The Unforgettable Desire

Or, How We Accept Care Earlier this year I was out with a couple of friends from school. I met one of them a few days ago, so I knew what’s up with her. I had absolutely no idea about the other, I was meeting him for the first time since school. As we sipped our drinks, they began sharing life stories. He was confident about his life, including marriage, pretty sorted. I wondered, how can someone be so sorted? Then, I realised, he doesn’t feel the need to fight convention. I envied him, for a moment. When she fell apart talking about her life, he comforted her, reassured her, and the phrase that comes to my mind is, like a gentle man. I adored them, the care he offered, the care she needed. It was my turn to go next. All I said was, there’s nothing wrong in my life. I sipped the last of my drink, admitting, I know I have the power to make every single change I need, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. This scene of comfort returns to me every now and then. That’s how it’s suppose...

I hum a lot, everyone does, I suppose. In last couple of days, I have hummed the songs that had been composed by people I personally knew, which includes a couple of childhood friends and an almost. I have no idea about what they are up to these days, haven’t been in touch. Often thought about getting back together despite the circumstances of separation but couldn’t find a reason to do so. I don’t know who needs to pass the bill, but someone needs to call the useless pursuit of understanding emotions a crime punishable by death penalty for people like me to stop. Useless, because, after all these years of ‘observing’ and ‘experimenting’, all I know is that even if we get rid of social conditioning (if that’s possible), there will still be things beyond our understanding. Maybe even centuries of philosophies later, we still have not figured out a way towards deciphering human emotions or maybe women weren’t working on it before (seriously!). I am going to call it a good assumption. ...

I held out a coffee tumbler that I had bought a few weeks ago, after I decided to quit drinking coffee. My grandfather took it from my hand, read the text on it – Do what you love, love what you do. ‘This is what I used to tell my students. I didn’t use these exact words.’ I turned my head towards him, ‘This is what I often tell my friends and juniors too!’ He continued, ‘Accounts is a subject that I love. I used to tell my students that to understand the subject, to do well, they have to love it.’ I was excited. ‘I say the same for English!’ There were a few other people in the dining room then. Different conversations were taking place at once. No one was paying particular attention towards us. I had been making a presentation of coffee mugs and the equipment that I used to brew filter coffee. My voice itself is a people repellent. I talk so much for so long that people lose interest. They are also aware that I won’t stop until I am done showing everything in my agenda, so they re...

When a close friend made a coming out video about a year ago, I thought, “he shouldn’t do it.” A year before that video, I had asked one of my seniors from school to make a similar video because I was then a part of a storytelling club that was organizing an LGBTQ storytelling event. The thing that had changed in the span of a year is that, I had stopped looking at the LGBTQ as other. If someone doesn’t have to come out about being straight, then why should others? For something to be accepted as normal, we have to believe it to be normal. We do not live in that ideal world in my head and these stories of coming out are important, making the person along with many others accept themselves because oppression doesn’t merely come from outside, it comes from within too. Why am I talking about this? I am talking about this because I still have a smile on my face as I think about Shelly Chopra Dhar's  Ek Ladki ko Dekha toh Aisa Laga . It’s been twenty four hours since I watched the ...

Last Monday five people asked me, “How was your (first/solo) trip?” I found it terribly difficult to answer them. The more I tried to answer, the more it felt wrong. I told every single one of them, “I need time to process the weekend, let me put the experience in words before I talk about it.” It wasn’t acceptable, beyond doubt. They wanted the excitement, the stories of adventure, the amaze-feels of going alone to another place and also, the mishaps, if any. I felt none of that, precisely because I wasn’t on a soul-searching-through-bungee-jumping-trip. I managed to say, “it was perhaps a much needed break to realize that I am not stuck, I am subconsciously choosing to remain stuck.” They responded that that’s the charm of travelling. I wondered if I could call it travelling at all. Going to another place to sleep in all day – does that really count as travelling? The most common emotion that I felt in the four nights-three days’ trip was anger. I felt that I was divided in...

Of course this kindergarten like colouring isn't anything like the charming book cover we sneaked at! When I saw a book named World’s Greatest Love Stories in my house library, I giggled mischievously. It was a hard bound book, with an elegant purple jacket on which ‘Love Stories’ was written in bright pink italics. I giggled because I thought, “Haww! Papa bought love stories.” Not only did he buy it, he placed it in a shelf where I could access it. I wanted to read it because I was not supposed to read it. When I picked up Romeo and Juliet in school library, the librarian took it away. She stared at me before smiling and saying, “Choose another book, this one’s not for you.” Disheartened, I thought, “It’s not for me because it is about love.” Somehow in the collective consciousness of my friends and me, Romeo and Juliet had settled itself as the greatest love story. You see, I did not want to read love stories because I knew what they were. Rather, I wanted to read them...

I have been juggling many life choices in my mind. I took a month off from Hyderabad. I went home. Before I left, I was in an internship that changed my way of looking at things. I realized, either I am not willing to accept ‘reality’ or I am not meant for jobs. I cried many times in my office washroom. I was frustrated that I could not read and write in that period of time. When it was over, I went home - away from the environment I usually live in, away from the people I usually interact with. I went home to discover myself. In the one month I spent at home, I read five books. I did not write anything worth publishing on my blog. I ended up with a few drafts nonetheless. What I liked the most at home was, the way my parents looked at my reading. Every time my mother talked about my reading habits, I could sense pride in her voice. I challenged my father at reading books. I had a good time. Every other day, I used to tell them about a strength or weakness of mine that I discover...

I did not want to make this an issue about men and women. Although I do wonder if in many urban relationships, a woman usually wants to pursue her career before settling for marriage. My brother told me about a pair of his friends who were dating but weren’t 'settling'. I asked naively, “why?” He said, “one of them wants to get married, and the other wants to focus on career.” I asked again, “who wants to keep working?” He replied, “who do you think?” “Yeah, the girl”, I said.   That conversation has stayed with me for more than a year now. While career is no easy choice for anyone, is it more important to women? Does the traditional gender role make the urban women have the need to prove themselves outside home? And, because men are expected to work, does marriage becomes an easy choice once they have a job? In one year, I have heard a friend or a friend of friend, every now and then, excuse herself from marriage market because she wants to be someone before being w...

[The following post is a personal and subjective take on the issue. Any offence is deeply regretted, or maybe not. Read it till the end and you might understand why. Forgive me for the irony and paradox used.] We belong to the Indian culture where we respect our elders and love the ones younger than us in our family, by default. I am simply stating a fact, without raising this culture to greatness or demeaning or comparing it to any other culture. If you are born into a conventional (Hindu, as I cannot speak for other religions) Indian family, you know you are supposed to touch the feet of the older members of the (extended) family, join your hands on the road if you meet the neighbouring uncle or aunty, share your personal belongings with your siblings and so on and so forth as gestures of respect and love. If you don’t, then either your parents are blamed for not giving you the correct upbringing or you simply become ‘that’ kid whose lack of such gestures is taken as naughtines...

SRK movie| "Love You Zindagi"|  Alia Bhatt| Gauri Shinde. Don’t do overacting| Some romanticised concept/ optimistic way of looking at life| Don’t disappoint me after Udta Punjab | Oh, she will make it look so good. That’s how I reacted to the first trailer of Dear Zindagi . I was pretty sure that the story won’t be new. I was surer that Gauri Shinde will not disappoint me. I have watched English Vinglish a number of times. It’s in fact my go-to movie, if one may say so, when I am low. It is a movie, but it also reminds me that my understanding of the politics of a house is a general understanding, only unacknowledged by most. With that in mind, I wanted to watch Dear Zindagi , to have the feel of a Gauri Shinde film; a film which is unconventional at the most conventional points and somehow doesn’t go haywire.

At 22, I have realised that people have underestimated the power/fun/peace of being alone. The state of being Alone is often confused with loneliness and hence met with pity or sympathetic remarks. Four years ago when I moved to Delhi, away from my family, I went to shop alone and got myself dinner. Upon my return to the hostel room, my roommate was shocked to know that I spent the day alone. She failed to understand why a person would choose to walk around alone when s/he can have company easily. In fact, if I remember correctly then she often said that she had never known people like me before.

As she looked towards her left, she saw him approaching her from the corner of the street. At the sight of him, she smiled. Blushed in fact. Her anger from the previous night was gone. She couldn’t recall a single word from the lecture she had mentally prepared and rehearsed, in an attempt to explain him where the two of them were wrong in their latest argument. But there she was, unable to control the hormones that danced at the sight of him.

The need to move on.. The need to let go.. Ever since I broke down that night, I have been doing a lot of thinking. Not really. I have been avoiding thinking. That was the worst I could have seen of myself. I had never thrown things. Every time I am angry, I remind myself that I can not break things. But that night I did. But I wasn't angry. I wasn't sad. I was broken. He said why am I letting a third person come between us. But wasn't he the one who brought her in? He makes it seem as if I am wrong. But I wasn't. He should have considered how I feel. He did. But he did it the wrong way. He lied.

‘Back then happiness was a choice because reciprocation wasn’t a necessity.’ It took me a re-reading of a few treasured books from my teenage collection to come to this conclusion. Also the readings made me realize how badly I had misjudged the books when I was 17. I am simply happy about the fact that the one book I had loved the most in those years remains my favorite in its own way even today. Back then I saw it merely as a story of love lost and found and lost again. But today when I finished the book, The Best of Me had a lot more to it than love.  Beyond the love story of the protagonists, it served as a reminder of the importance of human relationships and the purpose of one’s life in reality. In my previous reading, I had not noticed how much importance was given to the surname of the characters which ultimately decided their fate. The struggle in the capitalist world though vaguely mentioned was there nonetheless. Even though love story is what Nicholas Sparks...

Love life without a high school romance seems incomplete, to me. Yes, my parents may not approve it but when I come to think of it, I think it is beautiful. Again, love is beautiful I have heard. I am not sure if I can say so for here I still wonder what love is every now and then. When I look back in past to the time when I was fifteen, a soft smile takes over my otherwise gloomy face. Even if I try, I cannot put myself in the shoes of my younger self. Things that now seem extremely silly, pointless and ‘cheesy’ once made perfect sense. In fact perfection had no other definition. The love songs of Taylor Swift, Akon, Enrique Iglesias, the Backstreet Boys, High School Musical were put on loop in my playlist not ignoring the hindi romantic songs like Tera hone laga hoon, tum mile, bin tere etc. Being the mediator in the then love lives of my friends, I wished for a story of my own. Trying to set one of my girl friends with one of my closest guy friends formed the base of my hi...

Amusing it is how we do not accept reality because our mind has woven lies and fantasies since the time we started understanding language. The good night tales, the fairy tales are the ones we are made to listen. The clichéd concept of good over evil forms the base of everything in our mind. We look for good endings, just like the ones where the fox is dead in the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, where Cinderella finds her prince charming, where sleeping beauty wakes up and the witches always meet the bad end. Somehow these stories spoiled us. I am not saying good over evil isn’t true but aren’t the concepts of good and evil as delusional as that of day and night? As a kid more than often I wondered about getting married to the love of my life and have my happily ever after. What I did not know then was that there is no happily ever after. And love of my life? This is probably the biggest lie little girls grow up with. No, I am not heartbroken. But I still do not believe in it. Life is ...

I was probably six or seven when I hawed for the first time listening to I LOVE YOU in my classroom. Love then was not a word for children of my age to use, or so I thought. I love you was for the grownups, who have boyfriends and girlfriends. Love was for movies. And my tender little mind weaved the late nineties and early twenties bollywood scenes featuring the love of my life and me. Unaware of the feeling, love still seemed familiar since forever. I was twelve when a couple of my girl friends and I would meet explicitly to discuss that kiss we saw in the movie, that intercourse which happened inside the sheets, those uncensored pictures in the internet and so on. Believe it or not, giggling was our new profession. Surprised by the boldness of my friends compared to the shy person that I was, I was intrigued by things they said which initially seemed gross but always gave me a tingling sensation. It wasn’t till another year when I was made aware of that thing called lust. ...