cogitated thoughts

I don't like being disturbed when I'm sleeping. That is probably one of the reasons why I don't care too much for alarm clocks... and so, I usually ask my brother to wake me up at a particular time if I want to sleep in the afternoon or something. Extremely tragic, how he takes undue advantage of the situation. If I ask him to wake me up at 5, he starts by about 4:30 (and tells me later that everything needs warm up practice)Now, his method doesn't involve sweet words of encouragement or anything of that sort....what it does involve though is a series of karate stunts...moron recently got orange belt too!!!!!!!!! And before I can even open my mouth to reprimand my brother, my mother sides up with him and starts handing out generous amounts of the oh-you lazy, UNGRATEFUL, alarm clock disliking ,useless, bum thingy....But, anyway for some strange reason it always ends with all three of us in hysterics so I don't really complain too much.

There is something that is mildly disturbing about alarm clocks. Somehow, at precisely 4.00,yesterday morning, (joint exploits by rest of parivaar to bring about ruin of Sneha's sleep probably...) I found myself waking up to five different alarm tones, piercing into the almost deathly, pre 4:30 a.m slience. The fact that I'd read Animal Farm the previous night didn't help too much because as far as I can recollect, the alarm clocks had only disrupted a very complicated pattern of dreams in which pigs with green ribbons on their tails kept asking very fierce looking dogs to kill horses who said 'I will work harder' and the sheep stood by screaming ''four legs good, two legs better''.....so, when the clocks called, I found myself with eyes wide open, sitting upright on my bed, wondering whether I was still asleep; when the one year old kid on the first floor decided to intensify things by letting out a ear splitting wail...(I remember, very vaguely saying something about alarm clocks being mildly disturbing....well one year old kids who wail their heads off at 4 in the morning give them a fair competition!)

It is diwali for us tams today . What we do very early in the morning is.....to take a bath. It is called ''Ganga snanam'' and isn't too much of a pain except for the fact that we have to get up real early and apply a gooey oil on our bodies and then take a bath. Then, we flaunt around in new clothes with remains of the gooey-ness on our faces and generally sit around doing nothing. Basically, good fun this whole diwali thing. Every year I very resolutedly plan not to burst crackers ....think about the child labour, think about the noise and other such ramblings I tell myself but somehow apartment people always put too much enthu and I give in. This year I'ven't burst any crackers yet and have as always resolutedly planned not to.

My dad has this very eccentric type cousin. I love going to his place. His whole family's a bunch of weirdos ....but then he beats them all to it. We don't visit them too often but being diwali and all we went and jamaofied kabza there all morning. Their house is this very beautiful thing ....its ancestral and some haJaar years old and all that. It is very ethnic and stuff if you know what I mean. They've all these real nice sculptures and paintings and stuff like that. My uncle's some kind of a collector....he keeps going all over the world and brings back things. So his house is full of interesting stuff. If you go the right hand corner of the space immediately beside the staircase to the first floor of their house you would find yourself surrounded by exactly four huge tanks. Three of them have different kinds of fish in them and the fourth one has three turtles. I never used to like fish too much .I used to think they are too gluggy and scaly types but uncle put too much enthu and now I think they are alright. The next room is full of DVDs and CDs and cassettes with a gramaphone and a moterbike shaped telephone at one end of the room. The best part though is definitely the books. I brought back this real big Asterix book with 6 comics in it and all,home and have been at peace with the world ever since.

As some kind of a climax, my cousin, Shalini and her folks (there you go..your promised moment of glory, Shalu :-)) came home in the evening. We went to the terrace and sat around watching all the sparks in the sky talking of life, the universe and everything...laughing our heads of at things that were funny and some that weren't. For those of you who don't know my cousin....she's one of the few people that's closest to my heart....you know the kinds I can be silent with and it wouldn't get even trifle awkward...

As my dad, mum and I (bro went off to cousins' place) walked back from the gate after saying goodbye to cousin and her folks...my dad and I discussing some cheesy MTV fully faltoo thing and cracking ourselves up for no apparent reason....as I came back to my room and saw Asterix, the Beatles Anthology and my Chemistry text book lying on my table... and as I realize what a nice, casual, chuck acads and everything else, look-outside-car-window day it has been I feel....well...as though ''I was only waiting for this moment to arise''.