Rewind the clock and say "NO"

I wish I could rewind the clock. In my darkest hours and when despair tends to take over, I look to the past and wish I had never met you. Or I had never said "Yes". I wish I hadn't let you get close to me. I wish I had never been loved by you. I wish you had never emotionally tied me down. I wish you had never sapped my strength in your needy ways. I wish you had never called me and threatened to kill yourself- because it made me come back and pick you and your sorry little life up, piece by piece. I wish I had never given you the power to hurt me- to strip me down to my most vulnerable.

Turning 30...and the perils associated with being single at 30.

It has been exactly 10 days since the dreaded 3-0 birthday happened. I slept being 29 one night, only to emerge the next day as a 30 year old. And while I wept at the loss of my so called 'youth', a part of me was serene, calm even. Being 30 makes me feel a little wiser, with a better grip on my future. I am the woman who has challenged convention. Who refused to be paraded in front of suitable suitors & their families like cattle, to be looked up and down, and sneered or whose weak points would be pointed out and worse made into some sort of dowry bargaining chip. I am the person who has loved, lost, loved some more and then lost again. That I am proud of what I have achieved thus far is an understatement. I am a financially independent girl who is doing well in her career in an MNC and professionally I have reached my goals. However, not being married and being nowhere close to finding that significant other leaves you feeling empty. While I do not care much for what the society or my own community has to say about my being unmarried at 30, when all other women in the community do not cross 25 without marriage, it does put considerable pressure on me and my family. My family has been wholly supportive, if a little worried. I don't blame them for being worried, it is what families do. And yet, somewhere, the emptiness of not having that one relationship which you can count upon to be there when you need someone is overwhelming. I am waiting for serendipity to happen...and hoping that the wait wont be too long. So cheers to being 30 and fabulous!

Never look back....and yet we do.

The other day I reached out to someone who I had known for some time on a social media platform, and who like me was at a crossroads in life. Over coffee and advice on how to plan my future, we realised that we had been living parallel lives. He like me had had an extremely long relationship that did not work out and both of us had been left to pick up the pieces of our lives. What was ironical was that we both had laid out these plans of how our lives were going to be and in my case, 10 years later I had seen it all unravel like a spool of wool. By this time I was supposed to have done a second MBA, gotten married and started planning kids. And here I was, alone and without the person I had imagined a life with, mulling over whether it was the right time for the second MBA and wondering how I was supposed to prepare for the toughest test of my life (in my head). 

While this conversation ensured that I left with a conviction of where I was headed, it also brought back a flood of memories. Memories of moments spent charting out a future. Of shared dreams, destinies and best laid plans. Plans that were now empty of a direction. Plans that spoke of moments of togetherness. 

And then I did something I shouldn't have. I went back and looked at my past. Looked at where they were and what they were upto. For the ones who were married, I looked at the life they now led. Possibly happy and possibly content. The feeling of sorrow and emptiness that filled me was overwhelming. I was overcome with the feeling of sadness and loss. It felt like a death. And in so many ways it was, the death of a relationship/s. The death of bonds that held me here. In this place, all this while. 

In a way this journey also gave me a sense of release. Because I can now truly move on. The path before me is laid out once again and I have a purpose. A goal to achieve, another life to live.

Stop this madness, god.

In a country that follows 300 crore different gods, religion is a sensitive topic at the best times. Write something that is deemed even a little controversial and you are sure to be censured by all and sundry. Self proclaimed keepers of the faith pounce upon those they feel are 'derogatory' to their notion of absolutism. And every religion/sect/cult/society is hell bent (ironical eh?) in shouting hoarse about its supremacy over others. In all of this fish-mongering, it is ironical to note that the gods have allowed such wide-spread destruction of the very planet that they supposedly protect, led by their worshippers and their delusional notion of worship.

At the very heart of it all is Hindu-ism. As a Hindu by birth, this is a religion that I have seen up close and personal, having practiced its rituals for a large part of my life. It is also the predominant religion of this country and hence the reason why I speak about it first. Over the years, I grew to be discontent with religion when most of my questions remained unanswered. When I asked my parents why we needed to burn firewood in the middle of the house to cleanse it (Havan- as I am an Arya Samaji), and why were we not worried about the smoke it generated, I was told to keep quiet and not get in the way of rituals.Every Ganesh Utsav, I looked at the state of all our water bodies and the sheer destruction of the flora & fauna and wondered whether the Elephant god would approve. Diwali brought with it widespread air pollution and filthy streets as we burst crackers by the car-load, on streets which bore the brunt for days. And while we confessed to being animal lovers, our house-hold animals suffered with the crazy noise levels that the crackers generated. Holi brought with it immense amounts of water wastage, with chemical colours that reacted with our skin and more often than not gave us a rash. Today is Makar Sankranti which means that hundreds of birds will be injured by glass covered maanja and possibly die. The Maha Kumbh is round the corner and thousands of people will dip themselves into the Ganges- by far one of our most polluted rivers due to the sheer amount of garlands, diyas, ashes, etc that are submerged into it in the name of our religion. The pollution of the Ganges has now reached cancerous levels and yet we carry on, doing what we must, because it is the way things are done.

I am in no way trying to say that any one religion is to blame. I would instead place the blame squarely on each and every one of our shoulders. Everytime we go ahead and throw bread into the nearest lake to feed the "fishes", or garlands due to the idea that the gods will be happy, or immerse idols into waterbodies that feed the life force of a city, we are killing ourselves a little more. Think about it, the 5 elements that we are supposedly supposed to worship- Earth, Fire, Water, Wind, Sky have all been polluted by the very practices used to venerate them. And yet we continue unabated, blinded by practices and rituals that should no longer apply. Stop this madness, god.