Exam, crazy running around, surprise gifts from Mum and Dad, jumping hysterically at the bakery for a cake I had my eyes on, excitedly ordering a million things at the dinner outing, CRAZY photo session.

I’m still nineteen at heart, aren’t I?

I also volunteered to donate some money to the World Food Programme.

Maybe I AM growing up.

I’m impatient, and I push things too hard. I don’t know if that’s considered a bad thing, but I’ll have you know that I cannot sit around and let things take their own course. I just cannot. Can I really be blamed for being too brash and being a go-getter? No, I’m not apologetic at all. If I want something, you can bet your monies on me going all out to get it.

But that’s not quite where the problem lies. The problem is, my idiotic chases take me pretty much to the middle of nowhere (where Courage lives. You know.) And once I acquire this magical object that is the mother of all temptation, I don’t quite know what to do with it. And then I want to move on. The chase nearly kills me, the impatience leaves me emotionally drained, but I need it. I always need something to pursue. Inactivity isn’t part of my essence (been reading too much of Bartimaeus Trilogy. I’m a djinni. No, an afrit!) I switch back and forth between brutal spells of unrest and copious amounts of distress.

I might need to choose between unrest and distress, one of these days. Nothing else will be quite as difficult.

In a brilliant flash of light, the wait ends. The 4000 strong crowd explodes in cheers. As the crowd takes up a great chant of one single name, the gods come to the stage, and I know that everything to this point was, and everything henceforth will be worth it.

It is raining here in Mumbai. It is weirdly symbolic of how I feel right now. Woke up today with a cloud of gloom overhead, and it is only getting darker. I must have committed emotional suicide at some point of the day, because I refuse to feel anything.
I want to drown away in the rain, but not start afresh. In the end, what does it all mean? What does anything mean?

I want a wider view. A way to look at something with such vastness, that it would be impossible to notice any detail.
I want to sit and look at the ocean, its compelling force against land.
I want to walk for eternity, knee-deep in a never-ending sea of sand.
I want to sit on a mountaintop and breathe in the crisp air and soak in the valley below.

Every bit of me screams for release in the explosion of a thousand suns.

I’m claustrophobic.

1. I prefer to buy books and read them rather than borrow them from friends or a library. And I think Pune could do with some good second hand bookstores. I love books. But I’m very choosy when it comes to authors and genres I’ve never tried before.

2. If you give me something “useful” as a gift, and you mean a lot to me, I will NOT use this “useful” gift that you have given me. I will keep it in a drawer/cupboard/under my bed/in the bathroom, but I will NOT use it. I will preserve it.

3. If I say a random word in the middle of a conversation with you, I expect you to respond with an equally random word. Or I’ll get very annoyed.

4. If I get terribly angry with you for something, I can ignore you for hours, days, months, years. I will not reconcile even if you offer to buy me all the Dosas and all the books and all the coffee in the world that I could ever want.

5. I’m brutally honest about my opinion of things. But if you give me negative feedback about anything to do with me, I will not be able to take it in my stride.

6. I love the rain. I love getting stuck outside in the rain. I love sitting indoors and watching the rain. I love the sound of it, the smell of it. As a little girl, I used to dance on my terrace in the monsoon showers. And then I got new neighbours who thought I was mental because I danced in the rain.

7. I like and get along with talkative and lively people. Talk rubbish for all I care. Just don’t sit around in one corner looking and feeling moody.

8. When I’m feeling low, I need someone around me. I won’t tell that someone why I’m feeling low. But I need that someone to stay there.

9. I’ll never get over the people I loved. They’ll be in the past and in the far background, but somewhere somehow, I still love them.

10. If you wake me up before I have had enough sleep, you will automatically become my enemy and I will spite you for the rest of the day. I need my sleep.
If you let me sleep when I’m supposed to wake up early, the consequences are the same as above. I need my sleep, but later.

11. It took me a long time to learn to ride a bicycle. I still do not know how to swim.

12. I can tune people out at any time if they begin to annoy me. Even if they’re right in front of me.

13. If I say something absolutely foolish to someone, I will later spend hours brooding over it.

14. I will give away my things, and years later sit down and try to find them. And then I realise I gave them away.

15. My heart works harder than my head. I use my head only when it comes to intellectual thingses. Otherwise, I don’t think much before I do something.

16. According to my parents, I have never done a single weird or odd thing all my life.
But I remember putting wet rice grains in a lockable jewellery box and locking it. When the box was retrieved years later, the rice grains were rotting and had all sorts of insects on them. That was weird.

17. I inherited 10 foreign coins from my father, and then built a collection. Its not much, but I’m proud of it. Likewise, I have a number of stamps that need to be made into a collection.

18. I love bookmarks. I collect them. I like to look at them and admire them. But I never use them.

19. I don’t like to share. Anything. Hmm. Yeah. But if I’m in a good mood, maybe I will. It depends.

20. Since I don’t have siblings, I tend to call all my cousins my brothers and sisters. So if I sound like I have a cartload of siblings, don’t be too surprised.

21. I look pitiable when I cry. And I cry only if I have been deeply hurt. And that rarely happens.

22. Around a large group of people, I become very disoriented and confused. And so, I sit quietly in a corner and not talk much.

23. I love all forms of stationery. Period.

24. I will become extremely restless and brood and brood if the people close to me simply stop talking to me.

25. I don’t know why I stopped dancing.

Im achtzehnten Jahrhundert lebte in Frankreich ein Mann, der zu den genialsten und abscheulichsten Gestalten dieser an genialen und abscheulichen Gestalten nicht armen Epoche gehörte. Seine Geschichte soll hier erzählt werden. Er heiß Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, und wenn sein Name im Gegensatz zu den Namen anderer genialer Scheusale, wie etwa de Sades, Saint-Justs, Fouches, Bonapartes usw., heute in Vergessenheit geraten ist, so sicher nicht deshalb, weil Grenouille diesen berühmteren Finstermännern an Selbstüberhebung, Menschenverachtung, Immoralität, kurz an Gottlosigkeit nachgestanden hätte, sondern weil sich sein Genie und sein einziger Ehrgeiz auf ein Gebiet beschränkte, welches in der Geschichte keine Spuren hinterläßt: auf das flüchtige Reich der Gerüche. Zu der Zeit, von der wir reden, herrschte in den Städten ein für uns moderne Menschen kaum vorstellbarer Gestank.

Yes. When you read it in German, its extremely well written, the words well crafted. BUT. Germans love adjectives. Seriously. They cannot DO without adjectives. And well, this is one part of German grammar I totally suck at. Imagine the extent of immense pain I had to go through pushing through words I’d never learnt and the extreme form of adjectives, etc. I wish I had studied my lessons again over the summer. What I get after a literal translation from Google Translate (notwithstanding the pains I took to look up the Umlaut codes), surprises me. Because in English, it all seems so simple, and STILL well written! This is the translated version of the paragraph, straight off Google:

In the eighteenth century lived in France a man, one of the most genial and heinous figures in this great and abominable poor era figures not included. His story is here told. He called Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name is in contrast to the names of brilliant monster, like de Sade, Saint-Just, Foucjes, Bonaparte’s, etc., now forgotten, it is certainly not because Grenouille these famous Finster men in self-confidence, contempt people, immorality, wickedness nachgestanden briefly, but because of his genius and his only ambition was limited to an area, which in the history leaves no traces: in the realm of volatile odors.
At the time of which we speak, reigned in the cities and for us modern people stench barely conceivable.

I can’t WAIT to be able to read this properly!

This was a story I wrote for Cul-Week in college last year. I finally got a copy (edited, of course) in the college Magazine. I do not have the actual draft of the story. Only the magazine version. And this one is close to my heart because a favourite teacher liked it. The cue was the first line and we had to continue the story from there.

The Deepest mystery in Cookala was why no one ever got a table of Cafe Cobah. It is a bit of a Dicto Simpliciter because at some point of time, one did find a cosy table in a corner of the dingy cafe, whose only source of lighting was the sun shining through a circular piece of glass in the ceiling. The cafe poorly lit during the rains, was full to the brim with people dripping water from their rain gear. And if one did want to indulge in a hot cuppa and spicy snacks, one had to wait for a table to become vacant. And wait they did. Endlessly. Most people, losing their patience, would walk out of the cafe, tired of having to wait. There were very few people who ever occupied any tables. But they never left them. Almost.

An occupant of one of the various tiny tables was Rehan. The corner table he chose had been one of the many that fit perfectly against the wall and was camouflaged by the teak walls. He had arrived at the cafe before opening time. And this shocked Mr. Burgess quite a bit because Rehan was not a frequenter to the cafe. The inhabitants of tiny Cookala knew each other quite well. Nothing could be kept a secret here.

Rehan had taken a corner table when he arrived early in the morning and still sat there. It was six in the evening now. And he still sat there, staring at the same saltshaker. He fiddled with the rose placed in a vase on the table. It was a deep red. It reminded him of her. Her deep red lips that he tenderly touched, thinking anything that touched her would break her delicate, fragile body. He had stared at them all night while she slept in his arms, her face flowing with contentment. He knew every bit of her face and adored it. Loved it. He sat thinking about every single moment he had spent with her. Every single embrace since they had first met. But he also remembered that particular day when she had come to the river sobbing. After a great deal of persuation and convincing, she had finally told him that she was moving to England to do her Master’s. This came across as a kind of betrayal to Rehan. Hadn’t they vowed to remain in this town no matter what? Hadn’t she said they would be married and love in this town as long as they were alive? She had told him the university was offering her a full scholarship and she didn’t want to throw away the opportunity. Rehan didn’t try to stop her. She didn’t change her mind.

Tears welled up in his eyes now as she took the chair opposite him. The same pattering of the rain on the skylight. The same table in the dark corner. Had it really been five years ago that they had met? She had the same dark brown, inquisitive eyes as she smiled at him. A tiny dimple flashed on the face that he knew so well.

England is beautiful, Rehan. The University had taught me so much! Maybe we should move there. I wish we were allowed to make international calls. I’ve been lonely without you. I missed you so…

She looked at Rehan with a glint of fear in her eyes. He rolled an empty glass in his hand. Back and forth. Again and again and again. Then suddenly, he jumped to his feet, gave a hollow laugh, and threw the glass across the cafe with all the fury he could muster.

The glass smashed against the teak wall and shattered.

2.  The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

3.  The weather in Bangalore! I was born for this weather!

4.  The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas – Movie.

5.  Iiiiiiiice creeeeeeeeeam!

6.  The word “Bashful”.

7.  Laughing at and saying nonsense things.

8.  Mangoes! Boy, I can’t wait!

9.  Acting rowdy with old friends.

10.  This certain Cranberry drink on a breezy and cloudy afternoon.

11.  This inexplicable and unmentionable affection towards certain persons.

12.  1st year ij ovah!! Hallelujah!

13.  Summer’s gone? Already? And Monsoons are coming you say??