Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Since N wanted me to archive this golden memory

I will not complain I will not complain I will not complain!

Anyhoo...

Singapura is turning into a ridiculous experience these days. I spent all of yesterday with this absurd feeling that I'd signed on a starring role in a Mandarin film, with much in the script being lost in translation. The prospectus just magnified certain words like " Top 20 among world's universities", "world class facilities", "unique international experience" and bla bla bla ... useless glitz.

That being said, Singapura affords Madness too. Friday night found four generations of POI (peeps of indian origin) NUS undergrads congregating at our favorite (read cheapest) pub in Clarke Quay. The place closed eventually, so we found ourselves on the bridge till 3am, inebriating our selves with rounds of beer from the corner 7-11, puffing out perfect rings of smoke and getting strangely philosophical. Or maybe the philosophical part was just me. Eventually, people started coupling and left. Or maybe, they just had had enough nonsense.
And then there were 5 of us.

At this point, N points out that he has a 9 am final the next day.

"Abeyy, this is THE chance beyy. 4th year mein aa gaya hoon and
I've never written an exam sloshed. This is my chance beyyy."
We all agree. We promptly hunt for other ways to maintain sweet intoxication (free of cover charge of course)

Arena has two black women sporting c-rrrazy afros in white hot-pants. Not my beat, really.
The Rupee Room is infested with Indian uncles.
Forbidden City has shut by 3am.

So we arrive at our Mecca- The Ministry of Sound. 9 rooms of music (worth paying cover charge for). We skip trance and R&B and techno and all that (trance and techno are supposed to be the same thing no?No?) and reach the Retro room and boogie away to Boney M for the rest of the night. I feel like I've died and reached heaven. Somewhere in between, I notice people have dropped away like barnacles off a ship ( I know, most absurd analogy possible).
And then there were 3.

T tries to do a jive with me but I trample all over his toes. He, however, simply smiles and looks at the LCD image of the girlfriend on his phone. Aaah...love hath cometh at last. T is happy. N is happy. Everyone is happy.

At 6 am, a cab deposits us back home. We lie in uncomfortable positions on the stairs in front of the hostel (N, me and T, in that order) and count stars like drunken fools.
"I'm not high."
"Neither am I."
"Yea, I'm fine."
But when we notice that one star is positively moving across the sky, we begin to reconsider this.

" Err...guys, do you see a star moving."
" Abey, its not moving bey."
" But it is!"
" okay, lets see in comparision with a stationary star. Oh f*@% man! It is moving!"
" Do you think we're all in the same dream?"
" No. Its a geo-stationary satellite."
"Oh."

Silence for a while.

" Did you know that people don't dream when they're snoring?"
" Really?
" Ya"
" Wow. That means my dad hasn't dreamt in 30 years."

Silence. Laughter. Silence.

"Oh look. There's that planet Mercury. Usko morning star kehte hain."
"Chup kar aunty"

There are still 2 more hours before N's exam and its crucial that we keep him awake. T & I embark on this mammoth task by watching Waisa Bhi Hota Hai part II and feeding him with peanut butter and jelly on hot toast. But in about half an hour, two fully grown man-babies are fast asleep on my lap.

And then there were none.

I guess college in Singapura, as good as college anywhere.

Epilogue:
N made it to the exam on time. He didn't know a darned thing and consequently finished the paper in 10 mins.

"30% paper tha. I'll manage a B+." He says.


Monday, November 26, 2007

Children like me and children like them

Of late, I’ve been thinking of what a great influence our upbringing has on us. I took a mid-of-reading-week-vacation at the home of a dear aunt who has very young children. As I watched them, it hit me with quite an extraordinary force, how the things you learn as a child, really get printed onto your soul.
It made me wonder…Do parents realize that their role extends to beyond that of primary care givers, as far as soul-printers? If people knew, that their half baked beliefs and their protective helmets, their customized paradigms, their myriad insecurities- were being written into the eyes, lips, thoughts and actions of their little children, would they volunteer to take up such a tremendous responsibility? Simply for a thing so trivial as pure, unadulterated, unconditional love in return?
What about when these children grow up?
It’s so heart breaking to think that the people you love and respect so much, your very own super heroes, could have been so wrong.

The mythical enemies…
  • That the world is dangerous and everyone’s out to get you
  • That you must guard your wealth and not share, don’t even think of trusting.
  • That marriage is not about you, but about the people who raised you.
  • That you must never, ever trust your feelings but keep the strongest of them locked in your chest. Even when they pound hard enough to crack your ribs. ( If you’re confused, call your parents, beta)
  • That you must always expect the worst and spend your energy gearing up for scarcity/catastrophe.
  • That a bland and predictable life is far better than one that is even slightly tinged with risk.
  • That experience is to be avoided in favor of imitation.
  • That happiness is rare, that life is about hardship
  • That it is important to appear conventional
  • That, if you are a girl, men are only interested in chewing you up and spitting you out, that you should avoid them completely until your parents find a socially acceptable jerk-off who will do the above mentioned within the confined canopy of holy matrimony and that your only choice as a woman is to put up with this sort of baloney.

I know that for so many, life has been persistently ugly and unfair. It is only natural for such people to want to teach their children to save themselves.
So they teach you all they know, they give you all their armor and ammo, and send you out to the world, to war with it.
But that is the greatest lie of all. There is no war. There is nothing to fight in this ‘real world’. There is no great evil nemesis. All our monsters lie on the other side of the mirror. You start to win when you can begin to look them in the eye…even as you know it is yourself you will see.


I wonder what their parents taught mine. I wonder what life taught them. I wonder why they didn't notice that the world was changing.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

प्रातः काले


Lately, I've found myself up and about at sunrise. And when I do so, its beyond me how I could have ever slept through the enormous racket that those birds manage to put up.

I would never have imagined that I'd say this, but here goes...

The world is awash with such glory early in the morning that late risers can never imagine. Crisp, cool air, mellow, buttery sunshine, the fragrance of freshly blossomed flowers, the song of early birds that have caught their worms ...aah.

If there is heaven on earth, I'm certain that it looks better at dawn.

My friends , on the other hand, have been going the Transylvanian way. They stay conscious between midnight and the beginning of the next workday. This means that our waking hours coincide only between 7 and 8 30 am. So nowadays, breakfast is the new lunch. ( Or dinner, depending on how you look at it).

As we sit at YIH canteen, sip on Teh (which is not chai, mind you), munching on buttered kaya toast , I see new sides of their personality that lay hidden beneath the dust of daily monotony.
In fact they even came up with the most novel idea to solve the problem of bitch batteries. You know, the kind that kills off your computer exactly when you're in the middle of a writing fit, for the mere crime that inspiration hit you somewhat away from a plug point.

"Kinetic Keys," say Aditya* and Vijay**, their eyes shining with boyish excitement, "The machine takes the energy you use to type and uses it to recharge the batteries!"

Simbly ingenious. Never mind the fact that all their epiphanies at dawn are promply followed by crashing into bed, now my fantasies of writing really deep, emotional stuff while sitting amidst swaying golden grasses shall come true. Hurrayy.

* Names changed to protect privacy.
** To be said in Bachchan. Sr. fashion as:

vijay
, vijay, vijay, vijay.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

the last intelligent forward...

GEOGRAPHY OF A WOMAN

Between 18 and 22,
A woman is like Africa ,
Half discovered, half wild, naturally beautiful with fertile soil.

Between 23 and 30,
A woman is like America ,
Well developed and open to trade, especially for someone with cash.

Between 31 and 35,
A woman is like India,
Very hot, relaxed and convinced of her own beauty.

Between 36 and 40,
A woman is like France ,
Gently aging; but still warm and a desirable place to visit.

Between 41 and 50,
A woman is like Great Britain ,
With a glorious and all conquering past.

Between 51 and 60,
A woman is like Yugoslavia ,
Lost some wars, won some great battles but haunted by past mistakes, still
very strong and proud.

Between 61 and 70,
A woman is like Russia ,
Very wide, and borders are now largely un-patrolled.

After 70,
A Woman becomes Tibet,
Off the beaten path, with a mysterious past and the wisdom of the ages...
still desirable but only those with an adventurous spirit and a thirst for
spiritual knowledge and true love dare visit there.


GEOGRAPHY OF A MAN

Between 1 and 78,
A man is like Iran ,
Ruled by a dick.

Monday, November 12, 2007

career day

So this Diwali was full of Indian type fun and frolic - a happy bunch of us ate dial-a-curry Indian food, sipped on Bacardi mixed only with paani (true Indian ishtyle) and watched a wide screen screening of Monsoon Wedding, while nibbling happily on Kaaju katli. A half hour long cross-country bike ride deposited me back home at around 4 am and the last thing I wanted to do was get to lab on 4 hours of sleep to save my pet bacteria from dying (so I can kill them in a more systematic fashion later). But I discovered, quite abruptly the next morning, that it was in fact, not the last thing I wanted to do. The last thing I wanted to do was sit for 5 hours at the Lifesciences Career day Talk organized by our beautiful Faculty of Science who want to prove that no, this is more than just a glorified lab course. And fail miserably at that end for the third time in a row.

"You bum."
"b..wa..a....hoo?
"Wake up. Remember the career fair?"
" Iaya..aya... ai.. faara..thoeo...uaghxxj80@#mxiau...aisiana."

"If you rush, you'll still be able to make it. Come on. UP!"

OKAY. Time to wake up. I'm in my final year. I'm in my final year and I'm not even ready for Career day. Dang.

Challenge #1: Be dressed to kill.
formals..formals...formals...where do I find formals. The thing is, I'm not a formal person. I hate wearing anything that makes it difficult for my butt to breathe (an exception are my Wrangler jeans and you may note the not-so-subtle connotations of its nomenclature. Those are for clubs, where I consider it's better, actually, that it (butt) doesn't (breathe)). I've never bought formals. The only pair of black pants I own were bought as part of a dance costume...Okay they'll have to do.
Now for a top. Aaha..Bingo. $8 black tee from Giordano (thank heavens for lycra :P) A forma-lish pullover, steel earrings (I picked those up for the clubbing purposes as well), heels and I'm good to go.

Challenge #2: get through Registration- since I haven't registered.
I'm an hour late but apparently, they have no problem letting me through. It must be my killer look, I swell. But no, once inside, its pretty obvious that the LT's big enough to seat a lot of us irresponsible unregistered ones.

Challenge #3:
Well, there's no challenge three. Its just Career Day for heaven's sake.

I got there, armed with my laptop and Jane Austen's Emma ( so convinced was I of the seminar subjecting me to a greater degree of boredom). But much to my surprise, they had some really fun speakers down.

Stella Tan is a Masters in Life sciences who went on to get a Law degree at NUS. She looks like she belongs in a prime time TV drama. In fact, her work pretty much is a prime time TV drama- she argues for cases from a forensic standpoint and as a result, had some really gory, stomach-upsetting slides on her power point for us.
"You just make your own career route. Try not to do what everyone else is doing."

During the Q&A session, quite a few mahaan students asked the panel how one could become a CEO of something or the other.
"To become CEO. It has always been my dream. So how-a?"
This question was actually considered seriously by our panel and the CEO of Temasek Lifesciences Lab said.
" You have to have a passion for the job. All my friends who made it in Science, they had a real love for it and so did I. Then you work your way up."

Then there was the director of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity.

"All you’re A’s…. no one’s going to know anything about them a year down after graduation. Once you get to the interview table, the things that’ll really matter are:

  1. soft skills
  2. global knowledge
  3. interactive skills
  4. emotional quotient
  5. knowledge of the world

So, go read a newspaper, I say."

I've obviously used my selective hearing superpowers and sifted through a whole lot of BS that also inevitably made its way through to this day. (For eg, the answer to the question " Why doesn't the Faculty of Science have a graded internship program? Why do you send your kids out with no working experience whatsoever?" was - "Bla..blablablaa.. bla bla..blaa.")

But for once, life sciences career day turned out to be more just, career day and wasn't really half useless. Emma remained unread.







Saturday, November 10, 2007

edit. select all. undo.

Waking up is not much fun business anymore. Lie around, wallow for the half hour I should be doing Yoga... dreaming of things that will never come to pass...
Its become a disease now, this motion picture track thats constantly running in my head, full of people and dialogues and events that shouldn’t mean anything at all. To be sure, other people have had much, much worse.

“get up, get up, get up. Get out, get out, get out of this rut.”

I miss work. I miss than delicious feeling, the feeling that’s like crunching on nuts or sucking on gooseberries, this semi-punishing-semi-delightful feeling of doing work you can barely contain your excitement for. When I was in school, I loved my books. They were overused, abused and falling apart. They had been scribbled all over, in many colored pencils, highlighted everywhere in shocking blue and had doodles of girl-faces on the corners of nearly every page. They were definitely the un-tidiest books in the whole class. But I loved them and they were such a mess because I literally, loved them to pieces. I loved the notes I’d write over them, notes that somehow, only I could make sense of and drove my tuition teachers mad. In my mind, I wasn't preparing for any exams, I was learning of the wide, wonderful world so it was exciting and I wanted to master it all.

None of my books look like that anymore. I don't love what I learn anymore. What a fucking waste my education has been.

But then, as I constantly remind myself,
other people have had much, much worse.


Thursday, November 08, 2007

Working hypothesis/ I believe

If you can't think of any good reasons as to why you're still so unhappy, chances are that you don't have any. The past is right where it belongs, in the past, and the future calls to be made by this very moment. Occasionally, you need a kick in the rear to get yourself out of that self-sorry little bubble that you've painstakingly put up, coated with alternate layers of regret and pride.
Sometimes life gives you a kiss on the cheek instead and its as effective.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

new hobby after a "brief" hiatus

इत्स अनोत्हर वीक्दे मोरनिंग woah...watzis

okay...this place has definitely changed. I've been gone that long?

There hasn't been too much going on. Most days start exactly like this one. Unless I'm in lab, I spend hours sipping on chai and watching the nth episode of the
Gimore Girls for the nth time. Then I consider the prospect of practicing some Yoga and usually ditch the idea in favor of sipping on chai for a longer while. Before I know it, its noon and its time for the most important event of the day... Lunch . Post lunch, its hardly any time at all before its time to go back home and make some more chai. And then sip on it.
4th year's turning out to be the chillest (chill-i-est? imagine that, one i can entirely change the temperature of a word!) ever...there's too much time to bum around, too much time between classes and too few deadlines. And it suits me just fine. Don't get me wrong, its not a good idea to slack through your FYP...in fact, lab is one of the more serious, organized areas of my life but considering that I work with protiens (with proteins? sheesh...as if they were people) now, that have a mind of their own (like some people, in fact), its usually weeks before I have any results worth writing home about it. In fact, such an opportunity is so rare, that I haven't written home in months (figuratively speaking).

Since I don't want to talk about that
achy-breaky feeling in my heart (which might just be my asthma acting up), we shall talk about other things that have recently occupied the minuscule margin of my mind that's reserved for the examination of things like Indian Popular Cinema and such.

Laaga Chunri Mein Daag

( I imagine that the people concerned with the making of this film, saw the full length horror of it for the first time, covered their faces and sang the second line in between wails... "dikhaoon kaise...!?")







Its a baad film. On several counts.
  1. Its a baad film that actually portrays grooming to be a high class hooker analogous to grooming for a career in modelling.
  2. Its a bad film that wastes the beauteous Hema Malini, (who has preserved that youthful, angel-faced glow by drinking glasses of bittergourd juice day after day, year after year), do a hideous Mujra that only stops a little short of looking cheap.
  3. Its a baad film with Jaya Bacchan wasting a "Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa" performance on a worthless B-grade role.
  4. Its a bad film that makes it seem that every small town girl who doesnt know "kampyootter" can't make a living in big, baad mumbhaidoing things like stitching or tailoring (which incidentally, Rani's character actually puts on her RESUME in the film) or as a "Meena fancy store" shop keeper girl...or something, anything other than as a hooker.
  5. Its a baad film which, I imagine, that a reasonably good actor like Kunal Kapoor and a brilliant actress like Konkona Sen, were most certainly extorted into doing.

Its beyond me how the same person who made
Parineeta, could make this film. But then, as a friend pointed out, the story of Parineeta had only to be scripted from a well-loved novel.
In short- its a baad film. But I must admit, the actresses (Uh.. sorry, I mean female actors {wtf}), sport some totally covetable ethnic-wear. Otherwise, totally
waste.


To make up for this highly disagreeable experience, God sent to the earth a cutesy romantic comedy called-

Jab We Met.






On any given day, I will tell you that I detest Kareena Kapoor's guts. Now that I've seen this film, I hate them (her guts) even more. Because as another friend pointed out, in this movie you can almost see how the Shahid-Kareena romance might have flowered (and then she had to go and ruin it). But freaky fan-sentiments aside, what I mean to say is that their chemistry on screen is S-O-L-I-D. But that's hardly the best thing about this film.

Lets see...where do I begin.

O yes, the dialogue, definitely. It's like listening to a conversation between you and your friends. The lines just dawdle down the screen, like it was lifted off of an ordinary day from the ordinary people of
urban India. The sad, sad little industrialist boy Aditya meets an unreasonably happy (and go-lucky) Sikhni girl Geet, on a train. Now she could have pissed you off with her uncomplicatedly rosy take on life (Geet could so easily have been a different kind of "Lucky"-if you remember the one with no time for love?). But the character sketch is so thorough and the exchange between the two so crisply hilarious, that you start to love this girl with the balls to be so shamelessly happy in this big ugly world, even though those guts are brought to life by those of Kareena Kapoor (which, as I mentioned, hate).

Other things I like about the movie:

  1. I like the way they include an obscure Ratlam, one of those ugly little shanty towns that you pass by on long train journeys across north India, with its of Hotel Decent (s) (LMAO).
  2. I love that Geet's family in Bhatinda do not live in an impossible white washed haveli (you know, the ones with a living room as big as a football field, complete with a sweeping staircase in the living room that could fit 5 elephants standing breadthwise), but is one of those carelessly planned small town "terrace" homes from the 70's that's completely believable.
  3. I like the way the Grandfather of the house looks at Geet's halter top and says" Agar tum yeh pehankar ghar aayi ho, to Mumbai mein nanga ghoomti hogi!", yet is spared from giving long lectures about bharat ki sanskriti and such (which is a right this role may have totally abused).
  4. Similarly,
  • Geet is spared from playing te stereotypical bimbo( she thinks, this one),
  • Aditya is spared from being the stereotypical Knight in shining armor- (he doesn't save her and then claim her, rather just saves her and steps out of the way) and
  • The Punjabi family is spared from brandishing stereotypical hockey sticks when Geet comes back home with her lover 9 months after eloping.
My favorite scene in the film is when the two protagonists are sitting in a toy-type mountain train somewhere in Manali. Its one of those oh-so-predictable scenes, when you just know that the two are not going to say anything useful and will just throw clandestine lovey dovey glances at each other, afraid to say anything. That's what one would think, yes.

But instead, the script writer just ignores all those time tested rules and makes the girl say (and I translate),
"You really like me, don't you?!"
and then makes the boy say,
"Oh yes. But you don't worry about that, its my problem, really."

Pleasant little surprises like these are littered about this film so unselfconsciously, that I feel its only fair to overlook a mild dose of cheeziness that has also crept in. Its forgivable. They'll do better next time, you can just see that much promise floating around for this wonderful new director, Imtiaz Ali (this is his second movie).

So grab your friends and go watch this film as soon as you have a free evening, I say.


Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Clubber Pubber

I get all pragmatic these days, about the idea of clubbing and all those clubbers. There was this day during a clubbing episode, when it suddenly struck me that although it keeps happening all around me, I never get hit on at clubs . Not that I want to be hit on, really. Just that it seemed such an odd curiosity. And the question dubiously loomed in front of me- what is the true nature of the club?

So as the night progressed and when even 5 of the sugary pink house-pour drinks (that looked so deceptively potent in tiny shot glasses) failed to get me drunk, rather induced me into a mellow and thoughtful high, I was able to see a great deal of things,
clearly, if you will. I made the following observations:
  • Everybody in a club is gorgeous (maybe that was the pink drink thinking)
  • Everybody in the club is dressed to highlight his/her best assets.
  • A LOT people in the club are there hoping to fulfill some lusty fantasy- either in real time, or in their own minds, both with ample help from lots (and LOTS) of alcohol.
  • Everyone in the club is engaged in some strange, disorganized mating ritual, a mass gathering of sexually mature (as declared by a plastic card) men and women, many of whom hope to leave with a potential mate before sunrise.
  • In short most people at a club are somewhat pathetic and horny.
  • The most common archetypes of the female clubber are:
    1. The ones with the "girl meets world" expression on their faces.
    2. Or the ones doing the "let me shake my bum a bit harder so it jerks to the side like my lumbar spine has been electrocuted- then that cute guy will wanna feel me up"
    3. The ones like me: I wish I was drunk enough to be girl number 2 because ignorant bliss is really preferable to wise caution. But unfortunately, when you're girl number 1, you're girl number 1. Hmmm..
    4. Of course there are plenty of other, more respectable types, who're just there to cool off after a hard week.
Just a thought.
Anyway, frame shifts to this past weekend and the raucous party that it brought along. Actually skip that. Frame shifts (rather hastily) to Monday morning. Monday morning is worse than Sunday morning because on Sunday, everybody is still recovering from their hangovers and its well into Sunday night before your "friends" emerge from their cocoons and graciously inform you that you were a royal embarrassment to the human race the previous evening.So...This was a blue and gloomy Monday and I was feeling lousy about crassly exposing my inner fool at the party. Alcohol did nothing for me but bring back the most ridiculous, attention seeking, school-girl phase of my young life, that should have been wiped away into oblivion a long time ago. I was slightly upset about this because I wanted people to see me as I saw myself in the mirror (totally FABulous). That morning, I was afraid I had blown my image and reputation completely and I wanted some huge all-concealing lie that would distract everyone, most particularly myself, from the truth of all the stupidity I had subjected myself to. I considered joining a weight loss program or getting a fabulous new hairdo or buying yet another skanky boob-shirt- I’ve noticed how these things often serve to help people get over your shortcomings forgive you for being a flawed human being in general.
But luckily for me, I had a great deal of work to do and I forgot all about feeling crappy as soon as I wrote all of this down. Down with partying. Cheers to ruthless project work.

I'll be back in the groove by Saturday. Woohoo.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Peace. Temporary, deceptive, irritating peace that I bought using flat lies. So... this is what it feels like, to burn out. You feel a temporary, deceptive, irritating peace that you know is going out the window when the real world comes back in.

I wish I could be funny about this. I mean, the problem is supposedly that I can't take these things lightly. Its just a project. So you have the boss from hell- most people do. Its really all in your head. Think about your future. This is for your own good. You'll emerge a stronger person. Bruahuahuahuaha.

Its not that I dislike rats. I loved one of them like I would a dog- if I had a dog. I even wept for it the day I gave it an overdose of urethane, slipped it into a plastic bag and stashed it into the freezer so that it would die quietly. It was essential of course, that it died, since the lab has to pay extra for every day that its alive. It struck me then that something was awfully strange about this situation, real, happy scientists don't cry for their lab rats. Depressed scientists might. So might misplaced artists. So this was a very wrong thing, really.

So I took off. Cooked and churned up random excuses and took off. I bolted with my tail between my legs, wimp that I am. I may never go back. But apparently, I should.

I'm ready to sit on a street corner and make charcoal paintings of little children. I'll starve and suffer to save up for a pair of ghungroos. I'll live in a single room studio apartment with a hot plate and a mattress on the floor and an easel in the corner. People shouldn't be forced to do things they have no aptitude for. But people should just sit through the Honors year they worked so hard to get into in the first place. Apparently its the smart thing to do. I'm not so sure. Apparently there's no way I can do a decent post grad degree in anything with only a 3 year Bsc. Fine.

I'm spiralling on a tsunami to hell. Nobody gets it. I'm drowning in a pit of fear and self pity.

" Ride the wave, honey." That's the only comment so far that been of any use in helping me pull myself together.

Monday, July 16, 2007

In an instant

Instant coffee is the worst thing any body could have thought of. It certainly gives you the pick up you need when you're down and out and gives it fast, but soon enough, you realize that if you have to put up with this quick but poor quality stuff everyday, you might be put off coffee altogether. Anyhow, after my recent bout of trysts with quick fixes, I have finally decided that I'm an old fashioned, slow and steady kind of person, who doesn't really mind waiting a while for my perfect cup of coffee, of strength, richness and flavor thats just right for me.
If you're wondering if there's a point to this post, trust me, there is.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarhg
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhh.


I hate rats. I love cats. Because cats eat rats. I would love to unleash an army of cats out on the animal handling unit and devour all those mother#%^@#@$#!@ rats and bring all projects at CeLS (Centre for the Life Sciences) to a screeching halt and there by allow me to have an honors degree by speculating the degree of nociception (sensory, affective and cognitive) experienced by rats as they were being chewed alive.

Its unfair of me, I know. After all, they're just stupid animals- but apparently not so stupid that they can't be used as models to study human emotion. The rats are not the problem. humans are the problem. Human bosses are the problem. Humans with petty emotions are the problem. Humans, born and raised in this poor excuse for a country, are the problem.
Its unfair of me, I know. But I'm feeling kind of crazy right now.

Meanwhile, there's something else on the personal palatte that's also driving me utterly insane. I can't wait for school to start so that I'll stop being the only crazy one around.

Now, I go meditate.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Yes, it is Brain surgery
It took me three months to psyche myself into doing honors. It took three minutes for my P I to totally destroy any shred of confidence I had that I would be able to do this project. It took a three hour long ISD phone call to the U S of A to gather up all my spilt guts with some much needed words of encouragement and send a simple " yes, I'll do it no matter how tough you say it'll be" email to the same P I.

Its been three weeks and I'm still alive. Woo hoo.

Now, I'd louve to say that it was all much easier than I thought it would be, that it had only been fear I'd had to fear of at that first instance. No, I had very real things to fear, like the wild and wonderful jungle of my mind, where stray thoughts prowl and pounce at will, and eat words like "focus", " accuracy" and "concentration" for dinner. I'm hopelessly scatter brained. Of course, thats what makes me such a colorful delight of a person, but its not exactly the ideal skill set to bring with you to neuro biological research.

My first lab rat, my very own, the rat that was named after me, ARN/02/07, died pathetically on the operation table. I think I squeezed its skull too much while fixing it up for brain surgery and it hemorrhaged. It wheezed and whined and died sullenly with a " now look what you've done" expression on its face. Crap. I nearly blinded my supervisor with a prepared injection syringe full of atropine and displayed my fantastically poor arithmetic to the entire lab on my very second day.
But I've also uncovered a few talents that have lain buried under assumptions of daintiness. For one, I have no qualms about post-mortem. I can drill on target, any marked point on rat-skull. I can scicssor and scapel my way through innards, diphragm and ribs, all the way to a tiny, delicate heart, beating away its last on my fore and mid fingers. I can cleanly pull out a rubbery spinal cord from its housing in the vertebral column.

I know, it all sounds rather gory, but we're studying the nervous system and the effects of morphine on it and I feel its important work, the kind that might just make a difference in world. Of course, I feel like a bumbling fool on many days, but its all passing to give way to something really exciting...and ( I hardly believe I'm saying this) Fun.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Back at home

Yoga, filter coffee and temples. And cooking, the exciting artistry of spices. I've been busy this summer. Its been a long and lovely escape (including two happy weddings!). Home was more than worth enduring 6 hour flight on a bus with wings pretending to be a plane. Now why would I do anything as inane as sit in front of a box and punch out words from on an ancient, stubborn keyboard? I guess its because I'm kind of gearing up to get back to school.

My oldest friend (as in the one that goes the longest way back) is now a Mrs... Now the aunties look at me and say " The next invite will be for your wedding. Ah, I remember when you from when you were this high", they smirk with pseudo nostalgic looks. I smile back and supress the urge to retch. But still, I have learnt a few things from all the wedding fever- I am determined that I will never have a wedding in Guruvayoor, which is like an Indian Vegas, and my wedding sari will have nothing to do with any shade of brown.

The monsoons came early this year, it's first raindrops were shot straight to my face by the whipping wind and woke me up on the long bus ride back to Coimbatore from Calicut. I took 2nd class public transport both ways across Kerala- to experience real life, after an overdose of the MRT and glittering malls in Singapore. All I can say is, I'll take my upper middle class bubble of AC three tier on all India trips hence forth.

Real estate prices are at an all time high here, in Coimbatore, so high, that there's nowhere for it to go now but downward. I can't be sure but I must be growing up, since this excites me considerably and I can't wait to get my own stretch of earth to erect my dream house on. I told this to my mom and she said that on the contrary, this makes me sound more young and stupid than ever before.

I made honors. Now, I can be a Bharatanatyam dancer and a scientist, like all those fancy Tamil Brahmin chicks. All of them have a heavily left brained job- surgeon, computer whizz, magistrate, electrical engineer (now employed at Infosys, were all employees get free buttermilk daily) plus an artistic career on the side, usually classical dancer or musicienne. Of course, I have no business saying things like that...but I've never met any tam-brahms who weren't multi talented. I know, I spent all my time in school competing with them. So yes, I'm in that league now, after all these years.

*Like it actually matters*

Esplanade is on the calendar this August. Unless Teacher decides to throw me out of the show since I'm extending my stay at home by another week. O well, you win some...There's also an art exhibiton thats scheduled for December for which I'll have to do some major homework before I finally settle on my piece. Life looks so exciting all of a sudden. And ocassionally, its even clear to me, how the story unfolds. I can't explain what I mean, not just as yet.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007


I just luv these blog things...
plus its an excuse for my lazy-lately blog :)

Monday, April 30, 2007

Happy Summer Holidays

Dancing in the underpass....
Dancing where the evening fell
Dancing in your wooden shoes
In a dressing gown..

Yay! i'm done (for)!

I've been celebrating the end of exams. I deserve to.
I've been studying these past few weeks... standing upside down, not sleeping, eating too much, busting my ear drums (I can't study without the constant drub of music inside my head drowning out all the other voices), agonizing over tiny phrases while overlooking entire chapters, getting to my exams just in time to slip past before the final call, emerging in a semi-dazed state of zen... I am above and beyond caring about results, all that matters is that I got through.
So the first two days of holidays have been perfect. Perfectly center-free, perfectly aimless, perfectly indulgent, perfectly wonderful and I'm perfectly tired of it. Considering that I haven't slept much in the past three days and that its 6 30 am, I'm probably not tired of anything in particular, just tired-period.

The plan was to wind down at my dear friend/guardian's pad, sink into her rather uncofortable yet sufficiently squishy couch, eat popcorn,drink ice lemon tea and watch cricket. Yes cricket. I don't even like cricket, but what the hell, it is the national
passtime ((not this nation, I mean the mother country. And also not cricket per se, rather cricket watching is the national passtime). So anyhoo, I manage to get myself treated to dinner, then get as far as the couch and turn on the tele( thats what I'm calling it these days) when friends start calling up left right and center- everybody's going clubbing. Since everybody's doing it, I do too (story of my life) and clubbing we go. It started out in a bad way, and for a while we were caught in a nightmarish realm of obscure 80's pop music, with strange Chinese people and middle aged Indian men gyrating to the beat of Square Root ("the favorite non-Chinese song of Chinese people", to quote a friend) at Double O. But thankfully, we found that the bar below played all the R&B club numbers you could possibly ask for (even though the DJ turned down our request for Belly Dancer...imagine that?!). After shaking away about a thousand calories we made up for it at what will henceforth be reffered to as the Prada shop (as it is so cutely reffered to by an from-out-of-town acquaintance )with cheese pratas and maggi mee. Crashed at 6 30am...more than twenty four hours ago.
The day that followed was inaugurated by making myself the best breakfast I've had in a long time- Sausages, scrambled egges, peanut-butter on toast and my spectacular Coffee. I spent the rest of the day alternating between TV viewing and finishing up
The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster, which is
the most wonderful blend of the popular novel and serious post-modernist fiction I have come across (yes, I can actually use the word post modernist now and have a clue). The treat of the evening was Fracture at GV- very enjoyable (although some superior beings, who dwell on a higher plane of thought found it predictable). Gosling was h-o-t and Hopkins eerily resembles my Hungarian boss. And the best part of all, book your tickets online at Vivo GV, buy a popcorn and drink combo and get TWO Ben and Jerry scoops in your choice of flavor absolutely free! I was thrilled to bits. Nothing makes me as happy as chocolate chip cookie dough icecream.
Now my book is done and so is this piece of writing. The sun has come up so I can go back to sleep without having to leave the light on.


Saturday, April 28, 2007

And its back to school and boy bashing:
So one day (today), my exams finished themselves up and suddenly, I had a lot of spare time. So decided to actually take up an argument I remember having with *eyyyewww… boyzz*, when we were itty bitty. Lets start with the story that sowed this seed of thought into my good friend, the SewageMessiah's brain.
Consider, if we turned around Brian K. Vaughn's terrible (its terrible! What if all the men in my life disappeared? I would so miss both of them) story and all the women in the world vanished all of a sudden. Take note, in a matter of a mere half century, women have successfully permeated every field previously dominated by men and are established well enough to know the "internal workings of the system". But surprisingly, men still haven’t gotten the hang of "housework" and "looking after themselves" in all these past millennia. As a result, the remaining half of the human race would rapidly contract infectious diseases perpetuated by a general lack of hygiene. Without mothers, sisters, nuns or nurses to look after them, the sick would be incurable in spite of advanced medical technology. And men being the selfish bastards that they are would try to save themselves by quarantining the sick and letting them die. Having a strong mathematical sense and a wonderful mastery of numbers, they would come up with great statistical models on how to segregate different kinds of sick people to minimize contagion. But of course considering the verifiable fact that "men are pigs", that every man would contract one disease or the other would become imminent. Adding to this, the exponential increase of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome cases, due to spiraling rates of homosexuality in a womanless world, the whole world would eventually be divided into one country per ailment and everyone would eventually rot in their own private plague quarters. Hence, the second mass extinction of a species in the history of the planet earth, with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus emerging as the climax species.
Now, mounting an objective standpoint:
RELIGION:
Can't argue with the Sewage Messiah about this one. Religion would perish without men to keep up all the brahuahua. And so would a whole ideological state apparatus designed to seal the mind of the layperson (notice I said "person"?) off the natural human tendency to question the norm and pursue the higher truth. Good riddance.

SCIENCE:
I will pull my argument out of His own gracious words,
"for centuries women were barred entry to the sciences, therefore it will take a few generations before women reach the same level of scientific aptitude as men". As for direction and expertise, women are already working on that, what with statistics indicating that more and more women are opting to be engineers and scientists, including, surprise surprise, geneticists (yours truly) and astronauts (remember Chawla? But of course, you know there've been many more space-women before and since). So we're already preparing for a possible "man-ocide" situation.
Its true, if all the men vanished, the most missed would be the handymen. But wait! We'd still have the greatest scientific and technological legacy men ever left behind- The User Manual. Women will learn how to fix a bulb eventually. Of course, its not in our nature to do so, but hey, neither was domestic work and we managed to do that just fine for a really long time because of a real situation, similar to the would-be situation of "no-man"...if we don't do it, nobody will.
THE ARTS:
Women couldn't paint because they were cooking.
Women couldn't compose music because they were cooking.
Women couldn't cook because they were cooking?
Well yes. All the poor-to-middle class women of the world have been cooking for a really long time. And there's more.
But before that, what about the bourgeoisie women across the world? Now that's just absurd. They certainly weren't cooking.
So lets think about the fine English Ladies who sat in fine houses adorned with fine Van Gogh works of art. Now think about bejeweled Indian princesses in their Hawa Mahals. Or the Arabian chieftain's veiled daughter far removed from the reach of the evil eye. Or say, the young French women who often posed for these great works of art. What were these lazy women doing, wasting their time, giving themselves airs, not getting an education? WOAH! Did I say EDUCATION? Did I? Did I? O my god! What do the poor women, the middle class women and the rich aristocratic women have in common by shared deprivation? An Education! So the poor and middle class women were taught to cook and look after babies, while the aristocratic women of the world were taught rubbish things like etiquette, ceramic painting and bricolage. Of course, they were also taught how to be an ideal wife and mother.

SEX: I don't think women would turn to beasts. But this part is mostly right.
I'm tired now. All this angsty feminist ranting is exhausting. I really have no comments on the next ice age.

If you wanna know what a world without women would be like, there are other places to look toward. Like a prison, for instance. Monasteries also. Generally, sweeping generalizations are my pet peeve.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

In this hazy post-midnight hour, things have a tendency to mix. The mind's been on midnight mode for a while now...and Iris meets Ap, we converge and diverge, melt and merge and eventually condense back into our native forms, leaving behind a dusty, dried up, rather-wrung-out, thing of a girl. Its not easy, housing two or more people inside you.(Twin knows!) Yes, I'm crazy. Or very normal.

Iris vs Apu

  • Anarchical Eats healthy
  • Has no plan
  • Studies Bio
  • Does watever
  • Works as off
  • Works ass off when it feels right
  • Is always happy and is up for anything.
  • Moves from crisis to crisis

Both of us live life on the edge


The world outside is in a mad frenzy, muggers, crammers, (notice,the violence in the metaphors?) are all running amuck. Night has become day- we meet in packs, feast on junk, struggle through the night and collapse into fitful stupor at dawn. I can't wait till this is done. I write in fragments because that is how the days and the things in them go by, is it not so?

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Exam Panorama -3

and slowly...stillness..silence

Innocent casualties of senseless cruelty


EXAM PANAROMA- PART 2

Survival-while stocks last. No more oat-milk!


Victim. Groping for the last morsel.

Exam panorama: PART 1



Lost souls...trying to make sense of the madness



Sole surviver at the site of the carnage





Friday, April 06, 2007

I'm done for. really truly done for. This is it. I have truly, completely screwed up.
And whats my excuse? Dance? Poor excuse. Its not like I perform for the Russian Ballet.
What else have I got? Mental trauma? snort.
Anything else? Social life. REALLY? REALLY? You've completely totally given up working because you have too many places to be?

But its done. Yup. I just missed my deadline. There it goes. 10%. Whistling, as it slides down the drain. Why? Because I didn't find it convenient. It was just too much of a bother. It wasn't even too much work. In fact, it was hardly any work at all. But it was too much of bore. So I just didn't do it. But there it goes. My honors. everything. Gone going gone. Gone gone gone.

And I'm sitting here. and watching my bloodpressure climb and my grades plummet. But strange enough, I'm just taking a deep breath and going out for a drink.

Can you believe this shit?
My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.



Haw haw.

My Celebrity Look-alikes

My cool celebrity look-alike collage from MyHeritage.com. Get one for yourself.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Junkie

I've long prided myself for being addicted to nothing. Spring cleaning revealed a pretty different story.

( Face scrubs)
1.Seaweed.
2.Almond oil.
3.Almond and mineral micro nutrients.

(Body Lotions)
1.Micro fruit Oils.
2.Alovera.
3.Shea Butter.
4.Olive oil.

(Lip balm)
1. Mint
2. Gloss dot
3. passionfruit
4. PABA-free SPF 15
5. Mentholatum water

1. for dry hair (shampoo and conditioner)
2. for long and strong hair (shampoo and conditioner)

( hair styling products)
1. Revitalizing
2.extreme shine
3.instant bounce
4.anti-frizz
5. style water
6. Lipocomplex Protein serum

Peppermint Foot lotion.

Diamond Strength Nail formula.

I'm a cosmetoholic! Eeeep. How did I slip into this obsession without even noticing?
And the scariest bit is, I can't do without most of this stuff!

Friday, March 30, 2007

EXCERPTS:

Its been a while since I've written anything at all. Freshly opened word documents stare blankly at my face every night. After a few minutes of trying to will the screen to burst into words, I grab on to another thought's tail, as it goes flitting through my mind. Hence another wave of inspiration is left behind.

My time on earth has run up to twenty one years now. For twenty-one years of being their little girl, my parents sent over 9 gem studded ring, set in gold. It's such a grand beauty. I wear it like a talisman.

I'm bored with soaps, all of them. So I've taken to reading Sade's pornographic novels from the 19th century. A purely literary pursuit.

There was some talk of another play. I got all excited:

"Whats it about?"

“We should call the play parenthetically yours. Or rather parenthetically (yours)”

“ Ah! What's it about?”

“ Its about all those people (and these people are everywhere, mind you), who are completely devoted to someone around them but can't do anything about it."

"Oh"

"Don't get it?"

"Dunno. Maybe"

"How do I explain... okay it goes likes this. I'm always yours but all I can do is tell you. I'm not going to paint any banners for you. But I love you till kingdom come and once we're there, you still won't have more than an inkling of how much you mean to me."

" Oh"

"Makes sense?"

"No. Of course not."

It'll make a boring play.

Went out for a walk a few nights ago. I kept my eyes on the sky most of the time and walk along the darker parts of the track. It was a beautiful, starlit night with translucent clouds spread in thin shimmering sheets across the midnight blue sky. The beaming moon hung low on the horizon. Somebody had taken an enormous bite out of its perfectly round, cheescake face. It felt wonderful to miss red skies with no stars.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Shiva and the fear of death

Shiva and the fear of death

In the beginning there was Shiva. There was nothing and out of this zero came everything. Within the rims of the zero lie all that is between the two ends of infinity. Fear and love, joy and loathing, sorrow and wonder, desire, anger and peace. Blearg. The blearg sentiment also lies within this limitless "O".
In the beginning, there was a big, fat zero like s"O". It burst and threw out flaming rocks of its own nothingness. Yet faster than fire, faster than even liquid or light, traveled space. Space through which we move, space across which light sends its glimmering message, space for mountains to inch upward, space for setting strings so that sound may bounce off them in harmony, space for supernovas to swallow as they bulge and erupt, space enclosed by mirrored walls of a studio, within which I watch my reflection and wonder what to do.
How do we wake up? Out of the wrong side of bed...with a frown. With a smile left behind by a sweet dream and then dissolve into tears of disappointment. Or with a start, from a night-mare and then at once thankful for the safety of daylight. How many times a week do we wake up feeling anything at all?
Indifference. So many mornings of indifference. One more day. Another day in paradise is exactly the same as another day in the purgatory. Today began with indifference.
What will purge one of indifference? To wake up to the fact that we are not. I climbed up the top of a hill and considered free falling. Oh glory. To hear my blood flow, to hear my nerves crackle and to hear my heart beat. But one is not indifferent to death. Only to life.
Thats how it ends. Shiva..the god of THE END. But Shiva is the god of dance, dancing to the rhythm of the universe, of little atoms in their shells, of oceanic waves, the rhythm of the seasons, of day and night and of every breath. When we stop breathing, we blend into another instrument of the divine rhythm- the earth itself. If our ears weren't so used to it, we would be able to hear the earth spin.

Fear and love, joy and loathing, sorrow and wonder, desire, anger and peace. Heaven and hell. It is the cosmic gift, we were allowed to hear the universe speak in feeling.











Friday, March 09, 2007

What is the answer to stupidity? More questions.

What is the answer to dissatisfaction?

Why are there such wide gaps between intentions, actions and effects? Karma? No,perhaps we don't really think it through.

Why are the simplest questions the hardest to answer? Who are we, why are we here and why does everyone pretend like they know? Why must I, like everybody else before me, go through my life in search of answers to the same old questions? I want to do something new! Why does it seem that desire for controlling the mayhem drives many further than the desire to understand it? Why do so few really see the circumstance we are in? How can people pass through their lives neither looking into themselves nor beyond themselves, stuck in the gray space between? What has millenia of our experience as a race of enlightened beings, given us more than stronger and stronger arguments for every opposing idea? And grander reasons to keep up the argument? Do opposites meet at some abstract point in infinity? Or do right and wrong flesh each other out , can one thrive only in light of the other? Then what is peace? Is peace just another distracting idea that puts us off our quest for the truth?

Chill out over enchiladas tomorrow, thats what I'll do. Chilling out engages one in life and life has all the answers, ey? That's another question. So what is the cure for stupidity? Silence and stillness. No thats the cure for restlessness.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Hateful, children are hateful. They plague your time, your life, your mind space, everything, with their stupid, inexcusable, inexperience. They stress you out and make you resort to quick fixes like coffee and chocolate. That makes you fat. Where do they come from? Why are they made? To bother us, WE who have finally got the hang of what to do, after years and years of hard lessons? Why bother us now? Leave us alone! Perhaps its not such a Huxlean nightmare after all , to rear them all in human nurseries till they're ready to come out into the adult, adult, ADULT world! And the worst kind of children are those that are in their freshman year of college. Brainless twits. I wish they would, for heaven's sake, educate themselves. Worst of all, you have to be nice to them. Or else, they CRY. *shudder*

Do I sound a little mad? I am. And not just about child problems.

For example, I wished there was some way to up-date my music without having to work too hard. Like perhaps, copy it off other people, with their 60GB strong music collections. And I wished there'd be some easy way to shift all my music to Winamp as I'm done and through with media player. So God or His alter ego, the Devil, sent down to the earth, a virus that ate up all my music files...Chomp, Chomp, Chomp. So now, I use Winamp to play the 4 songs I have left. People are offering to share their collections with me. But reformated comp is still not on the network. Be careful what you wish for, huh?


Anyway, enough of all this, to work, to work... work makes really good escape.



Friday, February 23, 2007

ABSOLUT RAIN
It had been a sweltering day and I hadn't been expecting rain. Indeed, I'd been cooped up, alternately in my room and in the library and had had no expectations from anything to liven up my rather dull mood. But there I was in the early evening, walking in between raindrops, while sun shone brilliantly between dark clouds. I decided to brave the rain umbrella-less, (I have the ugliest pink parasol you could possibly imagine, so I mostly pretend not to have an umbrella at all), and pay a visit to a poor sick friend. It looked like the normal sort of rain. you watch it from a distance and see white lines, intermittently traced in the air by bullets of water. But when I actually went out there, not one drop met my skin. Strangely enough, I really was walking in between raindrops. I survived the watery blitzkreig for a full five minutes and emerged bone dry.

When I got there, she looked drugged as hell and the room stank of vodka ( Yes, I can distinguish the smell vodka from other types of alcohol, although all other types of alcohol smell the same to me. Except for beer, of course). I succeeded in chatting pointlessly about general going-ons at the Centre and about popping over to Malaysia for a hairdo (Jean-Yip Johor Bahru charges half the price it does here! Its too good to be true!). It was still light outside when I pulled out my ugly pink umbrella and made my way back home. This time I got back soaked.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

OF OVERCROWDING

I'm all out of words when it comes to talking things out. It should be a no-brainer, when you talk, you use words. But no, its exactly when I want to talk that I completely and utterly run out of words. Like that fellow Lebetezyatnikov in Crime and Punishment, "he was not very skillful in expressing himself in Russian, although he knew no other language...". Now that is one of the several and I do mean several places in the Great Book, that struck a chord with me. O hell, these dialogues I am forced to make with the many people in my head!

I belive that I am worse off than the average person, who has to bear with the white voice of the angel and the black one of the devil. For not only are there more than two of me in my head, there is atleast two of everybody else I know.

What drives me up the wall and makes me want to pick up an axe and slice and dice with crazed abandon, is that these versions of the same person (the several ones in my mind, as well as the one in the real world to which all the sub conscious ones refer) seem absolutely unaware of each other's existence and never, ever co-operate. You don't understand me? I'll explain.

Imagine a person, who I (or anyone else, for that matter) am friendly with in real life. He/she does this or that, says this or that and I smile (because I smile at everything) and say, "aha..". Thus forth, some sort of program commences in my head where a person has so much chance of doing any infinite number things, based on their character (or what I have naively (prejudically?) deduced their character to be).

After a phase, once the program has auto-corrected all its errors (arising mainly due to want of data), the results progressively get more accurate. So this becomes a very reliable way to calculate the probability of how this given individual shall behave in a given circumstance. And it works, this stupid, presumptuous program works long enough to mislead and misguide, long enough to catch me completely and utterly by shock, when the actual person (who lives in the real world) behaves with no regard, whatsoever, for my careful deductions, upon which I have possibly dwelt for days and days and days!


So I create a new program (quite involuntarily, believe me) to account for the changes exhibitted by this person, now weirdly, a stranger. But the former program cannot be deleted, it is still running. Over successive years, new programs are added for the same person, each program churning out too many conflicting results, each representing facets of this individual's personality so diverse, that they must, o yea, they must belong to different people.

Then I am left totally confounded. I cannot explain, to this complex human being, why I feel the way I do, why he/she can, by small silly acts, can upset me so and why I am unable, even to say that I am hurt (beyond any degree that they can possibly understand) because,
"I thought I knew who you were". Pah.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Life after college.
Wonderful.
Its almost 1 am and here I, am not doing the gazillion things I need to, again. Resumes (yes, the time has really come) need modification, essays await writing, fat textbooks, fairly bursting with all that biology, lie coated in dust, toppling over one another on the dusty bookshelf.
Whatever. Midsem break’s almost here, I’ll catch up then or so I hope.
I love this lazy illusion of life that college paints. Its closest to my escapist world of the ideal (to where I drift off often).
In my fantasy world, we’d all be suspended in thin air and we could drift guilelessly from action to action, without causing a ripple in the fabric of our lives. Everyday would truly be a new story. We’d never grow old, would never need to learn from experience or plan for the future. We’d be able to freely indulge our addictions and consume limitless amounts of alcohol without conditioning our cells to turn into oil hoards. Gossip would be as innocent as I would like to imagine it is. Puzzles of love would be solved in simple equations. And home would have a permanent address.

A bunch of people who’d graduated last semester were over at practice today. They were practising for DumbC event at Tarang. But Tarang’s for Undergrads ( which only accounts for two of them)! Of course, they're the masters of the game and we could use some help, but is it only Tarang that has so many of my seniors still hovering around campus? I wonder...

I wouldn't surpised if i found myself inching around college after graduation. Might be nice to let some of this carefree air rub off on me and sweeten (what I imagine will be) gray days chained to the corporate. But I guess this post is entirely, a rose tinted vision.

Now I need to craft a resume so that the evil corporate will think me worthy of their shackles.