From the archives: Saying goodbye...

... is so difficult.

I keep telling myself, this isn't really goodbye! In the end it will feel like a blink-and-you-miss-it-trip and it will be as if nothing changed. But that's not true and the closer I get to my time of departure the more I can sense that something really big is going to happen in the near future.

I know that in the next few months, my life and the lives of my closest friends will take this giant leap. And for the first time we will not be there to witness the change in each other's lives. But it is going to be incredible. I can feel it in my bones.

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This was one year ago. Life has turned upside down in this one year. I've moved. Started graduate school. Met some ridiculously inspiring people. Visited a new continent. Had the most incredible, life changing experiences. I can't believe that the year is coming to a close and that very soon I'll be writing a post very similar to the one I wrote a year ago, only this time for people I've met in this foreign land.

Promise for the second year of post-grad? Write about everything that happens here.

How I fell for a cliché...

Today started off as a difficult, grey, cold and busy day. It ended as a day full of laughter (some of it drunken) and a whole load of love.

I spent the evening with my newest friends finding out about each other's life, sharing delicious gossip, getting drunk, playing Resistance and generally being noisy. So as I left this party and raced from one end of the campus to the other end at midnight to wish P on his birthday and spend time with my chaddi-buddies, I realized what had begun as a burdensome day had turned into a lovely one.

Friends, old and new, are my pick-me-ups! I've fallen for the cliche. It's Valentine's Day and I feel loved.

Blregh :-/

It must be a really depressing day if not even exercise in the gym with some really fantastic eye candy can make me happy.

Yes I'm back in Bombay and back to the gym. Whee! Blregh.

From the archives: Another Essay. Another take-out. Another year.

I wrote this the day I got my admit letters. I can still feel the euphoria in the words :) Perhaps I never put it up because it reads like a Bollywood awards night thank you letter - naming random events and people and coming across as a little bit conceited :-P 
Anyhoo - This was my year - May 2012 to May 2013! 

What a year it has been! Starting with the move to Delhi, the year has gone by at breakneck speed. From learning how to manage my house to figuring out a new job, new city, new friends to completing applications and essays and forms to handling rejections and finally getting positive responses, it has been a year of extreme highs and lows.

I feel like I have spent the last year thinking about answers to supposedly deep questions and guessing how the world (or at least admissions committees) would judge me for those answers. It's been angsty, exhausting and very annoying for people who stood by me through this and I am thankful to those people for reading what I wrote, for answering my inane questions over and over and for telling me as many times I needed to hear it "you can do this! Just apply!".

What do I hope from the next year?
A little more patience - to understand that most things happen at the time they are meant to happen and always being in a hurry doesn't get me to my destination any faster.

A little more strength- to let go of dreams that can never be fulfilled and to let go of people who just don't feel the same way about me, no matter how much my gut tells me that I love them.

Fewer tears - so that I stop myself from crying at every tragedy, big or small, and learn to never let anyone or anything mess with my 'sense of self'.

Retracing familiar steps

I'm a blog stalker. Though it sounds creepy, it's a fairly mundane hobby where I visit blogs of my friends and then visit blogs of their friends... and so on. Over the years, I have some blogs that I like to visit regularly because I find their perspectives interesting or just plan entertaining. Also, there is a strange sense of comfort in knowing what other people my age, ostensibly similar to me are thinking. And of course there is the thrill of  of being the witness to someone's life without ever really knowing her/ him - just like in a novel that never ends.

Today I realized that I haven't done this in a while and followed the familiar trail over to some of the blogs. While it was nice going back and picking up the threads of their life where I had stopped reading, I was astonished that in the last year, all of them seemed to have grown up! Suddenly we're all out of college, and working and making plans or ditching plans and promising never to make plans again. Slowly we're talking about dealing with stress, about how our professions suck/ rock, about how the outside world is affecting us and in all this there is a subtle but noticeable shift in our tone. It's more sober and reasonable and somehow a lot more mundane.

I guess the characters in my never-ending-novel grew up on me when I wasn't looking.

I wish my life had background music

I've been drowning in work. And something that's helped me get through many hours is www.8tracks.com

Today I came across a playlist on the site by the same name as the title of this post and I thought hey! Yeah! I wish my life had background music! There are so many moments in a day that are funny or exuberant or tragic or full of drama, very fit for music to accompany them.

While I'm on a spree, I also wish my life had a in-slow-motion button. So I could play some moments slower than the others, really enjoy them and let the memory seep into my pores.

Why not! :D

Heavier Things

I demand too much from the people I love. I demand that they listen to me talk, assure me that there's no rat under my bed when I'm alone at home, make the small decisions..the "what do you want to eat today" and "which film should we watch" kind and never ever hang up on me when I call them.

Conversely, I demand too little from the people I don't know. There is the neighbour who's rude to me and gets away with it, the colleague who dumps all the work on me or the shopkeeper who sells me a bad product. Oh! How can I forget the maid who thinks she can bully me into buying her a pressure cooker! (maid management classes anybody?)

I may be unjust to my people and not mean enough to the strangers. So I understand why most of mine need so much space... But at the end of the day, if you claim that the walls close up on you each time I call, then you can't be anyone I love. And neither listening to David Gray nor willing for things to be different is going to change that.

Right. Now that this is out of my system, time to go shopping!!