Tag Archives: Sood Sahib

Smells

Out of all the senses, the sense of smell is probably the one I am most sensitive to. Certain smells invoke a very strong emotional response from me. Below is a list of smells that influence me.

The Smells of

  • Old Spice reminds me of my childhood.
  • Cigarette smoke reminds me of my father.
  • Beer reminds me of Sood Sahab.
  • Whiskey reminds me of Sanjay Patel.
  • Weed reminds me of Goru.
  • Damp and mold reminds me of the basement of our house at Panchkula.
  • Diesel Exhaust reminds me of Delhi/Gurgaon.
  • Lemongrass reminds me of Hotel Bonsai at Connaught Place.
  • Lemon reminds me of Lemon Tree Hotels.
  • Nail Polish Remover reminds me of my mother.
  • Naphtha reminds me of my paternal grandparents’ house.
  • Urine reminds me of T-Point Hostel, NC Jindal Public school and my maternal grandparents’ house.
  • Garbage reminds me of Uttar Pradesh.
  • New electronics reminds me of my first computer.
  • Cow-dung reminds me of Mathura and Vrindavan.
  • Panchvati incense reminds of of the Maruti 800 car we had when we moved to Delhi.
  • Nivea deodorant reminds me of São Paulo.
  • Rose reminds me of one time I travelled on Rajdhani Express with my mother.
  • Night Blooming Jasmine reminds me of the festive season in India.

Also, I remember a few distinct smells which I have no names for

  • The distinctive smell of the video game parlour at Jwala Heri market. Might have been some incense that I have never come across anywhere else.
  • The smell of freshly dried clothes out of the dryer provides me a lot of comfort.
  • The earthly smell of cosmetics in and around a Forest Essentials store.
  • The smell of rubber and leather that is omnipresent in old-school shoe stores like Bata.
  • The distinct smell that was prevalent at Tosh Opticals, Paschim Vihar that I once again got a whiff of, at Central few days ago.
  • The smell that comes from desert coolers fitted with new wood fiber.
  • The typical smell of carpet, tablecloth and linen at old-school Indian restaurants & hotels.

I Miss College Days

I frequently dream about my college days in Nagpur. Although most of those dreams are actually nightmares with a recurring theme, some are actually pleasant. Last night I dreamt that my daughter took admission in some Nagpur college & me and my wife also moved there to be closer to her. There, I was roaming around on my motorcycle and made acquaintance of some college students.

Although I have been to Nagpur many times since I graduated, it is not the same going back as an adult.

College days in Nagpur
Nagpur, PC: Kayak

What I miss about college days

  1. Seeing my friends everyday.
  2. Going to college but not going into the classroom.
  3. The widespread excellent food cheaper than anywhere else.
  4. Finding a new bar to drink for cheap every day of the week with friends.
  5. Once in a while staying at home blogging while friends are outside partying.
  6. Going to Buldi to buy cheap clothes, drink fruit juice and buy mobile phones.
  7. Drinking beer with Sood sahab at home listening to music while it is raining outside.
  8. Riding around on my motorcycle (RIP).
  9. Going on dates with my girlfriend (now wife) & spending hours talking on the phone on the terrace.
  10. Filling ₹10 worth of petrol in my motorcycle.
  11. The feeling of returning from holidays at home.
  12. Not having a single female friend.
  13. Hanging out at Shanky PP with friends and drinking coffee.
  14. Going to Pyramid and not buying anything.
  15. Our very first home.
  16. Going to Westside and not buying anything.
  17. Going to Poonam Chambers & playing video games.
  18. Knowing exactly what 2-wheeler everyone had & judging them for it.
  19. Attending college rock concerts without being judged for being single and poor.
  20. Sitting at Cafe Coffee Day staring at girls without a single worry in life. Also purchasing Q-Jam coupons for ₹5 and playing our favourite songs.
  21. Going to localites’ house and not relating to their culture, but appreciating a home cooked meal nonetheless.
  22. Consuming cannabis with friends at the hostel on Holi and then spending the next few days wasted.
  23. Drinking beer at Telangkhedi lake and pissing in the lake standing on the retaining wall.
  24. Watching English movies with shitty Hindi dubbing.
  25. Sleeping in on exam day.

What I don’t miss

  1. The sweltering heat & the ever present dust.
  2. The constant/ever present lack of monies.
  3. The shit fountain at the hostel.
  4. My immature behaviour.
  5. Exam result nights.

For anyone else feeling nostalgic about college days, suggest watching this excellent show on Prime.

Beer, my friend

I have a long relationship with beer and our relationship has evolved over all these years.

A mug of “Child” beer

I clearly remember my first beer (or any alcoholic beverage for that matter) which was at Orchid Lake resort next to the pristine Umiam Lake in Meghalaya. I was around 12 years old at that time & was going to Shillong with my uncle and his friend for the day from Guwahati & had stopped at that resort for lunch. My uncle and his friend ordered beer for themselves and offered me some. My first reaction was that it was bitter. I obviously kept that information to myself & commented that it was very tasty so as to not embarrass myself as less of a “man” in the presence of 2 adults.

I had beer a few more times with that uncle over the next few years but didn’t enjoy any of it.

When I went off to college at Nagpur, I was suddenly exposed to a whole plethora of alcoholic beverages. Beer was reserved for those hot summer days when we didn’t have electricity or had an exam the following day & didn’t want to get too drunk.

I remember one evening when Sood Sahib was feeling a bit low. I suggested that we drink some beer & his spirits lifted immediately. We bought beers from a store and some policemen tried stopping us on the way, but we somehow escaped, got soaked in the rain, reached home, dried up and enjoyed our beers.

Sood Sahib Enjoying and Appreciating Beer

I also remembering going to Urvashi with Neeraj after our gym sessions to drink beer with Tandoori chicken to aid our workout recovery. Beer also accompanied our jam sessions on numerous occasions.

My first major incident with beer was when I bought what I thought was “Haywards 5000” from a seedy store in Nagpur, went home and drank it alone. My roommate came home from college later to find me passed out with my head shaved. Later, when I regained consciousness, he also reported some strange behaviour from me but I would refrain from going too deep into those details. Later everything explained itself when we saw that the beer I had was actually a “Haryana 5000”.

When I moved to Gurgaon, I was exposed to a new world of freshly brewed beer also known as “artisanal beer” or “craft beer”. We used to go to Rockman’s Beer Island at Ambience Mall very frequently to drink fresh brewed beer poured out for us from taps.

We used to order barrels of this stuff and get hopelessly drunk. I remember one incident when we went to Beer Island with Soniel’s German colleagues, everyone got sloshed on beer and they ran away without paying for anything and we were stuck with the bill.

Beer plus Laser

Another incident with beer I remember is when I had something called “Beer Buster” at an office party. It was beer mixed with Tabasco sauce and I had litres of it. When I came back home, I couldn’t sleep because the Tabasco was burning in my chest and stomach all night.

Neeraj at Beer island

One of my best beer experiences was during my Beer trip to Bengaluru. We went to a place called Biergarten which was a huge open air pub surrounded by beautiful palm trees. The weather and the colour of the sky were unlike anything in Gurgaon. Even the washrooms had a killer view.

Biergarten, Bengaluru

Not until the lockdown, when I was forced to stay without any beer for months did I learn the true value of beer (among other things). When the lockdown did open and I rushed to the nearest beer shop to buy some, I decided that I would start treating beer with more respect from then on. Yes, I would savour my beer more and learn to enjoy it.

I started drinking beer slowly, appreciating the textures and flavours and enjoying the taste rather than aiming to get hopelessly drunk.

First Craft Beer after Unlock

When I drink alone at home, I never drink more than 1 or 2 cans at a time and I make sure I enjoy every sip. When drinking out with friends (rare), all these rules go out of the window, though.

3 cheers to beer and here’s to many more years of friendship.

Our first home

For the first 17 years of my life, I lived with my parents. When I went off to college, for the first time to a different city (Nagpur), things changed a bit. I started living with some seniors at a rented apartment. I was living without parents, but I was still living at someone else’s home. When these seniors passed out, I lived for a few months at the college hostel, which was, again, a different experience.

When the toilets at the hostel turned into shit-geysers, I knew I had to leave. I started looking for a new place to stay at and a roommate to stay with. The excitement was palpable; this was the first time in my life I would stay at a place of my own choosing with people I chose to stay with.

Eventually, I found a roommate in the form of a creature known as Whoreko and a nice, independent place to stay at Verma Layout.

The time spent in this new place were one of the most blissful years of my life. We had our own place, we could come and go as we pleased, we setup our stuff the way we wanted and we both had our own rooms. In short, we had our own place and we were masters of this little area. We even had our own terrace, where we perched in the evenings and threw water on Halud when he came to visit us.

We both had a computer of our own and we connected them using a LAN cable for multiplayer gaming and file sharing. We listened to our own choice of music (Which, thankfully, matched) in the mornings when getting ready for college and in the evenings, well into the night.

Our First Home
My Room

Once, we even setup a fireplace in our kitchen sink by burning old clothes, books etc. Flames were leaking out of the kitchen ventilator and the neighbours gathered around to watch. Everyone dispersed when we threw a pressurised deodorant can into the fire and it exploded, rattling doors and windows nearby.

Kitchen, forever charred by the fire

The place was at an awesome location. T-Point hostel and Shankar Nagar chowk were nearby, so was a Cafe Coffee Day and Ambazari lake.

After Whoreko, roommates came & went, but I will forever remember and cherish the time I spent staying at this house, our first home.

Below are some of my earlier posts about this place

Sood Sahib!!

This is dedicated to my illustrious roommate Mr. Arpit Sood, or Sood Sahib, or Spidey 2.1 as most of us know him… And also, the third CEO of a multinational bank. This is about all the things that he does (mostly excessively):-
Arey Sood Sahib to bahut:-

  1. Khate hai (Eats a lot)
  2. Style marte hai (Shows a lot of style)
  3. Chillate hai (Shouts a lot)
  4. Uthate hai (Lifts a lot)
  5. Samjhate hai (Makes people understand a lot)
  6. Bolte hai (Talks a lot)
  7. Chidte hai (Gets pissed off a lot)
  8. Pyaar karte hai (Loves a lot)
  9. Ignore marte hai (Ignores people a lot)
  10. Gussa hote hai (Gets angry a lot)
  11. Aur bhi bahut kuch karte hai 😉 (Does a lot of other things)
Sood Sahab during his younger days
Sood Sahab, now, even more illustrious than ever

I would like to thank Sood Sahib to give his humble permission to write this post. God bless him..