A YEAR OLDER

It has been a while since I last blogged. Since then, I have turned a year older, returned from a great and refreshing holiday and also come to some conclusions on my life and the general direction that I want to go. 

Getting fit in the next few months is on the top of my agenda. I went on a couple of short treks when I was on holiday and kept wishing I exercised more since I wanted to do a longer trek but my legs just wouldn’t let me! I did manage to make it up one mountain after a lot of huffing and puffing and the view from the top was incredible. This holiday was all I wanted it to be- visited some new places, made new friends, caught up with an old friend and reaffirmed the love and affection of the people I hold most dear to me.

This month has been an enlightening one of sorts. I know what I DON’T want to do with my life which is a start. But that’s just a start and I still have a long way to go in figuring out what I really want to do with my life. I spend all my time thinking of the direction I want to head in and it is confusing me like crazy. It’s very vague at the moment but I am hoping that it starts making more sense and becomes clearer as the months go by. 

HAPPINESS

This topic lodged itself firmly in my mind when I was talking to a friend who refused to do something about her life, even though she and I both knew that after taking that extremely scary plunge, she would be very, very happy.

Happiness is the only thing that does matter in the end. All people want, everywhere in this world is happiness. Granted that some people may be happy with lots of money, others travelling the world and still others doing what they love.  Every person in the world has their own concept of happiness and different ways of getting there.

For me, I think happiness is that one thing that does matter. I just want to happy and I am no saint, but I want everyone in this world to be happy too.

CROSSING ROADS

If there is one thing I am absolutely terrified of, it is crossing a busy road. Ever since I can remember, I hated crossing the road. Growing up, I couldn’t cross a busy road without having someone actually drag me across. I am sure my younger brother can recall hundreds of instances where he has patiently waited for the traffic to completely stop until he dragged me across the road.

Things have changed since then and I no longer need somebody to hold my hand when I cross the road as I live in the city now and every other road is a busy road! But, I do admit when I am on my own, I take forever to cross the road if it’s a road with no traffic lights. If the road has traffic lights, I wait patiently until the signal turns from green to red and then run across the road like my life depends on reaching the other side in less than two seconds. Even though I know the signal stays red for a while, I am petrified that by some freak accident the signal will turn to green just as I start crossing the road and a car runs me over!!

I am only getting better and better at crossing roads the longer I stay in the city and even weave in and out of traffic once in a while, when I am feeling especially courageous. I am sure a day will come, not too long from now, when I will calmly walk across the road as the signal turns red, thoughts of the weather and other little nothings running through my head instead of wondering if a car is going to come shooting out of nowhere and take me down!!

COFFEE AND MY STARBUCKS MUG

I love coffee! It is that one thing that I will never say no to, even if I have had ten cups of coffee that day.

The funny thing is, I was never much of a coffee person, I drank coffee once in a while but didn’t care much for it. This changed when I went to college and discovered the wonders of an amazing cup of coffee. I went from not caring much about coffee to loving it with an intense passion. And my love for coffee has only grown in the past couple of years.

In college, my group of friends loved coffee as much as I did and we all loved sitting around and drinking cup after cup of coffee and did some serious bonding over it too. Many, many memories have been made over millions of cups of coffee during college.

A couple of years have passed since college but I still cannot do without a stipulated dose of caffeine a day. I end up getting headaches by evening, if I haven’t had even one cup of coffee that day (though my mother swears it’s psychological and has nothing to do with caffeine).   

Just about the time I started getting really addicted and even obsessed with coffee is when I realized that every movie that I watched had the actor picking up a mug of takeaway coffee from Starbucks on their way to work/meet friends or wherever else they were headed. And since I watch a lot of movies and tend to notice weird things in them like the coffee from Starbucks, I began this obsession of wanting to drink a nice hot mug of coffee from Starbucks one day (India doesn’t have a Starbucks, though I did hear they are planning to open one in Mumbai soon).

I think I may have mentioned this quirk of mine to my good friends, more than a few times and imagine my surprise when my friend who studies in London sent me a Starbucks coffee mug when she came down to India for the holidays. I knew she was sending me a package but didn’t know the mug was in there till I saw it, and I was thrilled! Sadly, the mug didn’t withstand all the travelling and the bottom broke by the time it reached me, but that didn’t make me any less excited. There I was standing in my living room, holding a Starbucks coffee mug in my hand and it was absolutely the next best thing to actually having a mug of coffee from there.

 I loved that my friend remembered the little things I told her about and actually did something as nice as send me that mug. So, the first time I drink a cup of coffee from Starbucks, I want to drink it with her since I also have to persuade her to buy me another mug from there so I can drink out of it every day!!

Coffee and friends- two of the many important things that make the world go around for me, obsessions and everything else aside. 

MY LIST

I am not a big fan of resolutions- new years or otherwise. I used to make resolutions that I ended up not keeping, so I stopped making resolutions! But something is prompting me to make a list of things that I want to do this New Year and I do hope I get them done by the end of 2011.

Looking back on this year, there have been a lot of ups and downs- relationships ended, relationships gained, laughter, tears, interesting experiences, unpleasant experiences, a better understanding of myself, a better understanding of my loved ones, wonderful places visited, friends getting hitched and memories made that will last a lifetime. Through all this, I have realized a lot about myself and especially in this last year, I think I have become a much stronger person than I was before.

Off the top of my head a few things that I want to do in 2011. Keeping the list short and simple so that most things on the list can be achieved!

1. Getting fit is on the top of my list! (I have always wanted to get fit, but one more year has gone by without that happening. I am quite a lazy person when it comes to things like this but I do hope this year is different).

2. Reading and expanding my knowledge more than I did in 2010. (A minimum of two books a month).

3. Definitely writing more often.

4. Learning how to drive.

5. Visiting friends who I have been meaning to visit for a while now. (Also, be better at keeping in touch with my friends).

6. Travel to some of the places on my list of ‘places to visit’.  Europe, Cambodia or one of the many places I really want to visit in my own beautiful country.

7. Eat right (my eating habits are quite awful and I want to eat healthy and eat proper meals this year). 
8. Focus more on what I want out of life (This might take a while but I should start thinking about it seriously).

Hopefully I can proudly tick all these things off my list at the end of 2011!

UNPLEASANTNESS

You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach, that feeling that you have when something really unpleasant has happened and you don’t want to deal with it. Or you have dealt with it but the feeling just refuses to go away but clings onto you and eats into your mind until you begin to feel physically sick? That’s what I am feeling right at this moment and have been feeling ever since last evening.

Nothing really fazes me out too much, I tend to take things quite calmly most of the time but once in a while however calm and cool you otherwise are, there are certain things that happen that you cannot deal with calmly. In hindsight I do think I could have handled it a lot better than I did but emotions get in the way of a person behaving rationally sometimes. And that is exactly what happened to me. I know I am being quite cryptic about the whole situation but I don’t want to go into the gory details though I do believe that I did do the right thing at the end of it all.

Though things have been done and sorted, that feeling in the pit of my stomach refuses to go away. I sit at work with my hands trembling, I haven’t been able to digest anything since last evening and I feel like throwing up every five minutes. I don’t feel like talking to anybody and wish I could disappear off the radar for the next few weeks.

I don’t usually let myself feel like this and always talk to myself and sort things out in my head though this time that just doesn’t seem to be working. I do wish this feeling disappears quickly. I don’t feel myself at all. 

AGE-A STATE OF MIND

Age is a funny thing. I have been meaning to write about this for a while now since I end up having a discussion with my friends about the whole ‘age’ thing quite a bit. The thing I find so funny about ‘age’ is that just because a person is fifty years old it doesn’t necessarily mean the person is wise unlike the clichés that say ‘the older you get, the wiser you are’ or something to that effect. For me the numbers don’t matter and when I talk to someone or become friends with someone I don’t care how old the person is, as long as we find some common ground and get along.

I know a lot of people who have hang-ups about ‘age’. They think that just because a person is younger or older than they are, they cannot have a decent conversation with them since they belong to a different generation. These people are extremely condescending and think that if a person is younger than they are, they cannot have anything in common and even if they do, a decent conversation is highly improbable. And a younger person thinks that since the older person is, well old, even though they may have many things in common, the latter is too old fashioned to really understand.

I disagree with them since some of the most interesting conversations I have had are with fifteen year olds and forty five year olds. Age has nothing to do with getting along with a person and I hate people who cannot look past that. I don’t like talking to people like that and tend to avoid them as much as possible. I am going to borrow this line from one of my closest friends who incidentally is also my uncle- ’Age is just a state of mind and has nothing to do with numbers’. I totally agree!

READING

Reading is one of those things I was very passionate about growing up. I could read and read and read and sometimes it used to even annoy people around me since I pretty much did only that. I would go home for the holidays and spend the entire day curled up on the couch reading and my parents would force me to go out for a walk at some point during the day and I would be ever so reluctant to put my book down.
In boarding school too, I had a bunch of friends who also loved to read as much as I and since we were allowed to only pick up two books from the library every week, we would all pass our books around and by the end of the week, we would have read about eight books each. I remember how we would all decide on a single author and then pick up books by that particular author so that we could exchange them with each other. Reading was never more fun than when I was in school and after each book we read, we would all sit around and discuss the book, narrate our favourite parts and exclaim on how wonderful the author was or how perfect the man in the book was!
After school came college and that was when I stopped reading. Not completely of course, but it reduced significantly since I got caught up in living the life of a college student and occupied most of my spare time watching movies and tv serials. The only time I did read was in college, in class to be more specific. My college friends still recall how I used to read in almost every other class and I do admit I hardly ever paid attention except in English and German class.
A while ago, I started reading again, and it was only then I realized how much I had missed it. Granted I am a complete movie buff but there is something almost sacred about reading. I love how a book manages to enthrall you so completely that you forget everything else around you. I love how I can totally immerse myself in a book and its characters. I love the way the words can paint an absolutely vivid picture in your head of the scenes unfolding across the pages of a good book. I love how sometimes, a good book can be the best company.

JOGGING

This particular word has haunted me for the past four and a half years. I think about it often enough, and try to will myself to start but for some reason, I just have not been able to. The funny part is five years ago, when I was still in school I was a long distance runner and we used to run a couple of kilometers every single day and I loved it. Now for some reason I am so very lazy. Funnily enough I think about exercise at least once a day, it plagues my thoughts and I dream about starting some form of exercise or the other and I dream on about how I would go jogging every single day and I would be so,so very fit. In my head, I even plan my jogging outfit and think about putting on my nice jogging shoes and about how they would be so happy to be used after lying around for three years collecting dust. 
Once in a while, my guilty conscience bites me in the back and I take off the next day, jogging a very short distance until I stop, huffing and puffing and promising myself that the next couple of days will be better since my muscles wont be protesting as hard! And this continues for about a week, as I go around proclaiming very proudly to all my friends and family that I have finally started jogging. And then it fizzles out just as everyone around me thinks I am actually getting serious about my exercising. This has been going on for so many years now, that it has become a long-standing joke among my family and friends as soon as I get my jogging shoes out.
Hopefully, someday, I will start jogging and take it up seriously enough to do it everyday. Until then I just to bear with all the jokes that come my way the very second I mention the word 'jogging'.

MUSIC

'Music washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life’  
I love this quote and everything that it signifies. A very dear friend of mine who also incidentally re-introduced me to ‘The Beatles’ a few years ago sent me this quote which she had read somewhere.

 What would the world have been like without music? I for one cannot begin to imagine what my life would have been like had there been no music in it. My love for music maybe stems from the fact that my dad loves music too, as a result of which I was introduced to it at a very young age. Even today, songs by Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits and many more remind me of my dad. I tend to associate songs with people and whenever I think of the person I listen to the song and vice-versa. Music can get me through my sad times, make me even happier in the good times and just about gets me through every phase in my life. I think of my mother when I listen to ‘New kid in town’ by The Eagles because she once told me it was one of her favourite songs growing up and my brother and I have dedicated ‘Witchy Woman’ to my mother just to get her goat.

Many songs have lyrics that are so apt that you feel like the song has been written about you or for you! My favourite uncle has also for years played me songs that hold significance to his life or to mine and these songs today remind me of the wonderful times we have had.  A few years ago, I stayed with a friend of my parents for a considerable amount of time and I must say he played a very big part in introducing me to music from the seventies and eighties. The most touching moment of my whole stay was when on the very last day he took his family and me out for dinner to a restaurant that had a band playing old English numbers. Halfway through the meal he went up to them and requested they play a particular song that he dedicated to me. The song was ‘Teach your Children’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the lyrics of the song were enough to tell me how he felt.

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

All my life, I have had people who have improved my ‘Music Education’ as my friend and I liked to call it back in college. Every special person in my life has in someway or the other added to my music education and the songs that I listen to will continue to remind me of them.

KIND HOSTS

One of the things that continue to amaze me is the kindness that people show. In today’s world, it’s always wonderful to come across a kind person. I recently visited friends in another city and stayed with them at their friends’ house. From the minute I reached there, my hosts went out of their way to make me feel as comfortable as possible though I didn’t know them too well and they had only met me once or twice before. They made me feel so perfectly at home that by the end of my stay, I was strolling around their house in my pyjamas and opening the fridge whenever I felt hungry and grabbing a bite to eat! I loved my hosts and their kids and though I did think it would just be another trip before I reached there, I felt a great deal of sadness at having to leave them.

These are a unique breed of people because I have also stayed at houses where your hosts make you feel like you are a burden and you are just wishing that the days roll by quickly so that you can get the hell out of their house! 

SPITTLE!

I am paranoid about walking anywhere close to the windows of a stationary bus. The reason-I am afraid that someone from inside the bus will spit on me!

Why is it that we Indians have this awful habit of spitting just about anywhere? The other day I was walking through the market and a blob of betel juice misses my shoe by an inch! That’s the reason I keep away from stationary buses, it is very likely that somebody will spit out of the bus without even glancing out of the window.

Almost every road in our good ole’ country bears the mark of betel juice on its tarred surface. Anywhere that you go, there are these characters who are spitting away here and there and everywhere.

You may be walking along, lost in your thoughts, thinking pleasantly of the day ahead when suddenly, a huge blob of spit lands right in front of you, all your pleasant thoughts vanish in an instant and for the rest of the day all you are thinking about is how disgusting that blob of spit was! I do wish people would stop spitting!!!

BOARDING SCHOOLS

A common misconception- most kids are sent to boarding school either because they are too naughty or because the parents want to get rid of their children (having their children home only for the holidays is so much less trouble.)

Being a boarding school product myself, I think people are plain ignorant of the fact that most parents put their kids in boarding not because they have to see their kids only during the holidays but because they believe that their kids are going to get a better education, not only academics but in other ways that matter too.

I have been in boarding school all my life and I strongly feel that sending me to a boarding school is one of the best things my parents have done for me. Of course I was scared about going into boarding and of course I hated it at first and yes, I did cry the first few times my parents called (but a friend of mine started singing ‘Rudolph the red nosed reindeer’ every time she saw me because she claimed I had a red nose whenever I cried which instantly put an end to my tears because I was extremely embarrassed by the song) , a new place is always scary but once I made friends and got used to the place I LOVED it!! I know a lot of people who hated being in a boarding school, but the majority of people I have met swear by boarding schools and most of them talk about the amazing times they have had there.

Some of my best and most memorable times have been in the boarding. Whether it was the bullying seniors, the various punishments, the midnight feasts, the late night chats, the silly fights, the irritating juniors- all this and much more are things that I will never be able to forget. Cribbing was one thing everyone loved doing but it’s not until I left that I realized just how lucky I have been.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like going home, in fact I love going home and I love spending time yapping away with my mother in the kitchen and bonding with my dad over Animal planet but its just that being in a boarding school is an experience, maybe bad, maybe good, but in my case it’s the latter and I loved every single minute of it.