Gatty, as you all know, is taking a well deserved vacation in rural India. After trotting through the globe from the rustic university town of Bologna, Italy to the enigmatic Amsterdam and all places in between, he is now cooling his heals, body, head and eyes in that chick-infested town of Manipal.This is how his typical day looks like. He wakes up in the morning to the sound of chirping birds, having their lunch time argument, in that grand old mango true in his yard. Flashback to the good old days when a bunch of waste fellows (aka mukku, gote, bryan alias up-go-dum-blue, thambi, prash and thambi's arch nemesis Macha) used to gang up in the yard, picking up raw mangoes from that grand old tree, eating it like refugees from Somalia and shouting at the top of their voices. Of course, they never gave a thought to the fact that, gatty's great-grand father had planted that tree, hoping to live for ever, watching over his future generations.
Well, the protagonist of our story is not one made of branches and leaves, but our electrical engineer, who by now has woken up and slowly, but surely completing his morning ablutions. Now his stomach rumbles and he ambles, scratching, towards the kitchen. As a force of habit, he tries to reach out to whatever is lying on a plate there. Here he is reminded of how he used to go into his kitchen in the italian town, pick up slices of bread lying around and stuff his mouth. This was, of course, before he became a master chef cooking all things Italian, right from pasta, macaroni and such dishes whose names remain forever unpronounceable to our south Indian tongue.
He is brought back to the present by a sharp pain shooting all over his knuckles. He looks aghast. The pain is the result of a sharp rap from his mother, who is busy cooking in the kitchen. Then he realizes that he is reaching out for raw fish, which has been nicely sauntered with chilly paste and other secret ingredients. This now means a delicious, mouthwatering (slurp!) fish curry rice meal. That brings a smile on our hero's face and he ambles back to the living room towards that window to the world, that piece of metal and plastic, the ubiquitous PC.
(...to be continued. Watch this space for more adventures of gatty or in brian's alien language, mattre mattre gattre gattre!!)
