LIFE...

Things in life just randomly keep taking sudden turns, sometimes 90 degrees turns and sometimes even a complete 180 degrees u turn.
Right after you've had a great vacation with family and friends and are super-happy, you are forced to endure a 12 hour long bus-ride which is so bumpy that it makes your stomach churn. And guess what? it's dinner-time for the mosqiutoes under your seat.
Another scenario..
You're totally bummed out with things. Work sucks, people around you are boring and there's absolutely nothing in life which is even remotely interesting. And then you receive mail - your work has been published in a book! You can't stop smiling.
Yet another sharp shift.
The course of life never lets you feel a particular emotion for too long.. When you are too tired, you come across an extremely comfortable couch, and just as you start getting too comfortable, it gets pulled out from under you.
Life seems to be a very long journey with twists and turns and tricks and treats. You need to have courage, perserverence, and yes, a sense of humour to live through it.
But then again, life also seems quite short, as for the first ten years, we are mentally incapable, next 7-8 years, emotionally unstable, and last few years, physically incapacitated.
So well, life really is a bundle of contradictions.We can't make up our mind about it.. What we CAN do , however, is to use every ounce of our potential to fully live every moment of every day.
As someone said, "Life is nothing but a bunch of well-lived days strung together".
So go write that book, go have that make-over, go form your music band and put up a show.
Just do it.

What’s cooking?..

I’m ambitious. Sometimes, stupidly so.


The first day I bought my own tawa(frying pan) , belan and chaklan (the tools for making roti), I sat down, determined to make aloo paratha. Not plain roti, as a normal beginner with no prior experience would do, direct aloo paratha! By myself, no sensible supervision involved.

7 pm .. I have all my tools ready, am pretty excited, already imagining how they’d look like. Hmm.. took the wheat flour in a container, poured a little water, took a deep breath and plunged my hand into it. Icky!! Gooey sticky muck. Put a little more flour.. too dry, more water.. and the process continued..

7.20 .. This stupid thing looked soooo easy when I saw my mom doing it!!!

7.40.. yippee.. dough is done! Put the potatoes in water to boil! Uh-oh! Should have done this first.

7.45.. potatoes boiling.. Me watching TV.

8.15.. Oh shit!! The potatoes!!! Ok, nothing burnt.. just a lil over-boiled.. u silly gas-waster!!

8.25.. potatoes cooled enough to be peeled. Mashed them up nicely.. By now, started feeling hungry.. consoled myself by thinking that it’s almost done.. (in reality.. not even close!)

8.30.. added the spices to potatoes.. green chillies, salt, a little garam masala.. and dunno why I felt like adding a pinch of turmeric.. maybe coz it was the only thing left untouched in the spice-box.

9.20.. still trying to roll out the parathas with the potato stuffing.. no matter how I tried, the mashed potato filling kept coming out.

Why the hell did it look easy when someone else was making it?!?

Stomach grumbling , actually roaring with hunger… I continued battling with the dough.

10.00 pm.. ahaa! My first ever aloo parathas… though the end-product looked like a cross between cutlets and aloo tikki rather than paratha..

But the first bite was straight out of heaven.. they were yummy! Or maybe I was too hungry by then.. whatever.. I loved it!

quick tips..

When you are overwhelmed with a lot of work, dunno where to start, do this simple thing:

Take a paper, not just any scrap, a proper one, jot down the things u need to do, rate them based on their priority (how soon u need them to be done). It always helps to know exactly how much work you have.


After you've done the most urgent one, hit the hardest, ugliest task , which you'd tend to push away and then sit on it till u get it done. (ideal time for this would be mornings). As Brian TRacy says, "eat your frog!". Once the frog(the nasty job) gets out of your plate, you'll feel like doing the rest. There'll be a great increase in your levels of enthusiasm.

Gather all the things required.. all the follow-up emails, excel sheets, inputs from others, etc. before you start the work. This will help you finish it sooner.

After you complete each job, cross it out(prefereably in red ink). Trust me, it feels so good to cross each thing off!!

Take breaks once in a while.. Go have coffee, listen to a great song, check out any cute faces around you, practise your pick-up lines, blog, read my blogs.. wateva..


Reward yourself for every disciplined act you perform. No suggestions here.. do whatever works for you!!

gud luck!

morning hues..

The Masai tribe-
They say these people can arise from the deepest slumber to a state of battle readiness! When I read about them , I felt they were super-human. No human being can achieve that feat!
When I wake up from a night’s sleep (let alone a deep slumber) I wake up completely blank and blissfully oblivious to everything.

And God forbid, if I ever wake up before 6 am, I have a classic “ Mai kaun hu, mai kahaa hu” moment. I feel disoriented and completely clueless. I keep sleep-walking like a zombie, trying not to crash into walls and trying unsuccessfully not to stub my toes.. Even a hot bath can't make me feel human and when I dress up, I need to triple-check that I don’t have my dress on backwards.. And it takes quite a while before I can remember names and recognize people.

Actually, dawn is quire beautiful. i.e. if you are awake enough to appreciate it. The cool morning wind caressing your face and blowing in your hair. The sky above so beautiful in a dash of hues. A crimson ball of fire peeking out from amidst pink and purple clouds.. Watching the sun turn gradually into a bright orange (a color which sumhow I find really ugly) and then into a cheerful, resplendent yellow. This brings a smile to your face and you feel that life is wonderful!

an aftrnoon with national geographic..

Why?? How??

I was astounded as I lay on my couch one Saturday afternoon, as I saw this guy (Austin Stevens ) making his way into a dark cave in some rainforest, a place teeming with flies, lizards, hundreds of insects and goodness knows what. And he was there, chasing a snake! And when he found it, he started playing with it, cradling it in his hands. Eugh!!

If I saw even a cockroach anywhere near me, I’d jump onto the nearest chair, table, person, whatever, to get away from it.

And this dude, was voluntarily venturing into all these abominable place, teeming with awful creepy-crawlies! Yet I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen as I watched a different world- an undisturbed , fresh world blissful in its serene existence.



He waded into a shallow river to pick up a turtle and held it up for the camera, and the shy thing ducked its head deep into its shell. Was so funny.. The narrator said it must be around 50 years old! Imagine! 50 years of just silently wading through water, ceaselessly gliding by, in endless silence. I was wondering, how come it didn’t die of boredom!!

I’d previously thought/felt that it was wrong for humans to poke our noses into the world of flora and fauna, specially when I saw him wrench off a poor unsuspecting snake from a tree and forced it to open its jaws to show its incredible teeth to us folks resting happily in front of the TV screens. It kinda felt wrong to bother these creatures.

But when I thought of the turtle, I felt it was good that these creatures were getting a few minutes of break from the mundane-ness continuum of ceaseless existence.

And finally, feeling super glad and (supremely smug) for being human, I switched the TV off to get on with my life.

random update :)

“ why don’t you update you blog more often?”.. someone from work asked me this morning. I loved this question, which was indicative of the fact that there were people who liked my blog (ahem! read my blog)..
After a while, my team-mate turned up and said that he’d read some of my blog posts over the weekend.
And when I heard this for a third time today, (this time a dear friend called up to actually yell at me for not updating it), I took it as a sign! And here goes..

Life is as usual.. obscure random-ness punctuated by craziness, laughter, crushes and a rare tear or two.

Went shopping this weekend.. actually window-shopping .. Wanted to buy a new spectacle frame, tried out scores of them, but didn’t like any that much. And left the shop in a huff, when she said my eyes are too big!! You sell stupid frames n have the audacity to say that there’s something wrong with my face!!

And then went to a mall where I had to pay for accidentally breaking an ugly coffee mug. Stupid fragile things, destroyed by a mere fling of a careless hand!

And there it was again… the nothingness. Life right now is at a sort of frozen standstill. The minute I leave my mind alone, it sort of ventures into a scary zone.. of disturbing questions about the future, haunting philosophical thoughts of “what’s the point??” wrenching guilt trips of how I could have made my life better, anger at the unfairness of situations, indignation, and lots and lots of self-doubt! It’s a lot to deal with.

I heard all this mental stuff happens to every one..they call it ‘mid-life crisis’ , but ain’t I a tad too young to have it? Anyways, I don’t want to deal with it and as always, took an easy path.. I just mute my brain whenever these disturbing thoughts threaten to surface. I keep watching this show’ How I Met Your Mother’ I have 5 seasons of it in my comp and every minute of my free-time is spent watching episodes back-to-back, until I finally fall asleep. It feels good to live in passive-ness for a while, watching emotions from outside, while your own brain is safely cradled in the nothingness of ceased thought.

Time will come for me to un-mute my mind and get on, but right now, I’m happy and safe at the ‘Pause’ button.

??

He could be somebody’s grandfather…

This morning was no different from any other morning.. I woke up, rolled around in the bed, slept for a little longer, finally convinced myself to wake up. Got ready, had breakfast, mumbled ‘hi’ ‘hello’ ‘howz life’ ‘going good’ to flat-mates.. and left for work.. thinking about some mundane things, daily trifles. Same old weekday..

But then..

At a traffic signal, there was a wrinkled old man, looking like he hadn’t eaten for days, and he was asking for alms. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence at traffic signals. Yet I can never forget his eyes. I have never seen so much sorrow on a human being’s face. It was just so unfair.. He could have been someone’s grandfather, sitting in his home, resting his frail old frame in his last few years, perhaps with his little grandchildren playing around. But no, he’s not. He is on the street, barely able to walk, his beseeching eyes asking help from strangers.

And in that moment, all the worries of daily life seemed so insignificant… issues at work, broken hearts, weight loss problems.. all of this doesn’t even matter .. people are struggling to live out there while we fret about these things. Sure, we have problems too, life ain’t a party for anybody, yet somehow, looking at their suffering changes my perspective. Makes my problems look tiny.

What can we do about it though? Can we do something about it? These rare moments of compassion.. should we just mute them and go on about our lives like nothing’s wrong? Like we have been doing?

I don’t know what to do, or if I will ever be able to do anything about it. I don’t know if that old man would ever smile again in his life.

There are more questions than answers, but I know one thing.. I can’t mute these feelings and go on living. Maybe there is something I can do. Maybe there’s something we can all do. We can find the answers if we only spared time to ponder over the questions.
Maybe there’s still hope..
Think about it..