The best of '09

The best packaging.

This one I remembered immediately. It was a tiny heart shaped box that A gave me, for no reason, just like that. It was covered in red gauze with gold-wrapped chocolates inside. I still have the box, it survived even my minimalist streak.

The best of '09

Q. What's the best change you made to the place you live? 
I moved back into my hostel room this August, after six weeks away. I used to drive 20 kilometers everyday to work during that internship on a very old but determined scooty. It gave me a lot of time for thinking. I returned to IIT determined to de-clutter my life and that's just what I did. I threw away all the flummery, no wall decorations, no posters, no tubes of moisturizer I never use, no stacks of papers and old movie tickets preserved for sentiment's sake. It felt good. 

The best of '09

I'm participating in Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. It's an opportunity to look back and appreciate the year gone by. I'm getting into the game a little late, but don't intend to miss any more of it than I can. Do join in on the action if you like. I think it's a brilliant idea and it's very cool of Gwen to host this.
Today's question: New food: You're now in love with Lebanese food and you didn't even know what it was in January of this year.

I can't claim knowledge of Lebanese food yet, but the cuisine I sampled this year for the first time was Goan. N, P and I jetted in from different parts of the country to meet up with our BITS friends for three days of mad, merry fun in Goa in May. Compulsive as I am, I had cobbled together about forty pages of research about Goa, a map with all the locations I wanted to visit marked out in colour and a checklist of thinks I wanted to do before leaving. I wanted to see forts and beaches and perhaps work in a waterfall. I also wanted to visit the floating casinos, sit at a shack and try adventure sports. Pappu had other ideas. When I dug out my 40 pages, he looked stunned for a minute then said, "I thought we'd get high, Re." Turns out, it was possible to do it all, simply sacrificing a little sleep.


I had read a great deal about Goan cuisine and was eager to try it. The thing was, the food there is mostly seafood based and we vegetarians have pitifully few options. Seriously, in most menus, there were perhaps two vegetarian dishes, thrown in at the end like palpable afterthoughts. Still, I managed to sample the Xanuti: boiled vegetables in a mouth-burningly spicy coconut curry. Goa's traditional sweet, the Bebinca wasn't available in any of the restaurants we visited on those first two days.

Finally, on the day we were to leave, N and I marched out in the 11 am sun, in a quest for breakfast, brightly coloured dresses and Bebinca. The breakfast place we went to didn't stock it, though they did have thickly buttered and crackly paranthas which ate dipped in thick curd. The nice waiter there told us of a bakery about a kilometre away though, that did. So we trudged through the blistering May sunshine, pausing often in cloth covered stalls to ogle beach coverups and chunky jewelry.

Finally we reached the Imperial Bakery, a pretty little place on the main road with potted plants and marble tables. There we ordered ourselves a slice of Bebinca. It came on a pretty glass plate with two silver forks. Such ceremony seemed apt. It was delicious, at least I thought so. N, sweet as she is, isn't much of a dessert person, but I had no problems demolishing that slice, layer by sticky layer. We trudged back afterwards and though the sun had only risen higher, I was thoroughly satisfied. I could tick the last box off my checklist.

Written snapshots

In creative writing class, we discussed an essay by Margaret Atwood where she points out that one can never actually meet the writer of a book one has read and loved. By the time the book has been edited, published and distributed, the writer has moved on. He has evolved and grown older and changed into someone else.
It's a fascinating thought isn't it? That every piece you write is like a polaroid snapshot of you, as you are then and never will be again.
I've realised lately, that the written word is my favourite method of preserving memories. So, I've started a new blog, here. The whole point of the new blog is written snapshots, of everyday moments that made me happy, that I want to squirrel away. The point of Colours is different. I wondered once, why it was I blogged. I know now, that the point of Colours at least, is analysis. It's a place to capture a few of the hundreds of little epiphanies that happen to us each day, thoughts that are often felt rather than voiced. Ans while my new blog is about chronicling experiences, Colours is and will always be a place for thoughts and for watching them change.

Dust to Dust

They're scraping the old paint off the hostel walls today. I was here when they were painted the last time, transformed from dreary blue to shocking pink. We were outraged then, pink for a girls hostel was such an annoying stereotype. That pink faded from shocking to mildly surprising and then to inoffensively pale. The walls are now a rather depressing pinkish-white, pockmarked with holes and covered with the scrawls of students over the years- timid vandals seeking to leave their mark here in some small way.

I left my mark too: my name scrawled in pencil in painstakinly miniature cursive, next to my door. It's an obsession for me, doodling my name. I scrawl it everywhere, on the backs of notebooks, in pools of sauce on plates and this once, on a hidden corner of the wall. K used to tell me that I must have an identity crisis. He said it half-jokingly but he might just be right.

The labourers scraped my name away along with all the others. All our small rebellions. Now they are a fine layer of powdery pink dust all over the floor, flying up in clouds and marking our footsteps as we walk past. By night, it will all be swept away.

One month late, but still...

This post should have by all rights, gone up on August 7th. But what with Convo and the flu and a whole other bunch of other circumstances, it didn't, and Ravali's birthday went uncelebrated here on Colours. We celebrated in other ways, with orange cake, pink champagne and a silver tiara with green feathers (it was certainly colourful) but I wanted to give this bestest of friends and my most avid reader, a celebration here too. So here it is, one month late.

Ravali turned twenty three today. Twenty three isn't a particularly significant year. She was old enough to vote five years ago and could have been legally drunk anytime in the past two. But birthdays are after all, a time to sit back and think about the time past, a comma, so to speak, in the sentence of time when you take a breath, take stock and change your tone.

I met her four years ago, in our tiny, pink walled room. We sat facing each other on our beds. She couldn’t stop talking, I stayed mostly silent. We were both very nervous. We were exceedingly polite to each other, those first few months, but our conversations rarely went beyond common courtesies and tepid gossip. We had our own concerns and problems and the fact that we shared a room didn’t seem reason enough to share them.

She decorated her side of the room with a pink coloured poster of a bunch of chubby babies and insisted that everyone who entered the room had to sign on their favourite. I thought her crazy but signed on one anyway. The baby I signed on made me laugh, ducking away like it did behind a pink bucket full of pink roses.

There were always people in that room, friends of hers, arguing loudly, gossiping and sharing. I used to tire of the noise and of cleaning up after they left, but I never told Ravali. It didn’t seem polite. Then slowly, I was drawn into their conversations Her friends became mine. The noise became pleasant. She does that.
A vast number of her friends are mine now, wonderful people whom I might have never known otherwise.

We grew close slowly. I don’t quite know how. We shared secrets and stories. She took me to the hospital and stayed with me when I had a high fever but was terrified of doctors. She would clear my bed and smooth down the covers for me to collapse on when I returned in the wee hours of the morning from music practice. She would scold me when I didn’t study and coax me out of my sulks. She would attend every tiny performance I ever gave and always cheer the loudest. She often shamed me out of my own miserly tendencies by her sheer generosity. She always gave her possessions, her time, and her sympathy freely, to anyone who needed it and I learnt a great deal, simply by her example.

We’ve come a long way from that tiny pink room where we had our first awkward conversation. Four years of giggles and tears, of moments of high drama and those quietly shared, of conversations on everything from movies to mathematics. Four years of life that I shared with her in a way I’ve never shared with anyone before.

Our lives are changing now, very fast. We pause on days like this and take stock. When I pause and look around, I'm comforted to see you there, right by my side.
Happy Birthday Rava.

Singin' in the Rain

I just spent two miserable weeks fighting off the flu. I don't know if it was swine flu or just a run-of-the-mill influenza. As the doctor at the IIT hospital informed me (a little too cheerfully for my liking) they were all the same.
Whichever it was, it certainly wasn't pretty. I worked my way through stages of sweats and fevers and feeling too hot and then too cold and not being able to keep any food down and losing my voice. But worst of all, the world looked depressing. I'm generally an annoyingly cheerful person, A compares me to the character Alec Baldwin played in his guest appearance on Friends and I have to admit, there are some similarities. But through watery eyes and racked by the shivers, the world looked unrecognizably bleak.

Today though, I popped my second-last antibiotic pill and sang an only partially husky version of "Singin' in the Rain" to my mirror. It's good to be back.