Reflections of a restless eccentric

My mother is one of those people whose early life seems to abound with out of the ordinary tales. Here's one. A long time ago, somewhere in the 80s, my mother used to work at a hospital. Which meant that night shifts were a regular part of her life. She also used to get called in to the hospital at ungodly hours of the night, and that too was something she was accustomed to. She owned a Luna, which was the equivalent of a modern day Scooty. Her workplace and home were separated by almost 10 kilometers, but in those golden years, Bangalore was more a resplendent forest than a concrete jungle, and traffic was still unheard of. Her journey was therefore an easy one, the more problematic aspects of which were the deserted roads and the threat of lurking miscreants. One night, around 2am, she started from home. Hardly two minutes into her journey, it started pouring. My mother being the woman she is, never once contemplated going back home. Her only thought was how to get to the ho...

My blog has been chock-full of serious stuff . Here's one on the lighter side, for a change. A real-life incident.  About a month ago, Ramya(the character who keeps appearing in just about every funny post I write:D) was visiting Bangalore. A bunch of us friends decided to meet her and catch up. We picked a place, met in the afternoon and talked nineteen to the dozen over good food. Everything went as expected and then it was time to leave. My friend(Sush) booked a cab since we were all headed to the same place. It was then that the skies decided to open up and share their vast sorrows with us. While three of the four of us had laptops, only one of us had the foresight to bring along an umbrella(kid, kudos to you!:P). This particular conglomeration of circumstances had many woeful implications for us: the traffic would, of course , go from worse to unimaginably snail-paced bordering on immobile, we stood a fair chance of getting drenched, and our laptops, our eternal companion...

On a boring afternoon in the recent past, I was scrolling through my Goodreads feed(ironic how these things are called feed, don't you think? It's as if these various apps and sites provide fodder for thought, which in most cases they fail to do, but anyway...) and I stumbled upon a book called Stumbling on Happiness. It had fairly good ratings and the synopsis seemed interesting too. I picked it up, albeit mistaking it to be a self-help book. Now it was anything but that, nevertheless, it was one book that changed my worldview drastically. So drastically that my thinking has been altered irrevocably by it, and I wish at times that I'd never read it, because then I could still live in my fool's paradise happily. The book had several interesting conjectures, but I will touch upon just one of them here. Let me start with this: Reflect on your last birthday(substitute this with any other eventful occasion). How would you describe it? It would be reasonable to say that t...

This has been on my drafts for quite some time now. It has been tossed and turned around in my head like an overwrought sock in an otherwise empty dryer, and it is now unrecognizable from what I originally meant it to be. Nevertheless, I will give you my present take on it. :) Responsibility was one of the things I was taught quite early in life. My parents made it out to be a great virtue, the absence of which would render all living pointless. This was reiterated in school, where they further waxed lyrical on the various forms and kinds of responsibility and how one should do justice to all of them. Needless to say, I learnt these things quite well and inculcated them in the way I led my life. Sounds very green and glorious, right? Fret not, that curveball is just around the paragraph. As an engineer, one of the first things you're taught to think about is scalability. How well does your solution scale up? If your solution is x good when the input is y, how good is it for 10...

I found myself awake around 5.30, before my alarm went off. The first thought that crept into my mind was an incredible feeling of sadness. No more college, no more work. These were huge voids in my life--I almost didn't want to wake up to a day like this. But sleep eluded me, and I lay awake thinking. Just yesterday, I said to someone: I have a month's time on my hands. And I have no idea what to do. I probably sounded sad when I said this. Anyway, the reaction I got was unforgettable.  What would I not do to get a month off at this point! And here you are, cribbing about it. What can you do in a month, seriously? Go on a trip, live your life. Enjoy this time.  This, accompanied by an are-you-out-of-your-mind look. I got more or less the same reaction from everyone I voiced this out to, but I still didn't agree with them. I have always been this person who detests long holidays. I have hated vacations ever since I can remember, because boredom eats away at my soul rea...

I was talking to a friend yesterday, a friend who is very similar to me. She told me this : We are perfect to all the world but our parents. But don't you think they are the ones who deserve the best parts of us?  I agreed with her, for she was undoubtedly right. But this was nothing new to me-I had known it all along. As much as I detest it, I haven't been able to mend my ways. I sometimes wonder if I'm bipolar--the person I am at home and the person I am to the rest of the world are at two ends of the spectrum. Let me paint a picture for you. I wake up at 5.45 in the morning, run through my morning chores in a flurry of activity, gobble up my breakfast, grab my lunch and run out of home by 6.50. My Mom, wakes up around 4.30 without fail everyday, makes breakfast and lunch by the time I wake up, and ensures that I don't get delayed because of her. I come back around 6.30 in the evening, freshen up, and go upstairs in search of dinner, which I again eat without a t...

NB: Marked personal.Reader's discretion advised. I've been staring blankly at the screen for the better part of an hour, wondering if I should actually verbalize this or just let it go. 2nd July 2017. One year to this day. What do I say? It feels so wrong that this actually happened, and that it happened to someone so good and undeserving of even the least suffering. Even as I say this, I know how unrealistic I'm being. People all over the world die, and she was just another number. Yet another statistic. Just because she was someone close to me, I feel this with so much intensity. It was all so sudden and traumatic, and that period of one year seems out of some nightmare now. Countless tests, those irradiation sessions. The heart-wrenching vicious cycle of hope followed by despair--till at one point you become numb to both. Sheer helplessness at the face of it. Having to see someone close to you go through so much and not being able to do a single thing about it...