odd rambles

Should I start by saying that I spent half the day trying to retrieve the password to this account....(note : this was yesterday…..and hopefully that was the last time I abandoned the blog midway)...
As kids we wrote about "Visit to the zoo" and "scene at the railway station"...atleast I have never been asked to write about just bout anything...you know, 'anything'...or were we too young to think about 'anything'...or was it we were too young to know 'anything' about 'anything'....

let me give them some credit...ok...probably they wanted to get us started..but I guess if at school all I wrote about was what I was asked about..answered questions, I didnt learn much.
but everything said and done, not done...some of my friends write really well....and these 'you know whos' should abandon any ambitions they have of becoming lawyers..they should just write.

moving on.. let me indulge myself, indulge in some self obssessed talk...but before that I might as well remind myself here that I have to dedicate one blog to posts that were started and nvr posted in the past one year.. I have been asked to blog about recent events...about how I was woken up by an eunuch's voice in the compartment when she started abusing a man who (dared to) snap back at here when she demanded money….and how my bleary eyes at 5.30 in the morning saw her flashing two guys one after another (as in upper berth, then lower berth..yu see)...or probably it was a bad dream.. or should i blog about work and such other things you know..dunno about others...or what they may have to say......is this the best kind of work I could have done, is it not…challenging and the ilk..but that is a subjective issue as they call it....i cannot ignore the disappointment that is so plainly writ on people's faces when I tell them that I am doing fine...so many of them are rustling through employments news for me...the usual think that either am not competitive..or that I am biding time..about the previous I cannot be objective..of the latter I am sure - I am not, I dont even know whether I value that trait in the first place...but yes I am not biding time...I am not waiting for my time to come...I dont care about competitiveness..about the feathers in my cap..I just want to do everything that I have wanted to do,..ok that is vague..but you get the drift I guess,..... ...I know I want more..that has kept me in the fray...I cant want it the way they want it...more of what I cant bother to explain....chastize me….but I am beyond wanting to change your way...
……blabber, burble, blabber,..a lil more of this blabber..
..I just wish I could do something about them not seeing disappointment on my face…neways I could round up a few things over the last few months...one of them not being why I have not been writing, ...
the jamun tree jokes came..and went...
it isnt a struggle out here..but kind of weird...my life has been kind of rewired between few of the same things, few of the same people...deja vu you say....the same Citycentre, manisquare, beleghata..college..for the better or worse..I dont know..I am too young to be worrying...........
..or should I go on and talk about the scheming PG Aunty (her ploys are straight out of K Soaps)...my PG mates..a bunch of striplings barely out of their teens..their bfs, breakups, patchups, teddies, black nail paint, bangles, frills..life is somewhere between all of this...
O or should I tell yu we have our own version of the ugly naked guy.. o ya, there is this pyscho who bathes with his windows wide open…and this window opens into our yard....
.....ramble, ramble, ramble rumble rumble....ramble...
P.S., NO, I am not being pseudo philosophical….if I had had the powers of Dumbledore..this would just have been a piece of my thought put away in a pensive.

When they don’t talk and say it’s the jamun tree

She had lived in the neighbourhood. I don’t remember when she died. I just remember the legend. The legend of Mania(No. that is the name, pronounced Maa-ni-aa) that followed, that lived through blackouts of summer and the usual loadsheddings. We as children were hushed up with ghost stories and Mania featured in them regularly. She would be that frail white face in the nothingness of darkness, the white sari and the anklets that make imaginary sounds as she glided through the blackness of the night (my present idea of ghosts is quite coloured by dementors, ..too much of Harry potter you say) …and all of that (We were also told about this severed leg which (or the ghost of which) would go about taking revenge, no, I will not go into that..quite gory…although looking back..Why were 5 year olds subjected to such horrors?)

There used to be this jamun tree . The canopy mostly wore itself thin on that tree. And if you looked at the moon through its leaves..wooo.It was spooky. There was something about its smoky (or ashy) green leaves which brought about the eerie once the sun set.

The jamun tree among other things, saw quite a spate of unnatural deaths around it. Some just plain accidental but mostly unexplained or unnatural.

Our house is the last one of our block. As much as I loved the garden, the wet greenness of monsoons and thelackadaisical, carefree and bougainvillea laden winters, Mania’s supposed active after life on that tree, the jamun tree, made the thought of crossing over to our neighbours place anytime after dark , one laden with the probability of a woman in white pouncing on me. (As a child am sure we don’t need an overactive imagination to think of ghosts).

A few years back another neigbour who had shifted to another neighbourhood along with his family was found dead under mysterious circumstances. We still don’t know whether it was a suicide or whether he was murdered. A couple of other accidental deaths happened, one of electric shock and another was a freak road accident. You might ask why I wrote all this, I don’t know now..but when I had started writing they did seem pertinent. My own superstitious conclusions surround the fact that these were people who had lived in quite proximity of that tree. But that is besides the point.

In the meanwhile, our immediate neighbours (they have been here for some 7 years but I still refer to them as the new neighbours, the jamun tree actually belongs to their compound) had been unabashedly ‘trimming’ away the tree (they said there wasn’t enough sunlight for their stupid vegetable garden) until you could say “it used to be a tree”. For the past couple of months all that has remained of it is a foot long stump.

I don’t think its been a month since Gopi, their daughter died (name changed for “I don’t know what” reasons). She had had a chequered background. They say in the days before she died, Gopi used to sit for hours on the stump, thinking, probably contemplating suicide.

Thus interestingly, it again came down to the jamun tree. The neighbours talked, we talked. Tongues let loose by what if not sensational in the first place, had to be made into one. Non one will probably know why she died.

Her father was a drunkard, wife beater, she had once eloped, …all of this is quite unimportant. Hush, did you say, did I say, did the neigbours say.

Mania was raped and murdered, this is an useless piece of information. And more importantly, not something I can still confirm. Like with a lot of other things in life, it came down to the jamun tree. Its so much easier to talk about the jamun tree, isn’t it.

weekend update

We finally have a lawnmower.

heard that its taking 24 hrs from Bhubaneswar to Kolkata.

HR Classes were again in the middle of a storm. this time the winds uprooted everything taht came in the way. Dykes, dams ...how is this to be helped?????

I have gotten into the habit of beating up people. Have to do something about that.

After Outsider, for the first time a book has really excited me..Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook has achieved exactly what Coelho failed to do in Eleven Minutes...YES...showing an effortless understanding of women ....(k fine, it was written by a woman)....guess men will never accept that there are territories they can only invade but never really occupy....that kind of humility is unknown to them.

Can't believe ..I read the preface twice!!!!

And I have 1 GB (almost) music on my phone...isnt that cooool!!!!

Why do yu want to do lawww *nose up, disgusted*?????

Today I added Hemant to my Orkut friend’s list. Flashback to circa 1992. Hemant Kumar joined DAV (Section 2E) the same day as I had some 16 years back and its been some 13 years since I have had any communication/interaction with him. He was this angry kid with that frown, like, forever on his face. If I am not mistaken I was Roll no.32 and he was 33.The only thing that was common between us was that we had entered class after every body had, with that same grumpy face. My face must have been grumpier coz I had entered class with a heavy bag and ..well.. a shaven head (that was the last time). I cannot definitely say so, but all the photographs of that period do suggest the same.

That was also when this bright eyed girl, with neatly braided long hair, offered me the seat next to her. If the circumstance sounds familiar, yes, we did become best friends.
That was also the time when my English teacher, who was also my class teacher then, became my favourite teacher. Ma’am could, without turning her head from the blackboard, ask some back bencher to shut up. I always thought it was some sort of magic. How could she know who exactly was talking even without looking at them? I had only begun to acquire the garrulity that is now associated with me. So one fine day, I asked her, “Madam, how do you do that?” She smiled and said, “I just know, …if you ever do take my place, you will also learn.”
For some reason, I remember my English, Hindi and Social Studies teachers more than the Science and Maths ones. Actually, I remember both, but the former have inspired me more. Ironically I learnt to reason in the formers' classes and it naturally transgressed into my having greater interest in human reason than scientific reason. Perhaps over the years that translated into my desire of not becoming a doctor, engineer or scientist. Perhaps that’s why I went on to consider a career in some twenty odd professions (notably I had wanted to become a journalist (a freelancer, preferably a Times of India Sunday columnist), cartoonist, a Nat Geo Photographer, actor (ahem, not exactly), travel guide(yes), movie director, copywriter, advertising professional, architect etc among teh feasible ones)... Perhaps that’s why, like to many others, law happened to me – this fascination for human reason.

It wasn’t just a whim or intuition after all.

tattlertells

I do intend to continue this one...but everything I have to say just wont fit in here..so ...the alter ego is available at tattlertales.blogspot.com...i still dont know why I chose that name????...but since most of the time I am not in my right minds and do not anyways make sense...I guess...that should only add to my virtues (thats one word ..havent heard being used in quite a long time,no?)

a certain writing on the wall... and defenestration..

ok what i wrote was reiterated in class, in a 'fashion' I don't quite agree with. A writing on the wall can only be literally so unless it is from that magical hand. Magical or otherwise, that hand belongs to the teacher. the blackboard belongs to the teacher.

Dictionary.com Word of Day for Thursday was "Defenestrate". As usual I tried to make a guess as to what it might mean. The pea in my head suggested that it could be anything between removing ones intestines and dignity. obviously all this happened in the few seconds of tracing my imagination along my eyelids, quite like when your 5th grade teacher has just asked you a question (and you pretend to read the answer from somewhere on the ceiling), although quite unlike the nervous waiter at Cafe Noorani who rolled up his eyes to remember the menu.

OK defenestrate means "to throw out of a window". unless used in the context of mundane stuff like chocolate wrappers, Lays packs and the occasional beer bottle (OK, not so much), it makes for interesting talk. my earliest and for that matter the latest memories of the phrase in any significant context are associated with teachers.

you don't get your textbook to class or are caught chatting and Rita Ma'am, my High School English teacher would either "break your head like a coconut" or "throw you out of the window". just imagine, had she then said "i will defenestrate you", we would probably have learnt another word, but the magic (read silence/obedience whatever was required) could have worked with "throw you out of the window" only. perhaps it worked best, if it was some scrawny guy. Because, then it seemed lesser of a threat and more of a possibility.

I will skip those instances where similar threats were issued by dad or when any of the "siblings" or cousins would hold something valuable to me right next to the window to ensure its free fall out of it if their immediate demands were not met.

Historically defenestration has been associated with acts of political dissent. but i think history was made in Noojiedom, when the king (with that oh so benign smile) said "You can do whatever you want in your room. Just don't throw them out of the window."

HYPERRIA!

So as nostalgia sets in, flows and overflows and nauseates my tribe (read fifth years) …and I boohoo my way through the Vitamin C “Graduation Song”…or PROBABLY because of the precedent set by seniors …the fifth year syndrome of “LACK”….. "absolute lack"… I join in…into the eccentric and not so eccentric lot of bloggers For the record, this is the fourth time I am starting a blog, two of the three previous attempts being abandoned for the sole reason that I asked each time, first to myself and then in the blog… “why blog?”… “I mean …what am I doing???” This time around, therefore, let me put real (read random/arbitrary) reasons behind…and put it this way…people decided to swim, strum, salsa...so I decided to blog… The selfish reasons would include finding more takers for my jibber jabber.

I watched Sarkar Raj. Good movie. The sepia tone has been put to excellent use.

OK Human Rights. That’s the one which has managed to create some flutter over the past few days (for whatever reasons).
Actually I was discussing this with a friend. From the look of things they are more keen on ‘teaching’ human rights than making us learn (in triter words “imbibe”) human rights (although I have no clue as to why we would need to learn, either). Look at it this way. Say most of us become corporate lawyers (which we will). We would be anyways working for someone who is rich, powerful or as is in most cases, both. These are the last of the lot who may have human rights issues. These are almost never the people who are at the receiving end.
Then why not make use of the time at law school. Send us to work under a human rights lawyer, create legal awareness etc as a part of the curriculum (and please lets not even start to talk about first year NGO internships!). Instead of the three classes a week, set aside a day to be dedicated to some human rights project, where we actually go out and help people. Do you really think we or anybody for that matter in this country needs to know the difference between human right laws and humanitarian law? Do we really need to know the entire discourse on rights, what rights may be in the abstract? Rights are a reality. Period.
If an area does not have a hospital or drinking water, the only way to dealing with it is give them a hospital! Give them water!!. …what on earth would this ‘discourse’ help them in???????
One has to be in the middle of things. Learning the academics’ way can create only academics (the armchair sort as they say). and even though it has been clarified in class i refused to agree, because the results of these academic efforts have to be visible, tangible...with the academic obsession with abstraction lets not lose reality to the abstract.
Future discussions won’t be this random, its just that all of it is such a sham. Damn!!