Those who say "I love you" too soon, are the ones who mean it the least
                                                                                        ~me

Hoarders of beauty

People have a way of stripping off beauty from everything which is grand and make it mundane.
They say.."Art is nothing, poetry is bullshit"

Basically everything in the world which brings peace to a some souls can be negated, blown away and shred into minuscules of ordinariness

Why do people do this?If thats true then what do I hang on to, in order to believe that life and people have much more to offer than what they seem to?

Cos I have always been a hoarder of beauty, splendour and everything which was a little out of my reach, yet it intrigued and tantalized me..like a faraway light
A shimmer of glamour which I always thought is my eventuality...that in the end I will reach there

Its easy to shred things apart to their base nude form and say "this is what it is..nothing". But its difficult to weave a romance around everything, like a child, to be wide-eyed about things.

As a child I used to hoard beauty, in all forms..

I would cut pictures of a pretty face, a handsome guy, a scenery, a poem..
The house I lived in, had beautiful stones spread on its pathway, I used to sit for hours and pick the most beautiful ones
And store all of them in a box

I dint do it to show to anyone, but I treasured them in my heart secretly
Every night I used to open them and have a look at all the beautiful things that I had...I loved that moment of the day, it had a strange thrill to it, the whole day waited on me for that moment

I love beautiful words too, the way they feel and sound in my mouth
We used to have a book in my high school called "Words are beautiful" and I used to score a full marks on that cos learning new words was a passion for me
I would even read a lot of urdu books by Mazaaz, Iqbal, Meer Taqi Meer and few others, cos I found unnerving beauty in it
Even though urdu is not my first language, I would spend time to know the meanings of each and every word I came across
Cos by doing so, I brought beauty closer to me..in my grasp

(In class 6th I wrote an essay for my Hindi class.I displayed all my knowledge of urdu in that essay. The teacher next day read the poem in the class and said its a beautiful essay but totally not understandable cos maybe its written by a Muslim girl. I sheepishly told her that was not true :))

Beauty is an absolute for me, like truth
Its self containing and self preserving
It does not need acknowledgment from the world,
Like a black hole, it sucks in people without itself being involved and disturbed

Beauty is a way to connect with another who understands it

We all love beauty and know that too, yet we at times want to ignore it and claim beauty does not exist? Is it cos we are threatened by it, or by lack of it in our lives?

We try to find flaws in a stunning face.."The nose is too big"/ "Her Smile does not reach her eyes"/ "I find his face expressionless, lacks something"
And we try to glorify an otherwise ordinary face.."She has character on her face"
If you don't acknowledge beauty, does that change it?Why run away from it?

And at times I wonder what is this need to have beauty in our lives?

To have a beautiful house, a pretty wife or a good looking husband, a nice dress or shoe..
Everything is about storing beauty in our lives
Stocking beauty, so that we never have dearth of it in our lives

Yet we deny it its credit..

For me, beauty is what keeps my life interesting..

I am someone who marvels at beauty openly..and off late I have started taking beauty with a bit of gratitude ..and guilt too, for all that I might have maligned in this world, knowingly and unknowingly

If I read something written so nice that it tugs at my heart, I love that..and I thank God that there is someone in the world who can write like that..isnt that beauty?

I see a good movie or a well executed scene, or acting, I cant forget it for days..and I can never tire of watching it again and again..as if to keep beauty in a loop

A good song, we all know, sometimes defines us, our idea of romance, sorrow, love et al..
Isnt that creation, art and beauty?Can everyone make us feel the same way?

And when I see good dancing, I am mesmerized..

On that note I am totally awestruck by Hrithik's dancing.
No, I dont ogle at him like a woman ogles at a man and lusts after him, believe me I dont...but I ogle at him as someone who is just so perfect
I cant stop gushing at his perfection in looks and dance, when I see this,
He is just too groovy....and he fills me with reasons for all possibilities in life


He seems so happy just being himself, knowing his own charisma, and regaling in it..that's a superlative

So is the case with Madhuri and all her dances, I can never have enough of it

I get goose bumps when I read authors like Milan kundera, or many bloggers whom I read..I cant express that feeling when I read something which is akin to my feelings, which I could never put in words but someone could do it like s/he got inside my mind..thats beauty too

What would you call it? How would you shred apart all that beauty? And say its not art?
You dont have to think differently to be an artist, its the way you express it which creates art
And if others can feel a sort of oneness in their art, that's a good enough reason to be regarded as one

Beauty is my peace and solace, and I wont let that ever go from my life...

Beauty can make your world topsy-turvy, make you blind, bedazzled and you might think that you lost your way in its enchantment

But then, that's the only thing you would remember, which was worth it, when you sit and account for your life in your own mind

I might give up on love, on relationships but I will never give up on beauty..

Jagjit Singh

I had gate crashed his live show at Siri fort auditorium in Delhi. This was was some 14 years back. I was with my younger sis and a couple of her friends.

We dint have tickets and managed to make our way through the crowd and ran from under the arms of the security who was trying to push the crowd out and failed to notice us.

As soon as we entered the auditorium, we ran like headless chicken and plonked ourselves right in front on the stage, on the carpet(we did not have the gall to sit on seats after gate crashing)

When he began singing, I was a little disoriented since I could not make out if the voice was coming from him or every pore of auditorium was singing
The voice had the quality of all bass/surround effects which are available in the high-tech speakers of today

I just gaped at this good looking man, and lost myself in the voice
We were sitting right below his nose, and he could see us clealry..so in my mind I believed that some of his songs were directed at me :)

I had heard rumors of him being a womanizer, but his talent compensated for me, and I feel an era has ended with him

I have seen a lot of live concerts : Bryan Adams, Enrique..but his is the most memorable

Here is a lesser known song from him, but my all time favorite
What a heart-wrenching, defenseless love..this song portrays

मैं कैसे कहूं जानेमन, तेरा दिल सुने मेरी बात
How do I say it sweetheart, that your heart can hear what I have to say

Voracious writers

I have heard about voracious readers. But have any of you heard about voracious writers?

Yes, there is a category like that.

Some people just dont know when to stop writing, once they begin to write.

They have this habit of(and no knack whatsoever) dissecting every human emotion, nature, very clinically and then serving it in a platter.A dish made of amalgamation of their own sick mind, complexes, in-inadequacies.
As if they are some authority in reading human mind and its complexities

They are not even psychiatrists. It beats me how they churn boring sentences after another.

I'm talking about few specific people here(2 in mind), and I am pissed. Very, very pissed.

If only this person knew when to stop!

But just to tell them - What you write is ill-written, utterly boring, repetitive, senseless and nauseating to me. Probably over the years some people have fed you with the notion that you write well & now you have gone ballistic with it. But please read what you write. May be its not exactly what you had in mind.Your thoughts and your writings might be miles apart.

I understand that you have the rights to write whatever you wish to in the confines of your space, blog, diary, journal or whatever it is.
But stop badgering me with your over-the-top theories, ideas, conjectures, pseudo-intellectualism. It becomes difficult to even comment on another blogger cos of this.

I can not read beyond 2 lines of what you write. I swear I have tried, cos I believe in giving everyone his/her due. But I start yawning and my head hurts.
Man, you are caught in your own mesh of objectifying everything and fail to see beyond it.

And then there are some people who have created a whole blog just for me. To lament over me. The blog was created for the sake of putting me down, and it was made sure that I know of the blog, and every single post is a response to what I write here.
It makes me smirk at times, cos that's the degree of effect I had on this person.

But just a question to you, do you know the definition of a loser? Maybe just do a reality check and see if you are a synonym for it? Move on!

I could have let this go, as I have done so many times in the past, but since i have decided that I wont anymore, hence this post. Hopefully once and for all.

And I dont wish to be in the category of voracious writers, so I will stop my rant here.

They say....
Don't hold on to things, don't hold on to anger, don't hold on to people who are meant to go away

I tried doing that, but life has come to a full circle and I have realized some preachings are just momentary and do not work in the long run

One has to decide what works best for them

I am not the sort of person who lets go easily

So letting go initially, gave me freedom..a high of being someone else
I could heave a sigh of relief, to let that burden off..whatever it was..in whichever form
I felt a different me, within me, which was refreshing and delightful

But I dint know, that all the burden I let off, kept perching itself somewhere in the recess of my personality

So much so that I no longer felt like me,
I no longer felt myself within me..
I let go of my spark too somewhere

Letting go loosens up your senses ,
And for a highly strung person like me, its like a sedative
a drug which had started mellowing my senses,

It makes you lose the strength and the ability to hold on, to fight, to cherish your individuality

And thats one thing I cant afford to lose, cos thats my sanity

So I have decided, to hell with letting go..

She loved like she was going to war

"She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise pieces of him apart. Only when she failed, had she finally let go. She loved like she was going to war, but she also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back"
                 ~ The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Reading this felt like me. At least thats the way I have always thought myself to be.
Verbatim, ditto!

Nawab Pataudi

I am woken up by a sms from my father at 1 AM in the morning, the day Pataudi died.

Sms reads -
"Just saw news of Pataudi's death. This looked like a personal bereavement to me since Pataudi and Sobers were the two international cricketers whom I saw from closest range in my life, in the historical test at Eden gardens where second day's play was washed away due huge crowd, which could not get full accommodation.

Both of them were in a black car. As the car approached the gate, I ran fast out line, reached by chance the back side window, tried my best to put my head inside and saw them clearly laughing and talking.
One was black and the other was white, but both were extremely handsome and looked so smart.
Pataudi's death has made me so sad"

My father never fails to surprise me with his emotional connect to people outside the realm of his close relatives.
And being his daughter, am such a fry cry from that. I have never iconised anyone in my life, never held anyone larger than life and attached my happiness or sadness with them.

Its this child like thing in him that makes me love him , even though he drives me mad mostly. I could almost imagine him doing all that, what he wrote in the sms

A bright eyed teenager, he must have been back then

This sms dint make the cricket-lover in me miss anything, but reminded me of our huge bunglaw(back from Britisher's days), back in my home town. The huge terrace, where we all used to accumulate on a pretty winter day. Elders having tea, kids frolicking around, and the small rickety transistor blaring with live cricket commentary and my father and his brothers hooked on to it.

And being able to conjure up that image right now, seems like a privilege to me

Now I am dreading demise of next (rather first on his list) icon in his life, whom he idolized to the extent of fights with my mother. Whose hairstyle he copied in his hay days. And that icon is film actor Dilip Kumar.
Whose pictures and newspaper cuttings of all his achievement are sprawled across an almirah in his bedroom, as if he is our own.