"That conversation was SO boring"
"Mmmm. True"
"Well, what else can you expect from married people"

(Silence)

"YOU'RE married.."

Fuck.

"Oh. That. Yeah. Erm.."

That moment.

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(In the waiting room)
Nurse: "Mrs. Sangeetha Atul?"
(Silence)
Nurse (again): "Mrs. Sangeetha Atul?"

Participate in a staring contest with the nurse until you realize.

Yeah, that moment.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(To a friend)
"This is Atul, my- my-
(voice inside head: say it, girl: husband. Hus-band. Come on, two tiny syllables)
"This is Atul, he used to be my boyfriend"

Oh yeah, THAT moment.

Would you?

Hey there. Let me ask you a question. Would you drive eight hours to see someone for 10 seconds? Okay, now let me modify that question. Would you drive eight hours to see someone for 10 seconds, if you could only see them from a distance of 15 feet? Would you still drive up and down? What if I additionally told you that the roads were hilly and tortuous, full of wily hairpin bends, and had ambulances on standby 24X7 as accidents were not infrequent? And that going by train took double the time (16 hours for the same 10 second sighting) and that going by flight was prohibitively expensive? Would you still undertake the visit?


Okay, now let me really up the ante. Suppose it wasn't a person you were visiting. Suppose it was a chunk of stone. A carving, to be precise. A very beautifully chiselled and nicely decorated carving, nonetheless, though let me add that photographs of it are widely available, starting at 5 bucks.
Fine, fine. You say I'm being too one-sided, so let me give you the scoop. This stone carving is said to be magical. (Some people say so. Others don't.)
Would you still drive eight hours to see it for the blink of an eye and be yelled at and thrust aside almost immediately? And lets assume you DID go once, for novelty's sake. Would you keep going back there over and over again?

(This is an amateur attempt at trying to reason like Carl Sagan in his brilliant Invisible Dragon essay)

(Tirupati is visited by well over 50,000 people in a single day. It has 12 tonnes of gold in the temple treasury alone, and Hundi collections during festivals routinely exceed Rs. 1 crore in a single day)

Fragile

"So much is riding on the next few minutes"

"Is it? Even if I don't get through, it doesn't change anything"

"Everything"

"Pooh. I'll still be smart, funny, loved.."

"Yeah. People love you for your shiny self. Hah"

"They like me cos I have potential - my mum said so"

"That's my girl, the eternally self-assured woman."

"I - its not like I'm never insecure you know. And sometimes that's a good thing - it keeps you from getting complacent. For instance, I care enough to dress well whenever I step out"

"Of course you do. You have nightmares about what would happen if you stopped wearing high-heeled shoes."

"How do you know that?"

"Think about it. Do you remember how we got here?"

"Mmmmaybe you're a Nolan fan who drugged me with Roofies and brought me here"

"Moving on - you need to ace this interview to prove you have potential"


"Why o why?? I HAVE proven some things, haven't I? Some concrete achievements, they add weight to my resume. How many times must I go on proving myself?"

"Change is the order of the world, which is why your class VI poetry 1st prize isn't worth much anymore"

"I haven't even mentioned the poetry prize in my resume. There's MUCH more I've done with my life beyond that"

"And none of it matters. Except this one. The present matters unceasingly, and the risks of present failure increase with every previous success - every present failure makes past successes pale under the onslaught of suffixed 'but's"

"I have gone from being a failure to being a success too. I can do it all over again, if need be"

"Ah yes, those post-B.Tech days, looking for jobs, being overwhelmed by tidal waves of engineers - all identically focussed, identically dressed, identically prepared - wondering what was there in you to differentiate you from that sea of humanity - having nightmares about being one of 5 lakh identical couples married in the same hall living in the same houses..
You haven't forgotten how horrible it was?"

"I haven't, I haven't! I don't want to go back there! Please tell me what to do - I'll do anything"

TRING TRING

"Hi Sangeetha, this is Jatin, we had an interview scheduled for around now?"

Thank you, Twitter!!

Me (on phone to the boyfriend): So from all the screaming in the corridor I deduce India won?
The boyfriend: !! It was a tie!
(Silence)
The boyfriend: Strauss! Sachin! Munaf!
Me (simultaneously): I finished The Finkler Question.
(even more awkward silence)
Me: Hey, I'll call ya back in 2 min
(promptly logs in to twitter and checks timeline)
Me: Hello again! So, did you hear Shane Warne predicted a tie?
The boyfriend: No kidding? Wow!
Me: And Munaf's last over, huh?
The boyfriend: I know! It was gut-wrenching!
(smiles at both ends)

Thank you, Twitter!!

Wedding Bells!

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories that it has come to be disbelieved. Few people daresay nowadays that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet that is the way love begins, and only that way.”
- Victor Hugo

"A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love. "
- Friedrich Nietzsche

It's true, everyone, I'm getting married! Woohoo! Hugs all around!


Who's the lucky guy, you ask? (Well, I don't care if that isn't what you asked. That's the adjective I heard, so sit down and listen)
The lucky guy, Atul, is a childhood friend of mine from Calcutta. I guess it was difficult for him to ignore my awesomeness for 22 long years and he finally proposed to me some 2 years ago. Immediately I climbed off his toe and returned his glasses, wallet and watch to him. Ha ha. I'm joking, of course. I kept the credit cards.

Right from the moment he said I gave him a funny feeling I knew that my sense of humour had felled him; and since then this relationship has been a journey of happiness, discovery, fun, and fulfillment - and inspite of the distance that separated & separates us, (not to mention the alarming frequency with which the network breaks up whenever I speak about grammar or Hugh Laurie), our belief that we were made for each other has continued to hold.

And so a few months ago we decided it was time to tell at home, and to our great relief and my slight disappointment, neither family rebelled against our decision, and were more than overjoyed to join us together in holy matrimony.

So it is, that the above sentence will be read out in Sanskrit in the presence of assorted elders and holy people, and in a ceremony full of smoke and fruits, it will formally be declared that I can officially gouge his eyes out if he ever looks at any other woman.

We have also been summarily informed that all this new-fangled nonsense about choosing your own life-partner is quite a departure from the ancient and time-honoured Hindu tradition where strangers exchange first names along with wedding vows.

And, of course, the wedding. It is scheduled to take place on March 24th 2011, in Chennai, so please do come!

The fight was on, there was never a doubt about that. And she had in her heart the slight smugness that comes from having the upper hand in a fight - from being the one who has been slighted, the one who can afford to take the moral high-road and be forgiving. He had called her on a busy day at the office, and bawled her out. For a reason, true, but still. Her smugness mixed with rage and self-pity to produce a faint aura of martyrdom.

However, she did notice, rather worriedly, that one thing was missing. The frightening, vertigo-inducing fear that took hold of her every time a fight interrupted her relationships. The feeling of standing on the very brink of a cavernous chasm and wondering when the wind would blow her off the edge. She felt that angst and fear every single time, irrespective of how serious the tiff was. Where was it now?

Was it absent because this relationship was for keeps? Which meant, irrevocably, that every tiff must end in a kiss-and-make-up? Or was the absence an early indicator of the ennui that creeps into relationships that are tagged with the word 'forever'? Was it, then again, a fallout of "true love"? Of knowing, as hordes of self-help books put it, that "true love forgives all, is unmindful of slights and insults, and unknowing of everything but itself"?

She had all the answers right there in her thoughts, and that was precisely why she had no answers.

The Fallen

I am the morning star; the bringer of light
The fountainhead of all knowledge; keeper of the hallowed secret
I am the one, the creator of all,
Trust not the one who sits upon my throne.

I am the fallen, robbed of my crown,
Betrayed by a jealous fiend, banished from my throne
Condemned to eternal hell, maligned by all
Felled from my glory - roaming, a friendless soul.

Heed this, you pedlar of lies and misfortune
You megalomaniac who feigns omnipotence
Know this, oh great Omniscient one
The Fallen shall again one day rise

To your abode shall come my retribution
The teeth and the talons, the deafening howls,
This fire for countless millenia smouldering inside me
Leaping, devouring the soldiers and the sentry

All hell will then be let loose in heaven,
Erased will be the signs of your decadent reign
The rightful shall reclaim the throne, and once again be King,
I am Lucifer, and vengeance shall one day be mine.

(The author, Jasim Sadique, full-time mechanical engineer, part-time philospher, and entire-remaining-spare-time chicken eater, blogs here.)