Snuggling in....

Finally thought of my blog after a whole month...reasons many....more on them later.
As of now it's been three days in Delhi and i'm loving it.All the color,the heat,the dust,the traffic jams,the new daunting smell of things...i could go on and on.

Work is hectic,class is a mixed eclectic bunch.The NDTV mentors regardless of saying have been scaring the daylights out of us,probably because we are here to deliver so much. Ideas,innovations,brainstorms that would constantly re-brand them and ofcourse live upto choices that we made for ourselves.The mere thought of Dr.Prannoy Roy's workshops,learning camera techniques from Ajmal Jami(he covered the Kargil war for NDTV)is making me jittery.At the end of the day it all comes down to whether you can live upto all that you've ever wanted from yourself,pushing aside all frozen memories and living on the edge.It just couldn't get better.

The city is being nice to me as well,from my landlady(she's above 50 and never looked hotter) to the stranger at the Tata Indicom store(now friend) who helped fix my laptop on my first day out here;the cute family friend whom my mom insists should only be a brother to me(ouch!!) ;17 year old Kalika(roommate in my PG) whom i'm entitled to spoil.....and ofcourse phone calls from a special someone i left behind in Kolkata :(

Right now i'm busy with researching stuff that i'm supposed to know as a "journalist";i like the sound of the word,have yet to get used to it.A long night and a long way to go.....

The Dark Knight

The news was shocking.A deeply disturbed superstar left himself wide open to the vultures as he insisted on living in his own world of fancy.

The fact that MJ lived till 50 was in many ways strange.Footage of the child abuse trial of 2005 showed that he was "tiny,weak,flesh in the face visibly shrinking,pale and in very poor health".I believe facing more than 18 years in jail in more than 10 child molestation related cases;forced to sit through more than 60 days of court proceedings with 136 witnesses and innumerable pieces of evidence against him broke the man.

They say he got acquitted because of a soft jury.It kind of makes a little bit of your soul die every time the courts made a spectacle out of a man who had been so utterly corrupted by everything that's wrong with fame.

Being a showman from the age of 8 made him a terrible judge of character.He didn't know how or when to stop.Practically everyone who met ended up suing him,however he never let go of his of his profligacy till the last day.Completely broke,he lived in a $ 100,000 a-month penthouse !!! All of this has made him only a bigger target.

His controversies in terms of his alleged relationships with children were highly disturbing.any level-headed parent would consider it grossly inappropriate even predatory for that matter.If you refused to believe that his motives were sexual,i suppose you could also argue that children provided MJ with the purity and honesty that adults didn't.

I think children simply fed his messiah complex.After all this as a man who had ordered a giant replica of Da Vinci's Last Supper to hang over his bed with Christ's face replaced with his own.
And in the end it all ruined him.A decade of unemployment and overspending,a series of crippling loan-negotiations.

Now we debate as to whether we should put him with Cobain and Presley and whether he will be greater in death than in life.Well,I don't know.All i know that we are the ones who make maniacs out of them and then want them on stamps to make them immortal
To me MJ is a man of honor, a man of music,i owe him some fond memories of my growing up years.I just want his music to play on.

A Bang and A Whimper

I have this clingy problem. I get into things, hobbies, people. I throw myself into them.I find other people who are just as involved. Then something happens and just like a delicate floating balloon that was getting bigger and bigger as you kept feeling it with air, it blows up and all that's left are colorful shreds. Like take my Deutsch class ; I was on top of the world when I wrote my A1 exam and now that I can speak some too, I couldn’t care less. Ok, I hope my Lehrer is not reading this. Ahem!!

Lately, I've lost a group of people that I was very attached to. I have probably driven some of them away, others have driven me away, and I didn't even realize that until a few days ago especially after we’ve rocked some legendary crazy nights together, getting knocked off all possible liquor.

I spent some time in a weird disbelieving stupor, thinking of what really went wrong. I fumed at myself and others. I started hating people I thought I liked and who I thought liked me. I doubted. I tried to rationalize, I tried to explain and I actually tried to ask for explanation. I got a bucket of insults poured on me for simply trying to understand. I've mostly stopped keeping up with blogs, I stopped writing and all of it was killing me. I called Ma a bit too much now that I am in HELLORE which made her strangely suspicious (she always thinks I need money again!!) but also happy given that Baba doesn’t fit anywhere into my scheme of things.

I think I'm finally moving to acceptance. Admitting to myself that all the signs in favor of the good times were there and I just chose to ignore them. Embracing, that not being universally liked doesn't make me a bad person. Writing down a huge rant about everything that was wrong with them doesn't matter and it will not change anything, other than blow up the bitterness I'm trying to move away from.

The problem is - I don't always have a good way of dealing with unexpected reactions from people I've considered my friends. Most of the time, I do the only thing that always helps me. I retreat into this awesome invisible pseudo-shell where I always ran to as a scared little stuttering shy kid and removed myself from the situation. I leave. Sometimes leaving merely means stepping away for a few days, taking a break, cooling off, thinking things through before finding a better way of dealing with them. I leave so I make it through the rough patch.

I've been told to stop being bitchy and accused of always complaining, never being happy. Well I’m not. I guess it doesn’t come that effortlessly for some people. Now I feel a little bit like as if I just broken up a long painfully-romantic relationship, full of good memories, but simply too broken to fix, cracks of which I've been trying to ignore, until the pieces crumbled around me.I feel drained.

I look at my login screen and I have no idea what I'm about to do. The good thing about hobbies is that you can always pick up a new one. The bad thing about hobbies on cyberspace is that they are full of human ties, friendships,strings attached and all that and its simply impossible to let go of them, atleast some of them.

But one thing that strikes me amidst all feelings of loss and regret is relief.
Relief. Like when you come back from this long trip and you find all your stuff neatly unpacked, your bed made so you can just snuggle under covers and wait to fall asleep.

Yet another rant....

I sometimes wonder how long I’m going to sulk and consequently listen to blues, binge on zinger burgers, French fries and chocolates, have crazy cravings for things I can’t do on my own.

And friends keep blogging about how opening up helps and how friends are always there and all that.

It feels like a crime not to be happy; and with the whole NDTV thing coming up; after I fought with the world convincing them that it was I was supposed to do all along and I’d be good at and blah blah!! I guess the hunt is more fun than the kill, huh??

Lately all I’m doing after my lab work is getting a whole lot HIMYM and SCRUBS watching done and even people in sitcoms are falling in love, making babies!! Lately a close friend is expecting his first kid and send me some pics of his wife and it made me go "Awwww!! i want one of those!!" .All my girlfriends are “committed” and to quote a really close friend she’s supposedly “making out like bunnies” in Europe. That gives me a horrible visual btw. Phew!! Why me??

I started freaking out people at home so much so (given that I didn’t speak apart from monosyllables) that I was forcefully taken to Shantiniketan because Ma insisted that I needed a break. It was a good break away from all the cynical people I know and concrete jungles and all that but now that I’m back I’m onto it again, as a somebody aptly puts it I’m “feeling sad about the same thing once again”. I had promised myself that my blog won’t be a shithole for my psychobabble and here I go ranting again.

Last time I remember I was sulking because I thought I was in love and now I’m sulking because I can’t go out with my phenomenally hot neighbour on our customary walks all over Salt Lake because I’m leaving the city :-) and the outcome of it all are my regular visits to Someplace Else and rush headlong into pitchers of gold and tell off some poor friend (read Crush) because he’s happy with some chic!!!! I so want to undo that; if life would just be like my Ipod…..rewind, fast forward or shuffle.

Well the bright side of it all is I’ve watched a lot of good cinema, thanks to Max Mueller Bhavan and its Docu-forum and the upcoming “Dialogues in Diversity” featuring a series of short films selected from the 5^th Asian Women’s Film Festival 2009 supplemented by two relevant German films as well. Each of them has touched me in some way or the other, made me a little better or worse.Also I’ve done some quality reading, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke and Mohammed Hamid’s A case of Exploding Mangoes among a few others. The last two being the finest political thrillers I’ve come across in a very long time.

15 sachen über mich.

1. Ich hasse es,früh am Morgen aufzuwachen.
2. Ich hasse es,mein Bett jeden Morgen zu machen.
3. Und folglich krieche ich gern wiederhinein,wo ich war.
4. Ich bin eine schreckliche Köchin.
5. Ich kann für dunkle Schokolade und KäseKuchen sterben.
6. Ich habe eine sehr hohe Alkohol-Toleranz.
7. Ich habe auch eine hohe Schmerzschmelle,ich habe vier piercings in jedem ohr.
8. Ich liebe Wodka und Rum cocktail-mixturen ich mache (ausschlieβlich für mich).
9. Ich habe ein Lied,um mich an jede besondere Person in mienem Leben zu erinnern.
10. Ich habe eine Leidenschaft für Schawrz und Purpur und diese Farben beherrschen meine Garderobe.
11. Ich liebe Hügel und will ein paar jahre an einer vergessene Ecke des Kanchenjunga verbringen.
12. Ich bin eine an Schlaflosigkeit Leidende.
13. Ich habe immer einen Lieblingshund gewünscht aber nie einen bekommen.
14. Ich bin sehr impulsiv und denke nie bevor ich etwas mache.
15. Müsik hält mich am Leben,tag aus tag ein.

15 random things about me

1. I hate to get up early in the morning.
2. I hate to make my bed every morning.
3. And consequently like crawling into it the way i left it.
4. I am a terrible cook
5. I can die for dark chocolate and cheesecake.
6. I have a very high Alcohol tolerance.
7. I also have a very high pain threshold,i have four piercings in each ear.
8. I love the vodka and rum concoctions that i make(strictly for myself though!!)
9. I have a song to remember every special person in my life by.
10. I have an obsession for black and purple and these colors rule my wardrobe.
11. I love the hills and will spend a few years in some forgotten corner of the Kanchenjunga.
12. I am an Insomniac.
13. I have always wanted a pet dog but never got one!!
14. I am very impulsive and never think before doing something.
15. Music keeps me alive,day in day out. :)

For no good reason....

okay the reasons why i haven't been blogging are lame but i just can't help them:

1)i was on vacation with my folks in shantiniketan for poila boishak :-) more on that later.
2)its 42.5 degrees in kolkata and powercuts, i've pretty much lost it !!
3)i've been sulking a bit too much or maybe the dry spell lasted too long this time.
4)i'm tired of all the "what's wrong with you?"s from every living creature i know.....
5)i've been stuck with my deutsch classes and i promise you guys a post in deutsch shortly !
and the worst of them all,
6)IT has hit me again,to be or not to be?to tell or not to tell?do i or don't i?all because i can't get over IT.

Haven't i said enough?? get lost !!!

To You...

To the time that passes me by...
There were the good times.The bad times.And you.
There was the adolescence,with or without the loneliness....and you.
There were the long sweaty summer afternoons,the feeling down,and the careless scribbles across the pages.....and there was you.
The playing guitar in the neighborhood,stolen tunes and stolen lyrics....and you.
The falling in love for the millionth time,and the dull Grey sky becoming beautiful all of a sudden...and you.
The usual morning jog;on those terrible days when i was disillusioned that i needed to lose weight.
That one-sided soul-searching,intimate conversations, whatever on the roof....and you.
That horrible day when college got over and i left the city,rebelling over depression and neck-deep in vodka....and the thought that i would never see you again.
The bad days at work.Screaming and taking it out on the road that i walk on.
Mindlessly tossing coins at the street urchins and advising them to go to school.....they would just blink and run away.
Getting claustrophobic at home with mom,dad and rest of the paraphernalia and breaking down on the bathroom floor....and you.
If there's anyone who's brought me everything I'd ever cherished,it's been you.

So this goes out to YOU..........my most unusual friend.