To Someone...

Note: This post is a day late. My apologies.

To someone I never want to lose.

To someone who makes me laugh so hard, I cry.

To someone who manages to challenge my brain without hurting my ego.

To someone I respect.

To someone, who I think over the years has grown beautifully.

To someone who I sometimes feel the need to protect.

To someone really pretty.

To someone who is good at so many things.

To someone I never thought I’d become so close to.

To someone who has a trillion nicknames.

To someone I miss home for.

To someone who has a pakoda nose like mine.;) 

To someone I often feel too far away from.

To someone I want to eat Paradise biryani with.:D

To someone I have an amazing amount in common with.

To someone I love.

And lastly, to someone whose birthday it is today.

Happy Birthday, Ramya Kannabiran (my Geddy)

P.S: Welcome to adulthood, babes.:D

P.P.S:  Forgive the condescension, I couldn’t resist.

Closed Minds, Closed Lives

The first thing that hits me when I visit a new place in India, is what I am and what I’m not allowed to do. Unfortunately that dictates a large part of our lives, especially if you lean towards wanting to do things a tad rebelliously.  Different cities, different cultures, different upbringings in this one small country can lead to severe culture shock when you travel.

I’ve lived for five years of my life in Hyderabad, a city full of malls, flyovers and youngsters wearing fancy shades and fancier hairstyles. However it is also a city where if you walk around in shorts or a sleeveless T – shirt, you will get stared at like E.T would if he visited Earth. A strict dress code, a strict moral code, no short clothes for the ladies, no ladies for the gents, and vice versa. This bothered me when I first moved here. I still complain about it quite tirelessly, but now it’s with a kind of resignation.

 Then I moved to Chennai, and I discovered how much character a coastal city can have. It makes such a huge difference to me that I live in a city that has beaches. When you think of a beach, you think of a relaxed atmosphere. No restrictions on dressing is what you’d hope for, (considering it’s not very comfortable wading through water in a salwar kurta.) but unfortunately conformism is the way to go. The clothes you wear, the things you say, the way you behave, the company you keep, everything is under the scrutiny of the public. Boys and girls together, even in large groups are looked at with a disapproving eye.  Chennai is just as extreme as Hyderabad, maybe even more so.

And then came another city. Goa. I cannot even begin to describe the level of comfort I felt there. Walking around, meeting different kinds of people, talking to and getting to know them, enjoying the beach for what it is, taking in the scenery, the breeze, the sunshine, everything without a thought about what I was wearing, who I was with and how I should behave, was priceless. It was so hugely different from what I was used to, and so liberating.

It might seem trivial that all this is so important to me, but to be part of a city, a community where you don’t have to be afraid of and bowed down by societal pressure is to really live!

It’s not just about the clothes. That is probably the least of our problems. It only serves as a symbol for what is happening, because it’s so ‘in your face’, something we think of every single day. But there’s so much more. Everything seems to be everyone’s business. No one is left to themselves, to live life how they want to. Getting stared at, hearing stray comments from strangers who have no right to decide anything for us, feeling insecure in public, constantly worrying about what one is saying and how one might be perceived. The mental exhaustion might not be very apparent, but at some point it gets to you. Lives are ruled by the general public and their rigid codes of what is right and wrong. Moral policing has become an overused term, but unfortunately it is also an overactive phenomenon. One very important clarification that I want to make is: I am not at all criticizing people’s choices and preferences. I am only pleading that one individual’s way of living should remain his or her own, and not something that is thrown in everyone’s face and made a social norm.

True, I have become accustomed to the restrained way of public living, true that I do understand its deep seated nature to some extent, but to receive the breath of fresh air that Goa was after the stale inhaling of all these years, is an experience worth telling, and discussing.

Footsteps In The Dark...

To be awake when everyone else is asleep is a strange feeling. It feels as if you have for a short time stolen the world from everyone else, stolen time from them maybe, so that they seem suspended in a kind of timeless zone, while you stealthily walk about doing as you wish, thinking and watching and observing, undisturbed, a little anxious perhaps that your stolen world might be broken into, but enjoying nonetheless, the peaceful solitude of it all. And as you sit, lost in thought, free from outward interruptions, you feel a kind of serenity in which the only sounds are of the ticking clock and the noise of the crickets.

You sit, pensive, writing, imagining and at the same time anticipating the sound of the footsteps of someone who you might want to share your stolen refuge with. It might be a need for physical proximity with someone, it might be a need to dissolve the lonely feeling the silence brings, it might be a brief connection you made at a time when nothing else seemed to connect, that you wish for again. It might just be to share the silence and its solitary, self sufficient beauty with someone who will understand it.

Hats Off - My Notes On 'The Whole Woman' by Germaine "genius" Greer

 Note: This is just something I wrote when I began to reread this book for the second time. It's brief, not detailed and probably not fit to be called a book review, but it's stuff I needed to get down on paper, because the book overwhelmed me so much.

There are books I read where I love what the writer is trying to say but I don’t quite like how he or she is saying it. Then there are books where the expression is beautifully articulate but the substance is just not there. There aren’t too many books however that have something meaningful to contribute to my thought process along with being literary beauties. This book is one of those.

‘The Whole Woman’ deals with feminism, with women, what they feel, what they think and also what they are made to feel and think. It talks about how they are pushed down, emotionally and physically by everything around them, by men and by other women, by society in general. Almost every idea in this book, every detail and issue the writer addresses is identifiable with, for me and probably for every woman whether she admits it or not.

Each chapter has a topic of its own and can be read independently of the rest of the book. The chapters are all aspects of a woman’s life, physical and mental – her body, her appearance, her health, her emotional well being, her self consciousness, her vanities, her extremes, her questions, the answers she gives to her own questions, the walls she puts up, the facade she builds for everyone around her, everything basically that allows her to live and grow in a world that is constantly being taken away from her.

All this, although very interesting and enlightening might seem quite prosaic. But the almost poetic ease, and the passion and conviction with which words flow from the writer, makes this intense, thought provoking work, widely readable, understandable and enjoyable.

The book does not fail to shock, it does not fail to hit the reader where it hurts (the mind I mean), it does not fail to teach, to warn, to encourage and to celebrate. It does everything feminist literature should do – all without being a preachy, moralistic, self pitying pile of crap, which such literature always runs the risk of turning into.