Still Round The Corner There May Wait, A New Road Or A Secret Gate

It has been one long week since the last time I blogged and nothing seems to have changed except for ebb of thoughts that keep changing their flow from here to there and everywhere. The last weekend passed away swiftly and I remember the two bottles of wine, the rosemary and garlic chicken made by Sags and me and the funny conversation we had while Richa who was equally tipsy sat in one corner of the living room just laughing at our antics. Sags is a fabulous cook and she so inspires me to try my culinary skills out and I love the fancy glossy cook books she has and I so look forward to flipping through them cos they have a little bit of history written behind each recipe and its ever so intriguing. We even have pots of herbs in our huge veranda be it oregano, thyme, rosemary and basil and its turning out to be a veritable kitchen garden. Oh and I love thyme in my omlette and may I suggest the same to you. :-)

My eyebrows were growing at breakneck speed and my face looked right out of some ghastly tv serial so last evening I went to this shady parlour called Hi Tech Faces. Yes aren't you flinching too but beggars cannot be choosers cos I am too lazy to get out of the house during the weekends and weekdays one clearly has too much work. I met up with Nik the other day for dinner there wasn't a single restaurant open in the whole of Indiranagar all thanks to elections ofcourse and by the end of the evening we had sat on 5 autos. Plus he insisted that he knows the cool places here unlike me who tries to act cool and fails miserably heheh! So last evening Richa and I were at the Barista at Leela Palace waiting for a place to have our coffees when I suggested we took a round of the fancy, overpriced and tempting shops until they beckoned us. Now that was clearly a bad idea as I ended picking up a perfume. And I am quite excited about smelling all green tea lotusish. These days the tiniest of things make me happy. Maybe cos the bigger things are eluding me.

Last Night Batty and I had the most whackiest of conversations on how we'll never ever get what we want when we want and we are obviously gonna land up in places we never expected to and why cities matter so much to us. In the middle of debating and contemplating on the diametrics of cities, people and our lives we ended up talking about volunteer work in Africa or the Middle East, Baghdad and even Kabul and how we would die to work in such places doing humanitarian work. Quite a few secrets were spilled out especially how both of us would like to be oh so famous someday the right way and how it would be to be working in Baghdad and we would be one of those women who wanted to make a difference and who left their cushioned jobs in MNC's cos we wanted a purpose in life and then in the process landed up in Iraq. In Iraq too we'd crib and whine but we'll be happy and then how it would be to get kidnapped by one of those psycho terrorist outfits and then we would make a heroic escape and be all over news and there would be Facebook campaigns like the one for Roxanna Saberi and this one would say "Free the erstwhile Lawyer and Documentary Film Maker". Sigh! To think we had to come back to our ordinary lives what with me having to draft an agreement for an insipid pharma device and Batty having to edit some uninspiring documentary film. No heroes definitely but two dreamy and foolish 25 year olds who clearly imagine too much.

“'What do you fear my lady?'
'A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond beyond recall or desire.'”
J.R.R Tolkiens

Wanderlust!

I wanna go on a holiday to Ulan Bator. Ask me what place is it? Tis the capital of Mongolia and I have sat for half an hour checking out pictures of Mongolia and reading up on where to go stay, what to do, what to eat, the places to visit, the drop dead gorgeus scenery. I really wanna go. I wanna see the shamans and witness a shamanic ritual. Sigh! If only one had the monies. I even found out the price of the tickets and it only costs 70,000 something for a round trip. In college I use to want to visit Tibet and I still do. Maybe cos I spent 2 years in Gangtok as a child and went to school with Lepchas( people of Tibetean Buddhist origins). One of them was called Dorji and use to be my favouritest friend to play with after school. They made the most amazing momos and thuppa and I got a taste for their food at the age of 6 and I still die for momos any city, every city I go to.
I was thinking about the number of houses I have lived in the 25 years of my life and gosh the number baffled me too. Can you imagine that I have inhabited 22 houses? So I sat and counted how many cities, how many houses and 12 of those are all thanks to Dad and the Indian army starting from Dehradun, Jodhpur, Gangtok, Pathankot( small town in the north of Punjab) and Calcutta. Then there were 6 different abodes for the 5 years spent in Pune. Oh my God some of them I dread to imagine. After college a place in Chennai, one in Delhi ( I miss, I miss the house) and two in Bangalore. Yes 22 houses I could have called home. I wonder how many more am I gonna have and how many more places am I gonna visit. But I have always been India bound. I wanna get out and visit Russia, Mongolia, Tibet, Turkey ( Sigh!! Istanbul), Mexico, Peru and the whole wide world. I envy globe trotters really! I have only ever been an India Trotter. Hmphhhhh!
I never grew up in that one house you can call home where you spent most of your childhood and I always envied people who had that cos for me it was such a luxury and we shifted every two years the first 10 years of my life and I hated it. Now in retrospect I realise that the very essence of this gypsy like existence was instilled in me since the time I was born and I actually start getting an itch to get out a particular city after a particular time period. As a child we had a truckload of boxes and trunks whereever we went and those were used as makeshift dewans and tables, carefully concealed under drapes ofcourse. The tin trunks use to have my Dad's name engraved on them in white saying Col XYZ , _____ regiment, shifting from ____ to _____. Even the sight of them would disturb me cos it meant a new school, making new friends and catching up with school work.
Last week when I was home and Mum sent me to Fort William to the pay the bill at the Club everything made me upset cos it reminded me of Dad and the life he gave us. I passed the Golf Course and it reminded me of the days he'd be off playing golf at 3 in the afternoon and come back at 5: 30 all sweaty, happy and high on life. I see the huge fauji trucks and I remember my whole school life when I went to school in them and how embarassed I'd be when I got a little older cos they looked like mobile zoos complete with the cage and us monkeys inside.
Yup this wanderlust too is my father's legacy...
And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?

Picture Perfect Life

Sometimes you close your eyes and see the picture perfect life it could have been. The images conjured in my mind seem to be unreal. Fragments of memories keep coming back and its all so disjointed. I wanted it to be a train and not different bits and pieces as it has turned out to be. I wonder if I grew up to be the person I thought I would. Is this how I saw my life 10 years back? This walking, talking, laughing, perfectly functional wreck that I have become. Wow sometimes I hate everything and everybody around me. I envy people and I keep asking why the hell? When am I gonna be able to make peace with this and accept it as destiny? Most of the times I convince myself but again one phone call or one cry for help and one sob and its destroyed all the make believe peace goes up in the air. I am back to where it began and its as hopeless as ever.
I wanna be able to crib about silly and stupid things like I always have done and like the others do. I wanna be worried about why so and so did not message me and why isn’t XYZ not calling me up. I don’t wanna get upset all over again about work but I am cos someone said “I won’t deny that you have to work very very hard to catch up.” I know she didn’t mean it that way but it hurt and it amazes me that this thing at work will bother me always. I don’t wanna hear the tiny voice that says “ Oh God I don’t wanna be in her shoes. I am so lucky that its not me.” But I hear it silently every now and then. I keep consoling myself saying someday life is gonna make it all up to us but what if it never does and I keep leading this ordinary life the way I have all this while the mediocre and average way. I have begun to hate those two words cos apparently I am not even that.
I don’t know whats bothering me more the assumptions about me or the circumstances I am in. Both I guess cos I desperately want something to work out, anything to work out. I wanna see light at the end of this tunnel and this one wasn’t made by me at all. I had nothing to do with its creation but it has encompassed everything I believed in, shaken my faith. I can’t seem to reconcile myself with the stark contrasts. Honestly I have tried and failed but I promise myself that someday its all gonna be very very different, good different, better different, happy different. Someday we are not gonna be passed over cos we ain’t good enough. We’ll be good enough, way better than good enough, yes we will.
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”

With A Little Bit Of Help From My Woodwork Angels

I got up in the evening with the most rotten mood after my afternoon nap. I was angry with the world for a variety of reasons and primarily cos our prayers don’t seem to be working, cos my Dad needed an oxygen mask last nite, cos maybe I finally found something I can grow to love, be good at with time and I’ll have to take a break from because of circumstances. I have lived the last 8 years of my life skimming over everything, be it law school where I took it easy for almost all of the five years or my two years in Delhi whereby all I did was to have fun, drink too much( much too much for my own good), party, chill out with my friends and not give my best at work. I haven’t been true to the substantial things, the priorities for so long that it became a way of life for me. Somewhere deep down I always knew that I cannot continue in this fashion and hence the move out of Delhi. I wanted to be the best I could be and I know that I had fooled myself for too long. Nothing in life is free and yes all the fun has come at a cost and I am having to pay for every second of not making an effort at work before and I have struggled and continue to struggle here in this law firm but amidst this constant maze of questions I am getting answers. I have questioned myself every single day at work over here for the last 6 months wondering darn am I ever gonna be standing anywhere amidst people who are so good at what they do and know so much more than I ever have. The only thing I had going for me was the fact that I wanted to do well and I was sick of being a nobody, despised myself for having let myself become a shadow of what I could have been. But if you want something that badly and go for it even if you stumble every step of the way, make an utter fool of yourself in the process but you still get up, laugh and carry on cos this is gonna be one long journey and you just started, a tad bit too late maybe but tis never too late to go after your dreams and dreams change.
So there I was a couple of hours back fuming, snapping at my sister, furious after a phone conversation with my mother who insisted I was lazy and I should be able to cook instead of making do with take aways and instant food all the time. I walked out of the house to get milk for the coffee my roomie Richa was making for us and ended up buying eggs, onion, garlic, tomatoes and some potatoes thinking maybe I should try my hand at cooking and I can’t be that bad as they think I am or as I think I am. I come back home with the supplies and Richa goes “Wow you gonna be cooking.” I said sheepishly “Yes I am. Hope it doesn’t turn out to be bad, hope its edible.” I started with the chopping, cutting and boiling of the ingredients and doing just that exhausted me but not to be discouraged I carried on. In the middle when the mixie wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure how to make the onion, garlic, tomatoe paste I almost gave up looking at the mess the kitchen was. Whatever task I do and if it is a hard one there is always this one moment when everything seems to be falling apart and I think hell this isn’t gonna work out. But with time I have realized if I stick around and persist that moment passes and I do complete what I started out doing not in the spectacular fashion like in the movies but not half as bad either. I did finish making the egg curry and rice with a little bit of help from Richa and useful tips from Sags and my Mum. In the process while she fried the masala for me and I ground the ginger we exchanged stories about her Grandmum, my Dad, our families and I came to the conclusion that no I do wanna be there for my Mum and Dad now and if I don’t take that break now I’ll have life long regrets. The Egg Curry smelt yum, tasted fine and they liked it and there is a little bit left that I have to put back in the refrigerator. I wish I’d tried cooking before, I wish I hadn’t had preconceived notions about what I am good at and can be good at. But I am learning now that I can be good at what I truly want with a little bit of help from my woodwork angels be at Meggy at work or Richa at home with the cooking. Woodwork angels are those who materialize out of nowhere, almost the woodwork when you need someone the most. Thus Meggy has been mine at work for 6 months now and Richa was one today in the kitchen. :-)