A Thanksgiving Experience

It started out as a warm day and I was woken up by my roommate hollering "get up, we got to go to a friend's place for thanksgiving". A look of surprise replaced the bleariness in my eyes. During my year and half long residence in Nolan's Gotham, this was the first time I had been invited for a meal at a friend's place. Of course I had vacationed at my uncle's place during Easter and had gone out with friends countless number of times but this! This was a first. And I considered it with trepidation before nodding my consent and started getting ready. It was by no means a fast morning. We got ready at a leisurely pace and by the time we left it was well past 3 pm. The drive to his place was fun filled. We entertained ourselves by playing south Indian beat music at full volume, with our windows down and shocking the hell out of anybody who rode with their windows down. A hearty meal was followed by a few games of FIFA to kill the time until everybody was ready to leave for shopping. Of course, being end of month, I had enough money for window shopping while my companions decided to buy discounted overpriced stuff in the babe of thanksgiving deal. We went to a mall that was like no other mall I'd ever been to. It was just an intertwining maze filled with hundreds of shops. Enough to get lost in and end up losing contact with those who came with you. Sounds laughable? Well that's exactly what happened. It was a rather cold evening and I got engrossed in conversation with a friend over Facebook and my phone died within 5 mins and I turned to find that my roommate, to whom I had specifically told to not leave the shop without me, was nowhere to be found. Suddenly I was there, all alone in a place perhaps fifty miles away from my house without a penny in my pocket to aid me in getting back home. The only thought that reassured me was that my roommates wouldn't leave without me. So, without panicking, I started going around the mall in search of any of the half dozen people I went there with. Thanksgiving being what it is, the mall was flooded with crazy deal-hungry humans whose sole purpose, it seemed, was to prevent me from sighting my companions. To add salt to injury, the gods of rain chose to shower upon us with their fastest and hardest ammunition. Completely drenched, clueless as to where on earth these people could have vanished to, I started going around the mall like an addict in hunt for his daily fix. It took me 3 hours of roaming around without any means of communication to finally find them looking for me in some random corner of the complex. Heaving a sigh of relief, we started laughing at what a tiny miscommunication wrought in the past few hours. The hunt, while in vain, allowed me to observe a few things and make some observations of my own. Going through each and every store, I saw enough things that sort of made me lose faith in humanity. Two people brawling over some article of clothing ended up with one guy lying in a bloody mess. The embarrassed man ran out of the store dripping blood all over the floors while the crowd halted to peer with interest. Two seconds later the craziness had begun once again. In yet another store while walking through the rear aisles I found a bunch of teen aged girls hogging over some skinny jeans. Seemed perfectly normal until one of the girls suddenly fainted, banging her head on a railing, and fell face first to the floor. The others freaked out and one of the girls whipped out her phone and started calling someone. Stuck between people and clothes I could barely move while I overheard her call the mother of the girl who fainted and informed her about how the girl had accompanied them in spite of being terribly sick and dehydrated and how she had fainted there. Two hours into this ordeal it hit me that had this happened a decade or so ago, I would have simply begged someone's phone and called my friend's number from memory. It just showed me how dependent, lazy and mindless, technology has made us. It might have been just another Thanksgiving to most Americans, but for me it was the first time I had experienced different emotions in a country that still seems foreign to me in spite of having lived here for so long. It was, in short, quite the experience and for that I am thankful!


**********************************************************************************************************************************

I know i am 40+ days late with this article. I had started writing it as we were driving back home but was too tired to complete it and it lay forgotten until today. Just thought i should get done with it.

Comments and critics are welcome :)