New year, new beginnings...

So, on 31st Dec each year at around this time, I start my thank you roll call. Unfortunately though, 2015 has been so crap at so many different levels, that it feels like I don't have a lot to be thankful for at all. I trudged through the year, hoping things would start looking up soon, until the year just passed me by completely. Or maybe I've just been so busy trying to look for the bigger picture, that I missed the small joys altogether.

Before I continue, let me say that the best thing that has ever happened to me in life, happened this year...I got Ashwat - that's my nephew, and lately I pretty much associate all my happiness with him. Holding him for the first time ever, singing him to sleep for the two weeks that I spent with him, trying to feed him...those were the absolute best parts of 2015! He is the reason I laugh with abandon every weekend on Skype, he makes me look forward to that.

Aside from that though, crap year all around! And no, this is not my ranting kinda blog. I hit rock-bottom this year in some aspects, so I guess, thank you 2015 for showing me what that feels like. The only way to go from here is up!

Some of the highights (lowlights in this case I suppose):

1. Missed trip to Mansarovar due to Nepal earthquake - I'm not complaining because the people that were there when it happened fared much worse.

2. Hazy holiday in south-east Asia - But I got my 4 days of sushine in Bali eventually and a tan to die for!

3. Andy got married - This is actually good news, but it makes me feel like an old bat now, so it makes my lowlight reel anyway (sorry bro if you're reading this)!!  :)

4. Some other things that I'd ather not social media rant about. These things come back to bite you in the ass eventually, and I'm not drunk enough already to ignore that.

PS: On that note, I quit drinking for the year. I was never much of a drinker to start off with, but now I've just stopped cold turkey until the end of 2016. For the record, the last drink I had was in early Nov. I know the exact date, I choose not to disclose it. And I didn't know at that time that it would be my last, I just decided to stop altogether right after that for a lot of reasons that I hope to never ever talk about to anyone...ever!

Anyway, swiftly moving on...this year on 31st Dec I'm not kicking off any thank you roll call. Instead, I'm writing a blog, because this year I have a bucket list of things I want to do in 2016:

1. Find a hobby - or even rediscover an old one, but just find something enjoyable to do in my spare time. Netflix is addictive, I should really just lose my subscription and find something worthwhile to do with my time instead.

2. Learn something - a language maybe, or a musical instrument, or a sport even (kickboxing comes to mind), or read a textbook again. Its been too long since I've been a student, and the grey matter up there in my head is rotting away slowly. On that note, I should start solving crosswords, I like those!

3. Fall in love - with a person, or a thing, or a place...who cares?! Not an animal though, I'm no animal lover unfortunately!!

4. Travel alone - I have always said that I prefer travelling with someone like minded rather than by myself, but you don't always get what you want, so...travel alone.

5. Read and write - I used to be a voracious reader, and now I cannot remember the last book I read. And I set up this blog years ago to write more often about things on my mind, poems, random stuff...when did that creativity die?

6. Find an adventure - I've wanted to skydive forever, I just haven't gotten around to it. I ain't getting any younger, so I should really get on with that or any of the other stuff I've had on my mind all these years.

7. Empty jar - so there's this thingy doing the rounds lately that we should start the year with an empty jar and every time something good happens, write it down and put it into the jar, and look at it at the end of the year to see how many li'l things made you happy. I think I'd like to try that, count your blessings I say!!

There's a few other things too, but those relate to the lowlights I refuse to social media rant about. So if I start bucket listing them, that'd be a bit of give away, no?!

So at the end of 2016, I will come back to this post and see how many of these boxes I've checked. If you have a suggestion for anything else I could do, or anything related my list above, lemme know. If you have any way of actually motivating me somehow to get on with these things, even better...that's usually what gets in my way.

So once again: New year, new beginnings...let's see how far I get!

Happy new year everyone! 2016 is here  :)

Seven Lives

A few years ago, a friend of mine started questioning me about one of the most basic questions in Hindu mythology - what happens after your seventh life (since we are supposed to have seven lives and all)? Now I'm not a particular believer in any of this, and in my opinion, when I die, I wipe my slate clean. That's the ultimate price to pay for all of my sins in this life (I mean, what bigger punishment than death, atleast according to most constitutions in the world), and the most important blessing for all the good deeds done in this life ('Moksha' as it is referred to by the ones that believe in it). In either case, I strongly believe that we do not carry our burdens of this life into the next. So I said something to that effect to my friend, but we carried on this random discussion about what kind of lives I could have after this one. It wasn't until a few days later that I had a thought - what if this is my seventh life? What if this is it?! Well, that turned out to be the inspiration for this post. I figured since I (obviously) have no clue about my earlier lives or ones supposedly yet to come, I wanted to create my own little life fiction.

Please note that I started writing this post around that time (when I'd had that chat with my friend). I cannot believe the ridiculous concepts I set to work on sometimes, but I had scribbled down where I was planning to go with this post when I first started. I think I ran out of fresh reincarnation ideas midway through and abandoned it. I was surfing through my unfinished posts (plural because there were two - I deleted the other one, too depressing even by my depressed standards!), and couldn't stop laughing at the stupidity of this one, so I figured I may as well complete it. So here goes...

In my first life I was born a lion - majestic and proud. I was called Simba. I was a great ruler and all my animal subjects loved and respected me. I was brave and fearless. I led them through an era of prosperity and happiness. We lived through times where there was always plenty to eat and harmonious relations among everyone. Eventually I grew old and died, and my rotting carcass was eaten by other animals (in the animal kingdom, if you're dead, you're food!), and my leftovers got dragged to the pretty river that flowed through my kingdom.

Bits of me got buried in the river bed, and over the years I became part of the fertile river bed and in that way, I continued to see my lands and my future generations prosper. By the beautiful force of nature I was still a part of my old life for many years before I moved on to my second life. After so many years of being buried, I grew into a plankton, a small plant eaten by fishes. I joined the river on its journey to the sea. The travel was by no means an easy one. I kept fighting to see the sun every now and then, but the flow of water would keep pulling me back down. It was a constant struggle. A few times when I got too close to the riverside, I was almost left behind until a big surge in the water would pull me back in. Finally we made it to the sea. It was enormous and once you were in it, there was no end, it just seemed to keep going on...I was still quite close to the shore where my river joined the sea, when I was spotted by a school of pretty clown fishes. They played with each other and for some time they even played with me, until one of them ate me and that was the end of my second life.

I disintegrated into the fish's body, and joined its bloodstream and became a part of the fish itself. A few days later, the fish laid a few eggs, and I was one of them. There starts my third life - that of Nemo! For a clown fish, I did a fairly funny job. I had a decent sense of humor and as a result I made a lot of friends. We would go exploring all over the sea and sometimes even go into dark forbidden places. Our elders tried to explain the dangers that lay in the outside world but we hardly paid any heed. One such day, we strayed too close to the pretty beach near our home. As we played near the surface of the water a large colorful and rather fast Kingfisher caught me in its beak and flew away. I struggled for a bit, but without the water it was useless and soon I died from lack of oxygen.

While I became yet another yummy meal, the life cycle continued, and soon I was reborn as a baby bird. When I popped my eyes open, I was trapped in this big white egg that was all around me. I had to butt into it with my head a few times to get it to crack, and then try and spread my tiny wings to push the rest of the shell away from my body. I was an ugly looking tiny bird, but gradually I grew into a beautiful Kingfisher myself. I lived close to a large city atop a tall tree, but right next to the sea. I spent my days flying around and enjoying the view from the clouds. I lived and loved, had a beautiful family, had a good life, and then grew old and died. Ants got to my carcass, and made a feast out of me.

And then the ants got eaten by a worm, which eventually got eaten by a butterfly. And that's how I ended up inside a butterfly. And yes, you get the picture...the butterfly laid eggs, one of which was me and that is how my next life started. I grew into a caterpillar at first, until after a long period of struggle, my beautiful, strong wings grew out, and I was able to spread them wide and fly around again. This time I stayed closer to the ground, I fluttered from bush to bush and got to kiss a lot of pretty flowers. I lived and eventually died in a rose bush, and of course was buried there too.

The rose bush absorbed my essence through the soil, and before you knew it, I was born again as a beautiful red rose. I was a sight to behold and the envy of all other flowers, and the gardener in that park took very good care of me. He watered the bush and pruned the leaves and ensured that no one got to pluck me from the bush until I had the chance to blossom into my full potential.

And once that happened, I got plucked by this amazing man who gave me to his wife whom he loved very much. She cherished me and took care of me for the few days that I was still alive after being plucked out. She was a beautiful woman, a loving wife, and a doting mother. And she was expecting a second child. As I left that life of the rose, she gave birth to a daughter - yep, that's me! I was born into my seventh (last and final) form as Sneha, a Leo, a lover of water and heights and all the pretty things in life, a believer that we only have one life, and most importantly, a gigantic pain in everyone's life. And in this way, my seven lives/my seven incarnations have come a full circle.  :)

A Comedy of Errors

Well, I did promise a detailed version of my travel travails, so here goes:

Saturday, 08 June 2013 - a day of new beginnings, the day I was supposed to be moving to the small city of Wroclaw, Poland for 6 months on a work related short term assignment. Everything was in place, bags were packed, cab was on its way, house was shut and locked down, and I was extremely nervous. Don't know why, but I had a funny feeling all morning, I just put it down to the gigantic butterflies in my stomach that had made a home for themselves in there for a few days now! I had a 2.55pm RyanAir flight from Stanstead, and for those of you who don't know, RyanAir is a low cost airline that charges a small price for the ticket, but make up their revenue by charging pretty high amounts for any other facility.

My cab was called for 11.45am, and just as the cab pulled in, I updated FB with this post:

Goodbye London for a little while...a little excited and mightily nervous about this new stint...what was I thinking signing up for this?!

By 12.45pm I was at the airport - you would think 2 hours is sufficient to get a flight, but alas! At the check-in, the lady said my bags were over weight by quite a bit. I was prepared to pay extra, but this would have been quite a lot extra. So instead, she suggested I buy myself a new bag that the airline would let through for an additional £60 only. Now they charge £20/kg for excess baggage, so this was a pretty good deal. Anyway, she made it sound like it would be a cabin bag, so I bought a small additional cabin bag and repacked my bags and moved a few things (being mindful of cabin baggage restrictions) to the new bag. My two existing bags were still a bit over, but I figured I could pay a bit extra on excess baggage by weight, and then take the additional bag too. At that point I really couldn't be bothered repacking all my stuff, it was a little late in the day to do that.

So I made my way back to the counter, and a guy had taken that lady's place. I explained the whole story to him and he asked me to go to the kiosk and pay for the excess baggage and the extra bag. Now the kiosk accepted the excess baggage but did not let me add on another bag, so I paid for the excess baggage, went back to the counter to let the guy know that I couldn't add another bag on. He directed me to the billing section and asked me to speak to someone there. I got to the lady there and explained the whole deal to her, she was perplexed and asked a senior member of staff (who was somewhere close) to help with the situation. That lady said that I could have any more bags, and that the staff at the counter should have just charged me excess baggage on the whole weight.

At that point the time was 2.25pm, so the lady said that check-in closes 40 minutes before the flight and that I'd already missed check-in so they couldn't let me through anymore and that I'd have to miss my flight and take the next one which was at 6.55am on Sunday morning. I argued with her that it wasn't my fault that any of this happened, and I was perfectly willing to pay for all the excess baggage, but her staff messed up the whole thing. Well, as expected, she refused to acknowledge their mistake and did not let me check-in. I had to pay a £110 charge to be put on to the next flight. I asked that my excess baggage charge be refunded to me, since I would now repack my bags and ensure that I don't go overboard on the weight, and get rid of all the extra stuff. The staff said that the excess baggage charge that I had already paid could not be refunded back to me right away since it was made at a kiosk, and that all I could do was write to the airline and explain the situation to me and hope that they would give me a refund.

Anyway, I planned on having someone come and pick up my excess baggage and spend the night at the airport - an absolutely nerve wracking thought, but it had to be done. The whole time I was afraid that I would fall asleep and someone would rob me of all my stuff!! While all this was happening, I had missed a lot of calls from concerned family and friends wanting to hear from me if I got into the airport fine. So I called back my parents and told them that I had to miss my flight for all of these reasons. I messaged a few friends about my situation as well. Then I went back to the repacking area and moved all the things that I could discard into my new bag to hand over before boarding the flight in the morning.

I had placed a totally panicked call to my landlord (someone who's known me since I moved into London 3.5 years ago) and requested him to collect my bag from the airport and just courier over those things to me. He suggested that I make my way back home instead and he'd just drop me back the next morning instead. So I managed to have my bag weighed at the check-in by the same guy and I was still over by the extent of the excess baggage I had already paid. considering that I might not even get my money back, I figured I could just go ahead and utilize that money in excess baggage! Anyway, I went to the lost baggage desk and left my two check-in bags there overnight, and made my way back home with my cabin bag and the bag of extras.

Just before I sorted out my luggage for the umpteenth time that day, I updated my FB with this new post:

How to screw up ur travel:
Step 1: Pack too much luggage
Step 2: Pay half ur salary to have things sorted
Step 3: Despite that, still miss ur flight
Step 4: Pay even more to get the next flight
Step 5: Start all over again

Just lived thru steps 1 to 4, next flight is tomorrow morning, I'll let u know how execution of Step 5 goes!!

The next morning, my landlord dropped me off at the airport at 5.25am, an hour and half before the flight. I managed to check-in and complete security check without a hitch and realized I still had a good 45 minutes to my flight. I checked the departure gate and saw the 6.55am flight was scheduled to depart from Gate 42. Now the screen was right next to where the sign said Gate 39, so I figured I wasn't too far and headed to the Starbucks in front of me to grab a coffee and a croissant for breakfast. I spent the next few minutes sipping my coffee and on the phone to my worried mother and updating my FB status:

Onward ho...after a 18 hour ordeal finally off to Wroclaw! See you on the other side

I also posted a comment on my prior post:

Step 5: Give 'em the middle finger and take that next flight!!

Before I knew it, 15 minutes had passed and it was 6.25am. I looked over to the screen and it said 'Final Call', I might've sworn out loud because I have missed a train due to the early morning coffee and did not want a repeat telecast with my flight especially after all that had gone down the day before. Even more so, after I'd just posted that comment on FB, it would be pretty ironic if I managed to bungle things up all over again.

Trashing my coffee I ran to the sign marked Gates 40-something and only then realized how far I had to go to get to Gate 42. After running for 5 minutes I reached there only to be told that I was at the wrong gate, and the flight for Warsaw was boarding from that gate. At this point I realized that when I looked at the screen for the information on departure gates I wasn't wearing my specs. My sight is not very bad, but clearly I misread Warsaw as Wroclaw and ended up at the wrong gate (just my luck that they had a flight to Warsaw at the exact same time as a flight to Wroclaw!). I ran to the nearby information desk where the lady informed me that the flight to Wroclaw was boarding at Gate 84, which she told me was at the other building pointing behind her and that I'd have to rush to get there. Well, rush I did especially because Gate 42 was practically empty, i.e., all passengers were already on board. Anyway, after another mad dash through the airport I made it to Gate 84, where thankfully there was still a queue of people getting into the flight!

Queueing up at the correct gate at last, and sweating buckets, I posted another new FB status:

Ended up at the wrong departure gate, almost missed my flight...AGAIN!! No worries, ran like hell and just made it to the queue...a flight to remember! 

After a saga that lasted about 18 hours, this was my final post once I was on the flight before switching off my phone:

In flight, safe and sound...point of no return :x

All in all, it was a journey to remember,and hopefully a once in a lifetime incident...I doubt I'd be able to survive round #2!!

Treasure Island

Disclaimer: This blog is not about the famous book - I just start off with it to draw a few parallels and get to my eventual point. If you are not a bookworm, worry not, the only thing you won't understand in this blog is pretty much the first paragraph! So here goes -

I'm not a literary critic (or any other form of critic for that matter), but from the perspective of an avid reader who cannot tolerate heavy literary works, I'd say Robert Louis Stevenson did a brilliant job in writing about a group of pirates in search of a long lost treasure. This book was first published in 1883. One of the most famous parts of the book (atleast for me personally) was the pirate song

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--

...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

It was more than a hundred years later, in 1989 to be precise, that the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the UK. Trivia: He was honoured at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony by the way - for those of you who didn't know this. Anyway, getting back on track, with the advent of the Internet, life as we knew it changed completely, and so did the definition of piracy. See, now we can be pirates sitting in the comfort of our homes. And we are no longer in the search of long lost buried gold in the remotest islands of the world. Instead what gets looted now is usually the different forms entertainment - in fact, too many for me to probably even know. But the popular ones off the top of my head are music, movies and TV shows - atleast the ones that I am mostly familiar with.

Piracy in the entertainment industry is basically accessing copyrighted materials online illegally. Contrary to popular belief, this not only involves downloading content illegally, but also viewing them illegally online. Not very hard to do especially with the amount of content on Youtube, and a whole bunch of other websites that provide easy access to a whole world of stuff online. Before you start panicking about accessing Youtube content the next time, this site is heavily monitored for illegal content, and these are usually taken off pretty fast. But the other websites - not so much.

Why do people resort to piracy? The keyword is FREE content! Now why would someone pay £6.99 to download Mission Impossible III on iTunes (I'm sure it'll get cheaper with time), when it can just as easily be done for free elsewhere. In fact, why bother downloading it at all, when you can just watch it online as many times as you like for free on one of those other websites - saves you money and disc space...win win!!! Same applies to music. Imagine paying £1.00 for a song when you can just download it for free, and a very official version, not just some shady version that doesn't even sound right.

The issue that I'm mostly battling with is the fact that according to the first world countries piracy seems to be a lot more prevalent in the 'developing' economies, mostly in Asia, especially China and India. Ah, now you know what prompted me to even start writing about this topic! Let me start by saying - I don't think that's all that true. To be honest, there is a whole lot of piracy in India, but being the devoted Indians that most of us are, most of the piracy is also restricted to the Indian entertainment industry. We love Bollywood, and everything Bolly, so most rip offs are Hindi songs and movies. I doubt if the television industry is much affected though, I mean seriously, who would want to illegally download and/or watch Kyunki Saans Bhi Kbhi Bahu Thi?! Between the endless reruns and longevity of Indian soaps, the legal television version is intolerable enough...no personal offence to Balaji Telefilms, just my personal opinion! But the movie and music industry is affected hugely.

The strange part is the international entertainment industry claiming loss of legitimate income due to endless piracy in places such as India. Now this may be cliched, but here's my take...and I'll restrict myself to music, but pretty much the same arguments apply to the movies and television sides of the issue as well. First of all we have so much exposure to international music thanks to MTV and Channel V and a whole bunch of other television channels. That's awesome, atleast in the larger cities there's so many youngsters (for the most part) who have an immense exposure and interest in international music as a result, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, we are spoilt for choice with the different types of music and a whole array of artists within each genre.

I think, unfortunately, that is exactly what is the root cause of the problem. Now I may be way behind times, but I'm thinking of 10 years ago (sigh!) when I was in college. My mom was a bit stingy (no major complaints, I still survived!), so my pocket money was restricted to Rs. 500 a month. That had to suffice for most things - travel, food etc. Being a major Westlife fan (I know what you're thinking - there she goes again! My only excuse is that I did warn you a long time ago!!!), my one indulgence in life was making sure that I bought every album of theirs. That's only one album a year, so its not too bad, but imagine saving up from that really measly pocket money for even that! I didn't have an iPod (still don't have one) or any other MP3 player back then, so listening to music was restricted to the confines of home. The height of pinching pennies - I used to buy cassettes all the way through college, until I started working and could afford CD's instead. Believe it nor not, my cassettes are so worn out (yes, I still have them!), that the tape would get stuck every time I'd try to play them. I eventually replaced all my cassettes with CD's, but that was a long time later.

In today's world, its not hard to buy an MP3 player - that's a one time investment. Actually, we don't really even need that anymore, our phones just do the job anyway. But think of the recurring cost of the music. As I mentioned before, a song would cost around £1.00 - translation - $1.50 or Rs. 80. approximately. An album could cost as much as £15.00 when it is first released (that's about 17 songs usually) - again, translation - $22.50 or Rs. 1,200. I'm sure most students get a lot more pocket money now than I used to, but even then, setting aside Rs. 1,200 for some music (all of which you may not even like, but true devotion dictates purchase of an entire album, not just downloading individual songs that we like!) is no mean feat. Add to that the fact that not everyone would restrict themselves to one album a year like I used to. The music industry is so fickle these days that a song is last season before you even manage to memorize the lyrics correctly.

So, on an average, I'd think people would buy an album every two months, and in addition, download atleast five other songs a month. That amounts to an average cost of Rs. 1,000 a month on current music alone. Most of us are also fans of the classics, and because we no longer carry our Walkman around, music going back possibly 40-50 years (I'm thinking The Beatles here) that we used to have on cassettes, we need to redownload those on to our MP3 players/cellphones/laptops as well. We live in the 'Instant' era, and that combined with the 'I Want' culture, obviously no one is going to wait to get their first salary to start buying music. Between all that I have already mentioned, I'm sure the average recurring spend on music is Rs. 1,000 a month. Now our limited pocket money needs to be used for a lot of other things that unfortunately cannot be illegally downloaded - food, clothes etc. I was about to say books, but caught my thoughts in the nick of time!

While, for the most part, Rs. 1,000 a month (that's about Rs. 33 a day) doesn't sound like a very huge spend, but believe me it is a lot of money even in today's world. The poverty line in India is set at Rs. 28 per day (atleast that's what I just read online...pretty cheap I think, I can't imagine surviving on only that much a day in today's expensive world). Which means that the average cost of each person's music is actually the difference between rich and poor for atleast one person. And I'm talking about a person who earns absolutely nothing.

I think the point I'm trying to get to is that pricing international music at the same level for a developing economy is never going to sort the problem. I have only written about music so far. Add to this movies, television, books, software, designer labels, restaurants and the cost of being a normal youngster just keeps spiralling out of control. Honestly, even a developed economy cannot sustain this level of expense.

To the big labels I say this - most people cannot afford to spend so much on entertainment, especially in the face of free alternatives, does that mean we should deprive ourselves of the simplest joy in life - listening to something that gives us such immense pleasure/satisfaction? Do only the rich have a right to feel the rush of a new song? The artists who spew out the music in such abundance are being compensated beyond anyone's dreams. The industry is not exactly making losses either. This money is better utilized elsewhere, except that in all fairness, the people expecting to spend this money are for the most part nowhere near the poverty line. So I guess it just boils down to individual conscience.

A significant portion of the entertainment industry's take is 'Stop Piracy'. I appreciate every artist who has takes the different stand of 'Piracy - Your Choice'. However, for those of us who can afford it, let's not abuse the trust placed in us by our favourite artists. Go legal as much as you can, refrain as much as you can, but I wouldn't judge. My favourite method of restoring balance - give as much as you get. So next time you illegally download a song, feed a starving man on the streets...I think the level of satisfaction from that song will be beyond anything you would have experienced till date. Even the industry should not have much objection to this - its just charity!

PS: I didn't exactly find a place to fit this into my narrative, but its worth mentioning since we are on this context. I remember being at the Times Festival at Bandra in 2010 and had the good fortune of watching Indian Ocean perform. At the end of their section, the lead guy from the band announced that their latest album is available for free download from their official website. His take was something to the effect of 'You guys are going to download it illegally anyway, we might as well give it away for free - have fun!'   :)

Too Hard To Say Goodbye

Today Flying Without Wings was sung the last ever time by Westlife. Well, technically they sang it on 23 June 2012 at Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, but I only ever got to hear it today. Still confused? Let me start at the beginning. For those of you already second guessing me and jumping to conclusions, the beginning isn't my first post where I clearly declared my love for Westlife. The beginning is a school bus ride back home in what feels like a different lifetime altogether. One of my friends was describing this new song that was out on MTV. I used to be a Boyzone fan back then, but she just said to me that there's this new band out there with their first song. She couldn't even remember what they were called or even the name of the song, just rememebered that the video was a very simple one - 5 guys in black clothes, on a stage with a green backdrop and red seats - that's all I needed to look out for, and of course, a mind blowing array of voices.

Believe it or not, I found that song on MTV that very day. Once again, stop second guessing, this song was Swear It Again, not Flying Without Wings...that came a few months later. What also came over the course of the years were a succession of amazing albums and tour DVD's. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to finally consider hauling my ass over to a concert, Westlife announced that they're calling it a day. I don't know if I felt more angry or more betrayed that day. This was what I had grown up to (although there's always the argument that I never really grew up), this was what meant the world to me, this was what made my heart beat/stop/race at different times. And how could 4 guys with such perfect lives say that they've had enough?!

Honestly, I could see why they wanted to stop, and I was happy for them and the level of success they'd achieved, talking like a proper cliched fan. But as the same cliched fan, it just felt like life as I had known it just ended. Now I know how the Beatles fans would have felt so many years ago. So long story short, I never ended up going to Westlife's farewell concert. Part of it also because the London tour dates happened to be at the exact same time as my holiday with my family elsewhere in Europe.

As always, I bought the tour DVD, and watched it tonight. Their last ever concert. And they signed off their careers with Flying Without Wings in a fitting manner...the last time that Westlife will ever sing that song. And even though the last concert happened nearly 5 months ago, and I had said my goodbyes then, I just ended up saying them all over again today...and I tell you, its very hard. I mean c'mon, once was bad enough, but twice...phew! So today Flying Without Wings was sung the last ever time by Westlife. While their music will live on in my heart, as also in the name of my blog, I just feel like a huge void has been opened in my heart. Someday, the rest of me will get used to being all grown up and not having Westlife anymore, but today I just died a little.

The Sound of Silence

A happy day and so far all was well,
The celebration not quite as planned,
But unexpected is not necessarily unwelcome,
Everyone had other places to be.

A commitment forced a choice,
Stay back while others had some fun,
But the conversation had to be had today,
Because tomorrow held other beautiful promises.

A warm welcome followed a later meeting,
The missed opportunity was not begrudged,
Big laughs followed welcoming smiles,
The party was yet to begin.

A small nudge threw things off balance,
The ensuing apology probably deemed insufficient,
The evening just now so wet and freezing,
Was now dry, but just as cold.

An assertion meant in jest,
Misinterpreted to mean impertinence,
A long wait in an uninspired setting,
Conversations impersonal and intermittent.

Finally a small place to rejoice,
But hey there's not enough choice,
The fight began in earnest,
But a fight that united the group.

And then the cold is everywhere,
In thoughts and words, aloud and unspoken,
Questioning the incidents that had happened,
Never once thought about what lies ahead.

A few stray words were all it took,
No real motive but biterness galore,
An apology not expected, nor offered,
Instead barbed insults traded places.

A happy day and so far all was well,
But now it no longer remains so,
The unexpected was so unpleasant,
Now the sound of silence rings the loudest.

Broken Soul

I looked down to see

So many startling reflections of me

Staring back from upon the floor

Through the pieces of my broken soul

What was it that broke my heart

Ripped it out and tore it apart

A part of me just standing there

And that part of me really didn’t care

That part of my life was no stranger to me

I bowed my head down just in time to see

The tears about to streak down my face

Run down in an uncontrollable haste

Tears of sadness and of pain

Tears of despair, all in vain

Tears of shattered dreams and hope

Oh, how was I supposed to cope?

Through it all, my smile held in place

I could still hear my heart race

Took a while for the realization to dawn

This really was the end of my song

A melody I’d hum to myself all day

It looked like it wasn’t here to stay

The one I’d sing to sleep at night

But I let it go without a fight

The pain I felt now turned to rage

It was time to turn the page

To move on with what’s left of life

Forget about the pain and the strife

Surely there’s something out there for me

Through all of my flaws I only want people to see

The person I am, the real me

And the person I really want to be