Unwild Rumpus

This is a night like no other. I see the bright moon above me..casting a night rainbow in the clouds around. A fading beauty with a pockmarked face racing in the skies above to keep up with my ship below. She lights up the ocean around me.. streaks of silver in the darkness. It's past midnight and it's just me and the ocean and the skies. Stars peep through the clouds, zillions of them. Not a single man made light around me to dilute the effect of this gorgeous night sky. My senses are at war with each other. My eyes see peace but my ears hear war. The still water surface, sparking in the moonlight is a calm like none other. But the same ocean is loud around me, forever restless. The waves relentlessly hitting against the sides of the ship, wind blowing against my face. This discordance between sight and hearing is jarring. But it's easy for me to accept because I live in a similar discordance constantly - the one between my calm, serene brain and my loud, restless ...

Summer 2009. I woke up when the sun was rising, made myself some coffee and stepped out in to the balcony of the rustic mountain lodge we'd slept in the night before. There was a cool nip in the air, almost uncomfortable, but the view was breathtaking. Sun rising over the rocky mountains, mist still clinging to the plants and trees around me. We were in Leadville, Colorado - a sleepy little small town nestled comfortably in the rocky mountains. And the morning air was making me nostalgic. I grew up in the mountains. My childhood was a lonely one but one filled with idyllic images of forests of tall pine trees over blankets of brown pine straw, lush valleys with a scattering of red tiled roofs, blue mountain ranges in the distance, crystal clear waterfalls after rains, foggy mornings.. the list is endless. In my heart I'll always be "mountain person". Even now when I am asked to close my eyes and imagine something serene, my first thought is a walk through dense wo...

My high school, a gorgeous yellow building with a sloping red tiled roof, was nestled among the trees and overlooked a calm lake. Idyllic. We had a skating rink, a basketball courts, a sports field, woods all around, a cemetary, a convent with austere nuns, residential quarters with affluential boarding kids, and best of all - a calm, quiet library. The library was my haven. Wooden cupboards with glass doors lined the walls. The books arranged alphabetically by authors last name in each cupboard and increasing in difficulty and reading level as you went from one cupboard to the next. We started at the first cupboard near the entry way in sixth grade and then slowly made our way to the hallowed shelves at the back right next to the desk of the stern librarian. Shelves to which access was restricted. In a very Oliver Twist porridge scene style, I remember standing in front of the strict librarian asking "Please ma'am, may I have the keys to the cupboards with the classics?"...

Dearest "Friend-with-the-wild-hair", It has taken me ten years to do this. Ten years to even acknowledge that in some dark corner inside me, I have a bundle of emotions that I need to address. Ten years to deal with the fact that I wasn't there with you, for you, when you needed me and there's nothing I can do about that now. I was young, immature and took it for granted that we had our entire lives ahead of us - to talk again, to sort differences, to go back to where we started. I didn't stop to think that those pill overdoses and those slit wrists weren't just resolved incidents from the past but rather a warning that when things went from bad to worse, you had your own way to deal with it. I've seen you at your worst. I have very vivid memories of entering a smoke filled hostel room and finding you sitting on your bed, in the darkness, dark circles around your eyes, band aids masking your grim experiments. Vivid memories of being unable to get a wor...

I'm sure you've run into this person - the one who has an enviable memory. He remembers his first grade teacher, the place where he was when his first tooth wriggled and fell, the name of the boy who tripped him in kindergarten, the address of his first crush... you know the type. Well, I am the complete opposite. Sometimes when I am sitting around with my family and some old stories come up, I wonder if I even grew up in the same household! Some memories that I have of my childhood are not even my own - they are images in my head created after I've had those stories repeated to me/in front of me multiple times by my parents. I was a girl with her head in the clouds. Daydreaming was my favorite pastime and imaginary friends, my closest companions. We lived in the hills, amidst the woods, and when I wasn't in school, I was either hiking through the woods (imagining stories of adventure and exploration that awaited me beyond the next hill, around the next corner) or b...

When I posted my short review on Instagram, I started off by saying this - There are books that make you want to read differently; there are books that make you want to write differently; and then there are books that make you want to live differently. For me, Karukku by Bama definitely falls under the third category. I can safely say that it is the first book that made me pause and look back at my life through a different lens. All my life, I've been privileged enough to not have to pay any attention to casteism or bother about caste based discrimination. It didn't affect me at all. Actually, I take that back. It affected me. Once. When my ignorant ass ranted against the reservation system because I didn't get admitted to the medical college of my choice but a "less deserving" classmate of mine did because of reservation. She was a person from the Scheduled Caste community. It has taken me 18 years to realize how spoilt and ignorant I was then. How blind. Ho...

I have had enough blogs to know that the first post is the much dreaded one. At least for me. The pressure of setting the tone for the blog, of defining boundaries and parameters, of introducing myself in a way that would be the perfect balance of witty and mysterious and interesting enough to follow. And so, I have decided that I am not going to do any of that. No fancy quotations that define me, no poetic descriptions to "fancify" a mundane life, no limitations on what this blog might or might not cover. This is just me, writing things that come to my mind, because I love to write.