Semmozhiyaana Tamizh mozhiye...

This time around, I am at Coimbatore to attend my friend Arch’s wedding. The city has been decorated as nicely as a bride-to-be – all for the Tamizh Semmozhi Maanaadu. The flyovers have been painted, the roads widened, new traffic signals, a lot of police at the Railway Station, a lot of traffic police deployed – all this for just the next one week. Lot of Tamizh cultural art forms are going to be performed at different venues in the city. I feel proud to be a Tamizhian. The schools and colleges in Coimbatore have been asked to declare holiday for the next one week. How I wish I were in school now! All city buses will be ticket-free. There is no need to buy bus tickets for the next one week. Food festivals are being organized. Now is the best time to be in this city; well, if you like crowded places.

I miss my dad now. He would have really enjoyed this Semmozhi Maanaadu – being a staunch Tamizh-patriot himself. He would have forced me to take a week’s leave and taken me to all the programmes and lectures and made me listen to the glory of my mother tongue. I can almost see the pride in his face when someone praises Tamizh.

But the city has lost a lot of its trees in the name of road-widening. The programme will last for about a week or so, but the city might never get its climate back. Sigh…

Although so much is being done to ‘improve’ the city and its infrastructure, the people of the city still remain the same. They still talk with so much respect, throw rubbish on the streets, wait for TASMAC (wine shop) outlets to open in the morning and form a queue in the counter there, the auto-drivers still demand exorbitant amount money from the people, the city hasn’t changed one bit in its character.

But no matter what happens to this city, no matter what the people are like, this will always be my home. This is the city that I have grown up in, the city that has made me what I am through the school and college I studied in, through the innumerable people I have met; it is my favorite city (ok, next to Chennai). Chennai is still my most favorite J

I have a couple of good news to share with all the kind people who visit this space. There will be an announcement in a few days’ time (if all goes well). Pray for me, people!!!

My First Crush...

The day I saw you first, I was amazed by the color of your eyes. They were a clear bottle green. It was then that I remembered that I had not listened to your name correctly. It was so embarrassing. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had a crush on you and I didn’t ask for your name again. I had never been like that before I met you. Though we were classmates, I had to bring up every ounce of courage inside me to even look up to you in the eye. The toughest part of it was to hide it from others; mainly you. I fell for you again when you smiled – although it was not at me. What a kind smile you had! I fell for you totally – from the color of your eyes to the color of the clothes you were wearing. When I came to know that you needed help in understanding a few lessons, I volunteered to share my notes with you. When I knew that you hadn’t completed your laboratory record, I volunteered to write it for you. When I knew that you lacked attendance, I spoke to the professor (being the teachers’ pet) to set this alright for you. But still all this was overlooked by you. I was furious when I saw you chatting up to a pretty girl and exchanged numbers.

After those initial days of adoration where I was bowled over by your personality and your eyes and your smile, I started observing you much more. It was then that I realized that you were human too and not flawless. I noticed that you had a Himesh-like nasal tone to your voice, a little too short to my dream-guy (not that I am tall or anything, but you did not match up to my expectation), your green eyes were in fact fake (you wore contact lenses), lacked the IQ that I wanted my guy to have, a little too slow in grasping things, no knowledge whatsoever of the books I was referring to – all in all hopeless to have a future with. But still my heart wouldn’t listen. Whenever I saw you, there was that familiar drum-roll in the place of the heartbeat, that involuntary smile popping up on my lips, that tiny corner of my heart wanting you to come and talk to me, to hold your hands, the jealousy when you spoke to other girls – all that was still there, only for a moment though. Because the very next moment, when my brain started giving out instructions, it started emphasizing on the flaws in you and I saw you as someone not worth all my attention.

Now all that is gone, it has been a long 5 years since that first day. I don’t think about you every day now. I have grown out of being that silly teen into a busy professional. I simply don’t have the time to reminisce about the past or to feel bad about having missed your company for so long. You are not on my Orkut/FaceBook/Twitter friends’ list. But I still do visit your page and think about how different it would have been if you and I had indeed gotten together. The very reason I am writing this post is with the hope that you would visit my blog just the way I visit your pages and know that I still think about you and even now for a moment my heart beats twice as fast. But as you can see, I am very happy with my life and you are nothing but an occasional, distant, drunk thought. Nevertheless, you are my first crush and will always be special to me.

Oh, how confused I am! One minute I say I still want to be with you and the very next I say you are like one of my pets that I grew when I was younger. I guess that is just me or are all first crushes like this? I would never know. But I am not worried about it. I am happy with what I have and the occasional visit to your pages that remind me that you are alive in some part of the world.

Cheers!

This post has been published for a great contest called My first crush! organized by pringooand blogadda.

Remember those times?

Life cannot be any better for me. Now, at this particular minute I am writing this, I am happy. I am a very happy person now. Finally, life at Bangalore and this office are becoming something to look forward to every morning. Until last week, Bangalore could not give me the kind of happiness that Chennai gave; my present office and my office-mates can never compare to the awesome friends I made at Wipro, Chennai; I couldn’t go to meet Baba here. And all that has changed now. I have made very good friends here at Philips Innovation Campus. Now, I can say I have a gang – as in a bunch of really cool people with a great sense of humour – that I can hang out with. A big welcome to my new friends to this blog and to my life! And now I am back to my normal self. I plan my weekends during my weekdays and write about my weekends on this space. I have got a bunch of friends to go around with now.

It has been a crazy couple of weeks now at work with trainings and meetings all day long. But otherwise it is so much fun here. Last weekend, I and my friends from work - Rama, Barath and Sreekanth - had been to Nandi Hills – a tourist destination about 45km from Bangalore and enjoyed Saturday afternoon there. We went there to see the sunset from atop the hill, but forgot about it as we sat there chatting and looking at the mommy monkeys carry their lil’ ones.

On Sunday, Sabal and I went to Forum and met up with Dhinu, who I was seeing after almost 3 months. He had been to Norway on an official trip. Then we went to Dhinu’s place and just as we were about to leave his house, we saw the most amazing black clouds ever. And it started pouring. It was one of the best rains I have ever witnessed and needless to say most of the roads on our way back home were clogged. Our cities NEED to be planned better! The auto in which we came had a radio and we listened so many of our favourite songs, singing along loudly and time just flew by and we reached our home back.

The day wasn’t over yet. It was Sunday and I HAD to meet Baba. Barath had come by and he took me to the temple although it was raining. There was not much crowd in the temple and I met Baba, spoke to Him for a few minutes and came back home. The weekend, unlike the umpteen boring weekends I have been having ever since I came to Bangalore, went off in a flash. For some time, I felt like I was in Chennai with my gang, hanging out and laughing and playing and simply jumping up and down with as much joy as the time when India won the World Cup (remember 3 years back, when Sreesanth actually used to bowl well and caught Misbah ul Haq in the T20 World Cup Finals against Pakistan? That’s what I am talking about). Sigh… That was a long time back, indeed!