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.

Manure

Today I realized why holding manure in your hand, can be the best life lesson there exists.

To experience how inconsequential you are, dig a compost pit and create manure. Every time you regard yourself as someone more than significant to the working of the universe, find some manure and hold it.

Manure is, what we are. Manure is, what we will eventually become.

I am not driving questions at the lessons of self worth which most of us have been taught really well, but a rather subtle reminder, of how the significance of each individual is the same. At the end, each one of us shall decompose to become the same manure. Maybe some of us will yield better manure than others but we will all become the same.

Each one of us, so involved in our lives, with egos the size of mountains, forgets this fact.

Being someone who suffered from this disease of misbelieving that the world rests on her shoulders, I can safely be considered to be one of the best persons to sermonize over this.

It is necessary, to realize who we really are instead of the inflated versions of ourselves, that our ego makes us think we are.  It is also necessary to realize what an infinitesimal role we play, in the gearbox of space and infinity. Holding manure, seeing the ocean makes me see my insignificance. Makes me see that though I might fret over being ignored by my nemesis at a social gathering, the earth will not stop rotating on its axis, the stars will still twinkle at night. It makes me accept the status, which technically equates me to an ant and a lion, all at once.

Nothing drives home the principle of uniformity in diversity, better than this thought of how trivial, we all are.

“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:19)

Chronic urge to run.

Something is absolutely wrong with me.
Or rather something is finally right with me.
I guess I can devote this clouded phase of mine to a case of the blues.
God alone knows.

Coming back to the phase, I think I have a split personality disorder.
One part of me, is elated about new work opportunities and things like that. The other part is absolutely frustrated with the prospect of new assignments and loads of things to deal with.
Basically I am frustrated with the prospect of life.
I want to buy roller blades, get skinned knees in the process of learning how to roller-blade. I want to spend a year wallowing in abstraction. Doing random things.
In fact, I have a list for the same.
1. Train to be a bartender.
2. Learn how to do a headstand.
3. Go on a Satvik diet for a month.
4. Go bald.
5. Step out in an ice blue colored wig for the next twenty days.
6. Watch Aurora Borealis.
7. Go visit a nude beach.
8. Try and leech onto a person. (By leech, I mean cling to them, quite literally.)
9. Make a will.
10. Buy and try one of those pills that are supposed to make you loose weight.

I want to run away from my mundane existence. I want chaos. I want the dreary black and white in my life to be filled with the vivid colors of chaos and trouble.

"What did you learn from your time in the solitary

Cell of your mind there was noises distractions

From anything good and the old prison food

Color my life with the chaos of trouble 'cause anythings better

Than posh isolation I missed the bus you were laid on your back

With the boy from the Arab strap, with the boy from the Arab strap"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuNLJ1I1-vw

Repair Centre

A week into hostel life & I feel like there is a tenant in this personality.
A loner is hiding somewhere behind that excessively jolly visage.
I look at that face and something pierces me.
Something invisible & something painful.
That person is fake. Trying so hard to be THAT someone that they aren't.
Trying so hard so push life into dead situations.
Trying even harder to smile her way through things which she knows will not work.
It's like she has been given an appliance that won't work and she tries her best to hit that machine, throw it around make it work. But it won't.
It is like every situation in her life is like that appliance, refusing to work out.
I try to run a finger over that face. It feels cold. It is my face.

So I lament. Cry. Scream. Do all that I can to make it work.
Spend almost all my day in that exasperated situation.

But then I start writing.
My mind clears up.
"The clouds burst forth & it began raining".
That rain soothed the roughened edges of my mind.
Quenched that pained, thirsty side with an answer.
I had tried everything but this-

I put in new batteries into the appliance.

Look at me now.

There comes a point in everyone's life when you don't have options.
When you have to deal with a situation at hand in the only way that you wouldn't want to. When you learn accepting. Accepting things, circumstances that in no way appeal to you.
That make you question your point of existence.
You eventually have to learn dealing with things. Learn how the tough get going when the going gets tough.
And you won't learn unless you experience that once. It can be learnt only the hard way.
You'll learn how to rapell only once you do it. The theory about it won't take you anywhere.

The reason having provoked this side to come out is living in a hostel.
No one makes my bed.
No body picks up things from the floor which I keep chucking here & there.
No body clears the mess that I make of the table.
No body tells me wether a grey pair of jeans goes in sync with a black t-shirt.

All that dependence has just disappeared. Gone away to some distant far off place.

It's a total paradoxical feeling where I wish I could lean upon someone allover again & another part which is glad that I'm finally dealing with life on my own.
And for now I'm off to find entertainment, on my own.

But I'm still a child.

We all go through an array of emotions on seeing a 4 or 5 year old. More specifically keeping aside the "Aww" & "How cute" the predominant feeling is that of wanting to run back to your days as a child, savour each & every moment as it passed.
And that's why most of us believe in those cliched quotes which revolve around how we always wanted to grow up as kids & how as grownups we want to go back to our days of glory!

Coming to think of it, like everyone else, I wish I could too.
Run.
To those times when no matter how you dressed up no one would be excessively judgmental about it. Nor would you be over critical about people & their choices, their clothes, their dressing sense, their theories about life, their philosophies, their traits.

To those times when a guy you shared your crayons with was your friend.
Now even despite sharing a mother, there is animosity between brothers.

To those times when the one task which would leave me in a tizzy would be nothing but colouring inside the lines.
Not endless submissions in school coupled with expectations & pressures.

To those times when 'being cynical' were words which I would eventually learn to spell.

To those times when the only things I had to choose from where the clothes my doll would wear.

To those times when everything could somehow become a thing for your parents to deal with.

Ma

So maybe these thoughts just stem from extreme laziness & partial inadequacy in living life as I inch closer on a bridge to being a grown up. Yes, this point of view definetly comes from the fact that there's a part of me completely unprepared to face life as such. Unprepared to leave a mind which is still holding on to the last remains of innocence. Unprepared to live a life where nothing will shield me from disappointments. But someday I actually will be ready. I'll be armed. To become an individual. I'll be ready to grow up. :)