“Oh - thinkin' about all our younger years
There was only you and me
We were young and wild
and free”, hums her cell phone every time you give her a call. And she writes against her name in MSN
messenger- “place where I love to be the most is in my dreams.” These are not just sketchy, loose pieces of information about her, these actually go on to describe what Amrita is fundamentally about.
Amy’s a beautiful, sensitive Aquarian, who could best be thought of as Alice in Wonderland. She relentlessly worked for days to an end to write a short novel, a murder mystery, when she was barely 13. “It was more on the lines of Nancy Drew”, she explains. Amy would live happily anywhere where there’s nature and quiet. She loves to visit Nasik for the same reasons. Unlike many others, she doesn’t complain how little the green city has to offer in terms of entertainment. She can stare at a meadow for hours at a stretch and observe, meditatively, the evening sun till it sets.
Amy and her family shifted to Nairobi when she was quite young. She effortlessly mimics her African maid, “me me chapa ve ve”, which means ‘I will slap you’ in Swahili, fresh in her mind as the tiny, naughty nut received a lip lashing way too frequently. Always an eloquent elocutionist, she won two gold medals for a commentary on Sikhism, for which the competition was held at an international level in Florida.
On coming back to India from Africa, she joined a school in Mumbai, but in spite of her hopeless struggle with Marathi, she managed an 80-something in her SSC examination. A year later, she spent an exciting year in Goa, a place just right to stimulate her imagination with its enthralling churches and an absorbing history, the picturesque extravagance and of course, delicious sea food.
Amy has got an amazing variety of facial expressions, just like a dramatist performing in her own production; she presents herself with a fluency of thought and expression. At one occasion she had to deliver a
presentation on a - prima-facie - tedious subject, ‘the Indian Evidence Act’. With the combination of a soft voice, quintessential gestures, intelligent pauses and well-thought out examples, she made even the bare act sound like a thrilling courtroom trial.
Though she thinks she made a mighty mistake by taking up Mass Media for her Bachelor’s degree, it in no way changed the course of her original ambition and passion, a language, French. To pursue her study in the language, she has had to shuttle wearisomely between her hectic, full-time mass media classes, replete with tiring and time-consuming projects all day long, internal assessments and exams; and Alliance Française classes in the evenings. A bright mind like hers can take in all this and still show some fascinating degree of retention and reproduction. She did extremely well in her French tests and managed to top the college with a bold ‘Distinction’ printed on her Bachelor of Mass Media degree.
Today, she is pursuing an MA in French from Mumbai University. She translates Hindi movies into French and also attends classes at Alliance Française.
At any given point in time you could catch her sharing some interesting piece of information about Francophone literature, “Arabic men made their women wear loads of gold because the metal is supposed to have qualities that smother sexual drives.”
Or an intelligent comment on the movement of impressionism depicted in the works of Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir or Manet.
If you happen to ask her what she wishes to do in future… she’d tell you she wants to be a travel journalist and a teacher. There’s just so much that there is to her, because just like her million dreams, she is intriguingly vibrant.