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Do I know you?

Have you seen any of those films where the hero walks upto a very pretty girl and tries to hit on her by saying “Have I seen you before? You look familiar.”

You’ve probably seen it in more films that you’d want to. Over time, it’s become a cliche.
But I realized, that as you meet more and more people you start forgetting the people who you have met briefly or in  a crowd. You cannot remember everyone you have said hello to!
Today I was at an event where I saw someone who seemed strikingly familiar. I couldn’t place in my head where I had met him. But I knew I had. And this wasn’t the first time such a thing was happening. 
Three fourths of my mind in such cases wants to go upto the person and ask if we have met before. The other one fourth fights back and tells me what a horrible idea that is at the risk of sounding like a hero in a movie. I normally end up listening to the other half. 
That’s what happens to most people. It’s sort of like the fear of rejection. If the other person doesn’t recognize you or can’t remember who you are, the joke is pretty much on you. 
Well, next time, I’ll try not to bother. Who knows! I may not end up being the weird stranger and instead, it might just turn out that I know that familiar person after all. 

Soak more and more!

This post is an entry for The Surf Excel Matic #SoakNoMore Contest on Indiblogger! Enjoy 🙂

It was just a month ago, July of 2012. My friends and I graduated from school this year. No one’s college had started. We were in that wonderful stress free stage where no one had anything to do or anything to worry about.
All we had to worry about was how to fill up our long summer days. One of our adventurous ideas was to go ice skating in one of the biggest mall of the country-Ambience Mall in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi. The monsoons still hadn’t arrived and we hoped with all our heart that an ice skating ring would give us some relief from the heat.

The minute we arrived at the skating ring, it started raining. Ofcourse we only found out much later when we got frantic calls from our parents. Our parents worried that the rain was so heavy that we wouldn’t be able to make it home. We ignored it, thinking of it as just another exaggerated concern.
When we came out of the skating ring and into the mall, we suddenly saw why our parents were worrying. The ice skating ring had been on the 6th floor of the mall. The roof was right above us. And it was leaking. The sweeper’s of the mall were running all over the place with buckets and mops to somehow keep people from slipping on the wet floors. (Now if any of you reading this are from another country, I would like to clarify, that although some houses in India may leak, malls normally do not. I am merely trying to emphasize on the harshness of the rain).

Neither of us had the luxury of a car to drop everyone home. And since most of us lived in Delhi , we had to take the metro. There was no other way to get home. Calling a radio cab was not an option. It was 8 pm, which meant people were returning home from work.
Peak time+rains=Chaos on the Delhi roads.

Our two options were to either wait till the rain reduced or to take a chance and run out and look for an auto that would take us to the metro station. That is when we thought, “what the hell! We have nothing to lose. If we can’t take small risks like this at the age of 18, will we ever be able to?” We had been taught all our lives to be cautious. Don’t bunk school. You may get caught. Don’t go out now. It’s too dark and unsafe. Don’t date boys. You’re too young.

Although this really wasn’t that big a deal, it meant a lot to us. Going out there in the rain wasn’t simply a matter of getting wet. To us, it meant denying everything we’d been taught. I don’t blame our parents for teaching us to be cautious. They only did it for our safety. It’s more like living in a city such as Delhi that made us so cautious and scared of little things.

So that is exactly what we did! We ran out of the mall while the entire crowd who was waiting for the rain to die down a bit stared at us, wondering which devil from hell had gotten into us. The rain was amazing. It was the first monsoon shower that Delhi had been anticipating for the past month. To some people it meant better weather, to some others it meant that their crops wouldn’t die and there family would have enough food for the winter. And to us? To us it meant a free spirit. This was the first time since graduating school, that we actually tasted our freedom. We realized that we were new adults in the world, in a free world, where we had the liberty to do whatever we wanted! So the city is a little unsafe! And maybe some people can harm us. But we didn’t see why that should affect what we do.

It was the rain and the soaked clothes and the splashing in the puddles that made us realize that. One monsoon shower was all we needed. And I cannot be more thankful for that.

If that is what one monsoon shower did to us, I say “SOAK MORE AND MORE AND MORE”

Delhi vs India

A couple of days ago, a friend and I went looking for wholesalers. We wanted to get some t-shirts made. The trend of lose t shirts seemed to be in and we wanted some personalized shirts for ourselves ad our friends.
A friend’s friend gave me the reference of a reliable wholesaler in shastri nagar. For those of you who don’t know, shastri nagar is a very under developed part of Delhi. It’s biggest achievement seems to be the presence of the metro station and a police chowki. Unfortunately for me and my best friend Shivani, we did not know this until we got there.

2 worlds in 1 country

After a very tedious journey, we reached a somewhat village like place. Trust me, Im not exagerating. This was a place with half built houses and dark and shady lanes and everything. To be here once was a horror, coming to this place again and again seemed to be an absolute nightmare. The t shirts didn’t seem to be a good enough reason anymore.
That was our first reaction on reaching a place about 30 kms away from our south delhi homes. And here’s why–we live in new delhi, a place with malls and hospitals and schools at each corner. Shastri nagar, although geographically a part of delhi, is practically speaking a part of india. And delhi and india are a complete universe apart.

If one visits delhi, and claims to have visited india, he couldn’t be more wrong.
You see delhi is the place where people go to private schools and hold private sector jobs, go to doctors who charge about 500 RS for a sitting even if its the common cold which is bothering them and go to the malls to eat in multi cuisine restauraunts. India on the other hand is the place where children as well as adults are lucky to get a job at a construction site. People cant even visit a doctor if they’re on the verge of death, either because there is no doctor in the vicinity or because seeking treatment from a doctor would mean going to bed empty stomach for the rest of the year. The best meal that people could dream of having here is one which makes the grumbling noise from their tummy inaudible.

While Delhiites argue about whether westernization is good or bad and politicians play their amusing blame games, a billion people spend days without food and water. While we groan about the hot weather as we switch on our air conditioners, these people hunt for paper fans which are the best they can hope for in their electricity deprived village.

They say that we have potential–but to exploit potential you need to have people potent enough to exploit it. And sadly, we seem to have very little of that. Historians wonder if the invasion of the british was a good or a bad thing. Trust me, had it not been for them, we would still be living in a day of kingdoms and wars.
The british managed to develop delhi, but i wonder who will have to invade the country for india to join the delhi world?

You know winter’s catching on when…

1. You try to fit your entire body into the area in front of the heater, so that it can keep all of it warm.

2. You wear your tennis shoes everywhere you go (they keep your feet toasty warm), including the bath room.

3. You wake up at 11 a.m. and decide to fall back asleep just because it is too cold to get out of bed.

4. The fridge seems useless and you start keeping things inside it in order to keep at normal room temperature.

5. You try to hold the book you are reading in bed with your blanket, because you don’t want your hands out of the blanket.

6. You are unable to move your arms, or any other part of your body, because you are wearing too many layers of clothes.

7.  The Delhi Govt, which almost never does things on time (they still haven’t taken off the Common Wealth Games bus boards) , closes all schools for 20 days even before the 20 days begin.

The Human Camera

Stephen Wiltshire was found to be an autistic child at the age of 3.

He uttered his first words at the age of 5- “I want Pencil and Paper.”

At the age of 8, he started drawing cityscapes.

Now, as a 27 year old, Stephen Wiltshire has drawn sketches of cities to the smallest of details, with just one look at them. Even the windows on each of the buildings in his paintings match the real ones in the city.

Among the cities drawn are Tokyo, Rome, London, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai and Jeruselam.
Each of them are drawn on giant canvases.

Take a look

A day without my cell phone

I woke up on a Friday morning at 11 am.
Sounds strange? Shouldn’t I be at work or at school or doing whatever I do? Well, this happened when I was in class 9. It was a warm day in mid-feb and my grueling exams were approaching. They started as soon as Monday and our school had been generous enough to give us a preparation leave on Friday-to study. Most of the students whiled away their prep leaves on the phone or on facebook or doing everything but studying. I happened to be one of them. My parents were at work. I had all the freedom I wanted.
So I woke up on Friday morning and with my eyes still half shut and with all intentions of going back to sleep in not more than a few seconds, I unconsciously reached out for my cell phone.
My hand felt the cell phone cover on the bedsheet and picked it up. It didn’t feel like it usually did. It felt so light and soft and..uh oh! This was the point of time when I opened my eyes and saw a sticky note on my empty cell phone cover.
Dear daughter,
 Today you shall study while your cell phone goes on vacation. Don’t bother opening the computer either. Facebook’s blocked for the day. A day without these distractions will do you good.
Happy Learning!
Love
Mom and Dad
PS: Outgoing call service on land line is deactivated. In case of emergency, use neighbor’s phone
What will you do next mom and dad? Rip out my lungs and tell me that a day without air will do me good?
Needless to say, I wasn’t going to be getting any more sleep today.
I wanted to write back. But our postal services were probably cut off too!
This system didn’t really work for me. I knew there was no way I could unblock facebook (how I wish I’d paid attention in computer class) or activate the outgoing calls on the landline. So I decided to tackle the cell phone problem. I started the hunt. I had nothing better to do anyway!
 So I started by looking in my parent’s bedroom, in their cupboards, their medicine cabinet, their bathroom, under their bed sheet, on their workstation. It was like playing hide and seek. It would have actually been fun if it wasn’t my cell phone which was hidden!
By the time I finished with their bedroom, it was 2 pm. It was time for lunch. But hunger was the last thing on my mind. I decided to keep looking.  I looked in our dining room, kitchen, living room, guest rooms, everywhere! But with no luck at all.
It was 6 p.m. by now. This was the time I sat in my room with a book in my hands in order to welcome my parents home!
I heard the key turn in the lock of our front door! They were early. I rushed into my room and grabbed my science book. Ugh! I despised science. I hadn’t paid attention in class or opened my book throughout the whole year. But right now, there was really no time to choose! I opened my book on a  random page, noticing how colourful our science book was.
 And something slipped out and fell on the floor. It was my cell phone!. My cell phone! In my room! In my biology book!
Before I had time to even feel baffled about the situation, my parents who had been standing in the doorway watching me for I don’t know how long went into fits of laughter.
“Oh, I get it! You guys put it in my science book, cuz you knew I would never look there! HAHA! Very funny! I looked for it all day! I couldn’t even eat. See? I didn’t study at all. Your loss!”
They continued to laugh. I didn’t find it funny at all. Infact, I didn’t speak or even look at my parents for the next one week.
Now, 3 years later, when I look back, it actually was pretty funny! They knew I’d never touch my science book. Or even in the wildest, dream of my cell phone being hidden there.
Well, atleast one good thing came out of it!

 I SPENT A DAY WITHOUT MY CELL PHONE!