Two Halves

A desire to fly unhindered, alone
Another to snuggle in the cosiness of bounds...
One to embrace a limitless sky
Another to stand firm on the grounds!

Conflicts of desires are whimsical functions
Of time and being, of place and mind.
Though neither desires nor conflicts are trivial;
The story of life doesn't have a rewind.

A half of me is fraught in this war
The other half seeks peace and respite.
A half of me just wants it all
The other struggles to get past the night.

A half of me tries and struggles
to be, to give, to achieve, to smile.
The other half seeks comfort in pain
Fatigued, in dejection, watching ills pile.

I'm the half that wins, I'm the half that loses
and I'm the void in between that grows without a goal
I'm the outsider inside me who watches with sadness
How two halves don't always make a whole.

Nok - jhok

Hum ruswa hain unki khamoshi se, kyon zuban nahi deti unke ankhon ke prem ka sath
Aur woh khafa hain humse ki hum kyon, zubaan se keh dete hain unse dil ki har baat

Weepies

Everybody scolds me.
*sob sob*

I'm such a cute kid, fir bhi!
*sob sob*

So what if I don't have dimples?
*sob sob*
..pimples to hain na
*sob sob*

Sorry bolo to aur bhi daant padti hai.
Nahi bolo to gandi bachi bolte hain!
*sob sob*

If I say the truth, people scolding scolding
If I don't, all call jhoothi jhoothi
*sob sob*

Sare bade log jhadoo se marte hain
main koi bhoot hoon!
*sob sob*
...hoon bhi to cute bhoot hoon na

Nobody believes me...no uncle n no aunty
*sob sob*

Koi mujhe orange bar bhi nahi khilata
*sob sob*

Galti hi to ki thi, mistake thodi, huh!
Main sab se katti katti katti
:D :D

Just wondering

...if I died right now, would YOU be happy?

I certainly would be.

Books! :D

So I've been tagged by Madam Dreamcatcher herself! How could I miss this one....:-)

Off already:

A book that made you laugh: Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams...one of the few books which is a blast right from the word Go. Unputdownable once you start!

Also my all time favourite: Calvin and Hobbes.

A book that made you cry: I've contracted a crying disease in the last couple of months or so...I bloody cry in the middle of every half decent movie or book, most of the times unwarranted (half senti scene normally laughable in a B-grade hindi movie included!! Gosh I need a doctor..). Plumbing problems aside, there've been books beautiful enough to make me cry a little including The Kite Runner, Love Story etc

A book that scared you: Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry; Noi Chhoii.

A book that disgusted you: The one and only Mils and Boons I've ever read in life. Downright disgusting. I think it was called "Forsaking all reason" or something like that (sure did read like that!)

A book you loved in elementary school: Alice in Wonderland, Chacha Chaudhary, the first Nancy Drew I read too.

A book you loved in middle school or junior high school: Romeo and Juliet. Can't think of more immediately.

A book you loved in high school: Love Story, Eric Segal.

A book you loved in college: Plenty. I'm still in college, still loving books day in and day out. Loved Midnight Children, Salman Rushdie. Never Let me go and The Remains of the day, Kazuo Ishiguro. Shadow Lines, Amitava Ghosh. Siddhartha, Hermen Hesse. English, August.
And more and more...

A book that challenged your identity: Dreamcatcher's remark about Urvashi Butalia’s The Other side of Silence reminded me of the similar effect it had on me too. In addition there was Noi Chhoi, Siddhartha, Husband of a Fanatic, Fountainhead and a few more.

A series that you love: Lord of the Rings, including The Hobbit, by Tolkein.

Your favorite horror book: None. Still looking for one that could scare. The Exorcist was a nice read though.

Your favorite science fiction book: 2001: A space odyssey, and The Invisible Man.but if I included dystopia too, 1984.

Your favorite fantasy: LOTR.

Your favorite mystery: Used to love mystery when I was younger esp Holmes. Never swore by Sheldon or Dan Brown, but I remember enjoying If tomorrow comes.

Your favorite biography: will be the one I write for myself :P Kidding...My Experiments with truth, I guess.

Your favorite "coming of age" book: Fountainhead

Your favorite classic: Too many. Alice in wonderland, 1984, most by Marquez, Little Women. Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice.

Your favorite romance book: Love Story, Eric Segal.



I must have missed like a gazillion good ones in this impromptu listing. But still, books are awesome. They are the best, and sometimes the only, friends.

Tag passes on to:

Catalyst (to do in his own anonymous blog and mail me the post :P)
Vikram
Vibhav
Vibhor
Arnav
Shantanu
Yashshri
Doc
Tapasya
Oracle
Akshay
Pooja

Fragments

Excerpt from a story that never got completed :)
Miracles do happen.

Most of the crucial and life-changing moments—the ones that bring about changes for the good--- come in out lives without as much as a whimper, as if bare-footed. The noisier big-bang announcements generally turn out to be for things much less substantial, beautiful or useful than expected. The same goes with people. Friendships and infatuations that begin as feverish flings are often just that –short, temperamental flings; they grow quickly like shadows in the morning which shorten enough to disappear in the heat of the noon. People who come to stay are often those who’ve places their feet firmly in your life before you even realize that properly, and then it feels nothing short of a miracle if you think about it.

****************

Adversity teaches everything; a hard life turns every donkey into a philosopher.

*****************

I don’t think I ever had a sustainable magnitude of courage to do anything all of substance. It’s always a fleeting handful of moments, and I make up for the rest by pretence of an equal strength of nerves, and to my credit I’ve managed to be good at the pretence all my life.

******************

Anti climax

She smiled.

She was looking at the person walking towards her at this moment. She knew he would come at exactly this moment. She knew what was going to happen next. She was ready.

He wasn't far, actually had never been. He was just not meant to do this any earlier, and he hadn't. That was a good thing too. She prepared herself in her mind; the moment for her to break her silence had come and say everything she had been practising to say to him exactly the way she was supposed to.

He was there. He stopped. She looked towards his right hand and he raised it, as if to shake his hand. She opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly it didn't feel right. All her excitement disappeared instantly. She forgot what to say. She didn't want to stay anymore. She ran out.

Voices were heard behind her calling her back; commotion ruled everywhere. But all she heard was the voice in her head that told her, this was not right. She was not meant to be here. Finally she knew what she wanted to do in life.
She did not really want to be an actress. This stage was not for her.

Well, better late than never.

Rules

Rebellion is intrinsic to human nature, in whatever measure. There's a charm of its own in breaking rules, a thrill, an attraction. It's not really proportional to how often you actually break them which really varies from person to person but the desire for anarchy, for self-rule, for breaking all laws in nearly omnipresent. But what happens when you are on the other side...when you are the one who's made the rules or is in the business of upkeeping them. It is then that obedience and rebellion acquires a whole new meaning. Law-makers and law-protectors CANNOT be rule-breakers or else their rules and their institution entirely loses all respect and meaning. Parents cannot make the same mistakes they punish children for. Policemen and judges cannot be murderers and thieves.

But unfortunately, in the real world such moral blasphemies happen everywhere. People in position of power misuse it all the time, and 'every rule can be bent' seems to be a universal rule nobody finds comfortable to break. In recent times, I've been in a number of such situations where I either saw rules being twisted, or was ask to twist them. Rebel that I am no matter, I still find it uncomfortable and totally unethical to be "unjust" just because I 'can', at that point of time. And the rhetorical reasoning that people use to convince/console me simply goes "Everybody does it honey!". Now I know I've created for myself several grudges and judgements by refusing to budge at times, but somehow I feel worse about the times when I've seen injustice and kept silent about it, simply distancing myself from the proceedings because I had little say or power in those matters. With people senior to me taking the decision I could do no more than a meek protest and maybe at some level this silence makes me a hypocrite at times when I fight and argue to maintain my stand. Sometimes I feel happy for myself for sticking to the right, sometimes I feel so alone. Because when I look around, that's all I see. How can the IIT administration expect us to follow the often unreasonable rules they make when the staff, the professors and the deans themselves are seen to do out-of-the-way things. I don't want to take names here but I've seen with my own eyes some examples of rule-bending and unfair advantage. It may have been small in absolute size in those instances but it's question of integrity and the moral right to enforce the rules on others.

Power seems to do everything in this world, and that is sad. The power to give a wrong decision and change the course of a game, the power to cheat, the power to alter a rule for a friend, the power to flunk a student, the power to give someone an award they do not deserve, the power to keep merit out of the race, the power to be blindly selfish and get away with it. I have found myself in the middle of arguments and sticky situations with friends and colleagues in recent times when I refused to budge from my stance simply because it was my duty to implement a rule fairly for everyone and I wouldn't do anything but that. There was a possibility that someone would have got a job if I didn't stand in the way, but it was unfair to so many others who were denied a chance because they didnt argue long enough with me or werent there at that moment. But then, a few days ago, I stayed silent to manipulations and favours in another field (with much lesser at stake) and someone deserving didn't get a chance. From outside, it would have been so easy to be morally upright, to criticise and to recommend the middle path, but inside, that middle path is a very very thin line.