Friends are for life. This was proven yet again at Goa when 6 of us got together for a quick weekend at Goa.

Harshad was the initiator of this gathering, (3 cheers to him), unfortunately he could not join himself due to an urgent family commitment. Similarly uncle Menon and laddoo also missed this event due to unavoidable family events.

Marwadi (Vikas), Masture (Suhas), Focky (Parag), Doggy (Sanjay), Sheikh (Sajit) and Padya (pradeep) were finally able to make it. All of us came into Goa on a Friday evening and checked into the pre-booked villa. The villa was quite adequate and met all the needs of our boys get-together.

On Friday evening, we had our first drink-in session with fine single malt scotch and had lots of fun reliving our memories from yore. It didn’t seem like we had ever missed each other, though we have only met a few times since we graduated from college almost 23 years ago. The evergreen topic of conversation was of course Focky”s unrequited love story. He had some evidences to present, which he called as a surprise, but not all of us, myself specially were convinced about the veracity of this claim.

The next morning began reasonably early and all of us literally packed ourselves into Vikas”s vehicle and headed out for breakfast. After breakfast, we made a trip to Panaji where most of us brought some cashews at a ludicrously sounding shop called “Zantye”. As you can well imagine, this was the topic of quite a few PJ”s.

From there on, aided by some “expert 😂😂” navigation by Sajit and Vikas, we made a trip to Chapora fort, the place popularised by the boyhood movie of our times, Dil Chahta Hain”. The climb to the top of the hill where the broken ramparts of the fort was located took some mild effort, but we were rewarded with some sweeping glimpses of the Arabian sea, with the waves breaking onto the coastline and the gentle sea breeze against our faces. As usual we took many pictures to remember this and promptly posted all of it on to our whatsapp group, where I should acknowledge at this stage, we had the rest of our friends being a very indulgent audience, though they were faraway, they were all with us in spirit.

After the climb back down, we had cool coconut water and then went back to our room. After getting fresh, we were ready for our second drink-in session with the old and faithful bottle of scotch. Vikas and Suhas the tee-totallers never made us feel out of place and it appeared many occasions they were as high in spirits as ourselves. The colas from Pepsi did have that effect I suppose or perhaps it was us !

After a few rounds, we decided to make a trip for dinner to a place that served some kathiawadi food and it was indeed delicious, though ridiculously out of place for us to have this in Goa. After a full dinner, we decided to walk by to the place where all the action is located on a Saturday night.

Tito”s lane was where we went and all of us were a bit taken aback by the scenes there. It was akin to an international beach resort much unlike the Goa we remembered during the trips we made during our college times. The beach front was quite like Phuket OR Rio. Foreign dancers, dancing away on bar tables, people just sitting about on the beach drinking and enjoying their time and hordes of youngsters dancing away to the foot tapping and electric music blasting away from the speakers in the discotheque lined throughout Tito”s lane.

We decided to head back after feeling completely out of place (at least here, I speak for myself) and trudged back to our room and called it a night.

The next morning was checkout day and Vikas was out early to meet a relative studying in the city and the rest of us took a van to the airport to drop off Sanjay after the customary settlement of accounts and the goodbye pictures..

After dropping off Sanjay we had some time to kill and we headed out to another beach nearby and spent time at a shack having beer and lunch. Post lunch we checked into the airport, after Suhas and Vikas drove away to their town and all of us were ready to get back home, after having spent some really quality and fun filled moments with the ones we truly believe are friends for life..