Thursday, August 21, 2014

Being in Love is Not So Easy




Love is a charm they told me
Love they promised would be like a holiday on a farm
Love would bring serenity I thought
Love they said would create solace, calm and new energies would be bought

Love brings responsibility I tell them
Love creates complications they didn't know
Love might give birth to you and make you glow
Love will give re-birth to melodrama, unexpected serial arguments, impatience and immaturity
Love will bring along impatience, anger, unwanted emotions and asperity
The saga mysteriously unfolds and is very difficult to handle
People tend to get dizzy
Being in love is a lovable thing
But the thing is not that easy

Being in love I thought would be complementing each other
Being in love I thought would be living your life through someone else's mirror
Rejoicing at the reflection is a rare thing
Being in love is in fact accommodating two in the same mirror
All human beings are different, so are lovers

Love gets difficult when there is doubt
Love gets difficult when there is distrust and things are said in flout
Love gets difficult when expectations overleap donations
When in love, never ever calculate, never ever estimate, never seek victory
For victory lies in just keep giving
Forgive and forget, do not crib and regret
It's only in movies only that things are always breezy and cheesy
For in real life, love is not that easy

Being in love requires patience and communication
It is equally knotty as the friendship between two nations
Easy are the tasks of running away, hating and ignoring
Love needs to ace the difficulty of talking and discussing
Never in love get sleazy
For being in love is not easy

Love needs time
It's not just merry making or just a wind chime
The world is a silly messed up thorny place to live in
The world is not made for just him to be her's and her to be his
At all such times give your lover a break, give some time, be sublime
Ask for time when not given back
Time heals everything, time builds up love and bring things back on track
Love is not a midnight dream
Love is a bridge built over the best understandings of each other's differences
Don't let act them as hindrances, don't allow the bridge to seam
Differences will continue forever, so should the bridge and its beam
Understanding them will put strength in it
Communicating will increase the length of it
Not doing so will leave it like the Colosseum
Doing so will help you see and feel the limitless sky, and vanish the corrosion
But the endless sky is not so easy
For being in love is not that easy

Life is complicated, its essence lies in simplifying it
Let love be the the means to the latter
Let not love be the cause of the former
Do fall in love, the apple 'tastes' and 'feels' sweet
If you can't withstand the desire of falling in love, blame Adam and Eve
Making castles in the air is no crime
But walk together to jointly collect the wreckage when it falls at an unexpected time
The cooperation and eagerness to collect and re-make it will define your love
Not the magnitude of the collection
For making love castles in the air is easy
But being in love is not that easy

Love poems are like paeans they say, and they say it right
For in love, when things once go wrong, hardly go right
They go wrong as being in love is not easy
They go right when love is just love
When deservance falls before desire
When there is equal focus on both your love and your work
When you start realizing and prioritising the importance of both at the same time
When contribution and help precedes individualism and selfishness
When cooperation and coordination pave way for each other's problems in profession and life
When solution to each and everything is taken out by cautiously utilising each other's precious time
Into that heaven of pleasure, let me and our love take refuge and re-awake, and be the sweetest wind chime
All this sounds cheesy and is not so easy
But then, being in love is not that easy



The author can be reached herehere and here. In an essay on Emily Dickinson, the poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry.” We live in a time in which little is concealed, and that pressure valve—the one that every writer is intimate with—rarely has a chance to fill and fill to the point of explosion. Literary memoir is born of this explosion. It is born of the powerful need to craft a story out of the chaos of one’s own history. One of literary memoir’s greatest satisfactions—both for writer and reader—is the slow, deliberate making of a story, of making sense, out of randomness and pain. In the inimitable words of Annie Dillard, “You may not let it rip.”

Image from here.





Friday, August 15, 2014

The Old Bedsheet, The Rumble, A New Day








The weather is humid
The body is itchy and sticky
The food fumes out the human being inside me
There is so much of hustle and bustle all around
The surroundings are gloomy, stuck and discouraging
Amidst all this I fail to find peace and have lost my own self

I am surrendering to situations and problems
They say I am not good enough
They say it's to be done this way
They always do it better than me
I fail to understand what is wrong with me
I just lie down in nothingness
I am anxious about the past, I am worried about the future
I fail to understand what actually present means to me
The smell of pot from the room beside me is captivating
The world is taking refuge in the arms of alcohol and smoke
The spirit is dying
The body is seeking excuses not to work
The disciples of joblessness are so very eager to kill me down further
I stretch my body and legs further, trying to get lost and asleep continually ever
Only to realize that my bedsheet and my pillow have degraded more than me further
I have stopped caring about myself anymore
Then how would have I cared about things and people around me all the more
The limit of continuous sleeping has reached the brim now
Postponement of chores is becoming my flair
Attitude and perception is being rigid and unclear

Reality hits me really hard
Enough of postponement
Tonnes of laziness
Nothing else but just naughts of gains
No one but myself has to come to my rescue
No one but myself only has to help myself
Loved ones do not make things happen for you
The arrival of a loved one is further excusing myself
They are your partners in celebrations, your empathizers in pain
Celebrations and pains come only when you are not mundane
When the body is at work, the mind is thinking, the spirit lives up to your name
When you start living your life for something to continuously work for, achieve and gain

Oh I left my old bedsheet and pillow for another day
I removed the curtains
The sun shone and I started making hay
I was missing my own world for so long now
Thinking that I have been in a wrong world forever and now

The creation of my world lied in my own hands
The world is defined by our own deeds and actions
A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step
Our world would travel distances and cover journeys with every such single step
Oh I left the negativity for another day
What was wrong with me was my hazy focus on myself per se
I focussed too much on what other had their focus on
I started forgetting the Almighty's creation which was myself
I neither looked left, nor looked right
Held the head up, firm and tight
The sole focus on myself brought a high tide and new light

The wind was refreshing, the vibrancy came from within
External simulators were nothing but just a running away from myself game
A hero lied inside me
I was born to feed it till I was called back
I was not born to allow it to die by getting overwhelmed by the heroics of others
Everyone had their own hero, everyone had their in themselves, so did I

I decreased the inclination, I straightened my back up
I pulled up my socks, had a deep long look into my eyes
The spirit and the energy all lied buried inside
It was time to lit up the lost flame
For ships are safe in harbour, but that is not what ships are for
The voyage began, my ship started cutting across the waves back and forth
Their rumbling was a deep pleasing sound
It was a sound never heard before, it was a sound so magnificent
It was a sound of my confidence, sound of my vigour and courage
I could see and hear them rumble
In the rumble, I could see the reflection of my hidden self
It was just a spur of self created moment which took me to change
I promised to always be a life partner to it and never to avoid such a positive change
Oh I left the old bedsheet and pillow for another day
I met myself, it made me, my life, my day.

The picture is of the campus of Gujarat National Law University clicked in August 2013. Simple in depiction, the picture speaks for itself. The first three paragraphs refer to the lower half of the picture, where the problem starts. The last four to the upper half where one should head on. A very Happy Sixty Ninth Independence Day to all the fellow Indians across the globe. The author can be reached herehere and here.