Winter sights

When we are not shivering and cursing the cold, when we are not wrapped up to our eyes or not nestled inside our apartments with the blinds pulled over.. but sitting comfortably by the window side in a cozy cafe sipping warm apple cider, munching warm toasted sandwich and gazing outside, winter sights are a rare treat and a time for some idle contemplation if you are completely by yourself..

I looked out of the window, taking note of how the terrain had changed from the version I had in mind from a similar day back in July. Its all brown and frozen now, there aren't the energetic folks doing a quick lap in the lunch hour. Back then it was like 15 days for me in this city and now its almost 7 months here but I am still an outsider-someone who gets chauffeured around but left to his own resources would probably sit down and cry at an intersection baffled and confused. But I like to think that there is still hope for me and they call it GPS!

Well coming back to the topic, I was about to describe winter only sights in this blog. So here it goes, looking outside of the window, I noticed some dry winter leaves skating on the surface of the frozen pond, playfully skidding from one end to the other. The wind would toss them on the pond and then they would be dancing on the ice trying to keep their balance. As a child I always wondered how cold would it have to get for the Naini lake to freeze completely so that we kids could just skate on it. Somehow that was my idea of super-fun. (why???)

Digressing again, When do you feel at home in a city, how long does it take?
Perhaps it depends on how you define the feeling of home.. but at the most basic level it is about comfort and familiarity. And at times its about the ability to handle the occasional curveball that comes your way. The feeling of Home springs out of strong association with-people, food, places, sports, cultural events, activities... just a myriad of things that make you warm and fuzzy inside. And it sure takes time to create those associations afresh in a new place where everyone has a different set of priorities.

Lets modify the question to a achievable level- when do you 'kind' of know a place, how long does it take?
I guess you begin to know a place when you have your personal list of favorite things in the city and you have a couple of things in your to-explore list..
Top three Kolkata picks: Ferry ride on the Ganges(super cheap/no traffic/lots of munchies at hand/peaceful), College street  and 'puchka & rosgulla' place in the neighborhood..
Top three Hyderabad picks: Go-kart track, all the Firangi Pani(s) and just the best coffee place by the secret turn somewhere in the Jubilee hills..
Memphis: ...............................................................(I really need to push myself....)

Again coming back to the topic I was about to describe another winter sight. You drive in your car and just a handful of light, fluffy and lazy snowflakes nestled cozily in the ridge of the windscreen wipers begin to fly off in the wind or to put it more poetically I'd say-begin to waltz in the wind!
Its a beautiful sight to watch snow falling, when its just waltzing around before silently settling down.As a child I used to keep peeking with anticipation through partially opened doors and windows when it became all numb and quite outside. The cold snow always filled my heart with warmth for my hometown, and even today I rejoice inwardly when the first snow covers the hills back home..
For me, looking at the emerald lake flanked by snow capped  Naini hills while sitting next to a warm 'saghad'-fire is the best winter sight and my version of 'home'...

photo credits: A fellow Nainitalian(i can't recall where I found this picture and saved it to my Naini folder)

One day at a time

With half closed eyes I look at you, only I don't look at you. I am distracted by the rotating disc of changing colors playing on the wall behind you. The changing colors are assaulting my tired senses but still I can't tear away my gaze. My peripheral vision can still sense the distracting colors and I am only too conscious of their presence..

With half tilted head, I strain my ears to listen to you, only I am not listening to you. I am ill at ease trying to identify the song playing in the bar, somewhere in the background of all the loud chatter and your talking. I have heard the song but the words elude me now and I am tormented by my inability to put my finger down on the song before it ends and gets lost in the noise..

With half curled lips, I smile at you to acknowledge your presence, only I am not there and I am searching for someone who is not there as well. I am thinking of my cluttered closet, pile of unopened documents, my laptop that shuts and restarts at its whim on my face. I am all over the place and nowhere really..

I wonder if you can see through me or you are preoccupied by your own self. You mostly look enchanted by the sound and wisdom of your own prosaic words. You are trying to tell me about life and decisions and all things big but you are all over the place and nowhere really..

"Hush..
One day at a time.. Breath in..breathe out..One day at a time.
Its a good thought when the entire year is staring ahead-one day at a time.."

You look at me quizzically, perhaps I wrecked your chain of thought with my sudden moment of clarity but I had nothing more to add. I sat through the rest of the evening listening to you speak to yourself. When we were through and I walked up to my car, with a slight winter chill running through my spine, I smiled to myself  'one evening at a time' and then we can all go home...

Reading the sky..

A lonely fluffy cloud in the perfect blue sky

Like a cryptic message left for someone down below..

Is it standing still or moving or changing slowly?

It makes you think about a celestial story but you don’t know why..

A jet of smoke trailing the airplane in the blue sky

Like a fading white tunnel..

How often do these trails intersect before fading away?

It makes you think about parallel lives, but you don’t know why..

A lonely arrogant eagle circling the blue sky

Like someone on a determined quest..

Do they soar high just to mock the tall proud hills?

It makes you think about going around in lonely circles, but you don’t know why..

With a faraway glance I always scan the blank skies

Like someone in search of answers...

Did anyone ever find answers written on the sky..?

I sometimes wish I could read your mind,but then could you read mine...

Mind's Eye

Straight face me: “If I was not a Naini girl, I would have been a Cali girl..”
Uncontrollable burst of laughter from the other end of the phone, people do appreciate a good sense of humor!

Every time I visit California I am surprised at my ‘wannabe’ streak. However this idea is not so far-fetched, you are either a city girl or a country girl (for lack of better word for all things ‘nature’).
I am just saying give me some green hills, an orange sun, foaming waters, sandy beaches and I am a very content happy person!

On my flight to LA, I was reading about the scientist Nikola Tesla and his experiments with alternating current, wireless transmission of energy and Tesla prong and I feel somewhat inclined to define happiness in terms of physics. You are in a happy state when you find your resonance with a place, person or activity. You connect at your natural frequency, you are most alive, and your mind is unconsciously taking notes (some call it memories). These memories are like an incoherent map of happiness for future reference, a collage of images and experiences frozen in space and time. (key words-incoherent, frozen)

If I was to make a time-lapse video using images captured during my recent trip, the storyboard would look something like this:
LAX airport- colorful pillars you see just before landing, busy, makeshift structures at the arrival section; LA’s palm trees along the roads, curves, always moving traffic. Hit the freeway in the black shadows of the night against the backdrop of the city light. The black shadow of a hill appears right in front of you and as you race by the hill, it recedes and flanks you on the sides. The hills like the loyal sentinels hide away the ocean; however not for long, even the dark shadows of the night cannot conceal the foamy white waves from sight. You slide down the car windows and smile as the lights of passing cars, the wind, the sound and smell of the ocean all hit you at 80mph!

DSLR geeks tell me that making time lapse videos from RAW images is a lot of work but the human brain is unique, it can store millions of memories and string them together in the most beautiful way. I can close my eyes and see the stories that emerge from the images of the peaceful setting sun at the beach, the competitive full-moon following us all the way from Santa Barbara to LA, the picture-perfect postcard town of Solvang with its foreign Dutch air, the cliff with the view of a serpentine railway track running parallel to the shore, the quite ranches and big houses cleverly hidden behind tall trees.

Hopefully all the driving and parking lessons along the way will also stay in my head, at least till the driving test. Here I am completely banking on my Mind's eye!

Living alone

I guess I should keep an updatable memoir to keep an account of my experiences of living alone for the first time. Yes I belong to the set of the people who romance the idea of first time. The second time is never like the first! (end of discussion)
This will be like a record of the lessons learnt or changes in behavioral patterns.  So here goes the first moment of truth.

1. Living alone makes you cruel!
You no more have the King Arthur roommate who singlehandedly slays the army of multipedes that
invade your living space-the creepy insects with beady eyes in shady corners. You no more have the luxury to be saved, you have to pick up the arms and fight your own devils.
Within a week of moving into my apartment, I have already killed two cockroaches. One brutally drowned in hot water and the other beaten to death. I still have to deal with one dead body when I go back home.
My apartment manager tells me matter of fact, ma'am this is the wild South not the Mid-west.
Well I survived the East without killing a beast, (except for an unfortunate lizard which got squeezed between the door hinges and barred me from entering the room till the last trace of the remains was gone- ofcourse the room mate arranged for that). What memories!
This episode became more gory than intended, but hopefully the next will be uplifting.

2. Living alone makes you 'double-check' your every action..(07/07/2013)
'Dobuul check' is a phrase that I learnt in Kolkata, every time I would run a script or execute a query my team mate was in the habit of asking me to 'dobuuul check'. Well he was in the habit of asking everyone to dobuul check everything in life..
I remembered him, as I got out of my bed at 2am at night to just double check that I had bolted the door. Although I remembered clearly of having done so, I still choose to dobuul check.
I was never the person to check if the cooking gas regulator was closed at night or the doors were latched, there was always someone else to look after these errands. Also if this 'someone' was not around to do the same, I slept and woke up just fine with no care about the door or the gas regulator or anything else.. Now sadly the 'dobuul check' module is loaded, although slightly buggy...


3. GoodNight-GoodMorning system break-down..(11/11/2013)
If you can fall off asleep at night as soon as you get into the bed and close your eyes. Life is good.
If you can wake up at the sound of your alarm without getting too 'alarmed’. Life is good.
Needless to say that life is not good when the above 'ifs' don't hold true. Now there might not be a direct correlation between GoodNight & GoodMorning system break down scenarios and living alone but I do see a pattern.
I have come to realize the importance of the ‘good-night’ chat for a good sleep.
Back in the engineering days when we were not copying assignments, a bunch of us would be huddled together watching ‘Friends’- lack of resources for the communal watching. And as you walked back to your room with your roomie, you had the 5mins of good night chat about ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’.
Kolkata & Hyderabad followed the same pattern, though Kolkata was more fun-it was the time to curse the fools at work- ‘the today’ and making weekend shopping plans ‘the only tomorrow you cared for’.
MBA good night chats were about ‘submissions for today’ and ‘assignments for tomorrow’ at least for the first year.
The point is these ‘today-tomorrow’ chats gave a closure to the day and I could snore away peacefully having told all the stories/complains that I wanted to tell for the day!
Now when I find myself struggling to sleep, I have to pick up the phone and think of the nocturnal people I know. So living alone makes you understand the value of nocturnal friends to complete your ‘GoodNight’ ritual.

 Same is true about the morning ritual, at least for lazy people like me. Sometimes you come across another lazy soul like you and you instantly sign the most sanctus unspoken agreement about waking up late in the morning without ‘feeling guilty’ about it.  There is unconditional moral support when you miss morning class, show up late at work or improvise a super lazy Sunday morning record, and in some instances a partner in crime!
There are virtues of an early riser roommate as well, occasionally her goodness rubs on you and you have a proud day in a month! She is also your safety net when you fall too deep in slumber on an important morning.
Living alone you have to perform both the above roles by yourself to keep the ‘GoodMorning’ system running smoothly..- Not an easy task!
 

Walls vs Doors & Windows

Doors and windows are more eloquent than walls.

Walls stand silently for their entire life-they don’t move, they don’t make funny noises of their own but I have come across many a creaking doors and windows in my life. The best the walls can muster is to fail to block out the outside noise; however each door and window has its characteristic voice-the sound of unlatching and then the sound of force as it snaps open. You can also sense seasonal modulation if you are living in a place that receives heavy rainfall (moisture rich environment).

Walls stare back at you blankly, you don’t gaze at walls and ceilings unless you are really sad and then also the best the walls can muster is their stoic disposition-unaffected gaze. Walls hide away things- block them away from sight.
Walls define space; doors and windows represent a possibility to look beyond the confines of your space. Walls represent inflexible boundaries; doors and windows represent flexibility and freedom..

There are a lot of differences that one can create and write about but essentially the question is when do you create walls to shut out people and when do you leave a door or window of hope ajar?

photo credit sr
After a lot of knocking she finally sent me some pictures from her recent Jaipur visit.
Interestingly Jaipur is a perfect example of how walls(Jaipur city wall) with its seven gates(doors) and windows(hawa mahal) together give the city its unique character- Padharo mhare des!

Gravity

If there was a competition for the most popular word in October, my money would be on 'Gravity'. Let’s keep the rules simple, we decide popularity just based on online count of a word most used/searched/hash-tagged in October.

Just for curiosity sake I googled the string 'most popular word' but it looks like this pageantry has not yet made its debut. Imagine if there was a stock index for words based on the trading (conversations) we do as a society; we have been trading money and words for ages but the written and spoken word has no real (quantifiable) value. We could change all that!
I'll leave this bizarre idea to rest at this point and assuming that a competition did exist, this is why I would vote for gravity. Recently the word gravity pulled me in the following three ways:

• The movie Gravity ( the movie will get all the credit for bringing the 3D spot light on the lowly word gravity and getting all the online votes for our champion word. The movie is an impressive visual treat, kudos to the power of imagination and the hard work to execute it)
• FedEx living PSP session ( there are some aspects of corporate culture that are beyond the control of an individual, you just have to live with it. Interesting choice of word there for all things 'Gravity')
• I went skydiving last weekend and with all the talk about weightlessness and free fall gravity was self-implied.

I didn't think of the competition idea when I was suspended in mid-air and I definitely did not sing 'it’s funny how falling feels like flying for a little while' when I was ‘up’ there. My mind was mostly blank at that point, I wasn't really thinking of scary 'what-if' scenarios but in all honesty there was one thought that did cross my mind.

After the adrenaline of the free fall part had subsided, and I was peacefully suspended holding the parachute. I looked down and realized that one of my shoe laces was open and flying freely in the air. With a whoosh the ‘what-if’ thought flashed in my head, what if I trip and fall on my open shoe lace when we land? I wasn’t too pleased with myself to be hanging in mid-air with a lousy open shoe lace.
Later when I went running the next day, I took extra care to lace up my shoes.  Did I just develop a new paranoia after the sky diving experience (even when I didn’t trip on my shoe laces)? Hopefully not!

But there was one explanation that I found more plausible. I wasn't too nervous about the jump because in my mind I had reposed all responsibilities to the instructor. He was going to do all the heavyweight lifting and I just had to hang in there. People have different comfort levels when it comes to letting go of control and trust the other person to  save your a** when things are beyond your expertise. With tandem skydiving they don’t require you to have any skills to survive, they just expect you to trust the intelligence of another individual and make the jump. I could muster that trust, so I wasn’t too anxious about the jump.
However seeing the open shoe lace, the ownership of responsibility changed, it was something in my control and my mind quickly raced to do the ‘what-if’ scenario evaluation.
So the simple moral of the story is ‘tie your shoelaces’ and the not so simple analogy is about trust, responsibility and letting go. I don’t trust people blindly but when I do, I just let go of my control and no doubt I have landed either upstream or downstream on the Nile and it’s not a just world at both ends and remember it’s the wild Nile..

I have harked a bit far south here, however in the end my final vote is gravity and just to tilt the scale in my favor, I have already used the word 10 times in my blog (there is one in the label) :)

In case you would like to hear the song referenced above:

The Cobbled Road..

A pair of high heels on cobbled streets always attract attention; it is almost like the clatter of the heels wakes up the sleepy road and all the sleepy folks living on it. The lazy eyed old man sitting by the side of the road lifts up his half open eyes from his lazy newspaper to look at the noisy passerby disapprovingly.
The undulating cobbled pathway adds an extra spring to the gait of the high heeled stranger. She does the hop skip and jump as she walks and the locals glance at her disapprovingly as they firmly plant their feet and walk steadily along.
The extra inches make her tower over the rest; it is almost like she unabashedly seeks attention. She must be a snob to walk all tall when the rest of the crowd unpretentiously walks in lowly pair of sneakers on cobbled road.

The old worn out cobbled streets in the hills are the most judgmental of all; they know the old regulars from the occasional visitors and can get nasty with the new folks. Yes she was new to this queer little town and she could sense that the meandering streets here didn't want to make friends with her- the high heeled snob on her high horse!

She tried to block out the nasty remarks of the street and steadied her pace for she had a rendezvous to keep. She still had a long winding distance to cover and she was afraid that she might not reach there in time- It is never a good idea to keep people waiting for long; they ultimately give up on you.

However the disapproval weighed down on her and gnawed at her will to walk further. Was it just the cobbled street that was being unreasonably prejudiced towards her or had she deserving earned the disapproval with her purple plume and high heels?
The chatter in her head kept getting louder, it was disapproval mixed with self-doubt and the fear of failing to make the appointed hour. Her pace slowed and she faltered, overwhelmed by a shortness of breath. Then in a split second she stopped completely turned around and ran as fast as she could in the opposite direction. There was no one to call her back now, she would not stop. Her fears had taken the better of her and she was again the fragile kid who knows nothing better than to run back home when a bully stops her midway on the cobbled road…