Bungle in the Jungle

Vamsee Modugula, a gregarious civil engineer and transportation planner from Fremont a suburb of gay paradise San Francisco, loves to meet people and make friends. So much so she claims she has almost 150 friends from all over the world. Among them, she holds a selectfew very close to heart. In a freak turn of events leading up to this past labor day weekend, she organized a convention (of sorts) that almost ended in a melee and riot police having to be called to handle the irate crowds. Here is what happened, in her own words.

"...It started out as a funny idea. My friend Madhavi and I were talking about how we don’t meet that frequently anymore. See, she lives in Pittsburgh and a CEO of an upcoming software company, and has a cell-phone tattooed to the side of her head. Busy life-ishtyle, badei log (in her native tongue Hindi. What Vamsee says is busy life-style, important people). She loves to tell jokes of that about which we don’t talk about anymore, after this weekend. There are these friends of my husband's, 4 guys all married (Readers: please realize Vamsee means 4 friends married to other people, not to each other. Indians like to speak English in a circuitous way, remember Appu in Simpson’s?). Madhavi is married to one of them. The others are equally fun-loving and enthusiastic to talk about that about which we don’t talk about anymore. We decided to make it a yearly event where we would meet at a convenient location so we could chat and eat and talk about that about which we don’t talk about anymore (Readers: Vamsee likes to use these words "about which we don’t talk about anymore" a lot. Off the record, she sheepishly admitted she is a closet-fan of Night Shyamalan, famed Hollywood director. These lines are a shameless paraphrasing of dialogues from his latest movie "The Village") . But it turns out we were not spending enough time talking about other things, the real things we wanted to talk about. You know. Important things like recipes, finger lake wines, my obsession with mangoes, my husband's obsession with facials and imitating dances of Bollywood actresses (Readers: Bollywood is India's equivalent of America’s Hollywood) etc. The guys just wanted to get drunk and talk about their past. They are all pretty old, the men are.

Anyway, this year, we decided to meet in Vail after a long drawn out battle. There was voting, there was a recount, then there was a supreme court ruling. Heh, heh!! (After the reporter coaxed her on the "supreme court ruling" part, she revealed that one of these friends Tara has a 18month old son called Shtiram. It was his decision to stay put in the west, and the others so overcome under his spell of cuteness, agreed).Vail was picked since it was the boondocks of the west. The other choices were Finger lakes of upstate NY, North Carolina. Unofficially, I would have preferred Roswell, New Mexico or Area 59, Nevada. Both are equally desolate and we all needed to decompress and spend some quality time together. Also, if the going gets tough, there are aliens close by "to kidnap them". We rented a house big enough to house an army. We thought it would fun having the house all to ourselves. Then we realized we forgot to include other close friends. One thing led to another, and soon we had 45 gents, 10 little children and 2 dogs to fit into that house. So we decided to call it a convention and not a get-together. And so it was that we met up here in Vail, the whole posse. Coordinating the renting of hummers and tanks to aid with the logistics of travel and air-lifting of food by Apache helicopters was managed by Madhavi due to her connections with the US Army. Her company was doing some serious business with them folks. Alas, we had not accounted on the shortage of toilet paper. And the water supply. Food was abundant, and everybody ate to their hilt. And that was the problem. Need I say more: A riot broke out. Have you seen the Seinfeld episode with the toilet paper lady and Elaine ? Well, that was nothing. Tara and Kala may seem petite, but when they ganged up against bigger men like Murali and Bhaskar (their respective spouses),it was an impressive display of claws and fangs. The kind of hunting scenarios that show on Discovery channel my husband likes to watch. These men retreated into the woods with lotas. (Readers: You don’t want to know what the last thing meant. A word of caution to the readers to not venture into the woods around Vail for the next few weeks). Toward the end of the weekend, the men and the women were drawing lines in the ground and divvying up the TP supplies. The kids were ok since the diaper supply was enough. The dogs, well you know they are dogs. They went with the men. It was ugly. Tempers ran high. he noise roused the nearest neighbors 5 miles away. They called the police and FBI. Did I mention the suspicious looks we got from them when air-lifting the food supplies ? Guess 45 Asian men and women congregating in a rustic setting and speaking dialects that seemed mid-eastern, the men running off into the woods at ungodly hours, and the constant hooting and yelling must have raised suspicions beyond the yellow level. They must have duct-taped their windows too! (Readers: Vamsee is a democrat).

All said and done, 11am Monday morning, we were staring down the guns of 40-odd nervous uniformed SWAT team cops. By the time we explained our presence there, and sorted them out and got Ramanthan to return the nightstick he knocked off a cop's hand and the spaniel to let go of another's butt, it was ready for us to leave for the airport.

Next year, we have decided to call each other to chat about this year's events, and everything else, including that about which we don’t like to talk about anymore in person."