Sometimes..

Sometimes
The whole world looks bleak with no rhyme or reason
Sometimes
There is nothing to look back at, nothing to look forward to
Sometimes
My frustrated screams spare not even trees and walls
Sometimes
A nasty voice in my head says, “No one really cares about you”
Sometimes
I question existence, this fight for nothingness
Sometimes, sometimes
A wave of loneliness consumes me amidst a sea of people
Just at those times comes that call
A few minutes of arbit talk
Some cribs, a little nostalgia
And then happens sunshine
The world turns a tad rosier, the day a little pleasant
My heart gets filled with love for things animate and inanimate
For
Life is beautiful after all

Inspired by a conversation with K about J;
Dedicated to M, D, J, V, B and many others who make my life beautiful

The vela-vettis of life: Some clarifications

When do people blog? OK, I will restrict this question to myself. When do I blog? I got thinking about this after going through comments on some of my posts written at various points of time in these two years.

Quite a sizeable amount of my readers have commented, “Are you so vela/vetti that you are blogging about this (referring to the subject matter of the post)?”

For the uninitiated, vela and vetti are different ways of saying ‘jobless’.

In fact, I would say that my readers are hopelessly wrong when they ask me such a question. I do NOT blog when I am jobless. Laziness consumes me so much at such times that I just loll on the couch reading a book and dozing off. And, this jobless-funda does not even apply to my life anymore. I blog on these ‘apparently’ vela-vetti topics in the cab on my way to office and back home.

No, I did not write this post in a cab. It is too small for such a longish ride I thought. So I wrote it during lunch time at office.

The city that is

9.30 A.M. on a Monday morning. I am in a cab inching its way towards Worli. The cab driver asks me, “Tilak Bridge se nikaaloon?” And, I give the obvious response (more so obvious since I have no idea of which ‘bridge se nikaloon’ to get to Worli). “Kiss raste pe traffic jam kam hoga?” And, he says, “Is city mein kahin pe bhi traffic kam nahi ho saktha.’
That is Mumbai for you!
Where people and vehicles together throng the roads at comparable magnitudes. Where a measly 5 km drive might take you around an hour if you are lucky. Where there is no time to stand and stare, for time is money here.
But, with all its drudgery and pain, it is still a beautiful city!
Beautiful because it is the city of everyone’s dreams. Beautiful because it welcomes everyone who comes to it with open hands and still has space for more. Beautiful because of its never say die spirit.
The cab is still inching its way towards Worli, now having crossed some bridge like structure which I presume is Tilak Bridge.
I look out and back at those good old days when there really was time to stand and stare, even in this crazy, mad paced city. Perhaps, if I had been thrown into it with no time to inhale its spirit but just time enough to run from home to office back home again to sleep all through the weekend (as is the case these days), I would have hated the city for the turmoil it had brought me. But, no, I was introduced slowly and steadily, to sea faces, to town and its enjoyments, to eat outs and hang outs, to these and much more.
Maybe that is what has made me fall so much for the place that would have meant nothing to me a year and a quarter back.
Maybe, sometimes, it has nothing so much to do with the place as to how and through whom you get absorbed into it.
Maybe, it is plain old first impression.
My initial impressions of the city were molded by experiences with cabbies and auto-wallahs who used a meter to tell me rates (Chennaiites would understand my excitement) and took me where I wanted to go without worrying about how interior a colony it was (people from Bangalore would definitely empathize with me on this one). And there on grew my respect for this city filled with ‘round-the-clock active people’ who did not have time enough to poke their noses into others’ businesses.
Today, this respect and love has gone up to such proportions that I do not regret having relocated here when I get up early to leave for office so as to save some major time on the traffic jam front.
Finally, the cab has reached destination Worli. And, I gear myself up for another of those longish work – laden weeks in the hope of catching a better glimpse of Mumbai Meri Jaan this weekend.