meaningless collage

i don't know why or how i ever came to be the person who never takes or keeps photographs, saves e-mails, keeps old cards or shops for mementoes. tonight, i wish i was more normal. keeping it all in the mind is tiring- it offers me a kind of kaeidoscopic view of events, which changes by the second and also, i'm scared of getting alzheimer's and forgetting everything worth remembering.
my recent-most break is the object of my obsession now. it was the first and the last break i had in a year and now all i can remember, after two weeks, is sort of a bricolage of mini-scenes.

#1 a very harried afternoon, trying to get a print-out of my ticket, with C calling every half an hour to impress on me the importance of checking-in around fourteen hours early; me dutifully doing a trasferrence act on the SW, who to give him credit, bore it all with magnificent grace.
#2 being hyperactive with excitement at my first flight in India, so what if its air deccan.
#3 checking in - the SW's backpack is taken out, a bashful lady with a half smile moves over and a grinning guy takes over. the bag is unzipped to reveal a hoard of fresh clean undies. we start laughing extremely loudly, the SW quips - janaab fauladi hai. the guy blushes, looks at the Cow and me and says, "madam, yeh andar ki baat hai"
#4 excitement continues with trolley racing
#5 excitement subsides with realisation that the flight is delayed by a couple of hours.
#6 SW and Cow go white because the flight takes off during a mini thunderstorm and glare at me when i laugh at them
#7 inedible food, zero service, falling asleep on the way back from the loo and being taken as lost in a plane causing some panic to the Cow and the SW.
#8 reaching mumbai, soooo glad to find the airport loo.
#9 being taken to a dhaba where Mr S solemnly told us amitabh bachchan and shatrughan sinha ate in the 70's.
#10 interminable journey into the night in a car that had an ac set to arctic temperatures and a single CD containing all the songs by a loathesome creature called Himesh reshamiya.
#11 blinking and then opening my eyes to find the car going off the road, R reaching out steering the wheels with manic expression on her face.
# 12 three hundred quests to find a place to pee in.
#13 getting there
#14 getting into the sea. this is more complicated than it sounds. i love the sea, but i'm scared of it. i need people to hold my hands and tell me at the crucial moment to jump. then i get fully hit by the wave and grin like a maniac. it was no problem. i have good friends. except , one morning, just when a bggy hit, M let go of hand. his shorts fell off. almost. thought it was hilarious.
#15 thinking that i have a warped sense of humor. MY pants almost fell off, turned to find Mr S clutching at the back pocket of my denims for dear life.nothing funny about that. really, i need to grow up.
#16 R and me going in to check out a nightclub, leaving the rest of them on the street and then totally forgetting them to dance like devils, and then acting very contrite the rest of the night.
#17 three breakfasts on the beach
#18 pictionary on a hot afternoon with a bottle of bailey's and the most heinous criminalistic tendencies in people who would stop at nothing to win a game
#19 M's snoring, the Cow's special powers that are tied to her specs
#20 a beautiful dinner, courtesy M
#21 watching R relax
#22 piano massage
#23 throwing a tantrumling because i was feeling sick, everyone else throwing a tantrumling because of the presence of a perfectly inoccuous and otherwise nice family member of the S's. being human takes too much toll on us.
#24 the beach in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening and at night
#25 being hit in the stomach realising that even a kid like SW gets it that unloving a person is the hardest act.
#26 weird lazy afternoon conversation with each of us trying to figure out our lives
#27 SW's delight at being in the same bed with 3 women
#28 US Club, Tajmahal Hotel and Little Idlis
#29 SW's remarkable self-restraint and insistence that we do NOT change our tickets
#30 the first view of bombay skyline and THEN being hit with the mother of all traffic snarls.
#31 reaching the airport about 10 minutes before takeoff to find plane has been delayed.not deccan though.
#32 the sense of rejuvenation that only friends can bring about, which hasn't left me ever since

make your list

mycotoxin, quit being a lazy bum and update your blog. everyday, i open the page with great anticipation and then close the window cursing. this is not good for my BP.
gullu and sister, please do not be silent spectators. if you leave occasional comments, i will not eat you alive. actually, i'll be abjectly grateful. mailed in comments are delightful, but don't quite offer the same thrills.
the rest of you, ditto. actually ditto AND do start writing. you don't really have to share a blog if you don't feel like it, its just great fun writing. do it for your own sake.
now down to what i actually started out to blog about, but quite bypassed in order to get my tirade right - let's not joke about getting things in perspective. it is one of those done to death pop-psychology strategies, but it is actually worth doing a stock-taking. by all means, stand back and think. if you have stuff that afford you even a minute's joy, take notice of it. once you start, its a great thing. list them for yourself, list them for me. i'd love to hear what are the things you hold sacred in your life. what are the things you thank your stars for.
if you're good, i'll tell you about the office klepto.

counting blessings

it seems like the right time to count my blessings. exactly one year back, i felt like i will not be able to go on.yes, the darkness renders the light meaningful. but sometimes, you just feel a little less able to cope with things. a year later, today i can't wait to find out what life has in store for me around the next corner.

my transition phase ended with the recent trip i had. it was one of those breaks you take with friends, laugh incessantly, feel totally at home and do not even entertain the idea of having a meaningful conversation. it was just clean, mindless fun. i came back with the realisation that probably the only space where you should seek to be totally at home is with your friends. the rest - being at home in a job, being at home in a city, playing the 'right' part - is not really essential for survival. you should have those things ideally, but you won't stop being the person you are, if those don't work out.

i came back with a sense of calm and a contentment that i had lost , quite some time back. and then more stuff happened to lift me up to levels of euphoric existence. what more am i waiting for? this seems like the right time to do a stock taking.

- i'm very thankful that a year back, i had courage enough to ask for what i wanted. and throughout the year that proceeded, though i came close enough to giving up, i did not. though at times it took major faking of guts i did not have. but then again i'm a divine being, aren't i?
- i'm very thankful that i have friends to stand by me and hold my hands when i hurt myself. sometimes, they even go against their sense of self-preservation to try and stop me. i'm thankful that they don't give up on me.
- i'm very thankful that i learnt to let go
- i'm very thankful that i was taught to value the right things in life
- i'm very thankful that ocassionally i have it in me to make people i love a little bit more happy.
- i'm very thankful that i get what i want from life. yes, sometimes it is scary. but the other occasions more than make up for it.
- i'm very thankful that i have more than one person in my life who is happy or sad on my behalf.

* i'm also very thankful about my new slippers, the black top, orange rosebush and several other things. but its kind of flaky to mention those on this list.

i found the answer to one of the most profound questions that has bothered mankind. there is NO life after vacation. if one does exist, then its not worth living.more on this later. now i have to go to work. why? i don't know.

academia calling

S went to do an ethnographic study. those babies need a lot of interviewing and everything else. so he went over to call in on one of the people he really needed to talk to and was told "wo to chali gayin hai". being the patient bengali academic, he asked "shaam tak ayegi kya?" he was given the once over and was told "aj to unhka kreeyakaram hai". scene being bihar, the conversation that followed was not pretty.
he also spent a hundred and fifty rupees and a considerable number of cigarette packets in bribes each day, just to access material in public archives and libraries, got almost beaten up by constables of the bihar state police for taking pictures, shunned as a horrible hindu for objecting to the presence of twenty dogs in a reading room and to top it all he walked into a beer bar and ordered (successfully) buttered toast.
i'm feeling very ambivalent about going back to grad school.

i have misplaced/ lost/ let someone steal my passport, credit card, spare keys to my office in PA that i won't need anymore, my tax returns, my I-20 and my social security card. i think there is something very wrong with me. on some level, i know this is a big disaster, well mostly because upon hearing this, my friend stared at me in silence for 45 seconds before pronouncing "fuck" with seventeen syllables in it.

yet, i can't be bothered to get worked up about it. the worst it had done to me is provoke a deeply philosophical ( my kind of deep, which is like barely skimming the surface of the shallow end, holding the instructor's hand and clutching for life a life-jacket) question. if somebody steals my identity, can i go out and get a new one? i spent quite some time deciding on one and i am still not certain.

mostly i'd like one of those shiny, cool, sophisticated girl-woman kind of thing, with lots of inner balance, and a peaceful and tranquil core, propensity to like pastel shades and crystals and things of the sort. but i'd want the additional powers to shoot a mean one through the hoop and dance like pixies and eyeball a bartender over how a drink should be mixed. i'd also like my new identity to have gun or a biggish flick-knife and the ability to whip it out to totally crush deserving candidates into submission, without having to worry about the law and other tedious things like rights, wrongs dah dah da.

i can't help feeling a bit pleased about an identity theft.

them

he thought coconut oil was the only thing that could be done to his hair. she thought elvis presley was the last word when it came to styling. and of course elvis WAS the mark of god on earth, with that voice, that charm, and everything else.

he could speak for an eternity on the inricacies of indian classical music, and the closest brush he had with music of her choice, was when he heard janice joplin (much, much later in both their lives) and said she sounds like gangubai hangal.

she thinks elvis could still be alive somehwere, he could not sleep and spent the night walking on the streets the evening amir khan sahib died. she waited up for him.

she had been a heartbreaker, with her own share of heartaches. he didn't believe in love, not even when he was knocked out cold by it and couldn't recover from it in this lifetime. he still claims that there is no such thing as love, with a cocky grin. she just smiles at him and lifts her eyebrows.

she was silk, he was khadi ( he later had some khadi bell bottoms made to strike a compromise, which needless to say, didn't score quite as much as he expected).

she used to laugh at him, he used to laugh with her. they still laugh a lot. they share a passion for finding humour in the strangest situation.

he had one steel trunk in his newly rented apartment. she cut up her best sari to make a table cloth for it, so they won't have to eat on the floor, till they saved money enough to buy a proper dining-table. they didn't quite manage to save it, because they were perpetually broke buying books and flowers and book-cases and flower-vases. a disgusted friend took a hundred bucks from him and had a table with its own set of four weird chairs delivered to the flat.


she will not let the remote go and would sit through an unwatchable malayali movie, just so he doesn't get to watch tv. he will go the extent of tampering with the cords, so she doesn't get to hog the computers. all he does is play solitaires, all she does is watch news on tv. they also get extremely competitive with each other when it comes to exercise, morning walk, low-cal diet and page three trivia. and long-distance telephone calls.


he hates almost every shirt she has ever bought for him, she loved every sari he remembered to get. before every anniversary he is handed a list of things he should buy. she believes that exchanging gifts is silly, its all give and take - he gives, she takes. but she loves surprising him with gifts, her anticipation of his delight is a delight in itself.

he thinks she is the world's best cook ( she is NOT and they have a page in the telephone book devoted to the take-aways) and she thinks he is the best dish-washer she could ever get ( he is NOT, any maid or a small haier dishwasher could work miracles).

his body fails him, in small ways and large, each passing day, yet he finds himself picking up flowers for her after a ten-hour work day. her spirit just won't take a beating after all that she's been through, simply because he is with her, and there is nothing that quite counts as much.

they are old and tired and see friends and family dying. they see and sometimes welcome a growing seclusion. yet they seldom feel lonely. they have a cup of tea to sigh over, politics to fight over, scraggy tired old plants in a scrap garden that still spring flowers to wonder over, and each other to feel happy over.

they sometimes get very bemused and wonder how anyone could ever settle for anything less. i get very confused watching them and wonder, how can i ever make myself settle for anything less. but i have to, don't i?

the easter lilies came up. and i don't have to go to work till 11. and it is friday. i love my life.

i spent my evening very pleasantly. the first half of it, i took a walk in our neighbourhood park. suddenly it has become a very pretty park indeed. some atrribute it to an honest gardener who does not steal the money and run away with the maid from house no. 83 ( unlike the last three who ran away with different maids from the same house, and one even took Mrs Bose's brass letterbox). others attribute it to the fact that the secretary of the block committee finally got a closer look at the unmentionables (or entirely mentionables) of our friendly neighbourhood equal opportunities flasher, during one of his evening walks, and decided to make things better.

i topped it off with a chat with our little istriwallah dilip, who has set up his shop and home off the corner from the park. dilip is a charming host. at the age of 13, his social skills far outpace men a decade or two older than him. while i waited for him to finish up the batch that didi had despatched, he set me up on a little charpoy and put radio mirchi on for me. before he set the station, he asked me if i would prefer to listen to any particular one. i was floored.

later on in the evening, i had to go to the clinic. i really like going there. i mean not for check-ups, those bring all sorts of guilt to the forefront, i go there to meet some of the doctors and am made to wait an eternity. it is probably one of the only places where i get to have an undisturbed hour or maybe two hours of pure me-time, during normal people hours. it was absolutely blissful. particularly so after i told a kid in tones only audible to him that i will hang him by his eyelashes and keep him dangled for a week. i am not a horrible person, this child was begging for it. i wish more people believed in disciplining their kids , instead of simpering and then looking completely embarassed and pretending not to know their own child. anyway, things became immensely pleasant after that.

i smelt the rain last night. slowly my senses were filled with the smell of wet earth, that smell that makes you think of animals and the colour green and heat and raw life. that heady fragrance was the only thing i could feel, as if all my other senses had been temporarily suspended. then i woke up to a hot and clear night and it wasn't there anymore. i could see the stars.
i smelt the fresh linen, old books, two jasmine buds and dried ink smell of a leaky ball point pen. i looked at the stars some more and fell asleep again.

can you grieve the death of grief?

there is this blog that i spent quite some time reading. i'm too lazy to figure out sidebars and stuff, i don't know if blogiquette permits you to link up random strangers ( mycotoxin could figure it out, but i think he is in prison or in a coma or abducted by porpoises) and i am also a bit retarded when it comes to html. so i just copied the link here
http://chicklitindia.blogspot.com/
i was reading some of the older posts and it is sometimes an intensely emotional blog, that i couldn't help relating to. i don't know if i'd have the courage to be so open about all my fears and grief, anonimity does offer you the option, but i am a greater coward. i don't know if i'd be ready to lay it bare for me, to see for myself and face my demons.
reading her bit, i was assured. at least of of one thing - that i do not feel some emotions by myself and that there are other people who go through similar motions, who tread those same paths.
having gone through my own bit with my own K ( my own, hah!), i was remembering some things i've tried hard to forget. i was so unsure all along whether you are allowed to grieve the death of a relationship that never was. i could not figure out what to do and what to feel. except sometimes, when i cried, i would feel so guilty and tell myself i am not entitled to those tears.
i was very shocked to discover today, when i was reading it and as i am writing now, that something that took so much out of my life at one point of time, has lost all meaning. i amost felt sad to realise i do not feel sad about it anymore.

i am mildly bored. now. and too lazy to bask in the glow of an evening well-spent. calvin and hobbes is ( are?) reserved for when i'm more bored. i took blogthings and was told that picasso should have painted my portrait. i am pleased but not as much as i should be. we had a small print of a woman grieving with her face towards the wall. with my imagination fired from a trip to my grandmother's place, throughout my childhood i thought it was an obscenely intrusive picture of someone using an indian toilet.

Who Should Paint You: Pablo Picasso

Your an expressive soul who shows many emotions, with many subtleties Only a master painter could represent your glorious contradictions

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

achievement

i woke up today. the highest point of the day has already been achieved by the mere act of waking up. if you get monday morning blues on a friday, what do you call it?

another day

i spent the whole day today trying to get my bank to let me deposit a check. apparently they have never seen checks like the one i produced, before, never heard of my former bank ( not very surprising, very few people outside PA had) and did not know what to do. i went to 3 different SBI's to figure out what i can do with the money that is rightfully mine. its not only the incompetence, but just the sheer ignorance left me feeling extremely frustrated.what was also bizarre is that all the people i talked to, irrespective of whether or not they could do the job they are paid to do, thought they were very entitled to know everything about my life, inside out, left to right and so on. and after asking seventeen thousand irrelevant things, they all told me, with benign smiles, they did not know what to do.

i had to take the day off from work to settle something, that, after all the hassle, took 15 minutes to be done. it did not improve my mood when i was told that processing everything takes at least six weeks. my hazy, sketchy dreams of a measly five day vacation went kaput. i was already nearing the limits of my endurance, having dealt with traffic, one-ways that lead nowhere, a driver that had to be told where park-street is and an occasionally working mobile phone that was created solely for the purpose of making my life a miserable wreck.

i felt marginally better after meeting with my one of my oldest and best buddies. what was meant to be a quick mutual venting session and lassi stretched out for an hour and five minutes including leisurely trips to the atm, speculation about whether eating fruits on the road cause cholera (the vendor glared us away, neither of us are very brave), gloating over new shirt and new wife( him) and feeling slightly deprived about wearing old salwar suit and singular lack of spouse or anything in that direction (me).

five minutes after i came home, i recieved a happy phone call from shrams who became YM enabled today. in a gesture of solidarity and support i came online only to find her getting disconnected every 39 seconds. i had to spend considerable time and money (Rs 17 is no mean amount) trying to get her to be a respectable netizen. i also ended up having a very heavy discussion with gullu on the dynamics of being a junkie and somehow the concept of virtue came into it. i was trying to save some of that conversation ( do not spell the word archiving here). i found it immensely blogworthy, but then ofcourse my pc crashed or hanged or hung.whatever. i was also told that an extra-marital affair is something that is entirely the business of two consenting adults. couldn't help feeling that there is also a third non-consenting adult who suffers the most, but technology prevented me from continuing that discussion any further.

maybe my next bit should be on the much diputed anmd discredited concept of virtue. but i so much wanted to record for posterity how our electric line was cut off, and the man climbed on top of the howrah bridge to find food and what my brother told me in strictest confidence about bhishmadeb
("when asked apni faiyaz khan-er shishyo holen keno? tate bole je nasiruddin dagar ar faiyyaz khaner moddhe competition hocchilo. ta ekdin nasiruddin shaheb jama khulte dekhi or gayer mangshota bhalo na, tai faiyaz khan shahebkei first kore dilam").and how gharanas are made.

Not all true, is it?

The following is a part of communication I recieved from a friend of mine.

Dictionary for Decoding Women's Personal Ads:

40-ish ........................ 49.
Adventurous .............. Slept with everyone.
Athletic ...................... No breasts
Average looking .......... Moooo.
Beautiful .................... Pathological liar.
Emotionally Secure ... On medication.
Feminist .................... Fat
Free spirit .................. Junkie
Friendship first .......... Former slut.
New-Age ................... Body hair in the wrong places.
Old-Fashioned ........... No BJs.
Open-minded ............. Desperate
Outgoing ................... Loud and Embarrassing.
Professional .............. Bitch
Voluptuous ................ Very Fat
Hugh frame ............... Hugely Fat
Wants soul mate ....... Stalker.



I forwarded it to the usual people. The responses from the women were almost identical. I guess I's mail sums it best "jeeez...not all true.. is it?"
The men. Less said the better. Mycotoxin had a few add-ons to prescribe. His corrected version stands at:


Dictionary for Decoding Women's Personal Ads:
>>
>>40-ish ........................ 49. a healthy 55 more likely
>>Adventurous .............. Slept with everyone. why the past tense?
Definition of a slut - sleeps with everyone at the party
Definition of a bitch - sleeps with everyone at the party except you
>>Athletic ...................... No breasts. but the butt will more than make up for it
>>Average looking .......... Moooo. yep.
>>Beautiful .................... Pathological liar.
>>Emotionally Secure ... On medication. or dysfunctionally multiorgasmic.
>>Feminist .................... Fat. and hairy.
>>Free spirit .................. Junkie
>>Friendship first .......... Former slut.
>>New-Age ................... Body hair in the wrong places.
>>Old-Fashioned ........... No BJs. or much else.
>>Open-minded ............. Desperate. and everything else.
>>Outgoing ................... Loud and Embarrassing. and will puke on you at parties.
>>Professional .............. Bitch. or too expensive on an hourly basis
>>Voluptuous ................ Very Fat. but jiggly.
>>Hugh frame ............... Hugely Fat. one roll and it's all over
>>Wants soul mate ....... Stalker. and if you're reading this far, she's close to finding one.

The temptation to blog an omnibus on respect towards womenkind did fleet through my mind. But the dysfunctional idiots already live that lesson out in their lives , thereby robbing me of the right to preach. Not that I need a "reason" to jump up on the pulpit. I would kill 6 people anyway, if i didn't find it hilarious.

I woke up at 6:36 today. I already feel tired. think i'll become a lazy housewife and do away with the need to wake up AT ALL in the morning.
The Southern Wonder had the idea that we could all go gymming at 5:30 in the morning. Brings it up in conversation every time we meet.So far i've refrained from hitting him, but today i'm not in such a charitable mood after experiencing early morning, first hand.
Not that i have anything against morning people, I am friends with some of them. Mycotoxin, for instance, wakes up at the crack of dawn to go running ( ughhhh).
What I resent is the assumption that this is the Only way and if you are not your brightest at 5 f'ing AM then you are a sociopath.
I have to get a shower, get ready and go out of the house in 23 minutes and i do not have the energy to move a muscle.

note to self

i bought a pair of bright yellow rubber sandals from bata and i'm insanely happy, for the moment, just looking at them. there can be no problem that can't be at least partially solved by buying new shoes. one can never have enough shoes. or problems big enough to forget shoes. if you can't buy shoes, get slippers or sandals. everything works.

two of my friends are going through major life altering changes. its taking a great emotional toll on them. i feel so bloody helpless that i can't do anything to make things easier.
its such a bunch of crap to profess support, what can you bloody well do? you can't bear the emotional bruising on behalf of them , you CANNOT share the pain no matter what the shiny pop-psychology sprouting volumes say, and empathy - feeling the emotion, albeit second hand - does absolutely nothing to make things better for the people concerned.
i can only be witness to rage and sadness, i can only be witness to grief and an attempt to move on beyond that, i cannot do anything more. i can't heal them , i can't make things as good as new. i can only fail my friends. i wish i knew how to be a better person.

Yes baby!!!

You Are Scary

You even scare scary people sometimes!

How Scary Are You?

I'm so amazing

This is neat. I particularly like the section about slowly bringing out beauty around me. I tried it on my next door neighbor. As we were trying to decide whether wine brewed in Grover's vineyard is wine at all, I got to see her slowly breaking out in hives. You Are Rain

You can be warm and sexy. Or cold and unwelcoming. Either way, you slowly bring out the beauty around you. You are best known for: your touch Your dominant state: changing

What Type of Weather Are You?