To the end of the world and back

Sometimes more than anybody and anything else in the world, I hate myself. And its not about me obsessing over trivial things even when I am on my oh-God-am-stuck-with-trivial-mortals-who-obsess-about-broken-nails-and-broken-relationships trip. No, I am not talking about me the hypocrite. Or me, the biased bitch. *Yes, I am very very biased, and prejudiced, and judgemental. The very things that endear X to me are those I find repulsive in Y.*

So yesterday I was in a bad bad mood. And a 'how are you' sms from the DarkLord sent me to tears. Basically one of those phases when even a traffic jam can make you cry. And all I needed was a hug. And all I had in my room was my messy wali roomie. Only refuge, and I was very desperate. And as the roomie, who, by the way, I had called a bullshit-er 10 minutes ago, kindly wiped of the saline off my cheeks, all I could think of was if she had washed her hands after she'd used the loo the last time. And when I saw ink stains on her hands later, I really had bile up my throat.
I am such an ungrateful wretch. And mental filth is harder to get rid of than physical dirt.

***

Elaborating on why 'how are you'-ness psyches me a lot - sometimes when you've got nothing going right, and people ask how you are, and you mentally start framing an answer to that question, do you realise how sad and pathetic your existence is. Everything in a properly worded/sentence form always has a stronger impact. At least for 'words are all I have' people like me, who unconsciously compose a narrative of every moment they spend awake, to exhaust on somebody who's probably not even interested in listening. I sound like dripping depression all the time these days. I am not like that, really. When I am not on my self-hating guilt trips, I am normally euphoric, delirious and delusional. Ask people who talk to me at 2 in the night. People who have all the time in the world to change their gmail theme, but not a moment to send in a one statement reply. :|

***

Do you remember kids going "You're mental" when they meant "You're mad"? And even though the former isn't grammatically correct, don't you find it infinitely cuter?
Doesn't it feel like somebody stopped short of saying 'You're mentally retarded', which though, would be a medical condition, which shouldn't be joked around with, but then so is madness. Somehow mentally retarded sounds all technical and hence, much more serious. That's the advantage with big words. Or maybe disadvantage. You can call somebody mad, and there'll be no issues, but call someone a retard, and people could take offense. Plus it sounds nasty too. Its weird how the same meaning words have different connotations. 'Pagal' is something now used affectionately. And insane sounds so cool. Egad. Excuse, its just me, the random bullshit-er.

***

"Why don't you ever look at me when I am talking to you?"
"So you caught me."
"Yes, but why? I am not that ugly, you know, nobody's got their cardiac arrested by merely looking at me, yet."
"Geez. Its because I am afraid.."
"Now I'm scary as well? So is it like scarily ugly or uglily scary?"
"I am scared I won't be able to match up to the trust I see, or rather try to avoid, in your eyes."
"If only you would look into my eyes for long enough, you would realise.."
"Realise what?"
"That they are dark brown."

..And I don't need no Carryin' on..

Disturbed. Distressed. Tired. Tensed. Frustrated. Fed up. Misunderstood. At times. Mistaken. A lot. Messed up. More than I can clean up. More than I had expected. More than I can handle. An apology for an existence. Like a pebble lying inconspicuously on the road. A stone which does nothing but gather moss. And once in a while, in an uncanny rush of enthusiasm, tries to do something useful, and ends up causing an accident and getting kicked out of the way so that the world can resume its journey in peace. Me = Useless. Waste of space. And there will be no happy ending. Just a lot of 'crashing' and 'burning'.

No expectations. No explanations. No clarifications. Everything has already spiralled way beyond control. Its time she learnt. To shut up. And start keeping her secrets. To herself.

The DQ raised a very good question yesterday. "Why do you hate it so much here?". To which I mumbled some rubbish about the city making me feel unwanted, and out-of-place. But the truth is, I have no answer. I do not know. Why am I such a freaked out psycho? Why am I such a whine? Why do I have an issue with everything? Why do I write such embarrassingly stupid stuff? What exactly is my problem? I have no clue. Like The Dark Lord puts it, they don't teach us all that in JEE coaching classes.





Help. Please.

Just another face in the crowd

Sometimes the seemingly most innocent and innocuous statements stimulate the extremest of reactions. I remember a friend writing to me, in a particularly sentimental letter about how once my saying "Khush raha kar" had touched her deeply. I remember thinking this wasn't what you would call the quintessential tear-jerker super-awesomely mushy statement which would get you all emotional, and definitely not one which you would expect people to remember you by. But as I now stood, clutching desperately onto the phone, with the familiar warm voice cooing 'Try and be happy, beta', I realised how much something like this affects you when you know how you are fighting your way through the day, the hour, the moment. How difficult it is to maintain a bright and cheery exterior when your insides are tearing away at every smile you fake. How it feels to fall down and have nobody's hand to pull you up, but your own. And how you try to survive solely on the distant hope that you'll be visiting home soon. Sheesh. 'Visiting home'. Going back home. Where I belong. And will always.

Stupid Cupid.

Why is it that on the day and at the time you're feeling your worst is when the one true crush of your life decides to suddenly and unexpectedly tap your shoulder all 'Hey'-ey as you're trudging along after a long tiring day with a bitter expression on your face, (why bitter? because you just tasted life). And then instead of a sweet charming 'Hi' all you can say is 'Yikes', while that pink thing inside your ribcage, which used to be as big as your right-hand but has now swollen to mammoth proportions, keeps going 'Yayayayay' all through. And then the rest of the way back home, you can't help but keep praying 'Oh God, please please please could I have been looking drop dead gorgeous', though you know this was the very day you had forgotten to comb your hair and were most definitely looking five months pregnant.
Sigh.


PS - Its when you read Neil Nitin Mukesh as Nitin Jain, do your realise you're officially obsessed.

Comfortably Dumb

This blog was meant to be a medium of documenting my life around the JEE, its aftermath and its consequences. *Whoot, sounds like I was so mucho into JEE, which totally, and sadly, wasn't the case, but anyway*. A better option would have been writing a diary, you would say. But moi, the wannabe, born-into-the-limelight-and-can't-stay-away-from-it woman (Ha! 18 is so woman), would wilt away into upset-ness if she didn't have people knowing about it and commenting. So people here don't always give her the pleasure of the latter, but at least I know you guys read. Hopefully. And I obsessively compulsively confess everything anyway, so its not like I would have something on I could not put up here. Damn digression. The point was, me not treating the blog as a diary which me should have been doing. So, one tight keyboardslap to moi.
And, back to business.

The Get Thin Quick Scheme isn't working, and so I have given up sweets too. I had a Gulab Jamun today, which can be excused as I was really really depressed, with my room-mate leaving for her guardian's place, and so me=miss her so much. 3 days of missed breakfast, and 2 days of missed dinner, and no sweets on top of it, but no visible change yet.

Something very terrible happened this week, but I won't blog about it, I have already told everybody I could, and I don't want a written memory of it. Now that I wrote this, its completely defeating the cause, but then its my blog. I do what I want. I have all the permission in the world to behave like a random-verbal-shit-retching maniac having a neurosis, and I know thats what I am doing now.

The CHN class today was particularly entertaining with the guy demonstrating the Optical Microscope thingy going all: "Ang bang dang whooshtang foogang clearly, Dumastang wang wang goes in hair, clearly, Mang gang jang wang plang, hey you. is it clearly?"

This week has also seen me in pretty euphoric moods, which shouldn't have been the case, as a) terrible something aforementioned happened b)haven't got much work done c)got marks, which weren't much d)couldn't even qualify for the finals in the quiz yesterday. So yeah, despite all that its-just-not-my-day thing happening, I've been pretty okay, and not wallowing in self-pity like I normally do.

Now I don't normally blog about very close friends, but this needs a mention, if its to be a proper diary, so, here goes, I have come into contact with 'dodgy doggie' aka 'pure evil', who is also pure adorability, who showed me what drugs look like. Not the pharmaceutical drugs, my sweets, but the real thing. The ones they show in movies and write about in novels. And before momsy and daddy, and close concerned friends and seniors get all disturbed about the company I am keeping, let me clarify we just found it lying inside the IIT campus, and before I could touch it, responsible 'pure evil' threw it away. But anyway, that checks one of the many many things in my to-do list of very unnecessary things. Remember Twilight? Edward had to not-very-willfully bite Bella, and consequently turned her into a vampire, in order to save her life. Now, pure evil is equally hesitant about me crossing over to the Dark Side. But a part of me knows I was always meant to be there. I could never handle the sun when I was young, I would get headaches/faint/throw random tantrums. Now I understand why. I was always The Devil's Own. And it took me 18 years and a chance meeting with Satanic Shadows to realise. Sheesh. Who let this doggie out?

Cryptic much? And very un-me like. Whatever happened to the wannabe cheesy writer who wrote about happiness and sunshine and cottonwool and barbie dolls? It could be the still-awake-but-very-sleepy-at-2 am-ness catching up.

With the arbitical-nonsense off my head, and into your computer screens now, I guess I have done my Bad Deed for The Day and can now peacefully sleep. Like we would say in gujju, 'Good night, fox'.

PS - I still look for you in the multitude of students who trot out of the HUL class in the Seminar Hall every Wednesday at 4. And sometimes, I think I see you.

[Don't go looking for meanings, this was written in a very very morbid context, which could be a part of a 'fiction' piece I may never have the courage to put up, or even save.]

Thousand Word Post

Bathroom Rules

By Moi and Abhilasha

*to impress the BHM inspection committee.*

***

And you don't get to see the tears I cry..

..Behind these Hazel Eyes

*My first charcoal painting. :D*

***

PS - Pictures say a thousand words, in case you feel I bluffed in the title. But nobody reads the title anyway, so bleh.

Of Earthquakes, Fat-ness, My Roomie and other Scary Things

Its official. There was an earthquake last night. I, obviously, couldn't feel it. [There are few things which can distance me and my food, and me and my sleep. Slob, yes.] But my roommates were nice enough to wake me up as they ran. Now, I, having experienced the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, and all the aftershocks that came with it, get totally jittery and panicky with the quake thing. Plus, waking up to screams and the sound of people running, is very very scary. So when everybody collected, all excited and chatty, in my wing, me and my roommate(thankfully as much of a sissy as I am) stood holding hands, and shaking so much like the quake was still on.
After the whole tujhe-feel-hua?-mujhe-feel-hua! gossip, we returned to bed, almost on the verge of crying. And the third roommate with her weird morbid ideas of 'when death has to come, it will' and 'why are you scared of death, its an experience' did nothing to help our cause.

But then its Himadri, right? And there is something to smile about whatever the case.[Touchwood]

Girl 1: "I felt it. It was very very strong. Severe enough to wake me up from sleep, and guess what I woke up to, the cupboard swinging violently!"
Me and Roommate: *shudder*
Rest of the girls: :O :O :O "Hawwwww".
Girl 2 *apparently embarrassed at being one-upped in sensitivity*:" I felt it too. I woke up too."
Me and Roommate: *shudder*
Girl 3 *You should know who she is*: "Yaar, mujhe to feel nahi hua. I was sitting here filing my nails, they haven't even fallen, see see."
Me and Roommate: *shudder*
Girl 1 *trying to steal the thunder back*: "But we were in the room opposite to yours, how come we felt it and you didn't?"
Me and Roommate: *shudder*
Girl 3: "Arey there is something about epicentres na. Your room could have been one!". And she was totally serious, it was incredible.
Me: *tries to catch people laughing*
Me: *tires of searching in vain*
Me: *goes back to shuddering with The Roommate*

***

In further news(:D), like you might already have noticed, I am bursting at the seams. And so, after pensive introspection, I have decided to give up rice. And have been pretty much successful. No rice lunch-dinner-yesterday and lunch-today. But I kinda more than made up for it, and totally defeated the effort, by having 5 Jalebis for dessert. F-I-V-E Jalebis. There was a time, the very sight of those made me puke-y. IIT has made a monster out of me. I was the thin girl. People used to look at me and go *sigh*. But then. Times change. People change. I just never thought it could have this 'getting wider' connotation.

***

As a parting comment, I leave you with something very insightful my roomie had to say yesterday. My roomie and insightful are not even in the same zip code, and this was one of those rare 'Eureka' moments, so do give it the attention and astute appreciation it deserves.

"The President of the United States? I know I know. Hold on. Um...Obama Bin Laden?! Haina Haina??"

:D

Cheers!

***

An 'Inconvenient' Truth

You know you are having a bad day when...

When IIT turns into ITI...

1. "Prof. S. Arun Kumar is one of the toppest engineers in the world" - 2009CS10***

2. History of catalysis. Being shown pictures of great 'catalytic' scientists.
Roomie: "Stud lag raha hai yaar"
Me: "Shaadi kar le"
Roomie: "Mar gaya hai, pagal, year of death toh dekh"

3. Me: "You don't know SHUBHAM TULSIANI?!?!?!?!"
Roomie: "Kon hai? Kisi ka boyfriend?"

Sigh. RIP AIR 2.

>.< >.< >.<

This Past Week...

Sweetest thing someone said to me : "You're my latest obsession." :D
---
Wittiest wisecrack:
Me - "...but the point is..."
AIR 1**: "That you don't have one"
---
"What is the course for this is new knowledge for you?" - Feedback form, CYP100
---
"Cancer sucks"
"Smoking makes you suck"
- Ingenious slogans from the poster-making event, courtesy NSS, IITD
---
And oh, something I heard - "There are two girls in the mechanical department of IITD, and people are still trying to figure out who they are..."
---

---> HIGHLY RECOMMENDED <---

This and That

Overheard:

"These experiments were carried away by..." - in a CHN lecture, spoken by, ahem, our lecturer.

"Aniline kiska test de raha hai? Amine ka?" - in CYP100

"Mera cyclohexane to koi functional group ka test nahi de raha, ma'm!!" - in CYP100

"Is Benzamide testing positive for amide?"
"Amide? Wo kaha check karna hai? Am testing it for urea" - Yeah. Again. CYP100. Do all those chemicals do something to our brain?

"Tum bhi Kanpur se ho na, sahi hote hain Kanpur ke log tumhari TA bhi Kanpur se hai, usne N2O6 isolate kiya hai, aur tumse aniline ka test nahi ho raha" - The prof, to me. (CYP100)

"Ye ladki hote huye bhi tumse kitna achha kaam karti hai" - MEL110, the ladki in question being me. My respect for the prof went down a couple of notches. "Ladki hote hue bhi" means what...?

"Yaar, Informals mein please Nitin Jain ko bula le, please please please, main kuch bhi karungi, puri zindagi tere slave banke rahungi"
"Itna kya obsessed ho? JEE AIR 1 hi to hai!"
Wahi to. Sirf AIR 1. Bas. Tuchha.

***

You forgot her birthday. She isn't in crush anymore. Period.

***

And two people she thought would, did not call her at 12, she was very very disappointed. :( wala.

***

PS - Change of plan. No restricted access, yet.

***

Blah, blah and more blahs.

>>>

I've had this conversation a lot of times this past fortnight:

Random Person In Hostel: Are you an only child?
Me: Yeah. Howdyuknow?
Random Person In Hostel: You look all cute, and you know, pampered.
Me: Uh, um, is that a good thing? Looking pampered?
Random Person In Hostel: Haha.

Hear one, hear all. When I ask you a question, I want an answer. Do NOT Laugh, and if am talking to you online, do not LOL or :) or :D or anyfunnystuff like that. Because maybe I look like a kid(Yes, I have been told that by 3126 people in the insti. And its been just 4 weeks. Imagine!) and thus you might be compelled to take all my questions in jest, but I actually, totally, am serious all the time(mostly), and I HAAAAATE being called a kid, I've had enough, please. I mean it. I am turning 18 in 11 days. Please? PLEASE?

>>>

Ever since I've come home, Mum-Dad are like, 'Kitni patli ho gayi!!'. Which makes me thing exactly how fat I was earlier. Geez.

>>>

Why do you need to tell somebody you love them? Why can't they just...understand?

>>>

I get terribly awkward and embarrassed at times, and I've been asked, by my *having-our-best-interests-at-heart* seniors, to not look at seniors so much while walking around the insti, and guess who do I turn to in times of such solid distress. My Cell phone! So the next time you see me busy typing furiously on my cell, don't think am messaging, am just locking and unlocking the keypad.

>>>

Something I've been noticing over the past few months(years?) is that people don't usually reply when you say Sorry. Another funny thing is that they say 'Its okay' when you say Thank You. Not that its wrong, but really, its been like one hundred fifty seven days since anybody said 'Welcome' or 'My pleasure' to me. And there was this guy in my chem lab class who went all 'Its alright. Don't mind. My pleasure. No problem' when I said Thank You for having borrowed his pen. Gives an entirely new definition to etiquette. Or maybe its just over-enthu? He must have been from the Aravali hostel, their chant goes 'Ara ka enthu high hai'. *Starts fiddling with her cell*. Ok, I understand its not funny. This point was totally random, but its 1 am at night, what else do you expect?

>>>

I realised when I'm really really happy, I sing. And sing really well, or so I would like to believe. And your opinion on this issue is so not solicited. :P

>>>

I am neck-deep in shit. Work, I mean. Work = Shit, pretty much. And the weekend is going to be over soon. Monday ko professors ko kya muh dikhaungi? :(

>>>

Ra, sweetheart, am sorry, okay? I'll make it up to you. Which reminds me, I have a lot of making up to do, to lots of people. Sigh.

In The Last Few Days...

* I have been called Shachi, Shuchi, Deepshikha, Shalini, Shanti, Shruvi, Shubhi, and, hold your breath...

Prof: "I remember the names of only two people in this class. Aniruddh, and Sushi."

Sushi. Yes, that Japanese delicacy.

* I have become numb-to-the-dumb. I did not even laugh at this:

Hostel-mate: "Itna to courage hona chahiye, yaar, batch rep mein, you should have some gut feeling, you know."

* I have eaten out almost e-v-e-r-y-d-a-y. Am turning out to be such a Paris Hilton. Toned down, of course.

* I have been smiling in my sleep. Guess why. *wink wink, nudge nudge*

* I have been smiling waking too. Touchwood.

* But this weekend, and truckloads of work to be done, will do its best to snatch my smile. But I'll fight, I'll give it my best shot. :)

* Love Aajkal. Mission Accomplished. Literally, and otherwise. Go figure. :P



EDIT ( 8-Aug-09) : Gaya smile. Khush ho gaye tum?

Delhi Diaries: The Gyaan Guru Speaks

#Never go walking anywhere in Delhi. The supposed 'pavement' has a number of surprises in store for you, including puddles and potholes. Plus, a lot of drivers get their kicks by zooming an inch past you even when the whole road is available.

#Don't drink 'thandi lassi' at dodgy outlets even if you feel you are near-death. Trust me, a throat on fire is the last thing you want when you've already burnt the last calorie in your body.

#Don't go shopping at places where you think you'll get stuff cheap. The only cheapos you come across are people.

#The 'Excuse Me' culture doesn't work here. They'll just push you out of their way. Gives a whole new dimension to the adage 'Creating your own opportunities'.

#Staring back at people who stare at you doesn't help. They'll just stare harder. And will also probably like it.

#The Autowallahs are the sweetest people. Usually 'Happy to Help'. :)

# Don't drink Lassi, 2 glasses of Pepsi, and Orange juice one after the other. You may be very thirsty, but your tummy exploding is not a nice feeling at all.

This post was written after a particularly excruciating and fruitless trip to Ber Sarai. If I sound uber-pissed, its probably because I am.