freshly hewn out of old wood
you are going to be my pride and joy
you were a part of all my fantasies
and though i always dream't that
you would be full wall length
now you seem so right.

will stack all my Austen,
and Blyton
in a mock haphazard way

you will grow old in your own way
all my books will find their home

a treasure trove you will be
i know
it comes from a child
who discovered the joy of reading
from her aunts old
english prize books
stacked away in a old bookshelf.

looks like i'm finally learning to appreciate music. As i was telling a friend earlier today, i always had a vague sense of disconnect when i was listening, nowadays i feel that gap slowly growing small.
the familiar outline of eleventh cross is so soothing on a sunday night. the chill in the air, and the lights all around, the huge monolith of my school.

faces you know so well
the laughter unmistakable
the places you grow up in
and play
all your little games
come back in a rush
you ask yourself
where is my piece of truth

deepavali

deepavali has a routine to it ,not something planned early on at home but a sequence of events which just seem to fall in place during the festival, and at the end of it faintly reminiscent of all the previous ones.
It generally starts with Appa asking us in a mock serious way if we still want crackers , now that we are all grown up, we do not bother replying since we all know that he will be fiercely competing with us for rockets and his eternal favorite the vishnu chakra, all bought by K dodappa in Salem in the true spirit of a station master (oops!)
When we were small A and i would spend long winter afternoons bursting bijli paataki, days before the festival, our nails charred black at the end of it till amma shooed us in.
Every year we would always promise ourselves that we would buy better rockets for next year, not the standard standard ones.
The festival to this date never feels complete without S aunty(a Gujarati family friend, but more kannadiga than any iyengar ajji in malleswaram) bringing the customary jamoons and other khara stuff which i shamelessly devour ,talking to us in herfamiliar sing song kannada, exchanging recipes with amma, telling us that deepavali was the new year for gujju's and all that.

the crazy phone calls, new jeans , little cousins whom you can scare the hell out of, and of course shooting rockets on eleventh cross which is probably a near death hazard.

This year, we had two screaming NRI kids , opposite, who were just learning the ropes of bursting crackers, heavily chaperoned by their mum, and were awed by our bravado. (hahaha)
these hols were probably the happiest the whole of this year, and please don't talk of global warming.Obama ,will figure it out.

this post is for A & A , the best set of parents one can ask for. And sometimes it feels like i dont need anything else to go on. this is so archie's card on the inside.
being the prude i'm i would probably never tell you guys this. let it collect dust here.

so freaking scared.

one act play on a saturday

characters
shivu- my 12 year old cousin sister
sanku 9 year old dragon ballzee obsessed brother
me - the clairvoyant grown up (hahha)
sanku ( points to the federer pictures my sister has cut up, lying around in a stash and cheekily says- shivu is that your boyfriend?
shivu gets extremely flustered and starts punching the now guffawing brat.
(i'm silently enjoying this universal sibling tiff and laughing)
shivu loudly complains to the 3 aunts in the living room about the 'badword'
hushed silence.
sankalp yaako aval praana thinthiya?

I have exams, and analytical instrumentation tomorrow. Well , this subject actually made we want to study physics again and experience that leap of joy when you understand how something works around you. I’m studying engineering, and this is exactly what I should be experiencing on a daily basis, but to my misfortune its only been despair, well that’s for an other day. This is a purely self indulgent post about where I want to be few years from now. Now that I’m in final year( scary) and people all around me are making plans I’m totally in crisis mode. So I’m going to write this and see if it helps me.
1. Every girl wants to be princess. I can’t tell you how true it is. I have downloaded all the ten books of the princess diaries series and living my fantasy in them, or they rather gave me this fantasy. Arghh.
2. Election commissioner and a controversial one. I will totally aid the politicians I want to win, a certain saffron party will know rebirth in my hands. After my tenure I can travel around the world and teach ickle countries how to hold elections. Woooohoo. I can’t even imagine the joy.
3. Civil services- Ok, I have heard the line that I want to change the system hence writing Upsc some hundred times already and let me tell you I have no such intentions, instead I’m planning to write the exam so that I can somehow live in a nice bungalow in Lutyens, get calls from north block and south block, address the press as Secretary- ministry of XYZ (Damn you- Nirupama Sen).I could even become the Indian high commissioner to Pakistan or Sri lanka, if I get lucky Iran. Also this is the only way if I have to achieve ambition no- 2
4. An MBA and then work for a publishing house, but I still can’t envision myself in that corporate wear being a power lady (fantasies). My instinct tells me I don’t belong there. Darn.
5. Write a book or co author one with S.Become really rich , go around the world for book signings. May be win a man booker or two.
6. Quizmaster - I used to think of it when I watched bqc and mastermind as a kid. But RV sort of ruined it for me.
7. Marry Dalrymple.
8.Work in RV admin block. But I guess those guy’s are trained by management wing of ISI so no chances there.
9. Amma might implement plan b.
Being a software engineer doesn’t figure in this.
Ill go drown my misery in princess in pink.

There was this period late last year when college was all about making up long winded stories about profs , the bureaucracy and certain self important specimens in our class. S and I would always promise each other that we would write all these master pieces down, for the future benefit of mankind. Neither of us actually got down to doing it, believing in its permanence. I would often ask her, and she would laugh off the (then) seemingly impossible idea of us not laughing.
I almost feel the world got envious of these times when we forgot it existed.

The government girl’s school in the corner of thirteenth cross is idyllically romantic, especially on rain washed mornings like yesterday. This school is usually a picture of chaos on normal days, with gaggle of girls, walking in groups or standing in groups near yellow phone booths, or surrounding the array of hawkers who seem to materialize there every evening. All this seems to have completely clouded the old world charm and the simple beauty of this place. As we walked in, to cast our votes, I remembered how many summers ago, I learnt to cycle in the grounds of the very same school. I could still feel the exhilaration I felt back then, on gaining perfect balance and riding off into the road (very complan ad-ish , I know). The ground which is actually overgrown with unwanted shrubs is now enclosed with ugly green fences, which was absent. At the booth we were greeted by neighbors, with a grinning acknowledgment of my pyjama condition and P aunty to my sudden embarrassment asks amma ‘ yenri maGlige moog chuchisbitidira’ . The school seemed to have too much historyand it felt just right to vote in this cobweb filled place with dusty brown desks piled up against the wall. I spent the rest of the day watching TV, the usual election frenzy still hasn’t gripped me, and the media seems to have realized that Indian elections is a major selling point, fact I think which was almost unacknowledged till 2004, when a select few of us would secretly enjoy the hidden pleasures of it.

I just feel like writing. There was a sudden pang of fear in the morning when I realized what if I had to put something down and I just couldn’t? This is exactly how I have been feeling for the past few weeks. I could give myself a concession; probably everything has been too over-whelming by normal standards. Turning twenty one was scary, for simple reasons like, your own mother will not ask you certain things which she otherwise might have, it’ s her way of acknowledging the emotional strength you are expected to have.
The past one week has been good, though there is a quirky guilt of not deserving it.
There is this new cat, extremely whiney, can’t mew well like my old one either, and we have concluded that it is extremely stupid with very un-cat like characteristics of wanting company.
Yes, I can still put words together.
I don’t really know if Guha is partial to Nehru but I’m completely awed by the kind of decisions he had to make. It only goes to show that choices we make are vital, it’s the act of making the choice itself not its implications which matter. I dint mean to sound like mother Teresa or Dalai lama in the last line.
I suck at this.

I was cleaning my shelf today, to clear all the accumulated junk , when I realized it takes little time to shelve old text books ( with each one evoking few seconds of some kind of reminiscence ), next comes the school stuff, which I cant get myself to throw away etc etc.. finally I’m left with a pile of unclassified stuff, old computer sheets-new computer sheets, calculator user manual, data sheets and graph sheets -which appear miraculously now that I don’t need them, all in a steep mound in the center, staring at me and I usually stare back completely at loss. It’s the same with emotion , you can always put away well defined ones, others keep flying around.

I’m done with exams, fifth set of semester exams to be precise. It’s not some great thing to be blogging about on new year’s eve, but well that’s what just happened to happen, thanks to my flawed choices, many many years ago (yea, feels like a long time). These exams taught me a lot in the worldly sense. Idealism which amma routinely drilled into me, absolutely forbidding me to learn only the ‘revision question’s which some of the teacher’s generously gave for the final exams, instead making me learn the entire syllabus (including all the hindi poems) ,guess this bout of idealism lasted out its course till today or sorta till yesterday, when I made this elaborate plan on ‘smart studying’. It is an open secret, the mantra of sticking to the syllabus book and living by it, atleast on the night of exam. This brahma sutra like mantra, is not taught in classrooms, it is realized by dunderheads like me after two years of plain stupid -ness and blaming oneself for not working hard enough. There is an other vital secret to this whole process of swaggering out of the exam hall and lamenting about the two marks you might lose cause you messed up the labeling in a diagram, it is then that people like me would shiftily walk out of the building thinking about exponentially decreasing graph of marks, self esteem and self worth- that is pschyoanalyse the paper, always, not yourself during those precious three hours. it always pays off.
Digressing from the hot topic of my mark sheets, exams have a nice routine to them. I could sleep blissfully till eight in the morning, amma would double check my blanket cover thinking I had been mugging all night and thinking this early morning sleep is very important, she would shoo everyone away. Then of course I would spend the rest of the morning planning elaborate schedules for the day, messaging friends to check ‘how- much -they -have- finished-and –what –units-they –doing’, slightly panicking when they have seemed to be making rapid progress , this increasing my normal attention span of one hour . Alarm clocks would of course play truant on the morning of the exam. Cursing myself, I would wake up to see it was already seven and a half- hour left to catch my bus. Maximum mugging capacity would of course reach its peak in the bus, since it’s a routine favorite of mine to procrastinate everything to the bus-time.
Also ,S and I almost helped airtel and bsnl post respectable financial results by dissecting authors (text book one’s) and making elaborate plans to file RTI’s , day dreaming about our vacations, sometimes even talking about how certain author’s have the audacity to dye their beards. This helped me build my resilience to the world in general.
I should make a mention of ernest o doeblin in this regard, it was he who inspired this post. If you think this post is a marked piece of creativity, you can always borrow my copy.