You will look at the familiar and cry. The thought of moving on to new territories will terrify you. The unfamiliar will seem like a hurdle too big to cross. When you reach this point you will start to reevaluate your decisions and will arrive at the chance you took. The chance you took listening to your heart. And you will pray with every breath of your being that this will be worth it.
The past few days have been a blur. I keep saying everything is happenning fast but really, everything is happenning in LIGHTNING SPEED. It has taken me a while to comprehend it. I seem to have got my head around it but I still cannot believe that it is happening although, I am extremely happy that it is.
I try to keep recollecting what happened these few days but my memory fails me. I don’t seem to have registered everything. Memory is a very fickle thing. I wan to remember everything, the good and the bad. The feel of my new silk saree, the tears that would just not stop, the mouthfulls of sugar that I just wanted to spit out and this werid but good feeling in my gut. I want to remember everything and maybe that is selfish of me. My mind does not have this capacity. I look at pictures and I think “Why was I smiling?”. I can’t seem to remember why the photo warranted that particular expresssion.
This scares me. Now I want to savour every moment, remember every action. I want to store it all in a little cupboard in my head. And when I open it I want to the smell of the garland, the Elie Saab that I sprayed all over my dress. I want to remember why I cried. I want to know why I smiled my widest with certain people and looked morose with others. I want to remember that moment when the photographer asked me if I wanted to hide the sugar. I want to remember the taste of the awful banana milkshake. And I really want to remember the taste of the biriyani but I had so little that it is just impossible.
I am trying to take as many mental photographs as I can. I am trying to remember the feelings and the emotions. I want to collect all these and store it all away in that little cupboard and come back to it in my own sweet time. Reminiscing is a weird feeling. Recollecting the good can make your day so much brighter. But the bad and the bitter should never see the light of day. Reminiscing the bad just brings back all these feelings and I remind myself why I swore never to think about it again. Having a walking, talking reminder does not help. But I’ve become an expert in blocking out the bad, in muting out the constant drone and in blinding out the evil.
So right now is all about collecting. Thoughts, feelings and words to store away in that little cupboard inside my head.
Anything that has the slight possibility of going wrong will go wrong. You will be staring open mouthed but your mother will take the saree you wear meant to wear and run downstairs. She realized the tassels hadn’t been tied. Two hours before the event. Never have you been so thankful to have a mother like this.
Every bride needs to be able to differentiate between her dreams and reality. It is very important to have a firm grip on reality and not live in the clouds. She needs to know that what her mind’s eye visualizes and what her real eyes see are two entirely different things. She might have an image of a pinkish, peachish dress but what she sees is a pinkish, coralish dress. It may not work in the wedding of her imagination but it has to in the wedding of her reality. So she has to learn to make do and not be a fusspot about it because, let’s be serious, nobody likes a fusspot.
The first thing you need to know while planning your wedding is that the wedding is not about you. When a friend told me this few months back I laughed it off. Now, I’m experiencing it. There are a hundred and one things to be taken care of, and a million and one people to please. What you really want is out of the question. I know it sounds drastically unromantic. But it is what it is. The sooner you get your head around it the lesser is the heartbreak.
For a long while now I’ve been wanting to write. There were so many emotions, so many words that did not escape my mouth but the constant blinking of the cursor on white screen did not offer me the kind of solace a pen and paper did.
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
I have always been a Blogger fan girl. It is where I started my first blog and from there on I got to read hundreds of wonderful blogs. WordPress always seemed like the opposite of Blogger, something I would never do. It looked awfully plain and morose, in my eyes. Blogger was the fun, younger sibling.
The past few months I’ve experienced a writer’s block like no other. Ideas slipped out of mind, I could not form one sensible sentence and all my best ideas came to me while I was sleeping. Like, in my dream I’d think of something and be all “Homaigod, best idea ever”. I would tell myself to remember it and by the time I woke up, the idea would be, but a dream. I struggled with this for a quite a while and eventually just gave up.
Lately I’ve also been reading new blogs just to gather inspiration. I was feeling very insipid and needed a change very badly. I needed newer grounds to conquer, cleaner pastures. Basically, I just wanted to get to the other side, where, I heard the grass always seemed greener. Considering how I am on the cusp of new things and new opportunities are seeking me I thought it was time to document that in a newer place. That is how this WordPress site was born.
I chose the name ‘Maybe In Madras’ because Madras is my baby, my city of love. I hate to refer to it as Chennai, although that is the correct Tamil name. But Madras reminds me of beauty, of old world charms and of dreams that found it’s way in to the heart of the city. Madras inspired me to dream. She also reminded me to never stop. So here is to the city that molded me in to the person I am.
“Life happens in a certain place for a certain time. But there is a great surplus left over, and where will we stow it but in out dreams.”
Sometimes I’m too dramatic for my own good. I should have lived in a book. A really long, extremely dramatic book full of sequences the idle mind can never imagine, full of dreams that do not end.
Why is it so difficult to give yourself permission to feel. To feel without being betrayed, to feel without a doubt. Why are we holding back? Why can’t we just say exactly what we want to and move on? Why do I have to think before I talk?
So may times in life we come across situations that begs us to feel, makes our hearts beat faster. But we’re scared, so scared. Of feeling. It doesn’t matter anymore if it is right or wrong but you have to feel it in your heart. But we are scared of being exposed. We don’t want to be taken for granted. But what guarantee is there that we will be? What guarantee is there that we wont? That’s when you take a blind leap of faith. Blind, but your heart is open. Blind, but you’ve never seen clearer than right now, than this moment that takes your breath away.
Maybe In Madras 