'High' point

Pani puri ka pani on the rocks on the house for everyone!

The bar menu has reached a grand total of 500 drinks.

The blog and I have come a long way. My way of thinking has undergone drastic changes. I have learnt important lessons in self-discovery. I have found friends I never thought I could be so close to. I have made enemies I never thought I could make.

The blog has allowed me to don many personas. From Bollywood-crazy Sayesha Smitten showbiz kitten, to the baby-talking adoring masi, to the bar-tending Bhai whose name strikes terror in the hearts of many. And at other times, I am simply Sayesha, a girl who has experienced significant events in her life because of her blog.

A year ago, when a 3-day-old baby Aish was admitted to the ICU and the doctor said, “It’s upto God now.” it felt like our world was collapsing around us. I did not know what I could do. In that state of helplessness, I knew my wishes were not enough. I appealed to my blog buddies to send her their good wishes too. And they did. The wishes worked. I will never ever forget the countless blog comments, the emails, the sms messages that you guys sent to give strength to me and my family, and helped baby Aish get through it. In fact, on some levels, I feel like I owe it to you guys to tell you how my little niece is doing, which is part of the reason why there are so many posts on her.

Though I have made so many friends through my blog, I have had major major fights too. Sometimes to the point that friendships broke before the friends even saw each other in real life. I was upset at first, but took it in my stride. Friends fight, friends have fallouts. Otherwise there is something wrong. At first, I used to keep an emotional distance from my online friends, show them just my nicer side, but now I don’t. It's easy to maintain an on-the-surface friendship - after all, what are the odds that you're gonna meet every one of your blog friends? It just seems safer to be all nice and polite and keep it to jokes and not show the weak, wrecked side that all of us have. We have our 'real friends' for that, don't we? Wrong. I have come to realise it over time. If you’re my friend, I will fight with you, I will throw a fit, I will storm off, I will show you my ‘bad side’, I will yell at you, I will take a break from email threads because I know I'd been wrong, and I want to cool off without holding any grudge. I’d do everything that I'd do with a regular friend in 'real life'. If we're gonna be friends, I wanna be there beyond the silly jokes, the leg-pulling, the shallow bonding. I wanna be there when the laughter stops. And if you can’t, I don’t think there’s a point in calling this a ‘friendship’.

Blog friends aside, there is another group close to my heart. ‘The others'. They don't have a blogger account so they can’t comment but I know they are reading. They have been reading for a while actually. This blog used to be open to all to comment, but when you start getting zillions of spam comments promising you enlargement of body parts you don't even have in the first place, you have to take some measures. I'm opening up the comments space to 'The others' once again, just for this post, so if you've been one of those readers lurking around for a while, do get over your shyness and drop by with a Hi for the Bhai. :)

The most amazing thing about the bar is that it has made me a happier person. I am generally not a dukhi aatma kind of person, but sometimes life does get to you. But hanging out here in this bar with all the bewdas, and then hopping over to their blogs, just does something to me, brings a smile to my face, adds a spark to my life.

Of course, it’s not always happy-happy stuff at the bar. Sometimes I wish certain people didn’t know about my blog. Sometimes I wonder if I should take up my friends’ advice to change the URL. And then I think – nope. I chose to make it online, I chose to make it public. Now I can't pick who reads it. This is me, this is my bar. Ab jo hai, so hai.

I only realised last week that I was close to my 500th post. I know many of them have been crappy and I actually wince when I read some of then, but in a way I am proud of all of them. Because they are all mine. But if I had to pick my favourite, I guess it has to be this, because it contains the essence of what this bar is all about.

It’s just a place to get high.

On life.