Judge a book by its cover.

Head on over to http://bookcoverarchive.com/, fellow bibliophiles. Feast your eyes on this. 

Desinence.

Off late, my thoughts are among the many things I no longer know. If you enter my room, or head, sometime, you'll find me looking at the ceiling, as if the words I need are up there. No, I don't want to say Wow or Goodnight, or any of those expressions with words that should have weight, but hover weightless in everyday conversation. The words I used to write now have different meanings, and the words I use, I don't know their meaning anymore.
I need to keep writing, or I won't know how to speak; to myself.

Someday, I would love to fit words together into a lasting sentence of incredible meaning.
I lace my fingers behind my head, looking not for answers, but for unanswered questions.

The ice cubes are melting. The calender pages are fervently being flipped.
Life needs more life than this.

Tasting Happiness. :)

I love my life because I set an alarm for 7 p.m. everyday, and make myself a quick cup of cappuccino. Just because I can now.
Best. Birthday. Present. Ever. ^_^
*slow clap for gift-giver*

The Younger Daze.

I celebrated my 19th birthday yesterday. 

A day into being nineteen, and here I am. This moment, right here, is perfect. 

Well, almost.

I wish I were basking in the glow of a million candles at my desk while writing with a delightfully scratchy fountain pen; crimson ink staining the pages of a weather-worn diary. I wish I had a coffee mug at arm's reach, deliciously chipped at the right places, and a cup crafted for citrus juices. I am too adrift from myself to tell you my favourite novel, but I'd want it nearby too. I wish I were experiencing a white winter. The blanket of white, the promise of renewal; that's something I'd like to see. I wish for a lot of things, and birthdays only make me appreciate the brief history of time between yesterday and today, then and now, you and me. 

I'm not one to make resolutions, but I'd like to find a great book this year. The figures sketched in its pages might impress me as my own, or might resolve something for me. I wish a book enters my life at exactly the right moment. Like people, they tend to appear too early when I'm too intimidated to appreciate it, or too late, when its significance has been captured more wholly by someone else. I want to be as unsettled by a book as enchanted by it. 

Today I am nineteen, and relatively untroubled by questions of identity and individuality. I know the person I am, and I'm on my way to being the person I always wanted to be. The stupidity of mankind is infinite, and yet, intelligence is what separates everyone. I revel in the sheer magnitude of all I have to absorb this year. 

Happy (belated) Birthday to me. :)

I hope everyone finds happiness this new year. :)

Illusions, Dispelled.

 I was born in 1993, at the cusp of a generational divide. Born into a newly-liberalized India, I lived a life starkly different from what absolutely anyone older than me lived. I lived *with* electronic access to my country’s culture. The family regaled us with stories of life without what seemed like necessities in my life. Every 90s kid will identify.

But it was the regular immersion in literature that was the reason for my self-definition. To this day, I understand my life in the context of Jane Eyre and Raskolnikov, versus Brad Pitt and ‘the Rachel’. In an age of false perspective, where Shah Rukh Khan can appear taller than Deepika Padukone, and where marches are held to stand still, literature helped me gain knowledge in a way that television, or even the internet, never has. 

Books have taken me to places I didn’t necessarily want to go, forced me to confront my prejudices, assumptions, and at the bare bottom, forced me to confront my ‘self’ at an intrinsic level. Words make me vulnerable in a way actions never seem to. For those precious moments, when I’m alone in bed with a book, I don’t feel alone. That fleeting moment, where the author actually connects with the reader, makes me realize that the ability to articulate is a beautiful one. 

I can't believe half of December has vanished. Bombay continues to be a furnace, the morning breeze nothing but an ambush, the evening chill nothing but a glimpse of an actual winter.

Guess what? We got our very first client. (YAY!) I didn't ever imagine my life turning out the way it has.

2011 has been a breathtaking beauty of a year. Personally. Professionally. Every which ______-ally, there is.

I've been excruciatingly happy. I've been breathlessly sad. I've been indelibly excited. I've been morbidly afraid. I've undoubtedly lived.

Within Me A Lunatic Sings.

This song perfectly encapsulates everything I've seen, heard and felt in the past few days :')

Sigur Ros is sheer magic. Nobody can ever convince me otherwise. I love their music and how it makes me feel. :)

A Song for Starlit Beaches.

"There would be birdsong over flooded beach,

and we would be daylight over the shipwreck-sands."

I remember writing a few weeks ago, 'A risk is happiness'. The words echo in my mind, as I return to Mumbai after 4 near-perfect days.

There, the rhetoric of sudden freedom and liberation rings true. Perhaps the sun and sea and the sheer beauty of the place refracts the city gloom out of sight. The laid-back atmosphere there is infectious. I feel a growing sense of calm, something I thought I had grown desensitized to in the past few years, trudging along the corridors of competitive academia and teenage problems.

I feel like something out of a bathing soap commercial. Refreshed. Rejuvenated.
And so I'm back to the daily grind, with no lingering sadness for the sunset on those glorious days.
Perfection, after all, is best enjoyed ephemeral. 

Hitting 7 Billion.

The world's population hit 7 billion today. A number that lasted exactly one second.
The 7 billionth kid is an Indian. Apropos, I think. Gosh, this runaway population growth needs to be stopped in Mr.Plod stopping traffic in Noddy episodes fashion.

FYI: I am number 5, 513,802,182 on this planet.
And here's your number.

'Books' by Dorianne Laux

You're standing on the high school steps,
the double doors swung closed behind you
for the last time, not the last time you'll ever

be damned or praised by your peers, spoken of
in whispers, but the last time you'll lock your locker,
zip up your gym bag, put on your out-of-style jacket,

your too-tight shoes. You're about to be
done with it: the gum, the gossip, the worship
of a boy in the back row, histories of wheat and war,

cheat sheets, tardies, the science of water,
negative numbers and compound fractions.
You don't know it yet but what you'll miss

is the books, heavy and fragrant and frayed,
the pages greasy, almost transparent, thinned
at the edges by hundreds of licked thumbs.

What you'll remember is the dumb joy
of stumbling across a passage so perfect
it drums in your head, drowns out

the teacher and the lunch bell's ring. You've stolen
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the library.
Lingering on the steps, you dig into your bag

to touch its heat: stolen goods, willfully taken,
in full knowledge of right and wrong.
You call yourself a thief. There are worse things,

you think, fingering the cover, tracing
the embossed letters like someone blind.
This is all you need as you take your first step

toward the street, joining characters whose lives
might unfold at your touch. You follow them into
the blur of the world. Into whoever you're going to be.

This poem just seems right on this blog. I identify with it on so many levels. Beautiful. :)

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