මාර පරාජය (Resounding Defeat)

I have a nice bunch of friends. Well, mostly nice but they - at least some of them - can be very nasty too. Let me introduce a few of them - all but one of them are from the same university I was at, and the 'but one' is a foreigner whose house is located halfway up the Mount Everest - to you which is necessary in order to tell you the story I'm about to tell you.

First there is Nee. A rugby fan, cricket tragic and a happily married father of four living in some unheard rural area of Australia. He's your pretty much average decent dude though unremarkable. Then there is Sayya who insists that we call him BS. I assure you BS doesn't stand for what you're thinking of right now. Now, if Nee is your normal dude, BS is at the other end of the spectrum; he's anything but normal. Born and raised in the hill capital of Sri Lanka, this dude at a very young age developed an uncanny ability to score as easily as another friend of mine whom I will introduce to you in a moment can gobble down anything with sugar in it. After a while, not just Kandy but the whole country was not big enough territory for BS so he decided to move on to bigger and better things. The territory I mean. Now under the guise of some unimportant but made to look important job he travels the world as he sees fit and 'scores' without fail wherever he goes. Remarkable dude he is. The man we all wish we were. Then comes A, the CEO of a leading web site in Sri Lanka whose greatest achievements to date remain tricking authorities to admit him to the prestigious university we went to and scoring a try in a game of touch-rugby at the said university. Then there is the 'but one' (there's only one T, you pervs!) mentioned above, let us call her B, who's so good at Sinhala she can fool Sri Lankans into thinking she's Sri Lankan. Last but certainly not least there is Looney. The same WWTCILB I told you about here. Now she's one of a kind. Her extraordinary feats include being the said WWTCILB, sleeping 16 hours a day, freezing shoes before putting them on even in winter and being able to consume - in a day - three times the amount of candy a normal person would in a week. Unfortunately for him Nee was not aware of this last fact until he found out about it the hard way. This is the story of how that happened.

All of us are regulars in G+ and fool around there a lot. Nee, being one of the two unremarkable dudes (the other one being A of course) among an awesome bunch as we are (Oh yeah I didn't tell you why I am awesome, but then again does it really need to be said? You all know I am, right?), wasn't feeling particularly happy about it. The fact that he was in the same side of the fence as A didn't help his confidence either which is quite understandable. Grass on the other side was indeed greener for him. So one fine day he decided enough is enough and that he should join the ranks of us immortals. His intentions were good, but the method he chose was, well, a poor choice. He decided that he would challenge Looney to a cookie eating contest to see who can eat the most in a given time and emerge victoriously on this side of the fence. Yes, cookies aren't candy, but they are somewhat sweet-ish and that's more than enough for Looney. Poor Nee, was the first thought that came to my mind. But this unprecedented sweet-ish-things-consumption of Looney was unknown to BS as well as A, and they were rooting for Nee to win the contest. I knew better and advised Nee to consider another time but he was having none of it. I decided to let him go bang the head in the wall. It was agreed upon that to spice up the contest A would also compete while I, BS and B will be the impartial judges. But B also wanted to participate so it was left for me and BS to organize the whole thing. However at the last minute B dropped out because she had finished all the cookies she had in her house and she was not going to be able to climb down Mount Everest and come back in time. Then we had to kick A out because despite being a CEO he did not want to spend a few bucks on cookies and started demanding judges provide him with them. This is not a place for the cheap so out went A.

Agreed date and time arrived pretty soon and we all gathered in one Hangout in G+ to start the highly anticipated event. Nee was still very confident of his victory and was sledging Looney even before the contest started. That was to be his demise though. We started the contest soon, and Nee was still sledging all the way while Looney was quietly going on about her business. But then, unexpectedly to me at least, Nee was getting ahead of the number of cookies and after the 10 minutes we decided upon he was on 16 cookies to Looney's 12. Looked like that Nee had finally crossed the fence, but unfortunately for him there was one last twist in the tale; the cookies Looney had brought were much heavier and bigger compared to the ones Nee had brought. Our calculations revealed that Looney, staying true to her self, had eaten more than one and a half times what Nee had had. Fate had let the poor fella down once again. There he was beaten and confidence shattered destined to be where A is for the rest of his life. Such is the cruelty of life he must have thought. But as I see it, he has only himself to blame for had he asked me, I would have told him the secret of beating Looney.

He should have opted for a cookie-not-eating contest; she wouldn't have lasted five seconds.