Random acts of kindness.

I know it's not my turn to post, but that's okay.

I figured, we spend too much time judging people we don't know and assuming the worst about them and the best about ourselves in comparison.

Last evening when I was walking home from my stop, I passed by a group of women sitting on the steps outside the gym building. I was listening to a Beatles song on my iPod, and was walking past without giving them a second glance, when suddenly, one of the ladies jumped up and shouted "Excuse me!". She was loud enough to catch my attention. She ran up to me and brushed her hand across my neck. "There was something on your neck," she said. "A caterpillar or something," another woman said. And I just stood and stared. Managed a 'Thank you so much' and continued walking.

As I was walking, I happened to make eye contact with one of the strays. He decided it was time to start acknowledging my presence (as he did today as well), and started following me, sniffing at my bag. I wasn't in the best of moods so I tried shooing him away. But alas, he just shifted to my right side. Then, a man who was walking in the opposite direction saw this and very loudly said "Oye! Shoo!" or something. And doggie ran away.

Two strangers who jumped to my rescue.

Well, not really.

But it still made me feel all warm inside.

Let it be.

Truly words of wisdom. But easier said than done, no?

I do try letting it be. But it doesn't let me let it be, if you get what I mean. I really want nothing more than to just let it be.

If it refuses to go away, then why can't it just be. In its little corner. Without jumping in my face every once in a while. Hmmm?

Maybe I haven't communicated with it well enough. Or maybe I haven't given it enough incentive to let Me be.

I need to figure this out.

The Centre Cannot Hold.

I don't think thinking much but I do. I know I over think and that it doesn't get me anywhere, but I over think anyway. I will do the 'right thing' as often as possible. Right thing not in terms of my convenience, but in the sense of it being of benefit to a general public.

I don't know where I'm headed with this.

Maybe it doesn't have to.

See what I mean by over thinking?

We're all trained to think a certain way. We're brought up differently, but essentially, we are all of only a few kinds. What happens when you don't fit under any of these kinds? Nothing. That never occurs. You inevitably fit into one of these categories because one category will be called, 'Those Who Don't Fit Elsewhere'. What happens to the people in this category? They are either forced to subsume into one of the 'convenient' categories, or they get killed. One by one, slowly, each is killed. Not by death of the person as such. But a death similar to the Death-of-an-Author death. Who you are no longer matters. Only what you have said might be considered.

What you write doesn't reflect you but the time you live in. We all live in one paradigm. When this paradigm gets old, we get old. Or is it the other way around? We get thrown out of the paradigm to give way to new people. The new people create their own world and turn back to laugh at us.

Yes. The ones who will follow you will laugh at you. Remember when you looked back and laughed at the old man who said the aether is the substance through which light travels? Decades later, maybe even years later, a person will look back at us, it could be you, it could be me, and laugh too.

There is no truth. Everything in constructed. You are a girl because you've been told you are one and were around those who've been told they are too. You try to understand what is happening around you and plunge into further darkness. Because the world unravels when you start questioning it.

When things unravel, they fall apart.

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold."

When you break the centre, where from do you get gravity to hang on?

Blank.

I don't know what to say. I don't know how I feel.

Now Shwetha can go ahead and post. :)

Class.

There are days when you sit in class completely lost, hearing but not listening, you slip into a reverie and you wait for time to pass. You come out of class uninspired, you wonder why you went to class. You get back to your room and for days are not able to read or write anything.

And then there are days where you listen to every word in class and each word sparks a thought in your excited brain. You have so many things to say, but so little time, you feel. You answer, you argue, you counter-argue, you laugh at a witty statement, you feel useless, you feel...happy.

Today was one of those days.

Months and years later when I read this, I want to remember what was talked about in class. You can stop reading because it is probably irrelevent to you. Bertrand Russel's ABC of Relativity (the motion of the Earth around the Sun), the five papers Einstein presented in 1905, an exact replica of the person talking and how I laughed at the teacher's statement of trajectory being someone's excessively used word.

I love this feeling.

I like to cry.

I really do.

Give me a Chicken Soup for Whichever Soul, and I go straight to the 'On Death and Dying' section. I even make note of stories that have made me cry, and give them another read later on. Or at least I used to. I don't read Chicken Soup anymore. Haven't in a while.

Give me the opportunity to choose a movie, and I'll choose one that promises a tragic end.

My favourite songs are not ones that make me want to dance or hum along. They're the ones with lyrics that make my heart ache.

I used to think that was a major concern. But then I realized that I don't face much of my own pain. I don't think I can handle it. But there are all these emotions waiting to be expressed.

Isn't that what these stories and movies and songs are meant to achieve? Isn't that their purpose?

Catharsis.

What do you think?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher, has said:

'It makes no sense to speak of knowing something in a context where we can not possibly doubt it. Therefore, saying I know I am in pain is completely senseless.'

If I say I see the world in blue, you can not doubt me because you can't see the world through my eyes. You can never verify if my blue is the same as your blue or it resembles your green.

I say I am in pain and you ask me to prove it. I can't.

My kids are graduating.

Technically they're not even MY kids. Well, obviously not biologically, but even emotionally, my heart belongs to another bunch of kids. Those kids are MY kids. But yet, when This bunch put on their tiny little black graduation robes and sat like grown up little angels on their small little wooden chairs at graduation practice today, my heart couldn't help but swell with pride. And my eyes almost welled up.

I'm so sure I'm going to be one of those mothers who end up depressed when their kids grow up and leave home. Just like when anyone I've cared for left. It's a path I've been on since day one. It's been engraved onto the little relationship line running across my palm.

But I've come to accept it. And just work with it.

I get by with a little help from my friends who I've previously quoted. "Hello hello hello hello, goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye. That's all there is."

So I'll let them go.

How my day began.

I heard the alarm go beep and I opened my eyes to the harsh light of the mobile phone. What an exaggerration. I read a couple of messages from There and decided to sleep for five minutes before I reply. After switching off the alarm four minutes later, I replied semi-coherently because typing as soon as you wake up is hard. I think of sleeping for some more time and then decide to get my ass off the bed and wash my face with cold water. (High hopes of getting cold water in this hot weather. It's so hot, the water in the over head tank doesn't get cold at nights. This is not an exaggeration).

As I brushed, I typed out a message for her. But in an attempt to prevent the brush from falling into the sink, the message got deleted. Oops. And then I hear it.

My phone rang.

My phone. Rang. In the morning. Before eight. In the morning. No one calls me in the morning. My parents know enough about my schedule to know they shouldn't call me in the morning.

And when I looked at the screen I assumed that she called me by mistake. Haha, I'm sorry.

So we spoke, after fifty odd days. Yes, yes, so I counted. She gave me details about a certain situation and hung up after few minutes. And so my day began.

Of course it made my day.

Look.

Paint. Ah. Bliss.

After a long long break, I decided to get back to painting my little wall strip. And I painted myself :) Heehee.

Asked mama to come see it after I finished. And she couldn't figure out who it was. :|. I didn't think I painted it that badly. But then she said that it looked exactly like the print out. So then I showed her the actual photo that I 'Stamped' on Photoshop. And she said that girl didn't look like me.

So now I'm stuck with a possibly better looking version of me on my wall. Not that I'm complaining. But the artist-cum-perfectionist in me is quite disappointed.

And speaking of looks, I've decided to get back to the gym, starting tomorrow.

Never again shall I give my trainer the chance to look at me after a four month gap and say - "Have you looked at your face in the mirror?"

Men, I tell you.

My OCD is worse.

So there.

She posts two. I post two. Balance is Now restored.

Haaha.

I paused the movie that I was watching with a friend to come read the blog.

What does it say, huh?

This is my mild OCD at work.

I just Had to post another post.

There. Balance restored.

And the balance is ruined.

But on the bright side, both my ears popped this evening. So I can hear properly again after five days of feeling like I'm under water.

I had an amazing day today. Nothing went wrong. Even the cigarette burn doesn't seem so bad. Such days are few and far between, but they do happen. And I'm awfully glad they do.

Eeeeee :) Shwethaaaaa.

:D

Not my turn to write.

But hey, I'm sick. Atleast, sick-er.

Both of us are sick, health wise. Kirtana has been sick for longer and I fell sick yesterday. Her throat hurts, my throat hurts. She said she feels like removing her throat and keeping it aside until it hurts and I said I feel like removing my entire ENT system and keepig it aside and then we laughed thinking how funny (or gruesome?) we'd look.

Different cities, yet...

Louuuuuuuuuve.

Publicly declared.

Fixing.

I was wondering when one of us would talk about having associations with certain songs. Time Does take it all. We can only hope it takes away those things first which we don't want.

There are some songs which is still hard for me to listen to. There isn't a time when I hear the song and don't go back to another place. At these moments, I'm tempted to pick up the phone or compose a new mail on my gmail. Find the lost people. Reconnect. Do something different this time, maybe it'll stick.

Time heals wounds? It doesn't. Time never fixes anything. What do we do then? We push it at the back of our mind, we pretend like it doesn't exist, or it honestly doesn't matter anymore. Things not mattering anymore could mean something more important has come by or you've grown past it. But it's not fixed.

Some things can't be fixed. I really wish they could.

All our posts have references to songs.

And that's probably because music and life are synonymous.

Every song that means anything to me at all is invariably linked to or associated with someone in my life - someone I like, someone I liked, someone I love, someone I loved, someone I share an amazing memory with, someone I share a now not so amazing memory with. And the list goes on. You get the drift.

And that would make some songs horrible reminders of things better left forgotten. But how can you Not end up linking a song to the apt person or moment?

The same could be said for the song 'The Way You Look Tonight', from that heart-breaking scene from My Best Friend's Wedding, which I happened to catch again a couple of days back while sitting in a hotel in Bombay. In the recent past, that scene has come to mean something to me. Details shall be avoided. But it's not the song that has any direct connection - although it Is one unbelievably romantic song. It's the situation. And for a minute I could picture myself in that situation, but having another song sung to me.

And then I wonder. Am i sadistic?

But then a little while later, it doesn't matter to me anymore. And I take strange solace in Stephen King's optimistic yet not-so-optimistic quote: "Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all."

The rest of the quote is lovely, too. But it doesn't fit in here.

Then again, I think I might have stopped talking about songs altogether in the last few paragraphs.

Yesterday.

Yesterday was a tuesday. One class in the morning, one class in the afternoon. Nothing unusual, nothing to talk about. Yet, as I sat in class, I looked out, and suddenly, I felt I was some place else. I remembered a line, 'for a psycho, words become things and get imaginerised'. I felt I was no longer Here. The heat, the smell of the garden outside, the topic of discussion, I felt I would walk out and be There.

And then I realised it will soon be a year since I left that place. I looked down at my book and realised so much has changed. Suddenly it came crashing down. Crash is a harsh word, it came gliding down?

The party last night and the late night walk. What will I do when I go back?

Today, I woke up and listened to some Porcupine Tree. The song that's playing in the background is 'Glass Arm Shattering'

Feeling all your touching
Feeling all your blood
Feeling all your touching
Feeling all your love

Seen it through a windscreen
Seen it through the glass
Seen it in a bad dream
Seen it in your heart.

It's so sad.

Sometimes you don't feel what you are expected to feel.

Leaves that are Green.

Leaves that are green. Another work of genius by the masters of poetry and harmony - Simon and Garfunkel. This is definitely one of my favourite songs. And it's been on my mind a lot off late.

Here are the lyrics.

"I was 21 years when I wrote this song,
I'm 23 now, but I won't be for long;
Time hurries on
And the leaves that are green turn to brown.
And they wither with the wind,
And they crumble in your hand.
Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl,
I held her close but she faded in the night
Like a poem I meant to write,
And the leaves that are green turn to brown.
And they wither with the wind,
And they crumble in your hand.
I threw a pebble in a brook
And watched the ripples run away,
And they never made a sound.
And the leaves that are green turn to brown.
And they wither with the wind,
And they crumble in your hand.
Hello, hello, hello, hello.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
That's all there is.
And the leaves that are green turn to brown."

And they never made a sound.