Valentine's Day Special

Well, well, well.... Valentine's day is here. Time for the preparations! It's the perfect time for spreading love and fraandship! Just a week before the actual day, the brigade starts celebrating 'rose day', 'propose day', 'chocos day' and what not! Love just happens on the fourteenth day of February. High chances are that it will happen to you if you are jobless, are bunking classes and have been ogling at a cute 'ladies' ever since you family disowned you.

Valentine's day means a lot to those who are actually in love and it's a special occasion to let your other half know that you couldn't imagine life without their support and love. But, it means a hell lot more to those who haven't found love. It's about the hunt! It's about the famously frustrated females and males who are dying without a jee-eff and bee-eff!

It's not like I am a hypocrite or something who thinks 'making frandsip' is so uncool. On the contrary, I was actually almost one of them some time ago, so, I know the inside story. Now. don't you want a scoooop, dah-ling?

Ok, I'll narrate it in the form of a story, a surprisingly short one-

There was a guy and there was a girl. The girl was charming and sweet (and yea, she was awfully fair and couldn't inhale oxygen without the aid of maskara and lip gloss!) There is nothing wrong with being fair but being told "Oh you are so fair, I envy you" over and over again makes you think like you worked hard for this complexion... or like when God was handing out complexions, you murdered two people and severely injured three others to attain this complexion. Now that's bad.

The guy was nice, he oiled his hair daily, spent a considerable amount of time in front of the mirror to get his smile right. Ah! The joy of a perfect *clink* smile! The guy had frands, and his frands had girl frands. The girl also had frands, and they had boi frands. Love was in the air. For the boy it was somewhere in his hair.

The boy used to look at the girl from the corner of the cornermost corner of the city. The girl used to 'notice' him. When the girl used to walk, the boy used to chase her. It was so sweet.

One day the guy got the girl's number and he called her. She picked up the phone and the guy said "I love you"!

There! Right there! Cupid strikes!

The girl blushes but she has to be decent, right? She asks "How come? I don't even know you." The guy says, "I don't know, ever since I have seen you.... *blah blah blah* *Sorry to all the readers, I actually slept through their conversation so, can't report it word to word*

But, the gist is- The girl doesn't trust the guy so, she lets the guy clarify his feelings over a cup of coffee.

The next day, the girl and boy are having coffee together and are munching on sumptuous lumps of "LOVE"

YUM YUM!!

I believe in love now.... no, really! Truly, I do!

Even more power

So, as and where we left the story, the autorickshaw was turning to be a menace for humanity. It had given a whole new meaning to the term "illegal human trafficking". As things were getting dark and gloomy and hope was fainting by the day, a superhero rose from the dust. It jumped straight in the middle of the road and startled the unsuspecting auto-rickshaw with its grit and will. It had the super power of turning blind to the traffic and deaf to the honking horns. It could ignore three vehicles at a time and could lead to a super havoc. Auto-rickshaw lost its temper, did a 360 degree flip, cut across the traffic and crooned in its feminine voice. But, our hero was unperturbed, it kept an innocent face, pretended to be looking around but, his actions didn't match the gestures. It confused the hell out of the aggressive rickshaw and it swerved across the street and rammed into a tree!!

A suave, female, intelligent-looking journalist was thankfully around to acknowledge our hero's heroics. She gave him the name- "THE ROAD CROSSER!"

More power

Once upon a time, there was a city. Like any other city, rife with crime, tall buildings, similar looking crowd, identical streets and a rich heritage. Just the kind that would need a superhero. A growing population, rapid urbanization had forced a section of the population to resort to socially unacceptable means of income exempli gratia robbery, forgery, burglary and other similar acts. Most of the eminent scientist folk had gone bonkers and were cooking up evil plans of world domination, the billionaires wanted to buy the city so that they could carry out mass demolition for entertainment, people in boring professions like teaching, tailoring and white collar stuff had taken up the hobbies like asking wierd riddles and sticking axes in peoples' skulls etc. But, the biggest menace that was raising head was the evil monster called "Auto rickshaw". It could throw traffic into complete chaos in a single blink. It cut across busy streets, sowing fear in the hearts of school-going children, law-abiding citizens and old ladies crossing streets with their wobbly feet and meek hearts.

It would jump straight in your face, from the least expected nooks and crannies. It could turn around 180 degrees standing at its place. It would brush past you, rubbing your shoulder and depositing fear in your veins.

The crowd was scared... they needed someone to stand up for them... as the auto rickshaw crooned in a scary tune, sitting, smiling, ready to pounce.

Change is good!

As we live, we build walls, walls around us to secure us. Imagine the room in which you are sitting, what if it had no roof? It would be scary.... it walls were not there... wouldn't it be? It would be rough, it would be insecure and it would keep you on your toes, not able to concentrate on reading this blog entry of mine. These walls bring comfort. Limiting yourself, looking through the small keyholes of prejudice before letting anyone in... it makes you safe. When you do something that you normally don't do makes your day memorable! It is like the day when you chose to open the window only to shut it before too much of wind ruffled your papers of security.

When I talk of change, I am not talking about doing drastically eccentric stuff, I am talking about going with the flow and it's not like I am pointing fingers. This entry is actually a self evaluation. I want myself to extend my horizons, take chances, explore the possibilities and crap like that.

Sometimes, people or the circumstances push me to change my routine, and sometimes the motivation comes from within but, there is always this overriding feeling of fear. The fear of the unknown. My experience says that talking to oneself is the best remedy to clear out this fear. I can talk myself through things.

When my school finished, an insecurity crept in. How would life be now? New friends, new life? A search for a new identity. Life pushed me to deep waters and I learned to swim.

When I go to a new department after finishing one posting in college, I slowly grow an attachment to it.

Most new things we fear are the things with those we later fall in love. There is nothing in this world which doesn't take getting used to; there is nothing more taxing than the process of getting used to a new life; and what is life which is not a bit taxing and testing? It's a new life everyday with new people, old wisdom and new mistakes.


--A sunny positive Abhyudaya!

Humans to humans

We all were born, and in a well-planned manner, we were each given our very own, personal, distinct lives. Then, came the crossroads, and our paths crossed. Very selectively, we stumble upon and like people that we should like. Internet, public gatherings, social interactions direct us in a well orchestrated manner to meet the people and interact with them. Isn’t it some plan? Isn’t it fascinating?

No, it isn’t. There is nothing that is “meant to be” in my view and I am not trying to be impressive here. I think we don’t just stumble upon people, we guide ourselves, direct ourselves to sieve through the crowd we meet and reach the people we “want” to reach. Within us, there is a planner. We plan to meet people of a certain type, those who don’t fit in, fade away in the background and those who do, stay and stick around.

I don’t think…. Love or friendship therefore, might happen by chance. It’s pure choice. It’s your choice.

And it’s funnier after the first few days when the choices are made. After a bond is established, the intriguing factors in the relation such as “who will dominate whom”, “what sort of humour will ensue in between”, “whose angst would give way to whose preferences” and so on.

It’s not for nothing that I find anthropology interesting.

Friday the 13th

Ah The ominous date-day combo when something unlucky has to happen. If the whole world is facing the day, the bad luck is uniformly and evenly distributed. Why should one worry then? If I am gonna have a great fall, isn't the person who is laughing at me, stepping on a banana peel simultaneously?

This way of looking at things is very interesting though. One can read his horoscope and live a day before even living it. Prejudice comes easy with superstitions. Thoughts, actions, all of them get affected by thinking in this direction- the grand scheme of things, God's plan, nature's course of action. I would call it micro-time-travel. You live the immediate next moment before even it touches you.

A car is coming to hit you, if you are told that in the grand scheme of things, you are supposed to die today... you won't resist it. If you are told the opposite, you will drag yourself out of the deepest mud to make it come true. Knowing what someone would think, say or how he or she would react to you, may determine your course of action. It's even worse than not resisting a car accident.

If you think you know someone, you tend to project him into a virtual existence and daydream about his actions and behaviour. It kind of takes away the spice...

Voices in the head

Watched the movie "London Dreams" recently. The movie adopts a style where one of the characters is also the narrator of the story but, the story he is narrating is just a string of thoughts he underwent during the course of time. It is talking to oneself. Francis Bacon in his essay "Of Friendship" says that we all need friends to talk our hearts out. So that our thoughts are out in the open for dissection and analysis. Self-talk doesn't let you do that fully. It's a way of burrowing aimlessly into a wide open trench.

The other side of the fence isn't so pretty either. The majority of people consider someone talking to them as an opportunity to argue and to prove a point. Conversations should be had for the heck of it. When someone tells you how he or she feels about a particular person, it is not for you to judge their views and tell them what to do. It is more about letting them talk, providing the punctuations in their speech so that they can iron out the wrinkles in their soul.

It actually is easier said than done. It is hard not to advice. It is hard to keep a conversation going without arguments and suggestions. But, it is hard to keep a friendship going with their continual influx.