སྐྱེས་སྐར་ལ་བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས་ཞུ།

            Hello Internets! How you been? Good? Good.

            I've had a very interesting week. College continues to be fun and I have met several new and fascinating people through it. I know it's kind of early to be saying this, but I honestly feel as though being at college is already working some positive changes in me. Maybe it's because I'm free from that "prepare for the entrance exams or die" atmosphere which is basically the defining characteristic of the eleventh and twelfth standards, but everyday I go to college, I feel my soul blossoming a little more. It is blossoming like a Venus flytrap at the approach of the summer rains.

          One of the best changes I've seen in myself since I started college is the significant increase in my social skills. Till I joined SJC I lived a pretty cloistered life in one of Bangalore's Anglo-Indian, colonial period schools, and when I graduated, I carried with me all the benefits and hindrances of that. I had gained an excellent command over the English language, true, but I also took away with me a well-concealed, ever-present disdain for those who might not behave like me, express themselves like me or feel the same way as I do towards Bollywood movies. Being at college in contact with people from so many different walks and bridges of life is definitely rubbing all those edges off, slowly and painfully. And it feels good. Learning to accept other people is definitely a step towards learning to accept yourself. I feel confident.

         For those of you who don't know, today is the 79th birthday of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama. For those of you who really don't know, the Dalai Lama is not, in fact, a llama, but the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and also a very nice man. He is in exile from his native country, Tibet, right now because the Chinese government are a bunch of bullies, and so he puts in his time travelling around the world spreading a message of peace and working for the well-being of Tibet ex situ.

      Yesterday the Tibetan Association of our college organized a birthday party for the Dalai Lama, distributed sweets in class, cut a birthday cake, covered our college in pictures relating to his life, performed Tibetan folk arts for us, and expressed their gratitude to India for providing shelter to Tibetan refugees at the advent of China's invasion of their home country, in honour of their leader.

       I know there's a tendency in these kind of situations to confer certain god-like qualities of divine virtue and excellence on a certain group of oppressed people just because they've seen some trouble, and I'm not going to do that. All I'm saying is that all the Tibetans I've met so far are a collection of really nice, friendly, helpful and polite people, and it's a shame that they've been forced to leave their native land because of the oppression of a stronger nation. Many have been separated from their families in Tibet for decades, with little hope of seeing them again. There's even talk from the People's Republic of China that they're going to be the ones to identify the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, which is a piece of politics as transparently manipulative as it is abhorrent to the religious and social sentiments of the Tibetans.

        Please take the time to become educated on this issue, and show your support and love for our lovely neighbours from the north in any way you can. In the words of His Holiness, "Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible." Happy Sunday!

#freetibet

Bus! Bahut Ho Gaya

Hello everyone! It's been a while since the last post, hasn't it? The reason for that is:

I'm in college! Woohoo! Freedom! Adulthood! Colour clothes everyday!

I'm doing my B. Sc. from SJC, Bangalore, and for those of you who are just sitting back, smirking at each other, going, "Pssh, didn't get a seat in Engineering, LOL," I didn't even write my CET, OKAY? Ha. Who's laughing now? Yep, still you.

College is great, and my course is amazing. The only thing I do not like about the degree I've chosen is the way people assume that the only people who take B. Sc. are the ones who didn't get in for Engineering or Medicine. Even if it's mostly true. I tell them I'm in B. Sc, and they go, "Oh, okay," in a gentle commiserating voice, as though I've just confessed that sometimes I like to dance the samba naked, and start talking very slowly and loudly to me, because my understanding must be pretty *ahem* moderate if I couldn't even get into an engineering college.

This B. Sc. thing is going to give me a whole new set of insecurities. Sometimes I just lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, thinking, "You're short. You're in B. Sc. You can't tell time." (my three greatest complexes, by the way), and then I sob quietly into my pillow till my Mom comes to my room and tells me to shut up because some people are trying to sleep, thank you very much.

But then I remember that hey, I did really well in my Board exams, better than most of my friends who are doing Engineering, and there are plenty of extremely smart and creative people in my new class. I like my new subjects, the syllabus is interesting, and Joseph's is an extremely nice college.

So, a new chapter begins. Another brick in the wall. The latest tick mark in my "Life, To-Do List"

Life To-Do List:
1) Enter world through gaping hole in Mother's stomach (that's right, I'm a C-section baby. When I'm really bad, I think my mum goes into her room, looks at the scar and thinks, "Yeah, I should have listened to him and gotten a Labrador instead.")

2) Learn to walk and talk, and then spend the rest of my life being told to sit down and shut up.

3) Go to school and learn absolutely nothing except how to sleep standing up, with both eyes open.

4) Go to college and get a degree because people without degrees are not qualified to live on the earth.

5) Realize that I can do absolutely nothing with my degree except laminate it and use it as a novelty coaster, and study for another ten years to get two more.

6) Eventually get a decent paying job, in defense of which it is only possible to say, "Meh. I need to eat."

7) Get married and have children because otherwise you will die alone.

8) Eventually die alone anyway because towards the end of your life you turned into the crazy old lady on buses who responds to offers of help by screaming "I didn't even want to do Engineering, okay?"

True story, there was a foreign lady on our bus today, around sixty years old, I think. I offered to help her with her bag, which looked heavy, and she said, "You can help me by getting me back to a civilized place like Europe."
I figured that she must not have understood me so I repeated my offer, to which she said, "If you people like to protect shit, it is not my responsibility," turned, and stomped off the bus, at which I was just left standing there like:

Posts on college coming up soon! Happy Saturday!