Jinxed

It all began on new years’ eve,

Our home we decided not to leave,

Followed by a tedious term paper deadline,

Our body clocks we were forced to realign,

Disillusioned by results, marks we had not received,

Secluded in our apartment we lay, heart broken and slightly peeved,

Followed by desperate attempts to produce a better dissertation,

Times of confusion and endless bouts of procrastination,

Unable to focus on neither work nor play,

About this messy phase, I’d rather not say,

On the whole, the year was a total mess,

Memories that do nothing but depress,

More importantly, friends and foes were lost and found,

My world seems to have completely turned around,

Yet it seems life miraculously fell into place,

I’m forced to wonder, was it God’s grace?

The year is nearing towards an end,

Good wishes I hope the Lord will send,

In search of meaning and a goal,

On the journey called life, I continue to stroll…

Youth

Before I actually begin to write this, I must put out a disclaimer. That even though I recently turned 25 and the (premature) gray hair on my head suggest otherwise, I am a staunch believer of the phrase ’18 till I die’. In fact, every birthday I do a little jig and sing it aloud in the shower. Fine, I’m exaggerating; in fact I’m lying only to prove to you that I am not that old. In fact, I’m a kid at heart. I kid you not. But then again, who isn’t? My parents are in their 60s but sometimes I find them more childish than almost every kid I went to school with.

But the point is that there is something to being youthful, something that has little to do with how young you feel inside or how old you actually are but just with being inexperienced. Often, that has a lot to do with how old you actually are too, but then again it depends on what kind of experiences life threw at you. But just the mere idea of not knowing; not even knowing that you don’t really know…You are young and every time you hit a mile stone which seems like you are now a grown up, you raise your collar and walk all proud as though you’ve figured it all out and know everything that there is to know. For instance, the move from junior to senior school or may be when you get into college after school. You think of yourself as one of the smartest beings there ever was. You think your parents ‘know shit’ about the world today because they are from the times back then. You strut around the streets thinking nobody really knows what they’re doing but you actually do.

But as you grow older, you gradually lose all the pride and the smugness only to realize that you don’t really know much. Perhaps worse, you realize that not only do you not know but that you’ll never really know enough. Worst case scenario is the realization that you might know all you want; but none of it will actually protect you from the impending challenge called life. You’re forced to accept that the world is not as pleasant as you thought and perhaps never will be.

But truly speaking, unpleasant experiences aren’t all that bad if you think about what you learn, not just about life but about yourself. You may find inside you immense strength to battle everything and everyone around you, may be even yourself. The only thing worth reminiscing about is the loss of innocence. The innocence that lets you have faith in yourself and the world, the trust and affection with which you open heartedly embrace people around you without a thought, the pretty picture where except a few minor bumps, the world is rainbow colored and in every living being around you, you see a sprightly soul! Of all the things I lost on my way here, unfortunately that probably qualifies as an irredeemable loss.

At this Silly Moment...

The sickeningly-sweet fragrance of incense sticks,

To the mugs of coffee I constantly replenish,

At this silly moment, I truly, truly cherish.

The blandest, boring meals that I regularly pick,

Suddenly seem to be the most desired dish,

At this silly moment, to be restored to my apartment I truly wish.

This feeling of deracination is rather sick,

And particularly inexplicable; for this place is much better furnished,

At this silly moment, my thoughts are nothing but boorish!

Perhaps the chaos is nowhere else, but within,

But to disentangle myself from the world, where must I begin?

I always seem to find someone to blame,

Oh Lord, how may I stop playing this game?

Tired of being severely misunderstood,

Act differently? Perhaps I could!

But then again, I wonder if I really should,

Pretend as though there exists a sisterhood?

At this silly moment, this is my lament,

That however hard I seem to try,

The tears never completely dry,

On this self piteous note, I relent.

Familiarity

Dedicated to BB, a flat mate, a friend, a support system, a buddy all rolled into one mass, err…mess.

There is something nice about everything that is familiar. Not because you’re acquainted or that you have experienced it before, but merely because there is exists a connection between you and the object/subject which comes alive every time you interact; a connection that becomes real only when it is absent or when that which is familiar makes an appearance. What is seemingly profound occurred to me only when I happen to visit SA’s place, the house which was a shelter to me when I first moved to Delhi for M.Phil. A junior turned friend, SA, kindly offered to make room in her flat. Of course I lived there only 1 week but everything about the house is so familiar. Starting from the main door that doesn’t shut, to the tap in the kitchen which is always temperamental and the flush that doesn’t work…A similar story is with my flat mate. It’s funny how you can get so used to some one that even their presence just blends in with everything that there is around. They just exist around you, much like the heap of clothes, the piles of books collecting dust and the scattered shoes in ways that you hardly ever notice them. But mostly I realized her presence only in her absence, when she was lasted stranded at home due to jaundice.

And it’s all so familiar. The much too many yellow lamps, the green bean bag (the one which has been used to sit not more 6 times in the last 16 months) turned into a dumping ground, the ashes of the incense sticks on the floor, bundles of jewellery callously strewn all over the wooden stand, the wrought iron mirror that serves more of an aesthetic purpose than a functional one, the fancy (over flowing) jute dust bin, the earthen ash tray, the bright pink mat…things which seem so familiar because whatever happens, they’re always there serving as little signifiers of the inhabitant of the room, the markers of her identity. Her love for green, her ability to horde things, or perhaps her inability to discard the sentiments attached to each one of those things, her belief in aesthetics over mere utilitarianism and her disbelief in neat structures, order…the anarchy not just in the room, but her thoughts. Her everyday-struggle for permanence, establishing an order of her own based on renewed ideas of what is right and wrong, ones which are more meaningful to her than what the majority preserves through mindless morals and regulations too restrictive for her spirit so wild. In the cupboard that over flows with clothes, I see the heart and mind of a woman, forever overflowing with ideas and love, thoughts that she rather mull over while the world passes her by, and love that she willing to offer anyone who may be running a deficit in their lives.

In a room where things are falling apart each day lives a lady who is a pillar of strength, to her family back home and to the girl next door. Over cups of aromatic tea and frothy, bitter-sweet coffee and the occasional smokes, they philosophize traversing several fields…emotional and intellectual; sometimes frivolous and sometimes serious! Passionate discourses on regrets of the past, betrayed relationships, lost loves, impending futures marred with uncertainty as much as hope and dreams. Brought together in a little apartment by the need to share expenses of a household, when they are not philosophizing, they share the insignificant details of their mundane lives; the woes of not having change when you need it most to the stalkers in the streets of Delhi, the inane gossip of D-school to emotional atyachaars inflicted by friends and foes. Together they prod along the path to a brighter tomorrow, stumbling and falling, assured of a hand to hold on to every time they might fall. May be familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt; sometimes it’s the most comfortable place to be in simply because it’s all so familiar, almost familial.

Vague

I wrote this long ago, and it made some sense at the time, but now it’s just a vague piece about I don’t quite understand myself either. If it makes sense to you, good for you.

Everyone is scared of the dark. But darkness comes to mean different things to different people. Sometimes darkness takes different forms in the life of the same individual. Be it the fear induced by the absence of light, or the black cat that stares at you while you’re trying to sleep, or the failure that defeats you, perhaps mere experiences that are timed wrongly. Or that the timing was right but you were unaware. Retrospectively, some experiences seem to be blurry images buried in our psyche, perceived and experienced long before they are ready to be understood, rendering a dark shade to them, by the mere fact of them being incomprehensible. Sometimes you are to dig them out from the depths of your memory that you once tried to hard to hide or just lost them all along the way, only to realize that you are now left with interpretations that reek of uncertainty. What happened then seems to be more valuable than it’s worth, perhaps only because you didn’t know what it meant. And when you begin to become aware of its absence, you find a space left unoccupied by a more suitable replacement.

And when you stumble upon a replacement, you expect yourself to take off from where you left off. Unfortunately, the passage of time took along with it memories that seemed so insignificant, perhaps even wrong or meaningless. It is unfortunate because memories made sense in a nonsensical way, thereby fitting perfectly well in the moulds of my innocence. Today I look back and the canvas that once seemed so colourful seems to be painted over by splashes of darkness. As I write this, I begin to uncover the life I once deeply desired before I changed my paths. What I am not sure is whether I am actually on a road less traveled or merely lost my way...

To All the Cynics of the World

This post is dedicated to all the cynics of the world, who I’m increasingly realizing are a pretty lame lot. Excuse the judgemental nature of my thought post but I just had some realizations and I’d like to voice them. It seems to me that cynicism is just a way of being lazy. You keep telling yourself that nothing good comes of anything anyway so put in all that effort? You tell yourself that all things (good and bad) come to an end just so don’t allow yourself to feel too much so when it actually ends, you are not surprised at all. It was expected, so duh?

But what seems to pass in the name of a ‘realistic’ approach to life seems to be just a way of being comfortable in your lethargic skin. That, or perhaps the complete inability to give life the opportunity to let you believe otherwise. If you’re comfortable in believing that life has little to offer in way of happiness, why live at all?

Strangely, I see a lot of old people who look really happy. I suppose they’ve been through the worst and they know it can’t get more fucked up than it already has. And if it does, they have the strength to deal with it. They are not anxious anymore. A good instance perhaps is my father. Even though I shall hold him forever responsible for handing down to me his paranoia gene, he seems to me like a happy man. At an early age he had to take on the responsibility of the household, marry off his younger sister and start a family of his own, a story common for people of his generation. Life doesn’t seem all that stable from his point of view because he often lost jobs, lost children leaving him with little stability and no real reason to be happy. But every time I speak to him about how I’m unhappy, his only advice is, ‘don’t take so much tension, we take too life seriously but life is really to have a good time’. I cannot help but wonder, where does he find the optimism, the courage to let himself be happy when life never offered any evidence to believe otherwise? It seems like as life gets more comfortable, people cease to explore their own limits, the limits of their hearts and minds. You’re so comfortable in your zone that you are too scared to even try, to reach beyond your self and see what life has to offer by means of experiences. To give yourself completely to something is take a risk, a risk that no one is willing to take nowadays. What a bunch of wimps!

Being Liberal

It seems like being liberal is the hardest thing to do. After being a humanities student for almost 6.5 years now, I am now qualified enough not just to exhibit the insidious workings of social institutions ranging from religion to marriage but even quote a whole bundle of theorists who have a problem with the way society seems to be designed. But often it seems like the problem with being liberal is that there is no end to it. If premarital sex is not an issue, why have sex only when in a committed relationship? If casual sex is not a big deal, then perhaps we needn’t expect our partners not to cheat on us? If open relationships can be comfortable, why be in relationships at all? Perhaps it’s not worth risking all that emotion into a relationship only to suffer heart burn when it ends. May be I don’t know enough about relationships, but I find it hard to tell whether the critiques of social structures elude the emotions of individuals or emotions of individuals try to elude a critical approach to their understanding of the social structures. It seems like the worst part about being liberal is the constant sense of conflict in your mind; once society and its ways are rendered meaningless and illogical in a never ending discourse of ‘critique’, there is nothing that can help explain why you feel the way you feel; the only explanation could be that either you’re not truly liberal or you’re not liberal enough (just yet). Most of you thinks everything is okay and acceptable while a tiny part of you grapples with that little voice in your head that causes a strange feeling of uneasiness. I suppose it’s a journey towards change you’re expected to make, a journey to a place where nothing really matters. Not even being liberal itself.