Quake !!

Normal life in Chennai and other coastal areas in Tamil Nadu came to a halt on Wednesday afternoon following those mild tremors that were a fall out of the massive earthquake near Sumatra in Indonesia. Well, that’s part of the news,  but the way our normal life came to a halt was hilarious ! We also knew that the two most affected places during that earthquake were Facebook and Twitter  
As a part of our relaxing therapy , we played  table tennis for around 30 minutes.  We use this 1-2pm as our standard timing, as the TT table was the second most highly used equipment next to the coffee vending machines at office . Once we were done, we headed to the cafeteria to have our lunch.  As usual we started trolling one of our friends with some funny pictures taken at college. It was then our Director came running in, to announce the earthquake news. Since we were at one end, we didn’t hear anything at first, and so we thought that he was calling us for an emergency meeting. On the other side, we were starving to death and were desperate enough to carry on with our lunch. But within few minutes, we were the only people left out.  We had no other choice, but to leave the cafeteria and get down to the rescue zone (too much of Counter Strike ).
It was only after getting down, we witnessed a plenty of things going around !  First thing that I noticed were photographers , different types of photographers all around. One set of people tried to utilize the opportunity to take a photograph of their female / male co-workers . And then there were these people who were taking group photos amidst that crowd as if they were the part of a winning IPL team at a post match presentation. Third and the largest category of people were trying to take a long shot as in a Shankar’s movie. Even I tried to take some, but since I was short enough ,  I couldn’t get that long shot as expected. It was when I noticed the fourth set of photographers still at the 7th floor  trying to take the top view shot amidst all these chaos ! (I remembered that guy who’ll try to capture Godzilla’s atrocious moves by standing beneath it instead of running of his life )
                After witnessing those terrific photographers, we saw couples everywhere,  you might ask me “yea  so what ? you can see them everywhere, even now”, true but even amidst those tremors few reserved all the shady short trees planted in the garden for them to… * yea discuss about their future *.. that’s how they call it   My my, they didn’t leave the short bushes either ! The summers in Chennai are so hot, that could turn a fish into a dry fish within a couple of minutes and  for those couples who came out late had no other choice but to take a sun bath.
 We went in after the first tremor, and as soon as we sat down in our respective cubes we entered the holiday mood besides all this commotion. Most of them felt the second tremor as soon as we settled down.  It was when everyone started packing really fast.  A certain team’s  supervisor asked everybody to evacuate the place really quick, it was when my friend  asked for 10 more minutes just because the movie he was copying from a friend’s hard disk was pretty slow  !!  We can even accept this guy, but our guru to the right (“iddiyae vilunthaalum work pannuvaen” #thamizh) he was working till that last moment, Not to mention that he is the technical guru of our team. 
                   One other ridiculous thing that happened in a certain MNC’s buildings : nobody were allowed to go out as their buildings were strong enough for earthquakes with a Richter of 11.7 Thoppi Thoppi but some of our friends from here called them and shared all their quake stories !!
               I did not seriously understand why we were waiting beneath those huge weak buildings, because if an earthquake occurs, then I’m sure all of us would have lost our lives. Initially we were asked to move into the safe zone of the park, that was an open area which can accommodate only people from one/two towers but there were 10+ towers totally !  So I guess, because of lack of space people just stood out where ever they wished too. An earthquake would never set a reminder event to our outlook before attacking us, the max we can do is to take all the preventive measures !