We are trying to contact Karthik.
Any South Indian knows the futility of this statement before they hit the full-stop. I am a bit fuzzy on the statistics, but it surely figures in the top 10 list of most frequent names. You see my parents-in-law and his parents became friends when they last visited here. Time passed...Karthik changed apartments and moved on. Now I want to contact them without their contact information.
I have a friend who works in the same company Karthik works for, and I shot him an email asking for Karthik's contact information. So, he must've dutifully contacted the Karthik and within the hour, I had all his phone numbers.
My husband (H) called him and this is how the conversation must have looked:
H: Hello.....May I talk to Karthik?
K: Yes.....that's me
H: Eh......how are you? So, did you guys move?
K: No.....why, and who is this?H: Introduces himself - ** Still not sure because he doesn't sound anything like Karthik**How is Chitra doing?
K: Who Chitra? My wife's name is Lakshmi.
H now feels that the conversation is not going as well as it should. So, he volunteers more irrelevant information
H: Oh, doesn't Chitra work at Google?
K: Chitra may be working at Google, but I am married to Lakshmi.
At which point, H would have found it prudent to end the conv. BTW, the above piece of conversation is purely fictional. Point is: We got a different Karthik.
So, I shot off another email to aforesaid friend, and qualified it saying: He speaks the Coimbatore dialect of Tamil.
So, now what would my friend do with this useless piece of information? Stick a mike to another Karthik and ask him to say a few words in Tamil to validate?
I can't stop myself from giggling while imagining the following:
1) The quizzical look on Karthik's face when my friend approached him for contact information. He must have thought that his parents sphere of influence extends far & wide, and given him the numbers anyway.
2) The increasingly embarrassing conversation between the husband and the above Karthik.
3) Friend sticking a mike to all the Karthiks in the company and asking them to say a few words in Tamil (Thankfully, there was only 1 person by this name, and we had already established that he is not the person we were looking for)
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5 comments:
ha ... interesting and funny. Something similar happened to my hubby Inder, when he called his long lost friend, gathering his number from his old addressbook. At the first hello on the other side he began in absolute friendly chatter, of the types of "Useless insaan, befkoof, cant you call, where have u been, what the hell.. " bla bla kind of ramble we get into with really close friends ... only to find that he was some other "Sandeep" who did not know him at all. I had extreme fun observing his enthusiasm and tone of voice see saw from one extreme to another!
Ha Ha.....I can imagine how embarrassed Inder must've felt!
at least you cannot see faces over the phone so the mistaken identity can be pardoned. my cousin's husband suddenly landed in Jamshedpur when I least expected him.I looked at him and thought 'he looks so much like Babu' and it took me a minute to understand that he was indeed Babu!luckily I realized my mistake soon enough.BTW don't you find coimbatore tamil sweet?i am from the area.
And btw, when I first read your title it sounded like trying to contact aliens or something; something really techno :-)!
oh yes ... I absolutely love Coimbatore Tamil - it has respect dripping in every syllable!
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