A moment of contemplation

Its funny, how death can change everything.. and sometimes, it can change nothing.
The death of a friend you had 6 years ago, can affect you for a day.. but it won’t for long. You move on in life, and lizards falling on you get more priority. The death of a stranger can affect you for like, five minutes, and then what? How long can you grieve for someone you haven’t even seen?
How long can you grieve for something that was never yours?
A relationship.. a friendship, a sisterhood, a closeness. What was, what might have been, what you gave up that could have been better. Life goes on. You find comfort in others, more importantly, in yourself. In hope.
Death, be it of whatever, can mark a full stop on someone’s life, a comma on others’. And sometimes, you can choose to move on, to not let it affect you.
If you can overcome the disappointment of a hope dashed, and have the strength to make space for hope again in your heart(not necessarily of the hope dashed).. is that wise? Is it the mark of a strong character or a simply foolish one? Is it not better to spare oneself the agony of going through disappointment again? Now that would be “learning from your mistakes”. But then that would also be a very bland, dull existence, won’t it? Hope is that tugging at your heart that makes you look forward to a new day, that makes you do good. You hope that your friend will like your present, so you get them something really good. You hope that you’d make a difference to someone, so you try to help them out. You hope that you’ll have a shoulder to cry on when you really need one, and that makes you hope for everlasting love and security and friendships.You hope that you can someday reciprocate all that you got, and that makes you be nice to your family, and everyone you care about. How can you not have hope?

*sigh* how clueless can one be?

Lizards

A lizard fell on me today. Literally from the heavens.
Now, you have to understand, I have nothing against these reptiles. I mean, c’mon, we all have to peacefully coexist somehow. I’d just rather they coexist quietly, kind of.. invisibly. (In all fairness, the lizard was quiet as a mouse, or a lizard. I was the one making all the noises.) The thing is, house lizards, or for that matter any kind of lizards, just freak me out. I’ve got lizardophobia. So I guess then it would make sense for kismet to think, “hmm.. know what would be fun…” and thus we have today’s episode.
And kismet picked out a nice fellow too… he (or she.. I honestly don’t know how to tell them apart) was a fine lizard, white as marble, and after I had screamed my head off and kicked it off my leg, he stood there, tail high up in the air and looking at me, challenging me for a rematch. Of course, he scurried away after a few tense moments. And a good thing at that.. a few more moments and I would have been the one scurrying off, and then spending the rest of my life with a broken self esteem.

Now people tell me a lizard falling on you is supposed to mean good luck. That’s like, such an antithesis in itself. Didn’t seem like good luck to me when it fell on my head. Just makes it seem like good luck when I reach the elevator next time and I’m still lizard free. Depends on how you look at it.

Anyhow, good luck or not, I’d like to tell lizards that I respect their slimy existence, but really, pick on someone your own size. I am not a bungee tower.

Little Lost Soldier Girl: "love is the desire to be desired 'I want you to want me, I need you to need me, I love you to love me'."

Some excerpts from this book i read.. " Taj, A Story of Mughal India"..

Arjumand:
"..We begin life whole, the sum of many people: fathers, mothers, grandfathers, brothers, cousins, sisters. And then, as they die, one by one, each death lessens that whole. We shrink, we shrivel, whittled down until all that remains from the subtraction is our self."


"Did men die or was it the world that died? Our grasp of mortal things,(isa thought,) is tenuous. When Dara died, he passed from our sight. Or is that an arrogant thought? Did we pass from Dara’s sight?.. It was a subtraction, but of what, from what? If the soul returned to brahma, that was then permanence, the world impermanence. We are subtracted then , not the dead."

All’s well that ends well… 14 dec 05

Well that’s another sem ended. And not a bad end either. A semester marked by the various respective crushes (landmarks for some, all in a day’s work for others..). heartbreaks, heartaches, heartburns, heartthrobs.. you name it, we got it. R and I saw the exam result today, or rather results… 15 in all if I’m not wrong. And we also saw DB!!! looking very very cute. The thing is, he looks cute only to us. I doubt if we displayed him as our crush, anyone else would find him cute. Quote R “ if I showed him to puneet (her bro), he’d bury me right here.”
And this was when I gave one of my not-yet-famous-yet-extremely-wise theories.
I think falling in love is just a matter of will power. If you want to fall in love with someone, you can. And if you want to fall out of love with someone, you can. Its not fate or destiny. Its you. You decide. And so this whole theory of ‘there is one person for each and everybody’ is false. And I do think so. Of course this theory would only hold if the first impression is what you wish it to be. For example you cannot possibly make yourself fall in love with someone whom you think to be disgusting. He or she has to be at least tolerable. But I think there’s always an element of your will that commands your potential to fall in love with him/her.
Poor r had to listen to all of this and nod along, but I think I managed to find a potential follower in my theory.