True Grit

“Oh! It’s a girl! Yet again!”

A small town, a financially challenged house, the elder daughter recently turned 9, the middle one is celebrating 7 years of her ‘existence’, and wola! Here’s born yet another girl! Quite as expected, barring the smiles of the father and the grandmother, this third-newbie-girl is welcomed with frowns. The still-in-pain mother is looked at with helplessly sympathetic, and sadistically pleasurable eyes, especially when her counter candidates had been ejecting out boys in series.

Thanks to the ‘sexually and racially paradoxed’ yet ‘cultured’ society, it’s female stigmatization, it’s effortless efforts towards eradicating some of the social evils converting loud dowries into so-called sophisticated gifts - someone just got an unexpected twist in her motherhood.

Underneath some unsaid silences, and her clogged breath, she lies.. Bewildered

So what next! Advice and opinions galore: “Beautify the daughters, engage in socializing and the associated show-offs, sing in to the tunes of the vanity of socialites, needless to educate the daughters, instead save money and hook them up with the so-called perfect grooms of the town..” For some reason, in India, human species surrounding a person, especially close relatives, consider this their birth right to dictate how a person, having committed blunders like arriving at multiple-female-offsprings, should now succumb to their life-saver wisdom. And if you are a woman, and choose not to do so, you will be simply labeled unsocial and will be out-casted. But I do not blame the social creatures in this case, as they had absolutely no idea of what and whom they were dealing with. For the lady/mother in question had a plan, a sense, a grit of her own, ready to be put to test.

Battling with the storms of the heart, here begins the waterfall..

Post delivery, the mother resumes working as a full time housewife, as a full time mother, and as a full time school teacher, all in parallel. Father continues struggling his ways out at a number of places –Singapore, US, Middle-east. And the concatenated effort is just about sufficient to keep their daughters studying in a decent school, while worrying about what lies next, while thinking if at all there is any way to hit a reverse gear in life and start afresh. Unfortunately or fortunately there is not.

In the middle of all this chaos, the family gets some ‘special’ visits by their ‘so called’ –near and dear one(s), the ‘economically and socially well settled’, and hence ‘wiser’ people, proud about their earned or inherited riches, in the name of brotherhood, shower their lessons of wisdom upon the mother on how to keep herself and her daughters grounded, and not to get over-ambitious. ‘Unrich’ daughters, per them are the shaky, slippery grounds and should never be invested/relied upon.

But strange is this mother, who even after being warned so much, after being suffocated deep into the noise of the city, still manages to remain untouched by it. Needless to mention, the other ‘domestic problems’ which are a part of every marital life, are a part of her life too. 

Stupefied yet stubborn, she continues and challenges messiness head-on..

Days pass by, crises continues. At this stage, an already working mother, mother to 3 kids, the youngest one just delivered, in addition to her full time working job, opens up a boutique at home. Several months pass by, never ending crises still continue. And while catering to all of the above roles, now she decides to add some advanced academic degrees to her belt. This belt already comprises of a Diploma in Arts (one of her art works even got auctioned in an exhibition in Germany), a Bachelors Degree in Science, a Masters in English. She takes up Economics this time, as this promises good money. Money! aah! The need of the hour.  

Somehow she knows what her way is, and the way to her way..

Even in the chilliest of winters, she wakes up at 4AM, unapologetically, and mercilessly. She lights a lamp outside in the balcony so as not to waken up her family. In the silent fog of the uncertainty, she sits, unwary of whether she is going to make it or not, she studies unknown and unheard of concepts. Her grit accompanying her, her love for her daughters fueling her, and her shadow comforting her. Few uninterrupted minutes follow, and she gears up for the rest of the day. She hand-washes clothes, dries them. Cooks and packs food for all. Leaves for her job. Comes back to see some customers waiting at her boutique. Attends to them, attends to the just returned kids. Takes tuition in next few hours, followed by tuition to her own kids. And chores just don’t seem to end.

All this continues for days, months, until the exam-day arrives. And she comes out good. She is an ‘Economics Lecturer’ now! Her brilliance and determination wins over rest all oppressions.

She is her honor, she is her veil.. She is her lamp, she is her wick..

Meanwhile, the daughters are too busy growing up. Yet again, against the opinion of others, they are sent to the best school in a new city altogether. The Mother further aggravates her tuitions and boutique strategies. By now, she is used to seamlessly waking up at 4 in the morning, and to her never ending struggle motivation for ‘larger than life’ experiences in the rest 20 hours of her being awake. As kids have to now catch a public transport to land into their school situated in another city, she first drives the eldest one to the bus-stand, some 6 Km from the house, comes back, drives the middle one to the same place, for she drives a luna and cannot manage a tripling. She comes back, drops herself in her school, yet another 7 Km away in the opposite direction. Years pass by like this.

Her body, her mirror needs some time from her, but she has none to spare..  

The eldest daughter decides to pursue MBA from a reputed college. The mother, without a hitch, stands by her decision, and extends herself into the risk of taking education loan worth lakhs. Decision well made, this daughter is successfully running her own consultancy firm today. The youngest one, being good in vocal and extra-curricular activities, plans to pursue Bachelors in Mass Communication from one of the most expensive universities. The mother, after facing a lot of criticism, stands by her, and yet again manages the fees. This daughter after having graduated effortlessly is now pursuing an MBA.

The middle one decides to go for extra coaching classes to help her with her admissions into good engineering colleges. Mother borrows money from cousins, cousins do help, but with a lot of noise around that ‘girl-child and her education’ crap. None-the-less the daughter gets to sit in the extra classes. The first wave of comfort comes when she gets into a decent engineering college, and also gets scholarship thoroughout. And finally gets the real break of her life, when she gets through her first campus placement and eventually lands into one of the world’s finest organizations. Phew! That journey still continues while I pen this down. Thank you Mom! :)

Who says happiness cannot be earned?! Happiness for me is satisfaction and it was clearly earned, rather snatched from the odds! Whatever I am, whatever I possess –

My body – for I came from her, and her hands nourished it further and turned me into a young lady even before I knew I had entered into adulthood;

 My education, my professional well being – for she taught me, facilitated my education, took the right decisions even before I could sense that blindly following her was doing so much good to me;

 My values – for she never preached but she practiced and demonstrated, and left the rest to me;

My belief system – for she gave me the freedom at the right time to develop one;  
My personal bliss – for she always trusted my decisions, and supported me into marrying the LOVE of my life;

My each compliment I have ever received - I owe it to her, to those wrinkles, to those gray hair.

And that’s why I call her a Bond! My James Bond Mother! It still does not quite sink within me from where she derived her perseverance, her belief in life, no matter how many times, and in which all ugly stunts life hit her.  

But since she excelled, and so we are where we are, and hence is the bliss.

Latest I heard, she is planning to pursue yet another Masters degree, even at this retiring age.

Proud to be born of you mom. In times to come, if I prove myself to be even half as good a mother or a person that you are, I will be a HIT in life, a BIG-time success.

Moral of the story -WYBIWYG (What You Believe Is What You Get) 

P.S – I am equally thankful to my father, but being born a girl, and now turned into a woman (though not yet a mother), I relate more to her...

Thanks to my grandparents (maternal and paternal) for their constant support.

Bad-ass Guys!

bad·ass/ˈbadˌas/

adjective Also, bad·assed .

1. (of a person) difficult to deal with; mean-tempered; touchy.

2. distinctively tough or powerful; so exceptional as to be intimidating.

This, I write, in deep admiration of the two most badass and absolute, though fictitious, characters I have come across till date. Not just have these fascinated me to an extreme and clung on to my mind like a haunt, for an eternity it seems, but have also inspired me in some rather unusual ways.

Dear Joker,

You are a force, a naked and a vulgar truth on the face of Gotham city. You are unpredictably constant. You don’t plan, you just do!

When you say, “I'm a man of simple tastes. I enjoy dynamite, and gunpowder, and... Gasoline!” this automagically dishes out your authentic and homicidal self. 

I find you insanely attractive the moment you hold a knife in someone’s bloody open mouth and fictionalize the chronicle of how you got your scars. And then, you ask him - “Why so serious!?”

You, and only you – out of all civilized men can go for whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, how-so-ever you want, just out of your pure obsession for the emotions, naked ones - which most people expose only when in their last stages of trouble.

Yes, you are correct in believing that civilization is just a mask, good to be flaunted as long as all is well, or as long as there is at least a perceived conception of it to be well. The moment you sprinkle it up with some uncertainty, some panic, some anarchy, it’s then that the real curse of being human comes in forefront. Security is just an illusion, which keeps the corruptible incorruptible, unless uncovered. When in danger, survival takes lead over virtue. And that’s why we are humans, the guilty imperfects - busy cheating ourselves into the acts of perfection by living self-inflicted so-called mannerisms, pride and social obligations.

Thankfully though, you did not succeed in proving your point when you could not infect the minds of the people on ‘one’ ship to gift themselves some more years of survival on this planet, at the cost of lives on the ‘other’ ship. Had you succeeded, it would have implanted some temporary moments of discomfort from reel to real life of the people watching the act. But deep within, I know your point’s true to a good extent. If it were not, we would have never encountered damages owing to such incidences as stampedes. Not everyone recognizes it, or at least does not acknowledge it - especially those who are the makers of the laws of perfection - and that’s what makes you come into the field and prove it, the uncivilized way. And then they call you a homicidal maniac. 

By the way when you say “Why so serious!?” I can oh so sense the sincere seriousness running deep down your frozen grin into your nerves. You have urge neither for women nor for money. You are indeed ahead of the curve.

P.S – Christopher Nolan - Thanks for creating this character. And making ‘Heath Ledger” do the flawless, awesome job. Though there’s ‘something’ more than his intense acting, which makes me crazy about this character. May be I see some invincible truth behind his beliefs. His acts of course are the acts of the evil, but sincerely, I am afraid that after having watched this legend; I would now have a diluted experience watching any damn negative character ever.  “Dark Knight Rises” will be watched only for Batman, no villain can ever match up to where Joker stands. Long live Heath Ledger.

-----------------------------------------The Beautiful Beasts!------------------------------

Dear Howard Rowark,

You are an Ayn Rand’s creation. She has done a marvelous job in conceiving and then describing you. And I don’t want to fool myself by even trying an attempt to highlight why and what is it that makes me mad about you. However given my current knowledge and understanding of facts, I would want to append my-bit to it a bit.

Since the time I have read about you in “The Fountainhead”, it has become my Gita. Coz you work, only for the love of it, and for no other strings attached. It’s your pencil which craves to be in your hands to arrive at a blend, of simplicity, authenticity, perfection and courage. Every work of yours carries an imprint of you, of your unadulterated soul inked in the form of pillars and structures. It’s not clients who choose you, it’s the edifices, their beauty, their connect with nature - already erected in your mind that makes you choose who deserve you; and then gift your courtesy to them.

Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."
Roark: "But I don't think of you."

That's the beauty of you! And of your indifference to the opinion of others, even of the socially perceived most powerfuls and most influentials.. These parasites are rendered completely powerless and meaningless, when in your presence.

You have struggled your way just to be you. Just to be a first-hander. You seek no acceptance for your beliefs or morals. No social or professional torment could wound you. Your purity guards you. Your integrity binds you. You are oh so complete! so uninhibited! so unmouldable! so uncompromising! so merciless! so concrete! so egotist! So you! Your very presence radiates your awesomeness. You are simple, you are direct, and you are functional! 

… and here I am, awed! Completely awed by the beautiful you when you say-

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others”

-----------------------------------------Long live my Badass guys!!--------------------------------

The Coconut Story

Say something, why don’t you speak to me, look at me

Just speak to me please…

(Lyrics from the song “MoraPiya” from Rajneeti)

Dejection, Desperation, Discomfort...

In this world of illusion and fakeness, where there is a bunch of affairs that seek our attention and devotion, what should you give yourself to and what should you stay away from? Well, the answer lies in your desperation. It’s in your pain -physical or emotional - that you are most fervent and vulnerable. It’s when you’ve been ripped apart that you either completely abandon yourself, stop believing in the positivity of the universe; or you gather courage and strive to rise from your own ashes. It’s in these moments that either an atheist or a believer is born.

It’s when life has bluffed you terribly that you are forced to settle down at your newly discovered awareness that – “No one and nothing comes with a tag: I will not disappoint you!” Then is there something which you can really hold on to forever without getting broken? Is there some ONE thing which you can put above rest everything else, without the fear of being let down or being left out in a lonely void? Ummm! Did someone just conceive the thought of God? But does (S)HE really exist? A question which has intrigued many curious souls. So were these souls ever illuminated?

Illuminated or not, I will continue to live with my belief that there are some phenomena which are and will remain alien to the encompassments of science and reason. If someone tells you that you can break a stone, without letting any visible force even touch it, and still make no sound, will you believe it? Well, provided he is not a magician and instills no tricks into you. Our lazy - or just pathetically busy and lost - mind would not even care to testify the authenticity of such crap. Right? But if one says same thing to a child, he might just go ahead, try this, he may or may not get the desired results though. But the point here is that, at the least he will get curious, and maybe for an instance he will believe it too, and this ‘belief’ does miracles!

During my early teens, my trust in Sai Baba was, at best, fallible. Some devotee of Baba, I happened to come across by sheer luck, shared an unusual experience and even asked me to practice the same. This involved getting a coconut to break into two, in silence, with no intervention from any visible force, but just with pure concentration and devotion for Baba. Unbelievable, right?! That’s what I thought when I heard it. But there was some grace, some aura about the lady narrating this to me which made me not un-believe this for a moment.  And thus began the haunt, of temptation and curiosity, of partial belief, of partial hope to not to be ridiculed even though if it meant self-ridiculousness. I waited for an opportunity when I was alone at home. I got one, and I conducted my experiment. My attempt went on for several minutes, until I felt like a complete failure and hence picked up the (as I thought ‘fruitless’) coconut to put it where it belonged, i.e. the kitchen…

A year later, I had the most severe jaundice. It lingered on to my body for 3 months. I still remember around 150 syringes, and some hundred bottles of glucose which I was injected to. My weight had flaked off to 30 Kgs or less. And my distant relatives started dropping off in the hospital suspecting meeting me for the last time. But then, on my not-so-obvious recovery, the doctor who took through my case, said, “This girl is unusual for her age. In 3 months, I didn’t see a single sign of thorniness on her face” Well, the secret was my strength, my faith, my awareness which banked more upon ‘something else’ than on my sickness. My grandma was daily narrating me stories of Baba in the hospital, which kept me amused and wondering all the time. So while Jaundice was busy playing havoc with my body, my mind was busy moulding into a healthier mechanism, healthier than ever. But this all was back then, when I was a kid, and believed in miracles and a happy world.

And today even a minor tooth problem holds the capability to scare the hell out of me. That’s because my ‘grown up’ deceased mind now wants to control the entire universe around me, and when things go unexpected, non-acceptance creeps in. Somewhere in the journey, I seem to have outgrown the fact that few things are better, if left uncontrolled. Try your best to correct, but there’s always a cap to the extent you can control.

And as I am writing this, I am reminded of the things which I should not have left behind in my journey. My talks with Baba. Even though he has never stopped being with me, it’s me who’s clouded herself in illusions and falsehood, and hence can’t see, hear or feel the obvious.

…Oh! By the way – when I lifted that coconut, only the upper half of it came to my hand! For it was silently broken! Geometrically neatly broken! Into two equal halves. And my fallible faith turned infallible, blind. I wonder if it was this strength which helped me endure the phase of near-fatal disease. As if all Baba wanted for me was to have a life-time proof to help me in years when I would have so-called grown up and started taking life head-on. Will the coconut break for me even today? I don’t know.

But I still want to say this to myself:
Probe your mind, traverse it through the sea of doubts, go experimental, and you might be amazed at your discoveries!

-Raise your hands, sing, dance and surrender yourself into the tunes of The Power : The Sufi style, The Iskcon style; or

-Worship an Idol; or

-Follow someone whom you think is Illuminated; or

-Read; or

-Enchant; or

-Surrender yourself to the elements of nature – fire; or

-Meditate, Go silent! Feel the shape of silence, its texture, and get in love with it; or

-Just go blind – the Meera way!

Get your strings attached. Get conversing whichever way it satisfies you. There’s no wrong way! Remember, one way to live life is to believe that everything is a miracle, and the other way is to believe as if nothing is.

Addicted – Who me?!

“Cocaine isn’t habit forming. I should know – I’ve been using it for years” - Tallulah Bankhead

 

Basically there are 2 kinds of people. One who are prone to some substance or activity, and others who are more prone. Those who are prone tend to develop a love, passion or hobby so-to-say; and those are more prone tend to develop a strong dependence, over-indulgence or habit. That’s it! That’s what differentiates moderation from extreme. Beauty still remains beautiful. But it becomes intoxication for some. And these are indeed the people who are weak on self-control.

Let’s just say I belong to the second category when it comes to ‘some’ kind of stuff. It took me a while to realize when I had crossed the thin line of ‘feeling good about it’ to ‘feeling void in its absence’.

I am sure each one of us have had or still continue to have one or the other type of addictions, still giving us those pleasurable moments, which make us feel guilty just after we are finished indulging ourselves, and try to program our minds into thinking and believing that this was 'that' last time, until we are there again.

Not all addictions make us feel guilty, but many do, because most of the pleasures, as they say, are sinful...!

My day boots with a cup of bed-tea. If for some reason, a few minutes pass by and I still haven’t got my cup of heaven, my ever-anxious skull would start knocking - ‘I need to get up please!’ It’s like there are times when I have woken up, but my mind has not. As if my mind and the rest of me are two different entities each having an existence of its own. And when we go out-of-sync, conflict punches in. That’s when a need arises to condition the mind into desiring the righteous or at least not desiring the non-righteous. 

Take today’s instance, Kunal isn’t here and there isn’t much office work either, so Great! Facebook! I got a little over-indulged actually. And after a while, it started getting sticky and on to my nerves, my nerves, well, are already in torture these days, thanks to the Men in my life! Oops I mean Dentists! So I decided to gift myself some peace by shunning all this noise around me. I deactivated my account, guess what, just to re-activate and post this in my status update the next day! Yes facebook is a cyber drug, it’s an addiction too. I know many of you out there (especially self-obsessed, attention seekers) who too have been infused with this disorder will agree.

Till some time back, I was too obsessed to watch horror and psyche movies. I wouldn’t say that I didn’t feel scared, in fact every time I would feel as if there’s someone under my bed waiting for Kunal to leave the room, and then get on a one-on-one with me. This trend continued but I still dint give up on my mania because the thrill, I analyzed, far outweighed my terror. Until I started seeing some real (and not reel) not-to-be-seen stuff at night with my eyes open. Well after being dragged rather damaged down to this level, where my thrill turned into suffocation, I finally got away with my obsession.  

It doesn’t end here for life is full of discoveries.Tongue-biting – yet another ‘insane’ indulgence of mine. Though it got discovered long back when I thought I was a kid. Unfortunately my growing up hasn’t helped me either. Sigh. It’s like I am constantly chipping off my tongue when I am into deep thinking. And after doing it constantly for minutes, hours at times, when I finally become aware of it, I stop it, feel bad about doing it, feel little pain on my tongue too, until in next 30-60 seconds, I am doing that again. Now this is as if the 'culprit' tooth and the 'victim' tongue have a chemistry, a life of their own. And I am no where a part of it. I would love to know if anyone of you or anyone you know of is into this ‘insane’ habit of tongue-biting. That would just make me feel a little saner about myself.

Thankfully there are some which haven’t been able to touch me till now, like addiction to shopping even though I am a feminist. Then addiction to gambling, alcohol, smoking, medicines, flirting etc. But knowing my highs on proneness, I must say, I explicitly make an effort to avoid some of the above stuff though I have this extreme urge in extreme cases to just go for it. When my body says 'yes', but my heart says 'no'. A few things, I know, am just not made for. And as New Year is round the corner, I don’t know how much of the ‘above’ would find a place on my resolutions list, if at all I come up with one, as I am not so much a believer of ‘New Year is the time to just get over from your hell’ and how much of the ‘above’ would actually succeed in being no more a part of me - once I start exhibiting some self-control and synchronization of my mind and body.

That said, addictions, if channeled in the right direction and driven with right intensity, can prove to be good too. My fb addiction triggered me into this thought of ‘addictions and me’; I could collect my thoughts and vent them out or rather confess them this way. Feels lighter. I must say. And it’s said it’s easier to work on some things once declared/confessed publicly.

After all, who is without a flaw! Even saints and so-called gurus are addictive. Addictive to the non-materialistic pleasures of meditation, to the pleasures they derive out of dedicating themselves to the cause of humanity. And not to forget - My marriage is a result of my addiction to Love, which in turn is a result of my addiction to Kunal. And till date, I feel, Love is like cocaine! So all addictions aren’t that bad!! ;-)

P.S.- Well, the planet is full of crazy nuts and their weird kick-bags–

Hating nerds, Angry Birds

Watching porn, Having pop-corn

Freaking on Gadgets, Crying on budgets

Stock Market Fluctuations, Doctors and their never ending prescriptions… list goes on and on and on…