Pause Button

There are certain moments when one gets to sit somewhere and start thinking. Whenever I do that I end up putting myself in deep distress. I micro analyze irrelevant issues and end up with this huge lump in my throat. It usually lasts a night and next morning I would be back to my plain old whining self.

I don't think this time it is the same. I was just thinking about stuff and tried to sum up what I exactly wanted. For once I tried being pragmatic and non-woolly headed. There seems to be a recurrent pattern in all major things in my life, thus proving I have always wanted things that were the same.I desperately want to get away from all this, get some control over my whims and try getting real.

I don't have an inkling about what I would end up doing, but right now I feel grossly inadequate, if that is the term I am looking for. I am so awfully tired of explaining to people what it takes for me to explain to them. I need to take sometime, figure things out.The frightening part is that I have all the time in my hand and I might just end up convoluting myself more.

So right now, I need to get busy, put all this aside and figure out things. I don't think I should blog for sometime. I am sure something real nice will happen, some sort of dawning and I would rush back to blogger to rant it out. But right now, I need to pause.

Until then Adios!

So Jobless.

Even study holidays seemed fun. Semester holidays are drab,boring and I don't know why I was looking forward to it. Somehow holidays spent at college is so much more interesting, with packed days. Here at home, I don't leave my room except for food and all day I spend looking at my inbox and refreshing it every ten seconds.

I have always maintained my unread mails at 314, for no reason and now, with nothing to do, I whoop with joy when I see the count going up to 315. (Even if it is a "Analog Planet Newspaper")

All of a sudden,I seem to have lost interest in all pleasures of life such as reading/movie/music/TV and have caused a great deal of vexation to my mother with my refusal to bath for the past four days.

I want to cook. Learn how to make proper God-Awesome-South Indian meal, with all the trimmings. But my dear mother thinks that I should never bother learning to cook. I was sticking around all day yesterday with my grandmother, learning how to make 'Puzhikaachal'. She seemed to be quite pleased with all the interest I showed. I have made a note to spend some time in HER well stocked kitchen after graduation and imbibe all the words of wisdom she can bequeath from the culinary front. She is one of the best chefs in family and makes the best picnic baskets (No, not-hot scones-mango tarts- sandwhiches types, more of the puliogare,coconut rice,curd rice,lemon pickles with assorted side dishes). She is mind bogglingly methodical and innovative when it comes to cooking, and all her daughters-in-law tag around her for recipes.

I even entered her at a cookery contest while I was at school and decorated her Besart Dosa (cut in shape of India, and decorated with three coloured chutneys as tri colour :D, lol). She was very pleased to win and was more pleased to add the prize, an ever silver utensil to her humongous collection. Too bad, my mother happens to be a non-conformist and adopts her own, finish-whatever-in-ten-minutes style and buy her always-whining-about-food-kid the rest.

I used sit and watch all cookery shows and would note down recipes for Rasagolla, Cream Cakes etc.For a person who can appreciate good food so much, I just need to close my eyes and imagine how I want the dish to taste. Something of the Ratatouille mouse.

Damn the past. I should have taken Catering Technology. I bet I would have been a top notch Chef by now. Genes.

Mum is not the word

How would a person react, if he finds that his sworn secret has become a dinner table conversation? Which is worse? Is it the situation when the dinner party knows that the man dining with them is the chap around whom the conversation is revolving or the times when the group is in dark about the identity of the hero who might be sitting across them and perspiring? What does such a person do during these situations? He subtly extends his foot under the table and kicks the narrator of the story, thereby signaling him/her (mostly her) to shut up.

As a recipient of such numerous under-the-table-kicks at dinners, I have done a thorough psycho analysis of such people. Our hero, to quote Wodehouse, probably is “a melancholy-looking man, with the appearance of someone who had searched for the leak in life's gas pipe with a lighted candle”. All he generally thinks is how his secret had become a candidate for a prime-time news feature. Less analytical mortals generally vent it out on the narrator of the story, post-dinner, with occasional displays of violence.

There are so many ways how news spreads like wild fire in college. Let us examine one. Chap A, whose future mental state we analysed in the previous paragraph, tells his friend Chap B, about an out of the blue proposal from an out of the blue girl. This is just because Chap A is mortal and hence has the urge to confide in to a close friend, who in our case happens to be Chap B.

Chap A also explains to Chap B how the thing is extremely personal and how he should consider himself lucky to be the confidant of such a hush-hush matter. Chap B feels so solemn and lends his strong shoulders, by being the friend in need. The chap B, a friend indeed, goes back to his room and sees Chap C who is his extra-roommate.

The term extra-roommate has to be explained at this point. Of all the definitions, it best describes the types who perennially hang around in your room, so much, that they generally stop buying pens ,record sheets and other stationery from the second year on, having a supply aplenty in yours. These are the types that have stopped you from buying oranges, apples and other luxurious edibles that your mothers urge you to eat during your biannual trip home. They are the itinerants without whom your hostel life is incomplete and who would go to any extent to make your life brighter. This includes activities such as stealing the corridor’s tube light to fit in your room after successfully defeating the other extra-roommates, (who, of course, are fighting for the above said tube light, for their own (non)extra-roommate). They would rather perish in this valiant effort rather than going to their own well lit room. Extra-roommates are created by the result of another extra-roommate in their original room,with whom they don't get along. There were efforts to stop this room hopping, in my college. The efforts ceased after the investigating authorities found it impossible to distinguish between the original owner and the temporary occupant from the four year old, twelfth standard photographs stuck on the hostel ID card.

So, Chap B sees this Chap C and gets this warm brotherly feeling towards him all of a sudden. He looks with considerable interest, at Chap C (who is currently wearing B’s shirt, watching Matrix stunt scenes in B’s laptop, wearing B’s headphones and is oblivious to the sudden attention being fawned upon him). B suddenly decides that there is no one like a brother in bond and proceeds to tell C, the tale of A.

Now C , who despite being an extra-roommate, is extremely popular among the ladies, thanks to the Abercrombie Fitch and other cool sounding pirated clothes he has borrowed on numerous occasions from around the hostel. The ladies, who are in general very partial to guys with a frivolous nature, find him absolutely irresistible. There were even fights reported from the Ladies Hostel over such a Chap C. Presuming you get the drift, let us skip C’s logical course of action. One of those ladies, (who had fought over C in the past) gets a furiously typed long message without vowels. The lady, who generally is a whiz in solving problems, uses her skills acquired in engineering and deciphers the message in matter of seconds. She stops in the middle of conversation with her friend D, excuses herself and runs outside to make a frantic call.

As the first recipient of the the hot news, her face resembles a sunny-side-up-omelet. She comes back to D’s room. C’s dire threats of murder and other violent acts for breaking secrets, reverberates in her ears and hence, she doesn’t wish to partake with D the very essential piece of information. It is also because she wants to look smug.

Semester exams arrive. C’s lady, D and E sit in D’s room and start studying a subject. Let us assume that the subject is something that starts with ‘electromagnetic’ or has the word ‘wave’ in its name. These subjects generally act as the catalysts. At the times of exam of the said subjects, one generally finds this embedded reluctance to take the fine printed book in hand.It is at these times, people like C’s lady (ah,well, let us just give her a name ‘Z’) get this familiar rush. At this point, let us take in to fact that this rush is generally called a ‘Girl thing’. Bluntly put, Gossip.

Z sings. D and E listen enthralled, with their blood boiling. Just when Z ceases her story, with the now clichéd footnote of “Don’t breathe a word to anyone”, E spots the subject of the story walking in the corridor of the fourth floor. Z,E and D throw their fine printed Bakshi books away(Well,the probability that any given book is a Bakshi is very high considering the fact that Bakshi writes books for all subjects and all departments in Engineering). They jump to their own ground floor corridor to analyze the subject with this newly gained knowledge. It is only during these times of tremendous high, girls forget vitally important things like mugging for the exam next day.

Now, this gives you a general picture of how sworn secrets become a matter of speculative interest for the news starved CITians. It is a pity that slander and tabloid gossips are not allowed on our Newsletter. Had it been so, the newsletter would have surpassed Femina in its popularity in the girls’ hostel.

The story doesn’t end here. E or D go back to room and meet some letter out of the remaining 20 alphabets and proceed with the preamble “Can you just believe what has happened?”. The other letter person remarks, “I was asked not to discuss this with anyone, but, seriously do you know this only NOW?”

It is just a Bing-Bang-Theory world!

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky- Lewis Carroll

It is 1.50 am, right now. For some strange reason, I love this poem!

A boat beneath a sunny sky,

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July--

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear--

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die.

Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream--

Lingering in the golden gleam--

Life, what is it but a dream?

Sandhya Vandanam

The first sunset, the first ever at a beach..

First sight-

The sun lies way above the horizon, turning itself orange and preparing itself for the big moment, as if knowing that a lot of anxious people are clutching their cameras to capture the prima-donna in all her glory. There is a full gust of sea breeze that smoothens down my frowns. I stop complaining about my ever aching legs and shush down, closing my eyes to feel the way it caresses my cheek.

I throw down all my stuff in a clutter and rush in to the waves. I see the tiny bulge of green sea, slowly gaining momentum and gathering froth at its tips. It comes rushing, though the first bit is a bit tamed. It gently rolls in around my feet. I start purring and when the big one crashes all around me, my purr acquires a higher pitch and I start screaming with glee.

It’s over now. The familiar feeling with which I associate beaches starts. The sand starts slipping beneath my feet as the waves start their journey back.

The Twilight-

Now, the beautiful, oh, so beautiful twilight starts. The dusk spreads the evanescent orange glow across the skies. It is not quite the moment, and hence there are twinges of pink streaks as if to rein in the roaring passion with which the dusk seems to be acting on to get to the moment. Sun has turned golden; a sign of the moment approaching. The twilight, immortalized in the countless Sanskrit poems I mugged in my eight years of Sanskrit, is there before me, in all her glory. I now see how beautiful Kalidasa’s Indhumati would have been, to have the glow of twilight in her eyes. Somewhere in the corner of my mind I remember something about the wavelengths, explaining the monotonic colour of the sunset. I brush it away, and take a deep breath. And then,it starts.

The Moment-

I stand in the water and stare silently at it. The entire sky is agog with fire. The sea slowly catches the flame and glows with the reflected glory. There is the divine ‘oneness’ which I have only read about. Everything catches on with everything else and acquires the deep golden twinge. However, the frothy tips of waves defiantly stay white and sear playfully from the fired up water.

All good things come rushing in to my mind, so many of them. No, it is not people and things. It is the lovely fluttering happiness I associate with all good things that has happened in my life. It is almost, as if each moment had a certain value to it. I even remember how it was to feel the smooth purr of my pep, for the first time, the way my baby cousin smelling of baby powder and milk, snuggled to sleep on my shoulders some eight years ago. All of them come back in a swirl so fast, that I feel a heat in the pit of my stomach. My eyes well up and I look at the sun. I understand what it means by an ‘ephemeral’ moment. It has inched past the level and in any moment there would be the adieu...

It slowly goes down and it is gone.

The Sigh-

Everything uncoils back to pre-sunset moment. The stealthy pink streaks come back, to wake me up. I un-stun myself and desperately try to memorize what I have been through. My ode to twilight, my prayers, my Sandhya Vandanam, is done.

Keying in

I have as much patience as Lord Emsworth has in things that do not pertain to pigs. This is why I get in to regular trouble at labs and with lab rats (yes, I simply seem to be plagued by them). Strangely enough nemesis has tried, time and again, in the form of administrative officers,flying ICs,Message swallowing Networks, Tirupati Treks and BSNL internet, to teach me the age old value of patience.

So today morning, I sat down to translate one of the stories. I was letting my hands flow up and down the keyboard, like the Blue Danube I was listening to and that is when I suddenly realized that all the ‘n’s were missing in the text I was typing.

I controlled my bristling irritation on having been interrupted during very important literary work. I frowned ferociously at my laptop and plucked the above said ‘n’ out to investigate. I found a layer of dust underneath that had caused the trouble. Now, generally when one plucks a key off the laptop, the little white plastic thingies below the key cap don’t pop out. Obviously, today they had to because I was in a very good mood. Now, I stared at the ‘retainers’ (which is how the white thingies are called) and suddenly they appeared impossible. As my lad Calvin would say, anything that involves more than ten seconds of attention is not worth knowing or doing. The retainers were impossibly small and screamed in big bold letters that they were trouble. They had small projections, minuscule surfaces and I had no clue how to assemble them back. I took a deep breath, put on my spectacles, and garnered all my Engineering skills to assemble it back.

“Okay, easy does it”. I heaved a huge sigh and carefully lowered the assembly on to the key board. Now the task was to put the cap back on. The lark was on its wings, the snail was on the thorn, God was in his heaven and since all seemed to be well with the world, I smugly slid the cap back in to place and nudged it back on to its place. “Ah, there you go!”. I was congratulating myself for possessing unbridled intelligence and started considering the possibility of doing a PhD or writing GATE, when the cap popped back at me saying “Peek-a-boo”.

In the times of adversity, one’s mind works fast and what does it do during the case of popping -back keys? It plucks the ‘g’ key, this time a wee bit carefully, so that it can see how the retainer assembly is. “Ah, so the arch comes down and the wedge goes behind the other the wedge’s back. Wait a minute, which is the back and which is the front”.

Like the Surf Excel kid trying to tie his shoe lace, I stuck my tongue out at the side and carefully worked in the so and so projections in so and so places at the so and so sides, with my right and left brain talking in the lines of the above mentioned conversation. After full twenty minutes of fumbling on it like doing a NTSC colour decoder block diagram in exam, I pushed the cap on to place.

The sweet sound of ‘Snap’ echoed back and I pointed my fingers heavenward like a Freemason-severed hand in Dan Brown books. I put the model key back in place and started typing this post.

“I have as much patiegce as Lord Emsworth has ig thigns that does got pertaig to pins. This is why I net ig to renular trouble at labs agd with lab rats (yes, am ag electrogics studegt). Stragnely egounh life…”

Yes, my keyboard read “ASDFNHJKL” and “ZXCVBGM”. I kicked the nearby chair, in the process bruised my leg, howled with pain, searched for my spectacles again, and spent the next half an hour blaspheming so much that people out on the streets figured out that I was back home.

Irregular Rant

Thirty days stretch before me endlessly. Now that am back home with

1)City of Djinns

2)Lord Emsworth and Others

3)Full Moon

4)Circle of Reason- Amitav Ghosh

I should be able to cuddle all day on bed with the above said books and with packs and packs of Hershey Chocolates to melt in my mouth. I should organize my reading and find the optimum way of wasting time. It will be difficult to cram in all the goofing later. The rest of the world is studying hard! For placements, for GATE and for CAT. Now that am least interested in the first two, and have given up on the last, I don't have any sense of guilt.

Am going to teach myself Salsa, probably do catching up with my old dance classes.Coming to think of it, I realize I have never spoken much to anyone about my dance classes. Maybe it's just too many memories.

I have been with three dance teachers in the 12 years of Bharatanatyam. The first one got married off. The second one was cruel. We used to have classes in Raja Muthaih Hall, four hours ones, three days a week. I was there for some five years. She was a young teacher from Kalaikaaveri in Trichy and used to drill us. The four hours used to be so horribly painful, with the pre-dance and post dance sessions. There used to be such a big fuss about how our Alaarippu wasn't pure enough and how we should stretch our frames more while doing the jumping things. She used to insist that our feet should hit the floor with maximum sound and that our eyes follow our hands, everywhere they went.It used to be so awfully draining, that my legs would ache for days together.That was the time I used to do stage shows, with the horrible make up and elaborate frilly dresses. That was the time I developed a loathing for make-up.Ugh, it was so grotesque and the worst part was that my parents were so proud! They actually video taped one such performance and I still shudder about thinking that. Istill flinch on seeing the Alta bottles (the reddish things dancers use to paint their hands and feet with) lying in the bottom draw of the dressing table.

So, I quit, because I hated doing the shows which the female insisted on and joined the last place for the next five years. The 'Aunty' , like how we called the teacher was a very sweet tempered woman with a pronounced Srilankan accent. She was 50-60 yrs old, with extremely long hair , youngish face and had a Pomeranian called 'Kutta'.I wonder how the place is now. It used to teem with kids and college folks. It used to be a class of sixty odd people, half of it being little kids. The mothers would accompany these kids and watch on proudly.

I had to start all over, as her style was different and thus, added up the fourth 'Alaarippu' to my resume. There was 'Jatheeswaram', which was full of fast steps that required a lot of agility. I obviously sucked at it and preferred to linger in the last row. There were 'Kouthuams' , each one dedicated to different deities. There were 'Padhams' which dealt with expressions and minimal feet work. I remember asking for 'Thaaye Yashodha' every other class and feel so gleeful doing it, because I was so good at it.

'Thillana' was so breath takingly perfect. People used to whirl and dance so ferociously for a full couple of minutes perfectly synchronized with each other. The same verse would go on and on, but the dance wouldn't be boring even for a second. It was an exhilarating experience though I was nowhere in THE league and the teacher would shake her head sadly at me, when I used to ask her for an another Thillana. I saved her more of the head shaking by quitting before I learnt a 'Varnam'.

The college girls (I bet all of them are married now, probably with kids) would stand and gossip about their life in general. Occasionally, they would bitch on how the teacher taught some new girl, another 'Varnam' while they had been asking for it for a long time. The school girls would also gossip, practice some of the 'Kalyani Jatheeswaram', get bored and go back to gossip.

I would be flitting back and forth between these two groups trying to find my place and finally start a chat with the teacher herself. This would hold the class up for a good twenty minutes.The Pomeranian would come and sniff at my legs and only then I would shut up.

Dancing was so much fun. I hated the dance classes, but dance was fun. One can't suck so badly at it like singing. The pouring sweat, aching limbs,the sweet joy of feeling the blood rushing to the face and sometimes, dancing with a vigour to prove a point reminds me so much of the basketball. I still watch Thillana,Salsa, Waltz videos on You-Tube. Organized dancing can be so awfully romantic and fun. :)

Coming back, I read this amazing collection of Sujatha Short stories. If am very jobless tomorrow, am planning to translate one and post it. Some stories were so gut wrenching, that I really want people who don't read Tamil books to know such a man was there who could write so amazingly well!