Meeting an old friend

Meeting an old friend is like finding an old treasure.
-Anonymous

Today I met one of my school friends. Nilesh Pachauri. He is a funny guy in a his own way. One of a kind actually.
We had been classmates from grade 10th to 12th and I must say he had made our class laugh like crazy throughout these 3 years.
He was in town (Mumbai) and had called me up and we decided to meet in Kurla (one of the busiest suburbs in Mumbai!). We were meeting after almost 7 years and I had this skeptical feeling throughout my way from home to Kurla on how would I recognize him. I don't easily forget faces, but 7 years is a long time! When I saw him at Kurla railway station, to my amazement, recognizing him was not that tough. I could easily recognize him at first sight. All the good memories flashed and came rushing to my mind. Same looks, same style, same smile, the only added feature were glasses and a weird haircut. Some people really don’t change at all!

In school I used to find it awkward talking to him for some unknown reason, may be because he was pretty smart and always had this innocent weird side of him dazzle everywhere which was overwhelming. But this time, I could interact fairly well as I could understand his sarcasms and the funny one liners. I was secretly proud of myself as on how I was able to communicate so effortlessly. I could respond to his humor with my wittiness. Later in the day we went to 'Jazz By the Bay' (one of my favorite Pizza places!) at Marine Drive. The awesomeness of the food and his company made everything absolutely entertaining. He told me all the stories of school of which I was barely aware in bits. Surprisingly, I was enjoying those comprehensive sessions of reminiscing the school days. Many times during the chit chat I found myself thinking, did I live my school days in incomplete enthusiasm?
We spoke about almost everything. The teachers who we disliked, the first benchers who always had this strange temperament, the examinations which were of least interest to us, our favorite hang out places, and honestly, all this was quite nostalgic.

Had there were a few more hours in that day, I could have spared more time and muse over about the good old school days.

 

Thank you my friend for meeting me again after so many years. I hope our friendship grows stronger in the years to come and may we meet up again sometime soon to update each other with exciting new stories!

The Changing Equations

From the strings of life
the beads of memories have rolled out.
Scattering all over the clay
they unfold an unsaid story...

Dispersing in all directions
and bouncing back again,
provoke me to watch my steps
Of which I was vain.

Retrospecting , I found
something has changed;
In the winds of time,
and in the strands of spell
Something is lost
in the grime of yore.

And this was never meant to be.

Delving into the begrimed past
and brushing the filth of sins
I found,
I dint lose anything.

There was nothing to lose.

There is just a change in the equations
And the equation is ‘I’.

The naïve ‘I’.

An attempt to salvage the indigenous ‘I’ is hard
But I have to try
for the dying faith,
and the mortifying spirit.
It’s harder for me to do so
for I am too weak to hold it back,
to recollect the fallen beads.

I am not here
I am in the coffin
And the new ‘I’ is born,
unaware of the fact
that it will eventually die.

List of ‘Things to do’ in this life time!

'True happiness lies in life’s simple details, and if we don’t see them, they become invisible. '
 This is so true!

The beautiful mystic world has given us so many things to explore, see, hear, learn, touch, and feel. My this post is to the life and nature for giving me such amazing gifts!

Well, everyone has a list of things one wants to do in one’s lifetime.
By putting mine on a paper, rather an e-paper, I have resolved to check off at least one of the items per year (and maybe add a few, while I am at it!) 

Legend:
Bold- Done!
Regular- God knows when.

Fly a plane
Travel to all 7 continents
Bungee jump
Learn to play a musical instrument
Get black belt in karate/Judo
Write an article for a newspaper or a magazine
Go White-water rafting
Learn to knit
Write a book
Build an orphanage
Paint a masterpiece
Learn to sail
Run a marathon
Hit the speed limit on the Autobahn (Germany's no speed limit highway)!
Make a short film
Skydive from 14,000 feet!
See solar and lunar eclipse 
Teach someone illiterate to read
Climb at the top of Eiffel Tower
Pet a dog
Own an Audi
Fall in love hopelessly! ;)
Visit the Taj Mahal
Go on Cruise
Learn some magic tricks!
Go horse riding on a beach
Learn moon walking
Visit Area 51
Go on a long walk on a beach
See a volcano
Make someone laugh wholeheartedly
Donate blood
Learn to drive
Take a Euro trip
Go on a hot air balloon ride
Pen a poem 
Learn to swim
Experience weightlessness
Visit the Great Wall of China
Bathe in the sea
Learn Sanskrit
Visit the Grand Canyon
Learn Photography
Learn roller skating
Own an aquarium
Visit North and South Pole
Buy a house
Create a Blog(though it gets updated very rarely!)
Break a rule
Parasail
Hang-Glide

Autobiographies - A New Beginning

Of late, I have been reading many autobiographies; Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin to name a few. But having recently finished the autobiography of Dave Pelzer - A child called ‘it’ made me think about something which we as a human usually chose to ignore; Child Abuse. Though it is written beautifully, it was depressing to know about the author's life struggle as a child and that he was treated brutally by his own mother.
For no reason, he was starved for days, was forced to eat dog’s food and do all household chores without a grain of food for days. He was badly beaten and was burned on stove. Since it was very disturbing, at times while reading, I doubted if it was really true. The cruel behavior of the mother at times appeared unreal. Had it been a fiction I would have left it in between, but a memoir makes a difference. The writer was an innocent child who was unaware of child abuse. He thought it was his fate. And that god has punished him for some reason unknown to him. He suffered the cruelty for several years. The most depressing of all was that even though his neighbors knew that he was treated cruelly, they were behaving deaf and dumb. They behaved as if nothing was happening in the neighborhood. But after years, the way he has come out of that fear and the “mad house” is incredible.

He fought for his freedom and later got admitted into United States Air Force. The fear of his mom had penetrated to this extent that it haunted him for months. I used to read such articles in magazines, but reading an autobiography was altogether a different experience. There are so many children in this world who are ill treated every day. They are treated like slaves, or rather worse than slaves. They are starved for food and water while their siblings in the same house are treated with cakes and sweets. They wear same pair of clothes for weeks, while their siblings are given new pair of clothes every week. Living under the same ceiling they are locked in a small room and forbidden to use toilet for days. They die in there because of bad hygiene and lack of food and later their body is thrown out on road for dogs to feed on.

Are we so occupied in ourselves and avaricious for high paying jobs that even after hearing the cries of innocent children we choose to ignore them? Have we become so inhumane?

It’s a high time that we have kept our eyes and ears closed. Sitting idle we too are the criminals, equally contributing in this crime. Now is the time to act and save souls, because not every child who is abused survives to write an autobiography.

Renaissance

I had been thinking about this for quite sometime now; about maintaining a blog. Long back I did started a blog but only to put some crap. After that I never posted anything. Often I used to wonder what I should post on my blog. But, after reading quite a few blogs (some crappy, some interesting, some informative) of people I know, I thought of doing it all again. Now after months of unproductive thinking, I am starting it all over again.

The other day, when I opened Google home page, I was wondering what I should search for. Blankly looking at the home page for a while, I thought of googling not so famous random souls. I typed one my friend’s name. Her name is little uncommon. Not many people have that name. I was expecting only a few results but to my surprise, Google searched about 64 results in 0.34 seconds. And yes, they were positively hers! I was little taken aback. Then I typed another friend’s name. It showed a lot more links and pages compared to previous one. And it was positively him. I repeated the same with 3 more names of the people I knew. Google found them out as well. Then I thought of trying mine. To my surprise I was not even on the 5th page! There were several other people with my name, but I was absolutely no where.

I thought, What does it takes for one to come on Google? An uncommon name? a weird picture? Admission in IIMs? Working for a top company? Well, How does it matter! Or does it? 

Well back to maintaining the blog, the hobby is being pursued merely as a 'catharsis'.   Hope it serves the purpose. Though some of the things that I would write will be absolutely non-sense, with the worst of English and the funniest usage of grammar that anyone could ever come across, and many few people will be reading it, but like I said, its more of a 'displacement activity', than a creative undertaking.