A Bowl of Elusive

I have always looked at human relationships from the perspective of an outsider. You can attribute this to the fact that my upbringing was less usual than others. If you read my blog, you know about my childhood, the fact that I was orphaned at an early age and was brought up by my father's parents. All relationships have been difficult for me to understand. I have written in length about my chemistry with my family and my old flames. But another relationship I haven't written much about is friendship. I usually had a tough time making friends. It was just one of those things that allude you. There wasn't anything I was doing wrong, there was just a lack of  the basic connection.  I did make some friends along the way, but when I look back at those friendships today, I can't help but feeling they weren't normal. You know, take for example, Buddhadev, one of my very first friends in the second standard. He and I were both a little nerdy back then and maybe tha...

Mirza joined college in the summer of '08. As is usual for freshers, he soon found friends, other misfits and rebels like him. Praveer was one of those friends. Tall, lanky and sometimes awkward, Praveer was a talkative and charismatic young man. And he got along well with Mirza. Praveer and Mirza later ended up as roommates at Indira Niwas, but this story was from a time before that. Male bonding can be interesting to encounter, especially because guys are usually so uniquely messed up in the heads and mingle in such funny patterns. The first year of college was all about finding their footing for Praveer & Mirza. It was a time for their individual personalities to clash and gel with those of their classmates and their seniors, who by the way were no less interesting than our protagonists. Meet Himanshu, Vivek Pratap, Arshad & Deepak, the seniors inhabiting 4 adjacent rooms in the boy's hostel. They were sassy and intimidating, and eventually became role mo...

"Kritika" & I: A Long Time Ago An old flame (Lets call her Kritika!) recently felt insulted when I referred to her as "an underdog" in one of my articles. This surprised me. She missed the whole essence of my writing. When I call you an "underdog", you must take it as a compliment. Because I myself am an underdog. I have always been one. I wrote back to her, "Its the underdogs of the world who actually rule it." I totally stand by that philosophy.  Anyway, the whole incident kinda got me thinking. I've written about all the significant people who've shared part of my life with me, except Kritika. That's not fair, is it? So here it is. Long term relationships are like drugs. You get addicted to them. You get addicted to the comfort level that you share with that person. You get addicted to being desired. So when you break up with that person, it feels like withdrawal and you start craving for "the drug". Lon...

Praveer (left), Anjaneya (right) & I: Goofing Around at Miramar, Aug, 2010 There was this group of boys and girls in my college who ruled the scene. They were pretty or rich or both. And I guess some of them were smart as well. If you're having a problem identifying them, these were the guys who still post sepia-filtered pictures on Instagram showing a group of them at some shack in Candolim, sipping wine and cocktails, looking pretty. I think you got who I am talking about. And then there were the "other guys". They were not all that rich or pretty but they had the advantage of numbers. They hailed from in and around the state and they stuck together. They would only speak in their mother-tongue and when in groups, loved to bully people around. They would create fake profiles on Facebook to talk shit about the creamy layer guys, the ones I mentioned in the first paragraph. And then were the other other guys, guys like me. Guys who didn't really fit ...

I still ask myself whether I’d have been better off at IHM, Pusa. My AIR (All India Rank) in the Entrance exam was good enough to secure me a seat at Pusa or Dadar, the best IHMs in India and I chose to be at IHM, Goa. I know what you’re thinking; Beaches, babes & booze, right? Wrong. For one, I don’t like beaches that much. Two, I never had a dearth of babes, irrespective of the place. And lastly, I was a teetotaler & I still am. I chose IHM, Goa coz I knew for a fact that Goa was culturally different than the rest of the country. And I needed to experience the diversity and the exposure. And yes, I did get all that I came looking for, and a lot of other crap. Maybe a little more than had I bargained for. The three years of college at IHM, Goa broke me down! You see, IHM, Goa is more than an educational institute. It is a way of life. The students here are as diverse as the flow of tourists that Goa gets each year. So imagine a random mixture of student...