She left my heart drunk with a beauty my eyes could never see...

It was a hot dusty Friday morning in Chennai. One of those mornings, where by the time you make it into the bus, find a seat and settle down with a book you already feel tired and exhausted. In any case, the 15-20 minutes that a bus waits at any large terminus is a time for a flurry of small scale businesses. Hawkers peddle everything from fruits to Clarke’s tables. This motley crew is punctuated by beggars of different age, size and minimum wage requirements.

So here I was, settled in my seat waiting for the merciful driver to turn on the AC and start the bus, when a girl of 4 or 5 got into the bus. She was dressed in soiled clothes too big for her, her hair was brown and matted and a bindi was tattooed in between her eyebrows. Might I add she looked unkempt and dirty, wait, make that filthy. She walked lazily from passenger to passenger, taking her time, staring at them until they were uncomfortable enough to fumble with their purses and quickly send her away with some coins. I must tell you at this point that I have no sympathy for child beggars; most of them are overtly shrewd, cunning and manipulative. They have no semblance of innocence; I guess the street makes them that way.

In any case she came up to me and started tugging at the tassels in my handbag. At this point, I must also mention that I love my handbag. It is a beautiful grey bag which has on both sides of it; a black metallic ornament with chamois leather tassels which I may add is very nice to touch. Annoyed by her cockiness, I yanked the bag away and glared at her. She pulled the bag close to her and started playing with the tassels again. At this point I thought the kid had some nerve (!), and asked her if I should call the police. She looked at me with her big brown eyes and said, ‘I just want to play with it’. And somehow when she said that, my rage fizzled out. I remembered the fascination I had for the bag when I saw it in the store and touching the soft fabric in the tassels still gave me comfort. After all she was just a child, a street child at that. There can’t be too much beauty in her life, I mused. Somehow, I was sure she had never had any toys and probably will never have anything pretty. In a sudden burst of inspiration, I decided to give her the ornament with all the tassels. She was surprised when I removed it from my handbag and gave it to her. I told her it was for her, with my most benign smile. She in turn gave me the most beautiful smile and did a little dance with it. She took it around the bus, played with it, and twirled it around her fingers, smiling all the while. Lovely, I thought, I had brought some beauty into someone’s life; I had made a little girl happy. Maybe she would show it to her friends and it would make her day.

While I was congratulating myself about this chicken-soup-for-the-soul-like-incident, the little girl noticed that since I had given her one of the ornaments in my bag, my bag still had tassels on one side, while the other side was empty. She promptly came up to me and gave me back the ornament, without so much as a hesitation. I refused to take it back and insisted that I wanted her to have it. As much as I tried to explain to her, she struggled to attach it back to my handbag. After putting it back, she gave the bag a satisfied look and said; now it looks pretty. Before I could react, with a hop, skip and jump she reached the entrance of the bus, turned back, flashed me a final dazzler and scampered away. I was stunned and not to mention humbled!! That kid is alright, she does not need my generosity. Her life is beautiful and as a mystic once said, ‘She left my heart drunk with a beauty my eyes could never see’.

Genesis – Flawed?

Recently one of my friends said something in jest (I hope!!) and it got me thinking. He said, a woman is old after 25, a man is never old. After my indignation died down, I thought about why women have a procreative shelf life while men do not. Why God or nature created these double standards? I am not willing to accept any philosophical or spiritual answers. Somehow this seems unfair; though I’m sure there is some genius reason behind it as there is behind every aspect of creation. I have other questions too, why are women created physically weaker than men (smaller statures, lesser muscle mass etc) but are expected to endure heavy physical hardships like pregnancy. In spite of this fact, it is also true that women have better immunity when compared to men. When there was a small pox epidemic in my grandmother’s village, more female children survived it than male. My grand mom says that nature has designed it this way so that more women surviving would mean easier continuation of the human race. If this was the case, then why didn’t the same nature have the wisdom to create a longer procreative shelf life for women than men? We need more of us if you guys still need to walk the earth in large numbers. Any theories? Anybody?

(P.S: Please do not tell me things like both men and women are required for procreation. I know that. I am only talking about the right ratio to speed things up. To state the obvious, more women and lesser men have the possibility of producing more progeny than more men and less women!!)

If you love some thing, should you let it know?

Should ‘I Love You’?
I heard someone saying that ‘I Love You’ is the most over used sentence and that he failed to understand the constant pressure to say it to his wife/partner. Maybe because Valentine’s Day is around the corner, but I have been thinking about these tired and abused three little words. From one extreme that thinks “If you’ve said it, you’ve killed it” to the other extreme who is of the opinion that “You should say it to everyone, everyday, all the time”, I have friends who span the whole broad spectrum in terms of the ‘I Love You’ usage.

If ‘I Love You’, then when?
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. Times of this magnitude are commonly encountered in the field of telecommunications, pulsed lasers, but more importantly to calculate the right time to say ‘I Love You’ for the first time in a relationship. Having said that, the right nanosecond varies from culture to culture; for example in the Indian culture, one says it right after running into each other in a college corridor after knocking down each other’s books and sundry items, as evidenced by many a desi movie. On the other hand, American movies and sitcoms lead us to believe that the saying of ‘I Love You’ is a momentous occasion which happens midway in a relationship, after saying which the relationship takes a quantum leap into things like moving in, popping the question, marriage and other murky areas. This dear friends, is the life changing quality of saying these words at the right time, it can change your life for the better or worse.

‘I Love You’: Overuse & Side Effects
Once you have said it for the first time, it pays to understand what ‘I Love You’ is not. It is not an excuse, a threat, a stress buster, an ice breaker or a booty call. For all my married friends who think “An ‘I Love You’ a day keeps the divorce lawyers at bay”, please note that God has given every man and woman a predetermined number of effective ‘I Love You’s. Overuse will result in a multitude of disappointing side effects from indifference to downright hostility.

This phenomenon is not limited to married/committed/non-single people. Every once in a while, I come across people who are in danger of ‘I Love You’ overuse, not to one but to many people. Saying these three words is not like firing a round of bullets at a shooting ring, where with every shot you try and get closer to the target. Remember always that we live in a small world, sometimes too small for comfort. With the advent of newer and better communication technologies, the distance between two of your former ‘I Love You’ recipients is getting shorter by the minute.

Advice from the wise
When it comes to saying ‘I Love You’, I always follow the advice my mother gave me about peeing. Don’t be afraid to say it when you feel like it, forcing it when you don’t feel like it will only result in pain. On that note Happy Valentine’s Day folks!!!

The Illusion of Free-Will

It is true that there is no such thing as free-will. Well at least not in this universe, since everything is bound by the conditions of space and time. Apparently to find the real ‘free-will’ concept in action, one needs to go out of this universe. Since we all have or pretend to have jobs, husbands/wives, friends, malls and movies to go to, we can safely say that getting out of the universe to experience ‘free-will’ is not in any of our immediate agendas.

But not having free-will is not entirely a bad thing as it turns out, because of the Buridan’s ass paradox, yes folks…Buridan’s ASS!!! The assumption of this paradox is that an ass (donkey not derriere) placed between a stack of hay and a pail of water will first go towards whichever is closer to it. Now when the ass is kept midway between both, it will die of both hunger and thirst as it cannot make a rational decision of choosing one over the other. (For those who think I’m talking out of my ass (derriere not donkey) Google it, this paradox is a documented theory!).


So in a way it is amazing how lack of choice or the inability to have free-will actually pushes us into the scheme of things and saves us from dreadful inaction. For all my friends who believe in weighing the pros and cons of different choices before making a decision, come on…who are you kidding? Like the ass we all move towards the choice closest to our experience or our comfort zone.

The next time you are making a big decision in your life and you have various choices in front of you, flip a coin, throw a die or ask your wife. The only freedom is, knowing there is no real freedom. That way you do what comes your way and give a flying duck to the responsibility of making the right choice. (And yes I have the freedom to say flying duck and you have the freedom to assume that’s not what I meant to say…in reality I do not have the freedom to influence your assumptions and you do not have the freedom to stop me from saying illogical stuff).

Biggie answered!! (And you're welcome...)

One bad job and many fb applications later, I have just had the epiphany that we are not designed to be happy and content ever. Happy and content is a state of rest and blissful inaction. We are designed to run after something we don’t have for a reason we don’t know. It is a major conspiracy and we are conditioned to be part of it from birth. Break out of it and see life for what it is…really this is nirvana. The way I see it,


It doesn’t matter if you are here for money, success and power or for the betterment of humanity or for the beer, fries and laughs, like me. We are all the same buddy and we are going to the same place. So it doesn’t matter whether you reach before or after me, just so long as you keep the party going until I reach there!!

Rambling…

Some relationships are doomed from the very beginning. Yet or maybe the fact that they are doomed is what makes people get into them. As they say, no one will ever know if it is more painful to get punched in the balls or to get through pregnancy, since no one will ever experience both, I can safely say that this is a woman’s perspective.

Throughout history, a woman’s sexuality has been one of the most feared and revered things. It is something she fears herself, maybe because she is afraid of carrying the testimony of this sexuality on her physical self. Is it because she has the power of creation, that she is burdened with the responsibility of reigning in her sexuality? Metaphorically speaking, a woman’s sexuality is like a raging river, it can create and destroy. Man with his curse of foresight and deliberation, has curbed its path into a social structure called family so that this heady source of energy can create more than destroy, like dams are built to use a river’s potential to the maximum. The beauty of it is lost, but it is the only way to control the chaos and uncertainty that results from leaving it as it is. But just like every power of nature that man thinks he can control, every once in a while dams break and a woman’s sexuality goes out of control wrecking havoc in its way.

Resuming my original train of thought, the reason women get into doomed relationships is probably because of the control thing. Sex is all about giving and taking control. It is a twisted way of taking control, by giving control to somebody. Unfortunately when you make yourself a weapon, the first person you end up hurting is yourself. I guess the answer to safety is neither control nor to be taken control of, provided safety is your motto.

Perfection

(Wrote this for my brother who is undeniably the best brother in the world!!! He turned 21 last monday)

Little pink fingers and pink little toes,
Droopy little eyes that caught fire when you smiled
You awakened my first instinct to protect,
You were the first baby that I ever saw
I was afraid of dividing my share of love with you,
Then you came along and multiplied the love in my life
First time is a trial run,
Second time around it is perfection
You are mom and dad’s little perfection
Happy 21…Wish you all the happiness this world can offer
And then some more from me!!!