A blank out

I am struggling , striving to put in a few words of original thoughts on my blog, but I am in a state of blank out . This happens to me often from last few years , when I am no more in touch with the tranquility of mind to write or do or perform something creative. I guess this happens when our life is too much in routine, procedure oriented and our work has become only a mean to earn our bread and butter. So I went on to embrace my dusty diaries in search of my little creative notes or poems. I found one..and it was liked by my college hostel inmates who gathered to form a community for literature and eventually I became one of the main coordinators after the recital of this poem. I recited a few of my oriya poems too..

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There
I stayed beyond your touch
beyond your eyes could see
my tears;

Amidst of the zigzag motion of
my life,
I pray to jot you my ups and downs
Alas!! you could have an address
to rest upon,

How amusingly I console myself,
To read my emotions
on plain and white surfaces,
Walls begin to laugh at me
as the boom-e-rang inflict me
day and night;

Alas! I could be a pigeon
could fly and see you at some
corner,
and snap your smiling eyes
and serious looks,

All I need is your signature
on my go-on;
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Another one from my diary....

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For the person who will be my true friend forever..( Long before I got married... long long ago....)
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An unknown distance sometimes seems to be mingling the way you look as a child,
with a twinkle in your eyes and a clear expression of what you reflect to the life itself.

It is a kind of love you replicate like.. a man in his sainthood and as a mother to her children.

Your eyes are so full of life like it is ready to embrace the whole world unhesitating... and the same moment it says " I am your friend and I am very happy to be your friend". This is the very thing that acclaims my presence so near to you.

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Back to my old friends

Hi,
I am back again to my virtual diary of monologues.Things are quite feasting at my end. What can be better for an IT professional than to get a chance to write a blog? I am blogging because I am not working seriously on any technology front from a week. Yes , a bit relaxed at my end. Time to look back, gazing endlessly at my own uploaded picassa photos or orkutting. Well..I am going to stop at orkut now..this very word which has added flavor to my daily routine life....

Orkut world was used to be an obsolete and obscure world for me. I never tried to be connected to my friends. I hated whenever I saw my brother did nothing , but orkutting day and night on the computer. I thought orkut is nothing but a honey pot for vulnerable attacks. My husband who is a computer security researcher, always disliked it and never encouraged me to explore Orkut.

Despite all presumptions, apprehension, I crept in orkut silently. Only my profile was updated as a matter of having google account. Other than that, I did nothing. My friend Devan who is at a far off place now , one day while chatting with me told me to login to orkut and add him as a friend. I never did that too..... I ignored, avoided and my more engrossed activities in weekends kept me aloof of my beautiful orkut world as it appears now.Thanks to Deb , who posted me the first scrap in orkut asking my wherebouts. Then I started searching for any known face.. there I was there with a couple of my old friends to start with.

I went a little back ... a handful of x-colleagues and then KIITians(my classmates) and then my school friends. What surprised me most when I was contacted by Guddi, a very dear school friend with whom I lost in touch for almost 10 long years. It was surprising to be connected to her. I felt as if connecting to them is getting connected to my childhood and it's vibrancy. I can't say how happy I am to see some of my friend's kids photos and amazing achievement they have in their lives.

One of my friend at college, with whom I was not really very much close, is now a days everyday in touch. In college, I never had really very good chance to know him, but now I guess I know that he loves Oriya poetries. That's an amazing fact about reknowing my friends.

Again I am in touch with a childhood friend Asima. We used to write letters to each other in our so called random poetic ways even being in the same town. We also used to meet each other and review each others letters.. :) that was pretty funny. We were not in touch for a meer ego clash we had ... but voila!!! she is again there,though at a far off coast but scrapping and snapping at my profile almost regularly.

Now I can see Aparna, adding everyday a new photo of her baby and Abhir his best photgraphy. I am also in touch with Nishans's recently uploaded amazing Rockeys's (Nishans's son) photos. Nishan is Sanju's friend and Sanju is the security researcher( my husband) who hates to be in Orkut .He also peeps into my Orkut frame to see Rocky's new photos added at Nishan's site.

Really there is so much happening in my friend's world and now I am happy to be aware of that. Some of the friends are silent and may be busy in their own world. At least I guess there is a hide and seek kind of activities of friends happening and I can watch them for that.

Now I can realise that the world is a small place. I believe we are all connected now despite of our squeezed life style and pressurized schedule.

Back on track I am now! music , friends , childhood , beginning of monsoon and Sea of Poppies...Life is beautiful again ...

Excellent Service

Hi,
Again I have come to my random blogging world. There is a little but significant thing that came to my mind today and I could not resist but sat for sharing it with you people.

Me and my sister were on our way to home from office. We stopped by a nursery on my sudden impulses of buying some green stuff. After I chose a very common flower plant, I asked the Nursery sales person about the price. He quoted very high rates for the plants that require minimum maintainability. I was reluctant to pay such a high price. Disappointed at the price, we went for a retreat in the street side for hot tea and bhajji.

The street side food joint was a very tiny and unnoticeable setup. That was a wooden trolley converted into a base for frying Bhajji and keeping plates. There was a table that contains a taffy box, some bakery biscuits and a telephone balancing on a iron rod with some wire settings on it. As soon as we ordered for tea and bhajji, the woman offered us two plastic chairs. We preferred to sit on an semented electric pole converted in a bench ,next to a bushy and swampy place. after a few minutes or so, the woman was with a hot bhajjis right away from her kadhai in a clean plate with spicy Podi and onion. Quickly after this, she offered tea and two packets of water. We were astonished to see an instant service delivered with a proactiveness.There was no slashing of plates and tea glasses as experienced in smaller cafe houses in India. We were surprised to see her sensitivity towards her customers. Then she came with two small tea glasses.As soon as we were thinking how to put those tea glasses, she pushed a chair towards us.Again there was a warm and sensitive response. She kept on asking us whether to serve more and need any accompaniments. I,being not a keen fan for Mirchi Bhajji, I finished almost four of them. Time to time, she served the accompaniments too with the Bhajjis.I also packed for my lovely maid who was working at my flat in my absence.

I added a four rupees tip on the total bill and started off to way home. We both were overwhelmed with the kind of service and warmth of the lady. My sister talked about her income and offered her whether she will be keen to work as a cook at my home. The Lady politely disagreed as she earns almost double of a cook's earning on the Bhajji shop.

Small things happen beautifully if we start noticing them. Being a hygiene freak these days, I tend to ignore such street side eateries, but the kind of service I get from this place probably is comparable to a service offered in a fine restaurant, but not the warmth added to it.

What should I write?

I am again out here for blogging on something. It is a long time since I last wrote, being in my retirement. Time now is to work and only relax in weekends if the daily chores of home allow to do so. I thought what to write on and scribble on a Friday morning. I love Fridays as many MNC workers do , to work an hour less and freak out in the night. I don't freak out . Freaking out is not in my scope. I dont like dancing in the pub and caught in a whirl of infinite smoking rings. Whatever I like does not come easily to me too. Well, recently I watched this movie "Just my luck". Well I liked it because it is a comedy and I did not like it because of it's non-functional, fictional and irrational justification of luck. Well, I am not against luck. It is my bad luck to fight with Chemo therapy and it is my good luck to have a job with a comfortable life..well yes almost comfortable, except a few fights with auto rickshaw pullers for charging a ransom to carry me from home to office. One day I commented to an auto driver on such a situation when he was charging more money than what was agreed upon and I said like this" Aap ka auto na hua..mercedese hogaya...bahot meherbani jo aapne mujhe ghar tak laye". The auto driver just gave me smile and moved from there.

Well, I wanted to tell you about my beautiful experience today . There is a tree in front of my apartment. Thats a cotton tree. It blooms with fiery red flowers in spring without leaves. Today in the morning while sipping my tea, a lot of birds caught my attention. I observed some birds that I have never seen. They look like parrots, but they are very small birds and they are green from front and black on their back. They look quite like king fisher birds but with a "green" difference. They were chirping continuously and jumping from one branch to another non stop. I felt as if they have an infinite source of energy with their lighter body. Nothing to say beyond this. Every time I see something very beautiful , I generally can not speak a word, neither of appreciation nor of anything else. I simply observe and get lost. There was slow , fresh and soft breeze today morning as if I am out there for a breezy bath. Sanjay standing beside me, was praising the fresh air and how every morning fresh air energise him the whole day. I was again spell bound and was lost with the morning breeze. Amidst of all the bad luck locks, there are some good luck locks that open when I have a sweet morning like today.

For me it is a time to slow down and observe minute details. These days I feel everything around me have become more lively and they touch me to the chore. Everyday I have a sense like the roads and the trees by the road side have a friction with me while the auto rickshaw moves with it's own usual pace. Now a days I have got this habit of silently speaking to anyone I meet on the road or auto rickshaw or in the lift. No idea..it is good or bad..and i will rather name it as "my petty indulgence during my chemo therapy". I have a season on my head these days and I name it "Autumn in Spring" as my head sheds more hairs than the trees do in the beginning of winter. If I shake my head, I get almost hundred of them. I feel like selling them to the wig makers. My hairs usually have a better quality and perfect for the wig making. Once I try this, may be my bad luck of the season may turn good. If at all I try!

What am I writing? no idea..no theme..no focus..just random. I think randomness is in the season...the latest trend in everything..say it fashion for cloths or interior accesorries... or ........
greeting cards. Well I think I am not out of the season.I am perfectly set and ready to go with the roller coaster! move on my life......

Short retirement still continues

I am again writing with respect to my short retirement..still continues. In fact it is now getting longer. I am yet to determine whether it is a positive sign or just an occasional cloudy weather in an European summer time. In India, we celebrate a cloudy weather and wait for a warm sip of tea at our balcony while it rains outside. I should celebrate the clouds being a Hindustani in fact.


These days in Hyderabad, there is no winter. It is just warm good season like spring here. The sun does contribute it's heat too to make it more a pre-summer delight. It is sad that I don't wear my snugly fitted cardigan and soft red muffler and sip a cup of espresso. In this weather I am happy to take musk melon juice and icy cool drinks than anything. Winter spells bad in Hyderabad. Well, I am better off the winter like in Delhi. Last year I had terrible health conditions.


I am just moving around to express something that the little girl in the wood should confess. Lets begin saying about it. After my short retirement in Trento (little city in the valley of alps,Italy), I am back to warm and rocky climate of Hyderabad. Suddenly after arriving there, I and Sanju started searching for shelter and employment. In the due course of searching, we used to be surprised over the huge demolition of rocks from Hyderabad. The rocks that I used to name like lovers kissing rock, or lord Ganesha rock or Kids sitting rocks are all disappearing and some of them are awfully bruised and broken. I am taken aback to see the emerging glass fitted huge buildings and apartments instead of rocks and serene lakes. At some huge constructions, amidst of concrete structure some stood very lonely and deprived of their lost city. Some became a part of big apartments play and entertainment area to serve a base for some artificial water falls and rock climbing for kids. When I arrived at Hyderabad for the first time four years back, , I loved the rocky stretches and I thought that the city should be beautifully emerged, surrounding these rocks and can be one of the most beautiful city. I used to be overwhelmed to see the rocks and the way they balance on the top of each other. I still remember of what one of friend used to say about the rocks when he saw them for the first time. He said to me that these Hyderabadi Nawabs must have done something to the rocks just to have their favorite time pass, otherwise it is not possible to have these kind of rocks here. I used to laugh a lot over his kiddish comment.


I always felt like those rocks are very dynamic and sometimes will march from one side of the stretch to the other side. Those rocks used to be dramatically organised, random but coherent and in a series . There is a lake just behind my current shelter to which all garbage of the surrounding apartment flows. My heart aches and bleeds, but to my vein I feel I am also responsible for the same, being an IT professional and working at one of those glass fitted structures.


There is another reason added to my retirement days and i recently came to know that I have got some free spirited radicals fighting with my good anti bodies. Thanks to the doctors that they stopped the war, and I am fine and able to write the blog to bug you all. I am happy to survive and fight the cancer and at the same time sad about the cancerous development in the city to kill all my favorite rocks.

A tale about my short retirement

Anything can happen to you in your life. It can be fantastic, mind buggling , spine tingling or just a big BAD. You can have surprises or accidents, failure or success , luck like getting a lottery or mishaps like missing your flight to a distant island for your vacation. I have started writing in a way that seems to me random but I am around a fact that made me going into the deep melancholy of life after a sudden declination in my career graph . I believe it is just a slight declination! I will not name this as my failure . It can't be an accident too. It is a kind of whirlpool of circumstances that were just not manageable by me. Some situation appeared where I was not able to do something that I was not aware of to be done. I will say that I was in such a situation where I was expected to do something but could never guess what was the expectation. The thing that happened to me sounds like the word 'paradox'. It existed and at the same time I thought it did not exist at all ! It is different , isn't it?

I believe now that everything that happens has some beautiful purpose and now as a result of that I am having a short retirement at a small hilly town in the valley of Alps. This is a time of silent retreat in the vastness of the valleys.

At this point of life what I mostly remember is about a girl ,cycling in a small hilly town passing by the small hillocks, small but deep woods , big old trees with wild orchids hanging on the branch , listening to the sound of wild winds and observing small details of the beautiful nature of her home town. She was a girl who always enjoyed loneliness and wondered why people say they get bored staying alone. She was a girl who loved everything about her small passions in life ..small passions like decorating her home, cleaning the nuke and cranny, small passions like talking to her plants and singing loudly in the backyard to believe that she can sing in the highest pitch and her voice can reach to the higher tones of Sargam. She was a girl who loved to be with trees,in trees and to be like trees. She had made the trees as her sole ideal, no person and no great men of the history ,but trees. She loved climbing up trees and looking at the sky and enjoy some fresh fruits like the rawest guava and mango and feel the richness of taste. Try tasting the rawest, and it has a bitterly peculiar taste ,a taste that is very new and fresh. She had mastered to bring beauty even in the most deprived seasons at her home. She liked a lot to make beautiful bouquets out of anything and she liked most the wild grass shoots and tiny wild flowers, whether dry or fresh and she was a master of putting bouquet at every place .She used to put tiny ones pasted in her diary and some on the back of the greeting card envelopes she made for her friends.

Apart from cycling and making bouquets, she also used to be absorbed in writing letters , letters very long and may be smallest ones , the ones with just two lines and a few words ...but meaningful and random, something like abstract art or intelligent quotes in Readers Digest. Her diary contained small biographies of the people around her... and she wrote almost every ways of how to comfort them and how to deal with them. She wrote diary almost anytime she liked, in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes the whole day. She was not a writer though and certainly not a creative writer at all ! but she wrote as if she is born to write . She wrote about her mental conflicts in her adolescence, and about how to avoid sexual thoughts and about how to avoid sleeping too much or too little. She was obsessed with the 'how tos' many times a day. She used to be everything in a day like confused, wise, thoughtful, imaginative, creative, day dreamer and also meditative. Well...a lot of things used to happen in her quiet world..and she used to write about every little thing that touched her. Stories too happened in her life!!

A little story did happen certainly due to her small , creative hand made cards given to cheer up her computer partner to succeed in an assignment. There was a guy who wrote to her that he liked her as she looked very different in crowd. He loved her because she was different. Well ...that story did not continue as the girl who was very particular about her authentic taste of everything, could not be capable of loving him. It was again her different attitude like having the thought of not marrying anyone because of her thousands of activities in a day. Still she thought about that guy quietly because he was the first one to propose her though lately , when she was already 20 where as all most all her friends got proposed by many guys from the age of 16 itself . Well this event made her realized about another facet of her personality and she thought about femininity of a girl who thinks she is a boy. She smiled a lot ..laughed loudly at this. She laughed because she was different.

There was so much to say about this girl, a self reliant and bright girl. She was whimsical and she was happy.Now I miss her..miss that girl who kissed every tree she liked and paid attention to every tiny flower on the way to woods. I am missing her and at the same time in a process of reviving her in this valley of alps. I wonder about the dynamic landscapes of high mountains and the rare wild flowers of the valleys. Every dimension of this place has something to tell you and take your breath away. While traveling in the train, I felt like those grayish white mountains are live and dynamic with their rapid changing shapes. I felt as if they are just rushing in to speak to me. They have wonderful shapes. Shapes that are stiff and curvy at the same time. They looked simple and at the same time mysterious. I just happened to see the color of the lakes in the mountains and all the lakes have the same aqua green transparent serenity in them. I can now again discover the girl who used to shed tears even with each falling leaf from a tree. She used drop tears out of intense emotions like sometimes the way you feel at some music concerts at the artist's experiments at some odd beats.

It is after such a long time that the girl is writing...and she is missing that crystal clarity of the words of her diary. Well, she will revive slowly ..and I believe she has started to be happy again with her small passions in life.

It rained in Alps and now cold winds hitting my face from the open window panes.