Another night, another spate of good resolutions, of plans to study and sleep. Another abject surrender to the joy of just living life. Several cold coffees and a pleasant stroll by the lakeside, and the night has culminated in a splendid dawn. Not even the thought of the exam I must face today can ruin this perfect, timeless moment....a moment of morning glory when the mundane road I traverse daily seems a pathway to mystery and enchantment.....

 

 

It's 5:45 in the morning. In precisely 36 hours, I will be through with another round of midterms. And two hours after that I will be safely ensconced in a train whizzing (or rather wheezing - this is Indian Railways after all) towards Delhi. I look forward to that moment with pleasure not unmingled with regret.

 Though I am fond of my campus, it will be a welcome break; several recent events have put a considerable mental strain on me and it will be good to have a little time away so that I can look at certain things objectively, from a distance as it were, and come to terms with myself. I do not know whether my actions of the past month or so were right or wrong, I know only that I could not have done otherwise. Cold comfort.....

 

Not that the impending vacation promises to be a week of unmitigated relaxation; rather the reverse in fact. Considerable travel (most of it, alas, alone) and much activity promise to fill the forthcoming fortnight. And thus, gentle reader, you will forgive me if am unable to keep my tryst with blogdom during this time. I promise that I will be back......

~lakesidey

A campus set amidst picturesque lakes and pleasant gardens seems like a salubrious place to spend a couple of years studying - Shantiniketan comes to mind. And indeed in the early spring it is a great place to sit outdoors and study (for those who have a mind to study, that is....:)


 

But in the monsoons, things are very different. One interesting phenomenon at this time of the year is the onslaught of the LGBs. LGBs, or Little Green Bastards, are tiny pests that reinforce one's belief in the theory of spontaneous generation of life; they suddenly turn up out of nowhere in their millions, swarming around any light source or any living being; and they are tiny enough to enter the smallest opening. For a week or two they make life intensely miserable. My personal grudge against them is that they seem to love coffee as much as I do.....but unlike me, they drown more than just their sorrows in coffee :( And I hate debugging.......

But LGBs are not the only side-effect of the sylvan surroundings. My hostel overlooks a lake which is currently on the verge of spilling its banks, and is well stocked with sundry denizens of the deep. And thus, in the wee hours of the morning, I found myself, armed with my trusty torch and broom, evicting a snake from a ground-floor room in my hostel. Admittedly, the poor creature was barely a third of a foot long, but it must still have come as a nasty shock to the poor inhabitant to find a reptile where no reptile ought to be.....

Having done my good deed for the day, I went off to fortify my nerves with a coffee (a cold coffee, with a lid on the cup, to defeat the nefarious LGBs) and then settled down to record the incident for posterity. Now its back to work for me - a long and exhausting day looms ahead.....and I have miles (to say nothing of an exam) to go before I sleep.

~lakesidey

Yesterday was one of those days. Everything happened at once.

Among other things, I went for a quiz (and was thulped in embarrassing fashion after making the finals with inordinate ease), ate again at Komala Vilas and was involved in an accident.

The accident (or rather taxi-dent) occurred thusly: we were in a taxi. The driver, in the usual manic style of drivers in this city, was zipping suicidally round corners and overtaking in a manner calculated to attract undertakers. What it did attract was the unwelcome attention of a traffic policeman. After an unpleasant altercation (of which I understood perhaps one word in five, it being in highly vernacular and uncomplimentary Bengali) he started to drive slowly off. Across a busy intersection. Still looking at the cop and muttering what I presume were foul imprecations. It was only when his five passengers screamed at him simultaneously that he deigned to notice the large truck ponderously bearing down on us. A judicious application of brakes saw us survive, shaken and stirred, but the taxi's front fender will never be the same again.

This one goes out to all my best friends.....you know who you are :) And special thanks to Shash for this piece - and also for being there.

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.

I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;

I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can't help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.

I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good,
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.

You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
But now your touch,
Your word,
And all the signs
Sing of the joy
That is you.
You have done it
By being yourself.

Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means
After all.

~lakesidey

The monsoons took their leisurely time getting here. They stopped off at Goa for a prolonged holiday (I have it on reliable authority) and doubtless the pulchritudinous women of Bombay also arrested their attention for a not inconsiderable period. Whatever be the reasons, they sorely neglected their duties in the North-East till quite recently.....

Having finally arrived here, though, they are making up for lost time with a vengeance. Three days of incessant rain have sufficed to make my immediate universe a cheerless body of none-too-clean water with the occasional soggy archipelago sticking out. At least I have a warm(?) room, this bedraggled crow looked too thoroughly miserable and cold to even fly away....



My favourite spot, the jetty was declared temporarily out of bounds by the authorities a while ago. As this ban had no effect, three days back they took the sterner measures of dropping a huge heap of vegetation on the entrance, presumably to prevent people going there. Wasted effort; in the current state of the area one would need an Ark to get to the place....

In a departure from my usual dreamy posts, here's something real and contemporary (I hope you like it, Aritro;)

On Monday, the anniversary of the launch of Sputnik (the first artificial satellite) a weird looking craft called SpaceShipOne managed to win the coveted Ansari X-prize by taking a second trip into space within a span of two weeks. The conditions for the prize required a privately built craft to top the 100-km barrier twice in a fortnight (SpaceShipOne did it in a week). En passant, as it were, the craft also broke the altitude record for an airplane set by the X-15.


 

It is no accident that the craft was designed by Burt Rutan, one of the most famous Aerospace Engineers alive. Rutan is no stranger to weird looking craft; he was the chief designer for Voyager, the delicate, spidery-looking aircraft that in 1986 made the first round-the-world non-stop flight without refuelling. That odyssey, carried to a triumphant conclusion by Burt Rutan's brother Dick along with Jeanna Yeager, was chronicled in the Reader's Digest and was certainly one of the inspirations for me to try out Aerospace Engineering myself :)

 

This latest exploit, of course, appeals to the science-fiction addict in me far more than to the aerospace engineer.......and of course there is the pleasant thought that perhaps someday even a distinctly overweight guy like me might get to experience weightlessness....even if only for a few minutes! :)

~lakesidey