That Feeling

It's that feeling I get when he puts his hand around my neck and kisses my forehead.

It's that feeling I get when he pulls me to him and holds me with full pride and authority.

That feeling when I feel One Third of Him.

Thanks to a few petty gossipers, I came to realize, it's not so much the attributes of a person that you love but the 'feeling' you feel when with that person.

On the Edge

I've been pushed on to a roller coaster I didn't want to be on

I can't see what lies ahead, but looks like a long ride

The highs that come make the lows steeper

I'm all by myself and I'm getting scared

I'm dizzy and I can't see straight

I scream for help but it's my battle

It's going to be tough but I will come out stronger

I can go through the ride or jump off mid-way

Trying to make up my mind, on the edge

- Henna Achhpal

Guide to Mumbai’s BEST Service

After my Richshaw story, let me hereby introduce you to my most favourite way of commute which also makes for an important part of Bombay's identity - the B.E.S.T. bus service.

If you're a traveller and want to get to know Bombay, you must travel by B.E.S.T. It will give you a better view of the city than those Mumbai Darshan tours and definitely much more economical. They not only get you familiar with the tiny lanes and big roads of the city but also give you a feel of the city's diversity. The buses go through glamorous areas that house the most famous Bollywood celebrities and on the same route you see areas crowded with people struggling for space to walk.

The local trains are definitely the best way to commute in Bombay but the B.E.S.T. is a personal favourite. My best experience to date being my Tour to Trombay.

They keep coming up with a lot of new modifications in their service (with a few loopholes) every now and then. For example, earlier the bus stops looked something like this...

People were expected to sit on the rod while they waited for the bus.

Then, bus stops were upgraded to look like this...

The bus stop is now silver and has more ad space but unfortunately does not solve the main issue of seating in fact makes it worse. You can barely fit half your derriere on this upgraded seat. Eventually you will get so fed up trying to fit yourself, you will just prefer to stand as you wait!

They also came up with things like Vodafone bill payment drop boxes (the only thing they gathered was dust), pay phones (which never worked), CCTV cameras (that faced the entrance and exit areas of the bus), 2 TV screens (just another medium for OOH advertising) which alternate between showing people getting on and off the bus, short documentaries with social messages, adverts and a few random (boring) songs. A few months back they used to show Prabhu Chawla interviewing Malaika Arora Khan. I'm sure every man on the bus would get a *ahem* every time this interview played. Imagine Maliaka Arora Khan in a black tank top with a plunging neckline with her assets in your face.

They also introduced air conditioned buses for a few special routes though I barely travel by those as they take a long time to arrive.

Since I stay in Juhu, the major halt of the buses I board is Juhu Beach. At anytime of the day, the bus will be full of couples/families excited about visiting Juhu Beach. It's irritating because...

1. They're usually huge families who occupy the whole bus and there will never be place to sit and they all get off at Juhu beach so it's no point because I get off at the next stop.

2. The women are dressed in shiny/sparkly clothes to go to the BEACH!

3. These families consist of a lot of babies that keep crying their lungs out.

4. If you have the misfortune of sitting next to one of these families, they actually insist on fitting their irritating/fidgety kids on a seat meant for two. Once I did have such a misfortune and to top it, for some reason the girl kept staring at me. Either she had never seen a girl with an ipod and earphones or I appeared to her as a clown who had just run out of a circus!

I yet love traveling by the bus because there's nothing better than grabbing a good window seat, plugging in my earphones and watching the city go by......

P.S. If you landed on this page by actually searching for a guide to B.E.S.T, you can find it here.

* All images from Google Image Search

It's That Time Again

It’s that time again
When I begin the day to awful reality

It’s that time again
When I’m physically there but emotionally lost

It’s that time again
When anything can get the tears flowing

It’s that time again
When my heart is shattered to a million pieces

It’s that time again
When I pick up the pieces, all by myself

It’s that time again
When I go to bed hoping for a better day


- Henna Achhpal, 24.02.09

Materialistic Li'l Me

It’s a materialistic list of things that I obviously cannot get by 27th December 2009. But, putting ‘The Secret’ to practice, I’m hoping to get each of them on my future birthdays :D

(Not in order of priority. I want all equally bad!)

1. No, I don’t want Isla Fisher for my birthday but the Pink Macbook that she owns in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

2. It’s funny how I would want a phone, a Blackberry at that considering how much I hate talking on the phone. But the specs of the Blackberry along with the idea of blogging, posting pictures and tweeting on the go continue to impress me every time.

3. A shopping trip to Bangkok :D

4. My Dream home. Even a small apartment would do.

5. Clothes, bags, shoes. (That doesn’t really need a mention)

I thought I wanted a lot of things. Perhaps this is it. Might add more stuff later.

Twitter for Dummies

Most people yet haven't come to understand what Twitter exactly is and find it totally pointless.

I had a few of my classmates along with my professor ask me why would they want to know a minute by minute update of somebody's life. Thus resulting in an argument. Thanks to my exceptionally bad conversational skills, I couldn't argue as there were 4-5 of them going at me all at once, I decided I would blog about it!

Firstly, to clear the biggest misconception of all - TWITTER IS NOT MERELY 'WHAT ARE YOU DOING?' - I agree it asks you that when you log in, but it's much much more than that!

Initially, you may find it pointless (even I did) and similar to Facebook's status updates, but once you start following (sensible) people and you have people following you, you will understand the beauty of the creation.

Your experience on Twitter mainly depends on the kind of people you follow. There are all kinds of people on Twitter.

- Spammers (nothing new)

- People who take 'What are you doing?' literally and tweet every minute of their lives and flood your timeline with useless tweets

- Celebrities who use it for PR

- Celebrities who use it to be in touch with fans (bullshit)

- General people who talk about things/events, share interesting links, post images, etc.

You may ask, why not do all of that on Facebook? Twitter is different from Facebook or any other social networking website in many ways.

- Twitter is not for making new friends or for keeping in touch with old ones.

- Twitter is not the place you will find 'will you make fraaaandhsip with me' kind of specimens. (Hoping the species never invade Twitterverse!)

- It is more of an information sharing tool.

- People discuss things happening around them. You might get to know of a book sale in your area or another event which you wouldn't have been aware of otherwise. During the monsoons, there were constant live traffic and flooding updates, train conditions, etc. You get those on the radio/TV too but it's even more credible when you're getting the updates from common people who are in the situation/place at that moment.

- People share their thoughts/views about movies, books, restaurants, various services, anything at all!

- Following Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, Pritish Nandy, Shashi Tharoor, etc. keep you in the loop of the latest news and other affairs.

- Adding a # in front of a word can start off a discussion immediately which can be viewed by anyone on Twitter and they can join in as well. An example would be the recent #bigboss3. And if the keyword is a global point of discussion, it soon turns into a trending topic.

- Interesting or informative tweets are spread to all by retweeting (RT)

- People who know each other on Twitter or otherwise also organise Tweetups. Some go for Beer festivals, some go on weekend trips and some like me and my set of Tweeple meet for rounds of Taboo every Sunday.

It's a whole separate world for me. I have a separate set of people on Twitter who I don't know personally but who I have good conversations/discussions with. Even though I don't read the newspapers or watch the news, I know what's happening because of the tweets people post. And I definitely consider Twitter a more reliable source. It's not limited only to your area/city. I follow people from Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chennai, Kolkatta, Bangalore. You get to know what's happening in those cities, locally. It gives you a bit of everything.

Besides, I found my most important person on Twitter. I have no reason to complain at all!

Felt like eternity

My Semester 5 (board) exams begin in less than 12 hours but I just had to blog since I've been away for way too long and I had started to feel guilty that I was shifting my loyalty to Twitter. But, it's always so much easier to tweet every thought in 140 characters than write a whole blog entry.

Things I wanted to blog about in the past few months but did not:

1. I was working on Section 377 for one of my projects when I came across this video of Baba Ramdev in argument with Sambhavna Seth (I don't get why she was even a part of the debate?!). Now, Baba Ramdev claims to be able to cure homosexuality with his 'brilliant' Pranayam techniques. He believes homosexuality is merely a 'bad habit' like any other for instance, drinking, drugs, etc. It is beyond my understanding how that can be possible?! Mr. Ramdev will obviously make such claims to garner publicity. But what I find immensely ridiculous is that he along with the news channel are openly spreading wrong information. Why is it being allowed? Homosexuality is already considered a taboo in our society and there are so many misconceptions already, why is the media hell bent of misguiding the Indian public rather than making them more informed and aware.

2. I have been hooked on to Restaurant City and Farmville on Facebook.

In Restaurant City, I run a restaurant, decorate it every now and then, trade ingredients and feed my employees when they get tired. I own a farm in Farmville where I plant seeds and harvest them after a few hours/days, milk cows, collect eggs, collect fruits, etc. There are a few awards/ribbons that we have to collect in both the games. There's not much you have to do in either of the games, but they're addictive.

After playing Farmville, I almost feel like running a farm in real life, living away from the city. When I went to Mahableshwar earlier this year, on my way there I had imagined how it would be to own a tiny farm. Own a tiny little house (probably something like this) with just the basic stuff along with my laptop and an internet connection. I would make my living by selling the fresh strawberries and sweet corn that I would harvest around the house itself. I would spend my days watching movies, reading books, writing, blogging and maybe even freelancing :)

3. Coming back to reality, I've decided I want to be a layout artist. My plans keep changing every month but for now I think I want to design newspapers/magazines.

I designed a 32 page magazine, 4 page broadsheet and 4 page tabloid for a 100 mark project.

I have designed earlier at Seventeen and I immensely enjoy designing pages. Maybe I will take up a course in Graphic design after my graduation to polish my skills further. Will find out details later.

I will definitely be writing too, but I prefer writing books, columns, blogs, etc. than writing for a newspaper/magazine. For me writing is a form of expressing my thoughts and I cannot alter my writing to match someone else's priorities/principles. We all know that there isn't much place for the truth in the media. I don't want to write things that people want me to, just to have the paycheck coming in every month. At Seventeen too, at times I wrote things I didn't believe in. It was pretty trivial but I realised I cannot do it. I know many people would say that eventually you will get into the mould of things and understand that you just have to do it. Well, I don't want to. I rather opt to design. It would be fun to see the editorial team fighting with the marketing team and not be a part of it. (I have been there, fighting the marketing team for edit space. Trust me, it's no fun.) Also, this is just for the beginning years when I will be settling in. There's a lot more I want to try my hand at.

4. I have been watching tons of movies and a lot of shows as well. The BF has an immensely huge collection of books, movies and TV shows. I love him for that more than anything else.

5. I watched Age of Stupid. It's a documentary on the deteriorating condition of the environment. I know for a fact that the earth is here to stay and if anything has to happen at all, it will happen to humanity. Yet, it's quite disheartening to see how we continue to ruin nature every single day because of our selfishness and greed for more. The documentary is much more than just about the environment. It's also about how the people in power exploit humanity and resources alike for their interests. A must watch!

6. The sixth point was on Twitter which was turning out to be too long. So I wrote it as a separate entry.

P.S. Will try to blog more often once the exams are done. Should get back to studying. All the best to me :)

Life, it's all we really have

Quoting Sam from Garden State, "I know it hurts. That's life. If nothing else, it's life. It's real, and sometimes it fuckin' hurts, but it's sort of all we have."

I had expectations. How a family should be, family ties and bonding.

You know when you're asked questions like would you choose love over money? And everybody tries to be human and say I would choose love. I say, if the money is not there, the love will dissappear eventually. The two can't be put on the same pedestal.

I'm depressed on most festivals because we don't have nice happy family get togethers. I hate meeting my extended family. I don't believe in the concept of family. I've come to believe that we're individuals. Family is a concept created by society.

I'm torn between trying to be a good daughter and wanting to live my life how I want to.

I wallow in self pity and when I realise everyone faces issues, I feel guilty.

I feel inferior all the time. No talent/don't know how to sing/dance/draw/paint/play a sport. Average at studies. Can't talk in public. Not very smart. Feel dumb most of the times.

I worry way too much. I build up situations in my head about things that are not going to happen but always tell myself there are possibilities.

I find it difficult to share my worries with another person. I feel I'm being too pessimistic and cynical.

Trying to stay strong amongst all this, I look for my share of affection and security from relationships but they don't quite work out right either. Which leads to fear about the next one turning out to be like the rest. Which leads to insecurities. Which leads to worry about this one ending because of insecurities. I worry that I've lost my ability to handle relationships. Maybe I never even had it.

The moment I feel happiness, I'm instantly hit by the fear of it being taken away. Don't show me hints of happiness and then abandon me. I'm afraid of being happy because it's never lasted long enough.

I try to take each day as it comes and think positive but am not able to banish the thought of the dark tunnel. It's terrifying and I'm afraid.

I'm the first one to give up on life. But then again, life is the one thing I really have...