when they unlearn to be honest to themselves…
when they unlearn to respect the decisions they once made…

when they unlearn that negative breeds negativity…
when they unlearn math, to multiply grudges and divide families…

when they unlearn true stories, to twist them to idle gossip…
when they unlearn that life is too short, and there is no time for hate…

when they unlearn that they have lived their lives, as must their children…
when they unlearn to ‘live’, and forget to forgive…

when they unlearn that their children will one day learn to remember…
and silently watch them grow back into children.

when you love something
set it free
if it comes back, it is yours
if it does not, it never was.

it took me seven long (and adventurous) years, but i have now returned.
congratulations praveen, you won 🙂

ps: thank you, you naughty little cupid, for breaking the seven-year spell

pps: come to think of it, ever come across someone in your life, who’s wished for something long and hard and patiently waited for it come true? what kind of a feeling must it be? and what will it be like to live with such a person?

oh, by the way, it’s official, we’re getting married! (asap ;-))

ever had the feeling you know exactly what’s happening to you but have no control over it?
it happened to me this afternoon. for almost one whole hour, i was blind.

i blacked out.

my sister freaked out. my parents were not at home, so she called my chitti who lives, thankfully, a couple of storeys above us in the same building. my cousins followed her…

i could hear everyone around me. i was cold from head to toe, and it felt like blood had frozen in my veins. painful cramps in my stomuch and back made me writhe on the floor, and i was told a few hours later (after discovering a nasty bump on my head), that i was banging my head on the floor.

hmm, looks like my bp needs a little pumping up, and i need a lot of rest. i’m taking the next two days off 🙂

(by the way, it feels good to know what a fright i gave everyone, and i dont think i’ll ever forget the horrified look on their faces when i came to! hee hee 😉

ever had the feeling you know exactly what’s happening to you but have no control over it?
it happened to me this afternoon. for almost one whole hour, i was blind.

i blacked out.

my sister freaked. my parents were not at home, so she called my chitti who lives, thankfully, a couple of storeys above us in the same building. my cousins followed her…

i could hear everyone around me. i was cold from head to toe, and it felt like blood had frozen in my veins. painful cramps in my stomuch and back made me writhe on the floor, and i was told a few hours later (after discovering a nasty bump on my head), that i was banging my head on the floor.

hmm, looks like my bp needs a little pumping up, and i need a lot of rest. i’m taking the next two days off 🙂

(by the way, it feels good to know what a fright i gave everyone, and i dont think i’ll ever forget the horrified look on their faces when i came to! hee hee 😉

april 5: day 2

7:00 am
the tomato and banana were nibbled at, one of the cake-cubes was missing. must be a really hungry rat, and dumb. can you imagine it just walked right onto the specially laid-out newspaper (in the centre of the kitchen) that had its favourite food on it? i wonder what will kill it first, the rat-poison in the cake, or its absolute lack of curiosity.

8:00 am
we found a dead rat in the building near the elevator. the rat-cake literature had said rats ‘mostly’ die outside the house, three to four days after having consumed the cake. which only left the three of us puzzled, “how could it have died so soon?”

anyway, we’re going to lay dinner for the rat again tonight.

april 6: day 3
the banana is missing! another cake was eaten.

i was trying to be brave and sleep on my bed last night, but rupali and daniela strongly insisted i shouldnt. both of them have sparate bedrooms and it would not be safe to sleep in the open hall, which has just a mattress and no doors to keep the little glutton away.

this morning, i’m glad i took their advise. the pieces of rat-cake and food all over the mattress sent a shiver down my spine. it’ll take me some time to get over that…i would have been sleeping there!

and btw, we found another dead rat in the building, lying flat on its face as though it had fallen from a fatally significant height. well, we live on the third floor…

now the three of us are petrified, “who knows, there could be more than one!”

rats!

april 7: day 4

we’re beginning to get tired of this now.

i don’t know about the others, but i haven’t been able to sleep well, thanks to the nightmares happening to me again…one time i wake up startled when it jumps on my face, another time i break into a cold sweat when i see black rats running all over freshly painted white walls…

this evening, i bought a rat-trap from the hardware store. very confident that since it has been ‘conditioned’ to walk to the centre of the kitchen each night expecting food, it is very likely to walk right into the rat-trap.

setting the trap was fun. i placed the piece of tomato right behind the hook…the rat seemed to like tomatoes, but the hardware store guy instructed me to attach a piece of hard bread to the hook, so the rat would find it difficult to get it off, and when it eventually would…SNAP!

hmmm, wonder how much longer we’ll have to wait…

i was enjoying my solitary walk home from nerul station, when my cell phone rang…

hello?
radhika!! where are you?
i’m on my way home…
come home soon! there’s a rat at home and i’m standing outside the door
er…what?
THERE’S A RAT IN OUR HOUSE!!

rupali sounded really frantic on the phone, and sure enough, she was standing outside the building when i reached.

frankly, after i ended the call, i found myself smiling. but i realised the situation could turn serious. as i continued with the daily purchase of milk, bread and eggs, i wondered how big the rat must be.

if its small, its going to give us a hard time, i thought. and the bigger it is, the more difficult it will be for the rat to move. that’s it! hoping that it was a big rat, i walked on, and remembered how my dad had once used a stick to scare a mouse away at our home in thane. but i was a kid then, who knows, perhaps i was so afraid i would have been standing on the tabletop. (or was that when i saw a cockroach?)

i always wondered how it would be if i were that small. imagine huge towering figures that track you all the way into a corner, or land on you from nowhere, just like that. its also interesting how we always run away at the sight of a cockroach or a rat, when in all probability, the poor animal must be terrified out of its guts when it sees us. to top it all, its we who study psychology using it as a subject, and call it a r-a-t…rat. but how does an animal know what it’s called.

as i reached the gates of my building, i saw rupali standing in the compound, still waiting for me, with nothing in her hands but the housekeys. suddenly i seemed to feel very responsible, like how a father would laugh at his child and lead the lets-get-this-rat-out-of-our-house expedition. as rupali filled me with how she saw the “big” rat and locked the doors of the other two rooms so it doesnt enter there, and that she’d already asked mahesh and daniela who were at at office, to come home quickly (i was coming back from vashi), i knocked at my neighbour’s door and asked them for a wooden stick, or something that was noisy, so i could drive the rat out.

my parents would have never believed had they seen me tapping the walls and the dabbas and boxes in the kitchen. i was beyond surprise myself…i wasn’t afraid at all! twenty minutes later, i was still tapping.

soon mahesh came in with daniela (her first week in india), and we thought it best to buy a rat-trap, since it seemed to be the least messy. what we were not sure of though, was when the rat would be inside the trap.

it was past 10:30 at night, and all we found was mortein rat cake, or rat poison. what we did next will remain unforgettable…stuffing rat cake into tomatoes and bananas!

i have a roomate, and a new friend 🙂
daniela luecke

disclosure: when i was a kid, and the then-towering-above-me aunts and uncles would ask “beta, what do you want to be when you grow up?” my reply was always ready, “an autodriver!!”

seeing the surprised and amused expressions on their faces, i tried my best explaining to them that “autodrivers get to travel around for free, you see! and then, they get to meet new people after every passenger gets off. the best part is, they never know who’s going to get in next, and they can always learn something about the passenger seated in the rickshaw (because they can hear the conversation, if there’s more than one person) and they also get paid after everything!!”

suspecting that they haven’t really believed what i said, i’d make a stern face and add, “and because there are no women rickshaw drivers around.”

well, i did not become an autodriver. for that matter, i still havent learnt driving.

but i still love meeting new people, especially if i don’t know anything about them, be it introducing myself to my neighbours, speaking to the maid next door, the autodriver, the storekeeper or the dabbawallah.

my interaction with foreigners has been limited to very short conversations with
a) the director for chip (worldwide) magazines from vogel verlag, dr gerald o dick, who visited us in india when we started chip, and took the entire chip team (we were about 10 then) to esselworld.

b) a lovely coffee + interview with kenneth keniston, deepak’s close friend and a very active member of MIT’s project for globalising local language for computers in india.

c) the 20-minute interview with adrian cowderoy, director of the multimedia house of quality, uk, at the QAI-SEPG seminar at bangalore last year. i was to interview the speaker at the seminar that day, but i’d reached late, and it was not until lunch-break that i realised that they had changed the speaker who was scheduled for the day…i was in the wrong hall!

well, an interview with the speaker i *had* to submit when i got back to itspace. but when i walked up to him, he was rushing to catch a flight back to bombay in 30 mins. i quickly suggested i could drop him at the airport, since my office was on the way (well, in truth, it was a wee bit out of the way, but well, duty calls! 😉 and that’s how a got my 20-minute interview with a very surprised adrian, in the taxi to the airport.

but all these rather abrupt interactions just left me very curious. what would it be like to spend more time with someone from another country? or to live in a foreign land?

“you’re too impulsive to be a driver, you think of hundred things at one time, and you’ll go and crash into a wall”

this i was told at a very young age, and it did the unintentional trick. the thought of learning to drive a car, intimidated me forever. even when i tried riding a cycle, there was this huge (imaginary) truck that would appear out of nowhere and i used to jump off my cycle, often hurting myself, or if i was on the road, bruising my ego.

i love speeding in a car or on a bike, but as long as i’m on the back seat. (except when on a horse, its my favourite animal, and i just know i’m good on one)

when i think of the more urban modes of transport, i dream of riding a bike to work, and it has to be an enfield machismo. maybe i’ll not see this happen, but i certainly will never ride on a kinetic honda, or the other more feminine ones…eby used to laugh at my dreams, but i promised him i’d get over my fear of driving, and ride a bike.

but though i sometimes prefer to let things take their time, i had no idea how i’m ever going to put myself in the driver’s seat.

today, i did just that. i went go-karting 🙂

watching the drivers zoom past on the tracks was really scary, my hands and feet felt cold and clammy. i used to feel like this when i was scared of using escalators at any airport or shopping mall. but i got over that at crossroads, when hari forced me to take the escalators at least six times. i was exhausted by the fear and effort it took, but i managed to get rid of the phobia finally.

“NEXT…!”

it was my turn. the voice jolted me out of my endless should-i-or-should-i-not-go-for-it questions, while my trembling fingers handed the guard the four-laps-card.

as i got into the kart, i could barely hear my colleagues cheering me, but i knew this was the only way. just then i remembered that years ago, i’d learnt swimming this way…by just jumping into the water. because if i was in there, i had to survive.

four laps later, i was shaking with excitement. i loved it! and it was only once that i brushed against the rubber-tyre-barricade. my speed result showed 14kmph.

everyone laughed, but so did i.

twenty minutes later, i was doing my second round of six laps, this time it was even smoother. i was confident and a little liberal with the accelerator…26kmph.

yes it was just a game, but i think i learnt far more than the fun part. phobias can never bother you for long, as long as you know that you want to get over it.

all you have to do is dive right into your fear.

there’s no better way to get rid of a memory than confronting it, re-living the moments all over again, and consciously. the circle *has* to be complete. and when your mind is made up, half the battle is won.

so when my colleagues at office decided to go to the disco at LeoPolds’ last evening, i agreed. there were about 18 of us when we reached our meeting point at mcdonald’s. while i enjoyed the company of my friends, i remember telling myself constantly, “its ok, you can.”

the ‘circle’ had started from that disco at colaba a little over five years ago; meeting the ghosts at the end of the circle was difficult, but i won. the battle lasted for less than five minutes. no gods to help, no friends. strange, just then, everyone decided to move to another disco down the road.
sometimes, i’m amazed at how well we know a certain moment is to come, its just that we don’t know when.