I want to put up a better post, but this will be the filler while I'm writing that better post. I think I've done these sorta tages so many times before that people who've been around my blog for sometime will know what I'll say! Anyways, here it goes:
The rules
1) The one who's tagged has to specify 8 different points about his/her lover.
2) The gender of the lover has to be mentioned.
3) Tag 8 more people.
4) If tagged once again,reject it.

Gender: Male
Prayers: Give me the patience to think of 8 points!

1) Tall, thin, no moustache face, and a smile that bowls me over.
2) Earnest, and should have an independent mind, and not do things because others do them.
3) Be patient enough to put up with me.
4) Be a voracious reader and a crazy fan of music - It would be amazing to have someone know what you're talking about, and add on to it too.
5) Eyes that are true and look straight into mine (if they don't, he's shy!)
6) Share most of my interests; and do one thing that I'm terrible at, and be terrible at one thing I'm good at (this makes you feel proud and humble at the same time!).
7) Not have a trace of male chauvinism in him - if he has, he'll have to put up with my chauvinism!
8) And like Sandhya said, he must love me for what I am...despite my many faults, which he should recognise...and still want to be with me!

I'll know it when I've met him! :)
Again, I'll be an angel and not tag anyone else...I know the pain of finding 8 things to write about!

It happens everyday. At least twice a day. It starts with my hands shaking to such an extent I’m scared they’ll just fall off my shoulders. And then it happens. And it leaves me teary-eyed.

I’m not suffering from depression. It’s just this difficult to put a drop of eye-drops into each of my eyes.

It started more than a month when my doctor suggested I use these drops four times a day to reduce the irritation in my eyes because of staring at the computer screen for long.

Things were fine as long as I was at home, because someone used to hold my head down and put the drops in. I tried to do it myself as my vacation was coming to an end, saying that I would, after all, have to do it myself when I come to my hostel. It usually never worked out properly, and someone else would end up doing it for me.

Now that I’m away, it’s a pain. I push my head and force the eye open with one hand, while the other shivers with the bottle held over my eye. I can see the drop hanging at the edge of the nozzle, stubbornly refusing to fall out. It seems like eons before the drop falls down. Alas, it doesn’t fall in my eye – for the jerk that my head gives when it sees the drop is on its way to my eye( :P), the drop lands on my cheek. Repeated tries get the drop closer to my eye, moving from the cheek slowly upward, until it falls on my eyelashes. By this time, my eye gets dry and painful. Process repeated after a minute of ‘rest’. And sometime, in a stroke of luck, it falls into the eye. Process now repeated with the other eye.

The only thing that’s keeping me going with the eye-drops is that I don’t have to use them after 28th of January. I don’t know how effective they’ve been, but who cares? Just four more days to go!

I can't help laughing as I see modified versions of the jholna pai becoming hep these days. I don't think it has caught on much back home yet, but in Singapore it's doing rounds like crazy.

For the uninitiated, jholna pais are what journalists in movies back in the 80s used to carry about and go. They are also the bags that people in their 60s and 70s take when they go out. I remember how a few years back I would find the very idea of taking one out revolting. And it's back!

Of course, not in the same paccha-manjal-jingucha-plus-white-stripes style. Now they carry 'cool' pictures, words et al. One of my classmates last semester had one with a huge Om on it (Not shutting up, I asked her if she knew what it was - she said 'It's Indian' - oh, I didn't know that!!! She was non-Indian, by the way..)

Other friends of mine have funky coloured and funkily worded ones, and they look good! I remember my grandmother having one which I used to think was good even during those years when I detested the jholna pais; it was one with a camel painted on it, and looked what we would call 'ethnic and chic'. And if I remember right, some relative flicked it! :(

And talk about fashion doing a cycle!!!

I'm scared of dogs. Though I find them adorable, it takes a lot of courage from my side to actually go close to one, and I'd be the happiest person if I could muster enough courage to go pat or stroke one (we're strictly talking about grown-up dogs here, not puppies - I have held puppies in my hand!)

So it happened two days back that I saw, for the first time, a stray dog in Singapore. I was sitting in the bus stop waiting for a bus when I saw the dog in the opposite side's bus stop. I was surprised, and I smiled, despite all my fears. And that was the mistake.

The dog, rightaway crossed the street and came to the bus stop where I was sitting. I was terrified, and look around. I was alone in the bus stop...HELP!

The dog came and stopped a few inches short of me. Then it darted off to the left and relieved itself on a pillar nearby. And when it left, it almost brushed past my legs, but I didn't do anything much as I was frozen with terror.

And everyone in the road was genuinely surprised when they saw the dog. Many were pointing to the dog and looking at it with awe (as though they've never seen such a species before!)

So what am I trying to say?

Singapore-a irukkatum, Ambattur-a irukkatum, theru -nai engeyum irukkum!
(Applause, please!)

“Am I really alive?”
I touched the desk. What was I feeling? Wood. What’s wood? How did I know what I was touching was wood?
I sighed and tried to listen to the Marketing lecture. Marketing, what’s that, my mind prompted.
I was really irritated now. Vague questions were popping in and out of my head. You’re in a lecture, listen, said my mind. But the very mind was questioning my existence and reality.
What if everything’s a dream?

“Value creation for our customers,” continued the professor “is the most important thing in marketing.”
Customers!?
What are we buying? And value? Customers? Who’re they? Just another set of humans. We’re just unnoticeable specks in the universe, and we’re talking about creating value for them? My mind laughed at the very idea.
Do I exist? Or am I a dream? Whose dream? The world itself exists because we, the humans, created it.. we make everything that’s the world…otherwise would anyone know that there’s a world, a universe, of which we were a part?
Existence, life, world, universe, sun………

“Archana, you’re dozing off!”
I looked up. I looked around, stunned. I was in an Object Oriented Programming class. Marketing? I was studying nothing as of now that was even remotely connected to it. The lectures? The words “Value creation….most important….customers…” kept ringing in my mind.
Had I been dreaming? I was shocked.
Which was the dream, and which, reality?
Do I even exist??

MY BLOG TURNS ONE TODAY!!!! Yippppeeeee!!!

A wish I had since class X finally got fulfilled a year back when I posted for the first time. I had started the same day a whole year back…a day when my lovable computer would come to me only ten days later; I was patiently typing out something I had written some months ago in my hostel computer room.

My first comment was from Twin-Gemini, and I was surprised and shocked at how someone totally unknown to me had found my blog; and I had no clue what to do with the comment until one day he commented asking why I haven’t replied for his comment. And that’s when the whole business actually became clear. ;) Thanks, Twin-Gemini!!

There are many things I wish I had never written on my blog; but I want to keep them….probably they show how I’ve grown through that one year, and how what I choose to blog about has changed!

The few on my blog who’ve been around ever since I began, whom I wish to thank a lot: my sister, Anu, Sandhya and Harish. Thanks, people! :)

Thanks ALL of you who have visited my blog and continue to do so. :) Your comments have seriously inspired me to actually think if I can someday publish my work. And it’s become a sort of dream now, and I know I’ll make it someday, sometime.

And P.S.: About my previous post: it’s nothing highly philosophical – I just felt that life would change…again, since I came back to university!! :)

And life changes....again....