As I suspected, I grow more and more inward than I am expected to. Home is living out of a suitcase, and life is only just reading and music. And I have a plan. Also, there is work. Tucked away is a sheaf of paper persons not even worthy of mention. And, some thrown away also. Fake and talkative. And yes, did I mention work? There is so much to do. So much to look forward to, and yet, so much to leave behind. So many to leave behind, in fact.

There was never an easier way to let go. Closure and work. The Formula, yes.

Because I don't write regularly.

I have no clue when I began to keep my private life away from my life in public. I began thinking about this a couple of days back, when I read Mandy's recent post where she mentioned in a supranote that hers isn't a feelings blog. Somehow I feel even I have divided my life into a thoughts blog and a feelings blog. The feelings blog, however, is locked and available only to very very few people. Anyone who reads my private blog would know the kind of emotional spill I go through on a regular basis. People who aren't invited to it and read only this would readily conclude that I hardly think, and that this blog is dying.

Maybe it is. And there is nothing much I can do about it. I refuse to be angsty and wear my heart on my sleeve in public. Plus, I like being discreet, now. Also, I hardly get creative urges now-a-days. Hopefully it is just a phase.

Well, it is the Freshers' Week in college, and I cannot make myself any clearer - I don't feel like attending the crap - silly 'breaking the ice' competitions et al. Instead, I like curling up on my bed in the afternoons, and reading/watching House till I fall asleep, totally disoriented. I've missed being with myself for a longtime, and since I get the afternoons free (with afternoon classes canceled, and N staying in college because she is one of the biggies for the Freshers' events) I take full advantage of it. Yes, you could say I am unsocial. Well, I don't care.

Also, now-a-days I end of spending a lot of time with A. Studying, talking, eating, going to Oxford, reading, discussing things I cannot with anyone else. Being as politically incorrect as I can be. I think we make a great team. We have two papers to complete (one of them has been long overdue), and I am anticipating attending at least two other conferences this year. I like the adrenaline rush of talking about my work on stage, though I'm terribly afraid of it at the same time. A, on the other hand, prefers mooting to speaking in conferences. I wouldn't mind moots but I like researching better, and our college won't have a researcher test for moots. So, I doubt if I'll ever have any national/international level mooting experience because I wouldn't ever go as a speaker.

I also gave up writing a paper I really wanted to write. But I could not get myself to understand the legal propositions of the topic, and lost my sanity over it. I feel terrible giving it up, and I know it'll be difficult not regretting about it.

I shall not comment about my friends and acquaintances, here in this blog. I am really close to only a handful of people in college and they know who they are. About the rest, I am trying not to care. Among other things, facebook has become a recent addiction. Also, House. I absolutely LOVE House. And I am really really glad that A gave me the episodes. One of my closest schoolfriends has shifted to a college faraway and I won't be seeing her much of her for the next five years, I guess. Another lives just forty minutes from my college, yet we cannot meet for our erractic college hours. Another gets lonelier in our city.

And, everyday I tell myself to write to them. I want to. But I'm too lazy. Often believing that it wouldn't matter if I didn't write; we'd still stick together (which we will, I am sure). I have the most believable excuse, of course. The course in college. It is vast, though I don't take much of the academic attyachaar. But I am liking the course this semester, at least most of it. Constitutional Law I and Criminal Law are, in fact, very interesting. If only I studied regularly.

We became different people in different settings.

Aristocrats in the bathroom.
Plebeians in the kitchen.
Students on the veranda.
Adulterers in the living room.
Lovers on the dining table.
And in the bedroom partners and soulmates.

And in doing so we discovered that the greatest lovers are not those who are blessed with constancy and sameness, but those who never stop changing. Those with the gift of being different people at different times.

- Tarun J Tejpal, The Alchemy of Desire.

And if I may add, the book is overwhelming.

We are running around in circles in pursuit of the maddening season of songs and love. Just like ripples. We are in a crowd, dying to find each other. We are in each other's shoes, living each other's stories, yet we don't know us. We are dying, I think. Dying out of sight. Living on morbid whispers. Just whispers that once had the fragrance of a sunshine we basked in. You sit beside my tainted reflection and wonder why your dusks are not like your dawns, and why we use this season of careless whispers to dream and talk to our own shadows. I ask the mouth of sky inside me why it is falling and how the stars just died out. And, we let us fade away; we are being gnawed away silently by the ebony darkness we ourselves created for our comfort. We are the debris of our own hopes and dreams, deadened even more by our wishful thinking.

I think we are running around in circles in pursuit of the maddening songs and love. We are waiting for spring. We'll sail through this. We'll shine on.

Vagabond Has A Family.

When I first came here, I had a preconceived notion that there are no friends like school friends. After all, noone can ever substitute the fourteen long years of running through the colonial corridors and ending up with bruised knees, scrambling through the serenity of the green fields, and those numerous little fights.. those tears and the wildwild laughter that is still a part of our alma mater. No wonder I kept to myself during the initial days when I came here. The headphonic idiotic, you guys call me. :P I would have probably been this detached had I not met you people. Now I can proudly say that I have a set of friends here who are not just friends - they are my family.

I'm really touched at whatever you people have done yet. (yes yes, I'm sentimental :) ) You people piss me off sometimes, yes and I feel like killing you, not talking to you and hiding away into my shell again. But I know you five will be there whenever I need you ( even when I don't need you, for that matter :P ). Right from running to get coffee when I was choking on my breath to getting food for me when I'm all hungry and can't move because I've an injured knee or a temperature.. to sending a teener tiffin box full of muree when I have pet'e baetha.. even tolerating my mood swings and the bangalar paanch'r moton mukh that I make sometimes. :P I was awestruck at how you all were so concerned when I injured myself the other day. * clumsy me *. I had never expected that you mind wasting the entire morning and half of yesterday afternoon just to take me to a doctor and get the wound dressed. :) I'm so touched that I can't even express in words.

Thank you for this family that I have found in the lifeless godforsaken city...

Meanderings.

I visited the purple hills today. Well, almost. With my roommate for a morning walk. We didn't go far because there were plenty of frustrated faces in the wee hours of morning, and we certainly didn't want to get into trouble. The hills weren't as purple as I had thought them to be. And, they had no stories scribbled on them as I had imagined. Just a mesh of green, rocks and boulders. Just an endless, infinite road with no destination. A turn here and a meandering there. And a few love notes in chalk made on the road by couples eloping, perhaps. Deepak loves Priya. Or were there other names too? They are making a school near the hills too. A kind of shabby looking building it seems to me. It looks to me like a school out of Enid Blyton books. All it needs is red paint, a very strict principal and a couple of teenagers hungry for adventure.

They say there isn't much to do in this city. It's dead. Has no life of its own. Yet, as I walked on today, I found life in the purple hills. A life still undiscovered. Waiting to be found out by wanderlust. Waiting to be devoured by an odd traveller. The roads are stories. The Pied Piper that leads the way, and promises never to come back again. The hills are full of a music, a fragrance of wanderlust, of meanderings of the mind. And it scars the skin.. burns into the soul, the music, the fragrance and it explodes in your mind like a tinybluestar in the sky.

And, I tried to bury a part of me in those hills knowing well that I'll go there again and again and there will be feeble screams of me from there too. From the part left there.

The hills are alive with the sound of music, and with a story newly etched with my footprints and a childish laughter among the trees.

Chasing The Sky.

It didn't take me much time to realize that I was almost chasing the sky today when you guys egged me on to photograph the sky. The evening sky here has a charm of its own. One of the few things that keeps me grounded here. Today the orangish churning sky captivated this random photographer and I persisted to run after it. I would've lost all sense of time had you people not joked around about my weird positions trying to take the pictures.

I ran from near the auditorium where the sky looked fiery - almost as if it were on fire, to the lawn hoping to get a better view and then, to the end of the iron-concrete wall that separates the temporary campus from the other wings of the university. Everytime I moved in closer, I moved farther away from my sky. Everytime I expected to get a better picture, I lost a part of my sky. Each time I thought I had the sky in my palms I lost the fiery gleams of orange light peeping through the clouds. A little closer and I would have probably lost my marmalade sky forever.

My dreamy sky is my muse. It engulfs me. No point chasing it. No point capturing it in my starshine eyes.

monsoon.

ei dekh brishti aashbe. tor brishti te megh daaka khuub bhalo laagena?

... and somehow monsoon played upon my lips all day. i think i played monsoon about twentytimes on my cellphone anyway. yes twentytimes. reminded me of an unforgotten fragrance. bheja maati'r shugondho. somehow i love the rain. the staccato of the raindrops on the red windowpane seemed like solace that day.. the workers ran away, it was a holiday. berlin wall - the BIG wall in front of the window was all mine. i could stare at it for as long as i wanted. the canvas for my reveries. thankfully my bed is beside the window. i get to experience the rainsparks and the thunderclaps first. and my sky turns a greyish hue only for me.. somehow i love the rain. i think it rained even on the day i was born.

raindrops are happiness. the song is joy.

brishti shuru hoyegechhe? dekh bheejte gechhe aabaar!

the rain seems to have blurred it all. aah! rain music! rain music flowing from the strings of your guitar.. as you slowly strum your way into my reveries.

puro bheeje gechhe dekh!

the berlin wall was once a dead-end. it is under-construction now. and i like it when the raindrops melt onto my face as i stare at the berlin wall.

oof! ei meyetaake niye ekdom paaraa jaayena!

sometimes i keep forgetting that there is home in sight. just around the corner.

running through the monsoon
beyond the world,
till the end of time
where the rain won't hurt...
fighting the storm into the blues..
when i lose myself, i think of you..

p.s.: this picture is by me from the window of the university bus.

in search of blogsubjects.

i have been searching for blogsubjects to write on recently. yes, really. i mean there is a perpetual dearth of blogsubjects, don't you think? like there's a perpetual dearth of goodlooking, intellectual, sensible and chivalrous men. i've planned to start dating men with the aforementioned qualities but, sadly, they are hard to find. either they're taken or they don't exist. not that i've looked everyplace. i want to begin with fiji, botswana and places suchlike. in all probability, i WON'T find any goodlooking, intellectual, sensible and chivalrous men. i think they're more blogsubjects than are nicemen. but oh, bother!

anyway, where were we? blogsubjects, yes. the photo blog is easier to update, y'know. just upload a randomlyclickedpicture, put a catchy tagline and add a footnote. people are impressed at your photography skills and relatives are curious as to why you've suddenly taken to try your hand at random photography. or photography of any kind, for that matter. they treat photography as if it were rocket science, and you being a poor, little humanities student wouldn't be able to manage it. ha! so, the photoblog always has an easy update. i do have a poetry blog.. but i'm abstaining from poesy for a while. i haven't been philosophical/romantic/dark in quite sometime now. i have been making a fool of myself, though. i could write about all that in this blog, of course. or, how i get shouted at after i wake just before noon. actually, it's frustrating for my parents to have an incorrigible kid like me in the house. so, they're sending me off. to college. they could have got me married too, right? but then, no nicemen, remember? they are all extinct.

i prettymuch think i'm worse to my blog than to my parents. at least when they call me/shout at me, i tend to reply in monosyllables. i don't care to give my poor lil bloggie-doggie an update mostofthetimes. i wouldn't mind filling it up with blogthings but then.. it'll be too harsh of me, that way. so, like i said, i could fill this blogpost up with the details of a recent faux pas. in anycase, i have filled up most of it with trash. plus, ma's calling me to go off to bed. ha! there'll be nightshift kotha-barta now. about which she doesn't know. i have ranted enough.

* grins and goes offline *
* picks up phone and gives a happywappy look *