A rumble at my feet… and a quiver in me… like frames per second…the sights pass me by… so many familiar views… huts covered with dung…bamboo shoots… rice fields submerged in water… sand mounds… dry ever stretching yellow fields… looming peepul trees…some destitute naked children…bricked houses dappled along the way… and I sit and watch in silent wonder and a gloomy face…
I have just left my utopia…stepped yet again on the paths of hell… only this time, with a slight hope to make inferno less charring…
Again a wistful me…makes her way into the paths that have been charted out for me by my most unkind mother fate – for I would give an eye and a leg…I would kill…I would have done anything to spend the next 3 months in the world I existed before…
A single day here was beautiful… maybe fed me with enough memories to last a week…and then what…like always would I have to depend on dipping myself in my revitalizing storage of memories that I have carefully preserved in my head?...
I like to call it my precious marmalade – these memories that I thrive on… every single hour in my utopian land…every single word that my friend Estella has uttered …every smile that my familiar people have showered on me…that crispy brewed smell of Village Café… that old yellowed pole by the road… the coconut-man that has been at that corner forever… its all a part of my marmalade… jellyed into a box… with the sweet smoothness and the tangy bits that makes it so unique… conserved… preserved… jammed in my head… flexible enough to make space for new moments… adjusting enough to squeeze in more bits…and yet, in its congealed state sits in my head, not allowing for my defective present to act like a fungus to its eternal undiluted perfection.
I am allowing myself to soon turn into a Miss Havisham of sorts…and yet, in all consciousness, I take that alternative…for I’d rather be preserved in marmalade than rot in the fungus of my today.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Camera or Vase
A very disturbing thought has invaded my mind recently and has built a nest there – and every few hours I hear the silent squeaking and the mute screeching in my head...
I was a searing feminist – I was an independent soul ...and the women who chose to objectify themselves were the sort...the type....the category I used to call “victims of society”. But now, my surety in myself sitting at the other side of the fence is slowly shaking, I can feel that fence crumble, can see the shiver under my feet and can feel an earthquake jar my self identity from its very core. A very simple universal and a loud question knocks against my brain and asks me three words...
Vase or camera?...
It is an interesting way we look at both these objects...
A vase ...ornamental, mute body of beauty, holding within itself, flowers of every season, yet sitting in the same corner – stagnant, unchanging, rather boring...growing older... mouldy...and yet becoming an integral part of the household...
And the disposable camera... in new versions, models, makes and colours... an accompaniment of the vacation...a break...a change... makes moments, captures transient joy and then without a second thought, once the usage is over, once the moments have been developed and handed to the owner, discarded as easily as it was picked...
As women, have we become confined to these parameters? To these definitions? To usages and moments? To boring stagnating existences and mute objectifications?
Have we become the vase...have we turned into the disposable camera?
For all my sensibilities and my opinions, for all my individuality and my intellect – I seem to be no different... I seem to have fallen prey to both these definitions...and in a period of less than 6 months...
For one man chose to have snapshots of moments with me... he lives for the moment while he kills every other scope of any more moments for the other – he is the one that knows it all – which is the better model of the camera at what time, what he can have, what he cant have, what he can afford to have, what he cant reach to. But I suppose that is how the market works....that is how the market of consumption goods worked for him – for in his momentary fast changing technological world – there is no word called durability that exists.
And the other – who wishes to exhibit me to the family unit – to make me a pretty vase on display and keep me stagnant at one place and space, to hold seasons and to live a uni-seasonal life...to make me a domestic object.
In both cases, we are objectified...so are we limited to the dual narrow bracket of wife or slut? Virgin or waste? Mute or loud?... in this journey from myself to these two, somewhere I have lost myself...and nowhere have I been happy... I do not wish to be a camera, I wish even less to be a vase – so as a woman where does that leave me and does it even leave me with any options... I had a sea of options holding out its multiplicity to me once upon a time...and now it is time to reaffirm my identity and have a dive into that sea before, in this dual dirt, I lose myself.
Q: Camera or vase?...
A: Neither.
I was a searing feminist – I was an independent soul ...and the women who chose to objectify themselves were the sort...the type....the category I used to call “victims of society”. But now, my surety in myself sitting at the other side of the fence is slowly shaking, I can feel that fence crumble, can see the shiver under my feet and can feel an earthquake jar my self identity from its very core. A very simple universal and a loud question knocks against my brain and asks me three words...
Vase or camera?...
It is an interesting way we look at both these objects...
A vase ...ornamental, mute body of beauty, holding within itself, flowers of every season, yet sitting in the same corner – stagnant, unchanging, rather boring...growing older... mouldy...and yet becoming an integral part of the household...
And the disposable camera... in new versions, models, makes and colours... an accompaniment of the vacation...a break...a change... makes moments, captures transient joy and then without a second thought, once the usage is over, once the moments have been developed and handed to the owner, discarded as easily as it was picked...
As women, have we become confined to these parameters? To these definitions? To usages and moments? To boring stagnating existences and mute objectifications?
Have we become the vase...have we turned into the disposable camera?
For all my sensibilities and my opinions, for all my individuality and my intellect – I seem to be no different... I seem to have fallen prey to both these definitions...and in a period of less than 6 months...
For one man chose to have snapshots of moments with me... he lives for the moment while he kills every other scope of any more moments for the other – he is the one that knows it all – which is the better model of the camera at what time, what he can have, what he cant have, what he can afford to have, what he cant reach to. But I suppose that is how the market works....that is how the market of consumption goods worked for him – for in his momentary fast changing technological world – there is no word called durability that exists.
And the other – who wishes to exhibit me to the family unit – to make me a pretty vase on display and keep me stagnant at one place and space, to hold seasons and to live a uni-seasonal life...to make me a domestic object.
In both cases, we are objectified...so are we limited to the dual narrow bracket of wife or slut? Virgin or waste? Mute or loud?... in this journey from myself to these two, somewhere I have lost myself...and nowhere have I been happy... I do not wish to be a camera, I wish even less to be a vase – so as a woman where does that leave me and does it even leave me with any options... I had a sea of options holding out its multiplicity to me once upon a time...and now it is time to reaffirm my identity and have a dive into that sea before, in this dual dirt, I lose myself.
Q: Camera or vase?...
A: Neither.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Angst
In my existential state of incompletion...
Like a mechanical corpse...
I breathe yet not live..
Unless you call existing, life.
In my affections unguarded...
I give in, give up...
Leave no scope for redemption...
Until you call existing, death.
Like a mechanical corpse...
I breathe yet not live..
Unless you call existing, life.
In my affections unguarded...
I give in, give up...
Leave no scope for redemption...
Until you call existing, death.
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