pele

pele left iit today.
i will no longer see his ever-smiling face daily subeh 'pele pele'
The companion of 4 years, the man-friday for any support i needed, a friend through thick and thin. Now life sends us apart, each on our separate paths. Why does it have to be so?!
Ahh - to think of how it will be over the years::
As two old friends we may meet, once every few years, to catch up with our lives over a hurried meal, where we used to catch up with each other daily!


His room - emptied of all articles. Our haunt of so many years, now stripped of all. I cant bear to look at it in that state just yet. Empty room, full of memories.

[Its dawn now, and i am just back from the terrace. Where we probed the depths of our hearts and minds to understand the world around us. Our terrace, no more]

The final moment is here - the taxi is loaded. Its getting late - gullu is drumming his fingers impatiently. Ahh damn you.
Pele's eyes tell the whole story. I will always remember you pele! You are the best!

[sighh...we realised the fullness of friendship at the moment of parting]

All i can think of right now is Floyd's High Hopes::

Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river

I hate going away from ppl just bcoz of circumstances - u meet so few ppl whom u love, and then life makes u go through these farewells.

the dolphin and the 150 km long beach :D

alibag
We were out there only for 30 hours, but it felt like much more :)
i have now covered all of the beaches in that circuit :D [well, akshi beach is still left]. We left at dawn, and went to Nagaon beach first, and had breakfast in the village shack before moving to the Murud area. Skipped kashid, murud and janjira, went to the very end of the region, and i had a blissful afternoon nap in the white sand of the small nameless beach near 'Aagardanda'
Spent the evening playing football, cricket, and generally fooling around [read sandcastles and samundar-bathing] in Kashid beach :D
Oh, and the fish thali in patel lunch home rocks :))



As night fell, we drove on back to Nagaon and Alibag, and i love roadtrips :)
I so wanted to grab the steering and drive, but alas! Fine, i will work out a roadtrip soon for sure! We had a great veggie meal in Alibag, and then it was back to the beaches with lotsa beer and tonnes of chips :D
Learnt how to make bonfires out of coconuts, slept on this beach too, woke up in time to see the moon set over the sea, and it beats any of the sunsets i have ever seen! It is so - magical!



Having fooled on the beach all night, we packed up our camp at dawn, and were back in bbay by 9:30! BTW the bbay goa highway, with all its traffic, was more exciting than today's Spanish Grand Prix! I am gonna drive out on that road someday.

ED:: A few more pics are up on my orkut album, and also here: http://harsha-vardhan.livejournal.com/

generalities

so today there is nothing much to post about
lets talk about generalities, shall we?

hmmm...so why did i reopen the blog?! why did i close it in the first place? i guess i wanted In, in on the plethora of career options that i was missing out, while stumbling about in my maze of confusion.

For a day or two, the mists cleared, the temporary short-term thing to do [job to take] was apparent, and i am glad to say, i am on it now! But along with the career focus came the knee-jerk reaction:: shut the blog, create a new average-joe blog. whatever that is. and not that i have any liking for being one of 'them'.

It may just have been that i wanted to give off a different impression of myself, maybe i felt that uncomfy that people coming to my site see this avatar of mine, inner thoughts, insecurities, ravings, frank expressions, outporings and whatnot.
[btw that is still unresolved...how do i go about keeping this an open blog, and yet not putting my foot in my mouth, socially speaking? :-? ]
What i dint realise is that this is how my blogs are always going to be - a kind of semi-diary! [i hope that this goes on to prove that i am an open book - QED etc, u know :P]

Confessional section now:: [:D] [damn why dont the sideways v brackets work in html!]

Yes i am an aspirer. All i want to be professionally is like Mr.So&So. [Ego wins in the battle against transparency :D ... not that lots of people would have heard of him, but still...]
He is my role model. I want to be like him. Whenever i am confused, I think of what he would have done in a similar situation. It helps a lot. I have role models for personal life too - i want to be as free and friendly as x, as communicative as y, as deep as z, etc.

All that is fine, i still am totally for the idea of learning from So&So and being a good manager [in all senses of the word] but i lost it slightly during the initial phases of this [for Temporary future goals!!] clarity that i have. [more on the progress later]
I ask myself, so do i want one of those oh-so-popular blogs that these IITians and IIMians keep, where they write about their campuses, day in, day out, and the eager juntax just LAPS it up! Heck No! Me having one of those light hearted humorous exploits-for-the-day blogs which are just that and nothing more - shallow to the core! Heck No! Well, gotta admit it, a lil viewership wudnt hurt my ego [:D], but the heck i am not gonna write crap in the name of pandering to the masses.

So Boing2 rises from the ashes! long live Boing2! :)

Hmmm...that wasnt quite generalities, was it! :D
So lets talk more, then. I can talk about the Obsessive-Cleanliness-Syndrome that i seem to be having [noticed it recently].

[that was space for laughing your disbelief out, now get back to reading :P]
Yea, it sounds incongrous, me and cleanliness! Well it is more abt personal hygiene, and somehow, personal hygiene for my brain doesnt seem to include state of room, state of body, state of teeth etc! All my brain is obsessed with, is clean hands. Bloody damn Convenient :D :D

And now to the succès d’estime
The off-campus applying is coming along well. The pace aint too good, but thats just me. I hope to up it a few notches, so Bestos to me with that :)
Lots of leads, i will try and follow up on all of them. I do get drained with this, hopefully will get used to it. Have this long list of companies to apply to. Thank God for the clarity on where to apply! WHERE ARE THE CALLS FOR THE INTERVIEWS???

hehehe i aint that freaked out just yet, but i will be soon enough. thank god i have that trip to hyd planned for just when i would have begun to freak out :D
Adieu!

more QC mention

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=11

this was one of the first strips
over the years, the cartoons rock just as much, and the cartoon-art gets cooler

anything that goes up...

i am just so blue right now
or maybe not, perhaps writing the stuff down helps :D
there, i got that nice lil smiley out, and i am feeling better already :)

still gotta write abt it though - i have been sensing it coming for 2-3 days now. dint talk to the folks back home for 3 days now, despite explicitly promising to call them up regularly. and this, despite knowing how much they miss me and want to talk to me :(
i console myself thinking they wudnt be too happy listening to a dull me (i realised long ago that they see right through any "i just woke up" kinda excuses :(

anyways, today the mood touched peak. did nothing all day, which isnt anything new, but i even slept half the day out too. this was after i overslept my quota already! i just dint want to wake up from that horrible semi-sleep! and then i woke up arnd dinnertime, feeling like pure shit. u know how it is when u have had too much of sleep - the brain feels numb, the monotony kills you. all i have been doing since then is reading webcomics, and i managed to piss off one or two well meaning friends. i hope they realise its my weekly PMS time. darn.

since when did i become a moody fella, i was about to say, but, POOF! the realisation is here:: i have long changed in this aspect while my memory hasnt!
updating definitions, clearing cache, refreshing DNS servlet entries now...
ahh i know silly attempts at humor wont work [smiles weakly]
and now writing this stuff down has already brought my mood down a few notches. harumphh.

temp pics

To remind u of the sea


Another Silhoutte


And we laugh, like soft mad children...

last few days

i've been having one hell of a time these last few days :)
it all started just a week before endsems, me and vishal and sunny went to lamington for getting some comp stuff. went on to flora fountain and bought lotsa books there. i have already touched upon this in my last blog - Maximum City, and The Tale of Parel. Next up was our dept. daaru treat, and boy was it ONE rollicking party. i got a few more pics just now, of us 'chilling' by the beer :D


lets see what we did next...
one more flora fountain book excursion - bought some 10 books this time :)
me kela ravi chaube mohit. sumtotal of 25 books B-)
then we topped it off with bandra promenade late night, and chicken biryani at Lucky

next up was a trip to juhu beach, 9 of us
me kela ravi chaube mohit shastry sabby manjan nagota
played football, discus, ate samosas, ate ice gola, felt the wind on the face, etc



then i suggested the crazy idea of walking all the way back to campus!! 15-20 km long distance
and most of them were excited abt it!!
We did it!!
i got my foot injured playing football, and yet i hobbled all the way back to campus :D
now i have a nice lil bandage to show for it :D
cricket h3

I declare boing2 closed! [for the next few years, atleast :D]

A new blog will be up soon!

~R

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

@R, go read HHGTTG before jumping to conclusions :P
and get happy, u r finally getting that second mention in my blog :P :P
[mutters to self...these attention freaks...tch tch]

Well, this is my final entry in this blog! [dramatic exhalation :D]
It served me well ... chronicled my thoughts etc, but now its time to move on. This blog is a journal of my confused wanderings, my philosophical musings etc. I havent travelled very far on that path, but time's up already! Now, life and career beckon. I have been thinking about it for a few days now [the previous blog was titled 'final cut' ;)]

Perhaps it was Prof. Juneja who galvanized the whole thought process, with his beautiful farewell speech. He got me totally hooked when he said "The next few years of your life should be just that, your life! Go about, work towards your dreams (your dreams), your ambition, your life! Work with a vengeance these next few years, try to accomplish your ambitions. This is not the time for other roles - leave friends and family behind. Leave the country behind for greener pastures, if you need to! Follow your dreams goddammit! [I dont think he quiite used that word :D] A time will come later, for your family, your friends, your country... but now is the time for YOU. A time will come for pondering and musings, now is the time for action! A time will come when you will want to slow your pace down, now is when you need to go breakneck fast."
A suitable time will come for me to worry/go blue, about the unfair world around us. But now is the time for me to be bullish about my own prospects! I will blank out any philosophical ruminations from here on. It will all be career oriented. I need to achieve something in my life first! Here's to the reloaded me, the good old Positive me!
Everyone has failures - what makes for a successful person is how he rebounds from them - Hustler (!)

~Adios
Life Calling!

final cut

Varun was here today, drunk and hence having more inclinations to intimacy. He says lets go out and roam!!! Why cant he see that I aint comfy around him anymore?
While he was here, trying to be happily drunk, thoughts kept flashing in my mind.
Should I just tell the chap to forget me as a friend? What does he see in me anyway?! He is one messed up guy... on the one hand, he is so desperate for affection and intimacy, and on the other, off he goes, judging everyone and everything! (through his bhootaddam :D)

I used to think that being alone, without friends is a saad state of affairs. Now I am not too sure. Somehow, I am only comfortable when alone. The mood is usually gray when alone, but its better than that feeling of uneasiness. So am i better off alone?

This 'I-am-better-off-alone' philosophy does have issues...
1)I dont wanna die alone - thats so pathetic! (Imagine the whole death-bed setup, with nothing to look behind at, that could bring a smile to your face)
2)I still subscribe to the "How-many-lives-have-I-TOUCHED-while-on-earth" kinda philosophy, and being altruistic doesnt quite gel with being a loner. (why does the word 'altruist' suddenly have so much negative baggage?!) I think I can imagine how perfectly hypocritic it would all be, trying to hand out happiness without being happy for them! All that I can apparently manage is a neutral reaction to everyone. Cant feel others' emotions. Neither their pain nor their happiness.
Its all so...disconnected. Yeaa I should do such-and-such so that so-and-so will be so gladdened. But the feeling is just that - rational and cold.

Now for the arguments and counter-arguments :D
Perhaps I may be able to feel more if my life and world werent to be so faraway and distant. But ahh I remember: the 'feelings' are only temporarily heightened with physical proximity.

Or is all this 'alone' shit just happening because i am being awful at communication?
But no, even if i manage to communicate, the empathy hardly lasts.

Perhaps its just a reflection on the company I have had recently. Indeed there are a few people I would love to spend more time with; people whom I can almost reach out to...
Ahh they are so far away! :D How do you connect with people anyway? I used to think i was good at making friends, but i dont think i am!

Heck do i sound like i am filling out a psychiatrist's clinic form!!
Pink Floyd is awesome when it suits the mood. I wrote that, and then the next thing i played was The End. Its THE best song ever! KICKASS. Doesnt need mood to be listened to! And so much tension in it...