Turmoil

Today I walked in your city,
You have no idea.
I walked the streets you've walked,
And you have no idea.
I am eating foods you once wanted me to taste,
You have no idea.

I met your friend you told me about,
Do you know yet?
We shared a frame on a camera,
Have you seen it yet?
We spoke about you,
Have you heard?

We've traveled so far,
We'll never reach where we wanted to.
Everything looks familiar,
The music resounds of you.
That stupid woman who sings,
Keeps playing on TV.

What am I to do with all the pictures?
Where do I store all the memories?
What becomes of our friends?
What of the hollowed greetings,
That will never be?

Goodbye, mon ami.
Someday, forgive me.

An Ode

For someone who hates to say goodbye, a one year MBA program is not the place to be. The frequency with which we have to bid farewell to out professors is higher than the frequency of Aravind Kejriwal's dharnas. Every two weeks, we give a standing ovation to a professor from one part of the world or other for delivering the last lecture for the class of 2016. I kid you not when I say the room is charged with emotions, I honestly believe some people secretly break down and cry later with all the energy that exists in that room. This term, we had Professor Katalan taking Decision Making and Optimization for half the term. He is a truly remarkable man. The kind of insight he brought to the classroom with all his understanding of different industries and weird trivia was awe inspiring. I don't think I spent more than 10 minutes of sleeping time in any of his lectures. (Not counting, of course, that one lecture that I slept through because I just could not bring myself to get out of bed.) And then there was dearly beloved little Professor Croce with his little eccentricities and perfect sense of humour. After his sixth lecture, I honestly regretted sleeping through the first five. He made economics fun. I find it hard to believe that I am saying this, but global economics is actually quite interesting. And just like the rest, they are now gone. To be heard from no more. Just two of the fourteen who have been with us in a span of three months. C'est la vie. our paths shall cross if they have to, or maybe they won't.

In another world, another one of those psychometric test reports has called me arrogant. I don't get it? I think I am the nicest person in the whole wide world. How can anybody call me arrogant? I disagree. Just stating my opinion out loud.
Neha is now waiting for dinner. I should scoot!

Another time,
Naina

Through History in Heels

So, I finally got to watch Jurassic World last week. I thought it was well made. Yash Raj would be very proud. They even took the effort to make Rahul Gandhi's strain of "women empowerment" a reelity (That was  not a typo). Apart from the cliched kissing scenes and the over hyper pre-teen, the only thorn in my side, (or should I call it the stiletto in my side?) was the five inch heel Bryce Dallas Howard was wearing through the movie. I don't care if those are Jimmy Choos or never before heard of shoes, here is a fact. Heels break. And I don't just mean the ones attached to your shoes. Here is another fact, Pressure = Force per unit area, which is to say, if you be walking on mud, your heels be sinking in deep. No way you run like a chicken whose ass is on fire like that. So Missy, unbuttoning and rolling up your sleeves is not how you compensate for your choice in footwear. Slipping out of those pretties, gently picking them up and throwing them far far away into the deep blue artificial lake behind you is the only way to go. And yes, you might want to consider putting on a pair of running shoes. Bare-feet ain't getting you anywhere either.

So much for the anti-sexist movies. Would it kill you if the actress doesn't look perfect (read sexy) at all times?

*Spoiler below*

Q: How do you outrun a T-Rex with a flaming torch in hand, pretending to be Anya Major?

Ans: You don't. But when you do, make sure you do it with panache in a pair of stilettos you've been running marathons in All Day Long.

*Spoiler over*

I don't want to get into any meninist/feminist arguments over this. I am just pointing out a big fat blooper in a big fat dino movie. Read it, and let it go.

And yeah, Go Girl Power!

Naina

OCD

How do I make the deaf hear,
How do I have the blind see?
Perhaps the greatest human folly,
How do I learn to let it be?

A fish outside of water,
Or a bird in a cage.
One struggles to breathe,
The other struggles to be free.

What really beats within,
Nobody wants to know.
Not you, nor me,
All we want, is peace.

One day the fish will die,
And the bird fly away.
The struggles will be lost,
And no peace shall prevail.

****

Let me know what you think. I have no idea what it means.

Braino-O

I feel like writing today, and as always, I don't know what I want to talk about. I am having an extremely tough time getting back to studying. I spend five hours reading two pages of text. And then I need to get up and move around a bit. I figured I'll poetize about it.

Brain-O, 

Don't be a pain-o.

Focus,

Else I'll be a mess-us.

It's easy,

What needs to be studied.

Just be a pal,

And we'll do it all.

After all,

We are a genius.

***

This is bad even by my standards, but there, it is out there now, I'll put up something more substantial some time when inspiration strikes.

Till then, I shall go and study some accounting. What DO all the numbers really mean!?

Adios, Chen-Chen

It has been five days since I got back home to Delhi and the fact that I am not returning to Chennai any time soon has not yet sunk in. My bags are still packed. I have effectively managed to put off unpacking them just the same way I kept putting off packing them in the first place. The whole process of packing and then unpacking has a touch of finality to it. The one thing that kept running through my mind when I began packing over three weeks ago, was, how the hell am I expected to fit three years of my life into two miserly suitcases? That would require leaving a whole lot of extra baggage behind. Now that I have to begin unpacking, my 4X7 ft. cupboard somehow feels much smaller than the one shelf that I owned in Chennai. C'est la vie, oui? Fortunately, the multiple visits to the bank and the extravagant planning for my new school are keeping me going. Nim returns to India in about four hours now, my added distraction. (She would hate to be called that, a distraction).
I wrote her a poem last week, which she hates as well. But for the benefit of all my Tamil speaking friends, I shall share it here.
For those of you who don't understand the ways and language of Tamils, you need to look up malli poo.

Nimpoo,
You ain't no malli poo.
But I still love you,
And will always do.

I probably made cummings or the others turn in their grave with this. But I laughed out loud when I came up with it.

There is so much to write about, but for once, words fail me. I keep thinking about all the people I left behind, some of whom I may never meet again. I am beginning to understand that attachment is perhaps the greatest of all human flaws. It ties us down to places and people, and prevents us from moving on. The fact that my luggage while returning home was 20 kilos over the prescribed weight limit speaks loads about what attachment can do to humans. It makes you pay for extra baggage. Things will get better with time. The old may not be replaced, but they will be remembered with fondness and acceptance. And who knows, our paths might just cross again. Let's hope that when they do, we remember each other the same way as the day we parted ways. I know I'll be seeing the girls again, some bonds are harder to break than others. And I hope we can still go crazy like we used to on Friday nights.
And yes, if anybody out there understood the point of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, please shed some light. I have no clue why I spent three weeks reading that book. It made no sense at all to me. I have cribbed about it on every possible platform that I could, yet, nobody has come forward to offer an explanation.
An hour and a half left for us to go get Nim from the airport. I need a new distraction to pass the time till then.

P.S. My last one year paid off. I got into the school I wanted to. Onto new things now. And that I only mention by the way.

Au Revoir, me looveelay.

Nighttime

Die
Mosquito,
Die.

Solituding

I asked Nim to give me a word for solitude which has a positive ring to it. Thesaurus. That's all I got from her. Thanks babe. Much help. After consulting one, I came up with words like seclusion, isolation, loneliness. A part of my brain was laughing it's wrinkles off. So much for positive rings.
I've been coming in super early to work these days to catch up on the hours of office time (not sleep) that I've missed over the past one year. When I walk into the darkened, empty building,  I imagine myself dancing and singing at the top of my voice just because I can. But then I just giggle and enter my cubicle. And then because I have trouble sitting still in the deathly silence and the weather is nice outside, I grab a book and my iPod and step outside. I usually head out towards the smoking zone that looks out onto an open field and sit there, looking out at nothing. Sometimes Mythalli the dog (technically, a bitch, but I don't want you to think I am referring to a coworker) comes and joins me in my positive ringing solitude, coaxing me to scratch her dirty head. I don't really know what Mythalli's name is, or even if she has one, but I like the one I have given her. I think it is a nice one for anything female. Every once in a while, a smoker will walk in and light up behind me. Once Mythalli has had her share of head scratching, she will turn her back to me and guard my back against these smokers who she obviously feels are a threat to my well being. She reminds me of Chica, my cousins' dog. Chica wouldn't let my cousins mess with me, she always jumped up and growled at Raghu if he tried to drag me off the armchair or something. She's a babe. I don't know where Mythalli is off to today, I saw her paw marks on the sidewalk on my way over. They disappeared into the dirt path just before the smoking zone, I assume she is lazing around somewhere else today.
The smoking zone is a nice peaceful place to sit in. This early, not many people are around, the few that show up are, like me, sitting around staring at the nothing. There is a kind of familiarity between us, yet, nobody speaks a word. Strangers in the day. You love each other for the ten minutes you spend sharing the solitude, and then you quickly forget. No broken hearts, just peace.
This is probably what Pico Iyer meant in his TEDTalk on The Art of Stillness. The sitting in one place without an agenda and letting the world pass you by. Without worrying about finishing the assignment or about the day that lies ahead. It is just the process of being, of floating free in time, absorbing the sun. This may be a silly post, but it's free floating, structureless, aimless. It exists just because it can, and that makes it beautiful to me.
Time to switch off and sit back again.

Adios,
Naina

Existence

“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”

The Stranger, Albert Camus

Living is a funny feeling. There are moments of pure joy, followed by an endless abyss of concentrated pain. It is an eternal wait for a few moments of elation enveloped between hideous moments of nothingness. You are born, you are raised, you are educated, you are spoiled, you are then sent out into the world to fend for yourselves, to find your life, to find out where your story goes. What you don't realise is that along the way, you lose bits of yourself, you shed your innocence, you hide your feelings, you pretend that your life has some importance to the universe. Once you have a steady job, a house, a car, a dog, a family...what is left? What do you wake up to every morning? To a job you have been working at every day for ten years? To your children whose shiny faces melt your heart till they start bawling and howling for attention? Or to your husband who means the world to you and who has spent his entire adult life growing into a spouse that you always dreamt of? Where is the joy in this melancholy? Where is the excitement? We, as a human race has advanced so much that our life expectancy is about 70-90 years, yet, what is the point of living such a long life if all you do with it is to exist? Some of you might argue with statements such as,  "Hey, what if Mother Teresa or  Van Gogh or A.R. Rehman or any of the other Toms, Dicks and Harrys had thought like that? Would the world be what it is today?" To you, I say, of course not. But would it have mattered? What would have mattered, probably, that the likes of Hitler or Idi Amins had thought like that. The world would have been a better place. The absence of bad will always outweigh the presence of the good. The good is only needed as long as the bad exists. Remove the negative, and you won't need the positives, just the neutrals. Most of us spend our entire lives living in the Neutral zone. Existing for the sake of it, trying to find joy, and failing to make it stick. It's just a series of highs and lows, with no end in sight. 

With the Delhi election results out tomorrow, it anyway feels like the end is near. All hope is lost. It is what it is, nothing moves forward, nothing can go backwards. It is a rut, we are all stuck awaiting some miracle to make our lives more exciting, more loved and more blessed. I doubt there is anything more than this. We've seen it all, we have been tricked into believing any of this matters.

It is the end of life, as we know it.

Milestone!!

Woohoo!!

I've got 3000 hits today! (I am almost certain 2000 of those are my own, about 50 each for Lala and Nim, and the rest I shared on my own with people that I laaaarve)
:D

Just need to put this down, I am obsessing over Hozier's Take Me to Church, and during the less melancholy moments, over Meghan Whatsername's All About the Bass (no treble).

I suggest you switch off everything around you, get a pair of Bose speakers, turn off the lights and play Take me To Church. Let it wash over you, and let go. Weep for what you have and what you don't. Weep for all that you're going to lose during the course of your life. This moment is it. For the uninitiated, the song has nothing to do with church. It is more to do with "sinning".  Beautiful lyrics. Beautiful music. My lover's got a great sense of humour. And an amazing voice.

Time to go help Lala win an online quiz.
Happy listening,
Come back for more!

Naina 

An Essay on God

Recently, I was asked to write an essay on  "God, a Myth or Reality?". I quite liked what I wrote and thought I would try and reproduce it here. I would like to put in a few words before I do that, though.
The post is not aimed to hurt any other person's views/opinions/religious sentiments. What has been expressed here is not an attempt to sound politically correct either. This is what it is. I suggest you keep an open mind when you read the following. It may just make you think.

****

I have been unable to make up my mind whether I believe in God or not. It sounds a little bizarre to me that there is a super being sitting around somewhere, monitoring the situation across the Universe and deciding how everything works. At the same time, when you think about how it all began with a few atoms clumping together to form a molecule which further clumped together to form mass and wonder at the complexity of the entire system, you cannot help but wonder at how it could have been a random and spontaneous occurrence.

I think God is more of a concept. Consider the Universe to be an isolated science experiment governed by a set of rules or laws. Changing a few dynamics within the system will lead to reactions. However, since we have not been able to unravel all the laws and mysteries of our world, we begin to believe in a super power which explains the unexplained and allows us to accept the unknown. Going by this logic, I begin to wonder, who made these laws?

I end this here, on this ambiguous note, because I don't think there is much more I can add to explain my non-stand on this topic. Maybe it's better to have a little faith, maybe not. Only you can know what works best for you.

****

A discussion followed the essay, where I was asked if I pray. I responded in the negative, to which I was asked, what DO you have faith in? What do you do when you need help or need someone to reach out to? I had no answer to that question. When I think about it now, I suddenly realise, why do we need faith? Why is it required? I realise I probably don't have faith because I have hopes. When you really come to think of it, when you Hope something happens, isn't it almost the same as praying it does? How is hoping different from praying? You hope within yourself, whereas you direct your prayers to a God. Maybe that's all the difference there is. Who is to say?

I have no more to add.

I bid y'all a goodnight.

Naina

Desperation

Dear February,
Come hither.
Look at me,
I'm beginning to wither.

Put me out,
Of my agony
Show me now,
How it will be.

I reach out,
For the fire
Burn my hands,
But still don't tire.

Everyday I stay,
I decide,
To grow a pair,
And toughen my hide.

Like a weakling,
I trudge along.
Looking for salvation,
In the depths of a bong.

My dear February,
Please come now.
Hasten the time,
And take a final bow.

Winter is Coming

I have to master the art of not feeling cold. I am sitting here watching girls walking around without socks in bare-all sandals, some even without their pants (going to the beach ladies?) and I shiver! Here I am wearing two pairs of socks on my feet, one pair on my hands, and I shall not talk about the one covering my head. And the men! One flimsy leather jacket, folded at the elbows....brrr!! Hey! Aren't you the same dude who was wearing a woolen skull cap last summer!? I think there is something off about your body temperature regulator, son. Better go see a doctor. Come new year's eve, the girls go all out in short dresses you wouldn't catch my grandmother wearing, the boys wear extra coats so they can *aherm* lend them to the ladies when they feel cold. (No judging, no judging)
The Taneja clan is out in this freeing cold to support the youngest Taneja in his singing venture. He looks gorgeous out there! (You can watch him singing here).
Everywhere I look, I am surrounded by people dressed in greys and blacks, with a few daring ones sitting around on the freezing floor in red. Winters is such a dreary season, I haven't seen the sun in two weeks now! If I was a dirty boy, I think I would have probably gone without a bath all season.
I think its time to put my blue and swollen fingers back inside my pockets. We don't want them chopped off now, do we?

Winterrrrrrs

Winter is here.
Naina

Red Hoodie

A silly poem about a silly sweater I've had forever...


Hot Shower,
On a cold winter day.
Steam rising up
To warm me top to toe,
Fogged mirror,
Shows no lies
While my red hoodie,
Sits outside.
My companion of ten years,
More faithful than a lover.
Jilted in summers,
Mistreated in December.
Dearer than a blanket
And scarcer than a jacket.
Oh! Red Hoodie,
How I missed thee.
One decade and counting,
Please, stay with me.