My Tapestry of Your Life

What good fortune it was
That brought my post on Facebook to your notice
That I had to be in the same city as you
Looking for someone to share a roof with
What good fortune it was
That I found someone that I ended up sharing myself with

What was it about you that made every daunting task seem easy
That made every challenge seem fun, 
That turned every cause for frown a reason to laugh
The abundance of positive energies that you carried along
or that radiant, warm self that God could show himself through

The day you moved in with your stuff of monstrous proportions
Made me wonder what baggage you must carry everywhere you went
It took me some of those magical times that we spent together
To realise and see how wrong I was
You carried no baggage. No regrets. No hard feelings
Only love, warmth, forgiveness, acceptance
And that sense of humour, clean and dirty, that made me love you more

You carried no weight
Light as a feather - that is what you were
Wish I had told you this on one of those many occasions
When you tried one outfit after another
Running all around the house, checking all the mirrors
To pick your favourite one. The one that made you look thinnest
The one in which you liked yourself the most
But did you realise you had become my favourite mirror?
The one I had no fears or apprehension looking into
Because it loved me for me, without telling me so

Waking you up in the mornings, I would hate to do
Knowing how sleep came to you with great reluctance
Sometime in the middle of all the nights I now wish I had spent talking to you
All those nights when you would give way to your creative outbursts
For all the wonderful talents in you to take wings
All the nights you didn’t let me sleep with your laughter waking me up all the time
Little did I know you would someday give me sleepless nights with your absence

You and Tea. It was a special bond, an inseparable one.
Mornings seemed weird if I didn’t wake up to see tea leaves by the sink
The tea that kept you company when you sang while I was asleep
Milk and Bournvita. How little things gave you so much pleasure, I wonder
I still look for your new Reebok shoes when I get back from work
Those that gave you all the satisfaction and peace when you took your evening walk in the park
Thank god you stopped wearing that darned blue t-shirt
Although I still wonder why you could never let those flowery white slippers go

Yes, I didn’t know Pizza Hut came with a “Hot or Not” policy
Cut me slack you could have, for making a fool of myself on that call
But do I wish I hadn’t said what I said to the delivery boy, No
For I now cherish each such time that I triggered your infectious laughter
The guy who sold us the fridge seemed to like you, who wouldn’t?
You wanted a bigger TV. I am sorry I didn’t let us look any further than we did
“Let’s bring the baby home!”, you said. You had to be dramatic and all na.
We got a decent one, I thought. One that we mostly used to watch Gutthi while we ate
Gutthi doesn’t know she’s not gonna make me laugh this time around.
She’s gonna make me want to see you do a “Aap aaye hain humare ghar mein”
How well you did that! Wish I had made a video

My birthday eve, you cooked me Papad ki Sabji if you remember
Barely were we half way through our sit-down meal when I had to leave
You understood. You decorated my room, you waited for me. And you went to bed.
I’ll do the same for you sometime, I thought. And when I do, I will remember to not add too much spice
Well, I knew you couldn’t deal with pickles. And that Dahi and fruits was your most savoured meal.
Your birthday eve, I was working. Like all the other days I had been working since we moved to the new flat
I apologised for not spending enough time at home. You wondered if you did something to make me feel guilty.
I wish you had done something. I wish I had felt more guilty and spent more time at home with you.

We could have actually made our living room a dance floor.
How many songs we went through to decide which ones you would dance to
At all those Sangeets you attended in all those Anarkalis you wore with matching jewellery
Nothing beats your Chandler dance though. And our imitation of Priyanka’s Exotic.

I’ve lost count of the number of times we watched FRIENDS together.
But we never finished this round of re-watching. Wish you’d come back just to do that.
You never got to wear your fancy purple glasses enough. Wish you’d come back just to do that.
You didn’t get to flaunt your new red Woodland jacket jo “Sale mein mil gaya!!”. Wish you’d come back just to do that.
You had to finish serving your self-imposed punishment of staying away from sweets till you got an admit. 
Dude! We don’t even have one picture together! You owe me big!

Let me now tell you things you’d have liked to hear -
All the Ghewar was still lying in the fridge. You made me eat it always. This time, I ate it on my own..hope you’re happy!
We’ve also made a proper list of bills to pay every month. Something you would’ve been proud of!
To spread happiness and joy was all your life was about. 
It’s not easy to do it as well as you did. But I will try and I start today.

Your life’s not all that different from our favourite show, you know.
Why does it feel like FRIENDS was so short-lived, despite it having lasted ten years, we thought
Pick any episode, there’s no way we wouldn’t like it
It made us yell, laugh, cry, want to dance, sing and live
We were never bored of it. Always looked forward to more.
And we watched it over and over again to relive the best moments and smile.

You, Astha Pareek, are always going to be one big smile-bringer.

Words.

How often do words suffice, I wonder. Actions speak louder than words, they say. Language is a channel of expression bound within the limits of a dictionary. While names and definitions, in more ways than one, have been assigned to the variety of things, emotions, actions, beings, phenomena, sights, sounds, smells and the plethora of elements that constitute life, there still are felt emotions and happenings experienced that are seldom captured effectively in a string of letters that make up what are known as words.

A look of love, a warm touch, a note of music, the whiff of a scent

A memory, a melody, a prayer, a wish

A walk, an adventure, a journey, an experience

Comfort, pain, relief, frenzy, solace, satisfaction.

We look around, see, hear, feel, smell. We think, observe, contemplate, conclude, express. But words do not always provide a canvas good enough to paint a picture that appropriately and justifiably depicts the mosaic of stimuli felt deep inside the recesses of the heart and mind. Words are accessible, words are easy. Words are fed to us from childhood, not difficult to comprehend. Words have the power to make or break, create or destroy, inspire or depress, revive or kill- because we give them that power. 

Words present a certified collection of options to choose from, giving room for expectation of the most probable and favourable choices being picked to convey an emotion, thus sadly robbing expression of the romance in ignorance and the eventual surprise arising from usage of intangible modes of conveying emotion. “I love you” is all you want to hear, when all that you can feel is so much more than what those three words convey. Words restrict what we feel and express, for lack of words. The power of imagination gives wings to the power of words. If words were the perfect medium of expression, fuelling our wildest spans of imagination, would each one of us still be enamoured by life and its charms, by the reactions that people and situations evoke inside us, by the excitement of experiencing things ourselves for the first time? If words were indeed the perfect conveyors of emotion,

Books would satiate all of our emotional needs.

A man would know the feeling of a baby’s kick in the womb.

Beethoven’s symphonies would bring tears to a deaf man. 

The blind would revel in the beauty of the crimson sky at sunset.

The creator did enough to make us think and feel.The makers of language did enough to get us to say. 

Can we ever do enough to express?

#FFFF00

It was yellow. I loved everything about it though I could taste sand in my mouth. Between my teeth and in my nose. It was scorching summer heat, combined with a blinding storm of sand. Me and my bicycle were the only things I could spot among the blurring mass of flying sand particles. A strange sense of deja-vu always erupts within me whenever I recollect that visual. That was precisely the scene I'd imagine and project on my sub conscious mind during all those times  in my childhood, when I'd walk back home from school with my aunt, staring straight into the sun through the fibres of the pallu of her cotton saree pressed in front of my eyes. The diffraction through the network of fibres caused the scenery around to appear much sunnier, drier and dustier than it was in actual. I would then imagine a world when the sun, dryness and the dust would be normal. I would envision a world without greenery or water, without life of laughter, inevitably digressing midway through the imagination to distant possibilities of migrating to moon if there were ever such a facility, so that I could escape experiencing the end of life on earth as I saw it. I have always loved to live.  Ironically, that same emotion and spirit kept me from fending off the sand storm I was in the middle of that hot afternoon in May. 

As much as I wanted to live the experience of a sandstorm; to feel and see what I'd never felt or seen before, a parallel track in my mind kept feeling extremely deja-vu'ed'-Is it coming true, after all? Is the earth and our surrounding getting drier, dustier and sunnier? Are we losing the race against ourselves trying to exploit Mother Nature.

Life seemed to present to me this unique opportunity to experience life as I lived it. To see all things as I'd wished and more. To know what it was to anticipate and expect and what it was when none of what happened was anticipated or expected. Life is after all a test of how we live through the rounds of tasks it sets us and how well we fare at them. 

I'll Be There

Does love seek attention or does it need it?
The premise of love- 
Sometimes understood as to have someone we can live, share, laugh and cry with. 
Someone who will stand by us, with us, accepting us for what we are, 
through times good and bad, 
trying and convenient, happy and sad. 

Is all kinds of love so different? 
The love showered upon us by parents- selfless, undying, unconditional
from the time we’re born 
till the time one of us is gone. 
Sets the standards we need to live by and look for.
Give and take is a misplaced notion
For what is given in love is never asked for. 

Is that what makes parenthood such a revered job 
and a mother the most magnificent person there can be?
Fly away, fly high for that is where we want you to be
The undertones of separation and craving lost in the heart’s unbound cries of happiness.

Is all kinds of love so different?
Brothers and sisters fight with us and for us when needed
allowing for co-existence and a share of what was all theirs
For it takes stronger love to share something as beautiful
as your mother’s warm hug and a ride on your father’s bike
I may not know what is best for you, for I have only gone a little further than you
I will, but, let you know when you tread a wrong step or two.

Friends come, but do they really ever go?
What is it that they bring in our lives, that ceases to leave our self
miles after we leave them behind, memories echoing through volumes of time.
You give, you take. You don’t give, you will be given.
And then follows the sour guilt and the sweet happiness
of comfort, of belonging, of the blessing.
The luxury of not being expected to do
Is not greater than the pleasure of doing. 
And so we wonder, is all kinds of love so different?

Stupid me, stupid me. 
Little did I know,
what I have now come to believe.
All kinds of love is not so different.
For in the end what have I heard them all say

Jump, for I will catch. Leap, for I will push.
Grieve, for I will console. Bloom, for I will cherish.
Celebrate, for I will too. Sleep, for I will put you to.
Eat, for I will feed. Live, for I want you to.
Love, for I will always love you,
Walk away, for I will wait.

Great Expectations

The wheel of life they say has to perennially move forward, or so we are known to believe. Be it the symbolic charkha of the Mahatma or the Ashoka Chakra on the flag, moving ahead in the quest for achieving prosperity and peace has always been the pursuit of man. What differs is the one thing in each person's life that qualifies as his/her ultimate gateway into their zone of contentment and bliss.

It has always been creative and intellectual satisfaction that has kept me at peace. It is when I look back into my childhood and what kept me happy as a child that I stumble upon this proposition. And then I look into my life now and get convinced of the truth in it. It is indeed amazing the way that people tend to find satisfaction in things they do rather than doing things that satify them. Their attemps at moulding their conscience to believe in the lie are all the more perplexing. Is that all it takes to tame the strongest mind on the planet? Maybe the sentiment of being content is only superficial, sheilding the true restless soul within. Or does the person truly change over years of suppressing the yearning to break away? The human spirit fails either ways. It is sad, for scores of creative geniuses are buried away and lost in the quest for material achievement. Society and family help no less.

The bad news is that there is no hope for the good boy. Be a rebel and you might find happiness.

Inertia of Unrest

Its tough to let something be. It sure is. The reasons are many-1) you are nosy and itchy; 2) you're being pushed to bring change though you don't really see the need for it; 3) you are so passionate that you can't stand to see something amiss or 4) you're just bored. Few can help you if you're 1. It is commendable if they'd even let you into a group. It is Indian mentality to be resistant to change. Albeit very less in a few cases, still. 

You know better than to be 2. There's infinite force and often zero momentum. It won't be too late before you realize your life sucks. All of us are 4 at some point or the other. Its okay to be 4 as long as the change is harmless. 3 is the most uncomfortable to be. Its neither a disease you have nor a result of external force. Its all within. You can well live without pursuing it, but you don't want to, coz you know you have a chance. Its worse when what drives the passion is something intangible. You cant see it to erase it or destroy it. All you have is discomfort and the urge to put an end to it. It doesn't take too much to get used to the discomfort. All it takes is to change that one part of the code in your mind that reads "Not OK" to "OK". But that's an uphill task when years of writing and rewriting that code strengthens the definition of OK. And to such extent that unless the actual matches the ideal to every dot, you can never rest.

You like everything about the way things are. That is paradise.

For sale.....almost.

What a terrible state to be in- your mind's all over the place, yet nowhere. There's not been any one thing that my starved grey cells could feast upon, and for so damn long! What is more astounding is that it has never been this bad before. For modest minds like mine, tolerating mediocre levels of intellectual capacity isn't as much of a problem. Its the total absence of any need for brain-usage whatsoever that is driving me to insanity.

It seems like forever since the last time I remember being engrossed in academic curriculum to barely last a concentration span longer than the shortest song on my play-list. Music soothes my head. Doesn't make me use it much; unless its one of those times when I need to dissect details to be able to reproduce it on stage. I work with limited resources when it comes to music- those acquired over three years from observing those innumerable sources of inspiration. Everything else I've ever indulged in, has only been a momentary vent to the occasional bustling of creative energy inside me.

People interest me the most. Undoubtedly. I've amazed myself very often with my ability to have the most intellectually-stunted conversations. I have an enviable knack of generating unthinkable means to prolong insensible discussions. Doing that consistently over a dangerously long period of time has probably taken its toll. Quality is definitely the bigger Q. So big, that despite having 555 friends on a virtual platform and possibly 500 more in reality, I still yearn for meaningful, engaging conversation. I'm meant for bigger things and bigger people, or I'm too small to realise the beauty of the little things that people share.

It boils down to me then. Now that's something to feed on.