Wednesday, November 30, 2005

a very special thanksgiving blog entry

very occasionally i get a wee bit nastolgic for home. and as the holidays approach, this feeling is ratched up a bit. sure, everyone loves a good deepvali festival, but sometimes you have to return to your roots. being an american, i could not help but want to celebrate that most american of holidays, thanksgiving. for my no doubt vast audience of international readers, let me explain the holiday: we "give thanks" for all we have, not though good deeds or quiet introspection or even fasting, but instead by quite ironcially eating as much as we possibly can. the culinary focus is on a generally dry and not-all-that-tasty giant bird whose meat contains a sleep inducing chemical. we spend our last moments of consciousness further stuffing ourselves with something actually called stuffing, along with mashed potatoes & gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, at a minimum.

strangely enough, i decided i wanted to participate in this bizzare tradition here in bangalore. I contacted J, my american friend at infosys, and my mexican-american upstairs neigbors, E & L. J brought a bunch of other americans with him, most of whom suck. we all headed to a place called "the only place" which, appropriately, is just about the only place in india where you can get a proper (or mostly proper) thanksgiving dinner. not only that, it's around the corner from where i live.

i don't really have much to say about the dinner, as it was pretty boring. we were limited in our turkey and stuffing and cranberry log, but a bunch of other sides were available buffet style in unlimited quantities, so the desired stuporous effect could be more or less achieved, though afterwards it felt wrong that i wasn't sitting in a big cushy chair watching a painfully boring detroit lions football game.

but even if bad football were available, the evening would still have amounted to little more than a turkey dinner. it turns out thanksgiving just isn't thanksgiving without family around.

that was, and will be, my one-and-only "touching holiday moment" in the blog. that is, unless i get loaded in goa on christmas day and stumble into an internet cafe. which, from what i hear about goa, is not only possible, but probable.

3 comments:

Sudhir Narasimhamurthy said...

Where r u these days..!! never heard..!!

Post in any new stuff...

Anonymous said...

I am certainly thankful... thankful that I'm not you!

Anonymous said...

When are you going to get back from SL?