Love and growing up...

1

Clouds were in hiding and sky was shining blue today, enveloping the earth’s head like my Mother’s favourite blue saree pallu used to cover my head while she brought me home from school during scorching summer of Jaipur. Of all the things that I remember and fall in love again & again is that experience, that cool summer afternoon walk. On the way we used to meet old Fagun kaka, the matka kulfi seller who would come to make us kids happy. Mother would buy kulfis every two days, and we would eat them on the way home. It was during those walks that I learnt the habit of looking in eyes of people; roadside men and women who used to stare at my free spirited mother.

2

It was the art class; my favourite class in school. We had been given a small exercise to close our eyes and draw what we saw. After about 10 minutes of closing my eyes, I decorated my white canvas with a painting of her plucking flowers in a garden.

I remember that was the first time, I was taken to principle’s room and also the first when all my classmates laughed at me while she a coyly smiled at me.

Today years later we have kept that painting in our living room.

3

Some incentives are just too good. Like the smell of lipstick on my cheek courtesy to my Primary class Mathematics teacher. It laid the foundations of my great mathematics score later in career.

4

Celebrity crushes are normal, In your Teens they seem like love forever. I still remember when social networking sites had just launched. A new  all women’s FM channel had started in Delhi. Indeed I was hooked to it, not to all of its shows but to one in which she was the RJ or the Radio host as she used to call herself. I had not seen her picture, but had fallen in love with the idea of her as a person based on just her voice. I became so obsessed with her that I tried to imagine her voice in voice of my female classmates, celebrities and singers. I would repeatedly search her name on internet, orkut and facebook. I used to dial her number to participate in all her contests on radio but every time was left dejected due to line being busy from the other end. Most of my efforts to see her, talk to her atleast once were a failure except one.

One day I found her on facebook, sent her a friend request and after waiting for numerous days and nights found her online. I sent her a Hi! Hoping for a reply, and she to my happiness replied back with a Hi. I replied with how I really loved her show and then chatted on How and why she chose this profession, how is it like to work day in day out in the same job. She too asked a little about me and praised me on a little poem I wrote and shared with her. Then she sent me location where I could come and meet her, She said she was going to come to a newly built shopping complex in city on this Sunday. I was elated, so on the designated Sunday, I skipped my coaching classes, wore nice clothes, picked up the greeting card I had designed for her and went to meet her.

But I was dejected as at the location there were hundred other people who had come to meet her. She had organized some game show on bollywood music and was giving frivolous gifts to morons who performed stupidly on idiotic Film Songs.

I had my first bitter taste of infatuation I had mixed up with love.