One day forbearance and impatience stood up against each other.
Impatience could not hold it any longer, while the forbearance wanted it to last forever.
Impatience poured out the streams of words out of her mouth, while the forbearance stood in dignified silence.
Impatience and forbearance, forbearance and impatience.
Each of them so different from the other, and yet so similar in so many ways.
Each of them standing on the opposite side of the barricade, but isn't it that the forbearance could not exist without impatience as much as impatience could not be there without forbearance.
Two extremes that compliment each other in so many ways.
Two contrasting realities that can exist only if the other is there to identify the other's space.
So distant and yet so connected.
Contrastive ideas that occupy space of my mind and fight with each other every day as I dream of peace between the two.
The state of equilibrium.
Like perfect union of Yin and Yang.
Like perfect union of past and future found in the present.
Like silence hidden in the storm.
Like force of a fall hidden in the stream.
Like sign of peace on the battlefield.
Like twilight hour.
Like my mind when I know that you are thinking about me.
I'm guilty, I admit. I failed many times in my life, everybody does. It's a human thing to make mistakes and err.
You are the only judge who knows the list of them all...
You are the only judge who sees through all the walls of imprisoned thoughts.
You are a judge of my life and I'm asking you for severe punishment. Life imprisonment.
Do not allow me to err again. Do not make me wonder aimlessly through the streets of the world, but close the gates of your prison behind me till the last days of my life.
Allow me only to stay in that small corner of the cell. For life.
You are the only honest judge I know.
Your Honour,
I'm lost. I've fallen into a pit of oblivion. Do not allow the sinner to wonder through the world of innocent. Do not allow the sinner to poison the innocent minds of theirs. Do not allow the sin to spread.
Your Honour,
I'm guilty. I have given my life into your hands. The time of your judgement has come. I'm asking you to punish me till my last breath.
Few recent conversations brought me back to my good old school days in a huge grey 2-floors building in a less metropolitan city far to the west.
No school buses - we all had to walk to school or take regular local buses or a tram. There was no auditorium or amphitheater - all the assemblies (if any took place) were held in our PE room that was of a size of basketball field.
I hated school. Somehow from the very beginning my mind wanted to be outside the system rather than inside, and thus few months of homeschooling that happened to me in my earliest teens were the best times of my school education and I cherish those memories till now.
My dissatisfaction with the school system began at an early age of 3 when my parents decided to send me to the kindergarden,,,,, Oh.... the famous cries and shouting in my street as I was dragged to the hated institution that is supposed to ignite the fire of knowledge in little humans..... Somehow it made me scream for the heating system to be on as I felt cold inside the grey walls. The only respite from that was the fact that we would sometimes meet a man with a monkey on his shoulder on our way. You see... Having an elder brother who often felt bored or had to take tuitions and a fairy-tale of a grandmother left a 3-year-old familiar with letters of alphabet (thanks to grandmother) and some of the french phrases (thanks to brother's lessons that did not improve his knowledge of French though). It also led to my first educational disappointment and breakdown of value system, when as a 6 year old I was told that the word 'MOCKBA,' that was printed on the cover of my brother's book, was actually a Russian word and thus I was not able to read it properly and a word mockba does not exist in my language. Can you imagine the tears of disappointment in the eyes of a 6 year old? and anger at being so severely cheated by the world....
School also meant my mother having to take a meeting with my PE teacher in classes 1, 2, and 3 and literally beg her not to fail me... This tragedy would have continued till the end of my school days but in class 4 somebody.... a genius I suppose, decided that in winter our PE ground will be turned into a skating rink and thus my hidden talents as a leader and figure skating performer were revealed. Was it really so difficult for the teachers to discover earlier that the only thing I can run after is the bus, the only thing I can throw is a grenade of words and that group games make me feel crumpled in the crowd of anonymous bodies... but figure skating.... that was something.... sheer beauty.... and thus each day a member of my family was forced to accompany me to the rink.
There are also 2 academic incidents I remember from my primary school.
Our music teacher taught me an exercise that I often do with my own students in various forms. - We were in class 2 and she made us close our eyes, listen to a piece of music and then draw what we saw.
Being disortografic was an experience of another sort - I remember an essay in which I got 2 marks as the only person in my class - fail for spellings and excellent for contents.
High school did not leave much impression on me, but it left me with deep feeling of admiration for my mother... You see... once in class there was a book of poetry by Jim Morrison lying at my desk...
Let me give you a glimpse of Jim:
“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”
These were the things that he spoke of, but one of my teachers, not the favorite one of course, saw it and commented....'Oh, mister Morrison, at whose grave people copulate...' And so my peaceful ad dignified mother went to school, banged her fist against a table and told the teacher in question to copulate at his own house and leave her daughter alone...
But I also had a fantastic geometry teacher, who gave me a gift..... I was not the best student in geometry but at the end of the school year he called me by his side and said that I remind him of himself when he was my age, and he gave me a cassette of some of his favorite music - 'Iron Butterfly'...
I was thinking recently about two research projects that I would like to conduct...
One is on street accidents happening in metropolitan city where I live and their applications on the life of the pedestrians...
Second project involves resurrection of the games that children used to play, for they were in my opinion much nicer and natural than the ones that people play in the present days.
A friend choreographed a beautiful piece on man and woman that I saw few days back... There was one moment in that piece where a man is just screaming silently in pain or anger and the woman is trying to hold him tight so that he does not hurt himself, for this is the only thing she could do...
If I could i would have gifted you band aid, but I was not there so I could not help in gathering all those tiny pieces together. I wish I could stitch them together now...
I'll tell you a silly story... All my stories are silly, i know.... Ridiculous....
When I was a child I once got an expensive plastic doll as a gift. You know - one of those dolls that are advertised on tv - slim body, nice dress, beautiful face... But that doll proved to be the greatest disappointments of my childhood, for when I had given her a haircut her hair never grew back and all that was there was a plastic skull...
But I had a teddy bear... I still have him... He is very grey, naked, his eye has fallen out so I had to stitch him a new one and till today we sleep together whenever I visit my mom's house. You see... Real girls with real feelings like those teddy bears who have broken noses and torn ears... It doesn't matter to them that they are not new, little girls learn how to stitch so that they could do something about all those noses, ears and eyes that have been torn.
I know a boy who needs medicine, even though in his stubbornness he claims that he does not care about it... You see, he was hit by a car once long time back and his knee, hand, ear, heart got hurt... He is scared that the needles will cause him more pain while stitching... He is stubborn like a little boy, but at the same time he knows that a bit of stitching is painful in the beginning, but then little girls always take care of their teddy bears and keep some nice sweets for them...
I would want to give you a chocolate of companionship in good and bad for many years to come... when your eyes become weak, walking difficult, memory weak....
That's how little girls treat their teddy bears... and they never allow them to play on a highway, for they know that it is a very dangerous place... and where I come from, we do not like the accidents to happen.
Sometimes writings should be coherent streams of words but sometimes there is a need for them to be just a series of loose digressions stitched together with invisible thread of thoughts.
Mom... Thank you for always being there... You were the only person who watched all my videos and read every single word i had written. It did not matter that you couldn't understand it all, what mattered was your presence. You were there, while others satisfied themselves with seeing my face on a poster, in a interview or with telling me that I should write for a newspaper. Do you remember how you were ill in last months and I was getting ready for a performance at university and you would come down sometimes to sit with me and I was explaining to you what 'abhinaya' is? What is the meaning of my padam... Thank you for being present there...
Mom... I was thinking few days back that Shakespeare must have had bipolar disorder too... Only a sanely mad person could have said that "All the world is a stage... " Mom... How many roles do we have to play and how difficult it becomes sometimes....
Mom... Can I tell you a story? I'm not sure how much of it will you take as a metaphor, how much as my memory but you see...
Father always loved circus, so when I was a child I have always been forced to accompany him to watch a circus performance, Just like I was forced to collect stamps when I was six, while all i wanted to do was to give an exam to a ballet school but 'my daughter is not going to make her living by shaking her leg'.... but that's another story... i'm digressing in my digression... I hated going to the circus with father.... it always made me sad... I felt so sad and sorry for the lion that had to jump through the wheel of fire, bears that had to walk on 2 feet and elephants with chained legs.... People were laughing at the clowns throwing cakes at each other, falling on stage, getting stuck with one foot inside the bucket and i felt like crying and I wanted to get up from my seat and run to the stage and help them get up from the floor... Somehow I could never laugh at them and always felt so sorry for them... as if their falls were my own... I liked some of the performances though - the jugglers, the woman with a spine of a snake...
Mom... I'm thinking a lot about idioms and metaphors these days... It's a story that I had told you long time back.... but if I were to search for a metaphor for heart it would be a tiny green teddy bear of a smell of vanilla...
Mom... I know that I keep coming back to a boring topic of Water station once again, but you see... it taught me a lot... Just like now i'm learning a lot about languages and multiple readings... but that play taught me about the set construction..... it taught me how to put bolts and nuts together while working on the set... and the english classes i'm taking are teaching me about the beauty of stormy weather..... but I designed my own umbrella for the performance.... i stitched my old flower dress on top of it and painted it green - my safety net of green trees and flowers around me.... would have loved you to see the pictures.....
Do you remember the orange that I keep in my bedroom? It was there since I was 12. It was a beautiful gift that I wanted to keep forever so I dried it and kept it there at my speaker.
There once was an amazing dancer with beautiful long curly hair and a little 12 year old girl who wanted to learn how to dance... So she took her flute and went to the old town to play and earn her money for the dance classes.... And since she liked that dacer very much she once gifted him a box that had a small flower inside... she learnt it from a play that she watched so many times - the greatest gift that you can give is you yourself... And the dancer gave her a gift on her birthday - the performance was for her only and an orange that was used as a stage prop... she kept that orange forever... She even vaguely remembers him sliding down the rope in another play few years later... And the story of his first love whose name was same as mine... I think he even looked her up and married her eventually... But I can't believe that somebody like him could have become a pole dancer later on...
I recently found a guava that I'm planning to add to my little collection of memories... A fruit from the dreamlands of nature...
I still dream of a perfect birthday gift when one would take me to an empty theatre and all night I could just stand o empty stage and experience the magic of being right there....
Pole dancer... Just like I couldn't believe that you could have exchanged Shakespeare for Kingdom of Emptiness... It did buy you a dog and a nice flat... but I liked that blue room with cracked walls much more than that.... And a gift....
There once was a tree where a boy used to have tea with two girls. One was a beautiful one, a picture of utter perfection - big eyes, short height, soft contours of her face... The other was an ugly one - too tall, long face, small eyes, dishevelled hair... The boy kept looking at one and kept talking to another... He loved the beauty of the soft face and the words and stories uttered by the other girl... He wanted to gift them gifts, so he painted the beautiful one and gave an empty blue notebook to the other one..... Thank you for not painting my face.... What can one do with a painting but keep it on a wall and look at it every day...... I was so disappointed when I got my gift, but I think it did me well... I did not know in the beginning what to do with the empty pages of all those notebooks that you gifted me on Christmas and my birthdays, but I know it now, and they fill up with ideas for new works, blue notebook came to life as a blog.... Thank you for giving me empty space so that I could discover and re-discover myself every single day....
If you had asked me I would say "no"... But the truth is that I would like to thank you God for making me different from others by making me me see the world differently than most people do... Thank you for giving me all the street dogs, cats, open sky, a rainbow, leaves to look at... Thank you for those few moments when I thought I lived through my own death... you made me go through the greatest fear of mine.... and thank you for making me pray to a heart of stone for I know that one day somewhere somehow it will awaken and somebody will finally hold my tired soul in his arms... Thank you for bipolar disorder for I prefer to see the world in its thousands colours than only see it as a spectrum of greyness... Thank you for my grand mother who was the most loving creature of us all...
Thank you for making me loose the battle... you taught me humbleness... to win one has to loose sometimes... i'm learning patience... it is a difficult and painful lesson... thank you for life... I love it... It is the greatest gift of them all...
A friend of mine went today to accompany his colleague in 'seeing a girl', while I had an encounter with two road side predators (the word romeo would be much too mild here).
I have always been disturbed with the expression “to see a girl for marriage” - nobody goes to
“talk” to a girl before marrying her, as if a woman was to be
seen only through the external beauty of her body. Why do people only
want to see women? Why can’t women be also heard? Is my being
limited only to my appearance? Should I just keep myself at the
periphery of the society and family and allow events to happen to me
rather than take my own life in my own hands? Should I be a passive
object floating in the rivers of family and society , or should I
rather have the right to stop the prevalent societal trend and choose myself the course of my
destiny.
The questions
connected with what it means to be a woman, what defines me as a
woman? Is it just about a biology and ability to bear children? Is it
just about having the yoni/vagina (words that I have problems with
uttering even as a 30+ person) and its physiological functions? Is it
about the roles that the society imposes on women?
As soon as I start
thinking about “womanhood” I remember how my mother used to ask
me “have you fallen ill?” each time she wanted to ask if I'm
having my period. I remember how she would cook my father's favorite
dishes, but nobody remembered to ask what would be hers. I remember
how she herself suffering form cancer would prepare meals for my
father, while he sat watching tv.
Do you know that marital rape is
still beyond the purview of criminal law in India? I also came across
a newspaper article about a panchayat in Haryana that decided that in
order to fight the increasing number of rapes the marriage age of
girls should be made lower. Another article was published in Tehelka
about the problems that women face when trying to report cases of
rape at the police station. Why is it that women are being blamed for
being raped? Why is it so that teenage girls should be given away in
marriage in order to protect them from a sleazy gaze of men? Why is
it that Krishna in Mahabharat did not try to prevent the humiliation
of Draupadi, he merely covered her up, but did not stop Duhshasana.
Is wearing a burqa, child marriage, not allowing women to go out
unaccompanied a way of protecting their chastity and honor? Or is it
just another way of oppressing them? I was shown the "f... you" sign from 2 guys on a bike today when I asked a shopkeeper for help. It was 18.45, not middle of the night and I was wearing a jacket.
Is it right to constantly cover
your body in fear and be subjugated by the patriarchal society or is
it needed to use the body as the act of protest like some women of
Manipur who undressed themselves in front of the army camp in order
to protest.
But I do not blame men for it... It's the societal problem. Do you remember good old photoshop and the photoshopped
pictures of “female beauty” staring at us from covers of
magazines. The mask of make-up covering the real face. Is a female
body really only an object? It is another extreme on the line
between covering and uncovering the body – the scarcely clad female
body that the west represents is another way of seeing the body as an
object of gratification for the male gaze.
A friend and I conducted a workshop for 130 male student of 1st year of college, One of the exercises was to find gesture to represent one's own personality.... If you could see the mount of hidden sexual aggression.... I felt sorry for those boys.
I don't want my man to be a picture of brainless testosterone operated machine. I would like to meet a man who would want to talk to me rather than look at me, who would feel shy to touch my hand and who would be scared that I may want to find his arms less attractive that muscular arms of other men. Naive and romantic? Maybe... but you see, I see myself as a person and would like to meet a human being not a machine in life.
