The Five Loves of My Life

First of all, this blog isn’t a list of things which I like because for one lists are girly and second of all (irrespective of the trouble that I have gone through writing about the stuff which I actually like when it would have been remarkably easy for me to write about stuff which I hate) these five things or six maybe for I am still thinking just happen to be striking at all doors in my mind and there maybe probably another five or six more of them lurking just around some uncharted corners and I will get to them when I am ready to face them but as for now these whatever number of things represent perhaps everything that I love now in my life though I have kept my family and friends out of it more so because my friends are nothing but an absolute bunch of jerks and having not seen my parents for about six months and sitting at least two thousand miles away I do not want to talk about. Secondly and more importantly this isn’t a disclaimer and even if it feels like one it isn’t and lastly and more importantly this isn’t a bunch of advice that I am dispensing because I don’t give advices at least for free and that too on the internet where almost every blogger thinks of himself as the next Deepak Chopra in the making.

Well let me begin with the first love of my life, the trains not the those teeny weenie train set ones but the big real one with huge blue carriages and blue upholstery, red engines and oily black fans which seldom work. My love for trains has nothing to do with the pseudo psychotic serial killer on lose decapitating innocent passenger in their sleep kind of stuff which our Hindi movies so willfully portray though I can’t completely deny the romantic undertone and I do believe that trains can play an important role in your love story, particularly if you have a knack for conversation and making friends with the strangers but much more than that it is the prospect of journey that I l love the most, sitting by the window and staring outside at the fast fading world and wilderness just make me lose myself in this alternating landscape. It’s in a train you realize how ephemeral this life is, an instant the tree you are staring at dissolves into a cow and the another instant that cow becomes a lady with a bundle of firewood balancing on her head, if life’s a journey I would want nothing better than a train to traverse it with some book full of heavy and literary stuff lying on my lap. That brings me to my another love of life, books and when it comes to books my taste has more of a opportunist flavor for I could read anything and everything and though I have strong liking for Indian literature for I think Indian writers are in a dire need of bibliophiles like me and the way they go about Indianizing everything it’s not a wonder why though I prefer sleaziness that Sidney Sheldon so seems to be full off or the satirical rendition which seems to ooze out of everything with Salman Rushdie written on it and also if you might have guessed I like the simplicity with which Chetan Bhagat writes though I am still confused trying to decide between lack of plot or repetitiveness for his novels always have the same undertone about an underachiever sleeping with a girl a tad too beautiful for him and in the end achieving something which would seem like a rung higher than mediocrity.

My third love has to be the girls or the better and more beautiful half to our mankind, I love them irrespective of their shape and size though shorter the better and I like the ones with really, really long hairs though I have a predilection towards the ones with brutal short cut hairs and androgynous looks, perhaps it’s because of the suppressed homosexuality that we all seemed to carrying inside of us and living in a country where almost every contact whether platonic or otherwise with the opposite sex without a stamp of matrimony is frowned upon it would be no wonder if we all turned out to be people with a closet full of suppressed cravings and delinquencies.

 I forgot what the fourth one was supposed to be so I will just skip on the fifth one and that is my iPod that has off late become my life all compressed in the 80 or so gigs, if I was to be asked by the committee dispensing Nobel Prize than for sure I would for sure nominate Steve Jobs because an iPod isn’t just a music player, it’s a phenomenon which allows you to stand away from the crowd, the prospect which allows you to carry your entire life in a something which is no bigger than your palm and given the number of people walking around with a pair of white earplugs and their thumbs circling the click wheel , I for sure want to request mother nature to fit us with inbuilt iPods and a plasma screen on the insides of our eyelids.

That was all about the loves of my life, though I want to add blogging to it but blogging is more of a stress release nozzle though I love writing and blogging isn’t writing and I seriously think we all are like Hank Moody says with our LOLs and FYIs and blogging instead of writing are contributing to a slow but imminent death of English as a language. Like I said before this blog isn’t a disclaimer, if it felt like one then deal with it and also never buy an iPod if you really love your friends and better believe me on that because that’s perhaps the only piece of advice you are ever getting from me.

The Chronicles of an Exasperated Traveller

I should have written this blog a long time back has it not been for my summer break and my perspective of leaving the life behind while on vacation but after almost a week of basking in my state of abeyance and watching endless hours of sitcoms and gorging on food and sleeping, I think my resolve is running a bit low. Perhaps I need to refine my definition for vacation and strike out summer break from it. Not that I don’t have anything to do, I can clean out the stuff in my backyard for starters or hang out with my old college friends or study for my campus placements but really the lassitude and ennui that seems to fill you up on those long and sultry summer afternoons is enough to bog me down. So here I am sitting on the portico(it’s been raining since the morning so I can actually sit amidst the potted plants that my father has lovingly nurtured and stare as the rain drops make a deafening sound striking against the fiber glass sheet) and writing about a travelogue of a sort. Yeah, okay, I got it, I don’t have a life but I am not really in a mood right now to spin some apocryphal story about my sexual escapades and lately though I seem to have quite a flair for that. It’s not that boring actually, though the journey indeed was sort of excruciating but then you can’t expect much in comfort when you travel by a train and that too for all of 36 hours. Anyways like Angelina Jolie’s butt says “What doesn’t kill you nourishes you” and indeed I am nourished finding it almost impossible to sleep on anything stable and not moving. It was sort of our fault as well because we chose not to back out despite of having an unconfirmed reservation but like everyone we took happen to under estimate the obstinacy of our fellow passengers. I got to a berth to sleep though, courtesy my friend who chose to sleep on the floor and believe me I didn’t had a whisk of it until the next morning and at that instant I felt like crying and after paying full fare for the ticket and sleeping on the floor tell me who wouldn’t. I never told this to anyone but I couldn’t bring myself to sleep that night, whether it was due to the rocking motion of the train or the rhythmic and cacophonous snoring of the guy sleeping in front of me, I am yet to ascertain. I really hate the people who snore, can’t they for once got to an ENT specialist and get that bone in their nose fixed, had it not been for the distance between our berths I would have for sure given that guy a kick on his butt. I slept somehow, burying my face inside the pillow and using IPod to cancel that cacophony, praying silently for the train to not to overturn. Somehow the night materialized into a glorious sunshine and guy whom I so much wanted to kick last night turned out to be a lady with a really big bottom albeit she did have a pretty nice face. I checked myself in the mirror as I tried hard to balance myself on the pedestal and apart from my hairs pointing in all the directions and at least a couple of discernable zits everything else seemed pretty much in place, though whether those zits where really zits or mosquito bites remains to be resolved. Each of my friends were awake by that time and they too had their horror stories to share, one of them actually has to wake up to the sound of Tamil songs and to the smell of coconut oil and Ponds talc and that too at five am in the morning, thank god that those people didn’t actually start cooking. We had our breakfast, a surprisingly nice fare with omelet and toast along with some boiled water in a Styrofoam cup that we were duped into buying in the name of coffee. All fed and deodorant we all contemplated on the issue of how to spend the day, I was perhaps the only with any ideas as I took out my book and retired to my berth while my friends tried really hard to drive their laptops on to a verge of suicide as they played their various trigger happy games. One thing that I pretty well learnt was to never carry a historical and semi autobiographical book on a journey and really nothing beats the good old Mills and Boons or a Maxim. I sat there alternating my gaze between the scenes outside the window and the lady sitting in front of me, thinking about all the myriad things that seem to fill my mind at that instant. I thought about life and love or rather the lack of it, I thought about people, friends and not-so-friends, I thought about the time that I was spending in this carriage, time that I was losing with each tick and that I wasn’t going to get back. I wanted to do something but apart from staring at that lady or the other one with two kids down the aisle or staring outside at the landscape as they changed incessantly there wasn’t much that I could have I done, so I did what most people held prisoners by time do, I contemplated. We all live our lives either in the memories of the days gone by or thinking about the time to come, we never actually exist in the moment because to exist in the moment epitomes walking down the edge that separates two almost unfathomable chasms, to exist in the moment you have to forgo your thinking because to think is to lose the moment. I am sounding like a freaking philosopher now; see what thirty six hours of claustrophobia can do to you. Anyways I got down at a station or two and bought some fruits for my friend who happened to sleep on the floor not because I was feeling really benevolent towards him but because he chose to go without food that day. The bananas that I bought, almost risking a possible dereliction on that station turned out to be almost wood like with only an exterior that was remotely reminiscent of the real thing. I am going to be a laughing stock for the days to come but you can’t avoid these occupational hazards. The night came and we slept much more peacefully as we all had a seat by now and more so because ordeal was coming to an end.

I got down only to be apprehended by the ticket collector who was looking for some quick bucks on that almost sultry morning, I have to bribe my way through somehow and got myself into a state transport bus. I sat behind a lady who probably thought it was chic to show off her old and dilapidated cell phone by playing almost antediluvian songs on it. She gave me a stare or two much to the dismay of her mother in law and I was happy for the beautiful distraction. A digression here, please bear with me, this abstinence thing is taking a toll on me though you are not supposed to saying abstinence and virginity in the same breath.

I am not yet sure whether those three hours of journey in the bus was more excruciating than the train journey, whatever it may be the jelly inside my head is far from settling and the thought of another train journey is almost making me puke but perhaps this is the way life is supposed to be going and like Zahara’s mom butt says “What doesn’t kill you nourishes you”.