watch Life in a Metro which tells the tale of several people in Mumbai. The movie was rather slow. Can’t say it was great, can’t say it was bad.

Watched the movie at Chandan in Juhu. It has been several years since I have been to Chandan. The theatre remains the same, but the area surrounding it has developed a lot!
We went to Pizza Hut in Juhu for the late lunch and got a drink free because the guy forgot to put it on the bill.

Lil white mouse came over after work and she stayed for mass. After mass, the two of us went to Lucky’s for dinner. It has been a while since I visited Lucky’s. Tried some different dishes this time which were yummy.

And then there was Sunday

Lil white mouse came over today for lunch. Mom seemed to outdo herself today. Lil white mouse left in the evening and I got down to getting some work done.
Tomorrow I study.

One of my closest friends (who now lives at the other end of the globe) Nikhil‘s sister is getting married tomorrow. As part of the series of functions, yesterday was the Sangeet. The sangeet seems to be along the lines of our roce.

The reception was held at Hotel Royal Garden in Juhu, which turned out to be a nice hotel. Had to be knowing Nikhil’s folks…

I thought I would be late but guess 9pm wasn’t late enough. Folks I knew soon started tripping in after that so I had my company.

Got a picture of the bride and groom to be. Did I mention that having an N73 is very handy?

The highlight of the evening was a small dance performance that Nikhil participated in. If I had known this I would have come prepared with my handy cam…. Well as I promised Nikhil here is one picture of it.

Ate a great deal courtesy one waiter who missed us once and over fed us after that. He even ensured that Cloreisha got a glass of juice to wash down her caramel custard

Overall had a great time. Got home only post 12am. My legs aren’t sore because I didn’t dance too much. Wedding tomorrow…

Christmas and Internet has been kind of responsible for no posts for quite a while on this blog. Christmas is over, but the internet continues to remain bad.

So I’m gonna make a post while I have the chance to do so.

I ended the week before Christmas with a wedding mass that we were singing for. As usual, we trooped out to eat after the mass. We chose Domino’s because of its proximity. My opinion that Domino’s is not an eatin was re-enforced.

The service was pathetic, they took a great deal of time to serve us (their thirty minute guarantee should apply to those eating in as well!)

I didn’t go for the Christmas midnight mass, as I prefer the morning masses. Did the second reading as well.

We made last minute plans to go for the Christmas Dance at Bandra Gym.
Picked up The Mouse from her place and then the ticket from a friend of hers. Stopped at Pot Pourii in Bandra for some dinner. I guess that either I don’t know what to eat at the place or the food just sucks there!

We reached the gym before 9pm and jived a good deal until 11.30pm with a small break in the middle.

With a little food in our bellies we resumed dancing until they moved the music inside and started playing stuff I hate dancing on.
By 3.30am we were totally bored and decided to just leave instead of waiting for the slow music to start.
Slept a good portion of 26th which is expected when you don’t sleep most of the night

Had choir practice on 26th evening to practice for yet another wedding mass on the 28th at Dominic Savio. Couples really need to prepare for their masses!

27th was the day of the grand Blogger Christmas party organized by Ms. Voice in Her Head.

I reached there in the afternoon itself to help her to get things in order (little wonder I never throw parties).
Her Mom is a real sweetheart and without her I am sure the party wouldn’t have come close to being as good as it was, especially the food aspect.
Read Melody’s mini post. Sakshi has a small writeup with photos of the evening and Vulturo has a detailed post of his experience.

It felt a little weird as a few there, Melody and Sakshi in particular, referred to me as India’s No. 1 Resident blogger. It’s nice to have that title, but I definitely am not that. And more importantly, I never set my sights only on India
Not being too much of the extrovert I chose to keep to myself and the mouse for a better part of the evening.

Today was an unfruitful day in college. However I did get my HDFC account closed, printouts of the transcripts and gave my bike for servicing, which means that I am without wheels for a day.

The weekend ahead is going to be with the books, with two mocks and classes as well.

Had a communion party of my second cousin Danielle today. The party was held at Orchid in Wellingdon Gym. Have been there almost a year back.

The party was a typical family party. This time Mom was in form. We ended up winning all the three games :O

Prizes to the right for those who don’t believe

Food was decent. No dancing, as is customary at most of our functions, but for the masala which is something I always avoid!

Got back home and continued what I do best (or some of the many things) viz. blogging. Hope to hit the bed soon.

Got together with Marilyn today and gave a small snack party to the choir today to celebrate our birthdays.

Picked up some chocolate balls and chicken pattice from Merwan’s in Andheri West, some chips from Hotchips and cold drinks (yes we drink Pepsi inspite of the pesticide scare).

Choir practice was good. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it for the wedding mass tommorrow.

Tomorrow and day after is well packed as usual. Looking forward to it.

I finished my first unemployed week today. Did a bit of studing in the whole week. Got to start a lot more serious studying now!

Yesterday was my last day at Larsen & Toubro – Control and Automation. My design team threw me a farewell party. Will be honest and say that I did not expect it. It came as a great surprise

Was gifted a Parker Pen set. Was also given my first birthday card (well in advance) along with a box of chocolates (which everyone made sure was shared ).

Will miss you all! And you can hold me to my birthday treat once the monsoons pass

Finished off the clearance formalities today at Powai. Just got a little settlement of dues pending for tomorrow and collecting my service certificate.

25 months in Larsen & Toubro Ltd, a long journey. I sure have learnt a lot!

And now it is time to hit the books! Have just three months to go for the CAT and I haven’t been faring so well so far (though I did have some welcome distraction today).