Carols - around the city on, wait for it, a lorry!

It's that time of the year when people suddenly begin to harbor a rather wierd affection for a fat old man in a red er... suit, even if the beard is fake, the wobbly belly is a pillow, etc, etc. And as is usual, this is the time of the year when people go around singing (or trying to, in any case). It's the accepted norm and people don't do much to change it. Or do they?


The idea was making the whole going on rounds singing carols more unconventional, while at the same time making sure we didn't have to get into each and every house*; The ever-green (or red) Santa with the fake beard and pillowed tummy present with bags of toffees; And to make sure the carols rang in the ears of a whole bunch of people wherever we went... Recipe for ear-ache? We were thinking more along the lines of the angels singing for the shepherds out in the cold** but you get the idea. 

What followed was sheer genius, and some rather interesting (if a trifle pointless) observations. We got ourselves a mini-lorry, and decked it with an amplifier, a pair of loudspeakers, a few boughs of a fir-tree, lots of fluorescent tubes and serial lights, some 10 chairs, a keyboard (handled by yours truly), and in a nod to technology, an ipod playing Boney M's Christmas album***, all packaged with nearly a dozen men and women, and a whole lot of balloons. 

... which eventually led to a lot of fun. Observation no. 1 was how little by way of suspension a lorry's deck has - I had to hold on to the keyboard throughout the trip, which went on a little over three hours - made me wonder about what exactly those leaf springs in the lorry do, and observation no. 2 revolved around getting into tiny little roads and finding buses there! Who er... honked a lot because the roads were barely enough for two Revas (or G Wiz to international readers) to go side-by-side comfortably. 

To make matters more interesting, the amazing suspension soon became too much for our amplifier, which shorted it's auxillary circuits, after which, trying to get the keyboards sounding through the microphone input was painful, to say the least. Obviously, we didn't stop and try getting it fixed. 

On the whole though, it was a very nice experience. Everywhere we stopped (and we stopped a lot!) a crowd came around to listen. Observation no. 3 - while you'd naturally expect Santa to be a hit with kids, youth and grown-ups seem to take a more than passing interest - more than you expect anyways. So we had people, young and old, asking Santa to pray for them, bless them, etc. I'll be posting the pictures from it soon. Keep watching this space.

* I know some of you are affronted at going through all that trouble and not getting a bite to eat at every house, but considering the sheer number of houses that would be visited, the modern human male and female prefer eating less to becoming Santa Claus. It's actually true.



** In Madurai, where snowflakes are seen during every Christmas since '97 in homes watching Cartoon Network and the HBO. 


*** Is it just me, or are Jingle Bells and Feliz Navidad of the said Boney M's christmas album the most widely known and heard Christmas songs in India?