Questions

How I wish relationships came with easy tags to identify how to treat them for preferred responses.

Why is it that we loose emotional openness and fear direct talking as we get older.

What kind of society do we live in that we must prove our image to others but not to ourselves.

Why did we accept differences be they moral, religious, or otherwise, easier when younger but lay hefty conditions as our hair greys.

Why is it that ability to accept and adopt different points of view grow increasing steep proportional to age?

Why can't it be accepted that tradition is not the only way? If morals and principles must keep pace with time, so must our practices.

We reap as we sow. We receive as we give. Work as if you have only today, do not wait for the results, they say. It's about the journey, not the destination.

Still we love, give and work, hoping that someday precisely what we want will be given to us.

But nothing ever comes easy, or on a platter. Time to realise that only you can make your ambitions happen.

Only you can make or break who you are.

Broken

"No, Rishi, I can not take up your offer!" exclaimed Shanaia, her cutlery clattering to the marble inlaid floor, flashing sun-light to the mirrored arks and ceiling as it fell.

"Why not?! It's perfectly legit and comes with a fat pay. I'd pick up on it if I were you."

"Look here, Rishikesh, I had you leave our home for precisely this reason. An honest day's work is worth far more than all this fancy parroting about. I can not believe I came all this way only to hear this rubbish!", she pushed her chair back and reached for the purse while turning to leave.

"Shanaia-di, Please don't leave me this way, I have an image to maintain and your walking away is not helping.", Rishikesh said, almost pleading while tying to appear suave; not a good combination of emotions to look at.

That line stopped her in her tracks! Slowly she turned to face him, disbelief, anger and a hint of more playing in her eyes.

"Never you mind that I gave a good leg so you live, forsook time for love so we had a roof overhead, never you mind all that! In you bounce, with your fake movie smile after all these years, not a question for those you left behind. No Rishi,no, I will not fix again what you broke. You once had a family and you broke it. You should've learned something from that before trying to make a second one."

With these words, she left, her heart feeling more lopsided than her gait, his eyes shining with regret.

"The Page"

Seems I've been very absorbed in everything but me these past months.

Must reassert myself to me, accept new definitions that marriage has created.

I found that it's easier for me to loose myself in someone else's perception and harder for me to find me again.

The break-from-work honeymoon is so over!

Need to realign myself and surroundings to get where I need to go, the dream I have yet to achieve ... "The Page"

I love reading

Books, notes, blogs, licensed paper, back-of-pack text, newspapers and even labels....I LOVE reading

There's a place in my head that I escape to.

What I read becomes me.

Every word, letter and syllable is the wind, earth and the sea.

A legal paper confirming a lease tenant draws pictures in my head; notes make me wonder at the variety of subjects we human beings have created.

Obsessive-compulsive need to record the move of every atom and the reason why Ms. Z changed her nail colour makes for fascinating escapism.

I write this in sheer awe of the volumes of text I have had the privilege to read and the volumes more that I know are waiting.

Keep it coming!

Of molds, stereotypes and happiness.

It is said that a man becomes a philosopher when he’s not happy with his wife.

For the average, working 20-something these days, the phrase might well apply to professional life. It’s amazing how much a job can take over life’s rhythm and patterns. For 20 years of our life we slowly graduate from play to study to work. We learn to equate happiness to doing something we love doing and doing it well. Many opinions shape our lives and slowly we go off-track. Potential artists become doctors and future engineers turn to sales and marketing.

Nurtured in a sea of stereotypes, it’s still difficult to mix and match the right ones in a formula that suits a particular individual pretty much exactly. Many break out of the moulds set for them. Some make it to the peaks they aimed at, many don’t. There’s an ocean of people out there who’d rather be doing something vastly different and there’s many more who don’t know what precisely they ought to be doing anyway.

Every now and then I find myself marveling at the zest which some people carry on at work. Here’s one type, the type that makes the things they do work for them and derive happiness therein. It’s a pleasant place to be in. Curiosity arises almost naturally and they seem to apply it in all the right places. They’re the ones that used the mold to get them happiness; they’re the ones that tick off milestones.

How then does one set about finding out how to keep oneself occupied and happy. Is the exercise of identification and implementation enough? Yes I think, but not always. As people grow, they change and with that change, one must evolve, as opposed to resist. Life works in strange ways; each twist, turn and straight road will lead only to the road’s end. How we find happiness along the way is up to us.

Reality bites

This morning, after an evening's worth of exposure to an arsenal of reality shows, I caught myself wondering what would happen if a participant was seriously, perhaps even fatally injured. Would the reality show be barred from airing? How would it affect TRPs of the channel? Would an incident like that affect the lay person's view of reality shows, possibly cause a withdrawal effect? Who knows what could happen.

In the evening I walked into news proclaiming the death of an eleven year old due to suicide. She featured in some dance based shows and was known to be a bubbly child. The awful act was discovered when her younger sister came home from school in the afternoon. No one is aware how it came about. Her own parents said she gave away no such intentions even as late as that very morning.

It was a tough task for her instructor to convince her parents about letting her star in dance-based reality shows. When her grades started dropping, they pulled her out so she could concentrate on her academics. And this to a girl who'd been dancing for 4 years of the most impressionable stage of her life.

What possible pressure could lead a eleven year old to her own death? My mind worked in three definitive directions. (a)Unidentified depression due to flailing academics[and the pressure that goes with it]added to the 'sudden' dearth of dance (b)child abuse, physical or otherwise (c)she was dancing with her dupatta and unfortunately it caught in the fan. This last option is the most unlikely, yet, for the sake of preserving childhood innocence, how I wish it was.

Listed

Another name on the list.
One more heart amiss.
Scathingly, to false sorrow you admit,
for parting only brings new tomorrows.
I can fathom not what you think.
Is your mind the master of its will?
Deeply besotted in your ways,
saturation leaves me disheartened.
Somewhere deeply imprinted inside,
a scar that you may’nt identify;
The only proof that you were here.
Memories can be doctored,
all evidences tampered,
but this fail-safe method,
the fit of your words to my own,
Assails any shallow sense of victory.