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Monthly Archives: August 2010
An Autumn Sunset
Temple bells fade
Fragrance of jasmine blossoms
rises slowly
intoxicating the evening
My gaze
follows the hills
bathed in unusual shades of colors
meandering green hues
vibrant wild flowers
and fluttering prayer flags
reaching out to heaven above
Amber light of setting sun
begins to merge in the lake below
making it shimmer like molten bronze
Igniting
fires of
illicit desires
Your thoughts travel
between our silences and words
your voice sings
emotions at pitch
I hear it clear
sensuous, delicate
robbed in one sense
but returning elsewhere
stronger, richer
I listen to the wind
softly blowing
whistling through the trees
I watch
as it rustles
and caresses each leaf
rolling beneath the twilight sky
I feel my heart slipping away
chasing the shadows
in the dark woods
Borrowing words from your old song
I fill the emptiness inside
and escape into another world
Shadows of reality .. When things go wrong
Yesterday was a strange day. I planned it all out and ended up with a trail of incomplete tasks. It began with a forgotten mug of morning coffee and led to burnt toasts, cold soggy breakfast, broken glass, unfinished chores, teary eyes and a broken heart.I made a simple meal that seemed unfit for human consumption and quietly tucked myself away with the laptop in the darkest corner of the bedroom. The worse awaited me there as I opened my mail.
Sometimes one is put in a situation where you are either dammed or hanged and there is no middle way and no escape route. I stared my the hazy screen and tried to clear the mist rising in front of my eyes blurring the words I was reading.
With a sigh I closed my eyes and thought about what relationships mean. Is there any place for trust, longing , compassion, understanding, faith, caring or are these words hollow and empty. crucified by the scheming minds or turned into slaves by those who never seem to go beyond the apparent . What is love ? What is lust? Passion, longing ? Why is it that a man or a woman gives in to desires that are illicit and murders the basic feeling of mutual admiration and love-making illusory dream castles over the graves of what could have been a solid foundation for an everlasting bond.
Why sometimes the heart escapes and we lose all control over it and the devious mind laughs at our misery making it even more difficult to pull the reins and bring back the wandering fool. we make different choices and end up in the same way. Caught in the crossfire of my own emotions began to bleed.
There was a time I believed . Believed in the romance , in friendship, in connectivity, in words both said and unsaid but now it is a bit difficult to digest. People change colors to shame a chameleon at least he does it as a defense mechanism, they manipulate, twist and turn the events to their requirement, don’t shed a single tear of remorse for their doings and continue with their lives parading as victims in the eyes of the world and the world sees the drama unfold with blinkers on and nodes in endless sympathy for the wrong-doer while those truly affected silently wipe their tears and walk a lonely road only to fade away with a hot flush. I snap my fingers till they hurt but the star-dust is gone. The show over and the magic gone.
Reality check 1.
No one can be trusted not even your own self unless you have a full control over your heart and mind which is practically impossible.
Memories however insignificant now create a deluge where you find yourself being sucked in and you struggle and fight and go ever deeper into the darkest areas of your life. Areas which haunt you and torment you which question you for creating them in the first place.
The past stands before you like a demon with a million tentacles ready to pounce at the slightest movement.
The darkness of those vacant spaces is scary and even more scary is the lurking presence of something, someone from the past.
Past which has continued to walk beside present tiptoeing silently unheard, unseen but ever-present.
Rain torn days add fuel to the raging fire. Strange as it may seem. Water as fuel for fire. As surreal as the life itself .
I stayed in the dark for long… uncertain of the light and now the light has blinded me . My fears come true as the smoke clears and I see the amber from the cigarette butts slowing eating away into the fabric of life. I had forgotten to stub them. Now all I have is Ash.
Burnt out … at least to some extent if not completely. The warning bells rang loud, they seemed too obvious and went unnoticed or was it that I chose to close my ears to them. Blinded by Love .. not just that.. even deaf and when two of the vital senses collapse the third one does overtime. .. words like wild river break the banks and flood.. only to destroy.
Somewhere between the lighter shade of black and darker shade of white I was blinded.
“L’amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together and impossibility of their ever becoming one!”- Luis Bunuel
Can’t place where I read this but it stayed in my mind etched forever.
We question, we doubt, and most of the time are uncertain of ourselves more than the other person and before we get our bearing right we are done.
I was a dreamer who tried to write epics with fire in the air till yesterday when the dark engulfed me and the air wiped clean all that I had so lovingly composed.
Phone rings, conversations take place and in the end each one thinks what he /she had achieved .
Be careful what you wish for , careful of what you desire badly, careful of what you give up and what you get in return because when the world begins to crumble the fall is much deeper than you anticipate . What you think is the beginning might be the end and the end just a new beginning. Who knows what’s His game plan and we are just the pawns.
Now as I watch the fading shadows around me and reflect upon what went wrong I am clueless. Somethings are best left undiscovered because the more you stir a dying fire the greater are the chances of some spark turning into a flame and that could be the last thing I want at this moment.
Life has bared and untangled all the threads I hold dear and smacked my face with those I don’t. At least the hidden is revealed , naked truth of what we refer to as ever lasting relationship.
Thursday Photo Challange
The Forbidden Fruit
The theme for Thursday Photo Challenge is creativity and I could not resist posting this lovely work by my son.
This beautiful painting was created in Adobe Photoshop CS 4 using the simple soft brush and some basic filters. You can see all his work on his site Dark Star , the paintings are for sale if anyone want to use and are copyright protected. You can contact him at adirocx@gmail.com
Please encourage the boy and leave your suggestions . They are valuable and will be appreciated .
It feels good to be a Blogeshwar :p
When I saw the Blogeshwar page on Facebook it made me smile 😉 .. Nothing can beat the feeling of being appreciated by the readers and to win the Blogeshwar title twice in the first edition is certainly an awesome feeling.
Two of my posts won in Blogeshwar 1.o
Here are the links
It pyz 2 enrich ur wrd pwr 😀 Lingo fkd
(Humor )
and
Being a daughter, old age and the empty nest
(Khichadi)
Will pick up some more books later 😀 greedy me :p
Thank you so much for this jesture of appreciation for my writing .
Thanks Himanshu Shekhar .
I got my gift from flipcart today . A book I wanted to read and add to my collection .
THE LOST SYMBOL BY DAN BROWN
Will post the review after reading.
Thanks again to all my readers , judges ( Pankaj Batra and Stephen aka ‘Ste ) and friends.
Time to cuddle up with the book and a aromatic mug of coffee . 😉
Wordless Wednesday – 18
Struggle : Haiku
stifled , silent cry,
ripples echo life song
an unsung struggle
{Say NO to Female Infanticide }
Originally I had written this as a Terset but changed it to make it into a Haiku . Here is the original one .
stifled cry, silently screaming, ripples
echo a song of life, a death unsung
struggle for life cut short
*image courtsey Google*
Smoke Rings In The Dark
Lay down beside me
on the soft moist grass
Let’s gaze at the smoke rings
swirl and drift
lazily in night
Roll it
light it
Inhale together
the mixed aromas
hold
and then
slowly exhale
Under the hazy veil
comfortably numb
float upon darkness
let go
shed all inhibitions
feel the warmth
seep slowly
rings of smoke
gliding
lingering
holding on
like my longing
to be with you
A feeling unexplained
whispered to the trees
and carried by the wind
Memories glowing
like an ember
and then
blown away
visions of you
in shades of blue
fading and merging
rising and falling
and then
rising again
I try to find
a spark of the flame that was
but all we have now
is a dream
turned into
smoke rings in the dark
Let me kiss you
one last time
for soon the dawn will break
and love will show us the way
to our separate graves
and I’ll gather pieces of my heart
and leave behind
just
the smoke rings in the dark
(image courtesy http://www.jcpe.tv/)
this is not poetry , it is prose run mad
63 Years of Freedom – What is this freedom we are talking about ?
This post is part of Blogadda Mera Bharat Mahan Contest
I am giving all my readers some food for thought on the eve of Independence day . Do read all the links please to understand what I point I am making.
India Shining – celebrating the 63 years of freedom from ” British Raj” .
The whole country is singing patriotic songs , blogs are getting updated every second telling how proud we are to be Indians and how much we have achieved since that day in August 1947.
The question that comes to me again and again is , what is this freedom we are celebrating ? Is it just the transfer of power from British to Indian or do we have something more ? Are we truly free nation, free thinking society ?
In a country where the great divides of the society tell a shameful story what are we celebrating any way? The economic, gender, cast based communal and religious divides that have created the worst possible divides in the hearts of the masses.
We talk of AMAN KI ASHA ( read my poem)but when I talk to common people I still feel that the bitterness that brews in them in much worse than before. Hindu /Muslim divide even after so much awareness is till not sorted out in the hearts and minds of people .
The sweeper who comes to take garbage at our place does not drink water from the hands of a Muslim domestic help and that too low-caste Muslim. The attitude makes me sick and ashamed I try to convince but the beliefs rooted from centuries in masses are hard to wipe out .. the efforts still go on ..
We have bridged distances with advance technology but were we able to bridge the distance in the hearts of people ? The Brits went but we carried their slogan of Divide and rule and did justice to it fully and don’t you think it is shameful that the country is much more divided than it was 63 years back ? Separatism and then to top it separate stateism , what more is in store for this “Free nation “?
All the talk about Women’s empowerment { LINK } seems so hollow. The term “Women Empowerment ” has a lot of hot air fanned from this end to that end of the country for quite sometime now and nothing substantial has come out of it other than discussions, speeches, talks by woman’s groups etc.
What have done to improve our society, to change the mind-set of the aam janta who still believes strongly in age-old dogmas, rituals that are inhuman but still prevail in the name of religion like Witch Hunting honor killings and much more .
A country still where domestic violence , sexual abuse, Rape , malnutrition, poverty, unemployment and many such issues still stare at our face mocking us for all our tall claims. How can that country rejoice Independence in true sense?
Are we truly Independent
When our girls are killed before they are even born ? [ Link } { Link }
When thousands of children go through sexual , emotional abuse and there is no specific law for child abuse ? { Link }
When there is an urgent need to make the much awaited changes in the constitution ? Where one has to question what are the policy makers doing and for whom ?
When issues like Marital Rape and domestic violence ( male victims) are pushed under the carpet and are best forgotten because of social stigma and shame ?
When the masses are ignorant, confused, uneducated and don’t know whom to look up to for guidance and support , when people are dying due to lack of basic amenities like health ,food and shelter even drinking water , how can we celebrate freedom and from what ?
When we have census based on caste what does one expect with this nation?
Do you feel proud today on hearing that Indian Parliament members have criminal charges on them, “including human trafficking, immigration rackets, embezzlement, rape and even murder” all the time . At state level, things are often worse. People have lost faith in the efficiency of the system due to corruption at all levels. Power , judiciary all are just toys in the hands of some rich and powerful and average person is still figuring out what’s this all about .
What kind of freedom is this where every day there are a ” million mutinies ” Read this TOI article by my brother to know how our country is under siege which is brewing within at a colossal cost of blood and resources .
Who is responsible for the farmers committing suicides in Orissa and other places and the cast based atrocities all over the country ?
Do we ever ponder about these issues and actually do something about it – positively and not just talk or write about them.
How many of us Be the change they want to see ?
We are free to make our own choices but do we have a choice really ???
and when we do have it then
Do we make that choice to stand against and fight for injustice and all the evils that infest our minds and in same way our society ?
We send hundreds of messages , mails , blog on Independence Day , congratulate and rejoice but we hardly spare a thought on issues which are dirty to look at but are the stark realities of today’s India ?
Till when will we live in a denial mode? Who are we fooling?
I am writing this article today to roll the carpet on which we have danced, dined and drank to celebrate our country’s Independence Day for so long never bothering to look beneath . Just as we are criminally indifferent to many other aspects of life including introspection we are indifferent by choice to look at those glaring issues that need to be removed from the core.
I hope when you are through with reading this at least in one of you something will stir within and that will be the first step to freedom.. true freedom .. shedding all that is not you , that which needs to be wiped clean and not pushed behind the door.
If our minds , our hearts are in bondage and we have not learned in 63 years how to use the freedom we got with so many sacrifices then we have no reason to say I AM A PROUD INDIAN
I would love to have this gift from pingoo
vote for this post on Indivine
Thursday Photo Challenge
Photo Theme for Thursday challenge for fun and learning is Beverages and I found this beautiful Premium Old Gold Single Malt Whiskey bottle in shape of a dagger and I loved it.It is an Indian Brand and tastes great .. Bottled in Sikkim , This has won many awards it seems .
So Cheers to some good times. 🙂