Finding home

9:30 AM, Frankfurt Airport, Terminal 1. Gate A 65
It is cold here in Germany. Cold as you imagine the word to be. I have a rather sore throat and am already missing home terribly. I am not sure if it is the illness, the distance or the place but I do not feel good. Not as of now. Lonely is one thing that I hate to feel and that is exactly what I am feeling. A tickling feeling, butterflies in the stomach, a pulsating head or an aching heart – you name it and I have it!

Tracking back a day in time, I was with my girl, my friends and in a place that I am attached to. A rather clichéd remark comes to mind (but as I told someone a few days ago, sometimes at the right moment a cliché is the apt thing to say or do) – Sometimes we don’t realize how important some things are to us until they are not around. When the touch-feel-see proximities are violated and the time-space quantum separates you out...

Slowly but steadily, the earnest reality of the moment sinks in and you look around to see people you do not know, to hear languages that you do not understand (apart from the occasional danke and guten morgen)... You start enumerating more than your brain is supposed to process – The philosophical context of the phrase "feel at home", the surreal feeling of almost not existing, how shiny the floor is, the rivets in some of the walls remind you of the "German war machine" that you read about so long ago, the silver foils covering the air ventilation ducts, the fact that more people around you are wearing brown shoes than black shoes - The fragments of moments from the past coalescing with your present in excruciating bonds...

10:09 AM, Frankfurt Airport, Terminal 1. Gate A 65
After being hustled out for check-in all the passengers were sent back to where we were sitting! Efficient usage of space or pointlessness – I am not sure. So here I am, around 20 feet away from where I was 20 minutes ago. Closer to the glass windows which are letting in some sun, I am feeling slightly warm and better. The endless enumeration of the world though, still continues. The sun or perhaps the boredom has triggered a bit more of chit-chat around here and this place seems to have received a fresh inoculation of life!

I can see at least 7 aircraft outside the window, some parked and others being pulled around by tow trucks. And here comes another one landing down. The asphalt, concrete and rubber uniting with an unpleasant screech... The airport vehicles moving up to the newly arrived craft... The smaller vehicles that are carrying officials moving at faster paces, the buses giving way to the vans – Organized chaos!

A silent crane in the distance seems to be staring back at everyone looking at it, reminiscent of its might perhaps. An old broken building lying at its feet, the old consumed to make way for the new... The laws of nature and mankind, instantly evident, almost revealed...

There are more people coming in and this place would now seem to be qualified to be called crowded – or not? Why not? Well simply because even with so many people there seems to be some kind of a wall or may I say some great barrier in an unknown dimension separating them out.

And well the mythical high in the life energy levels seem to have subsided sooner than I had imagined them to. It is almost as silent as it was in my college third year ‘Electronics’ classes. Which I witnessed perhaps just once or twice but it was disturbing to sit in such a silent class!

Nostalgia is just one of the several things wrecking my brains as of now. Wrecking maybe too harsh a word so let’s stick with ‘passing through’... The organized chaos outside of the window continues like clockwork...

The announcements have been made and the journey must continue. On to Seattle for now...

My tilted world

Just a play with colors... Tried to represent the times when I can't see straight and still everything seems fine or even perfect...

Sleep, assumptions and my three big blunders

There are times when we are forced to look back and spend some time in retrospect. Often such times follow times of great misfortunes or unforgivable blunders. Today is one such day for me. The third time that I missed an important professional meeting/commitment.

The first time was when I was in college. I had gone to IIT Guwahati for a technical presentation and a programming contest. One of the events was a debugging contest. Scheduled at 9 am. I was sleeping and so was my partner. We were woken up by folks who were returning from the contest after finishing it! We ran to the spot and realized that it was 10 minutes to closure. We somehow ended up solving one of the given problems and well that was that...

There was guilt and mockery that followed. I realized that I had made a blunder that I will remember for the rest of my life. I made a pact to myself to not repeat it again.

Four years later, the second big blunder happened! There was supposed to be a high visibility presentation at work. I was given the ownership along with 2 other folks. I assumed that they were taking care of it. On the day of the presentation, scheduled at 10.30 am, I got a call from my manager at 10:15 am - the setup for the presentation was not working! And yet again this time, I was sleeping when I was woken up by the call. Rushed to work and somehow got a few things working but it was nowhere close to what we had planned for... Guilt followed along with apologies... It was a blunder, the second time that I had done it! I thought that it was probably the last one that I will make...

Today, 8th of October, I had an important meeting set up with a friend and mentor in many ways. It was slated for 2 pm. I had fever so when I woke up at 11 am. I thought I will take a nap and then wake up and go. I woke up at 3:15 pm... to realize that there were many calls and messages, missed on my phone! I had slept off... and for too long. I have committed it a third time...

All three times, sleep and assumptions led to major failures on my part. Failures that I hope to learn from and rectify. Failures that have made me look back and think, I cannot avoid them. I will have to find a way to overpower these moments. Find ways to establish a channel to ensure that such failures ring an alarm bell before they happen. And to react in the best possible ways to overcome in the moment that matters and try not to fail others who depend on me...

-Anubhav

Quotes by Me

"There is a thin line between irrational and pointless"

"If you wait for the fresh green pea whose surface area is a whole number then you will just end up waiting to join Euclid in the afterlife"

"Eventuality is boring. Be weird - Save the world!"

"I thought that I was trespassing the bandwidths and was landing up in someone else's modulated section"

"Ah! Jobs always stink. They are there to pay for the perfumes"

-Anubhav

Puppets - You & I

Sometimes when I hold out my hand,
I grab some air, some dreams,
Some lost speeding wagon from,
The train of thoughts I yield,
And breathtaken speaks to me,
He who has no heart to share,
And he who has shared all of his...
Spared victims of vice, love,
Convicted fairies stand, close,
Holding on to the threads,
That they suspend in ether,
Puppets move, puppets fly,
They flinch and puppets die,
Smeared faces, teary eyes for us,
As they sing the funeral songs,
For the puppet fairies and I,
Hold on to something and hope,
Its not a thread, just air.

-Anubhav