Scene it before?

The scene was a culmination of every cliche associated with profs, grad students and undergrad students from times immemorial.
Time and Date: Second week of December, 6.00 pm.
Place: Our research building atrium. The stairs are in the center. All floors have study tables that look down to the atrium.
Scene:
Atrium all lit up, nice live jazz music, fancy gourmet food (chocolate covered strawberries, sit down dinner and the works). This is the faculty holiday party. Light laughter and pleasant chatter can be heard.
4 ragged people walk in from outside, red-faced and cold, clutching paper bags. Aha, graduate students! They have walked for 20 minutes and stood in line for an hour to get a $6 burrito for FREE at the newly opened Chipotle. They walk through the party, look at all the fancy food, sigh and go up the stairs.
Suddenly they smile when they look up.

All the study tables are crammed with undergrad students, with Red-Bull by their sides, cramming hard for next day's final.

Life is better again.

Stepping into a Jewelery store

I stepped today into a jewelery store,
Of diamonds and pearls and opals.
Of mother of pearl flowers, wondrous pure
Glinting and teasing and beckoning

The light was not coy,
One could call it harsh,
No shadows to speak of,
No mystery suggested.
No subtlety of décor
No strategic positioning
Of lone precious pebbles
To heighten their value.
Placed in clustered abundance
As if their togetherness
implied their existence.
Yet the cold crystals
Swathed in strong rays
Seemed more delicate to touch
Than the wispy green
On which they were displayed,
Strange, considering,
The whole scene looked like
a fuzzy jade sculpture.
A master worksman surely
Had wrought such magic
Into such tiny bits of nature.

Afraid of irreparable damage,
With a trembling hand,
I reached out to touch
one lone sparkling icicle.
It dissolved into nothingness.

And I smiled:
The joys of frost on a
Sunny winter morning.

Paradigm

DP just provided me with the idea for this blog post. It was based on an email I wrote to him about Phaedrus liking midwestern winters, and me absolutely hating them. Just matter of fact-ly, I wrote to him, amongst other everyday things:

"He loves snow...because he thinks of snowball fights and snowmen...I hate snow, because I think of digging the car out of snow and icy driving conditions."

He wrote back, with the same phrase, now in quotes, and added to it, "This is a good example of paradigm." One would say that the paradigm shift is quite obvious, but I am glad he pointed it out, because I wasn't really thinking in terms of a larger picture. I was just talking about the reasons for loving and hating snow. Think of how many conflicts could be resolved if we just listened to another's reasons.

On the other hand, I did find a poem I had written about the first set of flurries which came on Christmas eve, a particular year. I am surprised I can't romanticize it any more. Why am I not posting it here? It was very heavily influenced by poetry I had been reading at that time, very middle-school-Britsh-poetry-textbook written by-a-child-admiring-nature type. Very substandard. But, I did find a better one (still of the same textbook genre, I warn you), which I'll put in a future post.

Which now makes me think, that even a change in paradigm from a personal point of view can be situational. I am quite sure I hate snow, and that I hated it, because I swore at nature every morning taking the car to work. But I like the seasons in North Carolina better, so I believed, in retrospect that I really hated Indiana winters. But I found not one but three poems on winter.
It seems that every feeling seems to take an exaggerated hue when you look at it in retrospect. And a change in paradigm is more glaring.

Watering it down

What is it that Americans lack that Indians have?
That's easy...
Germs? Malaria? Poverty? Population? Dirt? No toilet paper? Cheap labor? Beggars? Cold cold....You are thinking too Third World, but think more of one of the items I just listed.
"A sense of culture (whatever that means)"? Fakirs? Snake charmers Learn Geeta in 21 Days. "It's a way of life, you dummy, It is NOT a religion"!! Naah.
Arranged marriages? Saris? Still cold.
Aha, the Taj Mahaal! Nope, Think everyday life.
Traffic? Mumbai locals? Autorickshaws? No.
Curries? Chillies? Chapatis? Spices? Chai (Real Tea)? Lauki? Oh well.

What Americans do not have is the humble red/green/blue/white/black/grey/transparent plastic bath mug.

Yesterday, I spent approximately 45 minutes on, what else, Google, and I could not find a single American store which understands the term water mug, plastic bath mug, bathing mug, plastic bath cup which translates into a plastic container with a handle, and sometimes a beak that is used with a bucket for bathing. Why did I spend a perfectly lovely Friday evening searching for this on the net? Well, all I was trying to do was submit a water saving tip to our university's water conservation website in the wake of the drought we have here in North Carolina. All I wanted to inform them is that bathing with a bucket and mug allows me to use less than 5 gallons of water per bath, and since I wanted to make it useful, I also wanted to add links to where you can buy a bucket and mug. Eventually I gave up, and just sent them a link on "How to take a Bath in half a bucket of water" (The instructions are such that I almost fell of my chair laughing...I didn't know it was such a complex task). And to top it all, I found another website, by an Australian who came up with the oh so original idea of bucket bathing, that he was featured on Australian National TV, no less.
It seems to me that in-1492-when-Columbus-crossed-the-ocean-blue, he landed in the new world with a bath tub and a shower head, and taught all the barbarious, pagan Indians that taking a bath should either feel like sitting in a swimming pool or standing out in the rain.

As for me, I have my own big white-with-grey-specks plastic bathing mug imported right from the shops of Shaniwar Peth, Pune, India, hand-delivered lovingly to me by my mother, along with the dried curry leaves and special home-ground bhaji masala.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I know about and Love hot showers and bath tubs. But I also know what it takes to have only one community municipal tap which has water coming out for one hour at any time from midnight to 5.00 am, with the holler by a neighbour "Paani aala!! (Water has come!!)". Out come the buckets and storage drums and miscellaneous utensils, for bathing water,water for the plants and drinking water respectively. We learnt to respect water.

So when my county here in the US has only 59 days store of water left, I know what to do, thank you very much.

Marryin' and Trippin'

A lot has happened since the so-called one year anniversary of the hear-and-dare blog. So here is part of what I have been up to.

Lotstodo and Phaedrus

went on the Great Indian Trip (covering 4 states and a union territory):
2 international flights
7 domestic flights (Indian + US)
3 train journeys
6 jeep journeys

and attended their and Lotstodo's sister's Great Indian Weddings, across three Indian cities:
9 pre and post wedding ceremonies
2 wedding ceremonies
4 receptions and
1 party

not to forget Lotstodo's wonderful friends in the US who threw not 1 but 2 parties for her:
1 bridal shower (Surprise!!)
1 wedding reception in the woods

And then I came back home and went to school the same day and wrote a research(!) report for my advisor. Wedding? What wedding?

And a year later...

It's been a year since my first post on April 23rd last year. An interesting coincidence is that this is my 23rd post.

Should I be nostalgic?
Should I reflect?
What didn't I know then, that I do know now?
What did I know then, that I don't know any more?
What has changed?
What hasn't?

The yellow clean room is just as intimidating.
Yet familiarity breeds contempt.
The leaps are in infinitesimal quanta.
The results are pin pricks, not resonating thumps.
The progress I think I have made may just be that: thoughts.
I think I know now why they call it the doctorate of Philosophy.

Here's to the next post. And the cabbages and kings that go with it.

Marriage musings

Forgive me, but this is a real cheat post.

So Phaedrus and I are getting married, and going back to finishing up our respective PhDs in our respective corners of the country for the next couple of years. And people ask, so when are you moving to his place after the wedding?
Me?
Why?
People haven't heard of weekend marriages it seems. Or house-husbands, or career women or gender equality ...
Ok, well, this is more like a bi -monthly both-working marriage. It's worked this far, dunno why it shouldn't after repeating some vows or circumambulating a fire ...
Plus at least for now I don't have to clean up my Mess (see earlier post). Heh heh.

Mess

My good friend Gsat suggested I put up some of my poems on my blog (well, not that she's read any other than those I put here :-) ). Considering that this blog is entirely made up of odds and ends, and also a pretty good place to fullfill narcissistic needs, I decided to post here, one of, what I believe, were my "literally" most witty poems written when I was living in an efficiency, in a not very effcient manner.....

14 – 15, March 2003

Mess

It needs a certain degree of finesse
To create the veritable perfect mess
Very few the talent possess
To create a complete havoc, no less.

Yours truly, is a master of the art
Of a cleaned place being the immediate start
For a premeditated pandemonium, as part
Of an inane effort to appear extra smart.

The smartness is evident in the reasons that abound
First, the mess helps in muffling outside sound
(No matter if the physics has basis or ground)
The abundant absorbents cause sound waves to be drowned.

My personal favorite, is the second reason,
This is ongoing cleaning for the end of the season
Or the beginning, or middle, as would please’em.
Cleaning process implies that mess will be some.

The most effective is the one of utter business.
One look is sufficient for you to guess
I am most importantly busy, yes?
No time to reorganize the mess.

Having looked at the purported cause
Let us examine the contents of chaos
Which vary from the elegant to the gross
With money-back warrantee for dropping jaws.

An acrobatic act of book and bundle
Positioned tactically to trip and stumble.
Cultivating colorful clothes to generate a jungle,
Adds a telling touch to the general jumble

Through clothes and papers, navigating your feet,
Is not really considered all that neat.
Better still would be for your derriere to meet
Miscellaneous poking objects on the seat.

It certainly provides vocal variation
Appropriate to the apportioned aggravation
As a bonus, it also creates quite a sensation,
For you and those around your station.


Print and pajamas and poky pins
Are still rather mundane things,
What really makes a mess is hidden beings
Like pet mice or snakes with molting skins

Creative chaos needs an element of surprise
This is where these hidden pets take the prize.
Guaranteed to raise people and cries.
For smaller the animal, greater the shriek size.

A distinguished looking mess is rather implausible
Without electronic storage media that is impossible
To identify or trace or give up as loss-ible.
Many orphaned disks and tapes make this possible.

A hearty havoc is beyond compare
If you add empty bottles of beer
Strewn with abandoned care,
In the path of the mess-see-er.

For the subtle hint of gory and gross
So that there is no doubt that you are the boss
You may want some mustard to tactfully toss
Or add a dash of ketchup and sauce.

The making of a monstrous mess depends
Entirely on the accumulation of odds and ends
That the seasoned mess maker with her life defends
Any rent in which she dutifully a-mends.

Thus enlightened on chaotic component
With due justice to reptile and rodent,
The art of good mess is a power potent
To manipulate alike any foe or a friend.

Should anyone complain a bit
See the scene, and throw a fit
Tell you how much they abhor it
Tell’em This is My Mess, I Adore it.

More Spring in my Step

Spring forward,
Miss a step.
Fall back,
On your Back.....

Ouch!

Back and Forth

Some dead leaves just do not want to leave
Yet, spring will not spring back their green.
Brooding over past fall follies, they grieve
Not making way for the young, yet to be seen.

Green leaves of summer, your time is spent
Brown, still clinging, what good can you do
For a bud, you are no replacement
For a tender shoot, no match are you.

Fighting the seasons, to no avail
Wanting past times of proud and tall.
Brightness fades, light always pale
Spring will always give way to Fall.

Disappear, for betters to take your place
Give way to the sun, let the birds sing
The darkest spots can still then hide an unborn face
Fall will always give way to Spring.