The zzzz-factor

I have a strong history with sleep. I can sleep through anything- power outages, rock concerts, nightmares, loud wedding music, ringing phones, earthquakes, heartbreaks, neighbors audibly performing their procreation duties, plane takeoffs, anything. Doesn't mean I sleep all day, just that when I got to sleep, I got to sleep. This is the biggest reason I do not go for evening movie shows. I have slept through 300, and I have slept through Harry Potter (the only exception being Dilwale, it was so bad, I could just not fall asleep). People complain of being unable to sleep in flights, but I often doze off even before the plane has taken off. There are few occasions when I have actually had trouble falling asleep. Those are handful, and I clearly remember most of them.

But today, I set a new record. People who know me well also know my frequent tryst with the dentist, and how often I have been visiting one (actually, two) for the past year. This smile does come at a huge maintenance cost. I am mortally afraid of dentists. Who isn't? However, I fell asleep at the dentist's today, in the middle of another procedure. I am recovering from jet lag and it was my sleep time in Kolkata. So sometime while lying on my back, blankly staring at the blinding lights and listening to the music of a drilling machine with my jaws propped open like an alligator's, I fell asleep. This is so unbelievable, it's not even funny. It's a different story that I'm sleepless now. The anesthesia has worn off. Forget sleep, I am close to forgetting my baaper naam (father's name) right now.

sunshine

Reading the reader

I have never looked at my email more eagerly, waiting for the readers to speak up. And they did. Not as many as I would have hoped, my hope being hundreds. But many spoke out their hearts, making me go “awwwww”. Here are some highlights.

1. Most of you have been reading my writings for more than five years, some close to ten years. I can see how just like reading, reading someone can become a habit.

2. My only disappoint is, so many of you blatantly admitted that you read but never share my writings. Do share. Writing becomes a lot more fun when there are more readers.

3.  A heart-melting moment.

“[I was] worried when you didn’t write for 6 months or so. I secretly prayed that you are alright wherever you are.”

I never knew I had well-wishers I never knew about. J In 2016, I made a resolution to write more regularly. My blog was slowly dying, and I was constantly forgetting the little things that inspired me. So now, I trying to write at least a few times every week.

4. What do you not like about this blog?

“Chappals on the header!” someone said. 

I laughed and laughed and died laughing. I left them there because those are my favorite pair of shoes. I still wear them. It also gave me a feeling akin to taking your shoes off when you enter someone’s house, the blog metaphorically being my home.

5. Looks like my grandma stories are a hit!

6. Someone asked me a question which was very thoughtful.

“In a world without work visa issues, what would you be doing and where?”

I absolutely love this question. I have often contemplated about this myself. I’d love to write a post about it very soon. Thank you for asking me such a nice question.

7. “If we end up at same city some day, I would like to meet you.”

Me too. And given how much I travel, that could be sooner than you anticipate. J

8. “How do you manage writing this frequently with all the work and travel you do!!”

I even write in Bangla. Just not here. Maybe I should start posting some of those here. I have actually started enjoying writing in Bangla even more than English.

9. “Don't you miss companionship (like a romantic partner/husband/boyfriend)?” 

I have plenty of companionship. I know more people than I can comfortably handle. Not everything gets posted on the blog, so it is easier to develop a uni-dimensional view about the writer.

10. “Real name?”

sunshine, with a lower case s.

I’d really love it if you shared my writings more, especially because I am going to transition very soon and start writing more career-related posts. And do fill out the form if you haven’t. The link will always be on the right hand side. I have even included a “follow by email” and “contact form” option recently, so that it is easier to stay in touch.

Regarding the chappal/shoes, let me think some more. 

sunshine

Knowing my readers

My life is an open blog. However, I do not know most of my readers. I often check my blog stats that show interesting trends. Let me share some:

1. I have the highest number of readers from the US, followed by India and Germany. Given the huge population of India, I would have suspected India.

2. My most popular article is a one-paragraph review I wrote about the book: The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. 

3. This month, I had audiences from Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, and Japan. I have no idea who they are.

4. One of the topmost things people are looking for when they land up on my blog is, "green vein on legs."

I would love to know more about who you are. So please take some time to fill out this form (link also on the right hand side of this page). All responses are optional, confidential, and anonymous. You also get to ask me one question in the survey, although I do not promise to reply. :) 

Thank you,

sunshine

Tooth and nail

I am not miserly at all. As long as I do not have to borrow from someone, and still save something for the rainy day, I believe in living well, eating well, and traveling well. I will not put myself through discomfort to save a few bucks, or not do something I really want to do just because it costs money. 

However, a tube of toothpaste completely changes my personality. Every morning since last week, I see myself vehemently squeezing it with all my strength to get that extra bit out before I have to trash the tube. I even have a new tube handy, but I can't let go of this one. My hands hurt, my nails break, but every tiny squeeze I get out of that tube feels like victory. 

Sometimes, I don't really understand myself.

sunshine

Hoping for more

The coming year(s), I hope that I find more feeds of travel, road trips, and recommendations of good books and movies. Because between books, movies, and being on the road, I could spend most of my time.

I hope for less whining and negativity, and more informative, reflective, and uplifting posts. The weather is bad. The neighbor is bad. Politicians are bad. The advisor is bad. Dilwale is bad (Okay, Dilwale WAS bad!). The roads are bad. Surely, everything cannot be bad all the time. Something good is happening somewhere, right?

I hope for more travel experiences, in newer countries and continents.

I hope for better dental health for myself. I fought tooth and nail to avoid two back-to-back root canals in one Calcutta trip. This smile you see every day comes at a huge cost.

I hope for more, and better friends. And to continue to hold on to the ones I already have. The older I am getting, the more I crave for interesting company, and interesting discussions over a cup of coffee.

I hope for discovering a new hobby, and learning a new skill. Or many new skills.

I hope for more peer-reviewed publications. I have had my fill of "I am sorry to let you know ..." emails.

I hope to get much better in German. I still struggle to understand, and be understood every day.

I hope to continue to stay away from the cellphone. 

And most importantly, my ardent wish is to get more disciplined in writing. I have so many aborted writing projects sitting at my desk right now, for lack of discipline and a person to kick my butt and get them done.

sunshine

Top up

This is a post especially for my friend G, my host in Seattle when I moved, the person who helped me transition to a new country.

Back in those days when I had recently moved to the US, I was clueless about many things. I didn’t know how to say my quesadillas and fajitas right. I used to be so confused while ordering food. I used to frequent “Cold Storage Creamery” with G (It is Cold Stone Creamery). And then of course there were these fashion faux pas I used to make. G is a shopaholic while I used to accompany her to these shopping malls with wide-eyed wonder.

It was during one such excursion that I had picked up a fancy skirt that looked smart and chic, a nice and solid color, something that I might consider buying. So I had asked G to accompany me to the fitting room and opine. When I had come out of the fitting room wearing the skirt, she could not stop laughing.

It seemed like it was not a skirt in the first place, it was a tube top.

My embarrassment had known no bounds then.

For the next few years, G used to refer to that episode, indicating my dehatiness as a fresh off the boat, adding her own salt and pepper and spices in the process. Talking of salt and pepper, her other favorite joke was how I had messed up my soup at someone’s place because I had no idea how to use a pepper mill. That will be a post for another day.

Everything we do in life comes full circle.

A few days ago, I was at the shopping mall again, buying clothes for my upcoming trip to the beach. I looked at a rather fancy looking tube top, turquoise in color, really pretty, something you know you want the moment you set your eyes on it. However, I had my doubts, since it was there in the skirt section. I asked the attendant and she did confirm that it was a skirt. Nevertheless, I decided to try it out.

In the fitting room, I tried it as a skirt, and decided that it does not look that fancy after all. It looked way better as a tube dress, knee-length, showing off my collar bones. It was too long and unattractive as a skirt. So I thought, screw it. So what if it is a conservative long skirt, I will wear it as a tube dress and flaunt some skin.

And then, I remembered the episode all those years ago when G had laughed at my naivete. G, I have come a long way from that day all those years ago. Not only can I shop for myself without help now, I also decide what I wear as what J

sunshine

The Big Three Ohhh !!!

You would foresee it years in advance, coming at its own slow pace like an ominous red signal prepping to stop everything fun in your life. Like a morbid, fear instigating animal sprawled on its limbs, slowly crawling and showing its claws and tentacles from a distance, you will never be more aware or petrified of something approaching. It should not be a big deal after all, it’s just another birthday. But then, it ends up being a big deal. In a way, it’s a milestone reached and crossed, a milestone after which you are no longer considered in the bracket of energetic, enthusiastic, eligible, and highly coveted age group that you call the twenties.

They say you do not hit thirty, thirty hits you. Whoever this “they” is, they could not be closer to the truth. Like a whack of reality on the head, it hits you hard. So what changes so drastically in that one day? Everything actually. You go to sleep being 29, and then you wake up the next morning not really knowing what hit your life and changed it forever. That is called turning 30.

I have been dreading this birthday even before I was 27. Call it social programming, cultural upbringing, whatever. It feels nothing close to the energetic Jitendra, white shirt, white pants, white shoes and all, gyrating his hips while playing badminton and popping those “30 plus” pills by the dozen. When I was a teenager, anyone 30 years old was just OLD. Plain and simple. When I was in my mid-twenties, I would not even look at anyone 30 years or older. Little did I know how I would feel while I approached that age.

The interesting irony is, I do not ever remember being so petrified of entering the twenties. Heck, I do not even remember my 20^th birthday. Back calculating, I know I was in Kolkata, somewhere at the fag end of my undergraduate education. However, I do not specifically remember the 20^th birthday as being a big deal or a milestone. If anything, I was happy to be done with my teens, and hoped I would be henceforth taken seriously and not be dismissed from adult conversations and asked to go entertain the kids of uncles and aunties who visited us.

So how would it feel like being 30? I thought I have two more months to find out, but I think I know the answer already. You have perhaps never been more aware of your bones creaking every time you try to shake your hips to the beats of Beedi Jalaile at a dance party. There are imminent health issues and you have suddenly entered the “more at risk” category. The acne and oily skin nightmares of the twenties are replaced now by the wrinkles and white hair nightmares of the thirties. In fact, you would be lucky to have whitening hair, which means you still have hair on your head to boast about. Some unfortunates with receding hairlines and balding issues will not even get a chance to color their hair.

99% of your friends are married by now, and you cannot relate to 99% of them. The career and job-hunting uncertainties of the twenties are now replaced by “mother-in-law is a pain in the ass” issues, “my husband never throws the trash” issues, or “the child needs to be reared well” issues. Your friends discuss alien topics animatedly, alien to you at least, which include, but are not restricted to paying off mortgages for that house, getting a citizenship, or investing in the college education of the child who is yet to be born in 3 months. Although you are in the age bracket eligible to be the president of the United States, you realize dishearteningly that you were never bright enough to be the President of any country, not in this lifetime anyway. It is a big accomplishment training the domestic partner to vacuum the house bi-monthly, let alone having big aspirations for changing the world. A moment of truth, faced with certain stark realities, you realize you have grown more respectful towards your parents, whose opinions never mattered to you before this.

Your worst nightmare is no longer related to maintaining a perfect figure, you are long past that age when you could even hope for a presentable figure. Now, you are worried about sagging bellies and mammary glands, dysfunctional hormones, plummeting sex drives, approaching menopausal issues, and imminent health issues like cholesterol, blood pressure, and cancer. You hear horror stories about someone’s colleague’s relative who died of a heart attack on his 32^nd birthday in the process of cutting the cake. Blowing 32 candles with gusto just proved to be fatal for him. Going to the gym is no longer optional, it is the only option you have if you do not want to die like that colleague’s relative. Every time you try to sit, stand, or start fantasizing about running that half-marathon, your knees make a funny sound, mocking you. Your biological clock is not longer just ticking tick tock, it has gone berserk like the shrieking alarm that wakes you from your sweet slumber every morning. You are no longer a badass hiking the rocks of Badlands in South Dakota on the weekend. You are a well-settled, domesticated member of the species with a family to shoulder the responsibility for. Accept it, you are no longer the lion or even the wolf of the jungle, hunting singularly and living singly with pride. You are now a cow, a big, fat cow that only mingles with other cows and chews cud with other cows in herds. Your belligerent personality is gone. The mountain bike has been replaced by a family size SUV, strollers and diaper bags and all. You are found spending the once adventurous weekends (when you hiked 20 miles or had 20 straight tequila shots in a row without falling sick) at the farmer’s market or at Chuck E. Cheese.

To avoid complications, repercussions, and outcries, I will keep this as gender neutral as I can, which will still not dissolve the bleak clouds of possibilities the gates of thirties open for you. You can hate me for this post, or make strong arguments, which will only establish your lack of humor, or lack of understanding of humor as you approach your thirties. And it’s not only the lack of humor. You are slowly approaching that age of hormonal lull, and these days you can fall asleep, snoring and drooling and all, even in the middle of watching porn. You are more philosophical, sedentary, hang out in packs or herds of other people similar to you, and while you spent the previous decade being a party animal dancing away to glory high on alcohol, you feel more at peace singing bhajans and devotional songs in “satsangs” and learning the art of living (pun unintended), breathing in through one nostril and out through the other, to keep expectations low, anger in control, and to adopt pain, suffering, and the lack of materialistic greed as a means to obtain nirvana in life.

I can imagine how many people I have pissed off with this post. You would argue saying, “Hey, they say 30s is the new 20s”. Whoever these “they” are, they are a bunch of morons who either failed their math class or made a life out of bullshitting. 30s can never be the new 20s, you learnt your math way back in elementary school. If anything, thirty would always be forty minus ten. So if you are an optimist like I am, your only consolation is you are not turning 40 right away, an impending doomsday that would be approaching in a decade anyway if the world doesn’t lose you to heart attacks or high cholesterol. Although I would rather be in my twenties than in my thirties, I would any day be in my thirties than be in my forties. So I’ll stop inviting the same feeling of helplessness that I get when a dentist comes near my mouth with an injection, his assistant strapping my limbs so that there is no escape and I bear my pain and torture in silence, and stop resisting something that is so inevitable. I will try to stop mentally resisting turning thirty. For I have a few more months left to cherish the last bits and pieces of my twenties, or whatever remains of it.

sunshine

Misusing Music

Try saying “misusing music” a couple of times until your tongue twists and twirls. Coming back to the topic, why do I always do it to myself? It happens every time. I come across some random, unknown song in a friend’s car, on the radio, during random youtubing, or through any random source. I like it instantly, so much that I look it up and don’t stop to rest till I find it. I download it on my laptop and in my music player. Then the fun begins.

For the next 2 weeks or so, I am found listening to that song in a loop every waking hour. If I am in the lab pretending to work, I put my headphones on and continue listening to it. During those 3 hour long classes, I keep playing it in my head. I sing it in the bathroom. I eagerly wait for class to get over so that I can come back to my lab and start listening to it again. It’s time to go home, and during those 15 minutes when I walk or take the bus, I wait impatiently to get back home. I reach home, kick off my shoes, head upstairs without even saying so much as a hi to my roomies (letting them think that something as urgent as restroom deadlines have come up). I go straight up to my room, start my laptop, and listen to it a few more times. Then I go down, say a hi to my roomies, grab dinner, and I am back to my room listening. I listen to it till I am sleepy, I listen to it one last time before I doze off, and when I wake up the next morning, I make sure that I start my day listening to that song. And the cycle continues. Me and my latest favorite song are inseparable now. I miss it when I don’t listen to it. I play it in my head and experience something as divine as a turn on, impatient to start listening to it again. I stop socializing and working in public places if I am not with my laptop and headphones. I dream of every good looking man I have ever known singing it to me. I even dream of it when I am sleeping.

If you think I am showing visible signs of incipient lunacy, hold on. I need to tell you more. After about 2 weeks or so, I experience a phenomenon somewhat familiar to a post-marital disengagement (assuming I was married to my song all this while). I begin to feel a negative overwhelming of my senses whenever I listen to it. I no longer miss the song. By now, I know every word, every syllable, and every note of the song. You can start the song for a millisecond and I will recognize it instantly. Soon my apathy turns to antipathy. I can no longer stand the song. My problem has almost become psychosomatic. Play it once more and you will see me wincing in pain with a distorted facial expression, both my hands covering my ears or clutching on to my chest. I know I have reached the point where if I listened to it once more, I would throw up, fall sick, or even have a cardiac arrest. I am happy not listening to it for the rest of my life. And this is how it ends.

There was a time not many months ago when I used to only listen to “Only Hope” (Switchfoot). I had a 3 hour wait for my connecting flight at the Atlanta airport, and no prizes for guessing what I did those 3 hours. I once loved “Mast Mast Do Nain” (Dabangg) as if my heart would beat to its rhythm. Then there was “Rabba” from “Main Aurr Mrs. Khanna” and “Zara Sa” from Jannat. Not to mention “Aashiq Banaya Aapne” years ago from the movie with the same name. And “Tujhe Bhula Diya” from Anjaana Anjaani. I can no longer tolerate listening to these songs. I will seriously have a mental breakdown if you played it. Because these days, all I am listening to is “Aasma Jhuk Gaya” from “Kal Kissne Dekha”. I did not even know of the movie until the last 2 days. I heard the song on one of the hindi radio channels (Radio Teen Taal probably) while doing statistics homework, and suddenly my senses were all alert. I quickly wrote down the first few lines and looked it up. Some moron had posted it on Youtube claiming it to be a song from Love Aajkal. If this was from Love Aajkal, I wouldn’t have waited for 2 years before discovering it. I tried all possible word combinations and eventually found my song. I knew the familiar feeling creeping up as I hunted down the song, a feeling of impatience while I tried finding it. Eventually I found it, it is apparently from a flop movie that did so badly that it was taken off the theaters after 3 weeks. No wonder I never heard of it. But this song stands out like the proverbial lotus in the mud (Keechad mein Kamal). I feel sad knowing the ultimate fate of this nice song in 2 weeks when I would not be able to bear it anymore. But for the last 2 days, it has been a blissful life. Akshay Kumar has sung this song to me in my imagination a thousand times now while we were shooting for a movie in Spain. I have woken up and slept listening to this song in a loop. I have obsessed with this song, not listening to a single more song. 2 more weeks I know, and then this song would be gone, along with Akshay Kumar and my imaginary shooting location in Spain. Sighs !!

sunshine

Humor Me

Someone asked me the other day about the kind of emotion I associate best with. I gave it quite some thought, and realized that humor is what suits me the best. Genre of humor- elements of wit, sarcasm, puns, satire, banter, irony, and wisecracks are what I like the best. Be it in my readings or in my writings, I love to get multiple meanings out of a word or phrase. I love to observe people and situations and look for humor even in the most challenging situations. There is this person inside me that loves to kibitz non-stop, with playful banters hurled at me and the people around me. Among the stuff I read, I love those that bring out a cruel, yet realistic portrayal of the nature of the humankind or that of society and circumstances. Even during dealing with personal crises, I have realized that finding the humor in the situation takes the load off it. Be it dealing with heartbreaks or dealing with abusive relationships, be it difficult employers or non-accommodating neighbors, there is only so much humor you can find in every situation gone wrong, every bus missed when in hurry, every professing-undying-love man gone astray, every movie ill-directed, every science project gone haywire, every nosy neighbor asking you about your love life, every moment spent in uncertainty, and every rejection faced in life. Like they say, it’s easier to be serious, but difficult to be humorous. Needless to say, a good sense of humor is a big turn on, not the cheesy, slapstick, eager-to-impress kind, but the one that reflects depth of thoughts and observation. It makes dealing with hardships easier. It is therapeutic. Word play and turning words to ones advantage is the weapon of the intelligent and the cogent. So the next time you read a post making fun of people, situations, or even me, you know where I am coming from.

Let me know the next time you read a book, see a movie, or face a situation that has my kind of humor in it.

sunshine

White Space

I gifted myself a white board on my birthday- a pristine white space measuring 4 feet by 3 feet. I even threw in five marker pens of different colors and an eraser. And I have never been happier. For ever since, I have been scribbling and scribbling. Now, I have someplace to scribble my thoughts, my anguish, my dreams, my little achievements, and my confusions, make lists- grocery lists, hate lists, to-do lists, lists of blogs to write, movies to watch, even a list of my dreams. It is amazing how simple things look when you put them down in writing. Every day after I am back from work, I am all enthused, scribbling whatever comes to my mind. It is therapeutic. It helps me in cogent thinking. It brings me innate happiness. And all this at a very affordable price. I am glad that after two damaged shipments from an online shopping website, all returned, I finally found more than what I wanted in one of the offices of downtown. And the writer in me is scribbling ever since. I just wish a little bit of patience and wait gave me everything that I wished for thus.

It is amazing how little things in life bring you such great joy. Even a little rectangle of white space that symbolizes my personal space, creativity, and freedom of thoughts.

sunshine

Home Truths

Of the many obsessions I am blessed with, this is one of them. I know, the word shopping is usually associated with women, and as a decently earning woman of the capitalistic society, one would expect me to be involved in frequent shopping sprees. But I associate shopping for dresses, jewelry, perfumes, etc. with oodles of indecision and discomfort, not quite interested in spending all the time and energy deciding what to buy, and then what to buy next that goes with the first one, and so on. Seems weird, but I once went shopping with 3 other men, and when we were done, all 3 emerged with packets and bags in both hands while all I carried was a soda can in my hand. In fact mornings are bad times for me because I might as well sleep the few minutes I spend deciding on what to wear for the day. Frankly I could wear my pair of jeans and a tee shirt for days, but then the questioning glances I get are disconcerting, to say the least. Waiting for the bus, I have envied doctors who can prance around in their scrubs and not worry about what they were wearing underneath. I am one of those people who support the concept of uniforms, just because it requires too much thought and effort to be un-uniform, to decide what to wear each day, and then decide on the accessories, the shoes, the bags, the nail polish, and the ear rings that go with it. But then again, I digress here.

I am into a different kind of shopping, a kind that barely requires any money. I am addicted to this site craigslist.org to the extent that I spent quite some time everyday browsing through stuff there. My obsession in particular lies in looking for houses and apartments, although I am very well settled in my current coordinates and do not wish to subject myself to the hassles of changing houses unless I am moving out of the city. So what? It is so much fun looking at the different houses on rent, the locations they are in, their rent, the lighting, the doors and windows, the décor. I derive an immense amount of vicarious pleasure going through the house ads, wishing I lived by the lake or lived in that house overlooking downtown. Well wishers have often commented on the lunacy of the situation. But then, if people can spend hours in a shop looking for a particular shade of orange they are rarely going to wear, what is the big deal about seeing houses I won’t live in? I think this habit stems back from childhood when those expensive, glossy paged Inside Outside magazines dad brought home featured the homes of the affluent. While owning and maintaining a home like that needed time, money, taste, and a lot of other things, sifting through them required almost nothing. And now that is what I do, sift through these homes in the city just for kicks. One good thing about this is that I have a fairly good idea about the cost of renting apartments- studios, one or multi bedrooms, and am aware of the nuances that will make you pay extra- an apartment close to the freeway, an apartment overlooking the bay, and stuff like that. I cannot comfortably get into discussions with people regarding the people running for presidential candidacy, but I can confidently act as a home finding consultant in reasonably any part of the city.

Weird habit, I know, but a pleasurable 30 minutes for me everyday nonetheless.

sunshine

Body Of Knowledge

I experience what I think as, for lack of a better word, an obsession about knowing my body inside out. And I am not talking about the basic details like the number of bones that help me walk or keeping track of the number of milk teeth that went missing due to dental carries. I am referring to the very minuscule and the not so important details, like the individual functioning of my cranial nerves, my tactile skills, the percentage by which my lungs decrease in capacity every time I exert myself, or the angle that my tibia bone makes with the tarsal bones.

I think this obsession has taken wings ever since I got into the habit of roaming aimlessly around the corridors of my department. For I keep running into flyers describing weird studies where they need volunteers. And instead of bullshitting that I participate in these studies because they give me free goodies or pocket money, or because I have the cause of furthering science and research as a noble interest, let me tell you the truth. I volunteer for these studies because I am very keen to know about those silly and unnecessary details of my body.

Like yesterday I found out that I belong to the 20% category of humans whose middle finger will not twitch even if you passed electricity through it. Now what was that supposed to mean? I read about a study where people tie you up to a chair (okay, not really) put electrodes around your hand, and pass electricity through your hands to see your fingers twitch and thereby measure muscle fatigue. Now any sane, rational human being would have stayed miles away from this study. But like the usual me, I had to express keen interest in the noble cause of furthering science and research, and had to volunteer. The very next moment, I see a heavyset, dark man sticking electrodes around my hands. And instead of screaming murder and running away, I find myself staring with fascination into my fingers to see them twitch. Ironically, they kept increasing the current till every finger in my hand was twitching. But this heavy middle finger totally refused to move even a nanometer. Ultimately, I was discarded from the study. But at least I know now that I belong to those 1 in 5 people who cannot make a career out of being a middle finger twitching volunteer.

This is not an isolated incident of craziness. While people tell me that they love their bodies and thus keep themselves away from all these weird studies, I have participated in things like this before. There was a study where all I had to do was blow air out of my lungs as fast and as deep as I could. They were measuring the forced expiratory volume of the lungs or something. So for one whole hour, I kept taking deep breaths and blowing myself out like a balloon every 3 minutes while they plotted how much my lung efficiency decreased over time. Don’t ask me what’s the big deal in that. Now I can add this useful piece of information in my resume, that my lungs had an average of a 10% reduction in blowing capacity after blowing out air for an hour or so. If nothing, I can even make a living out of selling balloons.

Then, I have let dentists pour water on my tooth to see how sensitive they are to change in temperature. I have participated in studies to find out what angle my feet bones make with the tibia. I have found out that one of my cranial nerves, called the vagus nerve is weak in nature, hence I might faint if I ever push too hard. I have learnt that there is something a little weird in my parasympathetic nervous system. And I have answered all kinds of weird interview questions for studies. I once remember how the lady asked me on the phone if I have been sexually active for the last 3 months for a study on caffeine intake and migraine that she was conducting. I proudly tell her that no, I am an Indian woman with oddles of cultural values and all that, and no, no alcohol, beef, or sex for me, thank you. The next moment, she tells me that I am not eligible for the study and hangs up. So much for celibacy !

I am sure you have your own little obsession stories, of things you like to do that would otherwise be considered inappropriate or unnecessary by most standards. And that is why even though we all have 206 bones and 12 cranial nerves and 33 vertebrae, we are all so different.

sunshine

The Dark (and soporific) (K)night

I write this post in a moment of great danger to the genre of idiosyncratic people like me, and as my friend Ali puts it, in a moment of great shame to mankind in general. He thinks that in performing the very act that makes me type this post, I bring utter shame, disgrace, and humiliation to humankind. It is a shame in the name of friendship, and the ritual of watching movies together that forms the basis of strong social ties. If movies can make friendship, movies can break friendship. If divorces were not restricted to disjoining two people tied by vows strictly marital in nature, we as friends would have been divorced and disjointed months ago. I marvel at the infallible spirit of mankind that thumps its tiny fists to protect its social instincts, and dictates that movies ought to be watched together, with close friends, amidst sipping cans of coke and munching pounds of buttered popcorn.

Ali knows I tried hard. He knows I gave it my best. He knows that as the darkness and the chill engulfed the large theatre, I tried my best to keep pace with him, and with the crowd, concentrating with greater dedication than I did while studying physics during the boards. I tried to cheer with the crowd, and clap with the crowd, and whistle with the crowd. But ensconced in the lap of luxury, the purr of the AC and the thick foam of a chair behind my behinds became too much for my soporific senses. I had come with the condition that there is a probability, God knows how un-minuscule, that I would fall asleep in the course of the movie. And that became a turning point in the history of mankind and cinema, when despite all my sincere and hard efforts, I fell asleep while watching The Dark Knight (TDK) in the movie theatre.

Sacrilege. Condemnation. Thus cries out every soul that reads this my readers. But history has witnessed it that no matter how good a movie is, there have definitely been moments, minutes, maybe seconds, even nanoseconds when I have fallen asleep. The reason? I go to see most movies at the end of a long day. My energy reserves start depleting, and even the excitement and the thrill of watching a great movie doesn’t suffice in charging my batteries. I cannot concentrate on something that lasts longer than 30 minutes, the situation made all the more worse by my comfortable surroundings. It’s not that I don’t like watching movies, and believe it or not, I have nothing personal against the movie makers. It’s just that the prospect of staring into an illuminated screen with a darkened background induces my soporific self to wake up. I have slept while watching great movies. I have lost so many friends who stopped asking me out for movie nights because the one time I went with them, I have had the nerve to ask them what transitioned between the hero in his days of sworn bachelorhood to the days when he posed for a family picture with his wife and 4 children ensued by the rolling of the names of the art director and the spot boys and other people I have no business knowing the names of when they realized that I have slept through most of the movie. It is an instinctive call, I try to justify myself. Fishes cannot travel in airplanes, no matter how much they love to see the view below from the window. A fish has to live in water and I have to sleep through a movie, no matter how Oscar-winning material it is. I have slept through Bourne Ultimatum. I have slept through Kung Fu Panda. Hell, I have even slept through Sleeping with the Enemy while my enemy-like friend kept darting furtive glances at me.

And thus I kept my record intact, sleeping through this one as well, amidst moments when I felt Ali elbowing me and nudging me to wake up and kicking me and blowing carbon dioxide into my ears and pulling my hair when nothing else seemed to work. But nothing really helped prop myself up despite the frantic kicking. Resigned, he had to be content with watching the movie on his own for a good 30 minutes. For no matter how much I try to feign interest, action movies do not interest me. I see no point of supernatural characters jumping out of high rise buildings or driving vehicles at the speed of light without risking a ticket from the cop or having to struggle for parking. I don’t identify these situations with my everyday life, where I jump out of the 10th floor balcony instead of taking the elevators, or don’t have a heart attack when I see half my face marred enough to delineate the muscles. Action movies aren’t my cup of tea. Sitting through movies aren’t my cup of tea. Hate me, get mad at me, elbow me, kick me, tickle my nostrils with the tip of your handkerchief, but the next time you tie me to your armpits during one of the movies again, I’ll snore aloud and wake up with a jolt to ask if you think the hero is from North Dakota.

sunshine

Shall We Dance?

Acceptance is a very special word, no matter how big or small the thing is. You get accepted into one of the IITs, and you are the next sought after thing in the neighborhood for years to come. You get a call from one of the US schools, and people walking on the streets often touch you to see if you are as real as the other lesser mortals. You fancy someone and the person proposes love. You wish something and the wish comes true. You have spent sleepless caffeinated nights trying to write a thesis proposal and it finally gets accepted by the committee. You send a poem for a poetry contest and it gets published. No matter how big or how small the thing is, it always feels great to be accepted by someone, hugely boosting up your self-confidence in the process. It is the waiting period in between that is killing. But getting a certain YES email or a letter feels so special, it makes the wait every bit worthwhile. Equally disheartening are rejections. But then, don’t all of us move on? I remember how disappointing it was to get so many rejects from the good and not so good US schools a few years back. It always makes you think- What was wrong with me? Was I not good enough? Why me? But one acceptance letter obliterates all the dejection, one good rank in the joint entrance exams makes all the years of hard work worthwhile, one chance to work with some professor you have wanted makes it worthwhile, and so goes for the person you want to live with. It is a different matter altogether that the real responsibilities, the pains and travails of living up to the expectations start later.

A month back, our dance team got rejected in one of the auditions. No one knew why we could not make it. We had our theories though. Some said that the deciding committee was biased towards north Indian folk dance, while some said that they had already decided who they wanted to choose based on personal preferences. Whatever the case be, it felt horrible to be rejected, all the more for me because I did not understand the language and the dance style was not familiar to me, hence I had put five times more effort. I drifted between stages from putting the blame to myself, to my team, to the choice of dance number, and to my luck. When sanity struck after a while, I realized that there was nothing to put the blame on in the very first place. Life was all about getting chances, we win some, and we lose some. After some 6 hours of feeling low and lachrymose, I had moved on.

However, I remained on the lookout for newer opportunities. In a way, I was tired of dancing with my south Indian dance team, neither understanding the language, nor feeling very comfortable with the style of dance. Someone up there heard me, for one of the bigger dance groups in the city were auditioning for new dancers in their team for a few upcoming events. I had been to their dance shows before, that beautifully showcased a variety of dances. However, this was a round 2 audition, meaning that they had already chosen the bulk of the lot and there were a handful more dancers they wanted. I was apprehensive, because one rejection was only so much I could take. If it was something like glass painting or knitting, I wouldn’t have cared, but dance is something that I really cared about. My apprehension about being rejected the second time knew no bounds. I would stand in front of dozens of pairs of unknown, judgmental eyes, and then the music would play and you would be expected to dance on your own while they decided if you were good enough. The music would stop in between and they would say “NEXT” while you would pack up, wondering if they got bored too soon or if they made their decision so soon. And then the wait would be unbearable. Probably you would know some of the other people who auditioned, and would live in the constant anxiety that they would make it and you wouldn’t. Even if you were rejected, you would be tortured to death, reading one of the most diplomatically and cunningly crafted letters- 

“While we were so delighted that you gave us your valuable time and brought your ass on the dance floor, we are sorry to let you know that you have two left feet! It seems you shook your hips a tad too more and your right leg and left hand were not in sync. However, we are sure that there will be other dance groups who would willingly overlook these and accept you in their group because hips and legs do not form an integral part of their dance. We wish you all the best”.

It takes a lot to face rejection. Anyway, here I convinced one of my friends to give me a ride, since I had no clue how to get to that godforsaken, desolate place they had chosen for the auditions. I plugged in my music player into my ears, and shook my hips for a couple of hours in front of the walled mirrors in the gym just to make sure I could still move a couple of my body parts without running the risk of being disqualified for having two left legs and a missing right leg. I don’t know what made me choose to audition to a Hrithik Roshan dance number, not even coming close to his flexibility and finesse, but after a few minutes of practice, when I still didn’t show signs for a slipped disc or a chipped tarsal bone, I decided to give it a shot.

Adrenaline is a magical potion. It can make you do things you didn’t imagine you were capable of doing. It can make you jump from the height of a 1000 feet, being tied only to a rope. It can make you thrust your hands in the crocodile’s mouth just to see if they use their pre-molars or molars more while eating. It can make you stand in front of dozens of unknown people, dancing in solitude, risking being laughed at or being stared at as if you were an alien. And thus we went through this together, me and my adrenaline. At that time, I didn’t care if I made it to the auditions. All I cared about was to be out of there as soon as I could, of course after stuffing my pockets with the little cans of free orange juice from the wending machine.

The wait was bad, all the more since I personally knew one of the judges, and every time I got an email from her, it made me cringe. Email I did get, but from one of the other judges. I read it calmly, got up from my swivel chair, and headed straight for the restroom mirror. I looked at myself for a long time, eyes not showing any emotion. And then I straightened my shoulders, held out my hand to the mirror in that typical ballroom style dancing, and said to the person looking back at me from the mirror-

Shall we dance?

sunshine

Draw-ing The Line

The other day, in one of my contemplative moods while waiting at the bus stop, I looked at my hands, palms outstretched, and wondered at the number of skills I had mastered over the years. I am not just talking about writing that first word “APPLE” or drawing the first house with a chimney. Even as an adult, I have mastered various skills over the years. Though not professionally trained, I have developed a knack of picking up and performing various dances. In my play, I did more of hand gestures than I could ever think. Always a pathetic cook, I have learnt to make a decent meal over the years. I have held the needle, I have created stuff with a pair of scissors, I have tried to make a point with the pen and the key board. I have raised hornworms for laboratory research. I have used the calculator to balance complicated expense sheets. I have done so much with my hands, these short stubby fingers with nails neatly cut. But if there is one thing I regret having not been able to do so far, it is picking up the art of drawing, sketching, and painting. It is not one of those things I’d rather regard as “Who cares” and move on. Quite contrarily, over the years, I have tried picking up the pencil on several occasions and come up with something even remotely coherent, if not artsy. Alas, my high built hopes have been cruelly demolished every time.

It’s not that it does not run in the family. My dad is a great painter, he can paint what rich people hang on their walls. But it seems that the particular genes have not been rightfully passed on to me. My greatest fears in school were those assignments when we had to draw science experiments depicting Brownian motion and Pascal’s law on the left hand sheet of our science notebooks. This was followed by having to draw different human systems, stems and roots, ginger rhizoids and potato tubers for the biology classes. I would look at the better artists in my class and marvel at that extra shade added to the stomach diagram that would give it a 3-dimensional look, those extra few lines in the liver that gave it a shiny appearance and identified it from the rest. Ironically, my diagrams were not bereft of the “Good” and “Very Good” remarks scribbled by the teacher. This is because I always managed to put on a helpless, lachrymose look the night before the submissions when dad would take pity on me and make a few strokes in my copy. He screamed at me, he got impatient, he got mad at me, but at the end of it, he would remain awake late and complete my drawings while I would always excitedly wake up in the mornings with a broad grin on seeing the best photosynthesis experiment protocol diagram in my copy. Dad always went an extra step to shade and give a 3-dimensional effect, that always worked wonders. I hated him getting mad after a hard days office work to stay up and do my drawing assignments. But over the years, he gave me hundreds of those beautifully drawn things I preserved and showed off in class proudly for ages.

When I finished school, dad sighed in relief to have been relieved from his duties. But alas, God had different plans. I took biology, and had to draw 50 times more this time. But this time, dad made the rules clear. I could bug him only on weekends, not more than 2 drawings everyday. I just could not appear with pencil and paper and expect him to start drawing. However this time I had a better plan. I started to do outlines and little bits of stuff of the drawing before I showed it to dad. I would draw, let’s say, the head of the fish or the tail of the rat, show it to dad, and exclaim more to myself, “Naah, this is not half as good as what dad draws”. He would take a look, start erasing things, and would redraw things for me. I still remember I had to draw a mouse one time, and he drew such an animated version of it, all dark and hairy and real, that one look and mom had almost thrown up- Yuck ! Even the tail looked so real with the rings that one would feel like swinging it by the tail.

So dad bailed me out through my torturing drawing assignments while I earned goods and very goods. But I never really learnt how to draw. It’s not that I never tried. I tried emulating simple sketches, carefully noticing the way dad held the pencil and made strokes. I also realized that I was not that bad in seeing something and exactly replicating it. But I had no imagination, no creativity. You ask me to draw something as simple as a caravan and I would end up making something that would look like a cow without a tail. With time, I told myself that there are only certain things I could master, and I had to live with the knowledge that I could not excel in everything. But then I would look at a certain painting in wistfulness, marveling at the brush strokes, the paint and the water color, with the signature of the artist scribbled below illegibly, and wonder if I could ever learn to draw something as simple as sketches showing different facial emotions. I looked at the art teacher in school with all jealously, amazed at the way her hands moved with speed as she drew fruit baskets and vegetables and flower gardens for the kids. One visit to my friends home and I gaped in amazement at the huge paintings she had drawn and hung on the walls that gave her house such a “rich person’s house” feel to it. A simple flower vase with flowers. Faces of different women waning into the background colors. The plumage of a multicolored bird.

So what reminded me of this? I was at the hospital earlier today for some bill settlements, and while I waited for someone to attend to me, I looked at the different paintings on the wall with the same feeling of wistfulness. What caught my attention particularly was a certain framed picture that had dozens of hearts, each unique and drawn differently from the rest. Every heart had a different color, a different pattern, and I was amazed at the creativity and the imagination of the painter. For a while, I wondered about the idea of making a life painting and hosting art exhibitions instead of studying cells and molecules. Perhaps I could use my creativity and learn to draw different patterns on the DNA, draw weird looking cells with star patterned cell walls, and weird looking red blood cells and mitochondria. I think I will give it a try tonight by sitting with my pencil and paper again, trying to replicate simple patterns of shapes and emotions and moods. But something in me tells me that I’ll again end up drawing vegetables that look like lamp shades. And just in case people can’t even understand what I was trying to draw, yohoooo !! I can always call it modern art.

sunshine

Sunshine And Sunrise

I just realized that I am more of an outdoor person than an indoor person, unless of course you put me on the dance floor. I also realized that though planned hanging outs are fun, surprises are way better. How do you feel when you are woken up on a weekday by the shrill ringing of the phone? You either expect an emergency call from your folks back in India, or you expect some jerk from a different time zone in the country playing a prank.

So, wanna see the sunrise?

Yeah sure, in your dreams, said a very groggy and irritated inner voice. A very sleepy me: What? When? Now? Well, okay… (still trying to figure out of it is April 1st)…. How long will it take you to come over? (Mentally calculated some 30 minutes of extra sleep)

Well, am right in front of your house.

What?

A very groggy me jumped out of the bed like the jumping jack out of its box, brushed and washed face and put on her slippers in record time, and in the next two minutes, was headed for the beach to see the sunrise in her pajamas and chappals. The sky by the sea had just started to change hues, and by Jove, this is one of the better sunrises I have seen. It wasn’t a big deal in India, but with the screwed up weather and the equally screwed up work schedule and lifestyle here, waking up at half past five just to watch the sun rise is definitely a big deal. And for the next few hours, we were happy people, whiling away time listening to the chirping of birds as they flew in a V-shaped herd, excitedly watching and waving at the train that snaked along the nearby railway tracks, and listening to the roar of the waves.

Like I said, planned trips are always great, but there is something about being woken up from sleep to be told that someone is waiting right outside the door, and the prospect of seeing the sun rise in pajamas and chappals has an amazing appeal to it. I would prefer it over wearing stylish dresses and high heeled shoes to a party. Absolutely anyday.

sunshine

Shells

I am an avid collector of seashells. There is something about these lifeless remnants of calcium carbonate from the exoskeleton of mollusks that never cease to fascinate me. Have you ever looked at them closely, observing the ridges, the patterns of rings, the different shades of colors? Like fingerprints, every shell is different from the other one, even the one lying the closest to it. It is so much fun digging your hand in the wet sand after having targeted a particular shell embedded in it, visible only half way. There is so much mystery involved in how big it would be, or how colorful. Sometimes your eyesight deludes you into picking up something that was nothing more than a half split and discarded groundnut shell. And then I jump excitedly when I find two little shells jointed together at their tips. It makes me think of the life that was nested within it, popping its head out occasionally to feed itself or move or see the world. The shell protected it from danger, from adverse weather conditions, giving it the luxury and comforts of a protected existence. And then the life within it died and was washed away, leaving behind remnants of hard rock to live a life of loneliness and solitude till it is either picked up by a collector like me, or vanished into the elements of the earth in anonymity. If shells could tell stories, have you wondered what would those autobiographies look like? Subjected to the sun and the moon and rain, being washed away by the sea again and again, tossed back and forth from the sea to the shore, so many of them all lying lonely, discarded, disjointed, witnessing hundreds of generations come by and go?

I have often wondered how long shells last before the elements are degraded back into the earth and recycled. What gives them their distinctive color and size and patterns? Is it influenced by the environment, or by the genetics of the organism? How can one determine the age of shells? If there was life on other planets, would there be seashells too? There are hundreds of questions I ask myself when I look at a shell. Like people spend hours looking at old photo albums and reminiscing about happy memories, I spend hours, looking at each and every shell I have collected. Back in India, I have thousands of them collected from different parts of the world, neatly dated and labeled in transparent jars. How it broke my heart to leave everything behind. When a friend was visiting Europe and asked me what I fancied from Europe, I’d asked the friend to collect as many shells from as many different beaches as possible. So my collection included shells from the beaches of France, Spain, and Italy, not to mention dozens of beaches in India. My greatest collection were these hundreds of little conch shells in Vizag that housed the hermit crabs, and our home stunk for days while I boiled them and cleaned them.

So what got me thinking about shells, of all things? The weather has been darn good for the last 2 weeks, and after a day’s bunking classes and coming early from work, me and my roomie decided to go to the beach. Now the beaches around here haven’t impressed me a lot in terms of their shell collection. I wasn’t even expecting shells in a beach that is no more than 2 feet wide. But there they were, tiny pieces of black and white jutting their heads out. They weren’t pretty and all looked the same, no beautiful ridges, just tiny lumps of black and white and grey. But even before I knew, I was crouched on the sand, collecting these little shells with both hands, as many as I could, stuffing as many as I could in my pockets and socks. A few hours later, I was a happy kid, running gleefully on the beach. I put my prized collection in a transparent container and placed it on my study table, in between pens and pencils, for me to see them whenever I look up. Now these shells do not run the risk of being lost in anonymity, washed by the waves and ending up being nobody while no one knows them. They can live with me to be marveled at by people who visit me and see them.

sunshine

The Kiss Eaters.

We Bengalis are strange. Social. Gregarious. Food lovers. Corrupt. Morally depraved. People tell me that you cannot mistake a Bengali. Why? Do we wear two extra horns? Do we talk a lot? I don’t know- says a friend. When you see a Bengali, you’ve got to know it is a Bengali. Okay, that was very intuitive. Not that it helped a lot. Often I have been told about half-cooked ideas of Bengali women being very proactive, with huge eyes and dusky complexions and luscious figures. Not that it helped a lot to boost me up. Then they said Bengali men loved to be dominated by the women folk at home and seldom had a mind or a voice of their own at home. This angered me further, because this was stereotyping. Although sometimes, interaction with the men folk in the friend circle had somewhat confirmed this. But then again, it is one thing to live with a notion, and another thing to vocalize it. 

Would you want to marry a Bengali? Asked a non-bengali friend in hush tones at a party. He was expecting a rebuff, a rebuke, like he must have been used to with every Bengali chick now. I looked around me and whispered in equally hushed tones- “No way !!! I have heard they are quite boring !”

And then we had laughed, my laughter borne out of guilt for having such an opinion about my own people. So tell me what Bengali people are like, asked my friend. The ice had been broken long back with the confession of not wanting to marry a Bengali, and the conversation had taken a somewhat humorous tone. I thought hard.

They are complete foodies.

And?

They like to talk a lot.

And?

They make friends everywhere. Strong networking skills, you see.

And?

Umm……… oh yeah. They eat everything.

So you said. They are foodies.

No, not that way. They eat everything.

Everything? My friend looked somewhat amused.

Yeah, everything.

Like what?

Like, they eat food. Everything. Fish. Meat. Eggs. Rice. Dal. Vegetables. Everything.

Oh wow !!!

Yeah, and even Bengali Brahmins are meat eaters. They eat everything, unless they are into Manekaism and animal rights kinda things.

And what else do they eat?

At this point I realized that it would be unfair to carry on the whole conversation as “they”. Who was I talking about? I myself was a Bengali too. So I decided to be politically correct here.

So we eat everything. We eat water. And we eat drinks.

My friend looked confused.

The colloquial Bengali language has no concept of drinking. We eat everything.

Even water?

Even water. We say, jol khabo, which roughly translates to- “I’ll eat water”.

My friend looked amused. What else do you eat?

I thought hard. We eat cigarettes.

Cigarettes? As in crush them and chew them?

Hell no, we smoke cigarettes, but when we say that in Bengali, we again say, cigarette khabo, which means I’ll eat a cigarette.

Really?

Yeah, it goes with cigarettes, beedi, alcohol, everything.

Wow. What anything else you eat?

Umm… that’s pretty much it. I thought hard. No wait, we eat something else.

Yeah?

Umm… I don’t know how to say this, it is kinda embarrassing. 

What else?

Umm…. We eat a kiss..

What? Holy…. My friend started to roll on the floor laughing even before he had completed his words. What the…..

Well, yeah, I squirmed uncomfortably. You see, we say, ami chumu khabo, which roughly translated into English sounds like, “I’ll eat you a kiss”.

With this, I too started to roll on the floor laughing, so funny it sounded. You were right indeed. We Bengali people are the weirdest people. We even eat kisses. I just wonder if this is what makes us the epitomes of romanticists. Good food for thought. 

sunshine

My Best Investment This Summer.

It was great to feel the breeze on my face and get my hair flying wildly in all directions after so many years. Just hope that the weather remains warm for some more time now.

sunshine.

Let’s SLEEP Over It.

Did you know?

I can usually go to sleep after I have woken up.

I cannot watch any movie in one go, not even a 90 minute English movie. I need to take at least one nap in between. Even at movie theaters. Ask my friends. We once went to watch Eklavya. I dozed off in an action-filled scene where Amitabh was crouched on mud in the sweltering heat amidst the lanky legs of the camels. The next scene, I see Saif and Amitabh together, only to wonder what happened in between.

G claims that she cannot sleep at anytime but night. I wonder why. I just need a place to lie on and close my eyes, telling myself that I need to fall asleep in the next 10 minutes. And this way, I can fall asleep even amid loud music.

The more exams draw near, the more I get tensed. The more I get tensed, the more I sleep. The more I sleep, the sleepier and guiltier I feel. Guilt only increases my tension, making me sleep all the more. Now this is what I call a real life synergistic effect of a vicious cycle.

I often hang around with a bunch of party animals. They meet at 8, start cooking at 9, eat dinner at 11, and then watch a movie or play a game, only to wind up at 3 in the morning. No matter what state the party is in, by 11 pm, I am fast asleep on the couch. These guys watch a movie while I sleep, call me when they are about to leave, I accompany them to the car sleepy-eyed, one of them drops me to my place, I climb up the stairs with my eyes closed, go back to my room, and resume my sleep from where I had left it.

I loved Vegas. I didn’t mind all the walking and casino hopping, as long as I had my 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep at night. No wonder he went home and told his mom that I am the only woman he has seen who sleeps so much.

My naps are as dream-filled as you could imagine. My dreams are a potpourri of action-packed, comic, tragic, suspense-filled and romantic melodrama.

Sleep is therapeutic for me. When I am stressed, I prefer sleeping instead of crying.

I have never had to take sleeping pills. Believe me even consuming pills prescribed to make me sleep less wouldn’t help.

I can never breeze through a class without dozing off at least once. Seminars are definitely meant to be slept in. My max concentration time is about an hour. When I can’t sit through a class, I sleep through it. I can even sleep in class with my eyes wide open. And just so that I do not fall asleep, I take my laptop to classes.

I remember a funny episode when we had a picture exhibition of one of the best wildlife photography. There was a slideshow in a dark room for about an hour, and they were showing pics of animals in the order of their biological classification. This meant that the order would be like this-

Ø Plants and trees
Ø Microbes (bacteria, virus)
Ø Protozoa
Ø Porifera
Ø Cnidarians (jellyfish)
Ø Platyhelminths (flatworms)
Ø Annelids (roundworms and earthworms)
Ø Arthropods (cockroach, spider, prawn, shrimp)
Ø Mollusk (snails)
Ø Echinoderms (starfish)
Ø Fish
Ø Amphibians
Ø Reptiles
Ø Birds
Ø Mammals

Well, I remembered till the Cnidarians. With the darkness and the AC going full blast, who cared? When I woke up, they were almost at the end of the slideshow, showing the picture of monkeys and tigers. And I had gasped aloud- “But how did they come to monkeys so soon?"

While I travel in a train, all I need is the upper berth. I love the rocking motion of the train. Barring occasional loo breaks and food breaks, I have dozed the entire length of tracks from Kolkata to Chennai.

I can never read a book on the bed to relax. I eventually fall asleep. I need to be wide awake and upright in the study even to watch a movie or read a book.

They say I sleep a lot. I say my heavy-duty batteries take a little more time to get charged.

It often happens that I fall asleep in the afternoons, only to wake up in the fading light of the evenings to imagine it to be dawn the early morning and start getting ready for school.

If I am hungry and there is no food at home and I am too lazy to cook or to go out to eat, I can fall asleep in order not to feel the hunger.

There have been more than one occasion when I have fallen asleep prior to the day of the examination, only to wake up the next morning and realize that I haven’t yet started to study.

Back in India, I couldn’t sleep in loud music or even if the night bulb glowed. After coming here, life has been so stressed and my lab work requires such weird hours that I have trained myself to catch occasional naps amid work. Most days, I do not even come home to sleep. I sleep on the couch in the lab amid the droning of machines. Unfamiliar surroundings do not bother me anymore.

I once applied to a study where all you had to do was sleep, while they traced your sleeping and dreaming patterns. I wish they had selected me.

I have slept through Sleepless in Seattle, Sleeping with the enemy, and eyes wide shut. I haven’t yet tried the movie Jaagte Raho.

Unlike other lovers, I can never claim that I have lost sleep thinking of someone.

If they made a movie about me, I’d never let them name it Sona Manaa Hai. Guess what I’d call it? Sleeping in Seattle.

All said and done, I lead as much of an active life as anyone else would. I gym, I dance, I attend classes and hang around with friends, I go for hiking, I blog, and I do a lot more. It is just that I take sleep as seriously as any other thing I do in life.

The Sleeping Beauty signing off now.

sunshine.