My take on Abrogation of Article 370 - Bullying is not sustainable!

It is a bit strange that mainstream conversations, whether at an individual level or as a larger narrative are centered on mass events – political, environmental or economic. While this seems absolutely natural, the causes that lead up to these events, which are underlying micro-phenomena and problems are largely ignored. There are scattered studies and reports which find a micro-plasm thin audience and do not appeal to the large population of the country, which decides or denies the political leadership of India. They remain untouched by appeals of environment or GDP rates as they go on with their life miseries trying to make ends meet and paying higher prices each year for the basic ‘roti-kapda-makaan’.

It is interesting though that the masses do respond to the call of the nation, bask in emotions of patriotism and want to fight Pakistan to rejoice in the glory of idea of the Indian nation. However, what really constitutes the glory of this nation is not just this. It is the creative arsenal of art & crafts, our ancient knowledge, our diverse philosophies and the spirit of one-ness. But who would sit and ponder all of this if there’s not enough food in the stomachs of lakhs of Indians? When there’s little financial security, health security, food security as well as security of our land and identity?

Vast acres of land is taken away from the tribals in the name of development. The same development dissects our forests so our elephants & rhinos die. This development promises jobs but does not promise mobility. It does not promise better lives or opportunities.

This is not the question of capitalism v/s socialism. This is just a call to the leadership to address the most basic human sufferings. To ensure basic necessities of life, a non-polluted living space and equal opportunities. It is the responsibility of elected representatives to nurture an environment of peace, non-violence and acceptance. And if they nudge from these, it’s upon all of us to keep our vision steady.

Media & politicians alike, recall historical examples every now and then to give analogies. I would like to bring upon a very simple and widespread example from history – bullying has hurt & broken populations, created human sufferings which lead to alienation or struggle. Bullying is not sustainable.

If you want to assimilate a population, begin by including them. Assimilate spirits and way of living, not just land. A nation is not just a political entity. A nation is a macro idea which is more than the sum total of infinite number of smaller ideas that come together. The forces that should bring them together do not lie in arms & curfews. They lie in hearts & feelings – of promise, compromise, compassion and the possibility of a better future, together.

Personal Life Moment: Poetry 'At All?'

I had written this on 26th December 2016

That was the time, I had just begun the course of healing myself after a really hard time in life. I was without work, without love, without ambition and without health.

My surgeries were over but I believed I could be back in OT any moment without notice. I was getting better, but I didn't know it then. I had felt that I had lost everything except that I was still alive.

It had been just a month after I moved to Bombay to join work. I found solace that I could be by myself again, even so for counted moments. It had become difficult to believe and think about future. Because, I felt that most of my plans had come down crumbling in the past.

In the series of these falls, I lived some of the best moments of life too. I learnt to love my family like I did as a child, once again. I learnt to love, whatever little I had been endowed with. And I learnt, that this little was all that mattered.

I had come back, a little more wise. A little more cautious. Careful, that there are no norms, no standards and no formats that we could all fit into. So, I came back, knowing it was okay to be unsure, and it was okay to lay back and give life a chance to let you live.

I've tried to put my 'then feelings' in a poem called 'At All?'

At all?

The hazy life that I look into, with shades of colour and those of grey

What’s going to be the path like, no one is likely to say

I find it funny, when they know for sure

Their names and games, their curse and cure

Who really knows the trueness of nature

For, is there really any truth or lies at all?

We tend to crave for motive & meaning

I step back to hold my head and have myself leaning

In the arms of destiny and ventures of time

To humbly realize that I am just a speck of grime

In the universe of infinite and expressions of mime

For, who knows a speck could be the whole after all?

Its endless, the dilemma which always plays blind

With insanity and questions rolled into a mind

Chances to succeed are near over

If I let you and others, on my heart, hover

Then again, the question remains

For, is there really any success or failure at all?          

Snippet: Love-Hardened Honesty

To the wishes that come true and the love, that is found
And to the sleep that evades me with the thoughts of a man

And to every story that finds a beginning

I speak these words of passion & compassion,
Of turmoil & pain, of madness of the rain

Words of truth, devoid of delusional disdain...

That I'm as honest as I could be,
And that, I've never been the same

Poetry: Pink Lipstick

I put on a pink lipstick and curled my hair

Wore my heels and slit in my skirt, without a care

Chin up and chest out, I walked towards the ac cab

“Ooooh the traffic”, my senses vibrating

Didn’t matter really, I was in the 1% slab      [1% people who paid income tax in India]

I scrolled for bits of news, looked at some twitter

Checked the time & cursed at the Dadar litter

Working in a ‘prestigious’ corporation

I am the upper caste middle class ambition

who praises modernity and vouches for equality

Just before dissolving into my vanity,

My eyes fell upon a despicable old woman

Shrouded by poverty and bespoke of filth

Ideally my attention should have given her its silt

But I just happened to sit and stare

Hoping she wouldn’t see me in an avatar

That is probably of an alien who’s raided her world

Holding on, I kept at it – feeling pity, my eyes ajar

She slided her glance and looked directly at me

Incase she could, in my heart, see

Ashamed and guilty, I looked away

Dare not to look out, my head would sway

Tears of humiliation trickled down my cheeks

As I asked myself, so what if the GDP peaks!!

That woman spoke no words and yet

She sang a saga for millions of us

Only if we listened through our hearts at times

Stopped the drama, chucked the fuss

She sat still as a stone

And yet sent chills down my spine

I imagined the reality of her and me standing in the same line [The idea of India – Constitutions confers us political equality – the line to vote where all irrespective of class or caste stand to cast the vote which has equal power]

The mirage of equality shattered, the illusion of privilege knackered

my arrogance and pride put into place

by who, the one who probably had little solace

I screamed in my head and felt enraged

My heart was conflicted, my spirit was caged

She brought down the shining India in one glance of an eye

Do I exist as is, or a stigma of a reality?

I sat in the cab numb and stooped

Low enough and yet to continue

In the dream of a glass building

Making graphs & sending emails undue

Silently ignoring the voice that stood witness

to the paltry of many, and the abundance of few

Sleepless nights I tossed and turned

Wondering if a poem could be churned

To call for attention and to seek some life

In the lifeless concrete and relentless strife

Of making it big and having it all

Of paying those bills, and delivery on call

Of playing up such passions, that compete like rats

We’re human, there’s richness of emotion

Is it okay if I don this hat?

Stuck in a vicious loop, the questions never seem to end

Somewhere as I type, the letter begin to bend

As my eyes narrow and my heart starts to sink

No use of lips that red and those so pink

If they don’t smile to those who need it the most

Those in the middle of deserts or waters far away from the coast

I forever ask myself, where do I begin

Do I continue to shun or blindly sign-in

Those eyes will never leave my sight

Perhaps, their powerlessness was their might

Answers to these questions may forever remain obscure

I am relieved I could ask at the least, if not endure.

Poetry: We're bound yet we're free

Prelude:-

Sometimes I want to jerk open my eyes and see the other side,

The side where everything happens but we know nothing of it

Sometimes it shines but mostly so dark

Its invisible yet leaves its mark

Its hollow as hell but dense as earth

As if it hid memories and secrets that we could unearth

Hanging on the threads of time

It feels like nothing has moved, yet everything’s new

We don’t know who we are anymore

Time was still and yet we flew

I can go on and on about how I am and what I know

But feelings & memories are hazy as dew

It would feel okay to admit

this is how things work

But it would’ve been better to know

that the pain wont lurk

I imagine that life will turn out all right

There’ll be love and laughter and a lot of sunlight

But hey there, there’s always been a box kept apart

Of shocks and surprises that often break a heart

And then there’s breeze of hope and lust

Which makes falling in love a must

Because there’s promise of you don’t really know what

But at-least there’s promise alas, of some sort

Then again I wonder if it’s the weakness of human mind

To want to want, familiarity of a kind

We are just slaves to an invisible hole

Hollow has hell yet dense as soul

Hidden with patterns and secrets, our memories and dreams

Filled with fear & rage, tears and screams

It contains memories, of who we were and who we are

Of those who are close and those who have been afar

Its this crazy plasma of perceptions

built on muddy minds and emotional interceptions

that makes us want what we want

and makes us want, what we cant

In a way that is unique to you and me

In a way that we are bound and yet we’re free

 Leh & Bareli - Part II

The decay of  the incorrigible idealist

This felt like an extraordinarily solitary moment. A night of intense madness and passion had given way to a morning of bodily pain, mental fatigue and emotional disorientation. He felt sick to his knees. He didn’t want to wake up and face the world. There was so much hatred everywhere including within him. He wished the night would have swept longer so that he could have just been lost in somber and avoided thinking of everything, especially of her. She was extremely precious to him. He’d loved her with everything he could have. He had placed all his emotions and faith in her. But there she was, accusing him repeatedly of being a failure, of stealing her happiness, of ruining her life. Her happiness. Could he have even dreamt of stealing it? He could have sold everything he had, including his soul for it. Why would he steal it? He had no answers. But he did have the guilt. The guilt of unknowingly, unwillingly destroying her and shattering her into small uncollected pieces. He knew, he was responsible for the lion share of all her miseries and all her complaints. She had howled like a dying fox, the previous night. Because she was pretty fox-like. Did he hate her for being more calculative and practical than him? Did he hate her for being more accustomed to this unfair world? Did he hate the fact that she was what she was? But he’d loved her only for this reason. He had no clue what was happening. His mind spinning, his heart ached and his body refused to feel any life. Motionless, he tried to hide in his bed. What had suddenly happened? When did things begin to get this ugly? How could they have treated each other so badly? Where did all the promises of love and life disappear? Were they fragile enough to have been broken by a few miserable happenings? Apparently, there were. He had hoped otherwise, though somewhere in his heart, he had known this was inevitable. Finally, the reality was in front of him to face. The incorrigible idealist in him had started decaying. It was the final beginning of their decay.

A very cold winter morning in Delhi had brought nothing but chills in their minds. She sat like a rookie typing nervously into her laptop. She wanted to write him an email. Because having a conversation was out of the window. He had walked out on her the previous night after having destroyed everything that she had, including her self-respect. Now she had nothing more to lose. Despite having been through so many ups and downs in life, she had never felt like a dead body. Today she felt devoid of emotions. She was a nervous wreck who was edging on becoming psychologically sick. She wondered if she should seek medical help. But then again, no doctor could have truly cured her. Did medical science known how to knead a heart back into its shape? However, somewhere she was also taken aback at her own ability of surviving what had happened. She had lived. But she was angry, at herself and at the world. She wanted to hate him but couldn’t bring herself to do that. Because she knew he was as miserable, maybe more. But she was supposed to be the stronger one – so she decided to carry on routine, albeit most mechanically. Surprisingly, she didn’t seek any company for distraction. She was beginning to love her own company as she’d started to loathe her personality. There was multiplicity in all the emotions and contradictions in all her wishes. She didn’t know what to hope for, not for the fear of those hopes shattering, but of those hopes coming true. It was actually a pretty screwed up place to be in. Then she thought of those two people for whom she’d have to be strong and get past this. Her parents were now to become the central focus of her life, once again.

Leh & Bareli

It begins with a whatsapp message – ‘This is when I was reminded that I had really loved you once’. The guy was in a strange depression having watched a zillion times a documentary on the insanity and helplessness of a young father who drowned his baby girl. This documentary had caught fire on media and was being aired on major English news channels like CNN and BBC. No one knew why he watched it over and over alone in his dark house at Bareli. His state of mind and state of house was dark, melancholic and lonely. The scene outside was very noisy though. Violently noisy. There were railway tracks being broken, people were being hacked, communal riots were once again at their peak. The common public didn’t know any real reason behind it. There was maddening spirit, dust and lawlessness. The state was quiet, as it waiting for all of it to end automatically. There was little police action and a state of helplessness. Just violent reckless hunting. The scene could be equated with the 1857 freedom struggle when the peasants hunted their landlords or the Punjab riots at the time of partition. Sense, compassion and sanity had gone to the dogs. In this dark moment, he gathered the will to set all the past memories of weakness, love, lust and ingenuity apart to message her.

It was almost as if she could sense that he had sent her a message and what it read,  that she instantly gathered up her wits and shamelessly replied ‘ I loved you too, and still do’. Very well knowing and not knowing the consequences of her text, she hoped everything would just stay put. No status quo should be challenged or it could lead to more pain, more heart breaks. The question of their coming together couldn’t even be considered, unless of course, the divine intervened, if the divine existed.

She was far away from Bareli, in the lifeless mountain of the Leh rock land. It was so barren and brown; it almost looked ugly to her. She looked outside of her hotel window only to find the colors of white snow capping the shades of brown treacherous rocks as if it it could cover up its rude, unfriendly landscape. Even the sky looked colorless. She had hoped to be happy in the mountains. But here she was looking disdainfully at the deep, dangerous passes and steep slopes and wanting to desperately look out for some life. Maybe some grass. A small plant. A bird in exile? Anything that could breathe. There was nothing.

She opened the window and to her surprise it wasn’t stuck. It slided smoothly to the other end to let her experience the freezing air on her face. There was snow on the window shills too. She was a little excited to touch and feel that frozen snow as she remembered how they’d promised to watch and touch the snow together.  The snow was supposed to bring joy. Today it brought back only memories and a sense of quiet. A bewildering quiet. Not angry or dangerous. Just a maniacal sense of quiet. Quite the opposite of frantic sounds and loud anger prevailing in Bareli at that time.

The news of Bareli riots had made its way to every part of the country.  She had heard it too and hoped he’d be spared alive. She knew who was behind this. At-least she knew a bit, somewhat. After having spent years in politically charged spheres of Delhi, she could trace these riots to the involvement of his family member. His own brother’s wife. She wanted to tell him, who was behind this madness. But how could she? Why would he believe her? It was her, not anybody else who kept lying to him all her life. She couldn’t accuse his family on a phone-call and expect him to trust her so-called instincts.

But there was some evidence. Why did his sister-in law-abruptly fly to Singapore with absolutely nothing in hand? Why did his sister-in-law never love his brother? Why was she always aloof? It was so clear she was up to something when she used to team with random men who came home and held long meetings with her? No, there wasn’t a bout of doubt on her character as is usually inferred about women who talk too much with unrelated men. She was detached from bodily love. All she loved was revenge and massacre.