Life As I Know It

If you ever reach a point in your life and wonder- “How did I get here?” then it means you have done many things of which 90% of what you did was wrong. YOU are the one to blame for what happened. The other 10% of the right things you did is not going to help cancel the wrongs. So you are stuck now. And you probably think I’m closer to doing all things wrong and so why not go ahead and make a further mess of my life. It cannot be worse than what I’m dealing with now. Then you have your conscience telling you – Don’t do that. There are so many people who’d love to have at least 10% of their life going right. You have hope that you will one day cancel out all your mistakes. But it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of will power. You can do that and why not? The fact that you did something right means you have it in you. Then the devil says- (Somewhere deep, deep, deep down inside) who are you kidding? You think by doing right the rest of your life, the rest of the world wil...

I wanted to write a sequel to my previous blog but did not come up with anything particularly interesting( I mean I’ll just be among the thousand bloggers insisting that peace marches and human chains may well show solidarity, but for a long term plan they need to remind themselves that they also have a duty towards their country. It’s not just the politicians and the armed forces that have their duties defined to them. We as civilians can also help the situation and marching with candles and spending half a day under the sun forming a chain is not the answer. We need to change our attitude, and not wake up to a blast and have our content and peaceful bubble burst.) Thus this post. It might come across as a “legal profession bashing session”, but heck we all need a reality check. I probably like many others had this particular illusion of the Supreme Court being the temple of my profession. (Sounds dramatic? Read on…) when we went to get our passes done we had to wait in this pigeon ho...

Every morning I manage to meet several morons who have no clue about traffic rules. They think it’s alright to drive in the middle of the road, or they drive at 20 kmph when it’s specified that they go at 50kmph and where they are supposed to go at 30 kmph they go at 60 kmph. Apart from driving in the middle of the road they have their hand (in case of a 4 wheeler) or thumb (in case of a two wheeler) constantly honking, which is so god damn irritating especially when there is nobody in front of them to honk at or when there is genuine slow traffic they think honking helps matters. Then there is the “jerk” specie that’s unleashed on the roads, this specimen targets girls, goes at snails pace when he spots a girl and when the girl overtakes he speeds up over takes and then again slows down and then the pattern continues unless the girl chooses to take a different route. Then there are people who over take you from the left and then turn back and give you an angry look in-case you insult ...

Last night I was watching TV till 11 pm. I then decided to browse for a while and then decided to watch some more TV and then browsed again. Watched Power puff Girls, Courage the cowardly dog, Shark and Criminal Minds. When I finally went to sleep it was 5 am. Woke up this morning at 9 am. Watched more TV and had breakfast (It’s something I do may be twice or thrice a year) The papers had more reports on the Mumbai happenings. The public has the same hysteria one saw soon after RDB was released. Looks like the youth is fired up to probably to pull a RDB on some of our politicians especially with all the updates about the government being warned of the impending assault on our financial capital. I’m sure the Congress party is having a hard time using 'brave officer' and 'Hemant Karkare' in the same sentence. Raj Thackrey is nowhere to be seen or heard. Hmmm… I wonder if the commandos got his tongue? The last page of the right hand corner of the Hindu talks about a totall...

Stupido was such a lovely puppy. She and Fenny struck up a friendship, something I had never expected out of my girl. But Fenny has shown me several things that she is capable of doing, one such thing is to go make friends with strays who she thinks my dad and I will approve of. So Stupido became a common visitor near the gate when we took Fenny for a walk. When Fenny would return home from the walk she would run straight inside for some biscuits and milk/water/mango juice (she is totally pampered) and Stupido would wait outside and she would get her share as well. There are several instances when Stupido tried to get me to pet her, but I wouldn’t because my mom has banned me from petting strays every time I see one. Stupido would follow my mom and me as well when we would go for our walk. She was such silly pup, half the time we would be worried that some big dog would come and attack her. Thanks to her I had to carry pebbles in my pockets to shoo the bigger dogs away. So Stupido st...

This blog was supposed to be about why I support BJP and chart out some of the biggest screw ups by the Congress. Congress has always called BJP non secular and many other things along with that. But BJP has accepted that they are communal. Unlike BJP, Congress has been a pseudo secular party. How? To start with congress has divided the nation into men and women. The fact that the citizens are referred to as ‘person’ so that there isn’t any gender bias was lost on Congress. In 1986 when Congress was in power, Shah Bano was divorced by her husband. She approached the court to claim maintenance; she was 65 when she was divorced. As per section 125 of Cr.P.C, it is the duty of the husband to maintain his divorced wife. The Muslim community protested about the court interfering in personal laws and Congress found this as a means to bank on Muslim voters. It enacted the The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 which stated that a woman shall be maintained for the iddat ...

From pranks to fibbing to doing the exact opposite of what I was told, hitting rock bottom in academics to proving that if they just let me be I might find my way back on the right track, fighting, verbally abusing classmates and teachers alike I have come a long way. I once ripped my Social Studies answer paper in front of my teacher because she told me I’d never come up to my brother’s “level”. I ripped it to shreds and threw it into the dustbin and walked out. I look up to my brother, he does things I can’t imagine myself doing. I do admire the guy, always have. But that doesn’t give anyone the right to compare us or say that one is better than the other. Like my physics viva in XI when my teacher asked, “Arundathi-95, Hari-97, Ashwini-How much?” I said, Sir still in XI, will let you know once I have written the paper. So the people from my family who studied in my school were the yard stick I was compared to. The words I uttered on that viva came back to haunt me, but that’s all ov...

This is a picture of one of my birdie friends who was giving her young one a lesson in flying. The little thing was so petrified it remained on the hibiscus bush for more than an hour and we had to make sure no cat gets to it and meanwhile to pass time i started clicking phutos. A frustrated mommy left her baby to make up its mind. The little one looks grumpy but two mins later it was flying.

It all began when we moved to our home. It was brand new and so empty. We still had plenty to do for the insides of the house. I was in my 2nd sem when we moved here. Two months into living in our house I noticed a nest on our terrace and in it were 3 eggs .I used to constantly go and check the nest. One day I saw three little birdies craning their necks looking at me, they had their mouths open expecting food. They were smaller than my thumb. Their head was as big as the remainder of their body. I kept visiting them till one day they were gone. I thought ah well they had to leave some day. Then came my third sem, I had just started classes and as always during the odd semesters we are plagued by the rains which fall only when I’m on my way to the college or when I’m on my way back home, till then the rains hold out. On one such day I went to my room to find grass strewn all over my bed. The next day I found a trail of grass leading to the loft in my room. On climbing up there I saw o...

I woke up this morning knowing that nothing could go wrong today, not even if I tried my best to screw things up for myself. I haven’t felt so confident about anything in a long time. The past 15 months took a major toll on me; I pretty much was trying to collect scraps of my life which were strewn around me. Imagine a large pile of paper being blown away by strong winds and collecting them all and just when you are done the wind blows again and you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again only the papers are flying further away with each attempt. That is how it’s been these past 15 months. But it won’t be so from today and I knew this even before I woke up. I knew that when I go to college today I won’t be seeing that woman’s face and that is such a relief because the kind of trouble that woman put me through, the whole “ The power is in my hands one wrong step and your life is at my mercy” , the threats, the bad score in TP paper are all a part of her trying to put me d...

Live journal is where I vent my feelings about my college, though that wasn’t the initial purpose of the blog, but looks like I have way too many problems and very few tools and skills to deal with them. For example, we have our internals going on this week and that’s alright, but the fact that we still have to visit the court and the chambers during test week is way too hectic. My day begins at 6 am, classes commence at 8:30am and end at 2:00 pm, 3:00 pm I have to either go to the court or have our weekly journal checking so this gets over by 5:00 and then I have one and a half hours to myself, of which 20 mins are lost traveling from college to home. Then at 6:30 pm I have to leave for the chamber and by the time I get back its 9:15-9:30. That’s a regular day in my life and the rains aren’t making things easy. So here is what happened on 22.10.2008, while I was leaving college one of the lecturer tells me that I have to got to a high school as a representative of our college and gi...

I had been having bad hair day(s) so I asked my mom to trim my tresses for me. It’s a mother-daughter thing; my mom usually trims my hair. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t notice that my mom was all grumpy today and armed with the scissors she began chopping. Once it was over, trust me I probably should have taken a snap, my hair looked like a rat had chewed on it and my mom had cut it sooooo short… it now is only up to my shoulders. Damn even the boys are going to give me a complex now. So my bad hair day escalated to being the worst hair day. Armed with a scarf I sat on my activa and rushed to the nearest parlor which is like 8 kilometers away from where I live. I cried my woes out to the lady, who calmed me down and promised not to shorten the remains of my crown any further. Once she was done my hair-do looks presentable and nice. (Yes nice) After what happened, I thought I’d never ever have a good hair day ever again. Well now I at least have a normal hair day! ( Moral of the story,...

Statutory Notice: Please look into the sententia legis and not the litera legis. Today like every other Saturday since I began final year has been tiring. After each village visit, I tell myself that I should blog about the visit. There is plenty that happens at the village that’s worth blogging, like today my friend and I were being followed by a drunk man, after a while the stalking got creepy and my friend and I started running. (We probably overreacted, but the guy was very creepy so our act is justified). Then there was this buffalo that decided to stalk us, and it followed us wherever we went and then finally we managed to lose it. Met a very old woman at the village who started weeping when she told us her problems and I almost removed all the cash I had on me to give the woman. My friend asked me not to do that because we have to visit the same village for 6 months and if word gets out that we are distributing money, my parents will probably have to support the whole village....

People say, college is the best time of ones life and once it's gone you'll miss it and blah blah blah yak yak yak... YA RIGHT! I've been doing my victorious warrior jig since the day I gave my 8th semester exam because that now leaves just one more year in my college. I'm not saying my college is bad, it's just that there are plenty of rotten people in it. When I say rotten, I mean dirty, stinking rotten, so rotten that even if you close your nose real tight you'll manage to smell it and the excessive rottenness kind of leaves an after effect which one cannot get rid off no matter how hard you smell something good. What happened yesterday was a standing testimonial for how rotten people in my college are. I got a 33 on my transfer of property paper, which was a shock, but then I got to know who corrected my paper and then it wasn't much of a shock. The lecturer who corrected my paper had made it public that she'd corrected our papers under the universit...

The first time I represented my college for a moot court competition was at Kerala Law Academy. It is the best National Level Moot Court Competition in the country. The problem is usually with respect to violation of Fundamental Rights. It being my first time at a competition out of the college I was obviously a little apprehensive. I'd finally know if I could actually moot and place my arguments before a panel of judges. In college the judges for our competitions are lecturers, and they don't make me nervous, so when I moot in front of them there is no lacking in my confidence. We reached Perurkada and were escorted to the girls hostel, that's where we were to stay for the duration of the competition. In the afternoon we were to go register our team and we would be given our team code. On our way to the registration counter we passed by the other teams and they looked nervous and were trying to do their best to hide it. When i'm nervous I don't really absorb whats ...

Here I am, pecking at my keyboard with my one good hand. I fractured my left wrist so it's out of order for the next 4 weeks. So my first post is a dedication to my left hand. As a kid i'd always wanted to fracture my hand because of all the attention and kids really love showing off their bruises and the bigger the band-aid the better. I used to envy every kid with a broken bone. What I wished as a child i'm experiencing as an adult and quite frankly, the novelty of a fracture is now totally lost on me. Of course the attention and concern is nice but then I prefer having both my hands functioning. There is another reason behind me not milking my whole sorry situation for what it's worth, that is because the story behind the fall is not so very dramatic, nobody can guess the way it all happened. When people see me they all ask me if I fell off my vehicle, next they ask if I was up to some mischief on the trees or if I was trying to jump from a height for cheap thril...

Gandhi is an icon to many, because of the principles he advocated and also for the role he played in the history of Indian independence. As it is his birthday today we see his name flashed on each and every page of the news papers quoting him. We tend to forget Lal Bahadur Shastri amidst all of Gandhi’s glory. Gandhi has never been my icon yet curiosity made me read," My experiments with truth" and to state it frankly I thought the man was slightly cuckoo in the head. I started reading the book to get an insight into his life and not to know every detail of him trying to control his libido to his 'supposedly' cleaning the toilets. I’m sure the man meant well, but if you go back to the pages where he is describing the day he and his followers went to clean the toilets, he mentions names of individuals, his wife Kasthurba included. Not once does he mention being a part of the whole of the activity, so it’s clear to the reader that he was merely a by-stander. I’d say th...

When I went to stay at my grand uncle's place for a week I was planning on having fun and generally lazing around reading his collection of comics. Once I got there I was welcomed with a ferocious bark and then felt something furry going around me in circles. I was trembling from head to toe and I didn't dare open my eyes. My grand Uncle tied Ruff and only after that I stopped shaking and went inside the house. I had my lunch and was reading a book in the hall, when my grand uncle decided that it was time Ruff and I became friends. He went out and freed Ruff who came bounding into the hall and made a bee line at me. I have never been that frightened ever, he came close sniffed me and then jumped straight at me and licked my face with his tail going whush-whush. Very hesitatingly I pet him on the head and he took it as an indication that I liked him and within minutes I was giving him a belly rub and he was chewing my toes and licking my face all over again. That moment on we ...

People always blame the law, lawyers and the judges . This is a shame in today’s day and age considering that most people are born prudent enough to judge right from wrong. Recently I read an article in Times of India about a 16 year old girl who killed herself because she got into social networking so as to make friends which went terribly wrong when she got sexually involved with one of her internet friends. Who, as anybody can guess took advantage of her and she decided to end her life. The article blames the law for being flimsy. Let’s go back a few decades when mothers used to warn their children about talking to strangers and divulging information. How different is it today? Fine, the internet exposes us to more people but that’s a risk we take up on ourselves. But does that mean we ought not to be cautious as to whom we talk to and what we talk about? So when one is on one of these networks one can use their god given brains and exercise caution. But if people are on the ne...

It's natural that people find certain insects and animals scary I don't blame them. I wasn't, but what made me more compassionate towards them was Ruskin Bond he truly manages to drive all your fears of all creepy crawlies away. There is one story of his where he be friends a squirrel and I'd always wanted a squirrel for a pet, when I say a pet I don't mean anything that would include a cage but just enough friendship so that the squirrel would be trusting enough to come and take some treats from me. It didn't seem like a possibility, no amount of sitting still under a tree, or ground nuts scattered around the base of the tree to lure the furry creatures worked. Then one day when I was just about to go to school I saw this little thing on our drive way and when I first looked at it I thought it was a baby rat, on closer inspection I realised it was a baby squirrel! It was being preyed on by red ants, my friend and I got rid of the ants and put the little...

It was yet another boring day in college, with nothing much happening around us except for the usual chattering, clackclacking and bakbaking . For some reason I was extremely quiet that day till my friend came rushing into my class telling me she'd spotted a roach and wanted me to catch it. Something is better than nothing, so I went and caught the roach. Now it was my friend the roach and me. Then we saw our real prey walking towards us. Lets call him The Wimp. The wimp always has a happy smile on his face, and a nice guy in general but definitely lives up to his name. He's scared of looking at cockroaches! This was our fun time and I showed him my prisoner and he started running. He pretty much understood that I intended to set the roach on him and so began the chase my friend and I in pursuit of The Wimp. Finally I decided to just wait outside his class, the guy had to enter it at some point of time. By this time the roach was in my friends hand and when I saw the wimp app...

It was yet another boring day in college, with nothing much happening around us except for the usual chattering, clackclacking and bakbaking . For some reason I was extremely quiet that day till my friend came rushing into my class telling me she'd spotted a roach and wanted me to catch it. Something is better than nothing, so I went and caught the roach. Now it was my friend the roach and me. Then we saw our real prey walking towards us. Lets call him The Wimp. The wimp always has a happy smile on his face and a nice guy in general but definitely lives up to his name. He's scared of looking at cockroaches! This was our fun time and I showed him my prisoner and he started running. He pretty much understood that I intended to set the roach on him and so began the chase my friend and I in pursuit of The Wimp. Finally I decided to just wait outside his class, the guy had to enter it at some point of time. By this time the roach was in my friends hand and when I saw the wimp app...

Its very rare that one comes across people who continue to influence you even in their absence. Mukta Ajji is one such person. She was my neighbour, friend, confidante and also an excellent balm in my times of crisis. The first time i met her was when she was 94 years young. We hit it off really well. She asked me if we study poetry at school, and I said," Yes, we've just started with Lady Clare." The next instant she was reciting the whole poem, with the gusto of a teenager. She had an excellent memory, she could recite Milton and Shakespeare verbatim. Her enthusiasm in literature was infectious, she got me hooked on to classics. When i came home from school i used to stop at her place, we'd read together and i'd tell her the latest from my class. We could talk for hours and it never really mattered that she was so old. At her age she used to walk without any aid, she wouldn't hunch, and she lived all alone. We decided that when it came to books i would lend...

I love animals and dogs rank first in my list of favourite animals. They have an affinity towards me which is reciprocated. I don't remember any time in my childhood that has gone by without me having made a canine friend. First there was Mary a stray who became our guard dog. All we did was feed her and pet her, she in turn guarded the house and accompanied my brother and me when ever we were out playing. She always used to lookout for us. She looked like a white lab crossed with a stray. An extremely well mannered dog. When she had her first litter, we were the only kids privileged to play with them when they were merely days old. Her pups bonded with us in no time. But since she was a stray we didn't have any say over her pups. People came and took the male pups. The remaining pups... well they met with tragic ends. I don't really want to get into details about that. But there were two puppies named Kappi ( because she looked and behaved like a monkey) and Thufan (...

XI and XII standard are probably the most defining years of ones life. You start taking responsibility for yourself. You take the reins in your hand and start planning your future. In my case, I was not sure about what I wanted. When people asked me what I wanted to do, I'd say law, journalism or veterinary sciences. But when my classmates were asked the same each one had one option. There were a few who even knew which college they wanted. There was this one guy who'd charted out his future, he knew what he wanted to study, he knew when he'd marry and when he'd have children, he had his whole life planned and ready for execution. So out of the 35 students in my class, I was living on the ideology of "life is a box of chocolates you never know which one you are going to get". Planning wasn't an option for me, I just decided that time will decide the road I'd take. When my friends were busy gearing up for IIT / JEE I was learning new expletives...

I read Kiran Desai's "Inheritance of Loss". All i wanted to do after reading the book was to flush it down the toilet. The woman seems to have a knack for describing toilets and has emphasised on the many ways of doing tatti! The book has no story. It's filled with characters, all of whom are pretentious. None of the characters in her book have a spine. Mind you this is a book that's supposed to take you through a cultural journey.What i despised most was the fact that she described all her characters as weak. She hasn't given justifications of their behaviour. She goes on to be descriptive in certain parts of the book, to maybe shock the readers into reading further. When i was nearing the end of the book i had lost all expectations( to say the least). When i actually was done reading the last page, all i could say was,"what a waste of time and energy gone in writing this SHIT!" I was forewarned about the book. Yet i HAD to read it to know how bad ...

In our old house my room was on the ground floor. I used to leave the windows open in the evening for Fenny, she loves sitting on my bed and looking out of the window. One day after a really long afternoon nap I woke up to find a small black bundle at my feet. I thought it was Fenny, but then this black fur ball was really small. I switched on the lights and to my surprise, sleeping on my bed was a black kitten. I don’t really like cats all that much. I poked the bundle, the little thing looked at me mewed and curled back to sleep. I poked it again and again and then it finally got up and stretched and yawned then looked at me as if expecting an explanation for disturbing it. All this while Fenny my puppy was sitting on the other bed observing this new visitor. She didn’t bark or attack the cat, for which I was thankful. I picked the cat and it was so skinny and frail and the silly eyes did it all. Instead of throwing it out I let it sleep. When I went to check on it a little lat...