Nothing at all.

Another year gone by. in a flash. sublimated  into tiny sparkling beads of angst and apprehension-irrational joy and wanton sorrow. sense and senselessness.yearnings for the warm sanctity of familiarity. this soul craves too little and risks too much.need to believe, hope and fight.

give me the reassurance that you will be there without my having to demand anything at all. that you won't leave me again and that i don't need to cry again and again. that you will understand and accept the imperfect me.this tired, fatigued Self seeks regeneration and a little bit of accommodation.give me the reassurance that we will survive all the turbulence and emerge stronger in Spirit-just like before.give me the strength to believe that you will protect this, no matter what vicissitudes fall upon us.let me hold on to the faith that our connection will ultimately validate and transcend all differences and disagreements.make sure you say all of these with your air of clinical precision intact. don't falter in speech.that would kill me.
if my words mean anything to you, i would not have the necessity to speak, the urgency to write.you would just know irrespective of my having said anything to you.

okay, i realize none of it really makes much sense.but i honestly don't care what does. so there.

Blah.

There are certain excesses I wish I could dispense with, to commensurate a mythical Balance in my Head. Too much of reading  and fantasizing about contrived, plotted situations hinders you from thinking and enslaves you into simulating what you know is not your thought,your word,your belief. It impinges on your moral sanctity and lays siege to your Intellect. You are actually a harlequin in a greater pantomime that is beyond your comprehension. You vicariously lead an existence which bemuses you into believing that you are a prepossessing interlocutor, contending big, weighty questions that have the immense potential to change the contours of the universe.
Of course it is all happening in your head- to assuage your dwindling self belief and ephemeral will power. There is a greater drama going on there that you are obviously not aware of. You are cuddled into believing you are destined for something great when the internecine forces are vying with one another to corner you at the next signal. Haha. this is the moment when you look all smug and say "i told you so."


There is a test today at precisely 12:50 pm. of course, too much of reading has caused this epiphany.Need to go and sleep.

Something that rankles deep down.

I was recently talking to this perfectly, enterprising departmental senior of mine who had shifted to Delhi and had lost a miraculous amount of weight.  Losing "miraculous amount of weight" almost gives out the essence of him severing chunks of flesh from his corporeal self. It does sound gross but this is the first impression i got when i suddenly chanced upon him yesterday. Now, i have been obsessing bout losing weight for some months to no avail. My sedentary state of mind, much to my chagrin, does not quite allow the notion of hyperactivity. However, i was not going to let this chance go before finding out what 'miracle' made him lose weight so drastically. So our seemingly innocuous and banal discussion started on this strain and drifted completely into uncharted territories. There were a hundred things racing in my mind at the end of it-things that i did not tell him or anyone else. In response to my question of what 'miracle' had made this seemingly impossible task  possible, he had responded by how he has developed this habit of going for long walks and also how he has been running regularly-yes, right in the midst of busy Delhi streets, jostling clueless pedestrians, upsetting vendors,  eve-teasers and such likes.
He was also kind enough to suggest that now since he is in Calcutta (till next week) and we are practically neighbours, i could accompany him while he is walking/running. Now my eminently enterprising senior had bailed me out of sticky academic situations in the past, had patiently explained abstract concepts  and  critical, literary theories over telephone, had solemnly endured my relentless idiocy during long, never-ending bus rides from Jadavpur to salt lake and had also kindly escorted me to British council and American Center because i wasn't comfortable travelling alone.Of course things changed after he shifted to St Stephen's for Masters, For one, i only go to British council and American Center on Saturdays when Ma is at home and the car is therefore available. I am still not comfortable commuting alone.
Okay, so obviously i agreed to the plan-the running and the walking that is but something else nudged me at the back of my head, something that had been suppressed( or at least, i thought so) but reared it's ugly head again. I was silent.What bout when he was not here? what bout when he is back in Delhi?
It really isn't easy to figure out, why this unnecessary thrust on always having to have some company or other while travelling and why this stress on always having to be chaperoned by someone physically superior. Why this unflagging, almost dogged necessity to be always surrounded by people you know and people you can somewhat trust, if one hasn't ever experienced what most girls tend to experience, when they are barely mature enough to understand, to what extent things can actually go wrong with them.
As a child, i always loved walking.Alone, that is. I still do, somewhere i want to believe.
So i would disappear for hours at a stretch.No one worried because they all knew i was responsible enough to not stray too far and be back home before it was too late. i would disappear, armed with a book and an ancient Walkman.I never cared bout the way i looked.Uninhibited, i was always eager to discover unfamiliar paths to house my own imaginative world, peopled with 'my people'. i would aimlessly wander down meandering, pebbled roads that drew up dust as i uncouthly stepped on the frayed edges, discovering covert ribbons of thin,ephemeral streams.yes, places like that did exist in Salt lake of my childhood. i would marvel at my discoveries with childish enthusiasm, coloring my imagination with fragmented, disconnected characters from my books that inhabited these hidden nooks and crannies.Ecstatically,i would trace patterns on the wet earth, fumbling about for lost treasures and surreptiously hidden clues.There would be a spring in my step as i would joyfully find my way back home after a hard day's work.
Matter of Time. The bubble had to burst. My idyllic world had to come crashing down.
i was twelve. i hadn't done well in my half-yearly exams. Ma had been shouting for the last two days. I unceremoniously banged the entrance door and departed, fuming in anger for one of my favourite reveries. By then, there weren't many new places left to be explored. The foundations of City Center, Salt lake had just been laid, so that entire area was in a veritable mess. I still marvel, as to how that pile of rubble of my childhood managed to look so sophisticated later on.

i was walking down this deserted stretch near GD block, when i felt something brush past me. Shock and humiliation took over.The culprit whispered something unintelligible in my ears, I couldn't figure it out exactly but it did sound humiliating to my childish years.I started running. He kept up with me and brushed past me again. By then we had entered the main thoroughfare. Before, i could scream he dispersed into oblivion. i still remember his face and can probably recognize him, if i do happen to come across him again. There is unfinished business to take care of.
i remember feeling dizzy, my heart pounding  as i desperately ran down the streets.By then the initial wave of humiliation that had previously taken over had conglomerated into a pool and settled down at the base of my stomach. There was a queasy feeling, as raw anger and humiliation overlapped and rose up my throat. I felt my fist clench and a feeling of helplessness take seize.i entered the safe haven of my room and dissolved into tears. Ma thought, i was merely upset bout my dismal results. i remember not being able to behave normally for days.i just hated the sight of the boys in my class.For all i knew, they might grow up to be as reprehensible as that stinking man in the deserted alley.i was also new to the school at that time and had already been labelled as as a snob.i could not really figure out what had exactly happened with me and why it had to happen.i was too young and i wasn't aware of adult words like 'molestation'. i did not have the courage to narrate this incident to my mother, fearing she would never let me go out alone again.i myself did not have the courage to venture out alone anymore.
Everything changed since then. i became inhibited, more conscious, started taking my mother's warnings more seriously and began dressing in loose, ill-fitting clothes.I would be scared to make eye-contact with people when i was out in the streets and would quietly finish my work and run back to the shelter of my home. Over time, i had this select friend circle comprising mostly boys. Friends who were more like brothers. Their protective presence was like an aegis, shielding me from roving eyes and groping fingers. Of course, there have been more incidents like that one as i grew up but i also became more mature and learnt to handle things on my own.
Now the idea of walking alone, brought this painful memory back again. i was just twelve then. My childhood had been nipped into the bud. That initial wave of humiliation stills exists when something like that occurs.I always believed that my diminutive, childlike appearance would protect me from such incidents but i have been proven wrong time and again.Today something rankles in me, when i remember this incident, not just the filthy nature of the act but how inevitably natural it seems in our present surroundings.Every girl has to experience something like this at some point. It is terribly wrong and inhuman. It just makes me helpless as to how distorted and convoluted the perpetrators of such acts are.
Twelve is too young a age to be initiated into this cruel jungle and gain access to the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.

Random

These days Sleep kicks in, clawing it’s way through like an unannounced, unwanted guest tracing intrusive patterns in my sedentary life. It is extremely disheartening the way I end up feeling drowsy and lethargic at unexpected times of the day. I always knew I had erratic sleeping patterns but this is something I had never accounted for in my 21 years. Ma says, it is perfectly natural and nothing surprising, considering the fact I am directionless, unfocussed and forever befuddled. Not to forget unorganized. But then again Ma has been associating such adjectives with pretty much everything about my life for as long as I can remember. I daresay, even at fifty I shall remain all the above in her eyes. Come to think of it, going by the kind of discursive life I am leading right now, such a contention seems hardly out of place.

So be it. At fifty, I would be old, with sagging skin and wrinkles crisscrossing my forehead, dozing off when the world was pottering about, trying to prove it’s worth.
okay, it is such a pain to type out directionless, rambling sentences. Everything is redundant and every damn thing so useless.i have been at the key-board for the last five minutes, lazily fiddling with random keys, trying to string together formless, shapeless, disconnected thoughts.i notice tiny specks of dust have settled in the edges, lending my old, battered key-board a degree of familiarity that nothing in the world can replace. These days, i am scrounging around, desperately clinging onto whatever remnants of familiarity i can scavenge from all the disorderliness. everything changes too fast. It is such a pain to hold on when everything is being devoured up in a swirling whirlpool of Change.
Constancy, be thy name is Woman.
i think i shall go sleep now.

Sit still.

I don't know why today I can't sit still at one place even for a moment. Even this, I am not being able to type in peace.  I feel oddly incapable of gathering my thoughts.  I haven't experienced such a degree of derangement in a long time. I do not know if this is a good sign.

Duuh, obviously that is because you are getting saner with each passing second. relax!

It is like, I close my eyes, real tight and I see this hazy, kind of sparkly fluorescent neon lights glaring back at me, grinning toothlessly in an alternating rhythm- a little bright, brighter, dim, dimmer and then Explode. I am drowning. I feel this undulating rhythm taking over me-sometimes a rage and then a warm, fuzzy afterglow the next instant and then again leaving a bitter acrid taste. It is not humanly possible to make sense of what I am feeling right now. I am greatly perplexed myself. I open my eyes and there are these dull splotches of colour staring right back impishly. It is all within me. The sound is deafening. I close my palms, clench my fist and feel my heart leap. Some tiresome being is weeping incessantly alternating between vociferous bawls and muted spasmodic pangs. It is all disturbing. Must there be a pattern here also? I am tired of patterns. I find myself whispering please in order to placate my trembling heart. I need to retreat. And then I am cowering under the altar, pleading redemption.

        

       'We were talking-about the space between us all

And the people-who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion

Never glimpse the truth-then it's far too late-when they pass away.

          Try to realize it's all within yourself

No-one else can make you change

And to see you're really only very small,

And life flows ON within you and without you.   '

Okay, relax now. Everything is fine.

To frame or not to frame.

Another empty frame stealthily creeps in. Unmistakably black against the white light. Before I can hastily grab  and  immortalize 'that' picture or 'some picture', it fades again, unmistakably white- against a black light this time.Tired and befuddled.The scent however lingers in the wake of all this mindless commotion.it happens all over again. and again. The same process repeated down to the minutest detail. Empty frames flit in and out.
  I have stopped counting the number of failed attempts to immortalize 'my picture'. An opportunity lost is lost forever. Maybe it was never meant to be.My picture was forever flawed. i did not realize it before. Now that i know,does it change anything? Does all this empty commotion have a far greater significance that eludes my immature, impractical being.? Maybe it is time to jettison all that excess baggage which has been weighing down on my diminutive frame,for what seems like ages now.
or maybe I need to simply walk that extra mile, carrying that extra baggage till I reach that state of coherence when I can discard it all with with eloquent ease-and with one sweeping stroke of my paintbrush give the finishing touch to my picture which had always been in the process of formation. just that I with all my whining and ceaseless complaining never realized it.
I can frame 'my picture' then.
.

Reading.

I have been reading. Reading quite a lot these days.Reading anything that has text on it.
Reading jerks you back to your senses, wrests emotions that were lurking all along, stultified into oblivion in that cobwebby part of your mind. Emotions that you had no idea, existed comes tumbling forth in the wake of such impassioned, frenzied perusal and weaves itself into eloquent reasoning or at least that is what one would like to believe it is.

In this welter of mind numbing logic and oddly misplaced burst of intellectualism, it is difficult to winnow out specious reasoning, waxing eloquent under a rich fabric of sophistry.It is perfectly natural to start housing beliefs that are in reality baseless and convoluted.How does one guarantee the moral veracity of what one is reading?

Some writers are inherently dogmatic.He will rest only when his writing is singled out for Nature's greatest approbation.Till the time it happens, he is wont to polemical contentions, all adorned in artistic brilliance.He will vehemently continue endorsing his beliefs, his muscles taut under the wake of frenzied writing, till he finds the necessary acceptance.
 I realize i am catering to a very parochial idea of authorship here.

And of course there are people like me who shall hungrily lap it all up and after having whetted her appetite to the point of satiation, would instinctively discard it all for other banal things.
I have not experienced such a degree of emotional involvement with text in a long time. This is a good feeling. Such is Life.

It enrages me when one reacts with pusillanimity during the most defining moments of their life. ‘Pusillanimous’ is a word I accidentally came across today; I clarify to dispel any doubts of pretentious erudition on my part. Okay to reiterate, the point is, I find it absolutely disgusting when one reacts with a sense of resignation and acceptance to put it a bit more mildly, during really important moments. Sometimes, our lives are so inextricably linked to each other that a mere twitch in one can actually cause a spasm in another. It is okay to not get disturbed and worked up but it is not okay to sit back and laze around with a ‘happiness lies in acceptance’ smile plastered on your blooming face. I find myself seething in veritable rage when I see people really close to me endorsing this kind of an attitude. After a point, it is just disturbing. I wish i could just connect their corporeal existence to a plug point and let a steady stream of electrons flow in the wake of a vast potential difference. Maybe the sheer shock of being electrocuted would jerk these lifeless forms back to life. I find it oddly incongruous when one accepts silently what Life thrusts at us. You are supposed to  bawl, throw tantrums and then stick your tongue out and get back to your feet, chins up.okay, maybe being vociferous is not exactly the most commendable thing to do but still you just can't afford to patiently endure without having any escape route in mind.Come on , be a Man and Fight with your Life just like you would have run for your Life if your were imprisoned and just had this one chance to escape.Even if the sword pierces your heart and ruptures your aorta, you must continue to fight. Fight till their is no blood left in your body to be shed.Be brave, Be valiant.On no account can you afford to come across as a coward.
and then there are people who are outwardly calm but their is a tornado raging inside them . With quiet resilience, they enter the battle-field -they fight, they endure but they do not shout even during times of excruciating pain.They are the masters of their game. Victory is inevitable when you are the one controlling your destiny.It is oddly reassuring to find such people.Maybe it is just me but i haven't come across too many people like this.

Looking back

It is inevitable that there are going to be major hiccups when you are trying to surmount a rather foreboding cliff. It doesn't get any easier especially when you are trying to combat your own inner negativities. Detailed Introspection followed by identification is the starting point. You are merely at the base of the cliff. You take another step forward. The climb ahead is arduous, rarely a journey that one would undertake voluntarily. With every painstaking step that you take forward you undergo your own spiritual metamorphosis. Not giving it undue importance, this spiritual change is as important as physical change. One always runs the risk of stagnation when there is no urgency to regenerate your soul.
Your soul is a living embodiment. You can't afford to let it starve. It needs to be fed regularly. Hygiene should be of utmost consideration. Everything must pass through a sieve before it reaches the Soul. Only when the impurities are discarded, you can say your Soul is on the path of regeneration. It is important to identify these impurities.
2011 has been all about identifying these multifarious impurities. I started my journey from the base, discontented and disillusioned. Every minute, every second since then has been a journey. With great Evil comes greater Good. This journey has been a constant reminder to refute the erroneous, discard the transient and reveal the true. The ultimate destination is not a measurable state. It is dynamic, profound and subject to constant change. It takes one years of assiduous practice to arrive at this state but only a second to deviate. I have deviated time and again. The only thing that has made me keep at it is genuine compassion and goodness. Compassion like goodness cannot be quantified in measurable terms. Every sentient being is capable of both. What matters is whether you are able to perceive this innate goodness in everyone. Only when you smile, the world will start smiling at you. I can't really remain knotted inside and expect the world to come and untangle me. No one is really bad when you actually look at the bigger picture. Everyone has their own justifications in place which can either be valid or invalid again according to you. Things get much simpler when you realize that no one has actually entrusted us with the responsibility to declare someone as right or wrong. To prove yourself right, you do not really need to prove someone else wrong. How righteous are we anyway? Freedom of speech does appear to be a very convenient contention here.
2011 has been all about undoing the baggage of things already done in a fit of impulsiveness and moments of displaced anger. Technically, it is impossible to undo things already done and on hindsight, I am happier this is the way it is. Looking back I really do not regret anything in entirety, apart from certain things in bits and pieces. You never know how strong your much talked about bonds of friendship are until the time they are tested. I am glad that I had to go through this test. I know who my true friends are. The rest are best left as acquaintances and it is best that one does not closely mingle with acquaintances. However, one person has been constant and there is little that I can do about it. Yes, at times it is ironical and extremely painful but I am willing to go through this pain in its entirety. This has been a conscious decision and I have inflicted myself a lot of pain, hurt and suppressed tears in the process but somewhere I have never been able to undermine the importance. I have realized, it is okay to hold on to what you believe in. Why is it so easy to grow distant when someone hurts you? We don't really decide anything here; it is always our ego and our false sense of vanity doing the talking. Dialogue is perhaps the only way to bridge the distance which is almost always self-imposed but taking the initiative would mean bending down and going back on what I had said once. One can't really surrender his ego here. Can he, now? The preferable option is to bind yourself, feign indifference and wave it aside with a dismissive flick. But I have realized, it takes a lot of resilience to stand up fearlessly for what matters to you , irrespective of what people have to say about you.
2011 has also been about finding my soul-sister, coming across the right people at the right time. Friends, who won't judge you for anything in the world because they have a certain amount of faith that can't really get erased overnight. 2011 has been all about heart to heart bonding in its purest essence. I do not ever think that just through mere words, I can give these people, the credit that they actually deserve. From their spirit of never begrudging, I have learnt what it means to be truly good. From them I have learnt, no matter how much people hurt you, it is not okay to hurt them back. I have learnt, no matter how righteous you are, NOTHING can justify your actions, when you are conscious of the fact that the other person is being hurt.2011 has also been about selflessly working for other people's happiness, doing everything in my power to resolve differences so that others can be truly happy. I have come to realize that it takes a lot of courage to be selfless but in the end it gives you a liberating feeling that nothing else can really compensate.
I am still nowhere near the top of the cliff but I want to believe that 2012 would see me further in this journey of self-improvement and spiritual regeneration of the soul.