//Scribblings//

If one fine day you enter my room, your jaws might just drop as you exclaim “what the”. Such is the general state of my room that even my fellow hostelers (who suck happily state that cleanliness is a figment of a wise man’s imagination) find my living conditions inhuman. So when I do clean up my room once in a blue moon, it is a special occasion.

This time, as always, I’ve vowed to keep my room clean. Though I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep up with that, I do have experience amassed over the past three years. Every year, I’d bring more stuff from home: clothes, primarily. And things would just pile up. This year, I’ve managed to downsize, by handing over extra clothes to Ma-Baba when they went, and by trashing those which had lived out their years. The extra space thus created made my job easier, and now I proudly look around to see a habitable place. The new curtain (with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse: talk about being kiddie) and bed cover add to the feel; this is a nice place.

On the wall alongside my study desk (it’s not really a desk, rather a granite-topped concrete slab), I’ve put up a cheetah poster, my favourite among the big cats. Agile and fast, yet graceful. It has one drawback, though: it tires very quickly. That beautiful sprinter breaks down into a gasping and panting feline in a couple of minutes. I somehow identify with it; spirited starts that end prematurely with lethargy taking the place of enthusiasm. But that has got to change, because I have a larger CAT to conquer (or, as they say, to bell). One thing about the poster, though, is that it is a freeze-frame of a cheetah at full speed, and not one of it gasping and panting. Me and my interpretations.

Another way in which I identify with a cheetah is that I’m a carnivore at heart, too. And since I’ve joined a vegetarian mess, I’ve been literally starved of chicken. So today I called up this restaurant and ordered chilly chicken and stuffed kulchas for dinner. It hasn’t arrived yet, so here I sit in my clean room, waiting for my food to arrive. That I skipped lunch doesn’t make the wait any easier, but it’ll surely make the food more delicious.

GROWL!