First Love

I went back to school today. Met some of my teachers, and spent a good amount of time feeling happy.

:)

Spent Prep playing here. And somehow I enjoyed being around those Ashoka trees more than on the swings n all. I was 5 years old then. Phew!!

This is a corridor in the Junior School. The first room here on the right was my 2nd standard classroom.


These are the entrance steps to the Middle School (5th to 7th std). I was a prefect then too, and used to be on duty here often.

I found an old room where the furniture that was used in initial years was lying. And incidentally this was also the room that used to be 8D when I was in VIIIth. One of the most memorable years of my entire school life.

That's Mr Frank Anthony, the school's founder. He was a member of the Parliament when it was first formed.

Courage is Destiny is the school motto.

Of course, the field. Never ran around it as much as I made kids who misbehaved do it. Chudail prefect in senior school! :P

This is the main assembly platform for the senior school. Took my House Captain oath here, and did some singing too. :P

This is an open auditorium/ basketball court that was built sometime when I was in 10th. Our formal farewell happened here. All the crying with "I believe I can fly" too.

That's our main hall on the left. The one where I debated a lot with shaky legs. And the open area is where the junior school had its morning assembly. I was here in a different line every morning for four years.

Spent 13 years in and around this building.

Forever in love!

Another Change Coming Through...

Yeah, I'm Free!

However deep the shit you’re in may be, there are some things that always take care of you. For the loss of 6 hours of urgent deadline work, an incredible project manager who stays at work till 1:00 a.m. to complete your work; for a sudden problem with your defective body, an ultra nice instructor at the gym; for career blues, nice older friends to advise; and for a fatigued mind, a not-so-new hobby of clicking pictures.
After getting over my disappointment of not getting the camera that I wanted, and still trying to understand the camera that I have got (and in the process fucking up some nice shots), I got back to clicking left, right and centre. Reminds me of the times when I used to shove my cam into all my friends’ faces in college or things around them and irritate them to the core! :-)

So, a little bit of nature, a little bit of culture, and a bit of random stuff makes up for a week of jpg files in my bag.

Yes, you will get to see most of it. :-)

Starting in reverse order, here I present the pictures that I clicked today. It’s Independence Day tomorrow, so I have been ‘in the mood’ since morning. Our regular petrol pump was beautifully decorated this morning, and I asked one of the guys there if they’re selling balloons n all too. They didn’t, but he gave me three balloons (you guess the colours) and I realized that it has been several years since I last phulaoed (lot of people heard this word in office today :P) a balloon.

At the entrance of my building :D

Made some colleagues pose too. :D


The fact that I worked for long hours yesterday, and that the border would have been a problem to cross after 5 p.m., we left early today and I thought of paying a visit to Dilli Haat. It’s a delight to see it during festive time. And Teej is celebrated in a big way here. There was dance, there was mehandi, and there were all kinds of food.
I went in, bought the bangles that I’d been wanting to since morning, clicked a lot of pictures, and felt happy!

Tiranga!!

The hippest and the most colourful drummer!

Jalebiii!!! :D

The most comfortable and flexible dancer! This smiling, friendly guy happily posed with the not-so-pretty lady, himself took my camera from my hands, showed it to all his friends, and very nicely handed it back. Fun!!! :-)

Before this, on Sunday, I ventured out into the green world and found...

Fuchsia? ;-)

Day & Night...on the same stem

The rest of the pictures are on my Flickr page. Hope to see you there too! :-)

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!
JAI HIND!

It's The Latest Addiction

Stormy stormy day!!

Yes yes, exams are OVER!!! :P

How many Ys and Vs?

College Sweethearts III

Happy Day@Safdarjung's Tomb

Some people are naturally slow and you can’t really help their case. The person in question here is one of my teachers who was supposed to conduct an exam today but the reason for postponing it could not be lamer than what she gave.

Anyway! So did not spend much time in college and took my Vasant Kunj Special. But I wasn’t coming home directly. I had been thinking of visiting Safdarjung’s Tomb for quite some time and today the plan finally materialised. Of course, I was alone just like I was a year ago when I went to see the Red Fort. The excitement was not as high as the previous time because now I’m a lot more used to doing stuff alone but I was definitely looking forward to seeing the place.

The back view

Tiny corridor

The Tomb was built by Nawab Shujauddaula for his father Mirza Mudim Abul Mansur Khan or Safdarjung. (Now that's a long name!)

The number of couples inside the place was not even funny. I was feeling embarrassed in front of all the foreigners because of ALL those people who were at it. Looked like a wholesale market! For once I wished for some moral policing. Ugh!

Anyway, I kept myself busy in clicking pictures. It is built on the lines of the architecture of Humayun’s Tomb. And if not the inside, the outside has been maintained quite well. The ceilings were extremely pretty too. I spent about one hour there. Moved around at leisure (but the couples irritated me!!); it isn’t too big.

The ceiling

Looking up

Part of a pillar. This is one of my favourites.

I liked being there. Now I’m thinking of my next destination. :-)

And oh, I made my very own Flickr page too.

En Route To Balance...

For the last three days I’ve been blanking out every time I get down to writing. There has been so much happening that I could use some ‘venting out’ but doesn’t work nowadays.
I feel this confirms that I am becoming stronger, detached and more independent. I know I am. I am more in control of myself than I ever was in the past. I don't need to write. And it makes me surer about ‘everything happens for the best’.

Good people are still around to listen and help but I’m less needy. I still crib at times but I’m human. I get frustrated but not bitter.

I have been ecstatic about the realisation that I am much more optimistic than I thought I was. In fact, I didn’t even know that I’m an optimist. It’s an incredible feeling.

And I hope I continue with this thing that has started.

...Finally!

College Sweethearts I

The Love Continues...

It is almost three years since I completed school. And thankfully, I am not over it still. That tells me that I never will be, just like I always wanted. It is not that I don’t like my life as it is today, just that I still feel that I belong to Frank Anthony. I think it is essential to have a sense of belonging in order to feel complete in any environment.

I spent the later half of the 31st night going through my school scrapbooks. I look at them quite often but that night I lived those pictures and those moments again. And as always, nothing can be compared to that feeling. I’ve managed to retain all the good things from school including all the people that I liked. Some of them chose to move on and I’m fine with that too now.

I have been registered with a Yahoo! Group for my school alumni for a very long time but only recently I started interacting with people there. Most of them, so far, are more senior than super-seniors – people whose children are maybe my age. Yet, it doesn’t feel for even one moment that I am talking to someone who is old. There is such a lot of energy flowing in all the group messages and in the pictures, and just the feel of fapsdelhi is incredible.

I clicked some pictures of the same pictures today. As in, they are all stuck in my scrapbook so I clicked one more time. They're not too clear but that's cool. They're clear to me. :D

This was the first time I participated in a folk dance competition. I was in 11th. My house won the folk dance category as well as the talent contest which used to have many other events.

That's my Accounts teacher, Mr Roy (Everybody called him Talli because all he thought and sought was alcohol) from 12th. My class teacher was absent on the day of the class photo.

This was the last Sports Day that I participated in. I had fractured my left foot two days before it but I still marched. It was the most important event of our Sports Day celebrations. We still won the cake for the best house for marching and otherwise also won while creating history when our total score crossed a 1000 points. Ecstatic was how I felt that day.

Like I said, marching was the most important event of the Sports Day. So the practices used to begin almost a month in advance. I loved giving those commands that went like, "Barrow House...by your left, forwaaaaard march!!!"

My house was on a roll those 2 years when I was in 11th and 12th. I was participating left, right and centre in all possible events. I was a prefect in 11th and the captain of my house in 12th. We made those other houses cry so much! Marginal differences in points at times, and HUGE gaps at others. We had the best debaters with us, the best runners, the best singers and the best dancers. The bestest thing though was that we were never over-confident. That was just not a Barrow House charactertistic. We stayed silent and let others do the talking. Only now I am talking! :D

Socials, 12th standard - 6th December, 2003

Socials was a dance party that the 12s gave to the 11s. It was more like a pre-farewell sort of informal party. LOADS of fun. This was the last dance party that I was going to attend at school so I cut the plaster that I had got on my foot just a few days before it. I paid for having done that though. Lesson: Don't fuck around with injuries!! But what the heck... I had to dance!

This was Scribble Day - February 5th, 2004.

The scribbling was fun but the formal farewell that we were given before that was something that I cannot describe in words. That was the first time I related to the song "I believe I can fly". Everybody had tears in their eyes. The tears, I think, were not because people were sad that school was over but because we got such a lot of motivational words from our principal and teachers that I think we can use them for the rest of our lives.

I just had one more picture to upload and my internet connection isn't letting me. Bugger! :(

Anyway, this has been one of the most fun posts to write.
The best years of my life so far... in my dearie FAPS!

100 Percent

This is a picture of Ma's Pa or Papaji as everybody in the family addresses him. I have had this picture for a few weeks now and every time I thought about it, I felt that I should write a post about him. But I think it would be unfair if I attempt to do that because there is so much to be known about him by those who don’t. There is so much to be told by someone like me who lived the first few years of her life with him. And one post or even my ability to put thoughts into words would not be enough.

I just love this picture. I love him. Today, I am ambidextrous, confident about myself, hopeful about travelling, appreciative of sketching, interested in learning Urdu, understand what determination really is, and a lot more because of him.

From My Backyard

A Thousand Kilometres

December 23rd, 6:30 a.m.
It was still dark and there was dense fog when I started from my home with Ma. We were going to my Granddad’s place. From there, we were supposed to go to ISBT to catch a bus to Ludhiana. I was kicked. The opportunity to go out of Delhi had come fallen in my lap; I wasn’t going to let it go.
But everything wasn’t going to go great. My uncle who was to come from Mumbai the previous night so that he could join us, landed at 2:00 a.m. That meant we could not leave early as I wanted to. So delay and delay and more delay had pissed me off completely. I had nearly 3.5 hours to kill. In the meanwhile, I went for a walk in a park near their place. The fog was still quite dense even at around 8.


By the time we crossed the Delhi border, it was past noon. NH 1 was going to take us all the way. I had a window seat, I needed nothing more.

On the way I sawLong stretches of green fields; yellow spreads of mustard crops; those tall trees with a white trunk; Carriers that belonged to Tamil Nadu and were visible after almost every kilometre for about 50 kms; brand new army trucks going somewhere, lots of gurudwaras, trains running parallel, and at least a 100 boards directing towards villages.

This was a hut-shaped booth at one of the two toll collection points that we crossed. The picture above was an attempt at being 'arty'. :-)

6:15 p.m.
The evening sky was one of the prettiest sunsets I’ve ever seen or at least remember. The horizon could not look more perfect from my window. To be precise: at 6:30, the light was dim, there was a symmetrical line of trees after the fields that was the darkest shade of green, about two inches of a dense layer of orange, then a 4-inch layer of violet, then 3 inches of faint yellow, then a wide layer of light blue, after that it was dark blue that kept getting darker and then there was a crescent moon. It was splendid.

The bus got late for some reason and it was almost 8 by the time we reached my mom’s cousin’s place.
They are a joint family. I had met some of them earlier, some I’d forgotten, and some I was meeting for the first time. They were all very warm people.

December 24th, 6:00 a.m.It was cold and I was bold (Err). There was a gurudwara opposite the house and they were reciting the shabad on a microphone while I was taking a bath. I rarely feel holy about things; this was one incident when there was nothing else to think about and nothing else to feel.

We were on a Punjab Roadways Transport Corporation bus headed to Phagwara at 7:30 a.m. We crossed the Sutlej but I could not see it. All I could see was the railing of the bridge. The fog was otherwise not so bad but of course, on the river it was. The chill in the air was the real chill…the chill that we are longing for in Delhi for weeks now. All my layers were failing me. But I was loving it.

8:00 a.m.A big, bright ball in orange was rising in the sky. Orange! I felt each soft ray that was hitting the glass of the window.

From Phagwara, we took a bus to Hoshiarpur and from Hoshiarpur to Chintpurni, Una, HP, our destination. It was even colder on the way to Hoshiarpur but thereafter it started getting sunny.
My first view of the Shivalik Range was at around 9:45 a.m. I went there after about 10 years but I still had memories. Vague, but they were there. So I saw lots and lots of monkeys, sharp turns, unique trees, dams, small huts, towns, picnic resorts, and more for over an hour. From the Chintpurni Bus Station, I could see snow capped Himalayas. They were so close. I wanted to extend this holiday, fuck all sorts of studies, and travel more. I was under a 100 kms away from Dharamshala. But as of then, I was dreaming.

So we walked up to the temple of Mata Chintpurni. The crowd there was crazy. Apparently, it never gets that bad. There were two long queues of people wanting to get in. There is also an entry from the back side but that was closed that day. But we found a way to get through. The men on civil duty were from one of Ma’s office’s wings and we misused her position to get in. I didn’t like it but we saved over an hour by doing so.

We took a direct bus back to Ludhiana from there and were home before 7:00 p.m. That day’s sunset happened early and was different from the previous day’s. It was all pink. Pink sun, pink rays and pink sky. Awesome!

The greatest loss happened on this journey though – I broke my nose stud (And I am still without one).

December 25thWe started our journey back home at about 10:00 a.m. Mom and I had our co-passenger changing every few hours. Each time, it was a woman with a kid. And the last one of the day was the biggest chaen (I hope you get the pronunciation of that word right). Oh, but there was this other kid who was sitting two seats ahead of mine. He was standing and facing us most of the time. Very fair, brown hair, bright eyes, chubby, cute and naughty – that’s what he was like. I gave him a smile, he gave me a smile; he showed me his tongue, I showed him mine, he showed me his, I showed him mine, then he showed me his again and his mother caught him. So from then on, he was doing it slyly…making sure that she doesn’t find out but also making sure that I see what he was doing. He was funny.

We touched Delhi at 3:45 pm. and I switched my radio on. I knew was back to the grind but somehow even this felt good. The real feel good factor was an email with my next entrance exam’s test centre. Perfect end to the perfect vacation!