177

-
Today was an off and it was a sweet enough day. I had a crazy nap - long, deep - it felt like an eternal seduction into the quiet. Here are all the things I am grateful for today:

1. Papa is well. Spoke to him and he sounded so cheerful! That was good. In fact, that's the most precious treasure I look for everyday - his joy. 

2. Got a short assignment that I finished in a couple of hours. 

3. I was thinking about money today. I need to earn more and was wondering where to go looking for more work. I felt myself getting into the usual panic mode but I stopped. Whatever else happens, that is the path in my brain that gets rewired. I will not panic or stress about money anymore. When I think about it, I have never actively made a budget but there was always enough for everything. Lately I have been flummoxed about how, even without making a to-do list, sone things get done. Of course, some stuff get left out. But that might mean that tasks come with their own destinies (or timelines). You intervene with some purity and then move out.

4. I started watching House - the medical series on Netflix. It is so awesome! Hugh Laurie is superb!

5. Ate some tasty stuff today. There was hummus with smileys and cucumbers, sliced pears, and stuff. A fried bhindi and potato dish and a masala rice dish.

6. I woke up from my nap, slightly disoriented. Then I just sat around. lay down again, then surfed through the gram. Then just pushed myself, washed my face, wore my harem pants and t--shirt and went to the gym. There was a sweet elderly lady in the gym along with her son. Her son always confuses me with someone else in the building. He confused me again. But his mother, the elderly lady with lavender-dyed hair spoke to me about Bandra of old. Earlier they owned a few bungalows in the area, but now they are staying in my building. It's an interesting phenomenon - how people get nudged out of the areas they call home. This reminded me of strengthening my resolve to work on detachment.

7. After gym, I had a luscious evening. Lit a candle and placed it on the ledge of the window. Beyond the steady flame of a straight, white candle, I saw the city lights twinkling. I genuinely felt a warm thankfulness seep though my heart and veins. It was a lovely feeling. 




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