Yellow attendance books, black lists, blue days…who ever said life isn’t colorful? So as the world keeps spinning (along with my head), the night giving way to the day (taking it from an optimist’s point of view) and the black hair giving way to the gray ones (some experts believe it’s due to ‘stress’, the next step towards old age that sets soon after you blow those 21 candles on your birthday and see it all go up in smoke and after battling the bahmbahmbahm effect) and I have to face yet another evening without the internet, I sit down to write what am best at…pure unadulterated nonsense!
After contemplating for long if I should buy Peter Norvig (sorry to the fellow author for I couldn’t mention your name, it’s always that when one’s under the spotlight, the other has no option but to settle for the shadow) or some tech-max book (how we love the Indian authors…ardent supporters of swadesi ideas aren’t we?), I finally marched to the bookstore today; giving him the details, the author, the semester, the branch and the subject and I waited. Then I waited again. And finally after waiting for some more time he bangs a book that reads Instrumentation Sciences!!! That is when I realized that IS could mean different things to different people! And at that point of time it spelled Irritated Silly! And as the ‘uncle’ went back into his lair of books a girl drops in…she had stopped on her way to the moon with her shuttle driver not ready to wait long…and the ‘uncle’ decides to preempt the hunt for Peter Norvig’s. She had come to get a 12th std. Hindi guide!! Such a thingy!! I wait there admiring the fat books and more so the ones who had all the time in the world to write them for those who always complain of not having the time to read them and still have no alternative but to buy them!! You see, a foreign author’s name that you manage to pronounce with that added dash of indianised syllables just sounds too hep during the vivas! Chirp chirp!! Oh she was talking to me! “So which standard are you in?” Did I look too young to her? Well going by the latitudes, maybe I did? But this tired face couldn’t be of a school going kid! No chance. No way! Hmm…girlie was trying to be funny :-/! “What…uuh?..am doing engineering…final year”, I snap back. “Ooooh!” comes the reply. Now what’s that? Kiddo! Wait till you get into an engineering college I curse her! And she disappears. With a screwed up face I ask again for the book. Yeah, right, the book is unavailable! Life has become as predictable as the K-series sagas! So try another store…when one door’s closed knock on the other! No use! Talk about knocking on the wrong doors??
So after that earnest hunt for Peter Norvig…I return empty handed and empty headed! And this is the best way to pour out my emptiness!
Hanging on in the over crowded trains, confronting the pig-headed ‘aunties’ who refuse to budge and the taxi-wallahs who literally don’t miss an opportunity to take me on a ride, the whistling ‘watch’ men, the mundane lectures, the stuffy labs, the undefined practicals, the quantified assignments, the pains of eating deep fried noodles with a spoon and those of eating half fried chips in a state of trance, the dilemmas, the ever prevailing predicaments, the days when even the radio stops playing my favorite songs, the ones when I begin to question the very path am traveling on or should I say pulling on, the days when everything seems topsy-turvy- you and the world around you, trapped in a whirling spiral! Gimme a break!!
It’s weird. The world’s set out to sail on the same boat. Nobody has had the time to carry a compass! We are lost! When will we stop living in the past and stop wanting to leap into the future and never live the present? When will we start writing in our diaries about the unknown faces that offer us a fourth seat in the train or about the little girl who amused you with her questions, about how it felt when you saw the rainbow stretched across the sky, of how it feels to fall asleep listening to the rain outside or how it feels to wake up to put your best dress on, how you felt when you sat by the window looking at the peach sunset, how it felt to have danced all by yourself when no one was watching, how it felt when you read all the good things that filled your scrap book, about the reminiscence that the old photo albums bring with them, of how it feels to lick at the melting hot chocolate layer on a chilled vanilla ice-cream, of how it feels- the soft touch of a woolen blanket as you snuggle inside it on cold night in the light of a burning fireplace, mesmerized by that old song you always love to listen to? When will we learn to do away with the to-do lists, the schedules, and the reminders? When will we learn to shun the violence, the hatred, the jealousy, and the pathos that we ourselves are responsible for? When will we start living a life that matters…that we can call our own…that we can cherish…that we can look back at and just smile from cheek to cheek! Time is ticking! :P
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