Purnima

I got this new phone (Sony Ericsson K750i ;) ) and something that I discovered was the thrill of capturing anything and everything with the camera (2 mega pixels). So I took it to Chittagong with me during the Eid-ul-azha break to take pictures of all my cousins, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunties, grandparents of all sorts. Frankly speaking, I think I could have enjoyed the trip much more if I was not under the pressure of visiting the thousand and one relatives that I happen to have there. To make it all worse, it would get colder in the evenings.

After two days of 'vacationing', we reached Dhaka at 4:30 am in the morning, shivering in the cold, waiting for the car to come pick us up. It was horrible and I promised myself that I would never go back to Chittagong in the winter and that too without any proper shields from the winter air. While I was feeling sorry for myself, a man dressed in a torn shirt and trousers (rags basically) passed by. He was filthy, was thin and barefoot. I chose not to see him, though I could not help peeking once in a while.

Then I looked up at the sky and saw the full moon. At the cost of being all dramatic, the sight of that moon actually took my mind away from all my so called trouble. It was not stunningly beautiful, though. In any case, it helped me to gaze at something literally out of this world and just for a moment, remember the times when I used to sit up at the back seat of the car, while my dad would drive, and watch the moon following our car. Sometime in the middle, I would fall asleep and then wake up to find the moon still shining down on my face.

I wanted to hold on to the memory, but I know that it would get lost in the middle of all the chaos that we are so used to in our daily life. So, I took a picture of the moon instead. Well, hail to technology, that’s all I can say. :)

To begin with this year...

I did not do much on New Year's Eve, except for sitting and wondering what to do. I did in fact think of giving my room a good spring-cleaning. But then, I simply did not have the strength to do so. Since I am not very fond of parties in Dhaka, where all you are expected to do is drink yourself to insanity and hook up with random people (I know I am being unfairly judgemental), I prepared myself, like every New Year's Eve, for a bowl full of Doritos, a bottle of coke and a movie on my hone theatre system (it was DVD time on my pre-historic PC monitor).

What drained my energy next was thinking of what movie to watch. The Shawshank Redemption? Too depressing in the beginning, though an excellent picture I must add. I have been meaning to watch Lost in Translation for a while. Ok, that could be a start. I kept dwindling in my mind for another movie. What if I decided in the middle that the movie was boring, or depressing or way too optimistic or very unreal or too mushy for my taste? I did wander about the oldies for a while. My all-time favourite, Audrey Hepburn. Breakfast at Tiffany's maybe?

Drained, drained, drained. Thinking of all these movies drained away my energy completely! I closed my eyes for just a minute, taking long gulps of breaths to steady my restless mind. I opened my eyes and it was 10:30 am in the morning, the first day of 2007 and Eid-ul-Azha in Bangladesh.

Well, I must not complain. A few days later, I received mail. I don't mean emails, but real-life mail sent via the post, where they crossed over miles and miles to get to my doorstep. The first one was an Eid card / New Year's greetings all the way from Santa Barbara from my childhood friends, the twins Tina and Gina and their sister Habiba. The second one was a calendar from a beauty parlour, Persona, one of those places where all the big names go to in Dhaka. The third and the fourth ones were bills of various kinds, the Internet, newspaper etc. The next one was from Hearst Newspapers in Houston, letting me know that they were very happy to receive an application from Dhaka but unfortunately I did not make the candidate list.

Oh well, I guess good things come in small packages.