When it had been a few days after I moved from my beloved home (I very badly miss it, for I have many reasons for it…(1) My family still lives there (2) I had lived there for 18 years (3) I hate Chennai. It’s just an opinion I hold of the city, please do not take it personally. (4)I despise my new ‘temple of learning’ as my math professor always quotes, to an extent beyond imagination simply because learning is just not interesting anymore…to my parents who might read through this, I still study because I have to, you do not need to worry! I could proceed with a (5),(6),(7) and (8) but then I would just be drifting away from the subject..you DO NOT want that now DO you?), my aunt had mentioned with all humor, that I would be learning patience and tolerance through my four years of living in this place. Well, if you WERE her niece, you WILL be learning that, because she can cook up remarkably long lectures on God’s existence, devotion, prayer, tamil movies, actors, soaps etc.etc. which I have to listen to even though I am not even a bit interested. I love her but I really cannot pay attention to stuff I think is ‘crap’ and has nothing to do with my life or existence. And yet I do lend an ear to all of that simply because I am trying to imbibe patience into my system or whatever:S. But when my aunt had said that I would be learning those qualities, she did not mean I’d be learning them because of certain characteristics of her nature but because of certain traits in my uncle’s personality! She was very, very true too! My uncle was probably born with the sole reason to test other people’s tolerance. With every sentence that I ended my conversation, he would come up with a question that would demand an explanation for a certain occurrence of events or why a certain event should occur. Most of the questions are plain rhetorics and yet just to mock you he would do that!…Why, Why after a long day in the college do I need to deal with something like this!!!!!
Just yesterday, I had gone to meet a really good friend of mine. We had a nice conversation about undisclosed personal issues. All was fair, till we parted our ways at the bus stop. There hasn’t been a single occasion when I have got into the bus 5E (travelling from Besant Nagar to Vadapalani), and it wasn’t crowded with a bunch of men almost falling off from the entrance. They do get down to make space for people to get in but you can imagine how difficult it is to squeeze through the crowd! Every step through them is painful and can literally cause you to shed tears. It IS that terrible. But you really have no choice. If you wanted to reach home and avoid remarks from your guardians, you better forget the pain and move on. That is the strong will I hold on to while travelling! I was already starving, and the journey had caused my stomach to almost tear apart!..I did this..breathe in, breathe out..the eternally suggested pranayam thingy..to keep my mind off the misery. But the passengers always tried so hard to keep you pissed:P. The conductor so comfortably relaxes on a seat while the money is being passed along from the other end of the bus to his end! Now to mention the worst part of having to stand!..The money is thrusted right into my palm!...(For the love of God, leave me alone! I can scream that at the top of my lungs within my head and if I said it out loud I’d probably never get down from the bus alive!) For the good human being I am, I pass the money on to the conductor, asking myself to relax and also pretend that it is not that big a deal. The situation keeps repeating itself infinite times before I get down from the bus and heave a huge sigh of relief.
I have to walk home from the bus stand. It’s a fifteen to twenty minute long walk…but that is not the problem. And there isn’t just one problem. There are many and they all drive crazy, always on the wrong side of the road and give you ugly looks when you stand in their way. WTF dude! I am trying to walk! YOU are on the wrong side of the road, driving as if the entire road belonged to you, not having the slightest of concern for pedestrians; all the drivers here seem to be on the road just to send you to the afterworld! The anger just keeps flooding through my system…I did not even have earphones to plug into my ear, did not have my i-pod to listen to the rock and metal that has always kept my mind deviated from things that so easily get me freaked and frustrated. If you have been on the road after 7 p.m. you know exactly what I am talking about!
So, when I go ease my heart and let out all the piled up frustration by relating the incident to my aunt, you might as well guess what I received as a response..” Even Chennai is trying to teach you to be tolerant!”…UGH!..Yes, dear aunt, it is teaching me the one thing I lack! Maybe it WILL improve my ability to be patient!...Who am I kidding?! I am still a mess, still wishing that I didn’t have to learn it this way and still swearing each time I think about the crappy ride back home yesterday:P.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Tuesday the 12th!
(Sneeze…) I woke up with a smile (Sneeze) while the cell phone screamed ‘Even in his youth, Even in his youth, Even in his youth, He was nothing…Kept his body clean…’. I have to cut short the lyrics because I switched the alarm off at that moment. If anyone is interested in knowing what comes after the above mentioned lines, you are welcome to ask me and I would gladly pen them down. Kurt Cobain has always had a remarkable impact upon my soul. His raw voice is the only reason why I get up at five thirty in the morning with a smile. But that would soon fade away as I performed the routine. At precisely six twenty-five, if you knew me well, you would know that I was on my toes, breathless, faster than an average athlete, after a college bus driven by a bald headed angry driver. It was a completely different situation today though. The bus was late! That too, by forty five minutes. My impatient being does not remember exactly how many times I had sweared, while one of my bus-mates remarked at the irony of the bus being late on the day we were going to celebrate BUS DAY!
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a BUS DAY is celebrated in remembrance of the bus that provides you with a comfortable commuting option. It is in remembrance of those seats you doze on during the two hour long journey to hell. In short, it is a journey that leaves you stinking at the end of it all! It was my first Bus day. The experience closely related to a beloved festival ‘holi’ and a wild birthday party. When I reached college I was a multi-coloured being who smelled like cake, sprite and tomato juice. I was also a bride. The circumstances under which that phenomenon had occurred are too secretive to be revealed. I tidied myself up both physically and mentally (cleared my mind of impure thoughts) in, say, half an hour in the hostel. Happiness dawned upon me as I realised I had missed the first two hours of a long, unfulfilling day in IT A. And soon a sharp, painful headache dawned with it. I had caught a terrible, terrible cold the night before. I walked my way through muck to the physics laboratory where we were supposed to have a revision of experiments. With my two compatriots (the three of us totally believe that neither of us would be able to survive a single day in the college without the company of the other two), I started looking at apparatus among which few were familiar but the rest weren’t. With a silent nod it was as if they had commanded me to proceed with the procedure of performing the experiments. I am regarded as a person gifted with sharp memory but my headache had overpowered my ability to briefly explain to them how they were to go about it. And yet, I managed to get a few words out of my mouth for their benefit. After having gone through each of the experiments, teary eyed, I pleaded them to accompany me to the class. But I failed in my pursuit each time. By then it was lunch hour. My head was pounding and my jaw had started aching.
Not being able to bear the pain, I comfortably, without worrying about the consequences, laid my head over the desk while our teacher for English rambled on for fifty minutes about some subject I can barely remember. I am glad that our teacher did not wake me up from my sound sleep despite the fact that I was seated on the first bench. I am very grateful to her for that, I must say. I got up feeling much better, and within a few minutes I was on my toes, accompanying my friend to the library for ordering a couple of photocopies of a few pages of a certain Electrical Engineering text book (my purpose of being there involved only payment of money and ascertaining that a copy was taken for me and my friend). With the required study material, we galloped our way to the bus stand only to find that the buses had resolved to park themselves in a very weird fashion that deeply troubled our senses. We spent around twenty minutes chiding at the new system. The system required the buses to be lined in two straight rows. It became rather difficult to trace our bus in the midst of the rest and after quite an effort we were all successful! But it was a dreadful situation to try and squeeze our way to the open ground (there was very little of that available!) . In some time I spotted a senior friend of mine, greeted him, and playfully scolded him for not having sent me links to a bunch of videos of my dance performance at our college festival. He has this amazing grin that flashes his white teeth in such brilliance that you almost immediately forget his mistake! Nevertheless, I was determined to make him feel guilty but I failed owing to the fact that he had in fact sent me the links but somehow they had not reached my email id. He said he would send them over again and I made my peace with that. After having bid farewell to him, I walked back to my friend, unaware that in the near future I was going to be in trouble. For quite some time, say a few weeks, I was being ragged by a senior, who was at my tail again that day, moving swiftly from place to place as I switched between them myself after noticing him. As if that wasn’t enough of dread, my friend HAD to make fun of the situation instead of making me feel safe beside her! But it was ultimately the buses that saved me from an unnecessary confrontation with the senior. They were on the move now, taking every day scholar back home from hell.
The Bus Day celebration had not rested in its grave yet. We stopped plenty of times during the journey when our bus seniors got down and bought food for everyone in the bus. The food was being rapidly distributed. This time the cake had landed on our paper plates and not our faces. With all the eating and the gulping, time had passed much faster….I took leave from the bus and I started walking back home.
Ah! I had finally rested my feet on the bed. I lay on it wondering how fast a day had passed and how soon the rising sun would come to greet me. I changed clothes and rushed to the apartment one floor on top. I occupied my aunt’s computer and went online. This is what I usually do. Stay online from six thirty in the evening to around eight. Work out for an hour or so and come back online from nine thirty till around ten thirty. Ten thirty is my curfew and as the minute hand on the clock points at six, I rush downwards back home. I brush my teeth and switch on my laptop to lose myself to the music of Great Lord and Idol Kurt Cobain and other brother rock bands till midnight. It is fair to contemplate at this moment, how in a year’s time the teen drama will be over under the effect of metamorphosis that I would undergo. As Cobain chanted ‘And I swear that I don’t have a gun, no I don’t have a gun….Memory yeah, memory yeah…’, I closed my eyes ending the chapter on another very normal, forgettable day in an eighteen year old girl’s life!
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a BUS DAY is celebrated in remembrance of the bus that provides you with a comfortable commuting option. It is in remembrance of those seats you doze on during the two hour long journey to hell. In short, it is a journey that leaves you stinking at the end of it all! It was my first Bus day. The experience closely related to a beloved festival ‘holi’ and a wild birthday party. When I reached college I was a multi-coloured being who smelled like cake, sprite and tomato juice. I was also a bride. The circumstances under which that phenomenon had occurred are too secretive to be revealed. I tidied myself up both physically and mentally (cleared my mind of impure thoughts) in, say, half an hour in the hostel. Happiness dawned upon me as I realised I had missed the first two hours of a long, unfulfilling day in IT A. And soon a sharp, painful headache dawned with it. I had caught a terrible, terrible cold the night before. I walked my way through muck to the physics laboratory where we were supposed to have a revision of experiments. With my two compatriots (the three of us totally believe that neither of us would be able to survive a single day in the college without the company of the other two), I started looking at apparatus among which few were familiar but the rest weren’t. With a silent nod it was as if they had commanded me to proceed with the procedure of performing the experiments. I am regarded as a person gifted with sharp memory but my headache had overpowered my ability to briefly explain to them how they were to go about it. And yet, I managed to get a few words out of my mouth for their benefit. After having gone through each of the experiments, teary eyed, I pleaded them to accompany me to the class. But I failed in my pursuit each time. By then it was lunch hour. My head was pounding and my jaw had started aching.
Not being able to bear the pain, I comfortably, without worrying about the consequences, laid my head over the desk while our teacher for English rambled on for fifty minutes about some subject I can barely remember. I am glad that our teacher did not wake me up from my sound sleep despite the fact that I was seated on the first bench. I am very grateful to her for that, I must say. I got up feeling much better, and within a few minutes I was on my toes, accompanying my friend to the library for ordering a couple of photocopies of a few pages of a certain Electrical Engineering text book (my purpose of being there involved only payment of money and ascertaining that a copy was taken for me and my friend). With the required study material, we galloped our way to the bus stand only to find that the buses had resolved to park themselves in a very weird fashion that deeply troubled our senses. We spent around twenty minutes chiding at the new system. The system required the buses to be lined in two straight rows. It became rather difficult to trace our bus in the midst of the rest and after quite an effort we were all successful! But it was a dreadful situation to try and squeeze our way to the open ground (there was very little of that available!) . In some time I spotted a senior friend of mine, greeted him, and playfully scolded him for not having sent me links to a bunch of videos of my dance performance at our college festival. He has this amazing grin that flashes his white teeth in such brilliance that you almost immediately forget his mistake! Nevertheless, I was determined to make him feel guilty but I failed owing to the fact that he had in fact sent me the links but somehow they had not reached my email id. He said he would send them over again and I made my peace with that. After having bid farewell to him, I walked back to my friend, unaware that in the near future I was going to be in trouble. For quite some time, say a few weeks, I was being ragged by a senior, who was at my tail again that day, moving swiftly from place to place as I switched between them myself after noticing him. As if that wasn’t enough of dread, my friend HAD to make fun of the situation instead of making me feel safe beside her! But it was ultimately the buses that saved me from an unnecessary confrontation with the senior. They were on the move now, taking every day scholar back home from hell.
The Bus Day celebration had not rested in its grave yet. We stopped plenty of times during the journey when our bus seniors got down and bought food for everyone in the bus. The food was being rapidly distributed. This time the cake had landed on our paper plates and not our faces. With all the eating and the gulping, time had passed much faster….I took leave from the bus and I started walking back home.
Ah! I had finally rested my feet on the bed. I lay on it wondering how fast a day had passed and how soon the rising sun would come to greet me. I changed clothes and rushed to the apartment one floor on top. I occupied my aunt’s computer and went online. This is what I usually do. Stay online from six thirty in the evening to around eight. Work out for an hour or so and come back online from nine thirty till around ten thirty. Ten thirty is my curfew and as the minute hand on the clock points at six, I rush downwards back home. I brush my teeth and switch on my laptop to lose myself to the music of Great Lord and Idol Kurt Cobain and other brother rock bands till midnight. It is fair to contemplate at this moment, how in a year’s time the teen drama will be over under the effect of metamorphosis that I would undergo. As Cobain chanted ‘And I swear that I don’t have a gun, no I don’t have a gun….Memory yeah, memory yeah…’, I closed my eyes ending the chapter on another very normal, forgettable day in an eighteen year old girl’s life!
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