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