The Great Divide

Dear Open letter writers (this seems to be the season of them, really!),

It is not a South Indian Vs. North Indian thing. I am sick of stereotypes. Really. There is no point in sugar coating this or being venomous about it. We ARE different, all we need to do is be aware of that and live with it.

Though I did have a good laugh over this, I am fairly certain (knowing me and my rage issues), that I would have been hopping mad if anybody had tried describing what a typical South Indian is like and how yevarybody eats curd rice and is covered in coconut oil.
I detest being called a Madrasi, thought I often wonder, not without a little guilt, when I will stop rolling my eyes and saying 'You're SO Delhi'.
I am tired of hearing Rajnikant jokes. I guess I should probably stop making Shah Rukh like blubbery noises in the middle of the movie then.
For every one of the guys who rev up their engine and flex their muscles in Delhi, there is one wonderful south Indian guy who says 'Super figure, machi!'(For the benefit of those unaware of Tamil slang, translated roughly to "What a babe, yaar")
I have minor palpitations when someone tells me I have to go to bed without eating curd rice, who am I really to pass judgement on a rajma fetish?
Everybody has to deal with the fact that I have difficulty speaking Hindi since the two languages most familiar to me-Tamil and English have none of those sounds or gender (How on earth is a train feminine anyway?), just like I will deal with the fact that the people who don't know Tamil or Malayalam can never say 'Mazhai pozhigiradhu' or that some people call a door a gate.
Please never resent the fact that when two south indians meet each other they talk in their native language, just like how I went through two months of barely understanding any conversation since it was all in Hindi. It IS exactly the same.
I admire some of the delhi boys who are more chivalrous than anyone I have ever met and I love Saranath who can talk to me about just about anything under the sun from a beautiful tamil lyric to psychoanalysis and uses words like 'Staccato' in everyday conversation.
I am in awe of the effort that Pups and K take in dressing up before we head out and I totally identify with Thoppi and Priyams when we don't mind going for dinner in a crumpled t-shirt and old jeans.
I love the chapathi and paneer binges in Ashirwad and yearn for the 'Eat dosa till you burst' moments at Dosa King.
That is exactly what I love about all of us. Snegama and me can make fun of a rajnikanth movie and still defend it in indignation when somebody who saw ROBOT made fun of it. Puppy and Joop can call me madrasi but still use 'Aiyo' and 'Da' just as much as all of us. I could say a 'Bas Bahut ho gaya' and mean it and could also hear choruses of 'Polaama?' before we went anywhere.
They now love rasam and I now wear colours other than dark blue, black and brown.
That, I believe, sums up the situation in a nutshell.

From,
A south indian girl who went from the very south to the very Jharkand and now eats Roti with Rasam much to the disgust of her fellow diners

Looking back..

If there is one thing that I have consistently prided myself on it is the fact that I do not get sentimentally attached to a place. Despite being in the same school from 3rd standard to the 12th, I was quite ready to leave it all and move to Bangalore. Despite loving my undergraduate degree and having an enormous circle of friends, I was very excited to begin work. Despite going through what was the most exciting phase of my life at work, I was ready to go do my masters.
I always presumed that the same logic would stick to XLRI as well. I would simply move on and be excited about working again. I told myself this over and over again- through the convocation, through the final dinner and through the final, hurried goodbyes in the airport. It's the proverbial morning after now and I realise that I miss XL with an intensity I didn't know existed.

It hits me suddenly that I can no longer sleepily walk into a friend's room and crib about not wanting to go to class. There will be no more hurried searches for a book to read in class despite not having a pen to write notes with. No more long chai sessions with random conversations. No more power naps. There were will be no more quizzes which reinforce how little I know of the world. No more midnight craving for cheese paratha and convincing four other friends to go stuff their faces with you and then realising that adding a fried maggi and bread burji to your original order is not a bad idea after all. No more making presentations till the very last minute and then eventually presenting a video which says 'Insert text here'.

Looking back, I can now see how much these two years have taught me.
I am glad for those bad grades which taught me that failure is an inevitable part of life. I am even more glad for the friends who hugged me when I couldn't stop crying when I got my first bad grade and even more glad for the friends who laughed at the bad grades along with me and reminded me how little it mattered.
I am relieved for the fights that happened because they truly made me realise exactly how much a few people meant to me.
I am surprised by how much I have learnt outside the classroom and how a plate of cheese maggi with hippo can solve almost any problem in the world.

I am grateful for the wonderful bunch of people I was always with and I can't help being choked thinking of what a difference each one made in my life those two years. They were my family in the truest sense of the word. I could go crying into any one of their rooms and each one in their own special would know exactly what to say. I could make fun and be made fun of. Being part of such a large group made every dinner out a celebration of sorts with a jumbling of orders and eventually ending with ten spoons fighting over a bull's eye. Even going to fill water was an expedition with no less than four people being a part of it. And I can't even begin telling you the advantages of having five friends jostling you out of bed or calling you from class when you have overslept.

It will never be the same again. The emotion at this moment goes way beyond mere nostalgia and the action of 'missing'. XL meri jaan.

A promise

Meow boy has been asking me to write something for quite some time now. I initially blamed the writer's block due to stress and academics and the like but as time passed I have realised that it goes a little beyond that. I have never been so pressurised as to ever stop writing. I have always loved the whole ritual of writing right from the silly detective stories I wrote as a child to amuse myself to my modest beginnings at a novel which was entirely lost due to a faulty hard drive.
When I look back, I now realise that my writing reduced the more I read. As a child I had no inhibitions and could sit and write for hours without realising it. I wrote as much as I could from Dear Diary entries to poetry which I struggled hard to rhyme to obituaries for dead pets. I was always looking at a different angle to write a story from. Becoming my writer was what I wanted for the longest time. My reading which, I believed, would add value and flavour to my writing however worked in a very different way.
The more I fell in love with the writing styles of other authors the more critical I became of my own writing. I wrote and rewrote because the lines had to be just perfect and over the years, I seem to have given up on it altogether.
This blog post is not merely a forum to crib and analyse why I stopped writing but a promise to be a little kinder on my own words and ideas in the future.
Here's to more baby steps that go beyond a nostalgic blog post!