{"id":26,"date":"2003-04-14T02:28:33","date_gmt":"2003-04-13T20:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2003\/04\/14\/sleepless-in-safdarjung\/"},"modified":"2003-04-14T02:28:33","modified_gmt":"2003-04-13T20:58:33","slug":"sleepless-in-safdarjung","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2003\/04\/14\/sleepless-in-safdarjung\/","title":{"rendered":"Sleepless in Safdarjung"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I feel hypocritical. I send mails to other people asking them when they&#8217;re going to reply, all while myself being late with the Fillets. I don&#8217;t have an excuse, either. Sonali v0.2 has been up and running for two days now.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, on with the Fillet.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s been a long weekend. Of course, while Delhiites are blessed with a &lt;i&gt;really&lt;\/i&gt; long weekend- Friday to Tuesday, I&#8217;m making do with Friday to Monday. Don&#8217;t I sound lazy when I say that?<\/p>\n<p>Well, anyway. I came home on Thursday by bus, reaching home around 8 pm, just in time for dinner. After dinner, I did something I hadn&#8217;t done for three months- had coffee at Barista. That is possibly one of the primary causes for my sleeplessness that night.<\/p>\n<p>I slept at about half past eleven, after reading Dune for about half an hour. Four hours later, I was forced awake when a squadron of homicidal mosquitoes carried out shock-and-awe tactics on my person. This, coupled with disturbing dreams of Fremen and Muad&#8217;dib up to that point did nothing to improve my mood.<\/p>\n<p>I decided to respond to the incessant attacks with chemical warfare, and padded out of my room in search of All Out. All Out lived up to it&#8217;s name when I found that we were all out of it. However, I did find Odomos, and applied it liberally to all my exposed skin.<\/p>\n<p>Fortified by my aura of Odomos, I exacted my revenge. The bed was soon littered with mosquito corpses. But, as usual, life behaved like a movie, and I found that vengeance, especially against mosquitos, just leaves you feeling empty. It was four in the morning and I couldn&#8217;t get back to sleep.<\/p>\n<p>So I continued to read Dune- not a very wise thing to do, but what the heck. Soon, I grew oppressed by Dune, and went off to check my mail. Sadly, there were no new messages.<\/p>\n<p>At about five, I went back to my room, turned out the light, and lay down again. And in about half an hour, just when I was almost ready to start sleeping again, birds outside my window broke into song.<\/p>\n<p>I gave up. If birds were waking up, it would be inappropriate to go back to sleep. Instead, I went out for a walk.<\/p>\n<p>Safdarjung Enclave at half past five in the morning is not exactly beautiful, but it&#8217;s much better than at half past five in the evening. A cool breeze plays upon your face. The sky, which is almost purple to start with, changes to a light greyish-bluish tint- a good approximation is the www.aadisht.net background colour- in a period of less than fifteen minutes. Watching this happen is very wonderful.<\/p>\n<p>I walked all the way to Hauz Khas District Park- the one with the Queen&#8217;s bathing tank. The first creature I saw out there was a stray dog.<\/p>\n<p>At half past five in the morning, even the mangiest of strays possesses an air of dignity. This one wasn&#8217;t a Hound of the Baskervilles, but it was no slouch either. It&#8217;s tail was up, and so were it&#8217;s ears. It stared at me with an almost regal air. Such are the wonders that dawn works.<\/p>\n<p>After this, I walked through the park, and smelt the dew evaporating off the grass. And then I climbed up to the roof of the tomb and listened to all the different birds. And I wished that I had carried a Walkman with me, so I could listen to Beautiful Day.<\/p>\n<p>That, in essence, is what this particular Fillet is about. There&#8217;s war in Iraq, people lose their loved ones on what amounts to a daily basis, most people are bastitches, but what the heck, dawn makes up for almost all of that.<\/p>\n<p>At about six, I walked back home to prevent my parents from panicking when they woke up and found that they were locked in and I was missing. My general feeling of benevolent lovingkindness towards the world also inspired me to make myself breakfast- scrambled eggs with mustard and cheese, and a Virgin Mary.<\/p>\n<p>About ten minutes after breakfast I discovered that my entire family, due to one reason or the other, had also been awake since at least four in the morning. How richly bizarre.<\/p>\n<p>I had another breakfast shortly after that- cereal and strawberry flavoured dahi.<\/p>\n<p>And then my brother invited me to come to the gym with him, thus capping off a highly interesting early morning. But more about the gym later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I feel hypocritical. I send mails to other people asking them when they&#8217;re going to reply, all while myself being late with the Fillets. I don&#8217;t have an excuse, either. Sonali v0.2 has been up and running for two days now. Anyway, on with the Fillet. There&#8217;s been a long weekend. Of course, while Delhiites [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-w-fillets"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}