Just some warm fuzzies.

Yoohoo.
Another dreadful year is about to end. Dreadful? Some ask why. Many will give you infinitesimal reasons why.
A lot of stupid wars
Brexit, Quitaly, Donald Trump (yes, I know, that shit went down.)
DEMONETISATION! (I swear, each time I hear mitrooo I have a mini panic attack)
And a lot of other political mumbo jumbo which we are not really affected by, but still deeply affected by.
A lot of our favourite icons have died (Yes, I am talking about Princess Leia.)
Basically, a lot of shit went down. A lot.
Still, does 2016 warrant the amount of hate memes the memedustry (Apparently it is an actual thing now) is churning out is a question I would like to ask.
A lot of political blunders happen every year. A lot of people die, famous people too. Who we have admired and have been inspired by. Travesties, natural disasters.
But no loss seems great enough if isn't personal.
A loss of purpose maybe, or a loss of dreams, loss of a loved one. Or losing your own self.
Such losses, I have experienced; inflict as much, if not more, as any grenade could.
And guess what? Most of them are self inflicted. And all of them can be cured by none other than?
*drumrolls*
YOU.
A little effort might be required. Okay more than a little.
A little spring in the step and a head shake with a jingle of the arms when no one is watching does make it easier.
So let's make 2017 a little better? And hope to gain more than we lose?
And since we have come to it, why not do something which frightens us, so we know we are doing something new?
Hope you have a good one this time.

P.S. It's now been an year that I have begun writing this blog. Thank you for still being here in my silly little cocoon of thoughts.
A smiley is warranted now, isn't it? :)

Trails which lead nowhere

I walk on a lonely trail
laden with yellowing grass
And bereft of any sounds
except an occasional chirp
or a distant bark
It's as silent as the nights
when I lay over you
And words were neither a barrier nor a
prerequisite to understanding
our jumbled thoughts
Lost in our own worlds
with nothing except the sound
of your heartbeat keeping me rooted to our realities
which somehow seemed more fiction than
The concoctions I had designed in my head
A cold wind rushes past me and
I am taken back to the park bench that now lies abandoned
And wonder if it feels tricked too
Still hoping against all odds
That the two lovers would grace it again
And fill the silences with banters
they were often embroiled in
Even as I let my gaze wander off into what was
left behind a while ago
I walk forward
And watch as the old peepal tree sheds its leaves one by one
Which it so affectionately held onto
And wonder,
Is it also a part of nature,
That sometimes we have to shed people too.

Collateral Damage

Little Goral looks out the window

with a tranquil smile

The glint in his eyes 

Must be as bright if not less

than the stars that twinkle in the night

He tries to count them on his fingers

One, two, a hundred or even more,

But in the middle of the exercise 

He is left perplexed,

What if he has counted the ones 

The Jhelum so duplicitously

arrays as hers.

Or maybe that's okay

For in a place where heaven meets the earth

And the skies seem to merge into the shores

Like an exquisitely painted horizon

Who could claim if it was only the ether where the stars belonged

And when they dance like they do, moving in perfect rhythm 

with each tide, to the tunes of the full moon

Goral's heart sings, moving in tandem with the waves

His hair rustle in alignment with the October winds

Completing the symphony 

Like the triangle's final beat

He takes a deep breath

To fill his lungs with the sweet air

laced with the intense fragrance of the Chinaar trees

And closes his eyes as he is taken back

To the school playground in the juvenile summers

Playing cricket with Vikram, Abdul, Aziz and Rahman

And running gaily in the fields

His train of thoughts is interrupted 

By the sound of a bullet going off in a distance

And his Amma calls out

Asking him to shut the window lest he get hurt again

Goral lets out a deep sigh as he picks up his crutches

And limps to his room

Heaven on earth, he muses

Hoping God returns to this place soon.

The wise old man's advice

Today while taking a train home I noticed this old, frail woman confined to a wheelchair. Even though her body seemed to decay with each fleeting moment, there still seemed some light in her eyes. Nevertheless, I felt this strange sense of pity, for she seemed to be travelling alone, even in her delicate state. A deep sense of trepidation then, seemed to have engulfed me.
We go through the motions of life every single day, building relationships, mending some, and sometimes, breaking a few. In our entire journey as human beings, our life knowingly or unknowingly pivots around these relationships.
No matter how far you go in life, it doesn't matter if the people you care about are not there with you to see it. This is what I was told one day by an old man. Now old age is positively correlated with wisdom; which funnily enough, was something again told to me by another old person. So I believed the old man and tried to, if not nurture, but at least not screw up my relationships.
But seeing that small woman, sitting in a wheelchair all alone, in a metro filled with strangers, with not even a single loved one, or at least liked one to care for her made me question this entire labyrinth of life we make ourselves fall into. This process of construction, destruction, nurturing and dismantling of our relationships, if the outcome at the end is to be sitting in a wheelchair all alone with no one but strangers to fall onto.
But then, we began each of our relationships with 'strangers', strangers who became integral to our lives, sometimes the favourite hue in our lives and sometimes the core to which our sense of purpose gravitates.
 Childhood buds who have shared everything with you from broken teeth to skinned knees, from homework to first crushes. Those friends, no matter how old and implicit they seem in our lives right now were actually strangers before that first hello or the first let's play together.
Lovers, who you can do anything for, who possibly know you even better than you know yourself once had to peel all the layers to your soul one by one, to reach depths even you were afraid to swim in. Lovers, who make the word 'home' mean much more than just a place were once strangers before that first smile.
College friends, school friends, work buddies, gym buds, spouses, ex spouses, ex girlfriends, ex boyfriends, ex best friends, and so on.
From strangers to 'your people' to sometimes strangers again.
Ex lovers, whose name once made your head rush to now just making your fingers curl up with contempt.
Former best friends, who drifted apart for no apparent reason, or sometimes for reasons.
School friends, college friends, work buds, gym friends, ex spouses,  ex lovers, siblings you haven't seen in years.
Doesn't it seem futile to build so many intangible treasures, when in the long run the only one you could fall back on is you alone?
Doesn't it seem wiser to not let people around you affect you, no matter what the old wise man said?
But giving it a second thought, in the long run we are also dead.
So not forming relationships with people might be akin to not breathing because after all you have to die one day. And that even though is as certain as anything else, still doesn't account for all the days that you don't die.
So, even though I might have lost some people, and would lose some others even still, it would still be better than not knowing them at all. So I brave the possibility of being cut to pieces and even being left in that wheelchair alone, to fend for myself on my own.
But today is the day I live in, and let me say hello to you, with a smile on my face and a gentle thudding in my heart. 

Of finding the unknown, and knowing what to find

A lot of times I question myself, why do I write? Why am I drawn to blank sheets of paper and a good old pen time and again? What is it, that keeps me going to it like a moth moves to a flame? For it is my destruction and my resurrection. My means of abandon and my means of salvation. How I stay afloat on this thin glacier that life seems and how I drown each time, losing all hope to come up to the surface again.

 For a long time, I believed I write for applaud. After all who doesn’t love all the love that comes their way, that feeling when someone gets it, gets what you have been trying to say, no matter how long ago you felt it, how long ago you wrote it. But at that one moment, you both are on the same page. Literally and metaphorically. At that one moment, it doesn’t matter how different your cultures are, how old or young or poor or rich or dark or light skinned ambitious or lax or a dancer or an accountant, whoever you are, wherever you come from. At that one moment, your connection transcends all those differences and you are one.

 And this is what I believed, I write for the reader, for the sheer want of being understood, to connect to another human on a spiritual level. But it has taken me some while to realize this in fact, I write for the luxury of understanding, of forming a connection to myself. Of understanding these swirls of emotions that engulf me, the seldom tides of happiness as high as the as the ones reached by seas on nights of the full moon, and the more prevalent lows, the ones in which you feel like you’re drowning into a bottomless pit, with no escape, no relief; for what can even relieve you from the prison of your own thoughts, from the self inflicted pains you so masochistically are drawn to.

So I write this time, not to be understood, but to understand. To look at myself from a peeping hole when it is too difficult to look in a mirror. For being an unattached distant observer to my self orchestrated catastrophy.

 I write, when it is too difficult to fathom what exactly is it that doesn’t let me come up to the surface; and even more difficult to find the right words to describe that feeling of being pulled down. I write, to not paint myself a pretty picture but to unhinge this mask of superficies that we all our forced to wear. Not to laminate the ugliness behind a rosy tint but to shatter the glass and revel in its brokenness.

I write not to understand the world because I finally know I never can, but to understand my perception of it. I write, not to cheer myself up. Not to shroud this feeling of decay, of being lost, and not the good kind, but to lay bare each thread of discontent, to lose myself deeper still into this tornado of thoughts.

 Just hoping I am thrown off to a better place.

A little bird's bellow

A soft pinch. A demure cry.

Enters a bundle of joy.

So precious, so chaste,

That one might fear.

It is too dear

To enter this world, 

a world so full of hate.

A world, which not unlike the little one

Was once, itself unaware of the worldly ways.

Just like the little one's face,

the world once too was a blank slate.

When the only cuts it knew were the ones made by rivers

Meandering through the lush plains,

Where birds wandered freely, not bound by nations

Maybe they wander still, and maybe they always will

But what about this little one?

The one who is much too small to fly yet,

And much too human to take a free flight.

The one who is trapped in the world as we know it,

The one who will never know about the world as we got it.

The world as we got it, much too precious, much too pure,

A clean slate. With mountains the only borders there ever were,

perpetual and infallible. God's precious monuments.

The world, in which the only tussles known were

between the shore and the sea waves.

The little one might not know it yet,

But it has got a lot to see.

Perhaps some deep wounds, 

God forbid, some deeper still.

But god left this place a long time ago, they say.

Otherwise, how could we have made these deep incisions

To this earth anyway?

For although we see wires, these borders are wrought with blood.

Blood, which reeks of malice, greed and fallacious passions,

Passions, to reason the wrongs, to suppress the rights;

But I do hope some day, the little one might get to take a free flight.

Because even though it has been a long time that God left this place,

A little hope still remains.

For although the cuts are too deep, 

A smile, some warmth,

A pinch of kindness; might still seep.

Stop. Let's be idle.

"Oh, I put in a hundred hours at work last week, it was sooo exhausting, I think these dark circles are going to stay FOREVER!", says my friend when I finally meet her after getting cancelled on almost a hundred times because she is "soooo busyyy". You could get the picture of how busy she has been, with all the extra syllables she put in while sending me TEXTS to let me know she can't make it. Not even phone calls. Because who has the time to make them? She lets out a sigh trying to feign sombreness, but the glint in her eye stinks of pride. Because perhaps dark circles are something to be proud of. Another friend complains that she absolutely abhors her job; but still goes out to do the same thing over and over again Monday to Friday, without even batting an eyelid, as if it was nothing to mull over. As if it was normal to go to a dreary monotonous place and drain your calibre into something you didn't particularly enjoy, something you didn't even particularly know why you had to do, except perhaps to earn money which would be whiled away in the weekends to 'blow off steam' with friends who have a similar kind of work style.
People who don't hate their job are increasingly seen as an atypical tribe, something foreign and almost unattainable. People who have "free time" are considered alien, after all what kind of life are you living if you are not grinding your mind to a state of almost zombie like depletion wherein at the end of the day you don't even have the capacity to think. In a world where dark circles are carried like badges of honour and not having the time to even have breakfast is something people "boast about", one is considered to be a failure if god forbid you work any less than a gazillion hours and almost akin to being a social outcast if you could afford to sleep more than eight hours a day. And dare you go sit at some place alone, without using your phone or your laptop or a bluetooth in your ear, things which give you the airs of a 'busy', important person. You would be branded a weirdo. Don't trust me? I have memes to support my theory! Because who else can sit all alone and all idle, with nothing to give him/her company except just one's thoughts!
 But you know who should sit all alone and all idle with nothing to give him/her company except just one's thoughts?
YOU.
Me. All of us. Take a second, or a minute, and if you are lucky enough, maybe even an hour. For just yourself. To think what you want to do. More importantly, to know what you don't want to do. Because someone once told me, "The mark of a successful man is that he knows what he doesn't want, even more than what he wants".
Think. Is it worth it to miss breakfast? Did missing birthdays, anniversaries, important events, not so important events somehow make you more successful?
 More importantly, is it what success should feel like?
Stop. Shut your phone. Take off that bluetooth off your ear. Close that laptop. Shut that book. Shut up.
 Breathe in.
 Think. Or don't think.
Breathe out.
Sigh out.
Smile perhaps? Without any reason? Because why do you need any reason anyway except that right now you are in this moment and you are alive.
Hum a forgotten tune which lingers in your sub-conscience every now and then.
Skip a step. Or may be two.
Or just stay still.
Laugh. Without any reason. Let them think you are nuts.
Stop.
Don't burn out even before you get a chance to shine through.