China, here I come!!

Last minute changes and rush jobs, that’s what can best describe the series of events that finally took me to the first week of my internship. The last minute change of location to Shanghai was unnerving in the beginning, only exciting by the end of the week. And thus began my first week with one training session after the other for a week, which in spite of the hectic schedule I ended up enjoying immensely. Some great free food will definitely give me “fat” nightmares in the days to come! But I guess with the prospect of decent Indian food in the next 2 months being almost minimal, I did not feel too guilty indulging in some good old gluttony. And thus arrived the final day, that most awaited Friday when all of us were supposed to fly to our respective locations. With a full day off to laze around in the hotel and pack, I spent time with mom packing and chatting about the time to come and times past. A hurried departure from the hotel in the evening, only to make it well in time to the airport.

Now, there were several things that I expected to see at the airport. Lots of Chinese people, lots of travellers from Europe etc. travelling to Hong Kong or further but what I saw was something so unexpected that it simple blew me off my feet initially. So, amid a mad rush of taxies, with blaring horns, guards shouting in the background and people bumping luggage trollies left right and centre, I saw a glimpse of the Indira Gandhi International Airport. And there is only one way to describe what I saw: there was Punjab EVERYWHERE. I heard people shouting in Punjabi, hundreds of red, yellow, blue, green turbans, huge suitcases and hand bags and every passenger usually accompanied by 10 other family members who drove all the way from their homes to say goodbye. My first thought was that there must be multiple flights flying out tonight to either “Amreeka” or “Caneda”. But it seems the Punjabis are out for world domination now. The check-in line for the Honk Kong was equally ethnically inclined. It seemed to me like the whole state was travelling to HK tonight. The biggest surprise came when I find the same distribution of people in line to board a flight to Gangzhou (heck I hadn’t even heard of the place ever!). Anyway, that’s my dear old state for you – completely ‘out there’. Made me wonder if there is any major city of the world that does not have a considerable number of Punjabis.

Anyway, it was quite an interesting start to my “Adventures in Shanghai” as I liked to call them. Waiting to see an exciting new culture, meet different kinds of people and experience the traditions, customs and rituals of one of the oldest civilisations of the world.

Here’s to a “happening” two months ahead. May they be filled with interesting times!!

The rest is still unwritten!

Sometimes I struggle to find words to express what I want to say and then there are times I discover that someone already said what I wanted to say and in ways infinitely better than anything I could have come up with. So, here's a reminder to myself that TODAY is the first page of the rest of my life and the rest in unwritten. Here's to the endless possibilities and the beautiful uncertainty called LIFE!

I am unwritten,
Can't read my mind
I'm undefined
I'm just beginning
The pen's in my hand
Ending unplanned

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words
That you could not find.
Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten.

I break tradition
Sometimes my tries
Are outside the lines,
We've been conditioned
To not make mistakes
But I can't live that way.

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words
That you could not find
Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
the rest still unwritten...

The Bridges of Madison County

It’s been so long since I read a decent book, any book for that matter. Ages since I last reached the last page of the book, unsure of my own feelings, confused about whether to feel glad to know how things finally went or sad at having no more to read. I remember that sense of helplessness at the end of Gone with the Wind, the feeling that you want to somehow intervene in the course of events to put some things right. I know it sounds crazy but I really love these books that by their very nature can get me so deeply involved in what they talk about. The satisfaction one has at the end of a good book is unparalleled by any other medium, music or movies. The mad rush of life in the past few years had made me lose touch with this awesome escape from reality. It’s actually unfair to call it an escape, it’s more the recognition of a newer reality, a reality that is subliminal, subconscious and yet more real than the actual thing. A book is an amalgamation of 2 people’s realities – the author and the reader which is why reading is almost an art, a test of a reader’s ability to connect and interweave someone else’s reality into his or her own and the author’s ability to relate his or her reality to the intended reader.

The Bridges of Madison County was one of THOSE books, the kind that I just talked about. At the end of the day if one gets down to dissecting it, it’s just a love story, nay a love affair to be more precise. But there were some things about the way it was written and about the people it was about that really struck a chord with me. Made me wonder about things that lead nowhere, made me ask questions that I know have no answers and yet to not wonder about those things and to not ask those questions seemed sacrilege.  I love books that make me uncomfortable, that force me to look outside the shell of everyday life that I inevitably end up building around me, that make me look at newer aspects of life, that give me new perspectives and question old ones, and especially the ones that shake my idea of right and wrong, that show me shades of grey, that cover life spans of protagonists to prove that in the long run, everyone is just dead and nothing else.

The book talks about a very powerful kind of love, the kind that very few people on this planet are ever able to experience. The rest of us it seems just go through the motions. I sometimes wonder if I’ll be one of the fortunate ones, if in fact I already am. I wonder if there ever will be a moment in my life that will merit me thinking or saying: “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.”  I wonder if THIS is the lifetime when I will be blessed with that certainty or if I ever will know that kind of certainty in another place or another life.  And then who is to say, maybe I already have. It seems like it, except that the shades are different, the hues are subtler and the tinges less pronounced. Robert Kincaid, the last cowboy, one of the last cowboys, a thought that struck my heart like none other had in a long long time.

“There’s a breed of men that’s obsolete or very nearly so. The world is getting organized, way too organized for some people. Everything is in its place, a place for everything. Rules and regulations and laws and social conventions. Hierarchies of authority, spans of control, long range plans and budgets. Corporate power, a world of wrinkled suits and stick on name tags.”

It said things about the way I’ve felt sometimes, in a way which was infinitely better than any words I had ever used to describe it. I sometime do wonder if I’m one of those people who are slowly becoming obsolete, if I was meant for another time and place. After all, not all men or women are the same. Some will do okay in the world that is coming, some will not. And as the number of the soon-to-be-obsolete kind dwindles, what are the odds of experiencing the kind of certainty that every man and woman, by right, should crave for. After all, it takes one to know one, right?

But then such instances also make me wonder if such chance encounters with our true soul mates or alter egos are so special only by dint of the fact that they are “chance” encounters, never to be repeated, only to be preserved in the recesses of one’s memory and the secrets of one’s heart. Wouldn’t these encounters also become ordinary at some point of time or the other if they were pursued? Yes, there are times in some fortunate people’s lives when they happen to run into their alter egos, an opportunity to see themselves with their own eyes, to know someone who is intellectually, spiritually or physically their other half. But I wonder if the sanctity and purity of that happenstance meeting is lost due to prolonged association. Is true love a function of the serendipitous circumstances or is it a hardening bond of trust and familiarity built with someone who’s been there for a long time? I wonder…

Back to basics!

What an amazing realization and it came without a bang! It's just another quiet day in December. Nothing special about it. While the usual spate of quizzes, assignments and submissions still hangs on my head, something else also managed to creep into the limited space in my brain, the slow and sure realization that things had drastically changed in the last couple of years without my realizing it, that "I" had almost completely changed without ever consciously registering the change. The discovery was pretty disconcerting initially because it suddenly made me realize that the change had cost me things that used to define me as a person before, be it music, movies, my fetish for all sports and everything sporty and books. To my chagrin, I had lost touch with not one but almost all of them. They had been an integral part of who I was, how I functioned and what I did on a day to day basis. The rigors of everyday life had taken away some of my most prized attributes without my knowledge which is why this realization suddenly hit me and saddened me as I felt that I had lost a couple of years of my life. Yes, I have significantly grown professionally and apparently as a person too but in the process I lost touch with certain aspects of me that I had always loved and suddenly, today the price I paid for the change seemed too high. So I decided to make a pre new year resolution, a decision to go back to what I used to be while retaining all that I have learnt in the past few years. I know it sounds like a tough task but that's what is making it so interesting to me right now - which brings me to a new chain of thought...

What essentially defines a person - is it their perception of themselves or people's perception of them. I think somewhere along the course of one’s life, the line between the two becomes blurry because each individual measures himself/herself by what they see to be others' perception of who they are. These external perceptions become their standards and this is what most of us end up working on and improving. But sometimes in the process, we lose some very precious characteristics and attributes of ours. Though you don't miss them much when you lose them but over a period of time, these missing links create a problem with your identity as without realizing we tend to get rid of parts of us that truly defined who we are and want to be. I know it sounds complicated but I feel it isn't. It’s about being in touch with your true self, at ALL TIMEs, about knowing what truly makes you happy and to always latch onto the things that do, and not bother about the things that don't. Life is complicated; I've realized that now and experienced it in more ways than one. But contrary to giving up on it and feeling bad about it, I have actually realized that it offers far more excitement now that it ever did before. My complicated life and the decisions that it entails on a daily basis have ensured that I discover something new about myself every so often. These insights and light-bulb-going-off-in-my-head days are rare but oh-so-welcome. And hats off to my mom for sighting the fact so soon, all these realizations came only after I followed her advice, took a step back from the mad rush of life that I had pushed myself into after coming to IIMB. It’s funny to watch the crazy crowds running like mad after some goal that half of them don't even understand. Putting life in slow motion has made me realize that there's so much more happening on the sidelines that I forget to look out for as I rush along the others. Now I can see the beautiful small things that I missed earlier, like the thrill of reading an interesting book and staying up all night to finish it, like listening to that amazing song that goes right to your insides and makes you feel as if it can define better than you what you are feeling at that moment of time or that spine tingling nervousness and excitement when you face your opponent on the court or the field. I wish to get back those feelings because they were far more rejuvenating and satisfying than any feeling any of my recent "achievements" have given me and that’s what my December resolution is - go back to the basics!

What's going on?

“It’s amazing how you can see right through my heart!”

There was a time that line used to give me a thrill, a thrill of discovering someday what that feeling felt like, that connection with someone, the satisfaction of knowing someone inside out, the belief that someone can read your mind faster than you can. My friends always said that those notions were fanciful, that all that was unreal and implausible but my heart never really believed it. I always hoped that it would happen to me someday, that I would be able to experience what poets have been talking about for centuries, that I too would someday know the feeling of seeing the whole world in one person. And it would have come true too had it not been for this cruel cruel world. The past 3 years have tried incessantly to teach me the true meaning of life, the way it should be lived, the way it should be looked at and treated and I’m not sure I like what I’m being taught. People all around me talk about the need of the hour, the pressing engagements and obligations of everyday life that just HAVE to be taken care of, the work that always needs to be completed before one can even think of indulging in leisure and the responsibilities that one can never really get rid of.

I’m sitting in a room all alone with the rain falling on the leaves outside, a sound that I haven’t heard in ages. It gives me the kind of peace that no achievement in the last three years has given me. Sometimes these experiences almost make me think that I’m a loner, content with the sights and sounds of nature, at least the sights and sounds that I have in mind – from the smell of the first rain on a parched ground to the pitter patter of rain drops in a puddle to the swishing of trees in the wind or of the rain drops on the roof – I just love the sight and sound of the way the world works!

Sometimes I crave for someone to share it with – anyone who’ll understand where I’m coming from when I go on ranting about the clouds in the sky and the wind blowing in my face or the sun shining down on my back on a cold wintry morning and the lethargy that accompanies the warmth. I miss the ‘good old days’ at home when I saw time as it went past me, not as a blur but as a procession of experiences and events, when everyday had a meaning, a purpose and a new lesson to teach. Now it’s always the same, with one day being an exact replica of the other, doing the same thing every day, learning the same lesson and following the same routine.