Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got til its gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot...

Home...

Looking back on the last day of my first term back in school, I can hardly believe that it was only a short 4 months ago that I moved to this new place I call home now. But is isn't quite home yet. Even though this wondrous city has welcomed me ever so warmly, and charmed me in more ways than I had imagined; despite the many highs and ample firsts of the term that went by, I have to admit I haven't looked forward to going back home and to family quite as much in many years as I have these last few weeks. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had fervently wished for a year to end and for a new one to begin either.
In years past, the end of a year would bring with it a sense of wonder at everything the year gone by had brought with it, and a twinge of sadness even at time's relentless march, quickly churning through the present to the recent past, and just as quickly to a more distant one. But not so this year. I am ready to flip the page, and kindle the dying embers back to a burning fire, bright with hope and cheer.
Somehow, knowing that I will be in the familiar comfort of home as I watch the year trickle down to its very last minute makes the wait seem bearable. Oh, 2011! despite everything you have taken, I am thankful for the smidgeon of courage and hope you have left behind. And thankful too, that you've spared me a few precious days to savour the pleasure of fingering the shape of words in my head with much reading, and even some writing. In closing, I offer you, these...

--

Year’s End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell

And held in ice as dancers in a spell

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown

Composedly have made their long sojourns,

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze

The random hands, the loose unready eyes

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

- Richard Wilbur

the write experiment

A recent article on being socially hyper-neworked, reminded me of two things.

The first.

No matter what the medium and how fast and new and convenient (add any number of other incentives), it seems that the onus of keeping communication alive can still remain as one-sided as it did in the day of snail mail. I suppose I should have learnt my lesson by now. But the eternal optimist in me (or perhaps, it is the love of writing in me?) persists. As a child, I took to the concept of 'Penpals' on Young Times (a supplement of Khaleej Times) instantly. Unfortunately, my pals' responses went from excited to tepid to none at all. My parents reasoned that clearly this was a lot of work to undertake for the sake of complete strangers. They had a point.

So, I tried again with best friends. As I had many opportunities to experiment with this variant of penpals, what with moving schools, apartments, cities and countries (with the last one, I was hopeful of adding to my other agenda of collecting stamps ;)), I figured this model was guaranteed a greater degree of success. I would studiously compile addresses before each move and set aside generous portions of my pocket money for stationery and stamps right after, and promptly send my friends a letter with my new address. Ironically, with this second model, the responses started directly from tepid and rapidly progressed to none at all. On occasion I would receive letters written by the respective mothers. Sigh.

As luck would have it, from time to time our worlds would collide again. And what had been painfully buried as a failed experiment would be dug out again, by a careless comment, such as "I used to love getting your letters. And then you moved." I would think to myself, at least they loved it. Oh well.

And then email arrived. I don't think I need to elaborate on the response rate with this new experiment. :)

The second.

Social networking sites have created a new layer of awareness. What was blissfully ignored is now dangled blatantly in your face. For instance, in years past, I could be completely unaware that a friend was in town at the same time as I was, but chose to call upon another/other friend/s forgetting me altogether. Now, I cannot. What's curious though, is a good number of these kind folks are the ones to have taken the initiative to search you up and add you as a 'friend' in the first place, leaving you with the challenge of trying to figure out if the person now sporting uber-starightened hair, a new-happily-married-last name, and an interesting online avatar is the same person you saw everyday in school a decade ago; posing the dilemma of whether or not to post birthday wishes on his/her wall; and the familiar response to your 'How are you? It's nice to connect after so long'.

Someday in the not so distant future, we might be able to surround ourselves with the virtual clones of everyone in our social network. I wonder what the communication experiment will result in then. A babel of noises? Or, perhaps, a shattering silence. Only time can tell. I do know that I will continue to write...and sing :)

As Arjun says, just breeeeathe...:)

a bar of soap

Little nuggets of happiness are stored in the most unexpected places. Yesterday, after an evening walk at the beach with my parents, Mom and I decided to stop at a road-side bead shop on the way back home, and stumbled into another store that had eluded us for many days. The store, (appropriately) named EcoNut, was supposed to house all kinds of natural, minimally packaged, organic goodies of the kind that is rare to find these days with the explosion of retail multiplexes in the city. As overjoyed as we were to have found the place at long last, I was even more thrilled to find that they stocked NEEV soaps!

A couple of years ago, a friend had brought me a soap handcrafted by a community of rural women in a village in Jharkhand; the enterprise itself had been set up to employ rural people while creating a more eco-friendly alternative to the most commonly marketed soaps. I was sold. But it was many months before I actually tried it out. When the most favorable conditions of discovering I was down to the last few drops of my body wash and no time to make a dash to the store coincided, I went hurriedly looking for that most curiously packaged bar of goodness. At the risk of sounding like a self-appointed brand manager for NEEV, I will proclaim that it was and is still, the most wonderfully moisturizing and refreshing piece of toiletry ever to have been made. Its fragrance (of that earthy first-raindrops-on-parched-mud kind) was so redolent that it lingered for hours afterward filling my senses at every corner of my apartment. Panic instantly gave way to the most luxurious bath I ever remember having. Alas, like all things material, that bar of soap vanished into edible oil. And with it went my morning thrill of being surrounded by its exquisite aroma.

Now, nearly two years thence, I have been reunited with this wondrous creation of man (& woman- please check out their website, they do some awesome work!). :)