The sound of my footsteps : Mirik and Pashupati Market !

Ola,

Well that’s how I normally greet people. I have been away for a while, been lazy and also have had typhoid for nearly 20 days but I have been wanting to write for a while now so here it are my typhoid induced pointless thoughts. If I try writing about the past few days it will be a complete waste of time so ill just write about my previous trips. I am a very moody child and this leg of the Sikkim trip hasn’t been written about yet L. Now I have decided not to procrastinate anymore and write some more.

              The last thing I wrote about that trip was the second day we spent in Darjeeling and the train ride. We decided to stay another day and go for a day trip to Mirik and Pashupati market!  It was this day that I realized that sometimes the destination really does not matter it is actually the journey that is beautiful. In life mostly we are waiting to get to places and forget about the time we spend getting there. It was this day that taught me that life or travelling it’s all one long journey with little stops on way and it’s the way that counts a lot more than the stops. So we started off early with our awesome driver rajesh and his little red car. It was a 4 hour very scenic drive from Darjeeling to mirik.  The road was flanked

with tea plantations on one side and a forest on the other. There were women with their baskets plucking tea leaves and all it needed was a Bollywood song. It had always been my thing to do the same click a picture with the tea basket and pluck some leaves, rajesh requested one of ladies to lend us the basket and we had our bit of tourist behavior which was awesome. Then on we headed to pashupati market which is in Nepal and my sister was very kicked that she was taking me abroad without a passport! The market was like any other but they sold very cheap cosmetics and gadgets. Looking as prices like typical women sis and I started shopping like girls lost in la la land. I will have to give credit to the sales skills of the people there, they actually make you want to buy their goods whether you want them or not. So they won and we shopped. The coolest we bought I must say is a 64 GB pen drive for I think rs200 and we were so excited because they also had 120gb and 240 gb pen drives and we thought they just weren’t available in India yet (WOMEN). No boy would fall for that one but anyway happy, satisfied and conned we moved towards Mirik. The way again was breathtaking and like I said sometimes the destinations just don’t live up to the hype. Mirik turned out to be a touristy lake place with a little forest around oh with horse rides et all (blah anyone). Disappointed we had some awesome maggi walked around, clicked some pictures and decided to head back to Darjeeling.

             I thought the way there was brilliant but the way to Darjeeling was just out of this world. It was foggy and silent and I decided to walk for a while. I walked down the road with my camera and all I could hear was the sound of my footsteps. I had never experienced noticing the way my feet sounded against the road while walking and it was beautiful. I could see the valley and nothing ahead it was very cloudy. It was silent and I felt like was walking on clouds and I was the only one on earth. It was one of the most cherished experiences of my life. I can still just close my eyes and go back to and feel the same calmness again. The words I use will never be good enough to describe the feeling all I can say was it was an ethereal experience.

After this we reached Darjeeling ate some food and rested in our room we had to head to Pelling in Sikkim the next day.

This is one very old story in current news I’m rotting in my bed and watching TV shows all the time. Oh and also my dreams are on drugs more on this later. As of now I’m going to close my eyes and go back to the road!

Yours nostalgically,

VEE.

A vee tale, maybe not !

So my friend actually had requested sort of for a vee tale and the last one wasn’t exactly a vee tale. It was just my observation of the world that we are currently living in. children have facebook and twitter accounts before they are born pretty cool? I don’t think so. Anyway so I went on and on about that yesterday and I’m not going to today. Really speaking there is nothing much going on in my life. I mean there are my friends and there is college and stuff but nothing really happening. As I write this all I am thinking is that I feel that my life is fun and happening only if there is a romance angle to it? Is there nothing to my life without the tales of some guy whisking me of feet and then well that not ending too well (that does provide for weeks of thinking). You know first the liking and then the dating then the break up and then the getting over it process. Time consuming I would say. Considering that we start dating at average age of 17-18 and consistently change boyfriends for the next few years then this is the drill that we get used to.  In all of this I think we get so used to this being meaning of life and time consolidate our thought process. Only recently have I chanced upon an idyllic time in my life where I have no guy to think about past or present and I am not interested in thinking about the future. But I am so used to associating the awesome quotient in my  life with love that I forgot one basic thing: the person living this life is me and what I do in a day or not do is what makes my life not when someone decides to give me attention because I look nice. After being asked ‘are you single?’ a gazillion times I thought that that’s what defined the quality of my life. I guess only now do I realize that it is not so.

                       With no guy in the picture to think about (this is not an invitation for losers to ask me out, sorry im not available I happen to be more into me now, thank you anyway) I have had time for myself. Not that I didn’t spend time with myself earlier it’s just that it’s an awesome feeling when my mind is not thinking about anyone in particular (loving or hating that person). I have me and my friends and my family to think about. They make my life. I was always so caught up that I didn’t realize the friends that I had left behind and it was my fault. I was too busy thinking about other things and then it just got embarrassing. It is only now that I realized that I actually did miss this person every now and then, I loved shopping for bangles with her. We hung out at JATC and just sat and read together (a reading companion is a rare one trust me). I didn’t realize how much I missed out on in the process of being just caught up in everything else. Time just flew by but when I had time not thinking about other random and stupid things I realized that I cannot treat people like this. Every one tends to at some point but one cannot just cut off all contact with friends because things are rough, that is when you are supposed to reach out to them. Anyway I am an idiot and took time but I am glad I did something. Made me realize that if you had a bond earlier and were genuinely sorry there are chances of becoming friends again. I always thought I should do something but never knew what to. Turns out it took just an email writing what I felt, well that felt good and I am glad I did it. The point being I am happy I am out of that circus and crazy circular pointless thought process and happy I may have managed to rectify some old mistakes. Take some time out and think about yourself the person you love is not the only thing that makes your life awesome. It’s the people who are with you that person is not around that matter. Look around and do not let them go, they are special and we must all keep it that way ..

Again not another vee tale as I would I have liked it to be, I thought ill write about the awesome drinking sessions and the crazy times but then I guess fun is not the only thing in life. Sometimes thinking and acting makes sense. I tend to procrastinate all the time even when there is no need as more time passes it is more difficult for me to get back to it. I am glad I didn’t do that again. So I guess it’s the season of realizations and changes to be made. And damn I thought with all that time I would be drinking a lot more. Hope I do, so that I have crazy stories to tell (till then deal with realizations).

Yours blankly,

VEE.

Virtual Living !

And hello,

I have been away for a while now I know I am guessing it was my own way of dealing with shitty things in my life, I didn’t write about the good ones. I don’t know what it was sadness, lameness or well if you may a writer’s block. Anyway thankfully its gone and I can write like I am doing now woo hoo!! So life has been pretty lame only not that a lot of things have happened except the fact that I have started tweeting a lot. Not I have not become friends with tweety the cute yellow bird and nor is it a cool word for singing, I have started broadcasting my thoughts on a social media forum called twitter (this explanation is totally pointless since everyone reading this knows twitter but I just felt like it). What joy do I get out of interacting with complete strangers? I do not know. The one thing I do like is interacting with friends I normally I don’t on a regular basis like pri. I was just talking to her today and it was awesome both of us were happy with our interaction on twitter and were smiling. Later when I thought about it I was a little disappointed honestly. Twitter/facebook/chatting none of these can really replace talking on the phone or meeting in person. The sound of a person’s voice, the lilt in their laughter, the normal easygoing conversation cannot be replaced with replying to tweets and liking facebook statuses. An actual laugh can never be explained with an LOL or ROFL those are just a few letters written together without spaces. This is what we are doing to our lives though first we replaced meeting with phone calls then phone calls with messages and now phone calls with chatting and the latest being restricting ourselves to 140 characters to express our feelings and talk to our friends.

It’s a really busy world but having information about which song we are listening to is not the same as knowing each other, it’s just pointless information. Tweeting about every little thing happening even while being somewhere else with other people is not cool. We don’t even let ourselves experience a moment properly before announcing it to the world. We don’t enjoy a plate of wonderful looking food before clicking a picture and tweeting about it. Why is tweeting about it more important than enjoying it, is beyond me.  This sort of behavior is bordering on lunacy, not that I am saying that it’s not addictive it sure is. So many people reading about you and your thoughts and replying to you it’s a wonderful feeling but it needs to be checked. We can’t shift our real lives on to twitter/FB/myspace/shared toilet, we need to live our real lives and we can enrich them with technology and not live in/with technology and enrich it with our real life time and again. Like my teacher said that a rose in a chat window is not that same as a rose pressed in a book and found years later, it’s the same with smiles and hugs and laughs. I think we should remember this and try and maintain real relationships with people enjoy life without worrying about tweeting and not make everything virtual.

p.s: it will take another blog post to talk about the phenomenon called BBM and also faking it in the virtual world 🙂

Yours virtually,

VEE.

The Ghosts Of My Past

They roamed around me

Moved in my head

In little concentric circles

Forming layers upon layers

Of them

 

They swirled

And danced

Laughed and cried

Stopped and smiled

Then flashed their evil grins,

Laughed wickedly

And moved some more

 

It resembled a ritual

Their movement planned

And well thought out

They all knew each other

 

My head churned

And they moved

They moved

And my head churned

I could not see a thing

Blinded and fainting

I seemed to be pulled in

By it all

I was sinking

 

They were like

Dust particles

In the sea

Like the sand

In a hurricane

Like lightening

In a thunderstorm

 

They just circled me

And laughed

Forming layers

Of themselves

And then all of a sudden

I recognized them

That’s when I realized

That they were

The Ghosts Of my Past

Moving, churning, laughing

Smiling and dancing around me

They were,

The ghosts of my past .

 

[another old poem 🙂 ]

Horny for Love

At the age of 21 it seemed to Riya , that everyone seemed to be obsessed with this weird, constantly differing and evolving vague idea of love. She caught herself thinking about it constantly. The time she was in a relationship she thought about it. At times bored, sometimes ecstatic and others indifferent. It bothered her then that she wasn’t constantly and perennially in love, that she even got a chance to feel boredom and indifference.

The times she was single it plagued her even more. She dreamed of love in all its imaginary forms. She fantasized of finding it with funny and weird people. She found herself weaving increasingly absurd stories around people she didn’t know. The only common factor in all her stories was that she was in love. She always wanted to feel it, breathe it and wanted her life to revolve around it. When she spoke to her friends also that was their only topic of discussion. An existing relationship when it did, and the lack of one when it didn’t. It just took over their lives and swept them into its crux. Love was the one mystical and beautiful thing that they wall wanted and ran after. They craved for it like it was a drug. It was a commonly known fact that as 21 year old’s they were all horny and craved for sex. . as they all said that once they had experienced the high that sex gave them, they wanted it all the time. It didn’t matter if they were in a relationship or not they managed to get sex.

But what she discovered was that under this mad craving for sex was an even acute craving for love. Everyone she knew wanted it, expected it and longed for it. None of them knew what ‘it’ was. It was the elusive thing that they all wanted in life. They all joked about getting married to people who were rich but all they really wanted was someone to love them.  At times it was quite illogical. Girls took back cheating boyfriends because they believed the guy loved them. Guys put up with crazy girlfriends because in spite of their faults the girl loved them. Everyone said that sex and money made the world go around. What really made the world go around was this ‘want for love’. This search which everyone seemed to have embarked on. All of them wanted this one thing. The entire generation seemed to be united in this quest for eternal love.

It was the one thing they wrote about in books, poems and portrayed in movies. Nicholas sparks and others had created this wonderful idea of eternal love. Everyone was looking for this thing which just happened to be a figment of an author’s/poet’s/director’s imagination. The movies poems and books had given an impression of this word0 and everyone was now looking for it in real life. No one really realized one little hitch that books, movies and poems were not real, hence the thing they spoke about was maybe not real. Not realizing that love was something else. It was not a need or craving to be with someone else. It was the want to be with that person in spite of the differences, difficult times and faults of the other person. It was acceptance of oneself and the other. Love was not actually what it was like in fiction. One had to find their own definition of love and look for that.

But like this generation was lost in most matters of life, they were lost here too. They were not really looking for true love, they were just horny for their idea of love and just like a really horny person, they would ‘do’ anything that vaguely resembled it.

 

VEE

(i had written this ages ago and just remembered it today, so here it is )