Celebration of the suffering woman

I am part of yet another whatsapp group that adds 1% value and 99% noise to my life. we all have that, dont we?

I have been recently exiting from the ones that give me almost 100% noise - have to say, my life is marginally better.

Smirk all you want, marginally better is still better.

This particular group is that of the women in the nearby apartments. They share a lot of forward messages, and once in a while get together to celebrate stuff, which is good. Life should have some celebrations.

the most recent call for celebration has been for karva chauth, a north indian festival in which the women (ONLY women, not men) fast the whole fucking day, without even drinking a drop of water until the moon comes up in the sky. Reason for fasting - so that the husband can enjoy good health.

Ironic, i would have thought its a better idea to starve the husband so that his digestive system gets some rest and thus improve his health.

but then, what do i know? I am from the south, thats not even India right? thats just where all the anti-nationals live. Anyway, thats another day's discussion.

So a load of 'happy karva chauth' and wishes for this 'blessed' and 'precious' and 'joyous' day lands on my phone. The ladies would be dressing up, make up jewellery et all, and gather to celebrate and wait for the moon.

Fun fact. its a cloudy night in Singapore. it rained almost all day. and they arent supposed to break the fast till they see the fuckin moon.

Ever since I am part of this whatsapp group, i have been enlightened. The calls for 'vrath' (fast from food & drinks) for women and the glorification of the clueless male in the house happens every few months.

There is raksha bandhan - here the sister bows down to touch the feet of the brother no matter how young the boy is and the boy is supposed to vow to protect the girl.

Bhai dhooj - something similar to raksha bandhan.

I hear 'teej' every now and then, this happens more than once a year - again the women fast. its supposed to signify the victory of a wife's love and devotion to the husband. this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are many more.

All in all, you get the drift, it is entirely one sided. the women celebrates the man.

There is not a single vrat that the man observes to win the wife's love or praying for the woman's health. Clearly signifying that it doesnt matter.

Throughout the rituals and festivals, the same singular message gets reinforced. 'a man is important, a woman is insignificant'.

and then when the female baby gets killed at birth or there is female foeticide, we just cannot understand why!

The men and the boys eat first, served by the women and then whatever remains is eaten by the women - served by themselves. the boy gets education and the girl is married off early by giving loads of gold and cash to the man.

The high number of rapes can be no surprise to a culture that treats the woman as the submissive servant.

Out of all this, what angers me most is calling the suffering as celebration. Right now, there are couple of dozens of starving women down there in the common area 'celebrating' and feeling great about their sacrifice.

Congratulations, your husband is not any fitter than he was yesterday, you on the other hand after the 50 times you fasted last year, could have caused yourself irreversible damage.

but that doesnt matter to you, does it? You have been taught and now you fully believe that you dont matter.. if you needed to matter, even to yourself, you should have a penis.

Talent in happiness

Where does happiness come from?

An especially ragged morning... these days it doesnt take much to put me in a ragged mood. just a cup of tea spilling and i can switch to a tragedy queen internally and mourn long enough to even miss the best that life has to offer me that day.

Elizabeth Gilbert said you have to have a 'talent in happiness'. I wrote that down some time ago. I wanted to develop that talent, that was the mission of my life. until the tea spilled or something similar happens.

it wasnt just any tea mind you. it was taj mahal, and had the right balance of ginger and sugar. and i did not get a single drop of it. my flask fell to the ground from a good height, the whole of the tea blasted out on to the white floor. i just looked on helplessly and a little mesmerised.

When you are frustrated, watching things get smashed or destroyed is like chicken soup to the soul. i have experienced this once before, few years ago.

I was wearing a hideous bracelet. i had never really liked it, but it came as a set with a necklace i loved and it also matched a number of my clothes. so i wore it anyway. that day was a very difficult day, i going through something at work for many days and it had reached a peak and this day, had been heart breaking, at the same time i wanted to break some people's bones.

Come to think of it, i dont remember what it was that set me off. its always like this, isnt it - things that matter soo much, over which we get so flustered about, 3 years down the line, you cant hecking remember them!

So anyway, i stepped out of the office, i could not take it any longer. I was out near a small garden, walking furiosuly and something got stuck in my shoe. i ripped it out and threw it away.

in the force of what i was doing, my hideous bracelet slipped out of my wrist and hit a nearby rock with such violence that it broke. it didnt just break, it BROKE. it blasted. in 50 directions. i think it had as many as 25 beads. but it seemed to blast in 50 directions.

i just stood there, time went still. i felt like i saw it in slow motion. every single hideous bead flying helplessly away from the violence of what just happened to them. even the band that held them together, something elasticcy, broke into a few pieces. it was glorious.

about 3 or 30 minutes had passed. passers by stared curiously at me. I could have said 'f**k off' but i didnt. In such times of intense vulnerability, life has taught us to always care about what perfect strangers who matter nothing to us and will not even remember us the next moment thought of us. but in that moment, i could have told all of life's teachings to go fly a kite. but i didnt care enough to do even that.

what i just saw was therapeutic and those people had no idea. and i needed therapy. strangely, the frustration had vanished. in its space, there was... nothing.

so i took in a deep breath with my eyes closed and time slowed again. I wanted to fill this emptiness with something. something useful, something helpful. fast, i told my brain. My brain sprung into action, looking at its archives for memories. finding all sorts. it kept tossing out the angry ones, the sad ones, the bitter ones, until it got to the happy ones.

My son looking into my eyes,
my mother and i on a trip,

I am eating a steaming hot plate of perfect fried rice,
and my lungs had reached its full capacity, my breath was done, now it was time to exhale..

I slowly opened my eyes and let out a long, calming breath of air.
Talent in happiness, here i come.

and to all those people whose bones were spared, my hideous bracelet said 'you are welcome' from the 50 different places its pieces lay.

"At one point in life you either have the thing you want or the reasons why you dont"

T shirt quote in Chennai Times today :)

One for today, one for tomorrow

Hot sun !
Month of may !!
Chennai !!!
Humidity that could melt u into a pool of boiling sweat !!!!

the only allowance - bright orange and yellow, plump, sweet, juicy..

MANGOS (5!) - the sole reason why summers were ever made!

So off I went to the spencers daily to buy some for the weekend. I didnt wait to look at the snack bar, didnt wait to gawk at the cosmetics shelf. for once, hopped happily to the fruits counter.

The place was not crowded, had just one other customer, about fiftyish person looking thoughtfully at the pomegranates. He also moved to the mango section as I neared it. I bent down examined some fruits and picked one up that looked neither shiny nor matt thinking 'this would do'. Fiftyish hunk straightened his back, looked at my fruit, took it out of my hand and put it back on the counter. did i see him shake his head as well??

'WHAT?!?'

I dont want violence. I am all for world peace. But then hey, do not grab the fruit that i picked out!

Anyway, with me being an ahimsak (!) i did not resort to any violence, I just moved a little away from the fruit grabber and threw my best nasty look at him (which went unnoticed). I continued to choose and picked out another one. 'hmm, perfect!'

but then, he grabbed that too from my hand shaking his head! The mere audacity!!

For reasons beyond reasoning, i felt like laughing! Not able to comprehend the actions of a seemingly normal person, i just stopped and stared, not knowing what to do next.

He put back my glossy mango, still looking at the counter in deep thought, picked out 2 ugly but healthy looking fruits and handed them to me, one by one, saying
'idhu innikku'
'idhu naalaiku'

this one for today
this one for tomorrow

I was speechless for a moment.
'wow! how do you know which ones to pick?'
'fruit grower' he said by way of explanation. Man of few words.

I thanked him and smiled at him, but then mr.fruit grower ignored me in totality after he knew that I did not want any more fruits picked out.

I heeded his advice and had one yesterday and one today and must say, they were really perfect. the best ones I have had this summer.

I dont know if the fruit grower was simply a friendly person, or was someone who could not leave his job behind. I would like to think of him as a nice friendly person, whose ways are different, but sincere :)

He made my day. twice actually. once yesterday, once today :)

Getting over first love

Pentax P 30, regular steel body, 80S make, Japanese, K mount SLR, as is lens 50 mm. no fuss, nothing grand. But i cannot put into words the feelings i have for this inanimate friend of mine. Countless are the memories i share with it.

My first memory of this camera was when I was a kid of maybe 5 years. We were at the zoo and my father was trying to take a photo of the hippopotamus. he was pointing the camera precariously into the wide well like structure where the hippos were kept.

I was looking at him (not the hippos) worried that he might drop the camera. I did not take my eyes of him till he had finished taking multiple angle shots, put on the lens cover and had strung the camera safely onto his neck.

I do not remember anything else we did/saw on that trip, my only memory is a Pentax P30. By the way, the hippo shots came out remarkably well. Dad is great at it. I am still working at it.

Dad was very posessive of the equipment, he never liked anyone other than himself handling them, so naturally, for a good part of my childhood, I could only long for it from a distance.

It was precious and I knew it. It is not unusual to consider anything that is not easily reachable to be a 'purpose of life' of sorts. When I was in the tenth standard, I took my first shot with the cam, that was one of the best moments of my life. that particular frame never got developed though :)

From then on, I captured in our backyard, a red ant carrying its food, bright red hibiscus in the morning sun, a silky green bug resting on lime green gooseberries and many more memorable shots - memorable only to me ;) My mom took one look at the ant's picture and asked me 'why cant u take normal pictures, of human beings?'

It was in the first year of my college that I had the camera all to myself for 2 consecutive days. I had to beg and plead with dad. It was a photo competition in an inter collegiate meet conducted by another college in town.

My camera was the object of envy of atleast 50% of the students who took part. those two days were bliss. I clicked and clicked till the end of the day, I was happy and content, I didnt want anything more, my mind reached a point where it did not matter to me whether i win. But I won. Another best moment..

Once i moved away from home, it was a challenge to get dad to depart with his camera. But i did manage the undoable sometimes :)

With time and usage, the equipment has slowed down and now, even after getting multiple services done, I am unable to get clear pictures out of it. It is sad, it is heart-breaking.

I still have strips of the LR44 maxell batteries that the cam uses. I cannot amount how much of money i have spent trying to get it into shape. I loaded a new film into it yesterday though i know it will be either over exposed or under exposed, the output will be grainy and distorted.
 
It feels like having a lover with Alzheimer's. You know you are losing him, but you cannot stop trying.

good-better-best. late-later-hopeless

A colleague who loves reading heavy philosophical books had insisted that I read one of his favourite books, light from many lamps. And ‘read’ I did, just that I took about 8 months to finish the first half of the book.

My usual reading time for fiction is 3 days to one week per book, but philosophy has to sink in deep, and that takes time, doesn’t it? You gotta make allowances ;)

Although I didn’t think I would like to finish the book, I am slowly realising that its OK to read it as I am in fact liking it. For one thing its not the average Donald Trump or Shiv Khera type of literature (if you can call it literature, that is).

It’s a collection of interesting excerpts from a lot of writers (all American though) and its not all pep talk. It narrates lot of incidents as they happened in people’s lives.

One story that influenced me is about an inscription on a garden wall. One day, a very busy doctor receives a letter from one of the old patients.

The patient, a young woman narrates how she had seen a writing on a wall in a garden and thought it might be relevant to the doctor. “Enjoy yourself. It is later than you think”

The doctor put the correspondence aside and tried to forget about it, but it refused to get away from his mind. He was getting old and he had always wanted to go for a holiday.

Since he thought his patients needed him, he never gave too much thought about his dream. But, from the time he read those words, he was restless. He kept thinking, “Really? Is it late already?” then he decided that “maybe it is later than I think”

He decided to take the long pending holiday, he wanted to visit South America. He met his friend and asked him to join him in the vacation plan and later, showed him the letter.

His friend initially said he cannot go, he wont be able to spare time, he is too busy. Later, they sat in silence, each in deep thought. Then he said “What is that thing again that woman said? ‘it is later than you think’? Well..”

And so they went to South America, and enjoyed their vacation by doing everything that the country had to offer them, as they enjoyed the peace, they felt their burdens slip off.

At his death bed, the doctor’s friend’s best memory was the days spent in South America. “I am so happy that we went to South America. I thank God we did not wait too long” – these were among the words he spoke in the last few hours of his life.

Lots of things I read affect me, some do not, and some I pretend that they didn’t affect me. But this short story went deep inside, made changes and made me do things I would not have done on a normal course. I am glad I read this, because I am glad with the results I have due to my actions. Not all that I did worked out the way I wanted, but not even one will make me regret later.

Thought this would be nice to share with few others. So here i am, spreading the message, Go ahead, enjoy your times ppl! I am afraid it is indeed later than you think!

'I quit'

Few posts ago, I was writing about the most difficult thing to do, this post is about the easiest thing to do. I did not get enough time to do my usual informal survey for this topic, so I will just put in my thoughts. As far as I am concerned, the easiest thing that I have ever felt I could do was, to quit. Just that, simply quitting. Thats one action that gives you immediate relief and that has so far been the easiest thing to do. I am not talking about just me, I have noticed this with lots of people around also.

Im sure you already got my point, but to reinforce it, I will give you an example. Jogging is a great way to exercise, when you start your run, you feel good (because you almost hear your fat cells going 'pop' :) !!).

But after you have run a long time, at a point when you are gasping and panting, all you want to do - is to stop running. Nothing else matters. Its as simple as that, You JUST want to quit running! and catch your breath.

If you have ever jogged, Im sure you will agree with me. When you are gasping for air, you think you are going to die or choke, though you know very well that not too many people fall and die on jogging tracks.

Still, the facts and the statistics cannot reason with your brain at that time, because you want to stop. that is definitely the easiest thing to do.

It takes people with extra-ordinary will to keep going and not succumb to the temptation of doing the easiest thing. This simple example is very similar to many things that we face everyday.

Anything difficult always comes with a loophole - and that hole will be the 'easiest thing to do'. in most cases, its just plain old escape. and everytime we turn our back and flee, we are making a voluntary choice. We know what we are doing, we know the consequences.

In short, we know that we are quitting, but we do it all the time, because sometimes in life, you are just exhausted and to quit is the easiest thing to do.

You just want to get over with it, quit it and get on with whatever is left. Easy temptation I would say, desparation - you would say, but you know we have all done that sometimes. Some other times, thats the last thing we do. But we do.

Not to mention, in few cases, quitting would be the best thing to do. Thats the situation I would love to be in. Picture this, its the easiest, its the best..now, how cool is that??

Books to buy (Compulsory this semester)

I was discussing with my friend, the best places in Chennai to buy pirated books and suddenly remembered the college days.

During my 2 years course, there was always a list of books that the college wanted us to buy compulsorily. Each one of us either had to place orders through the college, or buy a copy and that copy should be shown to the coordinator. He/She is said to note this and add it up to our internal marks!!! Anything that the students were supposed to do in the curriculam, was directly or indirectly and sometimes proportionately linked to the internal marks.

The college authorities took all this trouble to make sure that no single soul has been individually deprived of the knowledge and literature that the book provides. (its a pun... please!)

But in fact, these 'compulsory' books are the ones that are never, ever actually taught or used in the actual curriculam. To prove this to you, I will just give you the names of few compulsory books that we had to buy for the second semester; 'Power of positive thinking'. 'Case studies in Accounting'. Case studies! in accounting!! can you believe it?? Not even once during the classes were these books mentioned. Anyway, you get what i meant, right?

We being sensible hostelites (ahem), never really saw the reason to have more than one copy per 5 of us, or maybe 7 of us. Of course, there were few students who would buy each and every prescribed book and read it cover to cover. I dont mean them, I am talking about normal people, like me ;)

One of us would buy a pirated copy of the book and take it to the coordinator to show him/her and then hand it over to the next in waiting and that person would do the same and this will continue till all of us were convinced that our internal marks are safe. The bright part of this was, when I vacated the hostel, I did not have to carry away too many books. All my books fitted in to one compact cardboard box.

Wanna be friends?

Who says we learn from experience? Sometimes, we just end up doing the same things that hurt us over and over again. Then of course, we do it only because we like it. How ironic is that!

In the past few weeks, 6 of my best friends have moved away from town, for different reasons. Actually, no.6 and no.7 are just packing their bags and waiting. The other 5 have already left, each one has his/her own reason.

It was in these few weeks that I realised how dependant my life had been on my friends. I dont mean to say they are my basic needs, but they somehow complete my day. They are an integral part of social life, also giving emotional back up. Being in a different city definitely does not mean that they are not friends anymore, but geography matters. You see what i mean, right? If this girl is sitting in arizona, which is about half the globe away, can i ever catch up with her for coffee at the end of the day?

Just 6 people leaving at the same time has left me thinking in perspectives I had never thought before, such as this- Everytime we make a friend, when we get close to someone, are we just getting ready for another separation and pain. Yes, this sounds a bit far stretched, and yes, this thought will never make me stop making friends. Humans as they say are really social animals. We just cannot live without one another! :)

So people, here I come. I have 6 friends' worth time on my hands after all ;)