Material things

My steps faltered as I stepped out into the scorching sun. I checked my watch again, with a hope that there might be some time to spare. But the watch showed no mercy. It was my wonderland and I was stepping out of it in 15 min after buying only what I needed. Outside, colorful and intricately decorated artifacts lured me to pause, but I rushed past them. That Sunday when I had to work from home, this added to my already long cribbing list.

I think, the shopophobes are already bored, and the Shopaholics have probably never experienced this (nothing would make them leave the shop without buying what they get attracted to). So that leaves Shop-o-philics like me. I think my intelligent readers (if any) will get this term.

Seriously, it feels like ages since I have shopped wholeheartedly. I remember the idle walks through the Brigade road and Church Street when I wanted a big break and through the local Malleshwaram crosses when it was a ‘chhota’ break. I have found similar zones in Mumbai as well, but the excessive crowd and heat/rain (specially if outside a mall) is the downer. It’s not that I end up buying or spending a lot, just small things - sometimes useful sometimes useless. Thankfully, for me and my husband, I don’t have the guts to spend lump sum amount at a time. After selecting 5-6 things at a time, I still end up discarding a few, just before the cash counter.

But one thing which is very different from my friends who like Shopping is that I truly like to shop alone. With nobody to influence my choice and more importantly complain about the time I take, it also ends up being a perfect ‘me’ time.

I realize that it is not so much fun, writing about Shopping as I thought it would be. Anyways, it had been a long time since I posted anything. Besides, just like my shopping, when I have really written anything ‘useful’.

Time and Distance

I have to travel a lot for work. Now, before you start getting any ideas, let me clarify, it’s not actually ‘travel’ but rather ‘commute’. Aaah....Boring...absolutely. I had always had to travel, be it school or college and now work. I was quite amused when I met my cousins who used to walk to school, come back for lunch and go back to school again. How can there be a school without the yellow school bus and of course the morning frenzy so that you don’t miss it. Anyways, during school days, you have ample of time to do everything and ‘nothing’. I don’t know whether it was because of the fact that I went to a school far away, but the distance became less of a barrier while making a choice.

But by the time, I started working; there was one thing that had become scarce: Time. To get one, you had to give up the other. But the method of making choices that had got ingrained in me was more difficult to change. And hence in the bargain for something good, I took on the challenge of distance once again. I had done it earlier, so why couldn’t I do it again.

But there was one major difference this time. In between, I had tasted the other side and the wonders of it. And that’s where the struggle began. The most important factor in the time-distance equation is the speed. Considering I do not live in a place where bullet trains run, instead the flyovers are meant for a crawl it was just the start of the misery. Every journey was a torture; and just when I thought that I had found the wonder route, it would turn out to be a mirage.

And then one day I stopped the struggle. I had my reasons for the choice I had made, and finally I embraced the journey as the part of that choice. I still don’t always enjoy it and there are times when I feel like apparating directly home. And yet on some days, I am thankful for this distance because the commute time, not only helps me distance myself physically from my workplace but more crucially mentally so. At the end of a not so great day, the soothing music calms me and makes me forget the troubles of the day and worries of morrow. Sometimes, it is the hidden nuances in the oft repeated classical sequences while sometimes it is the mystery of unknown oldies through the Radio. By the time I am home, no wonder I have a smile on my face.

bdnasbdsahdg

Do you sometimes wish you were someone else? Okay, may be not in entirety but something here, something there? Do you wish you were as carefree as Person X or as responsible as Person Z. Well, every time this thought crosses my mind, I use my favorite line..."You are unique" till my brain chips in "as everyone else in the world".
Sometimes it is not even the other person, it is just 'me' at a 'different place' and 'different time'. I remember the other day, I was calm and peaceful like I never generally am. And today when I am restless for no particular reason as such, I am still trying to figure out why it seems so impossible today.
As I type here the series of thought that have crossed my mind, I am alarmed. I am thinking of my behavior in terms of mean and deviation !!! how my mean personality is probably restless and calmness that I recently exhibited was just an outlier...
That's it!!! I should stop before I pour out more gibberish (as the title suggests)...Hopefully, my next post would be during the above mentioned outlier phase, so that you all will have something better to read.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I am not talking about the epic movie here.

Oh I missed one major level here : "Mediocre".

That's how I end up classifying things I can do or not do in my head.

Good keeps having occasional entries and just as they are about to make me smile and sometimes foolishly trying to move to the imaginary "Superb" level, but then they change their mind, and decide to return to mediocre. Bad and Ugly have entries that I would like to push to mediocre, but they refuse to budge. And just when I am about to give up on them, they give me a glimmer of hope. But the major irritants are "Mediocre". If bad and Ugly is like the scolding you get from your parents, Mediocre is their cold stare. Mediocre causes the heart pangs that just don't go away. And what's worse is, you can't even explain it to anyone else. It's easier to admit you are bad at something. What follows is even worse. You fear that it will move to bad, and that fear makes it impossible for it to reach the Good.

Every now and then, I resolve not to start picturing these buckets. It works for some time, and then the self-expectations and assessments are back. Whoever said Introspection is good, must have had a very high opinion of himself/herself. Else, he/she would never have advocated it to others.

What are my "Good, mediocre, bad and Ugly"? Today's a bad day to write about them. I will probably write about it when Good has some visitors.

Leap to the New Year

2 hours more and it would be new year. Mostly at the end of every year, one gets a feeling that the year just swooshed by. But somehow for this year I am getting mixed feelings regarding that. The newspapers are talking about the glories of India this year ( quite a rare phenomenon this year) and first one on the list is course the World Cup victory. But somehow it feels as if it happened long long time back. May be overdose of cricket is the reason for it. On the other hand, while looking at the recent pics of one of my cousin's baby, I was quite surprised to see that the baby is almost a year old now.
Today, being a relaxed Saturday, while surfing through the TV channels, I was annoyed to find all "End of the World" movies playing in the afternoon. And it didn't quite strike me, till I stopped by one of the channels and checked out the movie name. It was "2012". Oh...That's the reason. TV channels seem to have taken the responsibility to prepare us for the Apocalypse. May be we will soon start having drills on the lines of Fire drills, but hopefully people will take it more seriously than Fire drills.
Anyways, I think I have completed my quota of babbling on this blog this year. So it's 11 posts for 2011. Hope I do better than what the series suggests :)

Alice in Wonderland

Before you read further let me warn you that people staying in the close vicinity of trees and flowers and blah blah blah should probably skip this blog. I would not want you all to waste your precious 5-10 min and end up shrugging your shoulders and giving a “Big Deal” cry at the end of it. But the nature lovers feeling like misfits in the concrete jungle may choose to go on. Anyways, I guess enough of the disclaimer.

On the busiest roads, with sparse greenery and suffocating pollution I got the first pleasant surprise of the day. Fluttering in a random motion was a beautiful yellow butterfly looking truly lost (or so I thought). There was not a shrub to hide or flower to rest on, so it decided to ride a nearby autorickshaw briefly. Of course it did not opt for the usual riding seats. And just like that it was lost in the commotion. My bus chugged ahead, but my thoughts still dwelled on the strange visitor. The polluted stretch was followed by not so polluted stretch. And there amongst the potted plants of a roadside building, another specimen of this lovely species greeted me. But this one was brownish in colour, designs if any were not that identifiable. I couldn’t believe my luck. Two butterflies in a day? Could there be more? I was on high alert now. I looked at every stretch of grass or shrubs that had grown. Somebody twittered recently about the incessant rains in Mumbai, “If nobody lived here, it would probably be a thick jungle”. So true. Isolated plants seemed to have sprouted at quite a few places. Shrubs left to survive along the divider on the highway were swaying in the slight breeze. And there I spotted a black one with yellow dots on it hopping towards the shelter.

I probably would have ended up seeing more but I was close to my destination. With the almost concluded rains, I am sure to catch some more visitors to this wonderland : "You are more than welcome, dear."

as you're there for me too...

It was already late by the time I reached office. The mailbox showed many unread mails from the client which indicated loads of upcoming work. It was going to be a looooooooooong day just like the day before and day before that. On any normal day, I would have been flustered and irritated and would probably have given a “Why, God Why” cry sometimes in my head and sometimes aloud. But today was different. I was still smiling. And so it continued throughout the day. It was as if I had a Felix Felicis to drink. Twinkling eyes, shared laughter and uncountable memories stayed with me throughout the day . I had just met my closest and oldest friend after a gap of four years.

She has been my friends for ten years now. Yes, it may not seem so old to other people. People have friends from the time they were in school. Unfortunately having been in multiple schools I don’t have such friends. In this gap of four years, we didn’t talk every now and then. Even the mails were once in a while. Technology has its limitations. You can’t say everything you want to unless the person is right in front of you. She missed my marriage and I missed hers.

Even now it seemed very unlikely that we would meet. But finally, overcoming all odds, we were there, sitting opposite each other in a restaurant, the way we had done so many no. of times during the college days. We both had so much of catching up to do. During the phone calls generally the milestones get shared but not the journey. Its only after talking to her I realised that I had missed this total frankness for quite some time now. The interruptions by the waiter who had mistakenly thought that we had come for a quick breakfast was a constant reminder that we had limited time. Anyways I don’t think any amount of time would have been sufficient enough. But even this small dose of Luck lasted me the day. Hope it lasted for you too, my friend.