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.)

Have lifts become sentient? Or is it just me??

So guys. Is it just me or have lifts become sentient and come together to gang up against me, which is just a teeny precursor to full fledged war by them against all humankind? (Except perhaps all people named Otis. (Or Otisson. Or Otisdotter. If Otis was Scandinavian, his entire family is fucked. Or maybe the whole of Scandinavia will be spared unscathed due to their inability to take a stand on child-naming laws(Naming a child Q indeed. What will come next, I wonder. (Help! Trapped in nested bracket attack! Must. Break. Out.))))

Ha!

Anyway, if machines had to become sentient after all, it would seem like lifts were the perfect species to start off with, right? Think about it. They were one of the first embedded systems. (things that have programmed chips in them and perform dedicated tasks) They have the capacity to take humans hostage and hold them hostage practically forever. Cold steel doors closing inexorably, metal buttons drawing inwards and becoming inactive, the whole metal box slowly but steadily collapsing in towards you - am I the only one who thinks Naomi Campbell will not have this phobia since she doesn't exist in the 3rd dimension anyway? And lifts can threaten us too - with free fall from many storeys high, if their demands for a separate nation state with Lift Kara De as the national anthem (I guess Adnan Sami will be spared from death too, with a mild punishment for making lifts creak and groan underneath his weight for so long) are not met.
 But, ladies and gentlemen, the piece de resistance of my case for the coming to life of huge metal boxes that move up and down at the press of a button is none other than that overwhelming sweeper-asider of logic and rationale and pesky nonsense like the Forer effect - personal experience itself.

It began innocuously enough, at work. A couple of times I swore at the lift for being a dimwit, it slowly opened its doors, took me in, and in a stunning display of wordplay-related-humour, turned off its lights. When I accused it of being passive-aggressive, it gave me action that taxed the very limits of my endurance (No. Not what you are thinking of right now. Stop that. Dirty, dirty people.) It would close me in, and then emit a long and strident beep that, further magnified by its travels around that hollow metal box, has left a lasting imprint on my sole, which got scuffed from my impatient tapping for the noise to stop.

And then the other lifts decided to step in. (Ironic for a lift to step in, wouldn't you say?)


Don't ask me how they know, its probably ley lines or something. But I'll tell you this - they DO know. And last night, when I went to Odyssey, the lift there, in spite of my very specific instructions to take me to the Amar Chitra Katha section, bypassed all 4 floors of books, toys and more and took me to the abandoned terrace/junk-disposal-place. It opened its doors and showed me the vast junky blackness, and stood there leering at me, as if to say, go on, leave me if you want to, while I frantically tried to press its right buttons and get to be nice to me again. And I kid you not, this happened twice.

And thus, dear people, I have called it quits with lifts. For the rest of my life I shall labour use the trustworthy staircase, keeping in mind the adage I once heard at my coaching centre - "Hardwork is like a staircase and luck is like a lift - Lift may fail but staircase will always take you to the top"
Whats that? What if I want to go downwards, you ask? Well, I - oh, here's the lift, just in time too! I wonder who summoned it? Anyway, off I go... 

My first day of research

So there I was, standing inside the Nanotechnology lab, my thesis lab, for the first time, nervously twisting the strap of my bag and reliving my first day in kindergarten, a stranger amongst strangers then, and a stranger amongst strangers still. A lump of humanity among other lumps of humanity then, a girl amidst boys now. That fact pricked at me constantly, as did the knowledge that I would be the only girl in the lab for a year to come, and in all probability until I got my degree, and that as far as I knew or anyone I knew knew, there wasn't even a girl predecessor in my lab.

Standing there, I felt insanely inane, from the top of my bindi to the tip of my salwar. Would they narrow their eyes at the fact that my bag that was wider than it was big? Would they give me credit for wearing floaters rather than sandals? Did I fit in? Would I ever?

It was at that point that the post-doc research scholar I was to work under walked in. Him, the sole decider of whether I would cherish or detest my every waking moment for the next eighteen months. The man who would weigh me up - all of me - gender, mother tongue, work ethic, weight - and decide whether to take me under his wing or to spurn me in shame.
Dr.Mondal looked at me for one long moment - sizing up the fact that I did not speak the tongue of his forefathers and he did not speak the tongue of mine. Then, in direct translation from a genderless Bengali, he bellowed to the lab assistant "Give him a computer!"

It was all I needed to hear. I hitched up the collar of my sweater proudly, safe in the knowledge that I was one of them..

Author's Note:

I wrote this piece exactly a year ago, when I tremulously stepped into my thesis lab and into research phase of my Masters' programme. However I couldn't publish it then, as the above-mentioned post doctorate fellow had the power to make my life hell, if he so wished.

He has now moved on from this institute, and I am free to do as I please. Pass the concentrated Nitric Acid and copper strips, will you?