It's raining again

Mumbai weather... I've lived here three years now, but I still can't predict it. All I can do is always always carry an umbrella with me, between the months of August and October.
This morning, sun rays from my east-facing window woke me up at an unearthly hour. Now, at 4 in the afternoon, it's dark and rainy and the sky is rumbling like it ate something bad for lunch.

My moods are very attuned to the weather. If it's sunny, I feel sunny, if it's cold, I'm rather sniffly. Rain- that makes me reflective. I've wondered about my purpose in life, about how much I can procrastinate the mountains of work I'm reluctant to do, and generally contemplated my uselessness. (This is not a hint for you to leave reassuring comments contradicting me. I'm not that desperate) In short, I've thought about just about everything these past three hours, but Nuclear Physics. God, give me some concentration!

PS: It's definitely a sign that I'm out of ideas if I dedicate an entire post to the weather. But I had rather blog than mug, so bear with me.

Time and sticky sweets

Two topics that would seem hard to link together in a metaphor, right? But somehow I managed it today in semiconductors class, in that half a minute before I jerked back to attention again.

Time sometimes feels like those brightly coloured sweets you see in shop windows. You pull and pull at it and end up swallowing a great chunk. It isn't possible to delicately nibble, you don't get the flavour or enjoy the sweetness. They come in all colours, from vermillion red to emerald green, to sickly yellow and burnt black.

Classroom notes

Over the past couple of years, it has become a habit for me to trace the wanderings of my mind in boring classes, by scribbling on the last pages of my notebooks. Now, as I distractedly attempt to study for the midsems, I find myself flipping to the last pages of every notebook, to see what I've written. Some of the jottings don't make any sense to me, some are quite surprisingly profound. There's a smashing idea for the start of a story in there and several abortive blog ideas. Here are some of them, for you to make of what you will.

The sky had been a sulky gray for days, the ominous silence only interrupted by a few grumbles. Finally, all that frustration burst out in a deluge of rain. But although everything is soaking wet, from the trees to the buildings to me, the sky's anger doesn't appear much appeased...

This was written in a rather blue mood, all the world was wet, I was annoyingly damp and the class just wouldn't end.

There's apparently a difference between logic and commonsense.

I can't remember what happened to make me scribble this, but every time I try to think about it, I get a headache.

Some of my greatest feats of composition have been accomplished in some of my most boring classes.

I've gotta admit, that's spot on.

My room smells of termite medicine. Chunks of the wall covered with gauzy fungus, float down dismally, at regular intervals. A whole bunch of dead insects lay in front of my monitor this morning, probably poisoned by the medicine and somehow thinking of the glowing screen as their salvation... I'm allergic to the fungus, it makes me sneeze. Everything I've eaten has smelled like termite medicine. If I was a bird, I'd be really worried about laying eggs without shells right now.

This was one blue mood. I later made it into a rather more optimistic post.

Everything about Mr. Chatterjee droned boring. His clothes were boring, his voice was boring, even his face was boring. Skin neither fair nor really dark, a bulbous nose and small bored eyes. A thin, greying moustache with short, bristly hairs that still managed to droop. His handwriting on the board was boring. Round letters ran into each other as if they didn't think it worth the effort to spread apart. The chalk squeaked in an excruciating monotone, as he dragged it listlessly across the board.
Whenever I sat in his class, I felt my senses suspend, my eyes slowly close and my mind wander off into far more interesting places.

I thought this was an excellent beginning to a short story, but I could never get beyond this point.

The difference between the elderly and the young- when an older person asks you to email him, there's a hint of triumph in his voice.

She had a tendency to put everything in quotes. So, she would talk about the "strength" of the "forces" being "short-lived". As a result, you never quite believed what she told you.

This scribble was for an interesting character in a short story, somewhat inspired by a prof this sem. For other hilariously inappropriate quotation marks, check out this blog.

I'm back!

It's been nearly four months since I last posted here. There's no earth shattering reason for my lack of posts, I just couldn't summon up the energy to type up a decent post somehow. I have 11 new drafts though. That doesn't mean these haven't been an awesome four months, they have. But now I'm back here in rainy Mumbai and everything is comfortable and familiar.

The hostel walls are still a shocking pink, although thankfully, a little faded now. I'm in a new room, in an opposite wing, but the lizards and monkeys are just as sociable. This room's shocking pink too, and the walls clash horribly with my orange sheets.

The whole hostel's having a seepage problem and a termite infestation. Talk about a homecoming. Until last week, there was a nasty brown line snaking across one wall of my room, proof of termites feeding off the cement. Talk about ewww! The exterminator who came last week told me reassuringly that I needn't mind these little critters, apparently they don't bite. He then proceeded to curdle my blood with stories of other species of termites that crawl over people's skin leaving a trail of rashes behind. Of course, after that I refused to enter the room until they were gone. So a whole bunch of exterminators came in and drilled holes in every available corner and filled them with vile smelling medicine. Now, all that's left of my termites is a light brown stain. But, as the exterminator warned me in his parting shot, they might be back.

I mentioned seepage, didn't I? The termite medicine might have been poison to the termites, but it was like Boost for the fungus. Great clumps of filmy white fungus sprang up on my walls almost as I watched. When I switched on the fan, delicate white flakes flew down to settle on my keyboard.

Stifling my disgust I liberally papered the entire wall- which come to think of it, is quite convenient. Now, all I need to do is look up to read of anything from Michal Phelps' gold medals to picking the correct bathroom tiles.

It's good to be back.

Ah, life

I had an epiphany this morning, as I sat at 7am outside my room, trying to blow soap bubbles.
James Herriot said of the veterinary profession, that it offers you innumerable opportunities of making a total chump of yourself. I found myself thinking of his words this morning as I watched a particularly large bubble pop.
Since I've come to college, I've done a huge number of things I never in my wildest dreams planned on doing. I've run barefoot around the deserted Open Air theater in IIT at 2am, behind a stray dog that had stolen my shoe. I've I've spent infinitely many arduous hours making 'cheat sheets' and constantly marveled on just how many words you can fit into a single A4 sheet, if you just write them small enough. I've acted in a play in which I mouthed the dialogue, "I'm dying, dammit! I'm dying!"
I have also walked barefoot along the entire length of the IIMA campus, while carrying a Veena, thanks to a broken sandal strap. I have driven a 20 year old, rickety kinetic honda at 60kmph in blinding rain, while pulling along a laughing foreigner on a cycle. I've fallen passionately in love with my bed, and for once, in this relationship, I'm the more communicative one. I've made one serious attempt to choreograph a classical-style shadow dance, to a piece of music that opens with heavy breathing that merges into hip-hop beats. The dance was thankfully never performed. Once a year, I wear ridiculous clothes and practice my 'come hither' look on a bunch of screaming girls, for the honor and glory of my wing. I've painted my face white and blacked out my eyes to look like a zombie for the department Halloween day celebrations, only to discover that I was the only person in costume in the entire class of 60.

Every ridiculous thing I do is chalked down on the slate of experience. At the very least, some of my friends did have a good laugh at my expense. So, I disagree with Herriot. It isn't only the veterinary profession that offers you infinite opportunities of making a fool of yourself- it's life itself.

PS: This post was actually begun on the day of filming of the InsIghT spoof video, in which we were doing a mock 'soap'box, which explains the bubbles.

My gilded pen

Today in class, my trusty ballpoint pen ran out of ink. Since I greatly pride myself on the accuracy and speed of my note-taking, I hurriedly begged around for another and R handed me her fountain pen. Writing with it brought back a whole well of memories. Fountain pens have individual characters, something our modern day ballpoints and rollerballs and technotips sadly lack. In most fountain pens the ink doesn't flow unless you hold the pen just so, and each pen has its own 'just so'. Shake a temperamental fountain pen too violently and it'll leave angry blotches of ink all over your notes.

I remember that we were only ever allowed to write with pencil till the fourth standard in school. From fifth standard, we made the drastic switch to fountain pens. I couldn't wait for the first day of school to start, I had such a beauty of a pen. It was made of a heavy metal and was painted bright gold with engraved geometrical patterns. It had a smooth long golden nib and a cap that closed with a most satisfying click. But its crowning glory was a giant plastic diamond, perched cockily right at the top of the cap. when you unscrewed the bottom, there was a tiny little well into which I would fill indigo blue ink with a dropper. My handwriting never looked better than it did shaped from that gilded pen. All day during class, I would secretly practice different signatures on the back page of my textbook.

When I broke the nib of that pen on the fourth day of fifth standard, I had to bite my lips to stop from crying. Big girls of ten don't cry over fountain pens. Back at home that evening, a comforting mother promptly took me to the stationery store where under my critical gaze, the shopkeeper replaced the nib. But somehow, the pen never seemed the same again. It grew more and more temperamental, spewing unsightly blots of ink at the slightest shake and always scratching the paper when I wrote. Still, I bore it all patiently, so infatuated was I with the pen's appearance.

Then one day, a notebook was returned to me after checking and it didn't contain the usual 'neat' comment from my teacher. If you've ever been in fifth standard in Army School Jammu, you'll know how much that 'neat' meant to us schoolgirls. We would gloat over our notebooks and compare the number of 'neat's and 'good's that we got. Losing one because of a giant blue blot that percolated three pages deep was too much for my loyalty to that pen. So in it went to the deep recesses of my pencil box, while I moved on to the safer and ubiquitous Chinese pens that had tiny pert little nibs that coyly peeked out from a plastic body.

The pen stayed there for several years. The shiny gold paint got scratchy and then wore out, the diamond chipped. Once in a while in a fit of pity, or when all my other pens had run out of ink, I would give this one another try. But it would always hold out for a sentence or so, before starting to scratch paper again.

As I grew up, I turned more impatient. I no longer had time to patiently refill ink in pens every evening, or keep experimenting with a fountain pen till I found its sweet spot. I discovered roller balls and gel pens, which would smoothly release ideal amounts of ink while displaying no personality at all. My relationship with my pens became more and more impersonal. Pens no longer have characters, they're just instruments that you take notes with. But today, holding R's fountain pen in my hand and coaxing rows of neat sentences out of it, it all came back.

panegyric on Grapes

Grapes are perhaps the most perfect of all fruits. They're so easy to eat too, you just pluck them off and chew. There's no business of peeling or removing seeds. There's something quite decadent about eating them off a bunch. It brings visions of Arabic princes surrounded by houris, puffing smoke from hookahs while being fed grapes.
And look at the structure of a grape, especially the long waxy green ones we see. Faintly blushing, they have incredibly taut, delicately thin skin. They're the perfect size too, to just fit in your mouth one at a time. Then when you bite, the skin explodes in a positive eruption of sweetness, with just enough tartness to make you smack your lips in delight.