Hailstorm!

After a long time and kids all around are very excited! And of course, me too.

The Spacemaker

Today was a big cleaning day and I finally created some space!! Of course it remains to be seen how it will get filled and how soon. I'm watching! Right now, bone-tired.

Annoyed

Being passionate about your work is rewarding most times but occasionally people make you pay for it.

So Near and yet So Far

My neighbour V and I went to climb Bedrugudde today. From our terrace, that hillock looks so close and for many years it had been and we'd taken it for granted. But of late, our old shortcut has been inaccessible and today we realized how far it could be. We went looking for a way based on what people said and returned not having set foot on it. The base of the hill is now swarming with houses and the moment we asked for ways to the hill, people asked us whose house we were looking for. It was revealing enough but somehow I had thought at least some of those houses would have rough routes leading to the hill but no. So we suspended the quest for the day and made ourselves happy with some jamuns and raw mangoes, throwing stones like highschool girls. Hope we can reach the dear old gudde tomorrow at least.

Some people are incorrigibly shameless and I for one never know how to deal with them. I can just smart and sulk after they take me for a ride. 

Reflections

Looking at the old mirror and trying to recollect how I looked in it 20 years ago. Looking around me and trying to see what I saw there 20 years ago...

A summer ritual for my parents is to visit either Polali or Kateel temples and Rishi has accompanied them for many years now. I went after a long time and we usually have lunch and return. I had forgotten that they have this separation of Brahmins from others for food and male members are to remove their upper-body clothing, which will show the sacred thread. Now, kids and I aren't Brahmins anymore but my parents don't want us to be separated so my mother took us along and it was a difficult feeling. The last thing I wanted was someone asking Rishi where his thread was and making a scene of it. I'd rather have my food outside in peace. Rishi doesn't like it too. I don't know if I would've given much thought to this Brahmin privilege if I wasn't in this predicament. I may have happily taken it for granted.

My mother was doing arati to the Gods in the morning and Anu watched the rotations for some time and asked her if she was hypnotizing the gods. I don't know if she was serious.

Recycling

Reading Gorky's Mother. For the umpteenth time. I discovered it at home in the year 1998 when I was desperate for something to read and it's been one of my favorites since then.

I have so many houses to visit and I've hardly started! Some of them are difficult because people one takes for granted are no more there.

On the Name Hunt

I've reached home and one of the things I feel compelled to do while here is to go out. Go for a walk along the road, go strolling on the ground, go to BCR, Mangalore...somewhere. So I did some part of it already and the only problem is meeting people who I feel I know but don't know how. So if somebody gives me a second look I get alarmed as that means there is a chance that he/she has recognised me. It's established now that I can't put names on the faces of some of the girls in my class, on many boys who haven't grown a beard and not to mention seniors, juniors, brothers and sisters of classmates and people with any kind of growth on their face. So when I notice somebody of this category looking at me like that, I just busy myself with something, do not meet the eye and just move away. Yesterday I met a no-name lady but since when I looked up I met her eye directly and she immediately smiled at me, I just asked some general questions avoiding names and waved at her while leaving. Gosh, I'm going to be roasted by somebody or the other soon.

Summer Hues

I'm on two weeks of vacation! It's kind of surreal. The last time I got two weeks at a shot was maternity leave. Anyway, this time I asked for it and got it without a word. But yeah, yesterday there was a debate on if I should be 'disturbed' during my holidays and after listening to arguments for some time, I said I didn't mind it. I don't, anyway.

In my first company in Hyderabad, we had this mandatory two weeks' leave and I remember planning what to carry home with a lot of fanfare. Auntie used to like the sweets and I used to feel great that she did. Anyway, I don't want to consider if such sentiments exist anymore within me but what is definitely true is that nobody out there wants to eat sweets anymore. There is hardly anybody below 50 in the entire vathara and all of them are mostly punishing themselves eating only healthy food.

It's embarrassing enough having an otherwise-very-tough person talk extremely gently to you but what's worse is somebody else thinking this person and you have formed a syndicate.

Blurred Vision

Today is an odd and bad day. I cried after a long time, that too twice. I guess you just imagine everybody that is dear to you in that little girl Asifa's place and the horror of what she went through is just unbearable. Of course there are so many cases of violence happening everyday and each is terrible but some shake you badly. We call it brutal and inhuman every time but to me it looks uniquely human. The perverse sense of justice, the cunning and vivid enjoyment must all be owned up by us as our own evolution.

Anyway, before that I cried watching a movie. I was surprised but anyway, now they seem much happier tears compared to the agony later.

Person Problems

I'm all set to go on vacation and suddenly there is work pressure! This feeling of deja vu goes long long back and this time it kind of made me wonder if I had multiple personalities or something - you know, subconsciously I'm making this happen everytime, may be?

I'm getting annoyed with K L Rahul's obsession with saying every time that he's not a Test specialist.  Specialist?! The way he's playing these days, he may hardly play any Tests in the first place! 

(B)Ragging Days

It seems like a thing of the past now but ragging was on all our minds the moment we stepped into the campus and even my grandmother had read the newspaper to warn me of those 'kolaku makada hudugiyaru'. :)

But that year was a peculiar one; thanks to some mismanagement, the students from Karnataka, who constitute 50% of the student population joined the classes only sometime in December while other state students were almost at the end of the first semester! This was terrible from the point of view of exams; we got only about one and a half months to learn the entire syllabus. But it spared us from the brunt of ragging. By the time we entered the scene, seniors had long finished harassing our peers from other states and our ragging was more or less merely obligatory.

Girls in our college were a very small percentage of the total - our batch had 27 out of the total 350+. So unlike boys, we had a single girls' hostel block and also, unlike them we didn't have state-wise ragging. We were one-for-all. Freshers were in a separate section along with the PG girls who never bothered us but this wasn't much of a relief as the common mess and the telephone were both in our wing. But the first few days passed off quietly and our wing was half-empty as the other-state girls had mostly gone home for holidays. So one afternoon I just sauntered outside my room and glanced at the corridor. There were two girls waiting at the telephone table. They were the smallest I had ever seen and at my height, they certainly didn't look like seniors. Probably some of my batchmates who'd returned from home I thought and gave them a friendly smile. They didn't smile. I got a stare back and after an eternity, one of them gave me a faint nod. This hadn't gone well so I quietly retreated to my den. I told my roomie Pal. She's my height too but definitely more circumspect; she suspected they were seniors. It had dawned on me too by now but it was too late. So we nervously waited for the consequences which happened as soon as the girls finished with their calls. For the next half an hour they reduced us to their height and gave us a sermon on how to respect the seniors. This had such an effect on me that for the next few months I hardly smiled at anybody unless I was inside the safety of my room or with others who were 100% my friends.

Anyway subsequently I had less trouble recognizing danger as our experienced peers returned from holidays and gave us heads-up on the seniors. TN and Kerala seniors were a terror; one of them was called bulldog and moved around like one. But for the aforesaid reasons, she didn't bite us much. Only thing we had to do for them was to enact Lord Rama and Seeta's romance and I remember L was Rama and Pal and I were butterflies in the park. It was fun without being allowed to smile or laugh.

There was another notorious gang of what they called 'hi-fi' seniors. Two girls from Bangalore, two from Mumbai and one from Raipur, some of the things they did to our other-state peers was damn scandalous. We diligently tried to avoid them, changing our routes if we spotted them anywhere in the horizon etc and for long, didn't get noticed. But one day one of them caught me bragging in the mess that Maths was my favourite subject. That's it; they barraged me with questions for what seemed like an eternity and sent me to the room crying and having no illusions about my abilities in computing.

Others were mostly kind, especially our immediate seniors and it was hard to be afraid of them. Once a senior made us stand in a line and when it came to my turn she asked me, "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to hell. Where do you want to go?" I guess if I had thought about it, I would've chosen heaven and would've been grilled to hell but I was tired and hungry. I said, "Ma'am, I want to go to my room". Thankfully she saw some humour in it and laughed and sent me on my way. And another thing that saved me was my hair. Most seniors would get smitten with it and end up asking tips to grow such hair and I guess I campaigned well enough for coconut oil in those days.

Alarming Levels

There is an alarm gone off in the building with nobody to stop it for the last half an hour. Reminded me of hostel days; girls in the middle of blissful afternoon nap are rudely awakened by the never-stopping alarm, whose over-enthusiastic owner has locked the room and gone before time! Gosh, the frustration and desperation that echo around!

It is boiling hot! Even the occasional showers are not helping much. Add to that the noise of construction happening nearby. You have a headache ready.