Topsy Turvy world

This is a crazy world we live in, where killing children is justified revenge. Where raping women is considered pride. Where fighting religious wars is a noble quest. Where all lines of sanity have been blurred. A crazy world indeed. 

What is love?

Love is not about beauty, not even about mannerisms, or a body. Love is a feeling, that transcends the exterior, goes beyond everything that one projects about themselves to feel touched by the other's soul. Love is a state of being, and a promise that completes you and guides you through life. Love is friendship, companionship, acceptance and trust. What I loved most about you was your mind. And I hoped that you would love me too - when my body was misshapen and my soul was broken... I looked for you. But you were long gone.

Solitude

Being alone scared the hell out of me. But I have now come to realise that there is a strange sense of relief and also freedom in it. To not be answerable to someone for anything can be calming. For the first time in forever, I feel content in just being with myself. Enjoying my own company, and doing things that make me happy. I can truly say that I am a wonderful person in my own right, and I don't need anybody else for affirmation. 

Into the light...

I feel like I have been put under the microscope. Every inch of my being has been analysed, discussed and detailed. Numerous psychological and sociological tests that define my personality have been administered from the beginning of my MBA and I have been laid bare. It has been an uncomfortable experience, sometimes challenging, sometimes irritating and most times frustrating. However, I feel a strange sense of liberation as well. It seems like the darkest parts of my soul have been slowly but surely chipped away. I am now so much happier, more content and far more positive than I was early this year. Something within me has softened. I feel healed. And liberated.

Mirror Image

I am not like her. She has no ambition. She feels defeated, deflated and tired. She looks at the mirror and wonders where her best years went. Sleeps only so she can stop thinking of the what-ifs. I am not like her, a shell of a woman with no will to live. With darkness in her heart and no one to turn to when she feels vulnerable. I am not like her, she is less than perfect, with so many flaws that people look at her and make snap judgements about her whole being. She comes across as harsh, angry at the world and herself for letting people get to her. She stands defeated, nursing her wounds in the privacy of her bedroom. No one sees her tears, only the walls she puts up between herself and other people. She is beautiful in a wildly untameable way. I am not like her, only I am.

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.

Why women are their worst enemies...

Recently I met one of my oldest friends who had come down from the states, after a gap of nearly two years. She was attending another common friend's wedding at my insistence. I had asked her to be part of the wedding since she was here anyway. Now my friend is someone who is profoundly beautiful in her simplicity. She is genuinely the nicest person I have ever come across and very rarely criticises anyone else, always seeing the good in every situation. She is also someone who suffers from low self esteem about her own body image and has struggled with her weight gain for some time. That she had put on a few kilos since the last time we had met had not even registered with me since I was just so happy to meet after such a long time.

And then we met this snarky classmate of ours at this wedding, and the first thing she had to say after meeting my friend was "Look at you, you have inflated like a balloon!" This classmate is someone who herself suffers from a weight problem and has nothing going for her in the looks department. And yet, the only way she can think of making herself feel good is by pulling down someone else. My friend was extremely hurt by this careless comment and will carry the effects of that stinging remark for a long time. And this brings me to the point I am trying to make. Women in general can be extremely vicious to one another. In our quest for perfection, we try and point out flaws of everyone we meet, just so we can compare how we are doing in comparison. We revel in someone else' misfortune and feel secretly happy when someone else fails. We delve into our enemies lives and try to guage whether they are miserable or not, and if not, try and add to their misery with bitchy statements and careless remarks. I have seen my share of such women, and I have only one thing to say to the likes of you:

Remember that you are your worst enemy. You are the reason why you failed- that you will fail is an inevitability and when you do, there will be someone else in the world who will laugh and rejoice at your failure. But you brought this on yourself. Everytime you knowingly went ahead and spoke against someone else, belittled someone, or compared lives with those you think are less fortunate than you are, you challenged fate into bringing the same upon yourself. And when fate deals you that final blow, I hope that you take one moment to think about what this makes you- a pathetic, desperate loser.