दो इंच का Bend और मीलों की दूरी

Do you love trains? Because they are one of the most fascinating man-made things for me. And not just for their graciousness in carrying us through most geographical marvels (they make me love India so), or the magical ability of the mind to think up new metaphors every time you let go and stare long enough as the tracks course along joint-by-joint to places where stereotypes dwell even as your thoughts memory-by-memory reach a new understanding. I enjoy them especially for their culture. Every place has a culture: dynamic as made by the people there but also inherently unique. The few times I have been on a plane I have only been most glad getting out of the airport. Planes make me claustrophobic and every one seems to be in transit, just waiting to get where they are going and then start living again. May be it is only because I have been on short flights and longer ones must require some settling down. But, I hope to do all my travelling by train no matter where; station-to-station, wheeler-to-wheeler because life goes on even in stopovers…

Any way, my post today is a hark back to the past 4 years of weekly train journeys through the absolutely-lush-right-now Sahyadris. Being a suburban and staying in Bombay all years through had me well-bred in trains. Then good things happened and I got the chance to move out to study at 18. 4 hours is not very far, but it is far enough. Now in less than a year I am going to be back home entirely, and as I returned this time I found my self thinking of the incidents that every ride bore with itself. There is so much I learned from the first time I travelled alone with a reserved seat to when I got a sympathy seat for appearing tired after being up all night before a university practical to when feigning ignorance and my college ID card got me to travel on a long-distance train with a short-distance pass. I am reaching that stage in life where being a woman and being a doctor are preceding who ‘I’ am. May be they always did only I am now aware of it. But I have also learned that they can be effective shields and sharp screening tests.

The journeys have lent themselves to characters. Sakshi, the 7 year old, whose 4 year old sister ‘lai bhav khaate’, and who travels alone every day to a school 3 stations away and chats up any ‘tai’ to her fancy by asking her the time.

The man with protruding eyes and hoarse voice who must have not been more than 35, and selling pencils with pink tassels as if he were selling his soul; he might have been because he was also cachexic, sweating profusely and between tirades to the women in the crowded Karjat local on the upkeep and features of the pencils, he had to twice stop and wait for his breath to catch up. But what made me notice him was how he was dressed in a remotely ironed shirt and a pair of trousers held up by a belt. And I remembered as a child swinging my mother’s dupatta over my shoulders and trotting around the house with her work-bag on my arm telling imaginary people I was going to work. I imagined the pencil-seller similarly ironing his clothes and wearing his belt to actually go to work.

Then there was the kid, not more than 10 years in age who chatted up my classmate to get his shoes polished by him, but the classmate was wearing Floaters that don’t need any polishing, still the kid hung around. He said he was hungry, so the classmate gave him a 5 rupee coin to buy a VadaPav. The kid quickly pocketed it. We asked why. He simply said he’d give it to his mother but not to his father because he was often drunk. Then Dadar came and we went our ways.

Climbing up the stairs at Dadar I often had to turn my music off to let me hear the man that played a bansuri that sustained it self above the drone of announcements and shuffling feet and talking people.

The early morning Ladies’ Compartment sleepy rides have had their share of intrigue as things involving women often do. My first train-fight was fought here. An obvious rookie to travelling alone or in trains demanded I get up from my seat for her. On asking why she suddenly yelled to the window of the yet stationary train “Mum! She is not giving me my seat!” Thus, my rite of passage.

There was once a woman who began chatting up her neighbour and subtly plugged the travel agency she ran. Every mountain, waterfall and slight mention of weather would cause her to segue into raptures of the tour she conducted of a place with similar but trumped up features. Time and again she would say that her family was financially very well-placed and their agency was therefore awesomeness-at-unbelievably-low-prices. But by her manner she struck me as desperate. I wondered wheather she was phoney or I was judgemental.

The most distracting co-passengers have to be the clan of Iranians that got in one day at Karjat. They were loud, they were gossiping, they were obtrusive, and it was hilarious how much like any other group of women they were but because they spoke Farsi no one knew what to make of them. And because the littlest one wanted the window seat I was occupying, she tried to bribe me by singing a Farsi song mostly I think because she saw me listening to songs through my ear-phones. It is much fun matching wits with kids.

Songs have been such a constant through the years. Sitting at the door way, standing while trying to not think of the discomfort of the leering eyes, or just sitting by the emergency window which has no bars, songs and their words are tied like ribbons to the familiar trees, shapes in mountains, orange and pink temple tops, lone houses amidst vast stretches of paddy fields and the one boy of the many that stop and wave, that I spontaneously waved back to.

The mountains made me realise that I could jump between them any time and die with out regret. The mountains that change colour and mood with season and question my questioning why I should not feel in a particular manner just because of the weather. The mountains that always come back to being green and fiercely private in the rains. The mountains that stretch languidly across the horizon while the train snakes in and out of tunnels like in a game of twisted hide-n-seek. The tunnels that make boys hoot without fail. The men that play cards and fold at every station like they must turn off the sinful thoughts before entering temples. The man who sells chai-coffee mix, chai-bournvita mix, coffee-bournvita mix and even plain milk. The will to resist VadaPav at Karjat. The man selling half-bad roasted peanuts at Kalyan which you eat half of any way because suddenly you don’t want to eat any more.

And the games one plays! Red Hands when there were many. Then Antakshari even when you didn’t want to but no one else was getting that song from ‘Ae’. Then the senior boys that came trouping under the wings of the girls from their class because where else would they get a better chance to acquaint themselves with the Bombay chicks and those that stayed in propah Bombay and those that stayed in Kandivali or Thane or Dombivili. And what their parents did. Only introductions, we are not ragging you or any thing.

The creepy guy that stood at the door and gladdened his eyes so much that we had to change seats. He then turned out to be our Pathology Demonstrator next year. The random guys that may or may not have been surreptiously taking pictures of girls on their phones, who none the less got ample doses of misplaced Feminism. Peek-a-boo with cute guys. The changing definition of cute.

The old man that wouldn’t quit talking about why he mistook us for Americans, his sons in the USA and his Diabetic Foot.

The first train ride was with new bosom buddies. Then we formed society and withdrew our borders and ‘caught’ our places. The anger that I couldn’t shake off of riding home alone and the frustration that I now try to befriend on having company.

Changing trains in the middle of some where. The smell of ‘home’ as we entered Kalyan. The two trains missed. The one caught running. And the thoughts, ideas, and pasts I forgot on all of them.

Take Care Of Her. She Is Your First Patient. Cure Her.

I think I was/am going through a 'Writer's Block'. Not for lack of things to write, but because I have much to put down. I put words to thoughts and ideas in my brain and then grow weary of going over them all over again as I ink them. Even so, I was itching to write something here but just didn't find that shove, that moment when you know you just have to do it before you get ahead.
There are comments to be answered and I will get to that after I have given myself some time to ripen the thoughts I penned; to see where life takes me and what it makes of me and my ideas about my thoughts beyond that distance of time.
So, as always I waited to see if I would ever get a chance to say something here...

And here I am. I just read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart Of Darkness'. I had been getting directives to its 'great-work-of-artness' by way of reference to Kurtz and all he embodies, in any write-up I read on colonialism or what-exactly -is-screwed-about-the-world, or T. S. Elliot. Like all things I took it as a sign from the universe to read the book.
With a stroke of good luck I was locked out of my room for a while with the book on me. It was like one of those days you wake up thinking is going to be totally routine but a series of wrong turns make it part of 'Fond Memories'. So, fiercely rainy day, empty hostel, quiet town and a well-worn second-hand copy of 'The Heart Of Darkness' were part of one of my Perfect Days.

Coming to the book. Because I was already primed to it, I was in a hurry to know the story first. I can not keep pace of the writing and the subtle layers along with the story, nor do I try to because it leaves me with a sense of incompleteness once the story ends. Then, if the story stays with me days after I shut the book; its characters hound me with renewed understanding of them as I go through the grind of my life; its words read themselves out in hours of early wakefulness as dreams are leaving- I know I have to get back to the book.
It amazes me every time, the things that my mind retains when I read a book once (or even watch a movie, hear a song) and the thoughts it thinks and turns on their heads on re-reading. It is like a version of Free-Association.
So, the book was a similar experience and I will return to it for a more nuanced, slower reading. The writing is very captivating and demands complete attention. Kurtz and all was all there. It makes one think for oneself, sift through all the devices and motifs used and find one's own reckoning. All that was very fine.
But while reading it, especially the parts when Marlow and crew go deeper into the forest in search of Kurtz, Conrad writes of how it felt like going to Primeval times, to unchartered Earth, inhabited by 'savages' whose colour added in large parts to the 'Darkness' of the milieu, I felt the text was suddenly anachronistic. It is not a tale of time-travel. It shows what Imperialism actually was, yes, but at the same time not really acknowledging the Right of the conquered nations to just be. It still shows them as weak, ignorant, bumbling people full of witch-craft that needed the White-man's hand gently if not in the barbarous manner things came to pass.
It was just a tiny red-light that lit up in my head when I read it. I have grown to be vary of all popular ideas and things that evoke ample cheering from the world represented to us in most of the media around us.
I didn't think of how a person of African origins would read this book set in Africa.

Once I was done reading, I looked up 'The Heart Of Darkness' on the internet. The internet is such a powerful tool being yet unguarded. I once read a blog where the author was listing his childhood fantasies. One of them was a magic box/thing which would easily take him to different times or places. Then as he grew up the Internet came to be.
So, Wikipedia gave me this:Achebe: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"
It is a Nigerian's thoughts on the book. And it is very gratifying.

My room-mate was very fond of Geography in school. She being schooled under ICSE, me SSC with the booklets made of cheap paper that passed for Textbooks, is a tad better in her fundamentals of academics. So, once we were discussing school projects and she was telling me about how she loved doing projects on the earliest Civilizations. She enumerated the four or five that were there. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus and one in China, from what I remember. So, I asked her what about Africa? and Americas? She said they are not counted in the early 'Civilizations' because they don't conform to its 'definition'.
I remember also reading some one who in response to some body saying-America has no culture, said-The way the Americans are is their culture, only it is not yours.
I have a problem with definitions. I can never remember them. Of course, being a medical student that is also my nemesis. But don't you think one can never give any thing the limits of words?
Define your self. Define the worst thing you know. Define Love because we live in its Age. And if it be Friendship (à la KJo) define Friendship.
Labels of 'Good' 'Bad' 'Excellent' or out-of-5-stars are convenient, but are they fair?
Some times I wonder if I would be at any peace without these things that trouble me and make me sad and angry and utterly helpless about the world. I think the worst is living in the age where even hope gives sorrow. Living long after colonialism was officially over, wars were aggressively and obviously fought, and 2 nuclear bombs were dropped in full consciousness, can one ever say some day every thing will be all right again? Just How did this come to be; and how do we let go and move on?
And when did we swap faces and names for numbers? We talk of Afghanistan and Pakistan like all these places surmise is Americans and the Taliban. What of the normal people there, you know the every day kind, plain persons. You and me. Where are they?
And those of 'us'. The stones-throwers are out of work, but are the Kashmiris ok? The Naxalites get our well-placed gasps but how will we react when one morning our mountains disappear? And our wounded pride at the 25-year no-show of the Bhopal Gas Scam must have healed because we are raring to go (and how!) at the atithi-devo-bhava-exclusively-indian hosting of the 'Commonwealth' games.

What if history as we know it hadn't happened? We know we could be different. What if we were? But then the books, and the movies and the songs and the need for heroes and fairies and great 'love Stories' wouldn't be.
May be that is why we are not.

What I Learned This Week

1]The purpose of going through life is to be confronted and questioned by our beliefs and have them tested by trials of anguish and remorse and to be compelled to form one's own moral code of existence and existing.

2]Does the need to reiterate love for another stem from the absolute absence of it or the doubt of it?

3]I can not be passionate about any thing. I carry all my baggage at all times, and I get drawn by the wind only too easily. It is the only natural way of living I have experienced and I must stop trying to live otherwise. I'll drift.

4]I have had a very safe childhood. My major grudges are that my parents left me to grow up into my own. I did most of my mentoring. Considering the realities of life on earth, I am absolutely privileged-both my parents were present, I knew them from the start, both were my own, I wasn't molested, beaten, taught to be a girl, I have never seen a person murdered, never been compelled to kill another, I have never starved, not had to save my mother from a drunken beating, cheating husband or an addiction, not had to take up cudgels on behalf of myself much less a people, never been beaten out of my own home with nothing but the clothes on my back, never had to bear the curse of colour, caste or religion, never been scarred by seeing the humiliation of another, never cowered for life in a war...I have got a true complete chance at life...

5]The way people behave and the things they say are who they are. I must stop thinking that they are only fooling around just because I would behave in their manner only if I wished to entertain.
People are clues unto themselves.

6]Industrialization has gifted us the marvel of 2-minute lives-Just Add Water. We have forgotten the aromas and earthy flavours of the real deal.
Just because some one looks it, does not mean he is it. Stereotypes are outsourced and mass produced.

7]The best way to manage relationships is to not nurture them. Let them grow and assume the plainness of weeds. Let them survive on their own merit. Don't give them thought or time, you'll want returns on your investments, and greed sticks to our insides.

8]How can we lay claim on an artist's work? How can we compete to 'own' them?
Why can we not build centers housing all the works of an artist in a place that he loved most and each be allowed to pay respect?

9]Isn't it criminal to have children in the times we live?

10]We are the children that would question-What did you do to our home?

11]It is very saddening that we choose to like traits in people like ice-cream flavours, and easily dump them if they taste a tad different. Has our fear of falling ill crept into our relationships as well? Is the fulfillment of vows a requisite only for marriages?

12]It is best to leave when the going is good.

13]I am very good at moving on. When a relationship, phase or lifetime is over, it is over.

14]Some major things happen for no reason at all. There are no lessons to learn, no one to blame, only to suffer a weird mood and get back to life.

15]I love the style of the 8o's best.

16]Why does popular culture paint Love over every other painful feeling? Why don't we talk plain life? Why gloss up, thin out, and dumb down?

17]The excesses of the rich are paid for by the poor. There is no barrier to the imagination of their whims: they can play toy soldiers with real men and maximum gore; a wife can defend her husband for unleashing his perverseness on a child; eating mud can be labeled habit with a straight face; children can be trained to become dancing monkeys (reminds me painfully of Sohrab in The Kite Runner-at least his excuse was that he was an orphan).
I think I understand why most lust after power. Like every addiction, it fortifies weakness.

18]The only men I will ever truly love will be dead or writers I will never meet. There is much to match up too and none can. As Shakespeare said-Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men.

He is definitely for all time.:)

Hit Snooze!

*Beware when some body implies - Who the hell does she think she is?

*Back off when the mind goes - Who the hell is s/he?

Half A Life

I am so involved in living these days that at times I find myself suddenly torn from the situation and forced to view everything objectively. It is as if my life does not want me to miss out on the huge joke life is. And I am glad for it.
Becoming an adult I realize is like understanding a concept I once thought would be beyond me, but with time has turned out to be obvious and effortless. I find myself having opinions I don't rush to negate. I don't fear from being some one else to know what it is like. My head buzzes with jostling thoughts and ideas that successfully dampen the echoes that foreign voices leave.
I feel isolated and thankful for it.

Another fact I opened my eyes to is the aging of the world around me. I have a sense of the passage of time. The 'samaa' of my childhood that would recycle itself with every season is now a place I can be in only in my pieced-together memory.
The summer this time is different. Not in a bad way. In a new way. It might just be that it is time to live in the present. Just as well, but the impossibility now of reverting to a state where everything was possible deserves an unshakable sadness. I have my first stretched heart-string.
I know of the things I will never do, of people I will not like, of scenarios I will not run into. I am afraid of running out of questions...
And then there are the persons that used to answer them. They are fast fading away from my horizon. Some I realized are faking it. Some I can predict, even win against. Some I can only wish for. But they all seem wrinkled and bent all of a sudden. Like I blinked and they went old. Became mortal. Found regrets more than right decisions. Maybe it is to do with all the books I read on diseases. Or the time I spend often asking poor, sick persons for their 'histories' at their vulnerable best. Or with the loss of my grandfather to a slow, painful death. Or just making peace with the fact that no character, fictional or otherwise, seems to mirror my state anymore. I am on my own now. And this constant state of being around morbidity may as well stick around. It can serve to illustrate how powerless we are as individuals in changing another's life. And that it is evil to waste borrowed time. And the importance of looking at the bigger picture, especially when every thing around closes in and appears magnified.
I keep wondering at the chances that are to come my way. Will I ever covet for any of them? Will I blame all that I have gained if I lose them? Every man destroys the thing he loves...
Next year will be a year of changes and beginnings once again. I wonder if I will miss out on savouring the inauguration of my professional life because I will be doubting my capacity based on unfounded fears. Being in a private college may have done minimal to my clinical skills, but the time and quiet it gave for the furthering of my mind in so many spheres redeems it many times over. It gave me the surety that I will not die feeble. Right now, I will not trade these past 4 years for anything. I fervently hope I never do. May be I never will, and my life will turn out as awesome as I have planned it and as independent. May be I must stop using parameters that others around me apply. My needs were never theirs. My ways were never theirs. Most of the time I shudder to think of living their lives. They must exist for ample bad examples.
It is like the time school ended. So many lived stopped then. Lived to the peak they would reach. Whatever their excuses, they got sucked into the vortex of the world and 'it's ways'. Another vacuum seems to be developing in a year's time.
But I have just begun keeping time from this summer...

Meet The Man Of My Dreams And His Beautiful Wife

I was 14 when I discovered the song 'Ironic' by Alanis Morissette. I was in my school library mostly looking up quote-books for smart-ass words for the next preachy assembly. Like always once I was done I went up to the magazine stack before I left. I love going through magazines, especially the trashy, superflous ones. Maybe it is the early contempt my parents bestowed on all things commercial, flashy and easy, but I find cliches interesting. So from the India Today, Outlook and other such suited-up reads I picked up TeenWorld or something similarly named, that probably promised a zit-free path to boy-planet. Pretty much zit-free and clueless otherwise, I read for sheer surprise. I am prejudiced to a fault. Everything about me I deliberate and form opinions on. I am sure I am psychoanalyst's willing delight, but being ready for consequences all the time can be tiring now and then. Hence, I guess my love for formulaic art. My dad wonders how I intently watch shows like Big Boss or Rahul Mahajan's Swayamwar and thouroughly enjoy myself. But there is much to observe in the average or sub if you go beyond their pious efforts at maintaining farces. It is a good exercise in leisure for moments of thin-slicing when one must altogether dispose of the common.
But, I was remembering 'Ironic'. So, 14, and pop-culturally ignorant (it is such respite to look back at early years of teenage and not have me heaving over some slick Backstreet Boy, though Hrithik Roshan came dangerously close.), I guess I was in my early fascination for words, rhyme and uncommon issues. I was drawn to the lyrics. I had never heard of the song, much less the singer with a difficult surname. But there was something in the moment I read those verses that was clairvoyant. I had felt it before. Like the lessons I was learning then I was to put into practice some time in my life. And more.
Today, I guess my life stopped and perused that bit in my life-map for directions.
It being final year and all, I am trying hard to get myself to stick to a routine I will benefit ably from in the next years. But, it is like my mind tasted blood with all the free runs down the many thought-hills it has enjoyed in the last years. It refuses to stick to boring routine. But, when I sit to study medicine I want to read so much more.
It feels like a tight-rope walk, and though the balancing is exhilarating, the tendency to fall due to lack of practice is mighty frustrating.
So, being home in the last few days and not really reading all about the failures and attempts of the heart the way I had planned, I was irritable and losing my temper at every slight. I knew I should have known better, but, really, how?
But life has a funny way of sneaking up on youhoo-oo..annndd..life has a funny way of helping you out...you really must listen to the song.
So, the TV, my soulmate, my BFF, came to my rescue, by leading me to The Jane Austen Book Club.
For a while now, I have been thinking of rereading the books I really enjoyed reading once. I haven't read much, and I certainly don't have much of a favourites list, but there are a few. And Miss Austen, most definitely finds ample room! Pride and Prejudice was the first Classic I read and the first book I loved. Elizabeth Bennet and the profession of love for her by Mr. Darcy is the second best after that of Dagny Taggart and John Galt. We didn't really have to believe any of it, did we? Oh, I did!!
Once, in some blessed practice English exam for the SSC I presume, I was thrilled to have the rare non-yawn essay topic - If You Met With Your Favourite Book's Characters. I most enjoyably wrote on running into Elizabeth and talking at length with her on marital bliss and her views on matters of pride and prejudice.
So, the movie awakened the universal desire for the Austen word on things. And my joy was doubled on knowing it was a book adaptation. Googling, registering and extracting files later, I was proud of hunting down a downloadable version of it. All you people who do the great service of putting everything at a click's distance, Bless You! May your tribe prosper! Thank You for then, now and forever! You are my virtual heroes!
So I settled in cosily, with thoughts of a smiling Abhishek Bachchan-faced-tree. It is a good read. Difficult to keep pace with in just the first read because it dissects stories within stories. I am no good at absorbing a story and simultaneously thinking between the lines, or about psychological profiles of characters.And it is about older women. Seeing the movie and having faces for all of them, especially Grigg helped.
Another very strong reason for my getting sucked into an Austenian Day was the central character Jocelyn. Sketched like Emma, she is a happily unattached, controlling woman. She has her issues-which woman doesn't?-but I find myself always being partial to these independant women characters. I guess I try to find a clue to my future mindframe in theirs. I know 10, 20 years down the line I am going to be where they are. I know I am 21, and it is probably too early, if not futile to spell out my future. But, I like to be prepared, and I know how I am going to shape my life. I know for one there are going to be no compromises especially if not exclusively in relationships, and that itself shoves a lot of obstacles aside.
So, I look out for these women: what they do, who their friends are, how they are with their parents, who and how they date, how similar their reasons are to mine...it is freaky no doubt. I have thoughts of choking and dying when old and my body not being found for days. I don't like animals, so I know a cat won't eat my face off like Miranda from Sex And The City imagines. But then, if I am dead how does it matter to me?
Those I have shared this with have always come up with the staid,'No ya, you'll find some one, don't worry.' Worry I don't. I wonder more: I grew up on a healthy dose of hindi films, fairy tales, classic romances, real marriages, abandonement, abandoning and solitude. I know for sure the intimidation I inspire in most I meet with. I know for sure it is one of the things I hate about people. But I always look out for exceptions to generalizations. And I know there are. Only I don't know if I am one of the chosen. I guess that is what is most putting off of the entire affair. I can manufacture a life-detailed, perfect-for myself. I wish I could do that for the people I wish to be around as well. Just so, I leave that detailing for falling in love, finding a suitable man. It will have to be the way I want. It will have to be filmy and dreamy in equal measure. All that I have come to love and acknowledge, living, breathing. It is a tall order. And because thinking entirely of it is impossible and fascinating, I know I won't cheat myself on it.
Though, it may so happen that I may get all I want and still have good reason to pass over my happy ending...
I love that there are so many ifs and maybes. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Jane Austen has today made additions on the rough map on life I carry around with me. Some day I may stop and ask for directions.
For now, I need to keep going on.

The Last Train To Somewhere

I have been away for long. I had so many reasons to come back I just couldn't choose one. Amongst my many hopes for this year, was one to chronicle my times now for the various futures to come. But the life I am familiar with is largely of grand plans that waste paper and great ideas that occur when I am too lazy to pen them down.

But there is a change creeping through the languid years. Maybe it is the normal curve of growing up...I don't know...I've never been here. And that I guess is the best part about it.

As a kid I had no epiphanies of becoming a particular professional. I am studying medicine now, but it does not wholesomely consume me. There is an effort I have to garner to sit myself down and pay attention to its language. I definitely don't mind it. I value the opportunity I have and look forward to the daunting challenges. But this I don't count in my rites of passage. I would have had some thing to do anyhow.

I hated the entire period of childhood. All I wished for was to grow up. That was all I was looking to do once I 'grew up'. I had no date and time for it. I didn't know what to read or where to go to learn 'growing up'. All I knew was that some day I would be confident, content and immaculately independant. Then, I guess I grew up.

So now I am a pile of all the pieces that make me. Like, when this year began I cleaned my hostel-room cupboard after a year and half. I got everything it held in a heap on my bed. And then I began wishing I hadn't done it at all. (I am such a good candidate for mid-life crises, I've already been through them twice!). Then, one deep breath and coffee later, I got to sorting.

I realised how I have bit by bit added dimensions to my being in 3 years of moving out of home and kidhood. Like the clothes I have bought over the period for purely experimental reasons-let's try if this suits my style or if I suit it's-I have shopped in areas that specialized in self-development. I dindn't know what I was looking for, hell, I didn't know I was looking! But I bought loads and paid costs for every thing.

The lack of amazement at not missing home.

The realization of numbed pain and the increased awareness its agony bore.

Falling in love and then not being so sure about it.

The FountainHead and 'YES!!!' exploding in my mind.

Realizing the futility of fear of judgement and freaking out at the ginormous size of the stupidity monster.

Speaking Marathi and not knowing how to react when a leprosy-ridden patient tells me that good things happen to good people.

Forgiving my parents and re-casting them as fellow human beings that are living by trying to make the best of what comes along.

Losing friends that never were.

Ideas of lone lunches and death.

Achievement and her coterie of friends and foes.

Accusations and the will to not defend.

Running to leap but wanting a last veiw many times over.

All these lie spread before me to be labeled, boxed together and placed neatly in shelves.

Deep breaths and coffee?

Was That You Or Me?

I am sitting across the external for my PSM viva, answering his all-important questions about life and its prevention, and all my mind registers of the situation is: Hey! Doesn’t he look like Payal’s husband from Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi?

2 years I’ve spent trying to keep Park at bay. Every time I read the lame opening lines to each topic, I controlled the urge to bang my head against the wall or mutilate the book (hard-bound nonetheless). Yet I noticed it as it changed colours and told me surreptitiously about all the greed, incompetence and cultivated stupidity that went into the failure of social programmes in the past 60-odd years.

All that ends well may be well. But my normal curve finds PSM outside the ‘confidence limits’.

The only end to it is its prevention.

Everybody's Waiting For Me To Arrive

5 quick things I like about the view right now:

1) The Trees: They have been there before me. They have been the constants in my life. Many have grown up with me. They teach me about nature and her ways: new leaflets always grow toward the top or the periphery. The sun's full energy concentrates on them. The freshest rain molecules greet them. Taking care of newborns is a basic instinct in all life forms. We, the most progressed of life have made it optional. Babies are thrown away like garbage, cared according to their gender and left at the behest of maids, baby-sitters and PSPs.

2) My Piece Of Sky: It is not much, but it is enough. The rest is obscured by trees that are also maturing into adults like me.
I saw a little bird at sundown. While all the other birds were making their circadian trips back to tree-homes, this lil punk was flitting about in random irregular spirals. Its wings flapped like they were still learning to fly. But the birdie was relentless. Sometimes soaring, otherwise doing air-pirouettes, it stayed aloft throughout. The crescent moon had just risen and the bird seemed to do a little revel-dance performance. The sun had its breath ready to be held under water, but the bird was not afraid of the darkness. In my open window, I sat quietly formulating sentences about the chidai, while a medicine exam awaits my absent memory in a week. Maybe it too, like me was on impulse or brimming impatience waiting for calamity to befall him because he dared to stand and stare.

3) People: Of all kinds: those that are thinking about work, those that are working, those that want to lose weight to gain a narrower perspective along with narrow hips, those that are looking for words to fill the silences so that they don't have stop to breathe, those that carry the source of the sunset within them, those that are going to have to fend for themselves, those that are hungry, those that are angry, those that are...other people.

4) The Center Of The Earth: The sky from my perspective, I realise is ever moving. I have seen all of the sky. Every space that passed around the world, over events, people, and time, has passed over my head too. The earth I stand on has remained unmoving. My values, my thoughts, my principles will always be the ground beneath my feet even though the sky over me may slide by. I feel like I have a centre of gravity now, something that holds me down. I know I am not hollow within. What ever I have gained has filled up parts within me and what I have lost is still mine in the only way it ever was. I don't feel light and I know I won't float away. I feel fine.

5) Memories And Music: The cotton tree in the distance sent cotton seeds riding on fluff in the summer wind to an 11 year-old me. It told me that soft beds were a privilege and not a metaphor for life, but I had the latent capacity of a warm hug within me.

The Core

My idea of heaven is where all the answers lie...a court of science...where all 'why's' and 'how's' are answered...a place where physics resides with reason and integration is patiently taught :)

A place where past, present and future meet to form the Big Picture and it all falls in place to make sense.

So, what is your heaven like?

Noisy Interludes

It is fun being an observer. How can people not be interested in being aware?

In knowing the subtle ways in which our ever alive and kicking instincts peer from behind the masks that we wear throughout our interactions?

We are the most evolved of life.

But do we realise how much of natural life we've carried along with us?

We've created language. Modified, simplified, exemplified it.

But what have we forgotten and suppressed of when language did not exist?

What of the non-verbal languages? We know how to express in them, but how much of it can we read or understand?

There is a meaning, a message, a call, in every sound, every touch, every glance, every life...every movement.

All we have to do is observe. Learn. Respond.

I swallowed my dignity and killed my hunger

I am a student of Third Year M.B;B.S and I am currently posted in the Ophthalmology(i.e. Eye) dept. for my clinicals. Now, this O.P.D. sees a lot of elderly people coming in for cataract-related troubles.
Cataract is a degenerative disorder of the lens in the eye that progressively dims vision and is common in old age. So we have these aged persons walking in daily, who are having trouble seeing clearly, and along with that a host of other debilitating illnesses that render them slow and hard of hearing. And then they are scared...for one, of the world around that suddenly seems to spin too fast, and secondly, like most, of being in a hospital.
To get their eyes examined they have to sit at a couple of instruments/machines that help better illuminate and magnify the eye for the doctor. Most have never been to an eye O.P.D. before and are naturally confused with what they have to do: where to sit, how to place their heads,what and where to see...and they are invariably curtly told off by the resident doctors for not understanding, for being 'confused'...These are not erring kids. They are persons who have known, perhaps created the ways of the world. They just need a little help. And they are trying to get it by causing the slightest possible discomfort to the doctors.
The doctors are over-worked, under-paid and impatient. I get that. But is it the patient's fault?
Or do they just get some kind of awful kick out of berating persons who they know will not retaliate?
The patients are old, they need assistance at times, sometimes a louder repetition, a softer reassurance. Shouldn't they be used to that by now?
Why instead do they chose to get used to their own impatience?

Long time, Mr.Bukowski!

When you hear a song for the first time, and are mesmerized by its every beat, every verse, every dead sound, you know you have a favourite.
Then you realise that the song is a classic.It was around before you were.
It was played on instruments not loud enough to reach you. It vibrated air waves to its tunes that perhaps gushed as the wind around you.
But when you hear the song for the first time, it sounds heard...like its existence is not intriguing but obvious.
Like its essence was within you, only now it manifests in the the guise of music, just as it did in dance, in a book, a poem, a quote, or a painting. Or a person.
It is there somewhere. It is there right here.

It's so weird to see him like that, na?

They need our sanction. Amongst all the persons they've run into or been surrounded by, they chose each other. Two different beings trying to hold on to one common interest, one common need.
It is never easy. There are pitfalls...it is not a natural order...it is out of volition that two individuals from a multitude fall in love. And as much as they may wish, or even try, love, cannot hide. It is there in the midst of all to see, observe, and react to...
They are not committing a crime...all they are doing is taking a few moments, a few glances, a few touches for their own. Making a few secret memories and giving a few unbreakable vows...but their fruition requires our help...That we wish them, and their happiness...that we let them be...that we help them tide over the rough and sharp edges and bends as they walk on each others crossed paths...that we wish their tribe grows...

Starting Over

Extremes, the experienced in time say, are bad. I know they are for me.
Beginnings and endings confound me no end...they keep me up at night. Yet, I don't believe in them.
I don't care much, for or about, first impressions. Goodbyes are a farce. Unless someday I learn to let go of my memories.
Eyes size up; ears eavesdrop. And we haven't even been introduced...
Across walls, glances, water bodies, atmosphere, and many brushed-againsts, lives go on. Even if we don't know of them. Yet. Or ever.
The world was never a small place.