Pitch dark

A shadow has crept over my soul

Inching through my defences

Making me darkness herself

I wallow in grief over things lost

In the invisible bonfire

And try to survive on the warmth of embraces

Of kindred spirits

Only that it feels like a stranglehold

And I push them away with a

Weaponized tongue and my newfound strangeness

Friends and foes are all the same

Only difference is the name.

I burn through whatever light I get

Worried I might never see again

In haste I commit little crimes

And wallow once more again. 

Solo

Solo

Melancholy strings madly strumming like a guitar

Carnivorous id ravishing my morality from deep within

Inverted sleep cycles make me question reality

A madwoman NOT at work

I play a multi note orchestra  

To the current people of my life

Friends and family run fast

Away or Towards

I’m not sure.

 I have sat in silence too long

To continue the arrangement

Where I move my mouth

And you sing my song.

I will sing till

my larynx tears

Your eardrum.

The blood that will fall

Is a pittance compared to the pain

You so casually caused

So listen to me

Sing my glorious solo  

With my mistakes and all

And this time

Judge me

for who I really am. 

The Green coloured building

Blanket of nostalgia

Wrapped me tightly

Like a burrito

When I woke up today.

Past memories weighed me down

Go back to sleep they said

Relive those joyous days

Their glory finally acknowledged

Faces of friends

Spaces I hung out

Their authentic traces intact

Beckon me home

Ships eventually sail

Drop the anchor now and then

Thirsty for mirage

I drink salt water

It is better to revisit the green coloured building

In my head

The paths and persons more familiar and friendly

So I shut my eyes tightly.

Good night! 

Also : My juvenile post on farewell to the green coloured building is here 

It is my old school - BVM. Sometimes I get strong dreams about my school life and hope that I can relive them. I'm pretty sure I will appreciate it more this time around.

The Predator & The Prey

So the midweek motif in Poets United was ' predator and the prey' and I couldn't ask for a more perfect opportunity to write about this .It is more prosey than poemy but i just wrote what came to my mind. Leave your honest feedback below or I will go mad that nobody cared. Putting myself out there.

credits - Times of india

I always never liked him

The guy who rode me in his auto to school.

He acted like he was my boss

Bullying and puncturing my soul.

Made me sit in the worst positions

In his overcrowded rickshaw,

On the handrest, above his seat,

Even had to share his front seat.

My parents never believed me

As I had a penchant for fabricating honestly amazing lies.

He used to hurl abuses at me,

Unnecessarily delay taking me home,

He even drank on duty.

No one ever believed me.

Then one day he started asking me for ten bucks

And pestered me incessantly

Till I gave him some.

This became a habit.

I gave up complaining to my parents altogether.

He used to make fun of me in front of others

But I wasn’t a silent victim

I learnt bad words to combat his verbal diarrhoea

I acted like I didn’t care

Got used to his bad treatment to an extent that he got bored.

He wasn’t all evil either.

He told me about his son in law who had cancer.

I saw him giving free lifts to the poor

( delaying me furthermore)

Buying tea and biscuits to the old and needy

With whatever he had.

He told me about his affair ,

About his wife.

About his life.

He treated me like an adult ,

Alarm bells should have rung then.

He started speaking to me about sex ,

I was 13 then ,

It intrigued me

But I tried blocking it out.

I always pretended to read a book.

Then one fine day ,

The predator decided to hunt its prey.

But the prey was agile like a deer

And cried out like a hyena ,

The predator was old , tired and certainly drunk

And got scared by the fragile looking one causing so much

Noise.

So it decided to act like it was all a mistake.

The prey told her parents and her parents

Finally listened this time.  

Apparently many preys don’t speak out

And become silent victims.

Parents were proud of their prey

And the prey decided to not be one

And decided to act brave.

It worked.

People believed I was strong

I believed I was

I eventually felt strong

And became so.

But those memories still hit me when I’m weak.

If only they had listened quickly.
If only I had told them earlier 
If only

Ordinary together

(photo taken from google)

From the bottom drawer of misery

I sprang

From the top one of tyranny

You did.

And  the middle drawer of mediocrity

We accepted as ours.

For there is nothing more comforting

Than a thin veil of ordinary

In this inordinately trifle yet infinitely intricate turf we call our earth.

Geography tests

I haven’t written in over a month and I sincerely apologize for that. To make up for this often committed mistake of not writing in SSS , I am going to confess to some of the (small) crimes I have committed in the past.

< Disclaimer: Personal Post coming up >

I know I should be writing about the increasing terrorist activity or the omnipresent rape fear, but I choose to overlook these topics (mostly because better writers have written awesome articles about them already) and am going to choose GEOGRAPHY TESTS instead.

Very Random Right? Well, expecting a sane topic from an insane person is well … insane.

Everyone has an Achilles heel , a special subject that they hate so much that they would rather burn in hell than study it for the test next day. Most people hate math , I also hate(d) math . But coming to think of it, I hated GEOGRAPHY the most. History was awesome;, math dumbfounding ; Biology insanely difficult ; BUT nothing was so irrationally hateable like innocuous looking geography.

I mean who wants to study about the rocks, climate , pressure, river delta estuaries or even longitude latitudes? I learnt so much, but hated every bit. I used to read the most amount of story books during geography. The teachers were actually pretty good but boy! I hated that subject.

(Don’t) worry. I am (not) going to ramble about my hatred and be done with it. Nahi saar, I am going to give two awe some/ful anecdotes about 2 amazing geography exams I wrote in school time.

THIS IS THE STORY OF WHY I DON’T CARRY WATER TO EXAMINATION HALLS ANYMORE.

1.    1   Water on the desk

Sounds innocent enough. But nothing is ever innocent  in semiland, my children J . I was in 8^th standard I think, the class representative – apostIneverdeservedbutdidnoworkanywayssochill- and had this geography test. Our teacher was Nirmala miss, an old but smart teacher who would sit at the back of the class so that copying was out of the picture entirely.

The fundamental duty of the class rep is to develop class rapport and I found that working towards an underlying common cause would incite us towards that direction. Henceforth, I decided to help my classmates copy. Out of 34 people , at least 30 hadn’t studied , I had studied enough to fill the pages but many were planning unsafe methods to copy.

Our class 8A , we were a pack. We made teachers cry in packs , we chewed gum in packs and we decided to commit this crime as a pack. Cheating in tests is a crime which I have later come to despise but as a 13 year old class student who hated geography , I had no qualms about what I was just about to do.

So how can the entire class copy without getting caught? We can’t all whisper – 30 whispers cause a scream , we can’t all keep the notebook underneath , even if we had a plan – we can’t all ever agree in unison .

I tried dividing the class into 4 zones – the quiet zone , nerd zone and the last 2 were the mad cheater’s zone. Whatever elaborate plan I made up , it all boiled down to the problem that the teacher sat in the back bench and could see the papers we kept below in the desk. Creating bits was logistically impossible and if everyone wasn’t satisfied , somebody would rat us out.

So , I poured water on the backbench and added a dirty paper and banana peel to it.

That was the most popular thing I did as a class rep and it had to go undocumented L :P

1. 2.       Water on the paper
2. 
   

This was when I was around the same age: 12-13 . Although , I showed criminal tendencies as mentioned above , I was pretty dumb. To prove the case in point , I am going to bring back to memory this painful incident which ruined my entire exams - almost.

We have established my particular dislike for geography already , so it isn’t entirely unsurprising that I didn’t have much knowledge of it on the exam day. However , I forgot to mention this – I am a nerd. On the exam days at the least :P

I hate leaving blank spaces in my answer, probably because I know I’ll never come back to fill it , as I never have the time for it. The exact same thing happened . For the first question on the first page of the first fricking examination! Even though, I answered other answers properly , it irked me that the first page was half blank and first impression matters.

So , I poured water on my first page.

I still haven’t figured out why I DID THAT. A blonde moment , you could call it -_- My thought process was this : If I pour a small amount of water on the page , it would be a legit reason to have omitted that space.

I forgot that

• 1)      I was a MESSY KLUTZ ,
• 2)      That water has absorbing qualities
• 3)      My bottle had a very big mouth
• 4)      I used gel pen.

So the water leaked on to all the pages I wrote afterwards and my mainsheet was a wet nightmare. I had to rewrite the entire paper in 20 minutes and the invigilator wasn’t ready to give me even 2 extra minutes.

So ladies and gentlemen, please don’t pour water on your paper . Maybe it was the karma of pouring water on my desk which led me into that disaster of a decision.

And that is why I don’t carry water to an examination.

yours thirstily ,

Semi

ek gaon mein ek kisan raghu thatha! :P

It's been a week in Pune already!! :O
and believe it or not  - I have fallen in love with this city! <3
or maybe it is just another one of my defense mechanisms , protecting me from shocks. Whatever this is , it has aroused me enough, to write a post! So let me finish this before reality sinks in .
( Side note :

hahaha

  Defense mechanisms are pretty intriguing . Do you know that I haven't cried a single tear drop yet? My friends think it is some kind of sacrilegious blasphemy from my  part. But hey! If pessimists argue that I have effectively ended one life , I argue back that I have just started a new one :) I do miss chennai . However , I am not going to go gaga over it. Okay I just did . )
I haven't had much chance to discover the city in its entirety yet. But , from whatever I have seen - it is fresh , green , pleasant and mindnumbingly beautiful :')

So here it is . The elusive list of things I have noticed about Pune and my new life in general :

Not THIS adventurous generally :P

1) I was never a nature loving person or that's what I thought. However , climbing the hill in my college ( yes , there is a hill in my college :O ) changed that perspective. The liberating atmosphere , the refreshing smell of pure , fresh air is well worth the climbing - which in itself is exciting and adventurous! Also , I am for the first time realizing that there are four types of climate in a year :P Living in chennai can easily erase this fact into a mere illusion. Back there it is either hot or hotter :')
And in other seemingly related news I got crowned 'Miss Green' by the Mess Bhaiya ( more like a thatha actually :P ) Don't start clapping already - I got called that because i was wearing a green kurthi LOL

2) My new friend rightly said , " Here in Pune , people talk to you in Marathi . If you don't know that they'll talk to you in Hindi and after that they stop." Yeah that's right. English doesn't work with the rickshaw wallahs . Coming from Tamil Nadu , a state which has fervently opposed Hindi often in the past and which doesn't give importance to Hindi in it's education system - I am at a huge loss here . It doesn't help matters that I hated my L3 hindi teacher and in turn conditioned my hatred towards that subject. To all the young readers out there - Learn HINDI. It is very hard to learn later and in this increasingly globalized world it is good to know 3-4 languages . And learning the 'official' language of your country is never a wrong place to start :)

The fundamental problem with most Tamils in this regard ( I am heavily generalizing here ) can be summed up with one joke in a yesteryear Bhagyaraj film , which sadly is still popular. Instead of saying ' Ek Gaon me ek kisan rahta ta' the hero mispronounces it as ' ek gaun me ek kisan raghu thatha' Thatha means grandfather in tamil and raghu is a common name. And ever since then Hindi has been ridiculed and not learnt -_-

3) I love the food here. My hosts may think I'm being overly polite when i say I love roti over rice. Fact is I actually love north Indian food :') Being open to trying new dishes has finally helped this time. Thank you masterchef australia for opening my eyes about food :*

4) Heavily generalizing , yes. I find the pace of Pune to be much slower than Chennai . Maybe it is the monsoon's cozy feel . It perfectly suits a lazy person like me :')

5) It doesn't hurt that folks back home miss me . Makes one feel loved ,you know :P ( even though this may  only last for a short while)

perfectly put by some random citizen :P

6) Lastly but not the least , I am very proud of my new found independence. I make my own bed , wash my own clothes :O , do my dishes etc. Being self sufficient makes one immediately feel adult like :D I was so proud when I wore the tee shirt,which i had washed with my own hands ^_^  P.S - This doesn't mean that I'll do housework when i come back home to chennai xP Home is where the ass lays ;')

Random realization - Blood clots are very random o.O

Semi

Food for thought

"I should totally blog today."

you can succeed only if you try

After 21 days of fruitless inaction , I thought it was my mind playing mirage-like tricks with me again. Then I realized it was my lack of determination and fear of writing bad posts, that has caused this drought .  Remembering  what Hrithik Roshan said after his disastrous 'kites' in Kofee with karan  - it was something like ," You have to do something in the first place for it to be right or wrong. Worrying about an exam before writing it won't get you anywhere" Thank god he did write his exam - and we got zindagi na milegi dobara :')
So I should totally blog today. But I'm not guaranteeing you any quality.


 Ironically QUALITY has become my biggest problem right now. I don't even know what I mean when I use that word. But , I read all the blogs out there - enormous amounts of talent and potential :O and the sheer amount of posts in a month stun me. However there tends to be more misses than hits when you generate 50 posts a month ( or so I think ). When I was young, I used to cry to my mom about how my friends always wrote more pages than me during an exam and she calmly reassured me that ' quality is more important than quantity'. So I try to give my best every post and pray that at least half of what I hoped to convey reaches you.

I do promise you one thing ( i hardly promise anything in my blog - as I almost never keep it up :P) I will concentrate on writing more in this forum for at least my sake, if not yours.

 Sorry for the writer's rant :P I am sure fellow bloggers will understand. I needed to let it out of my system to progress . In this post I hope to 'rebuild my empire '  and give you tidbits of insights that have struck me this summer.

1)  Food for thought - I watched master chef USA 3 as it aired on t.v . I was never a huge fan of  the USA version in comparison to Australia as the former relied more on drama and antics, than anything remotely related to food. However ,since becoming the admin of 'Gordon Ramsay memes' ( see how I subtly put it? :P ) I felt an overwhelming sense of duty to watch the show . And surprise! this season was more about the food than about hate speech towards one other! :O And the most surprising of all - the winner of a cookery contest was blind. I heard tales of 'fixing' permeate the room but the truth is always far more inspiring :)
The finale was between the industrious josh and artistic christina. It reminded me one thing about food which we tend to forget somewhere in the over complicated world of reality shows - taste always triumphs . Josh produced stunning looking dishes with complex techniques but Christine simply made food full of flavor and yumminess . At the end of the day ,we do not care if the food is sauteed or grilled as long it tastes heavenly :)

2)That moment- After reading Agatha Christie's innumerable mysteries , I was very keen to get an idea

The eye in your mind paints things differently

about what went through her head and picked up her autobiography. Surprise! She led a very normal Victorian life , befitting the era. She puts us at such consummate ease, that her writing tips made sense to amateurs like me :') Among other things , she was a world traveller at a time it was enormously difficult to global trot for women . She didn't want to re visit countries she had already been to - she didn't think she could re capture the magic of the first venture. And somehow I totally emphasize with her . If she is scared of revisiting her favorite spots on earth , I am afraid of re reading my favorite books for the same reason. Every book has some poignant memory associated with it , and it is tough to breach the same ground without the feeling that it won't be as good as the first time. Sounds like blasphemy - but I haven't read even Harry potter more than once! :O

*Wow this post has drained me already :/ *

3)  The end? - The greyest book I have read in recent times is Dan Brown's Inferno . Among other things the book's plot is about the threat of overpopulation and that it will lead to extinction. Ironically living in India , I haven't really thought about that angle much. The 'antagonist' wants to wipe off 1/3rd of world's population , so that mankind can survive from extinction for a longer time . Is man made disaster the answer?  Should humans take this matter into their hands? Genetic engineering looks appealing from the outset , however its potential for danger makes it scarier than nuclear bombs. Should we interfere with evolution just because we assume we are 'superior' races? but what is the alternative - waiting for the inevitable? That doesn't sound very homo sapien -y :P I am asking instead of answering because I'm very confused about this topic and I don't want to make an uninformed statement or create an opinion too fast. If the book was true , you'll forget what you just read and deny that overpopulation maybe the end.
The book does conveniently ignore the enormous amount of resources trapped with the very rich - which has already resulted in general squalor in the 'bottom' rungs.

"The darkest places of hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality during times of moral crisis "

cheer up till then
semi :P