Sunday, July 16, 2006

Musings of an exhausted mind

It has been a long, long week. And not a moment of respite. A deadline met. Another looming ahead. And the next week is going to be the same, wake up, go to office and slave away, code, test, come home, work till your eyes smart. By the time i drag myself to bed, i am half asleep. i am trying to recharge my batteries this weekend. By the end of July, i think i should be dying of exhaustion. Well, i get paid for this so should i be complaining?

i walk to the office everyday now. It is refreshing. As it is, i don't exercise these days. i think i should start going to the gym again but i am lazy. Oh well, i can't have everything, can i?

i am searching for a recipe for cheesecake..i am going to bake one tomorrow and take it to the office on monday and feed my colleagues. i love cooking. i love trying out new recipes because he loves eating. i remember the weekends we used to spend trying out briyani, some african chicken recipe with peanut butter (that turned out to be something i have never tried twice), trying to replicate a Chinese dish we had at our favourite restaurant (the one where we went for our first lunch together)... We both love eating good food. i am very fussy about food. It used to be a joke in my family that the number of dish i could eat could be counted on one's fingers.

i managed to find a decent recipe for cheesecake - ricotta cheesecake. i think i will make it with strawberries or raisins, whichever i get. Lets see how it turns out. Too bad he is not here to taste it. He always makes fun of the way i go running to him with a spoonful of whatever i am cooking and ask him to taste and tell me if everything is OK. Whenever we are together, i never let him cook, even though he is a decent cook. My sister says i have this phobia of letting anyone cook because i think they are going to spoil the dish!

Right now, i am watching a movie called "Dhoop". It is a sad tale of the corruption in our society, about a father running from pillar to post to get a petrol pump allotted to his dead son's name. It is so depressing. Sometimes when i watch sad movies, i surreptitiously shed tears and hope no one is watching. i do that when i read gloomy stories too. Maybe that is why i love animation films. But i digress...The film ends on a hopeful note, justice is done. But as i sit here, listening to Jagjit singing, "It is not impossible to change a regime", i think about it, about the way the system is now. i think about the way we have accepted it as something that cannot be changed. When i hear about how much you have to pay to get a job back home, about how everything is rigged, there is this feeling of impotency. Will things ever improve, will we ever start thinking for ourselves and not accept everything as inevitable? When will we start fighting for things really worth fighting for? All my life i have fought against doing things because everybody else is doing it (Would that explain why i try too hard not to be a part of the herd?). i am notorious for being the most pigheaded person around. i am a very difficult person to be with, i guess. Because i always keep asking why, what and how. i have been told so many times not to question and just listen and do whatever everybody else is doing. But my reasoning is when i have been given a brain, why shouldn't i use it? Why should i accept everything that is told to me as the truth? i want to find my own truths. You know, sometimes your elders tell you "we are telling you because we know, because we don't want you to make the same mistakes we did. We have seen life". i tell them, let me make my own mistakes, let me learn from them, let me live life, let me stumble and learn to pick myself up. i have made mistakes in life, learned from them but i have never regretted my mistakes.