Another Mortal Life

Kahaan se vo aayi jaane.. jaane kidhar gayi
Mohabbat phir mujhe chhookar guzar gayi

Aankho se vo ojhal.. huyi to laga ek pal,
ke mere hi seene mein kahin utar gayi..

"You know, the Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died: "Did he have passion?""

(Serendipity )

They told us to give up “I”.

And I was one of the few who took them seriously.

But no! “I” is such a beautiful word. It may not be the heart of a conversation, but the heart of an informal blog post it certainly is. I won’t buy their ego theories. And I’m pretty sure you won’t mind me blabbering about the inconsequential incidents of 'my' life.

I’ve had a long session of self introspection. Now that it was long and I’m obviously not writing about it (Yeah this is the first time in months that the title is the first thing I wrote when starting on a post), let me only mention the little bearing I want it to have on my blog. I want small sentences. I want the posts to be plain, simple, and unambiguous. I want to use “I” more often. I want to use “me” less often. I want to talk like “I feel…” and not like “Something makes me feel…”. I control my life, don't I?
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A dog bit me. 10:30 PM. Nov 5, 2007. in front of the nearby Nescafe. Apparently dogs are getting more and more human. You never know when they would strike. This one came unnoticed, and before I knew, tasted my blood with its teeth on my heel. The lights near the Nescafe were dim. I could only feel the pain. I couldn’t confirm if I still was the only being on earth to have tasted my blood. A couple of minutes later I knew I had lost the title. The two friends accompanying me shared their knowledge about 14 injections I will have to have in the belly which I knew was no longer the practice. Almost at the same time, a couple of other friends appeared, one of whom is a self-professed animal lover. I blamed all this on his being a little irritated of me in recent times :D

Anyway I had to rush to the hospital and I was administered first of the five injections of the one month rabies course. (Only five! And not in the stomach! Thank God!) Returning to the hostel, I googled about rabies. It was interesting to know that rabies is not too bad after all. Rabies virus has anti-AIDS properties. (Well, I better have my injections, because I don't think I'm in any need of these positive effects of rabies' virus!)

I took the third injection yesterday. Let me tell you I had had dozens of it in one day once. But I never looked at the syringe until yesterday. A look at it and I was startled. A scene of an Amitabh Bachchan movie came flashing into my eyes: Bachchan administering an injection full of air in somebody’s hand and telling him/her (I don’t remember the victim) that in a few hours the air would reach the heart and s/he would die. I stopped the nurse and enquired about the air. She laughed and told me it’s only the veins which must not be administered injections that contain air. Relieved. *sigh*

Lot of G.K. improvement, you said; didn’t you?
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Another understanding out of the afore-mentioned self-introspection session: It’s difficult for a perfectionist and a procrastinator to reside in one body. And it’s impossible if you’ve got a big ego. That’s the story of the colloquium. Firstly, I postponed the preparation of report and presentation to the very last day (The procrastinator). Then I thought I should postpone the submission (medical certificate would’ve been easy. Remember dog bite!) because I, at least once, thought I can’t finish things up in 12 hours. But somebody said, “Yes, I know you can’t” and I replied, “No.., I CAN.” (The big ego). Then I won’t do the copy-paste stuff. I would write every word of it myself. It’s not the number of pages that count; what counts is what’s written in them. (The perfectionist).

In short, I screwed it up.

And umpteenth time in my life I told myself: It is important to know what counts. But what’s more important is “in whose eyes it has to count”. And most often it’s not you.

OK, world, you are the boss.
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This evening, a friend pointed out that second half of 'Om Shanti Om' was such a direct take from 'Madhumati'. I remembered the Dilip Kumar movie and remembered how this particular song was once a favourite of mine:

Suhaana safar aur yeh mausam hasii.n
Humein darr hai hum kho naa jaayein kahin

-Mukesh’s surreal voice had no parallels.
And when you talk of Mukesh, you remember Raj Kapoor. Kapoors and then 'Saawariya'! Well, the latest Kapoor does act like his Grandfather (though, I must say, he knows little of acting.)- a younger version of the over-innocent Indian.

But, this must be called Rishi Kapoor’s week. While one of the films released this Diwali takes heavily from one of his biggest hits 'Karz', the other has his son in the lead role. Both the films feature his famous dialogue:
“Kya tumne kabhi kisi se pyar kiya??”

KIYAA!!!!