Sunday, November 30, 2008

Of Slippers

What's the weirdest thing rain's done to you? I was walking along the SAC road one fine Thursday evening (the day the endsems ended!)... the day was anything but fine, what with cyclone Nisha literally banging away all night long. The SAC road (err... road from now on) is one of the lowest-lying areas in the whole insti. Currently, that means waist deep water. That also means water flowing downhill with river-like force.

So we're walking along, trying to get to CCD in one piece so that we can speak to the guys who we hope will be arranging Paintball for us at Saarang. Juwa: "Yaar SAC road se chalte hain". Okay, so we start walking. The water gets into our slippers; its fun! The water gets till our ankles; its fun! The water nears our knees; its fun!

Then, we get to the uphill part, where water's flowing down at us. Not only is it hard to walk up, the current is tugging at my slippers. And then, without warning, my right foot hits mud. Why? My slipper's decided it loves the current more than it loves me, and has followed it into the IITM wilderness (which looked then like a big, random lake just placed there).

Picture the situation. My right slipper's floating downstream, its pouring cats and elephants, I have an umbrella in hand, and I'm chasing my slipper. I try to stick the umbrella in front of it in the hope that it'll stop. And guess what? It does! For a few seconds, at least. Then, the umbrella decides to fold into its upside down position, and the slipper goes past.

That alone was annoying enough. But while running after one slipper, the other one decides to come off my left foot and follow its partner downstream. No doubt they're making love in one of the insti swamps right now. Make me godfather, guys..

I did eventually make it to CCD.. barefoot, soaked, and extremely annoyed. At least the sight of the exceedingly cute Planet Adventure representative was uplifting.

PS: Put our writeup back on the Saarang website, ya bozos

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Updates, I promise

"Imagine...



I see a vast expanse of land. Behind me, a hill rises up almost vertically, topped off by a highway. My feet are on grass, not the soft, short grass of a well-manicured lawn, but the rough, uneven grass that grows in the wild. There are bald patches in areas, where sand replaces the grass. To the right, an impenetrably thick, tall forest blocks off all access.



Straight ahead, the land becomes more and more dusty, as the grass yields to a riverbank. This is the bank of th"

I SWEAR I'll start updating again, soon.

To anyone who cares,
Shreyas

Friday, February 1, 2008

Relationships

A guy meets a girl, they find each other interesting, go out together for a while, all's rosy and amazing for three months, and then suddenly they meet other guys and girls, and everything's over, usually with one big heartbreak.

Two people studying in the same school/college get interested in each other, get to know each other better, talk about everything (including spending the rest of their lives together), stay together for a few years, and then the illusion evaporates for one or both of them.

Or maybe the exact opposite happens.. maybe things DO work out after all and they (as Baz Luhrmann would like to say) dance the funky chicken at their 75th wedding anniversary. The question is, how do you KNOW until you've TRIED?

One thing, of course, is to go extremely slowly. Know the person for a year or two, their ins and outs, their goals/ambitions/desires/adaptability/mumbo-jumbo, and then decide whether to be together or not. This might work for some people, but then it isn't really falling in love.. its more like putting all the variables into some goddamn equation for horizontal and vertical velocity and factoring in the hardness of the place you're about to land in. It formalizes love, makes it a calculated gamble instead of the wild, growing, mutually nurturing thing it should be.

That obviously doesn't mean that you end up going out with every random stranger you meet.. but you also don't need to know every small detail to even think about a person seriously. After all... hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things...

"You're afraid of me! You're afraid that I won't love you back! Fuck it, I wanna give it a shot! At least I'm honest with you. " - Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting

That just about sums up a very common attitude towards relationships... fear of rejection or of the fact that things won't work out. Well, what if they don't? You'll be hurt, sure... perhaps you gave your 110% but things still didn't work out...then what? Is it all over? Is life done with? Most importantly, was that time wasted?

My answer to this is NO. After all, what is life but the sum of the experiences you've had while you lived? Its the journey which matters, because everyone's destination is the same. A bond which lasted a few years and then ended was not a waste of those years. Instead, in all probability, it made both parties evolve into better people, and enriched their lives in a way that only they could, for each other. As Lord Tennyson would put it, its always better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

Lastly, of course, there are moments. Things that no one can ever steal away from you... the most special things that people do together... be it walking together down a moonlit beach or just having an ice cream fight... these are things that no one can EVER take away from a person, no matter what happens. And in the end, these are probably ALL that count. After all, life isn't about the number of breaths you take, but about the moments that take your breath away....