Do I know you?

I wrote earlier about how I stuck this trackbar (yeah the Live Traffic Feed in the lower right) in my blog to figure out whether my family knows about the existence of this blog or not. After several excited data analyses the first few days after I got the trackbar, I gave up trying to imagine who could be reading my blog. Now, every time I open my page, I scroll over to see if anyone other than myself has visited it and try mapping it to people I know. I am fanciful that way. I try to imagine the lives of people who read my blog and whether I ever pass them on the street without knowing it.

That brings me to my question. Who are you, oh person from Richmond, Virginia? Do you live in Columbus, Ohio? Why is the DoD your Internet Service Provider? Do you work for the DoD? Do you VPN in to my blog? Do you like it? My blog I mean, not the DoD. Do I know you?

Who are you, reader from Scranton, Pennsylvania?

Who are you?

Time

I wonder a lot about the flow of time through my life. How it speeds up and slows down at will so I can never say if a summer went by too fast or too slow. I wonder about what I would be doing a couple of years from now, this very date. I try to remember what I was doing this exact same date, a few years earlier. It helps put your problems into perspective and it reminds you of the person you were. And dream about the person you might be. That's one reason I write. It makes the past a lot easier to remember and a lot clearer.

On prejudices

A few months back I wrote about prejudices, about how I was falling prey to the convenience of them- the convenience of fitting people into different categories that predict expected behavior so you would know how to behave around them. The problem with prejudices is the problem with any classification algorithm. You are trying to fit an infinite range of people into a finite set of classes. And even the strongest classification algorithm supported by the strongest of data has its flaws. And there will be outliers.

I have never been exposed to people from other parts of India much. Tamil Nadu has always been stereotyped as an extremely self-sufficient or in less flattering terms 'not a very convenient place to stay in if you are an outsider and don't know the language'. So we don't have as many out-of-state people per unit area in Chennai as, say. Bangalore. Thus I grew up conveniently ignorant of how the rest of India behaves and had no need to learn the prejudices and stereotypes that try to describe an entire group of people in a few words. Now that I am outside my little cocoon and meet new people from across India all the time (what better place to meet Indians than the US) I have given in to this deplorable habit of learning about stereotypes and trying to fit people to them. And as I do that, I also come into contact with stereotypes about Tamilians. Like any self-obsessed blogger, I love hearing what people think of me and how they perceive us as a people. And a lot of it is news to me. As a disclaimer I must state that my family is not the stereotypical Tamil family and a lot of that is due to my mom who is not the stereotypical Tamil mo. So the reason I cannot make any sense of Tamil stereotypes is not maybe because the stereotype is false but that I am an outlier. That being said, I feel a lot of the people I know would be outliers.

Myth #1: Our ability to speak Hindi and English
A lot of my friends can speak impeccable Hindi though I personally suck at it. But most of us are pretty good at English. Most shop keepers and auto drivers can understand English and the ones that do love showing off. So have no fear. But I speak for Chennai more so than any other city/town/village. So dont take this as a general rule.

Myth #2: Our food habits
I hate curd/yogurt. I prefer rotis more than rice.

Myth #3: Our language obsession
We are not all fanatical about our language. Speaking for myself, I don't understand a lot of the most beautiful words of Tamil beyond the ones I use in everyday conversations and the only reason I can read and write it haltingly is because my grandmother taught me the letters of the text from gossip magazines about film stars. And that is the case for most of the urban youth. A lot of us are more comfortable with English than Tamil and I agree that that is a sad sad thing.

Myth #4: Our chutney serving sizes are too small
Chutneys come with unlimited refills. Ask and it shall be given.

Now follow the Chennai myths.
Myth #5: Autodrivers rip you off if you don't know Tamil
First things first. There are no fixed auto fares in Chennai. The meter is for show. It hasn't been in popular use since 1998. Everything is negotiable when it comes to auto drivers. The direct implication of that is that you are only as strong as your negotiation skills. If you are an outsider, you are going to get ripped off because you are not going to know the standard fare for going from point A to point B and that is a chink in your bargaining armor. And trust me, our auto drivers are a hardened lot. If they see a weakness, they will swoop in for the kill. The end result? You will be taken for a ride, pun intended. It has nothing to do with the fact that you don't know our language. It is not personal. If you don't want to get ripped off, study up on the rates you have to pay and brush up your bargaining prowess. Else, call a cab. We do have them and share autos and buses for the faint of the heart.

Myth #6: Chennai Tamil is ugly Tamil.
This is a myth that people who grew outside Chennai love to propagate and stress on every time I comment on their Tamil. Chennai Tamil is NOT just slum Tamil. We are NOT just a city of slums. The slummish version is a stereotype that Vivek the Comedian made famous and we didn't mind because he was funny. But we do not all start every conversation with "Ae kasumaalam".

Some generalizations about Tamilians and Chennai are true. We are a coastal city and the climate is typical of that. It is extremely humid. We love Rajinikanth, more so because he is a humble and generous actor, than for any other reason. We are not yet completely conducive a state to outsiders but we are slowly becoming better at understanding what outsiders need and implementing it- English signs on all buses and road corners and most shops is one such step.

All being said and done, stereotypes exist for a reason and do apply for the vast majority and as long as you remember that there will be exceptions and take care to not judge people too fast you should be fine. And personally, I am going to stop subscribing to prejudices and trying to slot people. That can be my new year resolution.

My Australian cousin shot this pic. Due credit therefore must go the typical NRI Praveen Gounder

The first of many blog tweets

I wonder how many years grad school has taken off my life. Not just the best two years of my youth but all those years I am going to lose off my lifespan from all the stress and excessive caffeine I have been exposed to. I wonder why no one warned me that grad school would drain your blood and suck your soul and drag your lifeless body through the streets before dumping you into the sewer. And then poke me in the eye and wake me up and tell me I have a degree and a job (we can always hope!). And I also wonder if the idealistic me that tends to resurface early mornings when the sun is out and the coffee is fresh and the music is fast and there are no deadlines in the horizon would have made a different choice. And if my mom would have let me anyway.


P.S.
To increase productivity, I made my friend change my facebook password and let me only use it once a week. I have to admit it makes me feel like an addict checking himself/herself into rehab but, hey, it works. But now I want a place to showcase my quirky/witty thoughts. Which is why I'm here. And which is why you'll probably be seeing a lot of micro blog posts (No, I am not on Twitter) in the coming few weeks or months if i manage to hold out. Watch this space for more.

Also, I was just hunting for a free note to type this out in my laptop, when I found this scrawled somewhere...

Better the sorrow of the future

Than the sorrow of today

I have no idea why I wrote that but it really sounds nice. Very poetic and profound and all great-Yoda-master kind of deep. Sometimes, I impress myself.

Midday epiphany

Its surprising because I have most of my epiphanies in the middle of the night, not just because nights do something to me, but also because there is more likelihood of me being awake at night than this time of the day. But I was cribbing to a friend about how some annoying guy and he told me something I should have realized a long time back. About how since I was just so open with everything, guys think they can talk to me and treat me anyway they like. And how their interactions with me are so much different from their interactions with other people. And how it was wrong that they can never say a nice word to me in public, that the only comments they can leave on my wall are lets-pull-her-leg sorta comments, how they'd ping me in private to say I look good on a picture or how my status in nice, but they wouldn’t be caught dead saying that in public, how they wouldn’t even acknowledge the fact that we are friends when we are in a group but would tell me their life secrets and text me every morning in private … how its just so so wrong that guys who are actually nice get laughed at. Also how it is wrong that all this and most social inappropriateness is considered acceptable guy behavior 'coz you know guys will be guys. And it seems to be exclusive to certain groups or communities of guys (thank God for that!). Since it is all I've ever seen back home in Chennai and since it is something that sticks out in particular groups now that I am here in LA, I tend to generalize and say that’s how Tamil guys are. I try to tell myself I am exhibiting the same narrowmindedness and prejudice that I laughed at my family for but statistically my prejudice is justified.

I was reading this article about how in this economy, people are scared to be rude but sometimes you have to be rude. (I tried hunting for the article, I cant find it now). Its true, you know? Its not ok to stew over a misguided comment or an ugly joke for a whole day and take it out on your friends and let it upset you but smile and act cool to the person responsible so that he/she can do it again. Sometimes people have to be put in their place. And if they are anywhere as nice as you deserve your friends to be, they'd understand and not hold it to you.

I stand where I stood a year back

...at the threshold of my life filled with wonder at what I am sure lies ahead. If I could say the same every year, isn't that more than what anyone can ask for? Thank you for being through it all with me.

Lots of love,
Divya

The obligatory milestone post and weekly update

Sometimes when I get tired of switching tabs on my chrome browser between GMail, Facebook and Yahoo, I think back a year and wonder what I was doing then. It's times like these that make me feel glad for having a blog, coz now I have a permanent (well, almost) record of exactly what I was doing or feeling at any given time. So here I am sitting at work, reading old blog posts from a year back and grinning to myself. And thinking 2 thoughts. a) I was much funnier-sounding a year back than I am now and b) (brace yourself, this one's a biggy) I was probably at Anjana's house a year back listening to her mom on important documents to pack and making a mental list of stuff to buy, after which I would probably have spoken to Maya and exchanged notes on the progress of our packing, after which I would have proceeded to drive around the city looking important and in a hurry after which I would have gone shopping/visiting relatives with my mom, after which I would have come back to the privacy of my room to fume and kick myself for making stupid decisions in relationships and wish I could go out with Niru and Maya and get drunk and bitch about guys. The month before you leave to the US, in my opinion, is the best part of the process that starts when you write your GRE. And since its going to be a year since I came here, I take it as a license to be even more obnoxiously nostalgic than usual. 1 big year and I wonder if things have changed much. For one, I still kick myself over my relationship choices and I still lick wounds of said relationship choices in private. You would think Time would take over already and I can move on but I guess moving on doesnt work without you taking an effort to NOT mope around, doing flash backs in you head and thinking of all the could-have-beens. For all the relationship advice I dole out to my friends ("You're 22. You have a whole lifetime of bad decisions and relationship mistakes ahead of you. Get over this one already."), and get yelled at for being insensitive might I add, it would help me to follow some, but then where's fun in not being a hypocrite?

But I guess a lot has changed in a year. I have become even more boring than realistically possible. Even the jokes I crack are nerdy pjs that very few can understand and almost none can laugh for. I have become more cynical as is obvious. I have also become more prejudiced and more inclined to fit people into undeserved slots based on where they come from and how they look. "Oh you are a Bihari, that slot right there. Oh, you are from Delhi. Sit here. Oh you are a Brahmin. Go there." So now my mind runs a pattern matching and clustering algorithm in the background every time I meet a new person, built on all the well-meaning advice of over-protective loved ones. In direct contrast to this, I have also become more open minded in some ways, more willing to try new things, finding it easier to blur some rules and forget there existed others.There has been a dramatic drop in the annual average of the number of times I have been felt up as there has been in the number of times I have fallen sick. My hair is thicker, away from the pollution of  Chennai public transportation. Perhaps having a non-existent public transportation helps to that account. I have also survived a year glued to my laptop living life more as a virtual persona than a social being.  I have discovered my inner girl in pink wedges, poufy sleeves and bright red lipstick and kicked off the last vestiges of my teenage awkwardness (more on that later). And due credit must be given to the absence of feel-uppers, snide-remarkers and the moral-policers that the regressive Chennai men can be.

On that thread, I went to the Slut Walk in SF last Saturday. It was nice, smaller than I expected it to be and considering it was SF, the Slut walk merged with a Gay Pride walk and snowballed into a Minorities United. I went expecting to be moved and came back feeling a little sad and a little empty and a little hopeless. As a means to band up people and offer hope and conviction and a sense of purpose to victims of violence, the walk probably succeeded. But all the while I walked I had to wonder how many perpetrators and bystanders of violence would be weaned away by a few people marching and carrying signboards. And if the walk was ever more than breaking a butterfly upon a wheel.

The Cost of Sanity

Now that the dust has settled in the happy land of ‘no assignments and no project submissions’ aka Real Life, the little green monsters, formerly concealed, begin to emerge and I realize not all is glittering and sunny in my new found world. And I realize that the source of this non-glitteriness and non-sunniness is, in fact, (surprise surprise) me. While assignments and projects gave me plenty of reasons to crib, they took away valuable time that I could have to used to do said cribbing. And time to discover any more things to crib about. Life’s tiny compromises were always hidden by the fact that there were larger things looming on my horizon to worry about. Now that the larger things have been dealt with (temporarily), the little things start their gnawing at my attention. Big God and Small God as Arundhati Roy would have said (Yes, I quote her a lot these days, especially since I am rereading the God of Small Things). So the Small Demons in my case, start rearing their head now that the Big Demons have wandered elsewhere to demonize (and I seem to be able to track their progress from the phone calls I do not get and the words I do not hear). And irritation oozes like a common stench through my days. People piss me off more than they used to and my patience with them bleeds away faster than it used to. I hate them and yet I need them and I hate myself for hating them and I hate myself for needing them. Even my dreams seem to be restless and unfocused and I wake up disgusted at myself, my memories of reality tainted by my subconscious. So it is a lot of hating and a lot of negativity that brought me here, writing like a therapy while searching for productive things to do. In school, when I felt hatred rising in me, I would go to the gym and punch out a few calories while listening to loud music. Not only would that release some much needed endorphins, it also served s a subconscious incentive to not be negative (my mind can conjure up reasons to not work out), I believe.  Now, with no convenient outlet or release and not wanting to make it obvious that I am annoyed, I turn my annoyance inwards and sit passively with my laptop in my hands, crawling the web for a distraction. Until it becomes obvious to everyone that I am annoyed. That is the problem for us extroverts. We can’t shut the world out as easily as the rest of the world can and contrary to popular belief, we do need our vacations from the world, as much as the other person.

Space. That is the problem. And the fact that it is a relative and ever changing factor in the equation of personal happiness and sanity.

This is why I write. The fact that although it offers no answer, sometimes, I can figure out the question.

Saturday afternoon as the sunlight dwindles- part 2

We keep life organized in little pockets, different parts of us go into different dockets, disconnected stories seen through disconnected glasses- the professional me in LinkedIn, families and friends go to Facebook, the ex boyfriends left behind in orkut, the old school groups in yahoomail. We show the persons we want to be seen as in our little bubbles of space in the cloud with different faces in different database views and we live as the people we are alone in our cars with the ipod on a loop and the windows rolled up tight.

Saturday afternoon as the sunlight dwindles

If you can find the dreams that drive you, find the people who love you, find the things that make you happy, the things that make you care, the little space to call home, if you can find your spot in the world and the person that is uniquely you, what more can you hope for? And what is left for you to live?

Midnight and facebook do not go well together

You look at old profile pics of people and you wonder the stories behind them, wonder how they could always have been the assholes they are now, wonder if they had friends who liked them and who miss them, wonder if they went through the same heartbreaks you did, wonder who taught them to be the way they are now. You look at the profile pics of the people you hate, smiling and feeling loved, and you wonder....

Falling in friendship... all over again...

Have you ever had a friend you thought you'd lost to the past? Have you ever been to that point where  you could see the relationship beginning to stagnate and the only reason that you still held on was a respect for what you once shared and all the while wondered if it is time to let go and give in to the distance growing between you? And have you ever had one phone call erase all that, one evening wipe away the sourness, so you go back to being the girls you were 4 years ago, the girls who shared everything, the girls who'd talk so long that the shadows grow around them? Have you ever ended a conversation in frustration and doubted if you could ever relate to the person again, if you can talk and still read between the lines, if you can understand what is not being said as much as what is, like you used to, like before? And then a few days later, have another conversation make you forget that you even doubted?

Have you ever hesitated before revealing a truth, wondered how the other person would take it, a million potential wrongs feeding in your head, procreating doubts? Have you ever typed the same sentence a hundred different ways finally clicking 'send' before you could change your mind again? Have you ever feared the reply only to be surprised by simple acceptance, plain understanding?

Have you ever woken up to a mail continuing a chatter you'd thought had ended? Have you ever stayed up at nights rediscovering people you'd thought you'd known, in a good way, like finding hidden candy in lunchboxes?

Have you ever had a person you'd all but forgotten about, a person you'd relegated to facebook contact, a person whose name only comes up when your phone reminds you of an upcoming birthday? And have one chance meeting reopen a door, so you start where you'd left off, like all the years in between had never happened, and all those reasons you'd told yourself for the friendship ending never mattered? Have you ever walked into a house of your memory, walked smiling as you saw what had changed and what hadnt and pleased with yourself to still remember those little things noone else  knew, walked in and to be greeted like you'd never left?

Have you ever seen change happen, seen it, felt it and hated it, and not understanding it, walked away from it? Have you ever convinced yourself you've moved on from it, except for those few times when there was no one and nothing to distract you and protect you from yourself, when those questions you thought you'd answered would rise again and make you wonder if you could have done anything differently, and wonder if you were to blame or he or time? Have you ever packed away people like dolls, in boxes to be placed in attics? And move to a new future, to a new country, only to find them old friends and those old relationships for which distance was never a problem, nor time? And stumble upon the paradox of space and how it can bind as well as separate?  Have you ever written away a relationship, only for it to come bursting back in to your life, or creeping in slowly until a day when you look up and find the space that was, occupied again?

Have you ever fallen in friendship, lost it, found it and fallen in it all over again?

A moment to ponder and eat our words

I’ll go first.

In 11^th grade, i had a frenemy whom everyone loved to hate. I think our problem was that she was this exotic creature, so different from all of us, and so much more difficult to understand. So what we couldn’t understand, we termed as dangerous, bad, ‘unculturely’, thus following the footsteps of so many before us who name the unfamiliar as opposed to culture. Her family was one of the cool ones. Her dad would let her drink a little if he and his friends were having a party and she was around. She would wear the real hot dresses we could only dream about what with our awkwardly teenage bodies. She would hang out with guys, she would do a lot of stuff that we weren’t allowed to. So in our jealousy and narrow mindedness, we thought being one of the familiar majority gave us the right to sit on our high chairs and declare that she was not really a nice person. Maybe she really was not nice. Or maybe that had a lot to do with the way we treated her. But a few years hence, when i was on the other side of the pub door and i was making my choices and discovering the ones i wanted to keep and the ones i felt not so comfortable with, and while this adventure of novelty was going on, people decided it would be in the best utility of their time to judge me, i realized i didn’t like it so much. I realized i was doing the same things that i had dissed a couple of years back. The same and more, maybe. Atleast i was old enough to know my way around people. But that only made me feel more guilty for the cruelty we indicted when we were school kids.

I loved school. I loved being one of the popular girls. I loved people loving me and knowing my name and teachers showing me off and generally being nice to people. I really was nice. And i tried a lot to be nice because before i became one of the popular girls, i was this super shy, super sensitive girls who always ended up getting hurt. I swore i’d never do that to another person. But then despite my best intentions, i did ended up hurting a lot of people. Sometimes just by standing by. To my defense though, there were times when people a lot older than me and who should have a lot more sense but didn’t were the ones inflicting the cruelty. And there wasn’t much i could do in cases like that. Like the time 4 girls got caught cheating on an exam (i think it was a second time offense for one of the girls) and after giving up on advising them, my class teacher decided it would be best to make sure their evil spread no further. So she made the 4 of them sit in the very last row and moved everybody else’s benches away from them so they formed a little island to themselves. Soon 3 of the girls jumped ship and it was just this one girl, the 2 time offender all alone. None of us knew anything about her. We’ve seen her talk to boys (the one cardinal evil in a girls school), mostly friends of her elder brother but a sin never the less. We knew the teachers hated her because she always was this firebrand they never could get to. She wasn’t particularly friendly so none of us ever felt the compulsion to stand up for her. Atleast i didn’t. I didn’t even know her so i wasn’t going to go out of my way to vouch for her/ give her a makeover/turn her into a new leaf shit they show on movies. So i just stood aside and watched the drama. The girl left school. I have no idea where she is now. And i don’t know what prompted me to remember her after so many years. I hope what my very Catholic school did, left no scars behind.

People who know me know i hated the 2 years of DAV and loved my high school. But while my high school was great, they weren’t above this judgementalism, if that is even a word. All these years later i wonder if there was ever a point to moral science classes, if not a lot of non-practical bull shitting. I still remember being taught how a girl should be modest, how you should never show off and if your work is good enough you will be recognized for it. No good has ever come to me from being modest. In fact it is one moral that has been nothing but harmful to me all these years. But that deserves a post by itself. Anyway, to cut a long story short, all these years later i wish we’d been taught an entirely different set of values and not judged so much on how we dressed or who we spoke to. Those were probably dangerous lessons to teach to kids in high school- that you had the right to decide how people should behave and the right to punish them if they weren’t to your liking.

Over the years, i’ve done my share of criticizing the things i didn’t understand- NRIs, my classmates who want to get married early, Vijay's acting skills, Indian education system... You only have to read my old posts  to realize how much ranting I've done on this blog. And yeah you can go ahead and call me a hypocrite. Even my mom, who is the one person i admire the most and who is probably the most tolerant person i’ve ever seen, isn’t above her share of prejudices. And while i don’t begrudge you your prejudices, most of which probably arise from gross generalizations of painful personal experiences, i will hate you if you try to enforce them on me. Life has this tendency of making you eat your own words and i don’t think any of us ‘are in a position to diss anything without having tried it first.’ (courtesy: The Mad Momma)

What got me started on this post? I was reading this awesome note on FB by a friend of a friend on why he hates V-day. And everything was great until he said something along the lines of V-day is a western phenomenon and it is only the west that needs days to honor relationships because they really don’t respect and value relationships otherwise. Since it is not part of rich culture, we must refrain from making a big deal out of mother’s day, father’s day and various other assorted commercialized days. Culture talk again! And this time from a guy closer to my age than the orange toting, badly dressed, Shiv Sena members. (Yeah I do not understand the values Shiv Sena stand for and so i diss them. This can be counted as hypocricy. But I would love to sit down and have a debate with you if you agree with their ideals and maybe you could convince/convert me.) Anyway, ever since I started talking about going to the US, I have been hearing shit about the wild ‘wests’ dangerous ways and their lack of culture, not so much from my family since half my family is actually here, but from other random people who are by no means authorities in the field of culture. One person, a person i really liked and still like, told me i should be careful late at night (very good advice indeed) and i should not try and emulate the Americans because they have no culture and so they really wont care what happens to them but i will. That was the stupidest thing i have ever heard in my life and trust me i have heard a lot of stupid stuff. America has been one of the most ‘culture-ful’ places I have ever seen especially from my vantage point inside a university in California. No other place can be such a melting pot of cultures. And trust me, they value their relationships, sometimes a lot more than i value mine. Solitude does not equal loneliness.

I would love to write more but my crazy neighbours are blasting music through the wooden walls. I have to go now. Damn Americans and their love for bad music. This country has no real taste!

Divya Zeitgest 2010

Writing about the year that has been is such a cliché. But i thought this year deserved a tribute, if not for now, atleast for the future when i can look back upon reading this and remember. Already i can feel memories fading. I have to struggle to remember the events of the early months and have to read my old posts to get a sense of how they were. Hence this post.

Last year around the same time when i was being all nostalgic about 2010, a friend told me the coming year would me more exciting and filled with more opportunities for me. Boy, did any of us have any idea of what was to come.

The winter was long. I had my project to worry about and the uncertainty over applications. At first glance, I would say these two worries kind of defined my early months. But i also had amazing fun with my friends doing absolutely completely nothing. All those afternoons watching movies, taking pictures, long bus rides and talking and talking and talking, about the past, about the present and about the future. We discovered a room for our conversations and called it our secret. We had our fights, we had our spats. It was a sad time for some of us and it kind of touched all of us in some way. But regardless, i think we would all say that those few months were some of the most carefree in our lives. I doubt we will ever get that sense of nothing-ness again. I remember missing Anjana, while she was away doing her project in Blore. I remember people getting mad at me for not being a part of Instincts. I remember people i’d dismissed as extras in my life stepping in and gaining priority. But i didn’t give them much thought. Their time would come later in the year.

The spring was tumultuous. We had a farewell to remember. The fights that followed and the tears were the highest point of drama in all of our 4 years of studying together. Ironically spring was the time for a lot of lasts.. The project and university drama drew to a finale. I went on a so so vacation with my family. And came back to face the summer.

I’ve always loved summers. Even Chennai summers. But this summer was by far the best and the most life changing. If spring was the time for lasts, summer was the time for firsts. But summer was also the true farewell. Suprisingly this farewell was sweet. I met people I thought had dropped out of the horizon of my life, in particular Zameera. Some people took centre stage, in particular Maya and Harish. Some people gained importance towards the very end, in particular Brighton and Arun. Bhavya didn’t come to visit me on my last day in Chennai. That was a niggling thorn that would dig in further in the year. She called a few minutes before I boarded and said ‘Oh shit you’re going for real!’. Almost every minute I lived that summer stands so vividly out, even the mundane ones. I remember standing in the bank, staring around blankly. I remember sitting on my parents bed, the feel of the bedsheet under me talking on the phone to Maya making a list of final things for her to buy. Summer was for shopping. Summer was for goodbyes. Summer was for love.

Fall was an odyssey. Fall was for everything and everyone new. Fall was for realizations. Fall is returning to size ‘S’ dresses. Fall has already been audited enough, so no more boring you.

What I have learnt this year

I deeply value and need my space. I like crowds and I like having people around, but only if I can go back to just myself and my space after the fun.

I cannot do casual relationships.

I like and enjoy cooking. Especially for people I love.

If you can walk away knowing that you’ve learnt something, that is more than enough.

Not to hate something that once made me happy

People should inspire, not intimidate

Living independently is not about never needing help. It’s about knowing when to ask for help.

There is a fine line between laidback and lazy, and optimism and denial.

All guys are assholes and jerks.

You’re never too old to make a fool of yourself. And you should atleast once a month.

I can fall in love with places easier than I can with people.

I have never lost something good to not been given better. That there is a reason for everything that happens in my life. Sometimes it takes years to realize it but there is. But not for people. People walk in and walk out of my life without reason. There is no point trying to reason why.

That we are all more connected than we know. That six degrees of separation is more than a theory. Which means that you can never really live disconnected from the past. But which also means you are never alone and never a stranger.

I probably have bipolar disorder.

In a tree by the brook, there is a songbird who sings: Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven

I am sitting in my bed in my grandpa's house applying body butter on my elbows and knees. I have to enjoy luxuries like body butter while I can coz soon I'll be back in LA and I'll have to grunge on a student's budget again. I am sitting and staring vacantly into space thinking about nothing and everything. I have no mood to write. And I especially cant write about what I want to write but I have nothing to do and I might as well write. Better than staring blankly and creeping out everyone in the house, I guess. My words don’t even have the energy to form themselves into coherent sentences much less paragraphs so I am just going to throw caution and good language sense to the wind and pen down my thoughts of the last half hour.

I want to dance. Not in a club with random strangers grooving around me, checking out the girls, getting drunk at the bar and puking their guts out in the bathrooms. Not some synchronized choreographed performance with a group. Just put the music on high and dance and whirl round and round in my room. I cant even dance alone in this country without waking up the entire household and then some. I wish I can go back to stone and cement houses where I can do anything I want to and noone would hear.

I miss my room. My own private room. How much it has seen my through! The tears, the midnight phone calls, the conversations, the blood and the pain of the DAV years and the clandestine trysts of the last few months.

Its funny how one incident can mask years worth of memories, how one person can define a season, an entire year so that when I look back at the year this has been all I can see is that one person, that one incident and some other random memories struggling and rearing their heads once in a while for recognition.

The year has been good to me but not kind. I got what I wanted, everything that I wanted and everything I wished for. But none whole, none how and where I wished for. I wake up in my dream everyday. But I don’t know if I like it. I don’t whether I am the one screwing it or the other way round. A bit of both I suppose.

The last few days have been wierd- catching up with the past and the past catching up with me. I met with people I knew as a different person from a different life, met them in the here and the now, met them as different people. Part recognition, part rediscovery and part reorganization the weekend has been, looking at old things from new perspectives and new things from old perspectives. But you cannot choose what you want to remember, atleast I cant. And with the memories I'd forgotten and remembered again with friends, came the memories I'd not really forgotten and never wanted to remember. You think you are over a part of your life. But it leaps up and bites you when you least expect it, when you are most defenseless- in boring classes, in long train rides, in the middle of some crappy serial when some chance remark sets off a wholly different train of thought. And you go over and over it in your head, dissecting and analyzing, not knowing whether you want it to end or not.

I feel like I rewound my life back 6 years, only this is worse. The past, I don’t want to remember, the present drains me and there is no promise in the near future. If I could go into hibernation for the next couple of months, I would. Its times like these that make me wish badly for my mommy.

I mentioned in my last post I have never lost a good thing to not been given something better. But now that I've crossed the point of no return with the good, I seem to be stuck in a state of suspended animation and not even the assurance of a better thing is enough to wake me up from this limbo.

Sigh. This has turned out to be one of those posts where you write an entire blog to say one sentence, where there is only one thing you want to talk about but you cant so you talk about everything but that one thing and yet manage to make everything you talk about only mean the one thing you cant. To all of you who cant make any sense of this post, I am sorry but that is exactly how I feel now too. To all of you who think you can, you're wrong.

Till next time, when I shall, hopefully, be in a more coherent state of mind, lots of love and happiness for the holidays!

No, I am not drunk.

There was a time when i had my relationships all figured out, my friends all classified and categorized into neat little boxes: ‘Best friends’, ‘Good friends’, ‘OK-ish friends’, ‘friends to suthify with’, ‘friends you call up’, ‘friends you message’.... it was a world with well-defined boundaries, well-recognized rules. Sometimes people would surprise me and consequently be promoted or demoted to the appropriate level. I miss that rigid world.

Now my world is fluid with relationships that shift and change in moments. People walk in from the periphery of my life and lay claim to it. People whom i considered to be the core of my life walk away or simply fade into obscure mists. Relationships, i can no longer categorize or define with boundaries or set down rules of exchange. And i, who have never been able to shut up, find myself at a loss for words to describe what i share with the people in my life. How do you explain something to somebody that you do not understand yourself? I start sentences that i cannot end. I stare vacantly at people who were once ‘Level 1-Best friends’ and wonder what changed. Some, i have lost to meaningless fights. Some, i have lost to lethargy, a listlessness that we allowed to let grow in our relationship and now we are too far apart with too many spaces between us that the only thing binding us together is a respect for the past, the time whence we walked the same path and looked at life with the same perceptions. And some have changed so completely that you no longer know whether it is they who have changed or whether it was you who’d judged them wrong the whole while, trying to fit them to an image in your head. Others, who wouldn’t have made the ‘friends you call up’ grade a few years back are now some of the people i cannot go a day without talking. One, whom i considered my natural sworn rival 4 years back (for liking the same guy), i talk to everyday and make giddy plans for the future with. And then there are the others. The ones who have always been there. The constants, who despite a few tumults and distractions and angry words and periods of cold accusing silences, have stuck. It is to those few that i dedicate this blog. To the ones who, even if they do not understand, listen to what i wish to say; the ones who, even if i can no longer relate to, i can always talk to (talk as in hold a conversation with as opposed to mindless empty chatter that mean nothing or endless reminiscences of the past); the ones you can laugh with over a drink at interviews and boyfriends and dumb vijay moviesJ

It has been a season of goodbyes, when my memories are reduced to snapshots- a group of 4 girls standing under the neon lights of Southern Residency watching as i walk to the bus, Rd standing outside a train beaming like an idiot, Mani sitting in a hotel explaining (his theory of) why coffee should not be taken together with breakfast, Anpu leaning in her balcony waving goodbye, a wierd call in the middle of the day saying ‘i love you’-snapshots that play an endless montage inside my head set to sappy friendship songs. A season of promises. A season of not knowing what to feel, too scared to hug and say the usual “goodbye, all the best, take care” combo because it sounds so final. A season of watching friends leave and counting down the ones still left and the days until you have to leave too. A season too sparkling with the possibilities of the future to regret or wish for the past. And a season that doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon. So till then, heres to more sad FB statuses and early morning trips to railway stations and listening to people crib about bad food and internet restrictions and training assignments. Hic!

P.S. May God bless TCS and the few other companies and universities who have delayed their joining dates to allow me the pleasure of the little company i have left. Amen.

Twilight, Conversations and Realizations

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday and she was explaining to me why she did not like twilight.

“It ended too happily” said she. “Bella got everything she wanted-she got converted, a husband, a child, a family, a friend. Everything. It was too much. Meyer should have killed someone in the end, just to make it sound real. And made the ending more ambiguous.”

And instead of calling her a sadist, i actually agreed with her.

I don’t when exactly it happened, but sometime in the last four years I turned Cynical. Cynical to the point that in a story of vampires and werewolves, the only point that offended my (or I should say our) sense of reality was that everyone lived happily ever after as one big family.

I scoff at fairy tales, at driving into the sunset, at happily-ever-afters. As my friend pointed out, happily-ever-afters are boring. And unreal. I have come to point where I wouldn’t trust a happily-ever-after if it slapped me in the face. Unless there is a story of compromises behind it. I am not so far gone that i look for the catch in every situation or search for complications where none exist (as opposed to what some people think of me). And i am definitely more optimistic than most of my friends put together. But i no longer am the idealist dreamer I used to be. No longer believe that I can play solos like Slash. Or that World Peace can be achieved by a touching dialog in a Mani Ratnam movie set to A.R.Rahman’s background score. Or in guys who are smart AND strong AND sensitive AND open car doors for you. It’s not that i don’t want the aforementioned scenarios to happen. It's just that i cant believe they would be handed out on a platter like hot dogs in a ball game. As my friend said, easy victories are boring. There must be challenges. And problems we can laugh about later over a cup of coffee together. And for once, I agree with her.

I am floating along, letting the current take me where it would. Every few minutes I remember I have to take control and I kick and I swirl and I create a maelstrom of confusion. Only to give up a few minutes later, tired and wet and extremely irritated and even more clueless than before.

Lost in the river, just one of millions of others, trying to conform and stand out at the same time. Wanting to be unique, just like everyone else.

Peering into the darkness, trying to give shape to vague, abstract emotions. In the midst of grey bursts of colors, I stand, trying to select one of many goods, none great.

Every once in a while, I get intoxicated by the power afforded to me, only to be brought rudely back to earth by chaos. Blinded by an illusion of control, I float on.

I rage against fate, I fight against the very notion of destiny. All the while, I long to be led by the hand. Life is easier when you have someone to dump the blame on.

Irony of Life

Death has a way of changing your priorities in life. What seemed so important a few days back now seems meaningless. Things you normally overlook, people whom you don’t usually give a second glance to, now overtake your life. Everyday activities seem so inconsequential. Making small talk, filling up awkward silence, speaking just to stop yourself from thinking seems to be all that you ever do. And there are those moments of introspection. Those rushes of memories you couldn’t stop. Those sudden recollections sparked off by an odd song, an old name in a phonebook, photographs. Forgotten words, broken promises, fresh guilt. And doubts. The nights spent asking yourself ‘what if…..?’. The days of torturing yourself with ‘maybe’. Maybe if he’d worn a helmet….. maybe if she’d gone for a checkup earlier….. maybe if he’d quit smoking…. Maybe if I’d had the sense to call earlier….. Numb todays, hollow tomorrows. And then it all fades away.

Life is short. Life is fragile. One small mistake, one wrong judgement and it could all be over. Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.Why take the risk? Why put off till tomorrow? Why fight when you don’t mean to? Why live for glass images? Who cares what people think? Who cares if people may not agree with you? They are but illusions. An existence for appearance’s sake?

Life is happiness. Why should it be anything else?

Sometimes you just need the night

To realize the value of the day

Sometimes you just need some setbacks

That victory would taste sweeter

A few tears

So smiles seem miracles

Sometimes you just need death

To recognize the beauty of life.