Onam - 2015

August 28, Friday 2015 :

 Friday evening, onam pot luck dinner at Sreejith's home with Jimmy and Harris' 

 families as well. The mix was perfect as all of us were exactly the same age and it was nice to 

 feel so much understanding in our conversations.

    Jimmy and myself wore traditional Mundu and hence we mostly stayed put on the sofa 

 to keep the Mundu from slipping. Home ownership decisions that Jimmy and Sreejith had 

 taken had paid off pretty well as their respective home prices had increased. While we 

 were driving through the complex, indian families were playing badminton and it almost

felt like we were in a posh neighborhood in India. 

    As has always been the case for such get-togethers with manhattan colleagues, the 

frustrations of overwork at Manhattan frothed up. I could at once relate to it as well 

as see that my life has clearly improved after moving out of Manhattan to Deposco. 

Divya had observed how not a single day passed without me cribbing about work while 

at Manhattan and how that tendency stopped completely after moving to Deposco even 

though Deposco takes more working hours from me. 

    Jimmy was particularly open about his attempts to seek help from books like 

Alchemist , How to win friends and influence people, Simon Senek etc. I could 

completely relate to him. Jimmy/Harris are both avid cricketing sportsmen and are 

clearly particularly passionate about the game. Sreejith stood out a bit as someone 

who was less confused and took life as it came. 

    Then we shared our passion for malayalam movies, talks about going back to India 

and about the children. Generally, we were relating to each other on all these fronts. 

Meera's cousin who had just passed out from Georgia Tech was also with us. He spend some 

 time with us and also played with our kids. 

     Kids were playing. The wives were collecting the pots of curries together and set 

up dinner on plantain leaves at the dining table. All of us were food lovers and we 

enjoyed the vegetarian tradional onasadya followed by three payasams.

    Conversations continued on till sleep caught up. While the guys were talking, the 

 ladies were dividing the remaining curries into ziplock bags to be brought back home. 

We left around midnight and Sreejith's home was a bit of a mess with scattered toys.

Closing the note to take some of the packaged onam curries out of the ziplock bags 

 for lunch.