A day is not enough!

I have never been very comfortable with this "Days" business.. Its like you have reserved and also restricted your feelings towards a particular person or particular relationship. Whether it be Valentines Day, Mother Day, Fathers Day or very recent Friendship Day..

Yes, I know these days are earmarked to celebrate a person or a feeling more than any other day...it never stops us from expressing it on any other "Not so Special" day also... But after all its a free world, and I have a free mind.. so I have every right to express my opinion ..Right ??? Right!!!

So I feel that these special days, more than spreading happiness , actually are more potent to hurt... OK let me explain.. On any normal day, a person in love always knows he has someone special in his life, and he or she can any time just give that one look or do that little gesture and the beloved would know that she is special and that would make her happy. But, lets take the other scenario, where it is THE Valentines day, where each person, irrespective of his background or situation, is expected to be a part of that celebration. People are bestowed with a never questioned right, to just ask blatantly to anyone, what are his or her Valentines plan. What if the person is heart broken, what if he is not lucky to have met "that" person yet, what if the person whom she loves doesn't know and doesn't want to express his love like all others... Yes the pain can be subtle but hurt it does...

Why just valentines, every time on Mother's day (Not that I don't pamper my mother), this thought always crosses my mind, that on a day like this all those who have been cheated by destiny, and who do not have their mothers in form with them, their sense of loss most definitely gets multiplied. I feel its unfair, one to make the person realize what he is missing, and to make matters worse, also celebrate something he has been denied.

That is why I have personally not been very enthusiastic on these special days, and mostly prefer to  keep low in forwarding messages and wishing. In the process, I might have also hurt a lot of people close to me, who like normal people expect acknowledgement .. It is the "I do" day for all relationships...

By this post I want to tell all those special people in my life that I celebrate them, their presence in my life every day...every day is special because it is filled with memories and thoughts about them. I want them to know that I do not need a calendar reminder for me to thank God for their presence in my life.. In my prayer every night I do that... I thank the Almighty for all the kindness he has showered on me in form of these people around me..who make my life meaningful.

I may not send cards, flowers and gifts when all around them might be getting, but want them to know that in my prayers they are there, like forever. I wish them goodness, health and happiness in every moment of their life, not just on that ONE PARTICULAR day. To my friends, who have been with me through thick and thin, I want to say - "You make all my days special, and if I have to celebrate you, one day may just not be enough"

By the above statements, I absolutely do not aim at taking away the value of expression in any relationship..what I want to say is..why keep it for just one day..Let it flow as it comes...

This post I dedicated to my dear friend Manish, who triggered this thought in me yesterday!!!

Colours of my life

“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. ” 

― Oscar Wilde

What is life if not a spectrum of colours... Colours that define it, colours that fill it and colours that make it "picture perfect"

 For different people colour means different things... For the little ones all around us colours are their first lesson of association and identification, on which they are tested by all Uncles, Aunties and Didis round the clock.- "Tuktuk, want this icecream... but first tell what color it is?" or "Laddo, go get Uncle the Red box"

To a teenager, on the cusp of falling in love..."Roses are Red, Violets are Blue"

For the old lady you meet in the park every morning, doing "anulom vilom" , white is her colour..the colour of divinity.

For me the colours define the people in my life, people who fill my life with their presence, their vibrancy, their variety, their characteristics and their expressions. Rather I should say, those colours define me.

It has always been a challenge for me to give introductions... whether on the first day of college, or in a "informal" intro to the seniors, or in the ice breaking  of those boring training sessions, or in interviews... each time I was asked to define myself, my likes, my dislikes, my dreams, so on and so forth... But are we really an island in ourselves better known by only two coordinates, coordinates that define us in isolation. I have always failed to believe in this and hence always failed in giving straight from heart and complete introductions in my life.

So here I attempt an introduction about myself for the first time in its true sense. I am nothing without the people in my life, the people who make me realize that I am. Come to think of it, how do you know you exist... because you take in a chemical element O₂ inside to give a compound  CO_2, or because you see yourself in the eyes of the people around you. Well! its a no brainer, all of us know the answer.  "They are so you are". So here I will showcase the colours of my life, what they make me and what I make out of them.

Brown is the colour which marks my identity. It is the colour of my mother. She gives me the earth and the ground to hold on to. My roots, my beliefs, my values all I got from her. Brown is the colour of soil that reaps flowers, cactus and fruits with equal care and nurture...thats what my mother does too. My imperfections, my follies, my mistake all take shelter in the never ending fields of her pastures. I learnt to stand tall from her.

Orange is the colour that keeps me warm and hopeful. That is the colour of my father. All I know of hope, optimism, cheer, glee, joy all I owe to this man. His life was difficult(Well ..who's isnt) but did I ever see him droop in sadness..never once. He is the balancer of my world, who brings with him the strength and the disposition which can give any trouble a run for its money. I learnt to live (in its real sense) from him.

Pink  is the colour that brought love in my life. It is the colour of my two brothers. Yes, they are the ones who made me realize what "Love" is. My first encounter with a selfless unconditional love happened by design (of God) with the twin angels of my life. Yes! God felt one would not be enough for me, so he showered me with two at one go. But his strange ways...gives some - takes some. He sent them without a voice to this world. But you know what, they came with a note in their palms which read .. "Your voice I already sent in advance one year back- Love God". Ever since that day, it has been an unbreakable bond between the three of us. They bring sensitivity, friendship and love to my life. I learnt to love from them.


Yellow  is the colour for all the beautiful people in my life whom I bumped into by accident, by chance and not be design. This is for all my friends, the ones really really close to me. Names are not important, they never are.. the ones for whom I write this, will know when they read it. That's the thing about friends.. you never need words and at the same time you never fall short of words. There is so much you can tell them, you can listen from them..everything need not make sense too. And in those critical ICU moments of your life, when words fail, they never fail you. Yellow is their colour because they bring sunshine, they smile and the world looks better, they brighten things up and clean up the "shit" in your life..that's why colour yellow. I learnt to smile from them.

So that pretty much sums up my spectrum.. that is what I am ..a myriad of colours that mix with people and people that mix with colours. Its confusing and thats why its beautiful!!!

ps - So what do you think is my colour?? :)

The Shadow of your smile

“Yes she loves me”. Sameer couldn’t believe it was real. Shikha had finally confessed her love for him.

And here they were on their first date. Giving them company was “Hamara Bajaj” and a soft drizzle.

Shikha, sitting on the back seat of the scooter, had accelerated her dream engine and was already time travelling to “lived happily ever after” tomorrows.

She saw the rear glass, and caught Sameer’s eyes. That look and the endearing smile told a million tales.

Vrroommm… came the crash and she was robbed of everything, but the shadow of his smile, to haunt her forever.

This is in response to the below prompt:

The Shadow of your smile

Prisoner of our own device!

Prisoner of our own device

This world was a peaceful, quiet and sensible place to be till the time a crazy person got a crazier idea to come out with the craziest invention of his time - The Omnipresent Mobile Phones..

How I remember and miss those days of selective communication... when a land-line connection used to be a luxury and only the affluent "haves" of the neighborhood  had it. So distinct are those memories of my childhood, when my next door aunty ,"Micky ki Mummy" , stood yelling at the top of her voice at her staircase which was just adjacent to our balcony, broadcasting to the whole "mohalla" that Bittu Bhyya from Lakhinpur had got engaged and his mother, Shyama Behenji,  will call again in 15 minutes to talk to Jijaji , in this case my father. And soon after this announcement there was a flurry of activity at our place. Papa was but of course not allowed to step outside the house in his loongi ( Translation for Gen Z -a wrap around skirt for Men, don't get weird ideas), so he was ordered by the Big Boss of the house to change in a decent attire and that too in a time bound manner before the next shout from next door. By the way, "Micky ki Mummy" was an excellent cook and made amazing ladoos, so in hope for one, I always used to tag along as an attendant to my father, who was on a "Phone call Mission"

PCOs, whatever the full form was, started mushrooming everywhere in early 90s. Every entrepreneur with a little money and big dreams, thought this was where the world was looking and investing in this venture would take care of his next two generations at least. Little did he know that PCO had already found its nemesis in a thingy called mobile and it was a already an everyday use thing far ahead in the West.

Remember those queues in-front of that small shady PCO cabins, which became a commonplace hangout for the goondas of the galli, who used to tip the PCO man to reveal the phone numbers of Poojas and Nidhis of those days. 

All this while, I was busy growing up, and by now was a college goer. And thanks to "No Mobile " could easily bunk classes and hang out with friends late in  the evening, in the name of extra classes. There were no every hour tracker calls from Ma inquiring my position, location and status, making me feel like she is M and I am her James Bond. Looking back I feel it was no less than a miracle that all the group outings , well those days our reach was only till zoo and crocodile parks, could be easily managed without any sms, calls that were wrongly missed, and missed calls that were wrongly received to track each others coordinates. No matter how many people from how many different logistic combinations, we all used to gather just at the right place at the right time. 

Alas! those days were numbered. And here came the so called Hitec, technosavy highly communicative world breathing on mobile phone networks and beating to the keypad heartbeats. I have no qualms to accept that I hate this device to the core. It has overshadowed the man's existence. Now people feed the number of the person in their handsets and then ask them their name to save their number. A phone call even if its a wrong number, is any time given more priority to the friend who is sitting in front of you waiting for you to finish your calls and spare some moments for him.

The patience meters of the human kind has touched its lowest best... one missed call and your mother might just register a missing complaint for you in the nearest police station, one engaged tone at 11:00 pm in the night and it might just cost you your girlfriend, one "out of network" message and your boss might job rotate you for insubordination and the list goes on. 

For the lesser mortals like me, who have this knack of losing anything and everything, it is one notch even more worse. We live in this every minute trauma of the possibility of forgetting your "lifeline" the phone at the shop counter or public washroom or if nothing else in the"never-ending & all containing" deep pockets of our handbags.

I dread this device so much that my idea for a dream destination is no hi fi international picturesque get away but a place in nowhere where I have a justifiable reason to be "Out of Existence " (Read Out of Network)...