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.

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)

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....

Of Destiny, Karma, Happiness and that thing called Life.

Destiny plays with us in two ways, one in which it is pre-destined and the other in which we choose what to do, the path we take that changes its course forever.

There is no such thing as coincidences. We don’t meet anyone accidently, we don’t stumble upon jobs or change houses. These things happen as per a plan that we at some super sub - conscious level have chosen long long before. The exact time and place where we would meet someone, the consequences that would lead to it and so on...

Ever wondered at a particular situation and travelled back with it? Everything appears to be linked. Nothing and no one enters our life at the wrong time. It is always the right time.

But that is where the second role of destiny comes to play. Destiny gets us to the point, the crossroads where a certain path could alter our lives if we choose to walk it and maybe if it is not the right path, wonder all along the way what the other path could have bought into our lives.

To choose the path and to walk on it in order to let that destiny enfold is free will.

There is nothing that is impossible, no path and no choice that is not given to us, what we do with the choice, how we exercise our free will, how far we go to either make ourselves or perhaps others happy is up to us, at each point and each day in our lives, when we make the decision to wake up and live another day.

If destiny is pre chosen then why do we make mistakes you might ask?

Could the answer be Karma or maybe sheer bad luck? No one can and would choose an unhappy life, isn’t it. We are all on our own spiritual journey treading slowly towards a path that reveals itself unfortunately only when we make mistakes, or to put it in the positive sense, when we learn.

I am not saying that it does not reveal itself when we are successful or happy, but do you remember the last time when you were truly happy and you thought about karma, destiny or your growth as a spiritual being?

This brings me to another question, what is happiness and where does unhappiness begin?

It is written in the Gita and also propagated by Buddha that evolved is the human being to whom happiness and unhappiness holds no meaning. We cry tears of joy and laugh when life slaps us in the face, we yearn for drama in simple, normal lives and when in pain wish for relief. We never endure happiness or unhappiness in its true sense. We hardly become numb to emotions, a place where there is no beginning or end to these emotions.

I often take my own example when I wonder about life; I don’t want to take the liberty with anyone else’s life. I look around me today and I wonder about the lesson I am supposed to learn from what is and what is not in my life today.

I also wonder if the ‘lack’ of something is truly a lack? Or it is a perception of my make believe perfect world.

I wonder about what is not lacking in my life today, is it ‘perfect’ and if it is how often am I living up to its perfection?

Of the various books I have read, people I have met, conversations I have had, movies and art I have seen, I have truly come to believe that destiny always brings you to your dreams, because somewhere at some level you are always fighting for your dreams with the universe. The universe being as compassionate as it is delivers, maybe not in your face but it does.

What you choose to do of your dream, to live it or to leave it be is up to you.

I have also come to believe that it never gives second chances; it never crosses the same path twice.

And then one day you die.

Morose? Well, it’s the truth isn’t it? As Mitch Albom in the beautiful Tuesday’s with Moorie wrote that we ought to live each day as if we were going to die tomorrow, we would then live a happier life.

Pick up that phone, write that letter, and make that long pending visit. Tell the people you truly love that you love them. Quit the unhappy job, find your dream and when you do, live it as if there was no tomorrow. Pay attention to the signs the universe gives you, the people you meet, they are there for a reason, don’t let them go. And when it is time, also let go.

Make a point to start living, maybe selfishly at first, and you will notice that when you are happy how much happiness you can bring to the ones you love. Because there is nothing as comforting as to see someone you love happy and content.

A day to live and a day to learn while I hope tomorrow brings sunshine.

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I had the strangest day today. There are some days when you wake up and you know something will not be right today. These are the days when you should keep quiet. These are the days when you should listen to that voice warning you. But exactly on these days, you refuse to listen to that screaming voice inside of you.

I learned a few things in the past few days – about myself, people and life through myself, people and well, life. 

• I have learned that if you lose a friend, that person was never really your friend to begin with. It is sad and it hurts but it’s true. Friendship doesn’t come with terms and conditions; people don’t come with terms and conditions. It is all a game of expecting and accepting. 

• I have learned that relationships have their troubled times. We stop being what we are initially to the people we love. We become comfortable and say things that we should not say. It is at that point that we have a choice to either evolve with the relationship or fight. 

• I have learned that I don’t have the energy to fight anymore. We are so starved for love that we fight for love itself. Maybe that’s the reason even countries fight. 

• I have learned that as we get comfortable in things, places and with people we also start to ask for more. We start to treat those things, the places and those people as home. We take them for granted.

• I have learned that there is no time slab, price tag or an expiry date on some relationships. Sometimes, they just fade. 

• I have learned that we can’t accept the fading away. It’s a fear we carry around us all the time. 

• I have learned that letting go is a process. It takes time. We feel it’s the hardest thing we have to do. But truth is, we have to let go, we have to walk ahead and we have to move on.

• I have learned that with love comes insecurity. To evolve and conquer it is an ongoing process. It is also the same process that either brings two people closer or makes them fall apart. 

• I have learned that I have to wait for love to come to me. The kind of love that has its ups and downs, arguments and insecurities but all of it stems from passion and immense emotion. A love that each day learns the good and bad about me as I learn about him and together we grow to make him and I – Us.

Of Circles, Squares and Thin Lines.

There are these moments in life when you feel that you are walking on thin lines. Points where everything seems perfect but you know that a little gentle push and you will fall on either side. Neither side you know is anything compared to this but you know sooner or later you will fall.

So what do you do?

I remember a line from a song that says – ‘Even falling feels like flying for a little while’

Sometimes we like to endure pain, revel the pleasure of risk and fight with ourselves to go to the limits of our beliefs and values.

I wonder if we are all masochists at some level and on another level if we are all desperate attention seekers.

We reach points of balance and we like to stretch them till the longest time. Then it all starts to seem mundane and so very boring.

We look for triggers to sway us, make us tip and make us fall.

We fall, rise and start walking the line again.

If life is just made up of these circles, when does one settle into a plain, simple square?

Just some thoughts on an idle Friday afternoon.....

Of failures, love and simply emerging.

I am back and emerging. I have played the vanishing act for some time now and it is time now to wake up, smell the roses and the coffee (whichever is available) and move on, live another day and breathe another moment.
I have been in a trance since some time now. Flowing and moving in a stride without any reins in my own hands. It’s been one of the times when you don’t know who actually holds the reins to which you sway, sometimes uncontrollably.

I wonder if that is a good or a bad thing to do – letting yourself flow along the tide. Does it mean you get hit by the occasional rock? Does it mean you just keep flowing and never reach the shore?

I can go on and on being pseudo-philosophical here but the truth is sometimes we can’t help but flow. Sometimes we don’t realise we are in the middle of the water till the tide kicks in, shakes us and forces us to float – directionless but afloat nonetheless.

When you are in a limbo, writing gets affected. You go through so many emotions at each moment that writing them is a task. It has taken me hours to pen down this much and I have no clue where this post is headed.
Therefore I think it’s better to share news.

In recent news, I tasted failure.
True failure I believe is only achieved when you fail in your own eyes. That only happens when you put expectations on yourself to excel and then you don’t. You know it and there is no excuse you or anyone else can give to make you feel better.
Thankfully, I have always emerged from failure as a learner and stronger and readier to face worse.

In other recent news, I wonder about love.
I do believe that ‘Love’ is the most overrated and underestimated word we humans have created. In those terms it is quite the oxymoron.
I have never understood how people can put in boxes, squares and rectangles an emotion such as love.
Why does saying I love you become a big deal, so big that people don’t say it. And then life just passes you by.
Imagine if six billion people accepted, emoted and professed love to the people they knew, how much happier a race would we be?
Love comes with its own set of expectations and issues and reasons, maybe seasons too. It’s a journey, quite a tricky one, to move past these and rise to something close to unconditional.
When I was told, people get over people, they move on and that is what happens to each one of us.. I started looking back at the people I had let go. Or had I really?
Do we ever really let people go? We talk about them, we think about them through our life, yes we let go of the emotion, but we never let go of people.
They just move from a certain part of our hearts to another part. A part where they become less important in the scheme of things but they always remain somewhere as people who came, touched our lives and someday just moved away.
Instead of cribbing that someone didn’t love us back, shouldn’t we be happy that we loved them, for whatever time and at whatever level, we felt the power of love.

So, while the rant continues in my head. Bukowski beckons and I leave...

Love continues to touch me from all around as I open my heart to the universe, failure on the other hand like a timid mouse hides in a little hole somewhere in the crevices of my brain.

To more rants and random musings... cheers!

When I meet you ... (love letter #22)

When I meet you .....

The darkness will not bring in loneliness but the solitude we seek.  

We will stay together yet rise apart

And each day you will grunt more while reading the morning paper aloud

I will smile, sip my tea and pretend to listen.

Sometimes, we will forget to speak out what we need to say & leave post its on random mirrors

We will not talk for hours but know just when to reach out for our fingers

Our fingers that with interlock perfectly

We will not get out of bed on Sundays and read thrash lying on each others laps

We won’t bother about crumbs on the bed and glasses on the side tables without coasters

On Sundays we will just be

When it will rain, we will walk without raincoats

We will kiss and jump over puddles

Sometimes you will hold me and just close your eyes

I will wonder and just stay.

Me

P.s For more love letters read here

Just another rant post ....(where she rants about the blackberry, friends and new city)

I wonder if writing a post and changing the opening line a million times classifies as writers block. These days I seem to suffer one more than what I would like.

Idle Tuesdays have become insomnia driven Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights.

Nights where mundane facebook stalking and tweeting are given importance. Books are bought and never read. Paints are drying and empty word documents stare at me all the time.

The BBM messenger has become a curse. Did I have a life before February 23^rd 2010? I wonder if I did. Ummmm, yes! I certainly did. It involved conversations across the table with numerous cups of coffee being consumed and moments in between spent looking at the world go by, at  birds flying back home and watching the sun go down.

There was a life before BBM messenger. I just seem to have lost that.

Technology will kill us one day, I always used to and continue to say that and sadly I have become prey to the evil itself. Someone told me the other day that he is just a BBM message away and I wondered where the days of, ‘I’m always right there.’ And ‘I’m just a call away’ have vanished.

In the future will I ever meet friends and have conversations?

In other thoughts, ‘Friends’ reminds me of how difficult it is to make a friend these days.

Do you remember the last time you made a REAL friend? Someone you could be honest with, open your soul to, call at 4 am and have them standing at your doorstep in fifteen minutes, watch all kinds of films and listen to all kinds of music with, laugh your guts out, talk rubbish, talk sense, not talk at all yet communicate.  – You know that kind of friend?

I honestly don’t remember when. I guess in the words of Baz Lurhman (we all need to..) – “Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young”. (Sunscreen song, my anthem)

I guess he knew how hard it is to find friends as you grow older. More than that how hard it is to compartmentalize them because that’s what you need to do with every year that you add to your kitty of numbers. Boxes and compartments for the married couple friends, the single girl friends, the (very rare and almost nonexistent) single guy friends, the couple friends parting ways, the younger lot of friends, the older lot of friends. .... and on and on .....

There are rules and lines that one needs to draw when it comes to making friends as one grows older.

The single girl will not appear to be too lonely for the single guy to think he can take advantage of her. A simple coffee becomes a ‘DATE’. The married woman will not appear to be too friendly with the married guy or it might connote an affair. The singles won’t go out with the couples and the couples will try and always fix up the singles.

It wasn’t this complicated a decade ago. Life was simple, to the point and accurate. These days I don’t know where it is headed and where the 4 am friends have vanished.

In other happier news, it is a pleasure setting up a house. It is a pleasure every human being (and especially single women) ought to go though and experience to the fullest.

I had this dream when I was little about how my ‘grown up’ house would be. How it would have nice smelling candles (that I would actually burn and not just keep) and fresh flowers every day. I can’t afford the flowers but I have the candles and they are consumed!!  I have a fridge stalked with coke and beer – none of which I drink too much but it feels really good to see it there.

During insomniac nights sometimes I look around and ask myself, am I really doing this? Is this really happening? Did I really move here?

I still look both sides before crossing the street, I still cannot explain the road that leads to my house to people who are visiting, I still convert the prices of onions and still wonder how chicken can be so cheap!

This was not in the plan. But it happened. My 6^th city, my 6^th set of acquaintances, my 6^th home.

And when people ask me if I am liking it here? I have no answer.

Maybe I will when I will finally understand which side the traffic moves.

He said, 'you complete me' and she said, 'you had me at hello'

Its been a long time since I wrote a love letter - this ones an improumtu sitting in boring meeting scribble. For more love letters feel free to browse here :-)

The drift won’t be in words but in minds and fingers

Tiptoeing towards one another, in magnitudes of darkness

There will be whiskey before and after soul opening conversations

There will times when eyes that will speak during Chinese takeout in plastic tins

Curtains will be drawn to pretend no one else can see

Minutes will turn into hours and hours will be too less

Mornings will be empty with a sense on loneliness

The one which comes with the sick feeling of completion

A completion of self

And we will continue to be lonely souls

Incomplete either ways

While the whiskey will continue to flow…

Metro Musings with Sting

And they speed by, lights yellow and white,

Sting sings in golden fields,

Reflections hazy on clean glass,

Lovers with jittery chemistry,

Some eyes wonder, some search,

Some are just lost

I don't see you...

And Its still a long way home.

My first crush .. is priceless!

I have never entered a writing contest, I never thought I was good enough. Thanks K, for sending me this link and believing that I can write for a contest. So here goes, my entry for the Blogadda and Pringoo contest.

My first crush .... 

Your first crush is like the first time you try a new flavour of ice cream. Once it’s over you don’t really remember why you choose that one anyways, was it the colour or the name or it was just an easy choice. What you do remember is the feeling – the heady little brain freeze, the spinning, the fuzzy feeling and contentment.

He did that to me.

Like the first kiss when you are so excited and can hardly believe that it is actually happening. The weakness in your knees and the sinking feeling in your tummy are mixed with the random, mundane thoughts running through your head. You want to remember that moment so much that you end up forgetting most of it. Years later you think about that moment and you remember bits and pieces of that random thought, the unnecessary details like the song that played in the background and the way the perfume on his shirt smelt.

When I was asked to write about my first crush the first thing I obviously did was Facebook stalk him.

I was not sure it was him, till I checked out our common friend list. And well guess what, He is now a man! Like a man with a belly and a moustache.  YUCK.

It totally burst my bubble and I wish I hadn’t done the Facebook stalking thing. In my mind he still was the perfect fourteen year old school hero until this moment.

Back in dreamland, School, life and everything I knew back then had changed after the first time I spoke with him.

Life would never be the same. I had discovered this other species in a whole new light. Very different from how I thought of them earlier, suddenly hitting them and punching them wasn’t cool, running around with them in the school corridors became a no - no. All at once being shy and being a girl was cool and so unlike the person I used to be.

I would now wait hours to see him at drama practice at the end of the day. Plan for hours of how I would react when he would speak to me and when he would – the few lines in the play we were performing and practicing for, something always got stuck in my gut, like someone stuffed cotton right in the middle and I could neither swallow or spurt but just be speechless with a constipated expression on my face.

He, totally unaware of my plight owned the room and all the people in it.

He would walk with this swagger as if he ruled the world. He was tall and funny and charming. His tie was never in place and when he smiled, oh when he smiled I could blush standing a million miles away.

But he would never know.

He would never know that every song I heard back then made me feel that it was written for him and me. That when I saw jo jeeta wahi sikandar, heard the song phela nasha and saw Ayesha Jhulka fall on a bed of saw I pictured myself in that frame singing for him.

He would never know how embarrassed I felt when I met him at a social gathering and I had been made to wear a frock by my mother (yes, during that era in 1980’s ten/eleven year old girls usually dressed in frocks!) while all the other girls were dressed in skirts and trousers.

I felt like a child. I felt confused and angry at my mother for making me wear that frock because he never looked at me. That, he would never know.

He would never know that I struggled to delay getting braces because I didn’t want him to see me with metal teeth.

He would never know awesomely and amazingly he changed my life in more ways than one.

And one day, he left school and moved away. Just like that.

He would never know he broke my heart and that was just a beginning to so many more to come.

If I could I would go back in time and tell him how I felt and just leave it at that. Stop and freeze time with that boy I knew. The cool, carefree fourteen year old.

I go back now to his Facebook page and wonder if I should add him as a friend.

Would he remember me? The girl in the green and red frock? The girl with the bug teeth and the pony tail? I wonder if he would remember the girl whose cheeks turned purple and who also cried in front of him when someone stole her crackle chocolate.

Something’s never change! There is the familiar cotton ball in my gut and my fingers can’t move the mouse to click on ‘add as a friend’, will he remember me?

P.S check out pringoo.com