I'll be there for you

Eby I am confused, I don’t know if this is right, it pains me to see you lying still like this and I regret for asking you to shut up those last moments. You know the doctors say you wont wake up, you are brain dead but how do I tell them I don’t want to believe it? You always played dead remember? I wish I could ask your mom what to do.She was always good at deciding during a crisis. She always surprised me with her decisions and now she has left me alone to decide this. You love her more don’t you, you guys are teaming up against me huh ? You want to stay together, punishing me for traveling around and leaving you alone always?

Doctors say you can’t listen to what I say but I know they are lying. You know this aunty came to see you and she told me there is a little boy like you who is not well. She says if you give your big heart that boy can play and go to school.

Your mom would laugh if she saw me now, I have never cried before you know? I told her crying was girlish. But I don’t care anymore .

What do you say? Will your mom be mad at me? I don’t know da I am not as strong as you both; I keep hoping you will come back. Won’t you? I met that boy he likes Sachin like you and he is in 2nd STD too. And guess what he sang for me? your favourite song. He asked me to say Hi to you.

I wish I could join you people too, you know how lonely it is back home. I have not touched the clay model you set out to dry. I promise I won’t stick my notepad over your paintings on the refrigerator. Akshay asked for your ball last evening. I said I need to ask you. He is not that bad huh?

Your mom is gonna kill me , I opened the cooker before the pressure left and guess what ? The roof looks yellow, remember the commotion she made last time. You know what? I wish she came back to kill me.I miss her fights.

You are laughing within aren’t you? Does it hurt a lot da? It’s been a month since we spoke. Your mom speaks to me at times you know? I hear her humming in the kitchen, yelling at me to reduce the volume of the TV. It’s you who left me alone.

Rachel misses you a lot, she has not eaten properly the past one month. She sniffs around searching for you beneath the sofa and bed, she is my comapnion in this game of hide and seek , we both want to believe you will be back.

His name is Aditya you know? that kid who has the heart problem, they call him Adi. The doctors say he does not have much time, and I can help him it seems, but I don’t want to leave you.
They say you can’t be kept like this for long.
Am I doing the right thing? Will you forgive me if I was wrong?

Listen champ ! remember we played rescue missions, you are gonna be a real hero now , you are gonna save Aditya and Papa's proud of you. You are brave aren't you ?

I’ll always love you da and I know you will be alive through Aditya .

what could i say....

What could I say about a woman who has the heart of gold and the fire in to have reached her all the way to where she is from a little village she left at the age of 15 ?

What could I say about a woman whose words were as crisp and warm at the same time that it melted your heart?

What could I say about a woman to whom no situation in life was perplexing, every obstacle was an opportunity from god?

What could I say about a woman whose immense faith and patience would put your arrogance to shame?

What could I say about a woman who cherished a gift like Pieta and bore the same feelings with reverence in life?

What could I say about a woman who would not cry when being tortured with pain that would choke any mortal man?

What could I say about a woman who taught what it was to celebrate life in adversity?

What could I say about a woman who on losing her husband would say to her children lets fight this together?

What would I tell a woman who tells her children pursue your dreams and never regret in life even if it’s at her cost?

What could I say about a woman who would smile to any problem on earth and say is that all?

What could I say about a woman who would comfort you on her way to the operation theatre saying I’ll be back?

What could I say about a woman who has lived on this earth for 60 years and still sees the beauty of life?

All I could say is she’s my MOTHER

“I never realised you are the reason I am here Mom and i had no idea , that all those qualities people saw in me was a reflection of yours.

Happy Birthday old lady- though you would argue you are young and I admit your sense of style in 60 is something I wont ever inherit not even in my late twenties

Teena's Diary entry -Chennai Book fair

Dear diary,

I owe this post to some of my friends. How shall i begin? How about once upon a time 4 IITians set out for a book fair :) nah.... pretty conventional huh ? well IITians !!! and book sale !!!! . Well if you have lived inside an IIT and if you belong to a non- tech background it would amaze you. But chances are minimal that someone belonging to that category would read this.



When I joined IIT I often heard people saying " why do we need a humanities dept" ? some said "man I wish they taught enough vocab for CAT and GRE and stayed to that alone " . When I met a bunch of Btechs at chapel I never wanted or wished to know them. Well that's history today they are very much a part of my life here, I hope I mean something to them too :)








Books are my passion , my conversations often trail to what I read and whose thoughts inspire me. So when it was time for Chennai book fair I was excited, but I never found anyone outside my department who read, naturally people here read other books to cure insomnia so when Jils and Sonu said they are joining me to the fair I thought they were joking .. but they weren't.

Book shopping is the only shopping that makes sense to me, with clothes and jewellery I am pathetic. Sonu was the highest bidder hunting for biographies and books on Einstein in the 300 + stalls there.

Book lovers identify covers from a distance like dogs sniff and find food, we were hunting for a copy of Alchemist for podimol our fourth member frevently that any cover with yellow and red cover page would draw us like travellers being drawn to mirage.

We paid homage to my favourite stall " left word" and got some food for thought with leftist lit. Sonu kept jumping for biographies - he is a collector of books rather avid reader , he needs treatment for compulsive shopping :P

Jils and I preferred pirated books so chose only rare books from the stall, Sonu dead against piracy kept buying originals, podi seemed lost in between she was trying to upgrade herself from Nancy drew to not so intellectual but digestible stuff - you know like kids proceeding from cerelac to solid food :) she finally managed to get Alchemist and Tottochan though i am sure she is reading none these days.





It was also an oppurtunity for us to share stories of books we read, viewpoint on ideologies and on our way there and way back we were like excited kids talking on and on, Jils says once you make a tradition of going to a book fair it continues, I cant stand crowds but that days among thousands of people and commotion in 300 stalls I discovered bliss.

May the book lovers tradition of going to annual fair continue... Jils, Sonu and Podi this one's for your cheers !!

Ms FOI

We named her “ FOI”- Flight of ideas. She had them frequently. Funniest part was that she never realised it. We would be talking about someone and she would talk about something incoherent. Those of us who knew her would understand it’s related to something she spoke earlier that day or perhaps that week. She would begin her sentences like “ He is mean”… now it’s for us to decipher who the ‘he’ is and why he was ‘mean’. Or maybe she would suddenly mimic her nephew. Sudden sight of something her nephew liked or asked her to get would take her there. Then it would be recounting her previous experiences home, but in between she would sing a song and then her conversation would trail of to her first experience of singing that in turn to some movie… that would lead to the name of some movie and some actor and mostly it would turn out like the actor had nothing to do with the movie. She would then come back to her nephew when we all would be stuck wondering about the movie she referred to. That was her, full of life like a butterfly flying from one place to another.
Her sorrow, her fears, her joy were all unhidden impulses, easy to identify, easy to relate to. She could never hide anything not to people she loved. But yet at times I find her alien, she could alienate herself. If she was full of life, she also lived life to her terms, she had conditioned herself with her lifestyle to be alone, she enjoyed moving alone but wanted us to watch her from a distance. If we alienated ourselves she would be crest fallen though she never realised how it affected us when she did the same.
She had timing for humour intentional or unintentional I never could know. Everything about her was comical her expressions, her FOI effect, her laughter, her tone of all. She had a flat base voice, more or less a dead voice when she said something and the melodramatic expression of a worn out warrior.
She was often lost in herself, but thanks to her FOI effect she would forget her fears in a second because she could escape by flying to the next topic , her mind was like a discontented viewer surfing channels , the moment discontentment crept in her mind switched channels.
She believed she had few problems; firstly she is colour blind not the technical colour blindness this was an advanced case . So if she told us purple for instance, we knew it’s blue. She had difficulty comprehending stories that meant if we watched the same movie she claims she didn’t understand half of it- no she is normal she could answer anything scientific , but you know you could say she is aesthetically challenged :) . She cannot relate tune to words.she hears them totally messed , well she got her genre of music , trust me she could make rock music sound like lullabies and threatens us saying she would marry a musician to compensate her musical loss . Same discordant relation she had with her room, she could not place things as it was maintained the result was, we could see her rummaging for basic things under her bed and her room is a certified archaeological museum .

But to us she is the coolest, the joker, the tragedy queen, who would in great adversities remark in her dead tone “ oh is that all, why bother” and in silliest situation scream “ Tell me what to do”… That’s her our dear FOI who would talk about Einstein and APJ and her nephew and Surya's Vel , and sing varanam ayiram and talk about Panchathantra all in one sequence.

Mr Butterfly Effect

He was full of irrational beliefs, the most superstitious person I had ever met. He believed if butterflies crossed your path your day would be great. And there was this child like smile on his face when he saw a butterfly and his eyebrows would arch in a questioning gesture telling me see butterflies!!
He believed if you shaved your day was gonna be hell. He was scared like hell of number 13, he avoided talking to people with roll number 13, he avoided fixing up meetings on 13, he hated being 13th in a line and in fact his hobby was finding out what happened to people given number 13 as roll number. I once tried rationalising with him asking what about people born on the date 13th? Or what happens on 13th birthday. But as you know irrationals cannot be reasoned with so I always gave up.

If he ever lost anything he would draw up his irrational theories, he was a walking, talking Harry Potter who lived in a world of magic and was contented with the bare minimum. The number of good luck charms he carries would amaze you, he has no track of the number of shirts he has, but good luck charms yes.
You talk about war, epidemics, anything sensitive you can see him blinking at you and saying , oh you are so serious and intelligent , which makes me feign a smile and wonder “ which planet is he from ?”. I suspect he never reads a news paper; well he was not very social either. Irrationality made him a dreamer and dispassionate about things that boiled me up, so when butterflies excited him , a book review caught mine.
It’s amazing how friends come in an assorted box called life. Each time I waited for a friend who matched my interest, and in the long run I realised “hey I got a bunch of eccentric weirdo”. I would yell years ago if I saw a person excitedly counting train boggies or stopping at signal to stare at an aeroplane or stop my work to talk about how many laps he ran. But that’s how he was. You accept it, his alimentary canal doesn’t function because what he hogs do not seem to show anywhere in his body or was it his digestive system that didn’t work?

But he is so different from “FOI” at least. Well who’s FOI? Wait for the next blog, I am opening up my assorted box, don’t tell me I got a bunch or wierdos for F.R.I.EN.D.S I love them anyways 

I can’t reveal their names so for now this is Mr Butterfly Effect!

Your not being around

Your not being around does not pain me
Actually it’s the void that annoys me
Remember I promised not to miss you
But now I realise how much I do

You were never the comforter
You were but my staunch supporter
Do you still remember the good old times?
The pranks we planned
The dreams we shared
That definitely was the best of times

Where did we go wrong?
Did I grow up or did I grow out
When was that moment I moved out
Why didn’t I know you weren’t strong?

It takes a life time for some to know their dear ones
It takes someone’s life to tell them their dear one
It cost your life to tell us what you were
It cost you , your life to tell me who you were

Did I forget to ask you how you are there
I always smile when I goof asking if you are bored there
Time and space cannot steal your presence
Memories cannot steal from me your essence

I regret for what you never told me
I know those secrets you buried from me
Did you know they echo around?
How I wish I could turn around


I hate you for not being with me
I hate you for making me a bold dummy
But of all I hate you daddy
For loving me the most and believing in me

I just love this