the first...

It’s 28^th Jan 2016, I think I have not been that late for wishing everyone HAPPY NEW YEAR!! I don’t believe the year is old enough (abhi toh saal jawaan hai).  I know I am rusty and I feel like the old librarian trying to find the book which she knew she had stacked somewhere in the labyrinths of shelves. Anyhow, for the lack of any creative spurts and the disinterest of doing the homework (yeah, you read it right.. HOMEWORK!) hear me ramble, if you please.

I had a decent year I would say and “decent” only cause I had pretty high ups and low lows, so they kind of cancel out and settle somewhere in the middle. I was lucky enough to camp in couple of relatives places and friends. A failed birthday surprised in Texas, a risky interstate drive to Nebaraska and being rewarded by the heavenly view, magical Disneyland , not a snowy Christmas, cold and chilly new York with someone warm to hold on to (wink wink). I have loved my trips and tedious long flights. And believe it or not I have loved staying with my aunts and uncles. I know I had stated contrary on some posts about my relatives but that’s what a foreign land does to you. You yearn for that familiarity and you try to find it anywhere even if it means going to a dingy Indian market and hearing gujus talk (no offence :P)

the 800km drive to 6,225 ft.. Lake tahoe.

the magic wand!

I might elaborate on my trips if memory, mood and enthusiasm stays, but let me describe the first snow/ blizzard of my entire three and twenty years. (I have lived that long!) The blizzard is not magical if that’s what you were looking for. There is snow in your eyes, ears, mouth, pockets (warning, do not try this at home) but the bunch of us the three wise monkeys went to experience the blizzard inspired by the overflowing photos of people in snow (amateurs!) and didn’t put any photos up.(laziness) but oh! What a feeling when you step out with the cold winds and falling snow and freezing hands. After an entire day of snowing and blizzarding when all had ended it was surreal. There was inches of whiteness all over untouched, sparkling in sunlight, icicles hanging from rooftops. Claiming to be a veteran of the snow (certainly more experienced with it than most of my tropical friends) but somehow this felt more intimate, more real. To think of, its nothing but white its simple but yet so breath-takingly beautiful, of course before we ran all over it and made it look like a crumbled paper. It felt like natures unused sketching papers just lieing around waiting to be inked.

It all sounds very romantic for now, but wait till you have to see that for the next three months and the white snow doesn’t stay white anymore! (what a delusion!)

white wonder! (my backyard)

I could have gone on but I guess I have spoken long enough for now. 

notes from seas apart

I am finally here! Can you (random)guys believe it! (pretending i have regular viewers) all the slogging and tantrums and mood swinging to moon and back, the sweat drenching anxiety ridden long wait has finally FINALLY bought me away from home. Just not away, but seven seas, 13,568 km, 10 hours away!! It just doesn't set into me. Every morning i wake up and see it's 11 and wonder how come my door hasn't been broken down yet by my early to rise parents, i just groan at the time and stuff my head back into the pillow. You do realise while reading this basket of jumbled sentences i have finally set my foot out, out from my loving over protective very happening bengali family, from the city of dreams and love to some place strange and wonderful and adventurous.
I am over romanticizing. You are hit by the ruthless and demanding nature of grocery shopping, the attention seeking laundry and the requirements of doing the dishes. You get the picture right?
But alls not that dull and dutiful. There is the amazing weather if you like -20s! And dazzling white-white skins if you are a racist. And a loving (south) indian community who seem to think telugu is the language of prime importance. So yeah, I am in paradise. It's like someone just cleaned your dirty specs. It's like you were living in a room where you could see brownian motion and someone just switched on the vaccum cleaner and the air was clean. (i know horrible joke) 
I am home sick and euphoric at the same moment, most of the times. It's so surreal that i feel its inception. My nightmare being I have picked up their lethal drawl. Next to the aussie's rotten accent I think American drawl tops the list. Cross your fingers that I don't pick up with the top 3 disgusting accents which includes overdone american- indian (NRI wannabes) accent.
I thought i should fill in with tit bits of life. I had the most filmy farewells(truly), the most teary goodbyes (yeah right!) and the un-happening flight (other than when i was expecting breakfast they give you lunch!) 
The only reason why i suddenly got time to write this rambling done is cause i seem to find time when i am always short of time. Amazingly me! I amaze me man! chalo I hope to catch up with you soon my ""imaginary"" "regular" readers. No I don't think i am some psychic kid having imaginary friends, atleast i hope not! :/ 

road trip wrappers...

Music ,wind, sun and please! not to forget my wayfarer glasses. It looked like a scene right out of ZNMD! Keeeeerrkk.. just, instead of the sky blue Buick, picture a truck in dashing orange. And oh! Say tata to the smooth roads of Spain and helloooo to the Indian grameen roads giving the pot-hole ridden Mumbai roads a tough competition.

It’s peculiarly common as to how these road trips come out to be the little lessons in life to which you look back and smile and say "Manh! Those were the days!" . My road trip taught me a few.

1. Always carry more jeans. (avoids the shocked expression of ma saying “did you sleep on mud?!”)

2. DO NOT drink outside water. Never. period.

3. Take the liberty of packing a first aid kit for a regiment.(cause most of the time you turn out to be travelling  with a group of ignorant hypocrites who are ninnies when it comes to health)

4. Check under the beds before leaving/checking out (it just might turn out that you left your charger there, doesn’t really matter how it landed there)

5. Always and always eat icecream whenever you are shivering to the bones!

6. Kick box anyone who is around.. (well ..cause it’s fun!)

7. Not to sit beside your NSP in an overnight bus. (cause if you droll while you sleep, chances with him/her will be down the drain forever!  )

8. Always have a dabba (dabba- old fashioned sans any fancy OS mobs) android people are cry babies when it comes to charging!

9. DO NOT carry camera, cause believe it or not there would be atleast one more guy who would be clicking same pics as you. So why do all the work?

10. This is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt.

 Acceptance.

 Acceptance of defeat. Of a better luck next time. That trip back to the hotel from the track was hardest most silent one, one could have ever sat through in a otherwise noisy group of 26. The moment of acceptance, that we had been disqualified. Of all those long nights in sparks and dust and grease and nuts equaling to nothing.

All stories aren’t fairy tales.. i guess.. but in the end there are always lessons to be learnt and memories to be wrapped for some far away meeting many years from now, when you sit with a glass, preferably bottles of drinks with the old college buddies and unwrap those discoloured boxes from the attic, to see that the flowers you had packed were still fresh and still full of tingly pollen to make you laugh over all of it. 

Cheers to a dusty luck and a clean tomorrow! Clink !

Beauty in randomness..or even the other way around

Whether its beauty in randomness or randomness is beauty is one and the same thing.. there is an explicit beauty in the random things which one chances to notice upon.. the haphazard random way the wild flowers grow over an equally tumbled down wall... or the random way the slum houses look from far away like they are a card castle (of course many might not think so.. but i really marvel that they hold their ground without toppling down by the breeze) a random smile on someone’s face, the frothing waves which emerge randomly from the sea and hit the shore creating nature's art on the sand, the cracks on glass which are seemingly random but yet create patterns (from a cracked mobile screen i have to look into every day!), the random way all the books and things around my room are kept (though this point is strongly opposed by ma.. again i have an anomalous concept for beauty).. such a concept was displayed by an artist in some art museum in Paris.. a room full of scattered rubbish right from tickets to thermocol to plastic bags were all scattered around.. we mistook it to be a room under cleaning but on enquiring was found that it was a work of art!! After all those years this came back to my mind that may be what the artist did want to convey was random things indeed has an appeal of its own.. and may be just may be modern art is about random strokes and thoughts creating a whole new picture (yes, i am still trying to come up with an explainable meaning for modern art)

And now that i got talking about randomness... may be fate is disguised randomness..... 

                         an instrument of patterned randomness....

VEINED MUMBAI....

What does one write for his/her first ever blog and post?! So after a lot of thought on what should be my first post I zeroed it down to my everyday life experience....

So to start from the beginning of all the beginnings.. i have lived all my life (well most of d part) in a colony big enough to accommodate few thousands. The place is like what central park is to New York...blissfully cradled in womb of nature away from the hustle bustle but still very much part of the city .. Its like a modern day self-sufficient village.. well not being a frequent goer in the city i have always marvelled of how people travel in the Mumbai’s famous trains... yes.. this post  is about  the very lifeline of the city TRAINS and me a tiny speck in all those crowded heads while i surge or rather flow on with the human tide...

I travel to college by trains... yes me .. which i would have thought quite impossible had someone asked me a few years back.. but if u have stayed in Mumbai and haven’t been on trains its like you are a Christian and haven’t  been baptised.. allow me first to sketch you a visual of how local trains look in Mumbai during the peak hours. They are slender metal boxes with discoloured peeling paint and paan stains all over the sides like the paint was meant to be that way!! .... looking at the very structure makes you wonder at the strength of the metal used... and when they are filled or rather stuffed with human bodies they look like overstuffed sandwiches with the fillings bulging from the sides at a point of time that they might drip and fall...so this is roughly how the trains look when they arrive at the station to fill in more people in  their  already stuffed compartments... now my narration would like to take you to the inside of these modern day voluntary torture chambers.. when ones eyes rest on such a scene as that, one often wonders of what’s the highest compressibility a human body can endure?! Puts a huge question mark on the limit of endurance! So here we are in a crammed up compartment with people of various strata's of the society scuffling, standing ,sitting, hopping ,meditating on one leg (ah yes, space crunch does that) . It’s amazing, really, the sense of understanding people develop when one is subjected to something that extreme .. even after a time you start enjoying it.. i know that sounds weird but believe me, when the trains are empty you feel like some vital part of the train is missing! Its hard to express the magnitude of unknown brotherhood that one experiences if you are a daily train passenger..u start smiling and recognise faces over the months of travels by the same local.You even make friends with people you would generally not do so...the throwing about and elbowing of bodies which usually takes place whenever a station arrives, the uncomfortable proximity, somehow  gets you connected, a mutual understanding with utter strangers is glimpsed on such situations which was plain freaking the 1^st time i boarded the trains!i apologised for every foot i stamped, every elbowing and pushing about i did! But as time passed realisation dawned that no one really minds being rowdy on trains was the key to getting down on time for your stop....  i am sure this is the same with all the the overly crowded metro cities of india given the facility of trains and metros!

Travelling in these trains gives oneself ample opportunity of observing .. learning, understanding the   amazingly different kind of people that have been blessed to grace these congested pieces of match boxes... life without trains for a mumbaikar is nightmarish... it like Paris without metro!

I often visualise  trains in the city as blood vessels.. they are the carriers of oxygen in this case humans to different areas.... sleek ,flexible, highly networked and efficient(to some extent) they are lifelines of the city without which travelling would be unimaginable...

On the concluding note i would praise the engineers behind those construction of fabulous hell carriages (makes even charon’s* fleet of carrier of dead look shamefully petite!)which till date haven’t given up my exploding through the sheer strain it goes through... the last thing i would ever want to be is a Mumbai local! But one of the many things without which this city of dreams would be incomplete...

                                                

*charon- greek mytho character,the ferryman of the dead