First Official Interview

You know what I'm talking about, don't you. Yeah, the interview where there is no Interviewer or Interviewee. The one that can make or break your life or just provide wholesome entertainment maybe some time in the future when you look back at it. Why official? I'd been through one unofficial one - sometime back. :)

I decided to put it in my blog so that I'll have some humour to come back to. Well. Not really. Maybe some learnings for upcoming Interviewers(ee) once I'm done with this.

We reach the decided place and are about to call the bride's parents to see how much longer they are going to be when I see a cute girl step out with her parents. They too seemed to be looking around as cluelessly as us. So sort of figured out they were the ones and approached them. After a few minutes of Introductions, the parents got down to the usual linking each other by links as far as they could go. Some links traced included school, college and work connections. Just as I was about to doze off, my mom said - you guys must be getting bored. Why don't you go to a different table and talk to each other? Oh!! No. I was really enjoying this. :-)

Me and N move to a different table in the corner (Bad choice as it turned out later). First couple of minutes of stunning silence. Then a few stupid attempts at conversation later, we did get to know each other a bit. Unfortunately, it turns out N hadn't yet recovered from her last broken engagement. She was going on and on about why it was the worst phase of her life and here I was consoling or atleast trying to console her. I was praying that she wouldn't burst into tears and make everyone think that I'd made her cry.

At one point, I told her about why she needed to take more time off, get over this crisis and then restart her search for her life-partner. Here I was acting like an Agony-Uncle to a potential life-partner. Anyway, even if she was a potential, the timing just wasn't right. The reasoning given by my parents to convince me to see the girl was that neither were they in a hurry to get married nor were we (since my bro was still looking). So if we liked each other, it would have been perfect. But as I'd repeatedly suggested to my parents, no-one and I repeat no-one can get over a broken engagement or marriage in a month and be ready to get engaged to another person.

Anyway back to where I left off, N and I were talking about our likes and dis-likes and interests and how we spend our time when an old man next to our table started blowing cigarette smoke in the general direction of our table or maybe it was just the wrong corner we chose. This brought our conversation to an abrupt end. We looked at each other. I said let's move to another table, got up looked around to see if there was another clean empty table, found none. The only other option was to walk back to the table where our parents were and wrapped it up.

My personal opinion was that we could have let it hang as it is and take it up whenever she was ready for this. But as it appears, things didn't work out (why it didn't is interesting material for another post).