leaning forward in a half darkened, nearly empty classroom.....it doesn't matter that there are a handful of people filling up the first few benches....it doesn't matter that in a room suddenly bereft of the artificial lighting that is apparently so essential to our acquisition of education only the faintest illumination filters through the murky glass panes of a half shut door.....the greatest light is the one that shines within......and I can see, even through the darkness, the light in his eyes....and nothing else matters

You say...my body, my hand
My heaven, my land
My guardian angel is mine

You say...my dreams, my head
My sex, my bed
And it’s my corona with lime

And then I say.......
Maybe we could divide it in two
Maybe my animals live in your zoo
Maybe I’m in love with you.....

You say.....my hate, my frown
My kingdom, my crown
My palace and court is mine

You say.....my lights, my show
My years to grow
The time that I spend is fine

And then I say.....
Maybe we could divide it in two
Maybe my animals live in your zoo
Maybe I’m in love with you.....

But you say.....my coat, my hat
My bones, my fat
My zipper is shut by me

You say..my skin, my blood
My devil, my god
My freedom is what you see

But still I say......
Maybe we could divide it in two
Maybe my animals live in your zoo
Maybe I’m in love with you..........

My begining, my end
My nuclear bomb to pretend

Artist : Brainstorm
Song : Maybe

Feeling unbearably sentimental....sort of in a wishy washy weepy frame of mind....quite the contrast to my passionate fury of last night....which was, needless to say, purely illogical and irrational and unprompted by anything worthwhile....
Ry and I talked of things that are lost in translation.....mehboob in English would at best be literally translated as lover (?).....but can the literal translation ever incorporate the nuances of the original....can I describe a dance step in so many words.....I believe I can't.....just as I cannot describe a colour to one who cannot see......perhaps there are feelings which are lost in the translation to words.......perhaps that's why we feel so comfortable in silences....is it really the same when I say te amo and when I say je t'adore.....Sentimentality apart, no words can ever convey what he once said I made him feel like.....a goldfish in a bowl!!

A kaleidoscope of raging colours....vibrant morbid hues.....my mind is not a blank....but it's so full of anger....the only thing I would wish to do right now is to take a beautifully crafted work of art and smash it.....anger is destructive but what I'm feeling at this moment is the need to destroy beauty.........destroy creation.......destroy life.......

I am Mortified beyond disbelief......I have been accused of psychobabble and that too by someone who first heard the word psychobabble from me!!! Much like Mort I am faced with the interface of Reality as it creeps through the walls of my self-constructed world of ineffectual aatlami........
Though it is true.......All these years I have been sitting for exams with nothing to say and too many big words to say it in........or to put it otherwise; the past few years have been.........a prolonged experience of augmenting gratuitous ignorance at the moment of assessment with pretentious verbosity.......and at the end of the day......despair..........the despair of facing a world which has so much to it and of which I am only able to comprehend a little and absorb even less..........

There seems a faint possibility that I am regressing to a pre-oedipal stage of consciousness; what Lacan termed the Mirror Stage, I believe....

hmmm.....at any rate I'm exhibiting a disturbing tendency to pause fractionally in front of mirrors or shiny reflective surfaces (or for that matter, non-shiny marginally reflective surfaces like the grimy glass notice board fronts which quite elegantly block the undisturbed vista of white washed walls in our department!)

Reaching quite the zenith of narcissism......although of course it is hard to remain consistently in love with my rather insignificant self when there are little puddytats strolling the face of the earth.....(and any true female Judean can guess the identity of one such puddy tat!!) As for the other one I know....ah well, when a man combines wound wound adorable eyes with occasionally twembling lips and an infrequent sphinx like smile is it my fault that I succumb to charm and quivering knees?!!

What a fool I was!
What a dominated fool!
To think you were the earth and sky.
What a fool I was!
What an addlepated fool!
What a mutton headed dolt was I!
No, my reverberating friend,
You are not the beginning and the end!

There'll be spring ev'ry year without you.
England still will be here without you.
There'll be fruit on the tree;
And a shore by the sea;
There'll be crumpets and tea without you.
Art and music will thrive without you.
Somehow Keats will survive without you.
And there still will be rain on that plain down in Spain,
Even that will remain without you.
I can do without you.
You, dear friend, who talk so well,
You can go to Hartford, Heresford and Hampshire.
They can still rule the land without you.
Windsor Castle will stand without you.
And without much ado
We can all muddle through without you.

Without your pulling it, the tide comes in;
Without your twirling it, the earth can spin.
Without your pushing them, the clouds roll by.
If they can do without you, ducky, so can I!
I shall not feel alone without you.
I can stand on my own without you.
So go back in your shell,
I can do bloody well without you!

hmm....charming song even if it is rather devoid of connotative references to my current state of consciousness....i love the insertion of the word 'ducky' it adds such a waddly quaddly cuddly feel to the entire flow of rhetorical invectives....

A week is far too long a period to spend away from my squealing, laughing, nerve-wracking, over-excitable bundles of joy. No matter how badly I want to spank them at times (a feeling generally countermanded by a deep desire to go cootchikoo and hug the offender) and despite the fact that thirty eight seconds into the class some of them will have my nerves pulling a Mrs.Bennet on me (re: Pride and Prejudice) I adore everyone of those little menaces......

every day is an endless stream of cigarettes and empty dreams.....

First day of college - alternately going glub glub and grinning away to glory!?!!
Faced with the incredibly daunting prospect of interminable classes over the next semester with one of our department's champion sleep-disperser. Why oh why oh why do they have to do this to us?!!!!!! I was reminded today after a particularly not-invigorating class just why I have been deliberately, desperately avoided this lady's classes over the past year or so.
But then again, life holds its little compensation. I sat and I stared and I stared as I sat, for nearly forty-five minutes, at a man who has held me enthralled for a record number of years now...
Why oh why oh why (again) do I have to fall for men who are
a. too intelligent for my own good,
b. unattainable,
c. married

(b. and c. have no connection; since there exist countless married men who are attainable and some highly elusive bachelors)

Life ain't fair....and Freddy, my love I do miss you more than words can say......

The joy of being a Libran!! Starting to wonder whether the Linda Goodmans' I dismissed as garbage in my me-the-brilliant-intellectual schooldays did in truth contain pearls of wisdom....
Dispersed sanguine advice on 'college relationships' to a fellow Libran and JU-ite today. Those two things are all he and I have in common, as a matter of fact, the stars we were born under and our university. The poor boy hankers for a classmate who pays him no attention and is inescapably cloistered among her female friends. The two have nothing to talk about, he gets irritated by her every action and mannerism and yet he craves her as his friend. So I sat him down and asked him how he would feel when her only response to his emotional or intellectual outpourings would be along the lines of, "sedin o ki bollo janoto...."(you know what he/she/it said that day...) And he looked gracefully embarrassed as he acknowledged that within two weeks he would probably tire of her attention. (He said two weeks, I'd give it half an hour, three hours if she's really pretty!) But the inescapable fact remains that no matter how logically he may consider the whole matter of his "crush" and reason it out, he still wants her exclusive eternal attention.....at least until he gets bored of it!
And that remains the truth about us Libranz.....incorrigible spelling, but incontrovertibly popular among star-struck [literally] teenagers......no matter how popular we are, and we usually are charming, popular spot-light holders......counting me as an outstanding exception [umm.....this being my modest streak on display]........we still continue to expect/exhort attention from those who don't pay us any. Nothing and I repeat absolutely nothing gets me more interested than men who seem disinterested!! So the sublime irony of it all is that no sooner do I get close to that oh-so-inaccessible man he becomes boring! Is it just the two of us or are there other librans out there who actually feel the way I do?
This is where I'm strongly reminded of Scarlett o'Hara.

For those who raise their eyebrows in ignorance please please find the time and read Gone With The Wind. I have heard it described too often as sentimental/romantic. If any of those adjectives appeal to you, read it because it's like that. Or if you want the truth, read it because it's a heart-breakingly brilliant portrayal of war.
For one thing it gives a Southern perspective to the American Civil War, and for those who've read, say Little Women or Uncle Tom's Cabin; the former glorifying the Yankees and the latter black-balling the Southern slave drivers, Gone With The Wind is an eye-opener. Don't get me wrong, I'm not speaking out for the slave trade or taking sides on the issue of the civil war. No doubt the slave trade was a great evil against all humanity, but then again what is war? I'm reminded of a poem by Wilfred Owen and I will digress further and print the whole poem because I find it so stunning (though to get the full impact, you should read it aloud)

Strange Meeting
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . ."

Gone With the Wind portrays the pity of war. Anyone who tries to exalt the book or for that matter degrade it by labelling it the greatest love story in the world will be very vehemently opposed by me. I know the entire novel superficially revolves around the story of Scarlett O'Hara and the resolution seems to devolve on her as well. But for Christ's sake!!
There are two universally famous lines in the novel. One is Rhett Butler declaring,"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and the other is Scarlett's last gasping thought , "After all, tomorrow is another day". Think about it; these lines apparently fit seamlessly into the love story but just for a moment think of them in the context of the war.........think of them as the two faces of survival, one past caring and the other in the throes of devastation still holding on to a flickering hope of the tomorrow that will perhaps never come....
Umm....this wasn't meant to be a book review. Hmm....this is where I scroll back and see why I started talking about this book in the first place.........Right.
Simple, to the point analogy. Scarlett persistently hankered after Ashley, despite countless people telling her they weren't in any way compatible. And since he didn't give her any patta she continued thinking she loved him. But the minute he showed an ounce of interest in her, kaboom.....all that 'love' just flew out of the window! That at the end of the day is the clearest literary analogy I can find for my life, And oh, my stars! Maybe I'll get married thrice and have three children and lose my favorite child and hanker after one unsuitable man and then discover he's not the right one and realize I was married to the right one(the third hubby) but I never noticed it until it was too late!!!!! Pratchett says five exclamation marks is the clearest sign of a delusional/hallucinatory/insane mind.......Therefore I conclude!!!!! and !!!!! Enough, I shall go to sleep.....too early....I'll go away and play inane yahoo games.....whatever.....I shall just stop writing...beshi bhaat boke felechhi!!!!!

hmm....something incredibly wrong in the spatial temporal alignment of the universe, or at any rate of my blog postings. They get the date and even the time right but somehow the am and pm gets mixed up! Is it just my incredible lack of expertise with computers or is this actually 1.50 AM?!!!!!

hmm....men who can cook make me feel maybe a man's place is in the kitchen.......considering the thought of him in an apron wielding a khunti is quite turning on......sigh.......i shall go away and fantasize about things that might happen on the kitchen table.....

I am incredibly, increasingly falling head over heels into this man who once said he wanted me with a "quiet desperation"....Strange that a simple 'ullo transmitted over innumerable wires and reaching me as the result of incomprehensible technological manipulations should unleash such a purely organic, natural, hormonal fury....... I restrained myself from telling him, right now on the phone, that perhaps if we spent more time together I would quit obsessing about him and merely settle down to thinking about him all the time....

All this despite the undeniable reality that there exist all these charming young men, a year or so younger than me, and one could fall in love with them so easily; isn't it ironic that all my sensibilities and senses are unequivocally concentrated on one person to the unfortunate exclusion of all twenty-somethings.....

I seem to be bordering on an incoherent or at least a seriously disjointed expression of thoughts....This could well be due to the fact that today I rolled my first joystick to the transcendental plane of ephemeral euphoria, and to celebrate my success I inhaled its pleasure-inducing aroma alone, realizing a little late that it was perhaps a tad too strong for the solitary soul in search of psychedelic heavens......in other words I'm too stoned to talk sense....

Methinks mayhap the moisture in the atmosphere has percolated into my already rather soggy cerebrum...feeling highly sentimental about some rather unlikely things....

Like the fact that every reunion with my closest school-mates is an endless litany of "remember"... We grew up together, lives linked inextricably, so much so that between the three of us we shared two boys - which sounds terribly crude and complicated but actually seemed heart-breakingly simple at that age of not-quite-innocence, but rather adoloscent immaturity... That we have memories to discuss is presumably indicative of the fact that we had things to talk about then, heaven knows what's happened in the here and now....At any rate we retain the ability to spend hours giggling hysterically, which makes for rather entertaining disruptions to the overwhelming boredom of enforced nostalgia.....

Woops....phone call coming through....why do people have such fabulously erratic senses of timing....the one call I've been waiting for, has to disrupt my singular moment of sensible (in the Austen-ian sense alone) sentimentality....

Lost and confused......have a sad feeling most of my posts will never quite cross the monosyllabic barrier of aatlami........currently assuming all who read this are equipped with a babel fish which helps them to attune to my perversely peculiar frame of mind......otherwise it ain't my fault, I'm speaking an alien language......a language that belongs to the land where the grass is always greener.....

for the unintiated.....

Babel Fish
The Babel Fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
The Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.