"Providence created Maharajas to offer mankind a spectacle"...wrote Rudyard Kipling of the Indian princes in pre independence India...

obviously that can be said for others...and i realised that whilst returning from Goa...

had loads of punjus for company...and man were they entertaining or what..

so this big punju family..husband, wife, husband's mother, three kids...two girls of ages 6 and 9 and one boy who is all of 2 and a half...

i wish i could set this whole piece to rhyme...but since i am more comfortable with prose...i will stick to it..

the two year old kid is called "Parth"..decent name i say to myself..especially for a Punju family which is most likely to go for soemthing on the lines of "Lucky", "Goldie" or "Happy"...until the grandmother insists we call the kid " Prince"! Thank God for consistency!!

am trying hard to read a book when the father starts whining to the fellow passengers over how Goa exploited him completely...until he realised that he was the only one in that compartment to have gotten fooled by cabbies and wily hoteliers who charged him a bomb for a night's stay..

and this is what added to his woes...Prince who is all of two is obvisouly the epicentre of all attention...and he shall not be displeased...so the little tyke does not eat a single meal without chicken..so although the entire family is veggetarian..they are obligated to buy chicken for Prince...now Prince favours Chicken Lollipop the most...so no meal is without a plate of Chicken Lollipop!! now a plate of chicken Lollipop costs around Rs. 90 in the hotel they were staying...how much could a two year old eat? so after a few nibbles the rest was fed as scraps to the dogs...the harried father was indeed in a sorry state after paying for three plates of chicken that were fed to the dogs...

Suddenly Prince takes a fancy for me and stands right in front of me ...staring...
to let you in on a little bit of insider information...Prince has been brought up entirely amongst girls..hence he has a twisted gender sense...which means he speaks Hindi only in the feminine gender..

he looks at me for sometime...and then tries to grab my phone..and says, " Phone fek doongi!" I was quite startled...until the parents explain that the kid has a hobby..he generally throws everything in his line of vision out of his sight. in fact he had just thrown his woollen cap in the sea in Goa and when his parents screamed, remarked quite casually , " baad mein aakar le jaaoongi!"

i hid the phone immediately...but i realise that i have many more throwable things on me in his line of vision...he insisted on throwing away my glasses, my book and even my food!!

the parents happily chatted away and insisted that it was a privelege that Prince actually deigned to talk to me because he usually doesen't talk to anyone...

the funniest part was when everytime that Prince threw a tantrum and he wanted to get back at his mum...he would STRIP!! or at least threaten to...

anyway!! i owe it to the Punjus for helping me keep my sanity amidst all the seriousness of the world..in or out of Gokhale!!