Third year, St. Stephen's College.
Brick-red, stone-grey, leaf-green.
Falling out of love.(Or so we thought)
What's love got to do with it, anyway?
Weeks of... tasting dead roses every time you walk into the starred gates of College.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to sweet delight
And some are born to endless night
A very wise Middle-earth resident once told me, "Love is not enough. Sometimes, a relationship just loses its energy, its drive... And it comes to a natural end. It's still love; but not the kind that will make you make an effort."
Don't we all wish we had listened to well-meant advice??? :)
Falling in love is so hard on the knees...
McLeodGanj.
Tiny theatres with makeshift seating and owners who bring you tea during the movie if you have just come in from the rain.
McLlo's terrace restaurant. Red wine and Godfather and a dreadlocked-hymn-chanting-foreign-hippy-woman who would generously give you herbs that would knock you out for hours and make you lose all memory of conversations with French-Canadian men and of tripping, dancing and swaying through the main McLeod Street market, all the way to the hotel.
"Yesterday was just a few hours long"
Tibetan freedom bands that play awful music but give the 200 odd people standing in the square an odd sense of brotherhood.
Running through the town to make it in time for the "Wednesday only-Korean Sushi" we tasted in the afternoon. Trekking up to Shiva Cafe and meeting the King and the Queen on the way (two chappal and pyjama clad foreigners surrounded by paintings on slabs of stone).
Israeli salads and fried eggs and sandwiches that were impossible for us to finish!
Delaying a friend's early scheduled departure by convincing him to tear up his ticket and scatter it all over the McLlo's lantern-lit terrace.
Dharamsala shawls- warm and fuzzy and bright purple-orange-green.
Tibetan shopkeepers that give you "Thank you India" bookmarks.
Redemption.
The Foreign Exchange Apartment.
Amazement the first time we peeked into their refrigerator. Everyone has separate milk cartons, separate butter boxes- marked with name tags!!
Heated political discussions- George Bush and Iraq and cultural clashes.
Insane terrace top parties where we whirled and twirled to trance and learnt what it feels like to betray other people.
Breaking down in a bathroom and leaning on a white person. Globalization does not lie in movie-making and ambassadors. It lies in beer, cigarettes and moments of weakness.
Darling, darling
Stand by me
Losing friends.
To drugs. To depression. To betrayal. To indifference.
Dealing with it.
Coming to terms with it.
Realising that we shall never really completely come to terms with losing friends.
It hurts for a long, long time.
Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be so hard.
Let's take it back to the start
Making new friends days before College was to end.
Lamenting lost time, making plans to visit Erithrea (look it up lazy!), bonding over a bong, discovering the understated magnificence of The Power and The Glory, trying very hard to make Ngugi interesting by reading the play aloud-only to have L. fall asleep in the middle of a line, smoking Camel cigarettes, dragging N. out to all sorts of parties till 6 AM, watching O. slowly lose her heart (and her mind!), devotedly taking the Metro to Chandni Chowk to eat kebabs and roomali rotis, dancing between the old and the new at the Graduation Party and laughing so hard that we thought we would collapse under the stars.
Complete and utter emotional chaos: enjoy the rollercoaster ride.
Oscar Epidemic.
A moment of pride when they screened Brokeback Mountain in College and no-one hooted or laughed when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal sweated provocatively on the screen together.
Movie Marathon at G.'s place.
Capote and cigarettes.
Transamerica and tetra-packs of juice.
Munich and Maggi.
Allnightlong till the Oscar-red-carpet-freakish-costume-extravaganza began at 6:30 AM.
Fighting fate. Fighting change. Fighting inevitability. Fighting the process of letting go.
fightingfightingfighting
The Night of January 16th: the Shakespeare Society's Annual Production-2006.
A very drunk final performance with impromptu lines that only "the insiders" understood.
Countless games of Mafia.
Hours before the show, the sound system in the auditorium blasts the Sutta song.
Ah...university!!
We know I'm going away
How I wish....wish it weren't so
Take this wine & drink with me
Let's delay our misery
Save tonight
And fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow
Tomorrow I'll be gone
Save tonight
