The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Saw it. Finally.

And managed to see a little bit more than its sheer beauty.

I saw the basic being at the very core of all our shrouds of civilization in Mr. Button , when stunned at the death of his loved wife and the deformity of his child that might otherwise had also been loved, his irrational senses compell him to almost drown his child before Benjamin's destiny leads him to the Old- age home.

I also saw that the essence of any kind of relationship, of life itself that has to be shared, lies in meeting midway. As Caroline and Benjamin realise after a beautiful ballet class, he growing younger and she older. That is a profound philosophy. We may bend backwards and forwards and maybe all the ways in between, But real understanding would come only when you meet exactly halfway. Anything otherwise would be unfair.

We all want to be different. To stand out. To be looked at. Stared at. Admired. But being different is difficult. Especially when you are really and truly different. Not different in the ways we know, in having only Prada and Gucci and Puma. But different in ways that are inexplicable. Being different in the mind. Being different in the body. Being handicapped. Then it cuts and bruises and we can ask for nothing more than normality. Ordinariness.


And of course, I saw that everyone does different things.
Some are born to sit by the river.
Some are struck by the lightning.
Some have an ear 4 music.
Some are artists.
Some swim.
Some know buttons.
Some know Shakespeare
Some are mothers and,
Some people dance.

I know Shakespeare, but he is not enough.

A Mother with her Son.

It's officially monsoon now and I'm still baking and broiling. I thought the worse was over when April was, But no, June still roasts. The weather's been so much on my (and everybody else's) mind I can hardly think of anything else. And for most of those load sheddings that I still endure, I could of think nothing except the people who overuse their A.C's so that I have to sit with my books in the balcony hoping for an occasional waft of cool breeze.

But today, returning home 1 in the afternoon, I saw something.

A malfunctioning ATM door of Punjab National Bank.

And sitting there, at the steps, in the cool draft of the AC within,a mother with her son. I don't think I've ever seen a broader smile on an urchin before, or more relief on the face of someone with a hand stretched out for alms.

Come all the load sheddings that may, I'll keep in mind that picture of a Mother with her Son and feel blessed for the sluggish fan that rotates in my room nearly 20 hours a day.

Apocalypse

I can't stop ranting enough about my exams. As soon as one's over, I'm staring at the other in the face. But the one next month (exactly 15 days and 6 hrs away as I type this *faint*) is the most important of them all. Now I usually don't freak out before exams. Correction. I never freak out before the exams. Never as in never have in the 13 yrs of my schooling. And believe me, looking at the amount of studying I do for them, that's saying something. But I digress. so , to repeat,I never freak out before my exams. But this academic session, as I look around at my brand new classmates, I am starting to feel like I have a lot of reasons to freak out. I'll tell you why:

There are exactly 4 types of people in my course:

The Weirdos: before you call me rude,I didn't name them. My friends did.(fine friends I have, still indulge in kindergarten name-calling) They are exactly five in number, move around in a group, are cold (make that icy)and they even have separate notebooks for their electives. Alone and effortlessly, they make me feel very,very inadequate.

The Cool Dudes: they are the ones who spend all their free time in the auditorium(our cafeteria stinks),take turns testing the willpower quotient of the weirdos( last count, the wierdos were left unshaken) ,yet manage to come for exams with the syllabus complete.They are the majority.


The "Kichu pori ni":( translated- did 'nt study anything) They hang out with the cool dudes in college, do all their studying at home, are hypocrites to the last degree and come with their syllabus complete AND revised.

The Library-worm: I alone inhabit that category. I sleep in class( just sometimes), and use my free-time to raid the library and study as I see fit. Most of the time its extraneous because loving the subject as I do, I find the syllabus incredibly and hatefully dependent on rote learning. So I look up stuff related to what I should be studying(but don't)and just Read. Extensively and voraciously. Doesn't help too much with my exams though and I end up for them with an incomplete syllabus, hoping for the best.

You would've noticed , category 4 is the only one where people don't study and being alone in it has thoroughly shaken me up.So I'm thinking maybe I should panic. Maybe it will help. Maybe it will shock me into studying.

15 Days to go. Will it??


P.S This post was composed on 18.06.09 ; 1.45 am but left unpublished due to load shedding.
P.P.S In this unbearable heat ( averaging 40*C) we are having an average of 3 hrs load shedding everyday.

Or Armageddon

Another day of fruitlessness, and I'm tired.Don't take it to mean that I've worked my ass of over my files of research, because I haven't. But I did open up my class notes and and wondered if at all it was possible for me to get round without having to do everything as copiously as the others have done.I wanted to plan some selective studying too, but ever since I 've given my ICSE exactly 3 yrs back, my plans have perfected a way of falling flat on my face.

I'm just weary of the system I've been seeing since the past year. There's simply too much of rote and that when the course has so much more to offer. There are vast areas that could be explored if simply there wasn't a do or die situation always hanging in the background. I mean obviously we need to be tested but there should be some elements of applicative study too involved.

Its important (and preferable to me ) that the examinees expand their knowledge to include a comprehensive idea, a kind of an overall view of the bigger picture.

But we don't do that. Instead we commit to our memory specific portions so thoroughly that we can recite them cold after being shaken up at 1 in the morning.If at all we are lucky to sleep that early.(I'm not talking about me here. I'm off to dreamland by 12.30)

I'd just like to go library tomorrow and read up something good. Something really nice.

It will wait.

Believe it or Not.

I would never have believed this, when I started writing my unread blog in 2008.

Farewell At Howrah.

Another friend departs. This time to Mumbai, a charmed city. And obviously, there are usual promises, but as always, these will lose significance, fade.

It's something like standing on a platform at the Howrah station, waiting for your train among chatters, excitement, reminisces and maybe, some tears. It comes and you wait for it's departure with the twin feelings of dread and hope.And then it leaves, with the sound of the whistle you've grown to love so much since your childhood. Only, this time, you are on the wrong side of the iron strips.

Soon you are left standing alone on a deserted platform, looking round with a lump in your throat, and a head filled with years worth of memories to other platforms,where more separations, more uncertainties await.

A Quest.

I want to be able to write. Beautifully. I want my words to move you, inspire you and make you want to lift up a pen too. But I'm no good at it. Thoughts rush into my mind every time I sit at this page, a whirlwind after the other, and I can never grasp them and fit them into my chubby fists, just like I could never quite catch the colourful bubbles at the entrance of New Market, then with chubbier fists. I do not cherish a dream of being published. Yet I feel like an author every time I hit the publish button. I want to mould my words into perfectly ordered paragraphs but again I fail.

I fail repeatedly and yet I persist. Even at the cost of scorn and laughter I carry on. Because, someday I'll want to be able to produce words effortlessly. I'll want like what I've written. Now I don't. I think that whatever I write is either too mushy, or too drab. Sometimes I feel, they are too contrived and sometimes , too spontaneous.I'll want to read that something in perfect balance, perfect harmony, written by me.


But for all my quest of perfection, I think my half-baked efforts are worth chronicling. And worth displaying. Because failure is beautiful. Its beautiful in its inherent humanity. Its beautiful in its ordinariness that shows me as an unremarkable human. It is the last, ultimate proof of my mediocrity. And that is why, much as I want to, I do not take off so many of my trashy posts, mostly written in my earlier days of blogging. And I continue to write more of it.It is, for me, a harsh lesson in reality.

And that is why so many unfinished drafts still lie, littering my dashboard. I deem them too ugly to show them light.

This blog was always meant to be personal, never private. But now I find lines blurring. And I realise that I need to pull in my reins once again. Perhaps I'm afraid that the more I enter into the private,the more deplorable its content shall be. Putting something into black and white makes it a final, irreversible reality. And then I wouldn't be able to shut my eyes and ignore things, believing that if I ignore them for long enough they shall go away.

Would it be possible for me to write about the deformed and ugly that is me without cringing while re-reading it?

Till the day I can't, I must continue heeding the lines I drew a long time back and watch my life chronicled through detached eyes.


(words did find their way through my fingertips, and I re-wrote this post on 7.06.09 ; 11.55 pm)