Forgiving the past

While deleting photos of the virtual world my eyes caught upon this photograph,that transported me back to a place long buried in my past.

Time has healed me,but I am still scarred. Guess that's a souvenir I will have to carry with me until it gets washed away into the tombs of time.

I guess, The story started on a random day. Five to six people in their separate destinies had chosen to select the same college to chase their dreams.

But among them was someone who had chosen to chase after someone she had seen before and had been consumed by his thoughts ever since.

And it so happened that all roads lead to Rome.
Their destinies met.

Their eyes talked, hands danced and the rest of the world found them soulmates, bridged through seven lifetimes.

The princess and the frog prince did not have their fairytale perfect, they had to kill a few good men along the way.

In every love story, there comes a villain before, "The End", but in here I became the villain after the "Happy Ending".

Inadvertently, I was friends with both of them and the bridge between two beating hearts. And very fast I had begun trusting both with bits of information that a stoic like me had buried deep inside my emotional spectrum.

My childhood stories, stories of my victory, stories of my first crush. They reciprocated in kind and the bonding had become thick.

For a stoic like me, this was all new.

What was to come was even newer.

And then she popped the question, he said No.

I was too far influenced into the friendship to take either side.
And then like all love stories in Bollywood it happened.

February 14 , they updated their relationship statuses.

And i was still lost in my own little world, until the visits became about them, the talks were cooey cooey, soon I had become the Kebab mein haddi.

It was then, the roughest part of the transition from stoic to normal. There was a fight.

Friendship vs Love.
My male best friend chose love.
The female best friend chose him.

I was the injured seal in a swirling sea filled with blood hungry sharks.

And the cold wars had begun.

All the happy memories were now turned to memoirs of another time. And I had become the man who tried to poison friendship.

By then the threads of friendship had grown into many other ships, but no one knew the real story.

It was this time, that I evolved as a person. Life in all its true rawness hit me with such amazing force that I was stunned for a long time.

An erosion of trust had sent a unfeeling stoic into a mad man trapped in between the old and the new.

And slowly and slowly, time healed everything​. And I decided to let go of all the negativity surrounding life and became " The Shiva of the Kailasa Parvata".

To forgive them , to forgive myself and to learn from incidents and circumstances.

That last remaining photograph, the last reminder of a long bygone era of friendship took me back a couple of years;
I decided not to delete it and let it stay as a reminder of life and it's ways of teaching you all you need to learn.

madness reloaded

This is an on the spot blog post.
All grammatical errors have to be ignored and taken with a pinch of salt, or lemon or whatever you take it with.

Time flies fast , really fast. And all the experiences that it brings are like trophies that we hang on the wall or keep in the non dusted almirahs that get cleaned once in ten years.

This is like a drunken binge of words, there is not a sense of control, just the rawness of it all.

Right now I have no stories to tell.
A sort of void blankness that is trying to compete with the thought flood in the brain, literally confusing me, when my ears are perched up to hear something that my mom seems to be saying. There is no response that I can formulate at this moment.

And then i break this dance and say "What?".
And I am switched off again.

The train of thoughts, starts with the dinner table.

Today the table looks so clean.
I have to clean my table of books and find the elusive sheet of paper on which the monthly calculation of expense is done.
I am old school , I have no excel sheets.
I still prefer public transport or walking rather than catching an auto.

Walking is good for health. Nowadays the only walking I do is walking to the wash room and coming back to desk. I have not seen a sunset in almost 3 months.

In Three months, my best friend is getting married, to the love of his life. Why is that I have no such fairy tale. Fairy tales are for the gods , I am a demon.
Hahahaha.
Jokes apart, I follow no rules of the gods. In fact i do not believe in it. But yet out of sheer ritual i so a salutation every time I visit the place of worship.

The only reason i go there is to find good food and interesting stories.

I do not like going to pubs and drinking either. It is a place that gives me the creeps. Socialise is the word my friends have for it. I do not see any fun in going to a place and paying for bad food, no heart to heart conversations and splitting heavy bills.

And the high you say, the drink gives you, I can as well get the high by drinking Filter coffee.

Filter coffee is my poison, if I am to go to a place with a coffee vending machine that spews out bad coffee then I am a dead man.

Death is omnipresent, a very real prospect for every being. We are causing deaths of hundreds of trees in the name of development. There will be a reckoning someday.

Today is March 19, Sunday. It is just another day in the long list of days that have come. The work I said I would do is still remaining in the to-do list.

I am without doubt a lazy person, I want to binge watch this new TV series, the bills to be paid is still on the desk that needs to be cleaned.

My bank account has been cleaned up.
Ten days to go for the next salary.
Ten days is a long time in the life of a IT employee, that is almost 7 meetings with the boss ,asking a status update.

Facebook,I had banned Facebook usage in my phone for 120 days but looks like the government has raised the ban.

I have banned the newspaper at my place, also the Tv channels that spread panic 24*7.

And in this thought train 5 minutes were up and my mother came at me with vengeance and shouted at me for not answering her initial question.

And thus this thought train had come ti an end.

Falling in Crush

Twelve years ago I had my first love story.

Now do not go back and try to determine my age. A lot of things have changed since then but a few things remain unchanged.

That was the very first year of high school and the classes were reshuffled. There were classmates from my older classes but most of them were new.

I was then a timid shy young fellow. I had a fierce interest in Gandhian principles, I loved to read books and make new friends and ask a lot of questions.

Classes began early and ended late. And then it happened, the onset of puberty. Until then girls and boys sat together and shared their lunch dabbas, good handwritten notes and not to mention we had no problems with each other.

It all changed instantly and I as usual was very late in adopting to it.

Classes were always interesting, Chemistry Biology, trigonometry and what not. Also interesting was this particular person of interest. She was just like anyone else to the common observer. But to me she sent the first thrills of an infatuation.

She was tall, not too tall, fair complexioned, average in studies, had long hands and even longer nails.A nose that flared every time she laughed and she always polished her shoe. A voice that always drove me crazy.

All in all i had "Fallen in Crush with her".

It became more acute this need to look at her during class and talk to her and hear her voice again.
And with a lot of effort the place next to her was secured. It was a small chair that had been placed adjacent to her.
The class had a large attendance and this make shift stream of chairs served as a perfect way to get to know her.

And the first tests came, our scores were all the same but in that doldrums of trying to figure out who got the better score a few names stood out and I was not one of them.

And each day the closeness with her grew, exchanging notes, dabbas that we got for lunch , scale eraser and what not.

Without any help the seeds of romance had grown. But the hurricane was yet to come.

We enjoyed each others company, it was a thrilling phase, we both used to come early and chat about things, I'd help her with the last day's home work.

Little did I know that this breeze of romance would eventually turn out to be a hurricane in my life.

Others in our class had already begun gossiping amongst themselves and started to call us as one. Although l liked this I did not want this to hamper this lovely friendship.

It was over a Truth or dare session that things went horribly wrong.
And among three women caught in a fire, if I had to kill someone, save one and marry the other, three options and I chose her name to marry.

And this brought a shift in the way she conducted herself in the next few weeks.

And my scores hit rock bottom.
The exams in the half yearly were a disaster.

And this distance she maintained rubbed salt to injury. There was a new player in town who had set his eyes upon her.

Our friendship was never really the same thereafter. The corner seat was gone taken away by swift politics.

I was playing the catching up game now, she never waved at me when i waved a hi. She dare not smile at my jokes.

I was obsessed now to win her back. Damn those bloody movies that came during that time. The hero always got his lady in the end. I tried every trick in the trade to win her trust back.

And then exams came.

I had "Fallen in Exams "

The next year of schooling had brought its own brand of experiences to cherish and learn by.

There was a huge fight amongst us two.

The seating arrangement was gone. A new class, heavier bag and a heavy heart.

This Falling in love thing was not something i could discuss in the dinner table.

The distance kept on growing, i wanted to tell her sorry. I did not know why but i wanted to tell her the same.

I did say that to her.
And she relented a little, but then she already had another band of followers wooing her.

And my cracked bridge of friendship had one nail in the coffin left to be punched.

There was a trip that the school organised , and she had an ipod, and the songs were of the latest hindi film hit. I sung along to the same tone having secured a place just behind her.

I think thinking back twelve years ago. I acted like a fool then. I did not ever consider her side of the story. And I did not even know then the difference between being interested and being obsessed.

I did everything in the book that could tick me off in her mind.

Now back to the story.
When things had become increasingly tense between us , I made another blunder.

There was a huge fight. The pride of lions on her side and only one friend on my side.

Things were never the same again.

I had "Failed in Crush".

It was here I learnt my first lessons of the real world.

Even now, twelve years down the lane I regret to being the person I was then.

Now, If I had met her in this stage of my life, we could have had a very long lasting friendship.