I Never Feel Earthquakes...

Do you remember back in the 90's the biggest problem men had when it came to dating was that talking to women scared the daylights out of them men? I remembering coming across a dozen articles everyday where someone had a brilliant advice how to break the ice-which usually was go-fucking-TALK-to-them. These days those articles have disappeared. We don't need them anymore, we now have the Internet.

*****
When I think about AB, I always remember the curt reply he gave me when I asked him if the Microprocessor lecture was cancelled; "apparently", was all he said and walked away like I was some lowly creature and he some God. He acted like one. At least that is what we all thought and hated him for it. He was one of those college topper boys and had an air about him that made people feel awe or hatred about him. As for me, I found him weird. And when Apeksha lost a bet, I asked her to go ask AB out for some Pineapple Milk**. She did and he said a "No" that sounded more like "In your dreams woman". (Appppuu! I am gonna meet you soon!!!!Yay! :) Baby! And we'll dance to the Pungi song! Fun times await.  Unless I die in a plane crash first :| )

Okay back to AB, I ran to the classroom, the ever late me, and true enough, the lecture was cancelled. And that's all the interaction I ever had with AB back in engineering college. Apart from throwing paper planes at him in the class when we got really bored and mean.

We graduated and went our different ways. Then one day Orkut came with the chat feature. Everyone on your Orkut list was added to your chat list on Gtalk. And suddenly, AB and I were chatting.

Today, not only do we chat regularly(I know, sorry for being tardy lately) and I must feature in his very small "girl friends" list, but also, I have come to understand him for the person he is and AB, sorry for throwing paper plans at you back in college :( You've been a darling of a friend, and one who's been always so, so practical! He's my "give-practical-unbiased" advice guy.


The whole point of this exercise was to tell you that the WWW has been really awesome, in bringing people together. I know so many awesome people, people I have never met, but yet who feature daily in my life, thanks to the WWW.

When I told my friends I was travelling alone all the way to Mysore to attend a friend's wedding, a friend I had known only on the Internet, every one of my friends thought I was crazy. But anyone who's been on the blogger and twitter has such friends and knows it's anything but crazy.


**We had the Aarey milk factory close to college which used to be one of our usual hangouts and the pineapple milk....simply yum!

*****
But as always, we have taken a good thing and turned it into a bad thing. In spite of having 1000 friends on FB, a thousand followers on Twitter, we are lonely and bored.


Boredom and loneliness is a problem today cause we choose to hide. And the WWW has given us that too. We choose to be lazy. We have lowered our standards and we are happy with it, cause not hiding and actually going and talking to people in person takes efforts, it means you can't be something you're not, you stand a chance of exposing your true self and you have to be vulnerable. It means we can go on pretending to be super humans in the online world and the real world doesn't matter anymore, cause look how many friends I have on FB! You can tweet about having a good time on twitter and post pictures you clicked last night with Katrina Kaif, but how many know that you're lonely? The WWW has given us that, a chance to be what we're not.


But why should we want to be something that we're not? Why are we so afraid? What do we have to hide? We have our BB busy status and we have the notorious invisible status on Gtalk. We have learnt to hide behind our FB walls and code life in our sly tweets. In a country of 1.2 billion people if you're lonely and bored, then the problem should be in you, no?


All you have to do is look up from your screen and at the people around you. So many interesting people, so many wonderful conversations await you. So many wonderful memories wilt and die, tired of waiting. I have a friend who's always busy on his BB, while I sit playing with my soup. I wonder if he'll miss these times when I waited for him and he was busy talking to people on his BB. And I see that happening everywhere. People enter clubs and restaurant in packs and then spread out in corners busy on their BB's. What's the POINT people? Retards.


When there's a person in flesh sitting from across you and you choose to talk to a machine instead, what times sweet lord! This is how these machines will take over us and this will be written as the beginning of the end of the human race. No, wait, I am not being dramatic here. You'll see! If you survive the talking-robot attack, that is.


*****
I am so exhausted that even the thought that today is the first day of my vacation doesn't excite me. Well, I still have to finish loads of work and pack!

But sigh, first travel of the year. God! I want more of these!!! I want more friends! I want to travel MORE! Argghh.

And God, if I don't get it in this life, I'll die and crib so much to you in heaven that you'll be forced to send me back to earth with the most awesome bunch of friends and loads and loads of awesome travel! Choose!

*****
And I am tired, I give up. Once I meet her, I am going to prostrate in front of her and tell her it's all in her hands now. She has to decide whether to revive or kill it. I am, tired.

*****
I want you to come and fold me into you arms and just let me be. Hold me tight and make me forget everything else. I am waiting, waiting, waiting :| Dude!

*****
I dreamt about you yesterday. You had written to me and you were telling me you were having some problems but now things are getting back on the track and you seemed happy writing to me, like you were not mad at me anymore. How are you sweetheart? Are you really so mad at me that you won't even talk to me?

You seemed happy in the dream. I hope you're so in real life too. I miss you, my Tarot lady.

*****
Look up from that screen and you'll notice the bare hill in front of your window, the blanket of purple flowers has disappeared and the wild grass has now turned brown, that summer has arrived and that it's time to go out and make new friends.


And while we're at it, I want to dance to this song with my new friends.

And I want to lie on grass under the midnight sky and listen to this song.

Save The Carrots For The Horses...

At times when you are faced with an uncontrollable desire to be close to someone else's skin, like when mine seems to forget how to breathe on its own from time to time, one will sit by oneself and often wonder, what can one do? At such times I have found a couple of things to help. These are after my own experiments and one must try, if they so choose to, at their own peril. Try this to begin with at first: Sit quietly in your closed room, and let the noise of the creaking fan drown your every thought, better than chanting om's, I assure you. But if you don't happen to be fortunate enough to have such an entertaining equipment at your immediate disposal, try reading. Politics, I have come to realise, helps immensely. And at times like the present, you will agree there be no dearth of reading material. But if you are not so inclined to reading politics, you might want to try astrophysics or interviews of famous personalities. But do not ever venture anywhere close to poetry or romantic literature. That-will-not-help. You will find yourself howling into the book even before you reach the third paragraph and who, honestly, wants to soil a pretty book of poems? No sir, you don't want to do that. Now, if you're no so much of a reading person, you might want to listen to music. Choose rock, heavy metal, and if you can stomach death metal, I'd suggest that too. Again, no jazz, no romantic music. But if in spite of chastising yourself a dozen times, you still gravitate toward those soft romantic numbers, another solution in the form of Orange Blossom could be tried. And while that fragrant amber liquid warms you inside out, you could gently nudge your mind into doing complex arithmetic. You might want to check how many sachets of Orange Blossom remain in the tin. Only 10?! Bad news, you must now ration out missing the person.


Oh wait, we are backing to missing then? Alright, try watching a funny video, a movie, maybe call a friend? And if all else fails, plumpling, pick up that damned phone and call that person who's causing so much misery. Do it. And then hear that person talk to you in the rudest fashion ever and as you struggle to get over the shock of those coarse words, ask yourself, do I still miss this person? I guarantee the answer will be a big fat NO.


Now, calm yourself down and make sure you don't leave any evidence behind. Gloves. And oh, you might want to double-check the carpets if any.


But if I were you, honeybunch, I wouldn't bother in the first place. 

The Gardens Of Kabul...

10 Things...

"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."
— Joan Didion



"Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."
— James Baldwin

A Casualty...

With each passing year, my list of favourite people grows smaller. Sad.

*****
 Is sexiness a lost art to the happily married?

After marriage, the whole equation changes. Sexiness becomes muted. Those navel-baring miniskirts that seemed perfect for the nightclub when you were 20 somehow appear pathetic and desperate when you wear them post 40. Those fishnet stockings that were perfect for your office when you were a rookie, now appear gaudy when you wear them as the boss.
It isn’t just about clothes, though. It is also about morphing equations with the whole notion of sexiness. You want to appear attractive but also want to be perceived as dignified. You want to appear desirable but only to a bandwidth of people that keeps getting narrower with every passing year. You don’t seek catcalls from hunks or come-hither looks from interns. You want—oh, I don’t know—class, maybe? You may enjoy being checked out, but you want their respect and admiration.

And it's not limited to just marriage.

*****
Once you turn a certain number on your age graph, things begin to change; your perspectives, ideas about life. Some gentler, kinder changes take place, some as subtle as Govinda's dressing. But thing to remember is that it's all good. And in time, you'll learn to accept these changes with the grace, and even, one might hope, joy.

*****

“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”

Don't beat yourself on the head if you don't know what you want to do with your life just yet. Yep, it's normal. Treasure hunt by Alain De Botton.

Would You Like Some Fries With That?

I normally analyse(like every other small and big thing in my life) my dreams, atleast the ones I remember vividly. And I wondered why I dreamt about dinosaurs coming back to life. I am sure it has something to do with the fact that I am reading Germs, Guns & Steel these days.

And that made me wonder about evolution.

Evolution is a slow process, but still, one does wonder, if we humans ourselves, have stopped evolving.


Here's a wonderful documentary by BBC: Are We Still Evolving?[Part1][Part2][Part3][Part4]. If you don't want to spend 60 mins, here's the gist of it.


So yes, we are evolving. We are becoming fatter and shorter and who knows, maybe one day we'll sprout extra brains and extra hands to handle the information load and multitasking, but I don't know if this is good, I don't know if we are going in the right direction. The test-tube baby and the technology to "design" your baby seems scary.

P.S: And I'd like to see some study that charts the evolution of dogs over the past few 100 years or so. The most domesticated animal, dogs, sure understand human emotions, they can navigate through the human maze of cities fearlessly, but why have they not picked up our language skills? Why is there no dog who can speak human language? Or walk on only two feet like its masters?

A Woman...

I immediately took to her. We met at the airport. She had come along with the bride's brother to pick me up. We said our hellos and me, like always, the curious cat, asked her a 100 questions. But she had me at the first one itself. There was just something so calming about her. Confidence and self-assuredness almost radiated from her. She was my exact opposite. While I am perpetually confused, she seemed calm and composed. Like she knew where she was heading and she was prepared. She didn't have an identity crisis like I do. She knew herself, and that self-awareness reflected in everything she did.


She was beautiful, not in the classical sense, but to me she was beautiful. Wholesome. She looked best in a Saree. When you look at me, you don't think woman, maybe the word girl comes to your mind. But there was something so womanly about her. Graceful. Her thick arms, you could cry in the circle of her arms and she would build a warm wall of love around you. She could envelope you in her bosom and you'd feel safe. You could imagine a kid straddled on her ample hips playing with her hair. You could imagine her with a brood of 6, calmly feeding them and then happily playing with them. She wasn't dainty, fragile, easily breakable. She was strong, wall-like, you could depend on her. While even a slight breeze could blow me away, she looked like the anchor you could hold onto. Flustered. Yes, that's the word. While I am, often, flustered, she was the kind who could stare in the face of a storm and then turn and look at you and tell you in a very sober voice to run, run for your life.


There was an openness about her that I so envied. I might walk like I was going to a war, armed, my face closed, betraying any emotion, but she? She looked like she was walking in her own garden, maybe out to fetch some fresh tomatoes. Always so uninhibited. Like she had a protective shield around her that would prevent any harm from coming near her. I would seek her out in crowds, wanting to be close to that protective shield. She told me she was getting married in two months time, and I envied the guy who would have her as his life partner.


If I was a guy, I thought, this is the kind of woman I would want to spend the rest of my life with.