my hols! the best eva!

If anyone asked me what i intended to do if i was given a month of hols i would say..."uhh...i dono..i can do so many things!" But the best part about the month of July 2009 was that i did a lot of things i din think i would. I am proud to say i hardly watched TV! neva was at home.. thought of studying but neva did! watched the best of movies ever made ( thanks to my dear friend kg!). roamed the city like " who cares!", freaked out on food of all kinds! Did things i usually don't! blah blah blah!

And who makes all that possible? my super duper frens.

One day we thought of watching a play. But thanks to my sis we went late and in Rangashankara 'late comers are not entertained'! so we just hang around talking crap and went home at 9!

Wait its just the beginning!

Then we i.e kg pp and i suddenly are bugged of not doin anything so the 'visioneers' decide to go off to 'some lake place' on mysore road at around 2.30 p m. Neither i nor pp inform at home. A certain sense of excitement since no one at home knows! So it was 2 bikes, one powerful, one not so, on a joy ride at 'wind bellowing in the ear' speeds! Awesome dude! It was drums in the ears, wind in my hair ( tangled like crazy later!), smile on my face, hands gripping the bike, heart happy from all the exhilaration, mind calm as the pacific! 90 kmph was our avg!

I cant ride a bike see? , so i sat with my shades on happily enjoying my ride!

We reach some place only to discover it is kanva dam.. nothing much to see there though, pp falls off bike TWICE!. Clicked a few pictures and headed back.

there i did a funny thing! At a traffic signal a eunuch came asking for alms. And i happily open pp's wallet and gave her 5 bucks! only to get yelled at by him for not having any 'value for money'! call me crazy!.. then had 'not so great ice cream' and went home very happy after an 'eventful day'.

All this while a secret relationship is brewing...will tell about it later...suspense!

Then the hols were racing at lightning speed..

Watched harry potter 6 with my bunch of potter carzy frens! fun again!

Meanwhile we had a few birthdays to celebrate.. Meg's, pp's, puny's, which we did. Went to UB city and had costly food for meg's birthday! I, again forget to wish her at 12 midnight cuz i was busily hooked up watching an ultimate movie! (Shawshank Redemption!). Puny gets an early birthday gift! A super sony digicam!

Then we had our " greatest ever stay over". Sup the busy girl, the brain child behind the plan, home alone, parents on vacation, The foursome have great plans! A cake with " good times mmps" written on it ( cheesy i know! but who cares), candles lit up in all sizes and shapes, photos of us ghostly creatures in the candle light, a movie ( amityville horror) that wouldnt run!, 6 bottles of breezer ( bottoms up with 3, boy doesnt drink), chinese food, a drive in a santro ( girl driving, boy by the side) at 2 am! , leela palace barista, start a game, word building with only names of places around the world, meg kills in the game "MIND IT"! continue playin over fabulous coffee, puny chucked out cuz he does not know any more places beginning with 'a'. meg still going strong, driving back, meg still going strong, reach home, meg still at it, too groggy to continue, meg asleep, puny asleep, sup and i with damn atlas! crazy!, sleep time at 3! up at 8! meg grinning and jumping on us! water on puny's face...@#!$$#...swears at meg! hahaa!! breakfast... thats all!!!....thinking about tht day still makes me smile..oh not to forget the 4 egg shaped cups v signed, each of which had a word to form " best friends together forever" on it.. its our rolling trophy!..

happy with the way things are going...life is smiling at me i feel!

kg and i design 3 super posters!...prepare the gifts.. try studying for GRE! fail miserably!

some other day...su's house...infested with su,sin,sne,swat,me,shed,mada,c2,pp,kg,and dash,laughter,crazy fellas!,food,and not to forget a lot of gifts and POKER!...3 birthdays..dash,swat and pp..

dash gets football with our signatures on it, a cap, a poster,a poem,

swat gets a lot of trinkets,colourful socks, hairband, poster,fink wallet,

pp gets a handmade bag( we made!), a book( cover designed by us again), a poem,a poster, comic book

and all get a video! made by us again..

Thats a lot dont ya think!? but it made everybody happy! was great fun..

POKER we did learn,

wat amazing fun,

kg keeps getting lucky,

but doesnt get it does he!

It ends, though, with me getting rich!,

only beating pp by an inch!!

poetry! hehe!

met christ frens..chit chat about evrything possible...great bunch they are..love them..

met dee and grass..over lunch...girls day out...lots to talk again...

FF..

the twosome going strong..they r talk of the town...i ll let it out in no time...

august 2, last day of hols, friendship's day, the day i ll cherish for ever,

My best friends are with me, all of them, meg, puny, chup, pp, and kg! I love them with all my heart! morning...its an excited atmosphere... some meet new ppl...instant friends they become.. for the first time a plan done so suddenly gets executed so well! thank me! backpacks ready.. breakfast done..off to t k falls, 10km from bannerghatta national park....our star chup at the wheel...driving her best drive in rough terrain...its a light atmosphere with a lot of laughter all the way.. everybody in their best mood.. love the place...trek up a little..lots of pics taken...tested tree climbing skills! wat fun!..pp's saga on top of mango tree not to be forgotten.. HAHAA..

get back with a lot of singing... everybody here loves everybody else...nobody as happy as me...spending the day with the ppl i love the most!..

after pizza and icecream...

its time to start cribbing...

have to go to coll!! :(...not happening...not after so much fun...but have to thank dee for making 'sitting in class a 'not so boring' thing..

the two ppl who i mentioned earlier are none other than kg and pp!!!

how gay they were...

my eyes swelled to c such happiness..

OOOOOoooo how much fun all tht was!! I would love it if it all stays like this forever!!

miss the days already!

thanks guys!

wat the hell!

After all the crap i wrote i get 77%. everybody else felt i should have worked harder and got more but i am relieved!!! yeah! i passed. phew...so dont bother reading all tht pathetic crap.. bull and shit combined! i mean, seriously...i do obsess sometimes...yeah, wateva!

post exam thoughts

I finished my exams yesterday! never felt more relieved!!! Not that writing exams is something new or something that is 'not for the faint at heart'! but it just takes over our lives for a week or two! The biological cycle of day and night goes haywire and no longer are you in the mood to think of all the happy and nice things in life, say, for example, hot coffee enjoyed by the window when its raining...taking your own sweet time to finish it!... also, we have food cravings, I always want to keep munching on something or the other while i figure out how the time domain affects frequency domain or how the hell does this complex circuit work! or its sometimes just,"what do i study? i cant decide!"
anyway, i end up wasting precious hours watching stupid soaps on tv, which by the way, seem more interesting than a simon haykin or a barry brey( those are the authors of our text books!) and then when i realise that there is hardly any time i finally decide to study the minimum amount possible. call me lazy, call me normal or whatever fancies you, but i really cant manage time! so now its the previous day of the start of exams. And i still am not that worried. I am in my own dreamland. mind in a wandering spree and body in front of a table full of books! Nothing seems to get me to start studying. So i call a few friends. Just so that i might find it a little scary or inspiring when i hear about their progress. But the friends that i make!! they are equally bad! then we have i long chat about what to do and what not to do! all talk and no work yet. the clock is ticking!!! A sudden pang of anxiety! Usually courtesy Megha, my friend!, whose favourite line during the exam season is " Maddy! what have you been doing all day?? still yet to start? i have already finished half! get studying i say!" then it occurs to me that there is going to be no sleep for me that night! I start! I move on like an old ambassador car. going going going... still just the first unit done...the sky is already dark! its time for status check with prajju and kg! prajju says " guess what! i slept all this while, i am yet to start! i am all tense maddy!" that is typical of him! he is like the night watchman! sleeps through the day and works his ass of at night. doesnt need a 'good night sleep'. But will eventually finish everything before time and does his exam well and comes out beaming or frowning for the loss of a mark or two! But if its kg!, he ll say" i was watching a movie! giving myself a break! after having made a lot of 'notes'!" after the exam he is very solemn usually! So i now get back to my books! " BORING!!" declares my brain! "Oh what the heck! just finish it" i say and i clobber along..night fall...lot more to go. Suddenly i have a feeling that i dont remember what all i studied all day! so i turn back a few pages and see... Brain says " wait a minute! did i really read all this just today?? where the hell did it all go??" then the frenzy kicks in...."study study maddy study!! You have to revise before you go and sit in that dreadful place for 3 whole hours!" i get an sms or two wishing me 'all the best' and 'good luck'...uhhh! its so not looking like thats ever going to happen! i finish 3/4th of the stuff at around three in the night before i declare " enough! now its time to sleep! god save me with the rest of it in the morning!" wake up at 7 a.m to the constant 'bell ringing' by mom and dad trying to wake me up. start studying by 8! I dont know why but on the day of an exam i have a strange liking towards reading the newspaper leisurely with bournvita in my hand. Like there in nothing i have to do 4 hrs ahead. Eyes sore, head drowsy, i get myself to sit in front of those books! yet again!! How i pray it will all get over soon! Then i start studying again! finishing by around half an hour before exam bell rings! then its revision time! "WOW" I dont remember a single equation! What seemed so logical and easy on the previous night is again all scrambled! its like a computer's hard drive just crashed! So i just leave it fate or god or who ever to help me with the restoration of my memory and off i zip to college!!!! Tra la laa la laaa! The question paper is worse than scrambled egg!!!! But i like scrambled eggs! Not scrambled questions though! so i spend 10 mins trying to figure out what i know and what i think i know ( which i am sure i ll have trouble remembering once i start) and what i absolutely have no idea about! So i write some crap about this and that...make a not so neat jigsaw about what i intend to say and leave after 3 hours in a state of confusion as to what had just happened! I look at Latha! " how did you do? " is her usual question! To which i reply " God save me!!!" Why cant i just remember what i have learnt! are my brain cells dead? She has a sorry look on her face cuz she has usually done well! Then i realise, Around 25 marks gone!!!! had i been in 5th standard, i would have cried all day! Not Now! now i plain dont feel bad anymore..what can do about it anyway! Mom says " you have changed a lot! You take things lightly! Do you remember how you would cry even for the loss of a mark or two?" Duh! that way i ll have to cry and cry till my eyes go dry!! pathetic!


And one after the other it all goes from bad to worse and finally! Its over...


Its a bitter sweet thing. I pretend i dont care how its gone and that i am happy that it s all over but that thing inside is poking me and sayin " You have gone another step lower you know! , you no longer are as good as you used to be!" Sad story right!


I am lately worried about what s wrong with my brain! How can i forget so much! PP doesnt understand when i say i forgot though i had studied! " How can you forget what you know and have understood? " he says! " how am i supposed to know!??"


Anyway, now i am all sad that i have 'royally screwed it up' this time... will be somewhere at the bottom...my aggre goes down, the graph ( which is already having a negative gradient) is still going to fall... and slowly my hopes ll all die... sad story ...i know..what do i do!!! Mom says " if only you prepared well in advance!" i dont see the point! I forget everything... Whats the use!


Well i need to just try harder maybe... I just wonder how i used to ace exams before...in school. I hardly put in any effort. Now nothing seems to work! What the hell! i give up! i am no good at this anymore! :(

nostalgia

It's post midnight and i have to wake up early tomorrow. The thing is, I just don't sleep early. I just cannot. So i while away time doing something far from useful and funnily enough time flies and before i know, it its 1.30 p.m !! But it is the opposite when i am sitting in my classroom. Everyday i wake up, nowadays, thinking " why!? Oh! why should i got to college!" It is that boring and if not for my friends i just cant imagine myself continuing college studies. Thanks! you guys! Coming back to the 'oh so boring' classes that our famed lecturers handle, they must be given a double Ph.D just in ' advanced studies on various ways of putting students to sleep' . My friend Grace has now become one of the fore runners for the award ' I can be put to sleep in class before everyone else ' contest! Sorry Grace!! lol! But i wonder why they come to college daily just to do that!? Gone are the days when they would inspire and motivate, cynical as it may seem, i think most people in my class at least would agree! Then i wonder. " why sit here and waste my precious 4 years when there is a lot more to the world other than completing assignments and records?" But that is the sad state of affairs that we are forced to deal with. No longer do i feel interested to know more about anything. actually we cant really blame our teachers you see, they actually do try hard to gain our interest.

Today while i was day dreaming in class, which is common around here, i began to think of how it used to be when i was in school. I strangely did not crib for even a single day about going to school. Not when i was five nor when i was fifteen! My mother still remembers me crying to go to school even when it was declared a holiday! Isnt that funny considering its usually the other way round for most children! We at my school had the most wonderful time of our lives and all of us agree to that. we still remember our silly stories, tantrums and the funny games we played!

here are a few we loved playing:
Lock and key: most children in bangalore know this game. very popular as 'tag' i guess.
There is a denner, and the rest are free to run. once the denner is near somebody they put their hand on their head and scream out 'lock' now he has to be 'unlocked' with a 'key' by anybody other than the denner. one who fails to lock himself up before the denner touches him, is out and the game resumes with a new denner! simple!

chain cut: In this game, we had to hold hands in pairs and one of them had to be the denner and another without a partner. whoever is solo and is touched by the denner is 'out' .

soda lemon ginger pop!: i dono who invented this but it was popular wherever there were 4 stairs! the denner calls out one of the four words and the others had to jump to the proper location. those who were at the bottom ( at pop) could be chased and if they did not escape they are 'out' . I guess! I have forgotten the details of it..

red letter, crocodile, chat pat kal beka munn beka ( read in kannada), doctor doctor, dodge ball, tunnel( a more interesting version of dodge ball!) , kunte bille ( Kannada again) , making sand castles and weird sand birthday cakes with candles!, hitting a tyre around and the list goes on.

we waited to get out and play! oh i am feeling nostalgic! we had a lot of trees in my school. mango, guava, neem, gooseberry, gulmohur and a few more. The favourite was the gooseberry tree. The largest among all and we had a great time throwing a football at the branches only to be showered with a lot of very sour gooseberries! we would take it to the school kitchen, wash them and eat them with salt! simple pleasures!

Our school had no regular shape or form! it was an old house converted to a school. complete with an old tramp like woman who lived in a small room in the backyard whom we were very scared of! The common dare around was to go near her scary cottage! funny how we fell for stories about that poor woman! Then there was the tree that has white and yellow flowers whose branches split very low. so we were taken there by my teacher to climb them!

there were so many unexplored alleyways with undergrowth that it felt like a great discovery and the 'explorers' took credit for the findings. Our endless playing in the sand pit and the large wooden blocks saw time fly by. We apparently were so reckless that after our short break we has a minute of silence when nobody was to stir or talk. We had our part of fun by standing in silly postures! We found something amusing about everything. The craft classes were never taken seriously apart from a few goody goodys. the art class was spent in freeing the boys from their ties being tied with their arms! Our art teacher would always draw a boy flying a kite and then continue tying up all the guys' hands with their ties! Western music classes in the big piano room were much awaited. I personally loved it. We had this cute teacher who taught us timeless country songs. prayer time lasted almost an hour and all we did then was pull at the coir from the mats we sat on.

all this was part of the primary school which had two playgrounds, the front yard and the back yard. with a quadrangle in the middle. the rooms had names too. the piano room, yellow cupboard room, p t room, prep room, shed room, wooden blocks room!

Then came the high school building. as old and as funny as the primary one. We now had other ways of having fun. the boys who were mischievous turned worse with regular 'troubling the teacher' instances. inking the teacher's Saree. setting the alarm in a watch and letting the teacher search fr the source of sound. playing undertable football with a basketball mind you! all this in Sanskrit class. English teacher was nice woman who wore too much talcum powder! and had a Tamil accent! we played cricket during Kannada class while the class was in progress. our dear ol' math teacher ( she taught me math from 4th to tenth std mind you!) was so fed up with us that she decided to play her lesson on a cassette player in class! library hour was converted to' tear out posters from magazines and stick them on the walls' class! most of them never turned a page over the entire year! I am proud that i did read a few. But i must say we did have a good collection which we would appreciate even more now! but we knew one thing. they loved us all and we did too. We had a bonding that we don't share with any of them nowadays. i agree we are old enough now and don't need parent like care but that human factor is missing in colleges. when i look back over the past years in college, i cant remember many happy hours spent in a very carefree way.

i will always long to go back to school!

Why history??

History is created everyday and everywhere. Whether people remember it a week or a month from now depends on how sensational it is. Some instances are remembered and cherished even centuries later. How many people did actually think they would be remembered for their deeds for many years to come. Most of them would not even dream that they would be studied by millions of children in their history text books. Imagine a viking or maybe Marco Polo sitting in class five and listening to children read about their brave conquests or rare findings.

But how important is it for us to learn something that happened on the other side of the world a century ago? Some may say, 'why should we care?'. What is the whole purpose of reading about the Egyptian civilisation and the great Pyramids and about which Pharaoh built them, when he has long been dead?

I say it is good to know. Simply because history is full of people's experiences. It is a window to the world before we came into existence. I think it is more exciting to know what has already happened which may have been instrumental in changing the course of life itself than thinking about what lies ahead. Many events in history, be it the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire make me wonder what life would be if they were never invented or discovered at all. Life without these seemingly simple things is unimaginable.
Some instances in history keep repeating. My favourite is discovering something by accident! How 'cool' would it be if tomorrow, I start my day as any other day but by the end of the day I am 'hot' news because I just found something nobody knew about till date? Sounds fascinating to me. This surely happened to many people over the years and whether they deserved it or not, they earned their place in the history books. Be it Columbus in search of India only to discover a huge new landmass which we simply cant imagine not being found until now! or Newton's accidental discovery of the mysterious pulling force of the Earth. How would it be if just nobody bothered to question a phenomenon that we see everywhere and everyday? Life would just be too different if the world just decided to take a different course during its journey.

Whenever something phenomenal happens around us we tend to compare it to something that happened before.That is very natural of us, trying to give meaning to all the events that occur. For example, if someone climbed the Mt.Everest he would probably be called
"Tensing Norgay of today" or Edmund Hillary for that matter. We, knowingly or unknowingly, live everyday in constant reference to the past. History today or history 20 years later is an indispensable part of our lives. There is constant reference to 9/11 even today( may the souls of the departed rest in peace). Examples form history keep us from committing the same mistakes over and over again. Nobody today would dream of claiming that he would one day rule the entire planet because he who really is sane knows very well that it is a task that would just remain his silly dream. When Alexander dreamt of it though, the world was a much smaller place. At least the known world seemed conquerable to him. But he too, failed.

History to some may serve as a book of examples. One who looks through it would already know what other people know and what needs to be found. So he need not discover everything by himself. People through the ages have invented many different things and discovered a lot of possibilities so that in future one knows from where he needs to continue. That is how a civilisation progresses.
If everybody lived by himself and never bothered to leave behind him, a record of all his findings, people would never have progressed. They would have probably kept finding out the same things over and over again. That would have been rather foolish.

Therefore, in conclusion, I would say History is an integral part of life. It is more than just relevant. It is indispensable. There is a lot happening in the world that is worth knowing. One lifetime is just not enough to know it all. So, we need to document everything that is worth remembering and must continue making history if we as a civilisation must continue to progress.