July Braindump

Hello and welcome to another installment of my monthly braindumps. I promised myself to spare you my usual annoying routine of going over how quickly time flies and how I cannot believe that another month has whizzed past in the one second it took me to bat my eyelids. What I will talk about though, is another little thing I've noticed about time itself. I know I do this a lot too and I've been talking about the various peculiarities of time for a while now but this is something that fascinates me more and more with every passing day.

Last Saturday marked one week of Meenal's arrival in Edinburgh and at the same time, it happened to be her last day with us.

Meenal's last supper in Edinburgh (for now) #shesjesus

A post shared by Desi Outsiders (@thedesioutsiders) on

In the one week that she spent here, we all felt like time just flew by. That's not too surprising considering everything we did but what was weird was that despite all the items we checked off our bucket lists, we still felt like there was a lot more to do. At the end of each day, we'd be so exhausted that we all passed out the second our heads hit the pillows. But before going to bed, at least one of us would remember something or the other that we'd forgotten to do that day, promising to get to it the next day. And the next day, the same story repeated itself.

Now that she's back in Prague, we happen to remember even more things that we should've done while we were together. But it's only when we look back on that week and try to figure out when we could have squeezed in all those things that we realise that we probably didn't have the time to get to all those tasks anyway.

On Saturday, I told Meenal and Shane that I had no idea how an entire week had flown by because it seemed like just yesterday, Meenal had arrived here and we'd celebrated her belated birthday. But at the same time, I told them how life as it used to be, with just me and Shane before Meenal arrived, also seemed like a distant reality. Like something from the past. It truly felt at that point, that Meenal had been living with us forever and we'd almost forgotten what it was like to not have her around.

The fact of the matter was that Time had acted very weirdly in that one week, speeding through some things while slowing others down. Have you guys ever experienced this? Do you get what I'm talking about? It's fascinating!

Since yesterday, Shane and I have been slowly bouncing back into normalcy and it feels bitter-sweet. I miss Meenal a lot and I wish I could have her giggling by my side all day long but I never realised while she was here how much I missed the mundaneness of just cuddling up to Shane in silence, doing our separate things.

This week has taught me that the best case scenario for my life is if Meenal and I lived in the same city, just walking distance from each other. That way, I could

  1. Have Bollywood movie nights with her at least once a week where we sit down with a glass of gin and tonic and pass commentary on old Hindi classics from the 90's.

  2. Interview guests with her from the same room such that we can communicate with each other using our facial expressions instead of depending on a separate chat to decide whether or not a particular question was relevant while a guest was speaking.

  3. Go to Zumba classes with her at least once a week because we both enjoy dancing like maniacs and have very similar rhythms.

  4. Start training with her in either table tennis or badminton once a week because she's been encouraging me to try it out and I've been seriously considering it too.

  5. Spend at least a few hours a week working together from the same room because we've noticed how much extra work gets done when we're together.

  6. Call her Mum and Mami for Indian recipes, go grocery shopping together and cook Indian food from scratch at least once a month.

All this, while holding on tight to that silent, boring, mundaneness of my life as a couch potato with Shane - a life that I just figured out that I love more than anything.

It's my biggest desire that at some point in the future, everything will work out such that Meenal and I end up in the same city. I don't know which city this could be but I'm just putting it out there and something tells me it will happen. As of now, we're both going to embrace all the uncertainty and go with the flow - something we've gotten pretty good at in the time we've known each other.

To add to my pre-existing sadness about Meenal's departure, The Bromance is also going to be gone for a whole month. Last year, around this time, Shane and I were also getting ready to join him on his annual trip to Greece. I remember our time in Greece like it happened just two months ago so I'm finding it hard to believe that it's already time for him to go back.

I've been feeling a little down about the fact that he'll be gone for a whole month and even told him that I'll miss him. Eww. I think I might like him after all.

It's not as if we all hang out every single day because as he pointed out, last year, while we were getting ready to start the podcast, we actually went for about two months without meeting up because Shane and I couldn't afford to have a social life around that time. But I didn't realise this because, in the back of my head, he was still there. There's always comfort in knowing that people are right there for you if you need them even if you don't see or call them all the time. It's the same feeling I had when Punchy was in London. It's not as if she came to Edinburgh or I went to London every month, but the mere knowledge that someone you love is close by gives more comfort than you realise at the time. And hence, the discomfort in knowing that they're going to be away for some time.

Anyway, that's the end of my braindump for this month. I haven't been getting a lot of time to just sit down and write in the past few weeks so this has been a good release. You have no idea how many blog posts went unwritten this month because of the same reason and that just shows my inability to manage time. I tried to write one of those posts that I'd planned to release two weeks ago but something felt off. And I think that something was timing. You need to hold on to ideas and act on them as and when they visit you.

My goal for August is to consciously try and find the time to write more, as and when something pops up. Let's see if I can live up to my word!