The Wanderer Chronicles- Jamshedpur

The one reason every person should escape to Jamshedpur is to breathe.  Its that simple. I was lucky to have found wonderful hosts in my friends, which made the trip all the more entertaining. It is probably a small, slow town much like my own but when you want to get away from the hustle without retreating into the mountains, this is the green haven you're looking for. What marked most of Jamshedpur was the little thelas of street food that studded the open lanes and the sheer flavour that put 5-star indulgences to shame.

 The ultimate dish was the litti choka which according to my Delhi-ite companion was 'incomparably better' than its Delhi counterpart. Another favourite is quite possibly the chicken roll made special by the rain and company of friends across the lake at Jubilee Park at Al Kareems. The roti  was what truly distinguished it from all the normal chicken rolls we eat anywhere in the world. It was like a Malabar Roti, but much softer and so beautiful, it melted in your mouth. To follow the buttery scented, surprisingly heavy, authentically 'street' dinners, we went to a small shop at the end of the food street of street foods and bought ice paan and chocolate ice paan. Not a big fan of tampering with classics, I fell for that ice paan so hard that regular sweet just doesn't cut it anymore. 

 To anyone looking for a genuine feel of Jamshedpur, I would suggest going there in a long journey on the rails in a train that according to 'rich brats' like me, has bunk beds. An AC Sleeper Class, to say it formally. Stand next to the open door and let the warm air and sandy terrain greet you the right way. Let empty streets at night, the palliative summer rain and Coldplay in a fast car with dancing friends be your trip through tree lined roads and the lush green city that is built around a factory which in its lights and smoke and fire compensates. 

 Jamshedpur is one of India's few planned cities, well laid out, successfully experimenting with being environmentally friendly but for me it is the home of some of the most incredible people I have met. Make it not a vacation, but a stop in a long journey and it will always pull you back for more. It is after all, the breath of fresh air you take in through your mouth between the puffs of relieving smoke, because your soul might crave the cigarette but your body needs the air.

Fear

Its almost 4 a.m. and I'm trying to sleep but the weight of the crumbing world that I can feel lodged at my waist is too heavy for me to turn and sigh myself into a slumber. I had the crushing realisation that in less than 12 hours I have a test. A test I know nothing for. A test which will decide whether or not I have to repeat this course next semester. I am sitting here under the crushing weight of the crumbling life on my shoulders disappointed and dead. The chunks, the debris of this crashing world is now lodged in my throat because all that can escape is a whimper. The crushing realisation is that for 6 months, I did not work. I did not even try. And now, in a little less than 12 hours, I have the test from the course I neglected for 6 months. Given, I am a fuck up, I had confidence in my ability to bullshot my way through life, to at least manage theory even if I am sub par at graphs and utterly hopeless with numerical. A realisation has come that my past tests are glaring evidence that I cannot, in fact, even manage theory. 15 chapters. A little less than 12 hours. A panic stricken 19 year old who has run out of people to ask for help. I am doomed. I wish I were dead but for once I have something to live for, though I fear in the daylight tomorrow, it will be snatched from me and I will be able to do nothing about it because i dont deserve it and i have to face that. I am in my Hogwarts but it is too expensive, and my grades are not up to the mark and I just don't deserve it. The dust from the rubble of my crushing realisations stuck in my back and my waist is rising to my stomach, tickling the insides making me giddy. A 19 year old, panicked, scared, disappointed, wishing to die. As always. Escape, because death is the easy way out. It is my escapist attitude that has brought me here. Had it not been for my cowardly conscious succumbing to my fear, I would have been over with this hell 4 days ago, with half the effort but alas, I am stupid. There is no denying it. I ask not for pity. Only wish to share the debris and sparks and the crushed universe that has fallen from my shoulders, blocking now my throat and my chest and the base of my back because this is what fear feels like. Not like nightmares and horror movies, like real life and adult things.

The 'Tumblr Generation'

We are the Tumblr generation. I’m not completely addicted to it but I love the comments and fandom things that are shared via Facebook. There are so many posts about empowerment, disorders, even funny things, things that we all do. It really is great to educate people through personal experiences, because it really makes an impact but some things that are, that we all relate to, it seems could be strange. I don’t blame bad grades on Tumbr. That would be pretty stupid of me. I admit that I am at fault completely. However, what I have noticed is that we are the ‘Tumblr gen’. We write posts about Netflix and Chill, Procrastination, awful grades and drowning/ sleepwalking through every semester. I relate as much as the next person to each of these comments on the nature of the lifestyle of a college student. Where I think the downfall is though that after sharing these and realising that almost every person is in the same boat, there comes this covert sense of false security, which we don’t notice, which silently cradles us in its warmth and leads us unaware in front of our laptops, binging to fill a hunger more in the soul than the stomach, watching a movie 5 hours before deadlines, thinking we all sink together. This ‘groupthink’ or realisation is ridiculous! Just because everyone is doing something doesn’t make it right. But we relate. This one post that has over a thousand likes and comments of agreement makes us feel better. But what happens when you actually see the grades at the end of your semester? Flunking at various degrees, but together. We fall, together. We sink, we teeter on the edge of unemployment, of sitting in our parents homes making sarcastic comments on Tumblr masking them as great philosophical insight and realisations. We write and read and ignore making unsaid, socially (at least in teenagers) accepted norms, like the sleep scatter, because there is no pattern, nothing cyclical about its occurrence anymore. It is a dangerous slippery slope we are on, and I ruined one semester, disappointed my parents to a depressing extent and lost all sense of motivation, to finally realise this one stupid addiction. The addiction of feeling secure in my loserdom. The best advice I recently received was that, “Its only going to get worse from here. Suck it up and get used to it.” Needless to say, it came far too late to make any real difference but it gives me the assurance that I won’t completely screw up my next semester. Its fun to read lighthearted posts and sharing them with friends for a good laugh but we really need to be careful of how intrinsically we let these alter our behaviours. And here I am, flunking 3 subjects out of 5, with 2 exams in the next 3 days for which I am entirely unprepared, writing a blogpost on the dangers of posting ‘the wrong thing’ on social media. We are the ‘Tumblr generation’. We express. Its just what we do.

Eleutheromania

In case you're simply too lazy to look it up, eleutheromania is an intense desire for freedom.

 I suppose being, well human, all of us feel chained or obligated to listen to others when all we want to do is yell "Butt out!". Having grown up in a moderately conservative family, and being excessively, incongruently liberal myself, I face a conflict every day.

   I created this blog simply to remind myself and others that restraints are only physical. Our parents and teachers and everyone else really, can only tell us what to do, what to wear, where to go, whom to meet, but there is no censor they can impose on our minds, thoughts, imagination and ambition.

To all like me, who live in perpetual wanderlust, who live vicariously, who live in their dreams, I just want to share the hope and the desires. In a community where we are forced to hide, suppressed and chained by constraints, situational or otherwise, I hope
 

A year.

Can you even fathom? A whole, entire year? Its been a year since the world last heard his voice, or felt his arrogant smirk crinkle up those tiny eyes. A year since the demand for drugs and alcohol went down. A year since someone called me 'meri jaan'. A year since I got a reply on whatsapp that made my heart skip a beat. A year since someone called me a nashedii for my 2 cigarettes a month. Its been a year since he left the miserable, dying earth. Did you notice that the earth stopped spinning for a little bit, or the hollow space in its entirety, or just the slight reduction in the babble of living things in which echoed the cracking of my iceberg heart? Did you notice the faint silence? Because I did.

Parents, I guess

This post is kind of like my Mother's Day present to a lot of women.

I was thinking about how parents fight, and screw up their kids more often than not. But the world is screwed up. And who is to say what's normal? I realised, that for every person I love, there's two other people I need to thank. So when I come to your house best friend, love of my life, amazing roommate, new college friends, high school forever friends, people I am lucky enough to be related to, I will go up to your parents, regardless of whether or not your relationship with them is good, I will go up to them and thank them for creating such an incredible human being. Love, whether you are made from their love or their neglect, their affection or their arguments, their environment, good or bad, it has created a lot of you. Their blood has fashioned your body and their presence, or lack thereof, your personality. And for every bit of that, I thank them. They gave me you, as you are, messed up or great, they gave me you and I am grateful because I love you.