Last week, I got some good ones, some bad ones… I mean the…comments. But I must admit you all have been quite earnest in your replies… never mind the cutting remarks. Hehe!
Well! I know what I penned down was not something out of the ordinary… but then…aren’t all lives related to each other through similar-sounding narratives. Life is ordinary guys… some precious little fun moments that are anyway few and far between that make it worth living. So, those of you who thought I was rambling and talking crap, I say, that crap is everywhere and it's all the same everywhere, only the characters change.
I am not answering no phone-calls or replying to any messages by that guy. Hmm… silence is golden sometimes… Saves a lot of trouble. Eh! But look at him. He has adopted another trick. Last week, I received two phone calls… not from him, but from these tele-marketing fellas. One said she was calling to sell me this membership card of the ITC Group of Hotels and the other one had called from a life insurance company. And they were quick to tell me (mind you, without my asking for it) that they got my number from ‘him.’
Now, it makes me mad… this pile-on attitude…. I lost my head big time on the insurance chick, man! For she was the second one to call… uff! All I could manage to tell her firmly was that she should refrain from calling me henceforth…
I am, however, very upset for a school friend of mine. No names again. Hehe! Let me call him MS and this best friend (who is also my friend) AP. This would make tale-telling simpler. Now, they were two years my junior, but the three of us got along like a house on fire. I used to help them in their studies and the girlfriend(s) issues as well.
Then as I left school and went to college, we lost touch. AP went to America to study and he is working there. Met him on Orkut. And through him I got to know about MS. MS was into cricket big time… Dad was in railways and all. But I guess he had some knee surgery and had to give up the ball. He was really good with it… won many tournaments for the school and the dishy hunk he was (and mind you, he was very self-conscious of that. heeh!), he had a bevy of gals around him. So, now I heard from AP that MS is trying it out in Mumbai, giving a shot at modelling… partying his life away and he is also into drugs!
Called MS, he hasn’t changed much. The same bindaas attitude, same yuppie behaviour. He is a really warm person. And when you talk to old friends, you don’t feel the need to begin all over again. You just start from where you had left off. So, there I was questioning him about what I had gotten to know from our good old AP.
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He replied, “Well! Yes, I have tried the stuff. But hey I am not into it. Yeah! But I do party almost daily and it's fun. I have started living for the present. And I don’t care no more. You tell me how are you? God, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to talk to you after almost four years.”
And there I was sermonising him. Telling him the way I used to talk always that I would wring his neck.
He goes…“you haven’t changed at all! You are the same crazy gal I knew.”
We talked and talked and I kept repeating myself only to put some sense into his head that he should be away from drugs for the repercussions are terrible. And that I don’t want to see him slipping. He assured me. I am not sure. I, for one, have never touched a cigarette in my life! God! How I hate that odour.
I want to see him take the success bike to greater heights. But there I was feeling helpless in the knowledge that my words meant nothing to him. But whenever I go to Mumbai, I will make sure I will set him right. But how?
During my theatre days, I have seen one of our friends falling prey to this menace. He had gone to shoot something near the Yamuna. High tide and all and some crap… the incident is hazy. He and another pal of mine who was also doing theatre with us had gone together.
Only one returned. He was high… he drowned. He was 21. I could not get over it for days.
As a second-year student, it was too much to bear. Suddenly, your finest actor was gone. Come to think of it I had met him just days before the incident at Lalit Kala Academy in Mandi House and was shocked to see him. He was looking like a ghost. Pale and emaciated. I knew it was the drugs.
Gosh! I hate it. Now years later, I hear about MS. And how I wish it weren’t true and if it were…I wish he just gives it up.
Work is fine. The new place is treating me well. But hell is on its way in December.
My MA exams are approaching. December is the month and I have not even opened mah books. To think I topped my college in English literature, sometimes, it feels it must be another person and another world. Back then, it was different.
Yes. It was.
My English teacher who taught us literary theory had told me once that, ‘everyday the system is trying to suck us in. We need to fight it out every day and keep our spirits high and do the work at hand. We need to be diligent.’ But damn! I have turned lethargic. I swear I have not worked as hard as I did in those three years in college. It’s time to get into the groove girl. I will.
I will.
I am not giving up. :)
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