And the last

I've written two posts already and I'm typing again, and my glasses are hanging askew, and I don't know what has come over me. Ignore these, ignore everything. I need dinner right about now.

I'm changing my blogger password to something I won't remember. But how is that possible, is it possible to type something in while you're consciously trying to forget it? There, I've started again. I was feeling silly at first, and then I felt angry, and now I really, really wish I had something better to do than type this. But I don't. I'm feeling a little hysterical.

I need to go take a walk.

And,

I hate it that I can't go to the king of my country and say, "Give me a fleet of ships and a horde of sailors, and I will sail to new lands and bring you back rubies and dried flowers." It is disheartening when you come from the country that was the hotbed of the spices and the rubies and the elephants and everything else. What can I bring back from the west, a burger? But we have that here too. I hate it that I can type "Spain" into Wikipedia and get a whole page about it, nothing is new and nothing is there to be discovered. No, I don't mean that, there is loads to be discovered but it has already been seen and commented on before, and you are in danger of hacking through undergrowth and coming across a little clearing populated by bearded loons who say they wanted to run away from the world too.

It isn't dangerous and you aren't pioneering anything by doing it, travel is now just a matter of taking breaks from work and doing things like family bonding, and you will never be sanctioned to go explore as much as possible - take my ships, bring me new ideas. If the sailors die, what of it, they were explorers. I hate it that there are no emperors today, just too many boundaries and too many permits, and airfares. Always the airfares.

The Mind Wanders When Dinner Is Late.

I know looking fresh-flower beautiful is a prerequisite, but one can overlook that at times, can't one. I wish I was a Rajput princess married to a Mughal Emperor who tamed elephants. And that is not Jodhaa Akbar talking, I really think it would be nice. You aren't expected to give exams or have a career or handle life with a mobile phone where everyone's a call away. You need to communicate through scrolls. You are only expected to train as a warrior and look beautiful and wear iridescent clothes. Then you can get married off, Mughal emperor or not - no worries about never finding a man who will like you. And you can be a part of a harem where you'll be left alone if you make sure you're aloof and disdainful, and then you can pet bunnies in luxurious gardens for days on end. That would suit me, right about now.

And even if you don't train in the martial arts you can carry a catapult around and let fly that knoblike tikli thing on your head right into your opponent's eye.

I don't even know why I'm writing this.

How Time Flies.

I've had three baths already and my skin still has a greenish tinge. I'm hoping the world will assume that my body cells have started producing copious amounts of chlorophyll, but you know the world. It is gleefully malicious, and that is why most people will think I'm just nauseous. Or decomposing. Serves me right for liking the colour green so much.

Holi delights me. I don't have to spend on expensive firecrackers, I don't have to spend dreary hours shopping for a jewelled horror that passes of as a notun jaama, I don't have to pray. I just have to get out of my house and look like I'm terrified of colour (yes, I smirked at that. Terrified, hah.) and every little kid in the vicinity who has a pichkaari appears magically. I then have to pretend to run, and I know water balloons will come zooming in from all directions, landing here, there and everywhere with woeful plops that are most unimpressive for what are supposed to be lethal weapons. I finally act like a damsel in distress and say something equivalent to "Look at what you've done, you little twerps." and poof, I'm a part of the chameleon clique. I will be offered sympathies and free bottles of permanent colour, and I can spend the rest of the day stalking and attacking victims.

Crime was never this easy.

Which reminds me. One of my earliest posts was also about Holi, which means that my blog is about a year old. Did you ever think it possible. And the dashboard tells me I've managed about 55 posts. Did you ever think that possible. And since I can't be bothered finding out how old my blog actually is, I have decided that it is in tribute to the family tradition we have of being unsure about our birthdays. My grandparents never could figure out the Gregorian calendar, my father was registered as having two different birthdates on two different certificates (but then he grew up in Bihar and that is another story), and my mother - well, she was told that she was born on the day that she was born, and you know how gullible children are. As for me, I can't read a thing on my birth certificate (which, again, is sure to be a conspiracy of sorts. I can't be eighteen already). And most importantly, my zodiac still confuses me. It is befitting, therefore, that my blog not know when it was born.

But this means that my blog's now the equivalent of a one-year-old baby, and every parent knows that the period after this is when you regret ever having thought of the opposite sex. I, of course, don't have that luxury either, being the sole begetter of this creature. Which means I garner no sympathy whatsoever. I am a single mother who has fallen prey to artificial insemination without realising that there will be no father to blame everything on. And, consequently, no alimony either.

Frankenstein seems a more lovable book all of a sudden. Aaah! It's alive! It's alive! Oh God, it's alive! Yes.

And since I seem to have run out of things to write about - witness the fact that I wrote this post about birthdays and monsters - I'll go back to doing something more worthwhile, like staring at the ceiling. Happy Birthday, blog, and Happy Holi to the rest.

The Mother of All Tags.

I can't help cursing Ad Libber, just a little, for tagging me with this. I'm terrible at introspection, and about as deep as a pencil-shaving, but I'll take a shot at this anyway. And I also don't know whom to tag, so if you want to rise from your seat after one trying hour, pale-faced and quivering-lipped, try this. You might want to supply yourself with a stimulant first.

Life Ten Years Ago:

Consisted of parents who went to work and grandparents who brought me up and teachers who made us colour things in class. Winters were the best part of the year, spent in cold grey Jamshedpur with the other set of grandparents, the paternal ones, in a sunny house with a kitchen garden and a jackfruit tree.

In school my friends and I spent much time trying to gain control of the merry-go-round, which was usually occupied by very mean seniors. We came up with a rulebook for merry-go-round occupation, which didn’t get us onto it anyway, so we moved to the big tree at the center of the playground. We pretended it was an ancient murder site and wove wonderful whodunnits around it. Chewed-up chicken bones appeared regularly near the tree-roots, which we of course held to be the grisly remains of some long-dead soul. Neither forensic science nor our understanding of the universe was much advanced then, with the result that murders were more exciting.

Life Five Years Ago:

My mother decided to retire and become a homemaker, which was a disaster. I could no longer get away with a lot of things because suddenly she was all-pervasive, like God. Maybe that is when I started going off religion. I also had to deal with two very good friends moving away, which of course contributed more to my misery. If emo bands had existed then I would have used up half the city’s supply of kohl and black nail enamel.

Life Tomorrow:

Is life tomorrow. I may laze around all day, or discover a parallel universe, or clean my room finally, or set something on fire. The possibilities are what make it fun.

Five Locations I Would Love To Run Away To:

Oh no. Oh no. You do not ask me questions like this. All I've ever wanted to do is travel. But my top five more or less remains the same:

1) Iceland, with the geysers and the moon-landscape.

2) The Amazon, with the macaws and the spider monkeys.

3) Ladakh, because it’s Ladakh. Also Kailash-Mansarovar. Also the North-East. Anywhere in the Himalayas, basically.

4) The Silk Route: Samarkand. Istanbul. Merv. Zaytun. The Levant. What names.

5) Prince Edward Island. One can’t read Montgomery without hungering to see it.

Five Bad Habits I Have:

1) I procrastinate. More about this later.

2) I am very contradictory. I cannot possibly explain this, but I am.

3) I tend to stare at people a lot. I also laugh at inappropriate situations. Which is a roundabout way of saying I do not have very good manners.

4) I am also very distractible. I tend to get interested in too many different things at the same time, and always forget to do essential things like pack a bag or carry a wallet. I have also been known to get onto the wrong buses and end up in strange parts of the city, all because I was dreaming about something irrelevant.

5) I talk to myself. In public. All the time.

Five Things I Will Never Wear:

1) Nighties/Maxies/those things that look like maternity gowns.

2) Anything pink. Baby pink especially. Also fakely floral things.

3) Plastic hair clips.

4) Any garment that requires me to show off a bright bra strap. I find it a terrible turn-off and it’s very pointless anyway, you might as well not wear the top. Fashionable things are very ridiculous sometimes.

5) Roman tie-up sandals.

Five Biggest Joys At This Moment:

Nothing specific, I’m just in a phase where I’m feeling at peace with the universe because I don’t have another exam till the 25^th, and there are some good movies and good books lying around, and dinner due in some time.

Something to Achieve By Next Year:

Must decide on whether tea or coffee is to be my major addiction. Since I do not live in Benaras I have ruled out paan.

Something that Impacted Me Last Year:

Getting my camera, my lovely sexy camera that makes the world look fabulous and glossy, after two years of cursing my earlier camera for conking out prematurely.

What I Will Miss About 2007

The last year of craziness with a bunch of idiots who have given me more than anyone else could. These guys got me through school and a lot of other things, and I will miss them without end and reason.

Five Things I Want To Do Before I Die

If I had my way, a company would employ me to travel and take photographs and write about the places I saw. It would pay me so much that I would retire at forty and write a book. It wouldn’t be a bestseller but would give me enough to build a tiny house in the mountains with an old-fashioned library. I’d then live there in peace with a great shaggy dog and listen to all the good music in the world. Also, somewhere along the way I’d fall in love. With a male human being, I mean. And then I’d die. I am very unambitious that way.