Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Drug. Sex. Insomnia.


Its well past midnight and I am doing some serious ‘burning midnight oil’ and it’s all about sex and drugs, err…drugs and sex. Well, this is no romantic escapades I am chronicling, if reading this far you envisaged some juicy anecdotes in the following paragraphs! Be warned, I am gonna talk about some real serious, real deep and really heart wrenching stories. And it involves me…yes, poor me!

I am happy that I finally got over that writer’s block I was suffering from and I am happy that I finally have a complete report right in front of me! Ah, I remember I did promise someone that I would share this piece of work I managed walking through all those spells of insomnias – well, it is now ready for public consumption! And I am really happy. Its rather not happy but a feeling which is so confidence boosting, a feeling which feels like as if someone is whispering sweet nothings into my ears! Well, it feels nice. That nice kinda nice :-)

Drug. Sex. Insomnia and a sleepy moi!

Some nights, working on my notes, I find myself sleeping on my belly with my face perched on the laptop keyboard. And then after couple of ‘turtle hours’ I wake up in the brightly lit bedroom to the tune of Sinatra. This could have been a scene of some nice, romantic, ‘sex-capades’, but alas it’s in my dreams, I dreamt of those tight embrace and those thick muscular arms!

Like a flower….

Picture this: Norah Jone’s husky voice filled the balmy air in the bedroom. It’s in closed door-window mode with dust storm outside– precautions for poor lungs which cant suck in thick air. Marquez’s orange yellow paperback lays upturned at page 17 and ‘remember me with a rose’ brushing on those tulip bed sheet, in the middle of a re-reading mode!

Oh, that orange yellow cover covered that famed cholera…err ‘Love in the time of Cholera’. Somewhere, that Medical Anthropologist and that Public Health Specialist and that traveller loses herself to a thing in the past on an unknown Spanish road, camouflaged as a Latina! Well, it had happened before; she had lost her ways to find her ways in life. And that was Barcelona. From Paella to Park Güell to Gaudi to Picasso and getting drenched in cava in those old Spanish pubs. Seven years since. Flashback moments and there was love. There was that husky voice, cat calls as you stop by the paid phone booth to make those phone calls to hear to that thick baritone from across the ocean. Yes, ocean! Hmm….flashback indeed!

Well, to come back to where it started from, yes, finally, suddenly, everything around feels so light, unburdened, as if there’s that lightness, a certain high from the first puff you suck in, as if there’s that slight buzz when you take a deep gulp after a nice swirl in your mouth, as if you just got kissed eyes all closed, all dreamy and light and as if a light feather just floated on the naked body.

The writing on ‘drugs and sex’ is complete and I am done with! and it all feels so dreamy yet real. Yes, drugs-sex and a bit of insomnia.. err …dreams :-)


Deep into the dark sky there are some stars smiling. Nice fragrant gardenias fill the air. A hint of sandalwood oil lingers on the nape and those saffron threads float on the water.

Surreal. Ecstatic. Blissful.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Spring Cleaning :-)


Spring cleaning!
Well, quite literally, actually I am in the middle of shifting to a new space both in personal as well as professional domain. You know, given my track record of travelling and moving with jobs, this should not make you any curious or jittery. Relax.

My office is relocating to a brand new seven storey building; I need to really pay attention to that email I received as I woke up on a Saturday morning. It’s the boss kinda telling in too many nice words to ‘get organised’. Though the email was sent to all who are currently housed in this beautiful ‘green building’ but I am sure many at work would know what this entails for me :-)

Well, moving to a new space which is not as spacious as your current work space can be a problem when you are dealing with a hoarder! C’mmon, I aint one, don’t you know how many projects I get to handle over this six years or so? And then I am very old world, I still like to do pen on paper and all my meetings with my students end up into documents which I keep referring until they complete their dissertation , even after that actually! So you get the scene, I keep accumulating stuff and quite like to keep them as I completely feel any tiny little interaction has the potential to inspire something and I am open to ideas all the time. You need to see my white board at work and how I scribble things on it and it’s a technique I have found which really helps me focus, helps me de-clutter and stay inspired.

Anyway, long story short, the mandate is ‘bring things which are useful to the new work space and leave the rest and they will dutifully find their way to the shredding machine’ .
Similar is the scene at home. There has been no email or no boss dictating or no new space on offer. Its just that regular spring cleaning – an extended one, you can say!

And what the hell of a cleaning it has been….huh!!

I remember reading a quote a few days ago and it went like this “you never know what you have until you clean your room”. This is so true, I have been staying put with my set of things (with intermittent additions from my many travels and some upgrade on the house etc)from pretty much the time I returned back to Delhi NCR in 2006 after staying in many different places for my work which almost started to have an annual pattern with a certain alphabet :-) I mean to cities starting with a certain alphabet! Anyway…

To continue with the de-clutter mode, I am trying to sort my books from travel documents, research papers from novels I read during traveling to some international conferences, painting and souvenirs from letters – hand written letters at that. And I am overwhelmed! First – so many people have been part of my life. Work colleagues, co-travellers, relatives (I have a very big family who don’t live in one place!), friends – so much memories and I am in no mood to abandon any of them. So what if I don’t travel back to see my old landlady in that beautiful summer house in Sweden but the joy that she thought of writing back to me years after I lived at her place is very endearing
. Notes, post cards, photos – and I am at loss how to organise everything. I have a dream to capture all of these, every experience of mine in a book. Yes, there I found this letter – a very lengthy, handwritten one, and someone very dearly telling me that I must do a travelogue as I write quite well. As they say, some things just don’t change and I am still nursing that dream!

I don’t know what was it that I started to write this blog this evening and now I am quite nostalgic, philosophic about life…err spring cleaning! But I guess, you got the point that there are so many people, so many things that shape you, that impact you and you only get enriched with each of these interactions, each of the trips you undertake, each of them….
Yes, sometimes in the passage of time some people or for that matter some memories are shuffled and sorted at a different layer which gets covered by the newer friends or newer priorities but they all remain there. It’s a different matter how you reminisce – I do with looking at old notes, old photos, books, letters etc.

I am glad that I met you all and I am happy that I remember you all and I have memories to cherish about you all :-) And wait, in addition to travel writing, I pretty much can even help guide/organize trips starting from the Great Wall of China to the Great Barrier Reef :-)