the ultimate unfreedom of the serf

What is the ultimate unfreedom of the serf?
When a human being is solely identified by the job he does. When his individuality is not even taken into consideration, which is apparent by the refusal to call them by their real names

How soon we forget the lessons that we taught ourselves

Irony

Wooden puppets with a thinking brain

And then Grief told me, " I am here, here to stay"

The poor does not have the luxury of pride

Sometimes the unwritten stories are the greatest

I am just a tiny tiny drop in the ocean

perceptions are subject to continual change

Do not resolve to do it, just try to do it

Distance

It’s a quantitative measure of how far we are apart

For each of us has to play one’s own part

Is it limited to this world? This life?

In a world that’s torn with strife

Does it make one think about the other?

Or completely forget one another?

Really why does it seem longer?

When it is actually much shorter

Perchance we make it out to be,

More dramatic than it should be

Strength of Character

I did my entire schooling in a girls-only convent school. My parents’ friends’ daughter was also in the same class. Sunita and I thus thrown in together mentally urged on by our parents to be best friends. We sat together in our identical blue pinafores, exchanged pencils and swapped lunches. I was in best-friend heaven. Sunita was a studious mild even-tempered girl, while I was notorious among the teachers for my sudden-flare ups and misplaced sense of righteousness.
Sunita did valiantly try to put with me, but the she was after all a small girl and no sage. Sunita found me too impulsive, impassioned and something of a pain. Once she found out that her parents echoed her thoughts, she punctiliously removed herself from my company. I wish I could say that she slowly distanced herself, but it was not so. This sudden alteration of my social dynamics threw me off my kilter. I was bewildered and confused. It hurt to see her methodically immerse herself into a group of girls, whom her mother thought were excellent examples for her to emulate.
The world around me changed so fast that. It always felt like I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. My life was a never-ending vacuum of wrongs. Every day was a bad day. My academics never great to begin with, hit an all-time low and it worried my parents. I wish I could fall back into a cliché and could say that at this point, there came an understanding class teacher who changed the course of my life, but there wasn’t. To make matters worse, the one that there was, was the bane of my existence.
My teachers didn’t waste any time typecasting me into the spoilt-lazy-wild schoolgirl slot, especially my class teacher, Ms. P who seemed not to like me very much. Most of the time in her 5th grade classroom, I spent either pointedly ignored by her or being given razor sharp glares. It didn’t bother me much, as I was pretty used to it by this time, but somewhere in the back of mind, there was looming feeling of dread, like something unpleasant was about to happen and it did.
As much as I disliked my school, I loved my school grounds, especially during the rains, when it would be peppered with deep delicious puddles, so much fun to splash around in. I would wait for the afternoon recess bell to go out and get my feet into these puddles. On one such rainy afternoon, after a particularly trying math hour, I stepped out into these puddles with welcome relief. After a nice feet-wetting session, I went back to find out that I was asked to meet ‘the class teacher in the staff room’. I went a heaviness in my heart, throat paralyzed with fear.
“You splashed mud on your classmate’s skirt on purpose”
She greeted with that statement and icy glare to match her tone.
“Ma’am, I didn’t...” I spluttered
To cut the long story short, it seemed that one of my classmates, her favorite, was walking near as I was splashing around merrily and was dotted with mud that I was unwittingly spattering about. She made me stand there cringing and watched me with measuring gaze. I don’t remember how long I stood, it seemed like I was there forever. I mustered all my courage and looked at her directly in the face. She looked like a wax statue to me, so still except for the vein that was pulsing at her temple. I looked at her eyes, measuring me and condemning me and strangely hypnotizing in their blackness…it felt bizarre, it felt like I was watching myself from somewhere else. Suddenly stood up and gestured for me accompany her. I did so, my head ringing with fear. On reaching the classroom, she pulled me to front of it, amidst all my curious classmates, some wary, some cackling and made the announcement that I will never forget in my life.
“ Roopa Culas ( heavy stress on the last syllable), you have been a shame to this institution, a shame to me and I am pretty sure, a shame to your parents as well. What you did this afternoon, just shows how much of a nuisance and trouble you are to me and your classmates. Well… I am going to give you ample time to reflect how bad you have been and how you can try to better yourself, until then no one in this class will speak to you, walk with you or even look at you. You will sit all by yourself in the last bench until you realize your mistake.”
She said this with all the gravity of a feared oracle. Her words were uncontested and her hate for me, blatant. This was accompanied by an astonished silence and then a few cackles of approval.
I sat there, in my dark lonely corner, with my head held high, as if I didn’t care, for a day, then two and on the third day I broke, laid my head on the desk and sobbed. Nobody dared come near me, I knew and I it did not surprise me. I was a shame and a nuisance. Why would anyone want to talk to me? I sat there for a with my lowered head, hating myself, wanting to fling myself out of the room and running all the way home without stopping. But I knew that wasn’t even an option.
A week passed in a haze of misery and confusion. I really was confused; I didn’t know what to do. Something about the way, the quiet maliciously confident way, which the teacher did this, made me think that I wouldn’t want to take this home. So I kept quiet.
On the 7th day, a Tuesday, I remember so vividly, I opened my lunch box when I heard a tentative “ Can I join you”, I thought I imagined it at first and then I saw a lunch box in front of me, I looked up to see a girl in my class, whom I hardly even knew. She was delicately built, average in studies, silent and more or less invisible. She smiled shyly and opened her lunch box. I stared at her, speechless.
“Won’t Miss P (our class teacher) know?” I asked her in amazement; half-expecting her to suddenly come to her senses and run away.
“I don’t know and I am not thinking about her. You just cannot eat alone every day you know” She said quietly but firmly.
That’s when the real meaning of something that my Dad had been talking about came to me; Strength of Character. It came to me in a sudden rush of realization, that’s what you call it, when someone, as small and young as my classmate, stands up to what she thinks is right. Whether it was risking a terrifying teacher’s wrath or the condemnation of the other girls, she just sat next to me because she didn’t want another human being to suffer alone.
I will never forget her till the day I die.

My time machine to the past

Beautiful dust mites floating in the sunlight, dancing in suspended motion. It makes everything so mystical. I would be laughing with my cousins, chasing the hens in the coop or even just lying down in my grandmothers cool dark room, staring into space, thinking of nothing in particular, when my eyes would stray by its own volition to the shaft of golden sunlight falling from the window or from a crack in the tile roof. There they would stay, my eyes and my attention, unable to tear away, hypnotized to a wistful dreamy trance. Everything under that soft light was molten gold, the dust mites turned into errant fairies that soared along with the overactive imagination of my 9 year old brain.
Whenever I get terribly homesick, the way when my heart feels really heavy and my throat pains, I put on ‘Venkatesha Suprabatham’. It gives me instant relief, though making me even more wistful for the days that went by. In my father’s ancestral home in Trivandrum, we used a green bedroom on the upper level with a small verandha which opened up into the tiny village hidden by thick foliage. It was always slightly chilly in the mornings, making it even more cozier to sleep…it was during this snug moments that the ‘venkatesha suprabatham’ would blare through those trees, coupled with a multitude of reassuring, homey noises like the pressure cooker going off from the kitchen underneath, dad snoring from the next bed, the dog barking outside. It would send me into a luxurious limbo of sleep and wakefulness; stretching contentedly I would savor my waking moments, knowing that I belonged, there to that moment.
I think, if asked to name some vitals smells from our childhood, most of us will come up with at least one fruit, rain wet earth and a favorite dish.. Well… I do have all this and some more…The list of comforting smells which would conjure up my childhood is long and complicated…I do have a strong olfactory memory. It would go onto something like this; intoxicating carbon dioxide laden fresh night air, petrol fumes (we used to stay in a house next to a petrol bunk,when my sister and I were small),camphour,fresh green mangoes, the musty smell of old silk sarees, Yardley lavender(my grandmother’s favorite soap), chalk, bata leather, moth balls, coconut oil, jasmine, old bound books, sandalwood incense and it goes on and on.. I catch a whiff here and there of some of the above mentioned items, and it transports me to a time, when everything was good and not so good and now, beyond my reach.
Some days I worry myself into a panic. It starts innocuously enough, with me gazing at my grandmother’s picture on my dresser and reminiscing about her. I start to think about her and almost always, the first thing that comes into my mind was her touch…it was warm, soft and firm at the same time…and I would try to remember her hands, work-worn, lined and tender…Whether she was cooking, feeding us, stitching or even speaking…her strokes were minimal, efficient and loving.. Satisfied with my memory, I try to imagine her voice and sometimes, just sometimes, I draw a blank. In those worrying moments when I despair that forgetting her voice would be the first step in forgetting her memory…I focus back again her touch, which evokes her eyes, alight with affection, to her smile and then finally her voice and then my panic ebbs…slowly I recede back into the warm cocoon of my childhood memories, strong and clear as ever.
The sensation of taste is very potent, because it is almost always accompanied by the sensations of smell and sight…Take the staple food of my family, red fish curry, I doubt the fish curry would be half as appealing if it didn’t smell the way it did or didn’t have that fiery red hue…Who wants to eat a sweet but odourless colorless mango? But nothing summons the instant advent of gratifying childhood memories as the food of our childhood, which, over time, acquires a cult status in our memory. It holds sway of the comfort, the sense of security and belonging and the key to one’s past and identity with a taste, a whiff or even sometimes, a glance.

Cacoethes scribendi - An insatiable urge to write

Little Red Frog

My mind was a Tabula Rasa and I searched desperately for my Muse. She simply refused to come. As a last resort I randomly searched for some writing cues and stumbled upon a science news report of a red frog found in the jungles of Borneo. This is a combined result of that news and Elmo singing nursery rhymes to my little Son, who is having a grumpy day!

I saw it hop into a green thimble leaf,
Posing and trying hard not to leap
The Little Red Frog sat there
Sunning itself without a care
“Are you for real?”
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
The Little Red Frog Huffed,
“Why would you want to know?”
I smiled because then I knew
It is a girl or else it would be blue

Tagore - Gitanjali

Mind Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

The Malayali and the Monsoon

Every malayali worth their weight knows the most elusive signs of the monsoon; it can begin with a tantilizing breeze,a falling leaf ,a dragonfly, an overcast sky and mostly, the fecund aroma arising from earth..its pulses underfoot and engulfs the being ... monsoon is the blood which runs in a malayalis vein!
And before even the first raindrop hits the ground, umbrellas mushroom all around, skirts and mundus are hiked up with amazing alacrity..People step out of shelters and roofs and scores of beautiful black eyes turn skyward, inviting, calling..
Newspapers torn and paperboats made
Hot steaming teas and shiny green leaves
Writers sharpen their senses and pencils
Fertile and seductive the earth beckons to the sky
Its a mating dance of nature and the malayali celebrates.
And every single time, it amazes, inspires and lulls me into a wonderful cocoon of shared belonging. A special kind of bond of the most primodial kind, composed of water,life, pain and joy..Yes, all of us Keralities love our teas, midday naps, repressed yearnings and arguments for the sake of argument all presided over by a passionate shower of wet wet rain.

"Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand
Unshaken when I fall; that I may know
The shattered fragments of my song will come
At last to finer melody in you;
That I may tell my heart that you begin
Where passing I leave off, and fathom more." — Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)

for me

Starting now

I will write for myself, ruthlessly and truthfully
I will not pull punches
I will catalog life as I have lived it
I will discipline my imagination
I will not let my emotions get the better of me
I will put down the things as simply as they could be put
I write for my own eyes
I am writing because I have to
I will write because I need to
I am a writer
At least I aspire to be one...for me

The 2011 entry

I am thinking what I should write. Darkness and silence do not offer any motivation, nor does the bright white space in front of me.. still thinking… somewhere deep inside I know, I want, I need to write. But the muse disappears as soon as the screen appears.

Where do people gain inspiration to write from? What makes the letters flow and the thoughts dance? Why is some writing so clear and crisp that you can taste rainwater in them and the saltwater in others? How can reading certain writing make you want to cry and laugh at the same time? How do they(the real writers) make you smell the soil and touch the air?
Hmmm...I wonder
Does the smell of turpentine and shaven wood awake in them a sob that has been smothered deep inside?
Do green wet trees soar ones thoughts?
Not wanting to see the sadness in eyes so young trigger compassion or self-loathing?

Or maybe real writers write for themselves

...there.. I made my new post for 2011

Lines to Live by

no truer words were ever written

IF
Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

Caliban - a vignette

The Island Innocent


Reflections don’t lie, especially something as honest as water. The water reflected the lucid grey sky, the green branches swaying and clearly showed Caliban what he couldn’t bear to see. He looked like he was what he was, an aberrance. His form served as warning of what could result from a deviant coupling, as in his case, of devil and woman. If the woman was more human and less wicked, maybe her progeny would have fared better. His was a form which could not be classified as beast or man or fish. It was as if elements of each was chosen at sundry and thrown in together to a horrific outcome. Caliban was nature’s mockery of everything unnatural.

Caliban essentially grew himself up, like a resilient weed in the island. He hunted with the animals, swam with the fish and slept under the blue black sky of the island. He didn’t think, he didn’t feel. He just was.

Then one day like pieces of driftwood, two humans came floating into the island. Caliban gaped, when he saw the ship-wrecked, bedraggled Father and daughter stared at him. Stupid as he was, somewhere deep inside, he could sense their instant revulsion. Feelings he never had flooded him; pain, a keen awareness of surroundings, fear and anger.
His anger later turned into a blind animalistic lust, when he noticed Miranda’s sweet flesh. He had seen the island animals do it. Just as he pounced on her and grappled her to the ground, he heard silence. Her silent revulsion suffocated him, for an instance he saw himself for the beast he was and for that millionth of a second, Caliban was shamed and with the shame came anger. Anger made him want to continue and he would have too, he told himself now, if her father hadn’t chanced upon them.

He’d slunk off the woods, into its comforting darkness and did something he never did before. He had begun to think.

Caliban started noticing things. Things like how the fishes in the stream swam together, how the bear cubs always walked with their mother, how the birds in the trees protected their young ones and he wished desperately, that he like them could also belong. He also noticed how different he was from Prospero and Miranda, how Miranda smelt like the morning air, pure and fresh, how the island seemed so still when dusk came.

The reflection on the stream rippled when his tears fell on them. The sky began to darken, enveloping the island in a shroud of black. Prospero felt relief when his reflection dimmed in the water. He got up heavily and made his way back to the woods, his ungainly feet weaving clumsily, as he tried to avoid treading on the flowers.

tell me your story

Tell me your story
I know you have one

I see it in your eyes
When you sigh and smile
I hear it in your heart
Whilst you gaze away

Tell me your tale
I want to know it

I know it is dark
With spaces between
That you care not to fill
Till you ready yourself

Tell me your story
I am willing to wait

Rantings of an existentialist

Every story is proof of the existential awareness of the writer. It makes the reader think of the life that we all pass through and seeing it with the eyes of another gives the reader a chance to perceive the writer's life .Thereby influencing his future actions.
Act defines a person, aspiration does not. I know it makes me into a hard-core existentialist. But it the only one theory that has intersected with what had been in mind forever. This may of course, throw a wedge into the 'nature-nuture' theory, tilting me very into the 'nature' side of things.
A new-born baby cannot be called an individual; A person is not defined at birth. The choices he makes and thereby his actions define who he is.You cannot blame your genes for what you are. There is a state of ambivalent freedom which stimulates or influences choice that precedes every action. A freedom which is responsible for one's actions and concurrent with one's values.
Why do people always say "forget the past an on with the future"? Doesn't our past delineate who we are? Every step forward should be taken with a glance backward.
So what i am saying here is; dwelling on one's past in not essentially stunting, rather can provide a composite view of things and impose responsible freedom in future choices.

Marriage

Holding on with a tenuous clasp,
Of faltering fingers and mighty resolve,
By failing strength and potent will,
Wanting very much to rest for a minute
She held on.
Lest He falls, into the abyss dark,
Where the end beings,
With clawing fingers and greedy grasp
To doom them to eternal stillness.
Thus they lay, draped on the precipice
Suspended and entwined,
Interlaced with guilt and anguish
Like a grotesque sculpture
That no human hands could make.

“Let go” He entreats
“Let the sun rise for you tomorrow.”
She smiles in tender sorrow
“You are my Sun”

Their blood and together mingle,
Dripping into the chasm below;
Filling the sinister depths,
With a red ocean of love and fortitude.
Washing away the sins of time,
And the darkness of doubt
And then they fell,
It buoyed them both
Kept them gently afloat
On the tide called Life…