This Week

Its Alright!

Sometimes all you need for the world to seem alright is a ride on a bicycle, with sunlight playfully blinding your eyes, gentle wind stealing the sweat from your forehead, while Rabbi is singing about Bullah's identity crisis.

And then you reach the class to find that the professor didn't show up.

Agents of Change

The clock reads 8.30 AM, and the room is filled with the jarring noise of the alarm. In the following few minutes, I am supposed to wake up, hit the snooze, steal a few more minutes of sleep, and then finally surrender to my daily schedule. IF I was asleep in the first place, that is.

I flick off the alarm, while hastily typing, trying to piece together something that makes sense, atleast grammatically if nothing more. I had been awake for the last 40 hrs, and still my status with the RFIC assignment read - "Almost Done", as it did a couple of hours ago. Everything in the room, including yours truly, was in a total disarray, and a brief look at my table would possibly reveal almost all my belongings, from utensils, clothes to even spent batteries, and apple peals. Talk about sustainability.

For starters, a typical morning at Roland Holstlaan 235.

While the rest of the day went past like a blur, with the "glorious" submission, 2 hours of glazed expression, while words about monolithic transformers whizzed past, the noteworthy moment of the day arrived when I entered the Advanced Device Physics class, and was handed a questionnaire with hundreds of boxes to be tick-marked, and carrying the ever-alluring text "win 5 ipods" in bold. Well, who can say no to that!

While the questions were mostly pertaining to the university, like the ones we ask our friends during times of self-consiousness, some of them managed to stir up quite a few emotions. Where on one hand, the academics-related queries were belted away confidently, the ones concerning the opposite sex, to a mild embarassment, were all marked No.

But the question that remained at the back of my mind, the one I took the most time to answer, was after six months in this rain-infested country, if I'd rather be back home.

The train of thought was brought to an immediate halt before it could leave by the professor, who pressed us to finish the 104-question formality, and get on with the exercises. But when faced with doping concentrations and space-charge regions, human mind begs to differ.

Six months, since the agents of change swooped down, and everything became different. Here I was, as I had wished, like a free bird. A bird bogged down with assignment deadlines, dirty dishes, questionnaires with false promises of ipods and rain. cluck cluck cluck

By this time, I'm on my cycle, moving at a sluggish pace towards my room. Around me, people are returning from work, heading back home to be with their families and companions, while a littered yet empty room waited for me. A sobering thought.

Those about to shed a tear for me, don't.

Normally I have something up my sleeve to give every post a happy ending, but this time I don't. But this doesn't mean I am packing my bags and looking for flight deals on the internet. I have had my highs and lows here. I guess there are days when everything looks so grey that its difficult to spot the silver lining (a common complaint in the Netherlands). All you can do is let the agents of change do their work, and hope you get a fair deal in the end.

By the way, I marked the option No.

Such a long journey

From oblivion to experience
From permanence to transience
From the shed to the open
From the familiar to the foreign
From plans to action
From summer affairs to separation
From existence to verve
From a straight road to a swerve
From hope to ambition
From dreams to realization
From mundane to adventure
From an old August to a new September

From one world to another

It seems to be such a long journey...

Saas, Bahu and Machchar!

The wind is rustling violently through the trees, the heavens lightening up repeatedly accompanied every time by a very familiar sounding thunder. A distant, incessant ringing of a bell fills the air already leaden with gloom. Half-eaten chapattis and sabzi watch idly from the sidelines, as the family is huddled closely together, rapt in attention. I take a look at the clock and yawn, rather helplessly. 10 more minutes!

Sitting in a remote town, in one of the more underdeveloped parts of the world, I bring you the single-most unifying thread in the history of India – The Great Indian Joint Family Saga. The saga that plays itself in every abode – from a shack in a village to a duplex in posh city locale, enveloping us all in their world, making their woes and joys ours and our money and time, theirs .

Ekta kapoor has unknowingly stumbled upon an untouched nerve of Indian household. Even though the only joint families remaining in India are found on primetime, their day-to-day struggles with surprisingly dedicated vamps and terminal diseases have really touched a chord with women all over India. And it really warms my heart when I see an executive and his driver, both bitching about their wives’ fixation with Tulsi, Parvati and Mihir, as it goes on to show how saas-bahu soaps have formed a bridge across castes, religion and class barriers and even nations. My father, on a recent visit to China, watched Kyunki… dubbed in Mandarin. Though I don’t know even an iota of Chinese, it would be so cool to watch Baa squeaking, in a high-pitched voice - "Tulsi zong shì fú cóng le zhè ge fáng zi guī zé"(“Tulsi ne humesha iss ghar ki maryaada ka paalan kiya hai”)

When the place I am currently located at, Khatima, Uttarakhand, was elevated to a sub-district or something like that, one of the first demands on the citizen charter was to ensure uninterrupted power supply during 8-11 P.M (any guesses why). Moreover, when Mihir passed away in an accident (the first time), the women of the colony held a funeral to mourn his death. I reckon, when you are riding the simplest of vehicles, even a slight bump can unsettle your bum.

Talking of bumps, quite a few have shown up on my arms and face. Come dusk and the country-side air, supposed to be good for health, is filled with a ubiquitous buzz of mosquitoes. They are so many in number that they have to take turns at having a go at you, while giving the All-Out a royal ignore. Here I came across a new contraption quite popular in Khatima to fight the mosquito menace - Battery-powered electric racquets. They deliver mild electric shocks, just about managing to knock out the mosquitoes for a solitary minute before they rise again to resume their pursuits, sometimes with a hint of vengeance. So it is essential for us to create mosquito-shaped, often permanent, stains on the floor, in order to make a dent in their ranks. Hence, at night you can see the young children in every single house practicing the same maneuver - smash and step. The future of Indian Badminton has never looked so rosy.

"dàn shì wo réng rán shè fa huò dé yī xiē lè qù" (“But I am still managing to have some fun!!”)

On the Road Again!

A Few excerpts from my diary while on the move. Most of them were recorded while traveling in a bus, my handwriting transporting me temporarily to those blissful, ignorant (and shaky) times of 2^nd grade -

In India, whenever someone is going abroad for a long time, there are quite a few rituals to be followed during the last few months at home. One has to earn up some last-minute good karma by say feeding the dogs, please the deities by performing pujas and jaagrans, dodge questions about marrying a firangi and settling abroad, but the most inevitable ritual of all is visiting relatives. And no matter how distant, if you ever gonna see them in your life, the time is now, or so my parents insist.

For me, visiting relatives has always been a painstaking HR exercise of huge proportions. Innumerable that they are, some of them are located in the remotest corners of India. And not the good ones either! Right now, I am headed to Khatima, a small “town” located between two equally weird-sounding, remote “towns” in Uttarakhand. Though the weather is good, and a glimpse outside the window presents a nice scenery, a glimpse inside isn’t half as good. The floor is littered with the all-pervading moofali-ke-chhilke and empty raj-darbar sachets, the seats are a bit rickety and having the last row of the bus, my rear is definitely in for some action.

But all of this isn’t enough to dampen my spirits, as I feel like a student on his last day of school. Even though he cribbed about getting up early in the morning, packing up, rushing through breakfast and catching the dilapidated school bus to be dumped at the place he doesn’t feel the need to go to, on his last day, he sees everything in a new light. The feeling is definitely the same, as I aim to seek adventure everywhere during this last in a long, long time, two-week long trip down to my roots. And though I have been to Khatima a lot of times, if I’ll ever remember a journey to that place, it will probably be this one.

Rest of the journey is quite uneventful, as I fall in and out of sleep, the conversation about recipes and sweater-weaving techniques happening between two ladies on the seat ahead notwithstanding. I’ll post more about the trip later!

I wonder...

Like in past, my present halat is best summarized by this beautiful song. Except the part about driving a car, fast and far, because I'm still not allowed to!

Lemon Tree
By Fool's Garden

I'm sitting here in the boring room
It's just another rainy sunday afternoon
I'm wasting my time
I got nothing to do
I'm hanging around
I'm waiting for you
But nothing ever happens and I wonder

I'm driving around in my car
I'm driving too fast
I'm driving too far
I'd like to change my point of view
I feel so lonely
I'm waiting for you
But nothing ever happens and I wonder

I wonder how
I wonder why
Yesterday you told me 'bout the blue blue sky
And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon-tree
I'm turning my head up and down
I'm turning turning turning turning turning around
And all that I can see is just another lemon-tree

I'm sitting here
I miss the power
I'd like to go out taking a shower
But there's a heavy cloud inside my head
I feel so tired
Put myself into bed
While nothing ever happens and I wonder

Isolation is not good for me
Isolation I don't want to sit on the lemon-tree

I'm steppin' around in the desert of joy
Baby anyhow i'll get another toy
And everything will happen and you wonder

I wonder how
I wonder why
Yesterday you told me 'bout the blue blue sky
And all that I can see is just another lemon-tree
I'm turning my head up and down
I'm turning turning turning turning turning around
And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon-tree
And I wonder, wonder

I wonder how
I wonder why
Yesterday you told me 'bout the blue blue sky
And all that I can see, and all that I can see, and all that I can see
Is just a yellow lemon-tree