Sunday

It's a Sunday. There's nothing remarkable about it because it is a Sunday far away from home. How far away you ask? About a decade away from the Sundays I remember. I don't want to use the clichéd "Those were the days.." here, but those indeed were the days. I remember reading somewhere that the strongest memories are those that were made using all five senses. Sundays were typical back then, and when someone says Sunday, those are the days I remember. Sunday meant waking up at 8 as the headlines were being read out.

Sunday meant going back to sleep after the 8 am bed coffee.

Sunday meant waking up 2 hours later to the smell of keerai, chowchow or whatever kozhambu of the day.

Sunday meant the smell and sound of potatoes being being fried because said keerai and chowchow were not considered edible by 25% of my four member family.

Sunday meant wondering how the kid sister could eat spinach.

Sunday meant exiting the shower and being fed hot paruppu sadham and fried potatoes while Sun TV was still on; either showing James Vasanthan hosting some family show, or a movie that did not have less run time than the ads that it was interspersed with.

Sunday meant appa battling against the ants in the house with erumbu powder in an old shower to shower dabba.

Sunday meant coffee again at 3:30 or whenever TV ran out of interesting things resulting in us waking up the parents.

Sunday meant homework after two nights of procrastination.

Sunday meant calling friends on the landline to remind each other to avoid missing stuff for school.

Sunday meant going back with excitement because Monday meant new lessons and no 'reading' of old lessons in class.

Sunday meant sitting on the hot blanket after appa ironed uniform for the next day.

Sunday meant searching for the school belt.

Sunday meant remembering that I forgot to cover the text book  ask appa to cover the text book which was only covered a couple of weeks back.

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Sundays do not have that familiar aura anymore. Nor do they stand out from the rest of the week. Sunday has become yet another day of waking up to spending another day with the laptop and phone. Those Sundays will be the Sundays I remember.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving post from an Indian (hehe). I started blogging and around one year after I embraced my internet self, I joined Twitter as well. I spent a good chunk of 2010-12 reading several blogs, a lot of which were written by Indians working/studying in the US, or those who did a short stint in the US and came back home. I fantasized about the life of an Indian in the US by vicariously living through these blog posts and yearned for the days when I would get to let nostalgia flow in my own blog posts as well. I was naive. I realize that sometimes wishes can come true too, and that it might not always be a good thing :D

After procrastinating through the week, and pushing every homework and project to the weekend and filing it under "hashtag can be taken care of during the weekendz", I wanted to do something during the week to make myself feel good. So I picked the easiest of them all, decided to write a post.

It has been a good week, in fact it has been a good day that sort of shadowed everything that happened from Monday through Thursday. My small family of four is happy (yes four :) ). I am happy.

Oscar acceptance speech level stuff to follow..

I wanted to take part in the thanksgivingthingummy and thank the people who stood by me. I don't want to go on a long post because my attention (and most others') has been severely limited due to Twitter becoming my primary language of communication, followed by complete silence, and occasional eyeball rolling at the stranger standing next to me in the bus when the driver decides to stop the bus to take a sip of water and absolutely relishing it.. I digress.

I will talk about three short anecdotes One each for my parents, kid sister, and my champion, who all stood by me when the tides got rough, even as they had tonnes of their own problems to deal with.

It has been three months since I left home to chase the American dream. Three months and there has not been a single day when I didn't want to catch the first flight out back home. I like the place, in fact I love what I get to do here. Yet, "home, is where the heart is" has an altogether different meaning according to me. There have been days when I have been at my absolute worst, caught in a faraway land wondering what I am doing with my life distancing myself from everyone I love. I would feel like curling up and crying and that would make me want to call home and speak to my parents, but that's exactly when I shouldn't call them lest they feel sad. They already miss me a lot and this isn't how they'd want to see me. So I'll call a bit later, talk to them, listen to them say "we'll take care of everything, you study." It is hard to say that when you've supported someone for so long, through so many things, even after being disappointed several times. Every time I spend all the money I win at a quiz paying for dinner, I feel like I am throwing all my life's savings even though it is filling my stomach. Imagine literally throwing all your life's savings, and more, so that your son could realize his dreams. Being a parent is the most thankless job, and looking back I've never said thank you.  And I want to clear my record this very instant, thank you amma & appa.

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

I had a rough week, I was rejected from several jobs. Right from a high end software developer position to a copy room assistant position - funny how both rejection emails started with "After careful scrutiny of your application..". I have been venting it out to my kid sister, though in retrospect getting rejected from a copy room assistant position does sound funny. She's been constantly saying all these rejections come in because there is something else bigger that's waiting. Didn't realize she placed enormous trust and love on someone whom she mainly used as an exercise object for her milk teeth. Thank you, kuttima.

I will probably be yelled at for embarrassing you/writing about you like this, but I think I should thank you too. Grad school is hard. Dealing with grad school problems is hard. Dealing with new roommates is hard. Now double that and you get two people's problems. You've been dealing with my problems as well, which seem like trivialities when looked at from where I stand right now. You dealt with it. It takes a great deal of everything to be one's best friend, and a great deal more, to be something more than a best friend. Thank you, champ.

Today, I sit here wondering if I have done anything in return to these wonderful people who make up my small bubble. And I think to myself, if anything, I have done something they've wanted me to do, they've been pushing me to do, they've been praying I would do, they've been begging me to do, I found myself an internship. Hey, anybody can do that, I am someone too and I am probably bragging, so what :)

I also have to say thanks to my not so small family, my wonderful bunch of friends, without talking to whom I would have probably gone mad by now. You know who you are. People should wait to read stories about you, someday.

This is my thanksgiving, thanking the most wonderful four people, the like of which I'll probably never find again if I lose, and I never intend to. How is yours coming along? :)

Pensieve

It was a perfectly ordinary day. Just one of those days that go by unnoticed, like the hundreds of people you pass by everyday without paying any attention, without realizing they have a life just like you, and to them you're another random passerby. There isn't a lot I remember about the day. It is probably two, may be two and half years since then. It wasn't raining. It wasn't particularly sunny, nor was it cold. It is never too cold where I come from. There wasn't anything interesting to take away from the classes that day. I don't remember what I had for lunch. I don't even remember what I was wearing. I don't remember most conversations I had that day. In fact, I don't remember anything but a single montage.

No words. We were just walking. Next to each other. No, not hand in hand. I never got to do that. I hadn't realized how much I have walked around inside the campus. I can't describe how much but if you asked my 5 year old self I would be complaining a lot because it was too much walking.

There is always something to talk about, nothing in particular, nothing about anything significant. Just something, exchange of words which just reassure you that there's a conversation going on here and you're a part of it.

We walked. A lot. May be we were walking in circles, through the same places, over and over again. We smiled, a lot. You know when you cross the road with your parent and they instinctively hold out their hand for you to grab? It was something like that. I still remember everything about those few minutes, perhaps longer, only that I can't pin point what it is. Why do words fail to capture certain things? It is like the familiar smell of lunch being cooked on a Sunday. It is everything you grew up with, every weekend, yet you cannot describe.  You can only close your eyes and let the memory wash through you. It makes me happy, like I own something that nobody else can. That evening was one such. I have had many wonderful days, so many wonderful conversations, and many more. But I revisit this memory over and over again and I feel like I should treasure this lest it escapes through the pores of my brain.

What is it about that perfectly ordinary day? I would love to go back and try to recreate the memory, only that it won't be the same. It will never be the same. Its like holding water on my palm, I can see the memory fading. I want to scream, ask myself to hold on. I see us at a distance. Walking, heads touching each other, fingers touching one another, our cells celebrating togetherness through a gazillion mini high-fives, just being happy to be around each other.

What is it about that perfectly ordinary day? I see a lot of light. Some colors. It wasn't a particularly beautiful evening, but everything seems so perfect about the evening. I remember the place. I remember feeling complete, like a wonderful feast after starving all day. I like this memory. It could very well be my favorite memory.

What is it about that perfectly ordinary day? It is just that. It was perfect and ordinary. It was just one of those days.

Clarity

In the Harry Potter universe, there is a clever mechanism inside the wizard bank, Gringotts, called the Thief's Downfall. Everyone who enters the bank to withdraw gold from a vault has to pass through it. It is present in the form of a waterfall, and it breaks all enchantments and concealment charms. Once you pass the Thief's Downfall, you will go to the other side in your truest form possible. For me, moving away from home felt like that.

Despite the acquaintances you make through internet and taking the road most traveled, you're on your own when it comes to a new place. You don't have a best friend, you don't see familiar faces when you go to the supermarket, you have to ask for directions, you don't look like the people around you, nobody recognizes you as the guy from that quiz. Robbed of all superficiality, knowledge of familiar territory, and the warmth of home, perhaps the airport's security check was life providing me with it's own version of Thief's Downfall. 

I have never been away from home (as I reiterate for the millionth time), and this move was probably the first time I went out of my comfort zone. It was a huge reality check for me; in terms of what home meant to me, what the people in my life meant to me, how many people I cared about, how many people cared about me. 

To be honest, I don't like making new friends. I am very resistant to change. I like the people I always have been with and I firmly believe it is silly to start from scratch all over again. The last 8 months of my undergrad was spent in idleness, where I could text anyone at any time of the day and would get replies. There was no lengthy conversation or discussions about anything because we were meeting almost everyday. I was meeting my school friends every weekend. I took it for granted, I liked that life. Now, everyone is busy. I feel robbed. 

This is me learning a very important lesson, something that I might never have learnt if I hadn't moved away from home. The lesson isn't about people leaving me or people finding other people, it is about the importance of forging new connections wherever I am. The difference between knowing someone and being friends with someone.

On an unrelated note, classroom felt the same way. There is no professor who hates me because I asked some cocky question in semester 3. Here I am new, another Indian student in the sea of incoming Indian students. Again, no preconceived opinions, no baggage that pulls me down. It is fun to start fresh, to make a new name for myself starting from scratch.

I believe moving away from home has made me transition to the other side in my truest form possible. Walking across unfamiliar streets, meeting strangers, acting the tourist, everyday is a new adventure.

Do you know how I got these scars?

Last night, a friend and I were discussing some disastrous things that happened to us and those around us. And not unlike the Joker, I began telling stories that started with "Do you know how I got these scars?". I thought I should share those stories (yes, plural). This will be really helpful for parents who don't know what horror stories to tell their children about kids who don't listen to their parents. Also, Game of Thrones is over so I'm trying to keep the violence content on the internet up and about. Do not continue reading if

• Seemingly humorous accounts of injuries are not your thing.
• You don't like Javagal Srinath.
• You hate me.

Steve Jobs had three stories to tell in his Stanford commencement address of 2005. I am one-upping him because I have not three, but four stories to tell.

Strike 1:

It was one summer back in the early 90s. I had just graduated from Pre.KG and was moving into LKG. I was at the doctor's place for a routine check up and we were sitting in the waiting hall. I was quite active as a kid and since it was known that I liked to play with the syringe, I was given one to play with so that I wouldn't traumatize the other kids who were waiting. I was running around with the syringe in hand imagining myself to be a superhero doctor who went around and saved lives. At one point of time, I had dropped the syringe between two rows of chairs. Now, the chairs were made of metal and were connected using rods in sets of four or five. Like any responsible kid, I did not call my parents for help but decided to go on all fours searching for the syringe and I found it without going through any trouble. But the tragic moment occurred when in the spur of victory, I got up without realizing that I was under the chair. I incurred quite a bit of damage in the middle of my head, resulting in stitches. I was the boy who lived.

Strike 2:

I used to watch a lot of cricket back when there was no IPL. After IPL, I stopped watching cricket because IPL keeps me busy enough. I was a huge fan of the previous generation Indian cricket team. When it came to pace bowling, one had to pick between Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad. I picked Javagal Srinath because whenever Venkatesh Prasad was bowling I was distracted by his watch. I used to wonder whether it would fall off his wrists so I never really noticed his bowling. I was a big fan of Srinath and used to try and imitate his bowling action. One fine day when a match was going on, I was simultaneously bowling inside the house, trying to imitate Javagal Srinath. I kept throwing the ball against the wall and diving on the cot to catch it. At one point, the ball was going to land quite far from me but I did not deter. I jumped to take the catch and I did take it, but I crashed chin first on the steel cot. I rolled down and continued playing till a couple of minutes later my dad who was in the hall noticed that I was bleeding. I still have the stitch marks on my chin, so whenever I am rubbing my chin thinking about a particular situation, it would seem like I am asking myself, "What would Javagal Srinath do?".

Strike 3:

WWE was the cool thing back then. Rebellious kids used to religiously follow WWE because some parents did not allow them to watch it. One evening while I, along with a bunch of kids, was playing hide and seek it turned into an argument about how we are grown ups now and we shouldn't play silly games like hide and seek. So we ended up playing WWE. We slotted ourselves into pairs and started fighting. I was a feather weight wrestler and was at least three times lighter than anyone around. One of them guys took it too seriously and we ended up playing the first ever 'first blood' match of our lifetime. (For those who are not familiar, 'first blood' matches are those in which the person to bleed first loses). I had injured my right indicator, just above my eye. Such was life in Madipakkam.

Strike 4:

This is my most favorite of all. When I was in class eight I was taking the final exam of the Hindi exam series which every kid back then used to write because there was nothing else to do in the evenings but to attend Hindi class. If you were a girl you went to paatu class in addition to that. If you were a boy with an unbearable voice, you could spend more time watching cartoons. I digress.

So, I had to bunk school for revision purposes as the exam was on the next day. I had come home early from Hindi class and nobody was home. I didn't have the key to the house so I resorted to roaming around my own apartment. That was when I was going through growth spurts and I prided my ability to climb walls. Every evening I used to climb the wall and walk a few feet on the wall just to see if my mother loved me enough, turns out she did as she would start yelling 20 seconds before I could even think of climbing the wall.

Since nobody was home I was free to do some wall-walking so I decided to navigate around my apartment but all the while walking on the wall. I kept walking and after a few rounds I pulled off a Humpty Dumpty (I fell off the wall).  Nature loves symmetry, and my left indicator got damaged as well.

It has been 9 years since I walked on a wall.

Forty days of filter coffee

After talking about it, blogging about it, dreaming about it, and tweeting about it for so many years, it is finally here. I am moving to a new place. I have been living in this city for 22 years, 1 month and 14 days. I will be here for another 42 days and I don't know when I will be coming back  again, hopefully soon. I write this not to evoke emotions about the city or appreciate Madras. If that was my intention I would go ahead and link the several wonderful pieces on/about Madras that people have written over the years, accompanied by photos on Polaroid and 2mp vga cameras of Madras to DSLR and Instagram photos of Chennai. My intention is to write, as it seems like forever since I wrote anything meaningful or anything I would go back and read again, for my own satisfaction. Apologies in advance for sticking to the soon to be NRI theme of writing about home town.

It has become a cliche to describe Madras. It has become a cliche to call it Madras as a group of people collectively decided that we would feel closer to the city if we shun the name Chennai. Madras is beautiful like that, it makes your possessiveness come out.

For me Madras is not about Mylapore or Mambalam, for the only Mambalam I know is Ranganathan street, and some textile shop I used to visit twice or thrice every year to buy clothes - uniform, Deepavali clothes, and birthday dress - and all the Mylapore I know is from attending Landmark quiz year after year, taking 29c from Mylapore station and then back. I am probably the most non-Madras Madras fellow. I still haven't visited Broken Bridge (okay Broken Bridge is Chennai not Madras), and I would ask for directions at least twice if you ask me to come anywhere that does not involve Mount road. For me Madras is about my house, my school, and sathsangam theru (street).

I have moved houses only once in my entire life. At the age of 11, we finally reached a point where the most popular middle class dream was no longer a dream, we bought a house. It was just before the real estate boom, when the actual middle class (not the middle class from movies where they have a car and a house with a garden in the middle of Adayar or Tiruvanmayur) could still afford to buy houses with general help from the folks at ICICI. We bought a two bedroom house with a kollapuram and a thunithovaikkara kal (backyard and a wash-stone), which were my paati's favorite thing about the house.

My family didn't travel much, we still don't. We went to Kodaikanal one summer, Kanyakumari one summer and back when my athai and athimber were in Calcutta (the name was changed to Kolkata the year after I visited), we went there one summer. It was the only place I had gone outside the state till I went to Bombay just 2 years ago. It was fun in Kolkata where I actually found practical use for the English I learnt in school. I stayed there for a good month and a half, made friends in the neighbourhood to whom I actually conversed in English (my mom, an English teacher was so proud), and played cricket every evening. So to say, all my Madras experiences come from home, and I don't see Madras and home as two different entities.

I am sitting here while it is raining outside trying to recollect as much as I can, trying to relive everything that meant to me, scared that if I fail to do this there will be too little from this place I will be taking with me.

I am not boasting here but when I was born I was a favorite in my neighbourhood. My first house was an apartment, and my parents had lived there only for a few months before my arrival. My parents are wonderful neighbours and fortunately everyone around were also wonderful. They helped us out a lot, especially with me being a toddler and both my parents working. I still remember Archana akka, Asha akka and their mother playing with me. Even today at my place I talk about how Archana amma (that's what I called Archana akka's mother) scolded me every time I went outside the house without underwear. Fun times.

There is paatu maami across the house we lived in. My sister went for classes ever since she was 4. Even before that, when I was about 1 year old, her students who were my mom's students at school used to come home and play with me. I still remember paatu mami's daughter Mahi akka, and her student Gayathri akka playing with me. (looks like I was popular among the ladies back then :D ) I believe I am still their favorite, a couple of decades later. Me riding the tricycle, being chased by puppies and developing a scare for dogs ever since then, everything happened at home. I will take all these with me when I leave Madras.

All these happened in Sathsangam street, which used to be a quiet neighbourhood (except during the December kutcheri season) in Madipakkam. Kanchi Sankaracharya visited Sathsangam (it was two doors from our house). The most brilliant bajji stalls used to arrive every year as the December season started. The number of apartments and houses on the street slowly increased and I made a lot of friends over time. Your childhood gets even better when you do the growing up together. In a street full of middle class families, there was nobody under the age of 12 who spent their time playing video games or watching cartoons. We were outside the house almost all day. Since everyone knew everyone else, there was no scare, no hesitation in letting kids out to play. It was perfect. I wouldn't trade it for any memory.

We played a tonne of cricket. There have been days when I returned to the house only to have lunch and dinner. We started playing at 8 in the morning and it was cricket, seven stones and what not till it was too dark to spot the ball. After sunset we played hide and seek, in a way nobody would have. Imagine about 20-25 kids hiding in a street with about 50 houses and apartments. It was a riot. A single game used to last for hours and it went on till 9pm or whenever everyone was called in for dinner. For me Madras is about this madness.

Once I moved to the new place life slowed down. I had grown up. I played with a different bunch of people, my classmates. My school is famous for being strict but I couldn't have had this amount of fun anywhere else. I have and had such wonderful friends. From going to Birla planetarium as school excursion to getting caught in class 10 for playing cricket in the middle of exams, we did everything that we were supposed to and everything that we were not supposed to. I still remember watching Venkat Prabhu's 'Saroja' along with 25 other people in the local movie theatre. Handsdown, the best theatre experience I've had. I doubt I will experience anything similar again.

I think I grew up at the perfect time period, the 90s and the early 2000s. Then suddenly everything seems to have changed. I still thank the stars that I was late to the internet, the mobile phone and everything that makes up my life today, because I would have missed on living through most of my wonderful memories.

Whenever someone says Madras, people seem to have this image of a person who went to PSBB, IIT coaching, Kapaleeswarar temple, and likes HSB-Filter coffee's fan page on Facebook. I did none of those and I secretly feel good about taking memories of Madras that are not stereotypes, incidences that can never be guessed. Like Bajji from stalls outside Sathsangam, being in the marching band at Prince school, climbing my first stage in a large event at Chutti Vikatan school quiz, getting yelled at by KP Latha for not drawing margins, and always receiving a 'not enough' from my correspondent while receiving my exam papers no matter whether I got a 95 or a 99.

This is home for me. My Madras which is different from yours, which I am sure is unique in its own way, because none of the stereotypes can define anyone from Madras. Madras is like the definition of love, everyone thinks they know how it is when two people are in love, but can never point and say this is it. I think only you know how you love Madras, while only I know how I love it.

Hatched

I don't see it as yet another blog, but it probably will be the last time I go through the signing up for a new blogging site ordeal before giving up on this (I shall persist) idea of writing about things in more than 140 characters. I started a blog on tumblr and started that also with a similar post, talking about communicating in more than 140 characters. Brevity, indeed is the soul of wit but sadly, sometimes I need to type a long incoherent post to end the day. 'Tis one such post you're reading right now and I shall thank you, new reader of a new blog.

*****

A new beginning deserves a new blog, incidentally my first blog post ever was titled 'a new beginning'. Well, this is a different new beginning, in fact a new new beginning. Something about writing this post sitting on an uncomfortable chair in the hot Madras weather says this is the beginning of a good blog, something that I will be faithful to, something that will have more than just a few posts. I'll leave out opinionated statements about writing for writing's sake, or whatever it is that makes me write here, because as long as I write it doesn't matter and if I don't write, then again, it doesn't matter.

I am not sure why I am talking about a new beginning here, when I am spending my days following arguments on the internet and sleeping through some great football matches. But soon enough, there are some significant changes scheduled to happen in my life and I believe this is going to be the place where I'll talk about that and everything else.

I really am not someone who uses "time flies like an arrow" whenever I get within a 100 mile radius of a watch, but it hit me hard when I was asking my friend about how his week was after he said something about not having enough time. Yes, I was 'catching up' with my friend next to whom I was sitting for almost 4 years. I am still spending my summer 'vacation' while he will soon finish one month at work. It struck me hard and I found myself feeling sad about everything that's changed so rapidly. 4 years is quite a long period without change. Well, it is finally here.

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PS: The post is beautiful isn't it? Earlier today somewhere else I said,

I think the most inanimate thing I can fall in love with is a typeface.

I guess this is my new home.