Monday, June 23, 2008

The Truthiness about Santa and Banta

According to Captain Nanu and Prabhu, this story actually happened. Since both of them are not the kind of guys who say just about anything when drunk, I am inclined to believe the 'truthiness' of the story. And as Stephen Colbert never tires of saying, truthiness is more important than truth.

All the people who joined our company through campus recruitment had a common training programme for 4 months. During this time, we used to stay at our company's training centre in, let's say, Bangalore. Life in college hostel had set our bar for 'pretty nice places' quite low. Still, it was a pretty nice place - with landscaped gardens, good food, basketball courts and fantastic weather. The only problem was that they didn't provide internet in our rooms. So to access internet, we needed to go to the computer lab.

Our batch included two sardars - let's just call them Santa Singh and Banta Singh. They are true blue Surds, hailing from Bhatinda and Jalandhar (two of the biggest cities in Canada). Come Diwali and the Surds were feeling quite homesick. With the limited number of leaves available during training, they didn't want to waste time in trains which would have taken them close to 6 days in travel alone. So they decided to travel by air.

However, there was one small problem - all flights to Delhi during Diwali were prohibitively expensive. It was in such a situation that Santa's roomie Prabhu told him that early morning flights were much cheaper than the rest. Santa's face lit up on hearing this and he hurried away to give this info to Banta.

That night, Prabhu had a troubled sleep. He was woken up by Banta knocking on his door at 3 am. This was followed by Santa and Banta loudly discussing how to go about executing their strategy of procuring cheap tickets. Having come to a conclusion by 3.30 am, they both proceeded to the computer lab to book their flight tickets. Poor Prabhu, little did he know that Santa and Banta would confuse 'early morning flights' with 'flights booked early in the morning'.

Of course, Prabhu came to know about this only when a tired and frustrated Santa returned to the room at 6 am and shouted angrily, "Oye! I tried all night, but the flights were all the same price as before."

10 comments:

Sidharth said...

No way ! Come on man how did this story escape my ears. This is so damn funny.

mathew said...

ROTFL!!..man thats too much!...kidilam...

silverine said...

ROFL!!! I so believe this as I have witnessed Surd brilliance myself. I had blogged about it too!

"Bhatinda and Jalandhar two of the biggest cities in Canada"
LOL!!

Philip said...

sid: This story actually came out once when Nanu and Prabhu got together. Apparently, each of them held different pieces of the puzzle and the pieces came together only recently :)

mathew: Nothing is too much when Santa and Banta get together :D

silverine: Thanks :)
I have read you Surd post. That was really funny.

scorpiogenius said...

heheheee Surds living upto their expectations:))

Anonymous said...

You took a huge risk bringing this story to light, in view of all the Sikh protests that are going on. Better watch out! :)

g-man said...

ah...are they familiar with the flourishing art of sardarji jokes? more importantly, do they have the link to your blog?

Sidharth said...

@g-man:
I am sure Philip wouldn't like that , they make up for their lack of intelligence in aggressiveness .

Raghav said...

Well, as it occurs, I protest against this. One of the Surds is a very good friend of mine and I vouch for him. He could never do such a thing, at least not at 3:30 am..may be midnight seems ok.

Anonymous said...

LOL! Surely you made that up!