Vanakkam Doctor !

………………… Alcohol was flowing freely by this time and the evening gala had arrived with lots of fun and activities for the kiddies.   Formal self introduction of the families began and lasted for few hours before the families became too restless with the sumptuous dinner, waiting for us outside the lawn. The buffet was very informal and more time was spent on catching up and net working with batch mates and their families.   Lucky (!) few of them turned up on their own, like I did, last year.   The singletons turned up mainly from the home land and as usual had lots of excuses for their families’ absence!!   For few of them the party had already begun. It was all fun and frolicking by this time and people were belting out songs with full throttle in the open lawn.   I sang my favourite of Maestro Ilayaraja’s, whilst few others sang their favourites.   Premkumar kept us happy too with his old favourite, whilst Shankar, Kondalam...

India has changed and Chennai by leaps and bounds. I was in Chennai very recently and came back only few weeks ago.   (Saturday 20 th August), after a so called three weeks reprieve or a holiday, or by whatever name you could call it!! The main event was the Stanley 1986 batch silver jubilee meet, which was held a week after our (family) arrival in Chennai. Sixteen of us, including Arun, Bala, and Chandru’s family have settled for our exciting journey on the 29 th afternoon from Manchester , preceded by a few months suspense and excitement over the dates and the venue. Well, we were grounded even before we started and thus how we began.   The Airbus 380 of Emirates luckily developed technical snags, before the flight was on its drive way and we were technically incarcerated for nearly 3 hours before we were let off with a ten pound voucher for each one of us for a quick snack. The flight eventually took off around 8pm local...