It really is quite a marvel...

-
...this innate mechanism of the human mind or heart to forget - at least for the time being. I woke up with a heavy heart today. Yet, as I watered the plants, I felt excited because I'd get to work on an exciting project this week. The weather was cool and it's a Friday. So even though I tried to fight back tears as I listened to my maid's chatter, I wondered what I'd wear to work. I'd got a cute black tee from Sarojini Nagar yesterday. It's got the Friends logo in it. I wore that with a wrap-around skirt.

Usually when I am really sad, I start feeling nauseous. It was the same today. When I stepped out of the house, my tummy seemed to squelch with unset jelly. I reached office with a really heavy heart. Yet I smiled and had a conversation - and it wasn't fake either. I genuinely was interested in a colleague's weekend plans and her mother-in-law's recipe of upma with carrots. I emailed someone else and quoted a little from Hemingway's 'Old Man and the Sea'.

Work came my way. I was deep into it for a while. Then something else came up and although, welts of pain seemed to mark my mind, I remember getting exasperated with MS Word. I attended a friend's call, planned a few things, made a promise to eat less (when I caught a reflection in the mirror).

I stayed back late in office and then came back home. Ma is here for the weekend and when I reached, she excitedly told me of a new recipe for aloo-gobi. It was pretty fabulous and I ate a lot of rice and daal. And then I got on to Facebook and laughed at somebody's update.

It's really a pretty awesome thing - this framework of existence. It seems to be so interconnected and all, yet...when I am going through possibly the crappiest time of my life, my 'life' so to speak doesn't quite know it.

I get the feeling that to actually tackle one day at a time - it's not really important to be positive or feel greatly uplifted. I think it's sufficient to stay curious, to just ask, "How will this turn out?"

And then sit back and wait for the answer.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more