When did it get over.

Oh but it had to end. Did it not?

You fought it and so did I..

We lingered on,

Yes, we tried.

No longer can I endure,

Stagnating thoughts

End of the stories galore.

Will re-surface somewhere else, some other time. Things have to change here on.

Cheers,

:-|

Orkut --> Facebook --> 3 or 4 blogs I follow ---> Webmail (office) --> Member Call notes ---> Gmail ---> Facebook ---> Gtalk ---> Webmail/Wikipedia/Sidereel.com/Ibnlive

End of day (weekday or weekend at home).

When do you know that too much is actually too much?

Is it ok if it is so wrong but feels so good?

Where are the interesting men of the world?

Days go by

It has been a strange month of sorts. The ticker moved another year for me as I neared my quarter life and no closer to anything else I want. It feels like I am watching a movie where happiness, sadness, highs and lows happen to other people. I am a mere spectator stuck with a plastic smile and a projected sense of someone else's emotions. Some people got through b-schools, some people are closer to better jobs and promotions. Some people to marrying and starting a life with someone else.

What on earth am I doing except perfecting my 1001 ways to sit at home and not do anything? People keep talking about the easier way out of things. Where is my easier way out?

P.S- On the brighter front my few moments of sunshine were
=> My visit home and an extended birthday celebrations with parents and sister, friends and lots of gift!
=> A letter from some guy who had a crush on me. While really funnily written with spooky details about our apparent encounters, it felt nice to know that someone liked you enough at some point in time, to put themselves out like that.
=> A tiny glimmer that Dodo could be back for a week next month and give me something to cheer about.
=>Finishing 4 years in a relationship and overcoming all barriers.

Quit.

The last few months since coming to Delhi, I have been trying to get over the feeling of being a 'square peg in a round hole'. For some reason, I have been feeling the need to justify, not to others but myself, my bigoted views about modernity. Where does it stem from within me? And while, I may have finally learnt to not let things bother me about people around me in general, I seem to be more affected when people I am close to act in a way I don't consider appropriate.

See, this is where the introspection creeps in. How can I just continue to ignore things around me and just mind my own business. Case in point -

1.I stay in a 1bhk house, which is a part of a bigger house with two more rooms rented out to an other person. Now this person happens to be a 50+ year old, married VP of a company who is staying alone in the apartment. Given that in effect we share the same house separated only by few doors, locked from both sides, quite unnecessarily we are privy to a lot more information than required. The most scandalous being the regular visits of his middle-aged colleague, who stays over at night and leaves early in the morning around 6. SS tells me such relationships are a common thing these days and not just in the upper echelons of the society.

2. Girls who smoke. Some part of me still cringes every single time I see a girl light up. Any girl. And while I was still trying to make peace with occasional smoking of someone really close, I get hit with the information that it never was 'occasional smoking'. The said person has been addicted for 3 years. And while I still try to come to terms with this, all I want to ask is - Why?

• Did you not go to good schools and colleges, where they taught you how harmful smoking is?
• Did we not have innumerable open discussions as to how unnecessary the whole addiction thing was?
• I still can't believe that you bought the myth - smoking helps you lose weight!

I know it could be labeled as a sexist thing. But I don't fancy guys who smoke either. Mentally, it doesn't create a negative image though because may be I am used to my Dad who's smoked all my life and quite heavily at that. And though it took me a while to accept, I am now ok with the post-coital suttas and the ocassional suttas with booze that my friends have, but I am yet to come to terms with regular smoking among girls I know.

And where does this mind-block stem from? From the Bharuch lineage? From home? What effects and shapes such preferences in people? I sooo need to figure this out.

To do, to remember

To remember – To compare functions, equalize the base.

To do – Stop giving myself hell for having not yet achieved the material possessions of a 30 year old.

To remember - I don’t even have two years of work experience. As of today , I have been working for the last 1 year and 6 months.Even then I haven't spent 6 months in doing the exact same thing.

To do – Continue to aspire. Accept limitations. Accept that I am yet to turn 24.

I will write.

When is late too late? When is silence too silent? When do words end and none ever begin?

Words feel like a huge mound of mud in my head. Wet, murky and capabile of acquiring some shape, if attempted.But am past attempting. I have perfected the art of whiling away my time without getting anything constructive done. Office to home, home to office and the general humdrum is what life has become. There are barely any highs there (not counting the professional ones) or any lows. People are figures who fill spaces around me and very nicely so. You smile at them when you pass them by near the copier machine, the cafeteria. You add a witty rejoinder to the banter over lunch. You wave a cheery good-bye when you leave the office at 8 in the night and become oblivious of their existence the moment you lose the eye-contact.

I miss Dodo. And as soppily love-lorn that sounds, I have had enough of being in love with the idea of being in a relationship and living it over the phone. Some day ...some day ...this wait will end. But when?

Me and my friends are in a strange point in our lives. What next - is no longer a question you can procrastinate about. Some parents are looking for a suitable match for their daughters and there is a call every other day in trying to condition them to accept the situation. For people like me, who are quite set about this question, the next one that comes is when. When will the damn studies get over? When will the US economy come out of recession? When will we feel ready enough to take the plunge? Life part - 2 should begin sometime...and sometime soon.

Interlude

There is a nip in the air. I wish Saket were not this far. It is the perfect weather to sit in the open courtyards of Citywalk and just read. I have been getting back to reading of late. Not as voraciously as I would like but some progress from their completely abandonment of last year.

The pace of the day is slow and lazy. For once it feels so welcome to just while away the time without the shadow of guilt that is always lurking behind somewhere. It is still somewhere around but I am fastidiously ignoring it till this year ends. I have come down from the treadmill, -- breathless and tired from running and reaching no where. The horizon has become hazy and so has the near future. The dream is lost but we are not talking about it yet. Not talking should make the void fill up or go away or I could just will it to cease existing. May be.

It is time to find a new dream.

I don’t mean to be this morose. If you know me and have been talking to me all this while, you would know that I am not. But words seem to be coming out of a place even my conscious self has no access to. So I am letting this cathartic purging take its course. Or may be it’s the surface rust from the lack of writing all this while – red, hard and crusty.

General Inertia

I should update more often and stop writing posts in my head instead.

Will be up and yapping again soon.

Mixed bag

Did I like Delhi? Yes I did and I still do.

Am I happy here? I am not sad.

Am I bored? Not exactly, but there is nothing thrilling just around the corner or to look forward to each day.

Its strange. As always, I chose to run out of Hyderabad when the people around me grew uncomfortably stifling. When, like always, I got entangled in the intricate web I had woven around me and found myself suffocating, by both the presence and absence of people. It has always been like that. School, then college, and now Hyderabad. The beginnings were quite the same too. Instant bondings paved the way for relationships that I struggled to maintain later on. Wishing for a bare familiarity over the friendliness I chose on day one. But even on retrospect, all these places, offered so little in terms of choice. I wonder, if I could have done better than what I did at all these places and somewhere I know, I couldn't have.

Nevertheless, I like me right now. Not plunging headfirst between people to make space. For once standing on the side-lines and observing. Often in the last three weeks, I have felt a small tug, pushing me to go and assert myself, make my presence felt. But I have held back. Friends I have related this to, find it amusing that I am able to do this, given the way I was! But no one is more surprised that I am. Its a strange, unsettling experience to not do that.

And all that aside. Its now been over 5 years since I have left home and settled on being just a vacation visitor. And despite, all the cribbing I subject my blog to, I have loved being on my own. More than anything, it makes me honestly appreciate my family. Not only for what they are but more so what they have made me. All these years outside, watching other people has made me realise, how screwed up people can be, if they didn't get that whack! at home when it was required or were made to believe they deserve the Nobel Prize if they picked up their plates or switched off the lights after themselves!

So as I spend my first Diwali away from home, I am thankful for being able to do that straight faced and stoic, knowing very well, no matter where I am, I am holding close to my heart what I have been taught and the people who have taught it to me.

Of Delhi and more

There is Delhi and then there is Delhi. The one in which I have moved in has malls, Metro, houses, open roads, enough trees, cabs, houses, hoards of people speaking in hindi and did I mention houses? Yeah! This place is teeming with houses but not like in the claustrophobic setting of the Mumbai bylanes but in more open surroundings. The place I am staying in has perfect straight roads without an end in sight and branches cutting the main roads at perfect 90 degrees. However strangely I don’t see enough people.

Then there is the Delhi the one which my dad saw in his trips here and that he watches on India TV and AajTak News flashes. The one of the murders, rapes and bomb blasts. And now these pictures have turned my formerly super-cool parents into these high-strung, paranoid beings worried about their daughter. And all my attempts to convince them that I am happy and enjoying myself has come to naught.

Among things I am getting used to here are -

• The lack of Supermarkets - It feels so long since I stood at the counter in kirana stores, looking at the shelves at the back to pick out what I wanted. The whole supermarket experience of walking into a larder , if you will, and pick and choose at whim, seems to have completely taken over! The whole idea of remembering what to buy beforehand instead of the random pickings is being sorely missed.
• Too much of Aloo - After my weight-loss spree, it was like feeding me poison. Daily! For my first week here in Delhi, all I had was Potato. Potato fry, in curry, in chaats and chole, in dosas, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Turns out the inflation hit the office cafeteria too and hence 3 days out of 5 we got different forms of Potatoes. And there has been a surprising absence of Paneer in the menu, something uncharacteristic of the Delhi from the reviews I got.
• Hindi - Its amazing to hear Hindi spoken all over the place. And initial few days it overwhelmed me! Hindi in so many dialects, different lilts and all over the place. Just made me realise that I have actually never lived in an all-hindi surrounding!
• Cycle-rickshaws - Some how it makes me feel really guilty every single time I have to use cycle rickshaws to commute. But there are absolutely no autos!! :O Unless you have to travel a really long distance. It feels so exploitative to have someone toil so hard for you to commute even though its more environment-friendly than those diesel/CNG guzzling machines.
• Delhi Metro - Both Hyderabad and Mumbai need metro. Especially Mumbai where already people are travelling by local trains. A few AC coaches would be very welcome.
• Shopping - And sorry. I think Delhi wins hands down from Mumbai when it comes to shopping for clothes. Even retail outlets like Shopper's stop and Lifestyle seem to have better stock here! I am waiting for the winters to kick in completely to go winter wardrobe shopping! :)

As for work and life, I am still settling in. Taking in the subtle differences which come in when you work for a bigger company. Standing at the bylanes observing people around me before I take a plunge. It will be a while before I take my guard down.