What of the age, huh?

As I contemplate on my (prematurely) ageing bones squeaking with pain, I reminisce quite a few conversations on age.

Sweet 16 - full of sweet nothings; forever 21 - not really forever; 30 - the ticking timebomb - it never goes off but is "still" (and) ticking!! 40 n midlife crisis - time to leave the vices; senility@50 - You are only as old as you imagine yourself to be! ;)

Age is nothing but a number. A number to rejoice, resurrect and reap life's harvest.

Now coming to the question, " How old are you?" Or guessing how old someone is! A direct question to a lady elicits a frank and straightforward answer. Maybe I have a bias here; for, in my circle of friends are bold, assertive women who form a niche echelon. The same question, when addressed to many a Y-carrying friend or colleague, elicits a pause, left-in-the-lurch bewilderment, a maze of guessing and finally, an approximation! Even among friends, whose DOB (they know)I know! What's wrong in saying you are that 30-ish, no 30+ish..or 40+ish? Well, I love their squirming expressions lest I blurt out that guarded number! Aaahhh, the gentlemen..handle with care.

Guessing someone's age could be outright crazy and fun, as long as the person is not privy to the free-wheeling conversations. From imaginarily pulling someone's imaginary wig to counting the hair left on the crest or looking for carefully tucked greys beneath the dripping dipped-in-blacks, it, sure. is humorous down to the humerus!(meaning, to the bone!)

Now to the other crowd who harp a bit differently but keep harping on the same string - the "right age" - to get married, to settle down (homo sapiens were long settled, aren't they?). "If not at this age, then it's never gonna happen!" Phew!!! Hahaha..sorry buddy, I've long crossed that age! I am carrying a never-detonated bomb..womb...heeheehee.

As an after-thought, a retort to this crowd ought to be, "Is there not a right age to retire and go on "vanavasam"?"

There are a few outliers who have something more to sneer at - contrasts in age, the wrinkles and the hair( rather the lack of it) or in outrageous terms , "budha and takla". It is coming of age, you see and I am sorry for those people who cannot see eye-to-eye, who have not yet come of age(mental, emotional). Physical ageing and its attendant frailties are gonna catch up with you too, dudes.  I am gonna see you go "budha"; takla? maybe not..you need chock-a-block of hair to cover up that empty box below.

So what of the age, huh? I love and adore you for what you are!  As long as we grow gracefully, with age! ;) 

The chaos within

I twist and turn. My eyes look hither and thither. My thoughts meander and slowly drift afar until I pull them together. My breathing is chaotic..fast as if I am searching frantically for something; slow as if to assure that this too shall pass.

What is this? Is this for real or an illusion? Am i missing something? Is something amiss? Is this something that will fizzle out? Is the stress making me go bonkers?

Unsettled questions unsettling me.

Fascinated by resilience

I've been waiting to write this post ever since I saw the brilliant green twigs, brimming with life and vigour, against all odds and neglect.

The fascination begins with the word itself and how I relate myself to it. It describes me best. No bragging this one. Simply - "Knowing oneself".

This plant - Omam (that's how my parents call it) or Karpooravalli (as others call it) is the only one I had in my apartment. It keeps off bugs and pests. It helps my sinus headaches.

So much for my scientific knowledge. Let's come to its resilient story. A year ago, I placed it along with my neighbor's plants so that it would get a few drops of water. And i requested them to. However, it was not to be! Later, I saw that it was dried up and looked sorely neglected. They never watered it. Why? Because it was mine. (The same neighbors flagrantly usurped my more flamboyant asparagus!)

The couple of days I was at home, I dutifully watered it. When I left, I forgot to put it alongside with my neighbors'. It was too late before I realised my act of omission.

When I came back, I was in for a lush, green surprise! It survived well; in fact, beat the game of neglect! Resilience, at its best! Fascinated? It is mine! ;) :P

The week that was!

It's already been a week since I checked in to my apartment! Or maybe, on a different perspective, just a week!! And I've already had so much of sensory onslaught to deal wtih. So much to see, hear, smell, feel...so much that I choose to call it sensory onslaught. Not the most pleasant of things to experience and reminisce.

The first few hours were spent in wheeling out cobwebs in the living room. I did not dare to enter the other rooms until a few days later. The dust had settled into every nook and corner, every exposed space. How I wish te dust of  "my single existence" had settled down too! Well, that's grist for the mill. More of it, later.

The realisation that I was back in dystopia-land was imminent. A friend visited to help me cope with my coming home to an empty nest. I was happy at the prospect of having someone for company.  Better alone than bad company, it turned out. Not for me, one that cannot tolerate the positive energy.  Signal for weeding out bad friendships. 

I am not too kind with people who utter innuendoes or mean comments about my choice of friends or whom I admire n adore. I let my displeasure known n the fragile ego was broken. I cannot give you the love that you are looking for, my friend. You need to look for that love in your caste. That's the truth. When the ego is not pampered, it finds fault in everything - no salt in the food, intolerance to music, the list went on.  I am sorry but it is absolutely my world!! I would never insinuate into that personal space of any friend and I expect reciprocation. 

I could not take in this negativity and was relieved to see the friend leave..and the friendship along with it. Life is so full of life to negotiate with people shoving in their negativity.

I also had some pruning on social network pending for quite a while. Had to place restraint on people who were spamming my space. Especially someone who was offering unsolicited gyaan.  An azquaintance from school invited me to her place in the US. I was flummoxed at the invitation. I was never her friend. In fact, I loathed her, to be honest. She later tells me that she was concerned about me settling down in an alien country. She knew the pain! Well, why couldn't she fly down to my place and buy me a piece of property and I could have settled down very well! Why should I fly ( spend precious dollars) to visit her in another state? Maybe she had some home-consults in-waiting! Just like the way she wanted me to drive 200 miles to check her parents' eyes for cataract at their home in India?!  Just because she thinks she is high on the caste heirarchy! She misplaced my patience in dealing with her and I was sorry for her illusions and more apologetic that she is gonna raise her child perpetuating this toxic jaundice! I refuse to buy this ideology of superiority/inferiority of caste. She had the temerity to tell me that I misunderstood that she discriminated me based on my caste! Well, she stepped on raw nerve now... I said I gave nobody the right to discriminate me. period!  

That was just day 1 and 2 :) More cheer to come! :) :) :)   

La bicicleta n more deja vu, mucho más

Puedo ser feliz

Caminando relajada entre la gente

Yo te quiero así

Y me gustas porque eres diferente

La que yo guardo donde te escribí

Que te sueño y que te quiero tanto

Que hace rato está mi corazón

Latiendo por ti, latiendo por ti

How strange but true..these words of La Bicicleta seem like deja vu! The song captures the essence of my being and state of happiness. I have always been a happy person. Sometimes I've been questioned, "How could you be so happy? It cannot be not normal". Whatever, I continue to be happy..I know to handle my level of happiness...set it free and unleashed!  :) yo me quiero asi 

N I have this small e-note where I write unposted letters... where I write down what I dream, what I love and why I love so much! mi corazón latiendo por ti, latiendo por ti  Yo me quiero asi, yo te quiero asi.

My romantic idea of my tryst with the bicycle goes further..I had signed up for a bicycle trip in the Oriental even before I ventured on this trip..the song comes to remind me that it's time for my upcoming bicycle trip in a laidback country where time moves with the sun and not with the watch! The lens' tryst with the bicycle at New York..N then the boss introduces us to La Bicicleta...life is strange, like Paulo Coelho's Alchemist. N I am hooked to it, on a never-ending loop ;)

A mí manera, descomplicado

En una bici que me lleva a todos lados

Life could get complicated but can always be uncomplicated when we choose to be honest and happy! :) 

The Sense(lessness) of Belonging(s)

Sense of belonging - it is the nth sense. Something akin to umami. It lends the unfathomable flavor to life.  However heartfelt the feeling may be, it is still intangible. It doesn't come from where you are born. It doesn't come from where you live. It comes from where you feel your worth. It is where you feel  liberated to seek your true worth. That is where you belong; the sense of belonging belongs  there. And that is, anywhere and, everywhere!

Belongings  - senseless! Like the dowry people fight over. The manic maniacs who are obsessed with the greed to possess the riches! The possessed! Whose belongings are those anyway? Theirs? Nope!  It is, in fact, much ado about "nothing". In the struggle to usurp anon's belongings, it is easy to crush another's sense of belonging.  The longing to belong starts thence. The self takes a drubbing. Therein lies the rub...rubbing salt into the wound. This hitherto unknown sense becomes conspicuous by its absence!

Remember, you never belonged there, in the first place! So long to belong but never for the belongings! ;)

¡No sé por qué!

No sé por qué... ¿Qué?

No sé por qué siento lo que hago.

No sé por qué no me siento nada, a veces. Y me siento todo, a veces. ¿Por qué siento todo? No sé por qué me siento lo que la otra persona se siente!

¿Porque veo todo? ¿Estoy viendo mucho demasiado? ¡No, no otra vez!

Quiero dejar de ver. Quiero dejar de verlos que me da dolor. Quiero dejar de pensar. 

No sé. Simplemente no quiero saber. 

Quiero paz..paz conmigo mismo. Quiero que todo el mundo contento. 

Voy a ir a pintar ahora. Todo lo que sé es esto. ¡Así es soy!

Not every friend remains a friend

No, not even the best of the lot! I was shocked the first time this truth hit me. And it came in when I was going through the worst upheaval of my life. It was sickening to know what a sadist she turned out to be. 

She coated her chirpy conversations with fine glaze. It was just the icing on the cake. Ignorant of the intentions that lurked beneath the cloak of this supposedly understanding friend, I shared my numerous joys and miniscule doses of unhappiness with her.

She chose to let me soak in my happiness alone but she kept track of me. She pitched in with her efforts to glean every detail of my unhappiness. She shared her happy milestones with me. Yes, milestones they were because otherwise, she didn't surface. It was her self-effacing way to show off. I was genuinely happy for her, as I did even for the faintest acquaintance.

It wasn't that simple. The glaze chipped away once, and I saw through it all.  She repayed a gift with one of similar worth. She didn't have to. So, she was keeping track. Friends don't do that. It wore me down by its weight. Too heavy an emotion to describe! There is so much to read between the lines, which I guess only she would understand. I know she would be  reading this. (I hope you get it, mi amiga! )

She has this uncanny knack of hitting at the most tender spot. Unfortunately for her, that's where my gut feeling arises. N i could see her smirking at what she believed was giving me searing pain. She reads this bit of my (s)crap-space in the virtual world and concocts her own impressions of what is on my mind. So I decided to take the bait and play my own game.  She gets her refills of sadistic amusement and I, mine, whenever she texts me out of the blue.

 It hurt to see that she was waiting all the years to see me lose. Lose, I did, a friend! 

.

The Art Sabbatical at Ann Arbor

Random thoughts on my Art sabbatical @ Ann Arbor ;)

I love weekends and the way I choose to spend it - quiet, unto myself.  Weekends remained pristine  until I finished high school - the Saturdays and Sundays in my possession, Once into medical school, things changed..my idea of weekend took the first beating. Saturdays were meant to work. And so it continued, with no respite.

There came a time when I chose to work even on Sundays. Solitude is a choice but loneliness is not.  Life is an (oxy)moronic irony, isn't it? Unable to bear the pregnant silence of loneliness with the truant mind endlessly bickering unto itself, it was my choice and I had no complaints.

One needs to lose something to appreciate its worth. I have reason to rejoice. I have time to indulge myself. I have the luxury of having my weekends all to myself, again! My work no longer expands to fill the available weekend. I fill my weekends with creativity, weilding the pencil.

There is something magical about holding the pencil - el lapiz! Peace runs in my veins as I hold el lapiz. (Pun unintendedly intended)

What started on the eve of Holi of 2009 as a desperate act to counter my loneliness and to kill time as I sat in my lab, has evolved over the years and grown into a passion. It all started with my sketching isolated eyes, noses, and lips. Then came pairs of eyes. I stopped with sketching the eyes. I was happy and contented. I looked at eyes; so, I sketched eyes. That's what I told people. Honestly, I was just too lazy and unsure of my true potential!

I once tried sketching my friend Ad. It turned out like that of Bhagat Singh - disastrous "A 2 B"  i called it! Didn't have the courage to show him nor the doggedness to attempt again. I was too tired to attempt; was myopic to see beyond and risk a walk in the beauty of the woods. Those were the times when i remained tied to a tree, the family tree.

As I learnt to fall back on this innate passion to soothen my frayed nerves, I took up the pencil a little more often. I had to prove myself to no one. I didn't have to be perfect. I had myself to call my own. I felt more confident about making mistakes, to fumble, to try again. Voila! I could sketch a full face with so much of life!

 Life is full of surprises and I am thankful..one step at a time!

 Now, with the certainty of my weekends, life has become perfect with its own imperfections. Life is always perfect in the artist's imagination, especially with the realisation that I am getting better at it, with regular practice - "The Art Sabbatical at Ann Arbor".

How effacing is self-effacing?

How effacing is self-effacing? Let's face the truth.

Nobody likes to be in the company of someone who constantly blows his or her trumpet. I would not, honestly. Would I like the company of a self-effacing person? Again, nope.

I like to be amidst humble people but definitely not with the consciously modest kind. There is a discerning line betwen being modest and self-efffacing. Or maybe, even a glaring line. Being a trait of the pretentious, it is particularly tiring to keep the person's ego soothed and buttered. One has to blow the trumpet for the other person. Not that I am faced with such a predicament that i chose to pen my thoughts. This thought surfaced on my mind, and took over like a water hyacinth, ever since i talked about it with a friend yesterday.

I use this portal as a scrapbook to jot down my distracting thoughts. And life goes on...Thoughts may come and thoughts may go, but life goes on forever, like the little brook.

Now that the overwhelmingly distracting thought is well on its way to getting itself effaced, it is worth the effort to dwell on "self-effacement", isn't it? ;)

Never a pittance for the puissance!

Random musings of the fortnight gone by. 

There was this entrepreneurial gentleman who spoke to me about his impressions of his humble self and his life. I listened politely. He thought he was a good match for me!!?? He impressed upon me how I need to respect my mother tongue. I was still patient trying to OHT (overhead-transmit) his horrible diction; not letting my auditory areas process any of the zoosemiotics(or homosapiens-semiotics). I paused the conversation to talk to my landlady. And then he tells me, "You WAS bayangarama peter-ing". Even my polite hmmm-ing petered out! A pittance for the puissance? Nay, never! Si, soy así.

Strangely familiar!

I donno how to react. I see strangely familiar similarities with this random stranger I spoke to, during my long trip from Moscow to India. He had an Oscar Wilde to read and I had some deadlines to meet. I saw in him, something of "the bunch of randomness" that I was, a couple of years ago. I put the deadline aside, to lend a ear, to feed my own curiosity. Feed my curiosity I did, with intriguing conversations and the typically atypical Oscar Wilde stating, "All art is quite useless."

 There have been recurrent tides of evanescent deja vu hitting me everyday. Just a few random threads of words to pen down this strange feeling and help me unclog my mind.



The fidgety fugitive from yonder,
Made my memory wander
In time, to ponder
Of the own self more fonder.
As I was left to wonder
Of the decade gone longer
I took a gander at the outlander
Labelled as gone goose
In a tight noose
With a dozen goose eggs!

Hither and thither
Yes, i went into heather
And bad weather
With fear always near
It took away the ones so dear
My mind was my fear
My thoughts weren't clear
The fidgety fugitive, tearing me ear to ear

With another year, came the salt and pepper
And the bellwether
Of the goose hanging high and nigh.
Turning all stones that lie
On untrodden paths to the unfinished goal
Hitherto dared not touch with a barge pole.
I go up the greasy pole
The way to the highman on the totem pole
No, not dole
But sweat, holy soul!

While I open my eye,
Into the deja vu I try to pry.
Srangely familiar
Far, yet so near.
Again, it is the fudgitive figitive!
Breeds curiosity, than contempt,
At every attempt.

Every word rings a bell
That all is well
This very moment - The present -
Is more a "present"
Of a future that I see, from a past
Forever lost!


P.S." A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one." - Oscar Wilde

Now for the deja vu. Is it art? Is it a flower that blooms to wither? Accidental? Well, the subject is a long one....

Manners maketh a man; what about the woman?

Manners maketh a man. Charity begins at home.

I don't know why i kept parrotting these age-old adages in my mind until i could no longer hold back but had to ink it in black and white.

It's a small world. I am impressed. More so, by the impressions made by a few small minds.

Myopic attitude by a high myope,  if i have to sound euphemistic and precise, both at the same time. How would one react if one were to bump into a college senior, albeit an acquaintance? I have a great memory, touchwood! I could recall right upto her name.

And there she acts - as if she has never ever seen me. Speaks for her poor memory - still acceptable; while I'm running my mental search engine, matching the features of those unmistakably popping eyes...I remember every detail of the eyes, bcos I'm an eye mechanic you see! ;) I ask her college of graduation and Madame says - - -. Now i know!!! Then i ask her a leading question, "MBBS from...?" ! She had to blurt out, "KMC". There, I gotcha! I am sneering in wicked mirth! ;)

Then i try to find out if my first impression (made more than a decade ago) still holds true. Nudge her with another question, about her PG college. Now, that's a mofussil centre. No wonder she chose to say - - - to my very first question. One's formative years are the MBBS days - the memories of those six years you carry all along proudly.

Hahaha.. well, people never change.  And first impressions seldom do.  The inferiority complex, guised as a pseudo-superiority complex, stays put!

Now, the best part comes when I ask her something related to baking my clay. She seems to suffer from selective auditory impairment. Wait, is it selective auditory processing? Maybe, we'll have to put her through some functional MRI studies. Good for her that I am thinking of fMRI - no radiation exposure. Well, you see she is already handling too much of radiation!
She left without an element of elementary courtesy. God, why don't some people grow? Small minds! Do manners really maketh a man? What of the woman? The woman was already made! ;) Move on, I say(to myself).

Single ladies and armchair daters, this one is for y'all!

What's on my mind? Some random thoughts for my single lady-friends.

You may be the no-nonsense girl but expect your man to be "the man". He cannot be an armchair dater. You know what i mean by that! 

Happy with Whatsapping, wants you to come over to some place closer to his workplace not because it is an extraordinarily mushy place but bcos it saves his petrol costs; wants you to pay for the date bcos you chose the place and the menu (Yes, I am old-fashioned). Isn't he supposed to be a gentleman wooing you? He is not expected to sleep through the date, for you are not looking for the frustrated insomniac.  If he suddenly gets busy with his appointments, do remind him that you have better jobs (better paying, as well) than does Mr.Busy. 

P.S: Please do not extrapolate any of the above gyaan to my personal life. If you do, rest assured that you will get a piece of my mind, absolutely free! ;) :Pwink emoticontongue emoticon

The pain of pregnant silence

The pregnant silence between  people can be more painful than the pains of labor. One is laden with the the burden of the memories of the past. Suddenly, all those lighter moments lose their buoyant spirit and sink to be drowned by heavy emotions. Every spoken word mocks at the heart and every unspoken word gnaws at it. The ego's selfish need to maintain societal riches wilfully betrays the alter ego.

Why does a poignant piece of writing  always have to emerge out of a deeper sense of hurt?