Rajasthan travelogue

Last week I went for a mini vacation to Rajasthan. It was the first trip I had single handedly planned, right from the dates, to cities to travel to accommodation. I enjoy the planning and preparation of the trip as much as the travelling itself. In a span of four hectic days, we covered four cities- Chittorgarh, Udaipur, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. Udaipur and Jaisalmer were the main destinations. Chittorgarh and Jodhpur were more like getaways and transits (respectively).

We took trains and buses, and stayed in heritage guest houses. It was a beautiful earthy experience. I travelled in a train after very long time. The sound of the train rushing by and view of the various lush farms filled me with nostalgia. Everyone in the train was talking about elections, about Modi and politics. It was fun to see how everyone has an opinion and arguments are endless in such train journeys, with a sheet spread in the center and playing cards.

The day we reached Udaipur, the first destination, election polls were taking place. We were afraid that we'll have trouble travelling around the city, but surprisingly everything was normal. But I had already checked out details of Chittorgarh and wanted to explore that if Udaipur was closed. So the first day, as soon as we reached Udaipur, we freshened up and decided to go to Chittorgarh. Chittorgarh fort is apparently the largest fort in India. It is on top of a hill, and there are a lot of palaces and temples inside the fort. It was very very hot. Considering we went in the month of April, I am sure it was relatively better. We kept ourselves hydrated with Shikanji and ice-cream. My mom said my face had turned red like a Monkey. Oh there were a lot of monkeys there. When I was about five years old, I was bitten by one. Since then I am a little cautious of monkeys around me. They are fun to watch but so unpredictable.

We came back from Chittorgarh by evening and then we explored Udaipur. There is a vintage collection of cars driven by rajas and maharajas in Udaipur. It is not a tourist attraction, but I had read about it somewhere randomly. I love everything vintage! So we went to see that. Some of the cars were really nice, the kinds you see in old movies and then there were chariots and old school buses and carts. Then we did some other touristy stuff, visiting museums and gardens. We finished the day with a nice candle light dinner at the rooftop of the hotel we were living at, just next to Lake Pichola. The wind and the light and the privacy were great. If only they played good music :-|

Next day we explored some more of Udaipur, saw the beautiful Udaipur palace, bought some ethnic Rajasthani curios and boarded the bus to Jodhpur. It was a looooooong, tiring bus ride. Google said it would take four and half hours, at the bus station they said it would take six hours...ultimately it took us EIGHT hours. We had taken a Volvo bus from Udaipur to Chittorgarh and it was wonderful. But for Udaipur to Jodhpur, Volvo bus timing was not convenient for us. And we had to take the regular roadways bus. Thankfully, we had got good seats. By the time we reached Jodhpur it was pretty late and we just managed to crash on our bed after dinner. The heritage guesthouse that I had booked was right in front of the fort. Early in the morning, we climbed up to the fort and enjoyed the view of the blue city. I bought a pretty pair of puppets and a mashaal like candle stand from there.

Then we took the bus from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer which was also long, but comfortable. Long journeys give way to long conversations which is the best part of travelling. Eat, drink, talk and nap once in a while. I enjoyed the bus rides as much as everything else. By the way, the ‘we’ I have been referring to is me and my mom. I went to this trip with my mom. She had her apprehensions in the beginning which she confided in me later on, about two women traveling alone. I come from a fairly conservative family background. My parents are one of the very few ‘progressive’ people in our clan. And while they try to keep pace with our changing world, with me, they gasp from time to time. Especially when I make sweeping statements like I don’t want to get married or what is the big deal about alcohol or I need to start smoking. Sometimes I say things just to see their reaction :) cheap thrills..haha.

Coming back to the trip...Jaisalmer was a lot of fun because of the sand dunes that we visited. Sam sand dunes. The tour agency from where we booked the cab for the dunes, said how Satyajit Ray was the God who discovered Jaisalmer and put it on the map (with his movie Sonar Kella). “Nahi toh pehle Jaisalmer kaun aana chaahta tha. Jab kisi ko punishment deni hoti thi, tab use bhejte  the yahan- ‘ja-sala-mar’” And everyone laughed. I smiled thinking how many tourists he must have said that practiced joke to.

We did a Camel safari around the sand dunes – one of the most memorable moments of the trip. We stayed at the sand dunes over night and came back in the morning. We did some more touristy stuff in Jaisalmer the whole day, and took the train to Delhi in the evening. My mom was extremely happy to find a Bengali restaurant in the middle of Jaisalmer, and we gorged on some “home-like” food at the end of the trip.

It was a very short trip but we managed to squeeze in a lot of things. Not a minute was wasted. Next I want to go to Jaipur and Pushkar. With that my Rajasthan odyssey will be complete. 

Here are some pictures from the trip.

From the Vintage collection of cars in Udaipur

In a temple at Chittorgarh Fort

View from the hotel in Sam sand dunes, Jaisalmer

The Bengali restaurant in Jaisalmer

Typical Rajasthani moooch :)

One of the many beautiful doors in Rajasthan.
I have a whole series of such doors captured in my camera

View from the hotel in Jodhpur

Our caravan in Jaisalmer

Camel ride in the Thar

Shut up, Confucius!

Confucius said- “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Three months into my first job - for which I had studied for 5 years eagerly waiting for the day when I will finally do what I love doing - I understood that Confucius was wrong.

What I realized was – if you make what you love doing, a ‘job’ - you will start hating it! Let me explain. So. I love writing. Let’s see what are the career options for a writer – journalism, copy writing, novel / book writing, script writing (TV / movie / theatre). . . I write when I feel like, when words come to me, overwhelm me, touch me and I feel compelled to put my pen to paper. It comes from my heart. Cut to scene – I have a deadline. Client has feedback. Others think they know better than me about the subject (they may!). I don’t care about what I am asked to write. I need to keep changing what I have written to get it ‘approved’. I cannot be attached to what I have written. I may have spent days and nights, redbulls and espressos on something, and then it never sees the light of the day. All this is professional, nothing personal against anyone, really! Most of the times the first draft which you felt a connection with, is completely mutated in the final version when it is finally approved. It doesn’t feel like it was yours. It becomes the Ship of Theseus.

Thank god, I did not take up writing as a career. Now the position where I am in, I can happily say that I absolutely love what I do. I don’t mind working over some weekends (unless I have plans!) because it is so interesting that I want to do it. But it is a job after all. When you absolutely love something, you are so attached to it, it is very difficult to keep a distant stance and view it pragmatically. My love could be my life but my job is not my life. I am working so that I can live the life that I would love to.

It becomes especially difficult when you love your job, the work that you do, but the people you work with are not as excited or passionate about it. In the short span of my work life, I have realized that I should not be attached to my work. So what if I have spent days and nights working on an idea, creating hundreds of slides, wringing my brain, forgetting to eat (you know it is a big deal for me!). Just because so much time, effort and energy is spent on something does not mean it will be accepted by everyone and you will get applauded (there will be those days too). You should be ready to start from scratch if required. That is how good ideas germinate. There is a thin line between attachment and detachment which I think I have come to learn. I get bogged down, yes. But there is only one way after that – getting up.

I don’t think I could use my attachment – detachment funda with something I truly love. That is why I don’t think I could be a ‘professional’ writer (though writing is a big part of what I do, it is not exactly what I do – it is a golden mean which I thoroughly enjoy).

P.S: A dialogue poster from one of my favourite movies :) Annie Hall.

Women's Day!

Happy Women’s Day- I may be a tad too late for this post, but work has been crazy busy since a few weeks and time is scarce (though I strongly feel that today people tend to glorify being busy, trying to sound important :)).

The first memory I have about this day was when I was twelve years old and my mom had wished me a ‘Happy Women’s Day’ just as I woke up and dragged myself into mum and dad’s room rubbing my eyes lazily in my polka dotted pajamas. I became stiff with embarrassment when my mom wished me, as my parents sat on their bed drinking their morning cup of tea in two big coffee mugs. Feeling my cheeks burn, I quickly and sternly retorted, “I am a girl, I am not a woman.” My mom insisted, “Now you are a woman, you are not a girl anymore.” I thought my mom was being very mean early in the morning, teasing me like that- right in front of my dad! I had got my periods just a few months before that morning. Being a woman felt like a curse.

Now though I don’t think being a woman is a curse, I do feel discriminated by the male and female stereotypes that exist in the society. I was exposed to discrimination right at the very moment when I was born in a quaint hospital in the pink city of Rajasthan. On that breezy day of September, I was the only girl child born in the hospital while hundred other boys wailed their way into this world. Incidentally, I did not cry when I was born. I was slapped hard so that I cry and start breathing. It was some complicated delivery in which I was born with blue arms and legs due to stunt oxygen supply. While my parents were happy and excited about my birth, there were people from adjacent rooms and nurses in the hospital who came to console my parents at the ‘second’ girl child. My mom was fairly young, and people told her that ‘bhagwan ke ghar der hai, andher nahi’- my parents were encouraged by those random strangers to try for one more baby. Our neighbours did not believe my father when he distributed laddoos celebrating the joy of a new family member. Who celebrates a second girl child?, they wondered and thought that my dad was fooling around with them. They came over to the house next day to confirm if I indeed was a girl and what was there to celebrate? According to them, our family was not yet ‘complete’- whatever that means!

That was years ago. But even today there are simple instances where I feel discriminated. Like how when I am out dining with a male friend, the bill is always given to the guy and the ‘feedback form’ is given to the girl. Always. It is just infuriating. Another instance, I was on an international flight and there were two guys- an American and an Indian- sitting next to me, I had the window seat. The air steward was offering drinks to everyone. The guys asked for beer and rum respectively. Then the steward asked me- “What would you like to have, ma’am?” And I asked him what were the options (I wanted to know if there was wine, but I didn’t want to sound too demanding) and he told me Orange juice and Apple juice. Hahaha. I almost laughed, the joke was on me. I smiled and said, “Apple juice”. When we were exiting the plane, the Indian guy saw me carrying a bottle of Absolut vodka and champagne in a “Duty free” bag, and looked surprised. We talked for a bit about buying alcohol at duty free.

Recently all the books I have been reading and all the movies I have been watching have strong female protagonists. And with the whole Lean in ‘phenomenon’ started by Sheryl Sandberg, and the celebrations of Gloria Steinem’s 80^th birthday this week- I have been thinking about feminism a lot. The book I finished reading today (by the way I have made a pact this year, my first real new year resolution ever, of reading 3 books every month- and I am so happy :) it’s working so far) was The Pregnant King by Devdutt Pattanaik. I am not quite into Indian mythology- many a times I confuse characters of Ramayana with Mahabharata, and I have never followed either of the epics- but this book is beautiful. Placing the story in the period of Mahabharata, it is fascinating how Devdutt conjures contemporary issues of gender and gender roles relevant even today. The Pregnant King is about a king who has two sons- being a father to one and a mother to the other- how he experiences both fatherhood as well as motherhood. It demonstrates how power lies with the man and how he needs to prove his manhood to grab and sustain that power. It is these acts of taking control, the thirst of being the mighty one that leads to violation of the opposite gender.

In the same vein, all the rape cases that we hear about in our society- is it really about the girl asking for it or men not having high morales? Not completely. Psychology behind raping someone is the power play- he does it, because he can, because that makes him feel more manly, because that makes him feel more powerful and the girl powerless.

I recently read the latest book by Jhumpa Lahiri called The Lowland, also nominated for the Man Booker Prize (did not win though). On the cover of the book it says that the story is about two brothers bound by tragedy. . .giving details of the plot. But for me the book was about the woman protagonist. She falls in love with and gets married to the younger brother who gets killed in the riots, and then as she gives birth to a child, she is married to her husband’s elder brother. Spread across different timelines, the woman is the only character who is constant and present at every curve of the story. When I had read the reviews online, people had some really bad things to say about the character of the woman- that she was bitter and selfish and ungrateful and stiff and emotionless. When I read the book she turned out to be my favorite character. She was not the conventional wife and mother. She was strong. Opinionated. Unapologetic. Focused. She was not heartless, like others perceive her to be. She only had a different way to express that love, she had different priorities. She reminded me of another fictional character- Dr. Cristina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy. She is my absolute favourite character in that TV show (apart from the yummy Dr.Shepherd ;) ) 

One thought struck me when I was pondering over these characters and human behaviour. In the same plots, the same characters, if you just change the gender, people’s perception would change diametrically. Now imagine if the woman from The Lowland was a male character who could not be loyal to the second wife because he was in love with his first wife and had seen her being murdered . . . haunted by that past, he could not focus on the present and left the house, his second wife and daughter, to pursue higher studies, his career and distanced himself from everything that reminded him of that past. Does it make the character hate-worthy? But because this was a female character, the readers were spiteful. A woman is supposed to be a nurturer and her priority needs to be her family, her kids. If you don’t fit that mould, you are selfish.

On blogging

It has been SEVEN years since I started writing here. This place has seen me grow or so I would like to believe. In these last seven years I have changed A LOT, going through different phases of life. Can be divided precisely into 4 parts in this blog- Graduation phase in Pune, B-school phase in Bangalore, first job phase in Bangalore and now the living-alone phase in Delhi. My very first post here was in February 2008. It was on Valentine’s day :) Just a little observation.

Before this whole blogging thing had come into my life, I used to write in a diary- very filmy ‘Dear Diary’ style. I even gave a fictitious name to my diary, like a fictitious (male) friend. Ahem, very corny, I don’t want to think about that now. I still like filling pages in pretty notebooks (I love stationery by the way!), but it is not addressed to anyone anymore. My mom still has ALL those diaries stored in one section of the cupboard at home, starting from when I was thirteen or fourteen. . .the early teens when I would write about school stuff and crush stuff and teacher stuff and growing up stuff. Writing was one constant thing all through my growing up.

I feel like burning those pages when I read them sometimes when I go home. It is so sentimental and dramatic and childish and there are so many language errors! Makes me cringe! But my mom tells me that I should keep it, that it would be good fun to read it when I grow old- but I don’t think so. I will only feel embarrassed reading things that I’d rather forget. And then she says that my kids when they reach that age may enjoy reading them. . . haha, basically she is preserving my diaries for her grandchildren :P But I have a different way of looking at it. The only reason I have not destroyed those diaries and older posts of this blog (some posts I have! they were really ridiculous!) is because I have a premonition that I am going to suffer from  Alzheimer's disease when I get old- I know it is weird, but I have this great fear of memory loss, I think one day I will get up and forget everything- how scary is that!

So my blog and all those diaries will come in handy that time. To understand myself all over again. One hell of a situation that would be. ~imagining a pretty 80 year old wrinkly S, trying to read through thick glasses~ which reminds me am scared of being old also. Ha! Fears Fears! Stop already, Peterpan. Getting old reminds me of that movie I watched recently- Love in the time of Cholera. It is based on a book written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a stunning Colombian writer. I have bought that book, will read soon. I like how he names his books. One of his books I read is called- Memories of my Melancholy whores :) isn’t that beautiful? Another one is called Hundred years of Solitude. I am yet to read those two books. I am reading a lot of books these days! There is so much to read! I am on a reading trip these days. And there are so many TV shows to be watched. I haven’t completed GOT :-O and I have been itching to watch House of Cards. Such dilemmas :D I am catching up on movies from time to time, and I think Wolf of Wall Street was pretty good. Which reminds me.. (haha..how every thought leads to another, I am gonna stop soon, promise)..I was asked the proverbial ‘Sell this pen to me’ on my very first job interview at the B-school, one where I failed miserably and this blog saw me rant like a baby!

Ha! Feels so good. It had been a while since I did a random post. Much needed break from all those posts that left me sighing (not exactly in a good way). Haha. How are y’all ?

P.S: I love blogging! Just saying :)

Date a girl who is lost

There are so many of these articles that have gone viral about “Date a girl who…”. In the series, there is a girl who writes, a girl who reads, a girl who does not write, a girl who does not read, a girl who travels. . . Today I also read one called “Date a girl who smokes pot”. And although it made for beautiful, heart-warming essays, I could not deeply or amply connect with any of them. I read, write, travel and all of that but somehow that girl isn't me. There is something amiss. 

So I say- Date a girl who is lost.

She is the one who is sitting on a window seat looking outside. Follow her gaze and you will see. . .that there is nothing to see. Or perhaps there is. Look closely. Is that the moon following you in the bus? Do the railway tracks seem to merge into each other? Does that cloud look like an elephant rubbing his tusk on a giant pillow? Date a girl who is lost to find joy in the ordinary. She is ordinary, in her own un-ordinary ways. You won’t live a single moment of a mundane life.

Look at that girl standing at the crossroads holding a map in her hands. She is lost. Not because she doesn't know how to read the map, or which side is North, but because she is trying to figure out which road she must take.

She is the girl who would look you in the eye, pour herself into your eyes and sigh while you are explaining her tax benefits and investment schemes. She is lost in the depth of your eyes and the slant curve of wrinkle when you smile. She is the girl who rushes at the last stretch of the trek to be the first one to stand at the top of the mountain and enjoy the view. She is also the one who will click a lot of pictures, and ask you to click hers because she is lost in the beauty of her surroundings and wants to mark milestones to find her way around.

Date a girl who lets go of herself and wants to get lost in you, inside you, when you make love. She is the one looking at your fingers when you strum the guitar under the starry night sky, lest she miss the way your knuckles swim up and down above the strings. Date a girl who gets lost in colors and knows her peach from orange. You will find her painting or chopping vegetables so intently, without taking her eyes off, not having heard you call her name twice. She is also the one who listens to her current favorite song on loop. Over and over again until every nerve ending beats to the rhythm of the music. Date her if you want to know what being lost feels like, unafraid to enter that fog where the road is not visible. All you see are some blinking lights coming towards you. Sometimes there are trucks and sometimes a stranger’s torch light. Date a girl who is lost because she is trying to find her way. And in that pursuit she is not going to hide away from the roads less travelled. Be with her and you may find a road for yourself.

Her tiny eyes are always wandering, not resting on any object, not satisfied by any sight. She wants to take it all in, in curious sips and bites. She is the one who orders all the books of the writer she has discovered and loved. And with each chapter and each book she gets lost in the world created by the author. 

She is the one who has never played Hide and Seek, because deep within she never wants to be found. She wants to stay immersed, stay lost and find her way only to get lost again in something new. Date a girl who is lost not to help her find herself- she can do that on her own- but to find yourself in getting lost with her, in her.

Window shopping for a groom

CAUTION: Long rambling post ahead. But I don't write long posts that often, no? So go ahead, read! :P

So 2014 is here and it has dawned upon some people that I am of marriageable age now. And I should be shipped off. Shipping address is the question. In India there are two kinds of marriages- ‘Love marriage’, the normal way of doing it, the way entire world does it, and ‘Arranged marriage’, the way India does it, when your family looks for a suitable match. The tradition of arranged marriage has evolved tremendously over the last few decades. I have stories from at least 3 generations- my grandmother, my mother and my sister. . .all of whom got married in the traditional Indian way.

My grandmother’s generation was late 50’s- she was the elder daughter of the family with fifteen kids born after her. Let me not get into my thoughts on family structures of that time, but yes it was amusing to have a young looking grandfather (my dida’s youngest brother was my dad’s age) and a kid uncle (some five odd years younger to me). So when my great grandfather, who by the way was a strict disciplinarian, fondly called Hitler behind the back, was looking for the perfect life partner for his elder daughter, there were a lot of men who came to “see” my dida. Yes, that’s what happened. The tradition is that the potential groom and his family come to the potential bride’s house to take a look at the girl who is decorated to set asail. Unfortunately for my cute, tiny, baby face dida several men came to the exhibition but nobody relished the offer made to them; though they did like the laddoos on the plate which they gobbled with immense satisfaction. Dida was asked to get up and walk in front of the guests, you know just to ensure that she was not handicapped. She was also asked to unbraid her long, beautiful hair, just to check whether it was real. My dida of course had no role to play in deciding whom she should spend the rest of her life with. She “saw” my dadu for the first time during the wedding at this ceremony called Shubho Drishti which literally translates to Auspicious Glance. My dida told me how she had got frightened when she saw my dadu- hatta-katta, a tall dark (I would say handsome too, I love dadu J) man with a moustache. Very auspicious start, I say. So that’s how my grandparents’ marriage got arranged.

Then in mid 80’s, my parents' marriage was also arranged. Things had evolved now. My mom had seen and met my dad before the wedding. In fact that is how it starts- exchange of pictures. If both sides of the families like the picture (and hopefully the credentials), they decide to meet. But there was a funny ritual that came about that time- singing. I am guessing that was their way to break ice. So the bride would be asked to sing a song, in her mishti mellifluous voice. Parents would talk about expectations, especially with the prevalent dowry system that time. Time for negotiations, leaving the kids alone to spend time. Oh no, not leave them alone alone; there will be the young uncles and brothers and sisters around. You know the sweet innocent flirting will be in the air- Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore style- that is if you are lucky and have any strain of romance in you from watching those movies and learning those songs from the radio. Otherwise you just sit there, stare and probably smile.

Then in the next generation in the mid 2000’s, my cousins and my sister also tied their knots in the arranged marriage style. Further evolution had taken place. Internet had not only emerged, but by this time the parents also had evolved enough to find their way in the world wide web. This is when Bharat Matrimony happened. So did Shaadi.com and Jeevansathi.com and many similar sounding match making websites that would give you a range of perfect matches to choose from. E-commerce has taken a very long time to bloom and make its mark in India; but online shopping had started with matrimonial websites way before flipkarts and jabongs came into being.

In the process of looking for The One, we actually regressed in our approach with these websites. Imagine my poor dida’s plight when people would come and reject her and leave. She was put on the table just like the laddoos and cups of tea, for people to judge and conclude if it was according to their taste. Likewise, we put ourselves on a display on these websites to be judged by people. Are we satisfying some sadistic pleasure in rejecting and judging people? Or is it this fake sense of control in finding the right match which pulls us into the trap? This is an era of consumerism- a buyer’s market in the matrimonial business. You have the right to choose.

In my sister’s case she had the good fortune to chat with him, get to know each other over the course of time and then decide whether they wanted to get married. It was a courtship of quite a few months before they got married. And they say they fell in love during that time. Quite a protected and stable courtship. No hiding your boyfriend’s picture from your parents, or secretly talking after everyone has fallen asleep. This is a courtship where your family encourages you to talk, spend time with each other and fall in love- how convenient is that?

And now ~tan te da~ it is my turn. I had always been against this system until I saw my sister doing it. And I thought- Not bad, huh? She did find a good life partner like that after all. And the whole process of looking for the groom was quite entertaining- people write hilarious stuff on these websites. I was young and naïve, and found great pleasure in taking the lead to filter people on the websites. I also take all credit in convincing my sister to take a look at him- he is not bad, I remember saying..haha :D

Now I am not young and naïve. So I have little faith in this established system that has been adopted by everyone in my family. Oh in between all these generations, an uncle had a ‘love marriage’ going against the grain, marrying his school time love. But things are not quite splendid in that front, so I cannot use that as a case study in my defense.

I never believed in school love stories anyway. You are too immature and stupid to know what love is and what constitutes a marriage. But last year I attended two weddings- childhood love stories, and I had this constant warm fuzzy glow on my face. It was so good to see people who had fallen in love in their school uniform sitting in the class room to finally sit next to each other in front of that holy fire, with a smile and the look in their eyes that said- see we made it! I was all mushy in those weddings and cried buckets after coming back.

Well coming back to my story. I find it very difficult to believe that I will be able to make such an important decision within a few months of meeting someone. My friends who have done this before, ask me not to worry and take every guy with a shot of tequila. There is nothing to lose, have fun, they say.

But it is no fun. I had never realized I was so commitment phobic until I reached this point in life. I wish I could fast forward a few years, take a look at his face, and come back to make that decision. Will I fall in love before I get married? Or will I just like someone and then get married to fall in love later? And what if I start hating him after marriage? What if he turns out to be a horrible person who was just putting on a show while talking to me? What if his parents are monsters and he loves them blindly?

What a sad boring love story I will have! No fun telling it to my grand kids! No excitement, no thrill. Plain old vanilla marriage. I don’t want vanilla, I demand Scarlett Thunder. But I cannot plan a love story; if it is not there in His script, I can do nothing about it. 

I have a fresh new idea about this whole arranged marriage thing. I think I should shortlist people based on The Criteria and then travel with each of them to some place. You get to know a lot about people by travelling with them. Whether he plans or is spontaneous, reckless or organized, talkative or quiet, how he manages crisis- tyre gets punctured or we are out of fuel, or if I want to pee, how he behaves when he is tired, whether he likes to do touristy stuff or be more local, whether he takes a guide, whether he is curious about new experiences, what he eats, how fussy he is, how he behaves in a new city, whether he has contingency plans or can think on his toes, how he takes care of me on the trip, the conversations. . .you know it will reveal a lot about who he is, which no Costa Coffee meet can do! I think it is a BRILLIANT idea ;) What do you think?

No, I'm not serious!

TATTOOO

I realized that I had not done the quintessential year-end post for 2013 which is quite a norm in blog world, and also my world- to look back at the year gone by and think what I was doing the previous year at exactly that moment, was I a different person? I think it is too late to reminisce about the year gone by and I must move on from ghastly 2013 which, let me go on record to say, was the most difficult year of my life till now. There were breathtaking beautiful ups and there were dismal downs, and the remaining moments in between were melancholic- which is what I would say defined my 2013. The year I turned 25. Being happy about little things, but sad in the big picture or being sad about little things but happy in the big picture. What choice would you make?

One of the happy things that happened in 2013 was getting my very first tattoo. I had been contemplating about it for a long time, the biggest challenge being the design. To find a design I could live with for the rest of my life, something meaningful and good looking, reflecting the point of time in my life and who I am. Not an easy task. Lo and behold, I did find the tattoo I was looking for. Dutifully and curiously I showed the design to my friends and family, and everybody loved it as much as I did.

This looks like five birds flying, but I like to believe that it is one bird shown in its flapping motion. The bird here is the symbol of freedom, the feeling of shedding all inhibitions, removing all shackles and flying free. The bird here is a swan, for me a metaphor of what I am, what I am becoming and what I want to be. With odd familiarity of the ugly duckling story, to me a swan stands for personal transformation, about seeing yourself in a new light and accepting yourself. This is not a superficial, cosmetic change but a change in heart, a change of mind, a change in the viewing lens with which I see the world.

Swans stand for fidelity and strong relationships, something I vehemently believe in. It also stands for spiritual awakening and grace.

I am thinking about the next tattoo now, but waiting for the ‘moment’.

P.S: I have not done PS in a long time, so.. hahaha

P.P.S: Please answer the quandary I placed in the beginning- Being happy about little things, but sad in the big picture or being sad about little things but happy in the big picture. What choice would you make? And no, you can’t be JUST happy. It is a choice, and you have to make that choice for me NOW!

*so demanding*

*giggles and vanishes*

P.P.P.S: *appears again* two blog posts one after another! what is up with me! :-o haha *poof*