Man.

This is a proper blog post, written after a really long time. And as much as I would like it to be contemplative, it’s not. It’s narrative.
Over the past few months, I’ve really focused on articulating, intellectually if possible, my inner thoughts. Inner thoughts are esoteric: only a tiny number of people who might call themselves shrinks (or not) claim to get them. The others, mango people, just go on fumbling with what they believe are their inner thoughts. They aren’t sure, they don’t know if they want to be sure, even. Uncertainty breeds a certain kind of blissful ignorance and even that has come to be coveted by many.
When I made an attempt to focus and articulate my inner thoughts, I realized that maybe I was trying to retrieve more than I had put in. Again, there was uncertainty, but it didn’t bring me any bliss whatsoever, so I double-checked: through shitty writing, shittier poetry, long streams of consciousness. And I got my little belief confirmed. I was trying to retrieve more than I had put in. I was giving myself the liberty of thinking up ornately delicate things and wanting them to happen without checking if I had the maturity to fathom their eventual happening. I was dreaming up experiences as a way out of some long-ago conjured-up existential crisis without understanding that one doesn’t get to choose one’s experiences. One only gets to choose the situation.
So I was doing it all wrong, to put it in a nutshell. Inner thoughts are all well and good, but after a while, contemplation has to end. Introspection has to cease. Consciousness needs a period.
When the summer ended, a few things in my life became clearer than they had earlier. I was glad about that part, but it was very bittersweet nevertheless. Every lesson I learnt and every conversation I had seemed to be tinged distinctly with sadness. Also, the more I knew of how things would progress, the more I seemed to ignore my inner thoughts, telling myself I would just pile them up for now and vomit them out in one full blog post later on.
What happened was that I became resistant to the idea of contemplating. Of contemplation. Several people seemed to call it over-thinking. I wasn’t sure if the two were the same, but somewhere, the pejorative got to me: I stopped contemplating. I don’t contemplate a lot upon things now. It’s been nearly a month since I gave a proper thought to the way things are around me. Earlier, I would have asked myself a dozen questions, stupid to a stranger’s ears but pertinent as hell to mine, and I would have answered each of those questions, recording each answer, queuing up sequences to accompany each, recollecting incidents to back each up, filing them away, one by one, in my mind. I would have done that. Today, I don’t. I am at a major turning point in my life, one where the sidewalk ends and gives way directly to a highway of sorts, and I think I might also be blindfolded: my carefulness will have to know no bounds.
I recently finished rereading one of my favorite books, Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s one of the most gender-specific novels I’ve ever read, the kind that would make axiomatic sense to a girl but would be of zero relevance to a guy. I love it. In the book, the protagonist, Lee Fiora, tries to live her life in a detached setting, away from her loved ones, in a strange environment she believes will be good for her, and unwittingly courts one unpleasant experience after the other, realizing, eventually, that life itself is one unpleasant experience, that we don’t get to make it pleasant; we just get to condition ourselves to its unpleasantness. Some of us condition themselves earlier. They know of blow jobs and pearl necklaces at age thirteen, they have given and received them by the time they’re fifteen, they ignore violence in the family and violence pretty much everywhere else in the world, and they lock themselves up, in mirrored cabinets of insecurity and packed schedules and divorces, hoping somewhere for a surprise party to come up, help take the load off. Then there are those among us who cannot condition themselves as early as the others. They turn to poetry and write some that makes real good sense, they practice kissing their wrists (just like Reese Witherspoon’s sister from The Man In The Moon) with the hopes that an actual pair of lips would be just as nice to kiss, they read up on philosophy and try to pepper it into their own lives, and they watch movies with the unsaid inspiration to be in one someday. Whatever the reality of the soul, everyone has to open themselves up to the unpleasantness of the world someday. Nature isn’t that, nature is sacrosanct, it’s full of naturalness. But the world goes beyond naturalness and that’s why it’s unpleasant. And not just naturalness; the world goes beyond so many things: it goes beyond biology, beyond rationality, beyond sanity, beyond barter, beyond physics. Therein lies the gateway to contemplation too. And that is where I’ve decided to stop. Accept the fact that world goes beyond most forms of sensibility, and move on.

Tada inner thoughts.

So long.

Pep Talk

Don’t think there’s nobody out there
that can rationalize you well
people took in Freud,
and Kafka
people are mighty.
Don’t be that way, where you think the mirror is not for you
you’re obviously not looking at it right
something’s off: you must erase from your mind
images of those better than your face
bring instead to thought what you think you possess with grace
what gives you your own pathos and pace
what you can stamp on your being and call your true self
bring that to mind, and rationalize that well.
It’s not easy, I know, to know that you aren’t the first to be loved
that millions were taken before you
billions more shunned
that dozens were dropped on their wedding day
thousands far greatly stunned.
Nothing is going to be a first for you, unless you leave love out of it
accept that, and move on.
make it a defense trick.
I’m telling you, I’m telling you,
there are people out there who’ll love your face
who will laugh with you in the same ugly ways
who will be just as scared of lightning and equally short-haired
who will pine for true love in college
yet hate on the warmth lovers have shared.
I’m telling you, I’m telling you,
you need to give yourself time,
because everybody is running isn’t reason for you to flee.
your future is bleak right now, but soon I think it’ll swell
with hope for the days you didn’t see coming,
and faith in strutting out of your hell
so don’t worry if you think you’re obscure, my dear
someone will rationalize you well.
don’t worry if you find refuge in your every fear
someone will desensitize you well.

“For every broken bone, I swear I lived.”

‘Until you’re full.’

That’s the notion, that’s the idea, that’s what life means to me. Death isn’t empty, it’s the point where fullness is optimum, whether the bearer likes it or not, where somehow a full circle has been reached, in either the person’s life or in the path of his stars, and where life cannot take anymore, because the fullness is optimum, and somehow a full circle has been reached.

To work until you’re full, to play until you’re full, to love, earn, own, kiss, dance, cry—whatever, until you feel full. And then to stop, to check if you’re still alive, to let the fullness subside, to let some time slide, and then to hit it again, to go back to loving, earning, owning, kissing, dancing, crying. That’s what life means in the end. That’s what life is.

My own life has been an experiment in courting experience—I have been a tiny desperate rat startling her way through large sacks of grain, awed by the clouds of wheat dust and trembling under the prospect of a human foot, scurrying—eventually—into that corridor of nothingness, only to realize I loved the prospect of the human foot better. I’ve been brought close to several experiences, but somehow I’ve always withdrawn, some force has compelled me to withdraw, something has happened: whatever it is, I have never experienced fully, and therefore I have never felt full, never felt I should stop, never felt the fullness to happily let it subside, never let some time pass so I that could greedily make up for it later.

It isn’t tragic, it isn’t comedic, but it isn’t indifferent either. The spectrum of emotions that I generally feel gets balked by an element of anger whenever I contemplate experience. Maybe it’s because I know what existentialism is and because I’ve felt moved by it, or maybe it’s because I feel like the childhood inside of me has yet to melt—cruelly and deservedly so. Whatever the reason, I don’t feel the usual feelings when I feel my inexperience rising in my throat, like bile, like vomit, like solid, poking cones of tears. What I feel is different, what I feel is unique—I guess I’ll treasure this feeling when I finally experience my first fullness, or maybe I might even laugh at it. Again, I don’t know. Much of my education in life—in the larger picture—has been theoretical, literary. I wouldn’t know what to do if you stuck me in the outside world (with or without a copy of Wuthering Heights) and told me to go seek experience. I’d probably go down the first pothole on the road.

I do have this dream, though, where I’m standing at a height—I don’t particularly mind what height it is, a cliff, a terrace, a diving board, whatever. But in this dream, I’m standing at a height, and I’m not looking down. I’m looking straight ahead. The lower half of what I can see is made up of buildings, the tops of houses, the green brains of trees; the upper half is the sky, alternating between light and dark as per my moods. And I’m standing there, with this feeling in my heart, that I’m now at par with life. That up until then, life had been this person taller than me, this person I always had to look up to, this person that hugged me forcefully and smothered my face in her bosom, making it difficult for me to breathe. And that in that moment, standing at that height, looking straight ahead, I’m finally as tall as life, looking into her castigating eyes and returning her acrimonious smirk, conveying that despite all her attempts to accomplish otherwise, I have been able to spot and retain some beauty.

That’s the dream.

It’s a rather disdainful dream, because I’m not looking at life as this portal that’s giving me the power to live and the inspiration to sustain—no, instead, I’m looking at life as this spiral that’s dizzying me, hurting my wrists, abrading my thighs and burning my toes. Up until a year ago, I think I would have disagreed with this view of life. I would have countered, quite hotly, that if one was going to be idiotic and spiteful enough to look at life itself as a cubbyhole of negativity, one was never going to end up in an atrium of happiness. In fact, then, one wouldn’t even deserve to end up happy, because don’t we all believe in self-fulfilling prophesies, now? Isn’t what we want accomplished by our wanting and thinking of it? How can we be white, then, if we keep regarding life as black?

But no. One year has passed and I would never disagree with this pessimistic outlook now. That’s because I know, now, that a self-fulfilling prophecy does work, but it works in cases of tiny things, in cases of chance encounters and once-in-a-lifetime dreams. A self-fulfilling prophecy doesn’t work for life itself, doesn’t work throughout life, for all its fruitful duration. If it did, there would be no literature today, no art, no liberality and no sins.

What I think life to be now majorly has to do with this very truth, that in the duller, less significant, more caffeinated parts of life, nothing but our will keeps us going, and nothing except our insides—our plain, unliterary, biological insides—constitutes our will at such times. During such points in life, there is no rosiness, no windows are left open to let the breeze flow. Nobody invites an eclectic mix of artists and writers and editors and has a good house party with ‘dancing and drugs to convince them that they’re still young.’ No television shows bring a smile to your face, no prospect of money keeps you awake at night. At such points in life, where inspiration itself is annoying and where one honestly would not mind dying, the only thing that keeps one alive is one’s flowing blood, one’s thudding heart, one’s churning, squeezing intestines. I’m an unsure critic of most things, but I worship the wonders of biology.

I believe life to contain many such parts, many such days, and I do not claim to be fearless of them—I’m fearful, I do feel scared. I do think about that point in my life when I’ll be in my middle-twenties, with a job that pays me but fails to stir anything inside of me, returning every day to an apartment with walls flaking at their bases, a refrigerator with bright white empty insides, newspapers collecting everywhere with proof that the world is moving on, and the occasional weekend spent getting drunk with my friend from the inner city. And I am fearful of that prospect. Before I reach its reality, I have to ensure my extraordinariness, prove it to myself and then to some people, appear in a tabloid. Before I reach that point where my experience has me full and the tragedy of it fills me complete, I want to be known.

And then I want to fulfill my dream of standing on a height and saying ‘fuck you’ to life.

(Broken)hearted/lined poem.

A chestnut mane to match your charcoal spikes,
cobalt eyes to love your deep brown ones, 
a coolness to draw out your undeniable warmth,

golden topaz like a thousand suns.
Petite fingers to guide your firm hands
Exquisite words to show you my dreams
Gentle laughter to match your guffaws,
Silent grimaces for your grieving streams.
A soft skin

for your senses to feel,
A hard anger in your exclusive defense

A foolish reply to your rational ways
A fairy tale for your word of sense. 
I could be all this, maybe less or more,
I could breathe in roses as lovers do,
but I suppose it was a thorn in my lip,
that told me I can’t be

good enough for you.

Ode To An Imbecile

I was born seven years too late,

And fourteen summers too dry

And I was the rain

When showers had already pounded by.

I was twenty-one years innocent

And hundreds of lawns greener

And I was more chiseled than other gems

All for being younger and sweeter.

I had love in my heart too much

When it was not in trend to have so;

And for not knowing this, was proud as such

So none told me how far to go.

You were older by age, wider by sagacity

But somehow you were narrow enough

To fit my filter, my curiosity;

And that seemed bluntly satisfying

Romantically rough.

But that was just it, we were torn by age,

Like sorrowful, egregious gauze:

And you were missing from my life

Like a precious page

So that you were my rhyme, though not my cause.

And what else do I know that I may write in your praise

Save for more of this upfront prose

Which I suppose will be passable in your poetic gaze

for does an imbecile not love a rose?

You Are So Young.

You are so young,
and your color's yet to flow.
You have minds to unlock;
you have roads to forego. 
You have abuses to ignore
and you have words to read;
You have emotions to barter
you have egos to feed. 
You have vomits to emit
and you have tears to shed;
you have blood to submit
and you have smiles to bed. 
You have laughter to disprove
and you have cries to abort;
you have hearts to approve
and you have ties to cut short. 
You have songs to sing,
and you have joys to shout. 
You have wrongs to think,
and you have truths to mouth. 
You have men to marry
and you have lovers to shy;
you have errors to carry
and dreams to pass by. 
You have cots to die on
and you have wells to drown
you have knives to plunge 
and you have deaths to frown. 
You are so young,
and your color's all flown.
My words unlocked you
and you're now foregone. 

A While

Hey there it’s been a while. 

Today I’m writing about family. Like, I think families are black holes on earth. Seriously. If you ask Wikipedia, you might get a more warped definition that is probably edited by a Raj Koothrapalli wannabe, but my definition of black holes is much simpler. I think black holes are those huge gaping semi-cathartic incidences, places or people in your lives that you approach quite indifferently but end up getting deeply involved with, in ways you couldn’t have foreseen. 

Now why is family like a black hole?

Family is like a black hole because it is very simply the first institution of our lives and that’s sweet and that’s it, and then suddenly it’s the basis for the start of our self-realization and emotional purging and quandaries and the resultant epiphanies. All of a sudden, we realize what we are in the context of our families, and more often that not, what we are in the context of our families is not the same as what we are. And that is when we start to realize how malleable family makes us, how ductile, even, drawing us eternally into this wire of concerns and money issues and fights and after-dinner tea. 

That’s when we start to realize family is not just an institution listed in the psychology text. It’s also an emotion. It’s also a reality.

I have stumbled upon this epiphany of my own after having a much-needed fight with a family member, a fight that was caused principally because I valued her opinion so much and was hurt when she said certain things to me. I made sure I cried a lot, like a baby, but that was not the point. The point was, I wanted my family member to be the way I wanted her to be, because as per my reasoning, she was family. And I was family to her. She could cater a bit to my wish, could she not? As per her reasoning, though, she was family to me, I was family to her, so she could totally be who she was (which is an arrogant person). Why should she be polite? Either way I chose to look at it, there was something deeply incompatible. I made a simple decision then and there. I decided I wouldn’t speak to her at all. Perhaps, I figured, if I could send all my interactions with her to an emotional Recycle Bin, I wouldn’t have to see them on my emotional desktop. 

Everything would have been fine, if some other members hadn’t intervened and told me how wrong I was to just drop talking to a family member. I was most indignant and demanded to know exactly what was wrong in that, as there was no point in having any sort of conversation with her anyway, to which more than half of them said, “But she’s family.” And that was that. That was the stupendously concise definition they had. And yet, could they have been more bang-on? No, I should think not. It’s reasoning like this that sets family apart, is what I think. Despite all the acrimony oozing out your pores for the whims and ways of that one person with whom you unfortunately share a gene pool, you will never be able to forget that the person is bound to love you or provide for you or care for you the way he or she will not for anybody else in the world. And that is a scary fact. 

I think somebody should write a novel on family. With Ernest Hemingway’s focus, Tom Perrotta’s narrative, Sylvia Plath’s literary imagery and Kurt Vonnegut’s wit. 

Or, or, I could write that novel.

(You know what, I probably will. Give me ten. Years.) 

 

Toodleyoo.

 

Feminist Alert Just Kidding Everybody Read This

                                                     

 

The ladies are incoming, gentlemen. Their exodus from the small towns of ignorance to the metropolis of progress is laudable. They are being beautiful, sensible, and feminist at the same time! Wow. What a thing.

No but seriously: no sarcasm employed, though, our ladies are being exceptionally great right now. Despite the abuse they face and the horrible stereotyping that is so rampant wherever they choose to imprint eclectically, our ladies have managed to be stridently graceful as they destroy preconceived notions and redefine successes. And what better allegory to this progress of the female mind and dream than the heroine, the quintessential “leading lady”, the silver screen’s showstopper: the Bollywood actress. 

Given above is a picture of two Bollywood actresses. In another fifty years their beauty shall be recorded and praised and garlanded as the beauty of eons, of timelessness, even. But in another fifty seconds [or even less, maybe] the reader of this blog may have guessed where this blog post is going with these lovely women. Going to praise them for their beauty, showcase their efforts, going to comment on their oeuvre, then going to end the article.

No.

Don’t think I’m going to do that, because I’m not. Yes, I shall not refrain from commenting on their filmography or some such, but my concerns about these markedly pretty ladies are of a different sort. A few years ago, actresses started sporting more bones than flesh, and then labeled in sizes their publicity stunts and fads: size zero, size minus-nineteen, perhaps? Then actresses realized that if they were to keep up the gig with their fans, they would have to be more holistic. So they started saying things like this: “Oh, I eat two parathas a day, with butter, but I also exercise a lot.” That made some of their disgruntled fat fans return.

Point is, actresses in Bollywood have long been in power of exercising some nice mystical influence on common women, at least in towns and cities. So far, it has always been a case of emulating their looks, their beauty creams, their bras, even. But what about emulating their need for achievement? What about emulating their liberal perspectives? And how about becoming examples of the same?

Now I don’t mean “emulate” like I mean “copy”, though I know the two words are synonymous. But seriously: where would our urban women be if they realized that the actress whose fashion sense they like so much can also be their non-fashion non-lipstick-brand role model? Like take Priyanka Chopra, for example. She is one of the biggest examples of multi-talented femininity striving to make it big in rather hostile surroundings. Chopra was an outsider, a wannabe winner of a beauty pageant. She was gutsy, sure, but did she have the way paved for her, like Dorothy from Wizard of Oz? No! Even Dorothy wasn’t that lucky. Where in the hell did Chopra stand a chance? But they both found their way in the end: Priyanka Chopra, as well as Dorothy. And now it’s the turn [or should be the turn] of the common women, to find their way. 

In a brilliant article published online, Leeza Mangaldas wisely said that as long as the men are doing it, it’s misogyny. But the moment the women start to do it, it’s self-hate. And that’s what we need to learn from the film fraternity of actresses: don’t judge each other just because you’re capable of it. Remember that you’re all in the struggle against one big patriarchal society that respects a bachelor’s privacy but labels spinsterhood as infertility [merely an example]. Don’t get divided by that horrible class system. Don’t show it, but help each other whenever you can. Let the others think what they want to. Let your neckline drop a little lower: it’s not like you can’t enjoy your breasts if you’re not a lactating mother. People may try to convince you of that little belief, but don’t for a minute think it to be true. Enjoy wearing the colors you love and the lengths you like, and then parade it because hell, they’re clothes and they’re temporary anyway. Revel in your beauty so that you may convinced of it. Retain your importance so that you may value it.

It’s difficult to practically be this way, as a common urban Indian woman [it should be a separate class, the CUIW] to act like she’s a Bollywood actress. First off, she doesn’t have enough money. Secondly, not enough bodyguards. Third, probably nobody gives a shit. And lastly, well, there’s family and norms and deadlines of all sorts. Who has the time? Midnight bloggers, mostly.

But no. We should make the time. We should make the time to make the changes in little ways in our life, so that one day, we can levy that change onto our men and make them more respectful of women as well. Charity starts at home, they say. Well, dignity starts with the self. If we can respect and restrain from making fun of Deepika Padukone for dating all those men and coinciding with the low points in their careers, then we can also move past our own faults, our own flaws. Because the only justification for “I am judging her” is “I judge myself too.” And conversely, the only reward for “I’m judging myself” becomes “I therefore get to judge her too.” And that’s sad.

Judgment can sometimes be the same as abasement. It’s true. Judgment can create barriers more quickly than it can unite closed minds. Therefore, judgment among our women, who are at the epicenter of our non-Aryan patriarchy, should be curbed. And we should learn start being bolder, more prepared. If this means carrying a knife instead of a can of pepper spray, so be it. If this means applying for a revolver license, so be it. If this means justifiable homicide, so be it. But the misogyny in our society should stop, the rapists and molesters and crudely accosting bastards should realize the purpose of their packages and execute only them, and we, as women, should stand up more in support of our choices, our likes. We should stop being ashamed of them, scared of them. We’re a slowly-liberalizing society. We need to depend on our modern forces for corroboration, for support and for defense. The law will help us till a certain point, but beyond that we have to depend on our attitudes and our group-thinks to salvage our sanity.

So let’s do that. Let’s take a lesson from these twenty-first century cinematic flappers who wear bright lipstick and aren’t really afraid to love and lash out. Brashness is not the need of the hour, boldness is. Because remember: five out of five men who will potentially molest you out there will get scared if you retaliate. With a weapon. Whatever that may be. So why do you not try, women? 

Make some eye contact.

Carry a knife. To slice their meat.

Be violent, easily offended. 

Don’t slap them vapidly, slap them sensibly. 

Or don’t do any of it. But be prepared to, at least. Because sometimes, readiness is everything. 

And brainstorm about how the sale of acid can be banned. Because right now, I’m doing the same. 

Toodles. 

 

 

Blue Academia

“It was supposed, quite easily, that they would survive. But oh no they did not, at least not until there was some knowledge. After that there was some hope, but only some hope.”

Hope. Nice word. For quite some time now hope has been that spider so high up on the wall that I can never reach him. I also suppose hope is like this male version of faith, maybe. But I’m rambling in the wrong direction here. 

What I really wanted to write about was the elitist turn Indian education seems to be taking nowadays, relying more and more on reputation and all the lesser on real content within the walls and classrooms. I don’t know if my validation means anything, or if my experience stands as bankable in the outside world, but I feel there’s a growing need in India to unite all education boards and systems and to stop the inadvertent class hierarchy that has sprung up in certain states. 

Access to education can never be equal from the people’s side in India: the ideology of capitalism has steeped so deep in so many spheres that it’ll probably never happen. But the government is still a separate entity, still not so connected to the people’s way of life. And so it’s the government who should unify all the education boards and systems, centralize them as one, and then decentralize them uniformly, so that from the leaders’ part, there is no space for inequality, for disparity, and in the end, for any discrepancy.

This is not happening in India. As if it isn’t bad enough that the states face so many socio-cultural divides and stereotyped perceptions, they are also divided on the basis of the education they impart to their people. Higher, super-specialized education, I don’t know much about. But what I do know much about is the basic graduation that universities in India offer. And how different that education is from state to state. 

My question is: why do we need an entirely separate board of education for each state? Why can’t our education be a bit more nationalized? We need to inculcate each state’s diversity and culture in its students? Okay.You do that, states. You do that if you want to. I’m not even sure if you’re doing that right, but let’s be a bit more holistic in our approaches here: we do not want a state-wise boast of student literacy, we need a nationwide impetus to education, and the only way we’re going to get that is by unifying the education of every Indian student under a common umbrella. Language barriers are no barriers, they are boosters of the unification, instead, because they convey the same idea in so many different languages, thereby enabling it to reach so many different people. And job opportunities! Job opportunities for translators and professors and educationists and psychologists! Hello!

But it’s not so simple, not so understandable. Sometimes, looking at the increase in the amount IB diploma or equivalent degree holders makes one optimistic about the type of education that might be taking its roots in India today. But there are still so many divides, still so many inequalities. Some students are eager to get out of the country so that they can move into a more equalized and liberal education system; yet others are eager to only get out of the education system and move into that office cubicle. What we need is more students who will be eager to get into their country’s field and commit themselves to change. And that goal shall not be achieved if we keep on dividing our education through “boards”. Why do we have the concept of boards? Why is it necessary? Why do we not have Culture Boards instead of Education Boards? Because yes, it’s true, aspects like culture and pollution [basically things that actually differ from region to region] are the only ones that need a Board. Aspects like education, which should be the same, holistic ritual of learning, incorporating, applying and fortifying, do not need boards: mainly because language is not that great a divide where knowledge is concerned [most divides aren’t great where knowledge is concerned], and also because it’s about time we did something about all that academic potential going to waste. In an article that I read on a popular website, the writer said, quite correctly so, that to “reinvent the current colonizer-inherited governing system for a modern India, we need creative leaders. To produce these leaders, we need creative learning. The current masses of by-heart schooling, where kids learn to excel at cramming and dumping will surely not produce any such talent.”

This is exactly what I mean to say through my blog [thank you, person who wrote that]. Not only is it unfair to the country’s future that only a select crop of students should receive a good education and then move abroad to better it further, distancing themselves from their country’s plight [would be so much better if they all returned], but it is also detrimental to one’s nationality and identity, which, no matter how much globalization stomps over everyone’s faces, is going remain pretty distinct in the end. 

That’s what every Indian student in possession of an education should understand and insist for: an education that is not elite in its purview, but an education that is elite only in its quality. Why should only a few students be granted the opportunity to learn the good way and others be relegated to a mild stone-walled dump for the best twelve years of their life? More than being an example of democratic injustice, it’s an example of democratic detriment. Both of which, by the way, should not exist in democratic education.

We are the world’s largest democracy, as the world’s largest cliche makes us out to be. How about we do something that would suit our democracy’s largeness? How about we devise a large education plan, a democratic, progressive education plan? And how about we take the future in our hands, and do some good to the land where we were born? 

The spider of hope just fell into my hands. And look, I didn’t even ask for him to fall. 

A Writer and her Blog/Block

Getting to write right is a major problem indeed. When I’m not writing, it seems meretricious, the entire effort, making me want to not write. And once I start writing, I find myself unable to stop, because finally, I have the flow of words with me, and I have the vibe, or whatever it is that writers call it.
I guess I’ll feel more of a writer after getting published, because I’m constantly surrounded by people who tend to rubbish creativity and anything that can’t be visibly laughed at. Writing, as is the case with most books that don’t fall under the notorious purview of commercial series or fiction, is to be felt, and the creativity in it is supposed to be admired. Words, arrangements, sentences, brief verbal phrases are to be remembered. Styles are to be elaborated upon, nuances opined upon. There aren’t many respectful people around me who do that.
So I suppose I can wait and watch what happens. But the dormant writer in me itches to discuss stuff, genuinely, whenever I spot a prospective literary soul. Discussion puts me in the mood to write. I like discussing stuff and then feeling so enthralled by the beauty of speaking good words that I have to transcribe it into pages upon pages of meaningful prose. I like such scenarios.
Creative writing might just be the most difficult thing ever, though. I don’t feel any sympathy for myself, that I ended up in the one niche that is so subjective it’s almost not a niche, but even the empathy that I feel for myself is kind of blunt and teary, making me wonder, at times, why I didn’t simply aspire to be a civil engineer or at least Kalpana Chawla. Then there are those times when the submissive, regretful me is cast aside, when all of a sudden I’m in that place where everything is below me, everything except Austen’s works, of course. During such times, I feel like I’ve already waltzed into that elite, august company of writers, people who are different and philosophical and gangrenous when it comes to funny enthusiasm. I feel like I should pander to the social lingo and say ‘fuck the world’ and retreat into my cocoon where only I and all the glorious writers of the world reside.
The kind of stuff that goes into writing is very diverse and distorted. Today, it’s also disguised, because writing nowadays is no longer the craft of the cunningly clever; it’s the mode of the mass matriculates as well, who rely on virtual support and the politeness of their friends to further their belief that they write well. And it’s a paradox that I’m going against these mass matriculates and then doing exactly what I just accused of them of doing, but I urge you to ignore that paradox, and appreciate my point instead, which is this: that writers today aren’t elite, they are everywhere. A writer, at least in the public eye, is no longer an object of curiosity and a classic example of people-oriented introversion or some such. A writer today is as commercial, as competitive and as technological as his neighbor, who, again, may be a writer too. That’s the entire reality of the world that scares and half-dismantles my own visions of myself in the writing realm. That it won’t be a realm by the time I get there, it’ll just be this big box factory of people who have a great number of supporters and are armed with good publicity skills, all riding on the fact that everybody can write if they try. Truth is, everybody can’t write, even if they try. You can’t get egalitarianism to seep into something as stark and undefined as writing, then insist that it be true so that something as paradoxically simple as writing doesn’t become the elitist base of grouped genius in the twenty-first century. That’s what scares me about my future as a writer.
Otherwise, I’m good. I look out the window sometimes and I feel this need to write poetry, and all of a sudden my senses are heightened to the sounds and the air around me, and I detect things like the aroma of jasmine from a downstairs apartment and three parrots screeching on the sill of an upstairs window, their beaks so red and bulky you just can’t miss them. And I’m suddenly aware of how the commercial and the artistic are two different realms, how, no matter how much the media around us try to dismantle the boundaries and set it all down on a platter for everybody to feast on, the artistic will always be the realm of the few. I have faith in this axiom and I’m not even being narcissistic right now. It’s simply a question of being patient. People today start a new blog when their earlier blog hasn’t accrued the number of followers they expected. Or they change the theme. Edit the posts. Add more pictures. “Promote” it. A writer won’t do that. She’ll be as patient as that last leaf trying to get off the branch, shaking so much in the wind it’s not even poetic any more, and she’ll wait, because that’s what last leaves do. The writer won’t edit her book too much, she won’t fuss a lot about the approval she might or might not get. It’s not what a mother does.
I suppose by now I’ve very well put myself into the mood for writing. I feel calm, now that the words are out of me and before my eyes. I’m soothed by what I read, allayed by the tangibility of the readable word. I think now of the term ‘creative writing’, and the next thing I think is: what other kind of writing is there?

Signing off.