8 Wonderful Meals - a dream left unfulfilled

It is my pursuit here, in this blog post, to take you along on a recap of my experience.

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About three fortnights ago, on an indolent afternoon, recumbent and dreamy me, I get a ping from guruP -

"Mama! Wanna put Infosys Hashers? I am too vetti and there is a lot of cash", he wrote, all ebullient. And thus began our quest for 8 wonderful meals ( ... I will come to the explanation soon ).


In the next couple of days, we wrapped up some docile code as part of the contest and were confident to enter the finals. Indubitably, about a week later, we were told that we were in the finals. Yay!

So, at this point, you must understand the dour and dire condition I was in. It had been three whole months since I came back from my internship at google and I was desperately missing "the Google Food". While my eating at IIT could, at best, be described as abstemious, I don't think in the near future you would ever find me as fat as I was at google 

(see for your selves, below)

10 weeks into google.

"All mine! All mine! My preciousss ..." (Just after joining google)

Badly missing google food, and really bored of my current insipid life, I was all ebullient about having 8 awesome meals at Infosys. It really did not matter to me if we won or not; we were being flown over to Bangalore from Chennai and we will be provided awesome food to munch on. Not a bad deal in exchange for some seemingly trivial code we wrote sometime back, not bad at all! Next stop - Bangalore.

The jocund mood, from when we started the journey to Bangalore, started to abate as we reached Bangalore at around 8pm and as we started getting hungry. There was a Infosys cab waiting for us and we got in with alacrity. We had heard that the Infosys campus was outside the city and so was the airport. So, we hoped that it would be right near the airport. But sadly, it was on the other side of the city and thus it was a car ride of two hours :(.

Nevertheless, I was hoping to reach the electronic city(the place just outside Bangalore where Infy campus was located) just before dinner got over, get some nice food and have a good night's sleep. As I expressed my hope to guruP, I got an admonishing reply back, 

"Machan! We can't expect a google-like experience now, can we? I am sure it will be some cheap place."

Only then did it occur to me that this may not be like google. We may not be given a opulent room with room service, tv and awesome beds. It could just be a small ugly antediluvian room with two beds. And then I realized! - all this time, I was recalcitrant towards my common sensical brain. There could as well be NO FOOD too.

Reticent and irascible, I got out of the cab feeling the chill of the night right on my face.Inundated with sadness and disappointment, I started towards the small open gate they said was the entrance to Infosys campus. All these realizations did nothing but exacerbate my mood and spirits.

As we cleared the security inside, a golf cart was summoned for us and we got in with our luggage. Within minutes, we were heading towards a huge hotel right inside the Infosys campus. We checked in quickly and the rooms turned out to be even better than the ones we were provided at google! Just the thing to ameliorate my mood and appease my soul :D.

If guruP could read minds, he would have known that my calm face belied my immense relief. After freshening up, we returned to the complaisant receptionist asking if the dinner was still available. Sadly, it was too late at the hotel restaurant and hence we would have to go to the employee food court. Thus, I missed the first of the 8 wonderful meals I was hoping to catch.

So, we headed out towards the food court and ordered some aloo parathas and kerala parathas from a place called Madras cafe. The food was decent and it was a pleasant cool night. As we finished guruP remarked, "These parathas are the true kerala parathas!". Yeah, that's right - a guy from Tirupur (in Tamil Nadu) was saying that some Kerala parathas from a Madras cafe in Bangalore were the right kind of Kerala parathas. Luckily, there was no keralite around.

Thus ended the night as we reached the hotel, circumambulating the many buildings between, and falling onto our beds. The next 42 hours were almost anti-climatic and certainly void of many events. But the final demo, the awards ceremony, followed by our night excursion all over Infosys campus certainly deserve a new post which will be coming up very soon :).

To those wondering - 
Yes, I am writing GRE in about 10 days. This is just the start }:-D