This has been one hell of an eventful year. Well What do I say…I’ve been one hell of a busy girl.

And to think that in one of our I’m-so-bored-what-about-you conversations, someone had told me that what I really need, is to do something drastic. Like get married. And get divorced the next day!!! he he he… U wish!

Right.

Life doesn’t come with an instruction book. Which is particularly unfair because life’s tough. And while this has been said many zillion times before, we don’t really give a thought of whats been happening in each chapter of our autobipgraphy…

Anyway, here’s What I learnt in 2007.

I write better than I think I do.
People actually read what I write. And enjoy it.
Every single person in the industry will have a different opinion on your work. You need to acknowledge that (but not accept it as the final call) and move on.
I really have no idea what I’m capable of doing, until suddenly I’ve gone and done it. This scares the pants or should i say salwars off me.
It’s best to embrace your feminine side and say, “kolhapuri Chappals? Hell yeah!
You have to be very careful of what you wish for because the man up above (God for the ignorant) loves loopholes.

In my case, this realisation has just about entered my conscious…. 2 years too late.

If you’re even half the person you make yourself out to be, people will like you anyway.
Life goes on. One year onto the next…. with just the celebrations at the end to keep you company…

Well! All I can say is… Buh Bye 2007 … it was great to have Known u…

Have you seen this person?

She was last seen blogging around this blog and has not been heard of for some days now. All we found is this picture. Help us tracing the whereabouts of this soul as we know how important it is for all you reading right now that she keeps blogging for your entertainment! (attempt to murder with stares, pinches and god alone knows what not!)

Here is a rundown of some of her distinct features… for you to help unearth her….

1. Most of the days she wakes up late having forgotten to set the alarm the previous night and is seen or say unseen by her family whizzing in and out of doors.
2. Grooms herself in record time and knowingly ignores those small unidentified stains on her outfit.
3. Reaches 30 minutes late to work and hopes no one notices, blames it all on her “insomnia” phenomenon.
4. Gets caught in dusty winds passing through her cab windows all the time and ends up looking like an electrocuted cat. (Rakesh are you reading?)
5. Gets kicked around for not informing, forgetting or rather unintentionally slipping people out of her mind… afterwhich shes showered with superlative filled messages and comments.
6. Smiles through clenched teeth (still looking cute) when ma calls to remind her of the evening wedding reception and that shes to dress up since shes the eligible in town. Oh Man… Y Y Y… the woes of being in your late 20s…
7. Falls on her feet and thanks God for giving her some releavant topic to write for her blog and sighs, thinks of her exercise and diet routine and a ballooning back with a much deeper sigh.

We are currently trying to dig her out of her boredom and get her to finish some of the posts that she has been accumulating on a notepad along with her growing pile of unwanted clothes at home which threatenes to flow out of her door and cause a tsunami into the coridoor.
Meanwhile keep her in your thoughts and wish her speedy recovery onto this blog.

See cobwebs? Smell mothballs? … I am a little confused here – What was Pradeep Sarkar thinking? Why go back to the tried, tested and often shredded subject of the fallen women… It’s a leave-your-brain-home-and-don’t-ask-too-many-questions genre.

One daag may have happened as a form of exploitation in Rani’s life but that doesn’t mean you have to stain the whole chunari with daags Laaga Chunaari…. does nothing but reinforce stereotypes that millions of Hindi movies like Chandni Bar, Astitva and Page 3 have made an attemp to break and had hoped to have left behind in the Eighties.

Frankly speaking, Its the bygone days that this used to work… Laaga…. is just not daagi enough, as I would have liked it to be. Go watch it for just one reason… Konkona Sen Sharma and Kunal kapoor…. Don’t miss the sizzle between the two… Nevertheless, What we can definately do is…. wash away this Daag with a spoonful of Surf Excel… kyunki Daag Ache Hote

Footpaths or mud tracks… Deep Ditches or overflowing gutters… nothing stops the Mumbaites from taking the route that would make sure he gets to his destination at least a minute early. At an impatient traffic signal, pizza and death delivery boys fidget with their helmets, cabbies glancing at the mirrors just to get a peek at his fares, drumming fingers and necks straining to see ahead, to find an inch of space where a two or a four wheeler can squeeze itself. Blaring horns, cursing voices (Chal be…Dikhta nahi kya?) and a girl in a cab will add, “Oh Bhaiya… Sambhal ke”

Then, a great initiative will change all — a clean entry spot, deft manouveurs, driving along hawkers, pedestrians and double parked cars, will get someone right in front of the cars, autos, trucks, buses and slow-witted bikes. Not to worry, the traffic cop won’t chase him. After all, it’s nothing out of the ordinary… for him or for the cop Plus, as our brave traffic spartan leads at least 15 other someones would’ve followed suit. Yes. Even if there’s a maddening jam on the road, traffic flows freely in these roadless by-lanes. —“Adjustment” at it’s best.

It seems as if all the world comes together, bursting at its seams with people, Vegetable Bhaiyas, cauliflower stalks, beggars, flower sellers, wadapav walas, ricksaw smoking beedis, marwadi pan shops, parked Santros and Carts… BEST buses trying to get to the bus-stops where people have queued up to get atleast one foot inside, artisans waiting with their tools for someone to give them a call,newspapers trying their best to draw attention to whats going on in and around them, all just wanting one common thing - a desperate need to squeeze into that wee bit of space we proudly and Oh so lovingly call Mumbai.

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And the fragment of a song
Half-remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over
You were suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the colour of her hair
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
- Dusty Springfield

This song always reminds me of all that I’ve lost, and all that I may have found. Things. Clothes, Books, People, Scribbles - and I had many. To the memories I’ve spun, to lots of laughter and conversations, to friendship and love…It takes a loss to unlock memories. But now there are only echoes of symphonies. This week has been mostly Blank. The enormity of stories around, of experiences and so much more. Time to absorb, to formulate responses. Sigh! Such a long journey, but still have miles and miles and miles, thousands of them, everywhere I turn

I came across this article on a friend’s blog and was amazed at what it said…. because it said what I want to… so naturally… so precisely… as if its me whos written it… It says all that my heart does … so i though i would post it here… as i cant find another perfect way…

It’s an article by Ms. Shipra Shrivastava on an HT tabloid site i visited after catching this on someone elses blog…

Oh this long distance love!

“It is very well said that “distances grow fondness among people”. It indeed creates fondness but takes a toll of emotions, efforts, time, energy and many times tears to keep it going. I might sound like a ‘guru’ of relationships but no; I am myself a victim and member of the Long Distance Club.

I guess people are right when they say that men are from mars and women are from Venus. ‘We’ are so different in every way. Apart from being different biologically, we are different to a great extent in the way we think. Something which holds great importance for me might just be a normal issue for my boyfriend.

And of course, dare I disturb him when he is at work. “I am busy. I have work. We will talk when I get back home” This is the response I get. But these things are quite a normal feature and easy to handle when you stay in the same city, meet everyday and can always explain things and make up for it if something goes wrong. But what happens when you are trying to measure the relationship across thousands and thousand miles on the globe?

And how can I forget the time factor? I mean why do we have different time zones? It’s like when one is free to talk, the other one would be snoring and vice versa. When I call my boyfriend and ask him to come online, he is either sleeping, or at gym, or at work and ultimately either I stay awake till morning waiting for him…. What pain!

With the advent of technology and the conversion of the world into a small global village, we find it quite easier to contact people through emails and chat programs…. Email might sound as a substitute for phone calls but it is surely not. The tone, language and intensions can be often misinterpreted and infact that’s exactly what happens. But then being a little diplomatic on emails is much better than being answerable for looong phone bills. And phones? What can I say for them? The time you call, you are more worried about keeping the phone down thinking about the huge amount of tariff on international calls and at the same time you end up discontented and unhappy for not being able to express what you really wanted to.

There are surely times when one starts remembering all the good moments spent together and the next thing is you pick up your phone and start dialing. But what if your boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t answer? You call again? Again he/she doesn’t answer? Here is when our minds start going on a wild goose chase. Has he run away? Has he started dating someone else? He must be with a girl, that’s why he is not taking my call and so on and so forth. And in the end, one ends up being unhappy and upset. I call these MUS - “Missing U Syndrome”

To sum it up in one word, Trust is an important thing in any relationship but it is the “most” important thing in long distance relationship. It is like a stone on which the relationship rests. It can make thousands of miles seem like just a phone call away.

A huge list of things including phone calls, letters, cards, gifts, sweet messages, voicemails, SMS, emails, chats and so on are needed to keep a long distance relationship alive and kicking. And one should always remember, Distance is not the end of the world in a relationship. Rather at many times it’s the beginning and a strong one. How? Well, I said in the beginning, “Distances grow fondness among people”. And trust me…it surely does!!!”

Books lie scattered. A glass of water teeters on the edges of The Maximum City that lies close by waiting to be read. I pace. I sit back to write. Everything is hazy except the space filled with words. Words arranged a certain way, words that want to say specific things but I don’t seem to get the arrangement right. Voices of people jostle for space in my head.

Today words seem wild, unmanageable. Theres this vehement need to restrain them and I love this feeling. This absorption of the body, mind and soul while creating - the restlessness outside and the stillness deep inside me.

Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and of course not to forget Cinderella - I believed in those fairy tales. They promise us a world that is not! As we grow up and get into the real world, we have our innocence kicked out of us everyday. In my case, what little was left, I was holding onto it for dear life But Alas! Now No More….

Experiences of people around me has started troubling me. Can you love and hate someone at the same time? Can you wish someone out of your life, while knowing you’d be the first one to miss them if they were gone? Why does life take such sudden turns and Why are you stranded at such a crossroad all alone?

Don’t you sometimes wish that people could read your mind? That you didn’t have to say, they just knew? That you didn’t always have to ask, they would just say what you wanted to hear. I’ve been feeling like that for the last few days. And then I realized how futile it is and It’s just hard to snap out of it.

STILL, I can’t shake those tales off. Damn them! Everything I’ve seen in the movies, sung or swooned over in books is turning out to be baloney. My romance with life seems to have come to an end and I feel like somehow I am supposed to realise it and shake it off…But something inside me just doesnt let me… just tells me that it’ll fly by. And my smile might just reach my eyes again.

I think I just want what everyone wants, something real, that I can’t corrupt with my pessimism. And I want to share these moments with somebody and have them feel it too. But where’s my joy? Right now somewhere faraway…. I Guess!

No musical numbers, No people jumping into any song and dance (terrified of these after the ‘Cash’ debacle) and for once no romantic angle… ‘Chak De India’ was a breath of much needed fresh air. In fact it’s a tried and tested path, but, in it, is such a different film.

This is one film that celebrates women power!!! Right from the Haryana ki laundi Komal Chautala to the Rowdy Punjab di puttar Kaur… What was more interesting was the reaction of the crowd to the movie. Take note of the the male bashing scene at McD’s… could practically see almost every women in the theatre jumping out of their seats in celebration.

One of the reviews I read said “Chak De! India now running across the US is a commentary on sexism in India”… But is it that really? Rather, the film acknowledges that it is harder for women to choose to play any sport in India, at the same time, Women needn’t be given an easier way out because of the sacrifices or the stereotypes they have represented.

There’s so much I felt while watching the movie. No women discussing clothes, Women with filthy mouths, rough,competitive and in control. These girls are not ficitonal figures. They are touching reminders that one of them might be living right in our own backyard. You don’t relate to the film just because you are a woman. Most the guys I saw the movie with, appreciated the movie because there’s a certain rawness to the whole movie.

For once everyone took an instant liking to the King of Bollywood - He has his fair share of critics (me being one of them) but… this time… underplayed with finesse, Kabir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan become one and the same.

It’s a feel-good movie with some great new actors and a terrific turnaround by a well established star. See it! It has an inspiring message behind it, without being too preachy.

This is a film about team spirit in its truest sense. Just that we need that spirit to fight and speaking of the fighting spirit… the adrenaline rush that the movie evokes led apna Sid and a manikchand chewing family wale uncle to punches…with a prompt “tujhe toh mein bahar dekhta hu” which added the much needed spice to the whole experience… Chak De Sid!

“So where did all that water come from?” That’s probably your question.

And it was mine as well as I waded through ankle-deep slimy water towards slumped shadows seeking refuge, from a strong evening shower just around the corner at Laxmi.
“The heavens,” some would say but am not quite sure… Oh i can see some of my office mates shaking their head in wonder…. am sure at my sense of humour…. Ah! I know I know… if looks could kill I would have been dead with R, P and N’s stares…

Getting back to our wettime story … Yonder, a taxi had stopped and the spray of the filthy water mushroomed in delight of catching up to the car but before any of us could even get our voices past the music of the raindrops it had vanished.

Priyanka and myself, after a hardly working day, (attempt to murder with another stare) had only enough energy to stretch an arm out and say, ‘Bhaiya Sion Jaega?’ to which we recieved a prompt ‘King Circle mein paani hoga toh wahi ruka dunga” Well, So much for choices… Those are the cabbies for you…. Our saviours…. The taxi lurched and the water took to chase again.