I am 16.....going on 17....

Obviously the title calls for an explanation. Well I have written 16 posts so far. This happens to be my 17th post. When I reminisce over my posts, I wonder if indeed I wrote all of it. Writing is easy, but writing on a public scratch pad is surely something! As always, anything creative invites a lot of criticism, which taken in the right spirit, can open a whole new direction to learning.

Spring is just around the corner. The 20th of March is supposed to be the official start of the Spring season. For most students in this country, the spring-break is the harbinger of spring :) As planned, most of my friends from Texas vacationed at Florida for their break. As a natural consequence of this, half my g-talk list got washed out over the last weekend :) This sudden dwindling of numbers was too jarring and I must confess that I felt sorry for myself. I did not get consumed in self-pity(Okay maybe I did, a little :)). I went apartment hunting to distract myself and am saddling up to move in on my own tomorrow!! So I can rejoice over the fact that it was indeed a weekend well spent!!

It is a scary venture indeed, moving in on my own. College Main Apartment- place I lived while in College Station- had become a haven to me. With all it's idiosyncrasies, it still felt like home, over time of course. There is this one song by Leona Lewis called 'It will all get better in time'. Mostly I feel it is all in the mind. If one wants to get accustomed to one's habitat, it will happen instantly. If the heart and head is not in something, passage of time is not going to have any effect.

I have been giving acclimatization a lot of thought......The first thing that comes to my mind is a song called 'Comfortably Numb' by Pink Floyd. (Disclaimer: This is not to be misconstrued as anything else other than a mere reference) Over time everyone becomes numb to their surroundings.....And a few become comfortably numb.... We accept all the short-comings, see the brighter side of things and make peace with existence.

As I embark upon this whole new life style.....I being to wonder thus..... Adaptability is all about how soon one can become comfortably numb....One can take the path less traveled and change the system.... But at this point in time and place....the chirpy child in me has been whomped by logistics of reality..... And, even though it is not totally new, I shudder at the thought of being me, myself and I......

.....and with this I wed thee....

Weddings are flamboyant events, I'm sure everyone agrees. It's all about celebration and a certain amount of pomp and show is expected so that the on-lookers can go green with envy :) I'd been to one such ostentatious wedding. An Indian (it's OK to be presumptuous, in case you thought it was Hindu :)) was marrying a Russian Jew. The ceremony was performed in both Vedic and Jewish traditions. This of course woke up the blogger in me. I went into raptures as I had something to think and 'ink' about :)

The Jewish part of the ceremony was sweet and more importantly 'short'. In about forty five minutes they were pronounced man and wife and showered with blessings to live happily ever after. An interesting part of this ceremony was when the groom was asked to stomp on a glass vase to prove that his marriage was indeed not ephemeral. As Physics would brand it, marriage is meant to be a 'chemical reaction', it cannot be reversed.

Coming to the Hindu part of the ceremony......well what can I say... :) All the Sanskrit chants were refurbished to suit the requirements of this country (the specifics are unimportant) and the invitees. The aspect, however, that baffled me the most was how Vedic rituals could be bent to suit the requirements of geographical locations and a variety of faiths. In the sitcom, 'Friends' Monica tells her betrothed Chandler that she wants a 'marriage' and not a 'wedding'. Wedding plans are subjective to the helm, of course, but I wish at times that parents or in general all elders could think of other goals for their existence and not treat the marriages of their off springs as the object of spending all their lives' savings on.

The current economy has had it's effect on the marriage 'market' too (after all it IS a market, is it not!!) A huge crisis has fallen upon parents' of all 'available' singles. It has apparently become exceedingly difficult to find suitors because of the ailing economy. Wow! And here I was......thinking that marriage and more commonly, matters of the heart are untouched by extraneous forces!!!

So...these days on facebook updates and google's buzz.....a very common status message is this- 'there are only 1141 tigers remaining in the world, save them'. George Bernard Shaw said 'When a man wants to kill a tiger it's called sport, when a tiger wants to kill a man it's called ferocity'. This quote is of course courtesy google. Can you imagine what would happen if Google started putting up a price!! The human race is yet to fathom the perils of taking things for granted.

Whenever the talk is about tigers, I am reminded of Jim Corbett. He wrote this book called The Man Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. The story (a sort of auto-biography) is about how he killed a terrorizing man-eating leopard in the Himalayas with his famous 'shot in the dark' and how he is left with mixed emotions at the end of it all. Almost everything in this world leaves us feeling mixed. And here I was being told....that we live in a binary world......where everything is either 0 or 1..... :)