Se7en

4.30 pm – the last Indo-Pak ODI is beginning to get interesting. If I was not host of the meet, I would not have moved even an inch away from the live telecast on Ten Sports. “Poor planning”, I say and drag myself out of the house with a great feeling of sacrifice.

4.55 pm – even as I am on my way to Jantar Mantar, I receive a call from Amit Gupta, who has already reached the venue. I am glad to know that there is at least one more person who sacrificed Cricket match for Blogging. I am happy that even if it’s just two of us – technically I can say that Flogger’s Meet happened – better than it being called a Flopper’s meet.

5.15 pm – I reach the venue, and apart from Amit Gupta, I also find Bhushan and Smita already present. 4 people in all (I can call it a huge success now.)

6.15 pm – Twilight Fairy calls to complain that they are not letting her in Jantar Mantar (some people have a very good judgement I tell you, just like wordpress – whenever she comments on my blog, they are filtered out as spams. I love wordpress :p). So we move out of Jantar Mantar to catch up with her. Puneet is also accompanying her.

6.30 pm – We move to CCD in CP for where Ajay joins us too in a while.

Now, did we have fun? Oh! boy we did and how…

Bhushan is the guy from DIG and he actually carries out sting operations as a part of his work. But he was genuinely there in capacity of a blogger and not as a sting journo ;) Bhushan initially thought that I am the Amit who had had an e-mail spat with him few days back, so he met me with an extra large grin, later when he realized that it wasn’t me but Amit Gupta, the grin was re-directed towards Amit Gupta ;)

Smita – who is from many places – is into Journalism and communications as well. She shared her experiences about the BlankNoiceProject meet she attended last Wednesday. Also she told us how almost everyone in China uses some funny english names as their alias.

Amit Gupta, the ultimate tech guy, raised passionate slogans like ‘Blogger Sucks’, ‘WordPress Rocks’ and ‘Beware of Google’. Being owner of a Hindi Blog, he volunteered to translate english parts of our conversation to Twilight Fairy. He was the first to reach the venue, and while waiting for other bloggers to turn up, he was a bit alarmed for obvious reasons when Bhushan approached him asking ‘are you waiting for somebody?‘. Luckily Amit understood that Bhushan was talking about bloggers and not hinting about something else :p

Twilight Fairy was busy impressing on me that she graced the Flogger’s Meet with her presence just for my sake. However the fact was that she did not get the tickets for ‘Rang De Basanti‘ for the third consecutive weekend (:D) and the next best thing to do last evening was Flogger’s Meet.

Puneet, went almost philosophical telling how he literally became a lazylump and has not blogged for over a year now.

Ajay explained to us how he literally has a sh!tty name, and also that he perhaps has an oxymoronic nature resulting in his choice for the name of his blogs – ‘married single‘ & ‘regularly irregular‘. Then we had some stimulating and scientific (read Biology & Physics) discussions over the difference between ‘regularly irregular‘ , ‘irregularly regular‘, ‘regularly regular‘ and ‘irregularly irregular‘.

See! my plans for not having any heavy duty agenda for meet, and just having pure and harmless fun was being implemented beautifully by Ajay. Just then I was accused of initiating serious discussion when I happened to say that most of the bloggers are essentially “brave cowards” :p

Twilight Fairy and Ajay had come to the meet with some ulterior motives. While we were discussing street harassment, TF asked me to present view point of the harasser :-/ Then Ajay and TF drew parallels between my name ‘amit’ and some other 4 letter words. Later on Ajay went a step further, I am not sure if he was defending his married status or he was trying to brainwash me with the thought that I should get married too. It was only when I tried to explain him symbolically that if one needs half a ltr of milk everyday, buying a buffalo is not a wise solution, he was convinced :o)

Finally after some paid coffee and water, complimentary Cadburys’ Chocho’s and loads of fun filled flogging time – we dispersed.

Thank you so much guys for making it to the Flogger’s Meet.

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** Seven is the number of people who attended the meet.
 Update: Amit Gupta writes about his experience of the meet here.