February 14, 2024

Why was the shawarma place closed yesterday

Hey there; ‘got another Yak blog for ya today. It’s the fourth one if you can believe it. Anyways, after a long day at the office, I am really tired and not sure what to write about. I first thought that I would write about how the shawarma shop being closed yesterday made me sad. Then I thought to write about the lizard I caught in my bathroom whom I named Bartholomew and then set free on the fire escape. But after all of those thoughts, I decided I would talk about board games.

On Sunday evening, I was invited to go to a temple festival by a student from BMS named Darshan, where I expected I would sit and watch local song and dance performances. To both of our surprise, we were greeted by a bunch of carpets sprawled over the stone courtyard of the temple with a variety of traditional board games laid out for people to come and play. One woman beckoned us over to what appeared to be a mancala board and began explaining that this was Ali Guli Mane, which was in the same family as the African-based mancala game. After teaching us how to play, we were left to our own devices so Darshan and I began to play. We were joined by a young girl whose name I forget, and she eventually took over for Darshan after a few turns. After finishing up with Aligulimane, we went to a cross-shaped board with what looked like Sorry pieces on it. I never heard the name but looking it up now its called Pachisi and is referred to as the national board game of India. The game seemed simple: you roll the rectangle dice and move your pieces around the perimeter of the board until you reach your start location, where you then move your pieces to the center of the board. The winner is the first to get all four pieces in the center. I initially thought the outcome would be random since I didn’t really hear the rules of the game, but it eventually became clear that there was strategy behind it. My “eventually” was apparently not soon enough, as I was in dead last for the vast majority of the game. That was until the very end. Once you travel the entire perimeter, in order to enter the center of the board, you need to roll the exact number of spaces for a piece to reach the center. Due to my innate talent skill in the game, my opponents kept rolling bad dice, and I kept rolling good ones. So I won. I also won Aligulimane too, but I won’t brag about it because I am a humble and self-aware individual. After some time passes, the performance begins, and I am able to stay long enough to hear a few songs, which was pretty neat too.

At this point you may be wondering: why is the title about the shawarma shop when all I talked about was board games? Well, that’s because I really wanted shawarma yesterday, and I couldn’t bother to rename this post. That’s it. Thanks for reading.

By Yak

Here a picture of me winning at Aligulimane with my horrendous posture