The last post was a very accurate snapshot of my twenties - all major happenings & people were mentioned and of course I ended with saying goodbye to Singapore.
I didn't know how to start this post, I don't know what to write about - which part of the twenties to elaborate. So i just to set the theme started looking through my previous posts. And realised how at some point I transitioned to writing poetry - both hindi and english. They are probably the rawest part of me on this blog. I started writing this blog for short romantic stories - i loved, and still do, Bollywood and that filmy idea of love. Of course over time, my posts have matured from love at first sight to falling out of love or the idea of not one single love, but many loves. But the core theme of the blog over the years has stayed the same. I don't know how I forgot to mention that another pillar of support in my life - this blog! I think I started it around 2008 as well - and remember thinking a million times before hitting "publish" on my first post, because who would want to read about what the hell I was thinking about at 2 am in the night or my idea of "white and black and right and wrong". But i am so glad i found the courage to do it anyway, because even though I have maintained (a much more personal) journal about my life, this blog is such a beautiful medium to revisit all that I have lived through - all the things that have made me mad happy and crazy sad.
So then, I decided to write about this blog and why I write it and also when i write it. My first post (which I read after many many years only today) seemed to have been either inspired by someone else's post or some conversation or maybe it's not even mine ? Resignation. Every word I said there holds true today too. There are days when i wake up and just want to be my parents little daughter again, and have school to look forward to the next day, have friends to share crazy non-sensical laughter with. And when I go to my parents home on vacations, it feels blissful because I am in a way doing exactly that, without even school homework ! Growing up is overrated. I obviously realised that in the first year of my twenties - and i had not even been through everything I have been through in the last ten years! I wonder what prompted that post. Maybe a search for a simpler life. Maybe a night of reminiscing the years gone by. Maybe a sense of "this is it, this is what everyone calls growing up, having independence and your own money" and then a sense of "is this really it?". I have no idea why a fresh out of college young me felt the need to resign from growing up already.
As the days for when i need to actually resign from my job near, I wonder what i will write in that email i send to my ex-boss and the goodbye email I will send to all my colleagues and ex-bosses from the last ten years. Maybe reading through some more of my posts might give me some inspiration? When I moved to Hyderabad, I first lived on Road number 12 on Banjara Hills on this by-lane called Kahaf Masjid Street with two other girls, one of whom worked with me on the same team. I have frankly never encountered any hardship on that street but it did at night look pretty shady - like any dimly indian street to be honest. Our house was right next to the masjid and that meant that we were fortunate to have the azaan wake us up and fill our atmosphere on weekends as well. Supposedly someone got stabbed in the street one day - we never saw it, but when we got back from work, there was a lot of police presence and this was the rumour doing the rounds. We never had the guts to ask folks on the street if that was true - so believed it and for a week after it never walked out without each other - my roommate-colleague and i. I lived there for two years or was it a year before we fell out and i moved to a house on Road number 11 banjara hills with three other girls. It was a lovely time - each of them had a very different personality - all of us stayed out a lot, but on rare days when we all were home together, the camaraderie was lovely. I often consider myself to be sort of an old soul and living with these three intellectually superior women contributed to that old-ness of the soul and mind in many ways - i am thankful to them for the all the laughters we have shared and even the disagreements and fights. The camaraderie didn't last and one of us left only to bring in - a friend of mine who i love dearly today - like I've said many a time on this blog - everything has a reason, every person walks out of your life for a reason and someone walks into that same every spot for some other reason.
I too eventually moved out of that house to elsewhere and then eventually from there to Gurgaon - we will talk about those other experiences some other time. But somewhere between Road # 12 and Road # 11 I started to write more and more. And I usually found myself sitting down with a huge cup of chai - my chai cups have never been small - and often not knowing what to write or how to start but the minute I put the first few words down, my fingers would guide me to the story. Now most of my stories are pure fiction. People often ask me if these are parts of my life or if a particular story is an experience I have lived through. The answer is mostly no, but a somewhat yes. Because while the whole story may not be me, the character - male or female - might have parts of me - something as irrelevant as "his favorite colour was white" to "she needed to have a cup of chai before kickstarting her day". So in that manner they are very personal to me. They are also personal because when I've written these characters down, I feel like i am them, Im living with them, I am crying with them, i am loving like them. Their heartbreaks and their joys affect me and my moods or maybe it's the other way around, I instil my emotions into a particular story. Which is why maybe even now sometimes when I read a completely fictional story from my blog, it takes me back to a very particular phase or emotion that was guiding my life then.
I also often sit down to write when I am experiencing extreme emotions - if I am truly very sad and upset or when i am ecstatic and i just feel like the need to put that energy down on paper or when I am blank. It is in those moments that I write the most. However, I also seem to find the inspiration to write when I have set my mind to it. I first did that with my posts about the trip to Bali with some of my closest friend in August 2014 and then also when I did my teacher training i recorded the experience through a daily or once in two days posts or even when I undertook a 30-day hot yoga challenge I write every day about what I did and what i learnt and how i felt. Which is what I am doing now, recording snippets of my twenties leading up to July 25, my 30th.
Some of these stories lift me up, some of them drag me to the depths of sadness, some of them make me laugh like a mad woman, literally rolling on the floor kinda laughter, some of them make me not want to fall in love and some of them want to make me fall in love all over again. But all of them are me, so while I am quite shocked at how juvenile some of these stories are - i am also secretly proud that I put them out anyway. I am not naturally a very confident person, it takes a lot for me to believe that I am creating something of worth, creating something that might in some way benefit or touch someone else's life. And this is not because I am not capable, I am very fully capable, but confidence and capability have never and will never be the same things. So this blog maybe is one of the few things in my life that i am completely confident about - which if why I find the courage of write and publish and write and publish. Every time I finish writing a piece, I hit publish asap. Because if I don't then they will keep sitting in "drafts" for the rest of their lives and never achieve the purpose they were created with - to fly. There are few other passions of mine that come close to giving me this amount of assurance regarding my sense of self-worth as this blog does.
When someone asked me why i write, I found myself thinking for a long time. I have always been a do what you feel like doing kind of person and I for the longest time I thought I write because I enjoy writing and it makes me happy and I think im sorta ok at it. But when I thought about it a little bit more, I realised that maybe something in my childhood amongst all those books in the many libraries I have dreamt in, inspired me to take the first step or in this case, type the first word. And it is to inspire. Now i know I am taking up a huge responsibility here - the ability to create to inspire humanity. I do not claim to have been able to do it or have done it. All i am saying is, maybe while poring over those thousands of books and newspaper articles and movie scripts & dialogues and short stories and poems and essays and listening to various ghazals and hearing millions of songs and marvelling at their lyrics, i realised how much they affect my life and how much they add to it in terms of inspiration and how much they broaden my horizons. Reading the first Harry Potter really made me believe that I was going to get that letter in the mail inviting me to Hogwarts - it was just a matter of time. The power to dream, the power to inspire and the power to make people believe in magic - it's what all authors, lyricists, song writers and poets have. And only because they have touched me so much and continue to make my heart sing, I want to be able to do the same for others - even if it is just one person. In fact even if it is just me myself - re-reading these posts after ten years - if I manage to smile, laugh, cry - I would have achieved my purpose.
I watched Dead Poet's Society again two days back and Robin William's words about why we read and write poetry sum up why this blog exists:
"We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business and engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."
~ Robin Williams
Dead Poets Society
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