CRYSTAL BANGLES

In the dark corners, in the fake lights, amidst the sleeping lives,
Lie the weeping whispers of an unknown
Lie the wails of a soul so lone…
Cold she is, shattered is her heart, broken into shards of countless crystals,
Flesh and nails grinding inside,
When time and time again she begged
“Not anymore… No more…. No more….”
Until the voice inside her, died..When the devil’s foot pounded on her head,
Gnarling teeth, devious hunger, vicious wetness
All over a withering soul,
Crushing her hair, once long black locks
Now no more, now no more…
When the womb that bore
The cursed life now
Wailed from her bosom
Once the vessel of elixir for
This broken life, this unwanted life
Uncared for, unseen by
That bears the mark of Satan and his sons,
Where was that god, some god who said
“Everything happens for goodness”
That’s all…
Where is this moment, draining into the ocean of virtues and all that’s good?
Where is that god, where is he lurking?
Is he lying in a corner
Too high, too stoned!
When everything went dark, bloody, painful and empty
Where was the one who gave that royal princess
An extra yard length of dignity, when she was stripped,
and stripped of Spirit and love
For an audacious audience of courtiers in the darbar of pleasures..
Does he favour the royal, does he incline for the beautiful?
Oh but she is none, has never been one
And now will not be anything .. No more..
The shrieks ring in the head, the pain tears the heart to two
Of hers, her body’s, her self’s, her being ..
All I can see with closed or opened eyes
The kerosene lamp that gave the wretched glow
On that fateful night,
When a woman’s honour was the doormat of the ceremony
And a mother’s tears
Became untold of…

~ for Kunjammi


( this poem is for every woman who has had the misfortune of being snatched of her life's dignity mercilessly.. Kunjammi is just one among the millions)

And they thought Johnny Depp was a loser!

After an explicitly “short” hiatus I return back with a thought that might disturb many of us when we read, bringing back memories of the worst days of our lives. The ignominy of having to get hit on your arm till abrasions appeared on it just because you screamed out across the assembly hall the name of your best friend and you were just five years old. A five year old who didn’t know how loud her voice should have been when she was playing with her friend just on her way to the class!
Years back a shocking controversy had appeared about a teacher locking up a student who had barely reached a “double digit age” in her car in Dubai and the child died of asphyxiation after being locked up in a car which had no glasses rolled down for hours. How much can the small lungs of a child’s take up carbon dioxide was aware to everybody else other than that woman. Of course if she was a tad saner, patient, prudent and a caring person all that was required were words of caution accompanied with a soothing touch and stern voice to keep the child a lamb in the class!
Corporal punishment shouldn’t alone be banished from the decorum of school teaching. A patient person should only think of being a teacher, just like a compassionate human thinking of being a doctor. Teaching is the best profession in this world as far as my convictions are concerned. No adult is going to remember a teacher for the words of scorns that pricked her/his thoughts like thorns! All the teachers out there, never a consider child worthless and make it a subject of your incessant verbal and physical torture just because he/she does not possess the caliber academically. Remember Johnny Depp was a school dropout at 13 and well I needn’t continue with who Johnny Depp is today right :)
I have had the luck of having a few teachers who were gems of people and a few many more who were worser than rotten eggs! No offense to the latter since they have brought about nil effects on me and my ability to solve mental maths with their blade edged wooden scale tactics on my tiny pink hands which did turn redder just to add to the woes of an even more sensitive mother of mine. All that comes to my face is a smile partly of pity and partly of ridicule when I think about them. And those days. And now..
Parents and teachers are the creators, the moulders of an adults perception of the world, his/her life, his/her thoughts about living here and having to deal with this enormous task and emerge out a survivor. No amount of comparison is going to help a child become a better human being tomorrow. It definitely hasn’t helped me, for a while it just gave me a rather unhealthy competitive spirit which I find if anything futile today! If a child is taught to deal with his/her problems in their own way instead of asking them to adopt the techniques used by another child especially when it comes to studying, if she/he is assisted properly in this mammoth task of having to fit in the proper crowd with helping hands and loving words, there is no amount that the person would thank you later on. I am indebted to those who have instiled in me that I am a winner even if I’d score a C in my term exams.
Teachers shape one. Ones interest in subjects be it history, language, science, music and the highly intimidating mathematics, a teacher is one of the very vital people who can guide you to your choice destination in life. And no form of insult or squidging a pen between the developing knuckles of a child is going to make an individual reach the spot faster. All that it helps achieving velocity is in the construction of the pile of frustration that can be induced in the adult as a consequence of the trauma that was once attained because of an ill tempered teacher.
I take this opportunity through my blog to thank all my teachers (no doubt, especially the angels among them) and also reproach through my thoughts the ones that ridiculed me and hit me till I thought I was a loser until my ever growing confidence and faith creeped in..
“ We are beautiful in every single way, as words cant bring us down”(courtesy:Christina Aguilera) .. Neither can flogs.
To every adult out there, remember every child does carry the sting and the kisses you give them in their heart on an equal measure. They are the adults with a better and bigger conscience than us...

Kitchen "Kursed"

For all these days of not exercising my grey cells to pen down a few words or to even think about a topic to ponder over ( or for that matter to even attempt reading anything remotely interesting!) I am glad to know today at least that I have one great woe of mine to share with you all. I don’t know how many women share this with me because my revelation hereby is not going to find me a great number of female allegiances as far as the woe of cooking is considered.

Yes friends, I apparently belong to that category of women (gawk at me or not!) who particularly do not take immense self pride in saying that “ I know how to cook Chicken biriyani and Paneer Mutter Masala and Chocolate truffle pudding all within a matter of two hours!” (My dad has a reputation of doing the same though, precisely speaking, a bigger number of dishes within the same time span!) because firstly I don’t know how to cook all the aforementioned and many more items and secondly why waste energy, time and sweat for a party when these can be readily ordered as takeaways from a nearby restaurant!

As far as my culinary skills are concerned I can quip up things more than just for my survival but I vehemently yet unwarily turn a blind eye towards actually crushing ginger and garlic in a mortar and just add plain “apna” readymade ginger garlic paste. Well of course the former does tingle the taste buds better than the latter but really why do I want to feel relaxed eating my own chicken curry when I have already perspired a litre in the furnace called kitchen in the heat of the Indian summer, when I can treat myself royally to Chicken Ghee Roast from a deli and pamper myself like a baby.

But I have always and still dream of having my own food show someday, a food travelogue combining the two most fulfilling entities of human life: food and travel. I don’t watch Nigella Lawson and Curtis Stone without a tad of envy , I find Bourdain a little too adventurous for my taste, and Kelly’s Chinese cooking is, erm well, a little complicated for my brains. My green aura doesn’t even spare Kairali’s Lakshmi Nair! The colors, the textures, the cacophony of tastes that could have probably melted into my palate had I been blessed with immense patience and culinary intelligence never forget to drift me into the hedonistic world of FOOD!

Lets say I am a wannabe Epicurean. A wannabe who is too lazy and clumsy and shallow to try to enter the kitchen. The only shows that I would probably stop on while surfing the television (which I rarely watch nowadays) are cookery shows but when my mother orders and sometimes requests(which almost borders reprimanding and later on imploring) to help her in the kitchen, all that I end up doing are: a) wash the dishes and b)sit on the cabinet comfortably and gossip with my poor mother who has to manage grinding, frying, washing and gossiping simultaneously making her Superman’s Twin Sister!
They say , the dominant gene of either parents definitely gets transmitted to their offspring as far as Mendel’s rules of genetics goes by. Even Mendel will go Mental seeing how I have connivingly disproved his theory as far as the disposition of my “cooking genes” are concerned. Both my parents and to an extent my brother are excellent chefs. They quip up the most innovative and lip smacking dishes in just hours. My brother has a special knack of making a continental dish out of, lets say, even biscuits and chocolate powder which makes me look like a fat and frustrated middle aged sister!
Today evening my friend narrated out the recipe of Paneer chilly over phone and as she ranted and raved on enthusiastically about how thick every piece of onion chopped should be I was dreaming away as to how I would write about it! Silly as it sounds, I replied back with an impish grin, “You are so talented!” At the end of the conversation I only remembered that Paneer chilly was supposed to have paneer diced as cubes in it (Or is it!) Another friend of mine who talks about preparing Idlis and dosas in Australia for breakfast, almost has me on the verge of tears, when I come to a self realization that I am a loser for a woman.
Then, I shake up from the ego smashing rut and muster my guts up and tell myself, that I am going to take over the reins from Lawson and mesmerize everyone with my food and charms ( provided if I have any by then!) and be The Queen of Food , someday… And then I think about having to patiently wait and stir onions till they are fried crisp golden brown over a hot stove till my hunger is suppressed with the smell of a materializing dish and physical fatigue and immediately I thank God for home deliveries with all my heart as I thank Him for electricity and anaesthesia.
P.S: Don’t stop visiting my place hereon. You shall never leave hungry. What are restaurants for anyways ;)

And now I see many eyes lighting up.. Many smiles widening.. Heat flushing out from cheeks (and in some cases paling of the same too)…
A.J has forever and will also be forever famous for its DJ than anything else(by the way our institution is supposed to produce doctors for souls unaware).. I don’t mind being a martyr for my words but then who cares, am not a puritan myself and am inevitably undisguising all our selves hereby. Having been lost in the rhythms of the “inadvertently” oft repeated music (I bet Bhool Bhulaiyya’s Hare Ram is still being played by overenthusiastic DJs in AJ ) myself too, in ALL of them, I have no right whatsoever to preach against these once in a while let-out for every frustrated soul called doctors!
But herewith, I would feel my blog incomplete without ever mentioning about the one( well people its just a figure of speech, apparently three or four every year) event, every medico(kittens and lions), every till –then-highly-revered doc, every attender, every live wire lecturer, every student from another college besides AJ wait for… The AJ Ball (as one of our professor had ridiculously put it once, reminding me of Pride and Prejudice ballroom scenes in Surgery clinics).
Of course, of course, this post would would be nothing but INCOMPLETE if the clash between The Dental and The Medicos of Kuntikana on every DJ night ( leading to either party being called MC’s , BC’s, MF’s and a plethora of other “honourable” words), is not reminded with a tad of pity, the extent of which can only be imagined, with what once, the Dentals even inviting the cats and dogs of Mangalore to attend their “Highly Priced and Exclusive DJ night” except the withering souls of AJ Medicos (sigh). That night we leaned against the grills of our window listening to the blast and the hysterical screams coming from a distance (seemingly near which was made infinite) like Shah Jahan looking at Taj Mahal after being imprisoned by Aurangazeb.

Anyways, we do get our fair share always ( maybe more after the unlucky ones like us left the college) but to all those who were& are In Da Club/House, here is to you, the memories of people who are always encountered in the luring dungeons of a club.

The Elegant Eleven of AJ ki DJ.

1) Let me start on a good note. These are the ones who are timid on the dance floor but gracefully flexible on stage. Disclaimer: these do not involve the self proclaimed official invertebrates of AJ. They might just move their hands a little here and there maybe a little hip swaying but all the more concentrated on maintaining their regal poise on an otherwise chaotic dance floor. I call them The Royal Challengers of AJ (punch me in your mind if it sounds cheesy).

2) These set of people are the exact opposite to the ones mentioned above. Nature always blesses the audience by not making these kinds attempt to venture dancing on stage. So they unleash their piled up wrath on the floor and ravish the place like Godzillas. I have had a poor friend of mine get hit on her head by a notorious dancer, otherwise “reserved” pal leading to a purple mark the next day on January 1 2009, on the former’s temple (ouch!) These are the kinds who irritate every single dancer out there by constantly extending their hands and legs in wayward motions like a possessed clock and hit people repeatedly even if the latter are screaming in pain. The Excuse: Partttaaayyy. Lets get it all rolling! Roll, but not on others faces and derriers and limbs please! These truly are The Daredevils of AJ.
3) The next set of people are the ones exceptionally good on dance floor but not necessarily that well versed on stage, in some cases. It’s a pleasure to watch these charged souls on floor and get inspired. These don’t hit another, Thank God for that! They are in their own world, grooving to the music in their own way, swaying their hips ( that’s girls, not boys!) and quite unwarily luring another ( that’s for boys, not girls!). They dance as if nobody is watching them. The Chargers of AJ’s DJ.
4) The next set is the Hilarious one of the lot.“The Hysterionics”. They dance as if they are in a bathtub with a hair dryer switched on. Or for desi standards, with the heater coil on in the shower. They seem apparently normal but once they start dancing, even if they look like Sharmila Tagore or John Cusack, people run away to get diazepam for them. Their style of dancing: erratically vibrating bodies, jittering jaws, rolled up eyes which makes them look like they are about to collapse on the other but on the contrary makes the one dancing with them run around for help. They want to get somewhere and someone with their controversial moooves but their situation is as unstable as that of Cochin’s( or is it Gujarat’s) embryonic Rendezvous team.
5) The Royals of AJ. This group is not a group as in a group. The group has been mentioned here because these kind of individuals collectively put together can after all be a group. Erm.. Forgive me. These individuals are the “stealers” of the show. Psychophants often hype about their fluid- Jackson-like movements and hail them as the best dancer AJ has ever seen. And once they start dancing, even if its fisherman’s dance, they are cheered because the ones cheering them are challenged. They dance in the repetitive mode. They are cheered also for the repeated moves. Repetitively. Aaahh too many repetitions. Getting a brainfreeze!

6) The Grouper Troopers. No matter what, these people will never dance alone or with anybody else, save their own customized group of friends. They create their own DJ Family and make boundaries linking hands together, like animals creating their territories except that they don’t pee around their group. Of course the girl groups are pardonable in the lot since they don’t want a dope to intrude and grope them. But what about the ones where an entire batch consecrates themselves into this groupism on floor. As if the worlds going to end right after their dance and there would be no tomorrow for them with their “family”! Music knows no bounds, guys. So does the limitations of these people. Music is the only element that brings the world together people. When will you all rise and shine?!
7) The Doppergangers. This can include the dopes, the drunks, and the wannabes who cannot sustain either. They are under the impression that clubbing is synonymous with rave parties! They mess around shaking the rest of the clan’s integrity. They are also, needless to say, The Strippers most of the time. They cannot dance with a shirt on. Its against their law. They go around threatening ” to kiss the gals” and sometimes the guys if their dope induced vision is too clouded! These guys have an aversion towards peace and bump onto every girl and jump on every guy who tries to be “the hero” . Verdict: They are totally not cool, if that’s what they think they are.
8) These are the haughtiest on the planet of AJ and DJ. They come flashed up in their heels and cocktail dresses, gleaming belts and gelled up hair, pert noses and lifted chins and when it comes to dancing they’ll wiggle their bums, resign to fatigue and the lack of quality of music (we know you don’t belong to the McCartneys) and sit around in a corner dismissing the ones who are enjoying. Ironically, these are also the people who have a self induced Madonna and Timberlake in them. But they are always a big failure when it comes to displaying their steps. The Kuntikana KnightRiders is what they deserve!
9) The spectators of the night. The observers. The silent ones. Every gathering, every family, every group of friends, every classroom will have such notoriously observant ones. They are the holders of secrets of that night. They sit back and observe who is dancing with whom, who is making out with whom, who is slapping whom, who is oggling whom and the ilk and pass verdicts in their mind (sometimes voice it out too with a dragging tone, only to humiliate the subject of their talk). They comprise of the shy ones, the clever ones (who are under the illusion that their brains will fly away with the gusto of the party), the occasionally tired ones( these don’t preside as much though) , the ones who want to dance but are certain to break a bone if they dare to attempt so and optimistically speaking, the Mary Poppins who are just too happy to see you enjoying to the hilt. I christen them, The Shadows ( if you have a penchant for beautiful words feel free to use The Silhouettes)
10) These group of people wait for the right regional song to play, to display their legs wide apart, butt jutting out steps. They seem to be doing balle balle and the rooster or Snake dance but apparently get the two fused up. They scream and pout and get their tongues out when Jeene mera Dil Lutteya and Manmadha Raasa are on air. The rest of the crowd better part their ways for them or else the next foot to be thumped by these mercilessly enthused people would be yours. They are the attention cravers of the lot but for some reason I prefer calling them The Bloopers ( you know precisely why).
11)These are nevertheless not the least ever, just because they are the last. Save the best for last is what I staunchly believe in, even when it comes to food. These are our erstwhile professors, some who come to enjoy( don’t mind these people at all), some who come in the name of enjoyment but are actually undercover agents in disguise for the Central Bureau of Casualty , some who are not as clever to disguise and appear as the aforementioned yet come to protect a certain outwardly naïve group of girls, some who come to vent out their frustrated souls with a certain vengeance in every possible ways. I pity myself fully aware of the fact that tomorrow I too might turn out to be like them. Since they are almost fading away, I am uninspired to give a name for this group.
I would like to quote what I had read once, as an after thought to my post.

“ We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.”

As Ogden Nash says, This is still a hope hopen for AJ ke DJ!

Menagerie...

No love is everlasting than that of a true friend’s….
And this true friend could be anyone. From my mother to God to a friend in a distant country to friends with whom I have grown up and cherished my rights and wrongs with, to teachers, to siblings( my brother once authoritatively claimed that He is the best I could get)and to pets, I know that the Love in Friendship is the only kind of love that would journey with me to my pyre. And am truly blessed to have, if not a big number , but some very few Gems in my life.
Friends are like pillows. The more you have the merrier you are. But only one or two would be your princess pillows. The only ones on whom you rest your head whether it’s a shadowed day, a migraine or a state of pure bliss and lightness or when you just want to sleep in the bus.
I always tell, I have a rather colorful variety of acquaintances, which sometimes does make my actual friends doubt about my sense of discretion on people and thereby often astounding them. And the subjects are:
a)people who talk to me and vice versa because either of us are bored, to even think {unavailability of more interesting ones could also pass lol)
b)people who I talk to because I don’t want to hurt their fragile selves with my silence.
c) people who I listen to because they are an inevitable source of entertainment with their taunting and reckless display of vanity which would have otherwise camouflaged an innate, imposing, insecure nature.
d) people who I am with because I don’t have to necessarily speak to them and be comfortable with our silence.
e) people who are with me because they don’t want to hurt me by ditching me!
f) people( this is indicating the “stronger” sex) who talk to me because they are talking to Me and people whom I talk to because I am talking to “Them”.
g) people who were my supposedly great friends once upon a time but on who and me, ingratitude, pride, envy, possessiveness, misunderstandings, expectations, callousness and an all too soon feeling of purposelessness has descended in the relationship thereby rendering it a memory worth deleting from the rusting recesses of brains and peeling chambers of heart (yet are following me on twitter!)
h) people with no sense of commonness whatsoever between us, from another land across the seas who make me feel great for who I am.
i) people from another land, another generation who I talk to because they feel great when they talk to me.
j)people who I talk to because I remember these shadows in tuition classes and class rooms somewhere in my distant past ( this is the group who rarely exchange a hi and bye with me yet are on my FB “friends” list)
k) novices who were “ always there” in the vicinity but became much more visible when a good length of separable distance came between us making me regret my narrow sense of vision and judgement and maybe the lose of good times we could have had together , till then.
l)people who I maintain connections with, for the sake of revival of good old times and for the blooming sense of nostalgia our conversations could bring to a perennially dazed state of my mind,
m)people who had committed the mistake of betrayal only to regret it and water the almost wilted plant of friendship later on( to not much avail,though) and last but never the least,
n) people who I talk to, not because they want me in their lives, or because a similar effort has been made from their side but because I wouldn’t want to lose them for who they are to me and to the world.
I thank all these people for making me who I am, irrespective of how good my encounters with them were or are. If it was good the memories are worth remembering and if it was bad the experience was worth having , to learn a lesson in life.
Honestly, my reticence and introversion have led me to lose many a fanciful and influential relations especially with the senior crowd, often diverting their opinions about me from amicable to arrogance and on this, contrarily, I honour myself. For being me and not stooping down to the level of a trying-hard-almost-getting-there-tart.
But I also do regret sometimes when I have bullied people with my words and disposition, shamefully dating back to my childhood onwards. Forgive me, for to err is human and to forgive (from your part) would definitely be worth considering Divine ;) Destruction is easier than construction, after all.
People like me,of course, would need a networking site with separate categories for friends and acquaintances, whereby the number of acquaintaces would be in three digits and that of friends in a humble single digit. Anyways, I console myself, as books and friends should be few but good, lol.
To end,I love my friends for who they are. Even if they don’t measure upto the norms of sensibility set by a seemingly straight society. We laugh together, we sigh together, we sing together , we make up after a fight together with an arrogant “Ok Sorry man” and…… of course we choose to fly together, against the currents of times. All because we belong to the same flock.

The best mirror ,is after all, a good friend. :)

JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure | Video on TED.com

JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure Video on TED.com
An inspiring talk by J.K.Rowling at Harvard's Graduation 2008.. A must watch!

Love and Circuits.

“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by Imagination.”
Only a 17th century philosopher like Voltaire could have summed up Love ( the most intricate subject to be discussed besides maybe free will and religion) in a rosy sentence like this. Reading this quote might take you to The Italian countryside or The North of France where the landscape is embroidered by silk. Needless to say, I hope you can imagine how picturesque that is going to be.
I have always been fascinated by love. Every sensitive being is! Near and dear ones call me foolishly romantic, especially now that I have attained age and am still waiting and not searching for the right one(searching is what parents do anyways, lol). But despite all my hopeless romanticism and an excess dose of reading about love and its various manifestations and the power that it can render one to create and destroy the world around oneself at the same time, am still perplexed about its intricacies. Just like I was confused about solving circuit problems in high school Physics. Ah! The joy when I’d solve a circuit problem, all by myself! Like a patient boy always waiting for that Ultimate model of PSP to quench his dreams, I believe patience is the only virtue worth giving a dime for, when it comes to love. And again, needless to say, I have had my constant questions about love in that patient period of waiting, seldom doubting its virtuosity, sitting like a brooding lion, grumbling that True Love is as synonymous as Perfect Human Being { friends know that too ;) }.
Yeah its old knowledge, that nothing is perfect. Carpe diem for love too, maybe. Seize the apparently right man/woman and make them and the love perfect, just because your logic tells you so. After all, love grows within oneself and another as years and experiences pass by. Hats off to those who have loved each other more after getting hitched. After all a person is only worth his/her trust in this world, trust being a compulsory luxury in a relationship, thereby determining the integrity of everything.
But what strikes me hard is, how a cold a business marriage( which “love” should after all culminate in) can sometimes get, making me wonder , does love even happen at all in such cases! Can love be arranged? How can soul mates be assigned to one on the basis of location, educational background, financial assets, the number of siblings and last but not the least , religion and caste and sub caste! And of course, HOR(ROR)SCOPES! Now that’s the paradox of living in India. We are meant to be the most romantic people in this world maybe third to France and Italy, yet we seek for love, not on the basis of its essence or the happiness that it can give us on being with one another but build it on the norms society and superstition has created to bring forth glory to itself! ( So I doubt the meaning of that “title” too, in return)
Maybe I might be right, maybe I might be wrong, but its better never to make a commitment with the wrong person, just because you would have missed the ”golden” chance if you hadn’t, than to bear the brunt of yourself and another soul and push the cart without having the energy to oil its wheels ,forever. Better feel alone single than with another!
Sometimes I feel, if free will was as overrated as sex and marriage, perhaps happiness would have been more prevalent. Most of the crimes done unto another and worst of all to ourselves, are done, because we do not know what we want and even if we know deep inside we are not willing to do that in the name of compromise. That stands for love too. We compromise in the name of religion, wealth, education and in the most foolish cases, looks.
People tell me that I should be scared that at 24 am still single, but I don’t know why, they still fail to intimidate me. Mulish that I am, I know that I cannot make out my soul mate from a picture, which could be airbrushed and retouched, or a profile ( which could again be airbrushed and retouched, if you know what I mean lol) from a matrimonial site. I wish I could. Life would have been a lot easier then. There would have been lesser stints with my parents who are dreaming about The Day with much more vigor and eagerness than me. Meanwhile I am still singing “Somebody Save Me!” as if drowning into a pool of quick sand(lol).
Only a good friend can be a good companion forever. Love is a friendship set to music. Maybe two bodies one soul and two hearts that beat as one, needn’t work out. After all that would, kind of, make us twins. And I would hate to live with anyone like myself!
Love, to me, is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Love happens to a person, it cannot be measured, sewn and worn like a dress. It is unconditional. I believe that it is not love when one feels restricted. Because to nurture one another and to grow up with time, one needs space big enough to fly, swim and stand and sleep (if not that much, at least sit and read lol). Any extra baggage coming with it should not be given the benefit of reconsideration. Only a perfect sense of understanding can mend any problems in this apparently beautiful world of love. And the position of one’s planets and its timings has got nothing to do with it.
Anyways, I congratulate all my dear and near ones who have found their love and I wish the rest of them, including myself, happiness whether love comes their way or not. After all, if we don’t get The One, The Dream still persists enough to give us bliss!
{P.S: It took me four hours to furnish this post, considering the sensitivity of this issue, so kindly bear with me, as you are bearing the heat of summer in India right now, if any contradiction still persists in this post or that which can happen in the future. After all I am just Vibina, not Voltaire ;) (and I still keep having nightmares about circuits!) }

Perfection in imperfection

“The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photographs of herself.”
As true as death. As in the words of Simone de Beauvoir “One is not born a woman, one becomes one”. And that commences with her perception of her beauty and the rest (which can get longer than history). And of course, becoming a woman is a mammoth emotional task. Especially when the question in limelight is her appearance. Beauty is anointed into her from her days of childhood and her mother’s lipstick becomes her favorite crayon. And the journey begins from thereon, spraying asteroids into the path of her emotions, occasionally.
Ironically, when I was in a salon myself, I had this question popping into my head,.. “Whoever came up with This perception of feminine beauty?” That a woman should not have flesh yet should have flesh.. That a woman should be curvy but not with tyres.. That a woman should be HAIRLESS! That too without visiting a parlor, without having to go through all that ripping pain of being waxed! That the perfect beauty shouldn’t have a zit. Skin glowing, hair shining. That a woman’s lips should be as rosy as when she would wear a Night Valley Red shade of lipstick, without actually wearing it!! That she should have the perfect arch of eyebrows, without ever getting herself plucked! That dark circles under a man’s eyes means that he has been thinking too hard and under that of a woman’s, intends that Nature is taking away the first thing It has gifted her since her birth- her beauty! And WHOEVER coined those silly two words.. SIZE ZERO! Why should a woman have a figure that would make her vanish into thin air and have that called perfect!
One should enhance ones looks, all right. After all girls just wanna have fun with their palette of colors and their bottles of perfumes and their high heels and ruffles and chiffons and as J.D.Salinger puts it up in Catcher in the Rye {this is for the platter of men out there} : If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody. J
But today my post is intended to girls and women alike out there who take their beauty far too seriously to make it appear annoying, rather make themselves the butt of another’s ridicule, out there, because somehow they forgot to sharpen their minds while filing their nails. For instance, I have seen on my FB homepage about how “nymphets” update their status of how sexy they feel when another girl looks at them with the word Bitch in their Eyes!( I need a break! ) and how girls think beneath all the compliments they get for being beautiful, how very much people understand their apparent “goodness”( ooh..la..la…She is so deeeeepppp) If this is what education does to women under the cloak of emanicipation, to revel in one’s own looks and degrade the essence of another being gestures with contempt and suspicion respectively, all owing to their apparent possible misunderstanding, then goodbye to liberation from moi!
Beauty is a parcel only secondary to ones wits. Consider it a “get 1 free” offer, if you have passable looks. Being sexy doesn’t necessarily mean that one should pout and flutter and sound husky with a balloon for a head sans vulnerability. The heart of a woman and the head of a man, that should be the dictum for the best of them. Without any intervention by vitals and other unnecessary numbers. Period.
Be pleased with the way you are, because I personally realized that no matter how chiseled your features look in a photograph or how good your hair shines in the light you just aint gorgeous when that glint of joy is missing from your eyes, which can only spring from the happiness in your heart. The pressure from the society to have pore sizes on one’s face not larger than a certain millimeter should be done away with, just like garbage.
Think happy. Not feel good about some unkempt illusion. Feel grateful when someone compliments you and not think further and further and further on about it endlessly and flash it on others social networking homepages about how much of your beauty they actually see, because hey who is going to wreck their noodles upstairs thinking about anybody other than themselves in this bad, mad and wild world where the only word that rules is WIN!
The truest gift to another is a portion of oneself. And that can only be given if one is happy with oneself. I accept or I better accept that I can never be 5’11 and 50 kgs to attain happiness. Or else I know I might lose my mind someday. Lose pretentions and break the rules, coz if your are never going to be ugly, you are never going to be beautiful. Like my dad says, “ Beauty and brains should go hand in hand for a woman, and that’s what I call Balance .”
Let me end this with one of my favourite quotes:
“They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.”
And modesty it is.
{ P.S: I may not be the best person to write this, but I still love my frame J }

Okay fellas.. Let me give a prosaic beginning to this post of mine :)4
Fatigue and my own temperament had receded me into the couch with my book and television today and as I was surfing the channels, I happened to chance upon a documentary in Discovery channel about a certain tribe in India and am extremely sorry to notify which part and et al details about them but that excerpt kept me pondering about…Life…and the various familiar anonymities that surround it……
Okay I know I am deviating into wayward philosophy so let me get back into the track…. It was about the lives centering around an old man called Hauro and his wife, who live an earning by making bamboo artifacts. Of course since I evidently missed a chunk of the show all I could make out was Hauro buying the colours to celebrate Holi , which has of recent become a part of their tribe’s culture. Of the tribe drunk and dancing around a bonfire and celebrating death (I am praying that you don’t ask me why death and Holi have been celebrated together by this tribe, coz as in the movie Mr.Woodcock that is going to be a rhetorical question) .
The question which set me thinking though, was not about how free, women were in that almost uncivilized and small society ,set in the backdrop of a jungle , when they could drink and dance just like men, in front of men and a bonfire to their bliss and hit their men on their heads if they crossed the lines (ahem this is not my creation or fantasy!) or their custom of hugging the souls of the dead ones by searching for them in the lakes where their ashes were immersed, which in my opinion was borderline Futile…
What set me thinking was how inconspicuous these people were.… A set of small, brown and hardened people whose faces never betrayed their emotions…the extent of the obscurity of their presence in this big yet small world where men and women are mad alike, trying to pull their children into a position which would be realistically beautiful yet more competent and crazier than their present situations tomorrow… Of how these people were happy despite of their nothingness.. And that made me ponder.. Are we happy with everything or nothing. Are they small in our big and anxious world or do we appear nothing in their small and happy world?? … Or do we strive a lot to achieve that sense of everything, when that is as Utopian as perfect man and world world and in the bargain lose the joy that even small things could bring us everyday just because we overlook them in our run..Of course so many questions remain unanswered and so many questions have an answer but cannot be made acceptable because they don’t make enough of meaning to us… To us sprinting in the tracks, jumping over the stones and hanging onto each rock desperatley trying to reach the winner’s point ….
Well living in a country like India can set any thinker’s mind into a constant state of contemplation mode because not only is India the land of colors and chaos alike but confusion too… Confusion in the name of paradox… Here is a country where people dump the day’s food under a tree because that would make it stale and not usable for the next day and have children in rags searching in that dump for a nice piece of fish! Or have you ever considered how “good” you felt after walking out from a mall with a Levi’s and Reebok bag in your hands only to see little muddy children running up to you, clinging and “asking” for change to spare for their meals( which of course is later on snatched from their tiny hands to feed the Bigger mouths of The Beggars Organization of that city!)
Of course if you haven’t, I am not going to ask you to stop and think and pause and ponder over all these a while because hey, who am I to stop you from enjoying and being happy… After all, Doesn’t life go on……..
But somehow I have been ,I think bought to this earth by God, at such an odd hour that I can never enjoy the pleasantries in my life without looking at the graying pages of it..It has always been like eating a gooseberry and mind you it is not just the big things in my life, which I feel I ,have rather, got undeserved, but the very trivial things that I have always craved for and which somehow loses its colors and glitters after a few days, not because they are old but because they fail to give me the sense of happiness forever…
Nothing is imperative in this world except for adaptation, maybe…. We all have dreams, illustrious ones, in the glory of achieving which sometimes we forget to make sense.Man lives covered by a veil of illusion until he tries and starts living and interacting with reality and its pressures… What Hauro and his people made me learn to day was that happiness is a much more frequent visitor than sorrow, except that we ignore it more than its melancholic cousin..Happiness is a state of mind… No matter how big or small we are, in the end we all die and life is too short to think about making happiness happen in our lives when it is already there… waiting for us… to be a part of our lives….
So people I really don’t want to continue being over-philosophical and ruining that little pool of happiness that’s already left in you( trust me am really good at it!) but all that I want to say is cherish every smile that you receive and every smile that you give, even if it is to a stranger, because these are the moments that make up that journey worthwhile….…

WRITER’S BLOCK…..
Now that is a word most of us, who may not necessarily be blessed with excellent penmanship but think that we are going to, in the words of Seamus Heaney, create history someday with the squat pen resting between our fingers and thumbs , are familiar with, almost akin to a mind block when one wants to scream in retaliation at that one person who whisked away the love of our lives but find to utter dismay ( and an inevitably occluded larynx) the intended and well rehearsed words suspending in mid air hovering somewhere between our eyes and theirs.
Often I, myself, who is a helpless victim to this interminable disease, find myself under the control of inconsolable anguish when I am always lured by the mental picture of a book , a pen, a table lamp, me and my unending thoughts writing away dreamily, but am constantly dragged away just because I frankly don’t know HOW TO START! So if you have ever chanced upon my blog post all you can see are three or four posts (but of course who am I lying to about the reasons for that lol).
Yeah, yeah there are various other reasons too but honestly when I see my friends mailing me beautiful poems and tagging me in their ever funny blog posts I always think, “ And so you think you can write,Vibina? :)
So here I was finally waking up, post a long drilling alarm, breaking my knuckles, breathing in deep, closing my eyes only to open them and stare at the blinking cursor and the bright white Word page in front of me…….
CLOGGED .
BLOCKED.
And to top it all my mom had had arrived into the room with the telephone just in time to put me into The Deodorant Situation…..Highly pressurized, highly flammable air waiting to burst out yet locked in a small tin can …
Calls keep flitting in and out. One aunt’s call ends in another aunt calling. Same old topics discussed with the same vigour, same languages but with different second and third persons. Again I stare at the blinking cursor. Again at mom, again at the blinking cursor.

And then it happens…… Why don’t I write about the one thing that is blocking my ,apparently brimming mind…..Nothing but that all pervading black veiled soul in my sprouting mind, THE BLOCK….. With a sweet yet nailing vengeance and drive him [no offence to sexist guys..You can make it a her, maybe in your article a next time J] home with the message “Go Away” when I clearly know that he would probably be the uninvited guest tomorrow of all. And just melt the ice in the bargain so that it wouldn’t freeze anything else at least for a few countable days !

So folks presenting to you my latest creation….

No. I wont pronounce the title once again. Lest I corrupt your flowing mind and my just- now de-clogged counterpart with the “B” word that most of us are bitterly aware of….
[P.S: Don’t you ever complain to me about the lack of “depth” in this article lol ]

COMEBACK....

"Better late than never....."
So that explains this late bloomer or rather procrastinator's excuse for not updating any of my blogs until ,say for months{thereabouts}, of which I myself do not have an account. Laziness, work, unavailability of connections, temperaments and the ilk are what I owe to for this stretching period of absence... So here I am once again resolving ( You know, I know, that they are eventually meant to be broken, a naked truth ;) ) to keep updating my thoughts, my encounters and my anecdotes replete, possibly, with pictures ( now who am I kidding ;) ) on a recent ( I am not promising you a-daily anymore ) basis.
So keep watching this space now that I have broken this block of ice :)
Sayonara............
V