Well, hello again.

I think this is the longest I haven't posted on this blog in about a year and a half. I just haven't had a lot to say somehow. Been pondering life, work, weight and love with no iron conclusions, only ironic ones. I have also been under the weather, then travelling some and otherwise mucking about with work, not doing, mucking. I have recently discovered a love for cooking...potatoes, so far. I believe I am keeping the tater industry afloat in my part of the world with fried potatoes, potato pakodas, potato salad, potato vegetable and potato parathas. Correspondingly all weighing scales are being avoided with great care. This may seem most mundane and it is, just not in my world. In my world, it's like the collective relative brigade can now take a great big shit of relief - "she can cook, she can be married". Now if I'd just start combing my hair and giving a toss, I'll be well on my way to being hitched in no time at all!

Anyhow, that's about it really... here's a little more about how I've been spending my time. These pictures are about as organised as I am.

The potatoes I made today. They turned out quite well in that they were edible with no muffled gagging sounds emanating from the bathroom thereafter.

The wizards of UU have decided to play football and a dangerous orc is the appointed coach. Except he will not tear his team's heads off as is traditionally expected of his community but will scare them into compliance with his frightening erudition. As is Pratchett's own tradition, the book is a poignant scream. I did notice that he has begun to resort to puns that are cheaper than some of my friends (you know who you are) and I did stop to wonder if this is him degenerating or me starting to outgrow him. Scary thoughts both.
Sam sand dunes, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.
En route to Mehrangarh Fort overlooking the old city, Jodhpur, Rajasthan.


Hotel Pushkar Palace, Pushkar, Rajasthan.


Feisty granny showing me I'm not the only one with a camera around there. They're not in the picture but her grandkids were facepalming furiously :)
Pushkar, Rajasthan.

This is exactly my mum's expression when I break out my threadbare harem pants. She's hoping any one of these days I'll get real. Joke's on her.
Pushkar, Rajasthan.

My monkey friends outside the popular Gayatri temple. Getting up here took a 30 minute trek and the nice corpulent pandit asked if I could read or not when I took my shoes off in the wrong place.
Pushkar, Rajasthan.

Yes I read her second book based on the first. Does she always make sense? No. Can she be a tiresome statistic-spouting paranoid idiot often? Yes yes. Is she razor-sharp, funny, tart and do her words sink like hooks into me anyway? Yes, they do. What I like about her is she belongs only to herself. Her work is self-indulgent but it always tries (and often fails) earnestly to be something more. I like that. Read Committed if you want to journey through somebody else's premarital neuroses so you feel better about yours.

Hannibal Luca. He was attacked by a couple of dogs a few weeks ago when he pranced up to them for a friendly butt sniff. Has to be kept muzzled so doesn't lick his battle wounds. Enjoys wearing it entirely too much if you ask me. Freak dog.

This is my foray into Dickens' world and already I'm breaking out in sweats. A very dehydrating experience. Let it never be said that my sentence construction is too long and cumbersome to keep up with. For I will show you Charles Dickens. Stand down.

One of us is physically sick here and the other one is just sick in an everyday overall sort of way.

You want to gently suggest I take another lengthy hiatus don't you?

Don't believe everything you've heard

Sometimes I feel like I've, in some misguided attempt at chivalry (a signature of mine), taken on everybody else' share of pessimism. I mean I think I'm being realistic, but placed against vox populi, my opinion's always the one closest to the floor.

You'd think I'd gone through some deep psychological trauma that had caused me to be diffident, wet blanketish, cynical, annoyingly even and whatever other euphemism people use when they're much too cultured to use that word that rhymes with 'runt'. And I can only hope that that is true.

Maybe some day, that epiphany will come. Maybe it will be on one of my travels. We'll be in the airport terminal awaiting the exact same flight, this serene-looking older gentleman and I. Suddenly he'll notice the spot on my chin, grow visibly pale and say, 'You...you're not Wanda are you?" And I'll be all "Ew, no." And he'll go, "You didn't by any chance used to sing O-bla-di O-bla-da at every single school talent competition till you were asked to stop...?" And I'll turn horrified and twitchy, my pupils would dilate and I'll say "Hey! You're just trying to freak me out. There's no way anyone could know that." And he'll sink into the vinyl and clutch his head in despair saying "Wanda, I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry." And I'll shrug and say, "Well it's not your fault, I really should have had a wider musical repertoire..." And he'll stare at me, thrown by just how much I've repressed and say slowly, all ominous-like, "I'm... Dilawar." I'll turn to him slowly, tears springing to my eyes and say, "Oh my god, that must be tough." And he'll start to get agitated and say, "No! You stupid girl, it's me Dilawar. I was your backstage hand?" And I'll start to guffaw because my mind is a bit of a toilet and only stop when I realise how silent Dila...the man...has gone. He'll look at me meaningfully and I'll say 'No, no, no." and he'll says "Yes," and I'll say, "so then two bad things happened to me that dreadful night?" And he'll nod ashamed, but say quickly, "I had nothing to do with the O-bla-da O-bla-di bit, I only diddled you. The rest was your doing." And I'll sit down weakly. "So.. my affinity for double entendres? M-my...wariness of boys... my unexplained nightmares about a certain Molly and Desmond Jones were all...?" "Yes," he'll nod morosely. "What about my alarmingly low levels of faith in humanity?" I'll say. "No," he'll shake his head, slightly indignant. "That's definitely just co-incidence." "Oh," I'll say. "Well this was totally unnecessary then, wasn't it?" "Yes," he'll says. "Yes I suppose it was."

OR!

I'm just used to calling things as I see them. Haven't you ever been to a party that everyone else thought was 'INSANE!!!' and you thought was only okay? What about the first time you had sex? Was it everything Joanna Trollope said it would be? No, stop lying, it wasn't. And Tina Fey. I was in danger of riding the general orgasm over her when a friend stopped me in the nick of time. She isn't all that. In fact she's not very funny at all. And that's what life can be sometimes - it isn't all it's cranked up to be. You're not all you cranked yourself up to be either. Hey, I thought I'd be a 'loyer' or a 'none' and all I ended up being is a 'no one'. Life isn't all rainbows and Follow Fridays. It's disappointments and split-ends and boys liking you pending what you weigh and the few people you care about thinking you're disgusting.

Like my favourite fictional cynic says "Think white and get real."

Wriggle free.

The world we're living in, by now we should've been gloriously scaling the acme of individual courage.

Think about it. We have next to no socio-cultural restraints left to speak of, just about anything goes. We've got all sorts of technology doing our work for us, whittling down our actual physical effort to a series of finger clicks. In fact we're a generation whose biggest legacy will be its ability for The Grey Area - we've rallied against stereotypes, sometimes even when we weren't sure why - don't laugh at a sensitive, philosophical biker dude; that lady is just attached to her flannel shirts and billowing leg hair, it says nothing about her sexuality.

And only recently it has dawned on me what our other big legacy is going to be - pussyfooting. Excuse my Truck Driver.

We're going to go down in history for our sheer wealth of cowardice. For our talent for talking endlessly in circles without ever concluding with or even intending a solution. For being victims of our personal histories and for recognising that and continuing to stay that way. We've learned to say everything it takes to say nothing at all. But most importantly for turning the Appropriate Thing To Do into Whatever's Easiest.

Don't get me wrong. I will never trade the loosed leash I have today with what my mother had at 25. I love that my dark jeans can qualify as formals and sex before marriage no longer occupies a top place in Fallen Woman 101. But the things that require heart, you know? That require a strong stomach? They're gone. Buried under layers of diplomacy, suffocating self-consciousness and a misplaced sense of modernity.

Invisible mode on Gchat, silent mode on your mobile phone and accumulating lightweight, feel-good, micro relationships on Twitter are all the totems of our generation. "All touch-me-nots" says my mother, blunt, brave lady that she is and always has been.

But I don't want to end this as a rant. I want to make a choice, I want to take a decision. Any decision. I want to start saying what I really think. I want to start telling strangers they helped me without worrying that it comes off as needy. I want to tell a man I love that I'm going to be there forever without worrying that I'm overstating. I want to tell a joke and then be okay when noone gets the punchline. I want to stop scaring myself every day.

To that end I will start with one truth. Here goes. I have been meaning to write a book for four years now but have still not managed it. I have written untruthful samples that were bad. And truthful samples that were worse. And I still don't even have an outline yet. The real reason is that I am terrified that it will bomb catastrophically and that I will never recover from my own awfulness. So instead I sit and rib on Chetan Bhagat. But as of this moment, I want it to stop being my concern. I feel I have done my part and issued the world a sufficient warning. I am now free to start writing My Great Big Failure Of A Novel with reasonable abandon.

There, all better. Now you tell me something. I am a stranger and I'm asking you to tell me something. I realise you might think I'm due my stay at the funny farm, but I'm asking anyway.

Grievance

I just finished reading Marguerite Alexander's Grievance and it has been quite a revelation. Apart from its actual plot, politics and characters, the larger strain of the book is grief and how people deal with it. On being dealt a personal blow, some people might spend years walking about with a sense of injury, believing that that particular incident has forever entitled them to no longer be accountable for what they do thereon. If such dastardly fate has been visited upon them, then it's only right that they go through life with more concessions than those who've had it better.

Others spend the rest of their days dealing with it with exemplary forbearance. But dealing with it so consciously that it erodes their naturalness, because every moment is spent on guard, manually and mindfully 'managing' their emotions. They can't relinquish control and ironically have done the exact opposite of what they'd set out to do - let the incident define them.

And then there is, in my personal experience, people who do neither, choosing instead temporarily gratifying and often self-destructive diversions. Still others will ply themselves with self-assurances so hollow, meaningless, even facetious, that you're frightened to think about what will happen when they do eventually crumble.

So what is the right way to deal with something bad that has happened to you? Do you keep running till you find you're all alone? Do you make it you get-out-of-jail card for everything? Or do you just let time take the reins, letting it choose how and when you will finally be free?

Oh waily waily waily!

Is anyone else sick of how much I've been whining of late? I know I am. All this slippery emotional BS needs to stop. I am going to go back to being hardcore. If this was five years ago, at this point I'd have been done with sarcasm and moving on to irony already instead of breaking my bangles and wiping my nose with the dog's ear.I was perfectly okay with not being liked/ understood, etc as long as I got to say what I really truly meant. And when I didn't have anything to say I wouldn't. And it was nice. And simple. And cooler. Way cooler.

I read something very simple and straightforward by one of my favourite authors. It was something to this effect. He says that it doesn't matter to the universe whether we live or we die, whether we're good or evil, whether we have runny noses or whether we nicked that eraser way back in 2nd grade when that land whale Jodanna wasn't looking. We invented Mattering. We're the only ones who think we matter, we're the reason we're upset, proud, elitist, euphoric and so on and so forth. The world was here before us, and will continue to keep once we've unwittingly stepped into the street and been leveled by an oil tanker.

Liberating isn't it? Can you imagine a world where we died unto ourselves and therefore really, really lived for the first time? No wars, no heartbreak, no Paulo Coelho. What a beautiful thought.

Sometimes it takes a swift kick in the pants before you realise you've got to learn yourself and fast if you're to keep your head above water.

I have decided I don't know myself very well. Or at all, for that matter. I'm one of those people whose answers to anything have always been something to the effect of "I don't know, could go either way." Which is why, too often, I end up relying on other people to tell me what to do or give their opinion way more consideration than I should.

Then it occurred to me that a big reason for this lack of self awareness is that I'm very hillbilly shit-kickerish with my introspection. For example I'll ask myself broad generic questions like "What do you want?" and I'll get broad generic rejoinders like "To be happy." And then I start thinking about potato chips and we all know how that story goes.

I'm very generic the few times I make a courtesy calls to God even - "Dear Jesus, give me everything I want. And also give everyone else everything they want. Thankyou." If I'm specific, I strongly suspect it's not the right kind of specific - "Dear Jesus, please don't let her (the parlour chick) fuck my eyebrows up. Thankyou."

I think the other reason I have failed to know myself enough so far is that I tend to judge my answers very harshly. The classic 'Damn, everyone else is asking for the cure for cancer and I'm asking for weight loss' syndrome. I feel guilty and lame and superficial and then I'll kid myself into thinking I want all those deep things when really I just want to very badly look smoking in my new pencil dress. Is that so wrong? I am coming to think not. I have just come out the other side of a very bad phase and even though I'm seeing lights in the distance, the repair takes time. I read these words recently and they made perfect sense to me:

"When you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life, it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."

So I have decided to ask myself a series of very pointed questions to which the only rules of answering are - Specificity and truthfulness. Wish me luck. And if I feel brave enough, I'll put 'em up here. Now I go hold down my day job.

The 'Xam is Upon Me

Which means my brain is categorically refusing to have anything to do with any manner of reading/ studying/ absorbing/ learning. I am hoping that I still have some flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants left in me. Meanwhile my thoughts are pulling apart in many vague, irrelevant directions.

Please enlist them, Gyuri, we're so intrigued?

Well when you put it like that... here's some of them. (If I'm wasting precious minutes not studying, it's because of you.)


My mind is like an industrial strength sieve. Nothing sticks, my memory's developed leaks, details just elude me. It's why, though I'm decently read, you'll often hear me talking about 'that book' in which 'that guy, no no that other guy' did 'that thing'.

I really, really like how women look when they're playing the guitar. I think more than wanting to play the guitar for 'the music', it was wanting to look that way that made me get one. Then I found the strings really, really hurt the fingers, you know? I still harbour some ambition on this account, though.

I'm convinced my exam centre is a place of knowledge by day, and a urinal for weary truckers by night. Will I be carting unholy amounts of tissue along for my papers? You bet!

I don't think the world can afford to lose Terry Pratchett. Or Havelock Vetinari. Or Sargeant Nobbs, or Captain Vimes or Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler or Granny Weatherwax. The whole Discworld really. And it's going to.

Letting go of the past functions much like my Mum's Asthalin pump. One minute you're suffocating, next minute you're exhaling with relief. Your chest doesn't feel constricted anymore, you can hear better, and your eyesight clears right up.

Cheesy lines only irritate when they're being used on everyone but you.

I have not been out in longer than I care to remember. Mojitos, some retro music and good company is a cliche I could very much use right now.

The minute I get a sense that you're playing to the gallery, you've lost me. The minute I get a sense that you don't care what I think about you, you've got me.

I cannot wait to land another role in a play. Even if it's a minute long. Barring that, being backstage hand sounds pretty good too.

I've met a bunch of people who do not have Facebook accounts. They're alive, well and seem to be thriving socially nonetheless. With a very low propensity for breaking out into impromptu photo-sessions, I might add.

I say 'fuck' too much. People think it's very unbecoming. Let them think. Fuck.

Dlisted has been an endless repository of sadistic laughs. Michael K, you're going straight to hell. I hope you aren't gay as a pink unicorn there because we can do sexy times when I get up there myself.

I haven't been crazy mad in a long time. Irritable, yes. Cross, yes. Mad, no. I'm certain it's not because I'm a mature adult. I just don't think I care enough. Oh well. All's the better for me. I look ten kinds of ugly when I'm mad.

If I pass this exam, I'll feel bad for people who actually studied. If I don't, it will be right only.