cogitated thoughts

I have been thinking about redoing my room for a while now. In my opinion, familiarity doesn’t exactly breed contempt but it does possess this knack of making you want to be dynamic. The feeling, like so many other feelings, sets in a little later than it should. In my case, it has set in at a time when the chances of my going to a hostel are fairly moderate if not prodigiously high. The kind of chances, you will agree, which narrow down my need for reinvention.

My room, in over-used words is a ghost from the past. One of it’s walls even has a Guns n’ (‘n’ ’ smirk) Roses poster on it. So I suppose you can imagine how far it goes back.
I would have been unaware of the walls or the atmosphere in my room, if it weren’t for a certain video I happen to have had the privilege of watching a couple of days back. The video, you see, was of a room. Queen’s English knocks on my head with her fist and asks me to be more precise. The video, you see, was of one of the most beautiful rooms I’ve ever seen.

Most of the people on my very eminent friends list feel that rooms are no big deal. They do exist after all for the sole purpose of giving you the chance to make them unclean. But as most of them belong to one-of-those institutions, which support the word ‘unclean’ with banners, hands up signs and trumpets, their opinion doesn’t really amount to much.
Even the thought of bare walls makes me feel like I’ve had my first viewing of the Ring.
So yes, bottom line: a room is where your heart is.

Along with the just-turned-teenager-I-want-to-be-cool attribute that is splashed across all over my room, there are a number of memories attached to it.
It was in this room that I celebrated my Tenth std results and it is in this room that I have now moped over my Twelfth std ones. Everyone tells me that it isn’t that big a deal, which in a matter of speaking is well and good. But it’s the first time that I’ve managed to miss a hundred marks in a goddamn exam and that is of course not a very pleasant feeling. In the short span of 48 hours, jaws have dropped, eyes have been strained, indignation masks have been put on faces, silences have been spoken into telephones and wild queries of true identities have been made. ‘‘Was it really YOUR roll number that you typed in?’’ And to all this I would like to say, ‘‘DUH! Shit happens’’.

I sincerely wish that it didn’t happen to me but it sincerely chooses to wish other wise.
I’ve been trained not to brush things under the carpet because of which, it wasn’t that hard to let the 80% slap me on my face, shake me up for a while and make me break down for a little bit. So, I patted everyone’s head and told them it was all right, made others pat mine and tell me the same.

There was nothing else to do but to call up the cousin-with-most-guest-appearances on this blog and ask her to please bunk college so that she could come to my rescue like one of those United States Marines Bertie Wooster keeps talking about. The place you are in, moulds your conversation to quite an extent and this was justified in ‘Rice Bowl’ where both of us treated ourselves to some nice Chinese food. The place as such is a cosy, quiet restaurant…the A.C, cushioned chairs and of course the food manage to give the dim lit place a certain feel, which makes you feel warm, laid back and that sort of thing. But I think they have an exceptionally bad DJ or whoever- picks- their- playlist because they had this crazy CD/cassette on which seemed to be a mixture of the most horrifying music that anyone can possibly be subjected to. Imagine Britney Spears, Christina Augielera, dik chik remixes and a not-so-good-percentage stuffed into one paper bag, then burst right in front of your face and you WILL genuinely feel as if ‘‘ AUGH! I’ve been shot.’’

Oh well, I’m afraid I’ve been digressing for a while now. Do accept my apologies and allow me to welcome you back to whatever it was that I was saying. (Scrolls up…Ah...oh…uh huh... yes) So, all that manages to mould conversation, making it the inane, rugged thing that technically isn’t supposed to happen between two people between whom silences never get uncomfortable…especially when there are things to be said and intensities to be evoked. The REAL thing is thus, built up, allowed to gain more energy and has a strong, structured foundation. If it’s done the right way…it can EVEN have a PLOT.

So, when we had finished lunch, made a customary visit to Blossoms (That was after Shalu promised me that she WILL NOT allow me to buy any thing as she likes my house and probably didn’t want my parents to disown me on accounts of prospective bankruptcies…she obviously ended up buying two books for herself.) and aimlessly walked the streets of Brigade Road, we found ourselves drifting towards the Barista on St Mark’s Road. By the time we’d ordered our coffees and laughed at the morons who actually managed to screw up a 5 lettered, easily spelt, clearly pronounced name by calling me ‘Snaiae’ or something of that sort, the REAL thing had grown and developed a voice of it’s own. If I’m not mistaken, it was at around this moment that time came to a dignified, silent, unseen stop. The words were heart felt, the emotions were genuine, the silences were comfortable and the frantic phone calls from both our mothers, asking us to get ourselves to home this instant because it was thunder storm-y and terribly cloudy were unheeded. Someone must have finally come and pressed the pause button because time had decided that it had had enough of inertia, making us realize in a simple, yet not abrupt way that the intensity had been sucked out, transported some place else and goodbyes were due.

There was something about the wind outside that didn’t quite feel right. It was too strong, powerful…a tad too icy cold. The world outside the stone walled, subtle Barista seemed to be in a chaotic mode. There was a lot of noise, too many traffic jams and a lot of people hurrying up. I realized then that this wasn’t going to be Rain Supreme. It was going to be something else. It was going to be Tempest-esque...

It doesn’t help in such situations, if your direction sense is close to zilch and your knowledge of bus routes is worse. These factors basically mean, auto zindabad and auto zindabad means raised eyebrows when you tell the driver ‘Old Madras Road’ and in a somewhat unhearable mumble, ‘Beninganahalli’. I finally did manage to find an auto and bid a goodbye to my cousin who suffers from no such ailments and got on a bus, reaching home about one and a half hour later than I did (Ha! :-P )

The auto had moved just a couple of meters when it started raining. Raining is actually understating it and doing it a whole lot of injustice. It wasn’t the sort of rain, which starts slowly, gradually turning into cats, dogs and all that. It was the kind, which thought that Darwin was basically a jobless man with a mid-life crisis and wanted to rebel with theories of evolution…making you wonder ‘what the (what’s that four letter word that begins with the same letter as fancy does…well…ahem, can’t remember) thundering typhoons?’ The auto driver immediately decided that the rain was MY fault. I immediately decided that I was going to go home broke...penniless…pleading ‘no, NO…not mea culpa’.

This time, my good friend, ‘time’ decided to slow down. It wanted me to contemplate, mix and match occurrences, question myself, question the heavens…. it wanted me to THINK. And for the next hour, that is exactly what I did. It was crazily cold and there was a constant spray of water hitting me. There was so much electricity in the air that I actually started feeling that things were following a synchronous pattern. Every time my thread of thought changed, something around me would change. Oh fine! little voice inside head, you been reading the Alchemist or something? But, I swear…the moment I decided that I HAD to do something about the walls of my room, they started a hail storm….

I needed yesterday. I needed the terribly sweet coffee. I needed the REAL thing. And I needed the wash. The rain that wasn’t a tempest anymore but more like a prequel of Noah sitting back with all his animals on a sunny island. There are no defined answers yet. But, there were at least questions. ‘Quo Vadis?’ you will say. And I will tell you to open your eyes and watch it rain...while I wait silently…wait for the mists to clear.