The metaphorical tunnel.

Four years have gone by.. I wouldn’t say it went by ‘in the blink of an eye’. They were four long years. I am here to neither glorify nor vilify my experience in college through this writeup. This is neither a tribute of any kind to it in any way. There are enough movies that do the prior mentioned things. I am simply writing this as a testimony of my existence through these years. A testimony of the people I met, the friends I found, the events I regret, the ones that I pride myself on, the mistakes, the silliness of it all, the seriousness, and to the many and various happenings that piece themselves together to form the complete picture that is my life through college.

It is not so easy to capture the essence of this experience. Primarily because it doesn’t lie in the fanfare but in the every minute nothingness of it all.Okay let me get out of this dramatic mode I am in. Let me be honest. I didn’t like college. Not enough to miss it. Not enough to have bouts of nostalgia that would idealize experiences.I can neither compare this to worse experiences nor label it as ‘the worst experience’ because giving it even that credit would be a mistake. I can think of many reasons as to why it turned out the way it did. It may be simply because exaggeration played a cruel role in my belief system. Exaggeration that life in college is always somehow the ‘fun’ part of one’s life and that later life gets into its typical mode of monotony. Experiences had here are the ones that are supposedly reckless and atypical before life hits you with its dose of reality.Whatever the reasons were, this is it. It started. It ended. And I just wound up in the middle of it!

I will herafter………………

New Year is near and i am reminded of the thousand resolutions that i take every new year. This one is going to be no different. I am going to take ‘em and well, keeping it is a whole other story. Well my list is still under intense preparation and scrutiny, and when i am finished with it we’ll see how it goes. Advance New Year wishes!!!

Let’s go for a ride! Vroooooooooooooooooooommm….

Huh i still remember the times of my struggle with the bicycle. My mom, dad, sister etc. tried to help me ride one but at the end of the day i just wound up crashed in the gutter. Interestingly, the more i fell, the more immune i became to the pain that accompanied it. After a number of ‘downfalls’ in my part, i decided to take it up myself. I wasn’t going to seek anyone’s help.Yes that was it. So started my fun and adventurous(you could say) experiences with the cycle. I didn’t own one so i used my friends’ cycles for my endeavors. I would spend whole days in my task and endure a number of crashes. It went on for a significant amount of time. During this period, i would dream my nights away about me at last riding my bicycle and have woken up many a time yearning for it to be true. At last came the night when i did ride it! It takes more than just words to describe what i felt when i did it. Man, that felt good! Aah it was the sweet taste of victory and i savored it for a very long time to come.
My learning to ride a cycle was just part of the fun. Then came the real fun when i finally started riding it. Huh I would roam the neighborhood with my friends and we would have this game where we were all explorers and stuff and our task was to find secret routes. My neighborhood suited well for this kind of game because it was very large and quite convoluted in its layout. You could easily get stranded or in some cases, going round n round in a loop that was impossible to exit or make sense of. We had tremendous fun doing this. The only drawback in all this, was that we could easily lose track of time. I remember this incident in particular. We had ,as usual, been roaming around and it seems I had my music classes that day. I was blissfully oblivious of that fact (I hated my Carnatic music classes) and it just did’nt click. After what seemed a very long time, we parted to go home since it was getting dark. I reached home and there, there was my dad. He did’nt usually come home at that time so I was curious about the reason he was there. It did’nt take long to find out. He was furious. The moment I walked in, he started scolding me like anything. He was in such a rage for 2 reasons: one, I had’nt informed my parents that I was going to play with my friends. Two, I had missed my music class. The second reason, believe you me, could be considered trivial because there is nothing that angers my dad more than ‘not informing ‘ them about my whereabouts and since it was above 7 o’clock (this may seem a proper enough time for us now, but when you’re seven – uh oh , is the expression that fits!) , he was definitely a force to reckon with! I cowered under his scorching gaze and hid behind mum. She could not do anything. I just stood there waiting for him to give me a good beating, but what he did was far worse. He told me to never step out again. Literally! I shouldn’t cross the threshold of my gate! I was grounded all right! After this incident, for several days I just used to stand outside leaning on my gate and gazing at my friends playing and having fun. That was tormenting. Let me tell you, for a seven year old there is nothing more painful than to be told to ‘stay still’… Eventually my dad warmed up to me and believe me, from then on i inform them even if i am going to the bathroom . After a few years i got my own brand new bicycle. It was love at first sight. The cycle was a purple Miss India and i had some of my best times with that cycle. My mom gave it away a couple of years ago because it was starting to rust and my mom thought that it would be put to better use if she gave it to our maid’s daughter who was in need of a cycle. At first, I was mad at her but then… well not anymore ..
All the above was just the start. When i was in my class 10th of school, i got fascinated by the bike (gear n non-gear). All my seniors who had it, strutted around feeling all proud and some of them had style all right. Well now i wanted one for myself. It so happened that my dad n mom thought so too since i was attending various classes at different places and they preferred i had one. Hah! We decided we’d get a Scooty Pep(just released at that time). I wanted a purple one . But due to unavailability, we had to go for a black one instead. I was’nt in the least resentful ‘coz i’d got my own bike! Imagine my pride.. I loved it. This survived for about 6 years before my parents decided that it had lived a full life. They sold it *sniff*.. Thus ended that relationship. And in these 2 years that have passed by, my parents have exchanged about 2 bikes and now have settled with the two we now have. I don’t have any particular attachment to the ones now ‘coz i had’nt had that much time home, being in a hostel and all that.. And one other reason, one of the bikes i.e the one that i am allowed to ride(the other is dad’s. I don’t touch that coz he doesn’t allow me to and second, there is the height problem for me anyway), is one ‘dubba vandi’. I dislike it.. a lot. It is not very comfortable and is not very friendly, trust me. Hmmm so its been quite a time since i have driven and enjoyed a bike. My next love is a car. Which one you may ask, but i am not that good at figuring out which is good based on what… So roughly, all i decide is based on how comfortable it is and how sleek it looks That way, i would say Lexus! … Aah, i know its like darn costly, but aah the sky is the limit…
So next time you see me, i may well be driving off into the sunset in my very own lexus. Anyone for a ride ?

As the world changes….

As i skim through the morning newspaper, sitting at the mess table eating the so-called upma and bread + jam(weird combo!! i know ), two articles catch my attention. One is a cosmic+astronaut+outer+planet+extraterrestrial+life kinda thing, the other is a very real situation that has always been a very important topic in the world, then and now..

The first one is about the discovery of a new planet. And scientists believe that this discovery will change the very basis of the system we have all followed up until now. Suspicion of life on that planet is also there. Well my opinion is, till we actually go up to that planet and knock on their front doors, we have very less chances of finding out if something is out there… This discovery is just one small hint that there is so much we don’t know and we will never know. All we can keep doing is imagine and come up with movies where the “aliens” are either “rubber skin like ugly beings” or “so beautiful and intelligent that you can’t bear to behold them in their original form” kinda crap. And most importantly, we are so self obsessed that we shamelessly over-imagine that they’d take all the pains to cross the galaxy to come to our planet just to warn us that we are wasting our resources(it is like your neighbor tells you that you don’t treat your child right or gives you advice on how to run your house!!!) and that they’d help us rebuild or in the case of some other movies, take over the damn planet. I mean “Come on people!!!”Our imagination only can reach so far. I mean all we can define is “good” * “bad”, “beautiful” * “ugly”, “chaos” * “peace” etc… everything in this binary system. Yin yang. Well frankly, i think if there ever is to exist any life ( the ones that can think, that is) apart from us, i think it will be like something our brains can never comprehend or be too stubborn to even take in.. Or there may be no one else in this wide universe to actually bother.. Well again speculation can only go so far…

The next one is Population… Ha i know what you’re all thinking. And yeah that is true. This is a topic we’ve been asked to discuss about an exaggerate-worthy number of times, be it at school or college or interview GDs… But the irony is, all we do is talk about it because there is concrete speculation( ) that the world’s population is gonna hit 8 billion by 2025 and a few years after that it’ll be 10 million!! Scary, don’t you think? The UN has predicted that if this happens then by that time there will be intense food and water scarcity! In MY actual future!!! I don’t want that and I’m sure no one does. But what are we gonna do about it?? There were some tidbits in that article focusing on the irony of thought process in two different parts of the world. One part of the world, a woman who had 8 children with another on the way, regretted having this many whereas a man, on the other side of the world, couldn’t get enough with the 14 children he already has and plans to have more or rather, make his wives have more!! When I read this, i could glean the magnitude of the problem we are facing here.It is not the number of people we have to reduce but rather a major shift in mindset that is essential. I am sure you will agree that it is easy to reduce the number than go on that dangerous and impossible mission of trying to change mindsets. So at least people who are aware can try to spread whatever awareness they have and help prevent something that is hanging above our heads, threatening to strike anytime..

Hmm by the time I am an actual adult, I am sure if all the major problems are still at their epic best, then I will at last believe that the world is really going to end. Not that movie-kinda-buildings-sucked-into-the-earth thing, but so gradually that while all the decision-makers are discussing problems over champagne instead of taking actual and smart decisions, the world, as we know it, will vanish…

Crossing my fingers for the first day of the rest of my blog…..

I am not new to blogging, but assured that where i had my blog before there was not much attention or motivation, my eager words have reached here…. Saluting the lord for a fruitful start, I now officially start my blog!

Today has been and is a day of misconceptions of the self.. Just yesterday I thought everything was what I believed. But no! My ideas of anything and everything have changed with the speed of a heartbeat. And again i am confused. To try to think clearly or even remotely broach the subject of clarity with my mind is a problem my friend.. It is all thanks to the lord that he did not provide the luxury of mobility to my brain! Coz by this time, for the trials and ordeals it has undergone supposedly “under my roof” , it will have run as far as there is to the distance a brain can run… It will have been a relatively painless and free lobotomy though!! Hmm….

I am sitting here , in my room… Listening to the playlist I have so “painstakingly” put together, thinking…. about food, assignments that await with evil intentions, hill stations, stupid mistakes, love, dogs, illusions of grandeur and what-not….. I am surprised I don’t feel my brain oozing that “harrypotter-pensieve-stuff” , trying to expel as much as it could , to relieve and separate itself from the despair and hopelessness that I so vividly feel.. I have come up with a number of reasons for why I feel this way for QUITE a period of time now. Here:

1. I am in my last year of a higher higher secondary education ,so probably I am prone to this because I’ll be dealing with the “real world” after a short period of time…

2. This is me. Very difficult. Incorrigible.

3. I am lazy to do anything. So I while my time away expressing and lamenting how bad I’ve been and documenting self-help steps that I know won’t help me unless I actually take a step forward…

4. This way I can just keep complaining .. I am in for a lackadaisical wait during which time life will figure itself out ….

5. Last! Maybe I am supposed to get confused and depressed, in order to figure out what I really want to do and what life I can make , out of the ingredients I have been generously provided with!

Mmmmm I think I am going to go with the last reason… Well that’s enough “blo-menting” (blogging + lamenting)  for the first day of my blog.. I promise to start on a sweeter and merrier note the next time!! I am feeling better already!! Adieu!!