Jan 9, 2013

I shall live. I shall still live.

When I was 23 a friend set me up with her geeky cousin who in hind sight was a sweet boy. He was a book worm, addicted to sci-fi books and animated series and flicks. I would actually wake up at 6:30 AM every day and sit yawning in front of the TV to catch the latest episode of the cartoon series just so we could talk about it. Some days he would wake me up through consecutive missed calls ensuring I didn’t miss the episode. Those were the days of when missed calls meant more than just calls that were missed. Missed calls mostly meant call me back right now cause I don’t have balance or it meant call me back later cause Mum won’t let me use her phone and she gets an itemised bill at the end of month and she’ll get to know exactly which boy I have been romancing over the phone, at the most unearthly hours. I digress. So the boy took me out a couple of times and we went trapezing on his bike around the entire city, went for walks on the beach, had ice creams and one day he got me a soft toy. It was a dog and I named it Jumble. I was young, just out of college, waiting to begin my first job and despite thinking I was mature beyond my years, I actually loved that soft, fuzzy toy. Jumble got lost somewhere along way, shifting cities and jobs, time and time again.


The boy and I parted as we began, as friends. Boys and men have come and gone. We meet and we part. Like someone said men come and go and they indeed do. Now that I shall turn 30 some people who are total killjoys tell me that there’ll come a time when age would have played havoc with your looks and men won’t find you attractive anymore. In short they are warning me against the perils of being the possible old maid or spinster. I laugh and ask them what makes them think that I have always had a constant stream of admirers throughout my twenties and not that I surround myself with men who fancy me and have never done so. I don’t flatter myself about the men in my life. Of course I do revel in the periodic bouts of attention when I can’t stop gushing about someone but there has never been any guarantee of uninterrupted attention and no stable relationship and it has all been so transitory. So yeah for now I am gonna hope something good does come along someday and if and when it doesn’t come, well I shall live. I shall still live.

Dec 10, 2012

Small things that give me great pleasure

I spent an entire weekend meeting up with friends. They were mostly old friends and one new friend. How happy I was amidst them! Friends make so much of a difference. Every day I get a little bit older and every day I realise how important it is to surround myself with friends. I won’t always have the good fortune to have all of them around and most of them come and go and some stay stuck to me despite the distance but whatever time we spent emanates happiness. I look back at the times and there is this feeling of comfort.


An old friend from school is getting married and she came down from London just a week before her wedding and all 5 of us met up together after some 10, 12 years for her Bachelorette on Saturday. I have met each of them individually separately over the years but never together since we all went our own way, studying in different places, living different lives and there we were gathering around one of us to celebrate Raka getting married and what a merry time we had. We were joined by the three of the husbands too later and the party only got better. The men in their lives had to make their presence felt. Haha!

Beginning today another one of my closest friends is getting married so basically I have two weddings to attend simultaneously. In the middle I went through this phase when I found weddings tiresome. I still find the dressing up part to be a tad bit annoying but when I think of meeting school friends again and again an entire week it is a small price to pay. Tinni is having a old fashioned Bengali wedding complete with aashirwad and the works. Raka is having a new age vedic ceremony followed by an after party. I am giving Tinni a coffee table that I have gone great lengths to get made. I so hope she likes it. Raka wanted us to donate money to a cancer charity as a wedding gift to her, a cause which is very close to her heart.

I saw Hotel Transylvania with K yesterday and loved it. We laughed and laughed at Dracula’s new protective daddy avatar. Later we were in Zara having a drink and talking aimlessly about how we dread Mondays and random holidays we plan to take this year. I enjoy hanging out with him and S. They make me laugh with their outlandish perspective of life and extreme sarcasm. Being in Cal has become easier since I met both of them. Wonder what is in store for me the coming year.

I have my phases of existential angst a little too often off late but I am gonna fight it tooth and nail. I refuse to give in to that inexplicable empty feeling. I promised myself I shall not whatever that might take.

Nov 8, 2012

You can tell yourself that you have already decided, that nothing now can stop you, but if that step backwards is so much safer than step forwards, what will hold you true to your path when the going gets tough? Sometimes, the right thing to do is to take that first irreversible step, the one after which you cannot go back. And now, for you, is one of those times.

Oct 29, 2012

I am missing the advent of winter in Delhi. I remember the hours spent curled up under my quilt with a book, feeling the warmth from the blower and watching episode after episode of Sex and the City and reading in shifts. I remember last winter rather vividly, the sudden welcome nip in the air in November and my stay in Dhaula Kuan, then December when the cold started spreading its icy fingers reaching into all those nooks and corners. I went for a holiday to Yercaud not before getting happily drunk on Christmas Eve with J. I remember lazing around on my aunt’s terrace in Chennai with Tinni. (They are leaving that house this month and how I’ll miss it cos I won’t have a place to stay in Chennai hereafter. ) I remember ushering in the New Year in Taj Coromaldel since we couldn’t find a better place to go and funny new year that was because ours began with a bang literally when I stepped on a chocolate bomb while talking on the phone on the morning of 1st January, 2012. That must have been sign enough.


So much happened this year and so much did not. Sigh! I was in Delhi 2 weeks back after 7 months and it didn’t feel like I ever left it. I wined and dined with M and chatted for hours and I realised how much I miss having her around my life on a regular basis. I hung out with Shivi too cos strangely she was in town around the same time. We walked around Khan Market reminiscing old days and hell we’ve had so much of history attached with this city. Then I tell myself well I have T now here in Cal and we make do with each other rather fabulously most times.

Next December where shall I be? If all goes as planned it’ll be a summery Christmas for me. Not before I take a leap of faith of course and this time it would actually mean exactly that. To say I am being unusally optimistic about this would be an understatement. Haha!


I am just gonna wait and watch to see how this unfolds.

 

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”


Mark Twain


"They say that there are three kinds of people in the world. There are people who never learn one way or another anything; there are people who learn from their own mistakes, eventually and with great pain; and then there are the really wise people who learn from other people’s mistakes and spare themselves the suffering. And I’m in that middle category. I’m an empiricist. A lot of stuff I have to fail at spectacularly, in person, in order to understand it."

Elizabeth Gilbert

Oct 17, 2012

The story of my life

The skeletons in your closet will come to bite you on your arse just when they need to be buried deeper inside. You’ll have to pay a price for every reckless act in the past.

Oct 6, 2012

Passion is not something you follow

"Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping...........................

Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world."

Cal Newport

From So Good That They Can't Ignore You