Trying to fall in love…..

How do you do it? How does it work?

It doesn’t work for me.

Giving a relationship a certain name and expecting love to bloom into it!!! Does it work that way?

You cannot choose love. Love chooses you. Love cannot be expected. You cannot make love come your way, if it doesn’t want to. Love doesn’t come your way, if you have a set of rules for it. And even if it does, it won’t stay because love doesn’t like to follow any norms.

Can love really be caged into a marriage and kept there unhurt and undestroyed? I don’t think so. Love cannot be caged. It just flies away at the first hint of manipulation. You can’t fool love into staying. It’s a free bird. If you think you have made it stay, you are fooling yourself.

In love, if you lose your identity, it isn’t love. It’s an adjustment. What will you love someone else as, if you are not yourself? And what will that special someone love you for if you are not yourself. The first rule of thumb for a successful relationship is ‘Being Yourself’. It’s a ‘Take it or Leave It’ situation. After watching all those mushy movies and overdramatic daily soaps, if you think changing yourself for love is romantic, you have a pretty messed up idea of romance. You are just being too harsh on yourself. How much would you change yourself? Would you like to live a life of somebody else? If you would, you don’t love yourself.

Love doesn’t ask you to change, marriage does. Love doesn’t ask you for adjustments, marriage does. Love doesn’t ask you to alter all other relationships you have grown over the years, marriage does. Love doesn’t ask you to stop doing things you would like to, marriage does. Love doesn’t ask for explanations, marriage does. Love doesn’t come with guarantees, marriage does. Love doesn’t believe in boundaries, marriage in itself is a boundary. Love doesn’t ask for social acceptance, while marriage is just a stamp of social acceptance. Marriage is nothing but a conspiracy by the society.

You think you’ll get married and it would be a happy ending. That happens in movies, pal. That happens in fairy tales. When it comes to reality, marriage is just an appropriate ending to happiness. It isn’t that marriage is all thorns. Marriage can be beautiful only if it’s not about adjustments but about understanding. It could be beautiful if you let your partner live his / her own life according to his / her will and you live your’s. That line about two lives becoming one in marriage is incomplete. Lives do become one in love but that is without losing themselves. Love breathes in freedom. You cannot suffocate it and expect it to stay alive.

If we try to generate emotional / psychological / social or any other boundaries in love, Love can be complicated. It can be quite simple if we follow a simple motto ‘Live & Let Live’.

Over the years I have realized that we are a free souls trapped in numerous webs of society. Rules made by humans are being termed as a word from a certain almighty.

The more we try, to shake ourselves free, the more we find a demon spider rolling us in it’s web of traditions, rituals, myths and superstitions.

I hate everything that tries to keep me locked in certain boundaries in the name of God, in the name of religion, in the name of relations or in the name of whatever.

I hate everything that tries to dictate the terms of my behavior. Who are these people who try to decide what we should not wear? Who are these people who tell us what’s acceptable socially and what’s not? Who are these people who show contempt on homosexuals? Who are they to condemn somebody else’s sexuality? Who are those people who force women to wear burkhas? Who are these people who justify the killings in racial riots thus denying thousands of people the freedom to live? Who are these people who ban Valentine’s Day celebrations? Who are these people who ban movies / books / paintings over trivial issues? Who are these people who judge our character? Who are these people who set rules of public behavior? In this bloody land of Kama sutra, who is that man who is staring at me right now while I kiss my girl? Who the……?

What’s all this moral policing about? Do these people follow any morals themselves?

Seems I hate a lot many things.

What do I love?

I love the feeling of freedom. I love to feel it running in my nerves like hot blood. It makes me feel alive.

They ask, “What’s freedom to you?”
They ask so many questions. They……..

Well, Freedom to me is equivalent to happiness. It’s a state of mind. To live life on my own terms without being questioned gives me a sense of fulfillment. My life tells me, I am it’s owner here. I did a certain thing because I wanted to do it. My inner self is the only one I am answerable to.

Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Satan? Do you believe in anything for that matter?

I believe in myself. My God is within me. My Satan is within me. It’s upon me what do I intake as food for thought. It’s this freedom to choose between right and wrong without anybody else dictating me the dimensions of good or evil. A wrong thing for you might be a right thing for me. It’s more complicated than we know. We cannot bifurcate everything in a set of two “Right & Wrong / Moral & Immoral / Good & Evil etc”
The choices I make, I am responsible for them. I wouldn’t like somebody else to be responsible for the way my life turns out to be.

A piece of news from Kabul I came across recently states, "As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night," Article 132 of the law says. "Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

Isn’t a person free to feel love, to use sex as an expression of love when he / she wants to? Is it necessary to succumb to somebody’s desire without caring for our own emotions just because he is your husband? How is somebody irrespective of his relationship with the woman going to force it on her? The question is, “Do women in Kabul and for that matter so many other places have anything known as ‘Sexual Freedom’ left in their lives?”

Freedom doesn’t include interfering in another person’s freedom. You cannot have freedom if you can’t respect the freedom of another being. “Killing / raping / hurting a person because I wanted to” is not freedom. And if someone thinks it is, it’s just his / her misinterpretation.

Loneliness is a tricky thing.

 

It can have it’s claws pierced in a person’s skin even in midst of his loved ones and people around won’t even have a clue.

 

Sometimes it’s not just about being alone. It’s about understanding certain emotions which are not open to all.

 

In a way, it’s about not being able to share what we think. And we can’t share because no body around us sees it in the way we do.

 

For example, let’s say you watched a movie last weekend with a group of friends. Let’s take a tough one. Say “Memento” or “Fight Club” After the movie was over, you happened to be the only one to understand and appreciate the psychological theme of the movie. Others found it plain bore – so full of gore and so very confusing. You try to explain it to your friends, but they only laugh at you and keep calling the movie a waste of time. That’s where Loneliness kicks in.

 

You being a part of a group yet so different from them that you are not able to discuss how you think about something you so much liked. You are just not around with people of same tastes. From that word “taste”, I can tell, you are in a similar situation as that mouse in “Ratatouille” who understands and appreciates the taste of food he consumes, which his family and friends are not able to. To them he is just a crazy fellow who is looking for taste in waste.

 

Forget about the movie, this can be true at various points in life. And you could be inflicting this pain on someone else.

 

Say, one day a son / daughter after much hesitation approaches his / her parents and confides in them that his / her sexual orientation is not what it naturally should be. In most cases, the first reaction would always be that of shock. That’s about fair. But then would the parents be able to understand that though it’s not natural for them, it’s a natural thing for their child. No force in the world is going to change what their child really wants. Normally what the parents would do is, tell their son / daughter what a shame this is going to cause them in the society. Or even worse, if they force their child to enter a marriage with a member of opposite sex. That would obviously put an end to their worries but that’s where their child’s problems would start. The child now is nothing but painfully lonely, unable to understand whom to confide in.

 

Loneliness can come out of simple things like ability of understanding and appreciating arts or out of complex things like marriage or relationships. And these happen to be just a couple of examples. At times, we get so prone to it, that we start living in loneliness. That’s when we accept it as a way of life. Then we start growing as introverts or sometimes selfish people who don’t think of what others want. Sometimes, it’s easy for us to term people as selfish. But what we don’t understand is, if they don’t think of their own interests, nobody else will. Or maybe, loneliness hasn’t played such a big part in our lives.

 

Like Love, Loneliness too is indeed a tricky thing.

I lived in a town
With a friend who was a clown

He had a habit unusual but funny
Though after a point his habit made me grumpy

He used to smile n' sing,
I wouldn't mind if he did it during the day

But his habit woke up every night
When deep in his sleep he sang and grinned

The first night when I shared my room with him,
I found it eerie as it came unexpectedly

But soon I grew used to this strange habit of his,
Moreover I enjoyed his songs with weird lyrics

However by dawn he had no knowledge,
Of songs that took birth on his lips

Everyday the clown would wake up
And would go to a colorful place to work

Everyday he used to jump and fall like a bunny
People would laugh as they found it funny

As the jumps were real,
So were his falls

And I can tell without a doubt,
His body must be aching

He would look at his audience
And grin as though nothing happened

And when he heard laughs and claps,
That came from the crowd

His chest would rise,
As their applause made him proud

Even today as he lays,
In his tomb

With a smile on his lips,
And colour all over his face

Now he sleeps deep in the ground,
Smiling as ever, but nobody to laugh over

Last evening I went to pay a visit
To the grave of my clown friend

And lo, there he lay
Six feet under the ground

As I sat by his side,
I could feel something creeping on my skin

I think I heard a whimper
Or was it a melody?

Growing like an invisible tree
Out of the ground that gave shelter

My friend still sleeps down there
But his songs haven't betrayed his lips.

Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, Chandrashekhar Azad, Khudiram Bose, Ashfaqulla Khan, Ramaprasad Bismil have one thing in common. All of them gave up their lives for a single dream, a single cause.

They all dreamt of a free India.

A free India which we now enjoy in, cost so many people their blood. They could have stayed in their homes with their families like normal people but they didn't. There Gandhiji withdrew the Non-Cooperation movement after the Chauri Chaura incident, and here was young blood gushing down the veins of India crying out a single cry, "Inquilab Zindabad" That blood was red. Our's isn't anymore even if it seems to be.

I am not writing about the great freedom struggle. What I am asking you is this. Are we really free? No, we aren't. Not as long as we suffer from our rotten mentalities driven by religious sentiments?

All these martyrs are sons of a single mother. Our proud mother, India. She never differentiated between ethnicities, castes, creeds of her children. For her Rajguru was not a Maharashtrian. Bhagat Singh was not a Jat, Ashfaqulla Khan was not a Muslim, Khudiram Bose was not a Bengali. They were her Indian sons. But what are we?

We are proud Maharashtrians, North Indians, Bengalis, Madrasis, Christians, Muslims, etc, etc...... And our Mother India is not proud of us. We use our energy in fighting each other because of statements made by some stupid politicians, who just want to gain political mileage. We don't see what harm we are causing the nation by our stupid religious sentiments. Why don't we understand that the money wasted in these foolish wars of castes and creeds can be used in the development of the infrastructure of our own country. Can't we be responsible enough to not fall in such traps?

With all this hatered, where are we heading to?

The british came, observed and conquered. Coming and conquering became a child's play when they saw how divided we were. Now aren't we committing the same mistake? Are we waiting for someone to step in the British shoes?

What if the great martyrs who gave up their lives for our country fought for their own states and villages? Would their fight make any impact on the ruling British Empire?

Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru didn't have a hint of Punjab or Maharashtra in their minds when they embraced death. But as we live, we do.

So next time you make a proud statement about your ethnicity, make sure you say nothing less than, "I am an Indian."

To hell with the castes,

To hell goes creed

Racism is a shame

And extremism - a pain

Sweep away boundaries

Let go off nationalities

Skin colors from psyche, let be damned

From those dress codes shake yourself free

Take good things from the past

Embrace this day

Chuck all enemity

Welcome to humanity

Hatered asks for blood to pay

For eternal love, make way

Smile like a baby,

And world can be a beautiful place