The Unforgettable Desire

Someday we are going to wake up in an alternate reality where horrible life is NOT a competition. In that reality when someone expresses how terrible their life is, the response is an empathetic nod rather than ‘Oh, my life is more terrible.’ Someday we are going to realise that it’s absolutely okay to have a time in which life seems and feels good. It's absolutely okay to not accept the misery 'as what life is' or 'normal' and want better for ourselves. We might have a lot of time to kill till that day comes, so I am going to share an experience. Once upon a time I wanted to die, from the ages of eight to thirteen. To make you understand my commitment to the act of dying, let me mention that I used to believe then that if I ask god something from my heart, then he'll consider fulfilling it. I prayed to die on my bad days. I prayed to die on my good days including birthdays. Because, why will anyone listen to a prayer that’s forgotten when the situat...

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...

Nine minutes into the movie One Day (2011), the following conversation between Emma (played by Anne Hathaway) and Ian (played by Rafe Spall) takes place. Emma: So, what’s your stroke? Ian: Sorry, my what? Emma: Waiter/actor, waiter/model, waiter/writer? Ian: Well, I am comedian. I watched the film in 2015 when I still believed that job is meant to pay bills, there was no wanting involved. I was beginning my M.A then, I hadn’t given a thought to who I will be by the end of next two years. In a way, I had taken it for granted that I’ll be somebody after college. Job was just what follows college, just like college followed school. It was a completely normal rite of passage in embracing adulthood. Yet, this scene had made me wonder, what would my stroke be? As and when I completed my post graduation, I was struck by a crisis that comes with freedom of choice. I was prepared for a step by step guide to death, I wasn’t prepared for making a decision. I struggled for a l...

It was raining, so we moved from the college ground to an empty classroom. The year was 2013, it was my first year in Delhi away from the place I grew up in, Sambalpur. On that rainy afternoon, we were asked to close our eyes and describe the images that we see when certain words were said. I closed my eyes and waited for a list of words hoping it won’t be as bad as improvisation sessions during theatre practice. I was trying my best but I just couldn’t understand the things that people kept saying about character building, setting, dialogues etc. I had clearly drawn lines between reality and imagination simply because imagination and I were sworn enemies. So, I held on to reality in the most stubborn way possible. I know what’s real, I don't know what's beyond. Words like imaginative or creative weren’t something I could use even while writing a facebook bio. A few people in the group were playing guitar and singing along. How much I loved the songs that our seniors com...

Here’s a confession: Never did I ever think that I’ll find a place in Sita’s tale. I was so mesmerised that it felt as if Sita had stepped out of the pages of The Forest of Enchantments (2019) to sing Sitayan to me. I didn’t think much of Sita until three years ago when I read Volga’s The Liberation of Sita (2016), translated from Telugu to English by T Vijay Kumar and C Vijayasree. I had compelled a few of my friends to read The Liberation of Sita so that I could talk about female companionship. We had then realised that we had spent many evenings on Whatsapp talking about Ahalya but never really saw her as a significant part of the Ramayana, and hence the book made the silences in the epic visible to our young eyes.   Beyond that, we were taken by disbelief that someone could imagine Surpanakha and Sita coming together to have a dialogue, the ‘other woman’ and the ‘wife’. It was no longer about the epic as we knew it. As I mentioned above, I didn’t think much of Sita. Dr...

There are a few of us who like to listen to stories without judgment, for the most part. There’s something so easy about the good guy-bad guy tag in a romantic relationship that we dislike it. There’s always a supposed clock ticking to move on which basically means shoving everything that hurts in a corner and reliving the same story with another till the time to shove hurt comes again. But us, the few of us, we are cheerleaders during heartbreaks. We like to dance with pompoms when the ones who thought they’ll die without the love of their life learn to live, as they learn romance and love were a part of their life, not the whole of it. We don’t judge them for trash talking or being clingy or whiny, we love them for wanting to live on when their faith crumbles to be rebuilt. We hear such stories all the time. The stories of heartbreaks far exceed the ones of coming together. We hear red flags and toxicity more than morning cuddles and breakfast in bed. We don’t remind them that...

I won’t claim to know the symptom that dissociation is to many mental health conditions. I won’t be speaking about any mental health conditions; I have a very limited Google-baba knowledge about them. I have never felt comfortable calling myself depressed because I haven’t been medically diagnosed. I take depression seriously because it is as scary a word as cancer for a misinformed or selectively aware person or a person with limited awareness. When I began telling people that I cannot recognize my reflection in the mirror, most of them heard it as a metaphor. I was talking in real life figurative terms, they weren’t literal. I was terrified every time I looked into a mirror or took a selfie or got clicked in general. The image that I saw outside wasn’t the image I had in my head. It was not even the image that people showed me or at least the one their choice of words did. I was unable to relate any comment on my body or face or hair for that matter. I began seeing the...

Book Title: The One Who Had Two Lives Author: Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan Publisher: Harper Collins India Year of Publication: 2018 Price: INR 299 Pages: 228 The One who had Two Lives by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan was published in 2018. It is the second book in the series The Girls of the Mahabharata. As mentioned in the author’s note, the book is a stand-alone volume even though it has a brief appearance of Satyavati who was the protagonist in The One who Swam with Fishes . The One who had Two Lives describes the lives of Princess Amba of Kashi who is reborn as Sikhandini and identifies as Prince Shikhandi of Panchal. The book is divided into three parts. The first part narrates the story of Amba’s Swayamvar. The third part narrates the story of Sikhandini’s sexual reconstruction to Shikhandi. These parts unravel the story of the birth and life of the protagonists in a non-linear fashion. The second part, ‘In-Between’ is presented in the form of dialogue between Amba...

Reading has become an online phenomenon in last couple of years. Although every reader has a personal preference, a balance between printed and digital books has been achieved. With platforms like Bookchor providing online buying and selling of second hand books, many books and readers have been united when hope seemed lost. With Instagram cracking the code for most appealing feature for humans - a platform for (visually appealing) pictures - book bloggers are getting visibility as #Bookstagrammers (more on that in another post later). Books on Toast has taken up the trend to another level with its quirky reviews and interviews. What I am saying is, apart from the last weekend when Avengers: Endgame and The Long Night were trending, reading books has been getting a lot of attention. I have a reputation of someone who reads a lot in my circle given I talk about reading a lot. I have recently realised that I am selective about the books I pick up, usually literary fictions. I ...

I find men discussing the position of women and their dignity and honour in society quite amusing because I am not sure if honour and dignity have been defined or conceptualized from the point of view of women. In my head these terms have nothing to do with a woman, they belong to and in a man’s world or dictionary. Yet, innumerable discussions focus on women’s dignity and honour. What do these words mean? Thanks to my grandmother watching programs, with volume level higher than usual, on an Odia channel ‘Prarthana TV’ since six in the evening I overheard a discussion on Sita’s Agnipariksha (in a show named  Tarka Bahu Dura ). I was intrigued. Three men were discussing an issue that had a woman at its centre – one of the men being the host. The two other men appeared to have opposing views on the matter. However, these opposing views centred on the credibility of Ram being ‘Maryada Purushottam’.  What caught my attention was the idea of a ‘Chhaya’ (shadow) or ‘Maya’...

Silent All These Years , episode 19, season 15 of the longest running medical prime time drama on television, Shonda Rhimes'  Grey’s Anatomy,  is everything we need. The episode has two parallel stories revolving around the character of doctor Jo Karev (Camilla Luddington) whose meeting with her birth mother is revealed in flashback as she treats a patient named Abby (Khalilah Joi), who has been sexually assaulted. Having survived domestic violence, Jo Karev suspects Abby to have undergone something similar and assures her a safe space to speak about it if she wants to. Abby refuses treatment when another doctor, Teddy Altman (Kim Rave), is called for help. Teddy gains Abby's consent by treating her with utmost care and sensitivity without getting near her till she is allowed to. She suspects that Abby has been sexually assaulted which is later confirmed.  When doctors propose a rape kit for the patient in case she later wants to report the assault and get just...

A lot has been said about loneliness. A lot has been said about the difference between being lonely and being alone. I was raised in a ‘learn to be alone’ way that implied the idea of being self-sufficient. Given my childhood and teenage was dominated by my dedication to friendship, I was often asked, ‘Will any of your friends do what you do for them?’ It was based on the assumption of requiring reciprocation. I am not sure if I said it out loud, I might have, that, ‘I am not doing it for them, I am doing it because I need to do it for myself.’ A few months ago, during a conversation I asked a man if he was married. He laughed and mentioned that he is sixty nine years old. I simply added, ‘and…?’ Then he clarified that he is married and has many grand children. I understood his amusement, but I didn’t understand what age had to do with the question. A person can be widowed or divorced or homosexual or asexual or just single. Being sixty nine doesn’t say anything about his/her m...