Travel is a great way to get to know better the people-you-think-you-know.
I always knew that Poppy was a determined, go – getter type, but he just zoomed in my estimation – and Soppy’s – the evening we got on the train to Kathgodam. His quick thinking enabled us to escape from a huge traffic jam on the way to the station and we made it to the train with literally seconds to spare. Once on the train, he readily walked up and down multiple times, checking out both the sleeper coach where we had confirmed berths and the AC coach where we had RAC tickets. Once we had decided to travel by 3rd AC, Soppy and I – old and lazy fatalists - plonked ourselves on the one RAC berth we had and tried to settle ourselves as comfortably as we could on one-third of a berth. Poppy, on the other hand, refused to give up this soon. He attached himself to the TT like the little lamb to Mary and trotted obediently behind him for 30 minutes bleating his request for berths every minute until he actually secured three of them ! “It’s the never-say-die, get-it-done-somehow-large-FMCG-sales spirit,” I sagely informed the newly converted Poppy-bhakt Soppy. (Never lose the chance to point out something good about FMCG to a guy from the air-conditioned corridors of finance.)
The same never-say-die, well-stoked-in-large-aggressive-FMCG competitive spirit manifested itself in other ways too. If I broke out into a merry melody during a walk in the hills, Poppy would be sure to correct me and insist that I sing exactly the words the lyricist wrote; he would not accept ‘happiness’ and ‘holiday’ as excuses for sloppy word placement. Let’s not even start on the comments about the quality of my voice, the pitch, the tone etc. What was most galling was that the source of all this nit-picking and feedback was someone who sang sincerely and correctly through his nose and sounded like Himesh Reshammiya !
Then there were the books Poppy carried with him on holiday. These were the kind that most people keep on bookshelves for others to admire and never actually read – think Kafka, Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, macroeconomics, yaaaawn. Not the holiday kind of books for most of us. Definitely not what I would have thought Poppy would like. I mean, this is a guy who drives a car too fast, slurps his coffee and thinks Chiranjeevi is cool !
Poppy would not just read these books, he would emerge shiny eyed after a few hours of reading and try to engage us plebs in intellectual discussions. That stage got over in a day or two and then he started giving us progress reports on how many pages he had read in the last few hours. Our reactions must have lacked a certain something (admiration ? adulation ?) for he then moved on to the next level. He started checking on what we had been doing and announcing a comparative activity progress report to us at regular intervals, “In the last two hours, I have read 150 pages while Soppy has read only 70 pages and Zen has taken 30 blurred snaps.” Score : Poppy – 10, Soppy - 5, Zen - 0. Insanity – 100.
(Do not work more than 3 years in a large aggressive FMCG, gentle reader. You get too used to competing, driving results and filing status reports.)
By,
Zen.
