VIBGYOR

Those lost days

An evening of "those days have gone by" and like an icing on the cake, I was tagged by my school friend... - there in facebook was me from 20 years back looking back. I stared at her, tried to decipher what she was saying - yet, as expected she was smiling. Inspite of getting into trouble with all the pranks, she had really enjoyed herself. Perhaps it is a reminder to take life a bit less seriously now though it is a struggle.

A lot of people exclaim at the 300 and odd friends that I have in facebook (no doubt I am not one of the top ones) - yet, when I saw this picture it reminded me about why it is more difficult for me to chose. I have lived in 13 places (oh dear! what is that for a number) in my three and a half decades of life. This is not the count of the number of times I have moved but just the number of places I have lived in.

Each time I moved and associated with a place all over again, I made new friends. Though I lost touch with them, I managed to find them back many times over again. Here in Brussels I again am managing to make new friends. So, while I do not keep in touch with all of them regularly, they are always there for me to call on them or for them to come calling with memories knocking on the door. I hope facebook is a new way to keep in touch with them permanently instead of losing touch the moment one of us forgot to reply to a mail or just kept postponing the reply - there is a mail from Thangam that I keep thinking I should reply to but I remembered just 1 month back that I was thinking about a mail she sent 4 years back.

Me and my fringes and my hair left open, me with fringes with my hair tied up - both in the uniform that I found interesting quite early on. As a result of all the moves (6 moves since these pictures were taken), I have lost these pictures. I think they are in my parent's house in Trivandrum or Chennai. However, since they do not live there anymore, it seems strange to knock on the tenant's doors to just take pictures. Perhaps next time.

Bins, I want to put up a post about the questions you asked - so I have not forgotten your comment.  

Talk about a positive stroke...

Lovely Lady

Colours took Which type of woman are you? quiz and the result is Lovely Lady
You are lovely and caring. You help others and spread out a lot of sympathy. Your life aim maybe is to serve the people. But your weakness is that you forget about yourself, your own needs. All your time is hold back for your friends and family. You are always there for people in trouble. Ready for any emergency. You make a lot of sacrifices just to be a good human. But every woman has her needs, her longings and a destiny. Don't loose yourself in work or curing other people's souls. You will have your own problems in your life. Another problem is that you don't say your opinion when it's right and important to say it. People trample onto your soul if you are always so kind and lovely and helpful. They will play on you. Though you should try to relax more and enjoy your life, you should not loose the gift that was given to you to help others . Not everyone is created this way... You are uniqe and rare!

Just one of those days

It is just one of those days when one wonders the following:

• "What on earth am I doing?"
• "Why did I just not stick to what I know best to do?"
• "Why could I have not focussed on just becoming better at what I was used to doing? - there was always much room to improve"
• "Where and when am I going to start making sense?"
• "Where is a shoulder to lean on and cry?"
• "Was I just running away?"
• "Will I just get out of this self-sympathetic mode after putting myself into trouble and instead take some action to feel better?"

all while still being at work for my 13-th hour trying to find a thread where I can feel safe enough to hang on.

Things I would like to do

I suddenly found myself with 10 extra days of vacation this year. Things that passed through my mind:

• Invite my sister over - she needs a break - take her around - let her sleep in - introduce her to different people.

• Eat the the Mosquite Coast - well... the name intrigues me - I am not fond of mosquitoes. Yet, they do bring back pleasant memories of the evening after the farewell party at WCC after our graduation. WCC is situated on the banks of the Cooum at Chennai. Legend has it that Tipu Sultan's sons were imprisoned in the main building of the college and were brought over the Cooum by the British. The hostel of WCC is close to the wall separating the building from the Cooum. We sat on the terrace that evening and late night fighting the mosquitoes who came in hoardes into our mouth every often we opened our mouth to speak.

• Set out from my home with no destination in mind and just take turns as it comes - at each turn make a decision which way to go (isn't there something deterministic about this plan - just the fact that I want it to be indeterministic has already made it deterministic - for the fear of coming back home within 5 minutes, will I not chose to go in the opposite direction?) and explore some places for 10 days. I wonder which places I will see and who I will meet.

• Do the above for Brussels during a weekend on foot when the sun is out (chances of me being in Belgium when the sun is out is quite rare)

• Buy a bike and go biking around Belgium.

• Decide what to do with my Bongo Box gifted by my boss. (Link it to 1??? - my sister loves to eat good food in an ambient place)

I was at Witcher Plein the other evening coming back. The luxury of the place gets to me - I love luxurious environment. The Conrad hotel and the luxurious bath shops and art shops elevated me to an exultant feeling. Shyness stopped me from standing on my toes and doing a twirl. On thinking about it I could have very well done it - there was no one around. I am enjoying this feeling of being alone and enjoying this time being with myself. As I was telling Parmanu this morning - I am beginning to enjoy Brussels, myself and my work a bit more and it is a luxurious feeling.

At the same time about 5 people asked me over 2 weeks about my plans to have children. It is a co-incidence that suddenly everyone else is thinking about me having children. Many were of the opinion that I would make a good mother (and curiously when going through my IMD year book I found the same comment "you were the mother of the class"). Adopting children has been in my mind since I was a teenager when I used to see the advertisements in Reader's Digest and Illustrated Weekly - when I got married to Parmanu it was something I always told him I would love to do. Perhaps it is time now to start thinking about it seriously. "What about your own?" - a question that came up from 2 people - If it happens it happens - else I am not heart broken. Aren't there enough children around this world who do not have mothers and who crave for a mother who cares for them?

Now - off to Waterstones, Dance Practise for 7 hours and then dinner with a friend. She and I have to share stories of our first week in our respective new positions at work and I have to pep her up since she had a work life balance issue and she has a baby.

Common?

What is common between me and this cat?

 

This afternoon

Why do I feel like a Saroj Khan in the making - a fat choreographer with a bunch of thin and slim and graceful dancers? (the difference is in the type of skill to choreograph).

 

In over 8 hours this weekend we managed to choreograph 2 minutes of our medley song. It does not help that I, the choreographer, keeps forgetting what step she just made and changes her mind so often. Yesterday one of my friends kept me on track and today she could not make it to the sessions. So we focussed on the easier songs. We need to see how it goes on Wednesday. We then need to see about the costumes (is that a choreographer task too?)

In anycase I converted my colleague to a Hritik Roshan song. I swoon over his dance in Dhoom 2

and You are my Sonia was already my favourite.

Procrastination at its highest level

Lars and Ulrike are visiting me with their baby Julia. She is such a lovely bundle. She smiles with her two tooth and crawls all around my apartment - my apartment is a good one to play hide and seek and she runs between the doors, around the doors, below the table and everywhere (I must say my floor is getting cleaning quite clean now). She is 10 months old.

They last visited me in early summer in 2007. So this time they knew the apartment quite well. So they found their way around, got themselves breakfast from the bakery near by! Ok! You can all be shocked - I had been so tied up the whole week last week  that I could always say I did not find the time to get it. Yet, since I do not have breakfast, it was just something that slipped my mind completely and away.

On the Thursday evening he came into my kitchen. Our IMD Brussels gang was expected to come to dinner on Friday evening and we both were cooking the main dishes. 

"I need to grind onions and later make a paste of corn and milk. Do you have a blender for this?"

"I do have an Indian mixie which could be good for corn and milk paste. The dome is in Walldorf but I can ask Parmanu to bring it if you think it would be suitable".

He took a look at it and found that it could be interesting. Of course you cannot make out anything about the performance of a blender/mixie by looking at it and so I could see a scepticism of unfamiliarty forming on his face. I called Parmanu and asked him to bring the dome cover of my mixie as well. We were all set. 

On Friday evening (as feared from my last 10 years of experience), Parmanu forgot the dome (besides forgetting to bring my iPod speakers which he had promised he would surely bring). I did have the flat cover with a worn out rubber stopper around it. Hesitating to show the condition of the runner stopper, I desperately searched my mind for alternatives. Ah! Yes - I had a little blender I had bought when in Lausanne. I took out my little blender and he ground the onion in it.

"Oh! It grind onions so well - I could use it for my Indian cooking since ground onions will taste better in many curries".

"Yes, that is true - you could".

"I should not be too lazy. I always hesitate to grind because I first need to take out the blender from the cupboard and then use it - it is faster just cutting".

"Well... you could just keep it somewhere you can plug it in permanently and you just need to use the bowl".

His eyes went to the platform.

"I do not have place - I must make it".

"Ah! I see the printer in the kitchen".

"It is not yet connected too" - I laughed at myself. "It has been a long time and I still haven't configured it".

"Well... I remember that was the state last time we were here too". We looked at each other incredulously. "My god!!" I thought - "it is really almost 2 years since I bought it".

So next weekend, (depending on some annoucements on 28-th January), I will be assembling my printer. Watch out this space for an update whether I finally did it or not.

and yes, Lars did use the Sumeet mixie and loved it. He is thinking of importing one now.

Health is wealth

Since falling ill many times over the last quarter of 2008, I have lost about 4.5 kilos. So I was happy to check my BMI today - yet, when I looked I am still overweight by 1.5 BMI - "DARN! I need to lose another 4 kilos" - I thought tucking away my third bowl of icecream.

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There are times when you think you have got over an illness. Swallowing the lump that rose in my throat, I tried to deal with the return of the same feeling. Where on earth is the medicine?

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I wonder whether icecream is a good solution for dry cough.

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I imported three bottles of Theraflu from US - 1.5 is already over - is it time for another trip?

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OK - time to sleep with the good intention of re-starting Yoga - perhaps that will help me regain my health and get rid of the lump.

Swades - my country

One of my favourite movies is Swades. I can watch it million times and still not get bored with it. Though there are some reviews which talk of it being like a documentary, it is precisely this slow pace and the depiction of the village life that attract me to this movie. I specially love the song "Saawariya" for the scenes where the rural Indian life is shown - the part that always made me want to spend long time in the "real" rural part of India.

 

We have a house in a village in Kerala. We used to go to this house when we were small children. My parents belong to a huge family with close ties and we were the nuclear family living in cities and towns visiting our great-grandmothers in the village during the holidays. We looked forward to these visits. Every visit meant a confluence of all cousins around the sametime - it was also the time when the families working for my great-grandmothers in the house used to make different special dishes (which I have not seen since - like Madakkusaan). They used to make huge biscuit tins full of sweets , bananachips, murukku, mango pickles and so on. These used to be kept in dark rooms around the kitchens.

 

All the families around there had children of our age. These children used to get together in one wing at the south end of the house - not used much nowadays. There was a small stage on top of which we used to pray all together in the evenings. In the mornings, these used to be summer school for all the children around. We used to join these classes to learn numbers, mathematics and malayalam. We had slates on which we wrote with a slate pencil (chalk was a luxury) and we used to wipe the slates clean with a weed which we picked before the classes.

 

When we were not in these classes, we used to run around the place fishing in one of the three ponds, climbing the haystacks, going to the fields and sometimes escaping the eyes of the elders and running to the houses of one of the families working in the house. They used to be small houses like the ones in Swades and dark inside. They invited us inside and treated us to some eatables, gave us a chair to sit. The families lived on of one the plots next to the house and all their families, had small houses around the house. All these relatives used to come to see these city bred aliens and to talk to us. We were absolutely thrilled to have the attention and always looking for small children we could run around with.

 

In the evenings, we used to go to the family temple about a kilometer walk away. We crossed fields and reached the temple. There were distant relatives living there and all wanted to talk to us and invited us into their homes. We had some festivals in this temple - each one had a special feeling and a colourful unique atmosphere to it. As you might watch in the movie Manichithrathaazhu ( remade in Hindi as Bhool Bhulayya), ghost figures locked into rooms closed by chants filled locks were normal life - the family temple also had shrines which were locked not to be opened. We had rituals in the temples which were to make sure that the spirits were at rest. We had small vans, autorickshaws which used to announce movies that were running in the nearby town. The fairs and the festivities from the temples which visited the different houses with elephants and the dieties.

 

Many images in Swades remind me of these trips to the house which now waits for the family to come back and claim it (though I have not been to a panchayat and many other things). When we go there now, the house stands forelorn, the families which took care of us have lost some of the last people who took care of us when we were young (Leelamma who passed away when I was at IMD was one of them). Their next generation had to search for other jobs as the family scattered and as my grandfather was the only one who remained and subsequently his illness made him leave for the city as well. Now when we go there we go for an evening, visit the temple, look at the house, hope to come back and renovate it and live back there. It is a dream - a dream combined with the dreams I saw falling apart when I left India - of taking vacations to travel around rural India visiting villages, visiting festivals in the villages celebrated as they should be celebrated.

 

A different version of the dream lives now - we visit rural Europe - as in Kerala (in comparison to other parts in India), the difference between a town and village is quite blur. One day, I would like to live my real dream - I know I do not need to shift back to India - I just need to spend my vacations at the right place.

 

 

Signs?

Yesterday and today were another of "those days"... I was driving back from work again defeated and dejected and all alone - lonely with no one I could talk to, listening to some songs which again showed me a "vulnerable" part of me showing I was not yet immune to many things. Suddenly in between all the french lyrics came floating out

Je pars, je ne reviendrai jamais
Bientôt le monde m’aura oublié tu sais…
Que j’aille…
Tu vois…

......

Je partirai et je garderai que des restes de toi
Souviens-toi encore quelques fois de moi…
Mais ne leur pardonne pas

Get me out of this place
Get me out of this town

Funny that these seem to be the words that came floating out. Do I believe in signs? I have to decide.

Then today I was reading the MBA Diary from IMD and there came echoes again.

"I have even started to question everything I have achieved so far this year. What has it brought me? What have I learnt? How different am I? Do I really know myself any better? If the aim was to suffer, I am sure I could have found cheaper ways. "

How many more signs do I need before I take the hint? Is it all a question of interpretation? Sometimes I also need to have the courage to move on.