Did you know A. R. Rahman still makes awesome music? I guess you did but I accepted the fact only after his recent Unplugged appearance. And the song to bowl me over the most was the one song whose lyrics made the least sense to me. ‘Nenjukulle’ from a Mani Ratnam film called ‘Kadal’, made awesome-r in this avatar. Rahman + Mani Ratnam always meant greatness. A given fact.

The semester ending exam is coming closer and closer and the inherent need to procrastinate becomes more and more powerful. Fuck studies, you read Mary Wollstonecraft and Vivienne Jones the night before, skip through Tagore’s view on nationalism and make up words supposedly said by Marx and you’re okay. (NO EVIL BRAIN, YOU’RE NOT OKAY.)

Now that I’ve a kind of an okay camera and live in a very photo-friendly city, I’ve been taking fewer and fewer photos. And I’ve been getting drunk and stoned more often. Yay. I’ve also been writing less. This is not what I’d envisioned about coming to Delhi to study Literature, apart from the getting drunk and stoned part which I like a lot, thankyouverymuchbye.

I’ve been meeting too many awesome people since coming to the capital and now I feel my anti-social self trying to make its quota of presence felt. I’ve realised that people and places’re inherently connected. When you leave a place behind and go habituate yourself in some other city, however grudgingly at first, you also leave behind a certain amount of your past and future with the people who made up the old place for you. Something silently changes, and you can still be best of friends but the mechanism is no longer the same.

I’m unable to make myself finish even one of the many stories I’d started while my classmates seem to write newer and better stuff every week. And randomly, smoking up in the Ridge is not a safe option. Police will come and ask you for baksheesh and go after making your already light student scheme wallet lighter.

When I read whatever I’ve written thus far, I see how all-over-the-place my thoughts’re, something I’ve noticed in my answers to Lit questions too. I don’t wait to elaborate on anything and go on to the next thing leaving my mind. A professor recently marked this as my ‘lack of articulation’. I say it is ADD. Which brings me to Marx, because the professor was then going through my answer to a Marx related question. You know how hard his writings’re? The footnotes provided’re actually longer than the text itself. And then there’re the laal selamis who name themselves ‘Marxist’ without even reading anything about or by him other than his Wiki page entry.

You can get dis-oriented by drinking a lot of cough syrup and this is something I’m experiencing right now. But this is different to the kind of disorientation you feel after drinking alcohol or after smoking up. One half you feel clearer about things than you’ve ever been and one half you feel that life is one big budgeted Inception. And this round of highness was not solicited. I got cough and a little cold and drank a little too much of the bittersweetsour liquid. Not a good experience.

I guess I started this blog more as a memoir of things that happen in my life so that years down the line, I could come back to these words and know how much things’ve changed for me. Others’ve such amazing blogs that I envy, but those are so impersonal, alike to being a painted actor acting for an audience. One of the only personal-ish blogs that I liked reading and was regularly updated was VK’s, but she has gone underground with her blog. Another that I liked is never updated these days.

I guess I write to remember. Too many days’ve gone by and I’ve put down nothing here. I fear I’ll forget things, I who remember everything. So for the future self, all this rambling is the product of a bottle of cough syrup, the procrastination caused by the approaching exam and the selfish need to remember memories. Today (or night) is the Choti Diwali, Parry’s birthday and a day off college. The neighbourhood kids’re burning down the city and after missing Durga Pujo back home, missing Kali Pujo is no big deal. Cheerio.