Bubble...

It's going to be interesting to see how this turns out. I can see the same thing happening here in Mumbai. Big real estate developers building these big luxurious houses, some even come with their own private swimming pools, and although, Mumbai -the city of extremes- has that kind of money, there are also those who can't afford even an one room-kitchen in Mumbai. And so confused, I asked a friend what happens to those who can't afford multi-crore flats, and then she told me about Virar.

Anyway, back to China, knowing the Chinese, I shouldn't have been surprised:

The second, a Beijing municipal regulation restricting families to owning one apartment each has also failed because, as Chovanec said, “People got around [it] by getting divorced.”

Read, China’s Empty Apartments: Part1 and Part2.

And, Chinese hit by over-inflated house prices. 

Oohs and Moos...

Saturday was spent watching two alien movies-Smurfs and Cowboys & Aliens. Although the friend liked both, I liked neither, only because guys possess this awesome ability not to over-think, whereas I? I obsess about things that no one obsesses about. Like, why were smurfs so much like humans? Oh yea, so they had four fingers instead of five, yes, very wow, very original (clap clap)! Or then why did the aliens from some arbitrary planet look so much like humans? Only a grotesquer version. Watch these alien movies and you realise how unimaginative we humans really are. How shallow our creative abilities. How obsessed we are with our own image. How we have never really learnt to look beyond us, how we still think inside the box. I mean, seriously, if we can't even come up with decent monsters, what does that say about us? Our monsters and aliens drive the same machines, they desire the same things-gold, really? and they look pretty much like us humans-hands and feet and eyes and a brain and all that. Pfft!

Sorry for being such a nitpicker, but I am going to save my wow's for the real aliens.

P.S: If you must watch Cowboys & Aliens, watch it only for Daniel Craig. And then come back and tell me where I can find such a man. Not much fun being a woman these days I tell you. Deep sighs and a tub of icecream.

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines...

This ruined my day.

Sigh. That delicate delicious ache when you love someone.

(Sometimes I feel I must have been a man in my previous life and I must have loved a woman with all my heart and maybe, I still love her, in this life.)

I could weep for days today. My soul is not satisfied.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.

Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

Promises...

From, Thought Catalog:

During the crystalline nights of winter, summer held an almost indecent promise. The kind of promise composed of hands resting lightly on bare shoulders, sliding off a thin slip of a strap from a cotton dress. A time of lying lazily in the grass hoping for a slight breeze to skim your face, of kisses in the kind of cold bars that had dark corners with wooden tables, and of picnics near-forgotten in a whiskey lemonade drenched haze. Afternoons of hazardously licking melting ice cream cones while riding bikes across bridges and nights of telling secrets on roof tops still steaming from the hot sun.

It was the kind of promise that keeps you sane, hopeful, and young.

But instead, summer became sad summer. The kind of a season where the thick, heavy air weighs you down—not with the heat from a storm about to break—but with the mistakes you’ve made, with harshly lingering regret. A time that feels full of significance you can’t come back from, of adulthood no longer pending but here. Gone is that childish wonder. Moments of almost incomprehensible glee find you fleetingly and slip quickly through your grasping fingers, disappearing.

Summer became a broken promise.

Now you sit, hours after midnight, chasing tumblers of whiskey with more whiskey, spinning sentences full of meaningful adjectives with your favorite companion in hyperbole. Each of you half in the moment, half inside your heads, claiming—wondering—if autumn turned to winter will hold a different promise you can reach for. If somehow once you stop running barefoot in the grass, unable to capture that same enthusiastic momentum you once had, you’ll be able to find some sense of peace in where you’ve stopped. That somehow months from now, your previous heartaches will be something contained only in memory instead of your everyday breath, constantly reminding you that your recovery time is no longer as fast.

But even to you that promise holds false.

You know winter holds gray days that take you to dark places, brief bits of laughter book-ended by melancholy. That you’ll find yourself silent, listening to the strains of the National on repeat, exile, vilify, wishing it was still summer because even if your heart was heavy, you felt light. That winter has stolen all the sunshine you once twirled beneath. And that snow will fall on your darkest day, burying you. But staring at that white perfection free of foot prints, you’ll smile. You’ll remember one magical night of stumbling, tumbling, falling tipsily through the drifts. And you’ll feel wistful for those icy days when the wind chills you to the bone and conversation brings you comforting warmth that no fire can provide.

Perhaps the promise of a promise is enough.

A Cheap & Easy Affair...

If tomorrow my kids ask me why I didn't marry that very rich and good-looking guy, I hope they'll understand when I tell them that he did not read. I hope they'll forgive.

Paul Bloom: The Origins Of Pleasure

Rain...

The earth, wrinkled, looks up at the sky
They are here, yesterday they weren't
but today they hover, full of promise, dark, heavy, lovely
The earth waits, expectant, eager, (so)ready to blossom
But they come and they go, unrelenting
A little thunder, a little lightning, a little teasing
A little show, but nothing yet again
And so the earth, full of yearning
Aches a little more, cracks a little more, begs a little more.