Your Beliefs or Mine?

People I know, closer and around the year I descended on this planet, are indulging and how. In satsangs, chanting, joining cults, motivational meetings, self-disciple-ing and the likes. And here I am beginning again to read books, exchanging ideas with newer people (sometimes half my age), thinking of travelling, giving up on 'No-chicken on Tuesdays' notions, wondering if it's too late to start a new vocation and the likes.

It is quite confounding to see how we are formulated with this basic urge to slink into roles at different phases of our lives almost as though sleep walking through it. My mom tells me "High time you start devoting your mind to some place now" like she began telling me I must get regular facials as soon as I stepped into my thirties. Like it's an unwritten rule and blasphemous to go otherwise.

However, I look around and wonder who's getting the better or closer to what's within! The same are these spiritual devotees who return back satiated with the idea of having “found” themselves at a certain level and then let manipulative bitchiness of the television serials consume them. Or allow the desires of flaunting their assets or knowledge, override enjoying the simple pleasures. Splurge on materialistic acquisitions and squirm at the idea of not being invited at someone's party while the whole town was there. Gossip and judging others is what feeds them, doubts nurture and the "me" surfaces most conspicuously while they demand time to do something for self to make them selfless. Kahe ka self improvement! Ghanta!

I also muse over my own relationship of convenience with God. Say a "Thank you for being with me and stay with me" is the only prayer I manage to sneak in everyday and sometimes I forget even that. Cramming my head with the notion that God shouldn't be narcissist enough to want to hear you praise him in mantras and read holy scriptures all day. That's a human craving, isn't it, minus the semblance to divine, or so we've learnt? Spirituality sounds like all the things that you already know being told to you so that you forget and be told about it differently next time. Tell us about it if you remember it still while you look down upon someone wearing a tacky dress or narrating animatedly how you heard XYZ's wife is having an affair. Some people don't need to grow within. They first need to grow up. And if it is just a brilliant ideology that dazzles you, dive in Literature, saunter around the lanes of fiction, join Twitter, whatever!

Maybe they are right and I am wrong. I do have these occasional bursts of inner ruffle. Don't they? I'd like to reform too as soon as someone convinces me that reformation comes with the guaranteed assurance of no-ruffling. “The frequency would be less”, they argue. “You'd be more patient and make peace with problems”. Hmm, isn't that what we anyways do when problems don't seem to be fringing on solutions? Tell me about the middlemen who've shunned limelight to light your soul. Who say beyond what age-old moralistic values have upheld almost blindly through time! Who let you believe what you believe in and not what you should believe in!

The priests and the sadhus and the babas and the gurus and the palm readers, insist they can change your life but for that you must have faith. I say bring that change first for me to watch that faith being born within, than have to cultivate it in, as though through surrogate mothers of your believers.

Or maybe I miss G who's gone on tour and Seeya who's begun school from today or this is just because I've not eaten anything remotely exciting since Navratri fasts ~ the ranting of a hungry woman. Why I keep them? I have no idea. Just been keeping them forever. Perhaps because the only reflection for me of God can be "ma". Perhaps because I want to clear my conscience with the idea that "Kuch to mein bhi karte hoon" after all. Or perhaps, dizzy in this pseudo superior complex of my idea being better than theirs, I’m looking for an excuse to give up fasting from next time and indulge in the pleasures of food. God would understand, won’t He? He does not want me to stay empty stomach to feed His ego? Well, I always win in the argument against him never mind if the world thinks He is just a silent observer.

I'm the Queen of the World!

So I saw Queen last night finally-

A. Because of all the hype created around it.

B. Because in all cuteness people were asking if I had seen the flick and wanted to know how I felt about it *I feel so critic-ishly kicked*

For otherwise, it would have been difficult to make me watch a Kangana Renawat movie just by the merit of her being in it.

Like I’ve said before, it is always better to watch a movie before they cram you with their opinions on it. The perspective is always truer.

Queen IS beautiful!

Also, I am beginning to realize that I can relate to anything onscreen that is based on a sense of abandon, with streaks of freedom from the stereotyped molds. It sometimes sends me into self introspection mode going in circles in my mind till real life takes over (Also the reason perhaps why I never watch anything on television). Aren’t we all trying to break free from whatever it is that defines us? Those tucked deep in riches want to live life the common man way, the common man strives to get out of his mediocrity, the house bound wife seeks adventure, the nomad travels relentlessly to find a base to root into and so on. Hence we are unified by a common thread for that desire to experience the uncommon of our lives.

Perhaps this craving is right. Why else should we get up from our beds each morning or what else would we dream of when we go to bed at night?

Queen celebrates the idea of being on your own.

Such a defining thought!

And for someone like me, it was a personal nudge. I CANNOT travel alone. Is there a name for the fear of traveling alone, some kind of phobia? Well, if there is, it would be what I suffer from. Ironically for someone who in her heart only sees herself as a nomad, experiencing life from place to place, is declaredly scared if she finds herself alone at the airport for over 5 minutes for the fear of being left behind or someone digging out drugs from her bags and getting her arrested before anyone even discovers she is missing. Not that I’d be travelling by air in those mind dreams.

Anyway, how beautifully does the movie sketch the female psyche!

I remembered my own mehndi and a thousand different thoughts zig zagging in that little head of mine like in Rani’s while the entire space around was a menagerie of sorts. That flickering doubt that came and went- Is it too soon? I haven’t even become anything in life yet? I might not become anything in life post this? But too many hopes hanging on me of everyone I’m pinned with, to tell them now to let me live my life first instead of building another one as a couple. My grandfather telling me he was glad he was seeing me getting married and could now die in peace; which he did within just three months of me leaving that house. Girls are like that or grow up conditioned like that in varying degrees - whether they live in Lajpat Nagar or not.

But then not everyone would be as lucky as Rani to be able to squeeze out a life from a latent existence in an unknown land. In a sense, the movie was real but dipped in a beautiful fairy tale flavor. The freshness emitting out of the fact that she became her own Prince Charming rescuing her from the gnawing miseries!

G looked at me intermittently through the scenes telling me now and again, “Seekho” implying on the streaks of independence as was being sketched out on screen. Little did he care to ponder over though that with an independent body comes a very independent mind! While driving back from the theatre, I asked him what did he learn from the movie. He’s a smart one now, my husband; he asks back- “What do you think I should learn from the movie?”

And very complacently I said, that it IS possible to have friends all over the world, who may or may not subscribe to the same age group, social strata or thinking genre as our lives are in. It is not always sexual. (Dear Mohnish Behl saying in Meine Pyar Kiya- “Ek ladka aur ladke kabhi dost nahi ho sakte”. Yes, fuck off!)

And he smiled mischievously for he refuses to believe one can find genuine friends over the internet and be close to them, even sometimes surpassing real life friends we’ve lived with. He shakes his head when I tell him of a 23 year old friend who confides in me, his life's trials and tribulations or of a 55 years old someone whose voyages on the sea fascinate me as though I journeyed with him. It is possible to share lives with strangers. Not all strangers come with dangerous motives. Some come with empathy that familiar faces find it strange to offer, without petty judging. And a woman thinking out of the box is not playing with her character.

But the most important thing that dawned upon me from there - Nothing good will happen to your stuck up life till daaroo happens to you! Oh yes!

I always forget I am reviewing a movie after a paragraph on it.

·        I wished I could see myself standing on a crowded threshold with that huge-ish map and make out anything from what seems like gibberish there.

·        I wished I knew what heeng was called in English, for friends around then looked up to the “English ma’am” honouring her presence to the group, to enlighten them.

·        I wished I knew how to contrive golgappas, even on Indian soil for that matter, to be able to eventually have that first kiss with that Italian hottie.

·        I wished I was streamlined Lisa Haydon-ish enough to be able to wear some Alexander’s shirt and scream out of the bathroom for the fear of some lizard, which I anyway do.

·        I wished I knew how to wear a bra like that under the covers just as stealthily as I can take out one.

·        I wished my parents would have at least let me go on that all-girls school trip in class 9 from my convent school. At least some kind of taste of that life on my lips for my life to look back on and not write such dreary reviews.

Let everyone live their lives before someone decides they should walk the aisle. Let that someone be the one who has to do it.

P.S. I still loved Highway more. While everyone gushed over Alia’s performance, I still can’t get over Randeep’s characterization and how well he sank and vanished into it, losing every iota of who he is otherwise. To an extent Kangana did too. That’s why these movies work for me. Also I’ve told my husband I am going to America alone now just to face my fears. He says, first try and book tickets uptil Unnao from here, some 100 odd kms from Kanpur. And to think I thought he’d be a new man post the movie. Tch!

Lunchboxing with my Mind.

And I’ve just returned from watching The Lunchbox.

Strange it is how sometimes things happening around you are not motivation enough to write but a contrived screenplay of a couple of hours on the big screen forces you to send your brain cells for a little jog or may be a leisurely saunter in the by-lanes of your mind, so far blocked or ignored in life’s humdrum.

I knew the story would not appeal to my husband, so I tagged along a couple of my girlfriends. We had seen Lootera and although he enjoyed it, he went weary with the pace. The Lunchbox seemed even tardier, like a soft uncertain wind trying to raise its head in a placid backdrop but bogged down before it can rise, managing only to rustle a few already withered or on-the-verge-of-crumpling leaves. Most people can’t relate to sentiments, especially when we are used to of motion or suppression.

I loved the movie.

Perhaps because I am, at a certain level one such leaf watching autumn slowly color my evergreen pride?

Perhaps because the idea of two people who are absolute strangers getting to bond through a thread of simple conversations, is not new skin for me?

Perhaps because as a woman I could relate to the restlessness in Ila’s form that wants to be heard, wants to be important and seeks a purpose of this all?

Perhaps because as a human I could empathize with Mr. Fernandez, a man who knows how to take care of himself but yearns to be taken care of?

Irrfan’s character is heart-warming, a face in the crowd yet subconsciously refusing to accept being one. He looked into that bathroom mirror and said that the space smelt of his grandfather and stiflingly comprehended that he was that grandfather ~ it was nothing short of a revelation for anyone who beholds such a marvelous conceptualization. He says he realized then he had turned old. Here was a man welcoming an early retirement, a man who lost his wife to old age and the same man who did not fathom when old age dawned on him. How amazingly well captured an emotion it was that only someone on this side of the fence would relate to!

Do we really realize how gradually age catches up on us? One day we are twenty and things move on, like a whirlwind sometimes and like the standstill of waters at the other. While weighed down in the twenties to establish our identity and lives, all too soon, thirty knocks at our door. We open the gates and let him in, as though it was in guise of opportunity, with a bit of apprehensions and some exhilaration too, for such a thing is anticipation. Little by little every day the same old drudgery as nothing changes and then one fine day we are forty and out of the blue everything’s changed forever.

But does the person who live inside the aging body really change? His aspirations, his fancies, his dreams, his desires, they remain ageless. He molds himself to the accepted beliefs of the society to behave in a certain mature way because that’s what adults do, to think in a grown up manner, to give up on particular things because it is the way the wheels of the society turn. He surrenders considering perhaps his aging bones too weak to stand before the frail fingers that could be raised. But the heart ~ It still remains at some threshold where it found its identity and continues to stay there. It just loses its legs or will to move on.

How empty are lives that get trapped in the wheels of earning a livelihood everyday so they have no time to stop and stare even at each other perhaps? And then some other voids that just make you stop and stare at them, having no motivation to stop doing it? Lives that have within their grasp everything a normal person should be glad to have and yet feel like sand hastening through the gaping edges of the begging palm.

I remember in the early years of my marriage I would leave little notes in my husband’s lunchbox, his office pouch, his wallet, his cupboard drawer, etc.-something that would remind him of me out of the blue and make him smile. Yes, a hopeless romantic like that. I would put up a picture of someone with open arms asking for an embrace or a sticker that said “I want you every day” in the inner cupboard door to catch his eye as soon as he’d open it. I would send him random messages of “miss you” at particular times to build the stimulation of meeting me upon reaching home eventually. I don’t know when I stopped. I don’t know when it began to seem that he had more important things to do than get bothered by inconsequential notes popping every now and then, every here and somewhere.

We give up and give in without realization.

When the protagonist says he should have looked at his wife laughing at those now forlorn serials a bit longer, my heart went out to him. Why do we realize we should have loved a little more, laughed a little longer, lived a little livelier only when it is no longer possible to do so?

I came across arguments on Twitter that stated had it been an aging woman and a young man in the same scenario, the society would have not been so generous in accepting it. Sad, that we want acceptance of the society for every bloody thing. They fail to realize that it’s not so much a matter of an old man and a young woman, or a married woman and a single man and other such classifications. Marital status or age is immaterial here. It’s the matter of two mortals trying to haul out their individuality through a reflection of similar needs in each other; the acceptance that such an unearthing of oneself is possible at any milestone in life and through our co-passengers in this journey, whether they boarded on the same route with us or not.

I was quite glad that the director here did not make a moral issue out of the entire predicament where the characters find themselves. When the man writes back to her asking if she would go to Bhutan with him, I quite anticipated a horrified Indian woman sentimentality surfacing that would go aghast at the idea of having crossed the line or even of its thought crossing her mind.

I silently rejoiced when she didn’t.

It is distressing to see people judge others without knowing what places in life they come from. What’s wrong with an old man finding a girlfriend? How is it morally a crime if a married woman finds solace in someone’s words outside the bounds of her matrimony that the dwindling threads of it fail to ensure? What right do we have to stop someone from getting happiness from whatever that redeems him unless we have better ways to ensuring it for him that pleases his hungry soul?

It’s a love deprived epoch that we live in,

Where money is easy to get and people difficult to find!

Where faces abound but familiarity fails!

Where we laugh too often but smile too less!

We live in a world where living it up is not thought as much as finishing it all up. Yes, the streaks of such ideas cross by even the sanest of minds. Like she said, we all find ourselves at some point or the other, ready to take the plunge but the depths to which we would have to fall, freezes our feet and numbs the mind. We continue where we are, allowing it to lead to a slow, excruciating death than a sudden, end-all one.

Little battles of little people. Millions of lunchboxes opening every day and so do millions of hearts. And day after day, without a second glance, with eyes riveted to some other priority each time, they come to a close. And the sun sets and the sun rises and the fan on the ceiling continues to sway.

I read and I live...

How do you satiate hungry eyes searching to quench a thirst?

How does one fill a void when one does not know what is needed for its redemption?

Such is life that it necessitates the delving into an escape route-to mingle into mindless relations derived out of so-called friendships or love, to drift into the unrealistic madness of cinema or devour the coming to life of words in books.

Reading, yes, I admit-I miss you. Let me confess today how I went wanton by turning to the blogosphere single-mindedly that it would make up for my erstwhile fixation of holding an actual book running into pages in my clasp. I haven’t returned to embrace you in many-a-years now. Would that explain my tossing restlessly in bed some days?

Should I blame the gradually reclining attention span or the steadily ebbing drama in my own life? A one page blog post reading of someone I admire, has been serving as a capsule perhaps to screen the symptoms though provides no cure. Or the witty one-liners on twitter that impress me no end perhaps ignite enough to ignore the larger picture! It gives me the hallucination of having “read”. Reading thus now doles out to fill some empty specks of my mind with a momentary realization of having travelled to some far-off domain, lived a reckless or meticulous life and sauntered back to my reality.

Reading is still serving me although I look not at it with the same eye.

I get magnetically pulled to any iota I see of the Victorian Ages or Romanticism symbolized by those peacefully resting in their graves now-any contemporary voices strong enough to stand at par with the Byrons, Wordsworths and Keats. Imagine the exquisiteness of ageless expressions like wandering lonely as a cloud or walking in beauty....

For such was the web they spun that getting entangled was the mind’s way of showing what a true orgasm is to the rest of the body. Such were the unadulterated emotions and expressions, as though the writers stood blind to all voices around and were enslaved to the voices in their heads.

Picking up classics or true Literature can at times have a therapeutic effect (just as much as a regular pacey best-seller). You walk down the wondering lane-what constitutes such a frame that manages to give you lines holding the grain of the ultimate truth, hand-picked from a solitary life but withstanding the test of times to reach the eternity? What immortal fountains they create and how? What triggers the unstoppable breeze that cools even the most burning of surfaces with their tender flap? Goes to prove that you can often create magic without movement or sound-magic by the gentle tap of your fingers and mind!

I read and I lived....in the days gone by when I would curl up on a sofa in a corner with a book. An illicit relation perhaps for I cared a damn how anyone looked at us-my transfixed gaze, my coy smiles, the scrunching of anxious eyes, the pleasure of reading love being made on page-me and my book, palming each other and then looking at the walls for a while, in reflection of letting sink in what the books showed me. I would move my body rarely and only when it fringed on getting numb while the mind travelled in frenzy and sometimes even that would be stationary, performing the arduous task of creating mind pictures for me-moving, pulsating images or just giving me the goose bumps with vividness painted there.

Did I become the protagonist in all I read? Yes, I experienced the greed for money, the lust for sex, the spine chilling edging in a mystery, the ache of soul for love, the crushing of entrails by a heart break, the malicious scheming for murder, the infinite search for truth. Did I come out unscarred from all I read? No, remnants of these got transfixed to me like second skin, shaping my mind, preferences and beliefs. They unwittingly went and formed a layer in my subconscious that made me think, opine and pine.

I carried the weight of whom I read for a while till fresh love began to reverberate within and another pristine crispness came between my nimble fingers, too eager to grasp the new.

Yes, Mark Twain, I agree with you when you say, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." But perhaps reading became too taxing for me-the way I wear my heart on my sleeves, I found it difficult to stop it from becoming a bookmark trapped permanently within some sheets of a book closed and done with. The pain of returning to a life less ordinary began to be weighed against the pleasure of dipping into ecstasy. Or perhaps I have just become too lazy using the garbs of responsibilities to disguise the change in me, looking for books in faces of people? I need to find myself again and I need to find a book that can find me? -A voice that sounds like the voices in my head and calms them down. 

P.S. Sorry a severe writer's block in progress here...hopefully would find my funny bone soon!

Love and the Semblance of it!

I love cinema that make me not just look but also think. A very belated watched Rockstar did the same. Nopes, this is not a review-this is the aftermath of some churning and wriggling while watching it not in the way you think though.

I don’t take the motion pictures too seriously but I like to ponder over the food for thought that some of them sneakingly sow in my mind. These are then the movies that stay with me for a longer time. And Rockstar fanned the hitherto latent pang with the astounding love equation between Heer and Jordon-the characterisation that left me bowled over.

The love that is unconditional, that is so strong that it becomes an ache to bear and like an alchemist to all ailments-that directs all your bodily functions into pumping not blood but emotions! A love that defies reason, relations and practicality- like poetry residing in bodies-that makes or breaks, leaving you impervious to any other sensation and oblivious to any other human being!

Does such a love actually exist or it is again a gimmick of the movie makers to keep schmucks like us in the dreamy zone of hope and expectations?

My lucid mind tells me it is all crap. How can you feel so strongly for someone after meeting for a few days or post years of separation? The fast paced, realistic world and the variety it offers, reasserts my conviction that ‘No one and nothing is indispensible or irreplaceable’. But then the bent-on-general-awareness waala mind points to me of the Cupid struck suicide cases that occur where love lost souls prefer death over disjointing. Stupid people, I say-whimsical brood!

Self-love is the only and truest form of love-how can you love someone, if you don’t love yourself enough to stay alive and make true your dreams. How can love be one-sided and yet forever? How can one love another and just one person so much? Although I also feel too much education and the classy flavour debars one from entering this mindless portal as reinstated by the Rockstar. Love is the idol of the idle-to feel it raw, perhaps you need to be raw and open.

Upon deeper introspection, I felt the “what-if” trudge in with its nimble feet on the well attended, sprawling lawns of sanity and leaving its indelible footprints. What if these people have managed to experience what we block ourselves to? What if they are not immature but just more receptive of feeling sans logic, that we so lack? They are not senseless but more sensory. What if they have traversed the thin line and moved over to something greater that we with our nitty gritties of issues cannot even fathom?

Issues like-Am I being used? Does he really like me? Is there a future? What if she wants my money? We are really different people! Why hasn’t he called? and mindless more. What if what we think is love is not really it, but a little semblance that we have found and cling to it fanatically feeling that's the best we can get and thereby shut all doors to the horizon waiting to expand? 

Maybe the souls who experience that kind of pure, unadulterated love are those who never think-just love, who never get-just give and who don’t even want anything in the first place or want anything else. And then maybe again, this entire concept is the conditioning of the mind and is as plausible as the Santa Claus. So we might just as well and please refrain from hanging the hope stockings, yes even the imaginary ones, in the dim vestibules of our lonely-in-crowd minds?

And so thus my tryst with internal struggles continues-I ache to feel that love which becomes a pain to bear and not just a pain in the arse. A love that pounds within me with such throbbing that mutes every other noise of the world! And then I dismiss myself as a hopeless romantic-in love more with the feeling of being in love than persons. Love always makes me an oxymoron-I know the coherent view but I incline towards the fantastical one...I am consistently wary of the fake yet persistently experimental for the real...I pride in all my judiciousness and still secretly pine to be erroneous.

I want to solve this mystery once and for all so that hapless people don’t spend endless hours in sighing or viewing prospective romances with soul-mateish spectacles. If only we could separate the romance from love, perhaps we would define them both.

The Sleeping Volcano

This is what I wanted to say to a dear friend and myself... I hope it helps!

They say all that appears calm on surface has ripples below if it is not declared dead-a dormant volcano, the about-to-be-boiled tea in a pan, an electric socket that remains silent on the outside but has wires screwing each other within. We all live like colossal houses done up for the arrival of make-belief guests, cobble together to show it dandy, cover up with colourful fringes, spotlight focussed on the smiles and stacking away the unwanted and unseemly in some dark, deep alley or cellar. We stuff little nothings so tight in the wardrobe that when later we do want to sort things out, the door opens and everything tumbles down to greater disarray.

We must “appear” to be beautiful. But does that make us “feel” beautiful in the truest of sense or does that increase the pang of restlessness for all praise then becomes a mockery?

It is not easy to live a dual life and not uncomplicated to get rid of it once you acquire it thus-the constant struggle between how you are and how you want to be or what you have become and what you were. Or even in the present, you would find yourself sometimes to be two different persons-an oxymoron in a way that only you can perceive. It is when someone or some situation comes along that extracts you from a convenient environ dragging you to the risky hilt that awareness strikes in-it was a stagnant pond which you might have been impersonating.And then the mind fucking game begins of wanting to know which part of you is real and which you have fashioned to please those around you. You are made to mould in a certain way because that is how you are expected to behave whereas your contours refuse to take just about any shape.

You begin to churn within to meet you-battling to and fro between two extremes that somehow got created and the chasm therein sucking you so deep, that each endeavour made for a rising swings between the feelings of either ecstatic joy of a drug induced roller coaster emotional rush or just abysmal low of being painfully weary and drab.

You rummage around for answers, you spend time talking to what you think is you, you ask those who know you, you test yourself time and again hoping that where you stand at the end of the experiment would be the logically derived conclusion. But life isn’t all science and even all science does not have all answers. Some searches manifest themselves into invisible circles. You keep turning and tossing in your head as the jarring bafflement creates the cacophony that gets termed as your life.

And then there are days when the head gives you no answer so that you come to the conclusion-It is all in the head. You have no feelings or lack of it per se, it is the head that tells you and you could/should tell it back what you want to hear from it. But then again it is not the head that has the sense or ability to do it, for it is seldom used by the owner. It is the influences that fan its insecurities and harbour all irrationality.

And as if that damage does not suffice, ego comes in and strikes the death knell. What “I” think is right becomes supreme and care-a-damn sets in. What I want consumes what I need! All love is self-love, all actions are perpetrated to this very aim, and all feelings culminate in this sea that devours it all. We want us to be happy but we want us to also not to appear selfish-how ironical! Most of us live our lives in trying to strike a balance between the two and hence be trapped in the see-saw of emotions.

Often we continue to fight against arguments that are not in line with our own chain of thoughts or feelings. We seldom stop to evaluate what caused the resurgence of these thoughts in the first place. Are they really mine or did I gather them from people whom I think are mine along the route? And now that I have imbibed them so rigidly, are they worth creating a ruckus about? We would never know who/what is right and who/what is not!

One man’s heaven is another man’s hell. Then why not live freely off shackles of guilt? Why let little termites of doubt eat you? Why not do that which gives you pleasure, irrespective of how many accusing fingers stand against you? Let ‘you’ be that where ‘you’ is happiest. The ultimate decision to be taken is to please others or to please myself-and there will always be a contradiction in both these polarities. You cannot do both no matter how Herculean your attempt or how noble your intentions.

So then how do we know who we are? What is our purpose? Whom should we please? I am known by the relations that move along with me, but they are not me. I am needed by the services I render, but that again cannot define me. I am my interests and my likes, but they are transient and ebb and flow over, yet I remain.

So if I go on this struggle of finding myself, am I being too selfish, too philosophical, too foolish? Am I going against the intrinsic fabric of human nature to accept what we get and live in it to our very best? I am burning within to break my limitations but then my limits end there where some else’s intolerance begins. I want to find me and ask it what it really wants and who it really is. I want to be able to then not question my own actions or have to think over my own decisions for I would know me beyond my name.

Right now, I know someone who knows little but then the journey has just begun and I must not fear and I must not run. I must accept all facets and neither curb one or encourage the other. I must remember it has to be fun. I must learn to fight so that I do not lose me in the crowd. I must survive. I must understand my needs and confront the doubts. I must not give in or give up and must not imbibe or disperse. I should not flow along and yet go with the flow....

And in case you find her before I do, would you please help introduce me to me?

Let's talk about Love!

Let’s talk about Love-love as we know it, love as we want it and Love as it should be. But they say “True love” is like a ghost that everyone talks about and few have seen. Love is like that-vague at one time and yet so bang-on at another. Try telling someone exactly why you love a person or exactly why you don’t love another and you’ll encounter utter helplessness of the highest order. And like someone said, it is more than three words mumbled before going to bed or hanging up the phone.

Love is a momentary or a momentous spark? Actually a bit of both-it comes to you like lightning. Strikes you once and effects you forever. The spark may be gone but the smouldering remains. It burns as well as warms you for life. But then for some it is like fever-it comes and goes with changes in the environment around them. For many others it is breathing-it sustains and completes and though we may not realise that we need it and have it all the time, when gone it suffocates.

The falling in love in itself is such an extraordinary phenomenon! It becomes a temporary state of frenzy within-as though all the atoms are suddenly charged up and hyper active. Slowly they become sluggish or your system becomes attuned to the velocity and you crave for an upgrade yes, I know, trying to sound all scientific and all. Some bodies harbour very lazy atoms perhaps-they become satisfied with what and how they are and live like that forever. You may view that as a blessing what another man may call a curse!

Love at first sight is something equally intriguing. Imagine for a blind man then-the dim possibility of this ever coming true. But blind mortals fall in love too. Sight as our guiding partner is a boon or bane depending upon how well we balance the other senses with it. So imagine it also for a man blinded by what he thinks is beautiful! There is only attraction at first sight-love is too long a process to get so simplified. Yet love at first sight can really not be dismissed as too dreamy, for dreams are said to reflect the sub conscious.

Erich Segal had said-‘True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.’ It is a latent phenomenon, say like a dormant volcano simmering within. To outsiders there appears nothing till one day it all bursts out and everything succumbs in its sway. Loving someone is not the same as being in love. A dear friend once said-everything is about a season, a reason or a lifetime. You may love with all your heart for all your life but that feeling of being in love comes for a short while. Some want the transient madness and others run after the perennial assurance.

We live in a world that waits for the extraordinary to come about to love and the ordinary rarely gets a chance to show that it can rise to that level. Why do we ignore the fact that ordinary requires just that little bit ‘extra’ to make it rise to the occasion? We sit with a list of what we want in a man/woman to make us love him/her. When truth is we never know what we really want from love till we fall in love. It is then that we realize what more we could and should get and how juvenile was the list to begin with. It then becomes an internal dilemma to accept the person as he is, which is the popularly deemed yardstick for love, or to keep on the search. We generally fall in love with our eyes and fall-out from our mind. Very few people are actually happy in love-as for the rest, they were either too quick to declare love to someone or too late in doing so!

If you say you can’t live without someone, get a rain check there too. Living without someone is easy-living with someone is the difficult part. When you fall in love once, there are chances that it becomes a habit-you can fall again-the body becomes inured to it and on its own finds ways to satisfy its craving. Living with whom you love, is THE test-for then you step down from the hazy clouds to the caked dry surface of reality and remove the shades to face the glare. You can scrunch your eyes or shut them or stare at the dazzle in its face. How long you can take it before you look for shade then measures if it was true love?

True love is often confused with romantic and frantic love. It is believed that if there is no madness, there is no love? If there is complacence there is something missing. So it is sometimes the hardest to derive at the inference of whether it is love or just a very deep-seated infatuation. It always is baffling for the symptoms are almost similar. The craving to be together, the adrenalin rush, the constant meditation of the beloved to the extent of becoming oblivious to it all-how do we know when it really is love?  This is where being in love and loving might come in handy. It is so easy to convince ourselves that we are in love and so difficult to actually love.

Some live to love and some love to live. It is what segregates wanting to sleep with someone hot but not wanting to do so too. It makes you look past all the negativity for that one positive aspect which thrills you no end. Love is such an incomparable feel-good. It is what happens to your mind when your mind should be at someplace else. It is the feeling of fear that grips at the thought of it being lost even before it is found. We love because nothing thrills like love does.

Can love be selfish? Yes and no. There is no such thing as ‘unrequited love being the strongest’. How long can you love someone who is unaware or unconcerned about how you feel? Loving someone is the reassertion of loving ourselves. We love because our love makes US feel good. Would we love where we do not experience the feel-good? So it really is about “me” at the end of the day. But then again-when two people do fall in love, there is no room for selfishness-no games played, no jealousy, no boastfulness, any offense or defence. In the Utopian state, there is no thinking then if you are being used or no devising of ways to play hard to get. Love is simple-you don’t do ANYTHING to hurt the one you are in love with-anything at all, and you know you’ve landed on something pure. Love makes you always ready to accept, to understand, to trust, to justify, to support. That explains why some women stand by their men despite knowing that they have been unfaithful. They know no other way of being than by giving unconditional love-accepting and not expecting is sometimes love’s biggest characteristic.

That also brings us to the very debatable issue of being in love with more than one person at a time. Is it possible or is it just an excuse to sleep around or boost your ego with the possible notion that you are so loveable? We can be in love with multiple people with evenly balanced purity of emotions and intentions. Aren’t we equally loving towards our parents, brothers, set of friends-why segregate romantic love from the domain of feelings? It’s like saying you can feel kindness just for once, compassion just for another and passion just for someone else.

We always look for a love that is forever-but how can something that is born have no end? And forever has anyways become redundant in the present times that we live in-nothing lasts forever and never say never! It is natural to expect something that’s been begun to reach its destination and thereby completion. A line can never become a circle till what you give comes back to you. And why is ‘end’ associated with a ‘dead end’? It can be a cross over to begin something new. Yes, love is like that too-transcending, changing its shades, taking new forms and you must move along with the flow or be beaten upon the crags on shore.  

Love is never easy-nothing that is worthy ever is! It tests before it puts you to rest. For some absence makes the heart grow fonder and for others-out of sight and out of mind. Love requires consistency, otherwise you just might turn around a few years down the line and realise it was just another fascination or fling. You may not hold hands anymore, you may not caress as before, but love is that million dollar look of concern when the loved one trips or a message on the phone that says ‘We don’t kiss much anymore and I know it is my fault.’

Love is a must for at least once in a lifetime. Find it if you feel it might not come searching for you. Experience it, for it might not give you opportunities forever. Treasure it, for nothing is more valuable. Without love, you’d remain vacant from within, lost even when found!

You love so you may live

Or do you live so you may love?

Tossing over a feathery bed,

Yearning for a tender touch!

You see the wonders the world has to offer

But only then close your lids gratified,

When you see passion in some loving eyes!

Why run after riches and fame

Suffering just to see your name

Etched in history as a glorious memory,

When all you need is to be stuck up

In someone’s fond reverie!

Crave not for immortality

Nor desire the world’s adulation

Pray to keep close a heart

That skips its beats on separation!

I want not gods or heavens or things money can buy,

I want not the worldly ties.

I want this fluttering heart of mine

To feel true love before it dies.

Adopt, Adapt, Adept!

Love at First sight!

And this month we complete a full year of having Seeya in our lives-a year which on reminiscing was one, that sometimes went by in a jiffy and at other times I remember turning around and questioning, ‘What, it’s just been a month since!’

For those of you who have joined me late-Seeya is my adopted daughter and we got her into our arms at exactly 5 p.m. a year back on 13^th July, 2010. She was then a tiny, timid looking bundle that was relatively quiet yes, appearances can be deceptive and somewhat lost when she entered the household and met all eager faces ready to welcome and pamper her. She spent the first few hours observing with thorough amusement the seemingly circus of our friends and relatives, enfolding before her and then around 9-ish, we heard the first of the later very regular and louder of blood curdling screams and wailing.

The first day dazed look

‘Oh my god’, I had thought! She misses the familiar hands of those who nurtured her for her first seven months. What if this is a mistake? What if she continues to cry and does not stop? What if she does not like the feel of having me next to her? I had spent the whole of that night with one eye awake and at this point it is almost a habit now. My journey began on an apprehensive and pressurized note-I had to make this work as I had taken up the cause-come what may!

When we had decided to go in for adoption, contrary to popular beliefs, my main concern was not where the baby came from or what religion would she be of or that should we not want a male child instead or why did the mother leave the infant. Neither did I think that this baby would be any different from one that would have come out of my own womb. These thoughts did not transpire in my mind even fleetingly. My main concern was-would she accept me as a mother? Would I be able to do justice to a child that is being handed to my care unconditionally?

My life for thirty two years prior to Seeya, had set into a routine that made me very less answerable to anyone except myself. I was fulfilling all my duties and with the rest of my time I was gratifying all my desires with all possible indulgences-teaching, blogging, shopping, travelling, gyming, meeting up friends for movies and outings. This was not a giant leap for the child who barely crawled-it was more so for me, almost like going to the moon. I wondered if I would be able to fit into the mould of a traditional and sacrificing mother, the kind that I always saw being reflected in my own mom. At the risk of sounding vain, let me just say I have surprised myself in the last one year although also occasionally admonished and sometimes self-shaken like a cough syrup bottle!

There is something in that word ‘MOTHER’ that binds two souls-one who calls it and the one to whom it is addressed. It brings in a magical attachment and the feeling I guess is mutually beautiful-when you hear a child cry out ‘mamma’ in her sleep as though she knows you would make her safe and when little ears hear someone say it is okay and cuddling her heartbeat close and tenderly.

I had pondered for a long while over baseless worries like what if she went to others’ arms more willingly like may be mothers around me who had brought up children. There must be some special charge about natural mothers that children get drawn to-something that comes with pregnancy perhaps and the waiting period of nine months. Did I miss on that which would cost me dearly?

Thereby there must be a latent organism or arrangement within the body that excreted exceptional amount of patience into a female system so that she would smile even if the baby woke and cried every half an hour of the night for half a year non-stop, even when it would have loose motions extending to a score or took one hour despite a dark room and pin drop silence to be put to sleep whenever tried. And when Seeya mouthed words like ‘papa’ and ‘umbrella’ before “mummy”, I could almost see my worst fears being realised.

I always and sometimes still do considered myself as non-motherly types. I was most decidedly convinced that there exist a plethora of genes that are preordained to different individuals variedly- the study genes, marriage-genes, mother-genes, arranged/love marriage-genes, business/service sector genes and the likes. And hence some are suited to a particular environment and others scuffle in the same like penguins brought to the equator.

I have had my share of struggles. I gave up on my social life and round the clock became a permanent fixture before Seeya’s big, beautiful eyes. I took a sabbatical of one month from teaching which left me with nothing else to do than hover around her like a relentless bee over a juicy flower. With the absence of domestic help to come to rescue for a long while I was managing the show single-handedly and the biggest positive that emerged out of it was- I had lost three kgs of weight in the first month, although along with a little bit of my mind too. Also the fact that my beloved’s super hectic work schedules till 10 p.m. and my mother-in-law’s social and television-al commitments saw no dip, escalated my woes nope, she is neither a social worker nor a television actress.

However, seeing so many people in the joint family on and off made her extra demanding as she would get bored of anything/everything and any one person within fifteen minutes and get cranky to necessitate more. Within a few months I seemed to have aged a few years, more so in mind than in body. I was losing the inclination to mingle with friends for we had no place to leave back the little one, with a relaxed mind and I had nothing significant to contribute to enjoyable conversations except garnish them with my cribbing to make it indigestible.

I sometimes felt hawk eyes were watching me intently waiting for me to err and in this delusion perhaps I had given so much of myself that I often felt little remained within me. I lived in the perpetual scare in the first half year of having her that someone someday would turn around with a pointing finger and say ‘She is not so good a mother, as the child is not born of her’. It made me burn the midnight oil also midday, noon and evening oil with a ferocity hitherto unknown to my placid existence. I would rarely let her off my sight as a result of which she rarely wants me now to go out anywhere minus her or be ready for hell being raised of tantrums and another night of sleep cruelly slaughtered when I return even from an occasional movie. In the last twelve months, we have been for just seven night outs without Seeya yes, I keep a count, comes handy in emotionally blackmailing the beloved!

There were days when I would ask other mommies, if they had really had it so tough or was Seeya an extraordinarily gifted troublesome baby. Turned out that it was a mix of both! She has mischief written perhaps with invisible ink on every pore of her body. She clings to me like a baby monkey to its mother. She has understood that she just has to shriek in her jarring volume, worse than Sunny Deol’s spine-tingling yells and she would get absolutely anything, for everyone runs to save their ear drums than save the child from getting spoilt and pampered. She is a smart one with tear drops waiting at the edges of her eyes to make sudden and super frequent public appearance its the days of publicity my friends and although one year and seven months old-she still does not sleep non-stop at nights for more than two hours at a stretch and sometimes breaking even in between to make us hear those cries as though we’d perish out of missing them so much!

However, all said and done, life does settle! Perhaps despite all my claims then, I really wasn’t prepared for motherhood, or the fact that I would have to do it all alone. And how does one prepare anyways-you can’t get the neighbours infants for three days of trial to your house to see if you’d survive it and live to tell, can you? The system gradually adopts, adjusts and adapts. I no longer care about being judged by others for I know my daughter cannot be without me even for a few hours, which by the way is something I sigh upon too sometimes.

I am slowly trying to get back vestiges of my erstwhile soul-meeting people, facebooking, blogging though still not able to take care of my shape as much as the mirror would prefer me to or impart my knowledge cells as much as the students would like me too. But the tightest bear hug from her and the genuinely nautanki smile makes me forget about anything deficient anywhere.

Seeya is a unique child-she can mouth rhymes to sing of Sheila and Ready to recognize the names, songs, ads and people and pronounce complicated things like helicopter, octopus, dinosaur, hiccup and yawning. She runs around me calling “mamma, mamma” like in the ‘mute-off’ version of the Hutch puppy ad. She does drama even more than I can possibly fathom to contrive despite my Drama Queen Title and nakhras that would put Begum Akhtar to shame. She is destined for great things, I just know it somehow. When she would lower her tone and marinate it with the yummiest of hug and say ‘mamma’ with her soulful eyes looking at me...it feels like heaven to say the least although it takes very little to cross on to the other side of the fence too.

So one year down the line, I have come to a conclusion which is generally what I come to, when I get too tired of thinking -Adoption is simple, parenting is difficult and well guided parenting is the easiest. To love a child as your own is not tough, to love a child despite yourself is. A child opens vistas in a person that are hitherto unknown and if you think you’ve ever loved a man/woman with your heart and soul, worry not, for then you’d realise it is absolutely effortless to love a child.  

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Sex and a whole lot like that!

These are just some baap of random thoughts/observations concerning/alluding to sex or lack/need/desire/madness of it and a whole lot like that kinda topics!

So bachcha log, please don’t read this and if you must then please don’t blame me later for not giving you spice enough!

•         I often share posts of bloggers I like on my Facebook page and generally my friends log do read trusting my taste and instincts god help and bless them all. However, when recently I put up a link to a post entitled ‘porn nights’ there were more “likes” and comments than ever before hmmmmmm...acha ji-wink, wink, even though ironically there wasn’t any actual porn or even a whiff of it anywhere. Just the title was enough to generate curiosity and thereby clicks. Even my own most famous posts have been those with double meanings and hints of titillation do you sniff some inane pride there? so much that I have to physically stop my dainty right hand with my super dainty left hand, from typing more of just that stuff. Pooooooint is-sex sells!

•            Like it or not, believe it or not, we are a bunch of sex starved voyeuristic lot no matter how many times we rattle the bed post in the cosy confines of our homes. We by which I am generalizing and in no way stating my personal preferences get thrilled still by watching hot lip-locks on screen or hearing about whose wife was caught in bed with whom. Complete crass shows like Big Boss, evoke such mass interest because the public is waiting with bated breath to hear someone abuse another in unfathomable terms or falter from the moralistic path into a fling. A hot item number ensures saleability of music and the movie no matter how crappy the content is. Katrina and John Abrahim still rule vast dingy corners of human imagination though they can ‘not-act’ the pants off anyone. Rahul Gandhi never mind masses calling him baba...he can be many’s baby;-) is the preferred politician among the youth for he is relatively sexier looking than the rest of the one-foot-in-grave or mouth-drenched-in-tobacco lot alright, maybe I am speaking for myself here, but isn’t he really?

•            Recently a dear friend of mine was very annoyed when he went to his bank for his usual dealings. Upon questioning why, he said that they had changed his Relationship Manager to a GUY and that was most disagreeable for him, as from the last twenty years of his ‘relationship’ with the bank, he had pretty and even passable, marginally pretty females, more ready to oblige than otherwise for business of course. Another dear friend of mine does not like female instructors at the gym for she feels they do not have the understanding of the body as a male instructor does. And in my many years of discerning people and their drift, I know better than to ask them to explain their weird surmise.

•             Why, sexier people do have greater chances of being hired than the ordinary dorks! And sometimes greater chances of being fired too. In my quest for maids came a damsel of a regular height and standard weight, except the top half of her body, just below the neck was inexplicably super bestowed, accentuated more hideously by the clingy kurta that she wore. So while I spoke to her, despite all my normal tendencies, please don’t raise that eyebrow...do I still need to convince the masses of THAT? I would inevitably find my eyes juxtaposed to those humungous things that would be called breasts in normal human understanding. My god, I was wondering, did she accidently take in those injections that is rumoured to be used on mini watermelons to make them ripen into the most giant ones on the shelves in a day? And I said ‘no thank you, I don’t want you toppling over with my daughter just because the 2/3^rd of your top half might not be able to handle the rest of the 1/3^rd of the weight below’.

•            It also is true that whatever we try to smother emerges out more strongly than ever. Tell your teenage daughter to stay away from boys and surely she’d be adventurous enough to commence on that very path to know ‘why’.  Create a hullaballoo about hot scenes in a movie and indisputably it would have more than the regular takers, wanting to satiate some urge or the other, if not just the curious one. Like I remember how a whole bunch of us friends and even many other ‘selective movie goers’ also, thronged the theatres for the movie Love, Sex and Dhokha although it boasted of no star cast or anything else, except what the title sheepishly hinted at. Neha Dhupia would forever be remembered, not for any movie that she was a part of, but for a simple quote she made, “Only Shahrukh and sex sells in Indian movies!”

•            Most boys do not begin as “men” unless circumstances make them promiscuous. This I realised post my blog article on ‘My Understanding of Men and Women’ where men have been cruelly stereotyped as solely driven by their libido I am sorry, please don’t take a morcha against me to ban me or something, I do love your specie at the end of the day. There a dear blogger Anshul remarked that he did not find many traces of himself or perhaps he just had to grow up to be a “man”. Bless you for being such a nice munda, bringing hope for my despairing sisterhood not yours obviously. Like always Anshul, even your comments give me food for thought; forget about your posts which are like a sinful banquet by those standards.

   

         Anyways, I then realised that although most men would say that there is    no man who does not have sex on his mind in his relation with a woman, I almost began to beg to differ. There are still boys who want to fall in love with one girl whom they’d eventually settle down with, dream of eternal love and bed hopping is just not their game though this variety is under a serious threat of extinction and such specimens are already declared as endangered species, fiercely guarded by the owners like Kohinoor Heeras. It’s easier to find tiger’s milk than them! Or perhaps, they are yet to become men- these tendencies surface even in the boy next door, more so in the middle ages, as a cynically wise dear friend says, when you realise that you gave up the best part of your twenties believing in ideals like those of teenage girls-even the teenage girls don’t think like that anymore, he says. 

•             Recent cases of celeb infidelities have made headlines everywhere. People scrunch their noses in disdain at the Strauss-Kahn saga, from Tiger Woods okay, his tally more than anything else makes him so outrageous to Ryan Giggs and Gordon Ramsay. Actors like Charlie Sheen and Hugh Grant have ruled the roost more so with their sexual escapades. While I am in no way defending polygamy, I do sometimes feel how difficult it must be in show biz to continue tightening your leash around the flimsy slippery corners of conscience. It is okay for us lesser mortals to sit comfy in our not-so-glamorous or powerful arenas we don’t have to bear faces of a Hrithik or a Kareena, within breathing distance every day, crooning love lullaby to us and then test our god damn moralities We just have to raise an accusing finger at those who reach unfathomable heights through the sheer beauty of their countenances and body or swoon-worthy talent. It is so pleasurable to pick faults in others whereby you make an assertion of a lack of them in you, without having to say it in so many words.

I mean come on, if I were a Bill Clinton and sexy females thronging me would flirt and make passes, I would be too abnormally human to let it pass without retorting suitably back, especially after the world known established fact of my gift of gab. And no one counts the 101 times he may have resisted but the one time he could not dodge no puns intended he was crucified. Sometimes it becomes difficult to realise when the blurring lines of harmless flirting have crossed over. So before we burn their effigies, let us at least put ourselves in their shoes oh how we’d love that, won’t we?

Ranbir Kapoor is accused of being philandering. Hell! When women like Deepika Padukone, Katrina Kaif and the recent bevy of beauties associated with the Casanova, cling on him or they spend days and nights in locales that only the dreamiest of fairy tales could boast of, it should not really come as a surprise with his kind of charm. I don’t know how Sachin Tendulkar and Shahrukh have managed to not create such headlines but then do we really know the truth always?

Ordinary mortals attached to their families and living in a closer knit set ups have really no excuse to stray but the stars...they are stars after all, beyond reach and part of their appeal is the hype around them!

All I am saying here is that you can’t beat the drums about being loyal and moral till your morality has been suitably tested by something which is difficult to resist. When Vishwamitra can give in, the rest of the men are also only humans!

•          While I am not being judgemental in the above cases, I would really like to jump the bandwagon in another one. In this age of internet relationships, it is easy getting hooked and easier still is assuring privacy with a person even though it may not be “touch”-phone like easy physical. While there may be chat rooms and the likes catering to such needs of individuals, it is sad how the youth is prone to blind faith or stupid thrill of exchanging nude pictures of themselves, with such non-chalance. I try to keep an open mind in most cases and think from the other’s point of view before being driven to conclusions yet I do believe that here one needs to be a whole lot more cautious of what is sacredly hers even after trusting the other to the point of obsession.

The younger lot are more confused than ever about their own preferences and loyalty because in relationships like these, they give too much of themselves too soon and then are extremely disillusioned if it does not work out. Sexual experimentation is worse when you are ignorant of the real world and worst still if you are on the internet, speaking from a girl’s point of view. From a man’s side-How can you let go of the belief in your loyal streaks because of a couple of failed internet relationships and convince yourself that you might not have it in you to not stray and thereby stray with the most guiltless of conscience?  

Enough! So much of sex talk is making me sexy oh how I wish it was THAT easy!

So until next time when I make more sense...stay sexy! :-)