1 week ago...

The little things. It's always them. Them, little things.

Nourishing by the mother, support by the father, care by the sibling, and love by the lover (?) - summarizes the littlest things in my life and which very rarely makes me pause, and wonder why I'm running the way I am, and why ain't I taking life slow the way everyone else is. The recent 1 month spent in India has been full of such little things, things which are almost impossible to find anywhere else. The relaxed atmosphere of spending every day doing nothing, really nothing, watching time pass-by by idling on the endless list of TV channels, lying on the cushioned sofa with feet pointing towards the cooler, savoring the makhan on fifth and sometimes sixth aloo paratha, going to bed without an alarm clock on the side, and the mobile switched off and thrown in some forgotten corner of the house, waking up late and finding food set on the dining table, seeing others doing chores and not participating at all in anything that's going around, and lying sprawled on a floor mat in pyjamas on a hot afternoon reading that long lost book that you always wanted to read in the summer...

But well, now I must say goodbye to all this, and resume the hard path that I've chosen. The self-afflicted horror of pursuing a PhD in science awaits me and I must part with all that is little, and seek all that seems so grand, at least for now. And everyone has illusions, perhaps this is mine. After all, what is life without a sweet, impossible illusion?


Today...

It's been a week that I've been in this strange land in Europe. There is no time for little things, only a soft remembrance lurks in my vision that once such things were.

Research has gripped me early on, but what's more impacting is the strong culture shock that I'm now going through. This shock is stronger and deeper than the one I felt in United States two years ago, and it is full of events that leave me sometimes in exultation over my choices in life and sometimes in this powerful kind of agony that is hard to tame. . . (to be continued)

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Current Book: "The story and its writer" edited by Ann Charters
Current Music: "Somebody that I used to know" by Gotye
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