eyes wide open !

The first shot of caffeine was just a wake up call. Drooping eyelids just added to my melancholy as it began to pour outside. I grabbed a newspaper and rushed toward the car door and didn't even bother to look around. As I hit the main road, my heart sank so deep that I gasped for every breath. A jaw-dropping view of the sunset in the mirror blinded me. Moments before disappearing below the horizon, the sun had torn through the miserable clouds. That end of the sky was simply... The fading twilight had mixed with the greyness of the sky to result in a texture so pure that I just gazed with my eyes wide open. My subconscious had taken over the driving and I just kept staring at the mirror for as long as I could. I was so dumbstruck by the golden hue that the 270 degree rainbow in front of me looked ordinary. The symbolism grasped me so hard that it almost suffocated me. The bright horizon was my "stairway to heaven", gleaming with hope and I was driving away from it, moving into the rainbow that stood like the arch of gloom, welcoming me with corroded hands, past memories and what not ! And then, just like that, everything turned grey and it was all over. I felt the glare from the green of the traffic lights and as my pupils constricted, I returned to reality !

a childhood memory lost in time...

It was the day before diwali. I was in second grade and was hardly 3 feet tall. But emotions and ambitions ran high in my family back then. So me and my best bud decided that it was time to climb the guava tree. Ater returning from school, we met under the tree and carefully sketched out the plan!! "Abey tu pehle chadh, phir tere piche main aaatum". That was my grand idea, after hours of silent tree gazing until both of our necks began to hurt. He went first and quickly climbed up onto a branch quite easily and gave me the stupid smart-ass smirk that pissed me off. Under 10, but with an ego appropriate for a 20+, I shrugged myself and started the 12ft "ascent". The next thing I remember is hanging from the collar of my pal's new shirt. It gave way and I fell on my delicate little fore-arm brushing aside some dust and leaves. I thought that was the end of it, until that idiot came down and kicked me in the nuts for damaging his school attire...understandable. It was the first time in my life that I had experienced real pain. I did not move for 5 mins or so until he turned me around to notice that my arm was dangling. This was my first fracture !!

Casting at the hospital was routine and they called it a "minor surgery" since they had to sedate me. The first thing I recall after regaining my senses was asking my mom whether I could still
play with the fireworks. I did burn a few and was delighted with the fact that I could still do it better than my sister. I did not advertise this too much for I was scared of the little monkey because of my short term vulnerability. Mom did all my homework for the next two months... I never complained! They banned me from school since they had trees all around ... more than what I had asked for! As the cast came off, the first thing I did was to go back to the same tree. My pal came along and we both started staring at it again. He was wise enough not to smile. There was silence for about half an hour until I broke the ice. "You know, I did climb the tree !"...'But I did it first!'..."Fair enough  ..Do it again?" ... 'Hell Yeah !'.. "Go ahead". As he turned around, he felt the same bloody blow in his cup that would almost make him impotent. I ran as fast as I could !

its that time of the year....

...when the weather is pleasant and people seem to get slacky. Ok Ok, when SOME people tend to get slacky! Time to file taxes and think of a million ways to spend the returns. It is also that time when in Raleigh, there is an outburst of pollen i.e. the horny part of the year for plants over here. On the streets, I'm like "Dude, get a room!!!!" and the trees seem unmoved. It's like me visiting those thousands of orkut profiles and spotting the lucky few who visit back...ehehehe. Summer's approaching and there's lot of research work coming up, believe it or not. When I walk around in MRC (where I work), I noticed that my pace varies like that of the pendulum. Faster and faster as I approach my advisor's office and then to almost a hesitant hop near mine. Time to get as much free time to laze away and prepare for the torrid times ahead. Apart from that, life's pretty much like PhD comics.

self-reflection for satisfaction !

I don't even know if the hyphen deserves its place in the title. Too late to care about grammar, punctuation and all that bullshit. Too drunk to even read what I just wrote. Too disoriented to be empathetic ! Thats perhaps the closest I have ever come to describe my present, ever ! But ... I am still sane enough to ask myself those questions that...!. In fact, I believe it is not too insane to agree that life itself is an exam with questions so randomly positioned, so scattered that no one has ever even dared to find out when and why those questions come up. Correction !!!Physicists are still struggling to find out the secrets of the "beginning" (a more rational approach !!!!), while religions are still looming large and trying to rope in the next great saint. Thats not even the full spectrum of "?"s. For ex:, why the fuck is there an eject key on the macbook air?
For those who have seen "GOOD WILL HUNTING": Life is full of peccadillos. Every time we peek back at those silly moments, that is where we find ourselves. Laughing away ...again and again, frozen in time by loose bonds of fleeting *ship, we try our best to fool ourselves every single time. Each of these times, subconsciously we somehow manage to convince ourselves that those smirks actually meant something, whether cheesy or not, whether preceded or succeeded by whispers promoting anxiety attacks. It is hard to believe we are just a matter of chance, a fabrication of possibilities, the results of an endless optimization, worms battling for resources or one among many other in this vast universe. But we are what our senses can tell us.... In the end, truth can be stranger than fiction, but we must try ...atleast give our 70% to understand why it is so, the other 30% is lost in translation...atleast for me!!