Walking with you, to the end of this world..

Walking with you, to the end of this world
When I am with you, happiness is assured,
Love is laughter, love is your thoughts..
So immersed in them, to forget one's whereabouts :)

From a sea of unknowns, a known face smiles
With whom she can stride, a thousand wide miles
From a spattering of ice, slips a familiar hand
With whom she can bravely, all bad times, stand..

Excited she speaks, with equal calm he looks on..
As high as she flies, is as grounded as he's born..
A 30 for her 60, a 45 for five nines,
A perfect complement for her perpetual feminine :)

Yet with all that has passed, has the attraction dwindled?
Will the love, and the magic, forever stay kindled?
Will a few stubborn stands start a never-ending row..
And burn down their castle, into a puddle of snow?

Random Thoughts, Episode 2

1> Tom Hanks in the photo in one of my earlier posts regarding Forrest Gump eerily resembles Aamir Khan in Ghajini/Three Idiots (closest I can think of). Also, now that I have photo-shopped these two images together, the one of Gump sitting on the bench somehow reminds me more of the character of Mr. Bean (whom I religiously hate, even in the cartoon series), though I can't exactly make out why. Weird.

2> The shortest of naps are the ones generating the most interesting of dreams. 

Conclusive Evidence Activity: Read Come Again.. Or, Have I?

3> For some days now, I have been deliberating on a very interesting theory that there has been a link between the writer's block, well, blocking me and the last two years of my engineering that somehow culminated in me having only two posts each on my blog for the consecutive years 2010 and 2011. Total = 4. Was it because of:

a) About one-third of my last four semesters being spent in the volleyball court that the Electrical Department was so generous to bestow upon a bunch of sincere engineering brats who would do anything to avoid getting into the Department?

b) About another one-third being spent in numerous trips to the Cafe House, the FabLab, the stores, the Boat Club, Uttam Copiers, and Rajeev Electronics (with at least 60 minutes of staying time)?

c) About a last one-third being spent in the B.Tech Lab that was so dear to us Electrical peepul, where the word B.Tech was lavished upon with a meaning that has been fully done justice to by each and every person of the class, if I might proudly say, by boycotting every single thing meant to be done as a Final Year student, and doing exactly the opposite of it?

Note: These compulsorily included, every day: photography in weird poses - at a minimum of 3 photoes/student/day, playing Angry Birds (in my case, Titan Quest), scribbling idiotic messages on the chalkboard, burning up a minimum of 12 electronic components (if minor, less costly), and 6 (if major, more costly), Facebooking in the face of the poor professor who was unlucky enough to be present in the lab at that time, playing volleyball inside the lab with the door closed (FYI, glass door with wooden framework that possessed the sound-proofing capacity of a teacup) with a lecture going on in the adjacent classroom, and of course, playing volleyball in the court.

4> I miss volleyball. :(

5> However, when I spent one whole day sitting in my prestigious workstation, not doing a single bit of work, but going through a lot of my posts, and a lot of my drafts (which, by the way, are greater in number than my posts), on my Samsung Galaxy SL (of course I had to mention it somewhere! Do you think I would risk leaving out any opportunity to brag :P), I realized that my writing has changed. A lot. Not in essence, but in style. At core, it's still the carefree, wildly enthusiastic and a bit of a stupidly emotional soul writing, but the wrapper has metamorphosed to a more refined kind. If I have to use the word, mature. Also, have let go of the innumerable italics, bolds, underlines, caps, dots, punctuations and colloquial what-nots that I had compelled myself to use in my writings under the guise of assertion, thanks to well-worded advice from a couple of folk. (No, now do not go back to my earlier posts and check out how many exclamation marks my posts include :P) So, the involuntary block was actually a painfully slow makeover, I think.

6>  A Timeline on everything is not necessary. Sometimes, haphazardness is the key.

7> Linking Google+, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the other hundred thousand accounts that each retarded entity (including me) on this earth possesses online is as easy as the pain in the ass it causes thereafter. It's just like sticking a poster on your forehead that says - "This is the address of my current residence, these are the exact locations of the money, the jewellery, and the documents of the assets I hold, this is the combination key of my locker that I so intelligently generated, please come and loot me." The only advantage is that, probably the chor will leave behind souvenirs in sympathy.

8> My office \m/ I won't say anything more, for after all, it is a publicly accessible blog. Maybe, some day in the future, when I am more courageous and less cowardly, you might hear more. (Hint: Watch out, 1.5 years from now.)

9> Random thoughts are too difficult to collect.

10> I just found out that me joining Twitter has had a significant effect on the length of my writings. Shorter words, shorter sentences, healthy keyboard. (Note: The word short in this context is inevitably defined as "in comparison to my earlier compositions".) 

Conclusive Evidence Activity: Determine the differences between Random Thoughts, Episode 1 and Episode 2.

Enough for now. But, the fingers will be hungry once again, soon.

A Mad Tree Party

FYI- My article for the Pune Tree Fest 2012, the original can be found here: A Mad Tree Party

I haven’t read the newspaper, not in a long time. I haven’t written, not in a long time. But yesterday, when after so many days, I picked up the Times of India lying on my couch, I had no idea why this tree festival article caught my eye, and made me read that page longer than any other, ultimately ending up in this tangled representation of a multitude of experiences. I was actually surprised, I mean, I have never been much of a strong idealist for plant-life, I love greenery and blossoming nature just like the next person, then why the pause?

And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a small scene flashed out. A little girl, sneaking chili seeds out from the potato sabzi in her lunch, just like every other day, only this time, not throwing them into the bin, but secretly putting them into a small white plastic Shikakai pot hastily filled up with damp mud, in the few minutes that her mother dozed off. Who watered it every day from her water bottle, fearing someone would discover if the water in the jug seemed lesser. Who looked at the tiny pot every day, and prayed that it grew enough chilies so her mother wouldn’t have to buy from the grumpy old vegetable lady. Who was terrified when her parents finally discovered it, fearing the worst, and jumped in ecstatic joy when they allowed her to keep it and gave it a nice, cozy place of its own in the window! Who looked in wonder at her pot after a few weeks, that contained a miraculous transformation from few seedlings to a handsome, swaying chili plant, and decorated it with stickers and glitter and chart paper and wrote in proud letters – My Tree. Who took it to her school and showed it to everyone and celebrated the plant. Who still has the white pot, although the plant, too big to grow in it now, had to be shifted to the park.

My relationship with plants has just been so natural that I don’t at all remember making a conscious effort to do anything in that regard. For no reason, I just choose them. More moments started flashing out in random order - I remembered caressing the jasmine plant when I plucked a flower, giving a long speech in front of the neem tree that always greeted me every morning when I looked out the window, reading tree chapters in my textbook with extra interest. I remember listening awestruck to stories of my grandfather tending to his neat vegetable garden in our village house backyard, I remember climbing onto the slanted rooftop to wave huge bumble bees off the bean-vines (even though I felt dead scared of them), I remember pleading excitedly to my mother to take me to the huge farm of her aunt where they used to grow everything that could be grown and who didn’t buy a single food item from outside except salt, I remember my great-uncle teaching me the names and the origins of different varieties of spices that he’d planted in his kitchen garden.

And the most splendid experience of all - spending the last four years of my life in companion with a tree that had become an inseparable part of me – The Banyan Tree of the CoEP campus. It was my spot for contemplation, its thick stem a hiding place for dodging professors who would walk by it to the next lecture classroom, dozing off beneath its cool aura as we waited for the next practical, to go so far as to conduct an entire club meeting underneath the natural canopy it provided! Every day included at least one trip to the tree, even if it had to be the only reason to walk to that side of the campus (well, not so much considering how lethargic I can be, but yeah, lots of trips :P). 

The countless moments spent beneath its benevolent branches, blink smilingly up at me now, as I can’t help thinking, trees are companionship. Trees understand. Trees soothe. But trees also rebel. Because trees, are life. And that is why, trees are memories. :)

Come Again.. Or, have I?

I have decided it's high time that I have kept ignoring my inclination towards expressing my completely irrelevant thoughts in the light of less important things (ex: work, office). :D Well, I was just going through the multitude of drafts in my blog that had collected alphabetical dust over the past few years, having never seen the light of the desert that is in the middle of nowhere. I found many that will soon come out, a bit dusted and toned, but there is one that I would like to put up, uncut now.

14/06/2009

The last week was one of the most bizarre I've encountered, in terms of night-time adventures. One of the rare few string of days during which I've gone to bed extremely early (around 10.30 - 11pm), and dreamt the most inexplicable of dreams. But yesterday night will take the cake, baker and his oven in the Department of the Unexplainable. Let me jot it down before it trickles away, and I’ll try to interpret it later.

Scene: My home, the place where I've been staying since 18 years. Now, it's very important to picturise the venue of this incident to take in the fantastically out-of the world nature of this dream. I stay on the 3rd floor of our measly three-storeyed building, and there's a couple more flights of stairs separating us from the terrace. Meaning, from our flat (no. 25), the terrace cannot be viewed directly, but which can be done from no. 28. There is a small square space before every flat, and similarly, before the entrance to the open roof area, enough to put a chair or two.

Time: Sunset, around 17:45 hours, and my granddad is sitting on an easy chair in the squarish space before flat no. 28, and staring on in front (exactly at what, a person can't see from behind unless they walk up to that level, combined with the fact that the door to the terrace was not exactly open). I, after finishing a yummy snack, came out to wash my hands (Yes, there was a wash basin outside the house, and yes, my mind has the capability of conjuring up just about anything :|) and saw grandpa sitting alone, so I just went by to sit with him and spend some time. He told me to take him up the the last flight of stairs towards the terrace, and when we reached there, he told me to completely open the half closed door, saying he wanted to show me something. I was on his left side, closer to the door, and when I opened it, what I saw could not be digested with jaw closed. It was one of the most mysterious sunsets of my life. 

I pushed the door and it slowly twirled on its rusty hinges, to reveal a brightly shining, perfectly normal, evening sun. Then, just as we were admiring its beauty, in about 5 seconds it turned into a just-about-to-go-down beautiful, golden orangish hue-giving off, calm, all-pervading, light sun. I looked on, mesmerised. But then, in the next 5 seconds, the colour of it swept off to reveal a shy sky blue from right to left! Just as my sluggish mind realized it had to register panic, the sun camouflaged itself into the light it itself gave off to the sky (making it light orange), and dark black spots started hovering in the sky, in the place where earlier the sun was visible, making it appear as if there was a black sun in the sky, with huge chunks torn apart from it, and the other remaining chunks started vibrating violently as if they wanted to be set free from the tortuously restricted circular sunspace. 

The next few seconds were so shocking that I almost fell over on grandpa’s easy chair; the black spots actually broke off from the space (as if someone had suddenly jerked off the invisible chains holding them down to the roundish prison) and flew off, leaving behind nothing but the slightly orangish sky. When they were breaking free, it appeared as if the spots were great, big black bats that had all but covered the sun, and they were now flying away into the horizon after gobbling it down. 

No sun, for a few minutes, and then the cycle kept repeating. And when I looked back to see the expression on grandpa's face, he had dozed off.

I stood there, perplexed. All the contentment that my post-nap snack had filled me with was gone. What does this mean? Did I just see a novel form of eclipse that has never been witnessed before? Perhaps, Bird Eclipse? :| 

*At this point, I woke up, covered in sweat, as if I had been the one doing all the flying, cursing the pillow for being too hard, at which point, I realized that my pillow had actually been a set of internship assignments. Sigh.*

My Little House

O dusty door of maple wood,

How more will you withstand?
Along you swing, your rusty hinge,
With a soft touch of my hand.

O window, of a set of five
You were target number one,
My catapult was on a roll,
Its aim had just begun.

O crackedy mirror on the wall,
O synth beside of it,
D'you remember my vanity?
Those hours of musical bliss?

And what about you, Mr. Nook?
Adorned with cobby webs,
Did you forget, those little tears
In times of loneliness?

Today I drive a Jag to work,
But when I listen to that song,
I find it's you, my little house,
It's you, where I belong.

Found quite a nice bit of thought in one of my unopened mails I was skimming through; never thought those endless forwards could be any fun! Here goes,

Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice!

Too lazy to change even the font size up there :P

LOST!

People, I lost my right to taunt and boo at other people for their absent mindedness (esp. at a certain poor guy who's always the butt of my jokes :P) approximately 20 hours ago :| You can't really do that, not when you've forgotten around half a dozen cards and papers, a driving license, a phone book, and a thousand and a thirty bucks on a park bench...all in a stupid, tiny, insipid..ah, there's the word, wallet. The limit of forgetfulness, don't you think? Yeah, even you go on...par at least poori story toh sun lo, so you can jeer in more detail :P

The story starts on a regular dead boring day in class, a torturous test on thermal and fluid engineering (which made me think for the 113th time whether I'm doing electrical engineering or mechanical), a mentally draining lecture on the same, a canceled movie trip (because the above mentioned lecture got extended for completely stupid reasons), vain attempts to convince certain seriously worthy-of-the-mental-hospital faculty members about an even more ridiculous mini-project group formation (the details of which I'd rather not go into), and some bombed technical work, at the end of which I was positively screaming with hunger and want of humanity.

Enter- Above-mentioned poor guy. :P I'd forgotten a couple of papers I had to photocopy with him, and I also wanted a brilliant bakra to rave at about the day's disaster! ;) So we decided to meet in the evening (I had to parcel up a Cadb as bribe :|) at this garden place near his home. Half of the evening amiably passed off with me shouting at him because he forgot the papers yet again, him shouting at me because I forgot everything anyways, a blessed call on his phone (during which I polished off most of the cadb, I'd paid for it after all :D), and a perfect relationship that I coined between 'poor guy' and our TFE lecturer that scared off a couple of bats from the nearby trees. (Yes! Aint revenge sweet! :D)

The real turning point came when the park started emptying and a couple of those people who're neither here nor there but come asking for money from everywhere (yes yes, you got that right, genius! The word is eunuchs :|) came up asking for, well, money. Well, it so happened that PG (typing out poor guy every time is a pain...) had very recently just given me a substantial amount of money from his pocket and now he sat happily on the bench telling them he was as much in need of money as them! Thankfully, they left us alone without putting us to much trouble, and that was the last time I checked to see if my wallet was still there in my back pocket (I have this very peculiar habit of carrying my money in a guys' wallet, and not in a typical purse like girls do, it's so much more easier to whip it up and pay than all those complicated never-ending buckles and zippers in a purse!); but they heated up our idly hanging conversation so much that we never realized when the place closed down for the day and we got up and were by our bikes saying goodbyes, and I happily went off, thinking of how enjoyable the evening had been. And it was not till I was ringing the doorbell at my house thinking of how hungry I was, that I put my hand in my jeans back pocket, to find...nothing. I instinctively put my hand in the other pocket, and the only thing that came out was my handkerchief. Of course I couldn't lose my wallet, it had to be somewhere, I've just put it somewhere else, I told myself. I calmly checked in my bag- nothing. In my jacket pockets- nothing. Windcheater- a couple of bills, and...nothing. Went down and checked in the inside of my Scooty- nothing. Then came the panic- I didn't have my wallet on me. Why the hell was my wallet not on me?!? And where the hell was it then?? I was up the stairs and bursting into the house in two seconds flat, frantically calling up PG, who answered the call in a sleepy tone. In five minutes, I'd shaken him out of all hint of sleepiness, made him gobble down his usually-slowly and deliciously-savoured food, and begged him to rush back to the place, hoping against hope the parking lot woudntv'e closed down too.

Those intermediate twenty-or-so minutes from when he started from his house and reached there and camp-searched were some of the longest minutes of my life. Einstein would've jumped into the Pacific to quote my example for his blessed Theory of Relativity :| I couldn't go myself because my license was in my wallet, and my wallet was..poof! I couldn't sit there twiddling my thumbs because had I twiddled them any more, I would've ended up with broken fingers. I couldn't walk around because I would've definitely kicked and broken something in the house for want of kicking my own stupid self. I couldn't even trace the wallet back in my mind to where I could've lost it because I'd never checked for it after the garden incident... Poor guy wasn't poor guy for me anymore; he was my last ray of hope to somehow miraculously discovering a rich, fat, lost wallet in one of the most crowded places in town. :|

I literally pounced on the phone when it beeped again, after what seemed like a lifetime. He hadn't found it in the parking lot. The park had closed down. On an instinct, it struck that it might have just slipped out from my pocket when I had checked for it inside. He suggested checking early next morning. I suggested NOW! But the park had closed down, he insisted. I wanted to say, jump off the garden wall and go, you fool! :| If I could just see that bench once... there was nothing more in the world I wanted to see right then! Luckily, just as he was leaving (and inadvertently relegating me to a sleepless night), someone came over and asked what was going on. Turned out there was a tiny gangway out of the park, apart from the main gate. I was ready to fly to the place! PG went off into the dark (cursing probably). He was giving me live updates on the phone. It was funny and stupid and terrorizing all the time. I couldn't just help dreading the moment when he'd reach the bench and find nothing and my tiny ray of hope would be blown off. I wanted him to reach there and not reach there at the same time! Nothing on the path, he said. My heart twanged like a giant elastic band. I'm near the bench. My heart was in my mouth. Two minutes of silence, and then a reluctant voice, 'I've seen under, over and all around the bench, anu! It's not there! You've lost it I guess...'; and suddenly, my heart was not there at all. There you go, I told myself. Congrats for being the biggest pea brain in town, girl :| My hunger had died. I thanked him for all the trouble and was about to set the phone down when there came a strangled 'Wait!'; couple of quick footsteps later, there was a huge 'Found it! I was checking around the wrong bench! It was beneath the one next to it, the one where we sat on!!' Poor guy seemed like some heavenly angel then! I vowed never to make fun of him again (let's see how many hours my vow holds on :P) Rest ahead is the usual story, 'take care of your belonging's and 'thank you's and light rebukes and a hearty, relieved laugh at the end of it all; and needless to say, I ate and slept very well last night :)

All said and done, instincts and prayers and mind-power are some things, man. They might be baseless in science and logic, but maybe that's just because we still haven't been able to discover the trivia behind them. Or maybe, I'm just stupid, and trying to find an excuse for my stupidity ;)

'Wall'ing off for now!