Ruby Woo and the associated insubordination

(It isn't wrong to say crises can make you or break you. Whatever I am, as of this August, reflects the slew of emotional changes I've been through over the past few months. The direct manifestation of this rather obnoxious disturbance was my inability to express. I have been extremely distant from my usual articulate self.

Today, though, something stirred within me and the corpse of writing was bought back to life.)

A smidgen of a deep purple lipstick, black eye liner, shimmery eye shadow and a bindi that overshadows thinly plucked brows. This is what the appearance of an average lower income group Indian woman has come to. Income classifications aside, Indian women have begun wearing makeup and I for one, could not be happier.

I have originally been the sort of person who associates makeup or any upkeep in appearance with anti-feminist notions. In sharp contrast, more recently, I have moved on to regarding even a dash of kajal as a secret handshake between women, saying, “Hey, this is the uprising we are a part of.” Having witnessed scores of women asked by their fathers/brothers/husbands to not wear ‘loud makeup’, a bold lip is my favorite symbol of defiance on another woman.
I do not care if you can contour like a supermodel or not, but seeing a maid wearing a nice pink lip gloss, makes me feel like she is overlooking the drudgery of living with a unemployed, drunken husband and accepting her responsibilities as the sole bread winner, proudly.

 Also, this is in no way discriminating against women who do not wear makeup because ultimately appearance is a matter of personal choice, but nothing satisfies me more, than seeing ten different women with the most intense and intricate winged eyeliner in a crowded Churchgate bound train at 8 am.
Multiple Indian middle-class women finally reaching their global counterparts in makeup application might seem like a vain idea but it signifies the snail-paced but growing voice of the Indian woman who is unafraid and unapologetic about her red lip terrifying you. And yes, she will wear it as often as she wants to, lest you sexualize her or her sisters.

Winter mornings.

"Remember when you felt so cold that you were convinced that no amount of heat in the world will ever make you feel warm again?
The chill that gripped your knees when you rode pillion on your dad's bike as he dropped you to school.
Your school skirt, sans a divider, awkwardly riding up your thighs while you sat straddling the seat between your legs.

Initially, the cold air had a bite, but twenty minutes into the ride, your legs were numb enough to not feel a thing.

The goosebumps moved along your body as quick as the sensation of pain advances across synapses to get to your brain and convey that the steel ladle you just touched, was extremely hit.

Initially, you kept expecting divine intervention where a gust of warm air would blow your way, but twenty minutes into the ride you felt the chill grip your vertebral column. It wasn't exactly that but it did feel that way.

This was 1995, twenty years back.
Today morning, you said you don't want me anymore. It was an illustration of how life comes full circle, because when you said "it is over" all I felt, was that feeling on the winter  morning, when I was convinced that no amount of heat in the world, would ever make me feel warm again."

Letter on NYE.

Dear inexpressive container of a sensitive soul,
Things don't HAVE to follow a pattern. You might be the loner on New Year but you're also the girl who enjoys sitting in a club and writing in her journal. You don't need to do things because that is what is expected of you. You can defy clichés in the less hipster and unpopular ways.
You might hurt at nights but what is important, is living in each moment, soaking it in. Not, counting your breaths till you die.
The most simple things can actually be the most comforting and happiness inducing, if you allow them to work their magic.
Don't chase. If you need to, pursue. But don't chase.
You do you, and this time not as a catchphrase but really. Do you. Because nothing else will free you from the pain except the comfort of being yourself.
Don't bring the sadness upon yourself. It is always going to be in you, to move on. So move on.
And don't get dejected. Count your blessings.
If nothing, you've working limbs.

Aim and work. Aim and work.
Brood lesser.
Hold in your hands what really matters and dust off whatever doesn't.
Force yourself to do the things you're afraid of.
And easy, please go easy on yourself.
Self criticism needn't transcend into a nasty self harming session. Stop directing malevolence towards yourself.
Stop seeking affection by making yourself sad.
People aren't going to pet you all your life.
I end with something I already said. You do you. Please, do you. Or there will be a bottomless pit of pain waiting to suck you in.

Yours truly,
A potentially more clear headed future self.

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.