Speak up!

 While our world is locked up, you need not stay quiet.....u can speak!

Call friends, call up family, share your experiences and no you do not need to put up with crap. Your opinion counts too and do not hesitate to speak up your feelings and experiences. You do not need to put up with people because you will become alone. It is better to be alone than toxic people who do not value you.  And trust you will not be alone for long as long as you are open to adding new people in your life. Be watchful that you do not end up with the wrong people. Control neediness. We need people who need us. Do not end up with people who use you. That is not pleasant. Choose wisely, don't be unkind to others. At the same time keep a lot of kindness for yourself. 

World Blog Action Day 2008-Poverty ...15th Oct, 2008

Today is the World Blog Action Day 2008 and the theme this year is poverty. Thanks to my friend in England I learnt about it and to show my solidarity with the cause I decided I would post this blog before the stroke of midnight.

Poverty needs no introduction to India and Indians. We see it around us all the time, so much so, that we have developed a kind of immunity to it. We cannot help everyone, I understand, and thinking this, shrug our shoulders and move on. I would not go about defining it, its well defined and well understood even by those who are not subjected to living a life of abject poverty. We all employ servants at home (thank god for poverty, we the people of the third world would say) at paltry wages. My maid washes our clothes for Rs.300.00 per month (approximately 7.00 US Dollars), a cost we all know much lesser than operating a washing machine for the period, and mind you, it does not have a fixed load, unlike a washing machine again. This is one of the better salaries that a decent employer would pay. And we are just two people at home, so it is actually an excellent salary because many servants are employed at much lesser the cost for larger families, the average Indian family size is about five people, in a regular metro city. This is an example of cheap labour employment. We are not yet speaking of the expenses of living in a large city. We consistently complain about our ‘meager salaries’ and the large cost of living. We draw a salary of a few lacs per annum and yet are broke (sic) because we cannot afford the expensive luxury wining and dining and designer items we hanker after (sic)! The truth of the matter is, it is a consumerist world and we do not wish to be left behind. How these servants manage to manage their basics is beyond the bother of our fashionable lifestyles and sounds good on the fiery ‘jhola brand’ journalists or khadi flaunting politicians, who also do not bother or care a fig really, as long as they can speak well and enjoy their martinis and wines along it and oh yes please, the kebabs should be well done, that’s how we all like it!. While we speak of ‘inflation most evil’, we would widen our eyes in horror, if these very same servants would ask for a raise. And then get back to complaining of ‘these servants really too much trouble nowadays’ talk.

I am affiliated to the cause of fighting child prostitution through a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) called ‘The Ahwaan Foundation’ through which we try and build awareness of the issue, try and rescue some of the children trapped in its throes from amongst the hundreds and thousands who may never be rescued and several of whom may never reach childhood. Then we have plans to rehabilitate and reintegrate them back in the society. The root cause of child prostitution is nothing but intense and abject poverty, where prostitution, though not easy money, seems a much better and easier avenue to the parents as well as often to the small children as well who are employed in it. Poverty so intense that sexual abuse seems lesser! When you look at the children, some are as young as five years old. I look at the children in my family and shudder, some of us, even as adults are treated like small children and fussed about. The world outside sometimes scares me. Yet we walk through it everyday and could be least bothered as long as bellies are full and desires increase everyday.

Despite the ruined shanties the poor call their homes, it is no less beautiful for them or any less sacred than what our homes are for us. Despite misery, they smile and laugh, even more than us, and show a far stronger belief in God. They have strong community lives which we sadly lack as we are get richer and prosperous, monetarily. The women suffer terrible abuses and still stick with their men, alcoholics who beat them and rape them, yet they are happy together.

The world indeed, is a strange topsy turvy place, and sometime in the moments before I sleep, I am in a reminiscent mood and I wonder with a book on my chest; indeed Gibran is right in his profoundness and beauty of thought!

“How can I lose faith in the justice of life, when the dreams of those who sleep on feathers is no more beautiful than the dreams of those who sleep on the earth.”

At least for a day, even when we do not give alms or money or charity, we could be more charitable and kinder to people, who are less privileged than us, for want of money, without being condescending. Let us please, include at least one poor person we see or know in our prayers, at least for a day. God may listen to us for a change.

Fury and love

While love cajoles me on softly in a bright room
Hell’s fury stands on its doors waiting for me to step out of the love’s lair
Unleashed, unburdened, undead, as free in its anger as love in its depths
Deep stirred maelstrom, tornado on its head
As deep as love but a stronger kiss
Goes no one unmarked, it never did miss
To the marked comes love, bathing gently in his pretty hue
Soften it, soothing and smoothing away but could not undo.
Hiss, hiss, hiss….scratch, scratch, scratch
Burns to the quick, gorges out the very core
Takes abode, overtakes the soul,
Punishes unrelentingly, takes on new victims of its roll.

It happens so often that love stands forlorn amidst a razed battlefield
Of charred remains
Fury caught love, raped and abused and bound it in chains
Love proffers slavery, fury accepts with snarls of disdain,
Tireless fury is spent and retires in vain
Love follows him, singing paeans

Artless fury lies quiet now,
His head on the lap of artful love, smiling
Love quelled fury sleeps contented.
Wake not the strange bedfellows!
He is asleep not dead.

more musings....

I sometime feel I live in a morally depraved world where indeed morality is like the trouser, worn to cover our shame and then brought down just as soon, to uncover lewdness. I do not understand this world and perhaps this world would also never understand me. A deep sense of alienation takes me over, and I feel a deep schism between the world and me. Not that I feel that I am not loved or respected, rather I have an abundance of these. It’s a weird kind superiority complex.

on Delhi....

I love Delhi. It has a soul that beckons you and holds you, claims you as its own. Like those who love the mountains, their souls live in the mountains and streams and rocks. And pick any book of a mountain loving person, you realize that they may live anywhere but their souls live in the mountains. And since no one can live without their souls for long, they get their deep urges to revisit the city that haunts them forever.
While when you look at books that glorify and make you fantasize about Mumbai, whether its Rohinton Mistry or Salman Rushdie or for that matter, any other, it’s a city that’s a step out, go between. Before you take the leap from say another city to a poised bigness, you come to Mumbai and move to that place. And those who never manage to leave Mumbai have this urge to go out and away. It pushes you away and far, the city that is.
The saddest fairy tale I ever read was ‘The Little Mermaid’. The Mermaid starts from the sea and ends in the sea, becoming the sea. When I was a child, I could not understand why this tale did not end in ‘and they lived happily ever after’ but rather the sea foam. That’s the soul of the place in which we live and affiliate ourselves to in our lives.

mad musings....

I have some strange mad musings and stranger dreams. I would speak my dreams later. As of now, musings:

Why do pagan goddess worship include fertility rites that are essentially feminine? Are not the men and gods bothered about it? Or do they think they are too virile to bother about it? Why the obsession of women with their fertility? Is the child the fruit for only the mother?

Why does love bring on a greater desire and need to love and be loved? Why is love not about contentment but expansive? Once you have been in a relationship, it would most likely teach you that when this one ends, try other relationships. No matter how miserable you feel, love is mesmerizing. Some people fall in love with being in love itself and these people are the most discontent.

Am I stupid to believe in the beauty and necessity of being good as much as possible all the time? I sometimes feel abused and used but I go on with a faith that when I do good despite pain and angst and deep seething anger, I bring in faith in others. Faith doesn’t mean god or religion. To me, the greatest faith of any being is trust. Even when a dog barks at you, its manifest distrust. When the animal is sure you mean no harm, it would either ignore you and more likely come and play with you. Humans are the most wary of all animals and to win their trust is something precious and peerless.

Why do the women have to lead their entire lives through their bodies?

on reading...

I love reading since I was a little girl. My parents knew that if they found me curled up with a book, I wouldn’t hear anything, and would usually be munching on an apple and would usually be famished as long as I was reading!
Reading was almost like a picnic to me! I would love finding a warm but not hot place with some nice shade of the tree with possibly a hamper containing some water and some sandwiches and an apple. I would lay a mat to lie on, pull a sheet over and settle down reading while lying down. I would be always admonished on that I would ruin my eyes reading a book like that, but of no avail. I loved it that way and would have no other way. When the sun got to me, I would keep the book on my face and take a long leisurely nap! Those days seem so luxurious to me now, no bother to think how the food and the book came from, with time to smell the garden and the summer and the spring, to chase the butterflies, to hear the birds and the bees humming around, to hear the wind, to run till you panted so hard that your chest felt like a bellow, to eat wild berries and leaves till you were sick, to wake when you pleased, to wait till the sounds dimmed and you knew it was time to go back home, to drink the raindrops directly from the sky, to pluck leaves out of your hair which would be so tangled that you would need hours to finally let the comb pass through without getting stuck!
Those years of abandon when we felt all the more better for being admonished are gone.
We are now too full of fears of what others think of us. We lie, we plastic smile, we are simply scared of being us. In fact, we are so scared of ourselves that we keep our beings in some hidden attic. Chained, admonished, shamed, afraid to break away, and more afraid of being alone.
These things stay and come back flitting to me as I read. I don’t run with my hair streaming behind me full of grass and leaves anymore. But I still love reading.
I love reading the books I read as a little girl…..the Enid Blytons, the Famous Five, the Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Secret Seven, the big books of fairytales from the world over. These books are still part of my most treasured library I have built over the years.
With these, stand the books that mark the intellectual adulthood of thoughts that never entered our heads when we were children. Life and death, compassion, soul searching, the reason of our being, the being and nothingness.
Sometimes, when I look at my books , all of which I love with a rare passion, I wonder that why on earth despite the depth and beauty of Gibran it could never match the magic of Enid Blyton. Despite reading minds of intellectuals, I feel that somewhere despite all the erudition and brilliance, they still lack a passion and fervour of childhood.
When my nephew turned 6 I bought him the entire collection of the Amar Chitra Katha comics which I grew up reading myself. Maybe he is too young to understand, but that was the only way I could connect to his childhood. As a child. My sister read him the whole stories as bedtime stories and now he is old enough to read them himself. I wish he loves reading as much as I do.
My niece is now 4 and loves reading. I someday hope to pass on my books to these children as my inheritance.