My interview

well I went for the interview and it went quite well. And I liked the feel of it. The people I met, the ones in charge and the ones who were fellow candidates. One of the good experiences of  the year. This year seems to be going real good for me! Let's hope it happens! I smell adventure... :)

A Crucial Choice

I am at a very weird place right now. There is this volunteer programme which I have an interview for this weekend. Although I haven't prepared, my chief anxiety is whether I should take it up or not. If I choose to take it up it would mean giving it two years of my life, teaching unprivileged kids in cities I have never visited and I don't have anyone to help me out. My parents and my boyfriend are both against it. Even people around are not very encouraging. They think it's a waste of time. But if that is what all volunteer work is categorised as, aren't we being too selfish?


Fine, let me do some introspection and figure out what I want. I am personally sick of studying literature. I mean I love it, yes, but only to an extent. You give me five back to back years of adventure sports and I'l get bored of it and I am talking English Literature! I would love to take a break. I want to take a break. But, not to sit at home. I want to do something off beat. I had applied abroad for a Ph.D but that didn't work out. I know it was literature too but it was in another country. With the daily drudgery of Literature I atleast would also be experiencing a new world. That's why I was so keen on it. But it didn't work out. The next good girl step would be to take up M.Phil. But if I have to do it, it has to be somewhere out of this city. I am actually sick of living such a comfortable life. I hardly appreciate it. So why not I live the hard way and see how the rest of the world survives. So what if I "waste" two years. I have done practically nothing worthwhile in the past 22 years that I can ever boast of. Or be proud of.. and why is it that people around me don't let me decide what I should do?? What's the worst that'l happen? I would be miserably poor? Well it'l be an experience. I would be very stressed and worked up over deadlines? That happens everywhere. M.Phil will have 10 times the assignments and papers I write in MA. And I would be teaching. For he first time in my life. Something I have always wanted to do and can only imagine what it would be like. And in extraordinary circumstances! C'mon face it! I'l never get such an opportunity in my life again. 


This happened once before in my life. I had got in a print journalism course but my father didn't think it was worth it. I would have got to travel to another city and learnt so many other things. If they wanted me to do an MA I could have easily come back and joined it. But NO! He wouldn't have it. So I lost a chance to learn something I'l never get another opportunity for. It's easy to say why not do it now. But it's a psychological phase. Once past it's very difficult to bring yourself back to it. The same thing is happening here. If I let go of this, I might never get another chance. I might never make it this far either! Not every time one clears an entrance or gets short listed with a high rank. It's that one chance you get. It's all about what you choose to do with it. I can come back to M.Phil. but it's highly unlikely I'l have the courage to pick up volunteer work again. This is the time when I can think about jumping into deep shit without a thought of my family and responsibilities and stuff like that. I am much more free than I would be 5 years later.


I do realise that this decision is extremely crucial. Not that it'l ruin my career or anything. But, what if it's actually not worth what it claims to be. I am scared, to be on my own and that too without support. And what if my dad is right. It would be more painful than anything to hear "I told you so" about something you had fought so vehemently for. I would end up losing further confidence in myself. I hate to admit but it's easier to blame someone else than yourself for the blunders in your life. But that's where I have always missed the point. I wouldn't have that regret if I had decided myself. I need to learn how to figure things out on my own. I can't rely on my dad or boyfriend for decisions in my life. I'l be very unhappy if that be so. And to be truly on my own, I need to do things on my own too. 


Hmm..blogging does help. I just figured out what I have to do...  :)

The last few days of my holidays

It has to be one of the most boring days of this year for me today! With my classes beginning in two days I must be all about enjoying my last days of indoor warmth and late mornings, but somehow I am only bored! This winter break was one of the most lousy holidays I spent in a long time. The reasons are too many. Firstly the lazy bum that I was born as refuses to indulge in anything remotely associated with getting out of the warm blankets, except for grabbing my next bar of chocolate, piece of cake or bag of wafers. And secondly, the million things in the world to witness and explore fail to appeal to me in front of the charm of the next reality series a certain TV channel promises me or the faithfully addictive social networking website I log on to religiously even though I have hardly anyone noticing me on it! sigh...

They say Life is what you make it so make it right..hey wait..isn't that Miley Cyrus's song? Argh!!!! Anyway, ignoring the source and concentrating on the message, it does seem like it makes sense and is the ultimate path to follow. But with a deadline or exams or with the ultimate struggle to get that dream job who cares about what life is turning into as long as one get's the grade, the money and the job/title/ blah..blah..BAH!

It's easy to nod along when someone throws such a life nugget at you but it's very hard to put it into your life. It's practically impossible. I might want to become a musician but the hysteria which would follow is enough to make me bury that idea somewhere deep down within my subconscious, to be lived in some forgotten dream during a good night's sleep. In reality I must become a professor or a high level bureaucrat to keep up the good name of our oh-so-brilliant lineage of forgotten beings. So no matter if I am getting bored to death, I am supposed to open a good informative (not to forget 'approved') book and sink myself into the darkest labyrinths of useless shit! So let me go and indulge in some much desired sadistic practices. Within two more days I would meet and share my pains with similar doomed souls. Till then let the dew rest on the leaf invisible to the eye.

what to be and what not to be?

For me being a 22 year old woman living in a metro might not be the nightmare it is to many. But it's not all cakewalk either. I come from a family of confused personalities and ideologies who were displaced 25 years ago in search of employment from their native habitat, and as is obvious it has caused substantial permanent damage to my nervous system. I struggle daily with this odd pair of parents who if were divinely brought together make me lose all belief in God (if constant atheist forces around me haven't yet achieved that). But these are the least of my problems. I go out and meet these wonderous beings who are still classified under homosapiens, despite their minimal/abnormal physical and mental development, whom I call Friends. Nurtured in similar love filled households, or by products of other sociological tragedies, they seem to influence me in ways I fail to fathom entirely. The result: a nervous showdown in my head between the idealised conservative jackshit my parents filled me with and the utopic, sci-fi anarchic ideas I savour, from my friends. That struggle has long since seeped down from my head into my life and from the ideal daughter-who'll-make-me-proud I have become this uncontrolled-talking back-rebellious-monster who is hidden away from polite company for good! 

The irony of my life is that I am not 17, not even 19 but 22 !!!!  22 is an age when half the world has finished half the things it had set out to do and I am still figuring out how to make the list! Talk about late blooming! For me things happened much later as compared to the company I keep. From my first night out, to my first trip, to my first shot of booze to my first date! The loser that I was made to feel and look like happily ruined my adolescence. One of the things that made me 'ideal' for such a treatment was that I never talked. I listened. I never leaded. I always followed. I never stood out. I blended in. And blending in two different contradictory worlds creates friction. Which I feel now. I lived as my parents' ideal daughter for 20 years, a wannabe ideal friend/peer for a few years (I failed quite miserably at that!), and am currently struggling to be the ideal girlfriend. And all these worlds are sadly mutually exclusive. And I am wearing out under the friction.

In all this mess I still haven't found me. I don't even know how to define the term 'Me'. My judgements and opinions seem borrowed and it doesn't seem fair to try and cut off from such nasty influences by redefining myself through them! It's like nothing original is left in me. I am a result of catalytic influences. A hybrid which will never know its original compounds! But aren't we all? Isn't that how we become us? This is one of the various inherent contradictions I cradle myself to sleep in every night. I know there are a million other dire crises in the world, but for this 22 yr old, this seems to be life's eternal problem. To find out what to be and what not to be...and how to be it?!!

my first mundane reflection

When I logged into blogger.com, it's homepage advertised it as a medium of sharing and expressing one's thoughts. Expressing oneself might mean to pour out one's heart and one's deepest feelings. But to put it more simply it means - cribbing! That's what blogs, especially those which are personalised ones like mine, endorse. And I agree. To write about the various mundane things that I reflect upon or am forced to reflect upon would inadvertently turn into a big pile of bitching, cribbing, and the most extreme form of torture an innocent reader might get caught in! But to delve a bit deeper (at the risk of sounding philosophical or profound), it's all because most of us lack people who would be willing to listen. We have friends, boyfriends and girlfriends but despite all of them if we still feel the need to express ourselves through a blog...I wonder what that reflects. But enough with that! If cribbing is what I am meant to do, then so be it!!

My first day as a blogger

Today morning, while reading an article in The Readers' Digest (a really old one I found while cleaning my room yesterday), I was inspired to get up and make a blogger's profile. But now that I have, and am now trying to write out something readable I am stumped! Still I wont be discouraged and would try and maintain this blog as one of my forgotten personal diaries significantly edited and more frequently updated. And that could conveniently serve as my New Year's resolution!!

Although a Literature major, (well, nearly!) I find writing and presenting my views, critical or otherwise, on anything a bit of a task. Whether it's a result of some unconscious inferiority or a more open fear of criticism I can't say, but I believe this medium of shielded expression might help me. I don't boast of an extremely sophisticated style of writing but the 'chosen few' (!!) who have read my 'mundane reflections' seem to feel I am decent. It's an opinion now free to be contested. I don't have a clear agenda in mind as to what this blog is meant to serve, towards me or others but I will figure it out on the way. Atleast I start today in the hope that I would.

P.S. Happy Sir Issac Newton's Birthday to all..