Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscopes have always fascinated me. They are so simple, yet so beautiful. When I was a kid, I spent hours on end just rotating the cardboard tube and looking at all the myriad designs forming inside the cone. I think I still have one back at home. I wonder who invented these.

I like to think of my life as a kaleidoscope. It's made of a lot of ordinary simple things, but it's still beautiful.

The friends who are so weird that you can't live without them.

My family which is the reason I'm this crazy.

The roads I've walked, drove and passed.

The college that ground the brains out of me.

The skeezes who made me realize my own worth.

The poems I read but never understood, only my skin was left in goose-pimples.

The fairs I've been to and got lost.

The cats I cuddled on the road.

The last benches we carved our names on.

The wallets I lost, and lost more than money.

The best friend I found in my boyfriend.

The scars on my legs when I was learning to cycle.

The tears I wept that nobody knows about.

The burps that scandalize but also amuse my buds.

The flowers I picked from a far away hillside and pressed between books.

The autumn sky with clean white cotton clouds.

The smell of a brand new book in a musty store.

The vapours of a plate of warm khichdi on a rainy afternoon.

The old house with vines growing on its walls that I once called home.

The wind that blew tiny leaves in my face and hair.

The forks of lightning I viewed from an open terrace.

The make-believe stories I played out.

The reality which had once become make-belief.

The dates that went bad.

The movies that made me laugh and cry and swear.

The times I loved and lost, but learnt to love again.
  

To all those bits that make up my kaleidoscope every day -

Best Friend

Whenever I come across posts and comments like "A good friend will ask you to share your lunch, a best friend will have eaten it already", I do wonder if that's what a best friend is all about.

We've all had "best friends" back in school. We'd always stick together, eat lunch together, walk home together, spend hours on the phone talking and giggling nonsensically. All those slumber parties, all those little notes passed in class. Our birthday parties would be incomplete without the best friend. We'd wait till they arrived before cutting the cake and blowing out the candles. They'd understand us like no one else.

As we get older, it starts to change. It would become about secrets. Trust. They'd be the first to know about our crushes. We'd spend hours talking about how cute the crush was and why they didn't like us back. Later when we'd get into relationships, all the boyfriend troubles would be whined about to the best friend. That's how it's always been.

It's sort of sad that I cannot remember having someone like that until a long time. I never left completely understood by another individual. No one seemed to share my interests. Also, I never really felt the need for a so-called best friend.

Yet, I've found some truly valuable friends in the most surprising ways. They have changed the entire definition of "best friends" for me. Now I know it's not about being similar, or even sharing similar interest. It's more about how much you can count on the other person. It's about how much you can be at peace with them. It's about how silences are no longer awkward. How you cannot stay mad at them even if they are annoying your guts out. They've taught me that girls and boys can be friends, and stay at that. They've taught me that age and sex don't matter.

I call them my precious friends.

P.S. This also includes my mother. And also my boyfriend.

Budweiser

"Grab some buds!"

I'm sorry to disappoint anyone, but I'm not going to be writing about the beer. What I am going to be writing about is friends, because they're almost as good as beer anyway. Come to think of, beer wouldn't taste half that good if you didn't have friends to drink it with.

Friends. One of the mysteries of life. If you have the right kind, you're the king of the world. If not, well, then I guess you're in trouble. But I'm not here to lecture you about how to choose the right sort, you can learn that on your own, like I have.

I'm going to tell you how amazing life can be when you do have 'your' kind of friends.

It wasn't until college that I had friends who really mattered to me and who have changed my life in many different ways, but mostly for the better. These people brought me out of my cocooned existence. I'm not a misanthrope, but I certainly had people-issues. But they, I can't reveal their identities in this blog, taught me that there's more to life than just grumbling about it.

One of them took me to the city's ghat, somewhere I'd never been before, in spite of living in this city since birth. There's one whom I can talk to anything about - from boyfriend problems to the latest books we read. With these people, I am myself. I feel I, too, belong.

They meant more to me than all my cousins and relatives put together. I get to be cranky with them, I can shout at them at times and they will still cheer for me when I win a lottery. I know that even if they don't call me everyday, they won't forget me.

I love the feeling when we've not even texted for a week yet everything just falls into place when I see them next. I love the fact that we don't need expensive clubs to hang out in, or the most happening parties to go to. We might not have any money in our pockets but we still manage to have fun. 

For one thing, I'm actually glad that I've had met the wrong people earlier, because now I can appreciate the right ones even more profoundly. Best friends don't tell each other how special they are very often, but the magic is, they don't need to, they already know.

All That I Have Been

My favourite game as a kid was to 'be' someone. I've 'been' a lot of people.

I've been the teacher, the doctor and the shop-owner.

And then I was also Maria from The Sound of Music, Aladdin from Aladdin, Stuart from Stuart Little, Babe from Babe and Agent J from M I B. I was Tintin, Bugs Bunny, Harriet the Spy... it goes on.

As a child I spent hours playing these favourite characters, writing the first fanfics in my head. Sometimes I goaded my cousins to play with me, but they never seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. I remember I played Jaws and Jurassic Park, making random people sharks and dinosaurs, without them having the slightest idea about it. Of course, when I screamed at their faces while pseudo-sneaking past them, they were mostly scandalized and at times bewildered.

I still play this game. In my head now, because of the whole behave-like-a-grown-up thing

I wanted to be a pirate because Jack Sparrow was that awesome in Pirates of the Caribbean.

I wanted to be an warrior-princess-cum-ogre like Fiona in Shrek and Po made me realize that Kung Fu is an imperative these days.

I wanted to kill mummies like Rick O'Connell and hunt treasure like Indiana Jones. I wanted to solve cryptic word clues like Robert Langdon and kill demons like the Winchester brothers. I wanted to play the guitar like Slash and sing like Cobain.

I've not achieved even a slice of all this. Probably I never will.

But I have fun playing this game.