My Precocious, Precious 6 Year Old

Dear Bloggie,

I don't know what caused me to give birth to you on 5th November of 2004. I think it was the restlessness that comes with being 21 or may be it was the need to have a creative outlet while doing engineering, but whatever it was, my beautiful bloggie, you were born and since then have been my one constant love. Yes not even my shoes. (you have to take my word for it, I'm afraid)

I'm bad at commemorating milestones. I forget anniversaries and birthdays and I forgot your birthday too (sorry!). I only remembered that you'd turned 6 when I was mentioning you to somebody, when she asked me about when I'd started blogging and that was when I remembered!

Dear God, has it been 6 years my love? 6 years since we started keeping a record of my life, my activities (heh!), my loves (double heh!) and my view on life? I want to say that despite the crests and troughs of life, having you as a constant keeps me moored.I can look back at the times and see how far I've come, see my evolution actually. Its wonderfully weird to see your own pattern of evolution. I think its the scientist's daughter in me that looks at various blog posts of the past and analyzes how I changed and where I changed. Pretty cool neh?

But I digress, this is about you and why you're important to me. Calling you just an outlet to my creative outpourings would be mean and belittling you. No. You see I think a lot. I've always been that kid thats been lost in thought. My head is filling up with sentences and my thoughts are flashing at the speed of light. To bring order to chaos, and partly to empty my head of these sentences, I start to write. To give them order and coherency. and thats when clarity happens. Like magic. They come together like obedient wards and align themselves into a marvelous whole. Before I know it, I have expressed an opinion and created something meaningful. Its like giving birth and thats why you need to be celebrated. You are truly my offspring.

I get to create thoughts and opinion and see them manifest themselves in you. You need to be revered because frankly, how many of us create? or even care to create? We are a world that idolizes rationale and logic. But not so much creativity. Parents don't tell their children to be poets or artists sadly. Creativity is a wondrous thing and it is ghastly that the world does not acknowledge or give rightful due to a process where you are essentially creating something from nothing. While rationale is discovery, creativity is invention. You, my dear, are magic and that's why the ode to you. You are my rebellion and my release. When I'm mired in calculation, I come to you for redemption and you let me be without judgment. My own little cocoon in this vast web.

I don't feel stymied in your presence, In fact I exult. I'm at my best, my most confident with you. My general awkwardness vanishes before you and I feel like an unencumbered conduit, pouring out emotions. You have no Idea how indebted to you I am for this. It is as much a safe haven as it is exhilaration.

I could list numerous reasons of why you are precious to me and if something were to happen to the server on which you're stored (Heaven forbid!), I would truly experience the loss of an offspring.

My favourite author/literary personality Oscar Wilde said that to love oneself was the beginning of a lifelong romance. You are indeed that.

Love,

A

The Defense of Liberal Arts

I was watching The King's Speech the other day, (brilliant movie btw, C.Firth is delishh!) and there is this bit where Firth's character, who has a speech impediment, has to recite a Shakespearean verse to his speech therapist, Geoffery Rush. The verse happened to be the eponymous verse from Hamlet, the one that everyone and their uncle claim to understand - To be or Not to be. At first glance, it seems a random verse but in the context of the movie, where Firth's character, George the sixth, is struggling to come to terms with his own existence as as a stammering, public speaking royal, the verse is extremely significant. It was an odd coincidence but it reminded me of the time I studied Hamlet in school whilst battling my own existential quandry. At that time, when I read the verse, I remember thinking that if there was someone more uncertain about things than Hamlet, it was me.

I shone all through school because of the diversity of the subjects we were studying. I loved that the specificity of science was balanced by the abstract hindsight of History. So through school, from standard 1 to standard 10, you could say I was thoroughly intrigued. So in standard 11 and 12 when I had to make a choice of what I wanted to concentrate in - whether Science, Commerce or Arts, I couldn't decide what I wanted to do simply because I had no measure of what I excelled in and what I didn't. I was sort of an all rounder and as everyone knows, there's nothing worse than the fate of an all rounder.

I chose to concentrate in Science simply because it had an aura of sagacity to it. Also, it seemed like the most logical thing to do because I grew up in an extremely scientific household. No-brainer it seemed. Unfortunately though, all my friends got separated into the other sections. You see, they had a much better idea of what their strengths were and appropriately chose to play to their strengths. A most excellent strategy, if I may so comment. So while I learned the irrefutability of science, they learned to glean insights from abstract prose. While I learned the rules of calculus, they were debating the importance of the UN in the modern era. I always felt short changed when I hung out with them. Their learning seemed to evolve with them while mine was fixed and centered around the rules of the universe.

Don't get me wrong, I loved my courses. Learning about the building blocks of the universe and the rules that govern them is a wondrous thing in itself, but I rued the fact that there was no room for debate or discourse. E was always going to be equal to MC^2 and that certainty sucked. so I hung out with them - the wannabe poets, the budding political analysts, the specious economists and was awash in their glow. I remember lying out in glorious sunshine, on the lawn outside a 150 year old building where our classroom was, and listening to my best friend recite "The Lady of Shalott" I comprehended for the first time what unrequited love must feel like thanks to Lord Tennyson. It made me wonder. It put me in another's shoe. I sat in on classes when they read poetry which introduced me to poets such as Phillip Larkin, D H Lawrence, Tennyson, and ofcourse T S Eliot. I remember being in agony when I found out that I had missed out on a poetry class where they spent 3 class hours decoding "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" I had read it and re read it, and each time, I came off gleaning something new, something abstract. I argued politics with them, we discussed the middle east peace process and took sides on which country had the most functioning democracy.

These discourses ripped open my certain world in science. There was no right or wrong but you learned to form an opinion or an insight. I was learning to make up my mind and defend them instead of having certainties handed down to me. I learned more about life outside the class and slowly started getting disenchanted with my own studies. I got caught up in an existential crisis that behooved a teenager - what did I want in life - certainty of logic or the uncertainty of the abstract? to be or not to be? I couldn't agree with Hamlet more.

When I look back on what made the most impression on me in those years, it was the Arts. Poetry, literature and political science.I don't remember now what a benzene ring looks like or how the carbon molecule concatenated, but I do know that the arts taught me to appreciate the philosophy and absurdity of life. It gave me the liberal outlook I still possess and transformed me as a person. From a world of black and white, I embraced the grey. I couldn't have asked for a greater gift from my education.

So not to sound preachy, but I think its time the Arts got its due in the Indian Educational system. We are a society that produces way too many engineers and not enough poets.

Do you tell lies? And say that it's forever?

Winter break, dear reader, is a wondrous thing in the life of a B-school student. Especially so, if you're a 2nd year B-school student. The days stretch before you and you find you have nothing to do except check Facebook with zeal and upload your term photos with even more zeal. Ofcourse, if you happen to be one of those who haven't sorted that bit about "impending occupation" you will have nights with nervous sleep but really, even you will admit that there's so much time and not enough to do. Not that doing anything is necessary. Indeed, after being done with 6 week hectic terms, where one is chasing one team meeting after another, plotting violent ends to said team meetings, meeting deadlines galore - one is quite glad to be not doing anything. It becomes a time then, to stop, breathe and smell the metaphorical rose. Its a time to reflect upon things, indeed, take stock of the world and get out, however briefly, of the B-school bubble and ponder wordly things. If you are me, you will do that and more. Like studying the lyrics of arbitrary songs and gleaning philosophical meaning from it.

Yes, given that I had so much time, I found myself asking what Def Leppard truly meant when they said "Love Bites" not just that, it even bled they said. It seemed a pertinent question given that the whole world except me was in Love. Numerous Relationship statuses changed, pink hearts emerged and you were led to thinking that Louis Armstrong was not chasing utopia and that it truly was a wonderful world. Or was it?

I may not know a lot of things but I do know Love. Well atleast I knew it. I also know that nothing is as misrepresented in this world as love. I've never been able to fathom why all the material on this topic is primarily concerned with falling in love. So much so that, the world at large is in love with the idea of falling in love. It is the only pursuit. What about maintaining it? what about the dark side of love? why doesn't anybody talk about it? Thanks to movies and other media, we have constructed an ideal of what love should be. We are told that its happy and things will fall in place once we are in love. Anyone who has been in a relationship, will tell you that finding love is just the beginning of things, and its maintaining it that is a bitch.

The only movie that comes to mind that broached this topic - the dark side of love - was 500 days of Summer. Which didn't do too well at the box office because ofcourse it didn't have the stereotypic happy ending but for me the move had a realistic portrayal of Love in our complicated era. She didn't know what she wanted, and he was too enamoured with her too really see that she didn't love him as much as he did. My biggest pet peeve is that nobody warns you about the dark side.

No one tells you about relationship dynamics and how you're always striving to maintain the delicate balance of conceding and receiving. And what about compromise? and how you don't always get what you want because now you're in a team and are expected to take one for the team. Most importantly, no one ever talks about how self-diminishing love can be. The more you imbibe each other's interests and habits, the less individualistic you each become. Is that not a cause for worry? Is it not a bad thing to be guilt ridden for wanting something for oneself when it may not be in the best interest of your relationship? I've been there and wondered why there is no handbook on dealing with Love.

I may be rambling but what I'm trying to say is that we are taught to believe that finding love is the ultimate jackpot but may be its not. May be its not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Its a whole lot more complicated than what our rose tinted glasses allow us to see and may be, just may be, it is not so trite as changing that relationship status and getting that pink heart next to your name.

Digits

From across the bar, when our eyes met

I knew in an instant, that the scene was set

For us to tango into discovering each other.

When you said you liked Shakespeare

I said OMG! I *heart* King Lear,

And my heart beat quickened a bit (just a bit),

We talked about cars, wars and beatniks

And even supported the right party in politics,

This is unreal I thought.

I wanted time to stand still,

If only I could, with all my will,

But you had to leave. Sigh. “Call me” you said,

and on my extended palm you wrote your number,

I knew I’d dream about you in my slumber

(and, of our dozen babies, ofcourse)

Soon after, I decided to leave too,

But not before making a quick stop at the loo

All the while my heart was smiling.

I turned on the water to make my hands clean,

Don’t yell at me, it was a matter of hygiene,

I wasn’t thinking ok?

I couldn’t believe it, all I could do was stare,

No remnant of you, my palm was bare,

Unfortunately, it seems like we were never meant to be.

> 1000 words

If you haven't guessed, this is a pictoral blogpost, capturing some of my favourite pics and moments of 2010.

1. 2010 NCAA Basketball championships: Easily my most awesome event of the year. That epic last shot that wasn't, the celebration that followed at Cameroon, will forever be etched in my mind. Hell it made my expensive education worth it.

2. Improv final performance: Acting silly and making people laugh can be the funnest experience. My improv team below where pigeons did make progress.

3. 2010 was filled with so much travel and such memorial experiences. Two of my favourite pics below. One from Brugge and one from Cairo

4. Re-discovering my passion for running through the beautiful WaDuke Trail. It is 3 miles long and my favourite running trail in the Durham area. Will miss it terribly.

5. Discovering The Duke West Campus thanks to my French Class. I got to see the magnificent Duke Chapel and the rest of the campus in the serene morning light. I loved starting my day with so much beauty to behold. Makes you appreciate life a whole lot more.

6. This was also a good year for collecting shoes. I'm literally gonna be the lady who lives with her shoes. My favourite pair of 2010. So pinkkk, it hurts :)

7. Also a year where I discovered my love for baking. Made cupcakes galore and this was my denouement. Aren't they pretty? they tasted awesome too FYI. The secret it turns out, is sour cream. Who da thunk?

8. Not so bad a year. A few ups, lot more downs. Good memories, painful memories. Hoping 2011, nay praying, really hard that 2011 is much better. Actually, the picture below sums my mantra for this year