The Silence of My Voice

Hello. It's Day Twenty Four. Merry Christmas, everyone! Twenty four days of writing are over. When I'd gone through the first week of BlogMas, it felt like the month was passing by so slow that BlogMas would never end. And now, I'll have to wait for another whole year to do this. I'll be honest. I was a little wary of doing BlogMas this year. It did take a toll. After work, I had to be awake till wee hours in the night to write every post. I reckon I did a poorer job of this year's BlogMas than last year considering I really haven't had much response this time. Though I have to thank every single one of you who still clicked my links everyday and read all the nonsense I wrote for twenty four days, because my page-views have never been better. So, thank you. I know if a job's worth doing then it's worthy of having some effort put into it. This year, I didn't articulate anything. I wasn't sensitive enough to how pleasant everything I'm writ...

Hello. It's Day Twenty Three. Two days to go. I've officially turned twenty three. On twenty-third day of BlogMas. There's nothing cool about it. Forget it. Yes, I'm sitting inside a blanket again, writing this post. But with a bowl of raspberry jelly. My mother knows I like jelly. So, okay, yesterday's post will go live with this one. That's two posts late this BlogMas. Last year, it was four, I reckon. That's not too bad considering this year was much busier than the last. Do not forget to read  Day Twenty Two . Speaking of, 2016 is also on the verge of ending. I'm excited for 2017. Not in a new year kind of way. 2016 was a year of a lot of changes for me. College ending, new job, new people, new city. With so much that happened, I still felt that nothing ensued at all this year. And to gather all that was occurring in an absolute whirl, I needed to sit back and think upon how it has affected me for the opposite of what I felt to be eventuated....

Hello. It's Day Twenty Two. Three days to go. Essentially two. But no lip. It was my birthday. On the night of twenty-third(24), that is. I wanted to gift myself some sleep. This post should have been up last night, but since you're reading it today you'll have to consider that you are de facto reading it on the night of twenty-third. My flight was also late, so please. I was quite busy eating cake inside a blanket while lying on a blanket, and passing out from sugar coma. And since it is twenty-third, I drove home for Christmas tonight. I always felt cold mostly in my feet during winters. The moment I stepped out of the airport to get to my brother, it was hurtful for me to walk. I knew it was cold, my feet instantly cramped and I knew I was home. Thus, began the process of putting myself into a sugar (and food, I'm cheeky like that) coma. You don't really miss home when you're away from it. You miss the comfort. I feel like I've spoken about this befor...

Hello. It's Day Twenty One. Four Days to go. The year is just shy of almost a week from being over. No. No sharing resolution talk. And it's funny how most people resort to resolutions to bring about change they need in life only around new year. It isn't as if we live a programmed life so it's acceptable to choose one day and burden it with all you want to change in your life. Life happens all year around. It might be a yearly cleansing routine of oneself for some people, if that makes any sense. And, I know a few people who diligently follow their resolutions through to the end, and on top of that plan out what they want to achieve for themselves in the coming year. That's planning and resolving.  And the main criteria about resolutions is to understand that if life taking place takes time, then so does the changes you want to make to it. It's not an overnight process. Hang on a bit. And decide to your level best what is not good, but necessary for you. ...

Hello. It's Day Twenty. Five days to go. I'm not going to lie. Daily blogging was easy in college, even amidst end of semester juries. No joke. I feel like a robot that doesn't need charging, but feels like it does. There need to be 40-hour days. If not enough sleep, at least there'd be enough time to finish whatever work you initiate every morning. The sheer amount of satisfaction at the end of a day, aaaaaa! Unimaginable. I was listening to a very classic 90s Bollywood song. And I remembered this one day of a Lighting class - just consider there was a class because 90% were dozing. And since me and my friend (Read:Apek) were on the verge of dozing too, because hey, we were also bored. In retrospect, it would have been much better if there were discussions instead of writing Lighting basics on board like a school teacher, who in turn are so techie now. iPads and soft boards and all. I don't think children today will understand the charm of a blackboard. Or ...

Hello. It's Day Nineteen. And, six days to Christmas. I'm quite blank for this one, here. Last year, during BlogMas I had done a trail with all the posts. It just constantly kept spinning with whatever I ended the post about on each day. This time, I thought I'd take each day as it comes and as it happens and actually talk to you about it. But today, I'm blank. I could talk to you about how I spent my day, if knowing the happenings of an architecture studio interest you. But how wondrous it is to not be able to think of anything. Everyday we try so hard to switch off and avoid social media for a bit. Not think at all, and be still. But when our brain switches off all by its own effort, we're worried and restless.  It's an extraordinary gift, to control the mind using the mind itself. Sounds like cannibalism a bit to me, if I'm honest. You use your mind to feed your mind full with satisfaction. This happens to be one really advantageous practice that ...

Hello. It's Day Eighteen. Just a week to Christmas. When I started BlogMas this year again, I was fretting about not being able to see it till the end. At each passing day, I would think of how many days still to go for Christmas. And now, I'm trying to stir up a new excuse to do daily blogging in some other month. It's important to cherish. I miss college. More so, I miss the freedom and carelessness that I harboured. And the transition is drastic, you know. You don't even realise where it's all gone. But my fourth year was most definitely an absolute blast! I reckon by that time we all had been together enough years and grown up enough to hold those friendships dear. And I think there are always a couple of them that run deeper. Right out of school, everyone thinks they've probably crossed a long phase of their lives, and the nose is consequentially quite a bit up in the air. And that is also an age where we are least bothered about who thinks what of us...

Hello. It's Day Seventeen. Since I was a kid, I always saw my parents donate a lot. Monetarily or materialistically. And that always got to me. There came a time when myself and my brother reached a certain age where we understood that everything holds value, and that the value of something depended on how much you're entitled to in life. As kids, there were times when my brother and I would want something more, or just more things for the sheer heck of it. I reckon after our first tantrum, our father once showed us a beggar, armless and helpless, and asked us if the correct way of looking at our lives is to realise we have more by how many standards, or how much lesser than whom. So, until we were teenagers and we needed things that were more constant, each year on our respective birthdays, our parents would make us pick out things that we didn't need anymore, or would probably be of more use to someone than us. Clothes, books, toys, shoes, previous year notebooks to s...

Hello. It's Day Sixteen. It is also my two hundredth post on this blog. My grandfather always preferred to write his poems in Hindi or Urdu. This is for him, and my father. "...live in the question."                                                      - Rainer Maria Rilke वो चीज़ ढूंढता रहा ज़िन्दगी भर  जिसे पाने के लिए कुछ खर्च न करना पढ़े  भूल गया था रोज़ की दस्तूरी में  जिसे खर्च करना था वही पल गवा रहा था।  वो पल ढूंढता रहा ज़िन्दगी भर  जिन में सिर्फ अख़बार के पन्नो का  जहाज़ बनाना भी सपना लगता था  जवानी तक आते आते भूल गया जिस पल की तलाश थी, वो ग़ुम था  मगर मेरा बचपन तो अब भी मेरे साथ ही था।  वो पल के इंतज़ार में गुज़ार दिया पूरा पहर  उसी खिड़की के सामने, देखता था जहाँ से  गाड़ियों को सारे मौसम पार करते हुए  किरणों से बूंदों का सफ़र नप भी गया...

Hello. It's Day Fifteen. Anticipation is a funny thing. The point before something beginning, or something ending - when nothing is said and done, or everything is out in the open - is humbling. These are times when you don't know the answer to what now, or what next. And it's a loop. this situation occurs a lot in an architecture school. The only thing you do know is what that place would be called. You never know how it's going to look, how you're going to even reach that point when it's done. It's mostly somewhere in the middle when you have just the slightest idea of what it was and how it's going to be. The rest is just details. There were always two types of students - one who finished the loop and others who fell into the centre like a dead electron. I have fallen in the latter category more than twice during school. Maybe not so much, but I probably jumped on another loop just when I was about to finish the first. It's hard sometimes to l...

Hello. It's Day Fourteen. Winter mornings in Delhi are wonderful. Driving in Delhi during winter mornings are the best. The sky is indigo, and the gloom is so evident, you can smell an evening dusk during dawn. There's a musk in the air that lingers a bit longer even after the sun is trying to do its job to amputate the fog bit by bit. I love driving. I've driven to my college everyday, for four short years, much prior to college as well, since I got my license. Driving to college and my coffee tumbler were the most obvious things to be noticed about me during winters. And it's funny how when you're deposed of your everyday customs do you feel the void of it when it's suddenly absent. If six months ago, someone asked me if I would think about my car and coffee tumbler coming winter, I would have probably looked at them as if they'd announced dancing naked on a Broadway. Granted, is a very heavy attitude to take, and a dangerous adjective to allot. I had ...

Hello. It's Day Thirteen. Every time I go out for a vacation, or a getaway, my first feeling is of thrill. I like arriving someplace new. Where you know close to nothing about everything. Even a few hill stations I've visited multiple times, I've had to hustle against every fibre to leave certain nooks untouched so that I could come back, tasting the familiarity, yet titillating for the new. But it's not for too long before the need to return hits me, or the elation to barge in somewhere new sinks in. I've been very restless about being in new places. No place other than Delhi felt like home, neither did it make me fall so irrevocably in love with itself as Delhi did. I came a lot close to loving Dalhousie, just all the same, but Delhi calls to me at an incomprehensible primal level. I would occasionally presume that one is bound to love the city they grow up in. Unless it's in the wilderness of Chhattisgarh - then you don't love home. I dropped anchor i...

Hello. It's Day Twelve. The issue is we are least willing to give time to anything. And that's not what is becoming the wrong kind of habit people develop. It's becoming an excuse. I believe, given enough time, a person can love anything. I reckon, as 'settled' humans, we're too fearful to step of our mediocrity and try something new, we're callously falling into this pattern. Two days ago, I spoke of how easily I'd forgotten to look forward to doing something I absolutely loved. I'm going to run back through almost five years of this blog. The titles are links, and you're more than welcome to read either of them, any number of times. Stoner. It's been the longest series on my blog ever. Slightly more close to my heart than the rest, Stoner for me was a journey where I not only learned so much about people and relationships, but about myself also. For the longest of time, I reckon that would be a year, Stoner was a part of my routin...

Hello. It's Day Eleven. Hands down, the one thing architecture school teaches you is to never say never. If ever in school anyone would tell me that I will have to stay awake for a week with only two hours of sleep everyday, and this might occur about six to eight times per semester, that person would see the back of me. No joke. But, see, there's this high of creating something with your bare hands, if you must, that makes you not halt even for a second. I'm not saying you would never need coffee - that'd be a lie. But believe you me, it's a high unlike any other. I remember there was this one semester, I had my entire design thought out, plans ready, models in place, but no other deliverables. I was jittery and way past being timorous, I was shaking with the idea of the juror failing me because of lack of my deliverables. I reached the studio and put up my work looking like a wet kitten all the while. My guide came to me told me very calmly that I ha...

Hello. It's Day Ten. It's amazing how I mention the day number in the post title everyday, and still go on like a teacher telling her students which chapter she's going to teach next, despite the possibility of them having already know about it. Yesterday, I spoke of how we're all stuck in a rut. We have made ourselves habitual to live in another place all the time. We're so busy attempting to capture and record all our memories, we forget that while we're doing that, that time and place hasn't become a memory yet. So, while we're not living fully wherever we are, we're flubbing on all the fair-shakes of being something more and maybe even absolutely antithetic of what we are. And, it's not much to say how monotonous our lives are shaded in this age. Even so, whenever I've seen all the pre-social media pictures of my parents' lives, the only thing that constantly hit me was, for them, those pictures was actually about preserving m...

Hello. It's Day Nine. Two posts in a day. Look who's golden. I went to town with my father today. Well, not painting-the-town-red-partying, but Town, southern side of the city. My father was born and brought up in Bombay. He showed me his school, where he lived as a child, all the places he would meet his friends, every single nook where he and his friends would go every time they bunked school. My father is my father (duh!) - it was equally wondrous for me, to look at him literally walk through almost two decades of his life, as it was for him to see how much had changed. It only made me wonder how much of this experience would alter all his childhood memories, now making him think of what all from his childhood had changed rather than what was there. He told me he loved Delhi more, but what if he comes back to this place when he's old and wrinkly. It was again wondrous for me to see how the nostalgia for his childhood morphed into a nostalgia for a future nobody is su...

Hello. It's Day Eight. A day late, but here nonetheless. Last year, I did BlogMas all through my juries, and in all maybe three posts were a day late. So, those means, I reckon I'm fine right now. As I did last year, I listed my favourite parts of the songs I'd listened to most last year. After a week full of BlogMas, I'll keep it simple and repeat the tradition. There might be a possibility some might be repeated. But, well, like YouTube, consider this my BlogMas Rewind. Feel the spot, don't let it burn, We all want, we all yearn, Be soft, don't be stern रहना  तू , है  जैसे  तू, थोड़ा  सा दर्द  तू, थोड़ा सुकूं , रहना  तू , है  जैसे  तू, धीमा धीमा झोंका, या फिर जूनून, थोड़ा सा रेशम, तू हमदम , थोड़ा सा खुरदुरा, कभी तो अड़ जाए , या लड़ जाए , या खुशबू से भरा  And on the Lower East Side, you're dancing with me now, And I'm taking pictures of you with flowers on the wall, Think I like you best when you're dressed in bla...