Jonmodin-e

Since ages, I had this habit of writing in my diary on my birthday- about people who wished me at midnight (funny, I used to rate their importance in my life and my importance in theirs depending on the time of the day they wished me!!), the gifts that I got, the lunch that ma cooked, the payesh :(, the extra chocolates that I could eat without thinking of getting fat(ter), and how exactly I felt on this particular day. I remember, in school, we always had summer vacations during this time and I always felt sad about 1) not being able to distribute candies to my classmates and 2) not being able to get more wishes, and consequently more gifts and chocolates from friends. But as I have grown up, I have realized how ridiculous those thoughts were, and how silly I must have been back then. Perhaps it is the wisdom that has come with age, that has made me realize that it is not about the number of wishes I get, rather the efforts that people put in to make the day special. So continuing with this tradition of writing on my birthday, today I write (albeit, digitally) how it feels on having stepped on the wrong side of twenty! 

Strangely, I don't feel old, even though I have recently noticed a few strands of grey/white hair on my head :(. When I was younger, I used to think 'twenty-five is old, atleast old enough to be the mother of two kids!' But definitely not anymore. On the contrary, I feel hot, matured, calm; and happy! It's hard to believe that this is already my second birthday away from home, family and friends, away from the city I love the most. However, the loneliness is much less this time and it's certainly because of the people I have around and the efforts they have put in to make me feel special on my special day. It feels nice to be the center of attention for just a day, to get a wish from the same person twice for two different time zones; to receive calls and texts at the stroke of midnight; to see best friend getting up at 6'o clock in the morning just to wish from across the oceans; to see the Facebook page overflowing with wishes and greetings; to see the excitement on the faces of colleagues and to realize how much I am being loved. Isn't it incredible when you see text messages from parents and old friends in the morning, when a close German friend drops in abruptly and presents a bouquet, and then shows that she has worn the Indian dress that you gave her just because it's your birthday, when friends whisper to each other during lunch breaks and plan wonderful surprises, when a colleague gives a big bag of gummy bears to binge on during boring office hours and then says 'I know you love them, so..', when a friend drops in with your favorite French wine, when an office-mate asks if he would make birthday-special coffee for the birthday girl, when a colleague gives a pack of beauty products, each less than 100ml, and says 'this is for the vacation in Nice and Barcelona, since you wouldn't be able to carry bigger cosmetics in the flights'; when another close friend brings flowers, icecreams and strawberries and then suggest to sit outside in the sun and chat for a while, when a friend installs skype for the first time to have a video chat, when office-mate compliments on the choice of dress and then flatters unnecessarily saying 'the sun is shining today after two weeks just because it's your birthday today', when a close acquaintance brings you a beautiful piece of junk jewellery and says 'you'll do full justice to it!', when another friend presents a hand-made container that she got from Kenya (and you realize the essence of globalization) :), when a friend wishes inspite of a huge fight two nights before and when PhD supervisor sends an awesome wish via skype and makes you feel so special. These small and big happinesses take away the pain of fighting with best friend, the frustrations of PhD, the loneliness and the pain of being so far away from home in a foreign country. 

I feel blessed to have friends like these; friends who care, friends who are excited just because I am excited, friends who are happy because I am and friends who love me inspite of misunderstandings and fights. In the end, I await a grand night with friends and colleagues and a blissful beginning of the twenty-sixth year of my life :)

P.S. (follow-up) The party was indeed a huge success, with so many people turning up to wish the birthday girl. And the icing on the birthday cake was a present from closest friends which definitely could be counted amongst the best birthday gifts ever received!

Binges!

So, today was one such day when I thought I would die from over-eating. Well it seems like I didn't, afterall, but I definitely would have. Rather should have, from the shame of overeating, if not from the overeating itself!

I am that kind of a person who takes the famous quote by George B. Shaw- "there is no sincerer love than the love of food"- quite seriously. In one word, I am a food-fanatic and proudly so. I live to eat and can die for it too. This undying love for food probably comes from 1) growing up in a typical 'Bengali' household, where the second most-often used remark by elders is "ishh ki roga hoye gechhis, nischoi thik mato khawa dawa korchis na" (how thin you have become, definitely not eating properly!), even when one is visibly over-weight (the first being "o maa kato baro hoye gechis!" which means "how much you have grown since the last time I saw you") 2) growing up in a family where 'eating' has always been considered synonymous to 'living' and 3) having a mother who, apart from being the most amazing cook, believes in investing deep thought and taking immense pains to feed us well (and how!). So while gorging on endless amounts of food, I have always shamelessly blamed my Bengali upbringing for those extra fat on the body. In Calcutta, the love extended mostly to those typical Bengali foods that 'straddled a million tastes, used a million ingredients and engulfed all the five senses'. The palate also often consisted of North-Indian dishes, Continental and Chinese delicacies and American fast-food. In Germany, however, it's the wide range of desserts that makes my heart skip a beat, literally. Perhaps this again goes back to the Bengali upbringing where a meal is never complete without a mishti and/or mishti doi, where rasogolla comes a close second to fish and where sweet-shops are super-crowded at all times. Although in Germany one can hardly find these (except in those Arabic or Indian stores), the country makes up for it by providing mouth-watering desserts and chocolates. But, for someone who fails to draw a line between indulgence and sinful over-indulgence, this often becomes a cause for concern! And that's exactly what this post had to do with!

So, cutting a long story short, today I wanted to give a break to my veggies-for-dinner routine and therefore decided to order some nice food from outside. Being the health-freak (the annoying health-freak at times) that I have turned myself into who always counts calories for every food she eats, the choice was between a Pizza/Lasagne without dessert and Greek Salad with dessert (since Pizza AND dessert would mean more calories). It was a tough call, but in the end I decided to go for the Salad which automatically meant that I could treat myself with a dessert. So I ordered a large Salad and, well, Tiramisu. Tiramisu is one dessert which I love to death, and which often makes me want to marry an Italian. Then again, I love German cakes, French crêpes and Swiss chocolates, and practicing polygamy might not be such a great idea afterall! Nevertheless, when the order arrived and I checked the delivery, I figured that somehow they have given two cups of Tiramisu instead of one. Now, I am not sure how this happened, because they would not have possibly figured that I absolutely love Tiramisu. So either it was a mistake, or it was a special couple-offer (!!!) or something. Anyways, since the delivery guy had already left (and even if he hadn't, I would definitely not have returned the other one), I decided to keep the second one for tomorrow and finish off the rest. I was completely full by the time I finished the Salad, but since my eyes were hooked onto the Tiramisu, I decided to finish it off too. A moment later I was done, and I felt that my soul was finally at peace although my stomach was almost aching from eating so much. I decided to watch a few videos and read something, but somehow my mind kept wandering to the other cup of Tiramisu in the refrigerator. I tried to distract myself by watching a movie, by calling up friends; but somehow that goddamn Tiramisu was too strong to resist. Moments later I went up to the refrigerator, took out the cup, and finished it off in one breath. And then, I felt like bursting. How i wanted to kill myself for not being able to control my pangs, for not being able to resist food, and for not caring about my 'diet'. I sulked for about an hour, decided to spend an extra hour at the gym the next day and promised myself not to have dessert for the next three weeks. But having said that, the satisfaction it gave me was undoubtedly, unparalleled! 

So, for the umpteenth time, I decided to forgive myself! Afterall, happiness comes in little boxes, or cups for that matter :)

                                

Holi!

.. that time of the year again! crazy pre-holi bash at college, bonfire the night before, the insanity that follows, early-morning surprises planned by best friends, bombarding each other with colored water balloons.. desperate attempts at making the color as hard-to-get-rid-off as possible.. abir-smeared happy faces and soaked shirts everywhere, those 'e-ki-kore-esechis-ekdom-ghawre-dhukbi-na' looks from ma immediately followed by 'ei-ei-amake-rawng-lagabi-na-ami-eimatro-snan-kore-berolam' cries, a grand lunch afterwards, meeting friends at Cafe coffee day in the evening, adda and gossip over cups of brewed coffees, and finally a peaceful sleep... how I miss being in the city of joy during the festival of colors! :(

thankfully, there are enough videos on Youtube to make me happy :) .. albeit with a pinch of salt :( 
 

Calcutta

A few weeks back I came across this blog by Vir Sanghvi called Oh! Calcutta. It seemed a very popular article, an obvious inference given the number of views the page had. I do not quite recall how many times I went through the article in the next half an hour that followed. I also do not recall how many times I felt a big lump in my throat. But by the time I was done, I could actually remember almost every little detail that he had mentioned about THE city. And also that I got goose bumps every-single-time. 

Okay, perhaps it was not the best of time to read a post about Calcutta- 1) because the Durga Puja was just a couple of days away, 1) because it was the first one I was spending away from home, 1) because it was getting worse with each passing day with the exponentially increasing Puja posts on Facebook (I know numbering, it's just that all were priority one). Later, I wondered if the article would have exuded the same emotions had I read it in Calcutta. Perhaps not. I mean when I used to live there, I used to get annoyed by the traffic, the noise, the pollution, the fact that garbage was everywhere on the road, the humidity and so on. But now, I crave for these very things (definitely not all, but most of them). I remember when I first came to Jena, a friend had asked what I miss the most about Calcutta and I had said 'the chaos'. Earlier, traveling with the bus or the metro would be painfully annoying and I remember how I would curse under my breath every few seconds. But this time when I went back, the first thing I wanted to do was take the over-crowded metro and go to Esplanade. And auto-ride to Gariahat! Earlier Jadavpur was one of the places I wanted to avoid, because of the terrible traffic system. But this time I took loads of pictures of Jadavpur and brought them back with me. And I payed particular attention to the fact that the pictures should capture the true essence of Jadavpur- with the autorickshaws and the buses and the taxis blocking the road, people crossing the road from every side, hawkers almost in the middle of the road and so on. I remember how I was constantly complaining about the bureaucracy while applying for the transcripts at the University, how much I was pissed because of the slackness and complete unprofessionalism of people, how much the lack of sanitation and poverty bothered me. Ofcourse they still bother me. But when I think of the city now, somehow I just look past these things. Recently I read a Calvin and Hobbes comic post about Calvin wondering if his mother would still have the nerve to love him if he was 'gray and grimy, slippery and slimy, an oversized hors d'oeuvre'. Apart from the fact that I absolutely love it, it quite echoes my feelings for Calcutta. 

Now and then I wonder if this love for the city has its source in the infinite memories and special people it has given me (Wake Up Sid, perhaps?). But then I think the city means more than that to me. Somehow the city has just grown on me, and even when I have left the city it has not left me. Clean cities, AC buses and trains, almost-perfect traffic and hygiene system, well-constructed roads, super-fast customer care services are always a delight. But even with it's drawbacks, perhaps it's the 'nari-r taan' -a strange connection that can neither be explained nor seen- that makes the city so special. To the Calcuttans. On that note I sign off, with a link to another goose-bumpish article Buffalo boy’s Calcutta crush! :-)

Happiness

When I was much younger, my brother and myself would look forward to the first day of every month.. It was not because we could get a day off from our daily routines and boring homework; neither was it because there was something special that we could do. It was mostly because baba used to bring us chocolates on his way back from office. It wasn't like he didn't bring us chocolates on other days. He did. But what made the first different from other days was that we always knew that a big bar of chocolate was 'guaranteed'. We'd wait for him to come back and then when he would hold out the bars of chocolates, we would have these big grins on our faces... 

As I have grown up, I have realized that happiness is about the smallest and simplest things. Getting up in the morning for school and realizing that it's going to be a rainy day; making tiny paper boats and then making them sail down the waterlogged streets; seeing the brother getting scolded, and not myself, after a severe fight (okay, this one's a bit vindictive I agree); eating pieces of cakes secretly that mother had baked for some special occasion and not getting caught, playing badminton on the road on sultry April afternoons and when completely exhausted, seeing an icecream-wala approaching; making random telephone calls to strangers and then making weird voices to scare them; bargaining while shopping for Pujo and later realizing how good a bargain it was; packing for a vacation (this doesn't even need an explanation); watching the hustle and bustle of Park Street and Esplanade right before Pujo and realizing that it's just a few more days, going to the 'kumor' the day before Kali pujo to check out how well the idol has been made; bursting crackers on Diwali and on the day of immersion; friend going over to our place on Kali Pujo and showing everything live on webcam; bunking classes and going for movies and dates; gossiping about professors and their personal lives and other friends and their personal lives; copying from friends' during exams and not getting caught; going to Nicco park with chaddi buddies and getting on the cyclone; reading old Gtalk chat histories; watching IPL matches and silently craving for a KKR head-band and then a friend sending it all the way from India on birthday; boyfriend 'who-can-just-boil-water' baking a cake and writing a wonderful testimonial to make up after a fight; playing Angry birds; drinking hard liquor and not throwing up and then being able to give a presentation the very next day;  coming out of the airport and identifying familiar faces in the crowd; being depressed all day about the laptop charger not working right before an important workshop and then a friend coming over and fixing it in a few minutes... 

Happiness.. yes, that's what I call it.. 

The midnight mission

After twisting and turning in bed for what seemed like ages last night, I got up and decided to clean my wallet (I'll get to the significance of my wallet in a minute). Ofcourse there were other better ways of wasting time in the middle of the night, but I decided to do something I had not done in maybe a year. So there I was, wide awake, at 2'o clock in the morning with the sole intention of giving my wallet a decent look. The task was simple: to pick out everything one by one, decide which ones deserve a place in my wallet and throw away the rest. However, it turned out to be not as simple a task as I had thought it would be.

Okay, so what's so special about my wallet? Absolutely nothing, except from the fact that it's huge. It's really huge. Friends, who have seen it, always ask me "what do you have in there?" I always tell them that women like big wallets so that they can carry their worlds in them. But that is just a lame explanation, because all my other female friends here have small and thin wallets. Ofcourse they have big hand bags and/or side bags where they carry their worlds in, but that's not the point here. So honestly, I don't even know why I need to carry such a huge wallet, because I hardly have cash in there. I mostly have my cards, the ticket from the Gerry Weber Open tennis tournament and a bunch of very small denomination coins. Apart from that, it's all apparently useless stuff: some old and torn movie tickets (they are atleast 4-5 years old), some Café Coffee Day napkins, a few Indian coins, a couple of Norwegian Kroner, quite many old receipts of restaurants and coffee shops I had visited with friends long back, a few bus tickets and a small piece of paper which has a list of things I need to buy for the ongoing week (and this one gets replaced every week or so). I really wonder how these 'few' things make my wallet look so big and heavy!

So last night, I started off by taking everything out of the wallet and putting only the selected ones back in. I put the cards, some cash and the to-buy list first back into the wallet. Now, about the rest. Most of the tickets and receipts were damaged and hazy. I couldn't even read the small letters, so there was no way of knowing what we had ordered at the restaurants or which movie we had gone to see. I could just make out the names of the shops or the theatres and I remembered going there with close friends and boyfriends. I smiled to myself and put them back in. Memories. Then there were the bus tickets, mostly for the routes 17B, SD4, S31A, S31 and E1. I hardly remembered where I was going and why I had kept them for so long. I could just remember those indefinite hours spent in the buses, cursing and abusing the infamous Calcutta traffic, texting friends, reading books; the verbal fights between the bus conductors and some fellow passengers and those regular arguments over the ‘Ladies’ seats. I put them back in too. Then there was this Gerry Weber Tennis tournament ticket. Oh this one didn’t even take more than a second. I’ll preserve it for my next hundred generations. I put it in the innermost pocket of my wallet, where it is least likely to fall off or get damaged. Then those few Indian coins which I had purposefully retained before coming here. They’ll stay, I said to myself and put them back again. The Norwegian Kroners, given by a friend when I came here. They’ll stay too, I decided, and put them back. Now the job was almost done, except for the few napkins and small coins. A friend of mine and I had this habit of writing things down on the napkin whenever we were at the Café Coffee Day. We wrote mostly about each other, what we like and dislike about each other and stuff. Sometimes when we were bored, we just made smileys or funny faces on the tissue papers and then I used to take them with me as memoirs. Going through these napkins took most of my time last night. Ofcourse I couldn’t remember which Café we had gone to. The only things I remembered were the time I spent with the few people I now consider family, the things we did and discussed, the double-dates, FOOD and so much more. I smiled to myself because I knew what I was going to do with those napkins.

Bottom-line: I spent a couple of hours dissecting my wallet, and now my wallet looks and weighs exactly the same (both from inside and outside) as it did before I went on this mission. Agreed, I could have thrown out some of the coins but then I didn’t know how else would I have paid at the Espresso bar ‘Rossi’. So I kept them too. Maybe I'll throw them away the next time I try cleaning my wallet. And I don’t remember when I went to bed finally last night :)

Memories

Missing the life we once had.. the energy, the patience and the intimacy we once shared with friends. Quite a few pieces of the puzzle have gone missing as we have grown up.. Gone are those days when we blabbered non stop in the metro about things as unimportant as the color of the shirt of a fellow passenger, shamelessly rated guys on a scale of 10 even after realizing that his girlfriend was glaring at us, talked about censored stuff and giggled nonchalantly in the middle of a class, whined about the profs, abused and cursed the damn distance we traveled everyday, discussed the infinite problems in our personal lives.. never having the slightest idea on how to solve them; when we called each other atleast 100times a day before the exam, trimmed the syllabus 'n' number of times based on our intuition, discussed every single question before answering.. promising never to deviate from the nash equilibrium in the exam hall; when we took the up-down metro several times a day and stood on the vestibule, or walked quite a great distance just to spend time with people without actually spending a single buck; when we poured our hearts out to friends over cups of brewing coffee or a couple of sizzle dazzle brownies at cafe coffee day, to new-found acquaintances while taking a tour of an institute campus and to lovers while walking past the new market area and simultaneously checking out the earrings, the bags, the shoes as well; when we secretly indulged in some not-so-good practices somewhere near a 'gowal' enjoying every minute of it and swearing not to do that again. when we chatted over the phone for hours at night or exchanged countless texts.. talking about nothing in particular or sometimes cribbing about life.. yet feeling a sense of great companionship..

The life has changed since then.. Over time we have realized the importance of self-dependence.. how not to be sad even while having lunch all by yourself in the middle of a crowded canteen or a cafeteria, how not to feel nostalgic while watching others do exactly the things you used to do with your lot and how not to miss the life you once had with your loved ones. Change is one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting it's toll on people's lives... circumstances change, people change..what doesn't change is the memories.. all of which come rushing back when you least expect them to....