Shopping a farewell gift for a friend

We always receive gifts on our birthdays, anniversaries,
felicitations, and God knows what all! And we even go
shopping for gifts for other people... maybe friends, parents,
siblings, cousins, teachers... any one and everyone.
This time it was my turn to go shopping for a gift for a friend -
an office colleague; who resigned from her job(in the same
company as I still work!) and has gone for further studies to
IIFT, Delhi.
I never knew it was going to be "not easy at all!"
First of all, since it was supposed to be a surprise... and you
have to create these situations, so just when I was about to
leave to go for the gift hunting(with another friend who I
expected will do most of the selection procedures & she did);
anyways.. when I was about to leave for the gift hunting..she
asks me to do some work for her at the Airtel office. Since we
wanted it to be a surprise, I had to make an excuse that I had
to go general store shopping to buy all the grocery n stuff and
fortunately she agreed.
So myself ( along with the selector friend) reached Ishanya
mall in Yerwada to find something.. worth GIFTABLE!
To start with... we entered a small side-store named
"Waarsa"; which had some Cultural stuff mostly related to
Pune. And we had an idea to give her something which will
keep reminding her of Pune, where she spent 2 years working.
There were a lot of things available: Tshirts(with Pune
university, Shanivarwada printed on them), Pune maps, and
lot more. In the end we picked up a Pune university t shirt.
And the selector friend picked up a mettalic bookmark in the
shape of a parrot(other options available were Bull, horse,
turtle,etc)
Now since we were done with one gift which will make her
remember about Pune, we decided we will gift her something
which she likes to do. And the first answer that came to us
was "Buy a book!!" Coz she reads so many of them, mostly on
Finance and Economics(no wonder she landed in IIFT!). And
the best place to look for books was Crossword! But that was
situated at Gold Adlabs, Kalyani Nagar.
We thought that since we were there at Ishanya already, lets
just go around the place. And seriously, it was one of the
wisest decisions we took that day.
We went around and we ended up in this shop named MAGPIE.
Its famous for Kitchenware, Utensils and some awesome
Dining sets and Bar accessories. The designs present were so
awesome, that we could not resist spending around half an
hour watching closely all the products present in the store!
Could not believe that Kitchenware could be designed in such
creative ways!
After being awestruck from MAGPIE, we did not find any shop
worth going inside!!
So we decided we will have something to eat and leave for
Crossword. As we were just about to enter the Food Street
(where all the food joints are present), a female came to us
and asked us to join a small stall they had setup as college
students for exhibition. They had a salad counter and were
projecting a movie that was made by them, and also acted in
by the students.
We went in for the Italian salad and the movie too. Well, we
did not understand anything about the movie first, coz it was
in some different language.. not English, Hindi or Marathi (coz
then I would have at least recognised!) After the movie got
over(which was just 10 mins long) we asked them what
language the movie was in, and they said it was Czech(no
doubt we could not understand anything!) Then we asked
them to play the movie again just to try and get some part of
it, but the effort failed again and we gave up and disappeared
from there.
That was too much heavy dose for us, so we decided to get
out of Ishanya and go to Crossword(remember we had to buy
a book as a gift). There we searched for some books(as usual
difficult to find which book to gift) but in the end with some
advice and suggestion, we finalised on the book "The
difficulty of being good" by Gurcharan Das. Wrote a message
on its first page. Got it gift wrapped and just lef from there.
(And not to forget, parceled dinner from KFC for myself and
frndz waiting at home)
So the whole "buy a gift" thing actually turned out into a nice
evening!