Being Evil

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Often times, we get so much caught in the web of living the good life that our visions end up blurred and myopic. We humans are such a helpless race that we are taught to compete even before we are born, right then when that God decides to send us to the world. And in our competitions we have forgotten the purposes of our existence, we are loitering around, taking our lives for granted. In our quest of the good life, we have ended up being irreparably hurt and broken. In our search for the way to glory, we have forgotten that we are made of flesh, blood and hormones and the fact that we can feel, doesn’t even have a backseat among us.

What we have acquired today is a set of lethal weaponry that we unleash every now and then, to emerge as the winner, to prove the best in us and to hide the dark in us. Today, we are not afraid to kill each other, let alone hurt with mere words. We can dig a grave and bury somebody that we have just murdered and act like nothing happened. The spoken words look too meagre compared to that deed, don’t they? And that’s where we humans are so maliciously twisted. To be able to speak anything and everything is our birthright.

When our conversations with someone turns unpleasant every time, we begin to build walls in between us. Even better, with the social media sites watching our backs, we have pushed ourselves into corners, isolating ourselves from the harshness of the world. Some of us fight back. We retort to everything, end up being labelled as ‘crude’. And that’s the point I guess, where we begin to change. Today, we don’t care if an eye for an eye will make the world go blind. What we care is the puffed ego and pride that has been passed on to us from generations of our dear ancestors who are no more than faint memories.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he do not become a monster himself, because if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. Nietzsche.

While fighting the evil around us, we naturally transform into something that we don’t want to. Look at the kind of zombies we have become. We don’t smile at each other too often, and even if we do, it’s like someone’s paying for it. We hide our troubles, our battles with depression and we keep the confessions to ourselves because we are scared to death that we will only be laughed at if we disclose. We don’t share our darkness and we don’t open ourselves to light anymore. We keep on struggling to declare that we are still strong and we stage those fake laughter. And the sorry side of everything, we keep on fighting the evil around us, not to banish it completely, but to let it rule us eventually.

We are dead people anyway, with dead emotions, and tongues that don’t have control. The least we can do is to remember that the world is a very small town and we all have the same sky.

Chained Lessons Deaf Kanhaiya

I logged in to my Facebook account today to find teachers’ day specials and Kanhaiya’s happy birthday moments without the cake (not even the egg-less one). I ‘liked’ the pictures where teachers posed for the camera on the one day they are celebrated with so much love and care that they begin to believe everything is alright with the world and the bubble is more transparent. Come Monday, bubble poked and left wherever it arose from, life-is-such-a-monotony, they begin and “Ma’am, I think you need a break” raises an alarm with red and blue sirens both, forcing passersby to stop and make way for back-bending bags laden with bricks called books. Tuesday, Wednesday and still life goes on, without a comma, a semi-colon. Somewhere, some teachers seized the day and went on hunger-strike, boycotting THEIR day, sobbing in front of cameras, begging for guru-dakshinas, beating chests and shouting ‘our kitchens are empty’. They did get their dakshina. By evening, the most stupid student of the class appears on the doorstep and says to his teacher ‘Sir, I brought you rice and some vegetables’. Don’t tell me you never labelled that student ‘stupid’. Oh, why?

Happy birthday Kanhaiya. I saw his pictures too. Posing. Clicking selfies. With that peacock-pankh and flute. The curd was missing though. Oh, and the blue skin too. I suppose he was so excited about his day that he left those two things somewhere and came by himself declaring that he lost his way in the milieu of people crowding to look at his sudden-transformed fair-and-lovely skin. When he finally reached his place, he was numbed by the variety of prayers thrown at him, incense-smoke shoved into his nose, whether he liked them or not, not to speak of those thousands of earthen lamps lit around him that his make-up came off. Then as I stood at the gate, looking at the mess he was in, he began to run crazily, bumping into fresh-lit lamps and offerings, screaming his lungs out ‘Today is my happy birthday, today is MY happy birthday.’ His devotees were scared, and thinking that their Hari was possessed by the devil, began to throw more fervent prayers. And all our dear Kanhaiya heard from the masses was ‘I want… I want… I want… I want…’. I took the backdoor and whispered in his ear ‘Are you ready for my prayer Krishna?’ He was about to nod his head, but then I saw his ear bleed and he finally said ‘Sing for me, my secret lover’..

Dinner’s done. What do I take to bed tonight? The morning.

Un-understood

When you choose to take the road less traveled, you don’t just choose to walk and find the hidden city of gold at the end of the journey. To find that gold, you choose to deny the red carpet laid for you on some other road, you choose to deprive yourself of love, laughter and sunshine, you choose to be the ascetic that nobody sees in you, you choose to be confused about the ‘-isms’ of the world, you choose to kill hunger and thirst with your mighty dictionary, you choose to shut up and let pseudo-intellectuals get hold of a light called the limelight, you choose to work by the night and sleep by the day…and finally, you choose to lock yourself in the infinite realm of your deserved freedom and throw away the key where even Time wouldn’t ever find it.

They say, people who take the road less traveled aren’t superhumans. They simply have the right brains and the daredevil guts to do things differently. They never follow. They make others follow. And please forgive me, as I said before, they never ditch sunshine. They are a Sun of their own and they shine of their own.

And what happens to those who take the road less traveled, make their choices bravely, walk half way, only to return to the nests even before the sun goes down? They die? No, they don’t. Death meets them the moment they decide to return without walking further to claim the trophies. What happens to them when they return, is far worser than death. Their souls are attacked, arrested and fettered. And then they are given air to breathe and dictionaries to cover their battered modesty. As if that is not enough, they are made to dance and be merry over their own dead bodies.

I would say, never return. Once you have decided to take the road less traveled, never return. Never turn back and give in to the temptations that other roads offer. Many times we are blind to what lies underneath and fail to read between the lines. What never shows, might exist. What shows, might never exist. What do I get to take back?

Cold winds and stabbed trusts for dinner tonight!

If writing helps…

When you are vulnerable inside, you pretend to be a very strong contender on the outside. True, the storm comes into everybody’s lives, rattles up the core and leaves behind a debris of different layers of the heart. The sensible ones realize very soon that they must hit rock bottom to bob up once again on the surface. Those people, even though smashed up inside, smile the I-am-okay smile, and nurse themselves when the rest of the world sleeps. Their wounds are seen but they don’t allow others to apply ointments. They are the sensible ones.

What do YOU do during those times when you feel vulnerable? What do YOU do when you are hell-scared to stay alone even for a minute? What do YOU do when you start hating the lights?

I don’t know what I should be doing now. May be a pair of jeans, a t-shirt and the I-am-always-happy smile might help. Although, to keep pretending to be strong is my mantra of moving ahead in life, sometimes in my heart, I do realize that it’s harmful to be a sensible person always. Sometimes, you must take a chance of becoming a fool and let others see your wounds. None is perfect, after all.

THE PEN TO PAPER

Every morning I wake up, there’s a resolution on my mind. It’s always the same everyday- “today I’ll write something”. And even before I complete the sentence inside my own head, the day is over. Somehow or the other, things clutter up and the resolution becomes a victim of my procrastination.

It seems I’m never able to bring my pen to paper (yes, I prefer to write before I type in Word). Before, I used to write diaries. Irregularly, though. Even that came to a total stop. By the time I sit to write the everyday pages, after everyone retires to bed, it gets harder for me even to keep my eyes open. Sleep is contagious, you see. Then a time came like this, that unless and until someone asked me to write something for somewhere, I would not commit to sit at my table. Not even for fifteen minutes. The course assignments too are lying in some corner. I don’t even remember the last date of their submissions. Here I am, a wannabe writer, never attempting to write. While writing this (I write before I type), I had to go to drink water thrice, then go outside to look at the sky, then go to the bathroom thrice and then back at the table. Half the time, I was fidgeting with the pen-holder, deciding which pen to use.

This happens every day. By the end of the day, it leaves me frustrated and angry. The words are inside, always intact in their places, but they don’t find their way out.

Today was different. Something stirred in my head, something very different from all other days. I realized I am a bit late. It’s an old adage- “Better late than never”. The world should remember people in certain ways. That’s what I’ve known always. So I’ve finally started. Pain can make things happen…