Vamsi surprised Aarthi by proposing to her on the eve of his birthday. She said yes.
On a lovely Friday evening in mid June, Vamsi went over to Aarthi's place to pick her up and go out to dinner with 3-4 friends. Aarthi, though, had other plans. She had secretly arranged a surprise birthday dinner for Vamsi, with about 10 friends, even getting his friend Omar to fly in from San Francisco. Her plan was to surprise him with dinner and then a weekend getaway to Santa Barbara. Little did she know, Vamsi was in on this, and had a larger surprise up his sleeve...(yes, this proposal involved Inception-level story-within-story planning. It was not easy.)
On the walk to dinner, they passed by a tree. Not an ordinary tree, but this spectacular tree. And sitting at the base of that tree was a guitar and a bottle of Champagne. Aarthi didn't quite process what was going on as Vamsi picked up the guitar ("What are you doing?" "Who's guitar is that?" "What's going on" "Stop it!"), but quickly recovered. Vamsi sang her a song (badly) and pulled out a ring and said a few words, and Aarthi said yes. The couple walked back home to call family and absorb what had just happened. Omar and Naureen show up at Aarthi's door, and Vamsi feigns surprise that they're in town.
Aarthi and Vamsi show up at dinner (Vamsi has to stall along the way to allow the rest of the surprise to come together), and the host has unfortunately canceled Aarthi's reservation for 10. She starts to panic about her surprise, but as the manager takes them around the corner, she sees not a small group here for Vamsi's birthday, but 35 people. Our closest friends and family from all around the country flew in to be a part of the celebrations. It was pretty great :)
Lots of good times ensued, and the Santa Barbara trip still happened, just with a much larger group, and this bus.
Vamsi would like to thank everyone who was involved, but especially Koel and Rani, for helping him not screw this up.