Morning.

It is the most beautiful feeling in the world to walk, oblivious of time and space. Plugged into music (The Doors), with a camera, by your side, watching the city wake up. Capture, in monochrome. Drink some chai. Walk. Grin as the music curls and hits the sides of your mind.

Play Cool.

 http://issuu.com/startmag/docs/issue1

Pages 16 to 20.

Someone who reads this blog contacted me out of the blue, and said she's starting an E-zine featuring young artists from over the country, and would I like to be featured in the first issue? I jumped. Above is the link.
I'm rather happy right now.

Also. I've been traipsing around Dharavi with Annie, who's filming her MA dissertation there. Stories have been heard. Interesting ones. Touching ones. I can't really give a positive or negative opinion...I can just say, it's a place everyone living in Bombay should visit. At least once.

Travelogues, vignettes, I love airports.

Right now, I'm sitting in Kay's hostel room, listening to thunder, shuddering, watching her pack, so that she doesn't have to do it later in the week. Our plans to go rollerblading on the beach have been foiled, at least put off by a couple of hours by the thunder and the rain. Hmf, this is like being in my room in Bombay, disgruntled with the downpour.

Snippets from the past three days...I wrote mostly at the airport. I like airports, you see?

Written 7th may, 7.00am local time, Abu Dhabi Intl airport.

Airports are wonderful, I've always loved them, if for nothing else then the sheer people-watching potential. Look at people, burly sporty types with backpacks and tattoos, a mother with her young son who insists on eating pizza at 7am, bored-looking woman at the table next to me, interesting couple with backpacks playing UNO. Accents and languages blend in a murmur with the sound of cash registers and clinking coins, people come in, walk through, walk out. What I really want to do is pull out my camera and capture.

Written 9.15 am, Abu dhabi intl Airport.

After a 40min phone call to Chikki, and about ten minutes at a free wifi terminal (I think these are very cool) I'm sitting at gate 33, with an 8-hour flight ahead.
My vacation is nearly over! I'll have only 2 weeks once I get back, there better be a lot of fun nights!

Written 10.15pm local time, Changi Intl Airport Singapore

Flight landed 20 minutes ahead of schedule, so no Kay yet. She left after I called her. I'm people watching, looking at many pretty girls in TINY shorts and long tops. I think i'm going to like it here.


I could swear a man just JOGGED past me, in running shorts and a vest :|

-----------------------------------

That was when Kay arrived, looking very Singaporean indeed, with a denim skirt, black top, pin-straight hair and a huge smile. I'm happily shocked at how well she blends in. We cabbed it to the hotel, where Bhaiyya was waiting. Happy times with good food and stuff. We got BACK to the hotel at...what, 3?

Ah yes I DO like it here.

Yesterday, I shopped. Girls, read on. Guys, go away if you wish.
I didn't buy much, but I did squee a lot in the 4-storeied Forever 21 (I shall never stop calling it that) where I bought a skirt and some tank tops. I don't have the courage for the uber-sex lace skirt yet, I'll buy stockings first. Orchard Road, you see huge signs for Prada, Louis Vuitton, all the usual suspects. I grinned at the thought that  was just the WRONG person to be here, Ankiet, SNam and Chinmoi would KILL to be here, and have the cash for it (ofcourse I don't have the cash for hardcore designerwear, but I don't want it either). I did go to Charles & Keith, and got a beautiful bag, and shoes. For the interested, black peep-toes with crossover straps. Ankiet, are you listening? Be proud.

Quote of the YEAR: Arvind - Is that Britney Spears being sung by a man?
                                  Kay - That's Savage Garden :|

The rain has stopped, so I'm off to the beach. Later, peeps.

Vacation from a vacation

An update: a local paper churned out a story on Facebook ethics and cybersnooping, talking about incidences that happened last week. What was supposed to be damped down became...a sizeable deal. Read the article here.

Meanwhile.

Bags are half packed, rather neatly if I may say so myself. Just have to dump in my shoes and straightener, and find the keys to that bag. So that I can lock it.

Camera batteries are charging.

Excitement...is high. Money has been exchanged. Lists have been made.

Singapore, here I come.

Change

Whee, facelift!! Thanks to knowledge gleaned from Espera. Like it?

Right now, I have not much to say. It strikes me, however, that half my vacation is over, almost. And in two weeks, I'm off to Singapore. :)

Off-Road

I may have mentioned that my dad's a total outdoor person, and over the past year, he's built up a pretty good stash of camping supplies. He drives a Prado, which makes all those wonderful rocky areas of Oman much more accessible. Plus, we have tents. Three of them, a two-man tent, a four-man tent and a three-man tent. Dad also happily bought a camping stove and the gas packs, and last year, (sadly without me) my parents have been going camping around Oman. Of course, dad did feel rather bad that I wasn't there with them, so he kinda made it up to me last week.

On Thursday night, and I do mean night (we left at 8.30pm) we went to a wonderful quiet beach an hour's drive away. The parents, me, and some friends of the parents. We got there at 11.30, and the moon, though not full, was huge and bright, so I tried some long-exposure shots, all of which sucked. It was a pretty messy expedition, mom was supposed to cook, but she didn't have time, so we just picked up pav bhaji and some parathas, and we attacked them the minute we chose a spot on the beach. And then, Dad and I had the delightful task of setting up our tent in the dark. We're having pretty strange weather, it's normally boiling, but then there was this sudden breeze that WOULD have blown away the tent...if I wasn't sitting in it.

Mom woke me up at 6.30 to see the sun rising right in front of my face.

It's a pretty cool way to wake up, I guarantee you that.

This is a crop of a slightly bigger photo I took that day...

Instant development.

These days, I feel like drawing. More than drawing, really, I want to just freeze the images in my head. They're Polaroids, these images, with a thin white border and white space at the bottom to write on. Pity they don't make Polaroid film anymore. A quick and easy capture of a perfect moment. Well, now of course you have the digital experience, but you have to admit, there's something about those borders and that white space that makes so many of us edit our photos to look like Polaroids, right?

The point is, it's freezing a happy moment. It's freezing happy people on the beach, wrestling. It's freezing natural, delighted smiles. I want to see those moments around me, and I want to click them, unobserved. I want to be those moments and have someone capture them. People aren't really candid when you stand around them with a camera, they're just naturally trained to strike poses, look pretty and then complain about how horrible they look in all their photos. This is what society has trained us to be. A pose, coy smile, hand on hip. Measured emotion. Whatever happened to wild glee?

Meanwhile, two of the buttons on my Fuji S7000 have suddenly stopped working, and so I'm stuck in black and white mode. Now I love monochrome, but sometimes, I really, REALLY need the colour, plus I'm not great at getting my contrast ratios right. So I need to get this fixed, and soon. I wanted to take this shot in colour, it was a beautiful (and goddamned delicious) Chocolate cake, a rich brown with gold ribbons.

One last paper tomorrow, and then I'm gone.

Procrastination. Cyberspace discoveries.

Ah, well. I have finally cracked my psych textbook, though I am making absolutely no progress. And it's all thanks to something I'd never thought possible: Fanfiction.

Actually, I'm done with the fanfic, now it's just me being lazy that stops my progress.

But seriously, after the Harry Potter series was complete, there was a void. In my life. Our lives. Everyone's lives. For some, that void was filled by the Meyer-menace called Twilight, others turned to fanfic.
At the onset, I resolved never to set eyes on these, but then I started reading SNam's work. And it is GOOD. The problem? It's not just fanfic, it's Harry/Draco slash fic.

*mutters to self*

Blasphemy, yes. Well written, yes. Want more....quite possible.

And so SNam, who's currently in India, and studying, and a tad bored, vowed to convert me. By sending me the link to the Shoebox Project. Notes, photos, letters, from the Marauders. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. And the making of the Map. In the authors’ words: “The Shoebox Project is a series of stories (of sort) written by the fabulous Jaida and Rave in the Harry Potter universe. It contains photos, notes, and stories, written about the Marauders (James Potter, Remus Lupin, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew) during their time at Hogwarts. While the story mostly takes place during their 6th and 7th years at Hogwarts, there are also tales of the Marauders younger years. While focusing on the mischievious Marauders, it also touches on the relationship between James and Lily Evans, the rise of Voldemort, and a relationship between Sirius and Remus (which is in the last few parts).”

I fell in love...with the writing, and more than the writing, the art. Oh, the beautiful beautiful art...I want.

See what I mean? This is NOT the best in there. By no means.

In other news, I have also discovered Community Queer, a blog written by 'Scudder' and 'Finn', from my old home, Muscat. This interests me because, well, the LGBT scene in Oman is so underground/closeted, you don't even think about it. Sure, you do hear the occasional rumour about that hairdresser at that salon near my place being gay, and having a boyfriend who went to one of our rival schools, but no more. I personally knew no gay boys at my school or any other, and I always wondered what would've happened to anyone in my school who chose to be open about their sexuality.

So yeah, I found Community Queer. It's kinda like a solidarity thing, I guess. And, it was in the (Omani) news, a bit, because the site was blocked by the service provider a while ago (the Government of Oman owns 70% of their main ISP, and thus chooses to block any sites that it finds to be...unsavory? While this includes all pornographic sites, and sites with sexual content, I once tried to venture into a website featuring tattoo designs and found it blocked.) and then, somehow, they realised that everyone had a right to free speech, and unblocked the site a few days later. In the words of Scudder and Finn: We have started something here, something that cannot be blocked or censored, something that will not go away, because people believe in it. We believe in it. And you seem to, as well.

I'm quite proud, I gotta say.

Meanwhile, it is with a slight exasperation that I announce that I have succumbed to Twitter. Hooray. Another way to waste time. Like I don't procrastinate enough already *shrugs shoulders, gives up*

I notice that my writing capabilities are deteriorating. How tragic. I haven't written any actual fiction in a while.

But I have been taking photos. I leave you with this, for now. Taken yesterday, at Worli seaface, with Datta bowing bubbles, attempting to get back some childhood joy, even as we slip out of our teens.

Damn, profound much? Screw that, man. Bubbles are happiness, don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

F.O.P.E.B.S!

That stands for Full On Post Exam Beach scene, as coined by Krish. The plan? Gather a bunch of people, rent a bungalow on Mandwa beach for the day, and CHILL. And that is exactly what we did.

We got to gateway at 9.45 am and took a ferry to Mandwa. Forty minutes sped by on the waves...and then we were on the beach. Mandwa...well, it's on the mainland. Serene, and deserted. The house Krish rented was perfect, no more than a tiny room, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a huge patio with chairs and beds, just right for a day trip.

It wasn't a party. It was an awesome day of relaxation, music, lazing, and frolicking in the water, and then more lazing. And posing, let's not forget. A wonderfully mellow day, the serene spot, the company and the music all added up to create something more awesome than each of them individually.

We caught the 5.15 ferry back...and it was unimaginably beautiful, with the sky glowing vermillion over the sea and seagulls escorting the boat halfway across the trip....

And I, listening to Floyd, blissed out.

Wallet cleaned out, I trudged home. Happy.

Miss Independent

I packed a fast bag after my first paper on the 30th (so fast, in fact, that I forgot to pack in my underwear and had to return for it the next morning before my paper) and went to meet KayDee at Dadar.

Yes, Kay's in Bombay, on a 10 day stopover between Singapore and Muscat. I spent my birthday with her, actually...(The birthday itself was not as blurry as 18th birthdays should be, but what can one do three days before the exam? I DID however buy some awesome headphones and a Bob Dylan tantra shirt. And I did all this in an awesome dress and heels. Mehh.)

So. We cabbed and rick-ed it through to Thane, where Kay's parents have a flat. The flat is a little more spartan than I remembered it, in some ways, but it IS impressively well stocked. The fridge is loaded with spices and I even found a jar filled with chocos. I finished the Chocos.

As for the actual living...well, Kay's used to it, having lived alone for quite a while now, but for me, it was a little strange not having an adult in the house. Then again, it was an awesome kind of strange. Plus, I'm an adult now, I suppose. More than that, it just feels liberating and quite normal, really, to do exactly what we wanted (she lazes around, I come back from exams, laze, and try to study, and watch movies), go out and come back at our own will. We reached home from grocery shopping at 9.30 the other day, and it didn't feel too late, but that's really relative isn't it, late and early? Depending on which relative setting your curfews. Sigh.

This feels so right, living alone. I should really start looking for cheap studio flats with decently sized kitchen spaces. I might be learning a lot from Bombay, but living alone will be the big lessons : Independence and...how not to be a bitch.

It's tragic that rents are so high.

Age is but a number....

But 18 is one of the best numbers to be at.

HAPPY FREAKIN' BIRTHDAY TO ME!!

November Rain

For the past two days we've had terrible unwinterly humidity. Expecting the same today, I stepped out in shorts.

But what a surprise! The air was dry and blissfully chilly, with a breeze against my face. And a light drizzle.

So very blissful.

Lectures we had two. And after that I just HAD to go to Marine Drive to revel in the weather.

After prancing around, back to the Lit room to sit in on the reading of The Night of January 16th. It's a great play, really gripping. In the two hours it took to finish the reading, the drizzle had opened up into a full fledged shower.

I sat in the balcony wearing shorts and a hoodie, writing. It's PERFECT weather for scotch and smokes, but I have no scotch, and I don't smoke.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Very excited for tomorrow. Why? Eve Ensler (THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES!) is coming to Bombay. And she's gonna be talking at our college! Thus begins my frantic search to find, download and RE-read the Monologues.

:)

Days go by, past my window.

Yesterday...

I got fined in a train.

I spent the day with one of my favourite people.

I had lunch at Theo :D

I shopped.

Today, dance class, again. It feels SO good to be back!

Exams in....3 weeks.

*panics, runs away.*

Trying, as always, to find the colour.

I have not much to write right now. So, the photos. I'm loving my new Nokia 6303 (low budget, to compensate for the loss of my MOTOK1.), more for the camera than anything else. It helps greatly when I'm bored.

I have a group project to submit by November 1st, the topic is Celebrities as social activists. Growr.

Okay, photos, from top to bottom, we have:

1. Mosaic at Candies, Bandra. I could take photos of every single tile in the place, it's done up SO well!

2. My daily commute. I need to reshoot this tomorrow.

3. Pretty blue tile, Candies. My phone camera didn't capture the colour as it actually was.... :(

4. What I did in today's English class. Inspired by thegirlinthebigbox, specifically her rainbow art, which I absolutely adore. Great examples of her work are here, here and here. She's so incredibly talented....I'm gonna stop now.

5. I shamelessly advertise. I made that. Got all the beads and stuff when I went to Muscat over Diwali. Green garnet and silver.

6. Teeny carrot-cupcake at Candies. It was delicious.

7. Colaba causeway. The silk bangles.

8. Conversely. I have magenta, she has purple.

So yeah. That is me, for now. Enjoy.

Now reading: Lesley Downer - Geisha

Now listening: 3oh3 - Starstrukk

Now watching: Pretty Woman

Mascate

Clean roads.

Half empty streets at 10 am, then again, this city wakes up early.

Solitude.

Did I mention clean? And bright? And sunny?

Empty, so drastically empty.

Meeting the friends was awesome, I went to school. No one except Chikki knew I was in town. So I got a whole bunch of :

"What're you DOING here?"

"Oh my GAWWWWD"

*Startled looks*

"your HAIR!"

Quite surprisingly, people seem to have missed me. And not just my heroes, or my teammates. Even the wonderful people whose bras I have messed with, seem to genuinely have missed me.

As Chikki says "people seem to like you this time round"

Huh.

I have a week of holiday.

And so, I'm in the parental home. This should be fun.

It's 2 am, I'm Halfway through Maximum City, and quite contented.

I will write, soon.

Grey days

It's rained for the past two days. Perfect hoodie weather. I decided to actually DO something instead of sleeping away my Sunday, and that's where the necklace came from. Moonstone and silver. I'm especially happy with the earrings.

I'm even happier with the haircut. I love it so much, I'm still so infatuated with the way I look....everything I do and wear seems so much racier.

For now, i have nothing more to say. The winds are changing...and I'm catching a cold.

Thank me later

How I Met Your Mother Season 5 Episode 1, for those who haven't already seen it.

http://www.himymepisodes.com/season-5/season-5-episode-1-definitions

you're welcome.

Sometimes, all it takes to make me happy is this.

A blue sea, a cool breeze.

Toes in the sand.

A tight hug from an awesome friend.

A cat who remembers me.

A warm soft cat who purrs when I hold her.

Home cooking.

My pink streaks.

Friends who know what I'm like.

Oh, being told I have an awesome ass, because that doesn't happen often!

Sometimes.

PS: This made my day.

And Just when I needed it most....

I went home. To the place I've called home for the last 17 years.

Swine flu holidays and the ongoing teachers' strike put me on a plane to Muscat on Thursday...and now I'm home. My bright flat with my white cats. Who managed to remember me within two hours of my arrival.

Just being here makes me feel good. More than being here, I think it's being with my parents, and my mom's excellent cooking. And the white cats. I woke up to Maheen-cat biting my ankles. *Happy sigh*

Kaminey was yefterday, and after that movie, I have a newfound refpect for Fhahid Kapoor. A double role with TWO fpeech defects if no eafy tafk.

Today we gave Basu a farewell, well a kinda pseudo farewell, it just ended up with a bunch of us in his complex pool, buoyanting, as we call it. Truly awesome to see these guys again, these guys I love so much, after so long. Today I learnt to always keep camera batteries charged. I learnt that the element of surpise, and some sentimentality is a good thing to have. (SLK, LOL.) I've been spanked multiple times today, and pushed into the deep end of the pool. Which I enjoyed, even though I can't swim too well at all....

Very cool. I love being in the water though. Feels nice. Not too nice after I get out, like a drenched cat, hair all frizzy.

I learnt...that a few people don't forgive easy and there's nothing you can do about it. And I know my Muscat friends love me, and home will always be home.

:)

For Once, I'm happy about this strike bullshittyness.