PALA

“Hey you Dunderhead, Don’t you know PALA is a city and Bharananganam a big Town”
I still remember Georgy who literally shouted when we listed PALA among the Tribal Villages. Right from our training days, PALA was always a hot topic.

We used to call Bharananganam as Birmingham. The PALA we discussed was actually a tribal village and Georgy was the leader(Moopan in Malayalam).
We made up lot of things like we have to swim across a river to reach Birmingham, how we can go for hunting and how the tribal girls come running to help Georgy. We always used to make plans to go there. Georgy was very proud to be the first ICICI account holder from PALA.

Few days back, I got lucky. I got a chance to visit PALA. Actually I was quite shocked when I saw few building there. By Jove, I saw an ATM too. Though we didn’t have to cross a River to reach PALA, the road was full of turns and curves and the Bus was always consistent about it’s speed. I was literally flying when the bus was taking Turns. It was a feeling of getting into a Dry Ride in an Amusement Park continuously for 2 hours.

One interesting but irritating thing about PALA is any building or Place you name; there will be two such places. First we asked for Bus stand, there were two Bus stands. Then the Landmark Muncipal Building, there were two. We wouldn’t have surprised if we had met two Georgys. Finally we reached his house and had a sumptuous lunch. And then we had our usual Chit chats and jokes before we parted.

That’s PALA for you, the happening place of India.