I repeat, change is NOT good !

[ Okay, I feel not-good, so this is going to be a sad, whiny post.
Still reading? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.]

On days when I don’t have school and I’m just sitting at home doing nothing, I get the feeling that time’s passing me by… I’m watching my life go by…it’s natural to feel a bit in limbo, I suppose because everything’s rushing by so fast, just a few days ago was the first day of 11th grade and now the finals are looming close…but then there were so many things I’d thought to get done, so many experiences I’d vowed to have, that I can’t realize somehow that I’m seventeen now. Almost grown up. I’ll be casting my vote next year…..but I don’t feel any different, any older.

(ON A DETOUR:
Things I’d thought I’d do:
Get a casual job after 10 boards
Write my Thamma’s memoirs (don’t grin, they’re hilarious)
Redecorate my room and learn to cook, learn spanish, learn the guitar, learn shorthand, something…
Write stuff and send it places
Really study for once…
After watching Rang de Basanti : Change the world (ok, tall order, but a little change, maybe?)

But all I do is:
Read. (the same books over and over again now that my British Council membership’s expired)
Go to school and come back, all in a sleepy trance.
Watch Friends
Watch the OC
Watch Seinfeld
Watch cartoons (in hindi for god’s sake)
Watch …you get the idea.

And I somehow don’t feel that’s going to change anytime soon, just because I’m gonna be 18 or 19.)

And in the meantime, everything is changing around me, leaving me behind…my cousin twin’s family might be getting transferred which would be horrible, other cousins are gonna go off to study and I love the bunch too much, Mitra’s gone to Ashok Hall leaving a huge gap in the fraying sisterhood,... they don’t show Lois and Clark anymore on Pogo…so basically the (more or less) picture perfect idyll I’d been living in the last few years is breaking down, piece by piece, like I always knew it would.

I just didn’t realize it would hurt this much…

All the world's a stage...

Writing about the Ozone street play got me thinking of the other plays I’ve been in, and huge attacks of stage fright notwithstanding, the stage is actually a really fun place to be. A place where you can shed your inhibitions and bask in the limelight. A place where you will get cheered (as your school will cheer you on!! Of course you’ll be jeered at too) and where you will forget your lines at times (but make them up seamlessly if you value your skin) and where you will have a hammering heart and cold hands.

So here are a few roles I could think of which I played:

The first one:

The dadu in a Rabindra Jayanti play involving a cat everyone’s mesmerized by…there was a whole pack of powder on my clothes, and very little on my hair, but at least I got the stoop and the quaver in the voice right-gimme a break, it was class 7!!


Not long after:

The bangal chakor in bharate chaai -a weird role involving an exaggerated bangal accent and a lot of gesticulation, for Teachers’ Day. Teachers loved the play-Inam looked amazing as a bangali bou and said “ki amar sokhar math gorer pran!!”(a teacher put her right), while hitting Mitra with a broom. That was the first big success--and that’s why we’ve been recycling Bharate chaai at regular intervals ever since, whenever we need a script fast.

Then there was Abak Jalpan which I don’t remember properly, and another one which our Bengali teacher made up..... and a few more I guess…none inter-school though.

There was a brief hiatus in our acting careers after that while we focused on our doomed-from-the-beginning band but Teachers Day and Rabindra Jayanti etc always saw us doing something, anything. We loved the stage and would do anything to get on it--all 11 of us!! 7th and 8th grade were packed with fun and we spent more time in our backstairs ‘practice’ spot than in our classes….I don’t believe how many classes we bunked back in 7…tar opor chilo music, debates, extempore, quizzes,-- everything we got our hands on, we participated in.
Maybe that’s why we got so jaded later on….

I got kinda sidetracked, but this will be added to and continued later on (hopefully)…..

Ozone's over, school sucks as usual...a grouchy post

So Ozone 2006 is over and it's back to school and handwriting practice( 'coz take notes is all we do) and i feel so empty. Abar back to drill in the hot sun for an hour and a half each day, Bengali class with the mad scramble for seats at the back, the lower-back-pain-inducing-chairs, the AC that doesn't work but is put there by the management on purpose to make us feel hotter....(fascinated? Don't worry, a post titled 'Why I Hate School's' in the works...)

Ozone was great while it lasted, though...jotoi onno onno feste giye participate koro, nothing quite beats the feel of the school crowd cheering you on....and beating certain schools (which shall be nameless)on your own turf.

This time I don'tknow why, I got into the mood late and as a consequence ended up participating only in the street play(we came 3rd by the way-bosco 2nd, sphs 1st. Bosco spoke the language of the people and won with audacity and skill firmly in place ; and sphs did 'Iqbal' which has a made to win script....we were good too, though).
Impact was fun, mbg had great costumes and was 2nd, bosco was disappointing and bvb was first; indipop, mock the band, were all the same as in every fest, fluffy and fun, while Jal was simply mind-blowing...I think I'm in love with Gohar Mumtaz.(by the way, all guys should have hair falling over their foreheads-try it guys, it does wonders for a sagging attitude and sagging lovelife. I woudn't advise one lock of hair though, only Superman can carry that off, but hair you and your girl can run your hands through-great.)

So it's almost 12, and I'm not supposed to be up blogging but here I am, and I'm sure to wake up late tomorrow and have to sneak in the back gate of the building; but then, gyan buddhi thakle I would not have lost my CBSE 10 mark sheet a month after I got it.( don't gasp, I found it again, although only after making thr trip to Allahabad for a new one...how my family puts up with me I can't imagine..)

Bye and goodnight and don't let the pyantakhancha below your bed get you.Use ginger-they hate it.

Richard P. Feynman

I've always loved learning how stuff works, how things happen, and the why of everything, so when my father handed me Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics a year or two ago, I immediately fell in love with the books and, of course, the guy.

Feynman simply has to be the most original thinker, the most versatile, the most human scientist ever- a bongo player, an acclaimed artist, an amateur safe cracker, a practical joker par excellance, a favourite with the ladies, and a man of conscience-not to mention the little matter of the Nobel prize- he'd started to supplant Supes in my affections. The wow thing about the man is how he says all the time how little we really know, how little he really knows.....humble yet arrogant, the guy takes my breath away. And if you want to get hooked to Physics, really get the beauty of it, live on his books.
Oh, and trust me, his remembrances-Surely you're joking,Mr Feynman?-make for really engrossing reading.

But then, Miss cornelia bryant was right in Anne's house of dreams-

"aren't there any good men then, mrs. cornelia?"
"yes of course
dear, in the graveyard yonder..."

(or words to that effect)

Don't mind the cynicism, i'm just having a Jonah day.

Reason? It's the day after the Jal live in concert in our school fest-MBG Ozone06- and as a result i have a sore throat and blisters from shrieking and dancing, and i've pulled a muscle in my arm from waving them in the air-we were in the very front row by the way(there are some advantages to being tiny)-and now it's back to the old take notes-have lunch-take notes existence in school which drives me crazy and makes me long for a feynman of my own who lives life on his own terms....and figures out electron spin from throwing a frisbee in frustration.

God i love the guy......

Change is NOT good.Pity you only realise that afterwards...

I've proved my last post right by writing this after two months-I am the laziest creature on Earth.
But then, it's my blog, so I rule.
The other day i was looking at an old picture of myself at age 10 or so, and man, was I weird! Not ugly exactly, but well, disturbing.

See what I mean?Glasses all over the place, the half-dead expression, the oversized sweater, all the signs of nerd-ness.....so anyway what i was thinking was, you hear all these horror stories of the nerds (me for instance, back in 4rth grade) getting teased,fetching and carrying and so on, but I was surprisingly spared all that. i mean I had it all- the air of helplessness, the tiny size, and, man, the glasses. prime teasing target, wouldn't you say? but all i got was good natured ribbing about being stuart little,and stuff like that...

i wonder why-maybe i was so immersed in the giant tomes that i never noticed, or maybe kids aren't as cruel as they say, or whatever the reason, but i was actually happy back then. Not giving a damn what I looked like, hanging out in the library and the grounds alike, playing 'sister-sister' and 'chain-chain' and being doodh-bhaath all the time, reading meaning into kites that fell into our school compound as part of our "detective club" ( involving many spine chilling episodes about secret passages out of school and a drug smuggling ring that actually smuggled chalk, but that's for another post)....anyway, i had a helluva lot of real fun back then.
None of the bitching, the make-believe popularity, the who-has-more-friends-and-a-better-boyfriend(s) stuff that's so weirdly important for everyone(not excluding me) nowadays.


I don't look like that picture now, what with contacts and a posh haircut and the typical clothes and outer trappings, and neither do i look like a lost kitten but act as maddeningly brash as the brashest of the gals; (and I still have the same great friends who have changed,sure,but so have I.....) but sometimes i feel that i'm still really the little girl I was, with the sad look and the tentative smile......

nothing really changes, does it?

I'm not Peter Pan after all....

because my birthday's coming up again, on the 11th of August,(i won't be "a sixteen year old girl from Kolkata,India " any more) and I suddenly realised that my blog's turned a year old a month ago. And i've made, like, four posts.
So am i incredibly lazy? do I not have enough time? Is there nothing left to write about? I think I'll go with the laziness theory and make a birthday resolution to post more often.

that's all for today, but you'll soon see more of the new, improved, seventeen year old anasua.and yes, that means i'm not posting till Friday-hey i did say getting over laziness was my birthday resolution!

Superman or Batman?

Recently i read The Tower Of Babel, JLA 02, (after buying it for the immensely low price of rs 35 at a second hand stall,yay) and was confronted with my age old conflict over who's the 'better', superman or batman.and it also made me feel quite uneasy, coz i absolutely sympathised with batman and his machiavellian manipulation (just love alliteration) and i couldn't for the life of me see why the other jla members were making such a fuss about it. In DC's words,:Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who watches the watchmen?). And maybe, just maybe, batman guessed wrong when he guessed how superman would vote.the man is an expert at ruining his own life! if youre wondering what i'm talking about and wish i'd shut up about men in tights, then look at the blog title. it's dedicated to humour, and superman.

well, to get back to my conflict, don't get me wrong, superman is and always will be my special favorite, not totally because he was the one who got me into comics and graphic novels, but because he's so completely the quintessental 'hero'.he's just so GOOD. and i don't care if you're thinking, bo-o-o-oring, coz however boring goodness is alleged to be , you can't have enough of it nowadays. in school , i'm known as superman-obsessed-he was the subject of my all india presentation!-but batman messes me up. i love clark- but bruce i can't figure,-or forget.tell me, anyone, what you think. and signing off, here is the one thing i love about each superhero.

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SUPERMAN: EVERYTHING.but specially,the fact that he's the most powerful man on earth, and could do what the supervillains all want to do. take over the world. in a day. but he doesn't. which is why people think he's soft.which is why i think he's worthy of worship.can you even imagine what it takes to resist temptation like that? his whole life is about resisting temptation, even the small ones(eg.not looking at women-actually lois, coz he's faithful- with his xray vision!), just coz he's so good!!

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BATMAN: his mix of strength and vulnerability. his reaction to his tragedy and his intensity.his magnetism. his scars. all women like a fighter who doesn't let his wounds stop him. but i like best that he's a vigilante, not a superhero. you see the difference?....and in his own way, he's just as noble as superman.

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see my dilemma?...

uh oh

i have just done a dumb thing or maybe it's a jonah day- the last two post were posted around july 2005 and due to my immense inertia,they were all i posted-so now i had to republish the blog and the dates are all changed-they're actually from july 2005.