Wednesday, September 29, 2010

My Greatest Fear


When one makes a mistake once and then repeats it then it hardly remains a mistake. It becomes a problem.

Forgiving and forgetting is an asset or not? Sometimes one believes so much in the sparks of goodness in the people one meets that they keep coming back to those people to reach out for the goodness they once saw. 

Sometimes a puppy face can melt you and then crush you into a million pieces. 

In innocence, ways of the world are forgotten. 

Seeking that one moment of perfection becomes so important that a thousand moments spent in the agony are forgotten. 

The ones that melt you also have the power to crush you.  

This, scares me.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

On Books, Movies, Self Discovery, Lists & A Little About Life

It’s one of days when nothing comes to your brain at work. You just wish you could be back home, cozy up in a blanket, make some coffee and watch a movie. It also happens to be a Tuesday and it’s been ages since I posted an idle Tuesday afternoon post therefore a day like this deserves a rambling of mundane crap.


I woke up today morning wanting two things. A blueberry muffin and a hug. Is that too much to ask for? Blueberry muffins make me happy and hugs tell me that there is some form of human interaction in terms of unconditional love still existing in the world.

I got a lot of virtual hugs after posting this on my FB status and I could almost feel the energies pass through some cosmic internet way straight to me. Unconditional love has that effect.

Still waiting to have the blueberry muffin though. Nothing like the muffins from The Bagel Shop, my quaint little hide out at Pali Hill, Bandra. Dubai has a few options though – Barista sucks, Starbucks is ok and what has come closest to my palate is Costa. I miss the quaint hangouts though, we have so many of them in India that give you the feeling of sitting in an European village roadside and just being there takes half your troubles away. Dubai on the other hand has everything but well, mostly on the surface.

While I wait for the muffin and an actual hug I have some more to ramble about -

I am currently reading ten books. I start them and then I lose patience (and that has never happened to me) so I go back to reading something else. I guess it’s a sign of restlessness, what I have come to now finally sit back and re-read since the past two days is Eat, Pray, Love. It is one of my favorite books, just re-reading it is making me fall in love with myself all over again. The thing about fiction and non – fiction is that you can read and re-read nonfiction a million times. Very few fiction books have left that impact on me – The Kite Runner, The Namesake, Little Women, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Prophet are a few that I can read anytime.

What Eat Pray Love does to me is be a mirror. When I read it for the first time I loved the beauty of Elizabeth Gilberts writing and the beauty of her life. But this time I identify. Each page mirrors me and I ask myself the same questions she asks herself in the book. That my friend is the power of a good book and makes life worthwhile. To experience just that simple pleasure of sharing it with someone you have never met but knows exactly what to tell you and when to tell you.

Movies do the same thing. I love the way cinema on one level reflects the social scenario of current times and on another level takes you into a fantasy that someone else creates just for you. These days I am off serious cinema, I rather watch stupid romantic comedies all day long than think hard after I watch a movie. Cinema does these wonderful things to my brain I just can revel in all day. I could write a whole post on my understanding of the evolvement of cinema through our social times but that we will leave for another time.

So now that I have a TV, I struggle to distribute my time between reading, movies and cultivating a passion for cooking. Cooking has never been my forte which is strange considering I come from a family of chefs. But maybe that’s the thing, I never bothered to cook and learn cooking. However I also believe that cooking for oneself can be a boring deed. The pleasure in a thing like cooking is sharing; you enjoy when you do it for people and share the passion that goes into it.

These days, I feel like the woman who goes to work comes home switches on the television, cooks a 5 minute meal, checks her mail and goes to sleep. There are days when I wake up with immense gratitude for everything and then there are days when disillusionment haunts me. It’s all a part of the game and coming in terms with yourself. I love the way Elizabeth Gilbert puts it – “Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend."

I think we often forget to be our own friend, to be our own shoulder to lean on and our own person to laugh with. We get so busy being the friend to everyone else that we miss out on what we need. It is only when after sometimes a lot of pain and heartaches later you have no one to turn to you remember that you don’t really need to turn to anyone, you just need to look inside and sitting inside of you if something that will carry you through everything life will bring along.

And while I revive my friendship with that person inside me, it hits me that in the next 5 months I will enter the 30th year of my life. I don’t feel this old but somehow age has a way on catching up with you right when you don’t see it. My knees feel weaker and my skin feels parched but most importantly I am reminded of the to – do before 30 list I had written sometime back. I am therefore revisiting the list and making a deadline for myself to finish the things I want to do before I complete thirty which leaves me with a year and a half to be precise.

THE LIST (AS ON NOVEMBER 14TH 2008) – with status

1. Visit Greece .. stay there for sometime (hope this is counted as one!) – Pending

2. Sky Dive – Pending

3. Learn to dance (I am the self confessed worst dancer ever, someday I shall learn!) – Pending

4. Relive a day at Symbiosis college once again :) – Cutting it out as its impossible

5. Be home with Mom, dad and Anubhav and do NOTHING for a day – Done

6. Taste every possible cuisine I can – Ongoing

7. Get a tattoo (hopefully this should be happening very soon) – Done

8. Play the violin – Pending

9. Experience motherhood – Pending 

THE LIST (AS ON SEPTEMBER 14TH 2010) – 18 things for 18 months

1. Visit Greece

2. Sky Dive

3. Learn to dance

4. Taste every possible cuisine I can – I am adding different kinds of meat to this

5. Play the violin

6. Paint a wall

7. Make the perfect Sangria

8. Read all of Charles Bukowski and Ernest Hemingway

9. Write the first 2 chapters of the book I will eventually write

10. Visit Leh

11. Learn to drive (confidently)

12. Get the belly button pierced (finally after 3 failed attempts)

13. Finish Reiki 3A

14. Get an Aura reading done – then learn how to do it

15. Re-start my work with make a wish foundation

16. Buy a property

17. Visit Florence

18. Go for a wine tasting and Learn about my wines

As I embark on the journey, she rightly puts it -
“There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Wake Me Up When September Ends


I have been receiving comments about the blog that it is 'depressing' but as Hemingway put it - "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."  It is just some snippets of yourself, some that you borrow from others and you weave them into a wreath and hang it at the doorways of the soul. Happy Reading :)
Wake Me Up When September Ends
I didn’t know why Green Day sang this song until recently someone told me it is for the singer’s late father who died in the month of September.
September has never really been my favourite month to begin with. I am not particularly (for no apparent reason) fond of the number 9. September is when you suddenly realise that the year is coming to an end and nothing that you planned as a yearly chore or the remote New Year resolutions you took have been put into any real practice yet. September is also when the weather starts to change; it’s a limbo – neither hot nor cold. I have never been quite fond of any kind of a limbo state and this in particular.
It has been a year to that fateful September I went through in 2009. It seems like yesterday yet when I start thinking about the events that took place and followed, I feel I have skipped leaps and bounds from where I was to where I am today.
So last September I was planning on settling my life and preparing for a new one. While I was rediscovering the joy of knowing and being known I was so unaware of what the coming months would bring me.
A year later I look back at the events that took place that fateful September and I am filled with a heaviness that almost sinks me.
I am nowhere close to today of where I would have or could have been.
Memories flood my mind and take me back to all the laughter that filled my heart exactly a year back.
Isn’t it strange that you can feel all the anger and hate at one point and then someday after time has passed you look back and all you remember are the smiles and the laughter.
Even if you want to feel the animosity again, you can’t. You try to remember pain and reasons that led to it but what comes to your mind are the good times.
Healing is a strange process, the moment you think you have healed a certain wound that is the moment you get wounded again. You start healing the new wound and forget the older one ever happened.
However, scars remain, and they emerge randomly on some unaware idle Saturday evening to take you back into time.
That is when you wish you could go through sometime in slumber just to dream of what could have and would have been and only wake up, when September ends....

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