It’s been over a month since I last
gave abstruse hints about my romantic meanderings, dear reader, and
to say that it has been just eventful would start a riot. All
the attention of the avaricious atrocity that is the world’s
largest democracy’s fourth estate has been on Anna, Arundhati and
even everybody’s favourite cow, Arindam, has failed to think beyond
it. Pardon the ill-advised amour with alliteration- don’t confuse
it with acerbity, please- but being averse and apathetic through this
succouring of angry acolytes has led to an accretion of... alright,
I’ll end your misery before you go all apoplectic with rage. But,
you get the idea.
The whole movement gave a mind with a
comic bent of, err, mind, so much ammunition for jokes. Yet, for fear
of being mobbed and lynched, I couldn’t release it all. Even after
this great surge of democratic(?) anger has finally ended in a
victory for civil society (refer this for perspective), one
hopes it isn’t pyrrhic. And, I have to admit, assuming it’s safe
now, that I was never party to it all. That enraged the jingoistic
Matkas in Azad even more than my pleas for them to stop calling
Jackie, “Kalu” (as Maya Sarabhai would surely aver, that’s
so middle-class!). In fact, even through the deluge of
Anna-related news all over print, news and Twitter, I looked for
diversions. MSD’s boys were bleeding black and blue, the football
season hadn’t started, and Blake Lively, Leighton Meester and
company hadn’t made an entrance into my life. So what I was up to
really?
If you are reading as a present student
on campus, I’d probably have rubbed it in a thousand times already
that I have no courses this semester. Which means no lectures, no
tutorials, no practicals- no contact hours. None. Naught.
Nothing. Nada!
It isn’t as rosy as that last word
makes it sound, though. Twelve hours of sleep have become
indispensable, while the only daily attendance I mark is to one
balding Gujju I run into everyday at Nescafe, him not taking
Architecture final year as seriously as the rest of that incestuous
family. Then, there’s the moping around with the rest of the
coffee gang, SMSing Mango to continue her education of the over-hyped
Shangri-la that is 5th year, and the tension-filled
conversations at home about feline matters. Thanks to the amazing
social anomaly called birthdays, though, I have at least six new
novels to get through with. And did I tell you, we get paid eight
grand a month for all this? Money for nothing, indeed.
The problem with having so much free
time, though, is that you get time to think things over. As I was
telling Dang the other day, time may be the best healer, but wounds
without closure burn the most. And that is when you’d spot me
walking about alone, shorts fluttering with the easy wind, eyes on
the lookout for that speck of brilliance always lurking in the sky,
and a heart still yearning for the girl with love in her eyes, andflowers in her hair. Did I tell you I was falling in love with
Led Zeppelin, too? Anyway, this is the product of the past two
months’ random walking. Trusty cell-phone camera earns the xoxo’s.
(Mal, I really don’t see how x and o aren’t hugs and kisses,
respectively.)
