I am looking for myself out there.

For a mother...where ever she is.

Last year roughly some time in November my best friend's mother passed away. I still have the message he sent me. It simply said- "Mom is no more...she has left me...and gone away."
I thought he was joking. I refused to believe the message though when I read it my insides just jumped off a cliff and plummeted below. Another friend who was close to the both of us mustered up the guts to call him up for I could not manage to task myself. She spoke to him for a minute and looked at me. I didn't hear the rest and I couldn't hear the rest.
I just started crying. Shamelessly, sitting right in the middle of at least 30 other people I broke down. It was the most natural thing to happen right then, And some how, sitting here, so far away from my best friend and no obligations to holding him up I cried.
I was never really that close to his mother. I had been to his house so many times but had spoken to her very seldom. The most i spoke to her was possibly when she asked me what colour muffler I wanted, She had made me a baby blue muffler. She cooked for us, stuffed us silly and watched all the soaps on t.v. Even when we went for shows she made us food to take with us. She even made me pickles to take them to Delhi with me. A whole jar of pickles that just sits there on the shelf in front of me even now. I am scared to finish it. It's like the day I do the very last bit of her will vanish from my life.
I think I cried more for myself than my friend that day. I just thought of losing my mother and my heart just broke. I couldn't even start to imagine what my friend was going through. His world was shattering around him and I was miles away, crying.
The other friend who had made the call excused herself and went away. She probably didn't want to cry as shamelessly as I had.
I miss my mother. And I can't imagine life without her. I probably love her more now than I ever could and when I think of my best friend I want to run to my mother and ask her never to go away to a place where i can't call her. I want to keep my mother forever and probably even let my best friend have a bit of her. Just a bit. Just so as he can get the love.
I never spoke to my mother about this. Nor did I talk to my best friend about it. He kept saying that he needed to talk to me. But I didn't want to. What could we talk about?

what could we possibly talk about?

MEMORIES

Is that you? You finally noticed that I was there. It was getting rather lonely here. I am so glad you returned. Please don’t ever leave again.
It is wonderful to see you smile; I almost started believing that those tears were painted on your cheek with permanent tones; I had thought that the nervous chin and the downcast eyes would forever be you. I had thought that I would reflect your deepest pains and lost passions forever.
But now, look at you! The brightness, the colour and the hope! Come closer...you know these old eyes. I don’t see too well these days.
You want to hear stories?
Ah! A treat for my ears. Sit. Let me entertain you.
You remember when you were small? When you were too pleased with the new crayons in school and you did not notice the shriek in the bedroom? It wasn’t the neighbor. It was your father hitting your mother for the hundredth time.
You remember the next day? Your father told you that your mother had gone for a long holiday. He lied. She had killed herself that night.
You remember your sister? She ran away from home because she hated you for being the most loved.
You remember the first boy you fell in love with? Did you know that he cheated on you the very night he promised to marry you?
Your convocation? Ah! The best! Did you know that you didn’t get the best student award because your best friend lied to the faculty?
Did you know that you were adopted and till date your father loves you and yet hates you the most?
And do you know that these stories about you are stuff of fairytales?
Don’t you remember your first boss? He used you unfairly and yet gave the promotion to his prodigal nephew? Do you recall the first pitch you lost? The first insult that was hurled towards you? The first desolate moment of heart ache?
You don’t remember?!?
My beloved, now you do! You must forgive this old mind...there are so many things one tends to forget.
But I am happy for your smile. For the steadily diminishing glint in your eyes and the vanishing colour of your cheeks. You are so beautiful this way.
I am happy for your present and the future but you must remember.
You are going?
No! Wait!!No...
Why must you pick up that paper weight?
Are you going to...NO...STOP...NOT ME...

The coloured paperweight crashed through the silvered glass and the mirror lay broken in a million pieces at my feet.
The memories were dead.
So I turned and walked away.


(This was written for a story writing competition in the annual festival of our school.)

The life, the truth and Everything.

A professor of mine made us write about love in her class. She gave us whole two hours to write about love. "Make it personal" she said and sent us off to class. Like a retarded bunch of immature kids we sat around a giggled, joked, wasted time, each person looking into the other person's work to see how 'personal' it was. None of us were 18 or 16 or 12.
We were all adults who have had relationships that were nor platonic. Well, most of us in class that day. These adults had also by all probabilities has sex, cheated, broken up and had their hearts broken.
Yet, while we were ordered to write, we acted like children.
Some found it cool to associate science with love and give some redundant explanation. It was most insulting to him, he didn't realize.
I'll tell him why if I could. Talking about love the way he did made it seem like a theory. And theory by rule cannot be proved/disproved and is always subject to change. So is what he made of love. Yet this was the guy who asked other guys for their rooms when his girl stayed back on campus.
Irony.
Some called it power to fulfill their aims, some called it faith, beauty and many such heavy things.
The professor patiently heard us all, lauded us, appreciated us and told us that she loved us. She said that every relationship was a negotiation. She said that to love someone you did not have to like that person. She sent us off with a new novel to read with this new vision and idea of love.
It felt like a personality development class. 2 hours of squeaky clean thoughts and heaps of lies. Everyone hid the truth about how they felt about the person they loved. I probably did too. For there are always proper temporal and spatial zones for some abject discussions. You obviously can't tell her professor that you love your boyfriend...that is blasphemy.


That very evening I had a huge fight with someone I loved. And in the end it all came down to negotiations.

What do you want to be?

She asked me this question when i was almost dozing off in the car next to her. I fought with the sleep reflex and opened my eyes and looked at her. Well, she didn't know I was half asleep and I was wearing sunglasses.
My mind screamed out - "Do you think I am 8???"
"I don't know..." I said and i looked out of the window and nothing in particular, I had to show that I was thinking.
"There has to be something that you like except advertising..." she asked changing the gears.
"Yes...sleeping..." I wanted to say.
"Well...maybe...I don't know..."
I didn't have an answer.
When I was 8 I had a lot of answers.
For then you can be anything you want to be. You can be an astronaut, an architect, a forensic expert, a historian and God knows what else.
But now you can just be one thing.
And sometimes not even that.
When you are 8 all you really need to do is to imagine. And everything just happens. It's so simple and you can be a new thing every day. You can even want to be a housewife and say so...and your mother will not raise an eyebrow.
But I am obviously old and lost. I don't even know what I want to be for 5 mins at a stretch. Every day was the end draws near I wonder about what I want to be.
And every day I have no answers.
I didn't have an answer for her. Well surely not one that i could tell her.
"I want to be me...for every day that comes now on I want to be everything i used to be...and for days that I have left behind in some long lost age I want to be EVERYTHING you can't imagine...yes even a rockstar..."
But i told my nosy classmate today-
"I am going to fly a plane..."

'' "

- Someone I do not know is reading my poems and choosing them for an event of embarrassment and discomfort scheduled for Friday the 13th. Bravo.

- Battles were fought and pitched on our grounds and we were not a part of it. Nor will we be.

- They will dance till the moon goes right up to the center of the sky.

- I lie. I don't like you.

- 9 Songs is a STUPID movie but i enjoyed the time i spent watching it.

- One of my friends is a chauvinistic, biased freak.

- I threw hot pink and violet gulal on black boxes and made it look funky.

- Went all the way to another state to have pasta in a shop that was closed.

- My room mate is going away for 2 weeks.

- Every memory is a trace of a tear.

- We live in an Utopia...yet some traces of happiness are so hard to find.

He didn't jump.
Instead, just to make a point he took of his shoe and threw it down form the 7th floor of the library. That is where he was dangling his legs from. He drank a lot of water, spoke on his cell, and talked animatedly to the people inside. Only once he addressed the crowd gathered below to say that JNU had no value for his life for the life of others. He got the police and the fire brigade and the tv crews in.
He didn't jump.
He came out looking like a martyr leaning on the shoulders of our student union president, he looked as if he had gone through hell sitting up there dangling one of his legs and his privates placed precariously on the window ledge.
I think he came down cause he had to pee.

Daddy!Daddy! It's just like you said- now the living outnumber the dead.

Going.Going.Gone.

We had our 'Hostel Night' yesterday. It is the last function of the 3 day hostel extravaganza that every hostel in JNU hosts. It is basically a 'gala' dinner followed by a dance party and loads of booze to add to the general confusion.
However the story is not that, or about anything that happened either at the dinner or the dance. But rather well after everyone had stuffed themselves silly and had finished shouting at the DJ to play that 'one last song'.

This particular friend of mine has a room mate who appears to me as a pretty nice and sweet guy. Well, in general, i obviously have to base my reaction depending on the very minimal contact i have with him. The usual B.A boy who has his set of weird friends, good in sports, confused with his German translations and so on. However every time his girl friend comes to his room to stay (those are the times when my friends are unceremoniously kicked out) they have a small World War of sorts. EVERY TIME.
Bottles are crushed beyond recognition, mugs are shattered to pieces, window glass is broken, book shelves twisted out of shape and I don't know what else. It in general is darn nasty.
It seems to me that they 'battle' every time they meet, or rather they meet ever time they need to fight. I should not assume any such thing for I am sure they love each other very much and after all my experience I know for certain that every couple has its own equation and perception. I cannot unearth this one perfect idea of a couple and expect it to work with EVERYONE and for information nor can you.
However, this time i was an auditor to their epic battle.

We were all outside the room, in an open space behind the room where people hang their clothes to dry and keep the coolers and chatting with friends who were having a few drinks, singing, laughing and having a decently good time. within roughly 10 minutes of the lights in the room going off we heard a loud noise of something being thrown, soon followed by another then the door banged hard and the windows flew open and the lights went on. My two friends who stay in the room with the guy quietly closed the windows and went in to check. We discretely left the boy's wing. While we were leaving we realized that we were not the only ones who had heard the racket. Half the hostel was awake and outside their rooms, at least on the ground floor.
What happened next is a different story but the guy had cuts all over his hand and the girl was unharmed albeit greatly embarrassed.

She was not embarrassed by their fight but rather by a million people barging in to find out whether he had hit her or not- especially those retarded feminists. The ones who never hear the full story but run to mutilate the character of the guy involved and run signature campaigns to get support for their propaganda.

I know for sure that the guy did not hit the girl, he never has. If he had ever done so then she would have been gravely injured; for a guy who can twist a steel book case out of shape is not a force i would want a girl to reckon with. Other feminists could and may by all means ostracize me for a comment like this and are welcome to. However I do not believe in their brand of feminism and I never will. I stand by what is right and what they do does not substantiate as 'right' to me.

JNU has this association (if i may call it so) called GSCASH- which is to make people stand up against sexual harassment of any sort. What happens when a boy/girl slaps a GSCASH against the other- the case is taken up by a 'court' who decide the tenets of who is wrong and who has been wronged, and it is a long drawn tedious process that can take forever. The group is supposed to be apolitical but they have party back up which absolutely makes a farce out of the whole system. The case in question becomes a joke and the people involved become characters to be joked about and talked about, the ones you make plays about and laugh. You however do not learn. NO ONE learns.
For these 'feminists' such an association is the best thing ever.
The guy is always wrong and the girl is always the victim.
The only grounds on which I think a guy must not hit a girl is because biologically females and weaker then males and can't physically match up to males. Genetically and otherwise females are built differently. There is nothing to argue on this. You cannot expect a female to be physically strong enough to take on a guy unless under unique circumstances. I believe that the only reason guys are taught to never hit girls is because girls get hurt easier than guys do. This is entirely a physical thing.
I am not even raising an emotional argument so don't bother.
So i remotely abhore these 'feminists' who choose to ignore that a girl may also harass a guy emotionally. They refuse to see the other side of the coin or hear the other side of the story. For them it is ONLY bout the fact that a guy hit a girl. Not do much about one human being hitting another.
So lets get this straight- you put sex before being human? Is that what your 'feminism' is all about?
I for one being a girl know how manipulative and harassing a girl is capable of being. I am not saying that ALL girls who have got harassed are like that but all I am saying is that there is another side to the story. Maybe you should try hearing that before you tighten the noose.
In every relationship there arise times when you could murder the significant other. I have felt it SO many times. Now how I deal with it is the question. As human beings who are cultured and educated (as per the basic government approved norms) should know that every relationship has its marker of respect and privacy and space that should not be violated. Stop the fight before it gets physical. I have seen bruises on people I love and I have cried for that. don't forget that we are human. You cannot and should not hit another human being. Irrespective of the sex.

There even cropped up a fight between the people who had been awoken by the noises about whether the couple should be left alone to sort out their differences or should the guy be pulled out and beaten up for hurting the girl.
They weren't even in the room and they already had taken sides.

I was asked by my friends to stay out of this so I departed. i knew that the girl was not hurt and I was fine with that knowledge. I am no one to say whether a couple should or should not fight and if they should then how, with what levels of decorum or what levels of approved noise.
That is not my concern, it is their private one.

I hate feminists. They are prudes with half baked and selective knowledge and no humanism in them. Maybe they should learn about being humans before they learn about being a girl or a guy.

Feminism is passe and its GONE.

Confessions for this Week

1. I bunked two classes for absolutely no good reason and two more for a decent reason. None of it had anything to do with love, anger, or anything remotely awe-inspiring.

2. I ate 4 egg rolls in 3 days.

3. I picked up a fruit from beneath a tree on the side of the road and ate it. Twice.

4. I lost my temper and cried twice.

5. I learned some terrible things about one friend and don't know what to do with it.

6. I called the American Center Library up at least 15 times to confirm one list of 30 useless people.

7. I was rude to one person today. A junior.

8. I was glad today that I had someone who loved me. I am glad always, but especially today. And the concerned person did nothing GREAT, in fact he did NOTHING.

9. Today i made sure that I looked smarter than the rest 30 odd people going for a seminar. I thought it mattered...to me it did.

10. I swore a breakdown that involved breaking and burning every piece of remotely flammable article of a planned project.

11. I abused the daylights out of people all down the week; not on their face but by typing it in sms and then giggling to myself about it for the words sounded funny when i said them. I didn't send those sms.

12. I didn't study, not one bit.

Maybe I should do this more often.
Maybe.

The Anatomy of Greed

We have sticky fingers. Probably green too. Like the ones that grab anything it tends to remotely like and sometimes even things that it just must have. It is a fancy, a fascination and an obsession to want anything and everything that can be wanted and probably possessed.
I was very small then...tiny in fact. Probably 4 or 5 or at the most 6 years old. Surely not older otherwise my ego would have retaliated back rather terribly at this incident. I had lots of toys. LOTS. Just as all pampered girls do especially if they are the oldest of the siblings. Even more so for the poor parents feel that since they have decided to go ahead and make the error of wanting MORE crying, bawling, defecating, noisy kids to add to the general chaos, the first of the blessed lot must be feeling unloved when the later truck load arrives. The poor child is made to feel miserable by relatives of all shapes and sizes and most hideous proportions that the parents would now love the new creatures and not them. So these disillusioned older children wander around plotting murder and managing to pull the cheeks of the new arrivals and subsequently getting shooed away by the ever watchful, irritating, pan chewing ayah. These juvenile delinquents are made shades worse when those awful relatives heap gifts over gifts on the new creatures and the criminal minds wonder- what exactly will a 6 month old baby do with a tricycle? Or a toy train? Or a Barbie? It baffles them. These were supposed to be THEIRS. And why not?
The parents do not care anymore about their glorious lives and no one gives them anything. Trust me. That is how the relatives and the servants ensure that they think. And if you are a shade darker than your new sibling then God help you and your likes. You will be ostracized to the depths of a dark continent and back. Twice over.
What do the parents do? In turn they together with some well meaning people donate some goods of decent entertainment value to the older child hoping to negotiate peace details. It works mostly. You know...the bright, colourful, shiny, new toys are such a temptation.
Someone had sent a packet full of toys to our house. I do not know who they belonged to and I never will. Being the eldest I managed to sift through them first before my brother and sister could reach it and I hunted out a plastic cat with a blue bow painted on its plastic body. Someone had nibbled on the tail and the right ear. Teething Animals!!! The rest of the things were broken and uninteresting. So I grabbed the cat, with its nibbled ear and tail as it stimulated this vague memory in me. It was probably an old toy of mine for I had the habit of chewing anything and everything. I still do. It also occurred to me that if this was mine then for sure some unholy soul must have taken it away from me when I was sleeping and had put it in the bag with all discretion so as to pass it on to my siblings. THIEVES.
So I grabbed the cat and exclaimed-
“Eta to Amar!!!”
Translated- “This is mine!!!”
The next thing that happened has engraved itself in my memory in such a bitter and raw way that it bleeds even today.
My grandfather snatched it out of my hand and said-
“Shob kichu tomar noye...”
Translated- “Everything does not belong to you...”
Nothing had ever been snatched away from me unless they were shiny sharp objects. Baffled I looked up at his face. There was a look of a strange disgust- a disgust of my childish greed and God knows what else. But disgust.
He took the plastic cat away from me and gave it to my sister.
The plastic cat with the blue painted bow now sits on the top of the refrigerator. And I don’t care who it belongs to.