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?

summing up

one more august gone, just like that!!

It has been like any other august, or perhaps a tad different because of a tincture of eerie anecdotes and a bizarre yet enthralling cornucopia of "oh-it-happened-to-you?" like situations. So, brace yourself for a sneak peek into my mad world.

1) College reopened from 1st and there was a lot of running and conundrum for the first week. We were supposed to register for courses and as always I was at my wit's ends figuring out what I really intended to study. Finally the scale tilted heavily in favour of physics courses. Ok, I am no Feynman but physics comes a bit naturally to me. I would not have been blogging were it not for physics. So, physics..thank you.

2) Went on a shopping spree and depleted my bank account to nullity!! Not often do I go berserk like that , but this time I made sure I hit the malls like one of those sleek damsels who throng there everyday, buying nothing. Bought two shirts ( there was a sale going on everywhere!!) and a back-pack which emptied me of every penny. I am like thriving on some 200 rupees from past 5 days and still there are two more days to go. But again humility rises from the dust and pacifies me. What about those little kids on the streets waiting for red-lights to halt the juggernaut of a traffic so that they can stretch their small hands and pester the commuters for money..?? A small girl always comes up to me ( Rather I stumble upon her..) and pops her hand inside the auto-rickshaw with two red-roses. The roses are so crimson that I have fallen in love with the color. I buy roses from her even though I have no one to offer it to!!

3) saw THE DARK KNIGHT 4 times in the multiplex. Still I haven't had enough of it. Heath Ledger was so different in portraying the role that I got hooked to the movie. I hit the screens more often than I hit the books. Only once in my lifetime would this gem of a movie embrace the theaters and I am not the one to rue before my grandchildren about me having missed it!!!

Ledger , wherever you are ...I tell you that no one would ever come even 15 furlongs as near as you ... you darted towards perfection with ferocity. Whoever said that perfection was boring, must be shrugging his shoulders in disbelief. Dead on, Heath.

4) Arpit( my college mate) drove the college bus after the whole crew grew impatient on seeing the key in the ignition for 15 minutes with the driver being gone. Arpit took to the wheels and oh my!! He was so sleek in driving..Was a hell of a ride...

5) latest news!!

Mr. A( don't fret!!)is almost there... talks are on and in almost all probability he would have a gf in about a month's time. The entire gang is so jealous ( by the sheer impossibility of him being with a girl !)
that rumour mills are running overtime. Some say it is a gimmick. I am beaming cause I know everything. R was saying , " Now even A would have a gf???????". Ohh, boy...!!! He has no idea...

missing the bus

I have missed the bus once again. not a great feeling to see it swish past me leaving a trail of smoke behind. from ages ( as far as I remember ..) people have believed that only losers miss buses. but I think the contrary.

I remember a different kinda loser from one movie ( Ok, He finally did something heroic...!! ) with files clutched under his arms ; ogling at some beatnik beauty at the bus stop and traveling from office to office via buses, only to be rejected by the managers again and again. What really did he get from boarding the bus in time? Nothing.

Missing the bus has given me opportunities to venture into different places. Once I ended up spending 3- 4 hours in LANDMARK ( bookstore) after I was left black by the soot of a missed-me-again-sweetie!!. Then, I struck a conversation with a learned old man once after he was left gasping and cursing by the same devil. He told me so much about himself in a gap of one hour. I don't know most of my super friends in such excruciating detail. He was a poet ( no money in poetry and no poetry in money , remember?? ). I picked up this habit of jotting poems from there. Who says only legacy hands you things. Missing the bus can come in handy!!!

watching the bus arrive finally after hours of desperate waiting brings me a joy which is very strange yet so sweet. I would have went on, but the bus may arrive any minute ( again the uncertainty adds spice to the whole anticipation and hope that my rickety overcrowded boulder of a vehicle would arrive ) , so I have to pack up. some people are watching me since half an hour. small kids ( laden with a full-of-books bag are chatting ..) ; office guys are keen on heading home and are betraying relief ( at last )..there is a whole bunch of girls ( ahh..haaa!!!) and they would board too....

and this is the first time , I have blogged @ bus-stop.

what more could I really ask for??

why, such a storm of posts??

{ nowadays I write too much. I have ample of time with me for offering crap. In free time, some play and most of us sleep. Some read so that sooner or later SLEEP embraces them. I, for the one, write non-sense and let others churn the sense out of it!!! pretty naughty of me but it is a good exercise for you all. Sometimes finding reason in a holy mess of scrap is the most difficult thing to do.... People, it is time for some serious brainstorming. Be Game.}

So why do I write so much these days?


1) Well, I have nothing much to do as of now. 3rd year in college has just started and the course flow is phlegmatic and quite viscous. I am not reading much of novels either since I have just finished a thick and heavy one ( as in plot). I am drained of everything. Writing is easy. Just type idiotically. If something comes out good, its pure serendipity.

2) I have almost overcome a dire situation in my life. I am so inundated with joy that only words seem to be the outlet. Long held happiness flows in words. Long held sadness fills the tear pools.

3) This is the best way ( for me) to keep a safe distance from unhappiness ( it is lurking to grab me, I can sense it..). If I don't scribble, I would be unhappy again because the idle mind knows no shackles and it invariably guides me to old unhappy memories.

4) because Writing generally comes out good when you are not making any sense. Sometimes a message behind the piece spoils the party . At times, Just Jot and shut your brain--doors.

5) Now comes the murky stuff. I am working on my writing skills. A pro ( I am not, but still!!) would go to any length to accentuate his vocational know-how!! I am working on a novel and some friends have gone through some part of it. They are finding it good. In fact good enough to make a sad man beam, a happy man weep.

please pray that I don't stop it midway . I hope that I would drift with the tide and the novel shall see the red ribbons and speedy reading- sessions.

ah, silly dreams. They make you look stupid, don't they??

blogging freely

15th august, 2008 and I am just back to my temple ( comp. room , what else?). We had a flag hoisting ceremony a few hours back. well, suddenly it occurs to me what being free really means. Cool!!we are kind of accustomed to live life on our own terms .Now, no one dictates us to do this or do that. Things are so drastically different from the 1930s and 40s. Everyday we break some shackles. Everyday someone or the other is breaking all bonds and becoming free. Freedom is a cliche nowadays. It is everywhere. Everyone asserts that he is free. But, I doubt this inflated notion of freedom.

I am not sure what I really think of Independence. To me , it is the most perplexing word in the entire dictionary. The same old devils : independent from whom, from what (but where? ) continue to haunt me. Ok, now you have no one like the Britons resting a baton up your ass but the tormentors are still there. Still, the goons act as Gods. Try to venture out , on 14th february with your Gf and then you would know:) . Now there are new dictators floating freely in the markets. Under their blanket , We deem ourselves to be very powerful. Smokey and Spookey free birds that we are, if someone asks to draw a line , we show him a golden finger ( f... , I am free). Now there aren't any Red clothed, booted rulers on horsebacks flooding our own streets. Now we have scantily clad mistresses. If not out of fear, but surely out of shame , our eyes do get lowered. Now that is how the rulers are supposed to evoke a response, isn't it?

Ok, why am I talking philosophical? ( untouchability is still not a passe. the new outcastEs are the ones who talk sense. Even I have laughed at such Big-talkers...). Philosophy arises when rigidity of thoughts meets a completely earth shattering situation. A few minutes ago, while I was walking my way back to the room , I stopped at a tea-shop to have some biscuits ( Ok, I don't drink tea. My friend does..). A small kid, hardly 12 years old, comes up to me and says "SAHIB, AAP BHI CHAI LENGE?". Obviously he gets a "No" for an answer but the sadness that I have seen on his face isn't the one which arises from a negation. This sadness surely springs from subjugation. The taming of his childhood dreams, the snatching of his play-hours. What more does it take to make him sad? But in an independent country, the rich and the famous are free enough to do that.

I think I would have to revise my whole notion of freedom now. If this is freedom , I shudder to even think what subjugation really was. Freedom has entangled us now. It has blinded us from many things. Just think. What have you ever done that a free man could have done and not regret? Nothing. Freedom , at best is a licence to live irresponsibly and not being asked any questions ( parents?? who art thou???). I am tired of living freely. For God's sake, chain me now before I turn unruly and cause a ruckus. I feel like a tamed lion let loose to poUnce on the circus crowd. I feel wild and unchecked. Ahh, awful to really feel like that.

Always feel free but when you act as one, do it a bit more responsibly.