Movies!

A close-to-140-decibels sound blasting into my ears whilst watching a movie in the Dolby-Digital Movie halls have been my childhood nightmares. Not that I did not watch movies [ I used to watch movie marathons on television since school ] but theatres were what I used to shy away from. Gradually my love for movies helped me overcome this nightmare... and with the help of a Crocin followed by a good night's sleep , I learnt to live with the excruciating headaches and the sick, nauseating feeling that theatres gave me.

What is so special about movies you might wonder... Here's what I think is the answer !

Movies let you live in a virtual world... not our own...

This new world could be close to what you live in or you may want to live in but looks like a distant possibility!

Every movie is like a novel. But with one major difference. In the novel, the writer gives you the liberty to soak in as much of the book as you can and make your own picture of the whole story. But when it comes to a movie, its as if this book was read by the director and he is directing you to look at it his way. We may like his style of picturing it or not.

To me movie gives me as much pleasure as reading a book [Maybe a little less]. Its one life we have, in which we try to live many through these movies.

Questions?

When, you get out of bed , do you hate to see the light of the day? Or do you feel envigorated at the start of a new tomorrow?

If the second is true, you would ask , do i need to do anything else ?

If , however, the first is true ,
May be its the people around you ...
May be its your work that you do ...
The food you eat...
The music or its beat...
probably you are really unhappy with how things are plating out for you.
So what do you do?
Cry about the dark and its hue?

I always thought that we could do something new or different to keep ourselves happy. We could shop, eat , travel and pray to stay happy. I never thought there would ever be gloom if we wanted to be happy.

But somehow, its probably not always that way. Sometimes in life you just cannot be happy. Whatever you do, how much you try . There will always be a cool soothing breeze in the scorching heat of a summer afternoon but will never stay. It goes as quickly as it comes.

I donot know what you could possibly do in that situation. Probably still looking for an answer to this question, i am?

Back to B-town !

The city of my dreams... one place I really have come to love!
Bangalore, I am so back :D...

Probably the one reason I did not like Pune was because I love this place so much. And now that I am back, days seem blissfully brighter and nights comfortably colder... I laugh and smile just like good ole days ... Being a butt of all jokes didn't feel so good in last six months as now... Everytime I go back to those lanes, my heart tells me its still the same and mind so agrees to it...
I don't think I have been as happy as this since college.

Every breath sounds fresher, every tune sweeter...
Who could possibly mind either !
Was it you ,Bangalore, who called me heither?
Or was it the universe coming together !

You rock my world!

Every day when I hear my morning alarm, I feel like drowning it into the deepest of oceans. [On afterthoughts, its my cell that holds the alarm in its womb and parting with my cell :O Impossible! ]

Drooling, I pull my head out of the pillow, hands pushing the mattress down[as if it would help] to help me out of my bed. My hair crazily curling on my head as if Medusa's snakes : cursing myself for being a mess , I manage to get to my feet. And before i even pop the toothbrush in my mouth, I have the headphones plugged in my ears. [I have forgotten how the world around me sounds]. The only sounds I know are of the MP3 player and the FM channel. I tune in to one of the frequencies and its my favourite song :D!!! I grin like an idiot, as if a child getting his Lollypop.

I do not know about others but to me music is life! Every song down that playlist of mine are delicately picked and woven into a beautiful necklace of songs.

Sometimes it amazes me how music would have come to being. Rock , RnB , hip hop, rap , classical , folk , punk.... God ! so many of them!!! And every one has its new flavour to it! As if one dish made by different cooks. All they throw into the pan is the same... but what comes out are varied looking , pleasant smelling and all equally tempting delicacies that we get to pick from.

Like the salty ones make you go cranky and the sweet get you high, one kind of music sets your foot tapping and the other makes you swirl. Ofcourse its upto you what you choose , but the platter is always full!

Love Music!

Its a new House!

Today is gonna be my 1st day in my 1st independent flat [rented though]!
This Bryan Adams' creation goes out to today, to me and my new abode!

Here I am, this is me
There's no where else on earth i'd rather be
Here I am, just me and you
Tonight we make our dreams come true! :D
Its a new world , its a new start
This life is a beating of young hearts
Its a new day , its a new plan
I am waiting for you!
Here I am :D:D:D:D

Late?

The clock strikes 7.30. I am in my room putting random things in my bag. I donot remotely remember if I use them ever in office and neither do I know why I pull them out of my bag each day after I come back home. But all the same, I do this activity as the clock irritatingly ticks into my ears and the tick becomes louder with each passing millisecond.

I am still to have my breakfast . My head is abuzz with the thoughts of the office bus zooming past the stop before I make it there. So, I unhealthily stuff the I-would-have-loved-to-sit-idly-and-gorge-on-it breakfast into my mouth in between sips of boiling hot tea. The tea helps push it down my pharynx as I keep hoping that it gets pushed down the oesophagus and not block my wind pipe and choke me to death. I dump the plate and the cup in the sink with a crash that makes everyone at the breakfast table jump off their chairs. I dash out of the house, pulling my bag up on one shoulder. I run through the lane, with my bag flying behind me. The old couple walking hand in hand, reminiscing their good ole days, can not help giving me cold looks as I run through them throwing them on either sides of the oh-so-narrow lane. They are more soar than Gandhi was at the Indo-Pak partition! And when I reach the stop I see the bus not on the approaching side of the stop , so I impulsively look in the other direction. And there I see it! I cup my hand on my mouth, eyes popping out, one hand pulled out high in the air! The other hand comes off my mouth to let it yelp after the bus and my legs burst into an already lost race to catch the bus. Passers-by on the road give me a dejavu look, as they are tired of getting shocked at a girl crying out after the bus [it has already been two months now to the same old story].

My insides start aching all of a sudden making me realize that there has been far too much activity down the tummy and I could throw up any moment! Panting and puffing but not puking, I reach the local bus stop where I stretch my hand out for a tumtum which stops and stops for long .... to dump in many more I-missed-the-bus-by-a-fraction-of-a-second employees. And in the exodus of people jammed into this small carriage, a collegue spots me screams out my name [otherwise you seriously cannot be heard in that torture chamber] and asks, "LATE ?"

Lakshmi : Part II

Now she took her pallu, wiped the sweat off her brow and got ready to hit the right keys. It was hot outside but not in there. I thought it was like ‘the hero wipes his mouth with his dirty left hand before he gives the villain the knock-out punch’ build-up, so I comfortably ignored. I had just started to dictate when she stopped me. “No Madam, I will do it!” And from then on, she never stopped talking. Right from how-hot-it-was-these-days till how-dumb-are-they-to-ask-you-to-get-such-clauses-on-a-stamp-paper. In between all this, she would pull her pallu from below her right elbow, take its one end in her hand and keep wiping her face as if rivers of sweat were running down her brow. Actually, by now, the room was so cold with the AC blasting right above our heads that such reaction looked completely uncalled for. It was more of a habit than a need I realized.

I must accept the fact that she had an amazing typing speed. Her fingers just glided over the keyboard covering the entire circumference and hitting the right key on every instance. That too without looking at the keyboard. She gave me the occasional see-how-good-I-am look along with her full-toothed grin and I reverted back with an I-am-clapping-but-its-in-my-head look. All this went on amidst her chanting the contents of the printout which I had by now read a hundred times. Whenever she saw my bored face, she would shoot back saying," You must always proof-read Madaam.... once we print it no, nothing can be done!" Again the mandatory grin and then back to work.

This went on for sometime till she suddenly realised that I was intently looking at the keyboard. Actually I was absent-mindedly staring at the keyboard and nothing else, but I did not bother telling her that. She said, “Do you know typing?” This question was thrown at me so ‘suddenly’ that I could only manage a WHAT? look. And without asking any further she took off, as by now the GURU in her had taken over. And before I knew, I had got into this ‘Typing in Microsoft Word’ training by Madame Lakshmi. “So let us start from the scratch”, she said as an afterthought. “Have you ever used a computer?” I looked at her, with my eyes bulging out as though they will fall off the sockets any movement and with my jaw almost dropping down to my chest. Looking at my [over] reaction, she [according to her] corrected herself, “Now-a-days toh naa, everybody know how to use computers! But you know you should, no, know Word.” I was so disappointed. After having slogged it out for four years in engineering college, when someone tells you that you are one of ‘everybody', you see your four not-as-tough-as-they-sound engineering years, being mercilessly wiped off from your memory . But even though I was down, I was not out. I told her I had worked on Word before. “You know what CNTRL J does?” and I truthfully said no. I was feeling miserable by now. Just Imagine!!! You tell someone you know something and that person pops up exactly that question which you do not have an answer for . Now that I had convincingly failed to convince her, the session became mandatory for me.

At first I could not get to terms with the fact that this was actually happening to me. But gradually I kind of started enjoying it. She told me stories [I do not know how many were true, though I felt like believing in all] of how she impressed some relatives who had come over for lunch with these ‘short-cuts’ of hers [Word’s, to be honest]. Though she was trying to show off her skills big time, there was this child-like innocence in each word she said, from which I could not turn away. Finally she finished her typing. Now, she needed to take a printout on Ledger paper. So she started hunting for that. She carelessly lifted all the papers that were scattered over her cramped-up table making it all the more impossible for the ledger paper present, if any, to make itself visible. The peon came to her rescue. He, like Flash [the comic book], started zipzapping from one room to other room of office, much to everyone’s displeasure but me. I was finding the whole scene amazingly funny. Lakshmi yelled out after him, “Arre Sanju, tum aisa kyun karta hai…Dheere se kaam karo!” Then she turned to me, and almost caught me giggling under my breath. I somehow ate my smile and faced her with a somber expression just to get screeched into my ears "He no, always keeps running!! Even when there is no need to….." And then she again set out after him. Finally the triumphant peon emerged out of nowhere with a whole bundle of ledger paper and Lakshmi appreciatively took it. She took a printout immediately and started checking the final draft again. It was more than just work to her. It was like her brainchild and as she looked on I wondered whether every successful assignment gave her as much pleasure as this had. The happiness was evident on her face.

She had derived great pleasure out of a small work that she had done and she looked content with it. Lakshmi was beaming looking at the draft and it was kind of contagious, as I too could not help smiling looking at her. She said that [the mandatory] if I faced any issues I should come back to her and she will be more than happy to help. But when she said that, I knew she meant it. A thank-you smile was all that I could manage then. As I got down the stairs, I thought why I felt so nice meeting this lady. Probably because she had in turn given me a reason to smile. A rendezvous to remember. A reason to write. A subject to blog.

Lakshmi- Part1

I love meeting people. I love to observe how people talk, walk, mock [just put it coz it rhymes ;)]. I feel like a little child who is blindfolded and left all by herself in the garden. A garden which is flooded with different flowers whose shape, size, colour I do not know. All I know is that mélange of sweet fragrances that adorn the air. And even if one flower were to be less in the garden, probably it would not have been the same. Every one of us is like that garden. Just that the flowers are different.

Last week, I happened to realize that I had some “legal” issues to put my head into. Now let your mind not race in the wrong direction. Neither am I suing any one nor am I getting sued. It was some stupid stamp paper which I had to get notarized. So I innocently took a printout and gave it to my aunt. [FYI…she is a lawyer so by default my legal [and otherwise] advisor] It was like a turning-the-tables-evidence being produced in the court [I am a lil scared of my advisor, u see] And as I had hoped, she jumped on me like a ferocious lil tigress. “Why is this not typed on ‘ledger’ paper?” she said. I could not help thinking that it was ‘laser’ and my aunt might be pronouncing it wrong. I know its lame and I told myself the same. I put my left hand in my mane [my hand almost getting entangled in my hair] and scratching my head lightly, I asked her “Laser?”[One eye closed, other almost closed…. ready for the next attack] Looking up from the top of her spectacles, with a do-you-think-I-don’t-know look, she said authoritatively “Ledger paper”. Still confused, asked her ,”Ledger as in Heath Ledger?” Everyone just burst out laughing, leaving me scratching my empty head and making me realize over and over again that the head my shoulders were supporting, was really really light.

Sorry for the digression. Back to the topic. My aunt ordered me to go to her colleague’s office to do the needful. I was to ‘report’ to Lakshmi, the typist. After walking in that scorching sun at 11 in the morning, zigzagging my way through all the I-am-fooling-around-because-its-Sunday people on the road, I reached the office which was in one secluded corner of the building. The office door was wide open as I stepped in. When I entered I saw a lady with I-am-from-Kerala written over her face. And the very warm and wide, full-toothed smile that she gave me, was a confirmation of all sorts. Then she gave me are-you-the-one look and before I had finished yes-I-am nod, she turned to her boss and yelped “Saar, she is Hegde Madaam’s niece”. It made me jump out of my skin but Padma was happy to have passed that information to her boss who obvious pressed for details. He was a big old fellow with diminishing ocular and hearing senses. It took some time till he asked what is your name, whose daughter, where do you stay et al only to end saying “Oh Sneha! Now I remember”. Then I was sent back to Lakshmi .

Lakshmi. She was wearing a clean, ironed, but crushed-while-commuting-in-the-train, cotton saree. It was white with a light pink border and small flowers of the same pink scattered over the whole of it with a matching pink blouse. A gold chain rolled around her neck, which she kept fidgeting with. She wore little gold buttons for earrings which went very well with her golden-rimmed spectacles, big aviator glasses to be precise, and gave her the 1960s look. She seemed glad that I was back. She made me sit next to her as she carefully closed all the word documents that were scattered on her computer screen . Then she opened a new one for me, started naming it... looked at me and said “Hegde?” and grinned from one ear to other, “No madaam, we will name it Sneha!” She was a female, happy with her self. I wondered if there was anything in the world that could dampen her spirits.

enroute Bangalore

January, the 7th......it was twenty hours forty......I got a call...I missed it... For those who do not know me, I generally dont pick my phone at one go.After a regular 1 to 2 hours of how-much-I-miss-college sessions with Pooja[P from here on],I put the receiver to rest....Before I could sink into ma bed, I checked my cellphone to know how many calls I had missed....:) And I saw Yashoda's missed call[Y from here on]...
We had been classmates for 4 years in college but were never the back-slapping,punching-you-in-the-ribs types friends, so her missed call set me thinking. It was 11.30 when I had checked The Call, but knowing the kind of nocturnal animals we engineers are , I did not hesitate to press the call back button. The phone rings and then somethings are yelled into my ears and my mind goes numb with excitement.....We Got Our Joining!!!
Next few days were abuzz with phone calls,parents yelling how careless and slow we were ,coordinating all the stuff we had to do, saying ciao to all friends....hunh!!!And finally on 18th of January,4 of us P,Y,Saurabh[S from here on] and me ofcourse ....all starry eyed 'New Joinees' set out on a trip that was the start of one of the most memorable journeys of my life!

Life in a 'To-be' Metro

Somehow from the day i got placed with Wipro,I knew i was destined to be here in the city of Bangalore...Sorry Bengaluru :P ... And to be very honest I was very excited about it ...



but the day I stepped in... my excitement kinda started sapping.

Day one :

We travelled by bus to B[bangalore from here on] and it was one 'hell' of a journey...there was this Couple right behind us who spoke nothing but Kannada!!! With my meagre knowledge of the same, we told them not to yell every time we move the chair behind but either my kannada was bad enough or they didnt want to stop whining that they kept cribbing all through the journey....

As a result, we got out of the bus all sore at our joints.....


We that is me,Y and P were going to stay at my cousin's place till we found a house in the city and our friend Saurabh[S] decided to stay with his school friend for a while.So, when we got down at the bus stop, my brother was waiting to pick us up. We waited at the bus stop, we and my brother figuring out how many entries and exits the bus stop [better known as MAJESTIC] had. Finally,when we were almost sure that we will never meet my brother ever, his face popped up from nowhere and we had not loved to see anybody else's face all our life as much as his at that moment. His friend had got his car to pick us up at the bus stop. It was a brand new Indigo in maroon shining in the sun.....Somehow its shine got a lil dim when it saw the truckloads of luggage that Y,P and me had got[I top the list when it comes to excess luggage.....never do I travel light]....With bags in the dickey, with bags on our laps, bags on my brother's lap,bags on our backs [basically there were bags in the cars and they had been merciful enough to give us some place to fit in our backsides ]...All hot and sweaty, we reached our destination....huh!!!


After a very much needed bath, as we lazed around in my brother's house,we sent him to slog it out in his office...We got hold of his remotes[thanks to set top boxes(dunno why they are called that) we needed to fiddle with multiple remotes...]Finally after a long battle with the the remote, we could switch to SAB tv and started watching Taarak Mehta ka ulta chasmah...We happily giggled our way through the serial only that the giggles went on becoming softer and softer. The tiring journey was taking its toll. I turned to ask if I could change the channel[it was a good question,we could have again lost the little that was going on too] just to see P and Y crumbled into the huge blue sofa with their glasses on and snoring softly, though the TV was on ;)I softly stole from my place,gently took their glasses off[somehow at that moment, even if would have shaken them off their improvised beds, they wouldnt have woken up] and went into the bedroom to catch a forty winks. But I donot have this habit of sleeping in the afternoon.....so was up before I could complete four :(

I had switched off the TV so there was no way [according to me] that I could swtich it on. I drew a pack of cards from my back-pack and started playing patience. After I had lost all my patience to 'PATIENCE' , I walked back to the kitchen to make myself tea. This was one more punishment I was inflicting upon myself as I make amazingly bad tea. But as there was nothing else to do, so be this. I went, I made, I drank.[puking face] Still Y and P were not showing any signs of budging. I decided to do NOTHING. I had 6600 which didnot have a radio nor a inbuilt music player[Obviously I had put a version version ogg player on it]. I had not got my headphones along[I instinctively knew I was going to buy a new cell here, so I didnot bother much]. Now I couldnot play the music aloud for these ladies might have held me with my neck and shaken me till my choking looked 'not-nautanki' to them and they mercilessly would have thrown me on the floor as if I was a bag of dirt[a big one,mind you!],so I quit that thought as well. Now it was just me and my half dead cell phone looking at each other, me with when-will-these-lazy-bones-on-the sofa-get-up' look.

Finally,after an hour or so,Y started showing signing of atleast rolling off the bed. But she quickly poised herself and rolled further into it. False hope. Out of boredom, I started arranging the things on the dining table in a different fashion[my bhabhi looked both baffled and irritated about that later].I tend to do such arranging rearranging stuff very often.Sometimes it makes me realize that I am crazier than what I think I am. Then when I was arranging the bottles of pickle in the descending order of their heights[all the more crazy],suddenly I heard a whisper.I had by then become so used to the Quiet around me,that it completely freaked me out .I had almost dropped the smallest jar of pickle off the table but then the cricket-ka-jasba in ma wont let me drop it and with a one handed full-stretch across the table[making all the other things on the table jerk dangerously enough to fall] i saved the lil one. And all thanks to Y getting up when i least expected her to.

P also somehow managed to drag herself out of the sofa soon. And now all four of us had nothing to do but stare at each others faces as if they were the most well-sculpted on this living planet. Suddenly out of the blues,we remember we were being charged a fortune as roaming charges and now that we had nothing to do we better get new sim cards atleast. I rang up my cousin,it was going to be good long two hours before he could head back home,so we decided to take a leap into this latest venture of ours.

We got down and then I took both of them to show the badminton court[it was my brother's and his alter ego PR's favourite hang out and when me and my sis had come last year, it became ours too] I had this stupid I-WAS-HERE expression on my face. Then we got out on the streets . Not Surprisingly,there were 4 speed-breakers on the road over a stretch of hundred metres[doesnot qualify to be a road honestly,it was a tar road improperly made]. My brother had already told us that the localites there had put those speed breakers so that the kids dont play cricket there[how mean!!!] But the nevertheless managed to dogde the speedbreakers and play!!!

Then we roamed around the small lanes around his house,found out what all documents we needed for the sim and by the time we were almost done ,PR called.He was waiting outside the house [as we had locked it]. He had come down for a match of badminton so we hurried back home. By the time we had reached, my brother was back and, with PR,was all geared up for the match. So, me and PR teamed up against Y and my brother while P as usual was busy on the phone ;P....

We played and listened to loads and loads of Y's and some of PR's amazingly bad PJs. After the game,PR left and by then bhabhi was back[i generally call her by name,but have to show some respect in public;)] We all went out to eat at a good Punjabi joint[Punjabi Rasoi].When my brother drove us back home, there was no electricity. So me,Y,P and Ami .....sorry bhabhi went to the terrace.It was dark and the sky was looking beautiful.The stars were spraying the stardust on to us and in that flickering 'star'light,we went on talking.

It was when the lights suddenly went on that we realised it was quite late. We went back to our house to find that my brother had already made our beds ready. The beds were so inviting that we just collapsed into them.Tomorrow was going to be a long day as we had our reporting at wipro that day. Setting our alarms to 5.30a.m., we succumbed to the silence of the night.