O Brother, where art thou?

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 5^th 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.)