The song of death

The love that defeats is your soul,
is no love at all
When he sees a monster in your face
while you look for God in him.
True love uplifts, and if it is,
God! give me the courage to withstand my pain
While my blood drains and life slips
Like sand from my palms.
How easy it would be for him to be compassionate
But alas! That door is closed and he is altogether a new man
You are but a bad memory,
While he is now your unquestioned reality.
Sorrow is here to stay.
God! Give me the strength to cup my heart
When it bleeds
God! Give me the strength to feel some warmth
when it freezes
God! please help me throw away this razor blade
when it comes calling.

People say Hi!!!

 Time: The day of my arrival in the US

 Place: Providence, RI

I was walking down the Brown street from the Kenowers' to J Walter Wilson Suit. I was trying to look inconspicuous and attract no attention what so ever..but I was also curious to see how people were reacting to my presence. Had my presence warped the American space continuum? Was it apparent that I was from another country and that it was my first day here? Was I already breaking a law by the way I was walking or by the way I was dressed?

"Hello"

 I stopped in my tracks. The women who had briskly walked by me had addressed me! She said "hello". Did she know me? I turned back to look at her but she had already walked past inundating me in a perfume flood left in her wake.

I had at least three "hello"s and two "good mornings" that day. Now I score at least ten each day. Let me tell you this straight away.. this doesn't happen in India. I mean, Gandhi would have been proud to live in Rhode Island. A piece of urban United States still retained the charm to exchange common courtesy's to total strangers?!!

That's not what I had heard in India. All the time watching Sex and the City, Friends or the Simpson's hadn't prepared me for this.

 I thank you Rhode Island, for this one small gesture of kindness made me feel more welcome in America than all the days of my Grad school orientation (and free food) put together. (^_^) 

On and Off

  America is run by technology... and to really understand this, you should see it from the point of view of an outsider - preferably someone from a third world country.
At my home, everyday, I would wake up to see my mother (who always wakes up an hour ahead of me) boiling water and then carrying the very hot tumbler to her bathroom. We didn't have a geyser and it was her way of having a hot bath in the morning. It wasn't that we were poor (we weren't rich but could definitely have afforded a heater if we wanted to) but it was that it seemed like an unnecessary luxury in tropical Kerala to take hot water baths; let alone have a current consuming device to heat water. But then, for some inexplicable reason, for the past few years the mornings have been very chilly (blame it on global warming) and my mom's arthritis did not help things much.
 Every home here has hot water. You turn the knob this way and you get hot water, the other way is cold water. The difference comes only in the accuracy with which you can tune the knob to give the temperature of your preference. Better homes have better knobs, poor homes have poor knobs. In fact in three weeks this has become so common to me that I feel stupid just mentioning it. Does anybody share my wonder? I guess if you were the kind to feel dazzled by just hot water, then you wouldn't be reading this in the first place - internet is more common that hot water. Correction: high speed internet is more common than hot water!
 The second thing that immediately struck me was that expect for lights there are no on/off switches anywhere.
To indians: Remember how we usually have a whole switch board occupying a sizable fraction of the wall with switches that you could on or off ?
To Americans: switches ( not the nipple kind of things that you have jutting out of the walls here but ..oh! how do you explain it? look up in the net..) are things that are used to close electric circuits.
  The difference is that I even had switches for the power sockets at home. Here you can plug something into a power socket and from an Indian point of view (!) it is always on. you simply turn the TV on/off or the microwave on/off. But if you put a fork into the socket, you'll definitely get a shock. In india, i would switch off the socket itself. Sounds weird? It does to me too...
This makes a lot of sense .. why waste wall space with unnecessary switches and switchboards? Things like TVs and DVD players come with their own on/off switches, what difference does it make to add another layer of protection to this? I remember that when my neighbours' house burned down, the fire started from a short circuit inside a switchboard.

Wouldn't have happened in America, heh?
  

Let's be realistic...

  In nominae patri, et filli, et spiritus sancti  Amen!

 Before anybody gets the idea that I am a devout catholic, let me make it very clear that I am a rather devout hindu. I was born a hindu, and like all people, there was a time when I gave up God ( when I discovered reason or simply science) and then came to it once again (when I discovered the limitations of rationality). A couple of years ago, there was this Simpson's episode where Bart is forced to go to a catholic school and when he comes back home Marge asks him to say grace before supper. Now, instead of the usual "Thank's for the microwave bounty" (Haha) or "Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub" (double Haha); Bart goes : "In nominae patri, et filli, et spiritus sancti. Amen!"

      It was latin and it was lovely. I learned it by heart. Though I enjoy the language and the diction more than the content, I really-sheally wish that the almighty God, his son and the holy ghost would bless me. Not this blog (!!) but simply me.

  Knowing me there is very little chance that I would be writing a lot ... there is even less chance that anyone would read it. I could post the URL in my facebook profile and get some of my friends to come to the page just so that they can see what I am upto (I could be more cryptic and say something like "Watch out y'all...find out who's gay" .. and get nearly everyone to read it)

       But let's be honest, What are the chances of that happening? Millions of blogs get written each day. Even if there are a million new people coming up to to read blogs, I don't think that's plain enough. There are just too many blogs. That's not to say that I wouldn't like people to read it... "VV the new blog star"..sound good..it definitely does. But it ain't gonna happen.

Then why am I doing it?

Because, very bluntly put, I don't have anything else to do now. I am a young Indian in a new country - just a few weeks old - not even sure how to use toilet paper (despite the overwhelming "How to.." videos in it there is no toilet paper tutorial in Youtube!!).
 Days go in classes and doing a couple of things here and there simply so that I move my legs and feel important. Evenings are usually spent wondering about the day and drinking beer.

 But then there is the night.

I know the night even before the sun puts off the light - it descends like a Dementor (read Harry Potter)  and you can feel the icy cold tentacles of a strange emotion wrapping around your heart - Like slowly settling dust through the cone of dancing summer light from an open window- you can feel it materialize; taking hold of you - and the day's happiness vanishes - evaporating like the morning dew until the trauma ends in blissful sleep. I know this emotion - had it before - but never felt it this strong in many years.

But then the day breaks again - all happiness and my bright and shiny future lies unfolded in front of me. Joy to the world! Joy to the Lord!

I write as a a therapy so that I can smoke out the demons inside of me. And then I also write to make fun of America and American's. I am discovering America - one day at a time. I am judging them sitting in a corner of providence, Rhode Island, near interstate I 95.  But I am  racing to be one of them and so I thought, why not write about these discoveries now, when they are fresh in my mind? Later, when I am thoroughly Americanized (white washed, a reverse racist friend put it the other day), I don't think I'll have the heart to mock my country (America? India?)

This Blog is my mind! Like my mind, it is always open to others - to read, to write, to tamper with and pretty much everything else except to live in it.

But lets be realistic. Who would wanna read my Mind ???