I am officially on a 'gap year'. I know they say its full of opportunities and how 'you can do anything' and 'find yourself' and travel yadayadayada but I didn't realize that this year off would cost me (my father) more than a year of my education ever did. Till now my year of doing many things has only consisted of me mostly hating my job, mailing hundreds of others for prospective ones, confusion, sometimes excitement, lists and lists of college plans, create a blank document titled STATEMENT OF PURPOSE, and endless facebook and feeling like my life sucks because I didn't go to NYU to begin with.

My friend today told me to promise her I wouldn't watch any Greys Anatomy because it would suck my soul into a dark hole, on which I proceeded to watch one episode, only to realize I can NOT bear it with Meredith Grey lisps the word McDreamy.

But I met a really awesome new person this week. We did a coordinated dance within one day of meeting each other. AND I am on the path to becoming a culinare extraordinare. I had decided I was going to do a Rachel Greene—cook horrifically and still be cute about it. But this is much more fun. 

Apart from a short trip to the hills with my crew, I haven't travelled at all this summer. But it seems to have swept past before I could collect. This was the summer I was supposed to figure out my life. The summer in which I would find answers, lose weight, become the person I had always dreamed of being. But soon the blazing sun changed to pouring rain and I was hardly different than I was a month ago but it's okay.

I have done some things I've regretted and some things that I've loved but I'm too lazy to tell.

Anyone I want to talk to just now seems to be in freaking Europe.
Today is one of those days when I feel incredibly sorry for myself.


I'm sick and don't have the energy to get started but this is just precious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA

Two people, one that I knew, and one that I knew of, died in the last two days. They were both as old as me. One died battling diseases he caught while reporting in Chhatisgarh, and the other out of drunken callousness. There is no difference.
Tarun was a colleague, not a friend. He was kind and sincere, and as I ran around office both frightened and indignant at being the youngest person around, he(as old as me) never let the ingratitude of youth bow him down. I remember him shyly playing old hindi songs on his phone as the editors screamed to him from an unseen side of the office about a good photograph. 

My friends and I trudged to the mountains and swam in waterfalls (one of us in a showercap- more for entertainment than safety). While I stood in freezing rushing water, I looked over at my friend in his protective head gear posing for photographs in front of a rock and as I screamed to him that I loved him, another one sat on a rock and looked at us with a sheepish moronic grin that only utmost fulfillment can produce. I can see our journey like a stop motion film inside my head, expressions changing from surprise to joy to annoyance to drunken ecstasy.
The mountains are magical. Reality in the paths that overlook valleys is outsized and unexplained. I saw myself as a speck in the vast drawing of the Himalayas, as a drop in the river, as a pebble in pathless woods. The spot when you know that you are small and insignificant and you must bow down to a force you can never defeat, a force that is fair, and beautiful, is comforting. 
I spent five days between upside down rose bushes, voices bouncing off each other, orange clouds and pink houses, absurd arguments ending in wild laughter, and a force that set my mind into motion.

But I don't know what is happening to me of late. I'm in a moment and I'm happy but when I start to record/review it in my mind or on paper it starts to disappear and leaves some lingering emotion that starts to claw on my emotional insides. 

I picture myself sitting in a chair outside our hotel in the hills with my friends listening to one of those songs that everyone sings together and drums their feet and nods their heads and smile at one another as you pass the joint while suddenly noticing that its breezy everywhere. I see myself and its a nice picture. But it seems painted. I can't recollect it or feel it anymore. I can't feel the tinge of simple pleasure run through me as I think about lying on a pile of people I love, everyone with half a glass full or empty of whatever it was that poisoned them last night. 

I used to be a patron of good feelings, loyal to exhilaration that comes from exhaustion. Right now I only feel continuous  doubt and a gnawing hope that something is going to come around and blow my brains out of my head. My idealism that was forever my solace has started to be questioned. I used to want my emotions to be like the ones that I saw in the movies. I wanted my heart to be ripped out of my chest, a smile to spread across my face in slow motion, for anger to almost kill me, and sadness cripple my brain. 

But as you grow older you realize that you prefer your passions being milder, your self being functional, but this proficiency is accompanied by a certain boredom or longing for the theatrics that you rid yourself of. You realize that you aren't living for it to be written into a book. That life wasn't literature, or literature itself was just life. 

Tomorrow is my last exam and I feel like for a while I have known nothing else and I am actually a bit nervous that they are ending. This is the first time I set any sort of goal and the first time I'm worried about a result. And I don't want to be told not to worry, or forget about them when they're over. I want to hope every day, anxiously, that I've done as I was hoping I would. I don't understand the appeal behind avoiding things.
About not thinking about how you did your exam, forgetting about the first person who broke your heart, about shielding it from being broken, about not allowing yourself to be blindly driven and inevitably devastated and disappointed towards an unreachable goal. 
I'm not saying my high levels of self consummation are healthy or freeing, it's actually pretty exhausting. I just don't understand how to be another way and it only makes me angry when someone tells me - don't think about it.  
I wish I could go back to being constantly bewildered instead of seemingly clever. 
It is prouder to know, but luckier not to, so you can find out for the first time. 

I remember my first year of college when I absolutely hated it. I was angry and alone and all of eighteen and wanted to shoot everyone through the head. The world didn't get me and I didn't know what I was doing there. So I made up stories of cute boys who paid for my Iced Tea at McDonalds and the D school canteen, as I rummaged in my bag and couldn't find change. It was an excellent story, not too unbelievable either. 
But eventually thanks to my prolific friends who hifived me through the pages in my course books, I learnt to love where I was at, and like I have said a million times on this blog, there is no high like a good class. 

Brodsky, Ma man .  

I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
the handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin-bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you'd shift the gear.
we'd find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we'd repair
To where we've been before.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy 
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that sighs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.

I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It's evening, the sun is setting;
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What's the point of forgetting
If it's followed by dying? 

On a less brooding, more normal note, I AM GOING TO GET SHITFACED IN THE FACE TOMORROW!!!And my friends and I will sit on a round table and scream sentences followed by 'bitchessssss'.! 
YAY. 

Today Stanford sent me an email answering my query about admissions. It was the beginning to my pursuit of an overseas education. 
I feel like as middle class Indians, we undergo a contradiction. We travel in autos, drink th cheapest whiskey available, chat up our rickshaw vaalas. We smile at the boy who sells flowers on the road, develop certain friendships with panwadis in our localities, we eat ten rupee meals, we brag about how Sarojini Nagar makes us look good inside 500 rupees. But we come home to buffer the latest Mad men episode, we tune in the characters into our life (I wanna be Peggy, I want to work for/have sex with Don), we think about what pasta we want to eat for dinner. I often complain that the fettuccine my mother gets from the local market is too 'kneady', although I have never eaten a non-Indian fettuccine. We are in this world, and in that. We are as rooted as we are mobile. 


I have been looking at foreign universities for over two months, figuring out which ones are in my league. For the last year I have been dying to go to Stanford/Yale/Cambridge and throw my graduation hat(is it?) in the air in pride to know I have graduated from the best schools in the world. I have envisioned a life for myself that I didn't realize was completely alien. In my dreams I often see myself in a world where my cultural reality is miles away from my present one. As a middle class English literature almost graduate, I have seen my future in the West. The system that has been easy to me has been unavailable to others, who are like me, are Indians. I sail through my exams, not worrying if I will pass because I read enough C.S Lewis when I was a kid, But eventually I outgrew the system, I looked to Cambridge to give me space to exhaust my potential. My education has created dreams that are physically so distant that I have never seen them with my own eyes. The university system here has no clue what its doing. It is riddled with inefficiency and politics, but I had assumed that the department at Stanford is not. 
We never realize that one of the reasons for one of our despairs is that our cultural world is sometimes imaginary and the occasional interruptions of material reality then annoys us. I want to eat a good Ragu, and I want to be able to go to an Arctic monkeys concert, but how. 
I have almost graduated from college and I am sometimes excited and sometimes paralyzed with fear and sometimes both. 


One day Percy Shelley bought a boat and wanted to name her Ariel. But Byron, as a joke on his friend decided to paint 'Don Juan' all over the sail. Shelley died on that boat, and Byron never got to apologize to his friend. These great men sound uncannily like my friends. 


After studying for the year the inadequacies and biases of language, today my friend said to me that 'it was unbearable BEYOND WORDS'. Now I see it everywhere. 
And I also realized now the incredible revolutionary potential in a tasteless graffiti that said 'SEX POTTY' in Khan Market, the home to places named 'La Opera'. 


I become obsessed with one happy song during every set of exams. Sometimes it can be really bad stuff. About a year back, Justin Bieber had taken over my soul in a completely non sexual non romantic way.
 But this really awesome song, sent to me by the current bassist of the band (who would KILL me if he knew I just mentioned Bieber in the same paragraph) is so happy and I dance to it everyday even though I have almost no idea what she's saying. My uncle who is Irish was a pediatric nurse in a village near Bangalore and a favorite with the kids. I never understood how, but now I do. He was round and happy and his eyes twinkled everytime he said 'Ok?'. This song is like that. 

I cannot watch No Reservations around my parents.
 My all time favorite episode till now was the one in Seoul. Tony goes to this Korean barbeque and it is out of the worldly.
BUT TODAY, I watched the Naples episode from Season 7 and I literally cannot breathe. By the time it ended I was clutching my stomach and turning from side to side. I have always DIED to eat a good Ragu, and i hate the bottled ones. I hate bottled anything. He then ate this fried rice pork sausage that is native to Naples, also which is now on my list of things to kill for.
While the other kids were watching porn, I was day dreaming about diving into chili.
Apart from bottled sauces, I also hate McDonalds. And Pizza Hut, Dominoes, all capitalist reductions of food without love. I also think cheesecake is overrated. And chicken wings.
You know what I also hate. Maggi, which unfortunately I must make do with today. SUCKS, life.

Most Badass gangsta EVER.