MirrorCracked

She loved him too much - she used to wait for him to come home everyday, patiently watching the door, never losing hope even when he turned up late, or sometimes, never at all. She didn’t say anything even when she could smell the perfume and see the stains of lipstick on his shirts. She sat close to him and allowed him to run his hand through her hair because she knew he liked doing it. She knew that despite his affairs, he still loved her. She believed that more strongly as each day passed and the affairs grew more and more prominent. He didn’t bother hiding it from her anymore - he started bringing his women home, caring little for what she thought and what she felt. She couldn’t cry out loud or voice her opinion for fear that he might stop loving her. Sometimes, she wanted to lash out at him, but restrained herself. She hated those other women.

But her jealousy was kept hidden within herself. She dared not do anything to upset him. She loved him beyond words and she knew he loved her.

But that night, when he forgot about her, she was angry. Even thorough all his women, he still had found the time to talk to her and kiss her. But that night, he completely forgot her. Anger made way to forgiveness pretty quickly. Her love for his touch became unbearable. And in the dead of the night, when all was still and all were asleep, she stole up to his room and crept up to where he was sleeping, nuzzled close to him, sniffed him and let out a soft bark, as if to say, “Feed me, I’m hungry…”

He woke up, smiled at her, ruffled her hair and said, “I love you. Come on, I’ll get you some juicy bones!”

She padded after him into the kitchen, wagging her bushy tail…

I woke up at nine in the morning today after three hours’ sleep and thought to myself, “I need an alarm clock!”

My sleep patterns have gone haywire ever since I knew that I was homeward bound in a week’s time. I stay awake most of the day watching Remington Steele and The Simpsons and by the time I realize it, it’s already 4 in the morning. I downloaded an alarm clock for Windows and set the timer for nine in the morning and slept with my laptop next to me with a blank screensaver. I woke up to the tunes of Verve’s bittersweet symphony and since then, my day hasn’t been no less than that.

Too many things to do and too little time to do them in. If only I had a time machine, I’d freeze time and get my things done and clear out of this country. But till I find that machine, I’d settle for an alarm clock.

We all are sick of getting spammed daily! My spam folder can be used as a stopwatch, it’s that quick! Offers of car loans, work-from-home emails, I’ll-buy-your-house emails and phony credit card are the usual suspects! I don’t really browse through all the junk in my spam, but occasionally, something comes up that is too hilarious to pass up on. Here’s one such similar spam I received just minutes ago:

Poolside Toilet!

Grab your own private poolside Envirolet - keeps your home dry; no plumbing required! Natural compost filters to block out the bad smell. Get yours now! Call me xxx-xxxx…!

First of al, I don’t have a pool. And secondly, what kind of a name is Envirolet!??

It’s been almost a year since I graduated from college and the memories are very vivid. I miss those times, when I used to sit in class and stare endlessly out of the window, with nothing to do but think of newer ways to kill time. I made some of the best people during the four years I was there. I was talking to a close friend of mine - Chuckie - who’s now in Sydney, doing her masters. We spoke on the phone for nearly an hour and she begged me to put up a blog about the good old days and I couldn’t turn her down.

There was a lot of things we did back then that got us into all kinds of trouble - we used to skip class and sit in the library, cooking up excuses to get drunk and even writing insanely obnoxious poems about the teachers! We were inseparable - but I think it’s more an attribute to my magnetic personality than anything! - and we  did most of the crazy things we planned on doing.

Once, I think we almost turned the whole class into a circus because of a fight we had. We started throwing accusations at each other and pretty soon, it was a proper brawl and had to broken up by the head of the department, who just couldn’t believe that we were almost 23!

Everything apart, I think that friendship is a bond that takes a long time to break, and sometimes, it doesn’t. I was blessed with some of the best people in the world during those four years and I am proud to say that we are all still best of friends. Distance can make it tough to keep in touch, but then, that’s a bad excuse not to. Right?

I have a profile on Orkut, MySpace and Facebook, though I hardly use the latter two at all. Social networking is a good thing, from my point of view, and I’ve found some real nice friends through them. Recently, I read a blog on wordpress (I won’t mention the name because I’m going to slander the author now!) and I was impressed by the thoughts expressed by her. Her language was simple and her articles were quite good. And to my surprise, I found a link to her profile on Orkut on her blog. I was intrigued. People aren’t normally this open about themselves on a blog. (I found another blog where the author had put up his phone number on the blog, but I’ll comment on one stupidity at a time!)

So, I visited her profile on Orkut and sent her a friend request with a message saying that I liked her blog, and didn’t think of it again. I send out friend requests all the time and I don’t bother to see if they’ve been accepted or not. And I generally am very picky about whom I add as friends.

Two days later, I got an email from this girl and I was quite literally, shocked. Here’s what she said, verbatim:

“you’re the one who wanted to add me right? how do you know me? i’m sorry but i’m not on orkut to make friends, especially with someone much older than i’m. i would prefer if you didn’t visit my wordpress and if you continued don’t tell me. honestly, i may seem like the rudest person right now. but i have gone
through way too much on orkut and i people like yourself make me even more weary of online predators. to add to all of this, in the new age of technology and shit, many of you are taking advantage of online social sites and befriending people you don’t know. stop giving our race a bad name and keep to yourself. tell everyone else, share some wisdom. “

There were a million different replies going through my mind at this point and not all of them were polite. She didn’t want to make friends with someone much older than herself, apparently! Last time I checked, I was barely able to feed myself and was making gaga-googoo sounds from my crib. When did I become “old”?? And the fact that she used the phrase “technology and shit” told me volumes about her knowledge of something called a computer.

She called me an Online Predator! I’d like to think that as a new height I’ve scaled in the past few years. She wanted me to share the “wisdom” of her message to “people like myself,” stalking the internet for young girls to harass. Give me a break, lady! I so badly wanted to say, “If you want our race to improve, then you should shut that trap of yours soon because you’re a prime candidate for population control!”

So, I drafted a reply as decently as I could manage and sent it to her and blocked her from my profile. Here’s what I wrote, verbatim:

“Wisdom comes in many forms, one of which happens to be a grave insecurity about oneself. People start blogs and social network profiles for a reasons - true, many a time, the intention may not be pure, but most of the time, its to address their insecurities. I have been called many names before, but an online predator, hmmm, thats a first. I would greatly appreciate you not voicing a generalized opinion about people without knowing them at all. I guess a true blogger would not have responded in the way you did, but then, its not my place to judge you. From your response, I can make out that you’re socially challenged. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you ought to visit the mall often; I’ve heard they’re giving lives away cheap. Don’t bother replying back. Have a great, online-predator-free life ahead… Goodbye ”

Get a life, woman! People aren’t all bad and not everyone out to make fun of you and harass you and get in your pants! Jeez!

Another small bit of unfriendly advice to this paranoid girl: Don’t even try to wage a battle of words with me; the only thing that’s bigger than my ego is my vocabulary!

Eight months of my life have been a blur. I vaguely remember being happy for some time, and I distinctly remember pain. There had been moments of self-pity and loathing, but I can’t be sure. It’s all a haze. There was also something akin to love. I think I’m sure of this. Bits and pieces of memory float in and out of my head - people, places, sounds, instances, thoughts, actions, voices - but none that I can be sure of.

It’s like being awoken from a coma. Things are clear now, but the last thing I remember clearly is looking down from the window of an airplane, 10,000 feet up in the sky and watching my home through a haze of tears and clouds. After that, it’s been more or less blurry completely. Things have been done, words have been said, books have been written and prayers have been sent, but I still don’t quite remember much.

This time round, though, the tears hesitate to come. Pragmatic voices hold them back. Relax, they say. You’re going to a better place.

One more happy hour to endure. Ok, I know this can be a bit confusing. I’ll try to be clear. There’s a group of people, scattered around the world, and struggling to find a cure for the world’s problems. They call themselves the Daisy Network. The main aim of this organization is to ensure that everyone in the world can live without fear and lead a happy satisfied life. They’re heavily biased against violence and they would do anything to help out a fellow man.

Now, I know that there are a lot of other organizations like this one, but how good are they really? Peace comes not from the outside, but from within. We should recognize the fact that once we achieve an inner peace of mind, we can achieve anything.

The logic is made nauseatingly clear in The Alchemist. Coelho, in his painstakingly clear and simple narration, brings such joy to the reader. When we want something really bad, the whole universe conspires to get it for us. whatever it may be that we might want. Even one hour of peace.

One more happy hour…

What’s so special about having a blog? Is it the “cool” factor - “Ooh, look at me, I blog, so I’m a blogger!”?

Is it the fact that having a blog allows us to meet new people everyday, read their thoughts, views and opinions and comment on them? Do chicks dig bloggers? Or does sitting in our rooms, when the sun’s bright and the birds are calling out,  and punching out random thoughts into an online journal, a pack of cigarettes handy and an open pack of chips get us high?

For me, personally, I think its more to do with the fact that I’ve been cursed with an insatiable desire to write, to tell stories through the keyboard, that makes me blog daily and twice on Sundays. I do it religiously, and I don’t really get bothered when I open my dashboard and see that there have been no new recent visitors. It’s just the fact that I’m sure that someday someone will read these lines and think, “Hmmm, he sounds nice enough…”

But then again, thats not all. I think, for everyone who blogs, its that innermost desire to tell their story out to the world thats making them write it. There’s a storyteller in everyone of us. We need to just let him/her out and express those desires, explore those plots and give life to those characters trapped in our imagination.

Blogging isn’t enough. We need much more. But then, maybe this is just me.

I’ve found out that the three most fascinating letters in the English language happen to be F, L and U. Put together and pronounced as a word, they provide us the perfect excuse to get out of any situation. Imagine yourself, waking up in the morning and realizing that you’ve got to go to work or school or wherever, and you’d rather be lazing around at home in your PJs, watching reruns of House. What do you do? Fall back on the most reliable of all excuses - no, the dog didn’t eat your homework; rather, it gave you a flu.

And everyone will buy this excuse. They won’t question it. You don’t have to produce a medical certificate because no one in their right mind would spend hundreds of dollars on a visit to the doctor for a common flu when they can get a pill for half a buck. And the best part of the flu is that it’s just debilitating enough to put you out of action for at least a couple of days.

Need long weekends?

There’s a rat trapped in a maze, cornered by walls on three sides and a hungry cat on the fourth. The rat doesn’t want to be there. It doesn’t like the whole idea, but it is unknowingly a player in a sick game of sadism played under the auspices of Scientific Research. What does it do?

The rat knows that it has no chance against the big hungry cat. It can’t scale the walls. It can’t call out for help because, well, for obvious reasons! It can’t dig its way out. Simply put, it is well and truly screwed. It’s life flashes before its eyes - those sweet, tender moments it had spent with its mother; those sweet, tender pieces of cheese that the human in the white coat had fed it; those sweet, tender minutes it spent with the pretty albino rat in the next room; those sweet, tender spots in the corner where it was cornered, where the temperature was just right and where it would have liked to curl up that night and dream of sweet and tender sticks of cheese if it weren’t for that hungry predator smacking his lips and looking on in quiet amusement at the panic on the rat’s tiny face. So, the rat makes a drastic decision.

Darwin was right - the fittest survive. The rat, trapped and helpless, proved to me more fit than the cat. The cat didn’t know and probably didn’t realize that for the rat, this was the last chance, the last stab at a chance to live, the desperation move. The cat was blissfully unaware of the fact that it had been a subject of study in a ground-breaking technology - one that made cats slow in their reaction times.

The rat rushed forward towards the cat, with all the speed it could muster, and the cat looked helplessly on, as it slid through its feet and ran away from the corner, away from the hungry predator, towards freedom and a well-earned stick of tender cheese. The cat didn’t quite understand how this had happened. It stood there, looking at the empty corner, still not being to comprehend the fact that the rat wasn’t there anymore. It blinked and looked around stupidly, trying to make sense. It must have been that strange nail polish-like milk that human fed me earlier, it thought. I must be more careful next time.

The rat, on the other hand, was on cloud nine. It began to feel that it had super powers and that it could outrun any cat. It smiled broadly as it bit into the piece of cheese. What a strange taste, it thought, as is licked its paws. Almost like nail polish…