What's 3 weeks to 9 months?

I don't want to understand. I'd much rather sulk and cry.

:/

It is raining. The green around me has turned a shade darker, wetter and better. I ride huge waves of nostalgia and love for the 23 year old world.

Who on earth would like to study Amilcar Cabral and Benedict Anderson on such a day? I'm sure they themselves wrote these voluminous pages theorising culture and nationalism on nameless, mundane days, not on such green days as today when the world turned a little older than 23.

This is what terrorism has done to us.

We find a purse lying abandoned near the steps in front of the Worldview Bookstore, a regular hangout of many. We suspect it as a potential carrier of bombs, however minuscule, though it is pink and has teddy bears on it. We try to finish our lunch quickly and move away.

I was taking pictures in the department today, randomly, looking for moments of frivolity in a serious life, and I was focussing on the students in a classroom when the class was in progress. I hear a girl enquiring her friend if I were a terrorist. At other times, this might have sounded funny. Today it didn't.

My friend A, one of the craziest friends I've ever had, one who has pulled my hair innumerable times in class,has hit me with fat books in tutorials, calls up from Madhya Pradesh, his voice taut and helpless at the same time, asking me to take care of myself, because he lost two of his batch-mates in the German Bakery blast. I had never heard him sound so broken.

Nothing changes. Nothing will change. Power will always be a love, stronger than love itself.

Memory is a yellowing photograph.

Madness is fun. Madness is fashion. Madness is the sign of genius.

Madness is scary.

Undesirable.

Disorienting.

Take it from me. I'm the mad girl.