Kadal

I happened to watch the promo video from Kadal.

The young lovers look like they are right out of a beautiful poem, and the song oozes like endless love, and the endless rumbling ocean in the background. I am 26 and utterly bored in life talking to random men out of matrimonial sites, and totally clueless as to what to do with life as I am writing this.The song is on a loop in my headphones, and I desperately yearn to experience the out of the world experience of *Falling In Love*. Someone to love like there is no tomorrow and be loved back similarly. Is that too impractical? No harm in dreaming on

Indian Wedding Reception

For your wedding reception

What to expect

Around 4- 5 hours of heat, boredom, hunger and being stuck with upset stomach.

How to prepare

The first few hours will be very stressful, make sure you sleep well the night before, wake up in reasonable human hours, make sure your diet was light and moderate. You don't want to end up with a stomach upset or gas. Just keep minty gas tablets handy. 

Clothes and Makeup

You are gonna be on photos so be well dressed. The dramatic makeup by the beautician is not to actually make u look pretty but for your face to look good in pictures. Never go low on makeup, also be careful of an overdose. You dont want to end up looking like a circus clown;  you don't want to look all painted up either. Try to not make your clothes too tight, but make sure the clothes wont come off at any point in time. Try to strike a balance between discomfort and proper fitting. Mention that to your beautician. Try to wear as light clothes as is acceptable  and jewellery as less heavy as you can, if you are prone to perspiration. Please wear lots of deo. No harm in a strong fragrance. Better than being a stinky bride.

Other tips

Keep a bottle of water handy with you on the 'stage'. But be careful, access to toilet COULD be difficult and actually using it will also be challenging with all your beautiful clothes. In the meanwhile, just tell someone to fix the fan in your direction/ adjust the speed etc. Carry with you a set of salwar or something less intensive and heavy to wear at the fag end of the ceremony. You might want to free yourself of discomfort and might want to use the toilet, and a heavy attire will be quite cumbersome in such a situation. Keep your mobile phone in vibration, and inform your best friend(sisters/mothers/ cousins are going to be too busy for this) to be attentive to any text/ phone calls from you in case you need something and no one is immediately available. The whole time could be very boring, and everybody is going to stare at you, so just keep talking to your guy, crack jokes, will look good on the photos. Dont be too conscious, it will become too evident.

An Advice to a Boring Life

In this time and place, you cant simply be purely a  software engineer, doctor a lawyer or whatever and making money is way too boring. That just makes you pathetic and uninteresting. You need to be a sports enthusiast, wine taster, stand up comedian, movie reviewer, pole dancer, a communist or a superwoman by the night.

Your ill faring career and odds with men/women will redeem themselves then.

Poornima

Battling the Archaic and their Survivals

I have this friend lets call her Anju. She has a baby girl, stays with her parents, does not have a stable job and the last time I knew about her, her husband was with her, in the same house. I remember the phone call from her 'enemy' at college informing me about her elopement with someone much older whom she barely met. Her parents had a terrible time finding and bringing her back. They accepted them in and found their new son-in-law a job, trying to settle him down. Anju was thrilled. Some months later, they had a baby. I remember her coming to college with her pregnant belly, 4 years back. Now that I think about it, during college, only those who got married eloping ever came to college with a big belly. This particular girl was not the most beautiful one at that time. She was short and plump. And early in college, she even had a fling with a young professor, who later married the sister of one of her classmates, who was pretty well aware of this fling this guy had with our Anju. Now how I came to know about her present life developments was when I got strange messages from Anjus facebook account. A person who most definitely is not Anju was talking to me and was so totally interested in me, and was completely ignorant of even the basic facts related to me. I informed the real Anju about this, made her change her facebook password and asked her what the hell was up. Thats when she spilled the beans and told me her story. The creepy dude who spoke to me through her fb account was none other than her husband. She then told me how the guy hits her; that he hardly bothers about the little one. Apparently, he lied about his qualifications. He is hardly educated. He showed signs of eying her fathers Gulf money. He started  an affair with a lady at his work and slowly started distancing himself from Anju. Now, they are unofficially seperated. But she is too scared of the society to seek a divorce. She is scared of a stigma. She apparently went to her husbands mother, and pleaded her to convince him to come back to her. And apparently her answer was that it will happen when the time is right.

In my opinion, she was a later bloomer. In the sense that she hit her mental adolescence after 20 when the rest of us did around 13. Although the rest of us were still grappling with significant immaturity, we were well out of danger more or less. Not everyone who makes bad decision suffer from immaturity though. This girl, Akshaya, also eloped (and later appeared with a big belly at college) away with someone who was considered well below her in social strata. I think a taxi driver I dont remember well now. She would make her husband make anonymous calls to vulnerable girls who happen to know her and made him talk dirty to them. If they talk back, she would intentionally spread the story to the rest, to malign them. In our particularly misogynist society such an act is potent enough to completely demoralise a girl. What kind of woman would want to intentionally do this to another person. What sort of a person would be ready to actually make her husband dirty talk with another girl, just so that she can be maligned. How evil can people get. I digress. Coming back to the original point, my question is, what should Anju do to come out of her situation? I personally find it very harmful if she tries to pursue her husband. It will make her feel worthless and will only weaken her self esteem. There is nothing virtuous about a woman taking crap. A society that romanticises a woman's struggle to regain her identity by winning back her husband is harmful. As though it is sacrilegious to cut the umbilical cord of dependance, the cord of identity attached to her master, a man- her husband. Do I become a feminist if I ask her to get a divorce asap? Well that's what I did

When I told a very close friend about this, she questioned the reason in my advice. She asks me- "why do you advice girls to get a divorce? How do you know that's the best course for her to take? You hate men, so bitter towards them that's why you give such advises". Then she quickly added that she is only worried if that girl will blame me later for sowing the seed of the idea of a divorce. I felt scared for her after this conversation with her because it proves that she genuinely believes that Anju should probably try and get back with that malevolent guy that her husband is, and not free herself from him once and for all. That she might get back with her husband and everything might become fine for her, and there is a good chance for that to happen. No good counselor would think such a probability is significant enough for her to risk pursuing the husband. But if I say that, I am talking out of my unhealthy hatred towards men. In my opinion, if Anju ever keep him close to the little one, she will grow up with a contorted understanding of men, and skewed ideas about the right ways of being treated, as a woman. I think I will be spared from being called a feminist if I think that a mans behavior towards other women and a woman's susceptibility to ill-treatment are direct reflections of their fathers behavior towards their mother, and therefore ask all women to find a guy who will treat them right for the sake of her own children's well being if not anything else. Above all I am worried that my best friend thinks so, because a rotten stigma from a mindless society should never decide her perceptions of what is right for her and her loved ones. For such considerations towards the low minds of the society that judge you for your choices that make you feel safe, content and free, are dangerous, and will lead to physical, mental and spiritual breakdown.

The Writers Block

When you walk, sit still or are bathing, your head keeps chirping, with all the literary expertise it learned all these years, replete with logic, rhetoric and strong self made punch lines and creative ideas. But when you sit down to write, all you can write is something unforgivable like "the romantic movies and songs fill me with amazing great emotions" or something else as cheesy. I just cant think of a more emphatic adjective than 'great' or 'amazing'. The right words JUST DON'T APPEAR in the head. This is the writers block. A complete account of your minds ideas with as less loss in translation as possible, making use of all linguistic faculties. Using seemingly unrelated words to beautifully form an idea that makes perfect sense and fits perfectly in the context. I miss that. When i was in school, or even in college i used to be able to do that. Just like I would never miss even a day of wearing some basic eye make up. But now. I don't write well. Neither do I apply make up. I probably lost the motivation to be aesthetic. I cant even write my tests properly anymore, because of this rusting issue. Language makes you feel so powerful. When you produce something strong, something that moves people or impacts them positively, you know you have something special that you can use to connect, to change or to make people act react and speak up, to share feelings and to offer solutions. Words are particularly important to the less skilled ones like me who lack the talent to express though music, dance, paintings and other such abstract means of expression. Ideas by themselves are not as significant as how closely and effortlessly they are transferred with as less loss in meanings and intentions to another mind. Prose is ideas delivered as words in literal fashion crisp and clear, like your regular physics text book. Poems are evolved prose. They transform ideas into imagination. This imagination in turn unravels into ideas in the listeners mind, so that the loss in translation is far less than in prose. This process of poemising and unraveling is so amazing that you will be blown away by the experience. You will feel one with the author whom you probably have not even seen, or even heard. You will sense things that are not written. Some human being somewhere with whom you connect remotely without the technological gadgets. This is probably what they mean by telepathy. Before I move towards talking more crap and later embarrass myself under the context of overcoming writers block, I am gonna stop. BTW you have no idea how much the spell check feature has saved me from total disgrace today.