She seemed content, and said that we could leave now. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was a little past tea-time. It was so much earlier than I had imagined! When I woke up, I felt sure that we would have to spend the whole day on the streets, fighting off flies and touts, haggling with the shopkeepers in the bazaar, fleeing just before the first signs of nightfall. My mind was prepared for this ordeal, and my body had no choice but to play along. But now this! Thrilled at the prospect of going home early, at that moment I wondered whether I had met a finer person.

The yearning to write is something I seem to have lost over the past year, but sometimes the old spark seems to manifest itself. But these days it is different, and hardly the way it used to be. Ever so often, I read something that makes me smile, and at the same time seems to secretly whisper "You can do this too!". Whereas in the past this might have prompted a blatant imitation, it seems that things have changed these days. Firstly, now I try and wait for something to come and present itself to me. What's interesting is that when something does come up, I seem to be willing to open up a little more in the hope of creating something of more value. Items that are borne out of my own life used to be vague and completely meaningless to anyone but me. Perhaps I am compromising my unique artistic vision (haha! I still have my wit intact!) by selling-out here, but everyone wants to be a star sometimes.

Secondly, I sometimes say "You can do this too! But hang on, why would you want to, it's nonsense anyway", and go back to thinking about the depletion of melodies in our lifetime. (There's lots of good writing out there, but there is also writing that only seems good on first appearance, but then turns out to be a bit of roobish. Whether my own posts fall under this category is one for another day)

In truth, though the vague posts of old are still entertaining, even to me they serve little more than reminders of events gone by. I have started to want something a bit more though. It is not just because it would be of more interest to someone passing by - I still maintain that this blog is mainly for my ego, and thus this new style is primarily me following its wishes. What this "more" is, I'm not exactly sure - it brings to mind ideas of profound statements and observations, but I think that's a bit ambitious. Far better would be attempts to distill the whimsy of situations as they strike me, although it doesn't help that I'm not a particularly whimsical person. If I were, wouldn't this post have been a couple of lines?

The smile

It seems like everytime I see you, you find some cause for laughter. It probably isn't fair to do so, but I do end up concluding that it's something about me. Heck, strike probably - it is unfair, yet if it happens once more, well, my dear, I'm afraid I will feel all the more certain about this matter. Things almost got to this stage, you know. One night, I was thinking about all of this over dinner. I wondered whether it was to do with the fact that I never was friendly to K. I dismissed the thought, but then I started thinking about K. Why was it that I never said hello, again? My mind was wandering, and you slowly began to fade into the background. But you were making your exit as the villain, as some cruel vixen finding pleasure in whatever fault it is you saw in me. For a moment, maybe two, what I felt for you was as close to hate as one can get. Hate forged out of mere speculation, maybe, but I never claimed to be fair.

I remember sitting there forlorn and watching the door. As you came in, I began to frown. "Here we go again", I started to say. Dark clouds were building up in my head, and I almost felt irate enough to take some actual action. Fancy laughing at me, after all. It all seemed poised for a confrontation. As if I would take one of those images in my head and put them into action. Maybe if I asked you straight what was so amusing, it wouldn't seem funny anymore. No more fading into the background for me, I said, for now is the time to act.

But then you smiled. Damn, what a smile. You could dismantle an army with that.

I like stories like the one about an MP3 player for the Mac that was squashed by iTunes. I'm not particularly fond of including links without any insight or opinion accompanying it, but there isn't much to say - to say it's interesting to be reminded that there are people behind everything is not saying much at all, I feel.

"It was the moment I saw that I wasn't entirely right about her", he said. I secretly said to myself "Oh God, not one of these again...", but betrayed nothing. "For howmanyever days it has been, I suppose she was just someone who met with people from around the world, talking business and the good life", he continued, and I felt like I knew where he was going.

"There was no big revelatory moment, or anything even remotely out of the ordinary. All it was was the music playing out of the blue, and then her saying with a genuine smile "I love this song!". Moments, moments...what was it about this one? The context of the song? The song itself? I was going to say it revealed that at heart, she was a simple girl, but that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Were it something from The Sound Of Music, perhaps one could see the connection, but simplicity and perfectly genuine pop-rock? It's a bit of a stretch, even for me". He was lost in what he saw to be the poetic beauty of his own words. But how strange, I thought; how strange that something that I too have felt before should sound so out of place and irrelevant here.

"And yet, I know that I felt something there. Maybe it was that she was, after all, just your average girl trying to make it in this crazy world. No matter what it is we do, we all have our moments of vulnerability, our moments where the simple strains of music can gently blow away the unforgiving menutia of days piled on. It doesn't have to mean anything, it doesn't have to be anything special, it just connects with us on a different level altogether".

I nodded sympathetically, wondering why I saw his words and tired and devoid of the magic I knew he intended them to have. But I did agree on one thing - heck, we all need some pop-rock sometimes.

The young businessman was making quite a name for himself. It looked as though the world was opening up to him, and opportunities were everywhere. But, even though he didn't mean to, it seemed like he was growing distant from his family. He was so immersed in his work that he never seemed to have time for those close to him. Whenever they'd call, he would be busy with some meeting or the other. Or maybe he was having dinner in a scenic restuarant, with a fountain in the backdrop, either with friends or with the moonlight, now his constant companion. He meant to be there more for his family, but somehow he could never find the time. It slowly dawned on him that maybe he didn't miss them at all. Whereas once he would have been wrapped up in guilt over this, computer screens and urgent meetings had now taken their hold on him, and his guilt was slowly overshadowed by apathy.

All this changed one day when he awoke with a blocked nose, and felt as though he was burning up with fever. In that moment of helplessness, the first thing he did was reach for his phone and call his mummy.

What if there were no mirrors? I don't think I could go on without knowing who I was.

SM (Got Me Down)*

It seems so cruel whenever an idealisation is shattered. I think sometimes that I enjoy lumping people into neat little boxes. That's a terrible thing of course, but I wonder if they'd mind the way I do it. S was always the model of the typical carefree, take-it-easy lad with the perfect outlook on life. Of course, he is still that way, but now some other parts of him have surfaced. All it took was an innocuous comment, and all of a sudden I find myself writing this.

You know what I like? I like looking back at moments like this and trying to piece together my state of mind. There is nothing to speak of! The words he spoke echoed a couple of times, and thereon in it sort of fell out of mind.

If you are wondering what he did, it is nothing out of the ordinary. The only reason it is becoming the focus of this little cloud-puff is that it broke up the box that I had made for him. Almost like the moment a child throws away the present you have bought for him! It was as if his essence walked up to mine, punched it in the gut, and said "You don't know me!". (If one were to follow this up, I wonder why his essence would act so. After all, this box was known only to me, and it's not like it was a bad box. Hey, if someone put me in the box, I'd be happy!).

So what is S now? The same guy he's always been I suppose, except to me he is no longer an idealization. Shame, ain't it? Like I said, he is still that carefree-boy, and I am still me, except I now have a punch in the gut.

* Terrible title - 'tis a strange song title, which is a bit too raw for me to include here. Why this popped into my head, well I don't know.

Camera shy

I remember the day as being nondescript till the evening hit, which is unfortunate because it means that this pretty much ruined the quiet and calm that morning and afternoon had so tirelessly strived to create. I was told to go down and meet the others for an urgent meeting. I think the trouble started there. Urgent. I didn't like the sound of that, it put me under immediate stress. It wasn't just the fact that I had to go down there quickly. It was also an ominous feeling that it was something important that was awaiting us - and, in most cases, that meant someone important wanted to see us and talk to us. I never did feel comfortable with these sorts of meetings, if only because the questions that were natural to ask had no answers in my case. If one were to ask why I came here, well...the opportunity was there, and since it seemed promising, I took it. There was nothing exciting about it, and it was dry enough for me to feel as though such answers were left unspoken. Instead, I would have to try and make something up, something exciting. Even as I was making my way there, I felt some pressure building, as though I would have to come up with something truly genuine, rather than fake pleasantries that everyone could see through.

When I got there, I remember having to wait a little while. Frustration set in - I didn't like having the flow of the day being disturbed, and having to wait only made things worse. It was perhaps twenty minutes later that we were escorted outside. That was where a camera crew was lying in waiting. I saw two girls saying something to the camera, and realized that this was going to have to be me staring at the camera, espousing the exciting answers that I had come up with in the walk here.

For whatever reason, I thought that maybe there was some chance that I wouldn't have to go on camera after all. Maybe it was all voluntary, right? I actually believed this enough to ask someone. I felt some amount of surprise when I was told that no, I would have to speak. I began to feel distinctly uncomofortable, and wondered how I would pull this off. We had to wait a bit longer while they found a place that was just right. I remember hearing snippets of conversation between some of them. What I remember even more is how my pulse was steadily increasing, and their innocuous words were somehow given a dark, cruel complexion. They were far too casual to fit in - they did not explain why I was about to break into a sweat. They were not evil, and so, to set things right, I imagined that they were.

While there were others yet to go, I felt only nervousness, but at no stage was it bad enough for me to reconsider the whole thing. But, seeing two of them go in and put those mics on...ah, it's hard to explain, it was as though there was some primal fear that awoke. I could not imagine myself sitting there and going through all of this. I'd had such feelings under different situations in the past, but this time it was different. Perhaps in the past, it was for something that I knew deep down was important, or that for some reason I had to do. In this case, it was neither, and I inevitably began asking myself why I had to do this in the first place. Pure panic had set in, and as I think about it now, it does not seem too far-fetched to suggest that I would have actually fainted at the time. Well ok, maybe that's going a bit overboard.

I don't know how, but I mumbled something and walked out of there with no regrets. I don't know why, but as I did so, I wondered if I was rejecting it on the basis of principle. Maybe I didn't want to be a part of a case-study, lumped into a group in the process. It all sounded nice enough, for a minute anyway. But then I stopped and realized that this was all nonsense. I just couldn't be on camera.

"How boring. Another student doing computer science. I want something original!". But it isn't true, you see, because I'm not really like all those other people pursuing computer science. After all, hardly any of them spend their time thinking of releasing a seminal folky album, now do they?