Live.

I do not want to flow. Flow between what the world defines as appropriate and what society expects you to do, out of the ever persisting fear of consequences.
Despite being a strong believer in karma, being defined by the fear of my actions is not what I envision my life to be.

It is almost like muting your true self to fit into this mould of an ideal human being. Your soul burns up and withers away while you chase the fire of purity and ideal existence.
Why don't you just impart the requisite amount of importance to this mould (which is none, since society created this mould anyway?)
Why don't you live exactly how you want to?

Love is...

You activate parts of my heart that I didn't know existed. Watching you breathe, slows down the pace of my life. It's incomprehensible to be in the same room as you and not touch you. This isn't lust, its love. A glorified support system.

I see people my age, questioning love, questioning how real is love, pretending it's a utopian entity. And I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry and I feel blessed that I can experience what it feels like to make an eye contact in a crowded shop with someone and sense a cosmic wave pass between you two (no exaggeration.)

Love is not unreal. Love is not a lie. And sit your punk ass down and stop pretending like love is a straight up depression inducing drug. Maybe you just have not experienced it correctly. I'm not saying I have a really perfect relationship, I've terribly sad days too but even on those sad days, I know how strong this abstract notion makes me.

Love doesn't make the world look more beautiful, it gives you sustenance to live through the ugliness or the strength to beautify it.

Maybe this post makes people categorise me as cheesy, unscientific, or even emotional. I don't give much thought to the label, as long as I'm wholly experiencing something so different and positive.

Honesty(?) Is the best policy

I am a little scared of myself.
I don't know how honest am I with myself and that bothers me endlessly. I need to know do I know myself best and unfortunately only I know whether I know myself best.
Dishonesty is unpardonable but more so when it is with your own self.
I am getting older and realising that there is no constructive, solid answer to most things.
And it makes me miserable, because in my love for the non ambiguous life, I've transformed my entire life into one big quest for concrete, defined answers.

Lack of boundaries, befuddles me.
I'm not ready for it. And that is why, I think I'm in so much pain.

I try finding more and more stars in the night sky in a city which is dying with pollution. I live with a sense of incomprehensible entitlement, with respect to the universe. I believe it will never harm me. And then this limitlessness, harms me. Hurts me. And I feel ashamed about my sense of entitlement.

War.

I have spent all my teenagers living under the garb of hypocrisy. Being strongly feminist, reinforcing that I don't need any saving but somewhere inside, I did need/expect someone to come save me.
Now that my teenage years are actually behind me, I feel happy I didn't meet someone who'd force the rescue flavoured alcohol down my otherwise teetotaler throat.

See, my point is quite basic. Somebody else can't save me because I know exactly what I need. I know exactly what I am fighting. I know exactly which battles I'm going to never win, no matter what. I know where I am going to emerge victorious even before the actual act of engaging in war begins.

IF, God forbid, I would've met someone who "rescued" me, I'd see myself only through their eyes, to never learn my struggles on my own. To never learn how to manoeuvre through the tricky and painful maze that society seems so ready and willing to construct for me. Forget these serious things I wouldn't have learned that examination stress gives me serious bouts of acidity, because someone would always be around neutralising it.

I'm glad I lived through it alone. I am glad I faced my demons without a metal armour weighing a ton which I probably wouldn't fit into and end up dragging around all the time.
I am glad I chose myself as my only warrior.

Who am I to judge?

My existence is a dichotomy. No, I'm not a  bourgeois mind and pauper reality.
I'm a girl on a mission to debunk the myths people have about appearances.

Just because I seem frivolous because I laugh at a rather silly statement, doesn't make me a candidate of "lack of intellect." I might actually be faking a laugh because I don't want the person making the statement to feel bad. But you wouldn't know that. Because you didn't take the time to hear or understand better.

Don't associate traits with other traits.
Pretty doesn't equate with airhead just like not attractive doesn't, with intelligence.

This is how prejudices could actually be defined. Your pre-decided notions, are actually limiting your scope of knowledge, your scope of learning. The "strangest" looking people, have the best stories. And the more time you spend in forming a character sketch of any person in your head, the more you're losing out on. Go save yourself!

Definition: I'd rather you see my shoes.

Have you ever felt this way?
This way where you want to walk barefoot on grass and you want it to tickle your feet?
The way where you want to hide away, but  you still want the world to find you.
The way you want to feel someone's skin against yours.
The way you want to stir someone's soul but a certain part of you feels like it already has done that.
The way where you want to control how you let it go?
The way you want to refrain from communication because you want to see who really cares about you?
The way you want to find an answer to this plaguing, unformed question in the pit of your stomach?
The way you wish you could erase your past?
The way you wish, to hide, hide away all your guilt?
The way you wish this white cloth hid away each bit of you but left only your shoes out?

My mother never really did my hair.

My mother never really did my hair.
Two pigtails, nice and tight. That was my usual.
One thick plait when I felt especially adventurous.
I had hair that reached my waist.
At 10, my hair was half of my 4 feet stature.
So the pigtails.

My mother never really did my hair.
She never really played around.
She never really did a French braid or a waterfall plait.
Just like my education system wouldn't let me drop a science subject to study psychology.
She stuck to the two pigtails and so I stuck to science.

My mother never really did my hair.
And once I got it cut, I think it was the 9th grade, it became a staple ponytail.
My baby hair interfered and the ponytail looked ridiculous.
But years later at 19, when I was away from home for 6 weeks, it made me realise that change in every form, is tough and ridiculous to accept.

My mother never really did my hair.
But she did teach me how to roll it up into the nice working-class-lady-bun.
She did teach me that no matter what ice cream flavour my society served to me, it was completely okay if I chose another and enjoyed it.
Despite whatever backlash my choices made me liable for receiving.
That, even if I were expected to stay at home and tend to the house, my working-class-lady-bun was one step towards wanting my own career and life.

My mother never really did my hair, but in the pigtails, the plait and the bun, she helped me do life.

Slice of you

There is a limit-less sea, between your lips. It is endless and it is beautiful. Every time you laugh during speech, this sea seems more overpowering to me, gaping at me, swallowing everything around it. I hope you catch me staring, and probably realize the magic that you hold, between the one part of your body that you categorize as completely non-monumental.
The boundaries to that space, I want to run a finger across them. Make that walk. I want my finger to trace where the pink of your lip dissolves into the wheat of your skin.
You are ostensibly unaware about my affection, about how I feel that the space between your lips, might be by the panacea to the poison that the bile in my liver fills me up with.
Nirvana might lie just there in that darkness, but this struggle is miserable. I analyze each action and reaction that you make, expecting so much and yet so little. With each accidental eye contact, I catch myself wishing for you to be entrapped by the depth of my eyes in the same innocent way in which the infinite expanse between your jaws has me reduced to a limb-less spectator.

Tomorrow morning, I might have forgotten this paradise of sensation and feeling that you have, unknowingly taken me to, today.
Tomorrow I might just find faults in your teeth structure, but today I wish to roll around in the gloriousness of your mouth.

Delirium.

It has been 18 days since I left Bombay and as eager as I have always been to jump wagons between Bombay and Delhi, I suddenly miss that annoying city. I have never really identified Bombay as home nor do I think I ever will but as is the case with blood relations, despite hating them, you grow up and realise that they actually were tolerable after all. In fact, you might even feel that you liked them at some point. This is exactly what is happening with me, vis-à-vis Bombay.

I don’t miss it, but something strange happened today while my uncle was driving me from his home to my workplace.
I was reading a book and my head had stooped over, almost making me look like a crane dipping its head into water for food, my water being the book. As the car moved onto the main road by crossing this huge intersection beneath a flyover and my head continued to stay bent over, I had this strange sensation that I was actually in Bombay, at this certain part of the highway, that I traverse by almost everyday. I didn’t raise my head for the fear of loosing this sensation. It was like balancing a soap bubble on your fingertip, you know if you move, it will pop.
As the car moved straight along the way, I began smiling to myself, not looking up from my book because how real it felt was proportional to how unreal it actually was.  I kept my head down and continued reeling in this happy sense of delirium in this sensory feast, where my brain despite knowing my real location, was letting me enjoy a moment of some strange satisfaction.  And then we hit a speed bump and my reflexes made me look up and everything vanished.

Was this a hallucination? I don’t know.

What I do know, is that it was beautiful, getting to live in one city, mentally when you are physically in another.

LSF

I have this unbelievably queasy feeling in my gut. The existence of this feeling has been brought about by the fact that I have not written in over a month. Every attempt at writing has been as successful as a drunkards’ attempt at walking on the straight divider line. Absolutely wasteful and disastrous.

I write a document and then I discard the document, it is becoming a visible loop of sorts.

So I decided to write about what has been troubling me.

1.     I have noticed a huge flurry of “amateur writers” using a certain typewriter application (curses upon you, oh social media!), stringing words together and pretending that this string of misused words, conveys some greater meaning and a higher sense of depth which can not be interpreted by people who do, actually possess some literary sense. These quotes, one-liners or whatever we might call them next sonnets, love poems, intriguing write-ups, or as I like to call them, lessons in sentence formation (LSF)  are ruining my life. Instagram poets are great! They are wondrous and they can transport anyone sitting behind a screen to a world of anguish and misery brought on by real, romantic love or by the pain and struggle of retaining your individuality but these LSFs are not the same.

Can we please take a moment and serve them a healthy dose of criticism?
No! Your attempt at romanticizing the darkness of my soul, is not working! You use the word misandry to try and explain her hate for men because one of them hurt her. Open a dictionary and see the letter in the parenthesis next to the word, does it say v? If it doesn’t then explain to me why would you use it as a verb? Now lets come to the part where plagiarizing concepts, is not an admirable thing either. Can you stop throwing a pity party, each time you write a new post?

I am certainly not against throwing one but can you not copy that famous party’s theme if you do decide to throw one, anyway?

The part that exasperates me the most, the part that feels like an attempt at someone acupuncturing the part of my mind that holds my menial writing capacities is the appreciation.

Either people are not exactly mindful about how writing prowess manifests itself or they are being supportive out of pity or admiration for the valor associated with posting such ginormous amounts of ridiculousness; whichever the case, it is wrong, it is incorrect.

Whatever little I have learnt in writing, is because of the blunt criticism I have received not because of the sugar candies of compliments. If you indeed want to be supportive, criticize these LSF creators if you know any.

Let us, please rid the world of these pusedo-philosphers who wish to convert us all to mediocre standards of literature appreciation by dulling our brains with their work.

How to save a life.

After Derek died, Grey’s Anatomy fans, all over the world, hit the roof. They went ballistic over how their beloved creator Shonda Rhimes, so brutally uprooted McDreamy from Meredith’s life leaving fans with little or almost no time to process any of it.
I was one of those people. I cursed the creators over killing off, one of my favorite male protagonists, in a show. But what I had forgotten in the course of the last 11 seasons, was that the only protagonist the show ever had, was Meredith. So Derek or no Derek, Meredith will never cease being front-runner.
After I finished watching the final episode of this season, I felt something unexplainable. I felt this strange sense of calm. Seeing Meredith out there, attempting to get her life back on track after her husband’s untimely death, helped me realize the idea 'Life Moves On.'
I had never imagined myself as a person who would admit that a show saved her life but Grey’s Anatomy did.
Meredith and Derek had me convinced about the idea of true love and forever and all those things and the first thought I had when he died was “Wow! True love definitely doesn’t exist!” and it broke me a little because after all the effort I had taken in making myself reach this destination of less realist and more romantic, this death move was a road in the opposite direction.
The next two episodes changed that. 

So the fear I had when I realised that the person I love, might leave me like that someday, was replaced with this feeling that I will survive it, nevertheless, I will deal with it because my favourite character, has seen worse.

I began watching this show, for the surgeons and before I knew it, in all my relationships, I could see traces of the show. While I had friends criticizing the show for being dramatic, sexual and even annoying I couldn’t care less, because what Grey’s means to me, no person, life coach, counselor can ever be.

“People can be broken, sure,” Meredith says. “But any surgeon knows, what’s broken can be mended.”

These lines brought tears to my eyes because this line summed up the journey that I ended up taking with this show. I learned how to take my time to heal when I was hurt, I realized how I had to put myself out there, ask someone to pick me and choose me, and stay strong even if I wasn’t. It made me realize that being a career woman is just not wrong (Here is looking at you, Dr.Yang). It made me embrace my twistedness. It made me accept my dark side, my sort of emotional-less side, my inability of feeling emotions when people in my family died, but crazy tears when my mother’s friend died. It made me realize that I don’t have to be good, happy, and perfect at all times. I can be less shiny and happy than my college friend and that makes me no less of a person.

On a very personal note, Grey’s has made me feel comfortable in my own skin. Every time I struggle with feeling insecure, disappointed, self-doubt and these terrible feelings of self-loathing, I watch an episode, and it makes me feel less alone. Less scared of the overpowering sense of depression.

Thank you, Grey’s, for bringing me back to life on my dead days.
The 40-second dance party is always nothing short of magic.

Lessons I learned this week.

(Written on 3rd May)

My mother lost one of her college friends this Monday, in an avalanche on the Everest base camp, due to the earthquake in Nepal.

Though I had never met the lady, her death shook me, in ways I had never imagined.

I spent an entire day in an almost dazed state trying to absorb her death. Trying my best to move towards acceptance.

I shall not go into details about things her achievements but she was definitely someone who was living her life. Someone who was squeezing life out of each moment of her life. Maybe that is the reason why her death made such an astonishing impact on me. 

Kashmiris have a phrase ‘shamshan varag gasun’ which literally translated means the lessons you learn about the volatility and vulnerability of life, its nothingness are just more of a momentary realization which fade away as soon as one leaves the crematorium.

My plan, is to not let the lesson, its effect, leave me once I leave this crematorium, where not just her, but the numerous lives lost in the earthquake have been laid to rest.

The volatility of life, is a paradoxical concept, it reminds me that my existence is finite, but the potential for greatness in me, and each human being, is infinite.

Unfortunately, we keep forgetting this, and tend to lose ourselves in the monotony, drudgery of everyday life. I do not mean quit your job and go backpacking around the world, but if that is where your calling lies, do not let anything stop you. Take risks, be thankful for the opportunities, but do not spend one waking minute of your existence, wishing you were someone else or wishing you were somewhere else, If you find yourself doing either of the two, stop not till you find what makes you tick. Squeeze each drop of sensation, the feeling of being alive from your live.

Make the most of your limited time because dying with some vague, tingling sensation of fulfillment will/ must be much better than ending a life that you never lived in the first place.

As Charles Bukowski said, “find what you love and let it kill you.”

Nothingness of life, might seem abstractly, contrary to what I just asked of you (i.e absolute involvement in life) but it is almost in tandem with the same. It is more of the chalk that you use to draw the boundary around how involved you are in life. Perishability, holds true for every animate object.

These are things I never want to forget but as an envelope to this rather long letter of life lessons, what I learnt can be summed up rather concisely by this alteration to Carpe Diem. Seize the day, before it seizes you.

No women's day, please?

No, I don't want to talk about how women are mighty because we squeeze babies out of our vaginas, or how we fall and rise each time we are struck, no sir, I've had enough of that jargon.
I believe that all humans are a ball of magic and might, your existence is the sign of your might as that tiny sperm. Since then, your survival through a milieu of life incidents, is an indicator of how wondrous you are.

Gender has nothing to do, with wanting to be proud of my battle scars,  gender has nothing to do with how we get through our daily struggles, gender has nothing, zip, zilch, nothing at all, to do with being celebrated.

I haven't responded or wished anyone today, because I don't want a woman's day.
I don't want a train bogie or a percentage of jobs or a seat in a bus or seats in the parliament either, reserved for me.
I want to get that seat in the parliament, get that job, by the sheer dint of my hard work.
I promise to put in my best, only if you promise to treat me the same way that you'd treat another prospective candidate who is not of the same gender as me.

Women's liberation is not about treating us special, it is just about treating us equal.

Don't give us a day, to be celebrated, don't even celebrate me actually, just stop oppressing me, stop treating me inferior.

Level the playing field and I promise, we will all be game.

Nonexistence.

(Forgive the language, I'm writing this at a moment when I can't handle my emotions, sentiments or my tear ducts.)

I am baffled while I battle this crisis.
It is more of a breakdown of a life situation into a crisis. 
I am running away from this conclusion that I have come to.

Life is nothing but blocks of moments which are nothingness once the moment has passed.
Think of it, once a moment has passed, it is nonexistent. It only lives on if you think of it. The anticipation that surrounds an event in the future becomes nothing once the event has passed, that event, becomes nothing. It is all, nothing.

Memories are such an abstract entity and at this moment, it is making me cry that memories are all we have and how do I keep my memories, how do I feel they were real? How do I hold them with my feeble hands, how do I stop them from slipping and falling out. Please stop memories, please don't go, please stay, please become more real than just a cloud of thought in my head.

I'm in pain right now. Miserable amounts of pain thinking about how desperately I want my mind to stop pick up each memory and sink into it all over again. And I can't, the helplessness that has covered me all over because I can not go back, is mind numbing right now.

Our lives are nothing but a collection of memories.
Should I be happy that they've passed and there might be better memories in the future or should I be sad that they're in the past and they're never coming back again?

She undid her bun. She undid her bun.

It was an unusual obsession,
Something you wouldn't realise till it was pointed out.
Her bun.
Her locks were evasive, while they stayed in that bun.
Black, brown or orange.
No one ever found out.
It seemed fairly normal,
like a sweater made of yarn,
That her hair was never open,
but always in that bun.
"Damned bun!" He thought,
Dreamed each night of black molten lava pouring and gracing her shoulders, if she ever undid her bun.
Her reasons were misleading,
The sweltering heat, she said
But only she knew the bun was,
Where she hid her hurt instead.
The bun held all the stories, she hadn't spoken about.
The bun held all the fury, she had never let out.
The bun held all the pain, that peirced through her pores.
The bun held all the sorrows, that on her heart had left sores. 
The bun held all the failed dreams, like pollen in a dandelion.
The fear of being found out, the fear of being discovered
And her hair never left the bun.
And then one day she thought, she could undo the bun for him,
Facing him she stood, gathering all her courage,
Closed her eyes because this,
Would feel like pulling a molar out with callipers without any anaesthesia.
She felt something loosen, a wall break down,
The dam had been broken & the water came swirling out.
But her hands hadn't moved, hadn't even touched the bun;
Aghast,
She opened her eyes and saw the satisfaction written on his visage.

He had only tugged at the stick holding her bun.