January is over!

Can you believe that? And we have just 13 more days… Actually, less than that if you don’t count the Sundays… 11 days! Ohmyword! We have just 11 days more of classes and then we’re off for two excruciatingly looong study leave months – during which period, I am going to go mad btw. Be warned. I don’t deal so well with staying cooped up in the house with nothing to do. Yes, I know… I do in fact have to STUDY during the study leave but come on… two months!? And now there’s talk going around that our exams will be in the middle of April as opposed to 4^th of April (remember? This is why I don’t take the University’s word for it!) Ew. That’s all I have to say on this matter… for now.

Anyway, today we were at a friend, Monisha’s place working on a presentation that we have to do next Thursday and well, between all the hard work (:P) we were just sharing stories from our first days of college and how we became friends and it’s just so crazy! Where did the three years go? I mean, I think we’ve done a good job of milking our college life. We’ve done a lot of crazy things but it’s hard to believe that it’s all almost… over :(

I never quite understood why people used to say, “Oh college life is so great, you’ll never forget your college days…” I mean, yeah… but I think when I came here I had the arrogant presumption that nothing could beat my years of school. I went to an awesome school and those years were just so fantabulous. But now I GET IT!! School was great – no doubt about that (and I’m super excited about the prospect of maybe going back there one day!) - but you can’t really compare college life to that. It’s been the best on a completely different level and I’ve changed… Honestly. Sometimes, I don’t even recognize myself! It’s hard to describe but I have changed and I don’t mean to be cocky, but I’ve changed for the better and that’s not at all to my credit. I know… maybe this kind of sounds like an Oscar speech but I’ve just been thinking a lot about these things as college has started winding down… Bombay has changed me. My friends have changed me. And it's all because I didn’t get what I wanted… I got what my parents wanted and I got what God wanted!

You know what I wanted? I wanted to go the US. Or Canada. Or Australia. I basically wanted to be anywhere in the world except for India. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to live in a clean, cool and organized city… I had dreams of traveling to all these exotic places… being closer to all my friends from school… ad infinitum…

BUT I got Bombay. And if you’ve been here you’ll know that Bombay is FAR from clean, cool and organized. It’s exactly the opposite. But I am actually grateful for it beyond what words can express... now! And I am so glad that I have finally reached the point where I understand this. This is why I can get on a train-full of vicious and grumpy “first-class ladies” every morning and still be smiling away to glory... for no apparent reason! Trust me it’s taken me a looong time to get here. I was pretty grumpy myself when all this began!

The point is, that even though it's been a long journey and it's not what I initially wanted for myself, I think it's been the best possible thing. I like where I am now but I'm not so presumptuous to think that I've gotten where I need to get. I'm still a work in progress! ;)

So there are some random “deep” thoughts from the recesses of my brain for you!

Now here’s a random picture… or two!

Firstly, this is my "Mama-Dadu" and me!
He's my grand-uncle and the closest thing I've ever had to a grandfather. Sweetest old man ever!

This is Gauri! She and Jo performed in a dance-drama last weekend and I was planning not to take any photos because when I'm taking photos I get so involved in that that I miss the whole performance itself but I just couldn't resist! These are just a few of the colour pics. I took most of them in B/W but I'll upload those another day...

Joyee!
She did a role that she hasn't quite done before and pulled it off with absolute grace! So proud of you girlie!

Antu, Sonu and yours truly at the performance!
We're all into sarees now! And we actually draped them ourselves for the first time! :)

Happy Weekend All! :D

As if we needed an excuse...

It's been a while since I updated, right? Not that there hasn't been anything to write about (and there are plenty of photos too)... There's actually been so much going on that the last two weeks of my being back in Bombay is kind of a hazy blur in my head. And time... Time is just flying! It's kind of scary. We're already into the last week of January and while I'm happy that that means February is just around the corner (it's my favourite month, don't you know? :P) I find myself actually thinking sometimes, "gosh time, slow down a little!!" :P

But yeah, I'll leave the details of what's been going on to later. For now, here are some pictures! :)

Today was the day we had to take our "class photos" and so it was an excuse to sort of dress up and an excuse for some manic *clicking* not that we ever require an excuse for that... But yeah, it was fun... until it got a little tiring! Lol.

Sharan and Jo at the marble stairs...
Our list of "Places we have to eat at before we leave Bombay" :D
My girls! :) Vini, Sharan, Jo, Antu, Sonu and Gauri - I don't even want to imagine what Bombay would have been like if it weren't for you lovely people!
Jo trying to be superman?
Socio buddies ;)
Fluoresce! Our Research group!
Vini and Antu.
Me, Gauri and Sonu
Astrid and Antu at the Central lawn...
Jo and Molu - our Student Body President! :)
Some of the girls in our Socio class with our teachers...

Something New.

So today there was a Blood Donation Drive organised by the Tata Memorial Hospital in college and I didn't really have any intention on donating. Not because I'm scared of needles because I'm really not but because I always hear these freak stories of how people have gotten infected with some scary disease and blah blah so I was planning to skip it even though there was really nothing to worry about. But then I went to the venue because Antu was going to donate and I saw everything and how it's organised and clean and I was like, hmmmmm... I think I should do it. So I did. I was still kind of paranoid for a long time and was observing everything and saw that they were using disposable needles and everything so I filled out a form and they checked my blood pressure, hemoglobin, weight, etc and I passed!

After a lot of waiting around, Antu and I finally got our chance and it was pretty cool. The needle is scary, I'll give you that... but you don't actually feel anything because they give you a local anesthetic and well you just sort of sit there and 300ml (I think) of your blood flows into a bag that will hopefully save someone's life. Now that's cool, isn't it? I think it is.

After you're done they compulsorily send you to the "Blood Donation Cafe"... Lol. Okay, well that's what I christened it! :P Basically you have to go sit down and drink some coffee and eat some biscuits. I felt kind of woozy because I guess my body suddenly missed it's blood or something. Haha. But then they made me lie down for a while and the doctor was like, "what are you feeling?" and I was like, "Ummm, I don't know! I can't explain it!" Yup, that's me. I'm so terrible at describing my symptoms but yeah the lying down helped and I'm all fine now... except for the little puncture in my arm. Seriously. BIG needle!!

So yeah, Tina did something new today... and I'd do it again.

One of my favourite things...

One of my favourite things in Mumbai is the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon and as you probably know, I got to take part in the "Dream Run" this time! It's a 6km race and thousands of people come out and take part. It's a place where you can just be a part of that great "Mumbai Spirit" that they keep talking about (it's true!). All these NGOs and other organisations come out and take part - spreading awareness about a certain cause or simply just to get some publicity.

Jo, Antu and I took part as individuals. It was a totally last-minute thing. I was planning to be there anyhow because I've been there for the last two years as a spectator and absolutely LOVE it but then Sharan and her parents couldn't take part this year so they kindly let us go in their place!!

There are basically three races... The full marathon (42kms), the half marathon (21kms) and the Dream Run. People from around the world (especially Africa) come to take part every year and the numbers just keep increasing! This year the total number of people taking part in all three races was around 40, 000 and you could really see it! It was actually pretty impossible to run in the Dream Run course because there were so many people and it was kind of difficult to dodge them! Anyway, we passed the start line around 9:40am and finished it about an hour later. I had the most awesome time! I took lots of pictures, got the Indian flag painted on my face, got a free t-shirt, free food, my friends were there with me... You get the picture!

Okay, the order is kind of messed up... Blogger really needs to pull up their socks on making it easier to deal with photos but for now, here are some shots from yesterday... in random order!

Antu and I, all flushed after the marathon... Practising our running poses :P Some people at the costume round.. You could get whatever you wanted painted on you for free! The crowd at the costume round before the race started... These guys won the first prize in the costume round! :) Girl power! All set! On our train to VT at around 7:30am Desi girls! :) There were LOADS of people trying to raise awareness for a greener planet. I like!! :) Hee hee! Jo and I on the train... I was trying to get a picture of the crowd. I'm not sure what's with my expression. Lol. Just excited I guess! :) My freebie t-shirt... So as we started walking, this lady came up to me and asked me if I would wear their organisation's t-shirt and I'm a sucker for freebies and well, it was a good cause so I slipped this one on on top of my t-shirt and so yeah, I actually walked the 6kms in TWO t-shirts. Lol. I tried to maneuver out of mine but didn't manage... But they weather was actually not so bad so it was okay! Gauri! She was running with an organisation called 'Laadli' which works to fight against female infanticide and foeticide. Unfortunately, it is a rampant practice in parts of India so you're actually not allowed to find out the sex of your child before birth. Laadli took part in the costume round so that's why Gauri is playing pregnant here! Isn't she just glowing? :) More friends from college! Marine drive... :) Look! I have a number!! :) Antu, Jo and I at Azad Maidan which is the "holding area" for the runners and where the race starts... Wearing our Marathon bands!

Dust off your running shoes...

Guess who's "running" in the Dream Run (6kms) at the Mumbai Marathon tomorrow??

Yours truly :) (and another 20 odd thousand people :P)

I say running in inverted commas because I won't really be running in the true sense because I only found out that I can take part this year (finally) like a few days ago thanks to Sharan (!!) and I haven't had any sort of training whatsoever but it's okay. The Dream Run is more about just being there with thousands of other Mumbaikers and solidarity. It's just the most awesome thing and I am so psyched to be an official part of it this year. I have a number and everything. YAY!!!

And no, I won't be wearing my Converse shoes. As much as I love them (and they just go so well with all the blue, don't they?). However, I walked the whole 6km (plus some more) in them last year at the marathon on the sidelines with camera in hand and it was far from a pleasant experience for my feet!

Anyway, I'm superbly excited. Seriously. I've been wanting to do this since my first year and I'm so so glad that I'll get to finally do it before I leave!

So that's all for now! Happy weekend all!

60!

Happy Birthday Papa! :)

Picture taken at my brother's wedding in Bangalore, 15th December, 2006. Love it!

First Day Back :)

So you know this project that I had to write over the holidays? Well I finished it finally and it’s all handed in and signed for and DONE! Oh, that’s a good feeling. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. Like seriously.

Besides the fact that I learnt about a lot of things that I probably wouldn’t have read up on otherwise, I also learnt that I am a procrastinator of the worst kind! I mean, I always knew this but I really shocked myself this time! :O I don’t know what it is; maybe I work better under pressure? Or I’m just plain lazy? It’s not lack of interest because like I said, I loved my project. I wrote about two Nobel peace laureates – Aung San Suu Kyi and Shirin Ebadi and I have so much respect for both these women and it was so fascinating just reading up into the histories of Burma and Iran. Once I got into the groove, I was pretty much hooked on it and I loved finding out to my utter delight that I can write. I mean who am I to judge whether I write well or not but I liked the fact that it’s something that I really enjoy doing even if it is for something other than my blog! :P

The problem is just the getting into the groove part. I mean it’s like almost... painful. To discipline myself to just shut up (in my head I mean, there’s always chatter in my head) and WRITE! I stayed up really late on most of my last week home (oh yeah, that’s another thing that I learnt… apparently I think best in the wee hours of the morning!) because once I started writing I was too scared to stop cause I’d have to go through the whole process again. It’s so weird. What is wrong with me!? Lol.

Anyway, so that’s that! I hope my teacher enjoys reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

First day back was really great. You want to know a secret? For all my grumbling about coming back to Bombay, I actually do love my life here in a lot of ways. (Not in every way, but hey, who can say they have a perfect life?) It was so great to see everyone in college! My friends (like I keep saying) are just fabulous and you should just hear some of the conversations that we have in the canteen... Today, we somehow went from a description of the Lit conference that happened last weekend to a heated debate on Kashmir!! It was so bizarre-cool. I mean, how on earth? And it didn’t even really get anywhere except to the realisation (well, at least for me) that I actually know shamefully little about this complex situation and I ought to read up on it...

In fact, I think I might go and do that right now.

Happy Monday all! :)

Private & Confidential!!

So I'm packing (again) and trying to figure out what to take and what not to take and just clearing up my cupboard and that's always fun because I have all this junk from school and lookie here what I found!

Lol. That was my diary in Std. 9 (or 10?) when I was at Hebron. Oh my word, what's inside is even funnier! I mean you can just imagine the things that worried a gawky teenager, right? Stupid crushes, "problems" with friends and just some other totally stupid things. Seriously, it's just hilarious. *wipes tear away from eyes* I'm finding it hard to believe that that was actually me writing in there! Here are some examples (and hey, don't judge okay? :P):

Dear Diary, (yeah LOL #1)
We were supposed to have extra swimming, but it rained so heavy it had to be cancelled. I got sooooo mad! I HATE rain!
(I absolutely LOVE rain now, btw!)

Dear Diary,
I hate English! I'm terrible at Poetry!
(I don't hate English now but I think if I still did Poetry I would be pretty terrible at it! :P)

Dear Diary,
It's June! It's the month we go Home!
(Sigh. I don't think I'll EVER get over the excitement of going home!)

Dear Diary,
Natasha's moving into the dorm this weekend. I can't believe it! Hopefully we'll be able to talk more... (Haha, I was actually talking to Tashu about this the other day. I had major jealousy issues when she wouldn't hang out with me. So funny! And so embarrassing when I think about it now. And we're still friends!)

Oh gosh, I could give you loads more but I think that's enough "LOL at Tina" for one day :P

School was such drama, don't you think? All those mad teenage hormones! I'm actually really glad I'm done with that!

Ok, let's see what other treasures are in the cupboard! ;)

The world is not a small place!

Will be heading back to my Bombay-reality soon and I find it difficult to be joyful about that until I'm already there. Once I get to college and meet my ridiculously fabulous friends, I'll be all-okay! But for now, I'm kind of sad that the day is getting closer and I was feeling a little more bummed out than usual today because my laptop has been giving me a lot of problems and it's gone to get fixed but the guy is such a procrastinator and i'm getting kind of desperate. I mean, my granny doesn't have a TV and so my laptop is my only sort of connection to the world in a sense so I think that I NEED my laptop which is kind of scary because that's not really true. I don't NEED it. What I really need, I already have. But yeah, it's hard to always be at that place of realisation and I was definitely not there today...

But then I just got to picking up this thread of thought that I had yesterday about this holiday and just how I've been able to reconnect with so many of my friends (from Hebron especially)... made new friends in Bangalore at Radiance... Got to meet with Lambu.. twice! Spoke/chatted with so many friends thanks to the wonderful technologies of Skype, Gtalk, MSN, etc! I just got off the phone with Sakshi in Nagpur. Yesterday I talked to my dear friend and sister, Taryn in Delhi. The night before that I spoke to Natasha in the US. I got an awesomely long email from Grace in South Korea just updating us on what's been going on in her life over the last couple of months! I'm currently chatting with Niru in Australia. I spoke to Anjali and Gloria in Germany. John in the US. Meg in Canada. Alva in Sweden. Jugal in the UK. And the list goes on... And also I've added so many new people on Facebook! Now, i'm definitely not the kind of girl who's into the whole friends list rat-race but yeah, it's cool to make new connections and then realise how your new connections have connections with your old connections. You know what I mean? I'm not going to say the clichéd "It's a small world" because I've always sort of had a problem with that phrase because I don't really buy it. It's not really a small world and there are definitely not a small number of people living on the planet but somehow, we still manage to bump into the right people at the right time :)

And I'm so very grateful for that. Friendship is precious! And I feel really blessed by that today! It's one of those things that make my heart siiiiiing! ;)

And talking of singing, here's a song that I'm loving right now!

What's four months, right?

Four months. Four months. I keep chanting this to myself.

I'm on my last full Sunday back home and I am very grateful for that because this was technically supposed to be my last half-Sunday here. And it has been good! I just got back from an extended sleepover at dada and D's place and we played Scrabble, watched a hilarious movie called Waking Ned Devine (1998), listened to music ranging from Nirvana to the soundtrack of Avatar (!!!) to U2...on their awesome home theatre system (it's just magical!), ate D's awesome cooking (spaghetti last night and prawn curry with coconut rice for lunch today - she's a genius, obviously), drank breezers, made conversation, another morning with Radiance today... all in all, lots of fun!

Anyway, back to the "four months" and what that means. Well, you see two nights ago, my friend Antu mass-msged us this...

This isn't something you should know on the 1ST OF JANUARY, but I had to tell you this- just checked the university website which says that our exams begin from the 5th of april... er, all the best to us

I'm not sure how the rest reacted to that but my reaction? Well, I did my little "jump-clap-fists-in-the-air dance that I do when I'm really happy and nobody's watching :P

Now, I generally don't take the "University's" word for it, especially if it's on the website but if this is in fact true what this means is that we have like no time and it's going to be all study-study-study as SOON as I get back but this is where the "four months" thing comes in... Exams starting in April means exams ending in May... hopefully. Tops. And that means, ladies and gentlemen... that yours truly is going to be DONE with college in FOUR MONTHS! Done with Bombay in FOUR MONTHS! (I feel like I should add a parenthesis everywhere saying "hopefully" because well, who knows anything for sure, right? God loves to add a good "twist" in the story sometimes and He might just decide that I haven't had enough of Bombay yet but yeah, HOPEFULLY!)

The tragic part about that is that I have four precious months left with some girls... who have been the best friends I've made in the last four years. (You know who you are!) Also, saying goodbye to Bombay... granted, it has its quirks that really drive me up the wall on the bad days but Bombay also gave me so much. A few months ago I tried to write down the whole "Why Bombay?" story... What's that? Well, how it happened (it is quite a story...) and trying to figure out why it happened (I mean the less obvious whys of it), what I've learnt from it, etc, etc... It's a pretty long story but yeah, it is pretty awesome how some things have just become clearer to me now and if I ever manage to articulate the whole thing maybe I'll publish it on the blog one day but the basic idea is that Bombay has been both the best thing and the hardest thing I've done since I left school so it will be hard to leave but I am also so looking forward to it!

So yeah, right now I'm still half-believing that my three years in Bombay has already just come down to four more measly months, being kind of sad that I will be done with Sophia's soon, and yet being so out-of-my-mind-excited about the fact that I will be a graduate very very soon and then there are new and exciting things in store for me in the next year (more about that as and when...)! That's what four months means for me right now.

Four months.

Isn't life just beautiful? It's never the same. Every day is just awesomely new. Thank you God for that. Seriously.

Still wondering why I’m here
Still wrestling with my fear
But oh, He’s up to something
And the farther on I go
I’ve seen enough to know
That I’m, not here for nothing
He’s up to something

There is hope for me yet
Because God won't forget
All the plans he's made for me
I have to wait and see
He's not finished with me yet

-- Brandon Heath, "Wait and See"

Have an awesome first full week of 2010!

Learn from the Na'vi!

The first movie I watched in 2010. Freaking a-w-e-s-o-m-e!!! I cannot put into words how much I loved it. It was beautiful and beautiful is such a pansy word to describe it! Words are just useless sometimes.

Watch this movie! And realize with me what morons human beings can be sometimes... We could really learn a thing or two from the Na'vi! :P