I am

I'm not twisted. i am just getting things straightened out.

I am not pointing fingers. i am just holding a mirror to people doing it. 

I am not perfect. But i make sure i do not make you look imperfect.

I may not 'live'. But i will make sure i don't kill.

I am not guilty. I am just.

For K

I thought I must write to you…each day, every day, a something special only for you. As usual your mummy has no agenda when she shoots off on these trips of hers. She wears her shoes, checks if enough time is in her pockets, for all the detours she is going to take on these trips… and it’s never enough. But she won’t stop.

While they say I am supposed to be teaching you all the good things in life, my sweetest you are the one who has taught me lessons… All of 3 years and you keep teaching me things. And all I tell you is what’s right and what’s wrong. But my honey bum, who is to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? Not me, not your achcha, not achchamma… you will have to learn it yourself – the rights and the wrongs, the in-betweens, being the most important, for slowly you will realize that more than the blacks and whites are the greys.

You scared me to bits when you ‘practised’ squinting. Even more so when you couldn’t identify the basic colours…yellow was ello and so was red. And then one fine day you just walk up to me and rattle off the names of colours pointing at a picture book. You made me proud. Yes, you did. And I know you will keep making me proud. No pressure to perform though. Nothing on earth can make me forget the squirming red blob the doc held in front of me announcing, ‘it’s a girl’. He made a mistake. It was a fairy. My very own fairy, who thinks she can’t live without me, when it is actually the other way round. 

I’m afraid I’ve got an opinion and I’m afraid I’ll die if I don’t shove it down your throat...

Everybody has made it their personal, moral, social, obligatory responsibility to make clear their idea of perfection, to decide what’s right and what’s wrong before double checking that they themselves have not committed the same folly (could be something as severe as a hair-cut or something as silly as a selfish act). Clearly, the high and mighty souls (do they have one, I wonder?) feel that the whole purpose of their visit to this part of the universe is to deliver their unsought opinion...

Teaching a child, the father of man (and woman)


They say love thy neighbour. But what if thy neighbour doesn’t reciprocate?

To which they say, do your deeds without any expectations. Then, why do it at all?

To which they say, do it for ‘your’self, and not to prove a point to the world. Well, in that case, I’d perform my deeds, sure. But then loving ones neighbour doesn’t figure in my list. What then?

And anyway, if I am not to have any expectations, then how do I create a standard for myself. If I must feel ‘satisfied’ with what I have, then does that mean, I need not aim for the stars, assuming realistically that I am not already amongst the stars?

They say, do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. But then where were the ‘others’ when this was being taught in the moral science class?

One lie leads to a thousand lies, they say. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of us from lying. The lies get justified as white lies, harmless lies and many more colour and intensity based categories are made.  

 I wonder what am i to teach my offspring... the one that’s warm and sunny, juxtaposing a stretch of cold, frosty moments, followed by flashes of cool and cloudy moments, with occasional bouts of prolonged heavy rain. My twenty-month old two-footer knows that the tiny French-manicure like nail of her pudgy left hand’s little finger, is enough for her to make me stand up in attention and do a “Aye Aye Sir...” to almost all her whimsical commands. So, what am I to teach my child, who is clearly the father of the man (I married), when it comes to being assertive, impractical, fanciful, but SURE of what she wants and how she’d get it.

I need to join a pre-school for the uninformed mommys  and get a dose on the right things to be taught in the right ways to the monster in all her rightness walking (falling, getting up, dusting her bum just to fall again) this wicked vile world.

Rant

Angry. Sullen. Sad. Betrayed. Wild. Violent. Disappointed. Scorned. Furious. Depressed. Suicidal. Apathetic. Is it practically possible for one person to feel all of these emotions at the same time? I don’t mean at precisely the same second. But each emotion pushing and shoving the other to occupy mind space? Is it possible? Or am I just thinking it up?


I want this. I wish I had that. I hope I become like him. I long for that cozy cottage. I yearn for a long holiday. I wonder if somebody is going to do it for me. A friend, while discussing our not-so-happening career graph, asked if we were not ambitious enough. Honestly, I don’t know what to say. Correct, even I am not surprised at my response. That’s how lackadaisical I’ve become. Returning to the point, I thought of all the people who saw the ‘fire’ in me, the power, not just the want, to do something big. And here I was, at 27, nowhere close to the starting point. Where did I go wrong?

I think I know the answer to it. I let many people have a say in my life AND tried to incorporate my little self as well. What a distasteful hotchpotch your life becomes when you lack the conviction to stand by what you believe. AND, like puke inducing cherry to the cake, let others lead you. Ooooh la la!

Now that I know what went wrong, do I have the nerves to stomach it with head held up high? Do I have the conviction to undo the knot and stand afresh? I don’t know. I’ll let myself know in another one week. Buying time? No. got a painful croaking throat. Need to get that straight and then we’ll grab the b@#$%^s by theire balls. No, I don’t need my throat for that. But who’ll do the abusing when they wince in pain?