Tuesday, September 30, 2008

my first post...memories

This is my first post in my blog...it reminds me of the day when I first started keeping a journal. That was way back in 1996, 12 years is surely a long time for a person who's 24...half my lifetime back on a wintry afternoon, I started scribbling in an old school notebook. Do you remember Jo from "The Little Women"?? My scribblings appropriately fit the description "half-wit poems, stories wild, April letters warm and cold"...strange things I used to write...historical novels where I would surely be the princess (but a very tomboyish princess, I should say) and the prince might be someone who was my latest crush that time, varying from a cricketer to some senior in high school :-) Crazy imagination!!! Sometimes I wanted to write detective novels but I had a serious trouble in finding the motives why someone would kill or steal!! I also tried my hand at writing poetry but...finding the second line to rhyme with the first is still an ordeal for me...blank verse is too difficult...so writing in my journal served as a vent to my "literary activities"!!!
I still remember my thoughts as I used to sit on a small mat on our terrace and stare out to the smoky sky and dream of far-off lands. Sometimes I used to paint and dreamt of the European painters of the Renaissance period...
Weekends or holidays, after lunch I had the time to myself. Generally, in India people love to take a nap after lunch so nobody really bothered to find out what I was doing and that was the time to let my mind wander off to places I have still not been to. There is something wonderful in imagining things...you really can think of anything and everything without caring of "what people would say". I read a lot of storybooks in both English and my mother-tongue Bengali, two languages very rich in literature...and so I had many things to imagine. Sometimes I thought about old Bengal villages and sometimes I wondered about the highlands of Scotland ("A Solitary Reaper" being one of my favorite poems). I still remember one afternoon, when I was thinking about my future...what I want to be when I grow up. Now it seems it was just yesterday, I dont really "feel" that I've grown up, but when I do look back, I understand that I have really crossed my teens and am heading for my silver-birthday!! Sometimes I think I will wake up from my day-dream and find myself sitting on my mat (with the picture of a brown horse on a white background and there was written "Sapna" which means "dream") with some old loose-bound notebook open infront of me...but no...I have crossed many years from that day till now and instead of scribbling in the journal I am typing on my Dell laptop...
I want to go back to my childhood days when I didnt have a care in the world...I want to go back to my ancestral home where I am still the "baby of the family"..."what is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare"...but no...I will not. My memories will be there with me forever, I have to move ahead...
A warm sun is shining upon Birmingham now and from my balcony I can see my university gleaming in the golden rays...I have a lot to do...God's love is wonderful...and I am here not without any reason, I did not come to the Earth without any special purpose...so I look towards the future and start off to fulfil my dreams!!!