Oh hello! A million thanks to you if you still come by this page (of course, that could have been due to social media). Eleven years since its birth, this blog has been languishing - my mind has been occupied with what appears to be endless reams of writing: writing as part of two jobs, writing for Spark, writing my journal - so much so that I have no space left to conjure something up for the beloved Blogger.

It's rather ironical that writing - for myself - which I used to turn to at every emotion, every stage of my life, has come to naught. Is this what they call adulting? My mind doesn't make up stories anymore, and my emotions have gotten too complex for me to put them down in writing. Working on gender and sexuality means the only non-fiction that immediately comes to mind has to do with feminism, social critiquing and a deep unhappiness at the current goings-on in the world. While I delight in writing these, at times, I just wish that I didn't have to outrage at every other thing, that I appreciate my privileges and learn to enjoy life a little bit more.

Travel, which used to supply me with faraway tales and magic, has also become a regular occurrence now. It's only August and I've already travelled to two countries (both second homes to Indians, and two countries may not be a big deal to many, but nevertheless). People, sights and foreign things don't enthrall me as much anymore, and I see myself routinely going to places, sitting down, trying to absorb things in my mind and not clicking pictures.

And finally, of course, there's marriage, which is a full-time job in itself. As my partner and I navigate our lives together - building memories, overwriting old ones, fighting-forgiving, forging new paths - marriage puts us through tests of patience, emotions, affection and perseverance. And mind you, I have had it rather easy so far, and yet that's me complaining about the enormity of it all. What if, and when, the serious adult things come into the picture? Like an aged parent, job woes, long distance marriage, etc.? My mind grapples with the complexity of all that marriage is, and writing - non-journal writing, that is - comes only in sputters, starting with little promise, coughing and dying an early death.

I wish - and desperately hope - that this is just a phase, for my mental well-being (and heck, identity) depends extensively on conveying thoughts, painting pictures and weaving tales through words. Friendships, partners, jobs - many of these have come about because of writing. At times I have to stifle a depressive sob when I think about how words have just dried up in my mind. But I have little else to do than to soldier on, praying that the words come back.

One evening, a cousin, the partner and I were lazing about, when an interesting question came up. What would you want to stay with you your entire life? I answered that I want books, music and writing to always move me as they do today. On a more cheerful note, let's hope this blog post, coming as it is after many months, marks renewed enthusiasm for writing. 

• For how suddenly winter set in in Delhi. The smog, the chills, the fans being switched off. 
• For the awkward coexistence of high-pitched excitement about Iran and the sense that it's still distant (although it's not!)
• For being 30 for a month (and it doesn't feel any different) 
• For discovering that the Mt. Fuji puzzle that I'd thought had gone for recycling with newspapers was, in fact, safe at home - enough to make me jump with joy 
• For some promises that I will get to do something new that I'd been waiting for, at work  

It’s nearly 10 am and there isn’t even a hint of sunshine. I look out the glass wall of my living room and all I see is grey – a cover of mist on the trees on the ground right outside my building, trees in mourning without a speck of brightness about them and brown earth that hardly seems brown. The scene looks like a picture that someone was editing; halfway across changing a beautiful colour picture to black and white, they gave up and left the greens, browns and blues looking almost like grey but didn’t quite get there.

I loathe winters. There are no two ways about it. I don’t like the cold, the multiple layers of clothing required, the decision on what to wear, the idea that at 8 in the morning my bedroom could look like it’s 4am, completely eliminating my desire to be up and about.

I don’t care that vegetables taste better and are cheaper in winter, that you don’t sweat or feel all icky, and I couldn’t bother about the pleasure of sitting in bleak sunshine. I don’t know how to wear a woolly hat properly, when to take a scarf or what to do when I alternatively feel warm and cold in that thick jacket. I hate that simple tasks such as brushing your teeth or sitting on a toilet pot become tests of willpower. It’s annoying that the quilt I get under first makes me go stiff with cold, then the gets cosy warm with my body heat and then ends up making me sweat in the night, so much so that I wake up with a jolt, gasping and throw the quilt off my body.

As a chai person, the only pleasure I allow myself during winters is that of holding a hot cup of tea to my freezing winters. Ironically, even then, I can’t handle the scalding hot tea; I wait a minute or two for the tea to cool down.

Add to this despondency my confused feelings about my voluntary unemployment. I swing between feelings of joy at a whole day of possibilities to use my pent-up words and feelings of utter uselessness and pure terror when thinking about my career and the future. Given my ideas to work full time in the gender activism space, I wonder what I know and what I can do with that limited knowledge. It’s a phase that questions your self-confidence, your daring ideas and idealism. When you see the bank balance that’s rapidly going down without any inflow, you wonder if you made the right decision.  

Thanks to a supportive partner gently guiding me through my mood swings, I come to terms with what it means to take a break to figure out the what-next in life. That involves accepting the dark days, making to-do lists, reading more and pushing hard to create a routine, for full-time work instills ideas of productivity purely because there’s something to do everyday: calls to take, emails to check, meetings to attend. The break also involves making those tough decisions about spending your money – knowing that with those limited funds (and for now, no inflow) lifestyle changes of taxi vs. metro, eating out, alcohol, etc. are to be made. It’s about full cognizance of the fact that most of my basic needs, urgent expenses and even my lifestyle expenses can be met, thanks to supportive and non-judgmental family.

Winter and unemployment tell you loads about the privileges that you were born with and continue to have. I chide myself for cribbing about the cold when I sit within the confines of home, with a room heater and instant hot water, and a range of thick jackets. I scribble furiously in my diary about the need to quickly get over the panic that washes over me oh-so-frequently. I try to use the time to wander about the city, to incorporate new habits like journaling everyday, and learn to take disappointment, frustration and unhappiness in my stride. Thanks to yoga lessons, I try to breathe deeply and dismiss stress and tension over things I don’t control.

It’s 10.30 and the morning continues to be bleak. A crow swings on a cable outside the room, making me laugh. An eagle swoops by too close for comfort, until I realize there’s a strong glass wall keeping me safe.

Another winter day begins, another day full of possibilities for me to feel happy through words, music and aimless walks. I wonder how I'll fare today! 

This afternoon in the office, I was sorely tempted to pull up my shawl to cover my head too – the air-conditioning was making the office so cold that my fingers were getting numb, my knit legging-ed leg was getting goosebump-y, and I was sure I’d get a headache at this rate.

And then I wondered how I would brave the Delhi winters.

Ladies and gentlemen, here I am, announcing the latest big move of my life. So far, the record is Chennai à Singapore à Mumbai à Delhi. I’ve steadily been moving north, except for the Singapore bit where I moved a few degrees north of the equator.

While Mumbai did a good job in getting me used to a city that wasn’t Chennai or Bangalore or another southern city where I had family – I could manage my way around in Hindi, get used to tomato-onion-garam masala-based gravies every single day – Delhi is a whole other world.

First of all, it carries the loaded baggage of being unsafe for women. After Singapore and Mumbai, here I was, resigned to not wearing shorts or being out and about alone at night. My mother’s concern reaches epic proportions as she signs resignedly when I tell her I’m out for dinner or to buy things. I try every time – unsuccessfully – to allay her fears and say it’s not that bad; but after Mumbai, I will admit that the number of women I find on the roads – alone – after 7pm is shockingly low.

But otherwise, things have been a lot more fun. The biggest change would be the Hindi. Yes, Mumbai made me feel more confident about my hesitant Hindi, and I shamelessly describe or bargain without any thought to whether I should use ka or ki, mera or meri. Mumbai generously allowed me those mistakes. Here, I don’t know… but I confidently rattle off anyway in my working Hindi until my lengthy monologue tapers into English and I finish with an embarrassingly well-constructed English sentence spoken to a house agent, tiffin delivery guy or carpenter who would likely just nod his head or answer back with a complex Hindi sentence.

Hindi here is literary, pure. After Mumbai’s Marathi-mixed Hindi and ‘Tum kya karta hai’ type lines, Hindi in Delhi is like listening to people read sentences from a book. Road signs use words like ‘pralabdh’ (or something like that, I forgot what intense word I saw!), and people use words that I’ve never really heard before, even though my Hindi is as textbook-ish as can be, given we learnt it for years in school without ever having to really speak the language. I hear the word ‘dikkat’ a dozen times everyday, and I wonder why they just can’t use ‘takleef’ (or does my limited vocabulary not understand the nuances and simply consider both synonyms for difficulty?). I also hear the word ‘nazdeek’ and wonder why you can’t use the simpler monosyllabic ‘paas’ (both, I’m pretty sure, mean ‘close’).  And took a minute to understand ‘khulle paise’ for ‘chhutta’ (change or coins).

I’m doing much better, though. I unconsciously switch to Hindi (albeit on very rare occasions) with my colleagues, and I consider that a big achievement because all my life I have never spoken in Hindi in a situation where I didn’t have to. I guess all the Hindi that I hear being spoken around me in office –something that amused me to no end on my first day – helps.

As life settles into a fairly comfortable routine, one of the things I enjoy the most is taking the train back home. I live three stations away, and two doors from the station I exit at. I’m silly enough to want to grin widely (but thankfully check myself) every time I walk past the cacophonous ‘Madam-madam-madam’ chant of the rickshaw-wallahs outside the station, asking me to hop on to their vehicle. I walk past the row of them and get into my house, the house till which their line extends. Ah, the pleasures of staying close to the station!

That said, what’s with having manually-drawn rickshaws in this day and age, and that too in the national capital?! It irks me whenever I have to sit in a vehicle and watch a man – often thin and wiry, and sometimes even old – pedal painfully through crowded roads. I feel worse when I have a co-passenger. The first time I sat on one – I couldn’t remember when I’d sat on a rickshaw before that day – it was like going on a roller-coaster ride through crowded, brimming-with-life-and-commerce Delhi-6. I kept sliding off the sloping seat, and had a laugh whizzing through the roads. Now, I wish I could avoid every rickshaw ride. Like my friend says, these men are selling their labour to earn money – but it’s bitter to watch. Like I used to be amazed and feel sad looking at frail, old people cleaning tables in Singapore foodcourts – they are only earning their money, but you wish they didn’t have to do this.

Otherwise, the roads are laaaarge and wiiiiide, and it’s such a pleasant surprise after Bombay’s choking, narrow roads. You don’t see slums, and the metro is just so beautiful and I’m so proud to see something like this in the country – and it’s kept clean, and how! Government buildings, state representative houses, a hint of the Red Fort from a crowded road in Delhi-6, the Lotus Temple that I see near the Nehru Place station, the Dilli Haat with its stalls from across the country… the city (or what I’ve seen of it) is like an everyday display of what the country stands for in its full glory, and it’s always thrilling to see things you’ve read about in History standing before you tall and proud (even though I’ve done enough trips to Delhi as a kid). And houses – man, where are the apartments?! Every place I wanted to rent was a barsati ­ - a glorified servant’s quarters or outhouse, built where the terrace should have been, stuffed with basic plumbing and a few perfunctory shelves. After seeing a dozen of them, I zoned in on one that’s as big as one of the bedrooms at my home in Coimbatore – and I pay more than what we would rent our whole home out for.  

As I settle into my new home, manage packed lunches and dinners, eat fruits like I never have before, feel hungry all the time like I never eat (!), hunt desperately for a maid (so much that I walked up to a random security guard and asked him to tell any maid he sees entering the society), feel like I'll melt in this furnace of a weather, feel delirious at times wondering whether I’m in Mumbai or a whole other city, and would give anything to get steaming, hot upma for breakfast, I’m slowly getting used to Delhi… and kinda enjoying it too. 

Three or four years ago, I went about telling friends who ‘accused’ me of being feminist that I wasn’t one, but that I was a firm believer in gender equality. Although I slowly revised my stance even before starting my Master’s, remembering those instances makes me cringe now – I wish I’d met earlier those brilliant people who explained to me why being a feminist isn’t a bad thing. Before coming to Bombay, I’d laugh with a friend who teased me about becoming a part of Nari Mukti Morchas. Now I’d tell him, what the heck, I’m proud to be a part of it now.

Besides intense discussions, heated arguments (and the faster heartbeat that accompanies these) or the pure joy of reading something that puts into words something you’ve been struggling to explain, feminism has introduced some externalities in my life. Many positive ones, the life-changing things. The negative ones are unavoidable, I guess, but they relate to some everyday things which now make me guilty when I indulge in them, or which make me positively worried about how future in this world is going to turn out. 

Those scenes in Mouna Ragam when Revathi plays up marital symbols: watching it last year, I stifled a cry when the scene came where she pulls out her thaali to explain that her husband was injured – why would an educated, English-speaking woman need that when she could convey it perfectly well to hospital staff? It’s not a recent phenomenon, I remember getting annoyed as a child when in Vikram Kamal asks his female friend when she says women can do anything men can: “I roam around without a shirt when it’s hot, can you do that?” But it’s gone to exponential levels now. I want to beat up anyone who writes a dialogue ‘poi oru selaiya kattu…’ as the worst possible insult to a man, or where there is a soup song that squarely places the blame on women, along the lines of ‘adi da avala…’ or ‘venaam machan venaam indha ponnunga kadhal…’ F$%*#r leave the women alone if you feel so bad then, won’t you? I’m scared to watch KLTA because I’m not sure I’ll be able to look at the humour without thinking of forms of misogyny embedded in it.  

Giving a gender-related argument to drive any point home (it just seems to the simplest, most obvious example!), so much so that one friend sighed and asked not to look at everything through this lens.

Getting alarmed when niece/nephew/other children say things like girls can’t be superheroes they have to be princesses/boys don’t cook or wear pink, and trying to get them to understand they can do whatever they want without thinking about being a boy or a girl (only to fail miserably because I just can’t do baby-level talk). Will these kids grow out of it? I don’t remember what I was like as a child, but I do remember enjoying my toy machine gun, my cars and asking for a football while enjoying my dolls Mini, Meena and Skipper, and fighting with parents to buy a Mattel kitchen set in Bombay.

Or going the lengths to tell my mother that I will not be kanya-daan-ified whenever I get married – am I an object? Or trying to convince her that I will edit out I-hope-I-die-before-my-husband- or Please-give-me-a-hundred-sons-type mantras: who wants to start a married life wishing for these things? I have other ways to prove love to man besides wanting to die before he does, and anyway, I should have a life outside of him, isn’t it?

Trying hard to take a joke. I don’t know when I should just laugh it off and when I should rise up in anger and tell the person to get the hell out of my Facebook feed. I’m tempted to try to verbally slap some sense into female friends who share with pride how motherhood is ‘divine’ (come out of it already!) or those who share (as if it’s a gem) Chetan Bhagat’s article about how men should allow their wives to work because it will make for a more productive household even if the phulkas come a little cold (oh, how dare you ….)

I’m not much into swearing anyway, and have never used mo-fu, bc or even ‘gay,’ but trying not to even say bastard when I want to hurl an abuse at some man – say, a harasser on the road – is proving to be quite difficult. Add to the mix trying to avoid ‘lame’ or ‘stupid’ because it is disrespectful to people with such conditions, and I’m trying to resort to good old English – as  friends put it, maybe it’s time to go back to ludicrous, ridiculous and the like (see, I can’t even remember too many of these words).

It’s been a wonderful journey so far, even though I wonder how I’ll make my peace with the aforementioned minor dilemmas in everyday life. I also wonder if this is just a phase I’ll grow out of when I get out of cushy student life and have to tackle the everyday pressures that come with working life. I desperately hope not. The last two years have been so life-changing that it would be a pity if I have to leave the learnings behind just because life demands that – but somewhere, there is a teeny, tiny hope this won’t happen. Ten years hence, I hope I can still read this blog and be proud that I am still living my life as an individual, as a Vani Viswanathan with an identity that is not tied only to a family, a man or a child, but also to something that is uniquely my own. And that I will still roll my eyes and try to explain why women shouldn’t have to cook, can enjoy movies wholeheartedly because they don’t really have sexism in every other scene, or tell little girls they can play superheroes too.

P.S.: And I’m officially out of excuses to start working on my thesis this morning. Work, woman, work! 

P.P.S.: The blog turns EIGHT! 

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 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. 

Dated 9 Aug 2011 and posted today because, hey, two months on and I still don’t have internet at home

It’s been two months since my massive move back to India, to Mumbai for the first time. And in this short span, I have seen so much: seasons (hot-humid-summer to horrible-rain to current-pleasant-weather), bomb blasts in the city, had endless permutations of pavs (vada-, misal-, bhajia-, etc.), jumped past dog poo, spoken Hindi that makes my new friends laugh in good-natured (I hope!) amusement, among other things. 

The day I landed was a hard-hitting lesson in back-to-India-ness. I had all but stepped out after a shower for two minutes, that I was covered with sweat that was mingling with dust from the roads (yes, it sounds revolting, but you can imagine. I wonder how students on exchange from Europe/the US handle it, but perhaps they have conditioned themselves to the I’m-coming-to-India experience?) Some five minutes after this, I had to cross perhaps the most dangerous road of all times. I patiently waited for the pedestrian crossing signal to turn green, realized vehicles don’t give a damn about it, and ended up running in terror, in between honking vehicles that screeched to a halt so they don’t kill me. I walked around the college campus, somewhat let down by the size of it (the whole campus was as big as the South Wing of NTU), but still happy at how green it was. I was surprised that every girl was in a kurta and chudidar. I found the canteen food good, but it was in a smelly place; I wanted to avoid having to walk over to the other side to wash my hands as far as possible. Two hours outside and I was craving to get into a mall for the air-conditioning (after being frisked and getting my bag checked at the mall entrance). I was disoriented and upset at the enormity of my move. 

Two months on, things have changed. The rains have begun, and the umbrella-hater me has had to walk everywhere with on in hand. Through the slush, into the auto rickshaw, sitting on wet seats, stepping into slush, and the like. Opening the cupboard to find fungus all over my black pair of jeans. Worms in the bathroom, leading the way to other kinds of worms and now, snails. I have gone from the phase of aversion to acceptance to now cold-hearted brutal murder. I have gotten used to saying Rupees and Paise, and not dollars and cents, and the fact that the 50 paise has no value today. I don’t run away from dogs anymore, just stand by and admire the gutsy mongrel doing his business by the tyre of a Honda City. I rattle away in crappy Hindi, know that kulta is a ‘bad’ word, swear more than I ever did, order Indian dishes I’d never heard (zhunka bhakri!), and enjoy my only non-Indian food at McDonald’s, having the McVeggie burger with fries. I negotiate the risky crossing with ease, shouting out the choicest of abuses at sedan drivers, sometimes even in Tamil. I’m used to the delays associated with Indian-ness, and although it gets the better of me very often (and it spirals into a whole hour of grumpiness and Singapore-sickness), I can recover with the help of Amul ice cream, Dairy Milk or Cadbury’s Bourbon. Drinking a can of beer that I queued up and bought at a ‘wine shop’ while the owner threw dirty looks at ‘girls these days,’ was a big achievement. NRI-ness has on the whole gone down, I think. 

And yet, it all feels so weird. I sink in nostalgia when I see Facebook updates on anything to do with Singapore; miss the fact that it’s National Day today and the crazy ads they have for the NDP. I spent a good ten minutes explaining the ‘We must be vigilant’ video they show in the MRTs. I look out for Singapore in charts showing statistics on different countries in class (though they mostly drop it out – either it’s too small or too developed ;)), and ‘lah’ and ‘sian’ have been taught to roommates and anyone else who bothers to hear me rant. I still say ‘I’m going to India’ when I mean ‘I’m going home.’ I miss wearing nice clothes – I’ve been wearing my pretty clothes to school because I don’t know what else to do with them. In a class where pretty much everyone is in a kurta/leggings or pretty tops and jeans, I go with my best workwear, and even dresses, and soon everyone is going to tire of asking where it’s from (and sometimes I feel weird; it feels a little show-offy to say that this dress is from Bandung, a hill station near Jakarta). Terribly miss the variety in food, the outside-of-work life, the endless movies, fast internet and God, the desserts (brownies here are terrible, and cakes, I’d rather not have). 

As I still negotiate the space between ‘I love India and it’s so much fun’ and ‘Ugh, why did I come here’ I guess the brain has already started leaning towards the former, and the heart is slowly following too – a sense of acceptance that one good life’s done and another has begun, and the optimistic self tells me I have to give things in India a fair chance. Thanks to the besties who still call/email from Singapore and keep me in the loop – so much so that sometimes I feel like I’m just on extended holiday in India – and the new ones here in Mumbai who make it so much fun – I guess I’ll survive.

- I should rethink the name of this blog. Really. To quote one friend: 'Idhu boangu!' Chennai gal is moving. Back to India. Far from Singapore. Far from Chennai. To Mumbai.

- I have always thought of myself as a less materialistic person. My prized possessions are notebooks (the kind you write in), greeting cards given by friends, scribbles on the back of flight tickets, my camera stuff, books - basically, things that are tied more to experiences than the happiness I get with possessing them.

- Oh, how wrong I was. Over three years of working, I've amassed nearly 40 kgs of clothes. I don't even want to check how much the carton of books weighs. I've always dreaded this moment, but for reasons cited in the above point, I'd always thought my worst nightmare when moving would be the books.

- Going back to studying is incredibly exciting. The feeling of being responsible only for myself, and not for an organization, a team, a boss or a client. Even though I'm worried about how I'm probably going to be among the oldest in my class.

- Going to Mumbai is even more exciting. Never mind I'll be staying in some corner of the city, far from anything happening. Never mind that after three years of comfort in a room all for myself, I'll be sharing a room with two other people. Never mind the dollars will stop coming in. It's Mumbai!

- With just over ten days left before I make the second biggest move of my life, all I want to do is write, and write. Keep listening to music. Praise MSV's genius in Ninaithale Inikkum. Forget work and handover. Forget packing, shipping, 20kg boxes, and Air India flight strikes.

- And if you're wondering why this title (if you do understand it at all) - just two Tamil words I haven't used in ages. I suddenly realized they used to be part of everyday vocabulary!

Black Beauty is now history. For the first time in nearly seven years in Singapore, I'm moving houses without lugging along my desktop with its CRT monitor (I know!), CPU, keyboard. I felt a twinge of regret and sadness as the karung guni (how rag and bone men in Singapore are referred to) opened up the CPU, asked me where the hard drive was (I'd removed it last morning) and kindly offered me $2. 'Just take it,' I said. 'I don't want any money!' And there, the monitor, CPU and the keyboard (I will miss that the most - it was the most wonderful keyboard ever) were tugged away right before my eyes like scrap (that's nearly what they became, but that's besides the point). Here's something I'd written about her when she was still new. It hurts just to think of the number of years that have passed in between!

Anyway, back to the new beginning. I've moved house for the fourth time in less than three years, but there's not been a single place in all my years in Singapore that I've been as happy about leaving as the last place I was in. The new house seems like a blessing compared to the old one - it's clean, new, bright and the best part of all, I only need to peep out the window to watch trains passing - something that will have me squealing in delight till I get used to it.

Oh well, there's a lot to get used to, but I'm not thinking about it all. For now, the biggest point is that Greece (and now Turkey - woohoo!) is just days away. Let me while my time away thinking of the Parthenon, Mousakka, feta cheese, baklava and Bosphorus.

It's stupid of me to want and write now. I've just come back from a photography class that lasted three hours and was led by one of the most can't-teach-for-nuts-and-is-uninspiring teacher ever. Worse, it was a photo critique class, I had lost my photos because my desktop decided to fail the day I brought a new laptop home (it was as if the desktop, my 7-year partner in crime, knew...), and had to pull some old photos from Facebook to take something to the class, all of which had problems (I cringed as we went through each photo, finding one issue after another, amazed at how much difference a few weeks of lessons can make to composition and all that...)

Anyway, on my way home from the class, I cursed myself for being over-ambitious and loading my life with so many things. Work is unimaginably hectic already, and I insist on doing things outside of work just to make sure there's more to life than work, but ruining any chances of free time in the process. I want a weekend with nothing to do, and I don't think I've had that for over a year! All the same, with my typical indecisive air, I tell myself I'll never be happy if I don't have enough things for my mind to think about. I want to work hard, learn something new, sing, read, write, swim, try to take good photos, travel, work on Spark and spend a weekend afternoon yapping away with a friend. How can I want everything!

I have no way out other than to wear myself out doing all of the above, take a breather and get back to the manic mode of doing it all, all over again. And that's just what I'm doing. I lull myself into sleep reading a book. I effortlessly shift from Harry Potter to Milan Kundera to Nikolai Gogol to Ruskin Bond to my current massive project, reading Ponniyin Selvan in Tamil. I make my computer/iPod want to cry out in pain with endless repeats of Norwegian Wood, Rehna Tu and Pudhu Vellai Mazhai. I work till I feel like I never left the office and have exhausted all the 'take-away' lunch and dinner options. I read the newspaper on the way back from work, enjoying IHT's brilliant stories, and read a book on the way to work, dozing off mid-way. I crave for tea every four hours, but restrict myself to green tea instead. I fall asleep thinking of walks with ice-cream in hand, of spending an hour updating my diary on this manic life, and of packing the tripod one Saturday and going to Little India for a photo shoot.

I've probably said this countless times before, but I think this is the busiest I've ever been in my working life. It's also the most exciting, though, thanks to the umpteen things I've managed to cram it with. Anway, at 12.04 on a Friday the 18th of March, things can't be looking any better: I'm watching Rahman perform some 20 hours from now, a dream come true (I'm probably going to burst into tears of joy when I see him, or screech till I lose my voice). And Greece is barely a month away, and hopefully there are more things to look forward to.

Oh, what the heck. I'll survive. And survive well, that I know.  

I have finally turned 24. I say finally, because I have long considered myself to have turned 24 - don't ask me why.

This is probably the first birthday I haven't greeted with bursting enthusiasm, with plans for the next year, and a constant grin on my face. Perhaps a sign of wisdom finally creeping in? Oh well, time will tell - for all I know, tomorrow I will get to work and swear reasonably loudly whenever I see an email that annoys me, or laugh like a fool at the lamest of jokes.

As listed to my wonderful colleagues who graciously agreed to do a vegetarian lunch in honour of yours truly today, these are my priorities for the 25th year in life:

- Travel more
- Take more photographs
- Be even more chilled in life. Boss interjects saying I'm quite there already, but I think it can be much better - I've decided I should up the ante a little bit there.

And I decided to shamelessly check what I put out on Oct 4, 2009 and evaluate myself:
- put even less tension: CHECK!
- write more: CHECK! Thanks to Spark, that is!
- sing more: CHECK! If all goes well, I shall continue to strain my throat and perform early next year.
- read more: CHECK, going on as usual. The library is being massively built!
- put the blessed d5000 to good, frequent use: CHECK! Nearly a thousand photos in one day, most of which I can daresay look pretty good.

Given my reasonably low goal-setting habit, I have done well and am immensely pleased. Now as 25 begins, and I enter it a little hesitant as I'm painfully aware of the possible changes it heralds, all I can say is hope it's all for the best!