Saturday, February 18, 2012

Random Thoughts

He is famous....he is loved by millions.....he is chased by his fans......he has a fame that spreads across country borders.....

But at the end of the day he is human, one human who started from the scratch and struggled hard from the zero to today's super-stardom.

So, during some special moments, the moments, which are special for him also, he behaves like anyone of us....

After all, all these years of struggle and success hasn't changed him to a machine from human.

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My reading hours have come down drastically from 2-3 hours per day to even 0 hours. All thanks to my laptop and the fact that I stay so close to office that I end up staying 14-15 hours at office on a regular day.

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My 15 years old days have come back!!!! Those songs have come back to my life again. Thanks Amith :) ...thanks for the Fingertips Fair Collection....as I said before...u're my backup plan...thanks a lot :)

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Are promises made to be broken? I had kept my first promise associated with this city...but the return promise was not kept....

Friday, February 17, 2012

Not Just another Day

As the cruel and cold hands of the clock took their positions, the shorter at 6 and the taller at 12, the clock shuddered with a squeak and started to shriek at the top of its voice. As if it was not enough to kill Siddhi’s innocent sleep; there was something more waiting for her that morning.

Still unable to open her eyes completely, and after successfully having taken the revenge on the clock by slipping it in the pit of silence—only until tomorrow morning, of course—Siddhi could realize that the day was not just like any other day. She could realize herself breathing out of her mouth and her nostrils were blocked and she was having an unbearable headache. She knew what lay ahead of her but was not really ready to face that.

Siddhi had shifted to Mumbai two months back. Getting selected for her dream job, fighting with her parents to relocate to Mumbai from Delhi and settling down comfortably in a PG in Andheri, just two kilometers away from her office, seems to be a distant dream to her now.

New city, new job and new accommodation kept Siddhi so busy, that she kept ignoring the fact that the pollution and tropical climate of Mumbai was causing trouble to her chronic sinusitis. But that day when she woke up with a stuffed nose, headache and fever, she knew that she couldn’t ignore it anymore and it was time for her to go to an ENT specialist.

‘Take a day off and go to a doctor,’ Siddhi told herself.

As she was getting ready to go to hospital, Siddhi suddenly felt very alone and she was upset for being so far away from her house. She missed her own room in her house, those cups of ginger-tea that her mother would prepare for her and her father taking her to doctor every time she suffered from such problems.

‘Grow up Siddhi! You are not a school girl anymore. Stop getting sentimental!’ she scolded herself hard and decided to cheer herself up by dressing up nicely.

‘Pamper yourself, dress up nicely and look good. You will always feel better,’ she remembered her mother’s golden words.

So here she was hunting for her favorite salwar-kameez, matching ear-rings and bangles in her still-unpacked duffle bag. And finally, Sidhhi wrapped herself in her favorite Pashmina shawl that she had got from Jammu on her last trip to Vaishno Devi.

‘Here you go pretty girl!’ she admired herself in the mirror and started feeling better.

As Siddhi was comforting her feverish body in the warmth of her beautiful Pashmina shawl, little did she know that the day still had some surprise in store for her!

Finding out the hospital was not difficult for Siddhi. Her PG mates had instructed her properly. With every passing day, she has started liking Mumbai. She laughed at herself that before coming to Mumbai, how she used think that every second person you bump on in Mumbai would be a filmstar or a gangster!

She got into the hospital and completed the registration process for the ENT specialist. The receptionist asked Siddhi to wait for half an hour, as the doctor was not in yet. She took a seat at the rear row of the sitting lounge and cast a lazy look at the patients and their friends and relatives scattered here and there in the lounge.

There was one more sitting area on the other side of the sitting lounge. There was something unusual there that caught Siddhi’s attention. She could see a very old man sitting in a wheel chair. There was a lady with him, ‘Might be his daughter,’ she thought.

‘He would be more than 90 years old,’ thought Siddhi.

Siddhi could see that the old man was shivering very badly as if he had Parkinson’s. The centralized air-conditioning of the hospital might have been hard on him. The old man seemed very sick and frail and the shivering attack was almost killing him. The lady next to him looked perplexed and helpless as she was rubbing the old man’s palms in a desperate attempt to give him some comfort!

‘The old man needs something warm to wrap himself in immediately.....may be a shawl…..what if he collapses now......I have a shawl..... I won’t die without it.......but it’s my favorite shawl.....what should I do?’—all these thoughts kept cluttering Siddhi’s mind.

She decided something in her mind. Siddhi slowly took off her shawl and started walking towards the old man.

‘Excuse me,’ she told the lady with the old man.

‘Yes?’ the lady replied with a question in her face.

‘Please take this shawl and wrap him up. He’s shivering badly,’ Siddhi told her. That lady took the shawl without any word and hurriedly wrapped the old man with it. The shawl was still warm with Siddhi’s body heat. The comfort that the old man felt was visible on his face. He smiled back at Siddhi.

The hospital reception was calling Siddhi’s name for the doctor visit. The doctor had just arrived. As Siddhi started walking toward the doctor’s chamber, she knew that the she wouldn’t get her shawl back but surprisingly, she didn’t feel bad. On the contrary, she was feeling very good!

Siddhi could feel her blocked nose opening up and her headache going down slowly. Surely, it was not just another day in her life.


Note: This is a true story with some exaggeration! The fist part of the story is my imagination and last part of the story is my sister's story. I had written this story to participate in a story-writing competition in my office.

View from my terrace at 6 o'clock in the morning