Happy Men’s Day

To all the wonderful men who have touched our lives in so many ways.. Happy Men’s Day!

I remember a small incident that happened more than 5 years ago, that has been etched in my memory since and left an impression on me that I will never be able to shake off. It was a good impression, so I don’t mind at all, rather it was one of those simple, small, ordinary day moments the simplicity of which leaves you more spellbound than the extraordinary.

Back in 2015, on one of my trips from Delhi to Bombay, it was when our flight made a landing in Bombay and we were about to disembark from the flight, that I saw a couple. It was one of those flights that didn’t have an exit from an aerobridge but had a staircase instead, which unfortunately made it a little challenging for this couple. I queued up like everyone else to make an exit, find a cab and head home. Not until then did I realize that I was standing right behind this couple who must have been in their late 20s or early 30s. They had two kids, one too young to walk on her own and the other one fast asleep. Well, it was business as usual, nothing out of the ordinary, to see a couple with two kids, just that they had 2 suitcases as well. Well, nothing extraordinary there either. What I saw next was what I will always remember. The woman flung her purse around her and took one kid in her arms and started descending the stairs, leaving the husband behind with one sleeping kid and two suitcases to carry. I wondered how the guy would do it, given that he also had a que of impatient passengers waiting anxiously to de-board as soon as they could.

It was in that brief moment that it struck me, how we, without even realizing it much, without batting an eye lid, leave behind, just so often, the heavy lifting for our men, subconsciously thinking that that’s a man’s job. Without realizing, that sometimes, men could use some help as well. And that’s perfectly okay, to need help but rarely CAN our men ‘ask’ for help, isn’t it?

Barely a few seconds would have passed since I saw this, that I found myself reaching out for one of the suitcases. I picked it up, told him its no bother and started descending. The man was a step behind me, holding on tightly to the kid and the other suitcase. I put the suitcase down next to where his wife was standing, asked him if he’d like me to help him with it on the bus that was a few seconds away. He said ‘thank you’ and said that he’ll be okay. I smiled and left the baggage and the couple behind but the bag.. always stayed with me in my memory.

It’s the subtelety of that one moment that made me appreciate our men more than what I already did. While we lament about so many dickeheads and assholes that leave us scarred and broken, this is just a day when we stop, acknowledge and thank all those who might have broken our hearts at sometime, but were also the ones who held it for a while. Who gave us love, who gave us care, watched us sleep, watched over us when we spread our wings and fly, wrapped us up in their arms and made us feel like we were safe, gave us hope, gave us courage, gave wings to our dreams and caught us when we fell, picked us up again and accepted us with our flaws, our scars and our broken souls.

To our wonderful fathers who might appear tough on the outside but are a soft ball of mush when it comes to us.. their daughters, to the men we love and the ones we loved, to our brothers who always protected us, to all our wonderful friends who continue to support us.. thank you for being you. Thank you for everything you have done and continue to do for us even though we might appear messy and less than worthy at times.

We love you and we want you to know, its okay to fall down, its okay to cry, its okay for you to not be so strong all the time, we are there and we will do the same for you that you do for us. Lift you up when you are down, hug you tight when you are feeling low, rest your head in our lap and let you cry, rest your head on our chest and wrap our arms around you and tell you that we stand with you to share with you all the joys, pains and responsibilities that life has thrown at you.

Breathe and relax and just know that we might not say it as often, but we respect you, we look up to you and we love you more than we might tell you. Happy Men’s Day!

 

Life’s little finger

Have you ever wondered how some people make such a whirlwind entry into our lives, give us such moments of joy or just plain companionship for a while, mean so much to us and then gradually just fade away? Our paths separate and we fall out of touch, maybe never to meet again and yet by the time they leave, they would have either altered the course of our lives in some way or just seen us through, some of our most difficult times and given us moments that we will cherish for the rest of our lives.

These are people I call ‘Interventions’. A little finger, that life extends for us to hold on to, that helps us either deal with some situations we find ourselves in, or wakes us up and makes us deal with some things that we’ve been scared to face. I’ve had some such interventions in my life that brought me out of situations that I couldn’t muster the strength to pull myself out of alone. These interventions came into my life, pulled me out of those situations and unknowingly altered the course of my life forever. They not only eased the pain but also gave me memories, to hold on to, to cherish and times that I will always look back at fondly.

I recently found myself to be an intervention in someone else’s life. I didn’t realize I was one for them until recently. Looking back it just feels like I was nothing but an intervention in their lives that unknowingly only made them see that they were on a path of annihilation, already emotionally dead and financially ruined. That they needed to alter their life and correct their course coz the wind had been blown out of their sail and their ship, wrecked and sinking. Seeing them in a much better place in life now makes me feel like my role in their lives is over and that its time for us to move on.

Life is so much simpler if only we take a step back and take a moment to understand the things that happen to us. Its amazing how we are able to see things in a different light once we look at them with a dispassionate eye.

Not every time will everything make sense and not every time will we get help, nor will we be able to see things in this light up until some time has passed. Knowing that sometimes some people only come into our lives for a certain purpose and for a certain time, would only help us deal with things better. We sometimes clutch on to such people believing that they mean more than just a passing phase, where as all we need to do is to thank them and let them go and just hope that someday we could repay the debt of life by being an intervention for someone else, and leave someone’s life a tad bit better than what it was when we found them.

Have you ever had any such beautiful interventions in your life? Or have you ever been one in someone else’s? Rescuing them at times when they needed someone the most? You might just be amazed at how some relationships might suddenly make sense if you look at them through this angle. For others, that might still be a question mark, well, what would life be without any mystery to solve…

“All the world’s a stage… and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances…”

 

 

‘Pink’ makes me feel Blue

Let me begin by saying that I don’t think any man can truly understand what it means to be a ‘modern independent’ woman, especially in a society likes ours. Ever since the movie Pink has started playing. I’ve had conversations with a few male friends of mine, all saying how brilliant the movie was. While I cried my eyes out through the movie, my belief, has been strengthened by the conversations with my male friends, that a man, cannot even begin to understand the ordeals of a woman in our times.

Yes, the film does a brilliant job of portraying the skewed mindset of our society against our women, but it also brings out so many other things that a man cannot even begin to imagine.

Let me take the movie as an example and bring to you a few more dimensions to it. The first half of the movie, starts with the girls worrying about the fact that one of them attacked the guy with a bottle, potentially rendering him blind from one eye. The entire time, they are overcome more with fear of what might happen, if the boys filed a complaint against them for assault, rather than being furious about the fact that one of them was sexually assaulted, that the guy forced himself on her. And as shown in the movie, a girl, even if she tries to file a complaint against the molestor / rapist, is deterred, by almost everyone she meet or thinks she could talk to. I myself have been dissuaded by my very own parents when I told them I wanted to talk to the parents of a 12 year old boy, who had groped me, in my very own building. Yes, you read it right, 12 year old. I cannot begin to imagine what the world has come to when I have to now fear even the 12 year olds. You might tell me that that was a one off case and that I shouldn’t make such a big deal out of it. But try, for one moment, to understand, the concept of the ‘sense of security’, which is a very fragile thing. Which once broken eludes us forever. Do you know what it feels like to constantly live in fear? Fear of being eve-teased, fear of being touched inappropriately, fear of being groped, of being molested, of being raped? I cannot tell you how many times, just how many times I have been touched inappropriately and been groped; a crowded market place, a crowded bus, under water, a bus stop, anywhere and everywhere. So many of these men look for just a moment, where they could touch you, feel you up and quickly get away. And trust me when I say, there are just so many times and places like that, where it is just so easy to do that. You might understand if I tell you how disgusting it makes a woman feel, but I doubt you’ll ever understand what it costs a woman. Or how high is the price of that sense of security that a woman loses in that one fleeting moment. In those moments, she is not just robbed of her dignity, but also her peace of mind and her independence, forever. For despite the fact that she might step out again, go out late at night, venture out in crowded places again, but she will NEVER, EVER feel safe again.

I cannot explain the horror of walking on the streets of Delhi at any time of the day. The way men even your father’s age will look at you, makes you want to crawl under a rock and hide forever. I cannot explain the horror of being out on days of dahi handi in Bombay. When every hooligan thinks that he has a license to leer at and touch every woman he can lay his hands on. I cannot explain, what, when you are at a ‘family restaurant’ with your guy and the middle aged man, sitting right across your table, looks at you in a lecherous way, does to you.

Do you know how it is to live, always having to think of what I can wear or not wear, depending on how a man might get ‘provoked’. I can’t wear a short skirt or a cleavage showing top, why? Not because I am uncomfortable in them, but because the dick heads don’t know how to control themselves if they see a woman wearing a low cut top or clothes in which her legs are showing. Why is that my fucking problem!? Why can’t I wear what I want to wear? Why can’t I be out alone, irrespective of the hour of the day? The fault lies with the rotten men, with the irresponsible parents who forgot to teach their sons to keep their dicks in their pants, and I have to suffer? Is that fair? Why am I being punished for boys who weren’t raised right? Why am I robbed of my freedom, my peace and my sense of security because there are desperate men walking on the streets? They are the ones who should be caged and tamed, but instead I am the one who has to manage my timings and my clothes and my company. WHY?

 

Have you ‘checked out’ yet?

I have written about this before Social networking: the new villain..and here I am writing about it yet again. Simply because I see this so often and its so saddening. People share their lives with the whole word, invest in so many virtual friends, over chats and whatsapps and forget to connect with a special few. Instead of investing in one, or a few they spread themselves thin on everyone.  They are busy counting ‘likes’ and waiting for ‘comments’ that they forget to live the real life. Busy capturing pictures and ‘checking in’ virtually that they forget to check out of the virtual world, disconnect themselves from the noise and really live in that moment, worrying about how it’ll ‘look’ on social media.

When I was in school and college, I remember the anticipation, the excitement and the joy of calling up a close friend, those short n expensive STD calls were things I still remember, the conversations, I still cherish. But now that we have the money and the calls don’t cost as much, we’ve become reluctant to call, reluctant to make an effort, reluctant to invest. How can we ever have real relationships if we are not ready to invest in them. You’ll find it amusing that I fell deeper in love with a man who, on one of his out of country trips, called me and talked to me over the phone for an hour, raking up a phone bill of over 10 grands. Why? you ask? Simply coz he wanted to hear my voice, talk to me, tell me how his day went and ask me about mine. As insane as a 10k bill might sound, in this digitally connected world, it was an equally insanely romantic thing. He wasn’t counting the ISD minutes, neither was I, well, I was busy falling harder for him 😛 The weak wifi signal didn’t weaken our love, it made it stronger. We didn’t put our love on the wifi ‘line’ and we didn’t hold it ransom to internet connections. These days, if you are not on a free messaging app and FB consider yourself anti-social since text messaging and calling are pretty much dead, though who knows, Jio might just bring romance back in our lives with its ‘free calling’ plans! 😛

Its perfectly alright if you want to share your life with the whole world every now and then, share your thoughts, your moods and highs and lows with a long list of people you’ve either never met or hardly met, but in case you are looking for love or you are in love, I’d strongly suggest that you care less about the list of contacts, the likes and the comments online and rake up the mutual likes, comments, compliments and conversations in your real life rather than the virtual one.

At the end of the day, you need to decide if you want to be the book that’s judged by its fancy cover page alone, that people come, take a look at, admire briefly, maybe flip a few pages of and then put back on the stand and move on. Or do you want to be someone’s favorite book? The book that finds that one person who’d want to read it from cover to cover, scribble in, make notes and mark a few pages, and keep coming back to em’ coz they are in love with it.

 

Missing! Several pairs of balls!

Over the past few years, with my experience with men, there has been one thing, that, when I look back now, I have seen over and over again. I give a disclaimer right away saying that this is not a debate of the fairer skin vs the other sex. I am not implying that women are better coz I cant. I can only talk about men and my experience is based on the many I have seen / met /been with.

Let me rewind a little and I go back at least a decade.  Been in a relationship for almost 5 years, but then at the end mommy and daddy resist and the relationships ends. Missing! A pair of balls! Then there were those who want to be with you but always have an excuse on the sides, oh I am already in a relationship, oh my parents will never agree, oh we are from different castes, it’ll never be accepted. Missing! Several pairs of balls!

Oh did I tell you? The type I just mentioned above includes a few who would get married to a girl of their parents’ choice and still want to keep in touch with you, still want to meet you and God knows probably still want more. I duly shut the doors on them so I never found out what they might still be interested in.

Oh I almost forgot to tell you about a guy I met through a matrimonial site, who had lost his father only a year ago. He still harbored a grudge against his father that his father didn’t accept, that his son, now 32, was now the man of the house. A few dates later and with things moving closer to both of us saying ‘yes’ to each other, his mother calls up my parents one fine day and tells them that it wouldn’t work out and gives some horoscope shit more than a month after things started. I call up the guy and ask him about it, and he says he has no clue about it. He promises to talk to his mom and get back to me the next day. End of story: the guy goes absconding, refusing to return my calls or messages. The mother showed the ‘man of the house’ his rightful place I guess. And these guys want to marry a girl and bring her home to be subjected to the whims of their families? So much for being ‘the man of the house’

Fast forward to today, a man (or so I thought) goes the gentleman way, holds doors for me, does those small little things for me that would make every girl go week in her knees, makes me fall in love with him, asks me to marry him and then two weeks before the wedding, backs out and disappears, never ever turning back to as much as even offer an explanation as to what happened, why he changed his mind. And voila! Another pair of balls goes missing!

Man up boys, grow a pair, tell me what you want or do not want. I can take the truth. You think I am only good to go to bed with? Tell me, and I’ll know how to deal with you. You think marrying me would be taking on too much and you did it just for the thrill of the game? Tell me, at least after your game is over, at least I will know the truth.

So this is a humble request to all and sundry, to kindly return any pair of balls that they might find, lying about, since quite a few men (at least, I have met) are missing theirs. Any clues in helping them find theirs would be highly appreciated.

To all the men, we women today are fully capable of taking care of ourselves, financially, emotionally, sexually, mentally or any other way you can think of. We don’t ‘need’ you. We might wear our heart on our sleeve, we might hold the door for you and let you in. But when we do, be sure to understand that we respect you and are willing to share our lives with you. Don’t try to take us for a ride and certainly don’t take us for a fool. When you give us those nonsensical excuses, not only are you wasting your time but also ours. And its not about time really, its demeaning that you would take us for a fool thinking that we will fall for those excuses. Don’t sugar coat your words, don’t hide, don’t make excuses, tell us the truth coz we can handle it. We might be heart broken, we might stumble, we might fall but we will be back up again. We have some amazing friends and family to fall back on, who’ll be there for us no matter what.

We will fight for you if you deserve it, we will stand by you if you respect us and we will give you our everything if you truly love us. Just don’t mess with us, we don’t want any bad blood and there shall be peace. And if you can’t respect us, we will still hold the door for you, only this time, with an ‘Exit’ sign marked on it.

 

In bed with one.. yet another on my mind

The last few days, I have been feeling guilty, guilty for I have cheated. No one knows about it though but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Worst part is I can’t stop myself, I still fantasize. I admit, I like variety, I like to shake things up a bit every once in a while, I like the idea of conquering a new unknown.

I should focus, focus on the one I have in hand. Damn! But I get tempted so often. I need more self-control. I should settle down with this one and then move to another, after all of the many that have come and gone, I have stuck to this one for the longest, but who can stop oneself from fantasizing now, can one?

Yes I am in love and have been in bed with my idea of a food start up for quite some time now. I am already making headway in setting it up but then I often get tempted by other ideas that come to me, while reading the Economic Times, reading about other startups, seeing various challenges that either I or people around me have faced. My mind picks up a line of thought, of execution and runs down to the last detail in a matter of minutes. Oh! the rush, the high! I get so turned on! And there it is. Before I picked up the newspaper, I was pondering over the next step that needs to be taken to set things up for the food venture, I was planning my next day at work and now, here I am thinking about another. I try to hit the brakes and push the thoughts out of my head. I try to calm myself down by jotting the idea down in one corner of my work diary, hoping that that would satiate my mind, make it believe that I will take it up later and plead for it to work on things that it should be working on right now. There are moments, very brief moments when I think it has stopped, that I can focus on my current venture again now, in peace, but I’m mistaken, the other one comes barging in and brews up a storm in my mind yet again.

This is what I think is called adrenalin rush, people get it from performing dangerous stunts, by taking weed or by indulging in extreme sports but I get it like this. Someone described me as a start-up junkie. And guess what, I’ve fallen in love with the term! I’m not a fan of labels, but this one; well bring it on! I would love to be called a ‘start-up junkie’.

A new idea, a new possibility, a new venture.  The freshness of it and the thing where my mind flexes its muscles that have started to relax a little since the last one is pretty much ready to go live now. All the planning and details are almost covered, it has all given way to execution and daily tasks. My mind gets bored, looking for something new and it could come from just about anywhere. So after one passionate whirlwind affair I lay it down in the memory book… my diary, promising it, I will return. What happens in the meanwhile? Well, all I can say is, a little bit of flirting on the sides never hurt anybody. Peace.

 

Social networking: the new villain..

Gone are the days when love was synonymous to a few stolen glances, love letters and long wait. Now everything is digital and virtual. The romance is certainly gone.

In simpler times, when we met someone at a particular place, secret glances were exchanged, our hearts would flutter and that’s where the romance would start. These days, a meeting is immediately followed by a friend’s request on Facebook. Put the name online and google gladly obliges. It throws up the person’s entire life in front of us with links to the person’s FB profile, professional network, blogs ets, enough for us to start with. Secret glances and those love notes are replaced by virtual ‘winks’ and ‘pokes’. Gone are the days when finding someone included befriending the other person’s friends and physically making rounds of the other person’s place hoping to catch a glimpse of the person. These days an overdose of minute by minute updates and truckloads of pictures that is further supplemented by self-posted status messages leaves no scope for imagination.

Romance was in the wait, in the effort one would take, to find us, to know us, to try and find out what we like or what we don’t. Today, finding it all is only a click away.  Tiny scribbled love notes with rendezvous place are replaced by watsapp messages. Think about it, when was the last time you made something for someone you loved, a card, a note, a handwritten love message? All that is replaced by probably a visit to an online shopping portal where we order an expensive gift that’s delivered right at the other person’s doorstep and satisfactorily lets us ‘check’ our ‘to do’ list saving us any guilt for not having ‘done’ anything on that special someone’s birthday. Think about the time we spent in getting it all done? A few minutes, an hour at max! I can bet!

I wonder if that is why our relationships are so brittle these days, coz probably we feel too little and are barely invested in them. Time is replaced by money and emotions, by emoticons. The time that elapses between ‘liking’ and ‘acquiring’ someone has significantly gone down along with the effort that used to go into it and probably that’s why we find it easier to move on the next.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against social networking or social media. Though I am amazed at how eager people are, to lay their lives bare in front of the entire world, its totally a personal choice. Where I do appreciate the ease with which one can find something or someone online, I certainly do believe that our usage of social networking sites et all has killed the romance. I hope we are able to turn it back on.. coz romance is in those little games, we used to play..

 

 

Let me go…

I don’t think I’ll make it through the night

I don’t think I’ll see the next sunshine

In case you still find my heart beating inside

Something in me, forever would have died

 

Your drugs possibly can not cure

The pain I have chosen to endure

The pain, I was too scared to inflict

Glad no one else had to bear, coz to me it befits

 

But tonight when I go to sleep

I don’t want to carry the weight with me

So I’ll sing a song only few could hear

Of what my heart couldn’t stand to bear

 

To those I knew, who held me near

Don’t blame yourself and don’t fret dear

Coz you could not ever possibly know

The pain, I did not want to show

 

I am sorry I learnt to lie to you

And didn’t let you know what I was going through

I tried so hard not to show

Coz I got too used to being alone

 

So tonight when I close my eyes

Just let me sleep and don’t deny

The peace, I choose, to embrace

Just let me go don’t make me stay…

 

Just let me go, just let me go……..

 

 

Lonely Soul

With tears in my eyes
I lie on my bed

with a pain in my heart
and a question in my head

a question I often dont dare to ask
coz I know the answer, and my hope wont last

even in the darkest of times, I've stood tall
with a smile on my face, carried the burden of them all

gave them the strength when I myself was shattered
cheered them up, when my soul was battered

but is there a soul, who would know how I feel
look into my eyes, and know the smile is not for real

someone who could fill that gaping hole
in front of whom, I could bare, my mind, body and soul

is there a soul who would carry me home
when I'm drowning in pain and all alone

someone to whom my silence could speak
in the arms of whom, peace, I could seek

but is there a soul who would know
how to keep my heart from sinking so low

someone who'd know how to keep me sane
in my worst moments of weakness and pain

is there a soul......

 

Breaking up? It’s not that bad!

All of us have done it, gone through it sometime or the other in our lives. Some move on, and some hold on, some learn and some never do. Yes it brings with it a lot of pain and misery but it also brings along a lot of stuff that we wouldn’t have ever learned any other way. You’ll probably think I am crazy or obsessively optimistic but then the fact is, at the end of it, every experience in our life, good or bad, brings with it a lesson, a take away, whether we take it or leave it, stumble, fall or rise again, it makes us who we are today. 

How many times have you been in a relationship? And how may times have you broken up? Did it ever occur to you that your breakup was probably a life saver? Did you ever happen to look back and wonder how you ever got involved with a guy or a girl like that in the very first place?

Think about it, don’t you think that it happened for the good? The beak-up… it was just the right thing to happen? Yes, it did bring with it a lot of heartache, tears and months of misery maybe, but in the end didn’t it all happen for the good? Some of us take a month, some, months and some maybe even years, we sometimes still hoped and wished it could have just worked out but then hearts of hearts don’t we know that it just happened for the best.

I believe that in every relationship, there has to be a common ground, a place where both the partners meet, where both tune and adjust to each other. Both need to take a few steps towards each other, yet some times, we happen to be in relationships where we seem to be the only one taking any kind of steps to bring us closer. Without even realizing it, we give up being ourselves, some times; give in just so much to a relationship; so much more than we should. We make ourselves believe that we love the other person and so it’s all worth it. We move away from our dreams, or expectations and even ourselves coz we hold on so strongly to what we imagine that relationship to be. In the end, when it ends, more than the fact that the relationship has ended, what crushes us is that our dreams and our relationship as we imagined it to be, has ended. Some times we just hold on, coz we’ve stooped low, low in terms of self-respect, low in terms of our levels of acceptance and low in terms of levels beyond which we wouldn’t go. We demean ourselves, degrade ourselves and accept what ever little we get in a relationship, suffering and knowing all the while that we wanted and expected so much more. Initially we keep hoping things would change, improve but slowly, we give in, we make our peace with what ever little we get. Not that we don’t know what we want just that we are too afraid to confront ourselves with our own desires coz we know if we let them come back to us, we’ll end up looking stupid. We think we wouldn’t get any one better than who we have already and so we hold on to them. We name it as ‘love’, but more than anything else, it’s our own fears and insecurities that make us hold on to that one person, that one person who instead of being the reason for us to smile becomes the reason for our suffering.

 Our friends keep telling us not to fall deeper but we fight them too. Some don’t care and those few who do, cry with us, not because the other person is making us suffer but because they see us, letting ourselves suffer. Sure, we are in pain but imagine the pain of those who are close to us, who hold our hand all along, give us a shoulder to cry on and laugh with us when we realize how stupid we had been. Imagine what we make them go through when we let ourselves go though all this, all for some one who doesn’t care enough, who hurts us in the first place and then leaves us alone with it.

 Its ok to break up, it might be tough for a while but life does go on and in time you’ll be perfectly ok, it might leave some scars, but they’ll just act as reminders of what not to do again. Every time you are reminded of those scars, don’t think of the time you did spend being in that relationship, think of all the time you would have ended up wasting on that relationship had you not broken up.

 Break up is not as bad as we often think of it as, it’s the only time in a relationship or after it, we see ourselves as our close ones do, it’s the only time we are able to objectively evaluate our being with that some one. It’s the only time we see things in a much better light coz we are not blinded by that thing called ‘love’.  So break it up if it gives you more pain than pleasure. Be yourself and don’t give in… May God bless you with what ever you need, whether its patience to see your relationship through a rough phase or the strength to break it up and move on. Just know that there are always those special angels called friends to hold your hand through the toughest of phases and bring a smile on your face. I have some too and I am dedicating this post to two such angels 🙂