a sari spectacle!

aha! i didn't look like a toothpick after all! to quote teesta, merely like a stick! success!!! the blouse dipped scandalously low at the back and equally low at the front. but the argument in some snide corners is that if one does not have anything much at either side, there is not much to fear.
ah well. the kids thought that moa looked smashing. the girls were unanimously in agreement, and the lil' guys thought i looked 'different'. lil'boy english translated into normal human lingo is 'nice'.
clicked many many pictures with the kiddos.

empty nest

last day of school. the kids left today. the girls were in tears. they will always remain special - and to think that i had thought last year that they were the special-most batch that i shall ever teach. now i feel the same about this batch as well.....that no one shall be so special.

the senior section's galaxian tonight. going to wear a sari. the bro is going bonkers with glee making dire predictions about how i shall look like a toothpick with a ribbon around it.

how does one erupt into spontaneous elbow-claps if one has not sharpened one's saw/not had an aha-moment/light-bulb experience/paradigm shift?

ponder-point: what is an 'elbow clap'? does one bang one's elbows together? mine hurt. too bony. and the only sound produced are quiet ouches.
it is one of those institutional idiosyncrasies which get irritatingly popular amongst the worker ants, and become dangerously commonplace. it is like how a hurricane can never be anything but 'devastating' or a review can never be anything but 'rave' or an odour can never be anything but 'rank'........
my teeth are near-worn out from all the gnashing i make them do these days. some others i can't stand are;
paradigm shift (which happens to everyone every other split-second, this being a school for 'life work change' - we take our motto seriously, we do.)
aha moment (which, more often than not, is an OHO!moment or an OH YEAH???moment, or an OH!NO!moment in these parts)
sharpening the saw (all the better to cut each others' necks with? apart from our motto, we take steven covey very seriously too. perhaps more seriously than his wife or son or publisher or even his dog do.)
light-bulb experience (for the chronically dim-witted? one is expected to have one such 'experience' every day. all the energy i burn in getting those bulbs afflicker can probably light up the entire earth for a day or something.)

the gang plus one husband and two kids home for dinner. glad they came. the day was not a total washout after all.
a very nice morning today. dewy. drops kept falling onto our faces and arms as bro drove me to the bus. frosted windows.

things are looking up.







waiting for summer. pomegranates. very oriental. very my name is red. fruit salad time.






reading teesta's manga shakespeare version of romeo and juliet. liking it. plan to use it next year to design a unit on the bard. also thinking of using excerpts from the original, some abridged peices and baz luhrmann's william shakespeare's romeo+juliet. should be fun.

here is a review of the book - readingyear.blogspot.com

the cover looks thus:

that strange feeling around the heart,,, true love or gas?

heppy-wala birthday! silver jubilee!
in amma's words, half a lifetime gone phut!

what a dud day. did nothing but correct the galaxian round 2 essays, and sundry other totally immaterial things. wore the magenta kurta, n the curly cloud. no motivation to dress up. smiling is such a chore.

feeling lost. people are starting to comment. the gang keeps ragging me about the look and are convinced there is some deep dark secret that i'm not divulging. well, there is a deep dark secret, but i'm in no divulging mood thank you. come clean, n have everyone rag me to death? huh! fat chance!that i can do without. i catch myself staring off into space, missing snatches of conversation, sometimes missing entire
conversations....i guess i'l have to wait for it to pass, n hope that it passes. things would be very awkward otherwise.

well.
i made my bed, so now i must do the lying on it, i guess. not very comfortable.

if wishes could be horses....silver jubilee approacheth!

the numbers seem incredible. come tomorrow, n i'l be 25! quarter-century. two and a half decades of walking this earth, and nothing major achieved. time to compose the to-do-before-i-die list.
here goes;
a) travel to the mountains with a biker party, roughing it out, eating momos by the wayside, staying at dharamshalas, breathing fresh air, feeling the wind whip through my hair...
b) straighten the curly cloud
c) adopt a kid
d) get glamorous
e) retire at 40 to a stone cottage in laddakh. totally unwired - no phone, internet, TV
f) volunteer teaching at a school which needs it the most. laddakh again? in the snow bound winters when schools shut down for lack of teachers?
g) learn to play the violin
h) learn urdu. bliss! to be able to read manto and chugtai in the original...
i) get a puppy- a pug or an alsatian
j) write a book
k) buy mom a house in kerala with a mango orchard around it. hens, a vegetable patch, a central courtyard, a swing, red plaster on the sit-out floor....
l) wear an off-shoulder dress! cherry red!
m) learn to apply eye-liner. properly, i mean. atleast enough not to look like a kid has been at one's eyes drawing particularly ziz-zaggy zig zags around them. looking like a colicky panda kills all glamour, past experience tells me
n) learn to eat with chopsticks
o) sponsor a kid's education
p) learn to cook biryani
q) learn karate. will be such a pleasure to kick certain people in the mouth!
r) build my own library
s) backtrack across turkey. with someone.
t) take a road-trip. again with someone.
u) find the someone.
v) watch basic instinct without flinching
w) teach a unit on shakespeare. make it fun. make kids fall in love with the bard's golden words.
x) watch 'the phantom of the opera', and 'jesus christ superstar' live
y) go to the promised land, visit the wailing wall, float on the dead sea, live in a commune
z) swim with the dolphins, snorkel


so many things. will have to keep updating this.

oh, in case any of the gang is wondering what to give me for the b'day, here are a few subtle hints...picture book style.

these are a few of my favourite things.....


a greek island. a house on it. simple stone cottage. freshwater spring.







a pug! to make me feel less bad about the early crows-feet and laugh lines.






a girl's best friend...a pair of them. solitaires.








a bonsai.

the i who came in from the cold

some words that i like - gossamer, epiphany, equivocal, melancholy, lapis lazuli....
such blue words.what do the words one likes the most tell about oneself? that one is an incorrigible kill-joy?

the words just fly off...