What will you remember?

In the song of farewell, what will you remember?

Will it be that sunny noon or the passing ember?

When you meet another fate, what will you remember?

Will it be the passing shot or the spark re- kindler?

When you wake to shining dreams, what will you remember?

Will it be the trees we climbed or the playful banter?

When you brave a stormy night, what will you remember?

Will it be the friends you made or the dreams afire?

When you lie in an aching shell, what will you remember?

Will it be the soothing brace or the hurt avenger?

In the times you test your strength, what will you remember?

Will it be that first reward or the blight December?

When you smile at a passing stranger, what will you remember?

Will it be the day we met or the moving ayre?

When you make a virgin promise, what will you remember?

Will it be the songs we shared or the thundering ardour?

When you make a new beginning, what will you remember?

Will it be the passions etched or the rousing chatter?

As your life flows out again, what will you remember?

Will it be the arduous climb or the restful slumber?

In the shining dawn time,

in the wakeful nights,

I will remember your face, and smile because you smiled.

Dedicated to all those people who graced my life in the last three years. Thank you for being a part of it- I'll always remember you! May you always achieve more than you dreamt, and all your day dreams find their way into your lives. I love you.

Redolence

I think mint smells of summer.

Not the mint that comes packed in little rectangular paper or cardboard boxes, but the fresh mint leaves you get only in the vegetable bazaars. I found this out a little while ago, and decided to investigate... the answer is that as a child, I was susceptible to heat, and that's not the easiest thing to cope with if you live in Delhi. My mother concocted a syrup concentrate whose main ingredients were raw mangoes and mint.

That's why mint smells like summer.

Long train journeys, with games of snakes and ladders thrown in.

Rain. Rain on dry, parched earth. The fragrance of quenched thirst.

Jasmine, roses, bougainvilleas, marigolds, carnations, freesias, gladioli, hydrangea... there's something about the oppressing heat of Delhi's summers that draws out all the perfumes of any garden, until all the disparate smells form one unique, heady, composite.

Hot curry and steamed Basmathi*.

Spice. Spice from the kitchen. Vegetables cooking in ghee** and masalas***. Chilli powder and cinnamon, thyme and lemons, curry leaves and ginger, cardamom, cloves, garlic.

Old books; new books; books.

Mangoes, grapes, litchis, watermelons, coconuts.

Hide and seek.

Curd and butter milk, heat and leafy shadows, water and flavoured ice.

Nightmares, for I rarely had dreams. Dreams, when I saw them with open eyes.

Incense, stories, laughter.

Crayons and swimming pools.

Neem trees.

This is what my memories smell of.

I hereby tag:

Q who is quite wonderful, and very patient, and who is not nobody.
Saim for whom I have no words, but many smiles.
Myprerogative who never ceases to surprise me. (I do remember your tag, and I'll do it after my exams.)
The whackster who always makes me think, and often makes me smile.
Eärwen who is beautiful, and whose blog I have enjoyed, but not yet commented upon.
Bindhu who always manages to make me smile.
Arun who sometimes frightens me.

I want to know what you remember.

* A kind of rice.
** A kind of clarified butter used heavily in traditional north Indian cooking.
*** Spices.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saim gave me an award.

:)

My first :)

I'd like to pass this on to:

Bindhu

Q

Arun

The boys at MATHAWAADA

Myprerogative

The whackster

I'd also like to pass it back to Saim.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have exams again. Isn't my life fun? Yay. Not.

Good luck to everyone else out there who will also be joining me in my misery. Do well.

Art

I made:

:)

Okay... what I forgot to add when I posted this was that I wast feedback on the new layout. Oh, and also some assistance on this menu bar thing... the only thing I can link back to, is the 'Home' tab, which is kind of useless... does anyone else know how to make those other pages to which the tabs can link? :S

To those of you who knew me at school, I say hello :) and no, you haven't seen these before, since they are all from after school.

Tags of 25

25 things few people know about me:

1. I love the meaning of my name.
2. I hate the fact that if it's western, it's history, but if it belongs to any other part of the world, or is different, it's mythology. Hypocrites.
3. I'm a solitary being.
4. I'm excessively judgemental.
5. There are moments in time that are etched in my memory. There are other times- weeks and months, sometimes, when I don't remember anything that happened during them.
6. Idealist, escapist, dreamer.
7. I don't really believe in religion... I do believe in a Supreme Power, and common sense.
8. I love colours, books, sports.
9. I think money only has value if you wish to put it to use.
10. When I look back at my life, I'm more likely to remember impulses, feelings, impressions, images, colours, and perceptions, rather than hard facts.
11. I like acoustic instrumental a lot.
12. I want to travel the world and live in the finest hotels on my own money.
13. There are only two compliments ever paid to me that I truly cherish.
14. I want my fairy tale, but I don't think it'll ever happen.
15. I cannot keep a grudge, and I don't hate anybody- I just become completely apathetic towards them.
16. Nature frightens and enthrals me in equal measure.
17. I dislike cats. I love like dogs.
18. I think the new WADA anti- doping laws infringe privacy, and are wrong on some very important levels. I also think they will drive the best sports persons away from their respective fields, and we'll only be left with the not- so- good ones.
19. People who cannot be on time, and proven terrorists, rapists, and paedophiles should be shot dead. Yes, I support capital punishment.
20. I'm intensely private, and to an extent, it applies even to my parents... stay out of my business, unless I specifically invite you into it.
21. I get irate when I'm tired.
22. I don't really believe in inheritance as such... I think whoever earned the asset has the right to it, and not their family/ friends/ class mates/ domestic help/ et cetera.
23. Success is very important.
24. When I'm really concentrating, I cannot really hear or see anything besides what I'm captivated by.
25. The poems :
a. A Psalm of Life by H. W. Longfellow;
b and c. The road not taken, and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost;
d and e. The Solitary Reaper and Daffodils by William Wordsworth;
f. The Brook by Lord Alfred Tennyson;
g. Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley;
h. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by ST Coleridge;
i. Seashore, Mind without fear, and *this other poem which I cannot seem to remember the name of* by Rabindranath Tagore

are the ones I still remember from school.

Bharath, since you tagged me, you obviously get tagged back.
I also hereby tag:

1. Amrita ma'am
2. MyP
3. Jerry
4. Bindhu Unny
5. The Layman
6. Comfortably Numb
7. Q (You can do a 15 things post, since you just did another one like this :) )
8. Human
9. The WhacksteR
10. Arun
11. Realskullzero
12. Foxhound
13. Sam
Well.... I can't expect the boys at MATHAWAADA to have two same/ different posts :D, so handle it like you wish to.

Purple thunder

Fire in my heart;
fire in my soul;
fire when you touch me-
fire in your ardent eyes.

Music in your voice;
music in your love;
music of your sterling trust-
music of my dappled life.

Stars in the sky;
stars in your eyes;
stars for your lambent wit-
stars in my mortal hands.

Whispers in my dreams;
whispers in the light;
whispers of the worlds foretold-
whispers of the ageless Lords.

Breathe- murmurs of my existence

My life is a path in a forest, where dabs of dappled sunlight dance with leafy shades, and so many cross tracks criss- crossing along... an arbitrary turn anywhere, and I'd be a completely different person today. I have lived many lives- daughter, sister, friend, guide, and somehow, in all of them, it is not what they mean- it only matters how they feel. So many questions, and no one to answer them, yet I know- one day, it'll all be gone.

In the stream of consciousness that gushes through the valley of thought, eons are often made up of moments- yet there are some moments of limpid incandescence that last for eternities together.

What is family, anyway? What are four walls? Family is where you find it, and a house protects the dreamer. Who do I see in everyone else? Is it a reflection or an aspiration? You only see the glory, never the bloodlust. Nobody knows what lies in the shadows of my heart. Have you even noticed the difference between faith and belief? Where does loyalty spring from, and when does it finally rest? Why? If I were a colour, which would I be? Nobody knows what walls could tell us, if only they would speak.

Every quest has its casualties, yet unbelievably fantastic things can happen even after the boots have been worn. A river runs an age and a long way, and dreams do come true- they're just not always dressed as we want them to be.

The imprint of my journeys on the sands of sempiternity; I look behind me, and already they're fading.

The aria of my psyche; listen to it now- soon, it will be silenced forever.

Photography...

The view from outside

Yesterday, while travelling in the Delhi Metro from North Campus to I. S. B. T., I found myself in a compartment full of pro- Tibetan demonstrators. They were all Buddhist monks, and carrying Tibetan flags. Some of the younger lot had 'Free Tibet' and such like painted on them in black.


I debated with myself on whether to ask them some questions or not...
Do it!


No.. it'll just look strange...


Just do it! ! !


NO! Everyone's looking!


Look, just stuff it up your-



"Excuse me, may I please ask you some questions about your movement? If it's not a problem... "

Oh, right...

The guy I had spoken to seemed surprised, but agreed anyway.



Yeah, right, like the poor bloke had a choice, with you doing your Rita skeeter act... Skeeter never said ‘excuse me’. Oh, just shut up, and concentrate...


Well, yes, I did kind of ASSAULT him with questions, actually.

Q1. So, do you want independence or autonomy?

Ans. Independence..


Q2. But, the Dalai Lama says he'd like autonomy...

Ans. Yes, but we want independence...

Q3. So.. do you think the furore about the Olympic torch around the world will help?

Ans. Yes, I believe so...

Q4. And what about world leaders debating about whether or not to attend the Games? The German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, do you think it'll work in your favour, or do you think it'll make China more brutal?

Ans. Yes, I think it's good...


Well, I could barely wait for the guy to get his answers out, and I was already asking my next. Honestly, I didn't even know I was that interested in the subject... Meanwhile, he was getting more and more flustered, which I finally realised, and said thank you before moving away slightly.



Then I realised, I hadn't asked him a rather important question, and went on to do so belatedly:



Q5. Excuse me, I'm sorry, but could you please tell me if you're a citizen of India or Tibet?

Ans. I'm Bhutanese.

I later realised I should have asked him if they were all from Bhutan.

Maybe five hours after this I told a group of friends about my encounter, and though initially interested, one of them told me, "You know, you should not speak to these people, these chink- eyed people, they're mostly prostitutes and drug addicts. You should be careful."

When I reminded her that they were monks, she shook her head and said "No, I live in North Campus, I know all about this. They're all mostly Pro's and druggists"


I didn't point out the contradiction in her sentence, and in any case, I didn't really know what to say to that, so I kept quiet, and let them change the topic of the conversation.

Later, I wished I'd said something, anything- to defend these 'chink- eyed' people.

Flushed

I love colours. It’s a fact. All in all, they’re generally the single largest factor affecting most decisions I take in life.

I don’t know when I woke up to these wonderful pigments, or feelings, or whatever they are, but I think my definition of hell would be a life without colour.

Point in case is, I don’t even know how to define them. I just know how they make me feel- like drinking air, or walking on clouds, or maybe just becoming a cloud bouncing along somewhere up there. I think they’re the miracles of nature most people are too busy to notice.

“For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green”

- Bilbo Baggins

And Bilbo, with all his travels, adventures and experience wasn’t wrong either. For too many people in this world colours are just red, white, blue, yellow, black, etc. At most they can graduate to dark and light green, blue and brown.

Have you ever noticed sparkling gray eyes like Anne’s in the classics by L. M. Montgomery? They make me think of stars… And yet, gray is a colour most often used to describe any bleak aspect.
How can the same colour be associated with two such opposing views?

Fire- no painter or photographer can ever capture its true beauty. Is it yellow and orange, or orange and red, or an amalgamation of all these colours forming something the human mind can’t ever hope to grasp?
Oh, by the way, when fire grows very hot it’s blue in colour…

A new born leaf is reddish- green, as it matures, it goes from being mostly- green to properly- green to finally becoming gold as it falls from its tree.

The azure of a clear spring morning changes to the velvety indigo of midnight, and two flowers on the same rose bush will always be a different shade of pink.

No poet will EVER be able to colour the sea- for which bit shall she do?
The shimmering haze of sunlight on the water, the clear blue of the shallow seas on white sand, the magical blue- green of the open waters, the sunset reflected on it in the evenings or it’s inky blackness at night?

For just 1 day on your high- definition flatrons try and notice the black and yellow blur of a cheetah chasing prey, enjoy the blue of a calm river turn suddenly to frothy white as it bashes up rocks, or just watch a butterfly do its thing…

I promise you, you’ll also start noticing all the different greens.