The Promised Land

Dear Delhi,

I write this letter to you curled up in my 10 pound quilt on this wintery sunday morning where the classes have been called off because of the overbearing power of a mass bunk and as I have substantial amount of time left till I leave home for my Narnia movie I am going to pour my heart out to you.Hence, I request you to get some popcorn or paratha if you must and sit back and brace yourself for a long-ish post.

So first things first. You have to work on your PR bro. I mean the amount of negative publicity this city generates is just crazy. So you call gola chuski and spell Pav bhaji the wrong way but still.All that any one imagines when one thinks of "Delhi" is rape,robbery,more rape,and the vvips of the nation zooming off in the shiny white ambassador cars with a red batti on top. This imagery although not entirely false tends to overpower multiple other facets and faces of the city, which is something that one has to experience to truly relish and cherish.

You my friend Delhi have been an adventure of sorts. Staying away from home in a different city guarantees the much needed freedom. I would like to take a moment here to thank you from the bottom of my abysmal heart for having protected the ijjat of my two girlfriends and I when we went out at 9.30 in the night from lajpat nagar to hauz khas to get booze to mark my transition from naiveity to stupidity on my 18th birthday.

Unfortunately,when the hangover of independance wears off and one has to go to the dentist and the doctor alone and when one is forced to wash their own undies everyday,freedom suddenly doesnt feel so pleasant anymore.

It is in this city that I realized what it felt like to be a part of a "society" in college. So, it doesnt feel any different. Well,turning 18 years old doesnt feel any different either but people around you have an urgency to get laid/sloshed/drive. Anyhoo, as I was saying, you realize how lucky you are to be in where you are when you can perform a street play dealing with the issue of mob mentality among an enthusiastic mob infront of India Gate.

Now, moving on to matters of grave importance. WHAT EYE CANDIES MON! + 200 points for the eye candies you stock,from inquisitive foriegn tourists to the lads with bieber hair-do, you've got them all. At this point I think it is only fair that I disclose a very important secret. I am studying in an all girls college. Therefore, I live in constant hope.

Having studied in co-ed schools for a major part of my life, the initial days at my college were rather strange. It was as if I was engulfed in a sea of boobs. But gradually, things got better, I realized that being away from the men folk lead to women dropping all their pretentions. (almost). Thus, the sight of a bunch of girls rolling down the slope of a grassy hill or just sitting in the front lawns soaking up the sun was not a surprising one. Among the gazillion girls at my college the group of girls with chocolate muffins and hot chocolate in their hands standing infront of the Nescafe stall singing glee songs in pitches gone awry and chilling would be my group of friends.

This city, would not hold as much value for me if it were not for these wonderful and completely bamboozled people I call my friends. We eat, we chill,we click random pictures(thats issy moo's forte),we plan world elimination (thats diya's agenda),we sleep (1 of piddi's favorite activities),we bunk classes(yeah this one is our favorite), we shriek (thats just me actually), we pet animals/humans, we stand tall (thats just adilah actually),we eat cheap chinese that tastes like punjabi but isnt at city cafe, we blow up all our money at big chill cafe but the best thing about us is that we belong. To the city, to each other.

Delhi, you are like a fresh made tiramisu, with layers galore, as one digs into you one discovers and rediscovers things,places and people. I only hope that I can discover myself in the process of discovering you.

Yours truly,

I love you as much as home,

Red one.

PS : Good job with the metros.
PS1 : Amazing food yaar.

PS3: Ainvayi likh diya :P

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This post was left unwritten so I decided to finish it today. Sorry for the long delay in publishing new posts. I admit that I am an idiot.

Soda Lemon Ginger Pop LPHS on de taaap.

My school didnt give us a farewell.

I mean what kind of a chindi school does that?

All through Podar. When were stuck in 12-D, a claustrophobic class of 20 girls and 1 boy, all we really wanted to do was to get the hell out of there.

Now it seems as though we are out of a hell hole only to fall into the dirty sewer of the over rated "real world".

We made movies in Podar. We started a movement to create awareness against child rights and instead of just limiting it to colourful papers of our spiral bound project we actually went around municipal schools and orphanages staging plays and singing and dancing for the lil' kids encouraging them to dream big. We played bhojpuri dumbcharades. We saw tribal porn (well almost) to get in depth knowlegde about the tribes of Andaman and Nicobar islands. We assumed that the bad moods of our teachers was directly proportional to their non existant sex lives and PMS issues. We went through a long day looking forward to downing pepsi, gorging on schezwan cheese frankie made by the nepali man with orange hair and having orange candy, 3 things which defined our after school activities and also reflected in our growing waistlines. But who cared. We were in Podar. And life and all its hassels could wait.

When jaishree who btw is the head of the department for english has hair like snape and shares my birthday, would come into our class to lecture us about our disappointing performance in the exam that we just gave or when were burdened with project work that we thought would just never end, all we really wanted to do was kill ourselves or kill them or both.

Podar gave us vivum. Podar gave us the freedom to choose who and what we wanted to be. Somewhere along the way,while we were busy taking notes Renita gave us and sniggering about her sailor husband who favoured the sea to her, during vasanthi's economics classes when she told us how mohanram her hero and husband had taught her this chapter and we should probably try and get the best of her before she forgot it, during Geena's poetry lessons when she tried to explain the concept of "sweet moans" to us, failing miserably as she related it to her sex life and ours (?),when Geeta would go on and on about her family and family friends and friends of friends in delhi and dehradun etc. We sat raptured in our seats. Amused. Amazed. We never thought what the NEXT phase would be like. We hoped it would be better but is it? We believed in the heart of our hearts that time would not fly by so quickly. That we would have a moment to pause. To reflect.

Today I sit here in Delhi (or the big D as my friends call it) 719.53 miles away from mumbai,away from home,away from all the madness,laughs and tears. Why would I voluntarily move? Well thats a story for another time.

Ps: I am totally crashing my juniors ka farewell. That is if they have one.

Pps : I am sorry for not being regular with my posts. I am supremely lazy. But I shall try and post a lil' oftener.

Things I should not have done, But I went ahead and did them anyway

So it had been really long since I last posted something and I thought that now you guys qualify as the privileged few and should to know more about me. You see the thing is I am what they call an over thinker, I think, re-think and over think things way way too much but that is all after I have already done what should never have been done in the first place. Sad but true. Here's a list.

1. Tried explaining the story of twilight the vampire love saga to my dad over the phone

Me : So there is this girl she falls in love with a guy, who is a vampire, he loves her but wants to eat her as well..

* Long pause on the other side*

2. Dispensed relationship advice on the radio.

RJ : My friend vicky has been dumped, he is upset, what should he do? (OR something like that)

I thinking that I am this major love guru use phrases like Many other fish in the sea, Move on, GET A LIFE! on the RADIO.

RJ : wow, you sound so level headed for a 16 year old.

Me : Yeah, I study psychology. (WHAT WAS I THINKING!!!)

Next day while going to school

My neighbour : Hi, red one from podar studying psychology.

Yeah. Out of all the millions of people in mumbai, My geeky neighbour heard that show.FANTASTIC.

3. Texted my geography tution teacher instead of my friend saying :

FUCK!! I am only done with 3 pages I hate GEOGRAPHY!

The woman read out the text in the class. It was so hard not to laugh!

4. Said " Mumbai is growing vertically 'coz it cannot grow horizontally anymore" in a compitition where I was representing the city, wearing a navaree and all.

5. Written this post during the study leave of my 12th std. Board examinations.

Although there are alot of times when I wish I could rewind,undo and fast forward my life, yet these incidents are what make me who I am and I would rather have it this way than any other.

Friends are like potatoes if you eat them they die.

When a Kid is really small and you hide the toy he is playing with,the toy ceases to exist for him but as he grows older,his brain develops and when you repeat the same action with him, he now looks for his toy as he knows that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen,touched or heard. This is called Object Permanence.





Today the same theory can be applied to the friends we have.There are some friends that you can call in the middle of the night when you are panicking about an exam or about the world ending in 2012 and they will answer your call tell you to calm the fuck down,console you and then tell you to slap yourself for waking them up.Then there are friends who you call after say 3-4 months and still manage to have the best conversations with, the kind that clears your head,with them distance or time doesnt change anything,unlike the rest of the world. (Thankgod for that!) And deep down you know that they will always be there no matter what.





But even though each one of us has these friends we still manage to put ourselves in the self loathe mode and declare that we have no friends and the world is a bad place after all. Untill..





We meet these wonderful set of people who completely change our views about life as we know it. The kind of people with who you just "click". They make you realize that all this time when someone gave that loser-ish speech about how there is a whole new world out there and how we are being completely juvenile in thinking that "my world is going to come to an end because my friends arent talking to me" or "the guy/girl I like doesnt like me I am gonna die", that person was actually right because there IS a whole new world out there where people accept you for who you are with no expectations or demands and where you just fit in like a puzzle piece that was in hiding.

^ Scooby and his friends. Different yet similar.

After a point you realize that there is no point in having 446 friends on your facebook friends list if you cant think of calling either one of them at a time of crisis. The thing is we spend most of our time thinking and over thinking about things and people who dont matter. As a part of my new year resoultion 101 I have decided to quit doing THIS and suggest you do the same.



Choose wisely live well - Some mutual fund advertizement.

Nishant has eggs and manish is pregnant

Nishant : Dude I dont understand why they call balls balls.

Me : :S

Nishant : Yeah If you go to see they are not exactly balls,they are more egg like.

Us: Nishant you have eggs.

All through the bus ride

Aakriti : Eggs to you man!

JT : So do you want omlette?

Me : Nishant will be the one ovulating in his relationship.

Aakriti : Eggjactly.

JT : *points to a random place* That place serves awesome EGG bhurji.

Guess who can never eat eggs anymore?

Manish *distributing chocolates randomly*

Me : Good news hai kya? *touches his stomach* Arrey this baby is kicking!

Manish : Main maa banne wali hoon. Bhakti you are having a sibling.

Other people start saying *All izz well*

Someone : But your stomach isnt growing!?

Me : Sperms are slow.

That day Manish made me buy a Mango dolly ice cream worth 20 bucks coz he was "craving " for it and I had to settle for the poor cousin - Orange Candy worth 5 bucks.

^ Manish and Nishant.

Nishant is the kind of guy who makes a spoon out of paper if you dont have a spoon to eat the awesome andorra's chicken fried rice. Geeta the english teacher calls him a chick magnet. Geeta is old and sex deprived. But Nishant IS a good guy and he can put his fist in his mouth. NO, he really can!

Manish is way too sensible for his Body Mass Index, but in his defense he is growing. I have known him since the last 7 years. I am his broker and I call him maniaaa *bihari accent*. All the mothers really like him.

Those are the kind of guys we have in podar, one has egg shaped balls the other one has been impregnated by alien forces, but we love them, just the way they are. :)

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. " - Oscar Wilde.

" I hate living alone with my dad. It makes me feel like I am becoming more and more like my mother." said Jo. Jo is my best friend forever who I have known since I was in 5th grade, she knows me in an out, and is basically the best thing that happend to mankind since chocolate. But thats not the point, the point is that subconsciously we have started to become what we never wanted to be.

Now dont get me wrong its great to idolize your parents but seriously,everytime we dont get what we want and our parents manage to completely piss us off, dont we always think to ourselves how we are NEVER going to let that happen to OUR kids.

During one of our frequent visits MacD' Jo, Khyati (Now she's the most sarcastic,practical and simple person I know, a rare kind in today's plastic world) and I thought of names from A-Z (for both boy and girl) for Jo's future kid. We even decided that if her husband doesnt approve of our choice of names then he was to be abandoned asap.

I was watching So you think you can dance? and this woman danced like magic, and I thought to myself, " Woah, I am so gonna make my kid learn dayancing". (Oh other thing we pronounce dance as dayance but that story is for some other time.)

Thats when it hit me, " dude why Am I planning my non existant-for-a-really-long time-to-come kid's future?", You know those ambitious mums you see outside school and thank the good lord that your mum isnt that way? the kind who enrolls the child in every class possible and the kind whose children suffer under the burden of her expectations and ambition?

See the thing is, like shahrukh said in kuch kuch hota hai, "You live once", so why not fulfill all your dreams, wild fantasies and do the things that we really want to do OURSELVES rather than wait for our progeny to live OUR dreams? That kid-to-be should just chill and think for him/herself dont you think?

PS: Now this could be one of those ahead of its time posts but what the hell some food for thought isnt it?.

" Do they know that we know? " - Rachel Green, F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

Women talk. (alot)
Its a proven fact.
And when a friend or a friend of a friend or a friend of a friend of a friend (you get the flow) is lovestruck, we get all the deets (short for details - oh I am so cool :P) about them.
Now more often than not, we have NO idea about who the person is and its quite possible that we have never met them and never will, but does that stop us from all the sharing and caring? I dont think so.

So whether they like hardy boys or own an alsatian dog or like to wear fluroscent green boxers or had a fling with their best friend's sister,we KNOW everything. Now you may think this is a mild form of stalking but tell you what this is the female networking at its best.

^ For example :P

Hypothetical situation :

Someone you know but dont KNOW : "Do I know you?"
You : " No but I do". :P

"Gyaan Is to be batoed" - Elastic chaddi buddy :)

After 12 years (or more?) Of schooling there are some things that I realized :-

• Math never was/is my cup of coffee/tea/buttermilk.
• Decision making is not my thing.
• Friends/bitches/ambition/lovestruck weirdness nothing lasts forever.
• Shit happens.

My mental state now?

" The paper fucked me so hard I feel like a slut " - Shayan Roy.

Oh my 12th std prelims are going on.I should be studying and Mayawati should be in jail but clearly none of the two are happening any time soon. So now that you are here might as well read something and realize "woah! life globally is the same Bitch".