El Plano del Pachydermo

Do you have friends who are totally, totally on a different wavelength? Sure you guys get along just fine. But sometimes conversations tend to get bizarre very soon. I don't mean different wavelengths in the sense that you work in consumer banking and they work in investment banking. No I am talking about the situation where you work in consumer banking and they work in mixed media impressionist sculpture or something.

Let me explain.

There is this dear friend who is the highly creative advertising-media-design type who does a LOT of work for JAM Magazine. She is quite the brimful of ideas. And I mean ALL the time. Now these advertising types have brains that work at a completely different level, (electron orbit?), compared to the regular moderately imaginative brain that I have.

When you ask them for advice or inputs on things you do so expecting an avalanche of creativity to be let loose. It's as if they just wake up in the morning, spend an hour thinking up a few hundred creative trains of thought, and then spend the rest of the day just launching them at the least suspecting MBA types who still can't get over the genius of VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP.

Question in office: "How do we give the magazine a new look?" Regular Sidin answer: "Let's get a new font, increase the visuals and jazz up the cover a bit!" Arty Lady's answer: "Let's chop the magazine to a square, punch a hole down the centre, print text down the diagonal and string it up at newsstands."

At the time you try to hold a straight face while wondering what substance makes the brain works that way. But most of the time you envy the insane coolness of their ideas.

So yesterday evening I am sitting hunched over the laptop wondering what to get the wife on the soon-to-be-here first wedding anniversary.

While I may be tall, dark, handsome, have immaculate chest hair and nearly odourless sweat, gifting has never been a strength of mine. I suck at it. And when it comes to gifting women I take that sucking to plunging depths. So, in a moment of weakness, I asked Arty Lady for a anniversary surprise idea.

The mystery is this. She doesn't even pause to think. It's as if her brains has ideas for any possible scenario just cached in somewhere. Without as much as a pause to suck in air she launches into the description of a plan unlike any I have heard before:

"Sidin what you do is this. First I will give you the number of a friend. He is a broker for elephants and other trained animals. You book a nice big elephant for your anniversary day. You then rent a good Indian prince type Sherwani. You dress up, take the elephant, go to her office and wait with the animal till she comes outside after work. Then you pick her up and begin a slow yet extremely regal elephant ride to South Mumbai. On the way you can stop at a cafe or something and share a coffee of some kind. Leave the elephant prominently outside. You must have booked a table at the TAJ for dinner obviously. Then you take the animal right upto the entrance of the TAJ. The valet's face! The idea is to give the woman an experience she will never ever forget for the rest of her life. Awesome no?"

I paused for a second in order to retract chin and a lion's share of tongue from the floor.

"Yes. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Elephant. Awesome. Very good. Give me that bottle of water please..."

"What were you planning Sid?"

"Handbag..."

p.s. Still open to outstandingly creative ideas that do not involve large creatures that can tenderize you for timepass.