Weekend Diaries continued...

Well, its been a bit of time since I regaled all of you with tales of my adventurous weekends in Bangalore. To tell you the truth my weekends have not been very interesting for some 3 months now. I mean I enjoyed them but they wouldn’t make very interesting reading. Going by the high standards of entertainment I maintain on this blog a tennis game in the morning followed by sleeping all day long does not exactly match up as the most exciting day ever. And that’s what I’ve been doing consistently for the last three months.

However, this weekend was radically different and was in sharp contrast to the staid weekends of yore. There was no tennis as the guy I play with was visiting home. Thus began the debauchery filled weekend again.

Friday: The favorite day of the weekend began on a rather frustrating note (By start of course I mean after office). I was supposed to go to this pub called Purple Haze with a few of my colleagues but ended up getting lost. Yes, yes BEFORE I even hit the pub. It so happened that I missed the entrance to the pub and then had to use my amazing direction sense to come up with an alternate route to reach the place traversing through myriad one-way streets scattered around that part of the city. As is a well known fact my sense of direction is consistently wrong, without fail (In fact if Delhi was not a circle I would never have been able to reach any unknown destination there). It didn’t fail me on Friday either. I finally managed to reach the place after driving around for an hour – in a 3 kilometer radius.

Anyway, after that it was just super. It had been such a long long time since I had so much fun in a pub. It was good company and I had a rocking time – head banging to unknown songs, playing the air guitar, jumping around, tipping waiters and attendants, getting into small challenges, jumping some more, recognizing some songs and getting totally excited about them. Really amazing evening. It had been way too long since I had such an evening out.

Saturday was even cooler, if that was possible. Bangalore open, the Women’s Tennis Association event, was going on and Saturday had some very interesting matches lined up. These were semi-final level matches featuring Patty Schnyder and Yan Zi and Venus Williams and Serena Williams. AK, as usual, was enthusiastic about trying new things so we tried to get tickets for the matches but failure loomed ahead as no tickets were available online or at the Café Coffee Day outlets that the newspaper ads said would have them (The Coffee Day I went to to ask, the guy gave me a gentle smile you give to a child when you tell them that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and told me that no such thing was happening). But did these failures keep us down? Or did the indomitable spirit of adventure nestling in our heart seize the day and shouted out "Carpe Diem"?

Er…slightly melodramatic…but anyway AK drove us down to the stadium which was a decent distance away and we managed to get tickets for the evening.

We reached there by 7:30. A word or two about the stadium. Excellent. Just walking inside the stadium (Kingfisher Lawn Tennis Association stadium in Cubbon park) transported us to a new place. Brilliantly floodlit with excellent facilities and international looking courts and stands. Excellent display screens for scores and previous set highlights while the players rested. Everything was hassle free and well managed. Seriously, this Vijay Mallya is amazing. He puts his hands in all glamorous endeavors but executes them to perfection. Seriously we need entrepreneurs like him to highlight the importance of quality and flair.

We missed half of Schnyder’s match but it was really cool seeing these top players of the world. Patty is ranked 11 in the world right now, Serena 9, Venus 7 . But the game itself was not particularly fast paced. It was more gentle and forehands were going well over the net rather than just skimming the net. Patty was playing more with slice and top spin than with power. Her opponent Yan Zi was trying to put power in the game but it wasn’t enough. Patty had way more guile and execution ability and ended up winning in straight sets.

The next match was the big one. The Williams sisters facing off against each other. And man, they’re huge. Venus is 6’1” and Serena is 6’0” and looked way way bigger with tremendous reach than that.Both are extremely athletic though Venus is more lithe. Now this was a game with a totally different tempo altogether. Both of them had so much power and their strokes were burning up the court. Excellent game that went right down to the wire (6-3, 3-6, 6-6 (7-4)). Serena won the game purely because she was more composed on the important points. Venus seemed to get ruffled, though Serena also did her share of double faults and unforced errors.

All in all a wonderful way to spend a Saturday. Seeing world class athletes slugging it out in a sport you love.

Sunday was interesting as I met a couple of friends, discovered a great lunch place and ended up watching an inane movie (Bombay to Bangkok. Don’t ask, just please don’t ask) on a 42 inch LCD tv at a friends place. Very very cool TV. I can just imagine what it would feel like to watch some gripping match on that large screen!

All in all a very good weekend. These are the kind of weekends that pump you up and make the previous five days worth it :)