I never thought I would pen this down!

I have always been a happy girl. I guess I have had a great childhood and was exposed to a pretty good lifestyle and education and had great parents. I was loved so much and was given so much freedom and knowledge by both my Amma and Appa. Amma insisted that I learn Hindi, while Appa was dead against it. But Amma had her way in this matter and both Gayathri (my sister) and I took to learning Hindi as our second language. So Appa somehow wanted us to learn Tamil and I was given comic books in Tamil to make me recognize letters and improve my reading speed. He also introduced me to the world of books, being an avid reader himself. He was an inspiration. He taught us to play Chess and taught us the rules of Cricket and Tennis and Football and Hockey. In all those school-going years, neither Amma nor Appa ever forced us to ‘sit and study’. Those were the happiest years – no tension, no worries, no idea about the financial situation of the family and in my case, no worries about tests and exams as well – I was a good student, duh… The biggest worry was eating – Amma and Appa and Paati and Athaipaati always forced food down my throat and well, it never stuck to my body. I was always underweight, still am.

Nobody’s life is full of roses. We all have our share of bad days. I have mine too. No, I am not going to start cribbing about kosu again – I guess I have grown used to it and am slowly learning how to tackle this. As my Gurudev Swami Chinmayanandji said, “This too shall pass” and I totally believe in his words. Now more than ever before! My point is, in order to understand where you stand and who your real friends are and who is trustworthy and how tough you are, you have to go through the dark patches of life. I went through a couple of them. Well, right now, I don’t actually remember the first one. But hey, I am sure it was there. I felt bad; maybe I was too young to comprehend it or something. But the second one, I remember quite well.

I was in college. Right now, nobody will believe me if I said I was more of an outcast there. I was popular – hugely popular would be more appropriate – but for the wrong reasons. Now what reasons they were and why they made me popular is beyond the scope of this blog :D (Effect of reading training documents, you see) Well, to be frank, now it makes me laugh and I feel like an idiot for worrying so much about such a non-issue. But yes, back then it made me a bitter person – I went into my own shell and refused to come out of it or allow anyone inside it. Well, to tell you the truth, nobody wanted to come inside, hold my hand and take me out of the darkness and the sadness. Everyone was busy too with their own lives to find out what went wrong with me or to verify the facts and simply stuck to listening to made up stories. There was no one to listen to me. I thought how true these lines were,

"Iruttinile nee nadakkaiyile, un nizhalum unnai vittu odi vidum;

Nee mattum dhaan indha ulagithile, unakku thunai endru vilangi vidum"

(When you walk in darkness, even your shadow deserts you. It is then that you would realize that you are your only companion)

My only strength was my studies. No matter what happened, I never let it affect my studies.

I was all alone inside a dark room for so long and finally when light came, I was afraid of it. I was starting to be afraid of being happy. But slowly, the light grew on me and I started enjoying my day in the sun. It just felt right. I started feeling so light (NOT weight-wise) and slowly started becoming the same girl that I was during school.

I got into Wipro – 2008 was one of the happiest years of my life – my project at Wipro’s Chennai One office, my (rather big) gang of friends, weekend trips to Vandalur and beach resorts with the ‘gang’ – each day was filled with so much laughter that I felt that God was giving me the laughter that was long overdue. 2009, too, was a very happy year. I enjoyed my new project and the early morning shifts – the only time when Chennai’s heat was bearable :)

I still consider my college days to be the most productive years. I went through so much of trauma, but I came out stronger – much stronger than I ever was. I kept on telling myself, “God is putting you through it, because you are one of His favorite children and He wants to make sure you come out strong and tough. And don’t worry; He is doing this to you because He knows you will overcome it successfully. He is just trying to build your confidence.” Now I am happy and strong and know who my TRUE friends are and who is trust-worthy. Behind all that suffering was a learning process. :)

Kosu Tholla...

Four days of rest and relaxation at home (not to mention made-by-Amma food) is a bane. No, I haven’t become any fatter (in fact, becoming a little plumper would make me extremely happy). It is a bane because at the end of four days, I have got to return to this city which is very similar in climate to Coimbatore, but horrible in terms of water, food and most importantly traffic. But return I did and stuck I got at work. And it does not help that I have a teamie who can’t see through a prank and escalate it to all managers (yes, I have multiple managers… sob, sob). It is certainly not easy for a small (read: shummall) girl to handle all this. I just turned 24 for crying out loud.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, life bowls yet another one of its bouncers (IPL effect, you see) and says I will have attend a training from 10am to 7pm everyday for two weeks and then do the support activities from 7pm to 10pm. WTF!!! And any training is bound to put you to sleep. Don’t you lie to me that you have always been awake during any training you have attended! No? Not even during the post-lunch sessions? Then you are either a compulsive liar or an alien. Now is a post-lunch session and I am terribly sleepy.

I haven’t read a book in months, I haven’t read the newspaper in 3 days now and I don’t have time for anything besides work. It sounds nothing like me. I have always been the person that gives more importance to personal life than work. My priorities were and are and will be this way for the rest of my life. But I have to go through this for the next couple of weeks and I will have to put up with. There might not be further updates in this space until May. I hate me for quarantining myself from the outside world. I hate this job. I hate my work. I hate myself now!

My teamie (who I disgustedly call “kosu”) is getting on my nerves and is hell-bent on getting everything from high priority issues to pranks I play to his digestive disorders escalated to equally incompetent managers (when have we ever accepted that managers are competent?). He manages to piss me off and irritate me and make me want to pull the hair out of my head – ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Now I understand why Goundamani said his infamous dialogue “Indha kosu thollai thaanga mudila da Narayana… Marundhu adichu kollungada idha” – the same dialogue that I have been using for quite some time now and had mentioned the English translation in my previous post. As I am writing this now, kosu is showing off in front of everyone how resourceful he is by running up 4 floors to get different color markers for our trainer. Hold on a sec… that is the job of the Admin/House-keeping department staff.

Before exiting the door, he asked, “Do you need anything else?”

I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Some coffee, perhaps?” And everyone (including the trainer) burst out laughing.

What pleasure he gets out of asking questions that in our domain are as dumb as, “How is 1+1 2 and not 11?” (The same dumb question multiple times and still not understand…) beats me! I have heard God helps those who help themselves. That explains my need for all the Tortoise/Mortein/Good Night/All Out. Hayyo Hayyo!!!

Happy Birthday to Me...

All of us go through different phases in life. And when we are passing through one, we keep saying a particular thing frequently – a particular proverb or sentence or movie dialogue or humming a song. Most of you know what my most frequent dialogue was. Well, for the late-comers, it is “I am soooooooooooo cute”. Okay, now don’t close this window. I know it was quite indigestible, but hey, so is seeing Sudeep Tyagi being in the playing XI for the Chennai team. After receiving numerous requests and warnings and threats from friends and others for refraining from saying that sentence, I stopped it. In fact, I got a better one!

This time it went, “I am the best in the world” (said like drunken SRK in OSO in his baatli award acceptance speech) and needless to say it annoyed people around me more. It was something I said to cheer myself up when I was down and no, I didn’t give a darn about what the others were thinking. These were my dialogues when aal waas wel… But it is not so any more. Aal izz not wel. I hate it here now and my current dialogue is: “Indha kosutholla thaanga mudila da Narayana, marundhu adichu kollungada idha” (This mosquito is annoying me too much, somebody spray the insecticide and kill it). Well, who this mosquito is and why it was annoying me is not good enough to be written here; kosu does NOT deserve so much.

But apart from kosuthollai, life is great. My birthday came and went and the day passed off too quickly. I missed being with Amma, Kiya and Paati. But still, I had great fun that started with cake cutting at midnight (the result of which devastating because it made me want to take bath at the middle of the night), Yals had come to my PG to wish me, I wore new sari and went to the nearby temple with Sabal in the morning, came to office, cut the cake at office, went with Sabal for a walk, had paani puri and aalu chat for dinner. It was just perfect J

But still, “Indha kosutholla thaanga mudila da Narayana, marundhu adichu kollungada idha”!!!