After a long delay finally the penultimate episode of the The Goa Mini Series sees the light of the day. There were so many issues. The award-winning scriptwriter hit the scriptwriter’s block, the amazingly awesome leading man had to scoot home, the brilliant director was dumped with more work and the brave producer was finally hit so hard by the sub-prime crisis that his wallet is in ICU for the time being. Doctors say he needs Dua and Daru. There is plenty of latter and not much of former. But luckily all bad things come to an end. P******m came out with a few hundred dollar bail-out plan, also known as Salary and the wallet was moved out of ICU but then another bout of unpaidbillitis has put it back in ICU. But I being the philanthropist that I am, have decided to make sure that the Goa Mini Series reaches the finale it deserves.

So to cut the Goa story short I will jump straight to the most innovative way to get rid of employees. At P******m we call it The Reach Camp. The Reich Camp basically is a crueler, meaner, cheaper, nastier, nazier and ________ (insert your favorite similar adjective) version of The Amazing Race, except they conveniently left out the amazing part. Let me break it down to you in bullet points as research has proved that its easier for mor….I mean people to understand things when listed as points.

• Each time consisted of 7-8 members
• Each team received 20 rupees per head
• You couldn’t carry your mobile phone
• You couldn’t carry any money period. Neither in your wallet, nor your socks or underwear or any unmentionable body crevices (though thankfully they didn’t really search for it in such places)
• Each team received a bottle of water and a packet of doggie treats, I mean “Tiger” biscuits
• Each team was accompanied by an Extra Luggage aka Outbound Expert who would carry a mobile phone
• For any extra bottle of water or packet of biscuits or a blanket you had to pay the OE one buck from your 20 rupees
• You could not pay for your transport. You could either walk or hitch a ride.
• ALL of the team members had to travel in SAME vehicle if hitching a ride
• Each team had to cover 80 kms and back in 16 hours starting at 6 pm.

Ok I think I covered all of them, if not then I am sure the sweet-looking-boy will butt in with the rest of them. When we first learned about this evil plan some of us found their jaws resting on the floor right between their shoes., others couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry and were trying their hand at both and most of us simple chose to be in denial as we couldn’t believe that P******m, despite being all that it is, could come up with something so outrageously vile and pure unadulterated evil. I, on the other hand, went Meh instead of WTF as you would have expected.

And soon as expected the Chaos and Panic virus set in. People could be seen running around in circles, some had be restrained from going after the P******m management, few not-so-original souls were seen throwing a fit on the floor and some smart ones were caught trying to sneak back to their rooms and locking themselves in. Within half and hour, some deep gulps of air and few tranquilisers later we were all pretty much resigned to our fate. I was just plain pissed that we weren’t allowed to carry any alcohol! I mean seriously WTF! This is Goa dammit, the land where people are born with two livers!

I wont go in to the team strategy stuff as it was boring, retarded and useless as usual. At 6 pm every team found itself in a park in Panjim with water, biscuits and torches. We were told our first stop was a hospital, whose name of course I don’t remember, and without being told which general direction it lay in we were asked to go. So we ran out asking people to get some sense of direction and started walking towards it.

Few hundred meters down the road we saw a petrol pump and had the brilliant idea that we could probably ask for a ride there. Unfortunately for us, every other team had the same exact brilliant idea. Soon there were about 100 odd people standing at the petrol pump asking for rides. You guessed it, instead of getting a ride we managed to scare all vehicles away at double the speed they normally do. I bet some people even chose to skip the gas station and risk having to push their car to the next one to avoid us.

All the teams gave up and started walking towards the hospital while we stayed back thinking how stupid they were to walk that long when we could get a ride and be there in 10-15 minutes. Five minutes later when we found ourselves still standing there suddenly it was us who started looking stupid! I mean seriously WTF is with people not coming to gas station in big empty cars? Luckily we met a nice couple who were going in their Jeep towards the hospital and they agreed to give us a ride to that place. So 8 of us crammed in to the back of the Jeep and off we went. On the way we passed other teams still walking and we made sure we showed them our support by making faces and whooping noises as we passed them. Maturity was not a requirement asked by P******m during recruitment. How do you think I got hired?

As soon as we reached the Hospital, we all got off and thanked the kind couple while the OE called up the Big Boss and we were told our next destination which was a good distance away. By the time we got back on the road more teams also arrived and once again it was a big fight for ride. Out Maturity earlier came back to kick us where it hurts when we saw other teams go past us acting very maturely as usual. Luckily one team just got off a vehicle in front of us and before they could realise what was going on we had talked to the driver, confirmed he was going to the next destination and we in the Van and off. The look on that team’s faces was P-R-I-C-E-L-E-S-S.

Over the next 6 hours what transpired was pretty much similar to this and covering it all in detail would mean a few more pages of this which I am not in mood to get in to. So I will give you some highlights. Hitching a ride in a strange land is never easy. Specially at night. Especially when you look like me. Yea sadly there weren’t enough hot female drivers in Goa or else there wouldn’t have been any problems. So we put the 3 women in our team in front to flag vehicles down and once they stopped the 5 guys attacked the unsuspecting poor kind/lecherous/gullible souls who had stopped to help the damsels in distress and tried to corner them in to giving us a ride. It actually did work as we didn’t have to walk too much for the most part. This is where Bunny Singh’ steam had an unfair advantage. I mean seriously who wouldn’t stop his/her car to help poor Bunny Singh as she helplessly stood on the side of the road asking to be rescued from the big bad world! In all this hitching rides, getting off at strange places, walking for stretches and stuff it was impossible to keep track of how many teams were ahead of us. For all we knew we might have been the last team, still struggling to finish the race while others were happily back in hotel!

Thankfully my sheer presence kept the team motivated and they never felt down. They had full faith in me and knew that since I was with them there was no way they would finish last. Under so much pressure from the burden of their great expectations I as usual did the best I could to take control of the situation, I just sat back and let things happen. Yes sometimes its best not let the higher powers alter the course things are taking. That would be unfair advantage no? See I am wise, honest and just man.

All in all we traveled in the back of a truck carrying eggs for delivery, in the back of a dumper truck which had just delivered a load of red soil (traces of which can be still be found on the jeans I wore that day), a jeep, a Maruti van that was carrying few gas cylinders, in the drivers cabin of a huge lorry (yes all 8 of us plus driver, cleaner and a kid, I ended up being perched on the dashboard!), a mini van, a Scorpio already carrying 4 people and couple of other vehicles I cant remember. The highlight for me has to be scampering up the sides of the dumper truck to sit in its back. Here is a profound lesson I would like to share with you all. Sitting in the back of a dumper truck can be quite painful if you don’t have much of an ass. Each and every speed bump and pot hole personally tried to violate me! Other teams were even more unfortunate. Some of them had to share the back of the truck with live chicken who were probably more traumatized than them by the experience, some ended up in a milk delivery van, others found themselves sharing space with drunk drivers and some ended up sitting on coconuts!

Just before midnight we found ourselves at our final destination, a waterfall. It was too dark to see anything but we could hear water and head something fall continuously so we assumed we made it. Then we were had to make our way back and realized that at midnight we were in the middle of nowhere with nearest busy road and habitation quite far away. The euphoria of having made it evaporated. Tired, hungry and full pissed we started our dejected walk back. On our way back we were passed by some teams that were still trying to make it to the water fall which made us happy that we weren’t last at least. After half an hour walking and no vehicles in sight we realized that we were still couple of hours walk away from a remotely busy road and our chances of finding a ride till there were even worse than those of Osama being elected the President of USA.

So we plopped our asses down near the gate of a factory and hoping for a vehicle to leave the vehicle premises. 15 minutes later a vehicle did stop, but not the one we expected. Cops! Apparently people had complained about groups of strange weird people harassing them for rides at this unearthly hour and the Cops were out to hunt us down. They asked us for ids. Erm weren’t they in the wallets that the P******m made us leave behind? Brilliant! Thankfully the OE had some kind of id and he convinced the Cops that we weren’t some terrorists doing a recce and all this while I made sure I stayed out of the spotlight lest they might have been given shoot at sight orders! They took numbers of the management people and called them up and blasted them for causing inconvenience to people and leaving us out in the middle of the night vulnerable to danger and what not and then told them to send vehicles to pick us all up! Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet. I was tempted to put the anti-establishmentarian within me aside and hug those cops but then I thought then they would have definitely shot me.

After another 15 minutes we were all picked up from different places and delivered to the hotel at around 3 in the morning where most of us crashed and died for few hours and some of us, like me of course, spent the rest of the night sitting outside sipping on, you guessed it, alcohol. The Reich Camp involved a lot more things that I haven’t mentioned which would tarnish the image of P******m and its employees. There were a lot of questionable tactics, unethical tricks and loads of controversies. But then that was bound to happen. After all the mud-slinging and finger pointing and stuff there was a result to be declared. The management used some kind of illogical logic and declared winner on the basis of team positions at a certain point in the race, which is strange since after that point everything went haywire. Any way in the end the CD’s team was first, mine was second and the team Jhayu was in was third or something like that. Who cares? I don’t. You do? FIIC.