Ditto!

As if the names Nirav and Niraj are not confusing enough, these two best friends, who used to always stay together, also used to wear identical shirts at times. Now that Nirav and Niraj work in different companies and in different cities and that I am more accessible to Nirav by the virtue of being his roomie, he wanted to use me as an substitute for his weird fetish of wearing identical shirts together. I politely declined his offer because I somehow do not identify myself with the Band-wallahs. The band-wallahs are the people who play at the band and are always dressed in uniforms. And someone like me who doesn't even know to play a single musical instrument, not even the tabla on a table, posing as a band-wallah would be nothing short of an insult to the tribe. To tell you how much I detest the idea, Lech and me decided not to have lunch together at office about a year and half ago because we were wearing identical shirts. That we ended up having lunch together, sitting as far as possible from each other, amongst our group of four, with Deepa and Kashy acting as saviours, is a different thing though.
Today morning, when I set out along with Nirav, wearing a flashy white crumpled cotton short kurta with bright yellow sunflowers, which I admit is gaudy, Nirav made the same suggestion which he thinks is cool and I think, with due respect to him, is outright stupid. I declined it yet again as politely as I could. Nirav, was one of the few who genuinely appreciated the shirt. There were a few others who appreciated it too, but I could clearly see the sarcasm eventhough they tried their best to hide it. And the rest; they chose to ignore the shirt.
Being a Friday, I started from office a bit early in Swapnil's car and got down at Sion at about 7 pm. From there, as usual, I took a BEST bus. After buying the ticket from the conductor, it was not difficult to find a seat in the relatively empty bus. Just as I sat on my seat and was about to let my breath out, I happened to notice this guy sitting on the seat ahead of me. This guy who was a typical Bombay tapori(vagabond is the closest translation in English, though the effect gets lost), the continuous tobacco chewing types,to my surprise was wearing an identical shirt except for the fact that his sunflowers were blue! I got up and took a seat away from him.

Please come back on Monday to see me wearing that gaudy shirt!