Blind Spot

In this traffic, called LIFE, everyone has a blind spot. For some people the blind spot is huge and for some it's very narrow. No matter how much caution you take as a traveler to be aware of your blind spots, you can't have control on a fellow traveler's blind spot. That's why "accidents" in life happen. The good part is that these "accidents" are not fatal and "LIFE" moves on. It has too, because when these "accidents" are fatal, you know that you have successfully completed the journey called "LIFE".

I was way cautious and given my past history, I kept watching for my blind spots all the time and tried avoiding others' blind spots. But the dimensions of vision of LIFE is infinite and we as mortals, can never grasp this infinity and should not try to do so. In this road called "LIFE", there will be these hidden "blind spots" which we will miss unless and until we stumble across them. By default of life, we will have accidents. And as like any other accidents, they will be a part of our life and we just have to adjust to them.

Am I scared of the darkness?

Whomever I talk to these days, keep consoling me by saying "whatever has happened, it happened for best", "the worst had already happened, now only better things can happen to you", "there is always a ray of light in front of this dark tunnel" and other things like that. In some other life, I would have loved and felt comforted to hear such things. I would have loved to believe in the HOPE.

But now, I don't want any hope anymore. I don't want this dark tunnel to end so that I can see the light. I know too well now that "light" will be short-lived followed by another extremely long dark tunnel. I am getting comfortable in this darkness now. I know now, that life is nothing but a journey through long dark tunnels intermittent with short spans of sunlight and the ultimate tunnel will have no end. When the end is all darkness and emptiness, then why do I need to have those short spans of sunlight anymore? Isn't it better to embrace this darkness forever now and make it my home? Isn't it better to prepare myself for the ultimate journey which I have to make alone without any ray of hope?

To sir, with love.

I'm going to dedicate this one to my Boss, Gary. And with time, this entry will be modified as it consist of all the witty conversations I have had with him till now.
While I was doing a rotation in my lab, almost an year ago from now, suddenly Gary comes to our desk and told my lab-mate Yaqiang that he has got some xyz GB external hard drive. Yaqiang says, "Awesome now you can store some of your data in their". Gary replies, "Ohh no no...I'm going to store some of my pornography in their". I hear it as photography. And trying to be smart I ask him "Ohh...so you've a hobby for photography". Gary pauses and looks at me for a few seconds and replies back "Ohh mohona, just forget it !!" Afterward I realized from the way Yaqiang laughed and the way Gary replied back that to me, that I had heard the wrong word.
One day when I was supposed to show him some data, but failed to do so, he scolds me by saying..."you know what mohona....you'll need 10 yrs to complete your PhD. And by that time, I'll be dead, you'll be in jail for killing me and there will be no one left to rescue you." I didn't know whether I should have laughed or cried after this.
Lastly, one day Gary asks me "Have you read the indian newspaper today?" I said "I guess so". Gary says, "Do you know what am I referring to?" I ask, "About the bombings in Kashmir?" He says, "Oh no, about the indian minister who resigns at the age of 86". I googled it and found some minister resigning at the age of 86 for being involved in a sex scandal with some 3 women at the same time. Gary exclaims, "If I've to resign for something ever, it should be for some reason like this. At the age of 86 and that also with 3 women! Indians should be proud of themselves" :P

Well there are many more and will keep you all updated about his conversations.

I have always found the roads (and any open area as such) in the USA to be claustrophobic. Soon I realised that I miss the fields with horizon lying ahead. But then I thought why do I miss the horizon so much as I really love greenery and dense forests. Trust me, the roads of this country is overly flourished with those. Missing the horizon shouldn't really make me feel so claustrophobic. But today, while walking through the corrider towards my seventh floor lab, I understood why I feel this way.

I just want to stand in front of a limitless field, with the horizon ahead of me and saying me, "Run towards me. Just behind me, lies your beloved (and sometime hated) country with all your people in there."

So I miss the horizon giving me the reassurance that I haven't lost everything yet. They are just round the corner.

Swept off my feet

Long time back, I was swept off my feet when I was standing alone in a bus stop. A car drove towards the stop, the guy inside it waved at me. Oh Man.....what a man was he......just took my breath away !!! But moments later I found that he was waving at a girl next to me. I sighed ......... and thought.......wish I was that girl !!!!! I moved on !!!!
And today it happened once more........I was again swept off my feet .........literally...... in spite of knowing the consequences.........!!!! And this time what a pleasant experience it was.
Yesterday night, while coming back along wid a friend, he said me to call up my family and friends back home 2 tell them about the experience I had. I said I'll write a blog. But at that moment, I felt like singing, dancing, shouting, laughing and what not. I was witnessing a snow storm. It felt like all the snow flakes were rushing towards the window of the car as if they were arrays of bullets fired from an automatic machine. Then today morning, I witnessed the whole landscape covered with snow......my first ever.......and the excitement was as great as the first love !!!!
I came to the university......tried hard not to slip.......after the class went to watch the inauguration of Obama........played with lots of snowballs on my way......fell over and over again....friends asked me to make a snowman.......my snowballs broke while rolling them over.....they gifted me my first ever snowman .......dropped snowballs towards the ground from the 9th floor roof !!!!!!!! n yes......my palms were aching like anything......i 4got my gloves at home.....n while making the snowman they were so numb.....every moment i was scared of having frost bite.......but at the end.....it was worth it !!!!
What an awesome day man !!!!! Wish it snowed a bit longer ...... mayb to make a foot thick layer.....but yaa....tat's my desire for the next year.....
btw....this is the pic of the snowman we made....isn't it cute ???

My day broke out like this image........and then the night followed!! At 7am in the morning, all the lights of my house were on and the outside was completely dark. Generally, I sleep soundly at this time of the day......but today i took my camera and ran to the roof....
There it was.......i felt the limitless sky was being choked with the dark, monstorous clouds....then it seemed as if they would engulf me too ....... i thought if i stretch my hands a li'l more i will touch them. As if the clouds understood my feelings, it became angrier.......it started threatening me with lightning and thunder..... i remained unperturbed........i was too much thrilled with this magnificent sight.......n decided not to move from there...... and thn the clouds crossed their limit of bearing my attitude......it started raining heavily and those thunders got louder....... i cudn't stand thr n giggle at those clouds anymore........ this kalbaishaki defeated me !!
i ran inside ..... back to my room...... felt asleep in my cosy bed yet again ..... trying to store the picture of those clouds in my memory forever !!

A wonderful Dream !!!

Yesterday night, I had a dream - the most beautiful one I could ever had. I went to bed at 1 am, a bit early according to our standards. Then the dream followed. I saw that I am sitting in a classroom and taking dictations when a bell rang. The teacher left the room and a few of us moved into the fields. We started eating cold rotis, breads and noodles, forgetting which item belonged to whom. I couldn't see the faces of the friends with whom I was sharing my tiffin. I could feel that I was wearing a short skirt, a loosely hung shirt and a tie having an improper knot. I could make out in my sleep that I was dreaming about my school.
As the night grew deeper, so did my dream. I saw that all of us are packing their backpacks and rushing out of the classroom after the ringing of the last bell. Me, along with two of my friends went to the playground. At this stage, I could clearly make out that my friends were Roshni and Shweta Joshi, two of my best pals from DAV. (Roshni and Shweta can not be brought into the same time frame as Shweta was there in Class VI and Roshni from VII to X; still it was a dream after all). We three went out to take turns in swinging till one of the gatekeepers told us to leave the school. I realised I will have to wait for another day to be in this place again and enjoy the bliss of all these fun and merriment.
After reaching home and having lunch, I felt asleep. Suddenly I heard my mother calling out......"Please close the door.....I am off to my school." I woke up and somehow dragged myself to close the door. Then after coming back to my bed in order to fall asleep again, I was horrified that my mother left for school and I am still there in my bed. I was angry on my parents as they were supposed to call me up much earlier. Now because of them, I am going to miss my school today. Then I wondered what had happened to the alarm which I had set on 6.15; how could it betray me ? I checked my clock and found out that there was no alarm. I concluded it must be a holiday for us and so neither my parents called me nor did I put an alarm. I said to myself ...... Ohh no !! another 24 long hours to spend before I could be at school again......Bullshit!!!
And then..with the utterance of that word in my mind, I realised I am a girl of 23 years, 8 years above those beautiful DAV days. I will never have to pack my books and copies into my bag before going to sleep. I will never have to get up at 6.15 in the morning, take bath and breakfast, ride my cycle to school thinking it to be a horse and then run all the way to the assembly line trying to knot my tie. I will never get the chance to play kho-kho, pittu and "keetkeet" in the sand, I will never hang myself in the crowbars in order to grow taller, I will never be made to stand up on a bench for throwing copies at my friend's head.
With all these "will never s", I understood that the beautiful, innocent and carefree childhood days are gone. In spite of all these realizations and breaking up from the reverie of my dream, I thanked my subconscious mind which dissolved the boundaries of the ages for a while and made me enjoy the flavors of the childhood days again.

Quotes

"A Hero is no braver than an ordinary man, He is brave for 5 mins longer"

"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go "

"To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide with" - Mark Twain

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when the gave up" - Thomas Edison

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is" - Albert Einstein

"You know you have read a good book when you turn the last page and feel as if you have lost a friend"

"Dont limit your challenges, challenge your limits"

"There is no point in growing up if you can't be childish at times"

"Its hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere"

"A pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, An optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty"

"If the only possible way we can be together is in my dreams...then I will sleep forever"

"The hardest jobs kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any"

"Loving you can take my life, but when I look into your eyes, I know you are worth that sacrifice"

"Love at first sight is easy to understand. It's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle"

My love, My life !!

People reading this blog will be thinking that I am going to write something about my better half !! Even though, my world revolves around him, my vocabulary and language is not that strong yet, through which I can do justice to my feelings towards him. Hence it is better that I start writing about my first love. Before that let me make it clear that my first love is not any person.

I was a kid when I fell in love for the first time, in 3rd standard. And in retrospection, I know that it was nothing less than love, though at that time I did not have any idea that a strong feeling has started to possess me.

My parents used to force me to develop a good reading habit. They even used to read stories from books when I was very small and gifted me with 3/4 books during my birthdays. But somehow I never showed any interest towards them.

Suddenly in 3rd std, during our library class (then we used to have compulsory library classes twice a week), I was given the book entitled "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain (an abridged version of course, with pictures on one side and texts written in a very simple language on the other). In the beginning I forced myself to go through it as we were supposed to write a summary in our library scrapbook. But after 2 days of reading, I found myself eagerly waiting for those 2 days of the week which had the lib classes (as we were not allowed to carry lib books home then).

At home, I started searching desperately among the old stacks of magazines and books. I found "Arabian Nights", "The Little Matchgirl", "Snow white and the seven dwarfs", et al. While turning those thick pages, I was utterly fascinated by the fictitious world. My parents wondered about the drastic change in me. And after that there was no looking back. I slept, ate, walked reading the novels or daydreaming about the characters. I completed Feluda, Kakababu, Ha-ja-ba-ra-la, Pagla Dashu in no time at all.......

From 5th std onwards I started Enid Blyton (though it did not appeal to me as such). Hence I went back to the classics. I remember I cried a lot after reading the "Little Women" by L.M. Alcott. As I grew Nancy Drew, The prince and the pauper, Around the world in 80 days, came to my life. Whenever new academic year in school started I finished all the stories in the English texts within the first week.

I remember I used to imagine myself as one of the characters of the stories, mostly the protagonist. While reading Pather Panchali, I used to be durga. I also dreamed about the royal mansions of the Raj Kahini. I got so much involved in these stories, that I became oblivious to the world around me.

One day I got caught reading "To sir, with love" during the 11th std. Actually I was reading the novel during my study hours. My father came and stood behind me and I didn't even realized. As expected, he scolded me very bitterly, took all the novels away from me and repented the fact that he had inculcated the reading habit some 8 years back. But somehow I did not even hear properly what he had said.....I was obsessed with my love then. I became more stubborn. During nights, after my parents slept, I sneaked out from my room and grabbed a novel, covered it with brown paper and labeled it "A textbook of Physics" (or something similar to that). I was careful enough to steal one novel at a time so that my parents couldn't get any idea about my midnight endeavors. I was blinded by love and desire. In this fashion, I read the novels by great authors like "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy, The God of small things, The Namesake, The Interpreter of Maladies, Rebecca, The Mill on the Floss and ofcourse The Harry Potter series.

Actually the novels and books mean the world to me. They teaches me about life more than my parents, teachers or friends do. They make me smile when I am sad, they make me cry, they comfort me saying "at the end, everyone has the capability to face any type of mishap" when I get depressed about something. I learn the true meanings of love and friendship, to fight against the odds in life. I also understood the fact that one can never undo one's mistakes even after a lot of repenting !! And hence, they have become an integral part of me. Till the end of my life, I wont dare to break this bond which has been made some 14 years back. So here is the quote which truly signifies how I feel about my first love....
"Never failing friends are they, with whom i converse everyday"