Ownership and Freedom

The body

2010-01-19T06:32:00.000-08:00

In this empty room I sit and crave. In this blank mind, I sit and desire.

For sex. For kiss. For touch.

I learnt that stares violate women.The learning empowered me. I had words for all those violations I had faced. I knew I could counter violations to come with braveness.

And then I reached this place, this space. Surrounded with people who seek me for the words I have to offer, for the concern that I have to show. But here in this place and space, I am de-sexualised. I am no longer coveted for, I am no longer desired. My body is absent, invisible. I am only what people see me. A good friend.

All of me revolts. In blinding anger. Against this gaze, this new lesson learnt.

of loves and friends

2010-01-02T11:44:00.000-08:00

boundaries blur. old memories come rushing in, slowly at first, but gradually gaining moementum and heaviness. bringing in feelings of a painful love, long forgotten and long removed from.

i want to hold on to it. make it mine. erase from that love all that wont fit in. and fill it with the most possessive love i could muster. keep it caged. for me to touch it tenderly when i wish to. take it out and stare at it till my heart fills up with joy for being the owner of such a love.

but i dont. absolutes float in heavily. irrevocability spreads its wings and settles down. the pain rushes in from the gut and disperses over the chest in the most uncomfortable manner possible. and i sit stunned and afraid at all the churning that my heart can conjure up at the most unexpected times.

for distractions the mind and heart craves.

Anniamma

2009-11-02T07:03:00.001-08:00

Anniamma tells me her life would make for a wonderful movie script and the movie would definitely be a super-hit. I try to avoid the tears and the pain as she says this.

Anniamma is 29 years old. Of all the women, I have spoken to, she was the only one who made her children people for me. She called them by their names. Arun and Mani. They were not just numbers to feed or care for in the daily routine called life.

After being thrown out of two homes where people did not want to talk to me, her inviting smile eased me as she agreed to answer my questions, terribly insignificant ones in the face of her life, as it unfolded before me.

I ask her what she does in her free time. She laughs and tells me there is no such thing. I persist. I ask her if she sat around and talked to the other women after work. No, I don't. People don't talk to me. They tell me I have lost my jati and that's why they will not talk to me.

And before I know it, I am privy to details about a life of a woman I am unlikely to ever meet or make a difference to. Anniamma is maaried, she says, to her husband's younger brother because the former died from being afflicted with HIV. And as is custom, she lost any rights she had to the house she lived in with her first husband. Her other brother-in-law took the house away, sold it and didnt pay her a penny. (Inheritance laws are not for poor women)

As she sits facing me and the road, she is constantly looking out. She wants to show me her daughter. The daughter who does not acknowledge her as mother. Who lives with her uncle across the road. Her daughter walks past us as she gets ready to do the day's cooking. Anniamma tells me that a child' heart is like stone and a mother's like a flower. I cry looking at my daughter who is no longer my daughter, she says.

I do not ask all the questions swimming in my head, despite my valiant efforts to not have them even exist. I am wondering, despite myself, about the details. How did the estrangement happen? Why did the daughter choose her uncle over her mother? Was the "sin of sexual incest" something she could not "forgive" her mother of? Or is her "unforgiving stance" because her mother left her behind when she ran away with her lover?

But I ask none of them. I keep begging her to stop, in my head. I am telling her that I cannot handle more of these stark contradictions, the injustice, my helplessness. Please stop. Anniamma asks me if I would like to see her dead husband's photo. I quickly say no. But she persists and hands me a happy photo of her, her dead husband, her estranged daughter, her dead niece and her young son. Standing in front of a bush with pink and purple flowers in Majestic. My eyes glaze over as I try desperately to maintain the distance. Her words keep chipping away at this barrier I've constructed that helps me go on with the farce called research.

I can no longer take it and I try to shift the conversation to lighter things. I ask, quite casually, if she had her dinner. Since everyone else around seemed to be eating. She tells me then that she does not have wood to light the stove, no food to eat, no money to buy them. So the fires are out today, she says.

With that, I had to leave before she could tear down my barrier anymore. I mutter my thanks and leave but not before she has this to say: "If God can't look after us and give us a good life, why does he not just end this life?"

I am told that research does not entail action. I must not hold myself to obligations. That I do my research, get out of there and help later when I can. Anniamma exposed and laid bare the fallacy of this reasoning for me.

musings 6

2009-07-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

What do the words I love you mean?

After an unexpected conversation tonight, I am left wondering at the import of the words and what they have until now meant to me.

I discover to my tumultous surprise that these words do not come strings unattached. That like for most people, they come to me with notions and expectations of exclusivity, of fidelity in mind and body, of unrealistic love made realistic by convention and conditioning.

Words that betray these unthought expectations create strangeness inside of me. The unnaturalness of extreme heat and extreme cold colliding against each other, of a liquid that seems like water but feels as heavy as oil, of heaviness and lightness existing in the same space at the same time...

I grapple for support in identifiable emotions of anger and hurt and sadness and equanimity and composure and evenness. I fail miserably. Uttterly. And yet I try, try and try. Till I succeed. Urging for reservoirs unknown within me to come rescue me.

musings 5

2009-06-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

wring your heart out. dry it out on the clothesline. blood drips. creating a pool of red and green feelings to drown in. try desperately to hold, latch, grab. not let the colours blind you. rationality you scream. come rescue me.

love is a hard thing.

Musings 4

2009-05-15T04:14:00.000-07:00

It is bloody difficult to go through everyday. And it is much more bloodier to go through everyday when you know others are having fun with their everydays

Musings 3

2009-05-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

There are some moments one must have to be able to negotiate the world of noise and demand. One night when the inaneness of what you do fills you up to the brim, you turn it off. You turn off the sounds you can and you make peace with all the sounds you cant. You let the quietness hovering around you for days and weeks and months come inside you. You wait for it to envelop you, to let out the thoughts unworded, the words unspoken and because there is no one around you, you speak them in silence to yourself.

If only it were that easy.

Quietness and silence has to fight. Fight with other thoughts that suddenly want to be thought. Schedules about what must one must do about all the work undone, the superficiality of hair styles and what changing them means to you as a person, the relationship you demand so much of, the relationships you kill actively and passively, the sudden urge to drink water and let its reinvigorating touch cleanse you, how one must sleep so that one does not screw up your body rhythm.... these and much more, much much more... drive hard to keep the quietness away.

Most often they are successful. But sometimes these poisonous thoughts scamper away.

Musings2

2009-05-04T13:51:00.001-07:00

Well, so today was one of those watershed conversations. We had talked long and hard earlier about keeping the relationship open and today we had the chance to really feel how difficult it is.

I hated it when I first heard it. And then I kept quiet about it. I felt jealous next. None of what he said about his love for me I heard. I merely kept quiet about it. And then I told him, I felt bad. And I told him why I felt bad.

And we spoke of inequality. Of egos. Of hurt. Of separation. Of love. Of Togetherness. Of binary simplicties. Of multiple complexities. Of finding new ways.

an encounter in a bus

2009-04-29T02:39:00.000-07:00

hurrying, i got into the bus. halted in my tracks to make it to the front end of the bus, i stood impatiently asking the conductor and the passenger with no money to allow me space to move.

in a strangeness that should have alerted me of things to come, the two did not move. not even the conductor which in my experience in bus travels is strange because conductors are always asking people to move ahead.

and then the brush against my breasts happened. the conductor did it. apart from the usual feelings of whether it was an accident (which one knows it is not), i was at sea because it was the conductor. who do you raise the issue to? the driver? other passengers? i had always assumed the conductor would conduct the scene if one raised the issue of molestation. that he would be the one to help me take the offender to the police station etc etc. so when such a man brushes his hand 'accidentally', then what?

he tried a couple more times but missed my breasts my a few inches. then he came, leaned against the seat in front of me, positioned himself in such a way that his standing legs leaned against mine. my instinct was to take it away. but i stopped myself.

i let it be. for a good half a minute, we let it be. i thought to myself, if he could get pleasure from my body, perhaps i should too. and i let it be and i enjoyed myself.

i saw that it threw him off balance. that now he was no longer the seeker. that i had asserted myself. and he did not know what to do. he moved away and never came back.

time

2009-02-15T23:01:00.000-08:00

What is time but a state of being? 17 days could transform into two months and two months into two days. The zones we all live in are so vastly different and relative that if time was not to exist, one would imagine that the world would be chaotic.

But in the acceptance of time as absolute, have we subjugated the mind to artificiality? Do we allow for time to expand like the mouth of a giant and to contract to the eye of a needle? Why do we dismiss it as tricks of the mind or of a non-existent absolute entity such as time?

Musings 1

2009-02-13T06:42:00.000-08:00

A calmness descends over me when I encounter people who speak of many things, coalescing the spiritual and the material. Shadow bits of anatomy, one said. Another, the beautiful one, said that her shattering accident where she had no word for pain, for hunger was her deepest invitation to inhabit her body. In all our musings about the body, while being the intimate we perceive it to be, we do not experience it, it remains in the realm of the metaphor. The schism, however unacknowledged, remains.

Love, the beautiful one said, is adoration and compassion. "two things that float into my consciousness now". It is also merciless, unremitting honesty with one self and others around you.

Of the Other that we create in our endeavours, noble and ignoble, the core of the other is within you. It is not an embodiment of everything you stand against. Unothering the other, she said, is a tool to escape the trappings set by adherence to a strain of thought.

A new world is before me. I can see it clearly for the first time.

of a relationship

2009-02-13T06:40:00.000-08:00

Today, I found a new definition for friendship for myself. Introspecting on the relationship that I share with her, in conversation with her, I found that ever-changing answer.

For long now (time is after all a state of being) I have wondered what made us so special. What made us share each other in soulful ways that only the most softest of music, the deepest of colours and the most melodious of words could emulate it.

In the stumbling and groping, erasing and rewriting, the going back and forth- for words, she provided me the gentlest of spaces to recapture my hazy vision of me. In those minutes we spoke, I found clarity, even if only for the briefest of moments. In those words of practical wisdom we have for each other- one that draws from the core of intimate connections that women have shared with each other since history - she cleansed me of my rancour, rid me of my self-covered malaise and presented for me my life.

For the freedom from loss of self imminent in routine life, for the freedom of a constant discovery of me, she stands as my true north.

random thoughts

2009-02-12T04:29:00.001-08:00

What makes us love understated elegance?
Is it the life it makes us suddenly live?
Is it the wisdom that it pours from within?

Quiet revolutions are possible.

A life saved is a life worth living.
Even of drudgery.

Faces can haunt you.
Codes can inspire you.

Things bigger than us have happened in the world before
Things bigger than us will happen in the world after.

The universe is you
It has many many others too.

Many universes exist
Parallel, Colliding,
Merging, Melting.

effects of a pregnant king

2009-01-17T03:52:00.000-08:00

Boundaries. Fluid and loving.
What one must do and not do, nebulous.
Crashing, unravelling, destroying
Light is bad, dark is good.
Is good good? Is bad bad?
Left is right because right is right.
Right is right because left is left.
Questions that are answers, answers that are questions,
Questions and answers that are neither but everything.
Categories that undefine more and define less.
Man is woman is woman is man is nothing and many things and all things at once.
Man enveloped in the woman; woman part of man.
Binaries equals clarity equals chaos equals world.
Are attempts then futile?

of power and love

2009-01-17T03:50:00.000-08:00

Power is involved you know, she said.

There are power structures.

I smiled and told myself

Not in mine.

But I nodded along.

Young, I thought.

To see everything in black.

Then the time came.

That going-into-shell time.

You know how it is

People claim your time

And you just want to leave them all

Yes, yes. Arrogance and all.

A privilege people around me have granted.

Until now.

A conversation.

Stifled. Clear.

No more talking.

For a while.

Expectation filled

That some persistence despite.

No calls.

Desperation mounts.

Not my terms.

Anger. Impotent.

Mind goes awry.

Power is involved you know.

There are power structures.

Ah.

Thatha

2009-01-10T02:02:00.000-08:00

My grandfather died.
He was old and he died.
Like all other old men do. Die.

His eyes, unblinking, he stared at some point in infinity.
His lungs, aided by a rusty oxygen cylinder, he took in air to keep himself artificially alive.
For his son, American son, who he referred to in his diary, Dr. Shivakumar,
To be accompanied by his daughter-in-law, who he referred ironically, informally as Anu.

His grandchildren, also his grand nieces, shook him and shouted at him.
As if it was a game. To see if he would respond. Perhaps utter a sound that spoke of recognition.
He didnt. He simply took in air. Loudly. Painfully. Deathly.

His son, my father, dressed in impeccable blue and black, striding and conversing about ambulances and ventilators,
Walked in and stood behind his father.
Called out to him- Appaji, Appaji- words rarely uttered to the dying man's face in earlier years.
He gasped and suddenly it dawned that they were sobs.
Of a child, my father, crying for his Appaji's life.

A phone call, few hours later announced that Thatha was "serious".
The doctors, life-keepers, who assuredly had announced he could kept alive for a couple mpre days,
They said, "he's serious. Less than an hour he has".
Men who grew up with him burst into torrid sobs.
Passing of a familiar figure, death announcing their own sunset perhaps.

Two more cell phone updates later, my father, his son, sank into a sofa.
He held his face in his hands and sobbed. His face contorted, he wept.
While his wife and two children, not knowing a response to this unfamiliar emotion,
Sat and ate. Guiltily. Confused.

He lay there. Limp and lifeless. Sleeping his last sleep.
His mouth slighlty parted like someone sleeping a deep sleep.
Hands and wrists curled up like the paralysed man he was.
Bound to a chair with infected legs.

His son, my father, touched his face, caressed his sparse but thick hair ( a little detail perhaps no one knew till he lay there limp and lifeless).
Composed in his conversations with doctors and in his driving to the hospital,
He broke down. Loudly.
For a moment, he laid his head on his wife's shoulders.
His wife, my mother, knew not what to do.
Sensing no warmth but only confusion,
My father and his loud sobs left the sterile ICU.

My father, whose only emotions public were Indifference, Frowns, Pearly smiles and cricket happy face,
Wept his middle-aged orphaned tears. Crying his fatherless tears.
I held him and told him that he was not alone. That he had us.
But face covered, his body shook while he pulled away from me.
And I held him again, uttering consolation again and again.

Opening his face, revealing his blood-shot eyes, he wiped my tears away
"That s all he was meant to live. I must control myself"
And then he stopped. Became the man I knew.
Covering up his fatherless silences with mandatory phone calls.

It was time then to say my final goodbye.
To the man of my childhood.
The distant old Thatha who offered flowers that I picked out from the garden to the Gods.
Who wore a red panche, a linga, and worshipped in semi-darkness.
Who eagerly but distantly awaited our arrival every Deepavali
So that he could take down our marks and tally who scored the highest among us cousins
Who sat patriarch like and old man like and soaked in the lights of the festival
Through our cracker bursting and who next morning diligently swept the courtyard of the polluting remains of our fireworks.

He lay there with an old bedsheet covering up his mangled infected remains of a body
His face that of an old man, sleeping his final deep sleep.
Goodbye Thatha. The only one I knew.

a poem

2008-09-28T20:54:00.001-07:00

Alone on the bed.

Sitting and typing.

Images flash by.

Images I have never seen.

Of what I think others have seen.

Of me.

How am I when I laugh.

Or when I talk.

Or when I listen.

How am I when I am angry.

Or when I know someone looking at me.

Or when I think someone is looking at me.

How am I in moments when I am far away.

Or when I am consciously far away.

What contours does my face take?

The physical features of this organ.

That so many look at. And so many don’t.

How do they mould and to what do they mould?

Who will tell me my truth?

Who will record my history for me?

from an earlier time

2008-09-06T23:54:00.000-07:00

you know how it is.... tonnes of work and everything and every part of your head is rebelling against it... so i decided on some vela surfing... and began checking out stuff from my previous blog... this one i wanted to share again...

Sudgadamma'- that was her name. The first part of her name "Sudgadu" roughly translates to a sort of hell-like cemetary and is used in Kannada as an angry insult to tell someone to go die.

All of us- my mum, sis and i-wondered why anyone would name their kid that. The best we could come up with was maybe cos she was a girl baby.

It still could be true. But after what I heard today.... that dalits request brahmins to name their kids... these brahmins hardly enter the dalit bastis because it 'pollutes' and stinks.... and name the kid by any word that comes to their head at that moment... another possibility arises.

I think of how my friend was unhappy with Srinivas and wanted to change her surname to Bhat because it sounded good.... and i wonder how this lady felt every time she had to tell someone her name.

How did she refer to herself in her head? As sudgadu? Was she reminded of how unwanted she was everytime she thought of her name?

Can there be a more cruel way to condemn someone from birth than this?

I wouldnt be surprised if there were...

2008-08-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

So I was at this wonderfully comfortable place today... mostly women and a few token men... and we were all sitting and talking about being feminists... and the usual concerns about being identified as a feminist were raised and the answers were mostly the ones that I had evolved to form in my head for myself (and by that virtue possessing some sort of longer staying power)

Towards the end however, a woman told us her story. Of how she was subjected to having people question her about the way she was dressed and how she was probably guilty for the advances made and for the time when a man broke into her room.

Now, the outline of the story has been played and replayed so many times that it has become monotonously trite. But at that moment it all came alive, filling in the gaping outline, was the real and the physical, the woman who stood there while people passed judgements on her and her body.

And suddenly, women were reborn in my head.

Forgotten for the past two years. Their body and the struggle to reclaim that space forever and continuously. Forgotten in the power of being a journalist.

I do not claim for journalism the higher ideals of equality. Like much of the world outside, it sucks and aint that great a place for women.

But it did something for me. It took away from me the shackles of worry of my physical safety. I remember riding home at eleven on my two-wheeler on national highways and open fields, having imaginary conversations with creepy men who would accost me midway. I would tell them that I am a journalist. That I know the area politician. That they would be in big trouble if they tried to mess with me. And in my head, they would run away in fear at hearing these powerful things.

My most cherished moment as a woman journalist came at this chief minister's city tour that i was assigned to cover. Now, wherever the cm went, huge crowds gathered. huge crowds of men. some of my women colleagues decided to opt out of the field trip and sit in our bus. but since i was always uncomfortable acknowledging limits of my gender, i went.

i went and i stood amidst hundreds of men. a woman in a crowd. nah... a huge, huge crowd. but automatically, there was space around me. people jostled and pushed, but never in that one hour that i stood, never was there an "innocuous brush", a prying finger, a humiliating groping.

i felt safe. for the first time, i felt safe in a crowd of men. i didnt have to move my body in those obvious, non-obvious ways we do, to protect myself, i didnt have to look out for suspect men, i didnt have to worry about a hundred little and big things i would otherwise have been worried to death about. i just had to do my job of covering an event and i did without worrying about being me, a woman.

i m not saying here that my safety was a result of being journalist alone. but it is the power i commanded because there was a whole battalion of people out there, police included, who were there for me. who stood as my shield.

this sort of safety, much flawed maybe, i can only dream about, having left the profession for a while. but. but imagine a world where this safety were possible. where we lived not afraid that we were women, but content in that we were women.

2008-08-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

Dum dum dum...

sat here in this corridor amidst scores of people alone. i like it here. to see how i can create my space with so many people milling around.

dum dum dum

kept wondering how long i can resist from opening up my blog and seeing if anyone has miraculously found their way here and even left a comment (gasp!)

dum dum dum

lasted about an hour and fifteen minuted before i capitulated and let the world know (heh!) that i exist and write.

tra la la

saw a random movie... someone' s random thoughts were on it... corridors, outlines, black and white, profiles, lines.... randomness that was assertive and defensive....

had conversation... lilting and.... random... about everything and nothing... about elsewhere...

hmmm....

dum dum dum

have started on a vicarious path... begun to read other people's blogs... what fun! different styles... of writing and of life.

little panic.

what waste of time.

all that knowledge to be gathered.

sigh.

sigh. sigh.

eleven already.... dum dum dum. little alcohol would be nice. but sleep would be nicer.

some organisation, classification and movement needed.

dum bum lum tadum ta da

what fun laptops are. people even read them during movies that they ve chosen to sit through. not a class by a lecturer imposed on them. little random no? actually very much. like an addiction. pah! people i say!

what fun laptops are. people all around you. their crowd laughter filters in and out. while i sit esconsed in my world. staring and writing. random. some pleasure at knowing worlds can be created with the aid of technology wherever and whenever.

seriously maybe i should read some science and see how it affect development.

dum dum dum

blogging

2008-08-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

somebody told me not to write a blog when you re down and out. increases your "existential angst", she said. makes sense. a previous experience with blog left me writing things I never would say to people, random people, but only to myself in conversations with her.

but now, three years later, as i find myself in a really new place, with her far, far away, at moments with no one to talk to, i turn again to this easy place.

i think to myself- i could write in my diary- that book which has so much of me, which if another read would think that the long life of 23 years has been a series of depressing moods, and that I could possibly not have been happy ever. but i dont write in it. i cannot anymore. its as if its life-span is over. brief attempts to revive it have failed and i am left with nothing to pour my angst into. nothing. except this.

this flicker of space. in a world where i am anonymous. the relative anonymity of this space-my blog-means i could say so much and yet maintain the sanctity of the thought, the emotion. i suppose.

and as i end this post, the mind goes back to how it violated the space of two people who had found each other through this medium. by reading their entries to each other about each other. and regret is overwhelming at ever having told them that i intruded into their space.

somethings are best kept silent.

Stories

2008-08-05T23:07:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a story to say about death. About how somebody survived death by pure, sheer luck. About how somebody almost survived. About how death struck somebody like thunder. All pointless, but nevertheless, they are told and retold. Unattached and emotionlessly. But overflowing with pity and sometimes as if it were a novelty.

As I hear them, I want to scream and ask them all to shut up. Tell them all that their stories are just that-stories. They do not make the pain go away. They do not bring a person back from the dead. They do not help the shattered family, coping bravely, feel any less unbroken.

Regular chitter-chatter seems so banal. It leaves me wondering how so many trivialities could be talked, sent out into the cosmos, when someone has lost their father, her husband for almost thirty years. When death is such a regular, recurrent feature, how could one lead a life immune to this overpowering knowledge?

Of death and of life

2008-08-05T02:53:00.000-07:00

For three days now, I have been walking around with the feeling of a heart constantly sinking. The tragedy, the grief of someone, someone a part of me, has been searing me with an intensity I cannot fathom.

With him losing his father, I feel as if I lost someone myself. Someone I could have laughed with, someone I could have known. Someone I thought I would know. Sooner or later. But that was not to be. He died much too early leaving behind shattered lives, lives that will have to weave a new pattern of keeping him alive and yet moving on.

Every day I read of people dying and it fails to move me, as I am sure it is for many. But every grief is personal, searingly so. And as I hugged and held her hand, I felt within me the need to know her, the wish to have her in my life, in however small a way she would let me.

He goes on strong. Vulnerably so. Mature in the way he handles his grief. Expecting it to fall to a set pattern. Knowing when it will hit him and how he could cope with it. I hope it does chart out a familiar path for him, yet knowing perhaps that it wont and that it would stray into darkness.

All of the life led seems so banal, all the pettiness and the idle thoughts of cruelty seem just that- petty and idle- till one is reminded- that there is something bigger than that- death. with its oft-repeated finality occurs and reoccurs. ripping off the permanence of life. hurting you again and again. till life with its temporary healing powers recuperates you.

bored and lonely?

2008-07-24T02:43:00.000-07:00

just why did i leave my job? why, i wonder as i sit in this class with v sleeping beside me and as i listen about marginal costs and average production... is this what i should have left a-more-than-average life for? maybe not...

agony

2008-07-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

it is as if a good title could get you writing everything that boils and simmers and anxiously awaits its expulsion. but it rarely does for me. more of a restraint than a freeing mechanism. i wondered, as i always do, what must i begin with...
first of all, i must acknowledge to myself that i will never be one of those people who will blog furiously and everyday... with this acceptance (in much the same way that every which way i ve led my life, it is that of an elite and perhaps even elitisit) comes the relief of a constrained thought.
a new life has been started... new life... how eager one is to always start on a new life, on a clean slate, as if it really could happen... but anyway, somehow, moved myself to a new city... with perfectly reasonable aims for future intellectual growth and any other incidental growth... with the hope (never has there been a more detestable word) that things will take on a different trajectory... that for some reason i will be efficient and pursue the goals towards a "better human being" with fervour, vigour and passion... bollocks...
it is the same old life. the sameness of the methods, the oldness of the efforts are getting under my skin and wanting to desperately be different... but the craving for a non-existence, for a simple vanishing is flooding in... and in some perverted sort of way, i welcome it with cruel laughter as it rips apart the intentions and the vain efforts.
follows is the desire to be expel all those close to me from a previous life. yes, i recognise the arrogance of it, but yet in this moment of honesty, i cannot deny the existence of the thought. i chart cruel ways in which i could do cut them all out without evoking any response from an deep-in-slumber conscience. maybe i will not pick up calls, maybe i will not call.... it s as if in the hurting of them , i can hurt myself and in that hurt i could be reborn.
reborn into another world of me. where the inner life will be devoid of all these gnawing and life sucking thoughts and that i could again begin to feel...for a long long long moment.
i must perhaps end this post but then i think i have hardly begun to write what i want to. that the words are still half said, that thoughts still remain to be expelled and banished into a cosmos no one enters and will be forgotten in the daily terror of living...but then i pause and i wonder. i wonder if i must at all write.. if this is yet another vain attempt to make me feel, to make me feel alive... and if this like most others will merely end in futility.

Ahhhhh.... Sigh.....

2008-04-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

It's the middle of the night and I have tonnes of work to do. Yet my mind refuses to do anything... To read about inflation, about jnnurm, about nregs.... i toss and turn in my head (if it was an omlette, it would have been burnt by now) the life altering decisions I have made... and wonder if they were all right... if i should have been a little more careful in ensuring they made me happy... or more precisely, if they have it in them to continue to make me happy or atleast not regret them....

The thought refuses to let go of me, holds me by the scruff of my neck, and demands that I resolve it. Except the combination of laziness nurtured over the last two years and the rusted methods of introspection just wont let me again....

Its interesting how all of these motions in my head seem to acquire elements of personality and as if I am their victim, the helpless victim... when the simple truth is that I have no answers for the crippling questions in my head....

Motions

2008-01-04T12:06:00.000-08:00

I stare at the keyboard, willing myself to write, challenging myself to see if words can still flow. I tell myself that I used to be able to write for myself and that those words meant liberation, from feelings bottled up, from nagging thoughts still vague,. But then stop again. And the silent night becomes silent again.

I blackmail me to write. Change my tack. Move from challenge to threat. That if I do not write now, I will never write again. That if I do not form my words, I lose forever the person I used to be, that someone who found herself through words.

But where are those words? Are they gone with the people that used to be my life? Have they taken away me, leaving behind a person I can barely talk to-someone hollow, mechanical and unsatisfied at the end of every day?

I live around people. Everyday I smile at them. I crib to them. I hear them. But I rarely ever speak to them, listen to them. I rarely ever have anyone speaking to me, listening to me. Everyone goes through the motions. Life is about living at the moment, and trust me it is not the most engaging way to live.

Growing up, what did I expect? I look back and think of all the things, all the people and all the images I wanted to be.... and I realise that all I wanted was this angst to leave me forever. But it continues, even if I have changed to become yet another mindless being, thinking and feeling mindless little things.

What is it that I am looking for?

Leaving....

2007-08-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

One seemingly impossible thing is leaving. Leaving to move on be it a job, a relationship even a passion. Even if they provide you no joy. If only hope did not spring eternal and people did not have that miserable light called hope to cling onto, would they have left for a happier life?

When did life become so difficult? The words of a fictional woman comes to mind- "She asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications"

So she died...

2007-08-23T22:26:00.000-07:00

Hina Fathima died. She had 35 per cent full thickness burns, which means the acid had seared her body, right down to the bones. No one survives this kind of burns. They dont even with 20 per cent full thickness burns. She did not either. We wrote about it, we cringed at the torture and we forgot about this yet another woman who died because she could not leave a murderous husband.

Death of a girl

2007-08-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

A woman was made to drink acid mixed with alcohol. When she tried to wrench herself from the husband's grip, he disrobed her and poured acid on her. All of 22 years, she has suffered '80 percent burns' and will probably lose her eyes because her husband burnt them with his cigarette. She had wanted to leave him but she always went back, because her parents asked her to and perhaps she thought things would change, in that eternal hope that women (and men) always nurture....

Would a world ever exist where women are filled with the strength to seek out a life not killed everyday by undeserved pain and misery...

In an effort

2007-08-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

So I am here again to a space I had abandoned. For words had stopped. And the ones written were too personal to have been shared with anyone.

But on a vacant night, when noises from within and without do not envelop me, the urge to write for myself but yet share it gnaws at me persistently. I looked for women and their words to fill me up, but my search was unfocussed and in vain.

This is yet another attempt to define a space for me, a space where no one can know me except through what I say. Not through my gestures or my person. Leaving me with ownership and freedom of my being, my words and my message.