Ta fete 2023

That song from a decade ago in Singapore is on my mind as I sit now in KL. 

 

Its time for some music, a little cruising on the yellow couch (not orange but then, that particularly dated colour fetish has passed), and daze-looking at the Petronas Towers. 

 

A view to die for. 

 

A song thats just universal enough - it could be English, it could be Portuguese, it could be Bahasa, or Nigerian, or Punjabi. Is there anything better? Peace, quiet, bigsmol and DH out on an errand, me, my fantasy book (Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House) and my germs sit and rest. Listen.

And watch the clouds go by and feel happy. 

Happy, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am the largest size I have ever been and if this holiday is not an exercise in practiced self love and affirmation, I don't know what is. Fat and fabulous? Nope. Just fabulous.

BACK TO COLLEGE

I spent five years and about a few hundred blogposts all within a little campus by the lake.
I'm now going back. For only a day, but still.
202 and 209 - here I come.

#nervous
#happy
#TOTALLYEXCITED
#messfood
#lane
#netcentreandtetravex
#somuchsomuch

All of life's a circle what

What <yet-to-be-determined-punctuation-mark>

It's my new thing these days. My new word accessory of the -till-whenever-I find-a-new-one.

For the past many weeks or so, it was 'and so on and so-forth', and you would think adding it to every other sentence would induce a rather overwhelming sense of elegance and a wisp of nonchalance when I speak, but sadly, it turned into a crutch I clung to while refusing to let my on-holiday-come-back-later brain really try to accomplish more than mango-eating.

My new word therefore is what. Its not said as a question, as in "What is wrong with you?" or even an exclamation "Whaaaaaat." its more of a mocky-sarcastic, drawl that cool people have and that I am now going to try to emulate. What.

***

I have eaten many mangoes, but none have come close to achieving the perfection of the Banganapalli mango from last summer. Just saying.

***

Suddenly feeling much deja vu. As I sit on my living room floor in front of the TV and type this out, its raining outside, and I am suddenly transported to Spore just after I quit when all of the city was rainy and I was sitting on my living room floor and writing a blogpost about quitting. :)

I was listening to Samba Noir then, but for now, I feel this is an age+ time -appropriate piece of music. Failing which, we'll always have Toco.

***
I've had the time of my life the last few weeks. I don't know why more adults don't take summer vacations, and I have to say, truthfully, DF has been the best for sponsoring this break of mine. Totally - ja, jee le apni zindagi type moment, and all I have to show for it, is a long list of youtube videos we have to watch when he comes back home everynight.

FYI, this marriage rox.

Good news SBI

I have thought about SBI more these last two days than ever in life. Its a subtle shift, but once you're past the line, you look back and you wonder how you lived differently.

I am now a changed person.  Be afraid.

***

Having said that, the ceaseless upholding of due process makes me VERY happy. Good on you Indian Supreme Court, you're a hero today.

***
Note that the SBI thinking was not _only_ due to CRR spats; in the midst of scam-mania, I noticed that a certain televison channel runs a 'Good News' segment, which, let me hasten to add, is not about babies being created, but a daily snapshot of positive news.

How oddly fascinating is the world these days.

***
Lastly, I found out that I've been a greater fool all along (Ego alert beep beep Ego alert). Its just that no-one told me so.

Monsoon grey

I'm sitting down with some paints and a sheet of blank paper. My current living room is a study in understated 90's elegance. Well, for a shell of an apartment, at least.

The floors are pale cream mosaic, the good kind. The walls are cream too, and the lighting is ornate. Furniture is sturdy and well made, some kind of sheeny expensive wood. There is no art on the walls, save a painting of cranes in the marshes - a blue and white soothing still life.

Amidst the mildy incongruous modern touches like a flat screen television, a space-agey heating device and an extravagantly crafted glass bowl centerpiece, there is a lamp that I have grown to love. A fishing pole meets the hunchback alien probe kind of lamp, strangely grounded in a hunk of marble.

On days like this, where the skies are monsoon grey, and the pool is limpid and quiet, and the fairy lights across the green areas are switched off, I pull one of the heavy chairs towards the lamp by the window, drag the side table so I can plonk my feet on it, and I feel a quiet happiness.

I wish you were here so you could be a part of this fleeting monsoon grey joy day. But wherever you are, I hope you are happy.

***
I don't really listen to much Coke Studio, but this one, which G has sent to me, is an excellent mid-afternoon rainy day song.

Sonu Kakkar and Vishal Dadlani - Coke Studio, Season 2, Episode 1: Madari

Many things have happened

Many things have happened:

For one, there isn’t a general one size fits all truth out there. So to those of whom I said, I’ll see you in the real world (because you know, the truth, you know is, like, out there, you know, like) – uhm, I didn’t find it, and I didn’t meet you in the real world.  Talk about spectacular let-downs.

Weirdly enough,  though I didn’t go looking for a specific truth, but a more well-defined, all rounded,  all encompassing- why am I on this planet-how do I save my soul and do I believe in rock and roll- type truth, I only learned a few important specific life truths. I did not learn any general truths.  I tend to reiterate a lot these days.

Truths from a half-year of travelling, city-hopping and non-blogging:

1) There will always be creepy crawly stuff in the water.  Swim/snorkel anyway.  If possible, do not read Matterhorn, it will make you forever incapable of training yourself to face leech ridden environments.

2) Smile at immigration officials.

3)  Ask and you will receive. 

***

Many things have happened:

Mostly good, very few not good. It has generally been an excellent of times.  Given such general all-round pleased-with-life-ness, I have made yet ANOTHER big decision.

And it is this: I guess I wanted something more fun.

This, this now and here, it doesn’t feel right. There’s always this sense of deprivation, no?

I want to roam streets if I feel like it at 3 pm. I want to be non-corporate. I don’t want to do timesheets. I want to read with the luxury of a lot of time. I want to make and drink a lot of tea. I want to wear orange clothes to work, shut down my computer at 6:00 pm and go out and learn a language or swim or bake or read a judgment or write!  If it rains, I want to go out and splash. I want to be wrapped up completely in my thoughts. 
I want to think.
I want to not sit at a computer all day. I want to be a veryusefulperson. I want to create and contribute.  I’d really like to set a goal and achieve it on my own. A big huge difficult goal. Not atention to detail – that is NOT my goal. NO NO NO NO NO.

I want to wake up and feel like there is a very definite reason why I am doing what I do. If I don’ t have that reason, I want to stop doing it – just like that – poof.  

***
Many things have happened:

Making the decision to quit is surprisingly easy. Making a decision to walk away from some parts of your life, a windy city, a few impossibly good and close friends, a darling flatmate, cupcakes, artisanal coffee, possibilities of grey winter coats with a just-right neck flap, boots, very short clothes and yellow fluffy cardigans, the freedom that comes with a tube pass, a life of unexpected discovery and minor adultifying inconveniences; walking away from all of this is not easy, but it is not impossible either.  So I have decided to walk away.

Walking away from someone else is also not impossible but nearly not as pleasant and bittersweet or fluffy. So I have not. I have walked back in.

The next few months, I will upheave myself all over again. (Again, dammit, again). I will move cities and phone numbers and archive parts of my wardrobe and fill it with transient fabrics once again. Before that, I will have to travel some more, shop in abandon, jump continents, embrace jet-lag, say good-byes, plan and attend a wedding, say hello to agents and landlords, and start all over. I don’t wear a watch anymore. I wear hats and dance with myself in my apartment. I have a new laptop (Macky). I’ve decided I love swimming. I’m in doubtful love. My life is organised to within an inch and I have perfected the smile of mild condescension. I want to scream with happiness. I listen to Caro Emerald and Mogwai and Groove Armada. Othertimes, I’m probably SNSD’s biggest Indian fan.

Some afternoons, I begin to write cover letters and update a resume and this song comes on and I purr.

Moustache tales.

Appa is growing his moustache again!

I'd like to believe that my father is the most good-looking, charming person in our family (until I), and the moustache (which I've never seen him without) only added to his charm and general sense of wholesomeness. I could never imagine appa without a moustache, and I didn't know how attached he was to it, till he sat my cousin down, when he started to grow facial hair, to advise him on the merits of having a moustache. :)

And then October 2009 happened and Appa had to shave his moustache. Later, every few weeks I would say to him, "So, are you going to re-grow the moustache?"
It takes the attention off of the bald-head I reasoned, it makes you look evil if you don't have one, I insisted and your face looks angrier, I told him, without the moustache.

He refused stubbornly, every single time. And I let it go after about eight months or so. We have moved to griping about weightier issues.

Today, I saw him on skype after two weeks, and he'd re-grown his moustache. There really isn't a story to spin here, an elegant recorded moment of bereavement humour or even a note of poignant shock for three seconds when I opened that video call window.

I'm just very very happy.

As hard as it has been for me to [.] my mother, it has been infinitely more difficult for my dad to have [.] her. Our struggles in dealing with the events of Oct 2009 are similar, but our contexts are vastly different. I cry when an email from her email id shows up in gmail search results, but he finds old love letters from when they were engaged while spring cleaning. My cupboard in London is thankfully memory-free, but he shares his cupboard space with a set of shelves that used to hold blouses and matching saree petticoats, but now hold bed linen and spare towels. I carry around in my jewellery box a ring that my mother bought for me once, but its well hidden and mostly obscured by crap from Oasis and Topshop. My dad though, glances at the dressing table at home everyday, which still holds a half-empty bottle of perfume (the maid sweetly picking it up, cleaning the table, and placing it in the same place as she has been instructed to do). The mirror has a bindi she stuck on it the last time she was able to walk to the bathroom and shower by herself, but in London, I have no sticker bindis in the shape she used to favour.

And so we struggle, in everyday bits and pieces and we have been getting better, but there are days when I have felt that only I was getting better and my dad, in that house, in that city, in that bedroom and that kitchen, was never able to move on as I have.

Today I am just happy.

At the end of a week-long series of events to celebrate a milestone, of sorts, (the milestone, not the events), a great many things have happened. One, is that the blog and its existence has repeatedly come into question, its ability to put me in touch with strangers, (though, gentle readers they may be) has also come into question. The purpose of existence, as it were, has come into question, albeit gently and casually and in a much more nuanced manner than one could have hoped for (nuances being ever so tricky to negotiate). Publicly admitting to trials and tribulations, (the kinds involving staplers, smoothie bottles and fingers, workdays that sap you of the will to be social and active, thick nib fountain pens, exquisite headaches from glasses of fine champagne at very many kinds of christmas parties and approaching nri-in-christmas- dejection, the days when more bots or clients email you than real people, or the days you reason with yourself if milk can really _not_ be used beyond the expiry date on the bottle, trays 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 on the printer, the unignorable red blinking light on the blackberry, the dreaded cough-y cold-y, sneezy voice of a parent many miles away, the stray full weekend of time slipping away gently in unordained and nonpremeditated morsels of virtual connection, the misery inducing time difference, dirty dishes, lack of cute men, ripped buttons, eyeholes and eyelets of  disappointment, the unavoidable scraping away of grand dreams, replaced instead by regular sized bites of achievable goals and grand (in name only) no sugar, double shot, cappucinos) has come into question, and mostly, the I-blog-because-I-need-to-write-in-one-way-or-another approach has come into question.  As you may perhaps know, one is generally more sensitive to these questions around a birthday. One has spent a lot of time over fourth glasses of martinis looking for answers to these questions in the faraway sparkle of xmas decorations and the closer up tart in the shiny sequinned dress.

Was there a list? (An 'everything I will have achieved by 25' list.)
Yes, yes of course there was, and it was (in retrospect only) a highly unrealistic, overly simplistic, list compiled in the most confident and cocky of moments.

Fall in love, Be famous, Travel, etc.

Looking ahead, I have decided I am not going to make a five year plan. I know what I need to do, and I am going to go do it, and if I fail, I shall have done it, and I shall do it no more. And I will find something else to do. And its as simple as that.

The crucial life lesson learnt, I think (and I did think about this deeply) is that there is time. And it will work out. It has to.

***
I'm continuously tweaking the template because I am looking for some measure of personable identity here, and it is rather elusive in its design.

***
Over this happy happy birthday week past, one of the best memories I have (not withstanding the stunning walks down the docks of Barcelona, the dazzling cocktail bars in succession, the food and the food and the cake and the books) is the BFF directing me downstairs in the midst of a busy Thursday afternoon at work for a belated present of angel cake cupcakes with creamcheese frosting and a vivd green birthday message. Definitely a bookmarkable moment for life.

***
I went to the opera! They sing when they speak! All very magical!