It doesn't have to be a warm gun.

Once in a while you have a day where you did not scream yourself hoarse at kids, or wanted to hit them, where they worked hard, and where you heard actual notes coming out when they repeated what you sang. Where your mind's on fire, and you are actually able to ad lib, and come up on the spot with a crossword about carbohydrates and things related.

Once in a while you have a day where you had a bath with hot water for the first time in a month (since winter started) and washed your clothes with the ease and speed of much practice. Once in a while you actually tear yourself from the blank screen of the computer to sit and watch the sky for that special hour when the sun dies a bloody and gory death and and the evening wears orange and blue and grey and purple and the stars come out for the party with strange music.

Once in a while you rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean and are actually Happy for the first time in your life, and you decide to write a blogpost about it, because generic and cliched as this post may seem, sometimes generic and cliched implies that you're happy and you really don't give a shit.

Of course, then your room-mate falls sick. Again.
But you know what. I'm Still happy.
So there.

Life's Tough

This morning, life was nice. Packed the bag, ate a banana, ate a whole paratha! Did the morning rituals, sat down at my table, and did some pretty high class design work.

But there was somebody New in the Room.
One was Tall and the other was short.
The tall one leaped about the conference table waving her hands excitedly, and handing out sheets.
My boss folded her hands and tried to look subordinate to these young eager party-crashers.

Everybody else seemed to find this normal. They calmly took the sheets, calmly took the working materials, and spoke sweetly to the new comers.

Something was Wrong.
Something was terribly disturbing.
Somebody was gently prodding me on the shoulder.
I was so glad she didn't know my name.

My boss came and said, "Lokesh!"
The somebody- not the tall one, said "Lokesh!"
Somebody else came and stared down at me, and said, "Lokesh!"
And the tall one stared at me from across the table.

And they all said Lokesh!, and they all stared down at me, and they offered me crayons, and said things like, Red, Sqoo-air and Sir-kill, and Baingal, and Bloooo, and I couldn't understand WHY!!! Why MEEEE? there were a million pairs of eys staring at MEEE.

And so I screwed up my eyes and puffed out my cheeks, and opened my mouth and cried! and cried and cried and cried!

And now I don't have to do dirty nasty colouring, and now I have a toffee.

Pop!

So I stopped blogging.
I've been telling myself that it's because I think I've finally hit the big time creatively, and that the two almost seemed to be opposed to each other. My blogs ended up being little itty bitty abstracted pieces of me, my moods, fears, and ideas and whatnot. But pieces, thats all they were. Fragile things.
And it seemed to me that it had become a fantasised dear diary thing, with fewer and fewer people reading it, and fewer and fewer people liking the posts, moody and moodier as they became, perhaps less spectacular? More and more waily?
So since I need to take off my head and shake it vigorously, just like I did around this time (this month at least) three years ago, hang up my dreams to dry, maybe now is a good time for a rebirth.

It helps that for the first time in my life, I'm happy with what I have, who I have, where I am, what I'm doing and who I am. So I thought I should celebrate this moment. I have an idea, many ideas spinning out of control in my head, whirring and whirring till my head aches, and I've got calcium deficiency and I have a large mysterious bruise on my foot, which makes walking painful. And I have my first day of school tomorrow- the first day after Diwali break, and those kids won't now what hit 'em. And I'm back under my starfilled sky, and my dusty litte village, and I'm incandescent.
Yay, basically.

So yes. Blogging will begin again. Wheeeee!

Cage of Gilt

Just a quick one to let the blogworld know that Thalia, though creatively starved as ever, is not Dead. The bloody minded might say the same of God.
I'm not one of them.

ANYway. I've been having a disastrous week of feeling guilty about Everything. The less charitable would rightly ascribe this to far too much time doing absolutely nothing. I would reply that I tried absolutely everything to stave off the devil's workshop. I even bankrupted myself buying kiddish stationery. Colourpencils, wax crayons, colourful postits, felt-pens, and less kiddish stationery like dry pastels and A3 sheets, all to find I couldn't rediscover my artistic side, as I didn't Have one. All very lowering. I shall henceforth stick to my pencil and ink doodles. Stick figures, fantasy maps, and mehendi. Bas.

Right, so the guilt thing. I feel guilty about mediocrity. About over using the net. I saw a woman with a terrible skin problem a few days ago, at the market. Boils covered every inch of her face and I felt deeply uncomfortable about it, and felt guilty about shuddering at the memory when I thought about the misery that lady must have faced, and faces every day. My maid turned all my brand new clothes- not worn even once, into violently ugly new hues when she decided to introduce a tint of blue to them. Since the clothes were beige, orange, white, and pink when bought, my chagrin was pretty deep. So I really gave it to my maid( which is unusual for me) with the result that she nearly dissolved into tears. Immediate surge of guilt.
I feel guilty about my class trappings, my bourgeois existence, my inability to understand anything outside my little 'comfortable' world.
Is this normal? Am I doomed to be diffident my entire life just because I'm over imaginative? Yeargh!

Hrmmm....

There are KNIVES in the kitchen!

I don't know if any of you have ever walked into a kitchen at dead of night, not bothered to wait for the flicker-flicker-ping of the tubelight, opened the freezer compartment, caught the can of beer that fell out with the whoof of cold mist and the bottle of water you were actually trying to get to, and whispered "Murder" due to certain trivial events that took place prior to your entry into the kitchen and under influence of the moonlight you got soaked in when standing near the kitchen balcony door.

It's a heady feeling.


....

Indianity

I sometimes find nationalism in whatever strain it demonstrates itself funny. No no, don't worry this won't be more of my gobblings about names and concepts, and so on. Well, maybe a little. A lot of people, including me, tend to scoff at our fellow men. Fellow men in the sense of statements like, "Yeah, Indians have NO sense of personal space," "Biharis cannot cross roads", "That'd never work in India. Can you imagine a queue here?" and so on.

And then, when I was gasping at especially fiery chili sauce ten minutes after I'd had it, (I was also sweating but I fully blame the sultry Indian Summer for that) I met somebody who raised one eyebrow superciliously (if you can raise one eyebrow without looking supercilious, why do it at all, right?) and said, "But you're Indian!" Not only was I bugged because generally I can handle a decent amount of mirch, and she hadn't even tasted the damn chili sauce that day, but the assumption bugged me as well.

For people like us- the 'educated', the urbane, the cosmopolitan, and whatchamacallit, the issues of 'citizenship in a globalising world'- (this was the title of of a pol. science course in college- boring as hell) become so very complex, don't they? the distancing and the holding on. The what is religion, what is tradition bit and so on. So we choose which bit we can safely call Indian, or sometimes unsafely.
I can't say Hindi is my first language, much as I wish it was. I can't say I prefer Hindi music to English- there seems to be too little of the good stuff. But I take it amiss when people write down hindi words in english, if we're doing a hindi song. Especially when people quickly note down सा रे ग म as 'sa' 're' 'ga' 'ma' or धा धिन धिन धा as dhin dhin dhin dha. It just doesn't makes sense to me when people who can speak it far better than I do, don't write notation in the form they're meant to.
So that's the extent of my weak pretensions to Indianness.
This is a silly post.
I'm going to stop talking.

Our pathetic claims to I Proud To Be Indian do verge on the comedic side is all.
We are proud of such obscure things just so that we can reaffirm Indianity.

'I prefer Dhaba food to any other anyday!'
'Please; I live in India. I take autos, ok'
'At least we bathe more often!'
'You haven't seen the Red Fort!?'

I didn't say that!

That which we call...

... your name? Somebody asked.
A nerve was struck.

Somebody waited.

Finally:
Erm. Which one do you want?

Somebody grew slightly irritated. Your first name would do. Or whatever people call you.

Nobody calls me by my first name. Except my parents. Or people who hardly know me.
Somebody was about to point out that this last category would fit very well, thank you, and bye bye, but decided to wait for wherever the tangent would lead.

So I guess you'd need to decide what you'd be of mine, or what I'd be to you, since I have a long list of names already, and the corresponding personalities, and unless I'm to become even more severely deranged, I really don't think I can fit in another side to me, so I'd be grateful if you'd pick one.

Somebody raised one of a pair of impressive eyebrows.

My chaddi-buddies, now an endangered species, call me by my last name. My really close and almost equally deranged friends (few and far between) prefer the first half of my first name, you could call me what my prospective love interests end up calling me- within a week of constant conversation- I am nothing less than a younger sibling to them; oh! you could call me a nice Westernised form of my name or a part of my name and for good measure, add an s at the end if making it plural makes it any more meaningful. Since a disappointingly large number find me endearing (why I cannot comprehend) they add an oo after the first half of my name, and leave it at that, leaving me at that too. Of course, you could call me nothing related to my name, but some relation of the word 'idiot'. Right, and there's a good big stock of people, who though knowing my name perfectly well, aren't able to stomach using all three (though it's usually a garbled two) syllables, and call me a variety of platitudes ranging from Oh and Hi to Er and Hey.

Smiled Brightly.

Somebody smiled back with slightly lesser wattage, laughingly chose the last, then walked away shaking one of a pair of not very impressive faces muttering, Frikkin pseudo. How hard is it to give a frikkin name?

Obviously the second last category then.