From my beloved confinement

My day started with reading news about The White Stripes calling it off. Yah, they’ve split. So what ? Still I read the news giving it great importance. Then I tuned to BBC World service through the internet radio option in my cellphone. Hail smartphones. I thought it wouldn’t play given my earlier experiences with trying to listen to that particular station but it did. It has gone on and on since then. It started with an interview with a schizophrenic patient, fishes in North Sea, Egypt protests, Obama’s voice and the same thing has been repeated over many hours now. I want to stop listening to it but I don’t want to walk to the phone. Now my cellphone’s ringing so am forced to go there.Hopefully its not Sanjay Dutt or some other Bollywood star calling me. Seriously, you get calls from ‘Main Sanjay Dutt hun’ here. Its ridiculous. As Valentine’s day is approaching it might also be a call to change the course of your love story by learning to say ‘I love you’ to your partner in many languages. Gawd!

The call’s over. BBC World service has stopped. Apart from my keyboard a machine outside my door is making all the noise. Someone’s decided to go on a cleaning frenzy. This room needs some rearrangements too. The curtain rod fell off its attachment when I opened the curtains in the morning.I got on the chair and then on the window sill to fix it. While I was trying to do so I was holding the iron grill and praying it doesn’t come off the wall as well. I not much of a Hulk do be able to do so but you never know what I end up doing. I tend to use too much force for simple tasks. Lato para le kaam garne vanchan ni testai. Thankfully the grill didn’t come off and I could put the rod back in place too.

Getting back to the room.I need a cloth stand. (I don’t know why I am so obsessed with talking about rooms.I think I have written a few entries describing various rooms I have stayed in.) Jehos, I need it. It is amazing to think of how many things a person requires even when they live in one small room. This room has a bed, a cupboard, a table with many drawers, another small furniture beside the bed with drawers( I don’t know what I should call it), two chairs, two tube lights, one bedlamp, dustbin and a fan hanging from the ceiling. And now I need a cloth stand. Does anyone know how much furniture does a human being need? I have spent quite sometime trying to answer this philosophical question No avail. I believe someone should write a ‘How much furniture does a wo(man) need?’ story just like Tolstoy’s profound story on the amount of land we need.

The sky is blue today. I can see it right above the tree in front of the place I am tying this entry from.Rooms are a world in themselves, aren’t they? There’s a different life you have when you are in a room. You enter your room, your comfort zone and you are no longer the person you were outside of it. The thoughts encircling the space around your confined space makes a room even more mysterious, complicated. For instance, no sooner we (me and a friend) step outside my another friend’s room the song ‘Shadow of the day’ starts blazing from her computer speakers. Do I have to reveal that I simply can’t stand the song anymore? Then she starts uploading her Facebook status ‘I listen to this song when I am in jail’ and tags me. Rooms are complicated confinements. And when we come to think of it we value our confinements as much as we do our freedom. Isn’t it?

Ajalai yeti,Sanibarko din pani kati sochnu. Aru din hyperplane bare sochera nathakeko jasto!

Have a great weekend everyone!

The picture of a mountain

There’s a framed picture of a mountain right above my head. I am not looking at it as I write this but I know exactly what it looks like. The picture has a black wooden frame and a distinct blue background. Technically speaking, the blue is called ‘light blue’. But this light blue is dark.  I haven’t seen the Mount Everest but looking at the picture makes me think that I have. I’ve decided that the picture is Sagarmatha.

Chomolungma, सगरमाथा, Mt. Everest: Why do mountains need a name? For some mountaineer to boast which mountain she has scaled? What’s the purpose? I don’t understand it. I do not enjoy racking my brains for names of mountains when I look at a picture of them like this one. Why can’t we leave the mountains alone? Just let them name one another and pass on windy messages now and then…

Names apart, mountains are supposed to hold meanings. So, as I look at the picture of this mountain I wonder what exactly it is supposed to mean. Aim high, the sky is the limit or is it simply an act of promoting Nepal?

I have nothing against mountains. But this picture bothers me. The blue, the black, the white and the gray, all the colors in the picture bother me. It doesn’t remind me of home. It doesn’t remind me of the real mountains. Its non-reminder of anything is disturbing. At the hindsight, I think it is the reminder of the lack of ambition, a goal and a height to reach in my life that is disturbing.

And Vivekananda with arms crossed across his chest commanding “Arise! Awake! And stop not till the goal is reached.” in big bold letters is not helping. The poster seems to have come with a purpose. It hasn’t fallen off the wooden plank when everything stuck there did.

Arrrrgh…pictures, posters. I think I am letting everything around me in this room get the better of me.  Still,

Jai Mountains! Jai Vivekananda!

I bought the poster. I chose not to move the mountain…..

dark n green

It is a green room. And it is a dark. But it is not a darkroom. It is not dark enough to print photos but it is dark. So, it is a green dark room where you can’t print photographs.