bubble wrap (BrE) (NAmE Bubble Wrap ^TM) noun [U] a sheet of plastic which has lots of small raised parts filled with air, used for protecting things that are being carried or sent by post/mail

©Oxford University Press, 2005.

can you bubble wrap me, please?
of course i wont be sent through mail, but i need it. i am rushing off at breakneck speed. through life. it is passing me by. i feel like a spectator looking in from the outside. a strange sort of disconnect. i care very much that i don't care anymore. maybe this is the beginning.

driftwood

Am floating. Yet again. In my own thought bubble, a thoughtless bubble actually. I am blank. I think this is what hitting a nadir is like. Putting down this thought helps.

And the thought that things can only begin to look up after this. But then some wise guy will say, there's always horizontal motion, that won't get you anywhere. Ha! Well I can't help it. I was born an optimist and education has yet to make a complete cynic of me. I still believe in the power of good thoughts. Of things getting better. Of the law of averages. And most importantly, the power of retribution.

invisible soul

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
- Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I sat on a bench at Wadala Road Station, trying my very best to hold back those tears, searching for chewing gum in my sack. Anything to keep me occupied. A lady spoke near me, she was asking if the ladies compartment would halt near there. I looked up, and her shocked expression has been burnt in my mind. I answered her, and went back to searching. All I could concentrate was on telling myself to keep breathing.

In this city of Mumbai, there is great comfort in anonymity. Every new member who comes from elsewhere in the country, is embraced and feels the power of this throbbing heart. But sometimes its so difficult to get a few minutes away from the melee. Its like being watched, constantly. Suffocatingly close faces and arms and hair. The assault on the senses of clean soapy smell, music on loud speaker, suburban woes and victories - all in a short space of an hour is sometimes more than the spirit can bear.

I walk home from the station on days like these. Just the twenty minutes before another world comes hurling at me, and hits me between the eyes. Home. The walk home, in the cool evening breeze is better than any other picker-upper. Ofcourse unless someone actually picks you up. Its the time when I just walk, music buzzing in my ears, a zillion thoughts flying out before I grasp anything at all.

And sometimes I feel like shrinking into nothingness myself. When I saw a girl wipe away a tear once from her swollen eyes. When I saw kids from municipal schools hawking notebooks after school hours on the train. When the flyover sidewalk was interspersed with old people sleeping on the benches or when the fledgling who had fallen out of nowhere stilled its flapping, forever.

wordiest balah!

I am awed by all the blogs i just read. How, I say to myself, how do these women manage to say exactly what they feel, think and believe? And even if i do not identify with everything they have to say, i still read, as if under a spell. That surely is an enviable talent.

It been ages since i posted, yes, i have said something to this effect before. But i have been writing, not getting very much better at it, but i have been penning down my thoughts. Its just been either so disconnected or so raw, its not given me enough gumption to put them here.

But really, how does one write of all the thoughts that just pass through all day. Some flit in and out, some take root, some just linger long enough to give company with a lonely coffee.

I travel for about four hours everyday. These thoughts are my constant companions. I hear my voice all the time, even if i am reading or listening to songs which are someone's favourites. I havent been good at recalling music, or lyrics ever. It just refuses to get hardwired into me, unless its really bad music, which unfortunately for my friends i can start spouting with not too much provocation. And yet, everytime i hear his favourite songs, I learn to love them, effortlessly. No forced conditioning, i just have to hear them once to warm up to them, adapt and make them my own. So everytime my earphones burst forth a song, i am taken back to some memory, some vivid occasion connected to the song.

I wonder about where life is taking me or where i am leading it. But I am almost always alone. Alone while i commute, alone when in a group, alone at work, and alone at home. Home too feels temporary right now. For some strange reason, i just havent been interested in my home. In my head its a transient phase, right now stretching longer than i was prepared for it. I still dont have a good, spacious cupboard. I share a room with my sister, but i am loathe to take responsibility for it. I spend just a few waking hours in it, a stray weekend when i dont go gallivanting about town and a semi comatose existence trying desperately to find meaning.

I cant even make up my mind if i like tea or coffee, in my head i cannot belong to both clubs, i have to pick! I walk into a mall, and walk out without a single thing added to my collection of junk. I wonder if age is catching up at 26. Maybe because i feel older, tired and bored as a widow. Life's charm is taking its time weaving its way back into mine. I aint properly, completely miserable even.

Its a weird sort of floating. No water to touch base with, no wings to take me higher to touch the sky. Words get caught up in the bottle neck called our throat. No where to direct them. Comfortably superstitious in my early days, either I do not remember them, or I couldn't care less.

If by now you havent already realised, my post is going nowhere.

blip

numb. plain and simple.
brain-dead, dull, unimaginative, boring, lull.
a will to move, squashed out fast.
growing roots, wherever i stand.

I breathe in, exhale, breathe in again.
focussing on this, makes a whole day pass.
everything else, flits in then out.
its my life, on my time.

i look around, for inspiration.
it comes in small measures
like a cherry on top
i can live with the feeling of that.

When i write i feel so hollow,
like there is no feeling, there is no sorrow
beginning a day, while feeling low
its the lack of a hope, that i cant swallow

ray of sunlight, bother me not
i really don't have a reason to wake up,
to trot.
let today pass, let it go
it's taking so long, i can't

Somethings-in-between...

Some call it the lull before the storm, some call it the inaction before the war, but i call it somethings that are just between new beginnings and old endings. A chapter that began but 24 months ago has slowly crossed over to being the past. The everyday things that heralded another beehive of activity have changed into things that i did when i was at MICA. My geography has changed, my co-ordinates uprooted and scattered across the country. Physical distances seemed to matter only at term breaks, and those were few and far in between. But today i wake up to a new reality, that hop-skip-and-jump was an alter-reality. It seems like in just two years, i have compressed a lifetime. Of friendships, of growing up, of being right and learning from wrong, and of loving and losing and learning to love again.

When i went there i was more a child than a girl. More sure of what I wanted and how. I emerged a lil older, somewhat wiser, and definitely more open to seeing what i needed and coveted. I met not just people who understood and accepted me for my quirks, they had enough of their own to know, but also learned me better. Things black-n-white blurred into a blissful grey and sometimes emerged in bright pinks, blues and copper. I found my own pace, a lil faster than some, a lil slower than the rest. A long 24 months that now seem to have whizzed past at break neck speed.

Rituals and rhythms, conversations over the nth cuppa chai, cheese paranthas with butter on top, french fries wid mayonnaise simply coz it looked like rain, and the marathon walk to Shela lake. Peacocks that broke the silence with shrill mating calls and squirrels that were gunning for certificates at gnawing perfectly at swing ropes. Mad langoor chases, the lone bicycle ride in the dark, shooting stars by the canal, birthdays fit for a queen. DJ Abhijeet with the beautiful people dancing until dawn. Lectures sometimes interspersed with interesting CP and DCP. The people in the last row, authoring their debut piece of work and artists capturing more than the eye spied. Formals shrugged into with the determined look saying, you got me for now SPC, but just wait until they're gone....

I will start work soon. But right now is a something of an in-between. The hyphen before the next word, imperative, but pondered about for its true meaning and worth. It was a good hyphen though. Worked some, played some, did things i always wanted to. But that was part of the plan for the summer. Now is another tiny in-between, a semicolon, a pause to conjure up more images of what the future holds, what i want it to hold and a sackful of hope. Every bit of this journey has been worth it, time to move into the next phase, bohemian or not, you gotta get with it, blend in with the folds, learn to breathe in a different world.