A Clean Slate To Scribble On

2013 - a year that saw me through some of the toughest times of my life. And yet, when I look back I fondly recall memories, incidents that have played a huge part in making me the person I am today - resilient, willing to take on change by the horns, someone who is finally comfortable with her own company as much as others'. I made the choice to fall out of touch with almost 90% of people I knew, almost everybody became somebody that I used to know. But a select few stuck on, despite my best efforts, and now I know how important those few are to me.

The year has been one where I have completely let go of discipline - no fixed schedules, no planning, no control over what goes into my mouth from the plate, no budgets, no nothing. And I have learnt that discipline is the only thing I need to get to my goals, everything else I already have.

I recovered from failure. And I learnt that all it takes to not let it get to you is to have the right people around.

I broke almost every rule I had for myself one time or the other and today, I have become better for the experience than worse. I won't bore you with details, we all walk similar paths strewn with similar roadblocks, so you know what I'm talking about. Which is why....

....2014 - I know it is going to be a great year, not because I went to two temples and prayed my heart out (a redundant belief but one that gives me peace of mind and makes me guilty for my sins at the same time) but because I am going to make it so. A great year where I'll read more books, write more meaningful words, learn my lessons. I'll achieve the goals I have set for myself and I'll have fun doing it. I'll smile a lot more and relish each moment instead of being the procrastinating prat that I was last year. I'll go easy on the sarcasm and the temper. I'll make the people I love happy.

This year, I have no resolutions. This year I only have the will. The will to reach out for what I want and get it.

May 2014 bring to you all that your hearts desire, folks. Coz that's all you really need.

Jusht.

We all have such collosal egos that need to be stroked and coddled every once in a while.

From gazillion likes on a strategically clicked and masterfully edited Facebook profile picture to carefully crafted tweets that make us and our lives look and sound so much cooler than it actually is to updates and chitchat about how happening we and our lives are - we are so bothered about putting out a good image of ourselves that the lines between what we really are and what we choose to project become blurred.

Making memories have taken backseat to snapping at anyone who questions our cool factor. Saying inappropriate things will get you retweets, cussing out the opposition will let people know you are not to be messed with. Fight with your friends to upload the pictures of the trip to the beach you spent taking pictures to upload, instead of digging your feet in the sand and giving yourself up to the waves.

I have been guilty too, I am not excluding myself out of anything. Varying degrees.
But once in a while, I look at my pictures I took from ten years ago, think back to the person I was then, the things that used to run in my head then and the kind of genuineness that colored every one of my actions. Simple, happy-go-lucky, restless to learn and experiment and with an undying love for books - I was what I want me to be now.

And I wonder where this current version, who judges and classifies people based on their language skills and the amount of books they read, came from.

My compliments are still genuine, my projection of myself is not so much.
But.... what if I let someone in and give them the power to break me with their critical gaze? With their toxic comments?
What if they judge me for my tastes, the way I live, the friends I have, the music I listen to? What if they judge me for being me and I don't match up to the standards they set?

Isn't that what we all are afraid of when we carefully cover reality with Photoshop, sarcasm and well-done make-up. And maybe that's where the 'ego' stems from.

Its surprising, actually...

... How fast time passes by.

How you block out things you thought were most important. 

How much things change.

How many emotions one person can make you feel and not in a good way. 

How there are certain days when the sun shines so bright outside that it hurts your eyes but it refuses to dispel the darkness that tiptoes around your aura threatening to engulf you. (wow, that's dramatic)

How some feelings never change. 

How some feelings change so much that you wonder why you felt them in the first place. 

How long you can go without the things that you loved the most.

How much you can change, as a person, over the short period of one year. 

How different a person you actually are from who you thought you were.

How much effort it takes to put a smile on your own face just to ensure that people don't wonder why you always have a hangdog expression.

How little it takes to fall apart.

How difficult it is to just believe the words that come out of a person's mouth instead of questioning every intention, every thought behind it.

How much you have missed out on in a world that was your world.

How many people, relationships you have had to lose because you do not have the strength to explain. 

How cynical you have become of pretty much everything.

How long it has been since you actually had a bar of good, solid, comforting chocolate.

How small things that you left in the past come back to make you smile.

How much courage you get in knowing that you are strong enough to still want to say bring it on. 

How much happiness it infuses in you to know that someone still needs your shoulder. 

How awesome it is when you can cross the road during peaktime traffic all by yourself.

How brilliant it is to have a group of people who just let you be and make you laugh.

How much hope it gives you that those people might let you call them your friends. 

How much it means to know that someone is trying to make you laugh despite everything.

How high you get on being noticed for having potential.

How much it means when someone believes in you with a steadfastness you have yet to see in others' eyes.

How the person you thought you hated is the only one who really believed in you, fought for you.

How funny Will & Grace is.

How some people have the knack of saying exactly what you want to hear and despite your cynicsm, you believe in them.

How mindnumbingly, awesome sukhapuri really is.

A long way, I have come.

A long way, I have to go.

 

I leave you to drool over this monstrosity from Indijoe's, Bangalore. A cake that almost got me a promotion, one that made me sick of food itself for well over a week.

 P.S: I HAD to write a depressing post before I could move past, so COME ON and cut me some slack, won't you? If anybody still visits this place, that is :D

P.P.S: I lost months of work that I did on my blog and a couple of pages that I loved as well, all because of a tiny mistake I made. Ah well, let's start from scratch, shall we?

Pick! Perfection Or Messed Up

Sachin FINALLY got to celebrate. About time, I should think. 

But, with all due respect, if I read ONE more update with 'Sachin' or 'God' in it, I'm going on a blocking spree.  

And we lost. To Bangladesh. 

Moving on (before I launch into a rant)...

There is this author, yeah. Pretty famous I should say, from what I hear. I was initially very taken in with the whole idea of her, but, bit by bit the charm faded. Then the charm went 'pop' when that Nanda guy got me her latest book as a Valentines' present and I spent all of six hours with my nose buried in it. 

I was disappointed. For a 'best-selling author' thrice over, the book and the story was only average. 

I don't have a problem with that.

Well, mostly because most recent Indian authors have disappointed me.

She posts regularly on her blog and I read every post religiously (I stalk all writers I can find on Blogger, bit of an OCD). And I have yet to find a post in which she doesn't mention her best-sellers or perfect writing skills or her perfect behavior in all manners of situations or her perfect life or the perfect people around her who are just perfectly perfect. She's always together, always has a condescending tone and a perfect answer to every question you can ever think of asking her. She never fails to mention that she has an amazing figure even after kids (I don't even understand why that's relevant to her work) along with what an awesomely well-rounded mother she is. She even gets her husband to write guest posts about what an amazing experience it is to have her as his wife.

She seems to have mastered the art of perfection.

I don't have a problem with that either. You have enough discipline to write a whole book, the grit to get it published and the guts to put yourself out there for the whole world to criticize and tear apart, you deserve to brag. Not that it's an excuse to be anything less that an exemplary writer but I'd understand. 

My question is: 

Can anyone's life be perfect? Can anyone's life go exactly the way they plan it, have all their wishes come true and never have any major problems to deal with? Can anyone take every single teeny bit of negativity that ever came their way and turn it into the 'most amazing thing' that every happened to them?

Even if you answer yes to all the above, is that how life is supposed to be?

Doesn't it take two weeks of bad food to attain nirvana with one piece of cheese-burst pizza? Doesn't it take tears to find out how beautiful happiness is? Doesn't it take hurt to find out how deep love can be? Doesn't it take mistakes to feel how satisfactory it is to be right? 

Shouldn't we mess up sometimes just to know what the other side is like.... to appreciate good things when they come to us?

If everything is perfect all the time, wouldn't everything become mechanical? Boring?

Or am I psychologically damaged? :P

P.S: No offense to the writer or her fans who might recognize who I'm talking about. She just got me thinking, that's all.

Things People Shouldn't Do....

1).... Wait till the battery is 1% to plug in your phone for charging.  The power might just go off, you know. And if you have the kinda luck I do, then automatically assume that the power WILL go off.


2).... Procrastinate going to the loo because your favorite scene is playing on telly. Accidents happen. Ones that you won't even be able to justify.


3).... Not keep back-ups of everything you own. Digitally speaking, that is. One wrong link clicked, one 'bad sector' in the hard disk, one teeny mistake - POOF! Every single song you painstakingly downloaded, every GA episode you love, every Word doc with your entire life's worth of 'outpourings', every assignment you caffeinated yourself for... Gone. Erased without a trace. 


4).... Take someone for granted. They might just decide NOT to be your doormat anymore. They might decide to just up their behind and leave. And then you'll sit there and be amazed at the 'them' shaped hole in your life that sucks all the happiness out of you.


5).... Fight with your better half and then try to get even by staying up till three a.m. talking to every member of the opposite sex you can think of. One word for anyone who thinks it's a solution. UNCOOL. And I will only congratulate your better half for have a screaming match with/dumping you. 


6).... Philosophize too much (especially when you're in your twenties and thirties. Or younger). Why? People start thinking you are going through a bad phase. They bring you fruit to alleviate the unhappiness. And sympathy. And lots of long, slanty looks. 


Most of all, people shouldn't lie. O.k, maybe 'lie' is a blanket term. What I mean is that I get when you're lying because you've bad grades or you broke the best crystal vase or about a missed assignment or being late because of last night's party or forgotten deadline. I get that. 


It's when people lie about inconsequential things that I don't understand. Those small white lies which have no real consequence except make you seem the way you want to seem. Fleeting words strung together just that second to make people believe your fake point. Lies that people don't bother hauling you up about because they are that small. What pleasure do you get in getting people to believe in your white lies? Not like they matter. Not to you, not to them, not to anyone... except in that one second before someone changes the topic.


I don't get it.


O.k, I admit, the rest of the post was a ruse to write about all the lying. But I realized suddenly just how much some people do it and I can't talk to anyone about it. I scared a couple of clueless souls with all my restless, disjointed sentences about liars and left them wondering if I had finally gone over to the dark side.  


The frustration wanted an outlet and thereby the blog post. 


O.k, I'm done here. The ones who snoozed can wake up and leave. Bbye.

And I'll Be Back

I’m sorry about not updating like a Mad-Hatter that I used to be. Nia wrote a post and it made me all guilty about the kind of crap I have been churning out for my blog these days. Most of it, just for the heck of it. I see the quality of my writing taking a serious hit; The Bike Ride and Real Beauty were so much better than Of Simple Lives and Raindrops and I’m sure you’d more than agree with me.

There was a time when I used to write for myself. A time when each piece I wrote took me an hour and a half, intense involvement and thoroughly furrowed eyebrows to conjure up. A time when each word I wrote made me happy, made me feel the emotion. A time when I finished typing and I’d be overcome with a feeling of intense satisfaction, one of having done something useful. A time when I used to be proud of having written that piece, so much so that I run around asking people to read it (regardless of whether they wanted to or not). Writing good stories and pieces get me high like nothing else does.

Somewhere along the way, I started posting to accommodate the growing number of followers; I started to think in terms of what they’ll want to read rather than what I’d want to write about. I started being increasingly random, I cooked up fiction that I did not feel just so that I’d keep up the posting frequency; each post giving me increasing amount of inferiority complexes about the poor quality of my own writing. I consoled myself saying that if people don’t criticize the posts, then it doesn’t matter. I refused to acknowledge that criticism is not a part of the blogger world; we just do not say it out loud.

I started using my blog to get back at people person/s, I know I should have drawn the line then but the stupid part of me egged the sensible part on. I took up a brainless meme, which I hate seeing in my archives now.

The trick is to find that fine line between what I feel and what readers want to read. I realize now, that I’ll be proud of my blog only when I love every single post. And while posting frequency matters, quality matters even more. To me, atleast.

What was once a source of immense pleasure and inspiration, has become a chore; reading blogs, ones that I love and ones that I discover. I have hated leaving comments in the last few days for I left them just for the heck of it. I haven’t even been able to do full justice to DOV. The writer in me wilts at all these.  

I’ve decided to take a break for a week (I doubt if I’ll be able to keep away even that long and I have to block myself on Google to stop me from posting anything) but I have to do this if I want to be proud of what I write once again, something that means a lot to me in the long run. I think of this as a cleansing process of sorts, kinda like getting my head out of the dung it seems to be stuck in and airing it out a little bit.

Do NOT get me wrong, I still am as obsessed with Blogger and the writer in me still breathes for those lovely comments and mails that I get but I just need to find a way to go back to what I was when I came to Blogger first.

My not-so-new maxim

Do wait around for I’ll be back with better PeeVeeness.

P.S: No blogging crisis here. No depression. Just thoughts of having gotten stuck in a place I don’t want to be in.

P.P.S: I just wrote out a whole post bitching about somebody who has made it their sole aim to annoy the crap out of my life, the shame at the vitriol and sheer violence of the post made these realizations surface. At least Annoyer was helpful that way. And special thanks to Spiff, who has somehow become that person I go to when I'm extremely frustrated.

P.P.S.S: After more than three years, I still love my post scripts:) At least some things haven’t changed.

P.P.P.S.S: Prithvi, Shreya and Viya, you guys are the mantals :P I was reading through my Twitter timeline only to realize that we make absolutely NO SENSE:D

P.P.P.S.S.S: Does anybody else think that a grown up, seemingly non-retarded person who spells pretty as ‘pwetty’ should be shot? At least in the ankle? No? Sad.

The Bleus

So finally after a month of holidays (lazy, LAZY ones), I'm going back to the college hostel. 

I don't want to go=(

The thing is, till now I used to look forward to going because while home means a lot to me, hostel was always a place where I've had the most fun in my entire life. I have the good fortune of being blessed with such awesome friends that hostel ruled \m/ xD. That, in spite of the rest of the shitty stuff that goes with college and the hostel wardens.

Nothing has changed. Everybody is still there. Hostel's still the same old, same old.

But I am NOT looking forward to it=/

And I have no clue why.

Packing and cleaning up my room has just gotten me so down that you can't even see the dumps.

The blue feeling.

Go away.