A Tale of Two Birthdays

A few weeks ago RD was telling me about a Karaoke device that he had brought from India for some friends of his. Both of us agreed that this was a novelty and of limited interest to us. The experience of last Friday night might have made me feel different.

It was the occasion of Vanitha's BD party, organized slightly ahead of schedule by Prem. The party was going along in routine fashion - good food - pasta, salad, cake from Champagne bakery (although the Menage a Trois was questionable :-)), and kids running around helter-skelter. Poker was not on the cards in honor of the BD girl and instead the plan was to watch a movie streamed from Netflix (I picked Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). Before that could happen, Keerti started encouraging Sanjay to sing a song for the group. The rest of the group had to push him a bit, but eventually he got going. A couple of folks hummed along and soon folks were suggesting other songs to sing. Malini had heard MGD sing a Kannada devotional song (Gajamukhane Ganapathiye) in the temple and tried to get him to sing that one, which he eventually did with great gusto. Then Vanitha was prevailed upon to sing a popular Tamil song (Illaya Nila). One song led to another and very soon it became hard to stop. Sometimes we sang the entire song, but mostly it would peter out after the opening lines. Every so often, Latha would startle us by jumping into a high falsetto, but it was all par for the course. It was mostly old Hindi songs and there was a lot of shared nostalgia reflected our choices.

Antakshri was suggested and after some more general singing, we started a game of antaskshri and that went on till almost 1 AM. The game was a bit unconventional in that we did not stick to just Hindi songs - Vanitha contributed some Tamil songs and towards the end, Murali broke into some Kannada songs for the guys side. For some reason I was not allowed to sing any ghazals on the narrow technicality that they weren't 'movie' songs. The guys were a bit more into the songs themselves - between Sanjay, Rahul, Murali, and myself, we knew a good bit of the lyrics of our favorite songs and insisted on singing them all the way through, which caused some aggravation to the women who were more competitive and wanted to get through the songs quickly. Malini and Keerthi knew a lot of the newer songs which was a distinct blind spot for the guys, but we managed to keep pace. Through all this, Prem was a rather bored bystander, serving up two rounds of tea and desperately scouting for a cell phone to play some games on. He seemed truly bewildered that the rest of us knew all the same songs. To his credit, he tolerated us rather well. Hari must have had a long day - he was desperately trying to grab some shut-eye with Alekhya in his arms enveloped in singing of often sketchy pitch and tune. The older kids, who were still playing would come and stand at the end of the room and look on in some puzzlement before heading back to their games. Finally we called it a draw and an unusual evening had come to an end.

The first thing that almost everybody mentioned the next evening when we met for Murali's "surprise" BD party was that they had the songs running through their heads for a long time after we broke up the previous night. The strong hold these songs have on our collective conscious is quite remarkable. I am humming even as I type this!

Latha had organized a potluck dinner for MGD's (35+x)th birthday. It was to be a surprise, but mostly in that the first person to show up would yell 'surprise!' and that would be that. Not your traditional surprise, but much, much, easier to plan! The BD boy was in high spirits as usual and he was only more uplifted when Hari showed up with a bottle of 'Gila', straight from TJ. The food was uniformly very good (or maybe I was just really hungry after skipping lunch while playing golf :-)) - Malini had made potato bondas (with a secret stuffing of chilli pickle), there were roasted sweet potatoes (RD), fruit platter & bruschetta (Sanjay), daal (Keerti), Chicken (Keerthi), Eggplant (Vanitha) and of course Latha's outstanding cheesecake. She wanted me to compare that with the Bisibele baath, which also she had made. I never did give my verdict, so here it is - cheesecake by a length.

This being MGD's BD, poker was a given and we got started early. We broke up for cake cutting and then dinner. We played some more, but after some ups and downs, Latha went broke and we called it a night. There was no singing, but the tunes from the previous night were still, as the Eagles sang, "calling from far away." I wonder how long it will be before somebody shows up at the next quarterly with a Karaoke machine.