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Time really flies. Days upon days and weeks upon weeks are passing by in a whoosh and it feels like I have barely taken a breath. At the same time, the days are so full that when I think back to last week it already feels like it was a long time ago. Which is a conundrum, for sure, except if you bear in mind that I remember a lot of things, even if they are all happening real fast. Sometimes this is a good thing. Like its wonderful that I can remember the colour of the dress I wore to an annual day function in II std. a (black and white) photo of which a friend of mine put up on facebook recently. I don't necessarily remember it distinctly, but nevertheless. I semi-remember and semi-imagine my father polishing those black shoes to a glassy shine for the occasion. Nice things. But sometimes these are a burden. In a first-aid session I attended recently (as in, three days ago), the instructor was telling us how a seizure occurs when the brain gets over-loaded with signals. He made a direct analogy to a computer going berserk and crashing and taking a long nap. Sometimes it feels like my brain will explode from the sheer strain of living my life. This is not a good situation. In fact, its an absurd one! My life is not a hard one. Its cool, its easy, I have no real tensions of money or health or an abusive spouse. My monster, despite all my complaints, is a sweetheart. Job rocks the socks off. I am independent. If you had asked me, when I was graduating college, what I wanted my life to look like fifteen years out, I imagine that barring a few quirks here and there, my current one would fit the description to a T.

If I have ended up sounding as if I have a very good memory, I apologise, it is not true, I don't. I think what happens is that I remember a whole bunch of really strange things that no one (in their right senses) would bother with. For example, I recall that the telephone place outside our college hostel (where we used to make the calls home, standing in line and sweating like pigs and wishing the guy would just hurry up already and stop cooing in Telugu into the phone), used to have a three compartment plastic thing, red in colour and shaped like apples, where the telegram forms (or some such shady sounding forms in a rat-grey coloured paper) would be housed. It used to hang there, menacingly, while I waited, shaking my leg impatiently. But ask me which year the Gujarat earthquake was and I just cannot recall it. Ask me the formula for anything, I won't remember it, despite my profession. I am sure there is a yoga technique somewhere that can help me get rid of some of my useless memories about apple shaped things, replacing them with things such as the glass transition temperatures for a whole bunch of materials.

I am sure there is a technique for getting rid of all my painful memories and quickly placing over them my happy ones, equal in number for sure. But sometimes, I like the pain. Even the real pain that comes when you feel like vermin. When words are hurled that make you cringe. Sometimes those words make you see yourself as you ought to. To analyse. They are important, not useless. The flammability limits of hydrogen you can look up in a book, you cannot look yourself up in a book, not even in a Murakami.....