happiness is

after all the gloom and melancholy of the past posts that few of you failed to comment on, guess this post is due.

happiness is...

...a gtalk list full of green buttons (given the chat freak i have become)
...a nice song to keep me company in the incessant rain
...hot green tea...uuummmmm
...exchanging smiles with people walking around campus
...landing in sagar and finding all the people you want to meet huddling up there escaping getting wet
...random meetings on the net that turn into inexplicably beautiful friendships
...conversations that leave you smiling for the rest of the day
...an expected call and unexpected roses ;)

oh, and cannot fail to add this, having people appreciate your blogs! this one should top the list actually! :)

musings 3

how does one live through a moment with the foreknowledge that this will soon end? and i don't mean the universal phenomena of fleeting moments, but specific and much more definite endings. somehow the sense of a slow motion in real life seems to happen at such moments. every action, word, gesture taking on a life of their own, magnified and every moment stretched out to its limit. its as though time is teasing you, making you savor the moment just long enough to ensure that you remember it vividly enough to feel stung by its absence.

how does one say goodbye? for the optimists amongst us, there is always the thought of an impending re-union, in another context or place. the relationship will go on (sometimes that is), so a display of grief is not warranted. (if you are over 20, a display of grief at partings is not really tolerated, unless its death you are responding to). but there is this absolutely unsettled feeling, a private upheaval that does not warrant display and does not bear concealment. You know this moment is gone and with it whatever you shared with the person, even if the person and the relationship continue. so maybe, what i am crying over is the loss of the things that enabled us to share whatever we did.

and then how does one say goodbye forever? to a person? a relationship? a place?

maybe

if everything unsaid was to be known, there would be many different levels to this conversation. and maybe then, more of you and more of me will become clearer.

four

orissa: one of the best trips i have been on. its FUN traveling with people who are as crazy as you, or at least don't mind your crazy streak. and to think this trip nearly didn't happen!

it was an impulsive decision like most good things in life have lately been, and till half an hour before we boarded the train we were not sure we would be going. i am so glad the trip did happen. the places we saw were awesome (i will have to write separate blogs on each of the places we visited to do justice to them), orissa is a very beautiful place, though it seems to have been completely hinduized. but more important than the places or maybe as important is the madness all of us brought to the trip and the intimacy that madness created. two images that come to mind out of the many many from the trip; the four of us running out of the train onto the ticket counter at the khurdha road station and then madly dashing across the foot over bridge to make it to a puri bound train. that was an unplanned switch, needless to say. and the other was this nice little trek we did to reach a river we had spotted on our way to dhauli. we were quite lucky to find an auto driver who was willing to humor our madness.

en route to chilka lake jose made a comment about the four of us gelling together because we are a "weird group". weird i don't know but this must be the most inexplicably close knit group i have been a part of. all the other groups have been based on a similarity of either personalities or opinions and outlook. with the four of us, i don't know what holds us together. we are so different in our perspectives, oftentimes holding contradictory positions, and lead lives that must appear quite nightmarish to the other three. yeah we share some passions, traveling, a sense of adventure, and add to that our recent fixations; foucault and srivats. beyond that i don't know, and irrespective of the reasons, these are three people i am so glad to have found.

jose- for holding on :), for the gossip, the leg pulling and the off color jokes
resmy- for the long hours of conversation and absolutely non-judgmental listening, for being the one i have gotten used to confessing to
vidya- for the silent presence and that smile which can light up a room

pain

in this isolation
between me and my emotions
and within an imposed
sacrosanctness
all questions and logic seem to get lost
within the void of a black hole
leaving nothing behind
but emotions that can neither be gotten over
nor repressed

journeys

have been feeling for a while now that the journey is an end in itself, not metaphorically, but in the "real" sense. or rather in the sense that the journey is interesting, exciting or not and meaningful either ways by itself, irrespective of what the destination or how the rest of the trip turns out. somehow the most vivid memories i have of any trip are rooted in the journey, the thrilling sense of speed as the plane gears up for take off and the feeling in the pit of the stomach as the take off happens, the constant sense of movement in a train (its almost depressing when it halts!), the feel of the wind as it hits your face while you cling onto the door trying to peep out just a bit, the euphoria that you feel as you rush past people, fields, animals, trees, hills and lakes and everything in between.

and of course the people. will stick to train journeys here cause have experienced more of them. have been on train journeys that last a night and recently have been on a couple of journeys that last a day. something about the overnight journey does not seem to be conducive to talk, to getting to know co-travelers. (barring this one time when i met this cute looking guy who went from being a crush to being a friend to being a crush again and then got lost in cyberspace)...people board the train, do a quick survey of the others in the coup, settle down with their book/magazine/newspaper/mobile phone/music, hurriedly have dinner when it happens and settle down to the all important sleep. though on these journeys i've had great fun observing people. the last one on the bangalore-hyderabad train, i was in this coup with a young couple and three kids.(one of them turned out to be a niece just when i was beginning to worry about population and the economics of raising three kids!)the woman was really beautiful, the man was pathetic, and i'm not talking about looks. she was managing the three kids on her own and the man was more than happy to sit around looking. and well he did seem to believe that kid management was her vocation anyway! hmmm...no moral to the story, just a random memory ;)

the latest trip was one from delhi to hyderabad...a full day and a night in the train. and yeah, long trips are definitely more conducive to making friends, conversation. but its quite interesting the pattern these long train journeys have followed so far. all of us board the train, spend the first hour or so looking around, arranging luggage and ourselves and sometimes fighting over seats and berths. of course all of this punctuated by the occasional person who decides to initiate the coffee/tea drinking and thus begins a chain that ends when everyone in the coup has had their chai/coffee. during this hour i guess people are also making notes about their co-travelers. looks, appearances, "where is she/he from anyway?", its a time of quick glances meant to ascertain the person's location, age, profession, where from, where to, why etc. the art of people-guessing. and yeah this is also the time when i look around and realize, once again, that all the nice looking guys are magically just outside my coup, usually within the next two coups, which effectively cuts off any possibility of legitimate conversation with them, unless of course i decided to trip on one of them during a loo trip, but then, seriously, thats hardly the start you want!

within the next hour, most of the people in the coup begin to get bored with the journey, maybe because it now sinks in that all of us are stuck with each other for the next 24 hours, so what if you have already developed a dislike for half of your coup mates and don't know if you really want to make conversation with the rest. and when existential crises of this sort hit you, you sleep. which is what all of us did on this train, settled into our berths with or without reading material and fell asleep quite easily in one solitary train making its way across central india and the sun burning down on us...(on second thoughts, the "solitary" was added for the effect ) i was one of the first to sleep and was mildly surprised when i woke up to see that all of the coup was asleep. so lazed around in my berth for some more time. the top berth is an interesting place from which to observe people, something about the on-the-top-looking-down perspective. gradually around mid-day some of us woke up and made our way to our seats, once again resuming our position as detached observers. of course around the time hunger pangs hit us we also seemed to realize that its quite difficult traveling together for a day and not making conversation. so slowly the conversation started, small chit-chat, predictably beginning with complaints about the bad tea and bad prices. i was still immersed in my book and might have taken longer to begin talking if not for a couple of people in the coup who were conversing amongst themselves in tamil, a language they seemed to believe i had no way of understanding. they were attempting to figure out where i was from and since i did not look south-indian enough they were wondering if i was from delhi. it is hard not to be pulled into a conversation about you, esp. when it is assumed that you are absent to the conversation, made for a perfectly comical situation. so i pitched in in tamil, told them the story of my fragmented origins and also told them i could speak kannada. in retrospect maybe i should not have divulged that, would have gotten to hear some amazing gossip. anyways the revelations did effectively cut off gossip and conversation turned polite and restrained again.

the other interesting person in the coup was this middle-aged pot-bellied matter-of-fact seeming man. someone who looked like he could tolerate no nonsense. my opinion about him stuck...till i heard him singing songs from the 1980-90 films, every single line intact! he remembered every word of gazab ka yeh din, pehla nasha and other allied songs. half-way through i started singing along. then gave up...the stanza we sung "together":
"dekh lo hamko karebse,
aaj hum mile hai naseeb se,
yeh pal phir kahan
aur yeh manzil phir kahan"
was frightened it would sound too much like an attempted pass! though all sense of platonic companionship with the middle aged singer vanished once i saw a co-passenger shout at him for attempting to insert his hand into her pocket.

the nicest acquaintance that happened was this co-passenger traveling to bangalore to meet her sister. a graduate in philosophy who had worked for a couple of years as a journalist and was now back to doing a masters. not too much conversation happened, but i guess the probability of keeping in touch makes up for it.

in many ways a typical journey, nothing out-of-the-ordinary, but has kept me smiling ever since.

"am I a chauvinist?"

"am I a chauvinist?" he asked
she thought of the
pleasurable sex and
shared child-rearing and
long hours of conversation and
decisions taken together and
the feeling of being free and married and
his supportive presence during a crisis
and more of the same
and said "no"

at which his shoulders relaxed
and he heaved a suppressed
sigh of relief...
lest it be audible.