Don't judge my naming sensibilities through this post's title. I know the difference between "labels"/"tags" and "title", it's just a new design I am trying out and hope it wouldn't seem like a literary faux-pas when I read this again in future. Now there goes yet another deviated start.
This weekend's drive to New England region brought back my memories of the lives, I'd imagined, of characters from stories of Jhumpa Lahiri. It's the Boston city that rekindled my memories and further strengthened by the walk through MIT while gusty winds blew over the Charles after an unexpected downpour in the evening. The silent and sparsely populated campus along the river, the vibrant Boston city with it's curvy and tiled roads through it's downtown, ubiquitous evening chillness in early October, people running along the Charles through the drizzle and cold - all of them occur, if not together, in stories of Jhumpa Lahiri. As I looked around Boston and it's people through my own lens I felt as if I knew about a part of their lives. As I try to form an imaginary connection with the city I feel a dull pain deep down my heart. It's like the pain of loneliness but only stranger and hard to completely decipher to myself. Probably because the city Boston itself feels like a prototype of something bigger like probably NYC but it's not there yet and it doesn't want to be NYC. It wants to be bigger and more importantly a better one in a different way or rather in it's own way. The people don't know how it's going to be and thus there is a hope to see it every day as one wakes up.
The next destination in the road trip was Nashua. I was bowled by the hospitality of the friends of my parents. Now they are my friends too. The families with it's daily chores, the funny Americanized-Indian kids who are inquisitive about anything Indian and new, the youngsters-turned-extremely-patient parents, their combined struggles and joys. That was a welcome change to my life in NYC that seems too fast to stop and think about even the mere existence of life in the form I experienced on this trip for a day. I realized that it's not like a hard to sell option to my life as I used to imagine earlier. It's the kind of selfless sacrifice one makes to create something bigger, with deeper meaning and satisfaction that only comes through doing it rather than prematurely, and foolishly, imagining about it esp in the wrong way. Such acts might be the sources of peace for people stepping into the "real" life as that had been the way of life for major section of successful people for all these generations and probably stands true for next generations. I am largely the product of such a sacrifice by my parents and it is the quality ingrained by most Indians.
Hitting on the last section of my post, rather my intimate one, about the spark that always burned in my heart. I realized at an young age that it's the spark that kept me hopeful, sane, peaceful, selfless, balanced and pretty much everything that one needs to be happy and satisfied. That spark was rekindled when I met a very distant cousin. I was meeting this person after about 15 years. Despite this long time I have vivid memories of the way this cousin's mom used to make me feel. She had this calming effect on the people around her which was driven through her balanced personality. I came across very few people with such personality. My grandmother and her mom, one of my aunt and this distant-cousin's mom, handful in over 25 years of life. The thing that sweetly bowled me over was that today my cousin was an exact replica of her mom. Her words, actions and personality as a whole had this striking calming effect. That's the effect I feel when I am in the company of my grandmother, aunt, parents and friends in Hyd. I never miss that spark as that's the one which ignites my hope and real-self and most importantly the satisfied-self. All the running towards my phantom goals took me farther from this aspect of life and that in turn made me cherish and long for such moments of this spark. As much as I fantasize that I find someone with who would make me feel that spark I fear that I may not come across such a person in my life and drift along longing for one.
P.S: This post was surprisingly struck in the draft mode for almost an year and now I don't remember what content I planned to add to this. As I said earlier I love running but am physically lazy to run and I love writing but mentally lazy to elucidate my thoughts into words. I found this post lying dead after a casual talk about my blog made me come back to it. Content's original date was Oct 8th 2012.
Hitting on the last section of my post, rather my intimate one, about the spark that always burned in my heart. I realized at an young age that it's the spark that kept me hopeful, sane, peaceful, selfless, balanced and pretty much everything that one needs to be happy and satisfied. That spark was rekindled when I met a very distant cousin. I was meeting this person after about 15 years. Despite this long time I have vivid memories of the way this cousin's mom used to make me feel. She had this calming effect on the people around her which was driven through her balanced personality. I came across very few people with such personality. My grandmother and her mom, one of my aunt and this distant-cousin's mom, handful in over 25 years of life. The thing that sweetly bowled me over was that today my cousin was an exact replica of her mom. Her words, actions and personality as a whole had this striking calming effect. That's the effect I feel when I am in the company of my grandmother, aunt, parents and friends in Hyd. I never miss that spark as that's the one which ignites my hope and real-self and most importantly the satisfied-self. All the running towards my phantom goals took me farther from this aspect of life and that in turn made me cherish and long for such moments of this spark. As much as I fantasize that I find someone with who would make me feel that spark I fear that I may not come across such a person in my life and drift along longing for one.
P.S: This post was surprisingly struck in the draft mode for almost an year and now I don't remember what content I planned to add to this. As I said earlier I love running but am physically lazy to run and I love writing but mentally lazy to elucidate my thoughts into words. I found this post lying dead after a casual talk about my blog made me come back to it. Content's original date was Oct 8th 2012.
