Au revoir

As I sailed off-shore, I waved good bye to them.
I saw them in tears, and drank mine too.
Our oceans different, we would never connect

Inside the veil, I was drifting with them,

The illusionary figures in the vicinity,

pulling me farther away from the reality.

They swam with me for a distance,

those angels seemed in transition,

we needed resistance,

Proximity was against my volition.

With each stroke, the figures became vivid

The masterpiece created, the untimely art,

gifting so much sorrow to the heart.

The figures were so surreal,

To escape from the art was a demand so unreal.

The Unwanted Capital

Indians rely on their social capital. We take pride in remembering our family history, father, forefather etc and thus we have this multiple branches of first cousins, second cousins and nth cousins. Well to me it sounds like some river dividing into distributaries. If one comes from a small town in India, it’s the family first you trust and then friends. Family in this context would encapsulate all those distant cousins and relatives, who you get as your social capital in legacy. If you don’t maintain these relations, you fall. These are the people who are there with you in your thick and thin. All that is good until, it strikes you where it hurts the most. What I intend to discuss here is incest, the forced incest.

 For a girl it’s not during the onset of menstrual cycle that she comes to know for the first time that she is a woman which would probably mean following certain rules related to her sexuality. In some cases the ‘stronger’ sex makes them realize the fact at the tender age of five or six. Avuncular love costs them their childhood. Especially in the case of joint families where kids don’t get enough attention due to paucity of time and children grow up in a small community of uncle, aunts, grandparents and cousins. A pedophile might be one of them, living as a parasite in your household without you having inkling of what all damages he is capable of inflicting on your little baby.

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Pic source:http://www.newjustice.net/blog/2012/03/09/international-online-pedophile-network-busted-by-authorities/

I still remember going for a wedding where a ten year old happy girl would suddenly become lifeless when she would see her forty year old maternal uncle. To my surprise, she would come to me and ask me to take my dupatta properly so that my cleavage remains unshown. I was taken aback. I just giggled and asked her where did she learn all that from? I could not sense the fear in the child’s behavior then. Years later the girl as an adult revealed that the maternal uncle tried to feel her 'non-existent' breast. I was furious. I wanted to behead that man right away. Thankfully, he was dead by then. When I saw Monsoon Wedding for the first time, it echoed the same emotion. I feel thankful to Mira Nair for bringing out this issue so upfront

The Demise of God

The death of Krishna is disturbing. Krishna, who had been my reason to believe in Hinduism, dies too at the end. As I finished another interpretation of Mahabharata for the third time, my heart is filled with agony. My belief in Krishna made me feel that I can have a niche in the religion. I can be somewhere between a staunch fundamentalist and intolerant secularist. I cannot be atheist. Somehow, I always managed to escape the death of the super hero in the earlier versions but this time my heart is filled with grief after reading about his death in detail. Krishna, the strategist dies the meanest death possible in the history. He dies like a commoner when the arrow of the hunter hits him. Unlike Duryodhana’s and Karna’s death, when petals fell from the sky on their bodies, Krishna dies an unknown death; his offence being breaching dharma at various points and here I was illusioned to believe that Krishna is the super hero of the history. As a ritual of my life, I visited the Krishna today; I looked into his eyes and asked him, ‘Are you here?’ I am deeply hurt to know that Krishna was mortal too. There is a sense of emptiness, too personal to explain in words. At Krishna’s death it’s Karna’ lines which give me some sense of relief, I see it now: this world is swiftly passing. Ironically, I know deep down that when I would be reading Mahabharata for the nth time, I would still be asking Krishna for all the support to read about his death. Such is the illusion created by Krishna.