Personal
A perfect Sunday…
…is when it is pouring outside, and you are warm and dry…relishing the world’s best filter coffee and reading a good book! But wait! Wasn’t I cribbing, just a short while ago, that the worst way to spend one’s vacation is holed up at home, stuck indoors because of the rains?
You see, it’s quite simple. Rain has marked every aspect of my life, and every point. I was named after the raga that supposedly brings rain. But, I share a rather ambivalent relationship with it. On the one hand, I love it. I love the freshness of the air we breathe; I love the wet flowers and leaves. I love seeing the colours of nature become so much greener with every spell of rain. To me, rain has always been a blessing. Every time I do something new, every time I start a new venture, the rains have arrived. My first job, and every subsequent job change, my birthday, my first trip abroad…it rained on each of these occasions; and each of them has been good to me in some way. Rain, therefore, is a benediction. Maybe the fact that I am named Amruthavarshini has something to do with it. Even if I did drop the “Varshini” over the years, to facilitate things; even if I cannot really sing the raga, despite several years of training off and on in Carnatic music.
However, it’s quite irritating when the rains cause massive traffic snarls. It’s even worse when you make plans to go out with friends, go shopping, meet people, or quite simply, spend the day at grandmom’s place. It’s much worse than you can imagine when there is something important happening in office, for which you need to be smartly dressed, but end up getting all wet and looking like a grumpy old lady! It is at such times that I wish there was no rain, that the day was bright and sunny.
But, all said and done…the rains are still like a friend, long-lost, but who will arrive, precisely when you need him most!
Madras…
When I was a kid, Chennai was called Madras. It seems like an eternity since I used the word. I hear so much of Chennai these days that I almost forget how much I resisted the name change when it first came about. The Chennai I remember was a Chennai before the flyover days. These days, all over the city, you either see flyovers, or you see flyovers being constructed. TTK Road, GN Chetty Road, Kathipara…name it, and you have flyovers! What the hell? The beloved city of my childhood is gradually disappearing under a maze of flyovers, grade separators and bridges. So much so that, the original bridges across the Cooum and the Adyar are incidental today!
This morning, fighting morning peak hour traffic on Nelson Manickam Road, childhood memories came flooding back. I remembered how this, now-chaotic, nearly impossible-to-navigate artery was once frequented only by the odd autorikshaw and an occasional 15C. Oh! How can I forget? 15C was a bus route that can only be described as capricious. There was just one bus that plied, back in the early 90s, between Loyola College and Broadway. Yes. You read that right. Exactly one bus. It was supposed to arrive every 3 hours. But, it only arrived when you never needed it. It would arrive, when you were waiting for any bus other than 15C! The driver somehow seemed to have mastered the art of driving a perfectly empty bus even in the most crowded hours of the day. There were days, when tired of waiting for the damned thing, I would take an alternative bus, get off a couple of stops before Mehta Nagar, and walk the length of the road (a good 2 kms) to get home. All this, in the mid-afternoon heat, because school was over at 3, and I was invariably on the road around 3:30.
I remember the days, when armed with a heavy school bag, an empty lunch box and an equally empty water bottle; I would trudge home, wishing I would catch that elusive 15C at least the next day! I remember how taking an autorikshaw back home was such an earth-shattering decision, because using up my weekly dole of 20 rupees would mean I wouldn’t have money to eat samosas in the tiny school canteen! Today, the dilemma I faced over whether or not to take an auto is laughable, to put it mildly.
Snapping back to the present, I suddenly realized that the Madras of old has disappeared as irretrievably as the Amrutha of my childhood. I haven’t stepped into a bus in months, or even years now. The last time I did take a bus from T Nagar, I was so thrilled that it almost felt like I was reliving a part of my childhood. I called practically every close friend to tell them I was taking a bus! Nor do I think or pause before I flag down the nearest auto, at times when my bike is unavailable. There is so much today that I take for granted that I so cherished when I was 11. This reminds me how much people change. How much something can mean to us at one point, and how meaningless it becomes a few years later. That samosas in the canteen, the auto rides, the empty roads, all of them seem like things of the past. It seems today that I lived those times in a dream, or maybe in another lifetime. The city of my birth and childhood has changed beyond recognition.
That said, change is the only thing that’s eternal. I loved Madras then. I love Chennai now. I have lived in a city as beautiful as Paris for two years, and yet, nothing can beat the warmth I feel in Chennai. I don’t know why, but I will probably never be able to get this comfortable with any other city in the world. Maybe because this is home?
Of bloggy birthdays, adieus and au revoirs…
Where do I start? What do I say? I typed out words on Microsoft Word three times, and deleted them three times. Because, I don’t know where and how to start. October 16, three years ago, I put down my first words on a blog. It was then called something else, hosted somewhere else. Not once, did I imagine that this would become such an important part of my life. I never imagined that I would reveal so much of myself online, to complete strangers. Nor did I imagine, I would find so many people who think and feel like I do. The journey started three years ago, and doesn’t look like it will end any time soon. Belated happy birthday to my baby, my very precious writing space…a space of my own…as it was once called.
Speaking of journeys ending, I have something to say. To someone who’s been in my life for barely 10 months, but whom I will never forget in all the years to come. To J, who will know this is about her if she is reading it. So will a lot of other people, if they know both of us. On Friday, before she left, she said adieu. I didn’t think much of it then. On my way back home, I reflected. Is it really adieu? Or is it simply au revoir? Is it really that easy to say adieu and leave, as if nothing happened? As if that part of your life doesn’t exist? I think not. It’s always only au revoir.
Never goodbye; just…until we meet again! Because, I have learnt, that life always comes a full circle. That what goes around always comes around. Because people never really leave. They just go away temporarily, only to come back when you least expect it. As a poet (please let me know who, if you know) puts it,
“Ab ke hum bichde to shayad kabhi khwaabon mein milen,
jis tarah sukhe hue phool kitaabon mein milen.”This is true for practically anybody we meet. Friends, colleagues, ex, even those we meet at a railway station or on a train. We never know when or how we might run into them again. So what if I won’t meet J at office again? So what if that part of the journey of her life is ending. It is, after all, a matter of time before our paths cross again. The time taken might be a day, two days, a year or ten years. But, our paths will cross. While we wait, I just want to say this to her. It was great knowing you. I know we will stay in touch, but I will still miss you. No…scratch that! We will miss you, speaking as I am on behalf of many others who know her too, but aren’t jobless enough to write blogs! I know I will. So, J! Until we meet again! Au revoir!
Life’s answers…
I got a nice forwarded text message. Yes, I am using the words nice and forwarded in the same sentence! But wait, this one was really nice. It goes like this,
“Life answers you in three ways. It says yes, and gives you what you want. It says wait, and gives you something better. It says no, and gives you the best you can have!”
Sounds nice, isn’t it? But then, it’s so difficult to take no for an answer. I am human, just like everyone else. Sometimes, when life says no to me, I get frustrated. So frustrated that I wonder if I deserve anything at all in life! Like this morning. My long-awaited vacation of exactly four days got cancelled. Again! For the fourth time. The reasons behind the cancellation were beyond my control, or D’s for that matter, who was supposed to come along. But, my first reaction was…WTF? Then, I was frustrated, upset, depressed. Then, I saw D getting even more upset and depressed. I snapped back and told him it was ok. That we would compensate some other time. That there was always a second chance. This morning, I was back to feeling depressed and upset.
Post-lunch, I decided enough was enough. I wasn’t going to waste the whole day regretting something so totally out of my control anyway. That said, it was not easy. Why do we find it so difficult to take disappointment? Why is so tough for us to take no for an answer. This is, after all, a vacation. A vacation I can take anytime later. A vacation wherein I was supposed to go only to Bangalore, all of 5 hours away. Then why was I feeling so depressed? So frustrated? What is the point?
Maybe because we pin so many hopes on that one event, one possibility, one person, or one happening? Maybe we should learn to take that no and life would be that much better. Huh? I don’t know! Honestly, I wish I had the emotional maturity to take that no. I know I lack it. But don’t we all at some point? Life once said yes to me. It gave me what I wanted. Then, I realized I deserved better. Then, it said wait. I am still waiting. Now, it’s said no. I wonder what best it’s going to give me!
Beauty is skin deep…
…they say. But, sometimes I wonder what beauty really means? Tall? Slim? Fair? Big eyes? What exactly? Everywhere, I am treated to the same bullshit. Fair is beautiful. Slim is beautiful. But, how do we know what someone else would consider beautiful?
As a teen, I was never confident about my physical appearance. I was always too tall and too fat to be considered beautiful, in the conventional sense. Privately, I wished I could become 2 inches shorter, lose a few inches around my waist and acquire that perfect, toned and clear skin. It was only much later that I realized that perfection was not always desirable. In college, I realized that I was better off than at least 90% of Indian women. I realized that people did not always judge others by their looks, unlike what I had experienced in school. I realized I could still make friends, no matter how I looked and that what was inside was more important than external beauty.
That said, even today, I sometimes feel insecure. Insecure about my physical appearance. This insecurity goes away very soon. Sometimes in 10 minutes, but never lasts more than a day. But then, it sets me thinking. Thinking about why we, as human beings have such rigid and inflexible notions of beauty. In India, fair is beautiful. In Europe, tanned is beautiful. Everywhere in the world, being reed thin is beautiful, never mind if you are anorexic or bulimic. Why are we, as human beings, willing to go to such extreme lengths to acquire that elusive beauty? Cosmetic surgery, skin treatments, botox…name it and we have tried it. Why? Why can’t we accept that we are imperfect and that is why we are human? Why can’t we accept the other’s imperfections as endearing? I wonder if I will ever get an answer to that!