Be still for a spell.

Hello! I almost forgot I had a blog. Okay, that's pushing it but yeah. It's been a while.

There are things that I want to blog about - things that suggest that I do think about things beyond my little world ;) but that requires time to sit and ponder and stuff and quite honestly I haven't really had that kind of time. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I like to be busy and between classes, K'SCOPE, and all this crazy reading that I've suddenly gotten into; it has been pretty busy around here. I like to be busy because that helps the missing-home thing and other various things that I worry about (Global Warming, world peace and all that stuff :P) but according to my doctor, somewhere along the way I am apparently subconsciously thinking about all of this anyway which finds it's expression not through my mouth but through my body and this is not so good. So maybe I need to make time to sort out my thoughts and EXPRESS myself and this is one of the primary reasons I started the blog so... Hello blog.

Yesterday, my friend Antu and I went to this amazing exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery and it was just... beyond words. It was organised by this man called Neville Tuli and his OSIAN Foundation who has this massive collection of photos, paintings, posters, artefacts, etc. There were paintings and photos from like centuries ago depicting the 1857 Mutiny, actual photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, original Clint Eastwood and Amitabh Bachan film posters... It was crazy and oh-so-exhausting to take it all in and apparently what we saw yesterday was just a tiny fraction of everything that he has... Whoa! If you live in Mumbai, it's still on till the 2nd of July and then they're starting in Delhi on the 3rd. Go check it out!

I decided to do my Gender & Society project on Aung San Suu Kyi and Shirin Ebadi as Human Rights Activists. I'd been thinking about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from the beginning and the lady with whom I had the amazing conversation with on the train a few weeks back also suggested it so I talked to my teacher and she seemed pretty enthusiastic... YAY! And then I went to this place Centre of Documentation in Colaba which is this amazing place where they document all these newspaper/magazine articles in these huge files according to the topic and I came across Shirin Ebadi who I'd never heard about but it'll interesting finding out more about her especially in the light of the current circumstances in Iran. So yay, again! :)

On Sunday, Sonu and I went Landmark bookstore and spent some quality time there flicking through books and even though I resolved not to buy anything because I have so much to read anyway, I couldn't resist and ended up buying a classic. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. We had studied North & South by her in A'levels and so mostly I wanted to read another Gaskell for nostalgia's sake but I am glad I bought it. Classics are the cheapest books to buy so it's almost guilt-free and I am really enjoying reading it...

I'm also reading Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman (my dad's recommendation). Honestly, I was pretty skeptical about getting through this book because I'm not much of a non-fiction reader and if you see the size of this one... it's pretty daunting! I have to admit though that I am impressed and am actually enjoying it. It is so well-researched and such an important issue and one that I am concerned about so I recommend it too!

In the music scene, I'm still mad about Brooke Fraser. Her songs bring me joy for hours on end. :)

In the autumn on the ground,
Between the traffic and the ordinary sounds,
I am thinking signs and seasons while a north wind blows through
I watch as lovers pass me by
Walking stories - whos and hows and whys
Musing lazily on love
Pondering you
I'll give it time, give it space and be still for a spell
When it's time to walk that way we wanna walk it well

I am waiting for you baby,
I'll be holding back the darkest night.
Love is waiting till we're ready, till it's right
Love is waiting

-- Love is Waiting by Brooke Fraser

Glimpse.

Thursdays are usually crazy-busy days but today was different. We had a couple of classes in the morning and then after that we had this "bonding party" for all the Sociology single major students and our teachers. It turned out to be pretty fun...

After that we headed down to the canteen to kill some time before our EC/Co-ord meeting for K'SCOPE at 3pm. Anyway for some strange reason we got reeeally camera happy while waiting...

I just wanted to show you one. I know the glare is crazy but for some reason, I just love this photo!

L-R: Gauri, Jo, Monisha, Eshana, Astrid and Shruti

Thankful Thursday:
* For the monsoon.
* For jolly people.
* For making new friends.
* For photography.
* For team-work.
* For friends to travel with.
* For insight.
* For hope.

Rain Rain Where Are You

First of all, thanks a lot to all of you who left comments/voted on my last post! I’ll keep you updated if anything comes out of it...

The monsoon is still playing games with us. It has rained some in the last few days but it’s not quite the monsoon, they say. I wish it would come. It’s kind of scary how dry this month has been, by now usually we’ve already had a “rainy day” and been unable to go to college because of the water logging. I’m just hoping it doesn’t all come in a mad deluge!

Life otherwise is okay. Classes annoy me sometimes. I don’t know why, actually I do know why. I guess I was expecting it to be better, more interesting, more serious, more challenging… And then there's this one teacher... Argh!! And what bugs me more is that there’s this resigned acceptance of the whole thing. Like when I tell people who have experienced this themselves they say, “You know what, degree is just a name-sake thing, you just have to get through it.” Hmmmm.

Also, who would've thought getting used to not having any classes at all or even any free time without Sonu, Sharan and Vini would be THIS hard! :(

I know there’s a purpose for everything; I just wish it were easier sometimes to believe that!

Anyway today I went to the Crosswords bookstore near our college to kill some time before I headed to see my doctor in Bandra and started reading Jodi Picoult's new book Handle With Care and it is fabulous! I just read a few pages and was real sad that I couldn't take it with me (I don't like to steal and it was too expensive to buy and they don't let you borrow!). And I also found this autobiography of William Wilberforce - you know that British guy who fought to abolish the slave trade? I'm a big fan. His story teaches me something new every time... (Amazing Grace anyone?)

If you like me...

****Update****
I've just put up a poll on the side of the blog to make things a little easier and if you don't want to leave a comment. Multiple answers are allowed so you can pick a picture from each Set. And in case it's a little confusing (I should have given the photos letters instead of numbers!) Set 1.3 for example would mean photo number three from the first set... Get it?
*****************

Here's another one of those, "If you like me, do this for me please" things! (Don't worry, it doesn't involve money!) :P Here's the deal: my ex-roomie and good friend sent me this forward from this photographer who wants to start up an online magazine and she asked me to submit some photos and because I'm biased and I can't make up my mind about what to send and I've been procrastinating about it for way too long anyway, I finally put together some photos out of which I now have to narrow down to six and this is where you come in, dear blog reader!

I've divided them into six sets with similar-ish photos or at least similar subject photos in a set and you have to tell me which one you like best out of each set! Simple, right? (Just leave a comment with the Set number and the number of the photo in the set that you like) I know the pictures are tiny but I think if you click on them, they might look a little bigger (?!?) I can't really put the large size ones on the blog because you know how the story goes - I'm in Mumbai - Tata Indicom "wireless" connection - not broadband - it will take ridiculously long and I have to pay the bill at the end of it (well, actually my dad technically does that bit but still... :P)

What say you? I promised to send them in by this weekend so get voting people! :D

Set 1

Set 2

Set 3

Set 4

Set 5

Set 6

Thanks!

P.s. If you're a photography enthusiast too then email me at compelleintrare@hotmail.com and I'll send you the forward so you can submit some photos too!
P.p.s. If you think of any other photo that you've seen on my blog before that I haven't included here, let me know!
P.p.p.s I'd like your input even if you don't really like me :P

5:47pm Andheri Local

Today was a bad mood day for me. It didn’t start off that way, I was quiet in the morning by not in a bad mood. And then Gender & Society paper happened which reminded that I still haven’t “reserved” a project topic for myself and if I don’t hurry up with it, there won’t be anything good left but then again I don’t really want to hurry up with it and just settle for something that I’m not all that interested in… So any ideas, people? Something to do with women in the Indian subcontinent (and no, I can’t do Sex Trafficking. I really wanted to, but guess what? Somebody else is already doing it…)

And then we had another lecture which was SUPPOSED to be Social Theory but our teacher ordered us to go to the A.V. Hall and apparently the Second Year students would be there too… Oh great. So it’s going to be a presentation on something. And then it turned about to be an NGO that works in the area of Leprosy in India that we already wrote a “project” on in the first year. It’s not that I don’t care about Leprosy (and weirdly enough, I watched the episode of House M.D. last night with the kid with leprosy who got it from India…) but this lady comes to us every year and demands that we go around asking random people for donations which is something that I am not comfortable with! I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a bad thing but I’m just not comfortable with it!! So if you like me, help me out and make my life easier and send me some dollars, will ya? :P :P

And then, the same lecturer who was supposed to be teaching us Social Theory wasted an entire lecture distributed forms to collect above mentioned money. Seriously, we’re supposed to be University students. The first two years were like a joke and I’ve been waiting to get to this year thinking that we might actually do some really serious stuff and the syllabus looks very taxing, promising and interesting (Karl Marx, Max Weber, French Revolution, Emile Durkheim, etc, etc…) but here we are not learning ANYTHING and if it’s true what our seniors said, the rest of the year doesn’t look so great either at least with this lecturer…

Anyway, at least I know what we’re supposed to be learning so if anyone is not going to teach me, I can at least read up stuff myself. So it has to be up to me.

So basically it wasn’t a great morning but then I had to conduct Photography Team interviews with my fellow-coordinators at 4pm and that was fun! It’s nice being on the other side and having all this insider information! :P

But the best part was the train-ride back. Thankfully, I managed to get an Andheri-bound train just as I entered the station (love how God pays attention to little details!) and I entered banging my head away to Brooke Fraser. I got a seat but I was too bouncy so I went and stood by the door and then my MP3 battery died and after failed attempts to try and revive it, I just gave up and went to claim an empty seat and read C.S. Lewis. Except that I never got around to reading at all because next to me was sitting a middle-aged lady who was… CROSS-STITCHING!

Now, I’m really not the kind of person who strikes up a conversation with strangers generally because I am an intrinsically shy person and my social skills are pretty pathetic but I just could not pass up this opportunity. So I asked her, “Where do you get this material from?” Although I knew pretty well where she probably got it from by deduction – she must live in Andheri – everyone tells me about this place near the station – has to be Natco. And sure enough, it was Natco but anyway, I had my ice breaker and I told her how I really like cross-stitching too and the coolest bit is how as the conversation went on, we kept finding so many common grounds between us. Andheri. Calcutta. Africa. And the best part was that she is a librarian at SNDT University which is a well-known institute in Mumbai and so I asked her if I could visit the library and told her that I’m looking for topics for my Gender and Society paper and she gave me some ideas and everything and we talked all the way till our Andheri local came to its last stop…

What a blessing! I was literally smiling ear-to-ear as I walked home. I just love it how seemingly insignificant little details come together and make a story!

Your Mercies Are New Every Morning.

All in a day of third year!

Look who we found on the train ride to college at 7:20 in the morning almost dozing off while reading The Return of The Native? Sonu lives further from town than we do now so she has joined the masses on the local trains... I think this might be one of the first times we got to sit down on the train in the morning after travelling second class for the first couple of days before we got our first class passes down. We're "happy" commuters now. Second class is treacherous!

Sharan, darling that she is, got me some C.S. Lewis book from the British Council Library! More books for my Book List 2009!Classes started on Wednesday and it's kind of weird not having anything else but Sociology all day long! For the first time I don't have to write the name of the subject in my timetable only numbers to denote which part of Sociology I have at different times... Crazy! Sitting in the classroom after a fun lesson with a fun teacher! I had to make some posters to advertise Photography Team interviews for K'SCOPE (our college festival). I'm on the interviewer side this year and not the interviewee :DStrange as it may sound, our timetable is actually more relaxed than last year! On most days we only start at 8:50am instead of 8:00am and there are breaks in between classes too... YAY!

After college yesterday we decided to grab some lunch and watch a movie at Colaba. Lunch was at Leopold Cafe which is a really old and famous eating place in Colaba (Shantaram anyone?) It's like a melting pot of cultures actually, there are usually a lot of foreigners around and they have all kinds of food for reasonable prices (although they've increased the prices of everything a little now...)

Madhuri, Shruti and Sonu

Looks picture perfect doesn't it? Vini's order...

Outside the theatre after the movie. L-R: Vini, Sonu, Madhuri, Monisha and Shruti

The movie - Bride Wars - was okay. You know how chick flicks go... :D

Gra[d-a}nniversary!

3 years out of school!

Here I go again...

So here I am, back in Mumbai on the brink of my last and final year of college! After that I will be a college-graduate! Doesn't that have a nice ring to it!? I am excited to be getting started with third year of college. Hopefully there will be lots to do...

Leaving home doesn't get much easier apparently but I'm trying to be positive. This is life and I am just so grateful for an awesome summer holiday. Here are some of the highlights:

- Trip to Kerala (esp. the elephant ride in Kerala!)
- Trip to Ooty with D
- Catching up with Hebronites in Ooty
- Salsa classes (although I never did get around to going to a salsa party!!)
- Spending time with Doris
- Catching up with Tripti
- Going through old stuff and photos
- Time and access to broadband to post stuff that I can't easily do in Mumbai
- Movies (and I've brought many more on my laptop to keep me occupied till October!)
- Trying out new recipes
- Earth Hour India 2009 (so glad my parents were enthusiastic about this as well...)
- Free summer afternoons...
- Voting and then watching the drama unfold in the news with my parents...
- Discovering that cross-stitching is a lot of fun!
- Grocery-shopping with my parents at Spar (I don't know why I love doing this so much, but I just do.)
- Sleeping over at my brother's place
- Discovering new artists (Brooke Fraser is my current favourite!)
- Bangalore weather (heaven, compared to Mumbai!)
- The "micro-mini Hebron Class of 2006 reunions"
- Cubbies* with Taryn and Grace
- My "fun-aunt" visiting from Calcutta (she always has hilarious stories to tell!)

See what I mean? It's been a fabulous holiday and I'm glad that I did most of what I planned to do at the beginning of the holiday... Except I kind of lost all my gusto with the Hindi and German half-way through. Oops! Oh well, I'm sure Vini will get me going with my hindi again once college starts and I brought some German resources as well but I'm not going to get too ambitious with that right now... There's a time for everything under the sun!

*Cubbies is what we used to call Sleepovers at Hebron. I have no idea why!

Ever Ever After

Yesterday was another fabulous day! It was the three of us again - Grace, me and Taryn-, catching up after two years!
Just the three of us...*
11:30am -- lunching at a Chettinad restaurant,
1:30pm -- feasting on blackforest ice-cream at the Fudge Factory,
2-5:00pm -- napping/reading/chatting while Grace went for a class
5:45pm -- drinking tea/chatting/reminiscing about Hebron/eating fish-strings from Thailand!7:00pm -- started making dinner with my "happy helpers!" (Pasta and Lemon Pie for dessert!) while Taryn played some tunes on my neglected guitar/chatting
11:00pm -- my happy helpers helped me put out the clothes from the washing machine to dry and then we sat up on the roof and watched the clouds do their little dance in the wind...
11:30pm --YouTubeing Taryn! (see here and here), listening to music, chatting some more, listening to some more of Taryn on the guitar (she's really fabulous!)...
and time just went by and we were starting to think about going to sleep at about 2:00am when the day just got better...
Tashu* - who is in St. Louis came online and convinced me to finally download Skype so we waited for that to download and install on my dear laptop and finally at 2:30am we started video conferencing with Tashu!! It was so fabulous! We chatted for an hour on Skype and then finally went to sleep like very happy and... well, very sleepy not-so-little-girls!!!

Ahhhh, it's been a good summer! Back to Mumbai tomorrow...

*I've known these girls from when I joined Hebron in 2001.

Raz-ma-Taz!

Hey!

Guess whose birthday it is today?

Guest-writer on Compelle Intrare and fabulous friend, Taryn!!

Happy Birthday Raz-ma-Taz!!!

Gosh, I'm having the best last week in Bangalore possible! Today we went over to one of my other cousin's place for lunch and pretty much every night till I leave is another dinner get-together with family! What fun! :)

Also, if all goes according to plan - another micro-mini reunion is on the cards on Friday! This time it will be with Grace and Taryn! Grace just flew in on Monday night from South Korea so she's just in time for a rendezvous before I fly back to Mumbai on Sunday...

The last time the three of us met in January 2007.(Thank goodness for archives ;))

Has this been the awesomest holiday ever or what?! :)

Oh-Happy-Day!

Yesterday was lovely. Really really lovely. It started off with my fun-aunt arriving from Calcutta to stay with us for a week and then after "breakfast" I headed off braving the hot sun, dusty and ridiculously crowded Bangalore streets to get to Brigade road for the "mico-mini re-union"!Like Taryn said, there was Cha, Jonny and us two and it was just so fabulous catching up! We ordered our drinks and Jonny and I had waffles with ice-cream and there was non-stop chatter... Jonny's just back from a year abroad in Egypt where he's been learning arabic so he had lots of interesting stories to tell and we (the girls) proceeded to make him jealous about the fact that we're already through (Taz and Cha) or almost through (just 1 more year for me!!) with college while he still has 2 more years to go! Muahahaha! :PAnyway, after about 2-3 hours of that, we finally paid up, got a little camera-happy -especially me, I took about a million with Jonny's Nikon D-SLR! Nothing special, I was just getting such a kick out of messing around with the settings and just hearing the sound of that *click*!- and then headed to pick up some subs from Subway before Jonny got on his way up to Ooty...

After that, Taryn and I walked to Commercial St. in search of embroidery thread (Taz wanted it for making friendship bands and I wanted them to continue my cross-stitching madness!) and after a little asking around, there we were, in Thread-Heaven disguised as a tiny little shop tucked away in some obscure little alleyway. Seriously, you should have seen this place, they had drawers after drawers of threads! Each drawer had various shades of a single colour and we pretty much gasped and squealed every time he opened the next drawer!

We came back home (Taz stayed over) and visited D and Dada for a little while and then came home, blogged, ate dinner(Ma's biriyani!) and dessert (Gooey brownies with Ice-cream!) and then proceeded to sleep-deprive ourselves by staying up till 2:30am - so much to talk about, so little time!!

Yep, so yesterday was pretty much perfect :) Even though Taz and I generally only get to catch up once a year despite living in the same country, it's so easy to just pick up where we left off! Taz and I joined Hebron the same year, were the two new girls in our room, went through home sickness together for the first few weeks, even devised master "escape plans" while lying on the trampoline together at night and talking about our "dream-guys" :P.... I can't believe it's been almost 8 years since then!!

Life is cool.

Thank YOU for this gift - life in abundance!!

Surprised (once again) By Joy

Okay, so since Taryn did such a great job with blogging the last time, and she's staying over, I thought I'd get her to do it again!

So I'll let her take over now...
TARRRRRYNNNNNNNN!

Oh right, she's right next to me... :P

Hello, Friends-of-Tina-who-are-therefore-automatically-friends-of-mine! Has it been as beautiful a day for you as it has been for me? My cup overflows.

A few days ago, I posted on one of Tina's Facebook notes, "The little joys...", with a list of five things (out of the many *insert big number* things) that bring me joy. Monday the first of June, of the year 2009, folks, would get four out of five stars.

2. meeting an old friend after ages and realising that they are still special to you and you to them.

*check!* Today I met Jonny, and Chandni, and Tina, childhood friends. I've known them for eight years! That's the majority of my remember-able life. I left Hebron five years ago, and yet our worlds are bound together by ties that do not seem to be getting weaker.

3. rain. full-force, whole-hearted, water-splashing-everywhere

-with-refreshing-abandon. rain.

It didn't rain today, which is probably a good thing, since Tina and I did an urban echo of the Duke of Edinburgh trek which we completed together six years ago - we bought Subway sandwiches and walked from Brigade Road to Commercial Street munching them happily.

4. mango milk shakes! (i'm a delhi girl, none of these vanilla lattes, Bibi! ;))

*check.* Since I'm not in Delhi, and good mango milkshakes aren't available in Coffee World, I had a Butterscotch Macchiato instead. I now declare Butterscotch Macchiatos a satisfactory substitute. :)

5. long car rides with good company and familiar music playing.

*check!* I went on a lovely evening ride with Tina and her family this evening, with Radio Indigo playing U2, K.T. Tunstall, and even Toploader's 'Dancing in the Moonlight' , and conversation drifting easily from Brooke Fraser to life in Delhi to the state of Bangalore's water table. Joy.

1. the word 'freedom', and all that it signifies.

*check!* I haven't done a jot of work today. I haven't had anyone tell me "do this" or "do that". I have finished school, I have finished undergraduate studies, I am summer-vacationing like I have never summer-vacationed before. But that's not why I'm free. This evening, I read for the first time the C.S. Lewis quote from which the title of this blog is taken:

"But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our Liberation.”

There it is! That word! Or at least a synonym of it: "Liberation". How deep is the truth of that last sentence! How I wish I could grasp that truth, even embrace it, for more than a few minutes at a time, that I might understand better this immense freedom God has bought for me. "So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." (John 8:36) It's true.

love,
Taz