All by myself.

I loved being all by myself.
When my friends would invite me over for lunch I would cancel,
Make an excuse of work;
Try to catch some quality lone time.
I liked being all by myself.

When someone would call me for chit chat,
I would wonder when they would hang up
So that I could finish my favorite book.
And when I put it down, late at night, maa would bring me a cup of coffee and something to eat.
And I would tell her to leave me all by myself.

When I'd see people talking about moving out to a different city for college,
I'd be all excited
To have a house of one's own; Decorate it the way one liked.
One could order pizza every night.
Or sit on your favorite bench in your favorite park until early morning.
And would not have to bother about curfew limits.
All I dreamt was being all by myself.

It's all come true. The house, the new city, the bench in the park, the pizza.
Everyone's on their own, providing for themselves.
Now I pick up the phone and look at the contact list that has just added numbers with time.
And I look at my favorite coffee mug and suddenly crave for mom's homemade pickle.
And I look at the book lying on the floor which has the bookmark my best friend made for me.

I have all the time I need to spend with myself. What else does one need?

But I have to admit: I hate it!
I hate being all by myself.

Inspired by the song: All by myself,by Eric Carmen. 

Photographs by: Shreyanshi Soni, Yoshieta Gupta

What world do we live in?

Which world are we living in?

Every day, while flipping through the newspaper, I come across various headlines in different fonts. And each one of them gets me thinking, which world are we living in?

So a 19-year-old girl gets raped in a minibus in Bangaluru. How it happened? Well, the same old, girl going to work, boards bus, horny driver, gives bus controls to assistant, rapes her for an hour or so, throws her on a deserted road, speeds away. Oh, and also, the writer mentioned another gang-rape incident in the vicinity just a few weeks ago, just for the record, you know.

There’s another small-font news where a man and his father forced the wife into committing suicide. Why? The usual: incompetent man can’t earn enough to support his own family so constantly forces the wife to bring in money from her ‘paraya-ghar’. 

It’s funny though, how the reporter mentioned leniency given to the father and the son on account of various other people they have to take care of, including a three-year-old son from the victim. Thank god it’s a son, though. She might not even live those three extra years if not for that xy chromosome. So usually there is a lifetime imprisonment under section 304-B (Dowry Death) now reduced to a seven year imprisonment for both perpetrators in this case. Also, I am made aware of the presence of a section 498-A of the IPC which designates punishment for subjecting a married woman to cruelty. Did someone mention ‘marital rape’ to me some time ago?

Oh, but what is the law for? What are PILs for? I’ll tell you. This very noble monk named Swami Satyananda Chakradhari plays his role as a politically aware and active citizen by filing a public interest litigation requesting a 10-year-imprisonment for cow slaughter.

Yes! That’s the solution! A ten year imprisonment for cow slaughter. And a leniency-granted seven year for manslaughter.

And what’s on the super-headlines? A debate on whether Chhota Rajan should be retained in Delhi or handed over to Mumbai Police.

This is the world we are living in.

Source: The Hindu, Delhi, Saturday, November 7, 2015

Fear v/s Embrace

How disturbing would it be to find out that the person who offered you a seat in the metro, or the person you helped cross the road, or the person who sold you those pink earrings at round the corner, or the person with whom you had a very memorable conversation last evening while waiting at the coffee house, or all of them at once-- are dead. No more. Gone to a place which noone has ever seen, yet everyone keeps talking about.
How strange it sounds how profoundly death— irrespective of our relation with the person— affects us, leaves a permanent mark: a wound; a scar.
Some people get irritated when you talk to them about death. It's like the unspeakable truth everyone keeps fearing and avoiding and distracting one's mind from. They know it's inevitable, "but why talk about something that makes you sad?", say most people who are convinced that I am obsessed with the idea of death.
But why not talk about it like one talks about marriage, or further educational pursuits, or dispelling one's virginity, or jobs- which are more or less equally unpredictable. We make a million plans: only a quarter of them work out as we imagined. People dwell over their dream wedding, or their dream vacation, and when I ask them about their dream death—long awkward silence, followed by looks as if you have shoved a knife straight into their gut.

Because we always want to cling on! This desperate need to make things last forever, even human life. We know it's impossible but we like to believe it isn't. So we would close our ears when someone would say the opposite.
What we don't realize is that the only things that last till you do are memories. So why not embrace them, accept their transcendentalism? 
How disturbing it was to think about deaths of those people! And how fascinating it is to know that their last memory of the living world which they would carry to the other world(if any) would be of an episode with a stranger. And the stranger, in so many cases, is you!

Faulty Perceptions.

He had never been so frustrated before. As soon as he saw his mother, he roared, out of anger. The redness of the blood gushing out of his would looked pale before the redness of his cheeks. "They think just because they don't understand our language, we don't understand theirs? Ours is a much older and intelligent civilisation! But sheer arrongance has made these people blind!"

His father tried to calm him down, offered him some food.
His anger was directed at the foolishness of people. They would always see the world through a self manufactured lens, and like to believe it to be the only way of the world!
Such lunkheads!
"What do they know about our daily sttuggles? We are in constant threat of being killed. Our family doesn't know if we'll return home at dusk. We don't even have any cars or helicopters to our comfort. Wherever we need to go, there's a lot of muscular energy exhausted; enough to kill the purpose of reaching the designated place."
His fury just wouldn't cease to flow.
"And then they would say, 'wish I were a free bird, with a limitless sky to explore...'"
How he hated such baseless admirations and fantasies.

If only he could show those humans how much they have polluted the air and induced in this so-called limitless sky an abundance of death and disease, they would know how wrong they are in epitomising the life of a "free" bird.
He would show them that class hierarchies exist in every civilisation, and that flying in the sky isn't as relaxing as getting one's ass onto the backseat of one's superexpensive sedan and signalling the driver, 'home'.

What's freedom to us then, they would ask us, probably; he thought. "And I would beg them to stop polluting our area, and stop flying those kites whose threads are tiny enough for our eyes to miss but sharp enough to wound our body anytime. And I would beg them to stick to the part of the world assigned to them, and not strive to conquer the sky. For if they continue to life their lives(and destroy ours) at the same pace, there won't be any birds left to symbolize freedom; only carcasses to hint upon our existence to the future generation, raising debates on the credibility of those artefacts, just like they do to dinosaurs." 

Cracked up

When she would lay awake in bed at night, this probable incident would always cross her mind. A background setting of a mall or some public space, ten-fifteen years from now. She imagined herself walking 
with her spouse, maybe a child, and she imagined accidentally running into a stranger, or maybe turning around to a tap on her shoulder. And she’d have a whirlpool of thoughts running in her mind at that moment. Strangeness-surprise-melancholy-excitement-dismay-joy.

She would imagine shouting “Hi!” with surprised, gleaming eyes, and hugging him tight! He- her best friend in college. Would he have a wife along? That never entered her frame. But the whole sequence 
repeated itself in her pre-sleep time every alternative night. 
She would tell him about this probable future of theirs, and he would laugh it away. “We’ll always be friends, stupid girl. That’s never going to happen.” He’d say. And she liked to believe it. But this alternative probability never left her mind.
.
.
.
She ordered her food and turned around. “Hi!” she said with surprised, gleaming eyes. It had been so long since she last saw him. He smiled slightly and replied, “How are you?” They made small talk for a couple of minutes while she paid her due to the cashier and waited for her order. She smiled within. No kids. No spouses. “Call me sometime whenever you’re free.” She picked her stuff and left at his affirmation.
Five minutes later, he saw her crying in her car. He thought of going to her, but quickly changed his mind. Cracked up inside, she cried like a baby who had lost his favorite car he took with him to bed every night. Tears would refuse to stop flowing down. She saw it coming, but not so soon.
It had indeed been long since she last saw him. It felt like just a couple of days ago that she narrated to him a similar story and he had laughed at her vivid imagination. It had been a long time since she last saw him. 
A year, perhaps?

The Five Second Emergency

They say, "Think a thousand times before you speak." What about ‘excess of everything is bad’?

So you wish to apologize to your best friend for something you did wrong, but thinking about it for a little while makes you feel like it wasn’t your mistake in the first place. Or you feel like confiding a secret in a close friend because you can’t stand torturing yourself with it anymore, but you realize that nobody can be trusted, and you better keep it to yourself than fostering a possibility of getting hurt in the long run. Or you need to tell your best friend how you actually feel about him(or her), but you’re too sacred to lose what you have in a drive to chase what might never become of the two of you. And the misery continues…

All of us make decisions every day. Starting from the first decision of snoozing the alarm clock and embracing those five extra minutes of sleep to the resolution of not procrastinating from the next day onwards (ironically, this resolution is an act of procrastination in itself, by resolving for a tomorrow- not today) and all these decisions we make affect our life in ways that we seldom realize.

Making a well processed, well informed decision is always considered a virtue, but it is interesting to note that nothing in this world is universally applicable. Last week, while watching a TED talk on ‘How to stop screwing yourself over’ by Mel Robbins, I discovered some very interesting facts about the human brain. Whenever an unconventional idea occurs to our mind, the brain has the power to dismiss it if we do not act upon it within five seconds. In cases where you are trying to go an extra mile to let yourself out to someone or share your true feelings (and anything else that gives you a feeling of being possibly vulnerable), if you do not act within five seconds of the thought’s inception, your brain will reason with itself convincing you to trust your anxieties.

Spontaneity is an important ingredient for success in most personal relations. If you keep weighing the pros and cons of apologizing to your mother for having yelled at her, your ego would eventually take over and tell you that you weren’t wrong, you were frustrated and hopefully your mother will understand it. But if you act upon your first instinct immediately, she would probably sit down and discuss with you her own set of worries which she tries to camouflage with the big smile on her face because she knows your life is too occupied with your own set of problems already.

Instinctive actions, hence, are important in numerous situations, and this doesn’t in any way mean that one should abandon considering all premises before arriving at a conclusion. It is not wise to select one side of the conflict and stick by it whether right or wrong. Rather, it is more reasonable to balance between choosing what is right and knowing what is not(and in what situation), before the five seconds pass and your brain pulls the emergency brake. 

Café for Creativity

So I happen to stumble upon this article from The Guardian titled "Pay with a poem: cafes around the world to exchange coffee for poetry" and it totally got me hooked. As a part of UNESCO's World Poetry Day celebration on March 21,2015, 1100 cafes, bars and restaurants across 23 countries agreed to substitute their national currency with poetic work for a day and serve a cup of coffee to their customers in exchange of one of their poems.

In a world where artists are barely surviving with minimum means of existence, this would be a moment of ecstasy for anyone who knows the value of art.

This got me thinking. Imagine a place where you could go, sit and create whatever you like. An environment where people can come, sit together, share their experiences over a cup of coffee, paint or write together, or maybe suggest places to visit, or give details of upcoming workshops and exhibitions. A place which breathes art. The fare wouldn't be a monetary currency, but a compulsion of leaving behind a creation of your own, something original which the other visitors could have an access to, and similar to the concept of Cafe Kunzum in Hauz Khas, it could have a little box at its exit gate, where you are free to drop in whatever amount you wish.

This is my idea of a perfect platform for keeping alive the spark of creativity that we all have in us. As Maya Angelou rightly said, 

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you will have."   

So a place where you pay with your creativity, your bit of art, your soul. What do they call it? Heaven?

When I grow up, I believe I will open such a place. If, somehow, I don't and you have enough funds at your disposal, consider working with me in partnership, okay?

P.S.-

I'd suggest you to visit this amazing cafe in Hauz Khas Village called Kunzum Travel Cafe. It's a place for travelers, and has a pool of information that may be useful for if you are planning to take a break from your overloaded-with-work lifestyle. And it has got free Wifi too. No, they're not paying me for promotion. It's a genuine recommendation.

The Art of Losing an Art.

We all have that one thing that we are naturally great at. It may not necessarily be academics, music, painting or dance. It may be a good understanding of people’s thoughts and actions, or a sixth sense about something that has a greater possibility of happening.

Then there’s this one thing we all can effortlessly make possible: letting go of the thing we are naturally good at.  There isn’t a specific sequence that one needs to follow to detach itself from its natural talent. All we need to do is engross ourselves in other apparently more (actually less) important things we have to (forced compulsion) do in order to fulfil our duties and responsibilities.

It comes to us naturally. He loves to play football. But he is working in this seven-figure-salary-providing MNC which eats up all his time and energy. She had an undeniably special bond with canvas. But her two year old baby deserves undivided attention. He’s working his ass off to survive in the Law school he doesn't even belong to. Her love for fashion and design has been reduced to a couple of crumpled sheets lying between the pages of Eighteenth century classic literature.

Whatever the reason may be: forced decision, societal expectations, self-induced responsibility or foresight of future, we end up dismissing the only stress-relieving mechanism we have and end up feeling trapped in this vicious cycle which entangles us into a state of incurable depression.

My sister was a person who was so easygoing with pen and paper that even her rough draft looked like a marvel to me. Then, she got married, and call it difficulty of procuring resources or responsibilities of a house and a baby, the number of her art pieces reduced to a zero. Her mind was an upheaval, until last December, when I encouraged-rather-forced her to start painting again. And not only did her peace of mind return to happy levels but she also produced two beautiful paintings within just three weeks.

This isn't a cooked up story, it is a tried and tested technique. I tried finding excuses to not write any post for about a month and a half, and this is the conclusion that I arrived at:  Our art is the only thing to hold on to in situations of emotional and mental exhaustion. And losing it is like getting a hundred thousand dollars and making a huge paper boat with it and trying to make it float in the ocean. After all,

“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”

-Bronx Tale, 1993

If you could relate to even a single line of this post, the clock is ticking and this is your wake-up call! *Ding*

Would you accept all I say?

I had a friend. One day I got the news of her death. My world came to a standstill. As soon as I could, I went to her house to offer my condolence to her mother. We were sitting on the couch when I asked her mother how it all happened so suddenly. She told me that she returned from the market one day and found Anika dead. “She died because of poison used to kill pests. We had conducted a pest control in the house and apparently it must have gone into her lungs and she might have died because of that.” The way she behaved was weird. She was bent on sending us away from the house as soon as possible. I felt there was something wrong. Anika used to tell me that her father lived abroad for work and a distant cousin of her mom used to frequent the place. After Anika died, her mother immediately cremated her body, without even allowing it to be sent for a postmortem examination so that the actual cause of the death could be determined. When I told her that we should call the police for investigation, she told me that Anika was a peaceful girl and her soul shouldn’t be tormented with such brute investigations. Her near and dear ones would be questioned and tortured by the police, some might be arrested or accused, and that would be the last thing she would have wanted for the people she loved.

All the pieces joined together indicated that her mother had something to do with her death. Why would someone’s mother cremate her daughter’s body before an examination otherwise? Shouldn’t she have wanted to know how her daughter had died? Her mother had a “distant cousin” about who only my dear friend knew. Probably she had discovered some hideous truth about him. Maybe her mother killed her due to fear of being discovered.

When you read the story, all the things I told you indicated that her mother had almost certainly killed her daughter. Because the way I narrated the story, your mind was conditioned to follow the lead I was giving you, it  was like I was controlling your thoughts, channelizing them in a specific direction. But what if I now tell you I killed her, and all this was my cover-up plan? 

You would feel cheated. Because you were looking at the picture through my eyes. I could take you wherever I wanted, make you believe my story if you trust me.

When we talk about Manusmriti, for example, we refer to it for the base of all the stupid classifications of caste and their respective supposed-to-be professions. But what if Manu wrote it based on an idea he had of the world? What if it was a figment of his imagination which happened to please the men in power and hence it was promoted to be the undeniable truth?

So basically, if I write a book about having met god and Photoshop some pictures to make them look real and create a setup of a “god’s vehicle” having landed on earth last night and make it viral then twenty years later people might read about me in the religious textbooks and believe it just like we all are forced to believe that Sita went into the core of the earth after giving an Agni-pareeksha.  Some might worship me as a blessed soul to have gotten the opportunity to meet the almighty whom no one has seen and others might debate upon the authenticity of my story and the corresponding evidences.

How can anyone believe anything anyone tells them about their past? 

Wouldn’t it then be okay to say that a moment that passes can never be written or told exactly as it had passed but it would be just the interpretation of the expresser or his choice of how he wishes it to be remembered?

Can anything ever be recorded correctly then? Is all of history a real sequence of events or just people’s perspectives? Was there actually a cursed fruit in the Garden of Eden? Did Sai Baba really found diyas lit beneath the surface of the earth?

We base everything on peoples’ perceptions. Don't we?

Paanch Sau Rupay

If you live in Delhi, the public transport you use most frequently after the (god bless the scientists for inventing it) Delhi Metro is probably an Autorickshaw. But negotiating for the fare can be a total pain in the ass. The autowallas would never agree to switch on the meter and would demand unreasonable sums of money. And you always end up faking that you’re a daily commuter of every damn place you go to even as rare as once a year.

Today, I went to Kamla Nagar market with a friend of mine. It was quarter past twelve and a pleasantly sunny winter afternoon. We would have walked back to the college after we bought her a new bag if it wasn't for our class scheduled at 12.30 and the delay in preparation of the coffee I had ordered.

So we decided to take an auto which would cost us 30 bucks and five minutes. Generally, we would have to argue with at least 3-4 autowallas before someone would actually agree to go by the legit fare. But today was an unusual day. On one side of the muddy under-construction road, a Sardarji had just arrived. So I asked him, “Uncle, Daulat Ram College jana hai, kitne me chaloge?”

He looked at me, and in a very serious tone said, “Panch sau rupaye (500 rupees)” I thought I had misheard him, then he smiled at me and I realized that he was kidding. So both of us settled in the auto and the Sardarji drove off. In a minute, I started a conversation, justifying that I was asking about the fare beforehand because some autowallas demanded extra money. So he said, “That’s why I asked for 500, beta”

I looked at my friend, and we couldn’t stop laughing. He laughed with us, and said, “Beta aise hi khush raha karo, meri to bass yahi koshish rehti hai ki sab bache yuhi haste rahein.” He had such a jolly vibe that we couldn’t resist laughing at the little jokes he cracked every now and then.

 Both of us were so delighted by this little pleasant encounter, and before we knew, we had already reached college. My friend took out three ten rupee notes and handed  them to him. He took them and smiled, “Beta, 470 rupees balance raha apka.”

It really doesn’t matter who you are and what you do, it doesn’t take a diamond ring or an expensive bouquet to please someone. A little gesture can make you remember a person for your lifetime!

I don’t think if I’d ever be able to pay off the positivity he gave me today, but I really hope I meet him again, just to lessen the monetary debt of 470/- I owe him.

Let go

So I found this very random piece of shit in my laptop's Recycle Bin. And it gave me answers to a certain situation I am presently dealing with.  It makes me think of a jogging track somehow. The whole process of our life is like jogging. You move along the same circular(or elliptical) track, and you come across similar situations over and over again. Yet, whenever you see yourself, and see yourself in retrospection, you're not the person who passed the same point of the track the last time. It's like you're older, you've already been through the same shit and you feel you know how to get out of it. But this is different. It is similar, not exactly the same stuff, and you are as good as an amateur. 
Here it goes, an undated post from a long time ago,influenced by someone, though I don't specifically remember who it was...

‘I don’t feel very well, if you’re free right now, could we talk for a while?’

I type the same message to three people, then erase it, syllable by syllable.

Sometimes you just feel like being alone for a while, and going into a self-introspective mode. You want to talk to that poor lonely soul that you've been unintentionally-or intentionally- ignoring for a long while, and it’s now screaming to come out and vent out its feelings. When you do, however, it’s too much to handle. Because the pressure is so high that all of it comes out like water from the fire extinguisher’s hosepipe, and it becomes too difficult to take, as if the water rushing out will sweep you off your feet. That’s because you haven’t talked to your soul for a long- really long time.

Everyday, we talk to our friends, beg some to stay when they’re leaving, strive to make some feel special on their birthdays, and maybe do whatever with the rest. But there’s someone we often neglect all this while, and that someone isn't even able to show that it’s sad, because it’s a part of you and it understands that you’re dealing with more important stuff and you need time to finish it right now. It is supportive enough not to torment you amidst your preoccupations. But that poor soul of yours is most often neglected, and in extreme cases, choked to death by the pressure of your own external obligations.

What are you doing?

What is your aim in life?

What makes you happy?

Do you really want to be with the people you presently are?

Are you really willing to try harder to keep hold of those who don’t even care if you’re alive?

Again, are you really doing what makes you happy?

Then it all comes to your realization.

You thought what you are doing would make you happy, but halfway through, you realize that it isn't working out for you, and you try to reassure yourself that it is just a phase and things would get back to normal and all these negative thoughts would then be out of your mind and you will again fall in love with the thing you are currently doing because that was the plan from the beginning and that is why you started it in the very first place.
You try to finish the crappy book that you initially thought was amazing but just because you don’t want to go against your previous assumption (that it was going to be amazing), you keep convincing your mind that you will eventually find it amazing when you finish reading it but you’re just being tortured by it right now and you can’t put it down and you don’t know which other book to read and you can’t think of anything else and you’re writing about how it’s driving you crazy and you don’t know if you’ll ever read what your writing.

So why are you actually writing it in the first place?
Fuck it. Let things stay or go, stop caring so much. Nothing in this world can ever matter so much to you that your life will cease to exist without it. People and things will come and go, that’s the way of life. There’s no point holding on to a piece of cloth that you've outgrown. Nostalgia is a fatal disease and it burns up a hole into you if you allow it to. But regretting what you have chosen and living with it is even worse.
So don’t cling on. Memories will stay with you, and you wouldn't want to spoil them with a bitter memory that you will be reminded of every time you think of the good ones.

So it’s better to leave the thing halfway and just keep the good part of it rather than pushing yourself too much to keep it longer and eventually lose the sunny side of it. And move on, try new stuff, explore new possibilities. 

So what I ended up realizing is that there is never one right way to live your life. And there isn't one best way either. And there's this one quote that might work for you at times when you are struggling between holding on and letting go: