The Relationship Crap.

Met PG after June 2006! I was a little apprehensive about seeing her here in India. I mean we were *buddies* in the UK. It was hard to imagine meeting her in a completely changed context, rather, in the Indian context. I had a million doubts about the Chennai trip turning out 'just-fine'; did we still have things to share? Were we friends because we were automatically put in rooms facing each other, or was there more to it? How would it be like to meet now, without the e-gap between us? I mean we were only in touch online, only once in a while to check up on each other, to find out if things were going 'just-fine'?
Uperse I was meeting her with her classmates, AN and DA. I always find it very hard to gel with strangers. I mean I had doubts about meeting PG after so long and these people were toh complete strangers, I honestly did not feel this would turn out to be good trip afterall. To add to all this, DP decided he would rather spend his time honeymoon-ing with his boyfriend over meeting us...
Oh! Well! I had a brilliant time, AN and DA were really sweet, especially AN, he drove us all over Chennai, just so that I could get a feel of the city and PG could go down nostalgia lane.

I still haven't come to the relationship crap yet! This was just the random intro...which calls for another short intro before I actually start rambling about relationships...
Now, PG is dating AR (who also is from Chennai, now settled in the UK) for over 3 years. She was supposed to be my relationship-guru in the UK. Giving me all the gyan about the do's and don't's of a *healthy relationship*.
After a long day roaming around in AN's funky military Jeep, PG and I retired to our hotel room to catch up on an entire eventful year, to talk about our lives, our love lives; she about hers and me about the non-existence of one!
I was happy that we could still discuss these things with the same intensity and fervor that we discussed them in the UK. Only difference being that, this time I was imparting all the gyan. I was the relationship-guru! Apparently, PG is physically attracted to other men when she has intellectual interactions with them and doesn't find AR intellectually stimulating anymore. He is Mr. Dependable who takes care of her, gives her all the attention she needs, knows when and exactly what she needs, who came across seven seas (literally) just to see her before the new year, who went so far as to do a zillion things just because PG liked them; he started listening to rock music (it was a huge thing for him, from Tamil music to Rock it takes hard work!), tried appreciating her taste in almost everything. Ms PG on the other hand, is very dismissive of him. Takes him for granted, to quote her, "when AR comes, it feels like I am being protected by warm blanket. He feels like family. How can one love anyone from one's family?!" (How perverse! But isn't that the ultimate objective of a love-relationship? to start a family together, to make the other a part of your family?!). I mean this woman wants to jump from one man to the next, eternally, having AR as a back-up for those cold wintery nights. She wants to feel "weak in the knees" everytime she sees him, I felt like shaking her up and telling her that she would be limping around the town if that was to happen everytime she saw AR! I mean, come on! you have been dating this fellow for 3 years, you give him hope, he plans his entire life centering you, what more can you want?! How can you shatter all his dreams because after all this while you dont' feel "weak in the knees"!?
PG wasn't the first person who wanted EVERYTHING from her boyfriend. SS had an emotionally and intellectually sensitive man, she wasn't physically attracted to him after 2 years of dating! Why do these women have these insatiable *demands* that their boyfriends have to be Purrfect!?! How can ONE person be your emotional back-up, be your sex bomb/sex machine (whatever!) and be capable of intellectual conversations with you? (and not just any intellectual conversation, a conversation about things that interest *you*). Why can't acceptance of faults come naturally? (One has to spend their life living with the faults not with the qualities of that other!) Why can't compromises be made with an open mind? Why can't there be sharing instead of compromises? Why are adult relationships so difficult and twisted? Why can't people learn that life is unfair and that is the precise reason they say that everything is fair in love!

People *create* problems for themselves and then wonder how they came about being in such deep shit?! Every damn thing is self-created and self-centered, give a little space to the other, share a little space, have a space of your own and then reflect on where you are in the shit...I'm sure the shit would've disappeared by then, or you would have figured how to get out of it!

I reflected on relationships of my past, not that I've had (m)any, but I've learnt much (At least, I think so). Acceptance of self is more difficult than acceptance of the other. Accept that you are selfish. Accept that there is always a give-and-take in a relationship, that there cannot be a relationship if there is no exchange. If you can accept your faults, it's just a matter of understanding the other has a "self" too.

I am not entirely sure why I wanted to write about this crap, coz as far as I am concerned, I feel I have issues all sorted in my head, if not in my life.
(Now, I feel like I am acting like a daadi, giving advice to bacchas of tomorrow. Haye! Nahiiii. I am supposed to be living the wild life, life on the edge, with the assurance that all *issues* can be handled tomorrow, a care-free existence where relationships don't matter much, where everything is about living in the moment! *sigh*)

Well, I think I am done with all the rambling, and since typing for prolonged periods of time isn't exactly one of my forte, I am going to leave a lot of things unsaid!

Ciao!

Playlist and More

Feeling sad and lonely and generally very low and I'm lying awake thinking of nonsensical things and just wondering where life has brought me? What I am doing with it? What am I going to do with it? I guess that's what they call "growing up"!
Reminiscing, thinking, pondering, analyzing and generally *feeling* was the theme for the day...
The songs that constitute my current playlist:

1. Keith Urban - Stupid Boy
2. The Fray - Over My Head
3. Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek
4. John Legend - Save Room
5. Chris Daughtry - Home
6. Rascal Flatts - Help Me Remember
7. Blue October - Calling You
8. Goo Goo Dolls - Feel the Silence

You lie awake at night
With blue eyes that never cry
And all you remember now
Is what you feel

The truth remains
In midnight conversations
I asked for this moment
But you turned away

Sad like a lonely child
Broken the day you're born
I held the light to you
But I was so vain

And you remain
A promise unfulfilled
I ask you for more
But you push me away

And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside us
Everything means more now than
Words could explain

And if we feel the silence
Leaving this all behind us
Looking for something more to say
I don't know where I'm going
Only know where I been
And you move through my soul like a hurricane wind
Been so lost for so long
I don't know how to get back again
And we're drowning in the water
That flows under this bridge
When you're fighting the current
You forget how to live
And I wanted to reach but I don't know where to begin

And you remain
A promise unfulfilled until today
And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside us
Everything means more now than
Words could explain

And if we feel the silence
Leaving this all behind us
When it's gone what will you say
How do we hold on (5)
You lie awake at night
With blue eyes that never cry

...It's my song for the day! Ain't these lyrics just lovely?! :D

Nostalgic! (yet again!)

I miss my kitchen! I miss my katoris wrapped with cling film with my sabzis stored safely for tomorrow. I miss the overflowing refrigerator, the super-heated heater, the walls with colourful collages, the inadequate chairs, the dripping freezer, the whirring of the washing machine providing the background score for the endless conversations highlights and revelations of the day being discussed and debated with a frenzy that would put all Indian netas to shame! over cold lunches, community dinners, hot coffees, bland teas, and the cookie smells from the oven or the burning smell of the toast I forgot to remove from the grill!

"Ah! Those were the days!..."

It's Holiday Time...Tra-la-la-la-la...

Everyone is in the holiday cheer. Eid is just around the corner, which translates for me into 3 days of classes-free existence. Papa Noel has finished packing his goody-bag, so all the naughty kids are hoping they weren't that naughty after-all.
All my students want me to leave classes early, my colleagues disappear before lunch-time. I finally have a vacation planned and booked! I am excited! Yay! Yay!

It's Christmas time! It's snow time! I was looking at these pictures from last year, and nostalgia set in (as always), and I wanted to go back and do it all over again, the christmas lights, the snow-angels, the heavy sweaters, the hot coffee, the German fairs, the marshmallows, the chocolate coated strawberries, everything!

I miss you my snow-angel!

Graduate Applications and Me

It's strange how so many graduate applicants go through similar emotions and actions and yet pretend so well their utter clueless-ness about the existence of "the others".
I am not saying there should be a support group, trust me there are many, I just want to feel that I am the only ONE, that only MY life is unfair, only I have BIG problems, only I have to face these horrible pressures and scrutiny...
All of that just so that I can say "Gah! Life! *sigh*" and move on happily. But they won't even give the pleasure of feeling that!! I'm done with praising myself, done with being overtly polite to strangers, done with asking for favours, done with filling out idiotic forms, done with worrying about the stupid "to be or not to be", the meaning of which I only truly comprehend now, I'm done with being pushed around by dumb-ass nothings and nobodys, I'm just done with it all!
I want to yell, I want to scream, I want to vent all the vex, all the anxiety, all the unwanted tensions. I want to crib! that I am the only one poor little soul on this planet who desperately needs, more than needs, deserves a break! and a BIG BREAK at that, not one of those the Kit-Kat breaks. I can't have those, I'll put on too much weight.

Now that my GradApplications are *almost* over, I want to do something crazy; colour my hair pink, may be run-away to an exotic island all by myself, jump off a cliff and then realize I can fly, or may be I'll just get a tattoo. Nah! I'm scared at the sight of the needle. Everytime I watch "Miami Ink", I feel like getting a funky tattoo, you know, one on the back of my shoulder, a bar-code with the Fibonacci sequence, wouldn't that be just cool!?! I wish I had that thing that you need to have to get a tattoo, or for that matter get anything that has even the remotest hint of being permanent. For now, the only thing that has a permanent mark on it, is my PhD *plan*. I guess, everything else can wait, or not, or whatever!

P H D

Piled Higher Deeper...

? Money V/s Satisfaction ?

I had a misconception about myself, which was dispelled recently.
I always had a question when "adults" spoke about their jobs. I used to wonder how many of them really like what they do? Do they do it because they like it? Or do they do it for the money?
And then I used to question myself, hypothetically of course, given a choice between money and job satisfaction, who would I go with? And my answer almost always was MONEY, without a doubt. The argument went, if I don't have enough money, I was bound to crib, which again entailed dissatisfaction, so money was a definite choice for me.
Recently, very early on professionally, I actually had to choose between two job options, one that gave me money and the other, immense job satisfaction. To my very great surprise, I chose job satisfaction; I did not stick around the other job for the money! I did not care for the money!
Again I asked myself, if I were to earn my bread, earn my livelihood doing this, would I still choose satisfaction over money? And this time around the question has left me in the 'don't-know/can't-say' zone!
Why is this question so important? I have no idea, but I wanted it out with it, so there!

I started writing "Of things I left behind" series because I was missing everything and anything that reminded me of UK. I don't know if it was telepathy or coincidence, but PG wrote a blogpost recently which says all the things I wanted to say, only more articulately.

"

Perhaps I'm just in a very nostalgic sentimental phase of life, but the kitchen brings back such fond memories. Mornings and afternoons and evenings and nights spent gossipping over boiling pasta, analysing love lives over mugs of hot chocolate, talking about friends and fun from back home over community dinners - D takes care of aloo, P takes care of rice, R handles the veggies, J does the parathas, P does the dal - singing along with James Blunt over a mop and vaccuum cleaner, stuffing an overstuffed fridge with labelled green peppers, screaming noisy crass meaningless hindi filmi numbers in chorus on a tipsy freezing cold night. Making brownies from scratch, making pizza from scratch, making oatmeal cookies from scratch, making 5 kinds of stuffed parathas from scratch, making Aunty Daisy's lemon pudding from scratch, pancakes and honey, rolling puris with a coke can, tossing spagetti on a wall to check if it's done, poking around in the cake and then wondering why it isn't rising, visiting mums and feasts, birthday parties, late night movies on laptops that weren't loud enough, photography sessions that went on for hours, last minute essay submissions, makeover sessions, kitchen wall collages, christmas lights, diwali diyas. I do the cooking, you do the dishes; I do the clearing, you do the wiping; I do the mopping, you take out the garbage; and then we sit together and look at holiday pictures and tell stories and exchange gifts. Or we gush about clearance sales and parade our exploits. Then there's the cute guy at the bank, and the tutor with a smile to die for, or the very hot lab partner, or the fellow who gave you the look in the computer cluster, or a cheating boyfriend, or a long distance relationship gone sour, or a story of unrequited love, or an all-the-way-from-middle-school-to- now crush that went her own way. And you dream. Of a Harvard PhD, a world-tour, a cafe-cum-library, living happily-ever-after.

"

Miss you guys SO much! (MUAH! HUGS!)
I want to go back! I want to do it all over again!

I've been perplexed and living in a constant state of anxiety for the whole of this month, what with the grad applications (yes, I'm still not done with them; 5 gone, 5 more to go), severe sleep deprivation, a bout of cold-flu-cough and the feeling of being utterly useless which has come about by the flash realization that teaching business = monkey business. And as if that was not enough, now my tiny brain has to cope with these bloody scientists who go and publish "Chimps Exhibit Superior Memory, Outshining Humans"!!!

What followed reading that article was funnier. I went and switched on TV. And what it was playing was this:



To hell with the population explosion, all you intelligent people out there, PROCREATE!!

Madhuri is Back...

...And How?!

Just back from 'Aaja Nachle'.

And I'm saying it for the nth time since I left the cinema-halls, Madhuri is just brilliant. I never thought I had missed Madhuri's presence in tinseltown until today...! Honestly, the only two things that worked for me in the film were the dances and the dancer. I felt like going "haye" after every song.
Hats off to Vaibhavi Merchant! 'Aaja Nachle' actually felt like a Vaibhavi Merchant film rather than an Anil Mehta's!
It was such a treat watching good choreography! And! And! And! Madhuri was in it!

Anyhoo, I've had enough of me getting all excited over Madhuri's come-back, dancing abilities, etc. It's bedtime and 'they' say that sleep deprivation is detrimental to health, actually anyone's health, but I care more about mine. So, ...

Good Night!