Hello Internet. You are such a forgiving mistress. No questions asked, no explanations expected. It is a shame how I treat you. But at least I don’t treat you like shit. Atleast, I keep returning to you. Are you my true love?

I am feeling lost in the mire of the all music bands that keep cropping up every time I switch on the idiot box. At one point in time, when I was listening to so much more music. Then I wanted new but new would not come. Now, out of habit and also because I get intimidated by all the variety, I stick to old. 

I am dealing with girls who are my age and younger to me, who come from villages. I am getting continually amazed at the openness that they exhibit. If you have lived in small towns and then lived in cities, I guess you would feel the same too. I love spending time with them. Their awe at things that would be largely inconsequential to me, its amazing. Or how openly they show their fondness for me. Such honest acts of concern and love. In some ways, they are making things easier for someone who desperately needed to believe in things like gratitude and inert goodness of humans. How will I ever explain to them how they are making life more simple for me with their open-faced honesty and inherent goodness. How. 

Some times you get kindness from unexpected quarters. When I shall go back to the world where lying is the norm, where there is competition when it is not required, where you are always involved in the game of oneupmanship, it is these girls that I will think of to get perspective. 

I don’t have those kind of friends. Friends that you would do insignificant things with like have an aimless afternoon doing nothing but talking about superficial things like how dark someone’s hair colour is or how lopsided someone’s frown is. This doesn’t mean that I don’t spend my pointless life talking about such trivial things. It is just that I don’t have special friends for that. I have empty talks but mostly they are with self. Petty and schizophrenic, aren’t we?

I want a trivial life, full of fair-weather friends. What I have is a life I chose with friends that are better people, better writers and more at peace than me. I don’t grudge them that. I just wish I too would have a slice of that what would give me that kind of satisfaction. Dear God, why for fuck’s sake can I not  be satisfied with what I have?

I hate weekends. They leave me feeling empty and like I don’t have a life that I  think I should have. Either the hubby is busy with all the work or there are formal social committments. The fact that I live in a bloody village does not help. DOES NOT.

I never considered myself the city-kinds. I thought I was the small-town/village kind of person. You know beauty of nature, innocence of people who are uncorrupted by the greeds of the big city. I am still that kind of person, except on weekends.

I am distressingly uninspired. And I don’t know what to do with myself.

I wrote for a friend today. A piece of 500 odd words. Serious shit that. Blogging does not come under serious shit. I doubt my kind of blogging come under writing at all. I felt nice. I felt like evading it. I kept thinking up of excuses to tell her that I could not help her out. But she is a rather good friend. And a wonderful person. That kind of combination is hard to ditch. So, after dilly dallying for about a week and half a day, I sat down post-lunch and wrote … for her. It was tough. To have regularly coherent sentences that show that you are not a dunce and to make it interesting while your heart is telling you to forget about the whole thing. I sacrificed my sleep for you today, S. Kindly note. Only because you are a good friend and a better person than me.

I am high on words today. 500 words. I feel worthwhile today. Smirk not. For me this is no mean achievement.

Let it be said. I miss working for my previous company. I miss you, Google. I really miss you. I had never been so excited about work . For more than 300 days that I worked for you, I wanted to come to your office EVERDAY. If issues were not going on between my parents about Universal Soldier & if life wasn’t as shitty as it was then, I would have been suffering an irreparable heartbreak for quitting you.

But life is about moving on. I got Universal Soldier for all the shit that I put up with. So even if I had to give up Google, I think I am better off in the bargain. Universal soldier, you rule.

I am currently in a place where the dawn breaks at bloody 0430 hrs. And by 1700 hrs it is nightfall. For someone who can sleep only till the sun doesn’t shine, I am facing major issues. By 5 in the morning I feel it is afternoon and I wake up. The biological clock has gone all wonky, internet.

I haven’t started on the book. I am thinking of giving up on it all together. It is just so tedious to think about the whole thing. I think I am feeling too lazy to write it. That too had to be said. So now, be rest assured that I shall find my solace in blogging. There is such comfort in having no ambitions.

I bought myself a nice, fancy black laptop. From the money that I earned. I feel quite proud of it. A camera would make my life more pleasant, definitely but let us not be too greedy.

I ate really nice chutney for lunch today. It looked too red without the necessary fire of red chilies. Or so I thought. The stomach is burning since evening and I have been sweating too randomly for comfort. Internet, do not trust red chutneys. There are hidden bombs in them that explode in your tummy.

I just re-read the previous paragraph and I find it was not needed in this world. But we are lazy. So things stay.

I am behind my time. One day I shall catch up. Till then I will live between red chutneys, deserted brave plans and half empty bottles of Pepsi. Life will always be wonderful, Internet.

Contrary to what I had been feeling all these years, I am feeling light and airy. Like well-made cake. There is no heavy weight of expectations and fears and impending failures burdening my tiny, little heart. No. There is no nonsense of that sort. So what if I fail. So what if I am scared. So what if it all comes down to nothing. The worst that it will be is a collection of badly written language, uncomfortable words. No hell will break lose because, I , wrote a bad book. The WORLD WILL NOT COME TO AN END.

I think I am finally superior to myself.

This blog is not a blog. I can’t really help it. I tried and tried and then it still is like a journal. What do I do now?

A friend is on his way to become the next political satirist/cartoonist/poking-fun-at-stupid-dumb-corrupt-politicians person. I am loving that good things are happening to him. When I come to think of it, good things are happening to all my friends. It feels good when life it working out for everyone at the same time. We all can be happy together.

The dog is doing well. Thanks for asking. He has learnt a funny way to whine-bark-howl all at the same time. It is irritating to say the least. Makes you want to tear his tongue out or chop your ears off. Universal Soldier is happy. I am happy. Dog is happy. World is happy.

I am living this joyous life, that I feel I do not deserve at all. I am waiting for the ax to fall on me soon.

Till good things are  happening.

These sound such stuffed-up, important words. Peace etc. It is all in the state of mind? May be not. At least not for me. The circumstances outside of my control pretty much dictate the levels of my peacefulness.

However, we are trying to be all zen like. And the effort stretches to the old hags and dumb fucks we meet. We are going to be the better people, Internet.

I have such an itch to share the picture of where I stay and I will.

Beautiful. It is very very beeeeutiphool Can the heart ask for more? Yes it can but we will ignore that bit for now.

I am happy. Gloriously happy.

Till I feel like meeting you again, Internet.

Long long time passes and we show not our pretty face to you, internet. Such is life, no?

There are things that one does and one likes doing and then one stops doing and then one does not resume doing because one is scared that one cant do these things anymore. The fear of writing another word after ages is such one ‘doing thing’. And why? Because the love is not lost but what is love is not returned.

That pretty much suffices my reason to take so long to return to you as a writing person, internet. Now I will tell you a funny thing. The damn cursor is not blink blink blink- ing on this white sheet of virtual canvas where I so want to paint my love and carve my words. That is making me very very insecure. But stout-hearted we are and a non blink blink blinking cursor shall not move us from our macbare intention to proceed towards our delusions. We are strange, my love. Oh! we are.

Right. Now we have run out of things to say.

…….

So, after having needlessly wasted your time, Internet… with a shaky promise of perhaps being here tomorrow again , I call it a good bye.

A furry little head is what I want to put my palms on right now, more than anything else. I have felt such joy in playing with animals. I played with a friend’s cat this weekend. And for a cat-non-lover like myself, it was fun. Yeah yeah! there is no shame in accepting this, even to a die-hard dog lover.

It was fun. But cats are cats and dogs are dogs. And so even if it was fun, there was the satisfaction lacking of having got down on your knees and rolled around with a dog who weighs as much as you and is not a nimble thing but a clumsy organism that can show how to fall or trip in 5 different ways in a matter of two minutes. Yes, that is what I missed. The feel of an animal pushing you back or with its paws on your shoulders and licking your face till it hurts or chasing you around because it knows it is as much of a fun game for you as for itself or just charging towards you to meet you, banging into you because it cannot contain its excitement at making a new friend or meeting an old one or just the ferocious bark to make me shit in my pants- that is what I missed.

I am a dog person. Always have been since I was a kid. Playing with cats was a new thing. It is something that maybe one gets used to over a period of time. However I am not so sure if I ever will be comfortable about it. And so I stand between two pillars- one a promise to not play with a dog till I am reunited with my own and the other that furry though cats may be, but the warmth that I crave in return from an animal- they are too self-occupied to provide that to me.

I miss my dog. Isn’t that the bottomline?

Like the rich shades of the night sky, there is substance you have added to my world. It is more concrete, made stronger on the foundations of what each of you thinks of me, of how I relate to each of you. There are equations that we share as individual and as a whole, the four sides of dimensions. The picture is incomplete if even one is missing, do I even need to say that?

One of you is my best friend. At one level he is that. But when all of us are together then each is as important as the other. And when I am with him, here in Kutch & talking to you guys through the ever-wonderful Internet, I miss each of you as much as I would miss the one-broken-toothed amongst us.

You are valued. I know, I know, I don’t need to say these things. But sometimes, there are things-understood that need to be said, not for the other party, but for the pleasure of one’s own self.

Here is to who we are to each other and to the comfort that each of us gets from knowing about the other sitting in a far-off place, before a screen and watching each other’s name pop up. You guys make me laugh everyday. About how many other friends can I say that?

(I am still to figure out why.)