Well, I'm back in my antiseptic heaven.

From this...


To this...


Sushi never tasted this good. Now for the durian.

I think it might be a little too overwhelming to return home.

When I touch down and step out of the plane into Changi Airport... carpeted floors, fast queues, grime-less toilets, smooth trolleys and the absence of throngs of people at the luggage belt is gonna throw me into mild orgasm.

This will be in the wee hours of the morning, around 7.15am (well, wee hours to me) on the 18th of April 2008. Hopefully it'll be too early for people to notice my smug grin or hear the excited pulsations of my heart as my head wrecks itself deciding what would be the first thing I'd like to do. Or eat!

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Above all, I think this exchange has been a journey of self-discovery. I've come to understand myself at a much deeper level and I've learnt to deal with certain aspects of my character such that I am more at peace with my place in this world. It is in relativity that comes gratitude. At the same time, it is in relativity that comes dissatisfaction.

These three and a half months have also served as a crash course on the politics of human relationships and personalities. The exposure to, I dare say, a great myriad of facinating characters, has enriched my own sense of self.

Although I know I've barely scratched the surface, my stay here has brought to light certain aspects of India and its people that weave together to form the fabric of this nation. I've gained insight into what it means to be a woman, to the complications of arranged marriages, to the value of family, to the implications of caste, to the grotesquely high rate of infanticide even today, to the dangers of dowry, to the teachings of Hinduism, to the fierce competition that comes along with every developing nation struggling to prove herself to the world...and countless more.

Lastly, at the risk of sounding cliche or like i'm on an overdose of happy drugs, I've come to realise that we shouldn't rule out the possibility of order in chaos, sense in absurdity, clarity in confusion, grace in subtlety, tradition in modernity, sanity in mundanity, ecstasy in simplicity, richness in poverty and... beauty all around.

For now, I close this chapter of my life to begin my next.

Thank you for the lessons, India.

So, I'm looking around the school for a weighing scale to weigh my luggage and ensure that it doesn't exceed the weight limit. The first place I ask around is the admin building. Guess where I am directed to?

The Kitchen.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

The cook has welcomed me to bring my luggage to the back of the kitchen to use the same scale used for weighing vegetables and flour. LOL! It's India : )

The absurdity!

The man's a genius.

Either that or we go with Erwin's theory that the skewed sex ratio makes Indian guys sexually repressed and hence the naivety with regards to picking up on social cues.

Where S$10 gets you a buffet spread consisting of sausages, chicken ham, samosas, cold coffee, fresh fruits, pastries, coco crunch cereal..and MORE. Definitely worth waking up at 7.30am for.

This world is full of people who crave for validation.
The ones who deny this the most, are the ones who crave it most.

It is 3am Indian time. 5.30am Singapore time.
I've just seen the clips on track specialisation and the cool "journalism.sg" website and now I'm kinda getting getting cold feet. I've checked out the courses offered for the next few semesters (I got a kick out of it seeing how everything is PLANNED WAY AHEAD OF TIME) and there's this strange mix of emotions I'm feeling.

Wait, oh gosh, I'm still getting over the fact that the course outline for courses offered in semester TWO next year is readily available for my reference. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm s.e.r.i.o.u.s.l.y amazed. Oh wow, properly constructed lessons and powerpoint slides...what a distant memory. I almost hyperventilated thinking of all the wonderful stuff I'm gonna learn when I get back. It almost makes me want to overload subjects so i can LEARN EVERYTHING. Nerd.

But the reality of projects and exams and GPA starts kicking in not long after and I'm now slightly reluctant to return to all that. Ok, not slightly reluctant to return...more like less enthusiastic about leaving this place. The end of stress-free learning, the end of ctrl-C ctrl-V assignments, the end of phaffing...the end of the invincibility of being an exchange student.

Oh Crap. I need to sleep. Good night. Til another day of the course on 'Limericks'.

(click on the image below for a better look)


Since you have not gotten the message even after we've stopped talking to you and stopped responding to your smses and basically stopped having ANYTHING to do with you, I think it is about time that I give you a piece of my mind before you pretend everything is perfectly fine and assume once again that you can contact me after some time has passed. But firstly, I shall do a translation of your email because I think half the population would not be able to understand what you wrote.

Translation:
I am sending you two photos. Please tell me which one should freak out a person more - the one in which I am posing with a smile for a friend who is struggling to find the best position to shoot from or the one where you are standing behind the mango tree quietly trying to take a photo (of the convocating students)? Does the former deserve the public humiliation you have given it through your blog entry for the world to see?

Well, I'd really like to thank you for NUMBER ONE: finally pushing my limits and giving me the perfect excuse to be really pissed off with you so that now I don't give a shit about your feelings when I write this and NUMBER TWO: giving me the pleasure of crafting this response to your email because right now there's nothing much to do anyway.

Two things in your email reveal how warped your thinking is:
1) I was not "STRUGGLING" to find the best position and even if I looked like I was, it was not to shoot YOU. In fact, if I could scratch you out of the picture, that would have been ideal.
2) HOW the hell you could think that I was SNEAKING around when I shot that photo. There was no SNEAKING around on my part as all I wanted was a shot of the proceedings of that day. You on the other hand, took the shot from where you were standing obviously with the intention of capturing me. (Unless of course I could be wrong and you were actually shooting that dude standing beside me.) I repeat, if I could scratch you out of the picture, it would have been perfect. Just to make things clear if you STILL don't get the message: You don't even come close to being the centre of my world. You're not even a part of the peripherals.

For the benefit of my friends and family who are reading this, and also for your benefit because I suppose you are deluded enough not to know that you freak people out, I will point out the incidents that give me sufficient reason to be inflamed enough to publicly bash you:

1) You tell me not to trust the French students and go on to give weak reasons when I ask you why. Then I find out that it's because you don't want us to know the weird shit you've subjected them to and that we'll be influenced by their point of view. Come on, you think we're born yesterday? We would have seen through you after the initial benefit of doubt we award you because you're from a different culture and perhaps do things differently.
2) You return the keychain I gave you (as a polite gesture for being our student guide) after getting pissed off that we went out with the French students to the city in our first week here without informing you. When I confront you, you barge into my room and put on this marvelous act that I "stole" the damn keychain and ask whether you could have it back. You don't own us and so you have no right to tell us that we can't interact with whoever we want to interact with.
3) We ignore you COMPLETELY after that incident but when you come back after 2 months of absence, you think it's fine to act like nothing happened and talk to me again. I must say I predicted this would happen.

Oh, I threw away the rubber bracelet thing you hung on my door because I thought it might be cursed.

HERE are two posters specially made for you by Erwin, JUST in case you STILL don't get the message....





By the way, thanks for the DVD that I never asked you to get but the entire cast was overacting. And Shah Rukh Khan is not even good looking.

Now leave me alone perv and don't bother contacting me when you're in Singapore.

We've noticed that people here pronounce 'parents' in a errmm, different way.

So this is what I came up with to the theme of Hope, using imagery.
(Inspiration from Mika's "Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)"

The day before yesterday was MICA's convocation ceremony...a time for wearing glorious saris, getting congratulatory handshakes from strangers, and for the heck of it, hugging your crushes. So of course we showed our faces, partly for the MICA brochures and mostly for our graduating friends we have made during our stay here.

I present to you "Cheese, what the hell am I doing here?"







The guest-of-honour for the evening was the ex-president of India, Abdul Kalam. He talked about yeducation and yethics among other important issues, most of which swept by me cos I was too distracted by his distinctive south Indian accent and fantastic hairstyle. And he reminds yErwin of a hobbit. heeheehee. But still, cool fellow.

Security was pretty tight around the school because of him so there were police cars and men with rifles shooing people off the roads. Check out what Erwin noticed on the bumper of the police car...



The ceremony was held in the lawn where invited guests included proud parents, the remaining juniors, anyone else and us.



Spot the only Chinese dude among the governing council...



Closer look...



As mentioned in Erwin's blog, our favourite dean was there for the ceremony. Had a very entertaining dinner with him last night with conversation topics ranging from gay hotels to spare underwear to swinging durians. hahahaha. I think we all left him being pleasantly surprised at his down-to-earth humour and the Singaporean-ness of it all. I agree, event of the night was when he conversed in Chinese to Erwin about how the taxi driver was trying to cheat him. His paranoid insistence on the waiters opening the bottle of water in front of him at Le Meridien hotel comes close as well.

Anyway, back to the ceremony. After a while we got bored so we started taking photos of ourselves and the people around us.

Deepak, big friendly dude from CCC.










L-R: Deepak, Himanshu, Mehul, from CCC.


Our very own Hiro Nakamura


Niraj (aka The Horse or The Stud...for various reasons.)


Ajinkya


RGS girl, Hima. She has RGS-girl vibes so we nicknamed her as such.


Besides the disappointment that the food was all-veg, it was a great conclusive end to our interaction with many people here...faces that we'll never meet again, some which we might. We should get an award from the Singapore Tourism Board for convincing Indians to visit the island.

And now it's back to a quiet campus, just like how it was like the first few days we were here before the PGP students started coming back. I'm glad I'll be out of here soon, hopefully by 23rd April, then headed to Kerala and finally back home. It has been a blast despite the countless moments when my threshold of tolerance has been tested.

Thankfully, I think I will leave still loving this place.

OK, I'm sorry the two of you had to sit through lunch listening to me griping about the loss of my vanished entry. I will now do this in parts so that I will not kill myself should the same thing happen again.
------------

The second wave of bittersweet goodbyes has finally swept over us and I am once again jolted into emo mode. We have to go through this a total of THREE times -first the Frenchies, now the PGP students and soon the CCC bunch (and MICA).

I will not pretend that I like everyone here, nor delude myself into thinking that I mean something to many people here. I've come to realise that I'm a simple person who is happy not fighting my way through to being the centre of attention, not keeping a conscious tally count of the number of cool friends I make, and I give people the time of day unless they start to piss me off at a level that I am surprised with myself. Being a social butterfly is not my calling. I've come to hate small talk, especially if it's not funny, to me at least. In essence, I think I have anti-social tendencies. Why be friendly when you know you are just being humoured? Why smoke hash when it still doesn't buy you a ticket to coolness? Why go beyond the polite smile or the passing hello when it's not worth the effort? It's selfish, but I only spare time for people whose friendship I know will go beyond the superficial heeheehahas.

My name will not be resounding in future batches of MICAn history, my face will be a blur in the crowd, Harleen will still mistake me for Kash. But still, I am happy I am leaving this place knowing that there are people I've met that I will care for. People whom I will want to meet up with again if I ever come back to India. People I will be glad to host if they ever decide they want to make a stopover in Singapore. People whom when I say 'keep in touch' and 'I will miss you'...I really mean it.

L-R: Me, Ajinkya, Kasturee, Raghu


Harshal the Giant and I


And of course, newfound friends from SCI itself. (This picture is for MICA's brochure so that they can sucker more people into coming here.)

I HATE BLOGGER. MY ENTIRE POST JUST GOT DELETED AND THIS IS NOT A GOOD TIME TO BE PISSED OFF. AND HOW THE HELL DO YOU DISABLE AUTOSAVE.

You know how you look at a photo and you see things that freak you out...



(Melanie's fine cos I suppose she honestly thought I was capturing her. Granted.)

Here's a closer look...



..ooohh..it almost reminds me of Shutter...