Sunday morning 9 am, I found myself sitting in a car. Not mine of course. It was raining. All around me were lush green fields, tall trees swaying in the wind and not so far away were beautiful hills with low clouds rolling between them. If you looked carefully, the hillside was interspersed with waterfalls inviting you come and take a dip. Sigh. Quoting Bono, “It’s a beautiful day”. Sounds like a perfect day for trekking right? And that exactly what I was NOT doing! I was heading to a writing workshop. Yes you heard it right. Why? Well you asked for it!
Here I go again. Remember I told you about Caferati? Like I had said don’t confuse them with Illuminati, though both are equally fanatical. So this month Caferati finished 4 years of their highly secret, underground existence and still hadn’t come under the government scanner. So it was a reason to celebrate with an all day long workshop. It was going to involve mini workshops, writing exercises and readings. Great! But where? Karjat. I don’t think I heard it right. Its in Karjat. Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
My first impulse was, fuck it, no fucking way am I going that far! But then I found to it was being organized by my colleague Ozzy (Ozymnadias) and another caferati member Suniti so I change my impulse to maybe, since I still had to figure out how to get there and what not. But Suniti was kind enough to get me in touch with Rochelle, another Caferatian, who agreed to give me a ride. I found that I had some poems I was itching to unleash upon them world, so I changed my impulse to Yes I am going there!
Another colleague Yo decided he also wanted a piece of it. So we got him to sign up for Caferati through the cryptic, sacred ritual which involves logging in to a weird site and filling out a form and then waking up next day to find a gazillion messages in your inbox.
Then weekend struck and I almost forgot to mail my art for approval. I managed to email them 3 poems on Saturday night, which meant I would probably end up at the bottom of the list in the oh-shit-we-still-have-time-left section.
So Sunday morning I found myself awake at 6 am wondering WTF as usual. It took 15 minutes but I finally realized why I was up. The Caferati Meet! Gah! So I showered, had breakfast, got ready and left. Met Yo on the way and we reached the meeting point where Rochelle was waiting for us. We picked up another Caferatian on the way, Bhaskar.
One the way I discovered that Rochelle is a scriptwriter and Bhaskar work as a BD in another AD agency. I had burnt a music CD for the way so we went through that. By the time CD got over I was almost in the “Are we there yet?” mode. Sitting in car is as interesting as sitting in office. But in office you have internet!
Somewhere between Karjat and Neral we realized we were lost. Not a surprise. None of us had bothered to look at the map they had painstakingly put up. We called and got some more cryptic directions from the owner of the farmhouse. Took us a bit to decode them but we were finally on the right track till some decided to tell us the wrong direction and we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere. So we headed back. Apparently we had missed the famous landmark, the bore well.
Now when you see a 4 feet high iron pipe with a lever to pump water, do you think bore well or do you think hand pump? Unfortunately we were one of those morons who think hand pump. We finally realized our folly and took what they claimed to be a road till it ended in a pile of cars in the middle of fields. Hmm now what, we wondered. So we stepped out in the rain to find another gentleman who also had the misfortune of being both a Caferatian and of being there at the same time. He found a trail through the fields that we waded through till we were at the farm house!
And that too just in the nick of time! They were just about shutting the kitchen down post breakfast. So we managed to grab a vada-pav and a cup of piping tea. Soon after, we were all ushered in to a room where we started off with the workshops.
John kicked it off with a presentation on Content Writing but got caught in the long tail of questions and couldn’t finish it within stipulated time. This was followed by Ozzy’s highly entertaining workshop on writing nonsense, no wait Nonsense. Yes there is a difference! Then Suniti took the centerstage and taught us how to perform our poems, which Bhaskar duly did. This was followed by Batul’s session on script writing which quickly degraded in to a debate and nothing much came out of it. Thankfully we broke up for lunch. The best thing I learnt in this workshop is that I can throw my voice and make it reach furthest place! So cool! So next time when I am reading a poem and I see someone running away Ill just throw it at them, there is no escape now muhahahahhaa!
Post lunch we were asked to do a writing exercise by Manisha which was interesting and fun. This was followed by the reading session where some brave and some mean souls read their work out to us and were attacked with feedback in return. Soon we were out of time and we broke up for tea. My evil plans to attack them with poetry will have to be executed some other day.
Post tea we said good byes and posed to pictures. Soon I found myself in a car again, this time on the way back to civilization. All the way back I said goodbye to nature as I knew soon I would be confined to the concrete jungle for who knows how long. Got off in Borivali and went with Yo to some place called Ustad’s. There we gorged on tasty kebabs and tandoori chicken yum. In a trademark move, I picked up a bottle of Thums Up and found myself in an auto somewhere in Malad.