Escape is easier than change. So I love vacations!

Why is it always so difficult to articulate beauty?

After about a month of dilly-dally the trip finally happened. I went to Goa with the girls. Probably my best ever vacation. Ok I might sound thankless for all the other wonderful vacations I've had but this was hands down the best time I've ever had! Colva, Majorda, Calangute (yuck!) Bagha, Candolim, Anjuna, Dona Paula, Panjim, Old Goa (ok not an architecture fan), Alcohol, dancing, driving, drunk driving, cops, bike breakdown, water sports, borrowing clothes, footwear, accessories from each other, getting pissed off and bursting into fits of laughter, sitting quietly for hours and contemplating about nothing and everything - it was all there in the last 4 days.

We spent hours at the beach, sitting on those long foot-ons, thinking to ourselves some hot guy will zoom towards us in a water-scooter. But as all of us know, life is not that kind. Forget water scooter, we did not even see cute guys at Totos or Brittos! And the ones who looked cute, if I showed you those boys you'd call me a pedophile. Yes we've all suddenly grown old. I couldn't even drink for the first half of the trip and I almost told myself this is the last time I am going to Goa - after all you can't sip pots of ginger tea at Goa, can you?

We drove hundreds of kilometers in the state, got a crazy tan, drank loads of coconut water, alcohol and tea. We slept until late during the day and stayed awake through the night. What was so different from your regular vacation? Well nothing. Then what makes it so special? Just the thought that it could probably be one of my last vacations with the girls for a long long time to come.

The same feeling again, that I get each time I am having a good time - life is so easy around people you know and you love. There is no pretence, there is no pleasing. They don’t care how terrible you look in those night clothes and yet make fun of you when you are dressed at your best. You don’t miss anyone, there is no wanting to make calls or worrying about  what the future might hold or how bad that last year was. Time comes to a stand still and yet moves so fast. There is no earlier in the day and no later in the evening. All that's there is that moment and the feeling of utmost satisfaction with what you have.

And then there is the power of the supreme. Standing alone in front of the roaring sea at 2 am makes you feel so small, so petty. Driving alone on a dark street tells you the darkness is for a reason, for a reality check. No matter how powerful man gets, some things will continue to dictate their supremacy. The sea can give you the same feeling that those mountains can give. They are harmless at that instant but can get nasty. You don't want to provoke the beautiful waves in the ocean, the darkness of the night, the silence of the mountains and the evenness of the deserts.

Vacations are getting better. Hopefully life will get better too. The hot sun is sometimes more comforting than the cool moonlight. As of now, I am back to this shithole of a place called office and to bustling Bombay. It helps to know that there are enough bounties of nature to leave behind your mundane life at and to feel alive for a few hours every year, in the name of vacation.

P.S: Do not spend on high SPF sunscreens.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

Happy New Year peeps!!!

I've been meaning to write for a while now but there has been no happy thing to write about. I wanted my 1st post of 2010 to be a happy one and if you see my blogger drafts for the last 20 odd days - you'd feel so bad for me. I churned out some semi-finished depression filled posts. I've been going through this endless process of submitting applications, staying up all night and working at office (a thankless bitch of a place!) This kinda schedule leaves little or no time for basics like food and sleep, forget blogging.

Anyway, cribs apart, I've been listening to some very cute telugu music (trying to read up lyrics and wondering what the mumble-jumble of vowels is all about! hell yes, its my mother tongue but still!) and anything telugu brings only 1 memory to my mind. No, not mom's weekly routine of sambar rice. It reminds me of my 2.5 years at Hyderabad. Those 2.5 yrs which gave me my budds for a good memory and a zillion other things for a bad memory. I hated the first breeze of that place when I landed there. I hated where my hotel was. I hated the locality where I moved in. I hated those malls that stocked piles of tasteless clothes. I hated those movie theatres which almost never played good movies and when they did, there'd be no tickets available. I hated the streets where people spat paan on your pants. I hated those mindless flyovers running from somewhere to nowhere and from nowhere to yet another nowhere - clogging traffic and making you sick of looking at tasteless buildings lined next to each other for 10s of kilometers. I hated the night clubs - they were a hangout zone for a bunch of rich wannabes figuring out how a mojito is different from a long island iced tea. I hated how the only bearable place in the face of hyd, a quaint little cafe at jubilee rd no. 36, called my cafe latte turned into a monstrous and ugly and loud coffee bar. When it was small, we spent every weekend for 6 months at the cafe, talking to the waiter in marathi and buying classic milds for the weekend at the pan shop next to it.

We spent countless hours at those bad malls, on those crowded flyovers, in those bad cafe coffee days and baristas, stood in those long queues for movies, walked on those risky bylanes, went to those bad clubs with bad music and terrible crowd and shook a leg, got fooled by half of the town, spoke endlessly about mindless topics like love and past, sat at home out of frustration, downed zillions of litres of tea, coffee, read books, slept, sat and did nothing, went to spas for massage and ate bad sandwiches thereafter for hundreds of rupees.

Me and budds were eager to leave Hyd the day we went there until the day we left. But why am I not surprised that cute telugu songs bring back memories of hyderabad, not in a bad taste, but in a tone of reminiscence? That's because we spent every day at Hyd telling ourselves - these are the best days of our life, no matter how fucked up they are, they are good because we are together. To have fun, to crib, bitch, to get wasted, to do nothing and to do everything.

And boy were we right!