GO GREEN!!!!

Amidst an assortment of dull grey and blue hues
( my bedsheet is white with blue tulips, so is my pillow with horizontal stripes of blue, the blue hardbound notebook i carry for french classes, my blue backpack resting unassumingly at the corner of the room, the blue mitsubishi pen i write with..., whew!!!) lands a delightfully fresh whiff of green...!

Ahem...sory!;) all this hullabaloo is about the plant i bought yesterday...i potted it in a glass bowl with white stones in it..

.............its nice to see some life thriving around you...:)

LOST N' FOUND

A greeting card with an dear ol' friend's name signed on it, an old fading photograph with you in your hilarious best, a newspaper clipping of your favorite bollywood hearthrob... how many times have you not found any of these amidst tons of personal paraphernalia when you went weekend cleaning? And ya... what about old poetry pieces... sketches...

Well i found one..when i went cleaning and sorting yesterday. A sketch of Mother Teresa rendered in oil pastels.

Checkmate!!!

Another sketch..this time its pencil colours and ball pens.:)

CHECKMATE, sounds like some pun. Its amazing how some musings urges you to take up pen and paper and set about rendering. Checkmate- Checked shirt, chess, mate, Whew!......& blue.( here it rhymes..hehe).

Foundation year saw myself struggling at human proportions. Am still the same four years down the lane. But that doesn't deter you from bringing imagination to paper..does it?

P.S Front profile grew hard for me to draw, so chose the back view..;)

Bamboo, wooden table and a window!

Well, uploading the first sketch(i hardly sketch), on my notebook,thanks to all the online watercolor tutorials.;)

This imaginative space is actually a dining area i concocted adding slender bamboo, old looking furniture and comfy cushions.hehe. A window to enjoy nature. Aru ki lagise!!! hingi maas aru narahinghor paator anjaa!!

friends r forever

The Full Split is not some acrobatic stunt that I can boast I can perform, but a small little incident with my friends - Hoikia and Turkey…they couldn’t contain their laughter and I was there clueless about what actually sent them into a laughing frenzy. What they told me was flaterring to me, so I decided that maybe full split can become my blog’s name. the ‘.com’ was added to put in a little jazz, I hope it does (wink!)


But thats a different story. What rang a bell was the thoughts that flooded my mind when I thought of laughter. How we friends used to laugh together at the drop of a hat or at the minutest minuscule speck of a joke or at the most obvious dull dry drab fact ever put across. But we had hilarious times together.. I bet.
Lemme start with me. People say I am like a tubelite, nay a ‘sarkaari tubelight’(no offence to all the govt services, they r doing their best), that requires a long time to get lit up. So next time you see me laughing alone or smiling, don’t wory I might be relishing the d- day- before-yesterday joke. O ya I will be dead( my friends would be after my life) if I do not mention the YUHU I do for a laugh..if ever I was a character in a cartoon strip, the speech bubble would never contain the usual ‘haha’ or a ‘hehe’, it would contain a ‘yuhu’!
And now that I have already jumped into the mud, I would like to bring my dear friends into it. ( disclaimer : content following isn’t copyrighted by me and the people with the copyrights would never allow me to publish this..hehe..but u see I am doing it. They wud gonna be mad at me but I love you people. Ahem! PDA!! )

O ya where was I, ya. Have you ever travelled by a deluxe bus that has become incessantly creaky and cranky…if you haven’t , save yourself a back ache and sit with Turkey..You can enjoy the creaking sounds of the bus when she laughs! Trust me.
Man, I bet not many of you have got to see Haley’s comet..sigh even we haven’t heard Hoikia laugh. Comes once in a while, you need to be attentive and on your toes to actually hear her hearty laugh..Toni is altogether on a different tangent, u actually cant hear her laugh! If you see her choking, don’t rush towards her with a glass of water , relax, she was laughing. But mind you, shes all video, no audio. And haan I miss the laughter of two of our friends, Vandy and Kanikao. Well am waitin for them to return from the city of dreams.

And now how do I end this piece on a happy note…aha..what can be better than hearty laugh..YUUHUUUU!!!! (chuckle chuckle…)

TRYST WITH TINKLE!


Some things you never grow out of.

For me, I never grew out of TINKLE, the fortnightly children’s magazine (also published in monthly digests) edited by Uncle Pai (who, I later realised was a sort of a pen name for Anant Pai). Just the other day I went through a recent issue of Tinkle. Whew, a lot of memories are attached to this colourful periodical publication.

I remember Atul Sriwardhan, V.B Halbe’s illustrations I was fond of and all the Russian, Chinese folktales that it featured. I remember anxiously waiting for the next issue of Tinkle to arrive. I even remembering bartering my tinkles for other issues I hadn’t read with my neighbourhood friends. Mind you, this ‘business transaction’ entitled that you can only have a digest if you lend 2 fortnightlies ( the cost of digest being some 25 bucks , double of that of a fortnightly)! Such understanding of economics, considering that we were 6-7 yr olds...

And now after so many years, I lie down on my bed, all cleaned up, arranged to form a cosy recline to read my favourite comic, I realise that I read it not because I love the children stories or enjoy the jokes, games etc…but because I find it as a escapade to my childhood. It’s the only living remnant of my bygone days. Every time I pick up an issue to read, I can see a small girl eagerly rushing toward her father (who had just come back from the monthly bazaar, and who had obviously purchased a tinkle on the way back) and jostling through the contents of the bazaar bag only to fish out a vertically- rolled- newspaper- wrapped tinkle. I can also see her munching snacks and relishing every story in it and simultaneously protecting it from the hands of her sister who wants to read it too.. I can see her being chided on the dining table for reading it while eating. I can even see her reading the issue over and over again, with snacks.

Things have changed a lot since then. I don’t live in the same quarters at Dispur, comics got replaced by magazines and books, and my table manners changed. I don’t read while having meals. And tinkle changed too. New illustrators, new characters and new stories, new sections, altogether a new look…Its in sync with the new generation but I kinda miss the old look.. So now every time I go to the Sunday market( an amazing plethora of odds and ends and old books) here at Ahmedabad, I make it a point to buy an old issue of Tinkle. I just love the paper quality, texture, illustrations, stories, folktales, u name it.

My tryst with Tinkle was an engaging one. One of our ( me and my sis) stories, The Boat Race, also got published in Tinkle ( for which one fine day the friendly postman delivered us a postal order of two hundred rupees) We were kids and rich!! J All the way during my reading years, kept contributing stories, participated in competitions which brought in Tinkle Digests, Tinkle labels, stickers, rejection letters with a copy of Amar Chitra Katha as gifts.

I still have those…and when I go through them at home, I can still see the little girl…

here it goes..

INTERN BLUES
DATED 6TH OF MAY, 2009

Well these days I have been deeply contemplating, reminiscing, pondering (n whatever on earth are the synonyms for ‘thinking’, I have been doing them all) on the things I (or maybe we) generally take for granted.

Check this out.
You get up in the morning drudgingly… only to be received by a hot cup of tea (we assamese are generally fond of tea), or coffee or milk (in case you do not like any of the caffeine dosed beverages) made lovingly by your mom. You are not even blinking your half closed eyes when from nowhere ( your dad just passed it on) your newspaper lands on your lap, and there you are sitting gobbling down breakfast while checking out steamy headlines or chilly cartoon strips. Whew like that was not enough, you are stuck to the idiot box and suddenly its lunch time..hehe..Heavenly rotis, parathas, sumptuous rice, enticing dal, delicious curry, lovely dahi ( you will know later why I have used such lucrative adjectives for these day to day dishes, or so you say) are served before you. Well you hadn’t even digested the afternoon course when the aroma from the kitchen finds way your nose. Its dinner time!!! Oh I forgot to mention the evening snacks you grabbed before dinner..sigh DON’T WE LIVE TO EAT!!!!.. I sure did when I was at home. When I was in the cosy cocoon of my parents, my sis. When I was amidst them…

Now I am here, away from my parents, surviving...or maybe it is intern blues…all by myself. My friends have gone back home, faculty is far away and cant hang around always with the rest of the senior inmates. Sigh in short I have no one except myself for company, no wonder I even am finding time to write this piece infact. And so you see, such aforesaid (lucratively described) mundane things we always took for granted have suddenly assumed mammoth proportions and dimensions ( excuse me I may be exaggerating) . I keep thinking about the next meal, what I am going to eat, how will I procure it, will it be healthy, will it make taller, sharper, stronger, etc etc… sigh now its why do we need to eat to live! No longer anything lands on my lap… I have to myself rush after it, sweat it out , grab it by the hairs end and then place it on my lap. Whew! I am doing it. complaining, huffing puffing. But ya all this has made me grateful to all the things I have in life. Loved ones to even the people I pass an occasional smile to, morning cup of chai to the dessert at dinner, dogs that I am scared of to the books I love, the four walled room I live to the tree laden pigeon path, the global warming effect to the water I am drinking…wait wait where am I drifting to..I was accounting the things I am grateful for but I guess there are to many to list and to varied to even to start sorting them..

Well my eyes are watering..hehe..so please excuse this sleepy soul. Oh ya..i wil be praying today..thank you God for all that you have given me..Amen.




(P.S a special thanks to Vasu aka Vasanthi Velluri whose soft proding and nudging made me type this all through the night till 1 am. God knows why I did this.hehe.)