Sounds Effect

It is almost 3 a.m. and there's bull shit happening in my head! I am sitting in front of the darn pc like a zombie - I have nothing to do, I am shit tired and dead, but the fuckin brain doesn't seem so. I can't believe bad music could affect my mood so bloody much!

Aaargh!!!!

Cigarette Smoke

When they're high, she feels vulnerable.

When she sees that colour, the dust sweeps away.

When she is quiet, she can feel it all.

When she gets that smell, she doesn't know how to react.

Will it ever go? I know it will...

Satisfying or unsettling?

How can something be satisfying and unsettling both?

First SLR :D

MY CAMERA'S COMING ON THURSDAY!!! THURSDAY THURSDAY THURSDAY!!!!!

THURSDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Rise and Fall

I had mentioned a pretty sunset in my post about Thursday. Friday’s sunset was equally incredible. Maybe more because it was in a completely different and contrasting place that I viewed it from but I was really completely lost when I saw it.
So, while Thursday’s was in a village & farms setting, viewed from a moving car, Friday’s was between two very closely placed high-rise buildings, viewed from the huge windows of my office. It looked surreal.
(And today I saw the setting sun by the side of Qutab Minar and very aptly positioned for a goddamn picture!! :/)
Sadly, I get to view more of sunsets than sunrises - which I think are even prettier - because of my routine. Sunrise infuses a very positive feeling in me. It is a refreshing sight. It has that clichéd new-day-new-beginning thing attached to it, but just the fact that I can feel that when I see it makes me connect more to it.
But then the setting sun also makes me realize that the day that passed was beautiful. It gives the perspective that I may need on certain days. Even if it was not noticeably beautiful, at least the end is. It is the perfect closure that one can hope for.

With Love, To Neha

I know, and people around me know, that crying comes easily to me. But I know that there have not even been a handful of occasions when I have shed tears of happiness. I recently got an occasion to do that. I was so touched, so overwhelmed, and just so happy for Neha that I had no words to express how happy I was for her. I was unable to give her the opinion she was seeking. All I knew was that I understood every word that she was saying, every feeling and emotion that she was trying to express, and also knew what ought to fill the places where she herself had no words.

Baby, happy is a small word to express how I feel and I think you know that already. But still, thought I'll express it via the more expressive part of me. I hope your dream lives forever, and I hope that this is a new beginning for you. Maybe I have started dreaming too, but for a change I would like to say that miracle can happen too.

Love

Richie

Beaded

While last weekend I had made my room free of every speck of dust, cleared my table of every possible thing that could have landed on it and dug behind all buttons and switches, this time I opened one of my cupboards for a similar spree. And it's a win-win situation for me. Not only does my cupboard look much prettier now, I also found something that I had hidden a long time ago because I was sick of even looking at it - my collection of chunky beads!!!! My God I am so happy to see them all again! I had completely forgotten about them during pseudo sophisticated days of college. And now I am proud of my collection again. It is a little surprising though that I still like something that I had bought 4-5 years ago - I generally find my own past taste in things quite weird (but it is a continuous process. I know I will call myself stupid and tasteless 5 years hence for the things that I buy today too). But my beads, I guess, are evergreen! Yeeheeee!!!! :D

Finding The Silver Lining

21 days, and I already know what a bad day at work means. I wanted to pull my hair out. I did not like the work that I was doing and only I know how frustrating it was! Thank God for friends on such days! At least someone was there to generate sentences like, "so you'll learn how to take pressure, workload, and shit work, all at the same time". Life's perfect. Well, accept it and go back to the work.

Moods are tricky business and it takes time to learn the art of handling them. I am learning by doing. Today morning I knew that it was going to be a shitty day, but I made the drive fun for myself - laughed as usual, got a very sweet compliment on my laughter too [:D], and so got ready for the work. At the end of the day, I came back with different people from a different route - the Valley View Road or the more commonly known Gurgaon-Faridabad road. Finally figured why it is called Valley View. That view was breathtaking! I could not have been in NCR to have seen that!! Also saw the sun setting from a small village and few farms. After that I saw some very lavish farm houses and a Hummer too. Then got dropped bang in front of the wholesale flower market at Mehrauli. This one is different from the one in CP as that one sets for only 4-5 hours early in the morning while the Mehrauli one is accessible all day. So I bought lots of red gerberas and yellow lilies and my house is looking all pretty now. :)

Mood okay, night is good, and tomorrow will be a new day. :))

Stretch Marks

I don’t like all the layers of tan on my arms.

I don’t like having people around me for 16 hours a day. But I think it is for my own good.

I don’t like the fact that I have a fucked-up back.

I cannot wake up even 15 minutes earlier than usual for my walk.

I am personalizing my workstation. The latest addition was my college calendar.

I am missing the Patel Chest bhel puri like crazy for the last two days.

I behaved like an 8-year-old when I necessarily needed to act my age.

Some mindsets live forever – I CANNOT see a red mark across any work I do. Especially when I work hard on something and the fault is not my fault.

I haven’t bought flowers for myself in months!

Hutch officially sucks!

My neighbours got suuucchhhh a cute dog. He’s tinyyy and all those words that I use for dogs but that don’t exist in any dictionary.
But they’re moving away this month itself.

I’m thinking maybe lots and lots of people should spam 104.8 FM station’s mail, etc and force them to change the name of their station. MEOW FM???? Radio station dedicated to women?? And then showcase women with whiskers in all hoardings?????

I really hope Pratibha Patil doesn’t become the President. I had no issues with her candidature but the Left had no real reason to highlight except the fact that she is a woman, and now everybody says that it’s ‘much ado about nothing’ if she said that veiling was used to protect Indian women against Muslim invaders. Dude, get your basics right before making speeches in public!

Auntie’s canteen has started stocking Melody. We love her!!

HSBC will claim that ‘you will forget all other banks once you start banking with them’. They’re right. Just that they’re wrong.

I told you that Abhishek Bachchan is losing it. The kind of reviews I am getting for his latest movie, I am not even feeling bad that I won’t get to watch him because I don’t want to spend on a stupid movie.

How can people have the capacity to repeat the same goddamn inconsequential/ non-funny/ spastic thing 10 times a day?!

Thank God for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his music to shut my brain up!

I know I’ve lost (or never got) the art of understanding much of any humour other than sarcasm. Except sad jokes.

I’m already half hour into my 8-hour sleep schedule. And still awake of course.

So, bye-bye!!

TGIF

The drive back home from work was looooong (1 hour 40 minutes – point to point) but funnnnn. I was laughing so hard that I could not breathe. I was literally gasping. :D No reasons for that laughter, of course. Silly little things, that’s all. For instance, we decided that Monday onwards we’ll carry pebbles to throw at all those people who cut lanes like crazy and follow no rules. A cab moving next to us in the jam was also doing the same and its wind shield already had a big crack. My window was open, its windows were open, I pointed my finger/hand/arm (my beautiful habit of wild gestures!) at it and at its driver to show the crack to my friends, the driver looked at me inquisitively and I started laughing. Looked at him and laughed. Looked the other way and laughed. The same old non-stop fit? That.

So the party was fun. Better than what I had expected. I know I’ve been talking about my office in all the posts that I’ve written this month but there were loads of fun things to discuss about office there too. Good music, good food, fun people...had a good time.

I came back home and saw my pc fixed. Maybe I should have cribbed about it earlier. But Ma’s such a sweetheart. Bhai and I haven’t had much time to get someone to fix it, so she got someone to do the job. :)
I’m uploading some pictures soon.

This is not related to the rest of the post, but I have started hating crowded places even more now. I cannot take too many people around me at one point of time! So now it doesn’t matter whether I’m in Chandni Chowk or Lajpat Nagar market, it’s the same and equally annoying & nerve-wracking.
Another realization is that in the last 2 weeks I have been very irritable at home. I don’t know if it’s the heat or exertion, but I know that it’s not good. Hoping for it to settle down soon.

And this is it for this Friday night. See you later. :)

DDR-QIPS-IC-AND-MEEE!

It’s another Friday afternoon, and I have a party to look forward to for tonight, but I am shit bored for some reason. I don’t feel like working. The weather is beautiful outside. It feels like it is evening already. The temperature inside is a little lower than what it should be. There is quiet and I can just nicely doze off.
This is the first time that I am writing a blog post from office. I am learning the ways of being like other employees – spending lots of time in the pantry, taking phone calls to the staircase ( although I avoid that quite a bit; only important stuff), using post-it notes to not just remember stuff but also to write notes to myself in order to keep myself pepped up (things die down quite often here), ordering food even though I carry my own lunch, and yeah….all that!!
One thing I don’t do is have tea/coffee. One day I had five cups of tea and it made me feel worse than what I was feeling without it.
Half my work I can’t do with music in my ears ‘coz it needs me to read up a lot (which is anyway a hard deal if the reading material is behind the computer screen)….and I really CAN use some music. Oh what do you know, looks like I’m cribbing already! Not nice!!

A little more please: My camera is not coming from the US. And it makes me unbelievably sad!!! Now I can’t wait to get my salary, which isn’t too far away, so that I can buy it asap!
My pc’s display has been fucked up for almost 20 days now and that means that I can’t even view anything nice properly either. Uff! Frustrated, yes!!

But yeah…party, weekend, salary, camera, office party and more to look forward to.

Back to work!!!

When The Weather Is High

So, the first real weekend after the first week at work, and I was all set to live it up! Saturday morning, at 9 o' clock I stepped out of my house and felt that maybe I should cancel all my plans and run back home. We (Delhiites) talk about heat all the time but Saturday was crazy! 45 degress celsius!! And I, being myself, was still out the entire day! And all over Delhi. First I went to Campus. Not that I had any real work; someone else wanted to go and I thought it'd be nice to feel the place again. But what I felt was just fireballs dropping on my poor skin.

It was also a friend's birthday, so I couldn't come back home. We had lunch plans. So I was back to the south, went to Pizza Hut after really long and had some good food. But it was the dessert that made me forget all about the heat. Hot chocolate cake with perfect chocolate sauce and vanilla ice-cream with it. Aah! (Sorry, I've forgotten the name of that thing. It was Ivory and something something.) I don't know if any of you remember, but it was the same set of people with whom I'd completely checked-out a super-duper hot guy at Costa Coffee last year. Sadly enough, now that we were all single, we couldn't spot any hot guys this time! :(

Did see some extremely weird men though. And I shall not even get into describing them.

Lunch lasted a little longer than expected and so I got a little late for the next set of friends with whom I had to catch a movie. Ocean's 13 this time - one of the many thirds of a trilogy that have come out this season. Again, this was a let down too. I mean, George Clooney still remains hot but the movie loses its subtlety. There was nothing spectacular in the way they executed their plan and Al Pacino was also just okay-ish.

I felt like my social self after really long this Saturday. After stepping out of the theatre, I kept running into acquaintances from all over. It was fun.

Hung around with friends for some more time and reached home at about 7:30 p.m., only to go out for dinner with family. The day was perfect...the only spoilsport being the heat.

Also turned out that of all the people from college who've gone 'corporate', it's only me who's so busy already. People don't have work! But I guess it's better to have something to do than to stare blankly at computer screens.

Sunday morning was my best driving session till date. After what had happened last Monday, I had not touched the car for 5 days and was quite sure that I'd never be able to drive. But thankfully I went back more confident and drove well. My turns were smoother, I had better control of the car, and I was happy. :)

This was followed by a late breakfast at American Diners which was a rather eventful outing. Now I know what the fun in making men feel jealous is like. He could not stop glancing towards me and Varun and boy did I enjoy myself or what! :P ;)

From there we went shopping for Varun's girlfriend but did not buy anything. I came back home for a nice nap and went out in the evening again. This time it was to shop for myself....all expenses sponsored by my dearie brother! :D

The mall looked more like a mela, and the queue outside all trial rooms looked like railway reservation counter queues. I'm so sure I'm not going shopping on a Sunday evening again. But I did manage to get a few shirts for myself....and two of them are in different shades of green. :D :D

I had thought that I'd behave myself in office but who was I kidding! People already know me for my beautiful language, my sad jokes, my so-called uncontainable never-ending laughter sprees, and of course, my volume levels. But never mind! I have absolutely no issues being the entertainer. :))

It got quite cold in office today and all my arguments about how the temperature is very well maintained there got washed away. :/

I know that the length of this post will not validate this...but it was a fuck-tiring day. And that because I didn't work today. Sitting through presentations (FOR 8 HOURS!) is such a bloody irritating thing! MS PowerPoint should just die!

At Tower A

Until today I didn't know how good a Friday could make one feel. Getting into a pair of jeans in the morning felt like heaven. I felt like I was going back to college.

Planning the weekend and then talking about it felt different. I literally have the next two days packed with things to do. Looking forward to some fun.

I am having a tough time talking in hushed tones at work. Every one looks like they're naturally soft, but they do match up to my standards when they're in the cafeteria. I don't know how they manage to be so soft inside the office.

The view from one side of the office is extremely beautiful. I think another golf course is going to be made there, and there are already some new buildings coming up around the place, but the view still has nothingness stretched till far away. It is unbelievably soothing to look out. Also, because the area is open, there is always a very heavy wind in the building complex. It feels awesome! I'm wondering how it would feel in winters. :D

A lot of people at work already know about the "vertical-motion-phobia" that elevators cause for me. It's just 2nd floor so I have absolutely no issues taking the stairs. But there's a service lift that takes us to the place where we can get chocolates and there are no stairs to that place. WEIRD!! And people laugh! :(

The commute is becoming fun by the day as I'm opening up a little and there's an hour each way to laugh as much as we can. Really! We're always a crazy bunch of women laughing all the way. Good fun.

The workload and pressure is already high and quite obviously, it will get worse in future. I'm just hoping that I'll be able to take all of it patiently.

The whole corporate/MNC feel is good so far, but going by what people always say, I don't know how long it will last. Enjoying it till it lasts. :)

The Heaven Above

Lying and relaxing under the night sky is talked about so much that I somehow took the feeling for granted for a very long time. I don't even remember if I'd ever done that in the past or not. But I recently did and as the cliche goes - it felt like heaven. I was on the terrace of my building, dead tired after a long day at work, and I don't think anything else could make me feel better at that time. The dark sky was covered with clouds and the breeze made me feel like I was floating. Those 15-20 minutes were moments of perfect bliss.

This past one week has also been very light and I'm extremely thankful to God for that. I don't have time to spend with myself, my mind doesn't have excess energy to produce crap, I'm staying up late to write this little post about a small experience that I had three days ago, and it's all just great. I'm loving every moment of this new life. So, a big hug to Him for giving me an opportunity and the strength to make myself feel good today. :-)

Rendition Time

June 1st, 2007. Another ordinary Friday for almost everybody. Significant day of my life - my first day at my first job.

A few calls from a few close people last evening kinda brought that Big Day Tomorrow feel with them. I was jittery, excited, nervous, tense, anxious and there was a slight feeling of the fact that life's gonna change the next day onwards.

The day started with my alarm, a late-night sms from Mithu that MG Road's seen violence the previous day so I should be careful, and there was also a message from Vidur wishing me luck one more time. Made me feel good.

While literally 'dressing up', I got a call from a 'colleague' that she's leaving early so she'll be early to pick me. Rush rush rush... got Bhai to drop me to my 'pick-up point', Ma came along for the thrill and I was on my way by 8:00 a.m.

The road had heavy traffic. It took almost an hour to reach office. We checked in at 8:57 a.m. and I was immediately shown my seat and my system. Right corner seat - but of the 'bay area', not the metro (:P). I'd been to the office once before so it wasn't all new but the feel still was. The China, Uruguay, US EST, India, UK times on perfect analog clocks on the wall looked beautiful. One of the people who had interviewed me was so sweet today that I couldn't believe that she actually managed to intimidate me earlier.

General administration stuff and admn induction/training were followed by a sequence of briefs and inductions by different project managers. All of them were in their positions because of their experience but with 4 different people, 4 different types were very evident. There was the definite leader, there was a passionate & intelligent personality, there was a dedicated & dilligent one and there was a plain, bored but still smart woman. [By the way, this is a women-dominated organisation. :)] It's funny how I could notice all this. I mean, I wasn't sitting there with the intention to judge any of them. It was simply evident.

And similarly, other new joinees were all verrry different from each other and I could easily gauge who's the type to stay away from. Much thankfully, that one is on a different project than me to begin with. Although, she did get the project that I think I might have enjoyed more. But I'm cool with that. I generally tend to do better when I don't get the best or the most interesting things too easily. Coming back, all this somehow makes that dawning of the realisation of growing-up clearer and perhaps more quantitatively visible. I know my 'vibe-system' has been in place for a long time now but this is different. This is what probably age brings. And that way, this first day was very different from the first day at college. I wasn't too eager to even start chatting up any random person. I wanted to take my time 'coz here you gotta know what you say to whom. And also, I'm in no search for friends here. It'll be great if I make some, and it'll definitely make life easier here but I'll let that take its own time. But I'm sure I still must not have come across as quiet by any standards. :)

Funny thing. Now my passion (IF we can call it that already) for photography is hardly a few days old but guess what happened. One of those managers had to wait to begin her presentation 'coz two analysts were missing. So in the meanwhile she started talking to me and one other new analyst. General stuff - college, family,etc,etc. So I mentioned photography as my new interest. :P Turned out that the woman bought a Canon 400D last year-end. We discussed how she started, what I'm planning to buy, and I am very sure that I heard the words shit and fuck from her too. She's cool! I'm gonna be taking my camera to office as soon as I get it... my senior wants to see it bhai! She's also from my college. ha! Oh, the funny thing... that other analyst was zonked out just like I used to be till not so long ago because of the Greek about lenses, etc that was being discussed. Funnn. :P

So, till about 4:45 p.m. we were more or less in the training room. I got some reading material after that and my brain was not registering a single word of what I was reading. I think I'll soon be on tea too. It's hard work. Anyway. Took a break, washed my face and read for an hour. And that was when we 'logged off'. :)

Did I say that traffic was heavy in the morning? I meant evening. CRAZY!!

Came home and nicely pulled a muscle. So, lots of pain and crying-shrying too. But I'm better now assuming that a fucked-up neck/shoulder can't let you sit in front of the pc after such a long day.

This was a very long and extremely detailed post. Thanks for bearing if you're still here. This is one post that I contemplated writing about for a very long time. The part of me that's undergoing transition did not want it up here, but the opinion of the one that finally dominated doesn't sound too bad still.

It's a Friday night and that's why I'm still up till 1:00 a.m. Other nights I'm gonna be a good girl. :D

Good night, people!

'See you Monday' sounded so cool in my head. :P