Can't Sleep When I'm In A Bad Mood

It’s just one of those days where I’m moody. No reason. Maybe it’s that time for girls that make them like that. Either way, its 1028 and I’m supposed to be in bed (that’s right, I sleep for 9 hours a day) but I’m not tired.

 Maybe just a little, but not enough where I want to say good night to today.  I haven't been blogging in a while and I don't know how many religiously follow it but to those who do I’m sorry for no recent posts.

Any ways, it raining outside and there is a power-cut (quite a common thing here in India) and all that could come to my head was, "okay lets write something".

I’ve been unusually quiet this evening and I don’t know why. I just don't feel like being nice to the un-invited guests at my house right now.  Any other day I would have loved company but today was just not mine. I'm sure they noticed me being a little different but hey, I'm allowed to be off-color too.

So basically, all of a sudden my mom tells me we're having guests. *yipeee* (being sarcastic) cause my plan for then was to write in this really new cool notebook I bought (yes, fact #593957385793 about me is that I have a fetish for really cute/elegant/funky looking notebooks). What to write I didn’t know but I just had to fill it up with something, and just when I was about to I have people pouring into my home.

So now I had to be with them and talk to them because they were really close to my mum and not doing the basic formalities would have just been disastrous. #avoid. so after talking to them, (although I didn't do a very good job of that) for a while I snuck out and wrote a few of my audit notes in the book and closed it cause I didn't know what else to write in it. 

Any ways so I had dinner and I’m up in my room. Relieved of all responsibilities for the day (which are probably actually nothing really) and now I'm thinking about how it is outside. Black. I hate the rain. Yea sure the earthy smell and the rejuvenations of crops and all is a good thing but I don't like it. Rain results in messiness. It results in water everywhere which make my feet wet when I’m wearing sandals. They make things all smelly when I’m travelling, and the list goes on.

This is how I feel I need to be before stepping out in the rain. Completely protected from any sort of contact with water.  Extreme? Maybe. I just don’t like rain.  In the end I do come home being wet. It doesn't help. I am still a victim of nature’s moody moments just as my friends are of mine.  That’s life, I guess.

 Ultimately, at the end of the day I am in my bed complaining about how it’s cold, dark and wet it is outside when I should be asleep.

#goodnight

p.s. I do tend to write a lot just when I’m about to go to sleep. I don't know why but all my energy to write something somehow comes up right then!

Plan Cancelled.

It's a Sunday and generally this is the day for most plans to work out for mostly everyone, but for me, it was the other way around.

Sunday morning. Bored.

 First of all, to go out anywhere apart from the area that I stay in, requires a lot of planning. I'm a more of a on-the-spot type of planner, of course the upcoming party on Saturday is an exception., so anyways, I was supposed to meet this girl who I met so randomly but it didn't work out cause she had a family plan come up in between and I couldn’t go too far into the city (cause I didn’t want to do a lot of traveling) so we planned for another time, being this Saturday again, and went back to doing whatever we were doing.  What’s really weird is that I don’t even know how this girl looks like. Confused? Let me start from the beginning.

I was actually dying to write a post on this incident a few days ago but I don't know why I didn't do it. Any ways, this is how it started:

I was standing at the bust stop waiting for a rather empty bus, which although might be impossible at 845 am , still made me hope, and just as I saw an empty bus come around the corner she came up to me, her face covered with a beige scarf and she asked me which bus went to ameerpet, I told her if she waited for 15 min then she'd get an empty bus and at this point we were conversing in Telugu, but when I started in English she spoke in a recognizable American accent. I didn’t show my surprise but I did know that this moment was going to change our day altogether.

 We talked till the bus came and both of got on. "I’m actually glad you're coming with me" was what she said and we sat together. She and I both lived in America (me living in Canada more though), both of us came back to India for our education and both of us were going to college. These common filters were enough to make us good friends in no time. We talked and talked and just couldn't' believe the fact that out of all the people at the bus stop, she had to come and ask me.  Then, when the conductor came to ask for our ticket, we both took out our wallets out and that was it. We became hysterical. We both had the SAME wallets! Hers in black and mine in red. Both wallets not being bought from India. That was the highlight moment. We just couldn't take in our excitement! We talked after that a little more just to realize we hadn't even figured out each other’s names. Crazy. 

Soon my stop came and I had to get down. We exchanged numbers and decided to meet up soon. That soon was supposed to be today, that soon was supposed to show me her face, but it didn’t work out. Happens. Looking forward to something too much, results in disappointment. I was kind of upset but we did have Saturday so I sucked it in and told her it was okay she couldn’t make it.

So what did I do after that? I went to the salon and got my eyebrows done, my hands waxed, came home and took a long nice hot shower and started writing this post.

The hair is supposed to look wet.

Orange Lights.

Its 11:00 pm and I'm not sleepy. Although I've come up to my room and mentally prepared myself that I needed to sleep, it wasn't coming to me. I was there lying on my bed looking up. It was hot. Summer‘s here and it feels like a 100 degrees. My parents were chatting downstairs so the light was coming up to my right window.

 Mine were off.

 To my left, I opened the other window (since the air conditioner wasn't fixed in yet), and I could see the orange shimmer coming from the street-light. For some reason, I just don't like those particular street-lights. They seem so un-interesting and just scream lonesomeness, and that too at night, - dangerous. I stop, thinking what to write next and look around. Nothing.

There have been times where I imagine myself in some of the weirdest situations. This was one of them. I close my eyes for a second and I imagined myself standing in the middle of the main road, under that street-light, my shadow in front of me tall and questioning. I looked from side to side. 

Nothing.

 Not one vehicle, not one person. I was bracing myself for something horrible to happen, but then, snapped back.  On my bed, with the window open, breezy, staring at the orange again. I didn't know what I was looking for but making me imagine all that definitely made my eyes droop. With a stretch and a quick thought about what to write next, I yawned, deciding to end this sentence and go to bed. Good Night.

The Lady in White

All my enlightenment's and realizations and flashbacks mostly hit me when I'm travelling in the bus. Don't look lowly on buses, since APSRTC has done a very impressive job on air conditioned buses, except the minor of glitch of not having as many as metros. Anyways, that's not what this is about. Today's incident called out for another post.

Today I was stuck in traffic for almost 40 minutes, and at that point, she walked in, clad in white, I immediately noticed her, but I acted as if I didn't. She walked in with 3 of her other colleagues and only one of them had place to sit so she stood, right in front of me. I stared outside. I heard her taking 3 tickets, all the stops being before mine. I could feel her looking at me, and I knew she was also probably surprised. She did look a few times, I could tell but I decided to be ignorant about it. 

We had a bad past, and that resulted her telling me to keep away from her daughter. The reason it had gone to that extent was because there was an incident between Mrs.S's brother and my mum, to which I had to stand up and tell him to relax and back off. Being a man, his ego was hurt, and my entire speech was put on loud-speaker.  I went over to apologize since he was elder to me, but the S family being highly offended told me it was over and that I couldn't come to their house or be friends with their daughter anymore. There was a whole other after story after this particular incident but I don't think I want to get into it unless it is specifically requested. So that's that, and it’s been 2 years since I spoke to her or her daughter. I didn't really care now, and I know while I drive down the streets, music blaring and her daughter comes in front of me, I hardly even give a look and zoom past her. I know she was expecting me to stop, but I wasn't going to stop for someone who couldn't stand up and convince her mum of our friendship. Felt good to know that she is the one hurt and not me.

Any ways, back to Mrs. S, I had my headphones on waiting for the traffic to clear, I looked everywhere around the bus except at her, and for some random reason our eyes met, and we were facing each other, I sitting and she standing.  Not a fraction of sympathy in me.  Let her stand. She smiled and I forced myself to take the ear-phones out and smile back. She spoke first " Baagunava"? I nodded and asked her how she was, she said she was fine. She asked me again "Amma baagunda?", I didn't know if she asked me that on purpose or if that was just a casual question, either way my smile only lasted for that answer and then I continued to look out the window, the bus finally moving. Soon, her stop came and she was saying her byes to her colleague's, and I knew she looked back for a second, but I didn't. I wouldn't. I can't respect people for their age, my respect extends for their character, and in my opinion she didn't deserve my look. Call me harsh, I won't mind.
 She requested the bus-driver to stop the bus and then she walked down, white fading to nothing.

Another Day, Another Change : Day #7252

I hate it when my internet just randomly stops working. Pages take a million years to load, and then as impatient as I am, I just end up closing all the tabs and then click the chrome button almost immediately.  This time I decided to write another post. 

The only thing that truly kept me happy the whole of last week was that activity relating to my blog increased.  #WOHOOO. Another thing I realized was that I have now started using hash tags almost everywhere. This is the result of twitter addiction. I used to hate it entirely before, because it felt like I was tweeting to a wall, but now, I don’t know, it just feels NICE. Completely random. I know. I’ve been thinking about what to write, and there isn’t really much happening right now. 

Hmm, how about I tell you what I’ve been doing at work?

Okay, basically (overview), what I do is audit. I’m an intern at a CA  firm ( Chartered Accountancy), and we do stuff relating to audit, tax, etc etc. basically check into the financial health of a company and see if stuff are in accordance, check documents, tds, advance tax, service tax, ETC ETC. So yea, right now I’m with my colleague at a manufacturing company called “Patil Industries”. It’s HUGE, so unlike other audits I’ve been on before, this one will take time. As an auditor we are supposed to CHECK documents, but these people have to get their documents and stuff from factories that are spread all across India. We can’t audit if we don’t have the documents. WHAT’S THE POINT of auditing if we can’t check evidence?! So basically all we do is go to work at 1030 am, wait for the office boy to get us our coffee, sit in the air conditioned room, use their internet and do a little surfing, wait for lunch, go to any nice eating joint, eat, give them (company)the lunch bill ( since any company we audit is supposed to re-imburse auditors lunch and conveyance bills), then sit back in our air conditioned cabin, do a little more surfing, wait for the guy to get our evening coffee, drink and leave. People might think, OMG, you are so lucky, you don’t have to work and, you get to sit and A/c room, and have your lunch bill paid and blah blah, BUT NO. Its fine for a day or two, but then? It’s boring. I’m an intern, my job is to learn. What am I going to do when I become a CA and I don’t know the basics cause I was having fun at a client’ office? NO. I had fun but now it’s annoying. I just want to get this audit over with and go back to my own office. GET ME THOSE DOCUMENTS. #likerightnow.

Btw, the title was a much thought about thing for me because there are going to be posts about the random things I do on a daily basis from now on and I thought I should use this title for those posts too , except for the #. The # basically represents my age! As of this day I am 7252 days old!  So that will obviously change.

Peace.

Hyderabad Metro- Not for me.

You can't expect every one to be like you. No. That would just be too perfect, BUT the minimum amount of decency to be maintained CANNOT be compromised.   My statement is a result of my experiences in traveling by the Hyderabad Metro. I finally understood why people like me cannot travel by such a mode of transport.
First of all, there is NO such thins as " trains coming on time". If a train is scheduled to arrive at 5, we are grateful to have to arrive within the half hour its supposed to come. I never used to travel by the MMTS because the thought of even seeing that thing move used to scare me, now, it disgusts me.
Let me start off by describing the "Ticker Issuer". It's my first time travelling with another friend of mine who also doesn't travel by train, and we are standing there, discussing which train goes where, and we have no clue as to why we decided to take the mmts, but since we were already there we decided to go ahead with it, and omg, that "TI" starts yelling at us! We apparently were blocking the "que" behind us, which basically comprised of like 3 people who were hardly bothered about our standing there. Finally, some guy who was kind enough to understand our complete lack of knowledge, explained what to do and what ticket to take and where, so when we go to the counter to ask, he stats babbling again about how we aren't supposed to block people's way , and then he doesn't give us our ticket stating that it doesn't go to the station we were planning on going. We had to ask him again,this time more firmly to make sure that he knew that we knew what we were doing. That's why old, grumpy people shouldn't sit behind counters. Puts everyone off.
Second. The train platform is much more cleaner than the people that actually come onto it. I realized how the majority of the cheapest ( and I mean this in a character related way) people of Hyderabad actually travel. I agree, 2 rupees is VERY cheap, but i guess, along with the cheap mode of transport comes along with it, the cheapest of the people.
Standing on the platform was the hardest thing to do. The number of eye-balls digging into you as you stand to a corner is just too much. Guys act as if they have never seen a female specie in their life. That's just one side to it.
The other problem that one has to fear is about getting onto the train. The train doesn't stop for more than 15 seconds, and in that time, you have about a million people trying to get off and get on. Where the ladies compartment starts and where the general ends, only a regularly train traveler would know, because all the time, I'm thinking, it's enough to get ON the train, forget compartments. I realized that my notion was VERY wrong.
There is a huge reason why the segregation was made and I understood that when I stood for 5 minutes in it. Being the fastest mode of transport, still, I found it to be painfully slow. All I could think was, " how fast the next stop would come, how fast I could get off".
Being a girl, it comes with the package of being in public places. People stare, but not shifting your eye-balls to any other direction but your face is just plain torture.
Once I was off, I cherished the bus travel very much. I don't think I'd ever travel in a train again, at-least during that time. Way too dangerous.

Virtual Memories

I'm in my office, supposed to be working, but it's not happening at the rate my sir's would like me to work at. I'm alone on an audit today. My sir's who were supposed to come here, ditched me (which basically means they're busy with some other client's work) and I'm sitting in this air-conditioned room all by myself.  This kind of atmosphere does incline me to go check out my notifications on Facebook, twitter and google+, but that doesn't keep up my interest for too long. The blinds for my office windows are half shut, and through the other half I look at the buildings terrace in front of mine. Wet. Rain. #Hate. It's all grey  outside, and that color doesn't work out for any thing but clothes.  So I'm sitting here, looking out the window at the roads and the trees without really any kind of thought-process going on in my head apart from the fact that some of the employee might come and peek at my computer and realise I'm not working, but no one does that right? After all I'm an "auditor-in-the-making". Any ways, then I look at today's date when I check my phone to see a message (I know, I could of just looked at the damn computer screen, but I didn't) and I realize that  in 3 weeks I'm going back to a place I once was brought up in. I think about all the places I've been to and try to remember all the stores I walked into, and then I open a new tab and go to google maps. I locate the country, province, city and finally the street I grew up on. I'm now standing in front of a bank my mum used to take me. I start roaming around. I first head out to my  house, which hasn't changed much except for maybe the flower patches that are now non-existent and over-done with cement. Seeing the windows that I used to look out of 8 years ago made me smile and wondered how it was inside. I moved forward now. School. This institution defined my childhood and for that I am ever grateful. I walk around it. The junior wing, and then the senior wing, and then the middle school where I never joined, although I never really wanted to. I looked out onto the field and stopped. Looking through the holed fence, I could imagine myself gripping it in between the gaps and staring out as far as I could into the school campus. Google maps obviously couldn't take me inside so I satisfied myself by counting the number of days I had left before I would actually be there. Moving around, I saw the lanes that I used to walk from, but decided not to venture out any more than I could solidly remember. Circling back to where I started my virtual school tour, I saw a fence. A brown one which now stood in place of where a huge flower bush once was from where I used to pull out leaves ( although I was told not to). A few renovations here and there, not so much of a major change. Guess they couldn't maintain it anymore. Sad. It did smell nice. I walked further away from where I used to stay, to see the stores. I tried remembering where a friend used to live and found her building. The supermarket and dollar store were right there too. The delight I felt in seeing the shops I once walked into. I wanted to venture out further towards the community centre, but then something came over me, like a hint of frustration. How long? I waited 8 years to go back, and now with days remaining for my departure, I can't seem to hold the excitement in me. Looking at where I stood so long ago makes me so nervous. I wish I could go back and have nothing change. I wish I could start my journey from where I left off. Although nostalgia is taking me over now, at the back of my head there's something that doesn't agree with what I feel entirely. Maybe I don't want to relive those moments, rather, maybe I don't need to relive those moments. Maybe I'm in a good spot, a better spot than before and I just don't realize it.
Anyhow, going back is going to be a whole new story, and I want to live every second of it, so all you people from my past, #betterwatchout cause here I come.