Now, this post isn’t about what my time there was like or how I found something myself or anything even remotely in a similar vicinity. It’s simply about the people I met while I was traveling. Some really interesting at that.

I have been to Mumbai quite a lot of times but this time my journey was very exhausting. For starters, we had to drive to a neighbouring city to board our train as tickets to board from our city were full. Why? You may ask. Because Kumbh had recently ended and Holi was near so people were travelling in huge numbers, much to my annoyance. (Yes yes I know the world doesn’t revolve around me)

So we reach the station, board our train only to find out that we had 2 upper and one middle berth. Now, this may be inconsequential to anyone else but when you’re travelling with two women over 60 one of whom has knee issues, this becomes a problem. After much pseudo-polite haggling, we managed to get one lower berth that was given to my aunt. My mother obviously took the middle berth while I was left with the upper one.

With everyone almost satisfied with their sleeping positions, people got busy with their dinners. As this train did not have a pantry so everyone brought their own food packed in old mithai boxes. We had fried karelas and aloo sabzi with pooris and pickle. So did a lot of other people on the train to my surprise. Turns out they are some of the few dishes that can survive overnight outside a fridge. But after having them for the third time the following night, I wasn’t sure how long they were to willingly to stay inside of me.

Anyway, dinner was done and everyone went to sleep early as there is only so much small talk you can do in the train compartment. Finally, in the middle of the night, some elderly couple boarded the train. They came in and for some reason were very furious to find out that people who had boarded before them had already arranged their luggage. Not being able to wake anyone in their compartment, their anger intensified. After all, why weren’t these people waking up at 2 in the morning and removing their stuff which they had a right to put there in the first place?

Furious the wife starts screaming at the husband to remove everybody else’s luggage and throw it as these people weren’t obviously going to help them. Now one of the lowermost berths was occupied by a lady who was travelling with her daughter and mother. The mother’s seat was a few rows done. While the couple wife was screaming to throw away the luggage the mother somehow crept up behind her and starts angrily asking how does she plan on getting away with it. The wife now caught, is trying to backtrack by becoming angrier and asking what does she think she is talking about and where are they suppose to keep their luggage( let me add that there was space).

Before long a screaming match starts on between them and the entire train is awake and watching. The guy who looks and talks like he is a Bollywood extra is watching while simultaneously chatting with his girlfriend on the phone. And he does look more interested in the fight than his girlfriend. Then there’s an entire family in the next compartment, the women is up munching on peanuts with a few kids in lap and berth, watching the scene like it’s some bad Ekta Kapoor serial whose last episode she missed all the while passing peanuts to rest of her family.

Eventually, after the fight concludes and everyone goes back to bed the couple suddenly realise that the wife who had recently had a back operation has a middle berth. They ask if anyone is willing to change but of course no one is and somehow the woman struggles to fit into the berth and the night comes to an end.

In the morning when I wake up my mother and aunt has befriended the couple in question and so has everyone else. Turns out the women is much nicer when she isn’t preoccupied with where to keep her luggage. There is laughing, exchanging of childhood stories and Mumbai. At last, the couple reaches their destination and take off. In their place another younger couple board the train.

In contrast to the previous couple, this one is younger and keeps to themselves mostly in the start. But there are similarities there, no matter how insignificant. The older couple was obsessed with their luggage this couple is obsessed with each other. Before that day I had never seen such public display of affection in a crowded train bogie.

The PDA is only piped down when the wife gets hungry and the couple realizes that they have no food with them. My mother and aunt never missing an opportunity to chat someone up some offer them food (we had enough to feed the entire bogie) and before long we are discussing the various communities of India, especially the Punjabis because both my mother and the husband are Punjabis. Then the topic shifts to clothes, celebrities and soon we are inviting each other to our respective cities. We find out that the wife is a fashion designer and a good one at that (she gave me her Instagram). Finally, they reach their station which was just the one before ours. Numbers are exchanged and they once again they invite us to visit them and we return the invitation. They get off at the station and we never see them again. Not yet anyway.

Finally, reach our stop and I get busy trying to get our luggage off the train without help at 11 in the night.

NOTE- This is just the first part.I’m thinking of writing about the return journey as a second part to this. Please let me know if you all enjoyed this and would like to read the second part.

A few months ago I had to answer some questions for an application which I now feel make a good post for this blog in the meantime.

What matters to you the most and why? A variation of that one question every single person loves to ask another but secretly hate answering themselves. The moment I saw this question I was perplexed. I honestly didn’t know how to answer it. An innocent google search to help understand how others might have responded and get some ideas lead me down a rabbit hole which ended with me feeling a little bigger than a mouse.

So yes I haven’t organized school unions and found that it was passion. And I haven’t been afflicted with some disease which concluded in a summer research at some laboratory either. But if I am being honest now then what matters most to me is; being happy in my life. There it is, an extremely simple enough statement but one we at times overlook. It might not be a significant enough aim for someone else but for me, it is a monumental achievement.

I remember once having a conversation with a friend of mine about our futures and what we wanted most out of life, her answer was a high paying job. Mine was a job I loved and didn’t want to be 40 years old one day and ask myself ‘what I had done to myself.’ Hence I would be satisfied with a job even if I earned a few thousand bucks less as long as I was pursuing something that interested me, she was surprised and asked me why and my answer was,” because I want to be happy in my life.” She didn’t understand me.

Being happy for me doesn’t mean that I achieve every single dream and hope I have but simply that whatever I manage to achieve in life including the mistakes, I achieve them all without any regrets.

New Years is that special occasion that brings out two kinds of people on social media. The motivators who will fill your feed with encouraging hogwash of how this will be your year and the others whose sole purpose is to show you that they have it all sorted, whether it is their life or the new year’s party.

I am neither of these people.

Unlike some people(also known as the ones who actually have their life together) the previous “new years” have never brought me anything to rejoice about. Yet somehow every successive “new year” has left behind the eerily similar feelings of worthlessness, each more ruthless than its predecessor.

This new year wasn’t a disaster. Actually, it was uneventful to such a degree that I honestly would have preferred it to be a disaster. I was in bed sick with a viral fever watching tv all day. Now even though my past new years haven’t really set the bar very high, this one made me depressed more than usual. The mandatory inspirational quotes on all the social media didn’t help much either. They pissed me off even more if anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not angry at anyone for posting motivating and encouraging thoughts. I get it and I commend people who do this. But honestly reading those made realise how inadequate my life has been. It brought up a multitude of negative emotions that I am still struggling with( also the reason for the lateness of this post). Now this nothing new to me but I hope that through this post I may be able to help someone going through something similar feel a little less lonely.

Over the past few days after some good old soul-searching, I realised that it’s okay to not have your life together.

It’s okay to be scared of your future and be sometimes paralyzed by your past.

It’s okay to not have fulfilled every dream and hope you had. Believe me, no one is that lucky.

It’s okay to terrified of your own shortcomings holding you back.

It’s okay to not have a perfect new year.

It’s okay to have never gone through with the resolutions you made.

It’s okay to doubt yourself sometimes.

It’s okay to wallow in self-pity and sadness because sometimes only if you have known what its like to be in the dark can you truly appreciate the light.

It’s also okay to be deluded enough to believe that one day you will get there and have your own perfect new year that you deserve.

SUMMARY:

Set in an isolated part of Norway the story flashes back and forth between the present in 1999 where protagonist Trond is living in a rustic cabin in a remote location and where he has decided to spend the rest of his life peacefully and in the past in 1948, the same place where he spent a summer with his father, the events of which altered his life.

The sudden breakdown and subsequent tragedy of his friend Jon sets a string of events in motion that gradually bring the author to the point where he is in the present of 1999.

THOUGHTS:

Out Stealing Horses is the winner of Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and of 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Award and deservedly so. This is a story of a man who through a chance meeting with a stranger from his past uncovers not only a web of lies and betrayal but also realises that the father he has been idolising all this while was a man who harbored many secrets. Trying to understand, reconcile and make peace with the past that shaped his present, Trond looks back on that fateful summer that ultimately left him fatherless, with reluctance.

The setting of the tale has a very picturesque quality about it. The description of the remote area in Norway where Trond lives is very peacefully melancholic as is the way of life there. The slow pace of the story is reflective of the Trond’s own approaching descent of withered remnants of life into the timeless abyss of death.

The lack of reaction on Trond’s part to the unfolding drama is sometimes aggravatingly unsatisfying but realistic of a man buried deep under the burden of a past he can’t manage to escape. The tenebrous atmosphere and seemingly unhurried rate at which the narrative advances is slightly eerie yet poetic.

In Petterson’s world, everything is interlaced and coincidences have no part to play. A lot is left unvoiced and that is where the author succeeds to make the reader uncomfortably interested in the story.

This is a nostalgic coming of age tale

The open-ended conclusion to an otherwise well-concocted story left me a bit frustrated and is the reason for the rating.

STARS: 3.5/5

SUMMARY

Set in a dystopian world born of a logical result of totalitarianism of the communist and socialist regimes of world war II, divided into three states of Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia, the story follows the journey of the protagonist Winston Smith abhorred with the tyrannical regimen of the big brother commences his own revolution in the form of a love affair with a fellow party member named Julia, which ultimately leads to his downfall.

THOUGHTS:

1984 is best described as a social commentary and a political satire. Orwell’s portrayal of a world where unparalleled and unchallenged power is allowed to a few can corrupt and lead to a society where individualism is not only frowned upon but is also punishable by law, where each and every action including thought is liable to scrutiny, where the purpose of language (called newspeak here) is to limit human understanding and comprehension, where a thing as ‘thought crime’ exists is depressingly chilling.

Orwell, it seems focused so much on building the world of 1984 that the characters sometimes feel like mere accessories to the story. Winston and Julia are at times a means to an end. The end here being the message of evils of totalitarianism.  The story isn’t about them. It is about the consequences of an autocratic government and Winston and Julia happen to be two of many individuals living in this dystopian world and affected by it.

Lack of depth in the characters, in my opinion, might be intentional. They are supposed to forgettable and of minuscule importance to the big brother. It serves to drive home the fact the party is supreme and Winston and Julia perhaps like countless others are converted and obliterated in the end.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is somewhat boring at times but is essential for the story buildup. The story picks up the pace in the second part which covers Winston and Julia’s affair. But the third part, which serves as the resolution for the development in the first and second part is the most satisfying.

The end is bleak and horrifying. However, it is surprisingly one of the most gratifying conclusions that I have read in a while.

STARS:  4.5/5

– PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER

Perks of being a wallflower, a coming of age movie based off the book by the same name, is perhaps one of the few novels/movies that can put John Green to shame in the business of Tumblrish quotes. As someone who steered clear of John Green novels after getting the impression that they might be entirely famous for their notably poetic quotes (yes I’m one of those annoying pretentious ones who at times judge books without reading them first but in my defense, I was bombarded with the company of John Green fangirls obsessing over his quotes during my school years), I was a little wary of perks of being a wallflower for the fear that it was another John Green story only this time with a different author.

So it’s ironic that I out of all people would fall in love with this movie. I still struggle on whether I should read the book and possibly run the fear of ruining both the book and the movie(only a reader will understand this pain). Any person who has seen the movie will concede that it is quite a task to choose one favorite quote or moment from this visual treat of a movie. I, however, have after some effort managed to pick one to make it to my personal list of favoured quotes.

“WE ALL ACCEPT THE LOVE WE THINK WE DESERVE.”

If we all accept the love we think we deserve, then does it mean that we could do considerably better in the love department or have we already found our own special best? Or does it mean we underestimate our own worth and settle for the runner-up instead of the winner?

Although it is the ones that seem to refuse to believe in the existence of any kind of love in their lives that intrigue me. People who received no unconditional love from their parents or romantic love from their partners. Or perhaps they did experience the love but were not ready to believe that it was real. Are the people who can’t seem to acknowledge that they were or are people who in fact love them simply do so because they can’t accept that they deserve the love being bestowed on them. Is it because they are masochists or merely ignorant?

A daughter who whines and blames her parents of loving her sibling more than her, a husband who prefers not to be there enough for his family and the seemingly emotionless friend are all examples of individuals who time and again refuse to admit that they are loved by someone.

Yes, there are people who beneath all the success, smiles, arrogance and control don’t actually love themselves. The ones we sometimes brand ungrateful for rejecting the idea that they are in fact loved are the ones who believe they don’t deserve it. They are simply afraid of not living up to that love. After all, it is easier to deny than acknowledge the truth.

We all accept the love we think we deserve. If this is true then what of the people who claim to be loved by none. As I previously stated these people are in fact loved and are perhaps even aware of it unconsciously but always deny its existence. Why do they think they are undeserved of the love, of any kind of love?

The answer is actually pretty simple. These people are afraid. Not of what the others might find beneath the mask they put on every morning throughout their lives. But actually of what they might unintentionally uncover if they got too close to themselves.

–  UPSIDE DOWN REFLECTIONS.

Now one of few benefits of overthinking is that it forces you to analyse even the most mundane of situations. So true to form, I wondered why I kept on finding myself incapable of tossing away the clothes which did not fit me anymore or were no more useful when I had easily discarded if not tossed away the people and circumstances connected with them. If we can move on from the ill fit relationships no matter however long it takes, why can’t we just as easily move on from the clothes and items that remind us of those relationships? It is said that clothes hold the memories and aura of a person. Is this the reason behind why we seem to hold on to clothes of dead relationships. Are we deluding ourselves into believing that we have moved on if we hold on to those old clothes of relationships lost? Maybe to clean out the closet of clothes, I have to first clean the closets of my mind and heart because evidently, the cobwebs of those bygone and extinct relationships are still hanging inside. 

Note: originally posted on upsidedownreflections.tumblr.com