New Shores!

Hello my readers! 

I have now moved my blog to a new home within Wordpress, under a different name! 

You are all welcome to stop by, and here is the url: 

https://the152girl.wordpress.com/

Please do read. All comments and suggestions are welcome!

See you there, stay in touch.

Ciao!

To New Shores!

Time For Yourself

I thought it's good to post about what I think can be a good idea to spend your time on, on lazy weekends. Because, these are few of the things that I did today, and considering I feel quite chirpy and cheerful now, these can be my recommendations to the readers of this blog.  

Read a cheerful happy book like one of these (or any other) at a coffee shop:

Watch TBBT's snippets on Youtube, esp the one on Friendship Algorithm!

And if none of those work, 

Just sit by the bedroom window and stare:

source:

photo1; photo2

It is important to spend a slice of time, at least every week, to do an activity that you like. I often go for walks, in the big beautiful parks here and reflect on my life, think about my friends and family, think about my work and every tiny detail attached to my life. Some bring a smile, some pour out a longing, and some leave behind a restless feeling; but in a nut shell the quiet time that I do spend, just sitting by myself, helps distill out the unnecessary clutter I collect on my way and helps me put the shine back on.

I have read Eat Pray Love a couple of times and I enjoy revisiting Liz's journey to finding herself through food and loneliness in Italy, chaos and companionship in India, and love and longing in Bali - the book does what it's supposed to do best - make me think! I have watched the film on the book Julie & Julia, and my stomach jumps with joy when I look at all those delicious food being shown, written and spoken about in the movie and in the way that every character becomes secondary to the food in every single frame! The Big Bang Theory is the latest entry into the many things I love watching online these days, they are hilarious, they are nerdy and we love them all; watching snippet after snippet only reminds me of geeky friends I have; and if nothing of the above works for me at any point in time, I enjoy sitting with a coffee mug by my bedroom window and staring into the stillness of life outside and after a while my own mind begins to resonate the stillness.

We all have our ways to spend the leisure time we get, and as long as we remember to not while it away in boredom, I think we will be able to keep in touch with our inner self.

Colours called F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Life can get busy, and sometimes you feel out of place, out of pace in it yourself. And, you find yourself in times when you stand in front of the mirror and ask, ‘umm, where are you headed? what are you doing? is this what you want?’ and go on till you find yourself exhausted. It is quite ordinary though to have these questions pop up, every once in a while, and experience might suggest that such episodes allow you to reflect, retrospect; you tap your compass a couple of times and set it back to the right direction. I think not only is this natural, but also absolutely necessary to happen.

And, people have different and personal formulae to react to these questions. Some take a few days off work to relax and unwind; some visit family & relatives; some take to traveling to a new place by themselves; and some meet friends. I fall into the last category. Almost always.

Call it a miracle, every time I have felt the slightest discomfort and an eerie uneasiness about life, these few friends – my core group – suddenly decide to appear (or join me, meet me wherever I am.) Friends from all over the country and the world come together, and voila! - you find yourself amidst laughter, poorest of jokes, lots of camera clicks and the warm feeling that life’s back on track again begins to sow its seeds. Of course, it is not something I can quantify very easily. This core group that I speak of, is made up of choicest gems of people I have met in the last 8 years. Some at the very beginning of my glory days (read: engineering college!), and some I met along the journey that I started those 8 years back. I must also add, I have been blessed with the time and energy to make it to these meets that are so meticulously planned, which only goes to add the adequate dose of colours in my life!

I am not going to write a thank-you note for my core group here, or go on to acknowledge how special these bunch of people are to me (I call it core, it is only redundant to type anything further!). This post is only to reiterate to myself and my readers how friendship is perhaps the most important ingredient of life’s rich recipe, and how liberating it is to celebrate its bright presence in our lives, every once in a while!

After all, someone rightly said – Friends only know to walk into our lives, and thereon to just stay!

Quote Un-quote

It is one of those kinds of days, I guess, when you find yourself wondering, if it's one of those kinds of lives. I sat down to write and instead ended up reading a lot of quotes and interesting things some very creative people had to say. All of these, I have collected over time; and I sifted through them all evening and took a walk down the memory lane. Memories of how I had come to collect each one of these quotes. From who, where, and when. Some of them were from the newspapers (I think I still have the cuttings somewhere). Times of India's Sunday edition always carried some interesting lines on page 17. A friend of mine and I would often sms each other "Page 17, TOI" and then it became sort of a subtle competition as to who would read them first and tell the other. Then, there were these days when something somewhere I read would remain in thoughts for the whole day - and every time I thought about it, it would turn out to mean something different. Soon, it would be shared over Pine with this friend and smiles exchanged! This habit continued for quite some time after BITS too. When I was at home, I had indulged myself in a lot of books and these would inevitably lead to a lot of discussions over gtalk chats with this friend again. Of course, this was the time when it was not just limited to reading quotes and adding them to my collection, it was about putting my mind to it and wondering about it too. I enjoyed that a lot. 

These days, it is not so much about that any more. So, as I came across these lines today I just smiled at the me back in that time. It felt good. 

Here are some lines from my collection that I felt I should share:

2007, ToI - "It doesn't take any longer for an enlightened to get a an intuitive grasp of what it's all about and that grasp that they get is so fundamental, so comprehensive and so deeply internalised thereafter that virtually nothing can shake their faith in it. but ask any of them to explain their particular thin slice, they would run out of words to do so. or if they did manage to speak about it, the essence would suddenly go missing - even to themselves. that's because the power of thinking with thinking belongs to scientific world of empiricism and rationality which always acts on the "more information is better" principle."

By Nora Ephron - 

"Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy."

"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive."

Food for thought, eh!

Blog: Update - 2

It kills me to write after so long. But, every time I have sat in front of my laptop to write, I found myself at a loss of words. Not only words, even ideas. Nothing interested me long enough to write about. And although I have titled this post as “Update 2” there is hardly anything that I’m updating you with this time. 

It is called “Update 2” simply because my earlier post talks about a series of updates that I was to write for my readers telling them about what all is/was happening in my life – thoughts and incidents that I wished to share with people through this blog. But I suppose there was so much happening around me that I missed a beat somewhere and lost myself. 

I am typing this out sitting in office. I am waiting for the clock to tick so I can catch my cab and go home. After a day’s work (and incessant rain), when sunlight shines through the clouds and makes its way inside through the tiny gaps between the blinds it brings along a feeling of pure ‘niceness’. A friend finds this term completely ‘fb-ish’ or ‘internet-y’, but I couldn’t find a word better suited to my mood right now. It makes me feel that I can go back to doing all those things that somehow got put on hold, and that the emptiness will slowly find itself filling again. 

I was listening to Norah Jones’ Seven Years this afternoon. Perhaps you too should - Seven Years

P.S. I must tell you the ‘updates’ series ends with this post. Tomorrow shall be a new day, a new post and a new beginning.

Blog: Update - 1

I put the title of the blog as “Blog: Update – 1” for three reasons. First reason being, it gives me a sense of satisfaction that I am acknowledging the fact I haven’t written a post for my blog for long; second, there is more than 1 update that I need to post here so more posts shall follow soon; and, the third reason is I am now very used to reading the “BP: Macondo Update…” reports regarding the recent oil spill in GoM published very frequently by the research desk I work for and so it is only natural I pick that up as the title of this post!

My days are spent reading about Oil and trying to figure how, in the broad scheme of things, it would help manage someone’s wealth; where as my evenings are spent trying to figure how to manage the Oil usage at home so my roommates and I keep good health!

I guess once you start working, the mind undergoes a certain conditioning, which is automatic and completely unintentional as well, but it sure happens. I realized this when I was sitting with a friend in Hard Rock Café the other evening. It was his last day in Hyderabad; his stint here as an intern had just ended. Digging into the hot melting dark chocolate on an unusually large piece of chocolate brownie, he was narrating his experiences at work. On the day of his final presentation, his boss asked him “how many hours in a day do you have?” and my friend blurted, “Eight, Sir!”. It did not occur to him, even for a moment that his boss could actually be referring to the total number of hours in a day! He thought of only the ideal number of working hours in a day and said 8 in all honesty.

The other I realized happened with my roommate. She works for a firm which leaves her with no life – both in terms of time and activity. In the first month of her job, she went to office on all Saturdays. She is supposed to have a five-day week but she never saw a relaxed Friday evening or a Saturday morning in that whole month. And then, one day she returned with the biggest grin on her face, announcing as happily as she could that the next day, a Saturday was going to be an off! But the whole of Saturday she kept repeating to us, “I feel this is Sunday!”, “I feel as if I need to go to office tomorrow!” or “I will feel weird when Sunday actually arrives tomorrow!”. Her mind is conditioned to have only one day off in a week – in just a month’s time!

And well, I did not escape the conditioning either!

Suddenly I find, the popular phrase “All is Well” has changed to “Oil’s Well” in my vocabulary. Humorous I know, but it is a certain inalienable truth of my life now!

The Blues and Hues

Disappointments are difficult to handle. You don’t know what you are disappointed with more – yourself or the situation you found yourself in. You don’t know whether it was you who did something wrong or if it was the situation that went against you. But clearly, you are dejected. And, that is why I presume disappointments are tough to handle. Because of the sheer ambiguity they carry with themselves. For a while, you are immersed in a feeling of loss – loss of something good, something you wanted but did not get; later perhaps in the lack of a feeling itself. The vicious circle that the mind then weaves gets you weary to even fight any longer.

I am talking about one such disappointment I experienced today. I will tell you why I call it an experience later. It has not been easy to overcome. Absolutely because of the confusion it clouded my mind with. I did not know who to blame, if at all I wanted to play the blame-game – myself or the series of events that led to the disappointing outcome; or both. And, I did not know of a way to find comfort in my chaos.

It wasn’t somehow a regular college day right from dawn; and yet I dared to march into the unknown armed with… nothing. Or maybe, with some hope against hope. And, as I sit here in the library reflecting on my day that just went by, one thing stands out. Life is not easy. There are days when you become a victim of Murphy’s Law and chance upon the sad realization that the road ahead might only get worse. And that’s exactly what happened today. Being hopeful is even tougher on days like these, but then that’s the best you can do. Perhaps the day was chalked out to be like this, says a friend philosophically. But I don’t know that. Yet, I mean.

Like in most Bollywood movies, where the good wins over the bad, the disheartened feeling also saw a heartening comfort in the end. Sipping on tea sitting outside the college mess, I had a ‘lecturing’ conversation with a friend. So when I say lecturing, you can imagine it to be completely one-sided. And it was not the lecture that was the actual take away. It was the fact that no matter how bad your day is, at the end of it you will always have friends to sit on your either side, who’ll try to make you believe that the script you have been writing for your life will win just when the time is right; that the blues within would soon be replaced with newer, brighter hues; and that there is no greater delight in having faith in yourself, patience with life and wielding your pen no matter what happens.

With the day at its end now, I realize I shall wake up again to dare and march into another unknown armed with… maybe, the experience of having done this before. And, that as they say, is Life!

Conversations

Some conversations leave you with thoughts haywire. It happens once in a while; perhaps when you least expect it and yet by the end of it, along with the feeling of being befuddled suddenly you also have a longing to get back and finish the unfinished business. Say what hadn’t been said. Listen to the missing parts. Understand what you couldn’t. And, come out of the conversation crystal clear.

These conversations blow the winds of change. These are also the conversations that as you try to reflect on, present to you some interesting insights into life around us. Listening to a conversation, I personally think, is one of the most enriching experiences one can have. Not just any conversation, but especially these conversations. I remember a dear friend of mine had written a blog post mentioning a ‘dangling conversation’ (famous song of SnG). And, dangling as these maybe, such conversations make sense only with a passage of time.

Three of us found ourselves entangled (fine! engaged… okay?) in the dangling conversations; perhaps trying to connect the dots by looking back. Some dots did join, some others couldn’t. It almost seemed impossible to get some dots onto the same plane – but then that’s Life. You hardly expect it to be the way it is now. I am not saying we remain unsatisfied always. But, there is always a greener picture in our minds, and we find ourselves blaming our limitations for it. I remember reading in a book, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” So true!

As the night unfolded in front of the three of us, we became more aware of each other’s resistances, of each other’s helplessness towards reasons – the want of it, the absence of it and the want for the absence of it, of each other’s perceptions and perspectives. As the end neared, each one of us imagined the conversation beautiful, just and perfect; yet as we walked away from each other, the feeling that the conversation in itself was quite a bit better than what we made out of it lingered on.

The fact remains, though, that the conversation is etched in our memories, and nothing that we do affects the conversation – its emotion, its irregularities and its comprehension. One could raise a question on our ability to choose to change our minds and hence choose different futures (interpretations) from a different past (experiences), the grander idea here though is to drive home the point that each experience in itself is a creation of life in its fuller meaning, and not a mere discovery.

Life’s Little Rides

There comes a stage in everybody’s life when the going gets hmmm… well, let us analyze.

This is a stage that you begin with intense Expectations and high Hopes. This is a stage when you have already decided that you are going to put in great efforts to bring out best possible results. You think your life ahead depends on this phase; this can either make it or break it! You are full of enthusiasm and vigor to face obstacles, to overcome challenges. Optimism vibrates within.

And then, you enter.

You begin to settle down. Meanwhile, you also look around to find certain gray areas that you had not thought of in the colorful picture you had drawn with yourself in the centre of it all. You say to yourself, ‘…that is ok. I can manage. After all, I have come here only to learn…’. You beam at your confidence. You feel things are only going to get better from here on. And no matter what, you are never going to lose that positive vibration inside you.

Here, after this part, two things can happen.

First one. You fall into the trap. You become a Dog. You are made to run around the whole time that you almost find it impossible to take even a day’s break and wash your clothes. You hear yourself many-a-time tell your friends/family on phone, ‘Too much work… can’t make it. Sorry!’ You slowly begin to hate the place; hate your desk and hate the very idea of doing this for the meager amount that you get paid at the end of every month. You start realizing of how golden those days were when all that you had to do at night for a quick dinner was say, ‘Chal bey, C’not chaltey hain…’ or how much you miss Bingers’ coffees when your stomach growls at 2.30am!

Second one. You are completely ‘blown away’ by the sudden luxury of living Life King’s size. It is an All Play No Work period of your life. Nobody seems to give a care about who you are, what you are, where you come from, where you go and the types… Nobody wants to know anything about you. You are completely on your own. Your so-called colleagues at your workplace find you amusing. Your so-called Boss looks at you in a way you cannot decipher. You wonder, whether he/she thinks you are a kid and so know nothing and so he/she doesn’t bother much with you… or he/she thinks you are fit-for-nothing, only a liability and so he/she doesn’t bother much with you. Either case, the outcome is the same. So you stop wondering. You realize the power of your new-found freedom. You have all the time in the world – to explore, to travel, to have Fun (something you’ve always wanted to but postponed it to a later date!). You call up your friends often, but hear them say, ‘Too much work… not this weekend. Sorry!’ But that doesn’t stop you from enjoying the bliss of nothingness! Well, only momentarily. And then, you start to get bored. You hate the idleness. You often find yourself appreciating the arduous assignments and demanding deadlines you had back in those golden times. You felt important there, among your friends and professors. It was your world. You feel you truly belonged there.

And you know what this part is called? This part, a small but quite a significant part where all the above happens… this part of your life is called “Internship”.