Excuse me while I kiss this guy

Mondegreen. That is what this is. When Jimi Hendrix wanted to "kiss the sky" in Purple Haze, I kept wondering which guy.
Mondegreens are when the brain interprets something completely differently from what it actually is. Like me and my insecure lot apparently do when we hear perfectly normal things and misrepresent them in our chaotic brains. Ah, woe is me. Why must these trust issues be saddled to my back.

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SHARAN!
You may not escape the birthday post. Crossing barriers of geography and the 10,000 years since I last saw you, I'm sending love, unicorns, wishes, all that good stuff.
Happy Birthday :)


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I met Shwetu recently. Yes, after two years of sheer cowardice, I saw her in person for further demonstrations of said cowardice. We did the usual giggling and talking, stuck and home and walking around. Gone are the days when our mother's wondered if we were fighting, since we were being so quiet *cough*lame*cough*. It is a low point in one's life when your own mother finds you vaguely uncool. Meeting her was a blessed relief.

I did not meet her friends. They now have a completely wrong picture of the both of us being melodramatic and highly strung. This just goes to show that one day, pigs will fly.

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What! I hear both of you gasping. Two posts in one day? Is everything okay, Aggie?
Yep, going swimmingly :)

Muchi, thy day has come and gone

Just when you thought I'd done the unspeakable by forgetting the birthday post, here it is. In all it's PDA glory, causing the two readers of this blog to wince and look away. I WILL NOT give up the birthday post. Not even when we are 80 and Alzheimer's has made me forget who Muchi really is. Even then, my clawed fingers will type some gibberish and you will bloody read it.

This year, traditions were broken. By that great disappointer, namely, me. To make up for not calling her two hours before The Day of Days, I am sending another one of my inexpensive and unique gifts of love. As they say, the best things in life are free, etc.

This year, Suchi's birthday was meticulously planned on a whatsapp group which made me feel hopelessly sad that I couldn't be there in person. How many birthday's have we spent apart now? Why? Stupid geography. Every year, plans are floated for New Orleans, Wizarding World of Harry Potter etc and then these plans go die at the same place where my other sock often disappears. In a void.

Happy birthday muchi :) You and your hair probably blinded a few virginal boys. Or maybe they were blinded anyway by that other thing that virginal boys do copiously. Hahaha, I will now laugh at my own jokes on this lonely blog :)

The Elegant Universe

Dr. Brian Greene was at Purdue yesterday. He is an unusual lecturer of physics. I understood all of his talk, despite it being mainly about string theory and what came before that. If someone can talk with that ease for an hour, without slides propping him/her up, and sound a bit like Hank from Californication, I'll dedicate a blog post to them. He talked about the fabric of the universe as some great minds understand it. His lecture made me miss my battered high school copy of Resnick and Halliday. And how small! how utterly completely wondrous! is our existence, in the here and now (both of which are concepts that make the mind spin, yet again). Also felt a wee bit of this.

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Somewhere in the first quarter of his talk, Dr.Greene explained the mechanism of gravity by asking us to imagine a flat rubber mat. A marble sliding on it would roll smoothly. Now if we were to place a big rock on the mat, the marble would no longer travel in a linear fashion, but would curve around the rock. And now imagine space is that rubber mat. A body like the sun would bend it and the Earth would then be forced to orbit this body that has bent everything around it. He had an animation to go with this. To the plebeian mind, it looked like those Maut ka Kua stunt rides, only on a planetary scale. Ah, cheap melas of Bombay, I miss you and your defiance of physics.


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Relationships are also somewhat like that,no? One heavy ball of expectations denting that fabric, so that both of us are forced to orbit endlessly around it. Pulled by the inexorable forces of love, what's next, too many work commitments, disliking each other's TV shows and would it kill to include a fucking smiley, eh? All that gravity, whattodo? How to be less of selfish pig?

Lola and Buzz

We named our cars and it all went downhill from there.

We graduated from names, to the pronouns her/him, to apologizing when we went rashly over speed bumps and to mutely sympathizing with them when they had to stay outside under polar vortexes and -40 C weather.

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You can never tell (and me, I can NEVER) what people might come to mean to you, three tiny inconsequential months into meeting them. Time mocks our relationships, just as relationships often defy the elastic boundaries of time. List, list, list:


12 hours: How much ahead of me, the most important part of me goes on living in my absence
1 hour : The shortest time in which I have fallen madly in love with someone
2 years: How long it took to get over an idiot I dated for 6 months
6 months: Getting over another chump 2 years after a painfully involved relationship
5 hours: Chatting on the phone with Natu. Just like that, one day after school
1 minute: Time required to get Sherin giggling madly, a month after not talking to her
5 minutes: Groveling to all and sundry for not calling. Im sorry, I suck.


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The friends I have made here surprise me because I thought I had long exhausted as invisible quota of how many awesome people seem to want to drink chai with you. But no, apparently, I have space for many more :) 

Hobo thought

Hobo thought: A thought that was slumming around in your head.

Innocuous. You didn't notice it at first, till suddenly one day it asked for a coffee or donuts or something, spare change.

The one is about a house. I had a stray thought about things my future house should have. A wine cellar, a water feature, plenty of guest bedrooms, terraces, balconies, patios, flowers, a mermaid themed bathroom. A reading nook, needless to say.
See, it's been growing and building on seemingly nothing. I'm puzzled and happy at these symptoms of growing up :) :)

Mutterings

Mental khit-pit is happening. Like city traffic as a background hum when you are sleeping, some thoughts are ever present. A slow back burner that is always on your mind, even if you dont know it. Shaping the way you think and react.
What I think about this alienating process of getting a PhD, what I want after this, a quiet death of hopes, that I have been furiously hoping all alone apparently.
Life happens at unexpected times and in unexpected ways.

Big, scary questions, guaranteed to produce 2 am hyper wakefulness.

Mother's Day a.k.a "What did you eat today?"

For the past four years, I have lived a couple of continents away from my parents. I live (relatively) by myself, own a car and am halfway through a doctorate that is killing me in stages. Despite all of this, the only note of real concern that has ever crept into my mother's voice is the weekly posing of these questions " Have you eaten yet? What are you eating? What did you eat this week?", ad infinitum in this vein.
Food is my mother's primary way of expressing love and affection. Other mother's may hug and cuddle, mine produces unsurpassable pav bhaji, dosas and strawberry milkshake. All on the same day. Given the miles that are now a barrier to personally stuffing my face, her modus operandi has become Surprise Food Parcels. These are giant boxes of food (Alphonso mangoes one summer, faraal one Diwali) that will arrive at my doorstep and have, on one occasion, made me cry.

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I have inherited some of my mother's legendary food pushing abilities in another form. Her's are more of a hawkish watching of who's eating what, expecting their stomachs to quadruple in size and then inflicting upon them, beta, one more roti, you only ate 7 so far, please.
I push people to read.
The most successful of my cajoling/bullying experiments has been Jenni, who never EVER read a book. It took years of work, and there she was, casually talking about Murkami the other day. I think I understand why people enter academia after at all.
I spend mental space thinking of books that I can match up with people. Can't help buying/mailing/lending people books that they just HAVE to read. Heaven would be a huge library, with pouffy old lady chairs, the sky for a ceiling, tables with coffee rings and lots of people to discuss PG Wodehouse with.

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Summer is here :D It is that gleefully sweaty, watermelon-infused, pink cheetah print chaddi shorts time again. Fitz and the Tantrums are my band for the summer.

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Love,
what a silly game we play,
Like a summer's day in May,
What is love? What is love?
I just want it to be love

-Love
Matt White

Cray old bar

Before you bother reading any of my hokey half though thoughts, please watch this: 

David Foster Wallace- This is Water 

Thank you very much Dee Dee bear <3 div="" nbsp="">

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Bug Muchi with existentialist hoo-ha just before her bed time and that's what she calls you, cray old bar. She's going for crazy old bat (guilty as charged, always) when she types this. Followed by entreaties to leave her alone. Very few people are gifted with a friends like these. Who know the thought before I have thunk it, who'll find a word for everything and who can tolerate you even when you sound doped without having gone near the stuff. I really lucked out here.

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Life is busy, the right kind of busy :) I enjoy working now. As if some bend was crossed without me realizing it. Somehow, all the cluelessness, the stress and struggle have morphed into a glimmer of understanding. I know so little about science but I feel as if I know what to do now. And where I'd like to go with this funny, maddening choice that life dropped on me.

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I want to see:

1. Inu

2. A documentary on why My Little Pony has any adult fans at all.

3. My pottery project, once we finish it

4. P, smiling 

5. Snow melting under the sun

6. The end of The Luminaries

7. Black storks, migrating 

8. My elusive family on Skype

9. Histone octamers, refolded successfully by moi

10. The blue ceiling of St Mary's

Charlotte's Web

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

-EB White in Charlotte's web.

I'll use this much abused emo blog to thank the following people who can string together the meaning of life (more specifically, my life) for me:

Muchi

Jenni

Sharan

Shwetu

Dharini

Sherin

Henna

Joy

Pritish

Deng

At some point of time, something one of them has written has made me smile/smirk/finally get it

******

Kagaz ke do pankh leke

Udaa chala jaye re

Jaha nahi jana tha, ye

Wahi Chala hai re

Umar ka ye tana-bana

Samajh na paye re

Disha hara, kemon boka

Monta re

-Swanand Kirkire in Lootera

I'll tell you why I like this movie. It's for all the wrong reasons: we drove an hour through placid corn fields, could not make the theatre attendant understand which movie we wanted to see, there was no samosa at the interval. Went through all this work for 2 hours of hearing Hindi on a big screen. The movie was beautiful, frame by frame. I dint like that Ranvir guy. But Sonakshi got to me, with her clumsy, artless lust for a strange man. Her sheltered world that becomes brightly exciting. Her gorgeous sari's. 

I loved this movie because I miss bollywood. There, I said it. I miss how it surprises you sometimes. How it's Delhi 6's and Swades' and Delhi Belly's exist and charm you. I crave those 3 hour long extravagances and Gulzar's lyrics. I want that overpriced samosa in the interval. 

What should I do? I wasn't so sappy before. Acidic would be the best summary of my attitude to the Indian film industry. 4 years away from India, and I'll be clutching the weirdest figments of nationality. I recently found myself defending Bollywood. I have a mini pantheon of gods in my car. I read the Indian Express on occasion. 

People move. I moved when I was 21,when I did not think about the weight of decisions. Heck, could barely spell that word. 

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Aur bhi kuch tha, but now I forget what it was :)