Today, I waited for that final piece of furniture we had ordered for our living room to be delivered. Now that it is here, it feels just like it did when we placed that elusive last piece onto the 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle I used to solve in my summer holidays along with my mother and cousin.
A lot of life altering changes have taken place since I last posted. First of all, you will start noticing the nonchalant use of ‘Our’ on this blog. Secondly, I am back in Bangalore. Thirdly and a little more obviously, I have changed jobs.
I will always remember that snowball fight we (this is a different we – it consists of me, my flatmate and my neighbours) had on the 13th of Jan, my last night in Birmingham. We were afforded that opportunity thanks to the heavy snowfall in what turned out to be the most severe winter the country experienced in more than 20 years. That was my second snowball fight within a span of ten days and everyone believed they owed me one last experience of knowing how it felt to have a tightly packed fistful of snow landing on my nose with unforgiving force as there was no telling when I would next see that much snow again. I am convinced they also secretly believed they deserved an outlet for having to see off somebody who would wake up with the smug assurance of getting to see the sun every day. I would have probably reacted in exactly the same way if I were to spend a few more months sinking my feet into 2 feet of snow on my way to work and back everyday in that perpetual dim greyness.
This winter has been an experience in understanding orders of magnitude, among other things. While I had managed to know what it took to keep myself safe and warm during the last two winters, all my winter clothing proved to be acutely inadequate when the temperatures went more than 5 degrees C below the average winter temperatures. I even had frostbite on my toes while I was indoors, inside a sufficiently heated apartment! (This is unlike the indoor frostbite I suffered in the previous winter when I was living in what was a virtually unheated apartment that belonged to an ass of a landlord for which I was paying through my nose.) As absurd as it may seem now, I remember days not so long ago, when I used to crave to know again what it felt like to feel uncomfortably hot.
Cut to a month later and I find myself in a Kancheevaram saree on the hottest day in Bangalore in 25 years. And then I realised I didn’t like the heat either.
Apart from highlighting the extremes in temperature and adding my half a cent to the evidence of a messed up ecology to generations in the distant future who might find this blog hidden below a heap of cyber debris, this is meant to be a post to help me take stock and move on.
So here’s bidding an official goodbye to the plants in the balcony, to the purple orchid in my window that I ‘killed with too much love’, the lovely apartment in the city centre, to the canal that flowed beside it, to Victoria Square, to gorgeous Louis, my neighbours’ half Korean, one quarter English, one quarter French baby boy who gave me the most beautiful smile on the day I left, to being addicted to Top Gear, to being a banker in the UK at a time when the word evoked unbridled hatred, to being a doctor’s flatmate and listening to real stories of human lives being saved over dinner, to ploughman’s sandwiches for lunch, to accumulating copper coins with every cash transaction and carrying an unwieldy wallet, to impulsive train rides to Banbury and London, to scones and crumpets, to jacket potatoes, to mulled wine and finally, to all the snow which must have now melted. I loved it while it lasted but as I have said earlier on this blog, it is swell to be back home.
The last few months have seen me go through changes at a rate that is unusual in the normal course of events for a regular person. Looking back from the other side, with the dizziness behind me, I am now in a position to say that I am grateful for changes of all kinds that have sometimes just happened to me with me not being in a position to control anything about their timing or effect. They help provide reference points from which I can identify who I have become. There is also of course, all the learning that comes with change, even if sometimes, you are too dazed to register anything beyond the trivial lesson that when a snowball comes straight at you, all you have to do is duck.
A lot of life altering changes have taken place since I last posted. First of all, you will start noticing the nonchalant use of ‘Our’ on this blog. Secondly, I am back in Bangalore. Thirdly and a little more obviously, I have changed jobs.
I will always remember that snowball fight we (this is a different we – it consists of me, my flatmate and my neighbours) had on the 13th of Jan, my last night in Birmingham. We were afforded that opportunity thanks to the heavy snowfall in what turned out to be the most severe winter the country experienced in more than 20 years. That was my second snowball fight within a span of ten days and everyone believed they owed me one last experience of knowing how it felt to have a tightly packed fistful of snow landing on my nose with unforgiving force as there was no telling when I would next see that much snow again. I am convinced they also secretly believed they deserved an outlet for having to see off somebody who would wake up with the smug assurance of getting to see the sun every day. I would have probably reacted in exactly the same way if I were to spend a few more months sinking my feet into 2 feet of snow on my way to work and back everyday in that perpetual dim greyness.
This winter has been an experience in understanding orders of magnitude, among other things. While I had managed to know what it took to keep myself safe and warm during the last two winters, all my winter clothing proved to be acutely inadequate when the temperatures went more than 5 degrees C below the average winter temperatures. I even had frostbite on my toes while I was indoors, inside a sufficiently heated apartment! (This is unlike the indoor frostbite I suffered in the previous winter when I was living in what was a virtually unheated apartment that belonged to an ass of a landlord for which I was paying through my nose.) As absurd as it may seem now, I remember days not so long ago, when I used to crave to know again what it felt like to feel uncomfortably hot.
Cut to a month later and I find myself in a Kancheevaram saree on the hottest day in Bangalore in 25 years. And then I realised I didn’t like the heat either.
Apart from highlighting the extremes in temperature and adding my half a cent to the evidence of a messed up ecology to generations in the distant future who might find this blog hidden below a heap of cyber debris, this is meant to be a post to help me take stock and move on.
So here’s bidding an official goodbye to the plants in the balcony, to the purple orchid in my window that I ‘killed with too much love’, the lovely apartment in the city centre, to the canal that flowed beside it, to Victoria Square, to gorgeous Louis, my neighbours’ half Korean, one quarter English, one quarter French baby boy who gave me the most beautiful smile on the day I left, to being addicted to Top Gear, to being a banker in the UK at a time when the word evoked unbridled hatred, to being a doctor’s flatmate and listening to real stories of human lives being saved over dinner, to ploughman’s sandwiches for lunch, to accumulating copper coins with every cash transaction and carrying an unwieldy wallet, to impulsive train rides to Banbury and London, to scones and crumpets, to jacket potatoes, to mulled wine and finally, to all the snow which must have now melted. I loved it while it lasted but as I have said earlier on this blog, it is swell to be back home.
The last few months have seen me go through changes at a rate that is unusual in the normal course of events for a regular person. Looking back from the other side, with the dizziness behind me, I am now in a position to say that I am grateful for changes of all kinds that have sometimes just happened to me with me not being in a position to control anything about their timing or effect. They help provide reference points from which I can identify who I have become. There is also of course, all the learning that comes with change, even if sometimes, you are too dazed to register anything beyond the trivial lesson that when a snowball comes straight at you, all you have to do is duck.
