Fishing on the weekend

The first weekend at training is over and I am yet to get a grip over things. At office, work has just started as I realize that the project I have been given is a full-blown HR project with hardly any scope for showing Fin/Mark antics. The consulting part might just come in but that, too sometime later (hope it is not too late, though). Surprisingly however, I am kind of enjoying the work that has been given to me, HR or no HR. As my guide keeps telling me, it is all about common sense and very little about MBA jargon or things that are by way of being rote.

Anyway, I was talking about the first weekend at Cal and an extended weekend at that. With Friday being off due to Bengali New Year's Day, I had three days of nothing to look forward to. Going into the weekend, I was a bit apprehensive, and given Calcutta's heat and the fact that most of my friends here stay pretty far from where I have my digs, I was not really looking at the world with rose-tinted glasses.

As one of the rarest Mondays (one that I thought I will actually look forward to) comes and I am back in office, I don't think that I had too nasty a time. Although the damn heat was damning enough to keep me indoors for most of the day (in fact, going outdoors any time before five was tortuous, so much so that I missed breakfast and lunch three days in a row), I did have some nice time in the evenings. Arnav, Rajesh, Debayan, and others that I had met in the first week of coming here were also not available for the weekend (the long weekend automatically giving birth to some long-distance plans for most of them) but there were new friends to be made, new people to be met.

Most of my time on Friday and Saturday (that is, the time that I spent outdoors) was spent with Anurag, a fellow digger and a student of IIIT here. The guy is good and unassuming enough to be in my good books right from Day 1. He has been a great help, taking time out for me and helping me get familiar with this place in a jiffy. He introduced me to "fishing" at the City Centre, one of the hip malls of Calcutta. There is, according to Anurag, a proper pool (read an area with lots of steps where people sit with Pepsi and wafers) where fishes (read girls) come in and where baiters (read stag guys with nothing better to do) sit for the entire evenings, waiting for their chance to strike a conversation and thus catch "fish". Atrocious, I know...but all the same, fun to watch. I spent nearly three hours there on Friday and almost the same on Saturday, watching the baiters catch the fish and believe me, at times, it can be a spectacle, especially when the fish puts up a fight and the baiter gets entangled in his own line.

After all the fishing, Sunday evening was pretty uneventful as I spent most of it wallking across the length and breadth of Salt Lake. With some half a dozen kilometres behind me, it was a tired me that came back to the PG place. Anurag suggested I watch the movie America's Sweethearts to freshen myself up and that is what I did. A good entertainer, this but more on movies that I have seen recently in some other post...right now, it is time to get to work and so, signing off...