I started out on the walk with an irrational longing to be in Mumbai.

Perhaps it had to do with the dull lighting in the Delhi street, reminding me of the long stretch outside my home and hostel in Mumbai. Or the sudden remembrance of the craziness that the city is during 'Ganpati'. Or the song, "Kya kare kya na kare", and Aamir Khan's Mumbaiyya Hindi in Rangeela, the first time I remember registering the way Mumbaikars speak Hindi. Going down the nostalgia spiral that began with Rangeela, distinct memories associated with the song suddenly hit hard: me (and my sister, I think) hanging on to every word in the songs of Rangeela at my uncle's home in Borivli. The cassette cover of the album, with Aamir, Urmila and Jackie Shroff, and my uncle's signature on it with the date he purchased the cassette. Of long (boring) days there, filled with Champak collections borrowed from the local library on my aunt's account, of learning to cycle on the hilly slopes of the locality, the local bhandaar (grocery store) and my silly joke of how it sounded like bandar (monkey).

"Kya kare..." ended and "Behene de" played. Yes, it went well with the sombre, reflective mood. I thought some more of Mumbai, and the dirty stares I get in Delhi. The fact that there are still cycle rickshaws in Delhi. I knew Mumbai couldn't possibly match up to Delhi in the latter's variety of food, but hey, I'm no foodie. I'm happy with Mumbai and its sea, I decided. 

Yael Naim's "New soul" came up next. Nope. I don't want happy. I want sad, reflective, slow.

"Raat ki daldal hai..." Sukhwinder Singh! I remembered a school-time conversation when two friends were arguing on whether Sonu Nigam was better than Sukhwinder Singh. I remembered "pfffft"ing, saying Sonu Nigam could not possibly ever sing a "Raat ki daldal hai". I missed Sukhwinder's Singh. He somehow isn't heard so often these days.

I was nearing my home. There were strays on the street. Another Delhi thing, I unfairly judged. They ran up to me, sniffing my bag and then my ankles.

And just then, "Kaara aatakaara" came on.

More Mumbai!

But a happy Mumbai! I remembered being stumped when watching the movie, amazed that the song was used this way. Months on, this remains my favourite song in OK Kanmani. It never fails to put a smile on my face, and is the first thing I want to listen to on the few occasions I wake up early and head to the gym.

Going up the lift, I remembered the happy scenes showing Mumbai in the movie. The beach, the sea, the rains!

Getting into my home, the only thing I wanted to do was to type all these random things out. While "Kaara..." looped, just so I didn't lose the energy, the enthusiasm to put this jumble into words.

Mission accomplished! 

And before you know it, so much has happened.

The rains are long gone, and the sun is shining so brightly that you beam in happiness when sunlight filters through your mesh windows into the room and casts its yellow glow on the wall.

The days are hot, humid and you constantly wipe your face as you try to recollect how the sun crept back into your life.

There are mosquitoes swarming the place, reminding you of last year’s Bombay winter that was mosquito-ridden and unexpectedly chilly – for in the last seven years, winter had just meant slightly less intolerable heat.

And then there are surprises. That tell you are special, that will change the way you look at some people, some places, some times of the day. That will leave you sighing in happiness, that will make you wish that unsettling, depressing feeling at the pit of your stomach can get drowned out in the shower. That will leave you a little surer of the future, and at the same time, a little more apprehensive. That will tell you things about yourself that you didn’t know.

And that’s how my September ends. 

It's the stupidest and most random title I have ever given to a post (it's worse than 'Random Ramblings-x' or 'What to name it') but the mind is simply panicking at the inactivity that the blog has seen in the last three months, so yes, whoever is reading this, just deal with it.

What can I say about the last three months? Life's gone through a whirlwind of change, mostly good, but bringing along with it confusion that I'm sure is turning my hair grey. Over the summer, Chennai happened, with yours truly gallivanting through the roads of her favourite city, on cars, buses, bikes and autos. By the beach, eating manga, candy floss, shooting balloons (would you believe it if I said I'd never done it before?) and chasing waves. Singapore happened, with the morning I landed nearly reducing me to tears with the overwhelming feeling of having never left. Of packed days of breakfast at one place, lunch at another, tea elsewhere, dinner somewhere. Cambodia happened, with beautiful temples, heart-wrenching displays of human cruelty, cheap food and lots of coconut water. Coimbatore happened, with lots of cooking and long chats with mom and dad. Dissertation happened, and I was witness to a myriad of mind-boggling views fellow humans hold about womanhood, independence and Indian 'culture'. Meeting old people happened, new, important friends were made. What else could one ask for in a two-month vacation?

Fast forward to the two months I've spent in Mumbai. Back in a hostel after four years, which, I must confess, I enjoy thoroughly (mostly because my hostel is kinda spanking new and has an awesome view and kick-ass breeze). I enjoy it thoroughly despite having to brush sometimes with scalding water in the sink (because of ingenious plumbing), deal with taps running dry a precious 20 minutes before class, sharing one common mirror with 11 girls in a wing, fairly unreliable internet, the neighbour girl who sings all the time, and being shocked that there is a maid who actually comes in to clean the room everyday, and the roommate who, despite this, sweeps and mops the room everyday. I enjoy it, probably because I know this is most likely the last time in my life I'll get to live in a hostel - yes, I might still rent an apartment for myself, but I'm pretty sure that never again in my life can I pay a fixed (down-to-earth cheap) rent for six months in a row and not pay electricity or water bills. It's blissful freedom, it's like my last shot at an innocent, fairly worry-free life. There's so much camaraderie in the wing with people I don't even know. There's so much fun in having people drop in and chat for a few minutes. Or in running one floor up and pestering your friends to give you food, and then ending up spending a whole hour there yapping and laughing or discussing crucial issues of feminism, jackasses on campus to be dealt with and soul-searching-important-to-life decisions. Or lounging about on the sofa on the corridor as long phone conversations go on, walking and feeling the breeze blow the rain on to you, or flipping through the day's papers absentmindedly while on the phone.

It is such a fun time to live through. Despite the many questions of so many types suffocating my thoughts.

More than anything, I'm happy the blog has been revived ;) 

Somebody decided that studying development would involve a lot of economics. And somebody in my university decided that we would do economics a lot (times) lot. And these somebodies are currently ruining my life and sleep.

I agree I should have studied these earlier, when they were being taught in class and I either vigorously nodded along – they all seemed to make sense then – or was nodding anyway – off to sleep. I agree that it’s four days before semester exams begin and I have no business talking about life or sleep, but you can read whatever I’ve said even through my college days, and life and sleep do not take a back seat ever in my life.

So right now, I am breaking my head over one blessed, Nobel laureate soul named Solow. Tagging along are his brethren Barro, Martin, etc. Somebody decided that they could randomly start off with an equation g(t) = a + by_o. Who said that was ok? What is ‘a’? What is ‘b’?! (They thankfully decided to clarify y is income). As if this wasn’t annoying enough, somebody decided to have fun and replace ‘a’ with alpha and ‘b’ with beta – really, what are you trying to pull here?! I know economics isn’t my strength at all, but I am a fairly logical person, but here all I see is a flagrant flouting of any kind of logic.

The other thing that really annoys me is how they quickly ‘assume’ things to ‘simplify.’ Let’s assume that labour productivity is constant. Let’s assume that all savings are invested. To simplify, let’s just divide both sides of the equation by L. I don’t know how it works in your world, but in mine, these aren’t simplifying things. And if you’re simplifying everything, please could you care to explain how these models can, in any tiny part of the world, help us understand the goings on in the economy or be used to predict the path of development most suited to them? Seriously, if you assume labour productivity is constant or that savings are invested, you’re assuming wrong. Get a reality check!

As I struggle to see how anything that any of these intelligent men said makes sense in the larger picture, the sample question paper from last year tells me to stop bothering and simply learn them by hook or by crook (the ‘crook’ method is what’s working now, with random ways of remembering models slowly beginning to be employed). I shamefacedly lament the lack of opportunity to write anything based on general observation or experience. I can’t help but laugh thinking of the plight of the poor professors who have to assess these (well, my) papers and imagine the looks of incredulity they might give at the absolute rubbish they will encounter. Too bad.

All I know is in just about 11 days, all of this will be over, and there will be a two-month break before the next bout begins. Wish me luck as I brace myself to delve deep once again into the world of misplaced letters, incomprehensible graphs and incongruous oversimplifications. 

... are a raucous affair. I decided to blog about it this morning at 6am, when I woke up to a mixed alarm of howling dogs and mosque azaans. I lay in bed, eyes closed but mind completely awake and taking in the sounds of the weird morning and awakening. It was as if the azaans were echoing off each other - for the number of mosques in my locality, it's no surprise - there was not a second when somebody wasn't singing, and all that varied was how loud the azaan was, depending on how far the mosque was from you. In that darkness, the azaans reminded me of when my friend walked around with her iPhone in the breathtakingly beautiful Blue Mosque of Istanbul while I sat shivering in a corner with my eyes taking in the splendour of the mosque at night.

And as if to wake me out of my reverie, the dogs howled some more; it was bloody awful, eerie and was ringing in my ears. At that moment, despite the fairly animal-friendly self I was (even if I'm tempted to run in the other direction or yell back at a barking dog), I wanted to find a stone to throw in the direction of the dogs and have them scatter away in fright.

And as if this wasn't enough, the doorbell rang and made me jump - my roommates were returning after spending a whole night at the library studying.

What else happens? I shouldn't forget the crows that go berserk at some 3 in the morning, cawing away like the morning wasn't going to break. The security guard blowing on the whistle like crazy, and walking around the apartment, beating his sturdy stick on the ground, as if it would be any deterrent to a sulking thief. I'd listen to the man walk around the apartment, tracking the sound as it faded and came back aloud again. Oh yeah, there's also the random something he burns in a little pan every night - to ward off the mosquitoes, apparently - that will make you choke if you happened to open the main door.

There is another man I should talk about. A complete nut case, loudmouthed and rude old man who cleans our building's staircases once a month or so. He is loony enough to think it is alright to ring the bell multiple times in succession at 6 in the morning and yell at us for buckets of water. I have yelled back at him in my broken Hindi, and roommates of mine who are not easily shaken have given them a piece of their minds too, leaving me shocked (and grinning) at their ferocious displays of anger.

It's only a matter of a few weeks. The apartment will soon be history as we move to campus accommodation. I wonder how mornings will dawn there - I anticipate queues for buckets and brushing teeth, and don't look forward to it, because hostel life in Singapore was a breeze that way. But well, it's all part of the big experience package I signed up for when I decided to move back. And what the heck, doing it for five days is going to get you used to it. Yay to hostel life!

And BY THE WAY - the blog is SEVEN years old! Wow. I feel OLD. The blog is OLD. And there are at least five people reading it, I think, so yay again. 

It’s a strange feeling. It’s been six months since the move back to India, six months since I became a student again, six months of feeling like an old, wise, out-of-touch-with-India woman, six months of alternating between missing Singapore and digging India. SO MUCH has changed in these months, and today I realized, for the first time – and maybe it’s simply a carryover effect of all the good things happening in university over the last few days – but I’m totally happy about the move.

So the university turns 75 this year, and there’s been quite a bit of (well-deserved) hoohaa, but I should be thankful – these events made me get closer to the ground realities, soak in the atmosphere, convinced me I really am back, and told me that it’s all for the better.

The first of these was the session on surveying M-Ward East, a collection of slums that have the worst Human Development Indicators in Mumbai. After a couple of days of mayhem and understandable disorganization – over 1500 students were to be involved in surveying 20,000 households, using tablets, so it was an organizational nightmare – we set out into the field, armed with water bottles, hand sanitizers, stoles around our heads, et al. I was excited about the project – my course doesn’t have sessions where you have to go to the field and interact with the beneficiaries of the development process I am supposed to initiate – but was at the same time very unsure of how far my Hindi would take me. Luckily, I was teamed up with a boy who had no issues with Hindi, and the very first survey we did will always stay in my mind: him completely at ease, joking, laughing, connecting with the people, and me listening to his every word to improve my fairly abysmal Hindi vocabulary. Over the next seven days, I realized how many things we take for granted – running water, electricity, access to medical facilities, etc. As a relatively socially conscious person, of course I was aware of problems people have with these things, but to see them live, in one of India’s richest cities, was shocking (yes, even though we’ve all seen Slumdog Millionaire). I spoke to women about their reproductive health, struggling to ask questions about their sex lives, vagina, etc. (resorting to crude ways of asking about it with a ‘Sorry, my Hindi isn’t that good!’), only to hear a number of them tell me nonchalantly about their babies who have died; it was especially painful to hear of a woman’s abortion experience, when her midwife put her hand so far deep into the woman’s uterus that it got scratched by her nails and was infected for months after the incident. It was an eye-opener in a number of ways, and most of all driving home hard one lesson – I have nothing in life to complain about, when there are millions who are surviving through days, forget living through them, hoping or planning. These seven days, life went by in a flash: coming back late at night after the surveys, showering, falling on to the bed and not waking up once till the alarm rang the next morning.

And this Monday, the school started its platinum jubilee celebrations. Four days of seminars, panel discussions, academics debating theories that went over my head, listening to a monk from Arunachal Pradesh telling us about their sentiments about being part of India, hearing out an activist supporting Manipur’s Irom Sharmila who has been fasting for eleven years to repeal a draconian army law, listening to students from the North East giving their views on how they feel alien in India even as the country claims them as one of its own, watching documentaries and short films by brilliant student filmmakers across the country, cheering performances from a highly-talented Naga troupe and a bursting-with-energy, feminist troupe from Tamil Nadu, hooting and going wild at a beat boxer’s performance, and wrapping it up by dancing to the DJ who had to stop spinning by 10pm to not annoy the residents nearby.

And this evening, somehow the realization that I talked about at the beginning of this post struck me, as we watched the cooks and servers at our dining halls and canteens put up a smashing performance – the one I think that got the most cheers and even an encore. For all that I have cribbed about the university, the curriculum, the bureaucracy, the pseudo intellectuals, prissy girls, wannabe boys, childish people, professors stuck in decades-old procedures and all that – there is something we have all learnt in our few months here, and something I know we will have learnt by when we graduate: appreciating others, and respecting people from backgrounds very different and often much more difficult than your own. Yes, the really urban ones will never be chummy with their more heartland friends, we will all form our groups with people from similar backgrounds, some of us will pretend to know more than our professors or criticise anything that comes our way – but somehow, and at some point, we shed these selves and know that in no way can we consider ourselves superior to anyone else, worthier than anyone else. The university suddenly seemed to be a beautiful place to be in, and I was proud to be in a place that had done some incredible, life-changing work in its 75 years of existence.

And for some reason, I left the place happy, brimming with hope and eager to push out the cynicism that has been entrenched in me since moving back. And for this reason, I knew that this move had to happen; it’s a phase of life God planned for me, to help me learn some things I would have not learnt so effectively in Singapore. I have no idea where life will take me next, and where I want to be, but for now, this seems perfect.

P.S., and note to self: Don’t be fooled by all this optimism. It’s time for classes, assignments and worst of all, dissertation, to begin, and be sure to look out for a crib fest next month. 

I was waiting outside an ATM. The white kurta-ed man inside seemed to be taking an eternity to come out. I started humming, tapping my foot lightly, looking around, till my eyes caught hold of my reflection on the glass doors of the ATM. I stopped humming and tapping my foot. My breath quickened. Calm down, I desperately told myself. They can smell fear. Did I have any food on me, I thought; no. For right behind me, were two street dogs, cream-coloured – you know, the typical street dog kind. One was slowly trotting, coming close to me. The other stopped, and lay on the floor, stretching itself (yes, ‘it,’ not ‘he’ or ‘she’), as if it knew I wasn’t anything interesting.

Do dogs know if we pretend? I put on a calm face, started to whistle (only to quickly stop – what if they think I’m being friendly!) and stared up at the sky and around, all the while keeping an eye on the reflection to see what the canine beast was up to. It came close to me, but suddenly had a change of mind, and thought it would be better to go back to its friend (who in the meantime, was performing athlete-type warm-up stretches – despite my horrific fear, I had to laugh), and started to sniff about it. White-kurta man came out at this opportune moment, and I made a dash in to the ATM and shut the door.

Despite everything I missed about India while in Singapore – the lack of crows (making me cry ‘OH MY GOD, THAT’S A CROW’ the rare moments I spotted one there), the whole cows-on-the-road feeling, the proud ‘Oh yes, I’ve sat on an elephant’ that I told my astonished classmates in college – I had no regrets about dogs, especially the street variety. You have stray cats in Singapore (they terrified me too: I’ve written about them here and here), but dogs in Singapore are all pretty, adored, on leash, with owners who groomed them to their best ability, collecting their poo (dogwalkers always carry a plastic bag) and taking their runs with them, and stuff. Pampered.

Fast forward to Mumbai, India. Street dogs abound in my area, and not only do you have to maneuver about them, but their turds too (it only got worse with the rains – many a time, I’d step on something to hear a squelch: whether it was mush, some tiny animal that I’d just killed, or dog poo, I’d never know). Hours after moving here, I had to shriek to my dog-loving friends to keep the street dogs away. Don’t play with them while I’m there (dogs on leash were ok!). They get into barking matches (thankfully, no howls – street dogs in Ahmedabad would howl through the night, not letting you catch a wink). They pee on the tyres of good-looking Skoda cars. They gang up and threaten the more scared among us by following us about. They taunt the pet dogs tied up inside their homes. As happy as I am that they lap up the leftover food I leave for them, I don’t like the fact that I have to take a particularly difficult way to enter a shop because they have spread themselves royally at the entrance.

Compared to these vagrants, the pet dogs seem like mellow creatures. It’s especially hilarious to see (when you’re at a safe distance, that is) a street dog tease a pet dog; the funniest of all was a large black dog that responded to the calls of a street dog but angrily jumping past every window in the wall of the house it was in, following the street dog that was gaily trotting past, basking in its secure position well away from the barking beast inside the house.

Oh well, what would life be without a bit of spice. Till the ATM incident yesterday, I was thinking I have become a little better at handling my fear of dogs. Unfortunately, no, I do have a long way to go. Maybe by the time I’m done with my studies in Mumbai, besides being able to speak Hindi fluently (that would be the day!), I’d be better with dogs – not to the extent of being able to pet them, but at least not walk away swiftly in terror? Only time will tell.