La Dolce Vita

The end of a journey of little sleep, delayed flights, late arrivals and early meetings, malfunctioning credit cards, miserable weather, incorrect GPS information and other such. A final delay, sitting in a tiny aircraft on the runway for an hour and a half, cell-phone and laptop so out of juice that I could neither talk to anyone nor work, nothing to read or write on. Finally, clearance to take off. A rocky take-off, the small plane buffeted and tossed around by a powerful storm, the world invisible as we rose through clouds banked miles high.

And suddenly, as we emerged from the cloud, a perfect, perfect circular rainbow against the clouds, and our plane sillhouetted within it.

Wonder lies in the little things. As long as there's something to make one go "wow!", most other things fade into insignificance.

And now, even the song is over

Why don't we stop fooling ourselves?
The game is over,
Over,
Over.

No good times, no bad times,
There's no times at all,
Just The New York Times,
Sitting on the windowsill
Near the flowers.

We might as well be apart.
It hardly matters,
We sleep separately.

And drop a smile passing in the hall
But there's no laughs left
'Cause we laughed them all.

And we laughed them all
In a very short time.

Time
Is tapping on my forehead,
Hanging from my mirror,
Rattling the teacups,
And I wonder,
How long can I delay?

We're just a habit
Like saccharin.
And I'm habitually feelin' kinda blue.
But each time I try on
The thought of leaving you,

I stop...
Stop and think it over.

~ Overs: Simon & Garfunkel

Rethinking Frontiers

My Very Elegant Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pins will have to be rethought.

Alien-ated

So there was a blood donation camp in my office building a few days ago. Posters were up for ages, asking, begging people to please donate. And as a good donor from years ago, I decided I would.

Off I went, on the appointed day, to the van in which the donations were to take place. Only to come back, because they needed ID. Back with the ID. Return again, to figure out my social security number - without which they wouldn't accept a donation, and which I never remember. Some time to hunt through documentation to find the number, then back again to the van. Fill out forms, extensive, long-winded forms about exposure to disease, sexual promiscuity, etc. Get finger pricked for blood-type testing. Wait for the nurse to be free to see me.

Only to discover that if you've been in the US for less than 3 years at a stretch, and especially if you come from sub-Saharan Africa, or India, or "places like those", they don't want your blood. Rationale: you've been exposed to malaria (I know malaria stays in the system for a while after you fall ill, but does it have that long a gestation period?!!) and "other such diseases".

I feel like I'm in a bad movie, where someone with a guttural Germainic accent is telling me, "So you fink you kan gif blood, eh? Vell, you're wrong. Go back to vere you kame from, filthy Indian."

Alright, so this is an exaggeration. Still, I'm feeling intensely alienated right now. Ironically, that's probably just how the INS wants aliens to feel.

Learnings

1. Hyperbole is usually a substitute for any real knowledge.
2. Technical information should still be readable English, but often - mostly, almost always - isn't.
3. You would think that there is a limit to the number of times the words "extensive experience" and "strong expertise" could be repeated in a 40-page document. You would be wrong.
4. Clearly, Very Few People are taught the Secret Code of using Capital Letters in Sentences.
5. If you're the only person trying to control quality, it's hard not to just give up at some point.
6. Especially if it's 11:30 p.m.
7. Drat.

Watch

This is worth a watch.

Courtesy of M.

It Is A Lovely Weather...

After days of stifling heat and humidity, the deluge has begun.

Complete with darkling skies, thunder, sheets of rain and that strange grey light that accompanies Indian monsoons. And only yesterday, I was trying to explain to a colleague the beauty, the absolute wonder, of the monsoon. Thank you, universe, for listening.

My flat is not made for rain-spotting. No grilled balconies where the spray comes glancing in, which is half the fun. But through the time I was growing up, I had a balcony to sit in. Cosily wrapped in a ragged "kantha", sitting in an "easy chair", with a mug of steaming tea and a couple of books balanced on the arms, I could watch the heavens burst open. A book would lie open (and forgotten) on my lap, and my senses would swell with the smell of wet red earth, as I watched the rain streak in dirty lines down the sides of once-white houses. Little puddles would form in the "maat" in front of our house, and swell to rivulets that would wind their way through the mud. Occasionally, a hapless cyclist, desperately trying to shield himself with the aid of a garish green plastic sheet, would go by, leaving deep squelchy ruts in his wake, and the rivulets would wind through these. Shivering crows would take shelter in the eaves of the balcony, or in trees.

And the sound! Everything else was drowned out by the companionable pattering of rain interspersed with bouts of rrrrrolling thunder and cracks of lightning. And you could just sit there and watch... and watch... and watch... and let your thoughts drift and your train of thought run away into far-away lands.

As a seasoned rain-spotter (no, I'm not sorry!), I knew when the rain was going to begin, and when it was going to end. And once the clouds had spent their fury, and the rain slowed down to a the occasional big fat drop, all the neighbourhood dogs - and the kids - would come out, to jump around in the mud and run around screaming, exulting. The air would have cooled, the skies grown a little lighter, and there would still be the occasional rumble of thunder, like the muted sound of someone's indigestion, promising more rain to come.

Not strange at all, I suppose, that of the thousands of songs that I learnt through years of singing classes in school, the one that sticks in my brain the most has a line that goes, "it's kind of nice when rain falls."



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Update:

I wrote that last bit while I was still safely ensconced inside office.

Then I stepped outside. Traffic lined up for miles. My usual roads home awash with water, the rain pounding down so hard that even at the fastest wiper speed I could barely see. Driving through ocean-sized puddles that my temporarily-opaque windscreen had rendered invisible, making sheets of water rise from the wheels like the parting of the Red Sea. Crawling through foot-deep puddles and patting the wheel of the car reassuringly, murmuring, "Come on, Bootle, don't let me down now," looking at all the cars that had got stuck and praying it wouldn't happen to me. The world outside looked like this:



But I got home, finally, and opened my door to the rain, and stood in the doorway for a while, cradling a mug of hot tea in my hands and watching the rain, and all was right with the world again.