Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts

Monday, August 31, 2009

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!

Friday, June 26, 2009

TO B.E. OR NOT TO B.E.

Question (by a very agitated old man, in a very agitated little tone, to a bunch of friends, yours truly included): What do you intend to be, engineers, or clerks?

Answer (by a very amused AB, the most outspoken in the group): We prefer being clerks, Sir, because Indian engineers are nothing but roadside mechanics. [:D]

Reference: "Indian engineers are merely roadside mechanics" -Kiran Karnik, President of NASSCOM, Feb 15, 2005

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Name Game

I recently noticed that I automatically associated almost all names of people to a particular nature. Like, Nikita meant plump, Ameya meant full of attitude, Tejas meant fair. I didn't know where this came from, but coming across a girl named Nikita who was waif-thin made me feel surprised for a bit. Now, I realize that these preconceived associations come from long back, from my schooldays. School being the first platform where you start socialising and making friends, staying 12 years with the same people had sort of given their name an identity, rather than the other way round. I was so used to Nikita being fat that even after breaking out of school, the name Nikita always meant plumpness, and anything otherwise initially felt strange, if not outright impossible, just like thinking of a subdued Ameya was like thinking of Sachin Tendulkar without a bat.
Fortunately for my current friends, not many have the same names that my school friends had. But those who are unlucky enough, shall continue to be the silent butt of jokes in my mind! :P

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Uhmmm...

Well, this time round, I'm just gonna give my messed-up mind a holiday, and my puffed-up fingers some exercise!


What with mid-sems over[Comments on this particular part of the post shall be considered nothing short of moral intrusion :P], and what with the sports fest and Regatta coming up[in which I play a very negligible role], I've landed up doing so many wild sort of things [of which bathing at half-past in the night(that was unplanned) and pilfering food 13 times in a day(that was planned! :P) are the menial ones, to say the least!] that nothing's gonna be very suspiciously startling for me, at least for some days to come.

So, right, yesterday, scouting around for something to do, I happened, by pure absent-mindedness, to open my overflowing spare cupboard! By mutual consent, none of my folk dares to open it...on apprehension of an imminent threat of an avalanche of junk..which is precisely what happened! I won't go into further details of what I was subjected to[let your imagination run askew :D]; the only interesting thing that happened was I discovered one of my ol'write-ups. One corresponding to my 10th life. 3 months for the board exams to go, and me scribbling away frantically, as if THAT somehow would make the difference I desperately hoped to be made. Going through it made me relive all those times as vividly as if they had happened right yesterday! Made me pine for those irreplaceable schooldays...made me see them in a whole new light...plus, I unconsciously got round to introspecting my writing too!


But all that for the next post. Right now, mind goes into dream mode, as I type away one of my monologues with God during one of the most intriguing phases of my life....a bit childish...a bit immature...a bit insecure...a bit dramatic...somewhat inquisitive...somewhat archaic...oh what the heck! The only disclaimer I would like to make before commencing is that the random incidents convoked below have been long since come-to-terms-with and it doesn't in the least matter if this post gets published even in the TOI[I wish! ;) ] coz the ones to whom it'll really matter already know. So I ain't even gonna bother editing it. It's ME laid bare.


09/12/2004

12:10 am

"Well, looking through, I guess I've written my last[or is it the first ?] supposed-to-be-diary entry more than 1 month ago. And u bet! The two days couldn't have been any more drastically different! My mood might be worse, but mom's definitely in one of her philosophical-cry-blame-sarcastic-depressed myriad of moods. It started off with me refusing to share half of my pizza[Anti-Pasto] with Vinod, my silly small bro [I mean, you people dined royally at Pancard's, mom, and bought me parcels AND still, U expect me to sacrifice away half of my food to that gluttonous imp!!! :( ]; the usual fight, which turned into nasty battleground fight[with bits of spaghetti flying round the gallery!]; and finally into EAT-or-DIE fight; I won the food but lost my mom! [The li'l devil won her all over again, as he always does!]

Anyways, one of the greatest differences between last entry-day & today is -

ONE SEMESTER OF MY 10TH CAREER IS OVER!!

And can u believe it GOD! The one with which I hoped to re-start my legendary string of standing-first-in-class times, turned out to be one of the worst! I came out 14th in the prelims, in a class of 60, going down badly in the subject I revere above all. MATH. And u know god, the worst thing of all, and i KNOW it, it is entirely, entirely 1001% my own fault [although I'll never admit it to mom, or dad, or for that matter, to anyone, EXCEPT YOU]. I am the world's biggest duffer, saddest person for letting this happen to me; happen to me when I WAS in charge, in full control of the bull, and I let it bound away while still telling myself I can control it! How pathetically stupid, how blindingly foolish can I turn! I hate myself for this! :(

But god, I am not gonna lose that wonderful touch. Optimism. NEVER! I've lost count of the number of times I've leaned on U for support! Instead, this time again, I'm gonna shamelessly ask you to pull me out of this mess, somehow, leaving me ultimately "spotless"; bringing the entire episode of my miserable preliminaries to such a cathartic conclusion that it leaves a ZERO[not even 'negligible'] bad impression on my score-card and certificates. Plus, somehow, try to achieve this formidable task without letting mom n dad know that I've gone through such procedures. Please. PLEASE, both for my sake, and for theirs. It will break their hearts. But that brings me to an altogether another chapter-My Behaviour towards them. Inexcusable. There's no other word. I know I've been the worst daughter to them the last one month. In the excitement of getting together with some of my dearest friends, I took my parents utterly for granted! They would've gotten accustomed to "getting their hearts broken" I s'pose. I promise god, I'll try my best to make it up to them, be a daughter that they can be proud of! [And maybe, I'll try to take a bit more care of my bro too. MAYBE! :D]

Coming back to academics, one more favour GOD. Apart from my parents, there are 2 other people in my life, and it is tremendously important that they remain ignorant of my miserable predicament! You know who they are [No names here, too risky!]; and one of them has enormous probability of coming to know about it as he's my pracs-partner[not to mention my on-campus partner-in-crime! cheers for the title dude! ;) ], and a damn intuitive guy[rare, those! ], so I don't exactly need to elaborate, do I ?? Please, let my friends support me at this crucial juncture. These 2 people mean soo much to me... I hope the daunting stand of this turning-point phase doesn't end up overwhelming our good-hearted throw plays, thereby engineering a forever-gaping hole in our blossoming friendship. And please, make sure the final boards DON'T GET postponed! The extra intermediate 15 days would be unbearable torture!!

Please. please. pleeease. U seem to have become an alternate anu's wish list haven't you ?!![knock on wood!] But what else CAN I DO ??? I have got so much to say, but my thoughts are lightning! Before I can even begin to compose them, a new string bounces forward. But you are faster than lightning-Grasp them from my mind and PLEASE help me!!!

[Maybe I'll put in that rant i scribbled to you in desperation here!]

In short, I badly need YOU! Be with me! I can do without anyone else, but not without you God! Let the New Year bring joy with it; joy for me, a signal of my uphill trudge! YESSSS! And i assure you, I myself will be 99% instrumental in bringing it about.

Alright, handwriting gradually turning into noodles, so I s'pose I should stop writing...Dunno when I shall be writing again.....hoping the next musing would be during a more cheerful phase of life.

Yours shamelessly,

But Yours nevertheless (GOD) always,

Anu."

Dissection later.