Adhi Potoba

I can admit without any resentment that I have spent the better part of the mornings of growing years at Hotel Vaishali. There’s no other place that embodies the slow paced, there’s-always-tomorrow sprit of Pune city more than Hotel Vaishali. Any regular visitor can tell you with their eyes closed what the scene at Vaishali is like in the mornings. Sadly, they can also name the people who will be there at any given time and the area in which they might be sitting. I first started visiting Vaishali for the food. I have yet to find a single thing or item on the menu to complain about. However, years went by, and although the food never took a back seat, mornings at Vaishali became more of a social event than a strictly culinary visit. Although, as fun as the mornings at Vaishali were, evenings at Vaishali just as awesome. And the one thing that made that possible was that the Chaat bar would open at 4:30 p.m. And the crowning jewel of the Chaat bar was the hero of the evenings, the Sev ...

After my lackluster performance in my SSC exams I thought I had sealed my fate of getting into the prestigious science stream or even get in to a good junior college such as Fergusson. Of course, anyone from India knows that merit has absolutely nothing to do with what college you get into or pretty much anything you do in life. So through "family connections" I was granted a seat at Fergusson College in the science stream. In fact my parents went one up and secured me a seat in division D of the science stream. In Fergusson, divisions C and D were reserved for the smartest students. You know those really annoying, snooty kids whose lives revolve around books, coaching classes and HSC merit lists? All of my friends however, were placed in division F—the class that every teacher feared, the class that is made entirely out of students who have come there by all means except merit. Even the girls were a force to be reckoned with. As the FYJC year progressed, my misery in a class...