Squiggles

I've always found writing to be an amazing stress buster. This probably explains the tiny pencil squiggles all over the walls in my room.

Thankfully, my hall manager hasn't checked up on me yet and so the squiggles keep building up. From where I'm sitting I can see the following quotes:

'Good girls go to Heaven but Bad gurls got to London'
and

'DO noble things, don't dream them all day long
And so make life, death and that vast forever,
One grand sweet song'

followed by a blurry

'It must have been Love
But it's over now...'

I can also see bits and pieces of a To Do list followed by a sharp invective :P

One peremptorily reads,

'Must have a bath' F&*!

And here in a corner I can see, the following string of words:

'Photoelectrochemical cells, Algae, Flux analysis. CHECK!'

I have a list of the universities I want to apply to on the wall beside my laptop. And above this list I've signed the following statement:

'The minute I get a good result. I shall come to Hyderabad.' -PdeSouza
This was attested by Tanushree Prasad on 20/8/2012 :)

My whole life seems to be spun around these phrases.
Right now, as I pull my hair out and try and get some work done, different phrases remind me of the good, the bad and the embarrassing things I've done.

They serve as a perpetual reminder that at any point in time, whether I'm on the Highest of Highs or the Lowest of Lows, Life has so much to offer.

There! my eye just passed over a squiggle that explains what I mean:

'Life is not an ashes to ashes or a dust to dust existence, but a soaring gift snatched from eternity'

blue

I suddenly feel so miserably insignificant today.

Everything I do is so pointless. I feel like I've been battling the universe to prove something and today I just can't seem to remember what that thing is.

It all started when this morning when I started looking at photographs on facebook and saw congratulatory posts and I had this weird 'dwarfing feeling' as Aditya B says.

Then the procedural maze at the lab to use a simple XRD apparatus bogged me down. To access XRD results, I have to wait TWO WEEKS. It took me a week to get signatures and now they're going to take another week for the scan. A black box period. How will I trust their results?! Maybe they'll feel lazy this week and give me some bogus data!

Why am I running around, fighting the system?!

Then I met my professor and he just found it funny that things are so slow in IIT. Hello? What about me dude? I felt unutterably weary as I sat in his office. Okay, I know I'm not myself when I feel an analogy from Harry Potter bubbling up to the surface. But I honestly felt as if a Dementor was sitting next to me, sucking up every positive feeling I had. I felt so drained.

Anyway time for a nap to forget everything. Then quiz time. :-/

Yay me!

To say I'm pissed would be an understatement.

I found the above post in my drafts. I guess it was too depressing for me to want to put it up on my blog at that time. I'm feeling blue again, dear reader. Life isn't the rosy sunset I once dreamed it would be. I'm going to mix up Ignatius Loyola's quote now, 'What profits a man if he gains the whole world but doesn't have a single friend to rejoice and celebrate with?'. I'm lucky and grateful to have made the best, most loyal friends in college. I've met people I've admired tremendously, so why do I keep wanting things I don't/can't have?

The Next Chapter

Dear Reader. Have you ever tasted heartache? Not the romantic kind, but the kind where a lot of familiar, friendly things seem to be slipping away from you?

Right until graduation, I felt close to my friends even though they weren't in Mumbai, but now they seem to be slowly but surely sailing away into a sunset; a gorgeous red and golden future of which I have no part.

I'm happy for them. I wish they always sail on clouds of glory so that I can tell my grand children, d'you know so and so? Well I used to go partying with them! Ha!

For there's no doubt about it, that each of them is going to be a very great, a very special person some day. They not only have the ability but also the drive and the ambition which are equally important. I have been inspired by them, and I have admired them.

The best thing that has ever happened to me was getting into IIT. Finally, it is not the lectures, or the opportunities which I value most, though they were certainly very helpful, but the people I have met. They showed me how to live. How to be passionate about something, how to want to contribute to a cause and most of all, how to just be myself.

They accepted me for who I was, an overly dramatic, crazy nerd. I didn't have to pretend to be cooler than I was, or nerdier than I was. They were my friends all the same. I've felt that most of my life, I've tried to adjust to the people around me in order to fit in. But in IIT I realized that not fitting in was the key to fitting in, and not fitting in, simply meant being myself.

I am grateful that I got a chance to meet the people I have become closest to. They are going to be starting new lives in a different country, but I guess I'll be starting a new life too. Here's to the next chapter!

Cheers.

Searching for Patterns

Life is like a great gilded book. Every second, the book expands as closely written pages are added to it. What is the book about? Why you and me!

Somehow, sometime, a dot of ink spilled on the first page and streaked out into the beginning of a story. As new characters were introduced, the story snowballed; driven by the momentum of the characters themselves.

If a tapestry could be woven reflecting the connections between the various characters, , Mandelbrot himself would probably be bewildered at the fantastic complexity of the picture; as hundreds of millions of microcosms cut across each other to form a picture that never seems to be complete; but is always tending to perfect symmetry.

Sometimes, one is rewarded by a flash, a view of a pattern which causes one's heart to ache with the beauty of it. And that's the secret. We search for these patterns, these micro symmetries and forget the all encompassing trend.

Everyone's actions affect everyone else. Just by existing, you are part of the pattern which would be completely different if not for you. I've given a great deal of thought to this. Sometimes I deliberately give in to crazy impulses just to see the pattern change and see the birth of new symmetries.

It's when I give in to my impulses that I most strongly feel that I am the Writer of my own Life. I feel Powerful as I control every other character in the book. They would not be where they are doing what they were doing if not for me.

P.S: This whole post is fresh evidence that I'm crazy. But the image of the book haunted me today and i had to put it down. I don''t understand exactly my own analogies but some part of me dimly understands what I have written.

"We are Young"

She was caught in a whirl of music, alcohol and dance. She threw her armor to the wind and responded to the rhythm. "We are young!" the crowd sang. And suddenly, she was shocked to find her cheeks wet with tears.

She woke up in a cold sweat and realized that it had just been a dream. She got up shakily and looked at her old, wrinkled, face in the mirror. Time had not been kind to her. Her hair was white as snow and her eyes looked so disillusioned and tired. A shudder wracked her frame. The only thing that was real were the tears.

Part 1

The storm expended it's spate of fury in a burst of rain.

Marion clung to the tree, her cheek pressed against the wood waiting for the rain to cease. As she waited she fell to her favorite past time of 'pretending'. She pretended that every now and again, time would cease and everyone assumed their true form and fulfilled their true purpose. She liked to think that she was really a dryad, tending graceful birch trees in the day and dancing on some mysterious heath on Midsummer nights. Life was really just an interlude between flights of fancy.

The rain ceased and Marion slipped away between the trees back home. Home was a small apartment in Mumbai.

Though her body anchored her to the city, her heart was usually always to be found on Prince Edward Island in Canada. Ever since she has read 'Anne of Green Gables' at the age of 8, she had dreamed of living on P.E.I with it's Violet Vale and Dryad's Bubble and Lake of Shining Waters.

All this talk of dreaming, must have given you the impression that Marion is a child. But, no, Marion is really 21; though she'd been a little girl too long to have grown out of the habit completely. All this speaks volumes about her soul, but I can hear my reader wonder what she looks like!

No, she does not have auburn hair and dreamy green eyes with a rosebud mouth, but fluffy, untidy brown hair and dark brown eyes with a tiny beauty spot next to her mouth. You might walk past her without knowing who she was. Marion possesses no exceptional talents except one; and that is the power to love. Be it, her family, her friends, her pet birds, the tree outside her window, Marion loved them all with an intensity which always caused her heart to break every time change crept into her little world.

And that is where dreams fit in. Everything in Life is ephemeral; change alone is permanent. Dreams on the other hand belong to one and one only and hence, one must guard them jealously and keep them close. They are the only things that lie between hurt, despair and ultimately cynicism and eternal beauty. Marion lives on dreams, lives for turning them into reality. That is why her world is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

In the next few posts I hope to make you better acquainted with Marion.

Moonlit Dreams

It's 10:00 pm and I've given up trying to coax sleep to sprinkle sand in my eyes. I've rather philosophically gotten up to stand by my window and dream.

I can hear the muted sounds of traffic as they filter through the leaves of the tree outside my window. The wing is quiet. The hostel dogs have finished their routine raid and have left the world to darkness and to me.

The moon is a young moon tonight. She seems to quiver full of expectancy. I can understand why people says that moonlight is dangerous. Nothing seems impossible or stupid when it's bathed in moonshine.

Is this the same moon that looks down on the Mens Wimbledon Finals Match, albeit unseen? Is it she that looks down on hunger in Africa, at war and bloodshed in Pakistan at despair and terror in Afghanistan? Is it she who has looked down on generations of lovers?

In a world of change it is so wonderful to have something that is constant, that will always walk in beauty through the night. For I've come to realize everything changes. Not just people and places, but ideals! Ideals change too! And I'm not sure I like that!

I've always wondered what Anne of Green Gables would make of today's world. A world so much more complicated and multidimensional than the one she lived in, in Avonlea. Would she retain that starry eyed romanticism? Could she hold on to her Dreams and Ideals? Well she must! Otherwise she wouldn't be 'Anne'.

I can feel sleep creep up over me as I write. It is such a lovely, delicious, cosy feeling! Good Night World and Good night Moon!