You And I

My mum says, " expect nothing, and accept everything."

I say " expect everything, and accept nothing."

My mum says I can sleep without having my dinner tonight.

First Tango, Then Paris!

Paris. The city of dreams, and of love, and of dreaming of love. an agglomeration of artists, architecture and arrondissements. The French maybe out to get us, I believe, with their baguettes, bistros, boardwalks and bisous bisous. The well known Bordeaux brigade. where every road is a runway, and every glass is a Chardonnay. Who cares if they didn't invent the French Toast, or the French fry. because in the end, Slap me, I would rather be French. :O

lone lampost, in a lone city square.I wasn't alone though.

light, wall and sky.

In Paris, do what the Parisians do.

ah. macarons.

The Moulin Rouge, and the famous windmill.

everything looks better in Black and white; The Sacre Couer.

living the poster life.

I read signs. this tells me that you need to exercise to stay in a good shape till you are 30.

catacombs, call out to me. I hesitate, and walk in. they are a farce, and I am a fake.

The Louvre. it was crowded, but I tried and I tried till I got a picture without any people in it. twenty wasteful minutes, and an irate cousin later, this was it.

some people hang their clothes out to dry. and some people do this.

books, glorious books. In France, read like the French. but alas, In french.

Gargoyles everywhere, all dead, all stone.

serenity, at its fullest and best.

The Eiffel tower. Need I say anything more?

Breaks the conventional point of the stereotype, this one.

The Pompidou centre, the service side.

Shoe inside a cage. Probably one of Cinderella's evil stepmother's ideas. :O

A part of a flea market in the Bastille area.

some bread, and some is sometimes all what you need. and then some ice cream helps too. when things look good enough to eat, they usually are.

and then, the end of the glorious food, and a glorious trip. Porquoi? Precisely.

The Way You Make Me Feel

It was all white, but not all right.

The walls were peeling, and paper thin, like the sheaves of a dusty, age old book. They could hear us, and we could hear them, a two way street of faceless whispers, haunting and taunting, speaking of untold secrets and unheard of stories, reaching immeasurable frequencies till it became a cacophonic din. But beyond their hushed whispers, they were nothing else. Maybe they were too distant, or maybe I was too delusional. I heard them, but yet I was not listening. Like a light switch, I had the ability to conveniently switch off. What was the downside? I was always left in the dark.
Bu things would change, and fast. The room was ever moving, but still sporadically stagnant, like the every growing, creeping algae that drifted on the surface of placid lakes, and simmering pools. Soon the paper thin, peeling walls would crumble, the facades would fall, and everything that was surreal, would become real. My legs would quiver, my heart would stop, and my pretenses would be parlayed.

Strangely, I was free, and yet I felt bound, trapped in invisible ties, devices that I had self-concocted and created; tangled and tossed, like an Antoinette doll, here every insecurity was magnified manifold, and every pimple felt like Pandora’s Box. Did I look any different from across the far-away wall, where the grass was conveniently greener and the air effectively cleaner?

This room was where we all lived with our inseparable insecurities, conjoined like Siamese twins, in an unending space of ten by eight, a muddle of skeletons that often got buried deep within our closets, long forgotten, or just cramped up behind years of secrets and unfitting clothes. Maybe we all had these secrets that we decided to take with us to our graves, things which we could have be ashamed of, things that we were in constant denial of, stuffed and squeezed into the room with the peeling paper-thin walls, not with unbound love and bursting happiness, but with malice and mirth.
Yet, the said room lay sparse, and wide like a fun house of mirrors, a series of distorted images, paralleling everyday life, where each reflection reflected something of me, and about me. It was a tell-all, a private place where you could publicly wash your dirty laundry and the fetid stench of decay and defecation rent the air. They would come, one by one, inhuman illuminations, each with their offense, at me, and through me, breaking me down, bit by bit, soul by soul.

I was match boxed in my own mess of introspection, and I inhaled and exhumed, through layers of memories and the other such clutters of an otherwise inoperative mind. Didn’t people say that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop?
The weak walls would close in, paper thin and peeling, like a trembling card castle, a fug of spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts, each with its own subtext, till I was a non entity in all my entirety, submerged in random rubble and not so random thoughts. The room was dead and broken, and so was I.

Where was this that I was?

It couldn’t be any simpler and it almost seemed like an easy linear equation, I was in hell, or maybe I was just out of my mind.
Like they said, Hell was very badly done.
And in so many ways, I was too.

The Inconvenient Truth

This is it. It’s that day of your life; the day of introspection.
Here we are, at that turn of our life, when you question, and you answer, tackling a long list of FAQ’s all by yourself, like a one person game of chess. We procrastinate some of the best things in life, just to live out our worst ones. Life needs to be reckless, a constant gamble of decisions, but we rely too much on our security blankets, our comfort bubbles, sidelining our spontaneous dreams to live out a dreary reality. I feel hopeless; like nothing can save me. Why did I come back to this hopeless place? Some place I must confess, I had sworn off? Weren’t those five arduous years enough, a constant reminder of bad designs and glass traced sheets?

A farce of an institution this; where they suck out souls, and train you to be mindless drones? Every ounce of creativity is crushed and mutilated, behind layers of rules and laws, loopholes and conventions, as frivolous of the alleged university that makes them. Where, ironically, in the words immortalised by one of my least favourite fictional teachers, progress for the sake of progress is an act of regress? It’s no surprise the institute is one step away from using corporeal punishment. Why complain about growth then, when you stunt the student yourself? The establishment discourages any form of out-of-the-box burst of thought, boxing you away into a useless archive, distinguished by year and roll number. Are we a fort or a foundation? Why choose the lesser of the two evils, when there should be an option not to choose any evil at all? There’s an obvious need for an intervention, which is ironic, because not all interventions can’t be designed. Can merit be judged only on mark, or the mother tongue that you speak? People needn’t be shuttled between egos, fearing stalwarts with blatant traces of nepotism, tributary follows river, son follows father, and idea follows ideology. Complaints, and pleas are thus suppressed, by fear or founding families. Hierarchy runs high, like a castle of playing cards, each playing the quintessential blame game; and I continue living in limbo, somewhere in between, two states, two frames, two ends, of teacher and student. Am I to be a glorified baby sitter, or a hapless little personal attendant? I came in free spirited and carefree wanting to make a difference, to bring about a radical change, but I couldn’t change the system, the system probably changed me. I am not dejected, nor am I depressed, not yet; But i am getting there, as fast as I can. Give me a life problem any day; it’s the architectural ones that I am scared of. I could have quit, and gone ahead to the job of my dreams, living a happier un-caged life, unbottled and pure.
The only problem?
I didn’t know what my dreams were.

Point to be noted, maybe these past few years, I made all the wrong choices, but somewhere down the line, I met all the right people. This butterfly effect probably made me who I am today, and any arbitrary turning elsewhere, I would have been different, I would have been delusional.
more so than I am today.
That is which brings us to the single most important question, after a long charm-bracelet string of queries.

This is not a rant, this is not a ramble.
What is this then?

This is the inconvenient truth.

Layers.

The bread, honey roasted sweet
Golden brown, lined, like a Brazilian tan.
A carve of tomato,
Like a seesaw wedge,
Goes to and fro,
Like a tennis match.

The cucumber crunch,
Like ice to a parched throat.
A smidgeon of sauce
Jalapeños, exotic,
Like the sound it makes in your mouth.
An orgasmic blur of spice and salt.

A slathering of mayonnaise
A sliver of olive
A slice of roast chicken,
Lush and tender.
A cut of meat,
Medium rare.

This ménage de trios
of multigrain, meat and me
Ah, these layers three.
One’s mine, another’s yours.
The third one’s the one the world can’t see.

Circa 08

Destiny was back.
And so was I.
The sky was a crisp orange, the clouds hung low and lethargic. It was one of those days you would have preferred enjoying from the confines of your room, but still weren’t.
Neither was I.
I was waiting at the same café, with a similar croissant.
She walked in like a breeze, her wavy hair askew. She looked different now; it had been four years after all.

She smiled apologetically, but I knew she didn’t mean it. She never did.
She looked at me. I looked at her. There was nothing else to do.
“So.”, she started, after a particularly long pause in which I chomped off half of my croissant. I had a strong urgent feeling of Déjà vu.
I stared at her pointedly.
“All’s well?” she asked, acting innocent. Typical, I thought.
“No!” I replied, monosyllabically, a bit louder than I should have had, making the couple on the table next to ours jump up a bit.
“Uh-huh, so what’s wrong?” she asked, nibbling at the end of her chocolate tart.
I stared at her pointedly.
“Architecture” I said, as she nibbled at her tart again, “Remember that? Big bucks, all the glamour in the world and easy drawings?” I drawled sarcastically, putting in the drawl, so that she would understand that I was not happy.
She didn’t.

“Uh-huh” she said again, twirling her paper umbrella in her sweet lime, “ So let me get it straight, you don’t like it now, do you?”, she continued.
I would have had liked nothing better than to take the umbrella out of her drink and thrust it up her nose.
“News flash!” I said coldly, trying to keep the contempt and hysteria in my voice to a bare minimum. “Three years. No money. No glamour and I am not even going to tell you how tough the drawings can get!” I continued, noticing the slightest amount of derision in my voice. “And it’s third year!” I added in an exasperated tone, half-annoyed, half-surprised as to why she wasn’t getting my point.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat and tried to look away.
Her cell phone started ringing. “Question, tell me what you think about this…” crooned the phone. Destiny’s child’s Independent Woman. Clichéd.
She cut the call, as her forehead creased up with wrinkles. “Not important” she told me, dismissively.
I stared at her pointedly.
“So, where were we?” she asked.
I was sure she was out to get me.
“Oh yeah, I remember”, she said, calmly, taking a small bite out of her tart. She twitched her nose,” It’s too sweet for me, anyway, I think you should stop making a big deal about this, This year’s going to be fine!”
“Yeah?” I asked forcefully, “and how would you know?” I continued, not quite able to mask my irritation.
She stared at me pointedly.
“Uh-huh” I said, apologetically. She was destiny after all.
“Yeah, chill it”, she said dreamily, as if the last two minutes had never happened, “it’s going to be all right in the end. You’ll finish your work, have a great holiday, and not to forget, fourth year’s going to be a breeze!” she continued, smiling the dazzling smile of hers.
“Easy peasy”, she said, acting as if it summed it all up to that. “Trust me, I know!” with the air of someone who seemed to know a lot more than I did.
I stared at her pointedly.
Now, one year later, destiny doesn’t seem all that bad. :P