Offo!

I chose this title because this is what I am listening these days and feeling it!

Offo!

For everybody in chandigarh, don't try the sausage pasta of nik bakers. It is okay types and you can get the same taste at fire and grill at half the price.

Offo!

It's hot!

Offo!

I have to go shopping!

Offo!

We had to go for a movie marathon!

Offo! Offo!

Highway

Imagine you are embarking a journey. You want to go to Tokyo and your friend wants to go to Paris. You can have any mode of transport but both of you decide that both shall take the bus as it will all be exciting and full of adventure.

You sit in the bus and you convince your friend to go to Tokyo. After much grumbling, you decide that Paris is better. Meanwhile, the friend decides that Tokyo is much better. 

Your friend then leaves you and departs for a newer journey. You are left alone looking for a destination. The serpent of abandonment is sucking the blood out of you and replacing it with its poison. 

What should you then do? Should you go to Tokyo like planned before or should you to Paris? 

Or just go to Amsterdam for the delicacies it is fabled about?

Status quo: Still Bonkers!

My finals finish on 24th April 2014. My banking days are to begin on 7 May 2014. I am very nervous about that. What if my freedom just goes away? What if I become like those people sitting in Sagar Ratna having that bored expression on their faces?

This is making me go bonkers!

Somebody great once said that you need to be outside your comfort zone to achieve greatness. Well, the comfort zone is too cozy. Reminds me of the 'garden' and 'forest' discussion of my corporate governance class. Garden is like my safe haven and forest is like a really dangerous zone. I wanted to stay in a garden with the forest as my neighbour. Probably, by living with my grandparents in Delhi, I have actually tried to create that. Let's see how that goes. 

There is a group of friends which is going to McLeo and Dharamshala. Anyway, my parents donot really like McLeod Ganj and Dharamshala. I really wanted to go there with my friends and experience it. I want to go trekking, bask in the lap of the nature, do all that what Wordsworth and Tennyson do in their poems and then join my bank.

I am going bonkers. Is it because I am leaving a safe territory? Or is because I am leaving my friends and going? I spent 13 years in school and four years in am engineering college. I have never felt the anxiety while leaving those friends. How is that friends I met just an year ago became so important? I think there is a study thing also. I am going to embark a new journey where I have no idea how I am going to fare. School and college were easy. You study, you score. In a job, the criterion changes. During my MBA days, I realised the more experienced a person is, the more he went out for trips. Probably it's the missing thing, while working. My friend Richa's sister thinks that when you have the time, you don't feel like going, sometimes because you don't have the money and sometimes the mood. But when you have the money, you donot have those senseless friends and energy to go, despite the cash in your bank. 

My worst nightmare is to get bored with myself. I like myself. I want to go to new places. Is that bad? Does that make me somewhat of a 'brat'? Mothers say that the world is cruel. I still want to see it. Call me crazy but I have already started looking for holiday destinations for the long weekend in October. I actually understand the Pepsi' ad campaign now. It is designed for us.'oh yes Abhi'

I am still going bonkers. Time to go study....take care..:-)

Random talk

Have you been insulted and complimented at the same time?

Something like I really think you are not that attractive but I think you are cool.

How do you react in such situations? Do you care about the former or the later?

I say get a good night sleep and just let things fall in place or well cry your heart out and just think how you died for like full two minutes and decide to walk away.

Finals are coming so I can't really write more. Take care.

P.S. Food for thought..did you know that if you say colourful, your lip movement may be read as 'I love you' (source: a fifth grader)

You can be anybody you want!

I hated finance, now I don't. I could not see myself drowned in numbers but now, it can be safe to say I  have started enjoying it. In every interview, I sat for, they asked me what interests me more. I always said 'Marketing'. What am I going to do on May 7?

I am going to join as A Management Trainee in HDFC Bank in the working capital division of Business Banking.(quite a mouthful, right?)

Why would we want to be the same person year after year? One of my tshirt comments at the last day of college was 'don't change'. I personally do not believe in the concept. I am the kind of person who at a new year night would like to think how I changed in the year and 'how awesome I became'.

When we were children, we could be anybody. It was the kick of hormones and a sense of embarrassment which stopped us but then my question is why should we learn from other people's mistakes? Let's make our own.

You know what I want to do. I want to get a ticket of a place I have not heard of or well get off a random station on a train journey. 

I want to change my look every three months to the extent that I don't want to resemble my Photograph on my ID. Every morning, we should be shocked by our reflection. 

Explore!

I want to learn at least 5 languages fluently. You ask me for a reason? I would say because I want to 'be born' everyday. Just like a baby who learns to babble and then gets fluent in a language.

I also want to forgive and forget like a river which cleans the dirtiest and doesn't really gets dirty itself;a river which throws all the clutter in the ocean and purifies itself. 

I don't say forget yourself. There is a thin line between somebody new and faking it all. If you ask me, I would rather become a 'good, new me' then an already jaded 'somebody else'. Something like wearing a denim of 'flying machine' rather than a second copy of 'fcuk'. If you are trying to be somebody new, be classy about it, otherwise count it as an experience and get made fun off with friends who actually give a damn about you.

Life is beautiful and short, so let's be born everyday!

Tc

A love story..

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure"

Today somebody died. She was the sister of my grand father, probably one of the persons who had known him the most who was alive till yesterday.

She used to come almost everyday for tea at our place. She probably wanted to spend her some time in our house, a house built by her only brother. Her story begins much earlier. Born in a humble family, she aspired to become an educated lady. If looks could kill, she was a dynamite.

She studied MA English and became a lecturer in a girls college. She wanted to be successful,an ambitious woman. An educated and a smart woman with beauty at her side , is a lethal combination. It not only gave her confidence but an appeal which could have made the straightest of trees bend. She helped everybody who came to her. She inspired a friendship within people. She was with everybody yet always a leader, a support of her friends.

One day she met him. He was an advocate, a rich man of generations. He was well respected and his opponents felt their knees weaken just by the mention of his name. He was everything a girl inspired in a man. He was a gentleman. He was orthodox. He had earned his reputation of one of the greatest men by his own merit in his twenty year career. The only problem was that he was already married. 

The first day she met him, she did not swoon. She looked at him in his eye and asked him to behave better. He found her endearing. She found him irresistible. The first meeting became a series of meetings. 

He left his wife. She was tagged as the 'other woman'. When she married him, she became the 'gold digger'. Her family resisted, yet they understood later. She then became the principal of colleges and probably one of the most respected women of the city.

She had his children later. He died his natural death. She was younger than most of his friend's widows. She lived on, sparkling in her glory. 

She started visiting our house more frequently since the last few years. She would look at her brother's photograph in our drawing room and cry. She had no memory of the recent past yet had a crystal clear memory of what happened a two decades ago. 

I met her yesterday. She died today. 

I was not close to her, yet her death makes me remember her words which she had once told me,"They may call me a 'gold digger' but I was irrevocably in love with him. I see myself in you. Don't settle for what the world hands you. Fight for you want and choose your own regrets".

I like to believe that she went to a special place where he was waiting for her. After all, an era of hers cannot end without a happy ending for she never settled what the world handed her.

Jhadhu(broom), hi 5 or a lotus..your choice?

The election times have come.

This time  I feel more empowered than ever before. I want to vote, choose a better government. I want to become a participant. I don't want to sit in the corner like my elders do and say that nothing will move here.

I am from Chandigarh. I do not keep an active interest in politics, but I don't want to sit behind and say that politicians buy votes and do what they have to do. I want to vote, even if a different party comes in power. I want the right to discus and debate. 

So I ponder. Gul Panag(AAP), Kirron Kher(BJP),  and Pawan Kumar Bansal (congress) are fighting for election here. ( I have just alphabetically mentioned the names of the candidates)

Well, so far I can tell you that Gul and Kirron are free of any criminal charges whereas Bansal,despite no charge sheet been filed, has been earlier convicted for the Railgate escapade.

While Kirron declared her assets to the tune of Rs 23.88 crore, Gul showed her assets amounting to Rs 5.5 crore. Gul has liability in the shape of loans amounting to Rs 21 lakh.

Bansal along with his wife has assets worth 7.7 crore . 

So in the terms of assets Gul Panag has the lowest amount of assets and Kirron the highest.

Gul and kirron are both first time candidates and Bansal has been a seasoned politician. If he wins this will be his fourth term at a stretch. Frankly, Bansal's  work is worth mentioning. He has helped the power issue and has brought more organisation. There is a 24x7 power service departments. There is an intimation of power breaks if any. We have e-Governance cells called Sampark all around. The chandigarh election commission have started working. Bansal is amongst  a common man here. The only blot is his rail gate scandal.

All of them are graduates from Panjab University. It strikes a personal chord with me because pretty soon,I will be one of the graduates from PU.(does that make my entry into politics a possibility?)

Gul and Kirron, apart from their dimples are both known for their elegance, with the former being a beauty queen and the latter being a theatre stunner. Bansal, whereas has more wrinkles. He is a smart old man and makes you feel like talking to a veteran who is always smiling and knows what it takes. He gives you a feeling of the 'uncle who goes to the office every day and does his work in the office'. He would probably come back and watch the news and would probably give every youngster who comes across him a lecture on 'good Heath' and 'early to bed, early to rise' kind of lectures.( now that I am thinking, wasn't it Bansal's tenure in which the culture is Pubbing and Clubbing in the city is getting so popular? Ironic)

As a citizen I will always be in two minds whether kirron is in Mumbai for judging her reality show. Gul would probably be somewhere acting in a parallel cinema film. Pawan would be in the office or talking health benefits with passer bys. 

It's a tough call. Can we punish peopl for their lack of experience? That's way no new comer would ever stand for elections? Can the angst and guts shown by kirron while running away to become an actress be ignored? Can Gul Panag's confident and determined smile to change the world be ignored? Can Bansal's consistence to improve our city be left aside in front of his rail gate scam?

This is our time to decide and What a decision we have to make! This has our and our next generation's destiny involved. May the best candidate win!