Deciphering My Non-Verbal Cues.

This is for anyone who is eager to know a little more about me. (Not that I live a secretive life, considering I have mentioned my entire AND real name on my blog and am easily traceable on Facebook.)
Perhaps you want to know those feelings of mine that I strive to keep hidden. If such is the case, read on, for I have compiled a list of all the non-verbal cues I unconsciously send out.

If I look away or wrinkle my nose when you walk into the room, it means I've begun to associate you with a certain kind of smell. Malodorous, yes. A field of manure or a garbage truck, maybe? Or you may just have put on that perfume I associate all menopausal aunties with, that leaves a weird 'Menopausal aunty was here' smell in the elevator.

If you're talking to me and my eyebrows are raised, it can mean one of two things. Curiosity or impatience. The height of the eyebrows is directly proportional to my level of curiosity or impatience. And since I haven't started threading my eyebrows yet, if you see them disappear into my hairline, do the safe thing and get the hell out of my sight.

If you catch me staring at you, best case scenario is that you're Ryan Gosling from Drive. If you aren't, this may mean you've annoyed me in some way. So, either I am thinking of an intelligent sounding compliment or how I should kick you in the gut. Obviously I don't have the courage to follow through either plan and you know it, hence the smirk on your face.

In case I haven't been able to get out of boring conversation, you may detect a barely audible sigh, a slight shoulder slouch, a stifled yawn or a series of punches to the wall that won't stop till I've fractured all my delicate fingers.

If you find me tapping my feet or drumming my fingers on the desk, I am playing my favourite song on full volume in my head and staring at your moving lips just for fun. I'll probably imitate you in front of friends later.

An interesting feature some friends pointed out is my 'duck face'. This is when I really AM concentrating, and ugly lines appear between my eyebrows and I pout like a petulant baby. Duck face usually appears during examinations when I finally figure out that 25 times 2 is 27, or right now.

If you see a huge smile plastered on my face, I'm actually enjoying talking to you. We may hang out after college at Barista or Candies. (This,however, is a truly hypothetical situation to convince you I am not as antisocial as this post may lead you to believe.)

You may finally, catch me daydreaming blissfully, generally in the middle of Accounts class. Don't interrupt because I am imagining myself one of two survivors in a nuclear apocalypse (the other being Bono, of course), and living the remainder of my days in peaceful seclusion and bloody Sundays. 

Fall Foliage Fun.

October: The season where everyone's an ant stumbling around busily in anticipation of beautiful winter.




Quote: L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Image Courtesy: Mike Bingley's Flickr Photostream

Drive.

'If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. 

I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive.'

Watch it. Watch it now. 

The neon lights. The brilliant soundtrack. The silences. 

Science nerds: This is the white blinding light of magnesium reacting with oxygen, made into a movie.

Girls: If you liked Ryan Gosling after Crazy Stupid Love, you'll love him in this one.

The Things I Think About When I Am Trying Not To Think.

If I had grown up among the Mongols in 1200 or plantation-owners in pre-Civil War U.S.A, would my moral map have been the same?

How some labels lose their sting (blasphemy) while others regain bite (racist).

What are the things I believe in today that will later seem ridiculous? 

How philosophers will deliver patronizing speeches in public when the sewers in the city cease to work.

How people conveniently forget that the Soviet Union also won the World War II, widely seen as the downfall of totalitarianism. 

How comforting it is to live in a city as competitive as Bombay.

How all the streets here end at a wall. 

How I don't remember the last time I saw a rainbow. 

How the night-sky, at the outskirts of nowhere, was flooded with innumerable stars.

How transcending time is characteristic of independence.

How thinking about not thinking means I'm still thinking which is an exercise in redundancy and pointlessness.

(Image Source: Flickr)

Book-Happy.

Yes, I am a book nerd. Pictures of books make me happy.

Why Aliens Will Leave Us Alone. Or Kill Us All.

It's insanity. Absolute lunacy.
I shouldn't.


Nothing can explain my infatuation with people that exist on paper. There is nothing rational about actually caring for a character that I know from the very outset is a figment of imagination. Jane Eyre was the first literary character I ever cared for. Intellectually towering over my sixth-grade self, I got scared with her and for her and recognized her faults as mine as she served as truly beguiling company on damp afternoons. Ever since, I have turned to judging books by the strength of its characters. I want to know about their coffee-stained teeth, their uncontrollable habits and the reason for their slouch.


Conclusion:
Some day, aliens will find me crying over Kathy in Wuthering Heights while not giving a poor beggar change at the traffic signal, and that alone will be warning enough not to land here. Or to wipe humanity off the map.

Joan Didion: On Self Respect

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a mater of misplaced self-respect.


.........To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. 


It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands to much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Didion, 

a personal icon.

Shedding Monkey Tears.

See Evidence of this travesty.
Let's bow our heads and mourn the death of the English language.

P.S. I made the above. Teehee. ^_^

Where I found the pensive monkey? Adam Foster's flickr photostream

Let Her Fly. :)

CRY truly is one beautiful organisation. Beautiful is the word. 

While it continually makes efforts to ensure a lasting impact in education reforms for young kids here, it realizes that the most effective form of  change is emotional. It allows children never to lose sight of their innocent wide-eyed aspirations. 'Let Her Fly' is their latest effort to empower girls to dream...and believe they can convert their dreams to reality. All they needed to do was scribble down their dream on a bright yellow kite and see it fly.

Context is of importance here- School is the high point in the day for most of these girls.
They come from homes with corrugated tin roofs, sporadic electricity, rationed water and uniformly uneducated parents. After the sun goes down, a profound darkness sets in their dark alleyways. The lack of streetlights in the interiors of some slums, converts busy vegetable markets by day, dimensionless black. One girl told me how she studies in the cozy glow of flickering candlelight.

Well, the kites didn't really take off, there was a scuffle for pens, the corridors were noisy; but as the girls drew batons and blackboards, wrote 'thanks' in erratic cursive handwriting, stretched on their tippy-toes and held up their kites as high as they could....It was a breathtakingly beautiful moment.

These girls want to be teachers. :)

These little ones want to be dancers. ^_^

And these, most courageous of all, want to become police officers.

One girl gifted me an airplane made with myriad shades of marble paper. That, along with the beaming smiles, reassures me that the scenario is brightening for children in the city. :)

Much Ado about Everything.

This picture was first posted on Tumblr 4 days ago. Now I see it has gone viral. And of course, why wouldn't it?
Loved it. ^_^