the past catching up-- 1

people, there are lot many things happening all around me. Commonwealth Youth games( some 26 days away...hell..I am so bad at calculations!!); repair of roads ( ain't very likely to happen..now with pebbles and rubble all around, it looks all the more worse..), the clearing up of shanties and roadside fruit vendors.. and the most troubling of all : The Delhi blasts ( nowadays ... there are always pluralities existing in their number...the miscreants aren't satisfied with one thud and boom...).

Also, the blog got rechristened, and revamped in a tinge of placid blue. I am in love with blue( Gives me blues... ahh no!!). . I am hooked to the blogger but I must admit that I am not very fond of templates here....

OK, now I must return to where I intended to start from. I have a bad habit of thinking. Doing nothing but lazing around with a thought playing in my mind. Always giving you a feel that I am at peace when deep within I am as turbulent as a torpedo. Couple that with a stack of pages and I would jot unnecessary stuff. The lines may come out good or terrible. But they really won't make any sense. Well, at least to you. I have been waging a war with myself. Its like a turncourt going on inside. One part says," Go and Talk. Do something. What you waitin' for? Things are not meant to last this way. If you are ending something, do it properly. Give it the end, it deserves." Other part insists on keeping numb and drifting with the tide of the times. Good things too, have not been far behind. Good people have turned the sun ( for a change !!) on my life. And pretty much like a sunflower, I am basking in it. Not knowing or perhaps trying to ignore the fact that the sun sets someday. Then the yellow flower droops and goes down. But while I am out there in the sunny times, I would soothe any on-looker. That is one promise I made to all my fellow travellers. Let not the light , but the will , guide us ahead. The sun can't be trusted. It would go down. And the night is always dark. We have our mutual joys to buoy us high in the sky of life. Keep floating, all of you.

So now? This time on, I am in an old and forgotten territory. I trespass here quite often. I overstay but I have never been stopped from doing that. So prolonging my stay has become my habit and also a mode of killing time. It is the luxury I have. Else the time is busy killing me. Minute by minute. Second by second.

I am cruising ahead notwithstanding the long queue of people vying to pull me down , dark situations vouching for my fall....Like Frost, even I have got promises to keep. Promises I made to myself long ago. Promises, I never intended to, was forced to make , to my loved ones. Ages ago. If not for these senile promises of mine , I have to just move for the sake of moving. Staying at one place is an open invitation for the evil forces to run all over you. You gotta make these creatures toil . If eventually they would catch me, why not make them sweat and pant for breath. They getting me easily would rob me of all the fun!!

Many of you won't be knowing that my caravan got rolling after I joined a boarding school in grade sixth. Before that I was gathering stocks of food , barrel of liquor and other ingredients that I thought would last long enough. Enough to see me through the whole distance. I thought I had them aplenty and once laden I won't need to stop and load myself again. Burdened with hope and some apprehension and fear, which perhaps every traveler setting on a journey feels, I stepped on the road. A road that looked straight then but made too many turns as I moved on. Ok, so the time at school went flying. Like all the good times, they flitted like the supersonic planes. Just saw them going, I never got to hear any sound. Journeys are deceptive. You start happily. You look around and see beaming fellow travellers. You see all of them mingling and leaning over their loved ones talking and chatting. You have a feeling that the long journey is just a matter of time. You got people to talk to, you got a cosy seat to rest. You got food and everything. Then gradually things start getting real. People start drifting apart. Journeys of some end before you. And some get tired and leave the caravan midway. The stock starts getting depleted and you become fed up with sleeping the whole day through. What do you do then? I don't have an answer. Perhaps bid your time and just pray that the train doesn't run out of fuel. So as the clocks ticked and I neared the first milestone, I knew it was time for many of my fellow students to get down and bid me farewell. I saw their disappearing torsos. Their alighted and waving hands got lost in the crowd. I had to move on. And I did.

Funny how, people forget faces of these small bundles of joy. The fellow travellers who dilute the boredom of the travel by their sheer presence. I admit, right now, I am putting my best foot forward and walking ....alone down the road. But I look back often. Not for remembering the grease and the gruesome details of my travels , but for cudgeling my brain so that I can remember those hideous faces. I still ain't able to recall. Amnesia, ah, it sucks.




P.S : Don't read anything. But please give a round of applause to Palvi who is as close it gets to spontaneity. An unfeigned and unadulterated source of laughter and joy. And then three other suns in my life, my sis Pallavi, my best friend ( Fiend?) Abhiket and Shruti ( The name spells her!! ). I am smiling you four. Thank you. Palvi spruced my blog all ends up:p. and actually ended up getting bored doing it...:P

This might be the first bead in a string of recounting-n-writing posts. Well, lemme see. As of now, it stands that way.

( Thanks should always be coated with a corny line. Ahh, just a passing, naughty thought!!)

I forgot Saurabh? I, be damned!!

stuck!!!

Buses will ruin me one day. Like every other morning , after having my breakfast, I got on the bus that heads straight to the academic building from my hostel. But looks like, I am destined to either miss buses or end up getting hooked in jams (even if I somehow manage to board one...) , all my life.

There was a big ditch in the middle of the road, thanks to the ongoing reconstruction... Result being the never ending queue of cars ( big and small), bikes ( flashy and rugged), cycles ( emphasing that size really matters..to the envy of my eyes, one cyclist even managed to race through the furrow between two standing trucks!! ) and the street flooding devils in yellow and black , the tripods .."Autorikshaws"!!

There isn't much one can do when your luck relishes playing foul games with you. It had rained the whole night before and this morning, I sat on a seat that was wet from inside but looked perfectly dry from the outside. Deceptive looks indeed!! Now I am wearing a wet jeans and am shivering under an AC.

One of my friend had taken to the back seat and he was praying that the jam lasted till eternity. The "why" here has a simple answer..A bus-full of girls was also stuck besides our own ...and my lucky friend was savoring the view to the optimum.

Two thoughts raced across our minds..

1) What if you are with a beautiful girl and it starts raining incessantly.. ( In Pune and Mumbai, that's not an impossibility!! ). Till now, this has never happened to either of us.

2) Being stuck in an elevator with a girl. Now as times have advanced, this dream has faded into oblivion. The apartments have generators to fire capsules up and down. There is an alarm which you can press if such misfortune ( hell, its a fortune !! ) befalls you.

While in a jam, people would droop to any level to pass the time.

.................................................................................................................................

And here again I see, the beauty of jams. No matter if you are a corporate honcho or a young turk or a prospective waste like me...A jam always mellows you.. It brings everyone down to the same level. You have to inhale the smoke if you are on two-wheelers or just listen to numbers in your car .. LUMAX red lights and horns hardly work then.. All you are left to do is to just stay seated and sulk. How humbling!!

I was ruminating and in due time , the driver was busy curbing the vehicle to places of less density of vehicles . He pulled it off and we reached the Institute some 50 minutes late. But we made it.

Where there is a "WHEEL" , there indeed, is a way.

A world sans girls!!!

Time to kick off , the post-season again. A new month, the same stale ideas. I would try to be different and so I am looking for a perfect start. A very good friend of mine has just started the blogging business ( by business, I don't necessarily mean business per se as in earning through blog..Yuckkkkk!! ). He is just new to this part of the world. I was going through his first post ( having excerpts from Paulo Coelho's book, Eleven minutes). I won't go into the meticulous description of what this book is all about ... it should suffice, perhaps, to let the un-initiated people know that the story celebrates the lamentation and quest of a prostitute for the ever eluding eleven minutes of exaltation ( Orgasm.. ) . Now here, Coelho tells how that homo-sapiens were not classified as male/female to start with and consequently courtship and the following strife had yet not started troubling the men. How the males and females got seperated and the all hell let loose from the day itself!!

Now my wise friend ( am not being sarcastic.. ok, "retrospective" is the better word!!), lying on his cosy bed , with all the time in the world to squander , started thinking what a world it would have been were there no girls on this planet. ( Let me add...were there no girls in the whole universe..else men would flock in swarms to that "gal-paradise"). He believes that there would have been no strifes, no heart-breaks and no Devdas like crying babies in the hostel rooms.. ( Although the very night , I pinged him and my friend was ruing that he had no girl in his life and it was so much boring. He is experiencing a vacancy , an emptiness ..He wants someone to share his thoughts with.. !!). I have nothing very different to offer.

But , believe me, It kinda horrifies me to imagine a world sans girls. It would be so much drab and boring. For most of us, Girls are the fuel which keep us living with a zeal and vigour.... a will to look good, a desire to dress like human-beings, an urge to bathe, apply cologne and what not. Besides Girls are very considerate in listening to poorly crafted and an even more dismally told jokes..They always laugh, you know. Boys are so cruel in dispelling bad humour. On the other hand, the fairer sex is kind enough. They laugh no matter how damn silly jokes are. There is no better sight than that of a beaming lass. The picturesque scenery, the landscapes, the malls etc. are a distant second. Girls are not a crutch for a boy. They resemble walls. You lean on them when you are going weak and you are tired of standing, you write on them when you are out of paper, you kick them when you are angry, you cuddle up to them when you want to hide your tears, you punch them a with tightly clenched fist when you want to be humbled, they are something you hold on to when the fall seems imminent. Girls are a storehouse of power yet they would mellow for you. They are a sword which can rip you apart but they keep to their scabbards. Girls are the songs, the dance, the happiness and the tear drops of life. You take them aside and half of the emotions on earth won't have come into being. For whom would you fight fervently, for whom would you like to be strong or at least act as one.. ? For whom would you seldom turn to literature and pry up for romantic lines? For whom would you scribble a page of lines ( you never means:d) ...from whom would you learn fortitude and the ability to stay grounded even when you have all the grace to take on the world??

Girls are a realisation that something exists outside the realm of cynical dome which encircles us. They were originally designed to stay cool,composed,innocent and serene. Any digression we see is purely an output of this unruly world. If she doesn't mould herself, we might even get bulldozers to get her down. Walls have to be tough, you know. I have a feeling ( and I might be wronged , but still I would say it) that she only turns nasty when she has seen enough murkiness from the world. She wants to turn a page and don a different role. She wants to show the world that everything breaks beyond the scope of reconstruction if you continue hammering it.

Come to think of it.. You are tired after a hard day of working-like-a-dog session and there are no girls to stare ( okay, ogling!! Men are allowed pitfalls. Sorry ladies.) at..there is no one who has prepared a mouth-watering delicacy for you when you return back home.. there is no one to whom you can talk to for hours without making any sense ( How much of that is left after a gruesome day?)...

If you walk a road in a world without girls.. you are attending a funeral. You can no longer walk blind-folded as no one would forward his feet for removing the thorns strewn on your way. When you think of replacing girls, think of a better substitute. I cannot fathom a better species. Definitely the new beings stepping in their shoes won't be half as beautiful ( and by beauty I don't mean only.. her eyes and locks..everything including her inner beauty).

My body temperature is already registering a couple of degrees above the normal and I am feeling feverish and frail. I don't want to aggravate my sickness by imagining such horrendous things...There aren't many tranquilizers that can cure me of such acute mental fever. How can a void left by a girl be ever filled? All tragedies have resulted cause we haven't still found a way to recover from that loss, the pain you get when your sweetie goes away.

The mercury is rising. Perhaps certain chemicals have gone berserk after the passage of such a ridiculous thought. Get well soon, me. For that Girls , you would have to stay put, right here on this planet. And pray for me, who knows?