An Epitome of Memories

- Razi Iqbal

An epitome of memories,

I have with her.

The thought of making some more,

Somehow scares her.

I look at her, she smiles shyly

I pull her hair back, she blushes gleefully,

I play with her hands, she holds mine tightly,

I look in her eyes, she gets lost

Somewhere in the abyss of her thoughts,

where I can never reach....

She comes in my dreams,

She conquers my thoughts,

She makes me smile without a pause.

A little mystery is she,

Which I keep trying to solve,

Just when I think I have won her,

She tries to distance herself,

Yeah! without a cause!!

When I am with her,

My life seems perfectly fine.

Mesmerised I am by a lady,

Whom I claim to be mine.

Hard she was to get,

Harder she will be to forget,

How I wish I never have to see a day,

When the closeness will fade away.

Father  time never has mercy on us,

Always goes away fast for a score.

Hope he understood how much we want him,

To stay with us for a bit more.

Holding her in my arms is a pleasure,

It makes me go through a momentary seizure.

Then I realize she is my world,

Where losing her is not an option,

I just hope that,

She does not have a different opinion!!

I love her for giving her heart to me

And trusting me with her pride.

I love her for wanting me

And needing me by her side.

She has been my lucky charm,

From the moment she has arrived.

Everything has gone perfectly,

With she by my side.

I know she will make me cry one day,

But I'll be happy over it.

Not because they will be tears of joy,

But because I know my lady will be worth it.

Distance is just a word,

Which cannot do us apart.

She will always have a part of me,

And remain near me in my heart.

Kasauli

- Priyasha Chawla

KASAULI…I wasn't very excited to spend three days of my summer vacations in just another prosaic resort in another prosaic hill station of this country. I had visited many hill stations in the past and the idea of going to Kasauli was like eating the same food every night; monotonous.

Travelling by road took us about seven hours to reach our resort. Travelling to hill stations by road kind of scares me, again not very exciting. I hate to look down but its hard to ignore the tranquility of the trees, the beauty of the mountains and the purity in the air. I suddenly felt that seventy two hours away from pollution , heat , unstoppable noise  cannot be that bad. In fact it can be amazing.

The resort was nice. We were welcomed by the staff with an offbeat drink( a mixture of strawberry and lemon). It’s purpose was  to rejuvenate every cell, every nerve in your body and so it did. It immediately helps you forget about the long and tiring drive from your place to the resort.  The view from my room was breathtakingly beautiful. After exploring the resort , the facilities it provided and satisfying my appetite I decided to spend some time in my room’s  balcony.

Few minutes with yourself: Something that you fail to get in your normal course of life. Something  that you crave for unknowingly all the time. I was lucky to get those few minutes. Icing on the cake was the weather and the view. Sitting there and thinking about everything that had happened in the past few months , that was happening and that was yet to come was like an epiphany; whatever happens, happens for good.  It’s funny how you need to stop , inhale and then take a few minutes to actually see around and realize that there is a lot going on in your life.

The mall roads of different hill stations are like platters; they have a little of everything to offer. Me and my cousins decided to walk instead of taking a taxi. He was charging 500 bucks for three kilometers! It was pleasant and the sun was setting. The sky was a medley of all colors that one can possibly think of. I was enjoying my walk with nature. I was walking with the pine trees, the crooked rocks and the birds. I had just taken a bite out of nature and happily swallowed the helping.

I saw many localites going back home from work. I wondered how they managed to walk such long distances . I also wondered where they lived! All I could see were resorts and guest houses!

The mall road was crowded with families and couples. The area smelled of shawls, fresh fruits, steamed momos , tea, corn ,vanilla ice-cream and everything else that was available. I am someone who spends a keen amount of energy and attention on the various kinds of eatables that are available and how each one of them tastes. In short , a foodie! I was drawn like a magnet to the small food stalls. I tried almost every possible dish that those stalls had to offer. The aroma of chicken momos is something you just cannot ignore. The maggi was so delicious that I was compelled to ask the recipe. A hot cup of ginger tea accompanied by pakoras is heavenly! Lastly two scoops of vanilla ice cream in a cone, also called softy by localites, is like a perfect conclusion to the journey of food.

I was so engrossed in the above mentioned dishes that I forgot to pay any attention to people around me and the other stalls and I don’t regret at all.

It was time to go back. The journey back home gives you time to recollect and relive the experiences you had during the trip before you get back into the dial of your normal life. Travelling is an expedition with different stages: expectations and anxiety, experience and lastly memories.

When I think back ,I realize how earlier it meant nothing more than a medium to escape and now it’s a bundle of emotions. That is exactly what travel gives you. It engraves a geographical area in your memory like an emotion which becomes a part of you.

Fear the Pain

- Akash Pattanayak

He looks around and sees different kinds of people around him. There are the academic whiz kids whose worlds seem to stay balanced just as long as they can score full marks and even missing out on that one mark is as if the Mayan prophecy is about to come true and we’re all going to die by 2012. Then you have your athletes who win and lose by a millisecond and he wonders why nobody remembers the guy who came second (who knows who lost to Michael Phelps by one hundredth of a second?).  And then there are the slackers who waste their lives smoking up and drinking. Now in this sea of diversity where you have the nerds, the jocks, the dopes, the other stereotypes, why does he feel like a fish out of water? He doesn't fall into any of these categories. The reason is two simple words that we all know but don’t truly understand- pain and fear.

Pain and fear are more often than not interrelated. We fear pain. We end up realizing that the fear was uncalled for (maybe that vaccination wasn't so painful after all.). Pain, now is it as simple as a bee stinging you on your bum or is it maybe something more complex, something that has far more intangible effects than being hit by a car and breaking each and every bone in your body? Well that does sound pretty painful to me. Maybe that last breakup or not making it to that IIT can be as painful as that car running you over. I’d take that breakup any day of the week but you never know with the “emo” teenagers these days. No kidding. Some people enjoy pain but that’s kind of messed up so we’ll ignore both the sadistic and masochistic weirdos and focus on the weirdo that doesn't fit in for now. So the only thing we know is that pain is subjective. It differs from person to person in intensity, toleration, and expression.

So let’s come to fear. I know we've left the story hanging but it’s kind of important to explain these two abnormal things before we can get back to this poor outcast, I’m sure he can hang in there a little longer. So let’s start with the clichés- “The only thing we must fear is fear itself”. Yeah, tell that to the little kids in Uganda who know Kony is still alive or maybe those kids in America who went to Michael Jackson’s house in the summer. But yeah fear is something that makes us human. Each and every human being has felt this and it is something that we can’t ignore. Unless you’re Evil Kanevil. It would've been great if we were Vulcans and couldn't compute emotions like fear. But we forget that fear is the most powerful motivator. It drives us unlike anything else;you run 10 times faster knowing a dog is chasing you. Now moving on to the next cliché – The fear of the unknown, we fear what we don’t understand. This one actually explains human behavior to a large extent and is visible in our evolution. We feared the unfathomable to the extent that we began worshiping these things. It is a function of our insatiable desire to rationalize (irrationalize?) everything. 

 Pain and fear therefore become the deciding factors in the decision-making process. Now when you think of that orange light, it makes you think of all those decisions. It takes you back to that time when everything stopped and it seems that the whole world was waiting on you to make that decision. Somehow that scares you because you’re afraid of getting hurt. Is it because you've experienced the pain or because you fear the idea of not knowing what lies ahead and are hence happy to stick to your comfort zone that you've carved out for yourself?

So let’s take all this philosophical cocktail party mumbo jumbo back into the life of the social pariah that we left hanging in the story.  Now when he was younger he was usually willing to take the leap. He went for the Olympiads, the sports meets and the parties. At the Olympiads he became the academically weak kid, which in the Indian scenario would probably mean he became the embarrassment of the family. Either IIT or idiot. In sports he sadly ended up becoming the last guy who got picked in the team or worse became the umpire. Finally at the parties he realized that he’s the socially awkward kid who nobody wants to hang out with anymore because let’s face it nobody likes a buzz kill.  I guess if you get burned that many times you’re bound to be a little apprehensive.  Now every time he’s faced with an opportunity he ends up being either too indecisive or too afraid to give it a shot. I guess at the end of the day all that pain made him fear that choice in itself. So it’s not really the holding back or taking off at the Orange light that he fears more than the light individually. That’s what sets him apart from the high school ecosystem. He’s kind of an alien, but not the fun type like ET or Jadoo that everyone wants to play with, and more like the ones who are out to kill humans like the ones in “War of the Worlds” or something even more ridiculous like “Independence Day.”

Maybe he would be better off not putting himself in that position or maybe if he is strong enough he’ll continue to take that risk. And after all the failure he will have that Eureka moment and will end up getting a Nobel Prize or something. That day he’ll remember all those things he failed at and realize that he made the right choice by ignoring all the jocks, nerds and losers who were honking at him at that metaphorical Orange light.  If not I guess the Darwinian realm comes into play and too bad because it’s the survival of the fittest and with the kind of road rage you see around the world, if you wait too long you’ll probably get shot by some trigger happy redneck.