Me & Blind Date

When IBM posted me in Pune in early June last year, it gave me a chance to reunite with lots of my school friends. I had lost contact with most of them when I left Nagpur almost 5 years ago, but thanks to Pune being the IT and educational hub, most of us landed up here. Orkut, of course was always there to help out.

It all began one fine day, when we were all hanging out together. Since we were meeting after a really long time, there was lots to catch up on…junior college, graduation, jobs etc etc. Eventually the conversation moved to past/current girlfriends and boyfriends (as the case may be). One by one, they all spelt out their stories. When my turn came along, I just told them that I don’t have a girl friend right now, and never had any in the past either (which is true!). They refused to believe me, and insisted that I was not being honest. To end the argument, I passed an oft used remark “All I have is useless friends like you who do nothing to help me in this regard”. It was a sarcastic comment which generally doesn’t yield anything. But this time, someone actually took it seriously.

So a few days later, B offered to set me up on a blind date with a very good friend of hers. B thought that she would be a good match for me and we might hit it off. Though initially taken by surprise, I thought that since there is nothing to lose, why not give it a shot. I agreed. B refused to tell me anything about her, except her name and the fact that they were very good friends. Also, I was supposed to make it a formal date, complete with roses and chocolates. I reluctantly agreed.

Now B was supposed to decide on the time and venue and let us know, but she suddenly disappeared for a few days due to some work. Meanwhile she (my to-be-date) managed to extract my mail ID from one of B’s forwards (smart eh!) and sent me a mail directly. Though we initially thought of meeting over a weekend, I had some other plans for Saturday and she was not free on Sunday. So we decided to go out on some week day itself. The plan was for a movie and dinner, but between us we had already seen everything that was worth watch (which isn’t much considering the kind of movies coming out today). So it was to be just a dinner.

I was there at the decided place on time. I did not take any flowers for her, but I did pick up a chocolate. I was not sure what kind she liked, so I picked my favourite (Mars). I thought if she doesn't like it, I can have it myself. She was late as expected. (Why is it that girls can never make it on time?). Expecting this, I had picked to meet at crossword (smart na). Having not seen each other before, I was wondering how we would identify each other. The problem got solved when she gave me a call as soon as she reached the place, and at that time she was the only person around talking on phone. After the preliminaries, she suggested that we go this restaurant called ‘Horn OK Please’. All my previous attempts to get into this place were futile, since this place is horribly crowded over weekends. But this time, I managed to find a table. It was a dhaba theme restaurant, complete with artificial truck tyres. It was only after we occupied our places that we realized that we were both non-vegetarians, and this was a veg restaurant (bummer!). We got this table near a nice waterfall and keeping with the theme of the place, we ordered makkai di roti aur sarson da saag. She had never tried it before, so I suggested that she should.

B had not told us anything about the other person, so we had to start from scratch. During the first few minutes, I felt like I was back at one of the B-school interviews, trying to tell her everything about myself. Both being from Nagpur, we did end up having a lot in common to talk about. We ended up having a nice conversation over a surprisingly delicious dinner. The bill came. I offered to pay, she offered to split, I didn’t refuse. The dinner was followed by desserts at Naturals (the real ice-cream of Juhu scheme) after which we said our good byes and headed home. Thus ended my first blind date ever. I did have a good time, and I must thank B for this. She turned out to be a true friend.

Btw, this story is like one of those which we read in our Moral Science subject when we were kids. A nice story, followed by a moral. And this one is for all my female friends out there :

Take a cue from B…