who is getting married???

Wedding diaries, something you may not want to read, or even look at, unless you are the one getting married! And even though I was so nonchalantly convinced that wedding/marriage was something that happened to other people. But even before you realize it, you are already on a self propelled journey of quite a few hyperbola’s. No please don’t stay calm, it’s your wedding for heaven sake, and yes you are invited by default..! So counting days, months to the wedding, I had to write the jumbo mombo of the many thoughts that go through the head (in the spirit of educating those who are succumbing to the “wedding syndrome”). The most obvious thought of “how your life may change after marriage” gets completely sidelined and predominant question of wedding dress takes the center stage in the “duh, obviously” way!. And before you appraise yourself with the changed priorities (from facebook to pinterest), everyone’s really concerned about you losing weight for the wedding! You expecting people to give you views and opinions of “what not to expect” when you getting married, but instead you are handed over a whole book full of wedding know how’s. And you realize that morbid reaction of “you don’t have a hair dresser yet” is universally accepted as normal. And “what designer you are wearing” is the most obvious question after you announce “I am getting married”! And then the next realization(of the feminist me) is how sexist was the world flashing pictures of smiling brides and grumpy groom holding “the end” placards..! How did we (women) manage to convince the world with such conviction that our ultimate mission was infact to be married and the wedding was our own little fairytale of perfection (perfect hair, dress, makeup, shoes, jewelry, perfect, perfect, perfect).! As much as I would want to deny it, I squarely fall into the category of “I hate planning” and if that wasn’t bad enough I have what they call a “9 to forever” job and hence my favorite thing for all wedding related planning is procrastination (so if you can do it day after then maybe you should attempt doing it the month after).! And then I hear all these voices “but what about the dreams you had for your wedding” (yes I panic “why dint someone tell me I had option of such simplistic dreams”) So yes I gladly convince myself “its just a wedding” (besides I have full 5 whole months)!

i died...

Why is it so difficult for us to accept that we are dispensable and borderline inconsequential? So yes we will die, and as sad as that may be, the world will keep on moving at its pace. Remember that book “who will cry when you will die?”, it was by far the most redundant title, because when you do actually die the last thing on your mind would be the amount of tears that it may cause..! Grand Finale, very last breath, good bye, emancipation equated to the comfort that you would otherwise derive from self importance… "hey! I just died, and all you did was cry..??" In a science class they once told me, we are 50-65%water, not solid steel or titanium, not precious diamonds, not artificial plastic, but water.. Does this mean we can evaporate and dry up? Our physical existence, a covering on skin, ectodermal tissue, muscles, blood, veins, bones, tissues and the internal organs delicately and meticulously put together, with immense meaning and purpose. And yet covered with this vulnerability of in-existence, only bones and flesh, breakable and degradable! Yet what a wonder I am.. While I process my thoughts, I also breath, exhale and inhale, process oxygen, throw out carbon dioxide, I eat, digest, process the food, retain the important, throw the waste and I see my screen, hear the noise of keyboard, touch it, type words while my minds imagining and thinking.. but I thought I couldn’t multitask and yet I am unknowingly, effortlessly equipped to perform various tasks, some with practice and some naturally. I wonder how was such fine balance created, such refined machinery and meticulous design and impeccable outcome..But yet, when created it was created to end, to vanish, to decompose and to DIE… In words of a wise Mr. Taxi walla … “even if you put all the money in the world, with all the many precious stones and every materialistic , expensive things that ever existed on one side of the balance... it would not be able to measure one tenth the value of even one human being, that’s how priceless each life is…. ”

"s-he"

So like the most, I was traumatized beyond believe reading how the women of certain states in India were objectified. How preposterous the facts were, “32” women raped in just three months! How did we get so immune to a crime that we speak nonchalantly quoting numbers, just unaffected? I identify with the word “shame/ haya” and the baggage of being obligated to act within the parameters of what’s allowed and permitted. I know sometimes how violated I feel by just a pair of letchy eyes and hence, my imagination does not even permit me to quantify the pain, the anger, and the frustration, of a girl who would be subject to such blatant abuse called rape! And hence, I am most bewildered by the man who would stand tall and guiltless saying: “she called it upon herself” by the way she dressed, ate, spoke, did her hair, her attributes, her cast, creed, religion, her whole existence …in short she was raped because she was a woman! I am ashamed and embarrassed for “him”, for I am questioning how he concluded to have such altered believes of apathy and complete ignorance of someone’s horrid helplessness. In the paradox of such well defined gender existence, how did the woman fall so low..Is she still repenting for the apple she once ate? So even though the operative word was and is still, “rape”, I am appalled at the mind sets and justifications that are floating around. I was shamed by just reading such blatant excuses of shifting the blame back on the woman. I have tried to rationalize the justification of letting the man scot-free from even any form of guilt and sense of wrong doing. Each reason is just as surreal and flabbergasting, so they even say and I quote a cop handling one such rape case “if she was really raped then because of shame and social stigma she would have never come out with it, and if she has reported the rape she is just a slut trying to extract money…”. As a woman, I also understand the complexity of such defined physical bodily existence and I know how blessed we are to be created in this form. But pride may sometimes stem from the fear of feeling threatened, so while I am reemphasizing I am so proud to be a woman, I question if even that’s taking a stand in recognizing the gender inequality, difference and the biases. The paradigm of “womanhood” where we all hold hands looking back at the long journey we have undertaken, reinstating our independence, liberation and freedom. Amidst the celebration, are we forgetting the facts, figures of the reality? I am concerned for how miserably we have failed to change the “mindsets”. How do we accept this reality where men are delusional about the power they hold, women are still covering their heads in burkha convinced it’s what they chose, little girls are being killed before they can even see the first ray of sunlight, we molesting young women and calling them sluts, beating our wives, banishing women to live in guilt and accepting their fate, reducing their whole identity to a mere sexual object! So here we are restarting the wheel where a man is sensitized to feel like a woman. We relearn to see, feel, comprehend the parallels of existence. It’s a beautiful yin-yan of conjoined existence, where we exist in such peaceful unity of acknowledging yet loving the multiplicity! Hence we restart from the very beginning where apple dint signify sin but an instrument of realization of the elementary difference that existed or the irony of similarly of sorts!

\frac{d}{dx}(x^2)=2x.

So they say there are some indisputable facts (irrelevant if you may want to claim), but ones you can’t really deny. So 2+2 in most cases will be 4 unless you can’t count! Then in the boring maths class, we were convinced that you couldn’t add toys to ladders, or books to animals, as invariably it takes two of the same ‘type’ to be added together. You may need to devise a way to make things fall under a common bracket if you do wish to add them together, 8books+8Books=16 books? . As intriguing as that may have sounded, I never absorbed the metamorphoses of Maths, and its boisterous claims to be based on sheer logic and facts. It requires learning and “practice” to solve trigonometry problems, there is not much imagination and creativity but yet "sin, cos, tan" seem more of a pun to your logical side! So 856 magically multiplies itself with 8568 and the figure you get requires an ancient object called calculator! Then world of calculus which breaks down the worldly reality into differentiation and integration and seems like nothing but manipulation by the more “evolved” brains to distort and reinstate the limitation of the average “common” man. To a mere spectator of the bizarreness of maths, 1 seem to be lean and focused all by himself, assertive, not valued very highly and 2 seems to be the more humble one, poignant, content yet not sufficient, and 3 is odd, chasing behind 4 who seems rather arrogant and self important, 5 seems more mature, ambitious while 6 is a little lazy but overtly promiscuous and 7 is stable, more recognized and linear in more ways than one, 8 is significant through its insignificance, curvaceous and a bit loco and then concluding number 9, the more I say about it, the less it is. The anatomy of numbers may be crass but ultimately what all it has been applied to seems so brilliant that it may appear like a propaganda! Hence we may want to conclude that the thought process of Maths is so logically derived that the conclusion (= X) seem more of an aberration! Yet this popular man once said” 'The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.'

Part-2: Note to self

1.Dude is not a word! Neither are anxcie and spendy! “Lol”! Yes the word vocabulary was intentional. 2.The only permitted short form is TMI, only because there is nothing better that may say “Too much information” in those many words! 3. “Overtly sweet” is so 90’s it died when Britney spears committed “the sin”.. 4.If you are an adult, you better have an opinion about the vainest things, and because you are an adult human being you better be accepting of the other side of the story! 5. If you bitchy and straight forward chances are you are my friend, and we will be together telling the world what we think of it! 6.There is a thin line between being straight forward and being mean, and if you are the later well there is this word “reality check”! 7.Being kind is super but sometimes it lacks empathy! 8.You may have all the money in the world, how you spend it is the real differentiator 9.Laziness is wasting yourself and for most obvious reasons worst than wasting water and natural resources 10.Watching TV is refusing reality and interfering with work of possibilities 11.The word possibility is a double edged sword 12.Madness is always permitted, but self inflicted pain is plain foolishness! 13.Love is so simple, that it takes time to accept that something so uncomplicated can still be profound! 14.Hate and jealousy are more consuming than love, and yet only love can come to your rescue. 15.Connection to self is the only thing that may join you to what lies outside. 16.If you don’t read, there is a essential part of growth that you are willfully refusing! 17.Music is.. I doubt if there is any adjective that may ever complete that sentence 18.Word “Aukaad” is so multidimensional 19.Red and blue are not just colors! 20.

Complete is the most overated word.

You have failed me…

Yes, you crumbling old city, dying of your own lack of actions and deeds… This dear city is stagnant and paralyzed by the ineffective anachronistic bureaucracy. The obsolete infrastructure is falling apart and the phrase “development” seems to be an oxymoron. It’s both strange and ironic that this very city takes great pride in being the commercial capital and yet the entire city seems to be in shambles. And the thing which irks me the most is that no one seems to be complaining! So if there is no garbage dump within 300 metres of your house, you have definitely have not been walking enough.. This city seems to have made peace with the never ending trash, rubbish and the typical stink. So many times I hear my friends proudly exclaim “this is the Mumbai smell” .. Oh so you have noticed??? So the best and the underrated irony of this city is its public transport! The buses which proudly calls itself “BEST” and the train which have lived past its expiry date! Its self inflicted misery, if you have to travel in a train during the rush hours. If nothing it’s the clearest picture of the word “survival”, where there is little or no place for words like growth development and improvisation. So I ask myself- is it even human to share a space of 100 metres with 100 other people? Isn’t it gross violation of someone’s personal space? The idea of space in this big metro city is wonked, the idea of housing has been altered and a 50 sq metres is considered a “house” and for which you are fighting, bidding and saving every last penny you have ever earned. The unrealistic cost for housing is preposterously ironic, it’s based on the primitive economics of supply and demand ratio. While the rest of the world would raise the basic question of value for money or the consumers need for quality, in bandra we succumb to high rentals simply because it’s marketed as the “hip” side of city and no one seems to know what is it that could be making it so hip! So then I hear certain nobody scream that “we don’t need outsiders in our city”, I am appalled with how unconstitutional that statement is, and how something so preposterous would take the centre stage in politics.! Then a certain somebody shows up and says “I will shut all the night clubs and ensure no one partys to ensure safety” and I wonder if a fun harmless party at Zoe is the essential and critical issue which the city is dealing with! So enumerable times I hear people boost about the city’s resilience and fighting spirit, which I feel is often confused with sheer complacence only implying how inured we could be to all the lack that we live in. The place and time we are living in does not permit the city and power to still operate in the manner it does, and it’s strange that we are just being spectators, accepting and infact allowing such injustice and lack of order. It scares me that I may live in the world that does not demand change and rather closes its eyes to all the inadequacy and lack. But then I see the change in other cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad, even Jammu and I can’t help but ask questions, why not Mumbai? The question is so rhetorical it almost seems like a pun! But I am glad I am asking questions and a slow transition towards demanding answers. The hope stems from our refusal to accept the way things are and that’s when change becomes mandatory..!!

if i could i would..

We have been preached through Ramayana that we were meant to operate within the Laxman Rekha that was drawn for us and the repercussions of disobeying such lines would only mean catastrophe. And to further comfort us, we were made to believe that such lines were drawn only for our safety and we were not equipped to fight the powerful demons that waited at the line to devour us! Each thought is head start to a limitless journey, course of which is but an experience. The incapacitation is where you draw the line simply based on what we presume is our capability. Hence limitation in most cases is nothing but an admission that stems out of the fear of what lies behind the line! What I am capable of, is a question to which the answer can be revealed only after I cross the boundary. The option or the choice is always with him who decides to comply or defy, either to operate within that framework of understanding or steps out of it to explore and redefine the very concept of his existence. The simplest and the most profound thing I heard was “you don’t have to be stuck at one place, you are not a tree” and then my wondering mind thought I am not brown and can’t see any green on me so maybe it is true! So the dexterous four limbs, those pretty eyes, a full talking mouth, and that powerful brain could not all just be a coincidence!