The popular term called unwinding...

11:30 in the night, I'd finally enter my room after a long tiring day. (Yes, yes, I know it's a dialogue from KANK :D)

Well, not that I do a lot of work. In fact work doesn't tire me much. Lack of work and uncertainty are the major culprits. Groping in the dark is really really tiresome.

Amid all the mundane chores I keep reading. Newspaper, articles, write ups, blogs...I wonder at times why I am such a voracious reader. It's mainly the genes. Mom forgets sleep whenever she gets hold of a new book, preferably thrillers or short stories. She doesn't have much patience. Dad, on the other hand, can finish a book of any weight and dimensions, provided it appeals to him, and he is that passionate overnight reader, staying awake for a book is his way of showing respect. I'm the daughter...what else could I have become?

I read a lady's blog - about what is actually ugly about a girl. She mentioned three things in particular, selfishness, bitterness and lack of self respect. I don't want to be ugly. So I have to constantly fight with these three monsters. A lonely, directionless and worried girl would be the easiest prey to them.

So how do I resist? I unwind. And relax. I try to wash away the day's fatigue in this small half an hour window...

There are different methods of unwinding, of course. E.g. when I have classes on the next day - I unwind by preparing or polishing up the slides. It'd be well past 3 in the night, I'd be half dozing off almost, still it's a rather cute fight going on internally. "What JS am I teaching them if I don't tell them how to code a calculator? And how can I not teach them validations? Please, just two more slides..." Yes, I do it for the money, but yes, I teach them very honestly. Right from the first classes I had taken on networking (not the social networking mind you, the more drab TCP/IP thingy), way back in 2004, I have stayed overnight and prepared for my classes. I haven't been half as anxious about my IT work, no matter what the challenges were, I could deal with those within office hours. Teaching scares me, I am always afraid of going wrong somewhere, it gives me an inferiority complex, you see, I have never been the best student or a teacher's pet (except perhaps computer organization in college and Bengali and English in rare occasions at school). But at the same time it is indeed a rare pride to be appreciated by the students at the end of the class.

And what do I do when I have nothing challenging, scheduled for the next day? Either I watch a movie, or read a book, or (for the past couple of days) I plug in the headphone to the tab, put "yeh laal ishq" on repeat mode, grab a pulse and munch on it as I sink in the song (I switch on the AC if it's hot, that's another luxury). Given a chance I'd have probably listened to only that one line...bus ek rahe mera kaam ishq, mera kaam ishq, mera kaam ishq..."

No hard feelings, I have stopped being selfish, I am not being bitter either (and suffering from the grape is sour syndrome), but I have my self respect anyways, so in this life neither can I reach out to you one more time, nor ever be able to indifferently look back at how I had reached out. I can't read our mails, or listen to my voice message and do a post mortem. This song however, doesn't repel me. Neither does "tum saath ho" from Tamasha or "mann marziyan" from Lootera. I listen to them and cry a bit and fall asleep. I still look beautiful, but look very very tired. The black under my eyes cannot be just smudged kajal. Still, never mind, I still unwind...