a lovely feeling

warning... its long.

It’s lovely and very exhilarating to be able to do whatever you want. Especially if that is to scream your throat off on a terrace, high above the rest, with the wind in your hair, dancing the stars away, to your voice and the tunes you love to hear. It’s a wonderful feeling to be helped with perfect timing by nature, the wind blows at a point where there’s maximum happiness in your voice and smile. There can be hundreds of reasons why one could be that happy. One might simply be to do all that I said, completely undisturbed in the darkness of the night where finally for once in the world, no one is watching.

Yeah I did all that, and am that happy.

Over the past week I have come to realize many thing… most of them turned out to be things I heard about love. But this time it was an experience, some of which I experienced directly, some of which I experienced through others.

Quite long and confusing isn’t it, but its wonderful to realize and know what I am talking about.

Firstly they say love is blind, you don’t know when it comes or will go, it’s an experience. Those who are in it know pain, sorrow, relativity in totality and most of all inexplicable happiness.

The thing that we don’t realize is, love can be anything.

It isn’t necessary to have a voice, a heartbeat, or being biped at all. But when it has all that…one word alone explains it, joy.

I love my cat, love it like anything. It had been with me since its day two. I’ve done things for it you would imagine parents to do for their kids. My kitten is like me. Moody, very picky, totally stubborn, utterly playful, a rebel. When it was small and abandoned by mummy dearest, I took it up. That was a beautiful feeling. It was mine to look after. Mine, another living creature… it was, is and always be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

I’ve spent whole days just playing with it, staring at its beautiful eyes, patting it to sleep when it crawled up into my arms for warmth and napped away to glory. I spent days trying to figure out the best way to give it some goddamn milk when its mum ditched it, ink filler, spoon, hand, straw… how the hell do I get it to stop scratching my hands off, how do I get it to sleep in a box instead of my face…. OMG I went mad. But in all that I had so much fun. I watched it grow from the size of my palm to what it is now…I’ve played so much, pampered it to laziness, took so many videos and photographs fit enough for exhibitions in Paris. That lucky cat, it left me… and today I am here, heartbroken, kitty less and sad, with slow tears down my eyes. Even as I sit here typing, I have a feeling it’s running around the room playing as usual. I look up to realize it’s my imagination.

Its painful, yes, very painful, but I look back and see how much fun I have had with it. How much joy it gave me in being there to play with and pamper…

I still remember the twinkle in its eyes when it plays, the way its tail twitches as I pet it. Beauty, love.

To others it’s just a cat, they say for how much it has bitten and scratched me, its good that it ran away. No one understands what I went through. But that’s ok. It is my experience after all. Had they known, would it be that light a thing to lose? The love of my kitty.

An inanimate love is also possible as I said. For me, it’s in a camera.

The best thing god created, in my opinion would be to be able to see. I really am sad for the animals and those who are blind for this reason. Color…color is life.

Music is ecstasy. Mind is a beautiful workshop in full function. Put all this together…you have paradise. And it’s a world of your own. No one, no one can see your world like you. That’s yours to keep bud.

I got hold of a few pictures of this kid, Alexandre Evans. He’s from Canada.

He’s 17 and has the most resplendent eyes I have ever seen, to go with the prettiest face I have seen on earth. Whatever his character is, there is a beautiful flawed flawlessness about his face. It was amazing to find how hard he is working at his photography, with the help of his friends… he has delivered a lot, which very duly made him famous online. For god’s sake, he’s gorgeous, loves and does everything I do, and has his own clothing line at 17! One can’t ask for more. My hearty desire is to be able to meet him just once… once and capture the light in his eyes to perfection. The most beautiful picture in the world… just once.

But its not just his eyes that make me happy when I think of my camera. My beautiful model was my pampered runaway kitty too. It brought out some of my best shots. When I walk around, my eyes hunt for a perfect picture I could take with my camera. To glorify an ordinary object, to its unknown forgotten glory. That, that is my love. When I bring out the light in an object flawlessly, that gives me joy. It is my desire to be able to take such glorious pictures of the people I love, many a day must pass before that can be. A camera is what I need. A good one. That will be. My love will live on.

Recently, and by that I mean, in the past two days, I watched three love stories. Yes a hopeless romantic you could call me. I don’t care, I like it. I watched Kate and Leopold and you’ve got mail (yes both Meg Ryan starrers, don’t you just love how cute she is!) and jab we met.

In each of this, I saw characters that brought me joy as I watched. It was very pleasing and a strange happy feeling…that joy I was talking about, to realize, wow love like that could exist.

Kate and Leopold… wow, that was where I saw Leo be himself, and Kate herself.

I fell in love with the idea, that being a real gentleman was possible. And the qualities I saw in him, Chivalry, grace, intelligence, actual sensitivity, forethought not to mention, as he was called in the movie, a Hunk. He was by all means a gentleman, though it could have been just by his time travel to the present from 1876. No that’s not it… he maintained all he had in him, even at the time he was here…that is truly a gentleman. I saw them fall in love. I saw the closeness. I saw the joy in the smile, the sparkle in the eye. A simple reason for all this was merely the other’s presence. Yes its madness you may say, it’s a movie, they are characters…so what? They were written to be imagined, to be real weren’t they? And where do you take inspiration to write? Reality right.

You’ve got mail was simply cute. In both these movies, there was purity about the love that made me smile. A really happy smile.

Jab we met, OMG that is one stupid useless movie you cannot watch by paying money. But my god, look deeper is what I say. The heroine… Geet has such an unbiased, purity about her character. It made and makes me desire that purity, that happiness which that character brought her. To see that Aadithya, her hero, fall in love with her, for only that… that is pure love man.

So what if I haven’t seen or experienced all this first hand…isn’t seeing all this and being able to understand it while watching experiencing it too.

Well these movies have done two things for me. One assure me that my high expectations are not baseless anyway, two… it is possible to have that purity. And that too, because of someone else.

Its even fuzzier, cute and a very happy feeling to have a crush. Dude, its like not love, just lighter. Its fun. You know its not for real, yet trying to catch a glimpse of your crush, trying to do this unnoticed by your friends or your crush all day, having just a word, getting a small smile, making them laugh, small things that make you happy… its also there… and these are better till you know yer gonna fall hard on your face in love with another soul. And ppl I mean soul by all means.

Wow. I could go on.

These things I realized in this week. And it has given me joy.

Music can give you joy. Color can give you joy, a kitten can give you joy, another human can give you joy… and all these can give you love. Its there… you already have it don’t you… you just don’t realize…

Now what does that have to do with singing like a lunatic on the terrace, where I might as well fall to my death from.

Think about all this. Music blaring, your voice to go along with it, dancing with you hands held high, wind in your hair. It gives you hope. It made me happy, it made me smile from my heart. Hope… Hope for tomorrow.

PS: please visit. Alexevans.net to see the guy I was talking abt…all credits go to him for my talk and the pics.

Boon and the bane

My day of blindness…. (Make that half a day)

It simply started out as a lazy day where my lil bundle of terror (in the form of my kitten) woke me up with her clawing away at my hand, out of hunger. The simple solution was to drag her away and thrust her at my dad, who takes better care of her than he has ever bothered for me (sad to say). Ah, back to my cozy bed for a few more hours of sleep.

A lazy stretch after waking and getting ready, I walked out to my mum, whose delicious coffee my (mind more like) taste buds were itching for, only to have my kitten. Christened ladoo, throw herself at my ankle and gnaw away at my jammies. Cute.

Cursing my cable provider for ruining my life, and driving it to complete boredom by cutting off any channel that gave solid information, I turned to my computer as usual for solace. I blared my favorite list on the speakers and checked mail etc. Alas that didn’t keep me occupied for too long. Oh yeah I remembered I had to take my bike out to service. Going down I pestered dad to take me to the ophthalmologist, cos of the trouble my eye was giving me.

Driving has always given me immense pleasure, a sense of power and freedom. I’m still waiting for the day I buy my first Bike. Hmmm…. Anyways, he was very particular about dropping my scooter off before heading to the doc. At the time I thought he was just being stubborn as usual! Little did I know why he insisted on it at the time.

My newfound ophthalmologist is a retired professor from a well-known college here.
And going to him was less a visit to the doctor and more a visit to your old grandpa.
Well, chortling away his joke about my age he made me take the usual reading tests.
All the way through except for the last line…. Dang.

Then came the shocker that I didn’t react outwardly to. Dilating my pupils. Yikes. The last time I had to undergo this torture the dratted doctor ( the old supposed doc who I went to before grandpa ^o^) diagnosed me for the wrong power and almost ruined my eyes ( given cos of my obstinacy about not wearing the dorky glasses I had picked out, I saved my eyes!) and it gets better. He practically blinded me for two days.

Everything was blurred. I knew where I was going, what I was seeing. But nothing had a definite shape. And this was around 6 years ago people when I had lesser life than I do now. I couldn’t do anything… not even TV! (sob).

This time around it wasn’t so bad. I could see everything…. Everything far off that is. He had diagnosed me for distance vision, thereby completely obscuring everything within a foot around me.

That was when I realized the pain it was to be blind. I know its exaggeration, but hey this made me realize a lot. The time I spent sitting there waiting for the medicine to dilate my pupils, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t use my phone, I had no idea of who was and wasn’t in the room. Not even if my own dad was there still. In the time that I was sitting there, I thought of the things that I really wanted to see then. I so badly wanted to see the bikes and cars out on the street. I wanted to see my dad’s bike. I wanted badly to be able to type out a message to my friends on my phone despite being charged for it. I wanted to call my mum and tell her that we would be delayed cos of the tests that I was to take.

Nothing. I wanted badly to see the face of my scrawny little kitten as she bounded up to me to attack my leg, to see her scratching away at my feet, and then stare up at me with those cute big green eyes as though she was an innocent angel. I wanted to go right out to my computer and draw out my most favorite character in my story. I wanted to see all the colors I thought were just so beautiful, marvels of life. I even had the urged to pick up my textbook for Physics of Materials and read through it.

Then did I realized how many things in my life I enjoyed merely because of my sight.

The things I had taken for granted. The things I was able to do independently all because I was blessed with near perfect sight (come on people I can see a bus at the end of the road and tell you what it say, who cares what the doc says!). I am able to do everything.

Groom myself to my satisfaction; get around to wherever I want. I have the option of choosing what I want to and don’t want to see. I have the option of seeing what the world is like, be it biased or even if I’m seeing just a fraction of it. I am able to express my creativity with color because I have vision. I realized how important color and shapes were in my life…. And the same extrapolates to everything to do with me.

My music defines me and I know now for fact that without being able to listen to my songs on the mp3 player my sister so lovingly bought me, as the drab journey to my university back and forth lolls on, I’d become mad instantly.

Yes it was for merely half a day I spent visionless…. But then the smallest interval of time is enough to make one realize what it is he has and what he is taking for granted.

I know for sure without my vision, hearing and speech I’d have gone mad. I understood what Helen Keller was trying to tell us. I found it terribly difficult for a day, I can only imagine what it is like to go through life, for those unfortunate souls who don’t have these faculties.

Seriously, you don’t know what you’ve had till its gone… don’t let that be. I’ve learnt that now, in half a day of blindness.