tso's blog

Sunday, June 17, 2007

i'm about to come Alive

3:06 AM

We're packing up.
My mom to pursue a life down under. My sister to start college. Me to start work. The lease is signed. The flights are booked. The trunks are being hauled out and filled with first date restaurant bills, books bought for dirt cheap prices off roadsides, first year engineering graphics drafters that took us a month and four ruined A3 sheets to learn how to use, boiler suits reminiscent of spending hours grinding a metal piece into a symmetrical hexagon with the metallic smell of fine metal dust and visions of the sweaty guy opposite you making you hope you don't look as disgustingly filthy!
Last night i was accused of having lost my passion for life. For a girl like me, that's a very strong accusation to make because its passion and not plans that make me live from day to day. I'm still wondering what happened. Why i suddenly find it difficult to make conversations with friends who could once chat with me for hours, why i end up thinking she's already told me this story the moment one of my friends start up a flashback narrative. still, i listen (its a cardinal rule amongst girlfriends - you always listen, no matter how repetitive!).
Have i become uninteresting? Have all my friends(seems unlikely!)? Has the world disinterested me?
God knows. For now, i pack, i move and i work. And then someday, I think why the girl who'd dress up anytime for a good time suddenly feels a shiver of apprehension when dusk falls, or when the night demands too much energy from me.
But to a special friend, I'll say but this. Give me some time. I promise, I'll get back to what I was. I just need to find a way to balance my old self with a new found shadow of reality that has crept over my heart.
It seems to me i'm just passing through.

< Remember when we first met
And everything was still a bet
In love's game
You would call; I'd call you back
And then I'd leave
A message
On your answering machine
I think that you came too soon
You're the honey and the moon
But right nowEverything is turning blue,
And right now
The sun is trying to kill the moon,
And right now
I wish I could follow you
To the shores
Of freedom,
Where no one lives>

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Lachrymation

1:41 AM

It comes down to this
At the end of a day
Exactly like the one before
When you walk out of the bathroom
On a very very routine day
When the shiver of your wet hair
Catches you
As it runs down the nape of your neck
To soak the first inch of the towel that drapes you
When unbeckoned
Unbidden
The tears come
Threaten to threaten your breathing
As they cascade into no longer swallowable convulsions
From the very base of your throat
Into uncontrollable spasms
Who do you call?
Who will not judge?
Who will not need a reason?
Who will not be foolish enough
To say it'll be alright?
Because it won't, you know.

Labels: verse

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the biggest mistake

1:39 AM

the biggest mistake we make in life is confusing comfort for happiness. the strange part is, unhappy and confortable people still don't realise it.

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When I Look to the Sky

1:04 AM

this one goes out to all you engineers who were dying to get out of college and then realised on the last day of college - no, not that you didn't want to leave - i still do - that you didn't feel jubilant. you didn't feel equipped to 'take on the world'. you didn't feel that you even deserved it.

hell, you hardly felt anything.

i'll admit part of it could be that i still have my albastrossian project to complete but mostly i wonder if i have achieved anything more than a degree. i've changed, but that was more of a time thing than a college thing. have i plucked enough courage to do what i want? have i tried enough crazy things that will become impossible for me to try as i wade my unwilling way into prim corporate staidness? have i paraglided? bungee jumped? finally told that creep off? done something illegal? do i have secrets not even my best friends should know (actually, yes to that one)?

i recently joined this site called 43things.com where you just type in 43 things you wanna do, from touring the world (redundant to say so since max ppl are on that list, but so do i!) to buying your mom a car. a classmate of mine who had the option of going abroad for his MS recently made the decision to simply cool off at home for the next one year and pick up all the skills he didn't have time to learn in college. a friend's friend decided to take a loan from his dad and pursue his dream of being a journalist. one of my dad's friends left the army at the age of 40 and is now a TV journalist with NDTV. it seems around me that dreams are being shaped, rainbows chased, lives lived.

and yet all i can say is, someday, when the time is right. someday, when i don't end up hurting someone i love. i know i'm entitled. i know i can right now. unfortunately, i also know what's stopping me.

i wish i could say i didn't care. that i would years from now be under red gunpowder filled skies, with shells tearing the side of my tent, with me sending off the draft for tomorrow's daily. i'm a strong believer that we haven't lived till we've seen how collously people die. that's when you know that the price of a human life is just equivalent to the victims's currency against the U.S. dollar.

but for now, i'm sitting on a friend's desktop in a comfy lil hostel, with thoughts read by probably only two other homosapiens, with more time to spare than i know what to do with, with a wait for my struggle that is beginning to wear me out. its like waiting for a train that's the only way out, except you have no freaking idea of the departure time. or date. or year.

To a person with serious problems, this is going to sound just outright arrogant. But I have had too cushy a life. Nothing I have wanted has ever been denied to me. I made all my own decisions, right from taking up engineering to colouring my hair. The wrong and the right. My dad wanted to give me the old car. I instinctively declined exclaiming, why would you want to spoil a 21 year old with a car for god's sake?

Instinct tells you things you'd never admit to yourself.

Labels: dreams

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Morning After

8:07 AM

Off again. Set off to check out one more place (for 'tassalee') and then finalise that house. ended up seeing two houses(surprise surprise) cause the first one was a 1 BHK (its ok even the broker didn't know that till he opened the door to what he thought was the entrance to the 2nd bedroom and it came way (the entire door) in his hands to reveal that it was in fact a verandah). The second place was a filthy but beautifully constructed house where 5 boys lived. Toothbrushes on the sink, tongue cleaners hanging over the tap itself. Cigarettes all over, a stashed portrait of boy and girlfriend visible in half open cupboard. Location bad. Rent high.
We were meant to take the other house. Why fight fate? So we went, met the owner, saw the house in the day (it still looked as good) and two hours later, the deal was made.
And so, ladies and gentlemen "anon-alphabet/anon-number, anon-colony-name" is now 'my place'.
It feels good.
Also went and saw my company innards for the first place. It was much better than I had expected.
Life's looking pretty damn good right now.

Labels: house hunting, tech mahindra

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Let the games begin !

6:53 AM

So, i woke up at 0730hrs and spent the next fourteen hours house hunting yesterday.And this is all of that wrapped into a blog entry.
We were looking for a quiet 2BHK close enough to the main road so it wasn't deserted, in a good society with respectable people where people wouldn't mind two single girls staying.
After going through a just gifted coffee table book of Desperate Housewives (I love the show coz its very realistic about how we're all desperate and how desperation can weaken the strongest of consciences into doing the pettiest of crimes to prove ourselves superior even to people we love..whole other blog post sometime else perhaps!) four hours ago, sleeping for the next three, a banging awoke me. My first thought - i fell asleep without putting my birthday cake in the fridge. A quick taste and a few seconds later, I awake to find a very sleepy girl saying - get ready, let's go. hm, i mumble. half an hour later, fortified enough not to fall asleep at the bus stop by good ol' traditional hostel breakfast of chocolate cake (that phrase is an oxymoron on too many levels!), we were off.

First Stop - a place called Warje off the Bombay-Bangalore highway. My company has a local classifieds' nightmare - a simple plain ol notice board where people who want/want to rent out stuff/furniture/houses just put up their details. These people were shifting out today.So we locate this place which apparently was built by some guy with quite some experience in the business of aliases. It goes by the name of Giridhar Nagar and Popular Nagar. Its not two adjacent places - the board states both names. Did I mention we've never been around this area and every non purposeful stride of a passerby seemed shady to us? Or that we had no mode of transport other than public and no choice but to tell the autowallah that we didn't know our way on the deserted highway?
Locate the place. We look around. Hm. Locality a bit weird. Colony interiors ok. Security guard check. Creepy security guard check. Decent families check. Crying wail of baby from house scarily close to ours check. On confirmation, wail is from the house we're checking out. Fair enough. He leaves when we come. Sweet couple open door. Tell us everything from where they work to the "bai" system to timings of their company. entering bathroom, we note a humongous grayish brown 2 feet x 4 feet x 4 feet tank in the bathroom above the shower area held in place by wooden bars that, judging by a drip, aren't all that well levelled out. Its ok, Ashita, struggle is good. First apartments aren't meant to be enjoyed, they're meant to be laughed at when you're driving down with the same friends in a luxury car some years down the line (looking at current salary, make it quite some years). Its not perfect, but the rent is great. Buut approach is still shady. So naah. Hey, the day is young.
Next up - um, nothing. We sit and have some breakfast, buy a paper. And then, just like a terrible stereotype, we encircle the ads we're interested in with (blue, not red) pen (not thick bold marker). Then we called them. To my left was sitting this extremely white collar looking prim chap in a light very obviously selected for its not too obvious coloured green shirt, some 31-32 i'm guessing, with his pretty fair wife and his daughter. And I was thinking, so where did you start out. Is this me at your age. Is your wife me at her age? a friend of mine once told me I had a career phase and I would get over it by the time my first child came along and get into social work cause that was my calling. Whether he was talking of me of women in general I don't know but sitting at Savera restaurant with a girl who was working only cause she didn't know what else she wanted to do, I wondered how well it was to know at all what you want..
Getting back, we called a million people, recalled the people we had spoken to the previous day, and made some plans. Half an hour later a swank looking chap called Sagar drove his Accent down to a place to show us an apartment.
It was perfect. Clean beautiful white tiled floors, a fantastic natural breeze and sunlight streaming in..you know what i'm talking about. Some houses just feel right. The problem was that's all that was right abouit this deal...too far, too expensive, isolated road blah blah blah. Damn these practicalities. Still it was our best choice so far. Hopeful of finding similar places in more suitable loactions, we moved on to the next broker. And from that point on, it all went downhill.
The next place we saw was above a restaurant 0 and i do mean above - the only entrance was via the restaurant kitchen. Ya, so as if that wasnt enough to unconvince us, it got worse. We climbed 4 thin thin staircases to reach a thin thin door and enter a filthy filthy house. door opens. My eyes fall on a bathroom bang in front of it. Half of the main hall has been used as a dump. The place is dusty with disuse. The bedroom's no better. Wooden panels that i can only imagine belonged to a coherent chair before its dubious demise lie strewn beside a bed with a bare mattress. As I walk towards the other bedroom (actually navigating towards is more like it) I turn to the broker and ask, "So this place hasn't be cleaned up after the previous tenants left?" Pat comes the reply "What madamji, the boys are still living here, see know." I enter the bedroom to see two groggy eyed boys wake up on similar unsheeted mattresses in the other bedroom. " "I see." (I could actually see them. More of them then I'd have liked to.)
So we got out of there fast.
Same chap then showed us a slightly better place in a location that had the vaguest semblance of good middle class neighbourhood respectability. The house was clean, a bit dingy and old but basically livable in. Option 2 located. Rent - a measly 1000 less that the white tiled wonder of two hours ago. So we decided to jump to the next broker - fast.
But wherefore did ever the needs of the human heart turn to substance? Not so piteous the day, nor the brokers for that matter. Another painful round of calls later, we met a lady who took us to a house with - get this - a pentagonal architecture. All the rooms were pentagonal, and not even symmetrically so. No parallel walls. Spacious, but strangely built. But it was bang off the main road very centrally located. Our new option 2.
A not-so -spicy double hot chicken pizza later, we set off for the five longest hours of our life. First no on e was free, then everyone was - at once - and only for the next hour. We shuttled to and fro, up and down the same roads, till another broker showed us the same pentagonal marvel. Screreech..obviously, we were doing something wrong. More cautious and less trusting, mp re weary and less prone to even tune in to what the broker was rambling about by now, the next few hours saw us rejecting houses within seconds, allowing the autowallah who was following our broker to give us his brothers' number (his brother was a broker), giving househunting advice to 3 fathers looking for accommodations for their kids who were joining the same company and seeing two houses we were sure wouldn't be all that great coz the broker was vaguely cute.
At 1900 we were tired irritable had two more brokers to go and still had no option3. And then Jeevan walked in. actually we walked to him. No actually, we took an auto to the new kothrud stand to meet him only to find out that he meant old kothrud depot and sped right up the way we had come to reach the place we had passed 15 min ago. Two houses later, we entered a colony short of the pentagonal marvel and went upto the sixth floor. He opened the front door. As my eyes got accustomed to the darkness I realised the spots i was seeing was actually a view of the lights of the entire city - laid out so beautifully in a dramatic view from the main hall window in front of the front door.
I looked at my fellow journeyer of the day and smiled.
This was it.
It got better. Our checklist was more populated by ticks than in any other house.
Ecstatic, we sleepily switched transport modes thrice. Reaching the hostel, I found the energy to repeat in full my day's finding to my father, discuss the plan of seeing the last brokers' offer adn then finalising the deal and then fell dead asleep on the bed.
It was a hard day's night.
Happy 21st Birthday, Ashita.

Labels: brokers in pune, house hunting, tech mahindra

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Saturday, June 9, 2007

The Intern

5:10 PM

currently reading :

night stories, alfred hitchcock
intro to nanotech
book one princes of ayodhya, ashok banker

last movies seen:

poc3
layer cake

So im due to start working in a month. im entering my 22nd year tomorrow. and life is beginning to scare me with the myriad possibilities...of how everything can go wrong!

Seems we do a 3 month training deal wherein we study stuff from java to oracle... and im not even a computer enggr! anyway, i just checked out this guys blog - onkarjoshi.wordpress.com and he's written about everything from his first day till now on it - in detail. it helped. and made me wonder. is the world a little too connected (some people say there's no such thing).

but i intend to do the same.

my project is on a road to peridition. my project partners are really cheesed off with me, my best friend and i are on the brink of god knows what and i have to find a house and rent it before the 12th of this month.

on the upside five of us intend to open up a blog of our own to keep in touch after college, and we're going to watch the outsiders today evening. and i may buy a scrabble for myself for my birthday.

speaking of which, on my birthday i'll be vacillating in the sun around the streets of my to-be company with my to-be roomie looking for our to-be new flat. freedom, living alone, womens' lib ..yeah yeah. tell the brokers that! cheers (hic, nah not really i hate beer!)

gotta go grab lunch before the mess shuts. ciao.

Labels: birthday thoughts, first day at work, freshers, tech mahindra

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Reality Check

3:21 AM

so, life sucks huh?! how you ask. well im kinda depressed about how im not going to reach my lofty dreams of being a journalist, a social worker, a writer and a media moghul.

so, am i the average teenager - you betcha! i got the potential but for some reason i will dissolve my dreams into mediocrity.

and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why life sucks.

Labels: disillusion, dreams, false illusions, life sucks, reality check

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