Happiness takes the cake

A milestone on National Highway 4 from Bangalore reads: Happiness lies in indulging in random acts of beauty and senseless acts of kindness. One of those clichés, I remarked. Little did I know.

That evening, I got a call from a friend. He asked if I was doing anything constructive right then; I wasn’t. Good, he said happily and took 15 long minutes to explain something that I thought was completely insane. He was thinking of start-ups — not the usual IT kind — and he wanted me to test the waters.

I agreed, having nothing better to do and a bit shaken by his enthusiasm. He arrived on his bike and shoved a guitar into my hands.

We rode off, collecting two other friends on the way, to a small restaurant that played punk rock, 30 km away.

We were going to wish someone a very happy birthday, cut a home-baked cake, present a hand-made greeting card with less than amateurish art on it, sing the ‘happy birthday song’ and other popular numbers as off-key as possible, and basically, ‘make her smile’. A simple agenda, except that she was a complete stranger to all of us.

“We don’t know this girl at all?” I asked. “No,” answered my friend, who seemed high on his idea. His plan? Surprise the girl, make her happy (assuming she would be happy to have a bunch of strangers coming  and doing all this for her).

The girl’s sister had hired his services, my friend confided and he was doing it for free this first time. One day he planned to make a business out of it.

Nice, I thought, rather dubiously. So we landed up at this restaurant and I was made to decorate the cake with M&Ms. It smelled strongly of rum — an added privilege, gloated my friend.

We scribbled our good wishes on the card and when the girl finally arrived, we collectively sang Purani Jeans, Hotel California and Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

She was elated: gave us a cake she was going to take home. We accepted it shamelessly as payment.

I left Bangalore a few days later. In those few days, we managed to go on a 12-hour bike ride to Tamil Nadu (just like that), took up a ‘make a stranger smile’ project on the roads, shot an inane ad for a denim brand that doesn’t exist, and went to see that month’s hugest flop in the most expensive cinema hall for the late night show. Since then, I have taken milestones seriously.