Ivy

In yearning, in not wanting, in disbelief and in faith, the quagmire of desires have camouflaged your existence in my being. My dawn-fulls of you, slip between my fingers, biding me with a forbidden smile of omniscience.
I can't remember when I met you first, but I remember you creeping slowly in my watery sunsets, infusing melody to my melancholy. Chamomile. I have only ever wanted to not want you. Weaving and unraveling every thread of moment snarled in your breath, I trudge to keep pace. You tickle, tingle, trickle on the sole of my feet and brace my soul.
Should I hold you or snatch you? Should I implore or should I writhe in longing till I long no more? Should I ask if you too will implode?
Or should I treasure you, like a beat in my bosom, living and leaving my life when I be?

My feelings don't make money

and they really don't. What did you think, they did? Ofcourse not! Which is why I am awake at, well, 05:19 and thinking about what most have either forgotten or conveniently refused to learn.

Your feelings will never make money either.
Sleep.

Shame

This is like one of those dreams where I am falling down from the top of a cliff. I am struggling to open my eyes to end the fear, while still trying to reach the bottom and know how it will be thereafter. My heart thumps loud, my palms are sweating, and yet I know that I am cold. Free falling and yet captive in the dungeons of my fears. Lost and yet not wandering.

Sitting right where it all started. When you make promises, you know someone will come and put them to shambles, put them to shame.

dV/dr = 0; Minimized.

So I realize that I cannot probably come up with an appealing blog layout, but that is not at all the point why I am trying to type in more than an email or a microblog message.

What have I been up to of late? Dreaming. Putting behind me every histogram that I must analyze, I have been caught up in dreaming, envisaging memories of dreams, complete with lights, choreographed movements and expressions, every which of is possible.

I have become more of a romantic, post the sporadic bouts of emotional blow-ups I have half planted myself and half let others kindle. I always was a romantic dreamer, (or a dreaming romantic?)

After many a humble unpublished posts, multitudes of arrogant resolutions to write more frequently and make more sense out of them, I am back to putting together the muddles pool of what I may call my dreams.

Sincerely, not trying any much to make sense of all this, like I do when I read my older posts. I do?

Do I really do? What does it change in my life? For the best I know, I tried last night to cook which started as a craving for the chingri-maach my bengali fantasies are made of, doused in thengapal, befriending my palette with a reassurance of garam-masala.

I think, I really do. I am a romantic alright.

humne aasmanon mein laakhon ke saude kiyein

I have to stop listening to songs that make me cry.

Never

I have never been insincere in loving what or whom I have ever loved. And I have never been able to hate casually, or broken causality in doing so.

To me.

I am lost. Help me out.

I am lost. Help me out.

I am lost.

Do not tell me where I am.

To the lees

While the crisp breeze inhales the life of this cup of tea by my half open window sill, caffeine imbibes the last few breaths of summer in my half awake soul.

I can go without tea for days, only to realize on the n-th day how insanely out of tandem I had been feeling. This is so utterly foolish, but I seem to be slipping in to remembering how many friends I forced into becoming tea drinkers to keep alive the air of the kingdom that never slept. The one-time friends who gifted me bags of tea to ensure my comfort in the insipid loneliness of the chattering crickets and never-ending playlists. Only that I could never finish that box of tea bags. Free air called me, in loose leaves and undesired spoonfuls of sugar. On another completely digressive note, my one-time friends also gifted me an alarm clock. But I never wanted to stop dreaming.

Last summer I broke too many things including my left wrist, one and a half hearts, and a tea mug of four years. And since then I drink from a mug on which is a sleepy damsel and "love" scribbled all over, gifted to me by vegetarian, teetotaler brahmin friend, who unlike me, can very much sing. For four years now, we have exchanged bergamont, chamomile, orange, jasmine and philosophy. But only the last we met, we could not and did not rue over tea and cups.

The only person who has ever b(r)ought me tea and vodka with equivalent zeal and zest has, in stupor of alcohol, caffeine and sometimes both, taught me the best and the worst of truths of relationships, patience and more relationships. I miss being demanding, "Oye, chai peeni hai? Toh bana naa mere liye bhi :)".

And one who has never ever refused me tea, whether or not I had the money to pay for it, whether or not he had the time and reason to relish the cup of the brew. The best one, raising his first ever toasts of whiskey, vodka, gin and rum with me, glass after glass, with a steady hand and full heart.

The jolly good geek who spent one whole spring learning the subtle art of extorting black tea from the unwilling likes of Champa, Deepak, Shahrukh. My friend who believes that he can take all my pains away with a cup of bitter black tea. Spending afternoons coding with a cup of tea, while I must sit beside with a puzzle in hand. Spending night longs coding with pegs of whisky, while I must sit beside with a puzzle in hand. Deep, deep brown.

And the craziest kid ever who doesn't drink any tea but makes a cup better than I do or can, but all for her Maam and Dad.

To you all, I drink life to the lees.

Paranoia

tele'r shishi bhangle pore, khoka'r opor raag koro

tomra jokhon buro khoka, bharat bhenge bhaag koro

(you chide a child for breaking a bottle of oil

and thence you break India into pieces, you senile children of the Mother)

And "Into that inferno of shackles, my Master, let my country sleep"

Candy Floss

I either have real fever or I have almost lost all handle on life.

Today was the most beautiful weather that Evanston presented me with in my eight month stay here. Yellow sunshine not only on my shoulder, teasing warm breeze and smiling people all around. Just the perfect way to begin a weekend, stay out, follow Brownian motion, sit by the open window and finish homework!

But the me chose to sit in my bed, put low lights on and watch a Shahid starrer.

Dance pe Chance. Well, since most of you decided to not watch it, you have already tagged me one of the biggest losers of this age. And for those few who dared to watch it anyway have otherwise tagged me the very same. And yet, my heart is racing at the speed of a lingering smile.

I turned twenty five a couple of months ago. And I have no more eloquent way to put it, but my heart hasn't really pumped as much blood at this rate in a long long time. Questions of existence and nonexistence, faith and disbelief, the capacity of power have been lately crippling my moods. And here I suddenly find this bubblegum lover who is not a hero, and not an irascible rebel at the losing end either. There is very little romance in the film but the way it oozes cuteness without annoying the hell out of an all-damning-all-knowing-walking-talking-search-engine. ( I might be wrong here, it still will annoy an all-damning-all-you know-the-whole-string.)

Candy floss has struck me at its zenith.

And please for once let me sound thirteen right now, because in my days you were not supposed to publicly drool at a movie star if you wanted to make it as a good girl. I love Shahid, oh my God he is so cute!

So he is going around being bosom buddies with this super cuteness of a female and not inspiring nausea in your being with the cloying sweetness of "woh mera sabse achcha dost hai" ("he is my best friend"). And like at least that one person you know whose love story must be happily exciting, he walks around talking to her on the phone and without any preface or suggestive background music he says, "aur haan ek aur baat, I love you" ("And yeah, one more thing, I love you").

I almost forgot to breathe that one moment, as if he said it to me. (Juve alert! Its okay you judgmental mature grown ups.) Then I let out all the mean air air with a choking snort. I chortled.

Just one Friday night at 20 degrees Celsius, I think bubblegum boy confessed his love to me.

Spring and its vagaries.

Ek purana khat khula anjaane mein

This will sound overstated. There are two people, I believe, whom you can quote in any situation that you find yourself in. Rabindranath and Gulzar.

Probably you will blow me away like a dying Eskimo, tag me as blasphemous, but it is uncanny how I can quote either or both whenever I find myself in a need or urge to quote. Silent or blaring out loud.

So, a few hours ago I managed to finally write a micromini blog and publish it. And as it is always a pleasure to fight sleep if you do not have an impending exam to study for, I sat up and started reading all my old posts, and comments on them. And though whatever is in the present is wonderful in its own incompleteness, the tiniest of moments that we have lost in feeling discontented will never come back to soothe us with its partiality.

Perhaps life is beautiful in those broken dreams, desires unreached, love unrequited.

When I lived the DDLJ, KKHH days in a red brick building, I wondered at nights, if at all were my crushes to materialize (unlike anybody else's), how would it to be? The end. I would have no chocolate boy to fall asleep to, no bouts of extra-rowdy scuffles to fight away nervous bursts during lonesome meetings, no sugary fantasies of 'what-if's', no shivers to live-relive-rerelive if my hair was pulled or cheeks were pinched.

It is disappointing to grow to your quarter life and realize that the crisis involves feeling too old to develop bubblegum-boy-girl infatuations and too sincere to flirt.

Khushboo jaise log milein afsane mein.

Thump.

Thoughts trickle down in a stream of muddled afterglow. Eights months and words elude me. Five half written posts and three and one quarter of over-loved romances.

Too little things she said, too little he heard.

For Eli

Five months out of Kgp, five months away from my corner in heaven, five months away from my personal social mess, five months of unknowing.

And yet I am happy today, in a strange way. I am happy in closure, happy with the beginnings, happy with the end terms blowing with the wind chill, happy.

Because I have you, amidst all madness. Because I can cry for you laughing with you. Because it took me a world full of pain to know the pleasure in our miles, in our hours. Because like a hot cup of tea in a winter afternoon, you hold hold my flowing insanity in your steady hands.

In and Out

Kgp. Finally out of it. And how does it feel? Wonderful! Home made food, cooling system, reunion with lost wingies (errr...almost them), shopping, general pampering...whoa whoa whoa! Stop right there, because that is so much all that is there to it. Though I can sleep through the day and pore in to the computer all night with super fast broadband and no proxies killing me, there still isn't DC++ and the "general arbit bhaat" to keep it alive. So, after a lot of procastination, I decided to clean up the most scandalizing stuff from my one terabyte HDD (spent a lot of dough on it, so thats a must mention ;-) ). And half-way through, I was choked. Choked with the overwhelming urge to run back to F-306, SN Hall of Residence.

The dirty, almost sickeningly so, stripped and scribbled with crayons walls, where the reassuarance of known names welcomed me after the rare excruciating vivas or intoxicatingly frequent beautiful night outs, are so not replacable by bright and clean walls of my room at home. Not that I am that averse to cleanliness, I just loved the names on them :-|

So... Hall

The first thing that comes to mind when I say SN, or think SN, is the buzzing common room. Way before it had that huge expensive television, and ages before they got that new TT table, there were sofas, we used invariably in our plays. The black covers with yellow flowers, the glass table, the broken dressing table, drawers, chart papers, paint brushes, dust, seniors screaming at me for not getting it right, followed by me screaming at juniors for not getting it right.

The lights practice, jumping around almost aimlessly barefoot on Netaji, the stinking sponge used by Abhiram da to paint us white and pink, and oh! the pricking moustaches.

Thank you seniors for the haranguing lectures and the tempo building sento sessions and ofcourse the treats that followed. Thank you juniors for the inexhaustible supply of paranthas an d chai.

The butterflies in my stomach, I still remember, never felt before exams, but almost everytime I stepped in Raman Auditorium. The cat-calls, the desk slapping (a deformed tell-tale gold ring still adorns), the utter disappointment at losing, and the consequent sniffing at possible poltu, and the exhilarating shrieks on wins, publically smirking at friends from other halls and later having chai/ scotch with those very mates, every day in the soc-cult calendar exhausted and rejuvenated at the same time.

Thank you SN, for keeping the vigour of competetion going every passing day, for making me more of a soc-cult scholar than a science student, for the tiny bit of tech, for the immense love and camaraderie, a dash of bitchiness and a heartful five years.

Dept

Seriously? Friends. And the most wonderful ones at them. The place where I refused to study for four years got me friends in the unlikeliest of people. What labs? Nescafe, not just the one right in front of the dept, all round the insti. And in case, it was a particularly soporific meter gauging experiment, it was nimbu chai all the way down to the old building.

And when the climax hit the rock bottom, it was those four years of friends who stood by, and literally so.

And we parted in parts, a day of a bright red key chain, gin-vodka shots with a thence teetotaller, pretty coffee mugs, vanilla twist, a glass idol of a playful God, and memories of playing in the sand and sea.

And yes, the ice-creams too.

Thanks Sriku, Balu, Subho, Breeta, Dhol, Varun, Ajit, Mangu and everybody else.

Kgp

I found love here, I found jealousy here, I found everything one constitutes for a life here. I lost my heart too many times, to too many things and I found madness in everything I did. The best of 2.2s, endless chai at Champa's , eating at Bala's expense at Shantanu's, Vodka in jungle, sneaky village trips, bitching on IG terrace, pretending to be heartless at freshers' in the mess, feigning arrogance at the hot-shots, trying best at being a girlie-girl on getting roses or chocolates, learning the use of make-up and also how to climb trees, hall days and the perfection at being a snob, walking tirelessly in the fog and stopping only to do a twist, singing emosanal attyachar in front of security gaurds in drunken stupor, playing monkey-kick, Poker and every possible flash game before exams, extorting treats from seniors and juniors alike (totally unbrazen in either deeds), cramming bengali dialogues whose meanings I still haven't understood, having square meals at harry's/tikka's and still not wanting to go back, being overtly mean to people I never got along with (sorry for the huge number of them), being a perfect bitch to one and willing to cross mountains for another, Kgp.

I always thought I cried a lot. Summing up Kgp, I know I laughed as much, I loved even more.

Thanks Froggie, Amrita, Mona, Doggie, Servo, Mallu, Ban, Beeps for putting up with me. And the dues for the last couple of months, for holding me up and keeping me high and dancing, thanks Jadda, Rathee and Abhas.

Kgp

Logged Out.

Catharsis

Of yore and fore I write hence...

I am constantly amazed by the ostentatious diligence with which stubborn change proves its permanence. Gliding through things I never thought I could manage to pass, I am left wondering how much more could I, would I change. I wonder if I may enumerate all that I scrambled, stumbled up on, volatile it may be.
I have confused all desires with needs, the desire of a confidant tangled with the need of an anchor.
Recently, I was "celebrating" a weekend, the "weekend" way. High and not dry I watched Dev D, the epic of eternal love of the quintessential bacchanalian at heart, tempered with optimism. Dev, the lover, the protagonist, the antagonist, the loser does not die bleeding at his lover's door in this novel rendition of the story of love and punishment that I grew up to idolize. The idea is not to punish unrequited love, but to question why love went unrequited in the first place. We have all loved and lost at some point in life, not necessarily a love of romantic kind.
My mother, who happened to watch Dev D the very night I did in a humongous drunken revelry, called me the next day to restate to me the newly fangled idea of "optimism". Climax! My heart does not really go out for Dev, it cries for Paro, the other lover, the other protagonist, the other antagonist, the other loser. The egotists cry in their own names, sing in their pain and throw complicated nonsense in the name of family, society, onlookers. Paro gets to nowhere, to a marriage which cannot be consummated, step-children almost her own age and ofcourse she has to tear her heart with the thoughts of decadence of Dev.
My thoughts have no Chandramukhi, for I know not her, neither do I know if she walks in beauty and talks in sugar. But I want not Dev D, if Paro must cry, so will have to Chandramukhi and not bag Dev, the lover, the loser.

Played ambiguosly by "हसरतों की दिल्लगी " (Farce of Desires) my heart says to
You, I wish I could say 'rot in hell', but then I wrote your name in sand and let the waves wash it away;
To the other You: The piper plays.

Nothingness

If only it matched a little less, only if it met a little more.
If only you could say yes, only if I never had said no.
If only I could sing in tune, only if you thrashed no words.
If only nights weren't awake, only if you nudged all morns.
If only, only if.

Thanking You, Sincerely

No, the last post is real rubbish. Tonight I am supposed to be sleeping, because I have a class to attend tomorrow, and attending classes is something I have not done in a long long time. But when did I say that I would do things that are expected from me.
So, what am I doing at 0254 hours? I am scrambling through my collection of hindi music, struggling to identify my mood, besides constantly refreshing facebook pages. Lame.

I had a bad dinner with a close friend, someone with whom I rarely agree, but it was a pain today. Suddenly, I realize that everything in life is falling apart. I want a new life, with new people, people who do not know me, and do not claim to know me.
I had the strangest of chats today. Somebody slyly prodding me, teasing me, tantalizing me to give relationship advice. Me? Am I not the one who broke every nice thing with my very own hands? When I was young we had a home-science class at school. It was the only class where I could lay prostrate on the floor and look at the ceiling while my friends painted, concocted snacks, stitched and made merry. I never did homework at school, I never had a classwork copy, I mostly never had pencils with me. My bag used to be as full of rubbish paper then as it is now. So, home-science.
I did sometimes stitch (there is this card holder at home where your wedding card will rest), and I painted sometimes (that nib painting I did and re-did and re-re-did over weeks) and that tiny glass painting, I over painted. Ma, you had given me a strong chiding that evening about how I made something beautiful, and then re-touched and revamped it so many times that it was finally rendered ugly. Could you, at least, not have said it so bluntly? It stares me back in the face today.
But then there is this utterly silly habit of washing away everything with tears. Lame, again.

Oh so coming back to the present, I am still struggling to find the right song for tonight. And here is the battle in my mind about everything. Micro-voltmeter, Nano, CPM, India, Obama, film music, proverbs, Dirty Dancing, you, cetzine. And then I want to scream out. No I am not crazy. I am but a little sane. With that drop of sanity I am trying to drive forward, counting days, finishing one job after the other.
Yes, you were right, some things are certain. Like I will have my exams on so-and-so dates, I will graduate, I will have a career, I will get married, I will try to have a family, I will make them grow as sane as I am. I will get tired. Finally, I am an orthodox old-fashioned croon. I fight for equality, but never flinch from becoming a dying word. I quarrel for my rights only to give them up for the ones I want permanently in life.
I could never earn my living by writing, because I cannot write for a deadline, for someone who will throw my words down the basket, for someone who is pocket-pinching. But I also cannot reconstruct formulae and fabricate strange theories of nature.
Where I am today, I long for a vacation down Seyechelles, on the reclining chairs with an umbrella-adorned cocktail, and somebody paying the bills. No I do not want to earn myself a richer life, I want someone to do it for me. Too much to ask for?
I want to practice dancing, learn Bharathnatyam, learn French properly, write short-stories, try world-cuisine, stare at the ceiling, advice people, gossip and travel, while he earns it all for me.
Somewhere in the streets of Oxford are candlesticks I fancied, and in Paris a pair of rings I can only dream of.
Platinum, round and shiny.
You.
Some things are certain.
Others are just illusions.

Forever

When you said "somethings are certain", I believed. Now I know nothing is certain. The sun may not rise tomorrow, gravity could just stop working, flame may not attract moths ever again. Nothing is certain.

The universe changes, the only constant is me. I wish you were there waiting at the other shore, like ever before.
How I wish, how I wish you were there.

Yellow brown leaves

Now this is called autumn. An autumn that sees tans and spates in the eye. For a heretic hermit that I am, it is an utter pain-in-the-you-know-where to pore into texts and have nightmares guised in blazers. And so to anoint the pain, I embarked on a crash course of F.R.I.E.N.D.S.
The show is miraculous (not that I am the newest addition to the already bursting sack of American Television enthusiasts, but it made me think in an antithesis of maudlin characteristics that I posses).
It is magical how none of them are, as Obelix would say, "well covered". Though Chandler vacillates between bloating up and shrinking down, every 10 episodes...and this isn't the primary objective of me going tap tap tap here.Tsk tsk.
Anyway, getting back to what I have always wondered about, since I started watching the harmless Different Strokes, and eventually graduated to the more bawdy, The Nanny. Is that forbidden Americanized sense of "love" catching up? What is all about, afterall? As I spend the autumn of my quarter-life crisis I am tempted, if not forced, to question how do these semi-adult relationships work?
Do they really stand on the cliched postulates of passion, honesty, equality, sharing and what-nots? Or are these the slagged after-math of the bygone era? As an eighteen year old, I would be stumped watching celluloid men and women flinching out of weddings at the last moment. It never occurred to me what the big deal about getting married was. When one can be in a relationship for a long time, or cohabit, what deters one from taking the vows?
Perhaps because, however dishonest or brazen man has become today, the vows still remain sacrosanct to a few of us.
For most of us wont be there to have and to hold from that moment forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from that moment forward until death do us part.
After all the raving and ranting about the sanctity of vows, what pricks me is the volatility of modern day relationships. All we do is go round and round in big-small circles, where do we reach at the end of a cut-throat day at the desk? People freaking out a few hours before the wedding doesn't surprise me anymore. The truth is distressing to the core. The first kiss can't last forever. And today when entertainment is all about "reality shows" where the contestants are crying, throwing up, biting bottoms on-screen for fifteen-seconds of fame, everybody needs a breather.
Juliet was the luckiest. Her era had ballrooms, dovey-eyed suitors, swords, confidant(e)s, pigeons and gardens of lillies and roses. Also, her time did not see mobile phones, instant messengers and emails. She loved and died at fourteen, while the fire of being "Romeo and Juliet" was still kindling.
What do we have today? Sex? Distrust? Insecurity? Side-drinks of flings while the long drink of a "relationship" ferments in crystal?
The worst analogy that I can draw at the moment is that love is like curd. (Now nobody throws the shoe at me for this). Take it off the heat and consume at the right hour. Keep it a little longer and fermentation goes awry.
So much so for anti-climax!

That time of the year again...

Goodbyes have been year-long. Trying to hold clock hands tight to not let time slip by. And yet again is back, the hour of soused adieus.
Nobody would know better what it feels to stand where we are than those of us over-living the winters of our Kgp life.
To those of us graduating to a broader life, I urge, please forget not peace, load, frust, Chhedis, Eggies and the 2.2.
Years may not bring us all back together, our photographs will mean more than just keepsakes.