Great Expectations

This morning I woke up thinking it was yesterday all over again. That feeling lasted for a minute. Deja vu spoils me slowly, especially when the morning milks boils over, recedes and then boils again. But more spoilt am I by the longings and the yearnings packing my mind like festive train passengers on a holiday eve. Here's a peek into them, with the top ten things I am looking forward to in what remains of this year:

A languorous and never-ending Saturday morning.
The scarcity of weekends recently has been a matter of great concern for me. To appease my craving for hopping around places and meeting people, I have run myself short of a perfect Saturday when nothing is planned and the only alarm clock to wake me up is the slant of noontime sunrays falling on my face through the half-open blinds. But well - I look forward to that, whenever that occurs next.

I look forward to the first proper snowfall in the city, after a 30-minute shower of tiny flakes inaugurated my experience with snow two weeks back. For reasons known and unknown, my trips have never been to snowy regions so far and thus I still remain a snowstorm-newbie.

I await the upcoming trips to California and Florida over the next two weeks, the former professional and the latter personal. One plunges me into the world of hedge fund administration (gibberish for a normal human being) knowhow which I hope to enjoy, and the other marks a pledge made with my little sisters two Decembers back to reunite outside Singapore within two years.

I await my new 3G iPhone due this week and my hands are active with a zillion itching cells raring to run amok over its crystal-black surface and prance on its touch-points. My faithful companion for two years, the Sony Walkman phone, shall be elevated to the status of a gift for someone selected through my own lottery system (probabilistically - a local friend, but historically - Mom).

I am waiting for some laywer in India to procure enough courage to fight on behalf of Kasab, the lone terrorist caught alive in the Mumbai carnage. Regardless of his dastardly crime, he deserves a lawyer who can atleast tell the court whether he should be hanged or left to suffer for the rest of his life in an Indian jail. The dumb bar associations and right-wing nationalists in India do not realise that without a defence lawyer, his prosecution cannot proceed. Ofcourse, under it lies the simple fact that with such a stance taken, they are opening a new course to the Indian judicial system - punishment without trial - which makes the Indian justice system no different than that held by the Taliban and the tribal chieftains of Pakistan. They cannot even declare him a Prisoner of War (and thus imprison him indefinitely), because there is no official war in progress. Why does self-serving sheer logic bid goodbye to educated civil servants such as lawyers? Did any doctor refuse to treat his wounds when he was captured? Or does a cook refuse to make him food everyday? I am retaining my confidence that some lawyer somewhere will struggle against his/her demons and do what the profession demands.

I await the release of Valkyrie and Ghajini, the former hopefully turning out to be a genuine seat-grabber depicting Nazi Germany, and the latter to be another memorable epic from Aamir Khan.

I am waiting for one friend to finish his MBA applications satisfactorily, another to tide over his ongoing job uncertainty without hiccups, another to dig his way out of his self-derision, one to give me my photographs and another to cook that dinner she had promised me.

I count the days to resuming the fantastic game of poker and spreading its trickery and its contortions into the sober social panorama in which I have displaced myself into, and then sitting back and enjoying it.

I look forward to this twilight zone of the year coming to a close, with the first signs of a fantastic January coming up that marks a BIG milestone for me.

But most importantly, I am waiting for the first morning now when I wake up without the attack of the deja vu, when the gates of the mind swing back from the realm of the illusionary dreamscape into the noise and proximity of the real world, without creaking back into a time-twisted arc of confusion.

And these are just tips of the iceberg of expectations that floats in my mind, the iceberg against which the colonial ship of the "Centre of Cynicism in the Cranium" has collided.

The night sky of the mind is crackling with SOS messages from the ship:
Great expectations found! Rescue needed!