How did the Greatest Murder Mystery turn into the Mystery of the White Shoes.

So this is how the story goes….few weeks back we had a team outgoing at Break Out. For those of you who don’t know what ‘Break Out’ is , it is a surreal escape experience and surely worth a try.

My team was assigned to solve the ‘The greatest Murder mystery of Westwoods’, which is one of the toughest escape themes. 6 of us had our detective hats on to solve the toughest murder mystery. In scene 1, we were locked in a small dark room with a torch. While looking for evidence, we spotted a mannequin which was actually a dead body with a phone. Our first clue was to unlock the phone, which we were able to do easily.

We then looked around for the second clue and found a box . We had unlock the box which had a rotating lock, the nastiest lock of all locks and with the most confusing instructions. We tried various permutations and combinations but failed. 15 mins were over so we finally called the game master for help. With his hints, we were able to open to the box to find a string with a small magnet attached at its end. We were clueless what had to be done next but finally figured out that we had to use the magnet to pick up the door key which was in the next room . We could then escape scene 1 and go to scene 2, the final one. But it was super difficult to get the key , until the Broomstick came to our rescue. We tied the string onto the broom and yes! The lid was attracted and revealed a key underneath. After many tries, we got hold of that precious key and unlocked the door, moving on to the next room. By then, 30 minutes were over . We just had 15 mins left.

Scene 2 was again a dark room which was the police office. The office had a few tables, with drawers and lots of things in them. As we were running out of time, each of us decided to look at different parts of the room to get clues.

Being a working mother is both stressful and tiring.To feel a little relaxed, I had opened my pair of white shoes and kept it on one side.

All of us were frantically looking for clues. Suddenly, I see my team, all knelt down and completely absorbed in observing something on the floor. One of them said '6+9=15, what does that mean? is that a clue?'. All excited that we’ve spotted the next clue, I made my way to the spot, I guess what did I see ???!!!!

My white shoes !!!! They were being thoroughly dissected as an important piece of evidence.

GOTTA RAAN !!!

Running is the new fitness fad. With everyone around you taking up-to running, I’m tempted to start running myself. For those who know me well, know that losing weight has been a hopeless saga of my life, though I’ve succeeded twice and failed umpteen times, I refuse to give up.

As I go through my own journey of ‘soul searching’ - this iconic term was coined by my college buddy, who taught me never to give up anything, be it losing weight, drinking or enjoying life, I’ve realized that I love making strategies and then leave it to others for implementing it. Hopefully, this will help me go far in my professional life but it certainly has had disastrous results in my personal health space. I keep making different strategies to lose weight, even go a step ahead and buy stuff but when it comes to implementing it or actually doing it, my record time has been less than 1 week. K says that I could have planned a Europe tour by now, if I hadn’t spent on those futile machines/drinks/weight lose programs/books etc etc.

Last Sunday morning, all four of us are on the breakfast table either feeding ourselves or each other. Aarya was watching Chu-Chu TV and this is the only time that she is not moving while being fed half boiled egg. K and occasionally Aarya, are feeding Czar with Marie biscuits. Czar is sheepishly looking at me to feed him with some egg or anything that Aarya is eating. Just yesterday he ate Aarya’s bread and butter which he would never even licked. While I’m feeding myself Maggi Ayam and browsing through face book and I see some pics of friends running a marathon. So I said ‘Amio RAAN korte chai – I also want to Run'. We, Bongs, at times use heavily accented English, where RUN becomes RAAN, 'What is this' becomes ‘Hot ij this’, 'For you' becomes ‘Furrr you’ so on so forth.

To my query, K immediately responded and said ‘ Hain, amar recipe ta use koro. India te sobakar khub bhalo legeche, ekheno lagbe – Yes, use my recipe, everyone loved it in India and so will people here' .K, who loves to cook and dreams of opening a restaurant or bar someday, consciously or unconsciously thinks and talks food all the time. He thought I wanted to cook Raan - It is a barbequed and spiced led of a lamb and K has kinda aced this dish.

So here where I was looking at a healthy lifestyle with 'Raan-ing'/Running, K was thinking about food and Raan. K and I started laughing. Seeing us Aarya started giggling and Czar started wagging his tail. Our Sunday started off on a happy giggly and funny note.

Loadshedding but NO Load – Shedding

Tick-Tock, Tick Tock! Woof the lights go off, it’s 11:00pm. A regular ritual so Kunal, unperturbed started looking for the emergency light and switches it on. This unacceptable tradition has been on for the past one week. The lights go off for an hour and a half in the night almost every day, exactly when you are about to sleep.

After visiting 4 branches a day, which is covering almost 50 km, Kunal is drop dead tired. I have had a bad day at work with 3 escalations and 1 offer drop out. All, both of us wanted after getting back home was a couple of Blender’s to wash out the stress, good food to satiate us and a good night sleep to wake up with a fresh mind and body.

The latter was royally slaughtered every day with this load shedding and it started taking a toll on us.

With less sleep and the current work stress, Kunal and I grew more irritable and less tolerant towards each other. Otherwise, the very patient Kunal lost his cool very often and the ever irritated me felt more agitated. Disturbed sleep triggered the acidity problem in both of us. The acidic nature of life started directly affecting us again with more acid secretion in our bodies. We lived off Rabemacs, Histacs and Digenes, I’m sure the medicine shop owner must have been thrilled with so much of business coming just from one household.Half slept and irritated I was always groggy at work. In this current corporate scenario, where you are exploited under the cover, of the newly coined term ‘Multitasking’, being attentive and fast was the call of the hour. Being groggy and slow was adversely affecting my performance in this rat race.

The worst hit was our dog Czar. The normal body temperature of dogs is 38 C – 39.2 C , which is two Celsius higher than humans. During the day, Kunal and I have the AC at work but poor Czar gets all roasted in the heat with load shedding occurring for almost 3 to 4 hrs during the day.If he could talk, he would tell me how painful it is in this heat. Being his surrogate mother, I could see the pain in the eyes of my child.

One night I was so fed up that I called Just Dial, took the MSEB NIBM Office Number. I frantically called up the office and asked for the concerned person. Like all Govt offices, the man on the other side was extremely rude and didn’t know a thing. I didn’t give up and kept calling him incessantly and after 3 calls, he finally gave me the number of the site manager.

The corporate world has taught us lots and one of the most important things is ‘how to get your work done’. Being a manager, I’ve been handling people for more than 3 years now, you need to understand your target and accordingly use your strategy (Coaching, Supporting, Delegating or Directing – Situational Leadership Theory). Maturity had dawned on me (finally) and understood that these Govt. Officers are highly frustrated attitude suckers with no heart, so to deal with them you need to know which strategy to implement. Thanks to Sooraj Baljatya and Karan Johar, I was at my theatrical and melodramatic best and gave a huge emotionally angle to the Manager on how badly the load-shedding is affecting my family including my kids, Kandisa and Keeyan who were born that every moment. Kunal like always with his worldwide ‘gyan’ gave me the look (not the dude one though) and told me that I shouldn’t have spoken to him as they are assholes.

To our Surprise, the lights came back in another ten mins. Kunal and I were dumbstruck and I realized ‘IT WORKED’. My emotional drama had struck a cord in his heart and he was kind enough to switch on the lights.

Though I abused the entire clan of govt. officers past and present, at the end of the day, they are also humans and wanted to be given due respect for their work. Suddenly reminded me of Munnabhai MBBS where Sanjay Dutt goes and hugs the sweeper. The basics of respect to human, to human life, have almost been erased in today's world. This is time to relook at them. We are so caught up amidst the struggle of everyday life that we’ve forgotten the basic emotions that constitutes humans. We are all out like warriors on the battlefield, trying to suppress and win against each other.I lay quietly on the bed retrospecting on these thoughts and realized that Kunal and Czar were fast asleep. I looked at both of them, smiled at myself and slept off.

Kunal, the Driver, Mampoo, the Navigator and Czar, the Traveler….

After a harrowing stressful weekend & financial year end, it was the perfect reason to take a break.

With Kunal’s novice driving skills, the distance and Czar’s comfort, we decided on the Konkan Coast. I must admit I felt almost like man convincing a woman to marry him when I‘d to convince Kunal for Konkan and not Goa (most people who know Kunal will agree with me). Friday, we started our research on the beaches and the staying availability. Mygetaway.com came in as the rescuer as we finally booked the place to stay, this being a long weekend all the other places were packed. So Bingo ‘Murud Janjira’ it was.

After a late night on Friday with friends coming over to our place (a normal trend every weekend), strangely it wasn’t difficult to wake up in the morning for the travel. Though Kunal did snooze the alarm twice still we were just one hour late than the scheduled time. 8:00am we left our home with Kunal, the driver, me as the Navigator and Czar in the back seat like the most excited traveller.

We drove past Pune in the morning and touched the highway in 20 mins. Kunal was a little nervous as he was driving on the Expressway for the first time. We took the Khopoli diversion from the expressway and headed towards Pen and from there to Mahad. From Mahad, we moved towards Alibaug with a little ghat area in between. The route from Alibaug to Murud via Kashid is picturesque with the coastline on one side and the Shayadri ghat on the other. We hit Murud exactly at 1:00pm.

We started hunting for ‘Priyasiddhi Cottages’ where we had our booking. PriyaSiddhi is a kilometre away from the beach with amiable caretakers. We dumped our luggage and headed straight towards lunch as we were extremely hungry. Most people suggested ‘Patil Khanawala’, which was exactly opposite to our idea of a beachside lunch. No beer, No beach and to our surprise it was crowded with people. We started looking for a place where they could serve us beer and to our surprise, there were none. Kunal and I were about to cry when someone told us that we could buy beer from the beer shop and carry it with us to the eating joint. We finally settled down for lunch and realized that everyone around was doing the same. Unbelievably it was a much-done thing. We also become a partner to this crime and didn’t care much as long as we could quench our thirst with the chilled beer. It took the waiter an hour to take the order and another hour to serve but we had the beer and the sea to keep us going but yes extremely poor service in 9 out of 10 joints in Murud. After the meal, we went back for a short nap as we wanted to see the sunset and Kunal wanted his ‘Sunset Swim’. (My swimmer husband)

The room was cosy with an extended balcony overlooking the garden. It was neat and clean and to me, that mattered the most. This was perfect for Czar, we just let him loose and he was running around without the leash. There was a basin which was awkwardly placed in the corner of the room and I kept wondering why.

6:00pm we went to the beach and had a lovely view at the setting sun and we were about to start the swim when something struck me and I checked the moolah with us and realized that we were running shot of 500 bugs. Immediately Kunal and I started inquiring about an ATM and to our surprise that there were NO ATMs in Murud and Kashid and we had to drive 34kms for one. I always thought isolation from technology and modernization kept the purity of a place but I was so wrong. Now an ATM wasn’t a luxury but a necessity. We set out immediately as we’d enough moolah for dinner and breakfast but then we’d to sacrifice our booze which was a BIG NO especially when we were on a holiday. We drove to Revdanda and enjoyed every minute of the sunset from the car and of course we’d to forgo Kunal’s ‘sunset swim’. When we reached the ATM it felt like winning an Oscar and I proudly came out after withdrawing moolah. We felt elated. Drive back was short and sweet and we reached the beach.

The beaches in Konkan are no doubt very pretty with whitish sand and the sea is away from the beach. Not in all the beaches, one could swim, like at Murud, you couldn’t but at Kashid you could. Also, in the night the water moves further away from the beach and you could walk all the way. I strongly believe people make the place but the crowd at these places was not exactly ‘our kind’. The beauty seems untouched and unexplored. But Kunal and I would still prefer a Cosmo Goa to a Traditional Murud.

Czar was getting very impatient as he had been restricted to the back seat for more than 7 hrs now including the ATM Hunt Drive, Kunal dropped us at the beach and went up to the Bazaar to pick up whisky. I must admit the locals in this area ain’t that friendly, they don’t respond to you in any other language but Marathi and have that look in their face ‘we don’t want outsiders’ the common feeling that most Maharashtrians have or are taught to have nowadays, thanks to Shiv Sena. It is strange that even in India, we have so much of discrimination just amongst states.

We went back to the guest house and the happiest of all was Czar. Amongst the hustle-bustle of everyday mundane life, this evening was definitely needed for Kunal and me to just unwind and feel the love all over again. The cherry on the cake was the food, home cooked Konkan seafood was just ORGASMIC and we enjoyed every morsel of it.

9:15 am next morning after breakfast we started our journey back home. From Murad to Kashid to Alibaug and the Revdanda port to Pen. Kunal enjoyed speeding on the expressway and touched 110kms/hr and was very happy. We hit Pune by 1:30pm and were home by 2:00pm with 3 bottles of beer to wash off the tiredness.

Statistics:

Distance: 190 Kms

Time: 5hrs

Petrol: 1500

Stay: 700

Food & Other : 1200

Alcohol and Fags: Like in Pune.

Our Rating:

Mampoo                        Kunal

     7       Scenic Beauty       5

     9              Food             8

     4            Crowd             4

     6               Stay             7

     6      Overall Rating       6

     6   Worth the Moolah     6