Curiouser and Curiouser
Today’s prompt: The last line of your favourite poem. Mine is “Pike” by Ted Hughes (http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/pike)
That rose slowly towards me, watching,
As I faltered at multiple steps.
That watched as,
I took some credit for team events,
And watched without warning,
As I basked in recognition.
That rose too far,
And as with everything else,
Came crashing down upon me,
Dawning the realization that
Nothing external will save you at your lowest
Least of all,
Your own ego.
I’ve been away debating for the last two days so I’ve written down my poems in a book, but forgotten to post them. Here’s me playing catch up.
As I cycle,
What becomes clear to me is that life slows down
When you are in motion,
And that is a counterintuitive statement I must explain.
As I pedal away,
My wheels revolving and covering meters of tar,
And dust,
My brain fades to black,
Nothing.
Nothing except:
The winding trail in front of me,
And the privilege of breathing clear air.
Life slows down,
Because as I turn through corners,
I pretend to be a MotoGP rider:
Leaning and collecting the wind as I drive past,
Allowing me to reflect on my life’s ambitions,
And every turn that landed me where I am today.
Incoherent thoughts
Are all I seem to think of now
As I struggle with poems
It’s very easy to blog about your seniors, because you know they’ll never (hopefully) stumble upon a rather embarrassing, but very honest exposition of why you love their batch. What’s difficult, is to write about someone you sit next to in class every. single. day. I’ve been struggling for 3 days now, because I can’t find the words.
I am a part of a set of addicts on campus known as mooters. Our drugs are Written Submissions, and our high is Oral Argumentation. I partake in several opportunities on campus, but very little compares to the feeling I get when I’m actively (or passively) researching on a moot issue. I’m awake all night because I don’t have an answer. I chain-read because I don’t have a solution that I am convinced by. It drives me insane, and I love it. In our first year of college, this dude & I turned up to college 4 weeks into the semester, because we didn’t have admission at GNLU before that. And our moot was a week away. In that week, we mustered the courage to ask seniors for help, attended a couple of debate sessions, got grilled like crazy (grilling: a process of preparing a mooter for oral rounds), got ragged together (with him judging me playing an invisible piano), and wrote our first memorials.
We picked different moots. Sir created history by qualifying to argue at the South Asia Rounds of OxPrice (something GNLU hadn’t done), and spurred me on to work hard at my moot. He was my #1 cheerleader when I needed him to be, but my #1 pain-in-the-ass judge during oral prep – he grilled me for 2 hours, with his co-tied-for-first-place pain-in-the-ass judge.
In second semester, Sir did the impossible. In first year, he ranked #1 on the Intra pool. We went ga-ga, knowing Sir was doing an International Moot of the highest calibre. At that point, I was working on International Law, so Sir came and spoke to me about the stuff he was reading. It was pretty cool, because he discovered a book that inadvertently helped my prep, and I was grateful. What was cooler, though, was that, at different times, we were both doing moots that lasted 6-8 months, and that was a challenge we were excited to take on.
This is where my journey stops, and Sir takes over.
I watched on as a fellow mooter as Sir went through the paces, getting a Coach, working his socks off on drafts, finding out his draft got ripped apart, and going back to work his socks off on his second draft. I marveled at the fact that he stopped chasing ‘bettering’ his draft, but started chasing ‘perfection’. He moved around sentences, commas, and full stops, in the quest of the perfect form. And that was inspiring.
What was more inspiring was how he was systematically shredding the problem to pieces in his head. Sir’s issue was jurisdiction. He self-confessed that it was dry and boring, but Sir found a way to love it. His dedication transcended the content he was working on. Because of the zone he had now found, sifting through material and attempting to find creativity in a position of law he found brutal at the start was something he was enjoying. And that was contagious.
We chased America together this year. He chased Florida, and I chased D.C. Post exams, I had the honour of observing the specimen that Sir is, up-close, as we shared a room in Delhi for 26 days. Once I started interning, I saw Sir only at night, and with Roommate #3 (who will feature in this story at a later stage), we worked on our moots daily. But even then, I noticed something unique to the way Sir worked. He worked smart. A lot of us prioritize incorrectly. But everything appeared to be magically arranged in his head (atleast from the outside). The stress didn’t show, but the eagerness did, and the magic of that eagerness, was that he was now obliterating and ripping out every tiny possible error he found within his written submissions. Over the last two days, he barely slept. And once he was done with memorial submission, we went to eat pizza together one evening: getting ripped off in an expensive city together. It was fabulous.
That was when the oral practice started. Sir fell sick before oral rounds, coughing his lungs out on a couple of days. But that did not affect him one bit, something I admired. It is exhausted being unwell is a city that is unfamiliar to you, but he motored on. Partially, I believe, because he had put too much into the moot to stop working, a feeling I empathize with, but moslty because nothing, at that stage would detract him from going to Florida.
I dropped him off to his auto the day he left for the Delhi Airport – telling him to make his work count. And bloody hell, he did it in a way that brought me to tears sitting alone on my ugly yellow bedsheets. Sir made history again: taking GNLU to the World Rounds of a moot we had been waiting to visit again.
He didn’t make much of it then, and with an air of non-chalance, almost, went about with his daily life: interning in Bangalore, and then taking a trip to Bangkok, bringing out the inner Gujju-tourist in him.
Come fourth semester, Sir got back to work, but in something I can only hope to do with my life, managed to balance other commitments, such as managing the GNLUMUN with all of the work, and the pressure he was putting on himself at this point.
Sir worked very very hard. Under the guidance of his Coach, and with his phenomenal team-mates, Sir worked hard. Because India Rounds, and World Rounds, are two very, very different things. And together, as naive first years, we had discussed how absolutely mental it would be, to argue at the World Rounds of a moot. In awe, I watched from a distance.
We still sat together in class every single day, and I asked him how it was going. He’d reply “slow” sometimes, and sometimes tell me “it’s going fine only”. I thought that was pretty good. Sir then self-confessed he was growing tired of the moot the more he worked on it. I had no words of support to offer him at this point, except some sympathy.
The process of mooting is exhausting: physically, mentally, and emotionally. It’s one of the things I love about the activity. It exacts every shred of you, and rips you to your bare. When you argue rounds, you argue with every fibre of your being, because nothing has mattered that much to you in your life, except the form of argumentation and trying to convince a bench that your words and your work and your arguments continue to stand despite what your opponents may come and say before the Court.
Sir is extremely daft/comical sometimes, something I think is important to mention at this stage. Before leaving, he confessed to me that he was worried he’d run out of clothes in America. That was Sir’s concern. Sir also kept telling me his rounds were ‘tomorrow’ when they were in ‘two hours’. He claimed that was a typo, but he admitted that the time-zones confused his brain.
I messaged Sir on Saturday to find out he was in the Quarter-Finals of the World Rounds. I shed one tear and wrote sentimental tweets and messages. Anything to tell him he had to make it now. 3 hours later Sir messaged he was in the Semi-Finals. He was two steps away: facing the same college that had beat him at the Indian Semi-Finals.
As a group we collectively responded with awe and continued to support him, praying for his success. The air on campus was getting noticeably silent. Everyone wanted to know if they would argue the finals. Everyone.
Sir texted: ‘We made it.’
Being the group we are, we responded with abuse (in the gentlest manner, to show him our excitement and pride) and began to find ways to watch it online.
Sir fulfilled a first-year dream I share with him, but a dream he fulfilled collectively for the college, the alumni of our college, and most importantly, a dream he had worked toward tirelessly for a year. He argued before the problem drafter, eminent jurists and a sitting judge of the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea. I had goosebumps watching him from start to finish – such was his demeanour.
I linked my parents to his livestream. They stayed awake to watch him with me.
Out of 85 people watching the live stream, I can affirm that a minimum of 65 were logged on from the same server in Koba. There were external speakers attached to laptops, cheers when we started speaking, and silence throughout the speeches.
He was great.
His teammate was phenomenal.
Together, they were insane. I was flabbergasted watching them. I sat on my Chair praying throughout.
Watching their opposition, I knew that these were the best two teams in the competition. My batchmate was 1/3rd of the 2 best teams worldwide at this point.
In an hour, my batchmate, the guy I’ve seen at his ugliest he’s been in the past two years, was 1/3rd of the best team worldwide.
They were Champions of the World. It was fitting that both oralists won citations: with Sir bagging 2nd Best Oralist (Prelims), and Ma’am bagging Best Oralist (Finals). What was also fitting was that they received trophies shaped like globes. At that point, they had the whole world in their hands, and Koba in tears.
I texted him when the judges were deliberating. At that point, fun activities were on the live-stream: they were asking questions and handing out green tee-shirts. I texted him to partake in these fun things and get me a green tee-shirt. He seenzoned me.
Sir was also requested by numerous fangirls to wave at them on camera. He snickered.
Such is Sir’s grace.
Sir drank bottled water on the finals table, a far cry from the RO we rely on here.
Sir went sheetless to the finals podium.
When he was announced as World Champion, I pumped my fists in the air and squealed like a 3 year old, exactly 1 year and 3 months on from when my seniors had induced the same emotion in me.
Sir reached Legend status, because he made history again on Saturday, the 1st of April.
My weekend, that weekend, was following LegallyIndia liveblogs for updates from moot results, and this post would be amiss without mentioning the fact that several other moots we achieved excellent things at as a University, and we have done very well at, as a University through the year. It’s insanity, and I’m proud to belong to a family of mooters at this college – an inter-generational family, so to speak.
But I’d also like to send a shout-out to my friends, whose moots didn’t go all the way they planned. And this isn’t some motivational thing I’m trying to pull on you, nor is it some preachy thing, but it’s me being brutally honest.
Some results don’t work out.
But some results do. Sir’s story, above, is an exemplification of that. Sir’s story also tells you that work: hard word, and smart work, pays off in the grand scheme of things.
If you enjoy working for the probability that your result may work out, then don’t stop working. Somewhere, I believe the Universe conspires for our success in ways we don’t understand fully. In light of that, if the Universe is putting in a little effort for you, you shouldn’t stop putting in that effort for yourself, right?
While Sir’s achievement will bring him a lot of adulation he has earned, what will fill our grey walls with colour is the story of Sir’s journey, because it represents the fact that your work will take you places. And if that work can fulfill a dream of yours, then it’s worth fighting for.
So go ahead world, and LegallyIndia, and MPL.
Throw us another Challenge. Rope someone in from GNLU by trying to tell them they have a 1/90 probability of winning something.
And watch them do it.
My Parting Words are me confessing my fan-girling to Sir’s teammates. You guys are amazing. You’re the reason I’ve written a post that is longer than half of the Projects I have written at this University.
Congratulations to the three of you and to everyone who picked up a moot win for us as a college. But Congratulations also to everyone who fought the war, lost, but fell in love with the art. Falling in love with a drug you’re intaking contributes to the high. And the high is incomparable.
P.S.: While I haven’t used Sir’s or Ma’am’s name in this Extended Essay, maybe you can check out the Stetson Website before you openly stalk them and accidentally give them notifications? 😉
Today’s Airplane Poetry Movement prompt tells me to use the first line of my favourite song to write a poem. I struggle to pick ‘A favourite song’, so I clicked my ‘Favourites’ playlist on Shuffle, and here’s what popped up: ‘Sun and Moon’, by Above & Beyond.
It’s raining, it’s pouring,
And everything around you seems to be falling apart,
Faster than the cookie crumbles,
Into the milk that you’ve dipped it in,
Lost forever.
The sun is a lasting memory,
And no shelter seems close,
Your heart fills with dread.
But fear not, O Braveheart,
For bearing the rain enables you,
To appreciate the warmth of the sun,
And of pleasant weather.
Fear not, O Braveheart,
Instead,
Jump in puddles,
Splash!
And create positive memories of your worst fears,
For that’s all you can do
When your fears become truth.
As part of GloPoWriMo, I’ll be writing poetry every day through the month of April, based on prompts that are everywhere on the internet. Today I’ve found a prompt that particularly fascinated me: Airplane Poetry Movement told me to Write a Letter to my 12-year-old self, so here goes.
i.
Hey,
You only. Listen up.
Yes, all the cool kids are getting girlfriends,
But don’t care about it.
Your single life isn’t boring, because,
One day you’ll understand the concept of being a third-wheel,
And you’ll realize you’re a seventh-wheel, or ninth-wheel,
But your bad jokes will allow you to be in every couple’s company,
And never feel excluded.
Yes, all the cool kids have videogames,
But you have a laptop and a piano.
Hunt for USB cable,
Open a SoundCloud account,
And go crazy.
Yes, all the cool kids use expletives,
But don’t fall into that trap again,
Because those words can pierce a wounded soul and push them
To a point of no return.
Instead,
Open up a dictionary,
And learn spellings of words that can help you acknowledge your mistakes,
S-O-R-R-Y,
Because having an ego will ruin you.
But language will take you places.
ii.
Hey,
Open up a map and explore your country.
Go outside and speak in your native tongue, and feel every syllable,
Set a curve on people’s faces,
Indicating acceptance.
Open up a map and chart the distance
That your father travels every time he wants to see you
And respond to his messages with more than “nm”
Ask him if he’s eaten
Because he forgets to eat meals in his
Endless bid to ensure you can eat unlimited buffets.
Open up an Encyclopedia, and buy some Books,
Because knowledge is the sharpened edge that will
Help you combat other insecurities.
Go downstairs and sit with your mother,
Because sitting in college you will miss her audience and the fact
That she is the only person who understands your confusion
But sometimes withholds her advice,
To make you independent.
Teach her about your favourite things,
Because otherwise
As you open up your map to new pastures,
Distance will replace frames of reference.
iii.
Hey.
Tell everybody you love them,
Not because you won’t see them tomorrow,
In your orange shirt and your blue shorts,
But because everyone deserves to know they are cherished.
And maybe that will keep you in touch with everyone,
Even when your rigid sense of morality burns bridges.
iv.
Hey.
Don’t stop arguing,
Even when people say you’re arguing for no reason,
Especially when people say you’re arguing for no reason,
Because logic is a tool that is best explained and understood,
Not dismissed in a fit of rage or sadness.
Remember every conversation.
The digital world will soon take over your life
And your words will travel far,
But nothing will ever replace the sound of people’s voices,
Heard in face-to-face communication,
Especially when you see them once in six months,
Once a year,
Or never again.
Remember every conversation,
Your understanding of people will be better for it,
And on a cold, frosty night,
You can rely on the warmth words made you feel.
v.
Hey,
Don’t stop dreaming.
Not everything will go your way,
And you will cry on numerous occasions:
Bunking days of school to avoid pity.
But your dreams will never blow into smithereens.
They’ll merely shatter,
So you can reach out to the tape in your pencilbox,
Patch your dreams back together,
Take heart at a valiant attempt,
And go again.
Because miracles do happen,
And optimism and work is the only way to trudge through grey walls.
In pyjamas, I sit,
Thinking of the comfort of home, as I swelter in heat
In pyjamas, I sit,
Browsing away on the internet,
When deadlines loom large in front of me.
In pyjamas, I sit,
Remembering every time I wore pyjamas at home, and
And spilt food on myself while eating dinner,
Prompting a change in pyjamas,
But today,
Spilling food on oneself doesn’t yield a fresh pair of
Doesn’t yield a fresh pair of pyjamas ready in my closet to slip into,
But rather,
The thought of having to trek till the laundry,
And collect the clothes
I had given last week,
Or the thought
Of having to wash my pyjamas,
With the Tide making my toes nimble.
As I think about these things,
The absurdity of it all strikes me.
I’m wearing pyjamas,
In heat rising to 40 degrees,
That shows no signs of slowing.
And I realize:
If pyjamas can set off this much thought,
Then thinking about a project due
Can do a whole world of good.
I’d like to say I haven’t written for a week to prepare myself for the mountain that is GloPoWriMo, because starting today, I’ll be writing one piece of poetry everyday. But I’d be lying. I haven’t written for a week because I haven’t gotten myself around to writing. It’s as simple as that.
I’ve maintained multiple e-mail accounts since I started using the computer for my own purposes. My first memories of a computer stretch back to 2004 and 2005, when, as part of the technology boom wherein my dad picked up a Nokia N95 Connector, we were privileged to have an HP Laptop in our house.
Actually, scratch that. It goes further back. I used Windows 98 on a big desktop PC in our house – to play Pinball, watch Tell Me Why CD’s and play a couple of deemed-to-be-educational games.
Anyway, post the HP Laptop, my grandfather installed Typing Tutor and tried to teach me the art of speed typing. He even helped me create my first e-mail ID on Yahoo. It ended with .co.uk – a fitting tribute to my colonial past as an Indian, but offered me something I could boast about to my friends – a presence on the interwebs.
I eventually found out this wasn’t the sort of presence on the Internet that mattered to people of my age. What mattered more was your Miniclip ID and the corresponding points you had earned, or whether you were a ClubPenguin/RuneScape Member (I was not). Nonetheless, I was pretty impressed with an e-mail ID, and because Typing Tutor expected discipline and daily practice, I weaseled out of it by formulating a typing style of my own.
That led to a manifestation of my thoughts about Kids Next Door on Microsoft Word – documents I still possess and value deeply.
When GMail erupted and you could voice chat through GTalk + they offered unlimited storage, my grandfather switched over. Soon, my dad did too, and I followed, creating a new e-mail ID in Bangalore during my 2006 holidays. It was crazy. GTalk opened up communications for me and my dad when he was in India, away from the prying eyes of my mother, and I assume he valued it more than I did at the time. To me, as a child, I thought GTalk was super cool because of how advanced technology was becoming, but to my father, it was an opportunity for him to talk to his son one-on-one. From Bangalore, he monitored my internet use.
From Bangalore, he monitored my internet use. I had auto-login enabled, so he knew when I signed in (to play RuneScape) and when I signed off. This worked till I learned about the Invisible mode (and therefore extended my gametime without his knowledge). Sorry dad.
I operated primarily on this ID for everything between 2006 and 2015 – the year I came to college. The e-mail ID posed a lot of social problems. Innocent as my intentions were when I created the account, an amalgamation of my parents’ names is also a very popular Indian feminine name. Which led to some (a lot) of teasing. An explanation however led to an animated situation where my friends found it cool, but couldn’t express their sentiments, since they had already made fun of me.
I switched over from this account in college, operating on a more formalized, so-to-speak, ID. However, so many essential functions were linked to the old account, that I had to log-in till I switched everything over. Having managed that, I logged in a few weeks ago to find some 300-odd mails left unread in my mailbox.
With some time on my hands these days I read through old e-mails. Things I sent during my time at school, responses I received, my chats with my friends from when I wasn’t on Facebook & WhatsApp didn’t exist, and that set off a massive nostalgia trip.
Aside from that nostalgia trip, it provided this amazing perspective on what has shaped me today. It’s crazy, but I have an e-mail from every strong memory that I have associated with school. Whether it was something positive: Board Results, Student Council Elections, MUNs, or something downright negative: A good sounding from dad, an e-mail from grandpa that went unread that he caught me out on, chats that went awry, a semblance of this exists on my Google Inbox.
I understand today with some maturity that I am a product for Google to sell, and a lot of spam I receive is Google’s doing, but damn, technology, and damn, science. You’ve provided a way for me to re-live a couple of years at a click of a button.
Forget the nostalgia trip. Go through your e-mail inbox when you’re feeling at your lowest.
You’ll find rays of sunshine and pearls of wisdom that have made you everything you are today.
And that’ll set you up for something truly special tomorrow.
In Anticipation of a month of poems (and hopefully normal blog posts),
Curdrice Out.
I can feel my brain form compartments for things that I do these days. Like a hard-drive, I see folders, sub-folders, and files for every task that I do. It’s very strange, experiencing this, because each time I return to a task after taking a break, I feel like Microsoft Word loading on an old Microsoft XP PC. Slow.
It’s uncanny how this all begun, and I think I’ve started to make these observations a lot more since I got free time, of sorts, but it’s trickled down to every part of my day. Conversations with people seem to be stored away and re-opened for reference each time I indulge in one. This compartmentalization has become so ingrained to things I do that my reading has taken on new forms: I have a book on my bed, on my table, in my bag, and in my laptop bag.
I think it’s pretty cool, being able to do this. I feel more dedicated and committed to the work that I’m doing as I do it, because I’m less distracted by the other things or the mountain of other work that’s staring at me, simply because I’ve stored it in some other part of the brain.
I wonder if there’s a word for this. Or if there’s Science behind how/why this happens. It’s very intriguing, but it’s helping me stay relaxed. I’m enjoying myself a lot more too. I’m also listening to a lot more music, which is definitely contributing to the way I carry myself these days.
There’s an Oxford Handbook about music therapy I have to read. Will source it from somewhere. More about this when I figure out what it’s all about.
Tomorrow’s a Friday, where I’m ordinarily supposed to have 4 classes, but I have 5, and then a working Saturday. Joy.
When hunger strikes,
Your mind forgets all else,
And your stomach rumbles.
When hunger strikes,
You dream of your favourite food:
Ah, the taste of tomato rasam,
Rice,
And Aloo Bhujia.
When hunger strikes,
You remember each time you’ve eaten your favourite food,
Every meal for which you’ve sat in front of the television,
With a cork-mat,
Because your mother over-heated the rasam,
And almost forced a burnt tongue,
By heating the rice,
Despite your warnings.
When hunger strikes,
You miss home,
Because home is where rasam is,
And these khakhra-eaters, and fafda-mongerers,
Make coconut float instead of tomato in their rasam –
Committing crimes against humanity.
I have a tinge of regret regarding my relationship with my peers from school. We were barely a batch of 40, but quite divided based on our sections – mostly because our sections were our boards – the ISC and the A Levels. So, in some ways, it was easier to relate your pains and struggles with your classmates, than with anyone else.
I always thoguht I’d manage, somehow, to be in touch with people I saw on a daily basis and shared a classroom with for 8 hours, 5 days a week. And that, chilling, just like the old times, wouldn’t be any different. A lot about this view started to fade away toward the latter half of the 12th Grade, but my fears were concretized only after my first semester.
I moral police, I’ll admit that. After a certain point, as a friend concerned for your well-being, I will inform you what I believe is the thing you should be doing, and may, perhaps, do, admonish you if you do not follow what I believe is in your best interest. I get that I overstep the line sometimes, and I’m pretty sure I did quite a bit with my friends in high school. I was and am a staunch believer in rules. It’s part of the reason I took up the Law. Therefore, when I was elected School Captain, I think it’s fair to say, I took the role of enforcing rules, and discipline fairly seriously.
At some point, I surmise this might have been the undoing of my relationship with some of my friends. But, I think what became abundantly clear as we moved to college was that we’re very different people.
Of course, hanging out will never be a problem, and yes, we can catch a meal, and chill for a good couple of hours. But our interests are extremely varying, and our environment in school had conditioned us to make us feel we had the same, overlapping spheres of interest. College allows you to follow your true passions, and I feel it’s where you become who you’re destined to be. It helps you find yourself. And it also means, because of a lack of shared space, and shared experiences, you lose layers of connection with people you’ve known before.
This struck me the hardest, and it’s what has sparked off this post, when I wished one of my friends – a pal I spent the entirety of 8th – 12th with ‘Happy Birthday’, yesterday. And I saw he was online, but he didn’t reply. And that’s strange for me, when you’ve spent 5 years together.
I have memories with him from my only road-trip so far in Pondicherry, and I’ve had a whale of a time with him in his house, with my other friends. We’ve watched numerous movies together, gone to school and collapsed in Physics class together. It’s been an all-round amazing journey.
But what sucks, is that, today, out of a batch of 40, I’m in touch with 6 people. 6.
That’s partially my fault. I gave up on preserving a lot of relationships after my first year, and I can see that today. I tried quite hard in first sem to keep in touch, because I missed home, and these guys were all in close proximity to Bangalore. But few responded.
And these few are the ones I’m in touch with today.
If any of my school friends are reading this, I’m always around for you. Know that. We survived an experience together. We overcame similar challenges together. We graduated together. And that’s something even months of radio silence cannot take away.
See you on the flip!
It’s rather easy,
In a world where social media dominates interaction,
To find people with whom conversation never ends,
To find people with whom you feel inspired,
You’re never bored,
And life’s every instant is an adventure,
Because of some new idea introduced into your discussions,
Things that surprise you,
That make you happy,
That keep you alive.
But what I find tough,
And what we miss out on,
Is searching for people to reach out, with
A hand,
To hold, on nights of sorrow,
A shoulder,
To lean on when life’s stability disappears,
A person,
To share our silences,
And understand every word that’s left unsaid,
Because silence sometimes heals wounds that
Words merely pierce,
And jokes merely shatter,
And time merely intensifies.
Tejas Rao 