I've always maintained that there aren't just 2 sides to the coin: true and false or truth and lies, like everyone else says. There's secrets too. I guess you could argue that a secret is actually a "truth that you're not telling." But then, lies are also “truths told wrong" – you know a lie is a lie when there is a predetermined and incontrovertible basis for truth. They all define each other. A secret is like a beautiful tropical island between the devil and the deep blue sea. But the island is dangerous – and lonely too. Secrets are painful to keep – the pain is the price for keeping them away from the rest of the world. When you do want to let one out into the world, you have to make a choice: say it right, as a truth; or say it wrong, as a lie. Anyway, what provoked this banter about an abstract subject was something that caught my attention while reading today (The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield), a very tasteful description of the painful process of keeping a secret, likening it to restraining a stubborn teenager fighting for freedom:

“The boy has been on my mind lately. ‘Tell me the truth.’ And lately I have felt again that strange inner stirring. There is something growing inside me, dividing and multiplying. I can feel it, in my stomach, round and hard, about the life of a grapefruit. It sucks the air out of my lungs and gnaws the marrow from my bones. The long dormancy has changed it. From being a meek and biddable thing, it has become a bully. It refuses all negotiation, blocks discussion, insists on its rights. It won’t take no for an answer. The truth, it echoes, calling after the boy, watching his departing back.”

"No praise, no blame, just so"

Its a Zen saying that means working for the "general good" rather than wasting time either eulogizing or pointing fingers at someone. And that's exactly what I feel like saying when a team or a group of friends disagree over something (its also exactly what our politicians nowadays need to be told). I really liked this quote - its like, it said so much in so little words. I came across it in the most unlikely place: a zombie novel (it was terrible: at the climax, the girl kisses the zombie who then magically "becomes a human", as if transformed  by the kiss. Talk about a modern day retelling of The Princess and the Frog.. blechh).

Paper Dreams

My first tryst with origami was when I made paper boats as a kid. I didn't even know there was a word for the art of making boats (or any other thing) out of paper back then. I don’t remember who taught me how to make a paper boat – some things you become so familiar with, you'd assumed you've always known them. But I think it came from one of those cool things a friend at school showed you during recess or between periods and everybody would get curious and learn to do it too. Then we would all go home, do it again, show our parents, and keep doing it for a week or so until we lost interest.

The backyard of my old house had a cement path running from the backdoor to the drumstick tree in a rectangle. So when it rained heavily, water would get logged in between, forming a little pool. That’s when I would make the boats and put them in the muddy water even if it’s still raining. I’d make at least 2 or 3 so I could be sure at least one of them would float – they mostly “capsized” and floated sideways either when the paper got too wet or raindrops smashed into them.

Years later, and really, really long after I got bored of making boats, I saw Prison Break in one of those finish-a-TV-show-in-2-days-or-less marathons that was a popular hobby in college. Apart from the unforgettably brilliant story, what really amazed me was the symbolic use of origami by the protagonist, Michael Scofield, a habit that he actually picked up from his elder brother (whom he tries to break out of prison):

“After Mom died, when it was just you and me, I remember having trouble sleeping, never knowing where you were, but when I'd wake up in the morning there'd be this paper bird, an origami crane sitting next to my bed and I never knew what it meant exactly, but I figured it was your way of letting me know you were checking in on me. Anyway, I looked it up, the crane, stands for familial obligation, watching out for your own. Maybe it's my turn to watch out for you.”

He would also make paper lilies to impress his lady love and prison doctor, Sara Tancredi. The whole idea was so romantic and appealed to me so much, I would frequently look up the internet and learn to do something like a crane or butterfly or a flower out of 3 or 4 square inches of paper and give them to close friends, not necessarily on special occasions. It’s a nice way to let someone know they’re special to you. It’s also amazing how a plain plane piece of paper could capture your imagination in a multitude of ways.

Too many times nowadays I daydream about being unemployed and ridiculously rich. Or rather, self-employed and ridiculously rich. Job jitters, I guess!

...

I really, really want to see a real ghost once in my lifetime!

...

I wonder if our first impressions of people are always correct... In my case, I've almost always been right about the people I thought I wouldn't get on well with. I would sometimes dismiss the negative vibes as a figment of my imagination and try to be friendly... But in the end my instincts would be proved correct. And then:

"You know when, sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later, they’re as dull as a brick? Then there’s other people, and you meet them and you think, ‘Not bad; they’re okay.’ And then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personality is written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful."

...

Rain, rain, come again!

I love going to the park after the rain. Its a small one, right beside my home and sprouts a fresh coat of small plants and weeds glistening with raindrops every time it showers. Camera in hand, I look for those little creatures that have also been enamored by the greenery - be it the butterflies that flit out of your reach or bugs as tiny as the raindrops themselves, that you notice only up close while squatting in the mud. It makes me happy to capture their small lively world that exists, oblivious to our goings-on. I guess the sky is one of the few things which makes the world look beautiful when it's sad.

Book Moments #1: Plucking & Planting Dreams

A thought is only as tangible as the words that are used to describe it. And those who can do it in a way that no part of it is obscured or shadowed truly have a gift. Seldom have I come across a “moment” in a book that is so profound it leaves me spellbound – I read the words over and over again, letting them sink in, until that moment is impressed in my memory. I wanted to share all such moments through a series of posts – not everyone may have the time or patience to read an entire book, but they sure can read a paragraph that can probably inspire them the same way it did me.

#1 is from the most influential book I read this year so far – “And the Mountains Echoed” by Khaled Hosseini. His “Kiterunner” takes the credit for bringing me out of the fantasy fiction world. You see, Mr. Hosseini’s books talk of a different kind of magic – the magic of relationships. Not in the looming, dull and tragic way some writers do (that make you depressed and fed up with life if you already aren’t), but in one that speaks of their beauty and fragility with such depth, it moves your heart. Though his stories are for the most part set in the faraway land of Afghanistan, the actions and psyche of the characters are universal. That said, and giving the green signal for “No Spoiler Alert ahead”, this is That Moment in ATME:

“When I was a little girl, my father and I had a nightly ritual. After I’d said my twenty-one Bismillahs and he had tucked me into bed, he would sit at my side and pluck bad dreams from my head with his thumb and forefinger. His fingers would hop from my forehead to my temples, patiently searching behind my ears, at the back of my head, and he’d make a pop sound—like a bottle being uncorked—with each nightmare he purged from my brain. He stashed the dreams, one by one, into an invisible sack in his lap and pulled the drawstring tightly. He would then scour the air, looking for happy dreams to replace the ones he had sequestered away. I watched as he cocked his head slightly and frowned, his eyes roaming side to side, like he was straining to hear distant music. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when my father’s face unfurled into a smile, when he sang, Ah, here is one, when he cupped his hands, let the dream land in his palms like a petal slowly twirling down from a tree. Gently, then, so very gently—my father said all good things in life were fragile and easily lost—he would raise his hands to my face, rub his palms against my brow and happiness into my head.”

Fills me with warmth every time I read it. And the rest of the book too is as splendid. Highly recommended!

Feeling Blue

No I’m not really sad or upset. I was just mulling over the lyrics of the Taylor Swift song:

“Losing him was blue like I'd never known
Missing him was dark grey all along
Forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you never met
But loving him was red…
Burning red”

I guess we've all associated “feelings” with various colours for as long as we could tell them apart. I vividly remember our Biology teacher in school telling the class that looking at green was “pleasant” and “good for the eyes”. There must be a reason why only red, green and yellow were chosen as colours for traffic signals all over the world and why rain or dark “gloomy” weather is used to highlight tragic scenes in movies.

As to how I feel about colours: Black is too secretive and closed, white is too open and cannot hide anything, green is omnipresent and boring, pink is mushy and cutesy, yellow reminds me of paint and its gooey-ness and strong odor, red is too loud for anything – be it a dress or a painting, violet is flowery, and I always relate orange to the icecream bars we sometimes buy on the beach that make our tongues go orange when we eat them.

But blue is nice. Blue, as in, the light blue you get in sketch pens. Blue makes me feel safe. When in the sky, it’s pacifying, and when in the sea, it’s alive. I love using blue while making something artsy, like a card – I just try and include it somehow, even coming up with a theme as an excuse. Some days, the sky is its deepest blue:  even the sun is not too harsh and makes long shadows on the ground and if there are clouds in the sky, they are fluffy and white like cotton bolls, not grey and threatening to fall. Those are the days I like a lot – they’re also good for photography. So when I feel blue, unlike many others who’re sad when they say it, I actually feel good.

Bloggering around

The other day while racking my brains for design ideas for this blog, I thought “Why not look at what other people are doing?” There was a Next Blog link on the dashboard and I always wondered where it would take me but in spite of my “seemingly morbid interest in people’s lives”, I never took that route. Mostly because the one or two times I did, I only struck a few drab, inactive ones or were full of ads. Anyways I was desperate for ideas so I stuck a little longer on the random tour this time.

As I took more than my usual amount of interest this time, I did notice a few blogs. There was one about a couple who met and married during the Second World War. The blog was written by their fourth child - a woman who seemed to be in her forties, judging from the beaming family pic with a caption at the very top of the page. The introduction caught my attention – about how her parents had barely met before her father, a soldier, had gone to fight in the war. They had a long distance relationship through letters for 2 years and finally got married (“Wow” moment for me). The rest looked like documents that I couldn’t discern head or tail of (but were definitely not love letters that I was really hoping to find).  There was another blog about a family “from Austria, not Australia” (this was actually written below the blog title which went something like “The Blog of the I-forgot-what-it-was Family”). It was just a collection of their photographs on various holiday trips with their 2 kids with really dull captions but man, weren’t they beautiful – these people have been to the most scenic of places.  There was another about a museum complete with photos of paintings. Then I hit a string of blogs of fast food restaurants that were also full of ads and I gave up.

I was secretly hoping to find a blog with even a remote likeness to mine or atleast close enough to make me feel that someone a lot like me is living a parallel life (I was obviously hoping too much). I tried again today and this time ran into a lot of foreign language ones, a travel blog of “a soul on piligrimage”, until I hit a dead end at a blog which was actually the official website of an Indian radio station. I was already done with the design idea search (you’re looking at the result) – today was just about searching for a 'blog doppelgänger' (if you get what I mean). Maybe everyone is active on Wordpress and Tumblr these days. Or posting minute-by-minute details of their life on Facebook or Twitter so they don’t actually need a blog.

Friendship over the years

School years: If there was a new kid in class, I used to make it a point to go up to him or her and purposely make friends. I wasn’t very choosy back then and there wasn’t any reason to. Making new friends was so easy. It was a class thing – we all just stuck together. I still have friends dating back to a long time ago but I’m not in touch with so many others. I guess its because “life happened”.

College years:  I made friends who I know will be there for me and I will care for life-long. There were some I didn’t take to so much in the first year but became thick friends with by the time we left. And the concept of a class drastically changed. There were people who haven’t spoken a word to each other during even a single moment in those four years. Though we did manage to have a little fun as farewell drew closer, looking back, most of them are still strangers to me! It wasn’t that we were too shy… Just our pre-conceived notions of one another and the choices we made.

Now: I made friends with total strangers on a social networking site, even exchanged numbers and talked to them. Mostly because I’m relocating to a new city and don’t know anyone there. And so far, it has been a grand success! My parents are amazed. Heck, even I’m amazed. Though this was something to dream of in my parents’ time, I admit I was (and still am, though diminishing everyday) apprehensive of this new venture. But I can’t wait to connect the voices and the words to the actual faces!

An Overdose of Jessica Day

So what happens when you have loads of spare time and decide to spend it, rather obsessively, watching re-runs of New Girl ? You just can't get enough of Jessica Day!You try to be her: talk like her, act like her until one day you realise you even talk in your head like her! There is something in her brazen frankness and offbeat outlook on life that fascinates me to no end.

Here’s the Jess Day version of my life.

When there's a question in the exam on a topic that I purposely did not study (and also, when my call letter said Pune):

After I do something outstandingly stupid:

or

Every time Spencer Reid comes on Criminal Minds:

I keep telling myself:

Mostly in the library when I was at college:

When I successfully debug a program:

When a friend asks me if I plan on getting committed soon:

What I think when someone gives me a side eye:

The last time we got a Telegram…

It was to tell us that grandfather had passed away. Me and my sister were just little kids and hardly got to know him well. It wasn’t a surprise though when they recently  announced in the paper that it would be the last day for Telegram service in India. We’d actually laughed about it – everyone has a phone nowadays allowing us to text or call someone at any time and at ridiculously low rates too, rather than send a telegram to someone "HELLO STOP URGENT NEWS STOP" only when you have something important to communicate to a far-off friend or family.

I wonder how many years the Postal Service would last. I guess we still need it, though only to send stuff larger than page-long letters which would rather be delivered easily with a mouse click only to lie unopened in the inbox along with other junk mail from shopping sites and educational services until you delete your way through them to find it (Google’s priority inbox magically solved that too, but I still get ETS emails in my primary inbox). People say there is a certain charm in posting a letter to someone.  It’s somewhat the same reason why I insist on making birthday cards myself instead of buying them. It doesn’t take much effort to throw in some fancy words and send someone an e-mail . But when you make the effort to fill in your words with ink, seal it in an envelope, glue a stamp to it and go all the way to the post office to post it, it says something about the lengths you would go to reach out to someone. What’s more, people don’t even to reply to e-mails nowadays. Everyone’s just too busy coping with life. It matters to show the people you care about that they are your numero uno priority. And that can be done by spending the “little” time you have on them.

Maybe in the not too distant future, private companies like Safe Express will pop up everywhere and suddenly sending even “stuff larger than page-long letters” would become a lot cheaper. Then the call for the close of Postal Service would come because it’d be too burdensome to maintain when no one’s even using it. They’ll put a copy of the last letter ever sent in a museum and we would tell our kids “Once upon a time, there were letters”.

Black & White

I guess up to a certain point in my life (not that I've lived too much of it) I thought I had people, in general, all figured out - they were either good or bad. I thought a person's behaviour and manner could easily be explained by his being either of these two things. It wasn't until much later that I realised that people, most of them anyway, have a complex, convoluted psyche - its each layer added by a real, human experience. Not every murderer has a stone-cold heart and not every seemingly happy person is bubbling with happiness underneath. We are what we are made of. It is difficult to put a label on someone simply because they had done something at a point of time. And it is also possible to love and hate someone at the same time. Then again, someone may say that people don't change - they are what they always have been. But what is it that they have been? Can a person's entire life be defined by a word?

But people actually aren't that simple. Take yourself for example. If you hadn't met a certain person, would you still be the same one today? Or if you had made different choices?  Or if a particular instance in your life hadn't (or had) occurred? You cannot just paint someone black or white without imagining yourself standing in their shoes and asking yourself what you would have done. I'm just trying to say that everyone has a story. And  a complicated one at that. Even today, when I find myself being too judgmental about somebody, I try to stop myself and be more.. understanding. I guess its because I read a lot of fiction that makes it an even more challenging task than it should be. In most books the characters have pre-defined attributes - they act a certain way and in a typical act of poetic justice, they get an ending they "deserve". But life is different. Its not just black and white. Neither do we have pre-defined attributes nor is the end predictable. And thats actually a good thing - one just has to realise that even if we ruined it and can't start over again, there's room for second and many more chances.