Sound of Silence

Is it silent for the want of anything interesting

and Me giving up, in dreary tedium?

Or things becoming overwhelmingly interesting

that I had to give myself an e-break to soak-in.

Maybe I am too wrapped up in myself to notice a thing

that's the worst - the unfeeling feeling!

Won't you just disappear?
or atleast fade away into distant fog.
Should be easy,
you were always misty.

I never have problems sleeping. I fall asleep the moment I hit the pillow. Mom and sis are forever envious - something like neighbours' envy, owner's pride.Today is not one of those days!
Inspired by my flatmate's 'early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy , wealthy and wise' philosophy I had decided no late night calls, gtalk chats, books. And it didn't work for me. I was tossing on the bed disturbed by the people shouting on the street, music from some night party, police cars whizzing by and my flatmate blissfully sleeping away to glory thoughout all of this! Even more disturbing were the random clicks from the past that I kept seeing - inspired by the 'Christmas Carols' that I read yesterday?
When I couldn't take the torture any more, I decided to go back to my usual ways - armed with steamed veggies and pitted dates to satiate a rumbling tummy, I turned to the laptop and internet to wear me out to exhaustion and sleep.
I once said to B that 'Life is like a decision tree with a lot many possibilities and only one certainity after which all the probabilities stop mattering' after a very stressful Business Stats class. Charles gave me a 'D' in the subject. Once we have chosen a path, we can't usually undo it and go back. And sometimes we may not want to. But why is it that inspite of what we choose and why, we have agonizing moments (hours and days) thinking about what could have been and what may be. Is having a choice really a good thing?
Another thing to ponder - this whole 'Am I really right' rigmarole only seems to get worse as we get older.
Why can't it be alright to be wrong once in a while. And not have to pay for it! And now that we are at it, why does life have to be a one way street? Why can't we flit between the parallel universes?

If you were at Reject ( a discount store in Melbourne) on the Bourke Street on the 12th evening and saw two seemingly normal girls giggling away to glory, it was me and the new flatmate.

Joke: Does a guy getting a Valentine's Day Card from Reject get automatically rejected?

Owgay, that seemed so funny back then!

And Happy Wednesday! Because I don't need one official day in the year to tell people how I feel. :)

I had a strange dream last night. I dreamt that a Dinosaur somehow materialised outside my house and followed me. I mean from outside, while I went about shutting one window after another. The dinosaur looked pretty adorable actually, but I was scared. Maybe the Dino was lost, maybe he was alone and the only one remaining from his species and he wanted to make friends. He sure looked friendly, however my basal instinct was to shut him out.

There are some dreams you remember very little about, but this one wasn't one of those. I remembered everything, every feeling when I got up in the morning.

Any Freuds and Jungs amongst those reading this, would love to hear your take on my dream.

Okay. I don’t need to tell you how much of a bad year last year has been. I am not even going there now. Well at least trying not to. Note to self – whenever you think you are going through a bad phase, remind yourself about 2010. That should make you feel better!

I put up with a lot of things from a lot of people that I didn’t have to – I don’t know why again. Note to self – Stop being so vulnerable. Everybody has an agenda. And making you happy is not on it. And stop listening to people who don’t make you feel good about yourself. You owe it to yourself. And yes, relationships will sour. People will stop being what they were or what you thought they were. You cannot hold yourself to something that probably was only a delusion and hope for the best. Sometimes, its perfectly normal not to see something good in everybody and every situation. And when you do, don’t make excuses for them just to make yourself better. Things are bad and they can only turn better if you accept that they are bad in the first place. And if something makes you uncomfortable, throw a fit! You are a princess and you deserve to be treated like one!

Quite a big note, aint it? How ever cynical all of this sounds, I think I needed this seemingly harsh reality check to bring me out of my “I-look-at-my-perfect-world-with-rosy-glasses” delusion. And I think my readers (if I have managed not to chase them all away with such a gloomy blog!) deserve to know this – no nursing of the broken heart or sort of deal. Just that sometimes a move to a foreign country with bad weather, no friends, really bad flat-mates, unpleasant acquaintances, indifferent colleagues, no support system makes your life less pleasant and more dreary. But now that it is summer, it is all well. And it is also helped from the fact that I have changed residence and put all of this behind me.

Wish me luck guys, I still hope to publish that book. And travel around the world. And buy my beach house. And meet my Prince Charming. (Though not necessarily in that order, not if my mom would have it :) ).

And while life looks all sugary, I am going to take it with a pinch of salt.

You left without as much as an Adieu,
No goodbyes,
With tears that were only mine….

The other day I asked a friend to stop brooding. And was magically transported back to class nine, KVAN.
It was the English class and PG, our English teacher was having a difficult time managing us(as usual). We were supposed to dramatize one of the English plays in our text book titled Meera Bhai and PG was randomly picking up people from different groups and asking them to play bits from the Play.
I was in Group Two - I was Meera Bhai, Nithin was the Rana, Suba was the Rani, Aravind was Bhojraj, Prasad was Jaisalmer, Deepika was Meera's nurse and Ramya was Sanjogta (Meera's close friend and lady-in-waiting).
The scene we choose to enact was the one where-in the Rana tries to reason out with Meera and get her to act 'normal'. He tells her to play with the children and knit and sew with the women.

Nithin asked me to stop breeding. Yea, you got that right. He was supposed to say brooding, but it came out as breeding. I thought it was so funny that I started laughing my goofy laugh and the whole class was in splits too. I soon realized that the joke was on me, but it was way too funny for me to stop laughing!

Like I tell you, Being N!V! ain't easy!

PS: PG thought I did make a better Rani than a Meera. I agreed 'cos I didn't want to be asked to breed, not again. I wore a parrot green sari and towered over the Rana. Meera forgot her dialogues. I forgot to face the audience while saying my part and when I remembered, I was talking to the audience and not to the people on the stage! All of us were just mouthing the dialogues and none of us got the chemistry right. I was miffed because I knew this was going to happen - I was always shepherding people into the rehearsals and nobody ever took the rehearsals seriously!

And yet, this is one of those things in my life that never fails to bring a smile on my face.

Flashes of light can mean so many things – it can mean thunder, bringing with it the imminent rain; it can mean a camera clicking somewhere near, capturing a memorable moment for posterity; it can mean the flash from a welding arc that joins together two metal pieces; it can mean a plain flashlight brought out to aid sight in the dark by a battery-life conscious soul; it can even mean a plain hallucinated you!

However, with me it can just mean retinal detachment. Oblige me if I ask you if you saw the flashes too.

Obituary

Dear Mom, Dad, Aparna, Sirisha, Bhargav et all (In all the probability almost everyone I know);

You remember the big brown dangling pair of ear rings I used to wear? Appa, the one you used to hate and refuse to come out me if I wore them? Amma, the one you would beg me to take off and wear a more appropriate one just to maintain domestic peace? Bhargav, the one you used to call tribal wear? The one Pavan used to describe as made from ball bearings and other metal scrap stolen from a garage? And the one that Aparna used to smile off – calling them as my “those” earrings.

For that matter they were always my “those” earrings, or at least that is how everybody who has seen me in them has called them. Few (Reality Check: more like a multitude of people) have been repulsed by the sight of those long ear rings, preferring instead that I wear something more traditional and refined (!). Most have begged me to take off the hideous thing. And there have been a couple of people who have absolutely loved them. There have also been very few like good ol’ Sirisha who never really voiced out anything (knowing her, I am sure she hated them); instead just asking me to do what I wanted to do – wear ‘em and not listen to all that jazz, err noise.

I guess I am just stalling. Those big beautiful brown earrings have died on me, in a freak accident. And so the earrings that loyally served me for about five years are no more.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.

P.S.: And before you heave a sigh of relief and start gloating, I have already found the perfect replacement.

When I was a kid, I always fantasized of how things would work out. I visualized my future as a very ethereal, poetic dream. I would just flit in and out of things and Life did have an airy feel to it. Cut to reality. Everyday life is just a struggle against sheer boredom.

A colleague and a fellow “Joined Company on XXX” flew back from Bulgaria yesterday and dropped into office post lunch. I am usually not very social after lunch, preferring to slump away in a half asleep half awake state until it’s time for my afternoon tea. And while I was enjoying my afternoon siesta as much as I could on my office chair, which by the way is no recliner; this Laddie walks up to me and says a good natured Hi. So far so good. Except for, one – I didn’t exactly want to talk to anybody then and two – I didn’t exactly want to talk to him.
You see, I am on what is called in IT parlance ‘the bench’. The bench is probably the best place to be in when you want to leave office early for shopping, when you don’t feel like going to office because you just feel like sleeping off last night’s hangover or when you want to take extended tea/lunch breaks as my dear friend Apar found out. However it is also the place where you don’t want to be in when you are in one of those pensive moods, evaluating your career and where you go on from here. And as a bencher, your friends are fellow benchers and you try to stay away from the non-benchers. There would be good natured queries on the bench status and condolences on not being on any project. And there are only a finite number of times that you can laugh it away and say it’s nice not being overworked for a change. Or joke about paid vacations. Or make the other person feel bad about not being on bench.
And as someone who has spent the last two months warming the bench, I dint quite feel up to the task. And while I quickly went about numerous excuses in my mind as to how I could cut the conversation short and make a quick exit, Laddie asks me why I am not my usual cheery self. Numerous attempts to deny so turned futile. I heard someone saying “Maybe that’s the effect you have on me”. Err, that was ME! Needless to say, Laddie made a show of wanting to talk to somebody in the next cubicle and made a quick exit. He never even as much glanced in my direction for the rest of the day, or at least till I called it a day.
And you know what? I didn’t feel bad about it. Sorry for him though. Okay just a li'l bit, but jus' a li'l. Maybe I'll talk to him tomorrow. :)

PS: I am now officially looking for a job. Looking for a project management/ corporate finance/general management role in an IT company – it’s the only business I have been formally trained in. Any inputs/suggestions/leads will be appreciated.

I do not recognise myself anymore. I am no longer the person I thought I was. And I am not quite the person that I thought I did grow up to be.
It is not quite that I don't like the person I have turned out to be. What I need to figure out is if this is the person I want to be.
To be or not to be. :)