To do or not to do

So, what is it about me that makes me procrastinate? My motto in life has always been, "Don't do today what you can put off to tommorow." Please note this has never been intentional. Given a choice I would love to be the kind of person who does her work a week before it's due and has gone through it thrice. Unfortunately I am not that person. I'm the one standing next to her pens lost in her hair, chewing through pencils, multi-tasking like it's no one's busness(read: thinking up ways to extend the deadline while simultaneously trying to come up with a masterpiece filled with the right combination of info and creativity, covered with spelling mistakes) 2 hours beore the deadline. You would think once I got a laptop everything would be much simpler. Hah! It has. now instead of scrambling about 2 hours before the deadline I scramble an hour before it. Now instead of losing stationary to my hair and teeth I have to constantly fight a losing battle against facebook, gmail, movies and soaps I've downloaded and ofcourse unbelievably interesting articles about the north korean president's hairstyle! So now multi-tasking takes a completely different dimension. Brilliant! Sigh...Mind you, I wasn't always like that...ok maybe I was. That isn't the point, I did try to start in advance. It did work once. But, believe it or not, I lost the assignment a day before I had to submit it! After searching for as long as I dare I began to write it all over again, cursing and questioning the meaning behind my life(every time I get frustrated I turn philosophical..something to do with displacement). Anyway 4 hours before the deadline I find it! And it turns out to be nothing in comparision to my absolutely brilliant last minute job.

You may wonder, dear reader what sparked off this sudden outburst. If you haven't already guessed it I have a killer whale of an assignment due tomorrow and I CANNOT concentrate! sigh..story of my life

To jeeju with love

As they began to prepare for your impending arrival into our lives I began to fear you and resent you for the rift you would invariably create in my relationship with my sister.Could you bame me?Who was this outsider to enter our lives and take away that which I considered my own, my sister. Who did he think he was this foreign element trying to ruin a relationship we had spent our lives trying to establish and perfect? Did he really think he could just walk in and destroy or modify a relationship that made us what we were today? I know to you, this may seem like a gross over-reaction but around me I had seen families changed as the new husband had one of two approaches

• To clearly mark their territory by imposing his will and needs on his new bride to an extent that this consumed her
• To establish himself as the third rung in the sibling relationship.

Neither of these options appealed to me and I began to dread the day you would officially carry my sister off.Once you entered I watched you skeptically. While everyone seemed concerned with your perfections I waited for you to reveal your flaws. As time passed I finally did begin to see a change. However it was not the change I had been searching for. For the first time I saw my sister's eyes glow when she spoke of you. I had never before seen this glow and it took me awhile to understand it. I slowly started to notice the contentment in her voice when she spoke of her life with you. The simple yet unmasked joy that lay in her voice when she spoke of routines you followed. The affectionate indulgence that arose from her voice when she complained about those small habits. Though this unsettled me first, as my sister was not someone I expectd to see such reactions in, I slowly began to enjoy listening to the happiness that sometimes could not be contained in her voice.

To say this redeemed ypu in my eyes would be a huge understatement. Then there was our relationship. As mentioned earlier I watched you warily, looking for how you planned to distort my relationship. But again you proved me wrong. Not once did you ever impose yourself on our relation and neither did you ever demand my sister's time when she was with me. Due to some cosmic miracle I got a brother-in-law who understood my sister's importance in my life and my emotional attachment to her. You encouraged her to be with me. You helped us become closer both geographically and emotionally. You understood me at times when my sister couldn't and explained things from my perspective.

For all of this I thank you. Our lives have been enriched with your presence. Know that today, tomorrow and always you are cherished and every day I thank god that of all the people who came so close it was you!

Love
Your little sister

How much is too much

I was reading an interesting article in the harvard business e-magazine. It stated that most positive traits if over developed turn into negative traits. It mentioned wit turning into sarcasm as one of them. I have always been accused, by all those who profess to love me, of being painfully sarcastic. Almost everytime this has happened I have never intended it. I have stated a fact in a style I am most comfortable with. I've never really taken these accusations seriously and rarely if ever consider them 'serious'. But reading this article reminded me of an instance where I managed to offend someone with my supposed sarcasm. I got me thinking,"how do u ever know how much is too much?"When does the very thing you admired the most about a person become the thing that keeps you away from them?
I guess the answer lies in our relationships. Someone once said, "no one gets crazy enough to hurt another person before becoming crazy enough for someone to notice." What matters is if you notice. The slight flinch at a casual remark, the pretending to not hear you while you list out the errors you've noticed in someone's work, the ever so discreet sigh when you insist on going over something for the 100th time. These nuances are sometimes almost invisible and extremely easy to brush aside. But if they aren't dealt with before it's too late, they can be the reason someone you care about is walking out the door without a second look.

An argument that almost immediately pops into my mind is, 'why should I change myself for them?' And in the heat of the moment it is easy to get carried away with this ideology. But as much as you may admire the rude and unappologetic hero of a movie who everyone loves despite his arrogance and lack of human skills, ask yourself would you really want to know him?
The answer is truthfully no! We are always willing to forgive but even the most patient person has a threshold. After a certain point jerk-like-behaviour just can't be overlooked.

It's always fun to know a witty person and it's pleasent to be with an easygoing person and it's reassuring to work with a meticulous person but when the wit turns on you as sarcasm and easygoing turns into indifferent and meticulous becomes fastidious, it takes a rare person to not want to wring the very neck they professed to appreciate a while ago.

Here's to you

Someone once said, "I get by, with a little help from my friends". Today I realized the truth behind that statement. I'm famous for my ability to completely disappear of the radar for extremely long periods of time. People who've known me long enough, know it's nothing personal it's just the way I function. Commitment phobia some call it, others a new degree of laziness(to them I say, "Hello!Have you not seen my display picture). But those observations aside I realize that most of the time I just don't see the point. I have also realized that being away from someone helps put your relationship with that person in perspective. The other day I wasn't feeling well. I had no choice but to call a friend miles away from me, who was busy in her class and ask her to contact her father who is a doctor. She did this and gave me the information in 15 minutes. It wouldn't be a gross exaggeration to say she is the reason I could get up the next morning. This friend was also my roommate for 3 years. More importantly we haven't spoken for the past 6 months. Not because of any disagreement but because our hectic schedules(in her case) and aforementioned laziness(in my case) have not permitted us. But all it took was a single message for her to miss an important class and tend to a friend miles away. Another friend of mine has been cramming for the past month. This party animal has given up his wild ways in hopes of securing a future in an Ivy League University. I was passing through his city and made plans to meet up. He did the 3 hour commute from his house to the airport and waited there for me another 3 hours. All this, to spend half an hour with me. He had missed out on a whole day of studying and this was a big deal for him. As I asked him why he did it he replied, "It was worth it, I met you!" That is the power of friendship. Just knowing that someone always has my back gives me a reason to walk with my head held up high and a smile on my face.

As I pondered on this phenomenon and how Id gotten this lucky I realized this is how my friends always are. They have always gone out of their way for me and have put up with my disappearing act patiently(or not) time and again. But what really struck me was the realization that I would do the exact same things for them in a heartbeat. I guess that's what real friendship is after all. It's not the huge birthday bash or the expensive gifts it's the shoulder to cry on when your dream comes crashing down. It's the person who forces you to give yourself a chance when you really don't want to. It's the sharing of fee stuff, the late night phone calls because you r bored, the lame jokes, the private jokes, the constant leg pulling, the experience of doing something stupid together that you know you will regret later on, the feeling of wanting to shoot someone for their stupidity and the knowledge that you probably will very soon, the fighting over something refusing to speak to each other ever again and waking up the next morning to do the same thing all over again.

Life throws various challenges your way. They say it's hard for someone to make it in this big bad world. They say you have to be ruthless, ready to kill if the occasion calls for it. But I have learnt that as long as you have friends like mine life just falls into place on it's own. My friends may not seem like much to a casual observer but it takes a special kind of luck to find people ready to put their lives on hold if it means they make your journey a little easier even if it's just for a little while.

the search for the perfect teacher

I’ve always wondered if the perfect teacher really did exist or if he/she were nothing more than a myth. Someone to see the possibilities that lay inside you, someone who understood you better than you understood yourself. That special person who took a student and saw the person he/she could one day become. The small time visionary, inventor and dreamer. All of his makes me wonder if this perfect entity is anything more than a random myth. My past experiences don’t leave me with much hope. As I look back I realize there are a handful of teachers who, I can honestly say I had the ‘pleasure’ of knowing. However who among them inspired in me to change myself from the placid person I was into a force to be reckoned with? Who was it, who drove me to get up and conquer the world by believing in me and in the process making me believe in myself? The answer dear reader, as anyone who knows me will testify is no one. Sure there have been some teachers pretending to have all the answers, unfortunately none of them have put on a very convincing show. This may appear to you as nothing more than the disgruntled ramblings of a disgruntled young woman, but the question remains. Have we in our search for that super child prodigy failed our duty to those little gems left behind?

To answer this let’s first look at what, we as a society value above all else. The answer is perfection! Anything sells as long as it is perfect. A perfect body, a perfect story even a perfect disaster or a perfect tragedy is hailed by all those who subscribe to it. The human race, after all is nothing more than a system comprising of innumerable sub systems and as a system we continue to seek that perfect mix of elements which will eventually lead to our own garbled version of Utopia. We plan to achieve this by filling our system with the perfect elements (something to do with our inner sense of Natural Selection perhaps). And so as this obsession continues to consume us, we continue to search for and select the best among us. And so the onus falls on every teacher to find the most obviously talented child and help it develop its skills while the others are gently nudged along until they find their calling through...other means. Can a teacher be blamed for this? Of course not! We dump over a 100 children on a teacher and expect them to patiently coax every child into finding their calling. Isn’t that a little unfair? We fantasize about the all knowing teacher the one who watches a child without judgement and leads it to its real path. But do we realize that it is we who have wiped out this guru. With our need for a faster solution we have managed to ruin the one thing that ensured we reach near self-actualization namely the Guru shishya relationship.

It is depressing that all we can do today is look back at what was once an almost holy relationship and a process through which many ordinary people were successful in enriching the lives of the future generation and getting a little bit closer to self actualization themselves.

Anxiety

It's so strange, I'm doing nothing!This is not good not good at all!I'm losing my touch with the english language. I mean sure I can converse through the written word but when it comes to talking..especially expressing my anger words fail me!Is that wierd? My grammar seems to be going to d dogs and life as I have known it seems to be changing..for the worse! I guess I'm just searching for answers..I really don't know..d confusion consumes me..when I think about it I know there is nothing to worry about. Two years and life will hopefully turn around I will find my calling blah blah but I'm so afraid of what I'm losing out on..All I can do is pray to god that I somehow get out of this the same as I was when I came here...I'm so sure I'm losing my mind..HELP!

Finding Myself

Sisters function as safety nets in a chaotic world simply by being there for each other. ~Carol Saline

I couldn't have put it better myself! When I think of my life(which is all I seem to be doing these days, something about an empty mind and devil's workshop) and all the people I believe I should thank/blame for making me the person I am today(which isn't much to begin with) a tiny voice inside me dares to be so bold to suggest, well they weren't indispensable, you could have done it without them. But could I? Yes people come and people go, someone always manages to fill the gap, but don't the people who never leave mean something? It's strange how you spend your whole life trying to establish an identity of your own, trying to prove you are "different" from the rest of the family only to realize everything happening to you has already happened to someone else and they have been watching you the whole time as you make the mistakes they made and learning from it just as they have.

Recently I realized this was the story of my life. Realization is actually quite rude and revels in jolting one out of one's comfortable state of denial. There I was wallowing in self-pity cushioned by the belief that life had been uncharacteristically unfair with me and my current state was not my fault but just cosmic unfairness. I even had myself convinced that this was probably some sort of karmic repayment for sins I know not of.

As my friends around me watched me become a perpetual Scrooge(for want of a better word) and wondered what happened I sank further into an interesting combination of self loathing and self pity. Initially I refused to talk to them preferring to be left to my own devices and later they found that I now was a good listener and used me as a sounding board for a wide assortment of problems,opinions,ideas and discoveries. I heard them never really caring about what they were saying trying to lose myself in their lives so that I may escape from mine. It worked temporarily but when their drama was over the void inside me grew. Unfortunately I succeeded I really did lose myself but only once I did I realized I needed to find myself if I was to survive. I went to the friends in whom I had originally lost myself looking for answers, unfortunately it was the person I was with them that they remembered and not the real me.

It was then that I found the guidance I was looking for in a place I did not expect. But before we get to that a little background info.Theoretically I have one sister and 2 cousins, however for all practical purposes I have 3 siblings. I have spent a good part of my life striving to establish a different identity from the rest of my well meaning if slightly annoying family. Following that trend I did not think to turn to them in my search for myself. So imagine my surprise when a conversation with my sister, over a cup of coffee, a treat for something I do not remember, turned into n evening of revelations. I found the guidance I had been searching for. They say,"A friend is someone who knows the song of your heart and sings it back to you when you have forgotten the words". This is what that conversation did. I realized I hadn't lost myself just misplaced me.

Now knowing where to look I have begun to find myself. The people to thank? My siblings..for caring enough to guide me, search with me, make me confront my problems and proving to me that Nothing was out of my reach.