Sleep

Innocent laughter mature into dirty jokes,
naive letters into witty one lined pokes.
Silly fights turn into ugly unspoken conversations,
shrink from never ending rambling to lethargic half sentence formations.

Fluid love metamorphosed into frigid protocol.
Mere remains remain.
Broken shards of glass but the past reflected vividly.

Is it too soon to muse? Oh worrisome unreason.
Venture we must into life, lest we stagnate.

They meant, once, the world.
But now they become one with it - loathsome treason!
Now, terrify me; compel me to feign.

Even though I fought to prevail,
my emotions sought to breathe.
Forgiveness met the knives they threw,
which slit my blossoming spirit through it's sheath.

Complains to step towards growth,
with hope for the crawl to burst into confident strides
But change occurs when permitted
Success transpires when mistakes admitted

Is it a crime to change?
(And worse to take them along, they say.)

Fortune shone on you so you never really looked.
Hope gave a hand that you never quite shook.
Life was right inside, you never embraced her -did you?
The world was watching and that's what kept you.

That made you one with the world.
Deem that acceptance if you will.
And you shall become them, fast asleep.
While I sing my lonely song - at least I grow, even though I weep.

Better late than Never #1

Rachel Getting Married

There are those movies for which people book tickets to watch in cinema halls.
And there's movies that you probably download to watch in the comfort of your rooms. (OMG! Illegal?)
And THEN there are movies that just happen to make it to your movie collection and you have absolutely no idea where they emerged from but they're there, reading 'Rachel Getting Married', and you watch these movies out of sheer curiosity- and hola! - turns out these are the ones that are real cinema.

Take my word for it.
Innovative, heart wrenching, real and unashamed. These words can only begin to speak of what this movie might seem/do to you. Anne Hathaway does, rather normatively, take your breath away but she's not the only one. The screenplay ( by Jenny Lumet) is truly commendable- makes you experience the entire film in its deepest vein, making you feel like a cinematic virgin.

The ambiance is perfected by the cinematographer who did Monsoon Wedding's. (Note to self - put that on download) Boy, does he know weddings inside out or what! To stitch together seamlessly the hustle of any marital house and allowing the central plot to still retain it's strength is talent talking for itself.

For those who need an entry point into the movie simply because they're as lazy as me and need unhealthy doses of encouragement: Kym (the protagonist, Anne Hathaway) returns home from the rehab to attend her sister Rachel's ( Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding. Through Kym's incompatibility with the "dysfunctional" family, the past is slowly unravelled and the viewer find herself in a rather uncomfortable place. What ensues is everyone's attempt to grasp the present and make their own peace with it - Does everyone find the answers to their questions? Does everyone succeed in finding their 'peace' ? How do the past and present interplay and which one finally won?

Yes. Hope that made you itchy enough to find out for yourself.

Trivia: The film was initially titled 'Dancing With Shiva'(courtesy Wikipedia), which wouldn't be a surprise if you can make the necessary connections as an aware viewer. *insert childish laughter*
Anne Hathaway and all the others wear sarees at the wedding and various other Indian influences are apparent - I dunno - just interesting to note.

Check this movie out if you're bored.
I don't want to build it up too much.
Forget you ever read this and just watch the movie and permit it to surprise you. Move with it.

Noise

At the end of the day, we're just adding to the noise.
We talk, we ask questions, we pretend to have answers, we resist, we follow, we conform, we rebel,we think, we think deeper, we observe, we change, we listen, we laugh, we make others laugh, we relax, we loose it completely, we get it together, sometimes we give up, most of the times we try hard, we don't succeed, we try harder, we do, we care, we don't care, we do what we want, we do what others want; we sleep, we walk, we sleepwalk, we run, we race, we discover, we learn, we forget, we recollect some things, we hide, we share, we scare, we get scared, we feel sad, we feel happy, we share bonds, we envy, we eat, we overeat, we digest, sometimes we throw up;we try to reason, we make good sense, we get confused again, we create, but mostly, we destroy, we sing, we dance, yus, we do steal things; we get fascinated, we get affected, we affect others, we add, we subtract, oh! we multiply, we mess up, then try to clean up, often we look back at the big fuck-ups and we laugh, we drink, we get high, we get low, we bend, now and then, we break, we please ourselves, we judge, we ridicule, we are judged, we are ridiculed, we jump up and fall down.

But in the end, it's all only noise.
Sense carefully.

Leaves

There's a purple in my mind.

But the black and it's blinds
prevent the smile from reaching my lips.
The brown rags tie me down, grind
with the steel machine,
don't let the Sun touch me on my tips.

Out of the hills, into life

Sunsets. Always a reason to be back home on time.

I have always had a knack for doing things differently. I guess we all do, in one way or the other.
But I have also always been a rather indecisive and frisky person and that's why deciding to spend my entire summer vacation in rural India pursuing the  Grassroutes Fellowship was not the easiest decision and much contemplation went into choosing to do it. (Even after discovering I'd cleared the apparently fairly challenging application process.Yep, I just said that. This is for those narrow-minded, self-important skeptics who might carry certain judgements about any achievements one might make in this sector :) So, I decided to throw myself in an entirely new universe for a little more than a month and work not just for my own development but take the others along as I did. I must admit though, that I was rather unsure of what was going to find me and, conversely, what I was going to find. But that was probably what made the whole journey as thrilling as it turned out to be. This was also going to be my longest time away from home all by myself. But I almost never have qualms about that. Doing things differently, you see, becomes much easier if mommy dearest isn't looking. Hehe.

And so it started. After the orientation at Bangalore, which I will come back to if I am able to find time, I boarded the train to Haldwani from Anand Vihar Railway Station in Delhi. I was late and there was a rainstorm. It was an early morning train and on my way to the station, I was almost certain I was not going to make it in time. I managed to find the train on the platform, boarded the first coach I saw and WHOA! it started to move. Most dramatic train-boarding ever. "Is this something of a forewarning?" I thought to myself. I made a mental note to be a little more careful towards the strappy thing wrapped around my right wrist. It was a beautiful ride till Haldwani, from where I took a bus till CHIRAG in Simayal gaon (village), which is where the Head Office of the organization is located.

The Haldwani Railway Station

Now that I think about it, it would be extremely hard to chronicle the time I spent there following a day-by-day pattern. When I think about my time there, I think about incidents, I think about people, I think about conversations and I think about the various places where I encountered each of these. A major reason why I thoroughly enjoyed my time there was because I love to explore because I genuinely believe that I can learn from everything I experience, everyone I meet and every place I get the opportunity to see.

Nothing Natural

Looking out of my wooden window painted white, I saw the brown wooden barks of trees that grew in my garden. The trees seemed somewhat misplaced. A little too neatly arranged. A little less familiar. Rather secluded and hardly reasonable.

And then, I was compelled to wonder if at all things are reasonable. The world seems to be trying so hard to convince me that it is so - that there is something about the human race, with its paramount intelligence and incomprehensible capacity to innovate that makes it, if not special, less ordinary- yet I somehow manage to sneak glimpses of its idiosyncrasies and loopholes every now and then.It's as if there is an apparent human order that is all-pervasive yet somehow there are always elements that are left out of this amazing compulsive and allusive regime. Is it that which we all watch it but don't allow ourselves to see.

At this point, I plugged my earphones into my ears and started listening to Radiohead. And looking at the scene outside of me and simply by myself and my thoughts, I felt as if my mind went into something of a trance. It's that feeling when your mind gets a kick out of nothing, and a heightened sense of everything. The lyrics begin to make perfect sense, the sound of every drumbeat and the strumming of every chord is heard to the extent of being felt and its a state that is purely achieved in the mind. In your mind.That was the state of my mind.

My mind was preoccupied with the thoughts of nature and how we human beings are so detached from it nowadays. How distant we have come to be from our physical origins and how much we would have to change our way of thought in order to bring ourselves closer to nature. And then my thoughts drifted to how that music was so therapeutic to that disturbing chasm between Nature and us.

But then it revealed itself to me, the fact that us and nature are not too far apart. We are nature herself. We may be one of the many million forms she is experimenting with and each one of us is 'natural' as the rest. since we are products of nature's scheme of things (the scheme, from whatever little I understand, is to simply create and flow with things) everything that we think/say/do is eventually an off-shoot of nature and that is how we are mere agents of evolution for nature.

Think about it before disregarding the point of view completely. It is very difficult to separate man from nature. It might be easy to classify plastic and 'artificial' and 'man-made' but I think it to be simply non-biodegradable. And leaving this particular case alone, it may not always be hazardous. Music, for instance. There is nothing natural about it, per se. The instruments were created by man. The sounds were all man-made. Their usage to create sounds and modulating voices to go with the music - what part of all this did 'Nature' teach us?
If you gather enough strength to deconstruct everything, you might be able to realize that even one of the elements - Fire , its creation and controlled use can then be understood as 'unnatural' in some twisted ways.

What I intend to stress upon is that the lines we simplistically draw between Natural and Artificial and correspondingly acceptable and unacceptable may not always be justifiable.

It might be slightly uncomfortable getting used to this idea at first but it might help in maing us all more tolerant and a little more creative.

All the Same

So, I discovered today that certain somebodies in the 18th century British society decided one fine day that they were going to redeem their society of all its dull wit and excite the spirits of what can only assumed to be a rather fatigued lot. They felt the need to publish a set of essays that would be read by a certain class of people with the the objective of making it "part of the tea-equipage." Together they undertook the lofty responsibility that would require them "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality..."

The two gentlemen being referred to in the above lines are Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. They were powerful icons and undoubtedly two individuals who were crucial in the process of shaping what their society's intellectual collective came to be. They were admittedly yet subtly; and rather remarkably prescriptive in these journals, which were known as Tatler and The Spectator. Prescriptive of the code of conduct, philosophical debates to be carried out and perhaps much more than we can even fathom. The journals were seems as educative in many ways and the gentlemen achieved what they claimed to have aimed for - "to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses."

This discovery of this fact made me slightly queasy. Imagine the kind of control the then-society allowed publishers and authors to have over their social and intellectual lives. Being led by a set of individuals and letting them steering your train of thought - what a grave violation! Permitting them to twitch the society's rationality as per their personal aims and ideals made me sympathetic towards the readers of these papers/journals. What a crazy thing it sounds like , to allow oneself to be influenced by something that a set of people should influence them -heh- Wait. What?

And these were the exact thoughts that led to realize that WE are subjects to the exact same cerebral tyranny. Simply that the two minds have been replaced by fancy, layered, structured organizations. And the mediums have developed and changed to great extent. The crux, however, remains that the black and white letters that we lay our eyes on on a regular basis (think newspaper!) are ultimately popularizing their own interests and preferences. They create an image of what they feel should be, which is usually something obviously admirable. What is most admirable is liked by people, evidently. That then, becomes the idealised for the masses. And this merely perpetuates the conceptions of perfection in the minds of people, rather than allowing it room to grow and evolve.

It has, as Russell Peters and other great men have often claimed, been put in our heads by the Media! Articles, adverts, analysis and editorials, are , if we consider the larger perspective, somewhat prescriptive and expect their audience to mould them according to their representations of reality.
And let us just face it kids, we almost always do.

Just saying.
Excuse me, I must get back to reading the papers now.

Sun, shine!

So Delhi University resumed school today. 21st of July. One "epic" day it was supposed to be - it was all over the radio stations, people were excited about it, girls were over-dressing for it, god only knows how many Facebook status messages were made about however many people were psyched to return to college.


 First off, really, guys? You could find nothing better to do in the last one and a half months - NOTHING better than attending classes and chilling at the canteen, trying to scrutinize what the girls around you are wearing or saying so funnily that it makes you wanna call them witches and the word that rhymes very much with it?
Secondly, freshers, darlings, what on EARTH are you thinking wearing that shiny, almost metallic dress with stockings to college , accessorized rather unpleasantly with that Beaver or Bergere hat. OR whatever it is that you may call that UFO that junior of mine had unleashed on her head.

But talking about my day. Must admit, it was quite pleasant, very unlike the weather and that sense of impending doom within me. I have scared thoughts about my results that might be coming out any time now.

The day started with a long ride in the metro, which I quite like. AS long as I am with myself and by myself. I usually dislike company on the Metro. I like my quite, alone, contemplative  time so I can sort out the things and thoughts in my head. I did reach college late.

Maybe it was just me who was judging these parents who just can NOT let their little helpless girls come back from college by themselves. It was pretty ridiculous that they made time to be and WAIT at the college gates to receive their daughters, so they are safe and away from all danger.

I think this is something the human race in its entirety needs to improve on. Get rid of their fears. I do realise how much easier it is to say the same through this medium, but it is so essential that I can not stress on it enough.

I met some old friends and I always like the days when I do. I like also the fact that they remember me and are willing to spend some happy time with me.

 Before leaving college, however, I came up with a few ideas about what I probably could feel for the Anna Hazare movement. This was because of the debating society auditions of course.

Well, I am supposed to speak for the motion for the topic that I feel that the Anna Hazare Movement is a regret for us. And for someone who is beginning to loose interest in him, I think it's quite an ideal topic.
What I feel about the Anna Hazare Movement is that it is unconstitutional in its very foundation. He may find you in the Administrative services but he wont. He would have loved to find you in the army but he wont. However, throw in religious fanaticism and much politicization of various structural issues, and we get the Anna Hazare movement.

They do not form a body that is legally or constitutionally permitted and their protests are a very obvious and a huge threat to the government in power and even though I agree to the fact that competition and criticism is essential to the well being of a democracy.  However, we must realize that unrests such as these destabilize the government in power and divert there attention to less important but seemingly more significant matters. The country, therefore, at a larger scale, does not benefit from exercises sch as these.

Finally, I must say that adding a religious shade to this canvas of campaign against corruption is something none of us would expect a good 'Civil' servant would do. And Anna Hazare has certainly and very evidently pulled that trope into the whole game, thus rendering it highly competitive, obvious and politically rather 'mucky' if I may say so.

In addition to that, we must realize that Corruption is an evil we all detest strongly, however, it is not a practice that people can simply be made to 'quit'. It is a deep set of values, en grained in our minds, a way of working that a system gets adjusted to and needs to be phased out with intelligence and persevering attempts rather than frenzied protests.

And with this I shall draw this post to and end. However, plethora of ideas in my head.

Up for revelation tomorrow: My theory about how we can change. Each and every one of us. Think about it before you read my post tomorrow. :)

Smells like an EVIL spirit?

The humans aren't too different from bloodhounds.
We are naturally capable of smelling our prey, innately programmed to spot our potential competition and sufficiently equipped to eliminate all possible dangers that surround us.
Let's face it, we are not too different from other living beings that have lived, struggled, relished and finally died on this planet.
However, what nature has bestowed on us, we often forget. In the process of evolution, we all have been given the ability to know what can harm us. Now what is harmful may be different for different people. But that is the beauty of this intrinsic quality; this 'Inner Radar', if you will. It is the reflection of our deepest values and beliefs.
And what I find to be the best part about this ability (and which may be the worst for many others) is that no amount of brainwashing can change it.
We can sense danger and then choose one of the two options available to us -either to face it.

At war and under progress

A state of war, is perpetual. War can perhaps be ultimately traced to the natural human tendency to compete and thereafter, a strong urge to win - eliminate the other to gain control, to emerge victorious to be able to win accolades and more , to become what the society has come to regard as the Hero. Power to those who fight for it. Power to those who kill for it.

Competition is engrained in our every atom of existence, taught to us at every crossroads where the sense of self goes astray and so we've come to view it as one of our many 'natural' instincts. We have come to accept it as a way of life. You ask people what they live for and they don't hesitate in accepting that their life's biggest achievements probably revolve around achieving more than most they know.


 War, however, can be seen to have no advantages to the majority of the population that inhabit countries across the globe. There is loss of life, there is wastage or resources, the repercussions are hazardous and in spite of all this, the result is never definite.

However, in all its ugliness, ruthlessness, apparent irrationalness war is a healthy essential for development and progress. Most importantly and sufficiently paradoxically, war in a lot of ways is a means to progress and development. because what war essentially does is contest the existing power. It challenges the norm, it destabilises the prevalent dynamics of power. The lives taken, the resources exploited, the money eshausted - these are all instruments that we, as a race, must employ for the benefit of the larger populus, in order to safeguard the .
War is bad for what it does to its soldiers, but it would be outright hypocrisy to not attribute the safety with which we sleep at night to the the entire exercise of war. The positivity of war is certainly difficult to foregrounded as war is occurring, because the  loss of human lives, the destruction to the settlements are difficult to ignore and the sudden advocacy of a notion supporting such a deed seems disgustingly utilitarian and the immediate human response would be to refute this school of thought as a whole.

However, if One reallly puts their mind to it, it is easy to see that this is wha the Human Race has been soing over the years. WE condemn war, because of all its grotesque consequences on face value , but have we been able to eliminate it? Have we has any alternate solution? Why does Peace remain an idyllic term? Why is it that NOT ONE person , all through the ages, through the modern times , not a single person of extraordinary intellectual strength, extreme political awareness, absolute social awareness has been able to provide a feasible solution to this armed, organised fighting?

Because we need to fight to figure out who wins. Our means may be flawed, but this is our best bet.
War answers a lot of questions. ANd most importantly, war is the manifestation of the friction that exists between us humans. The friction whose existence we can not deny. The friction leads to creation - creation of new ideas , new ideals and the parallel retardation of old ones.

Et Cetera

I absolutely must get things sorted. NOW. I have to remember what Osho once said. Meaning exists only if it is created. It isn’t something that I’ll chance upon or something that’ll be magically revealed to me.

Everything is inside of me. I just need to recognize it. Like this sudden expression of emotion. I did not know I had it inside me until now.

I am far more comfortable in a known place.

This brings to my mind the documentary filmmaker we had the opportunity yesterday – Samina Mishra. She had made a documentary about 'Home', the concept of it, the creation of one’s identity , the influence of religion on one’s identity.
“Home is a place where one feels at home" , she had said. These words stayed in my mind for what can only be explained as an intrinsic connection.

I feel at home, at peace by myself. I have fun with people, alright. But at the end of the day , I wish to be with myself. Perhaps I like myself more than I realize .

I love watching movies with me, getting addicted to TV series with me, drinking with me(though I will confess that has led to much trouble in the past, enough to scare me away from it for the time being), listening to music with me, clicking photographs with me. Me and I usually have a lot in common. We have great fun together.

But when I’m around others , Me and I seem to run in opposite directions. And I get so messed up. My brains stops functioning smoothly, seems as if some nuts have gotten loose or some bolts have suddenly disappeared. The friction heats my brain up, it locks me up and isolates me from all the fun I am capable of having. And I realize that I am falling into this invincible, unending trench of skeptical thoughts. It is unsettling. And sadly, it is not as pretty as they show it to be in the movies. I do not have a Brad Pitt for an alter ego. Nope. It is just me.

There are no blacks and whites. Its only those films that tell us that. Real life is mostly grey. In fact, it is ALL that exists in this world. You can read in black and white, watch in colour, but we all come back to grey. We are made of grey. We behave grey. We live within the various shades of grey.

But the simple formula to live without this confusion would be to remember that one dialogue from Mirch, a movie I recently saw. The protagonist says that the “market” as such would not cease to exist. SO our challenge is actually to play our own game and use their rules. This may strike some as a slightly passive approach to things but I think it makes sense as far as getting things done is concerned. An important part of life is about getting what you want. Of course, the entire ordeal is finding what it is that you really want. But once you want that, you must play by certain rules to get there. There cannot be speculation about doing those things, because if the rules don’t exist, then Anarchy will rule us, which, as a way of life appears quite  a daunting challenge in itself.

I must accept the moment I live in because living through it is the only way I can reach the future. (Alanis Morissette? :D ) Every moment in itself is complete. And every moment is also a part of the larger scheme of things, the "destiny" we are creating for ourselves and others. (Read the Mahabharata and you'll know).

But we shall get into that later.