Now that I got all your attention I can happily say this is my effort at fooling you on April 2 since April 1, the supposed April Fools’ Day was so disappointing. Nobody tried to fool me, be it in the real world or in the virtual (read: gmail/FB et al). There were no bizarre but believable posts on FB that would make me jump out of my skin, no phone calls that convinced then cracked me up and no tricks played on me in person.
I guess we were all so busy with work, home and FB (mind it, it’s become a must-do part of our life now) that we didn’t have the time to think of fooling a friend or a family member and working up some peals. I remember while working in Calcutta Times, Times of India, how once we had our readers fooled on April Fools’ Day. By the end of the day the incessant ring of the office phone almost turned us deaf.
Of course, such an idea could have only come from the agile and impish mind of our Editor, late Abhijit Dasgupta. He just got a photograph of a bunch of people dancing in a nightclub and got our designer to morph the faces into famous Kolkata personalities that included actors, authors, politicians, singers – in other words a most unlikely partying bunch.
The inimitable morphing coupled with the convincing article had everyone awestruck with their morning cuppa. Some realized the reality some didn’t, but there was absolute mayhem.
I remember when I was in school, our plans on a certain April Fools’ Day ended in mayhem too. We were a bunch of friends and the girls decided to meet the boys on April 1 with a trick up their sleeves. Our story was foolproof but I proved to be the real fool. I was the only one to whom the boys had talked about the meeting point and I had promptly forgotten about it. So as we tried to locate them moving from one usual meeting point to another, the boys did the same after they waited for us at the stipulated place. As a result we all went to all our meeting points but at the wrong time. Hence we never met. (In case you are wondering when we were in school we hadn’t heard of mobiles.) We finally decided to pep ourselves up with cola on a friends terrace when the boys came looking for us there. By then, after all the searching, we had even forgotten what stories we had worked on to fool them.
Actually later on I realized in our efforts to fool each other, thanks to my super fertile memory, I got everyone fooled. So if you want something desperately it happens.
Now going back to Beti B. Would you guys believe it? Ash even let me hold her while she cheered her favourite horse at the World Cup.
amritaspeaks 