The Rebelle blog

आपण आपला आनंद दुसऱ्यांमध्ये का म्हणून आणि किती दिवस शोधत राहायचा? सगळं माहिती असतं डोक्याला, मनाला, बुद्धीला तरी सुद्धा आपण उगाच भावनांच्या खेळात अडकतो. मी इतके दिवस तुझ्याशी नीट वागले, तुझं सगळं म्हणणं ऐकून घेतलं म्हणून तू सुद्धा माझ्यासोबत नीट वागलास. आता तुझ्या मनाप्रमाणे हव्या तशा गोष्टी घडत नाही म्हणून तू रुसवे- फुगवे करायला लागला आहेस! तिच्याशी मी तुझ्यासाठी बोलत नाही हा तुझा आरोप. इतक्या नानाविध पद्धतीने तुला समजावण्याचा प्रयत्न केला मी गेली दोन-अडीच वर्षे, पण सर्व उथळ पाण्यात वाहून गेलं. आता तिच्याशी मी बोलायला तयार नाही आणि ती तुझ्याशी, तर तू माझ्यासोबत बोलणं टाकलंस. ठीक आहे. तुझ्या येण्याआधी सुद्धा मी जगत होते आणि खूप चांगल्या पद्धतीने, उत्तम आरोग्यात होते. तुझ्या नसण्याने माझ्या आयुष्यात थोडे दिवस एखादी पोकळी निर्माण होईल पण ती भरून देखील जाईल. मी उगाच तुझ्या जाण्याने कोलमडून जाईन असं तुला वाटत असेल तर अजिबात नाही. एवढा अधिकार नाही दिला मी तुला माझ्या आयुष्यात, किंबहुना तो कुणालाच नाही आणि कधी देणार सुद्धा नाही. खूप रडले मी तुझ्यासोबत असताना आणि आता तर मला फक्त त्या...

 ...Country roads,  take me home  To the place I belong! I am crooning to Olivia Newton- John singing this lovely, understated melody from the Studio Ghibli movie 'Whisper of the Heart.' I watched it one slow summer night as I was lying low with self-doubt and an extreme dip into my self-esteem. What a saver it turned out to be! I resonated with Shizuku, her love for reading and writing and struggling to fit in the ideas of how everyone wanted her to be. How strange that age is truly just a number, and anybody can feel vulnerable yet derive strength from such visually striking stories. Coming of age is just a phenomenon and we can do so at any point in our lives.  So enthralled was I with the viewing that I rewatched it a couple of days later with another young friend. The feeling remained the same, filled with awe and a resonance with her discoveries. I became a little girl once again and relished the things that made me, ME. Sometimes it takes not people but a work...

"कह रहा है शोर-ए-दरिया से समुंदर का सुकूत  जिस का जितना ज़र्फ़ है उतना ही वो ख़ामोश है ।" पिछले कुछ दिनों से मैंने खुद के बारे में यह जाना के कितनी आसानी से मैं लोगोंको माफ़ कर देती हूँ।  और, कितनी आसानी से वह वापिस मेरे जिंदगी में शामिल भी हो जाते हैं।  पर, फिर वह पहले जैसी बात नहीं रहती। अब हम बातें तो कर लेते हैं, पर उनमें वह विश्वास नहीं रहा जो पहले था। ऐसा क्यों होता है, हम इंसानो के साथ? इतना भरोसा, इतनी इज्जत जिन्हे हम देते हैं वह किसी बात पर हमसे इतनी बेरुख़ी से पेश क्यूँ आते हैं? ख़ैर, मैंने काफी सोच लिया इस बात पर अब।  बस मसला हमारी जिंदगी में यह हैं की हम बहुत ज्यादा छूट दे देते हैं लोगों को हमें चोट पहुंचाने की। हम उन्हें इतना हक़ दे देते हैं की वह हमें बाद में कुचल दे अपने शब्दों से, अपने बर्ताव से, अपने रूखेपन से।  मुझे वासिम बरेलवी साहब का एक शेर इस वक़्त के लिए काफी मुनासिब लगता हैं--  'तुम गिराने में लगे थे, तुमने सोचा ही नहीं, मैं गिरा तो मसला बनकर खड़ा हो जाऊंगा।' हम तो सभी को अपना लेते हैं जो भी हमारी राहों में जुड़ते जाते हैं। साथ मिलकर, बैठकर...

आज मी मोकळा श्वास घेतला. इतके दिवस जे दडपण होतं, ते निवळलं. मनात दुःखाची एक रुंद दरी निर्माण झाली होती ती आज बुजली. किती किती त्रास करून घेतला मी स्वतःला, उगाच मनाला निरर्थक क्लेश दिला. बोलणं महत्वाचं, कुठल्याही आणि सगळ्या परिस्थितीत.  आपल्या अवतीभवती इतकी माणसं सतत रुंजी घालत असतात, त्यांचे विचार, त्यांचं वागणं आपण स्वतःवर घेतो. त्यानुसार आपण आपल्या भावनांना मोकळीक देतो आणि क्वचित अवचित घोळत बसतो आतल्या आत. आज, खऱ्या अर्थाने माझं मन शांत आहे. फक्त हळुवार फुंकर हवी होती मायेची, जी मी स्वतःला देत नव्हते. इतकं इतरांना देण्यामागे आपण लागतो कि, स्वतःला स्वतःकडून खूप काही हवं असतं हेच विसरतो! पण हा सगळा विचारांचा गुंता आज मी सोडवला आहे.    आणि, याला आता परत थारा नाही.  किती सुंदर दिवस आहेत, फुलण्याचे! उगाच कोमेजून कळीतच अस्तित्व मिटवत होते. बहर असून सुद्धा ढगांना बघून विजेला घाबरत होते. हसण्याचे इतके क्षण आहेत, आणि मी दुःखाला कुरवाळत बसले. आता मोकळा श्वास आणि स्वतःच्या पंखाना थोडं अजून बळ देण्याकरिता घेतलेली ही उंच भरारी!

....find balance and keep the circle flowing!  I woke up today to find myself entirely unable to cope up with the change in weather after having spent the last few days transitioning between different places. That feeling of being lost, and not able to pin a certain emotion as to how I really felt pushed me into a deeper abyss of chaos. My mind was reeling with a thousand clumsy thoughts of not belonging to anywhere whereas I wanted to, so badly.  Come evening, and I unleashed my chaos on to a paper with a yellow paint. Strangely it felt so calm and familiar as I kept going around in circles with the paint brush. The swirls kept moving around in all directions even as my mind kept wandering between people and their stories and my own unfinished conversations with them. I took to writing in my diary everything that happened over the past few days and yet as I went through some pages, I felt like an outsider getting to know little details from a stranger's life. I have had this ...

It's a blur since a few days, once again. I am home!  There have been good things and bad, and events that surprised me out of nowhere. I hadn't anticipated knowing and learning so much in the past few days of being back here. Mostly, the realization of being so conversant with my thoughts again has changed how I feel here. All it takes is a slow Sunday to reflect upon everything that's happening.  More than a week ago, time seemed to loom ahead in an expansive quantity. Now that I am writing here, I realise how much of it I have squandered. We always ponder and regret but never enjoy when we are present in the moment. Old habits die hard. As Simone De Beauvoir once wrote:  I'm not tragic these days, I don't weep, but I feel alone, bewildered, far from you, far from everything — nothing has any meaning. I feel this departure from my old self. I am self-reminiscing the old times and me in it but would not like to continue doing so. Yet, I think about it constantly si...

It's been about 20 days that I am here. Every day that I look back on confuses me ever  more. Is everything happening because it was meant to be Or I do possess some hold over events in the manner in which they are happening?! It's been a rigorous few weeks in terms of coping up with people, their expectations and the gradual process of falling into someone else's thinking. I find sanity in moments of happiness that are sporadic. I find myself questioning the reasons of being here and am unable to justify them, even in my own head.  The newness of being has transitioned into numbness of being. I find myself searching for answers that have no questions. My heart is stressed even more than my mind is. There is a vacuum in my thoughts and my ever-so-optimistic self is hiding behind this vacuum. The emptiness that stares at me everyday is drowning me into an abyss of misery and anguish. The days are spiralling into a fall that I  fear is going to impact me far worse than my m...

Today was a day of major realization about some missed opportunities. I felt terribly miserable even as I told myself to look at the other things. It prompted me to work out in another direction which I am now quite hopeful about. Did I really take some things for granted in the past two months? I did and I know it. How do I make myself not think too much about it? No clue but hopefully not let my mind wander towards these thoughts. It's quite silly as I look back and keep going towards the incidents in the recent past. And yet, only yesterday did I feel so content and calm over having a long luncheon conversation with my friend. We met for the first time since the pandemic shut us inside our homes. It felt so surreal to be able to sit in a restaurant with people, high voices, background music, laughter and occasional interruptions of new arrivals through the door. Almost like the world had never stopped.  I indulged myself in some material happiness as I bought a couple of books a...

Today is the kind of Sunday when I am too drunk on happiness and on music! All it takes for the heart to be happy is a memory and a warm embrace of love we feel for people and everything around us. This peppy cheer is keeping my spirits high and there is a kind of मदहोशी all around. How happy do I feel! And, I am not going to worry about it being impermanent. Something has changed inside me.  I feel like flying high and away, over the clouds and see the world beneath my wings over a swooping glance! My mind is lost in thoughts as I look back over the years and yet there are butterflies in my stomach about the future. I feel like my younger self from last decade when life was so full of things to explore, the world around me was huge and the eagerness to see it all made it so exciting. Every day was a new experience and I was lost in it, trying to find ways to go more deeper in and it felt like I was everywhere. I remember the laughter and tears, the madness and crazy adventure...

2022 is here and I am still writing, although not as regularly as I used to unlike a few years ago. I do not know whether I should attribute my lack of writing to work, other mediums of expression like Instagram or indifference to documenting my thoughts. I still maintain a diary and write in it but how the notes in it have changed over the past few years. As I succumbed to the age old system of being comfortable in my job, I have since given up on a lot of things that were a strong and inherent part of my life.  I am ageing now, being a tad too old to ponder over every single emotion and yet I find myself morose and cheerless having abandoned my ambitious plans. I suppose it's going to be easy, blaming failures and unfulfilled obligations and goals on this self imposed restriction over the past two years. I feel like time is indeed running through my hands before I can even comprehend about the things I wish to do and people I want with me. What a strange longing!  Today also...

I have made a new friend and we have been talking a lot lately on varied topics. Today we succumbed to nostalgia and went into the most animated conversation I have had in recent times. This thought touched my mind about how I fall easily into a candid confession with people I trust. Whether I do it because I have this propensity to disclose everything that's on my mind or whether I do it because I distrust my mind, is something I am not going to ponder too much upon! Not without first writing about it. It's very strange but not really difficult to think about how I have been penning down thoughts here to a blind world, people that I can't see and of course, who don't know me in person. At least, the ones who do also know that I could write here and then also still be afflicted with my emotions. What makes us write to a faceless crowd on the internet? Is it the freeing of fear where we simply exist and not feel ashamed to bare it all? I clearly remember how I began writ...

It's been a while to have engaged with my thoughts here. The humdrum of life and tapping keys here finally comes together again today on a Saturday. As I kept searching for a journal to pen down my thoughts, a look at the calendar took me back in time. I went through a meeting with my friends after a long year since the pandemic forced us down to be isolated. And then, last night I had a rather surreal dream where I met one of my oldest friends since college and it was such an exuberant meet where she appeared out of sight somehow. Then, came another friend that I just don't get to talk to anymore. It's strange how my morning turned out to reminisce about them and then I read some beautiful verses on pale pink flowers dashing through my screen.  This summer is making me feel the serenity of time. The heat is almost unbearable but there's art and poetry to engulf with and I am leaving no stone unturned to get together my senses in enjoying these moments. Text conversatio...

I paid a visit to my old home. It was such a surreal feeling to step into the dust, the honeyed light filtering through the window panes, inhaling the slightly musty smell made me feel extremely nostalgic. This is probably the longest that I have stayed away from this home.  Can we ever give names to the homes we dwell in over the years? I always harbored this dream of naming the homes I would live in the future. They first began with Gulmohar as my love for the tree exceeds my natural admiration for it, then came Russian names I had read in Tolstoy books, years later I became more fascinated with regional trees. Every song I heard crooning ballads about a longing for home would make me want to feel the same. When I went on trips for more than a week, I would miss this home. Every house, street, public spaces would remind me of my hometown. Yet I haven't truly ventured out for long.  Yesterday, it felt just different to be back. The bookshelves, the overflowing consoles with b...

It all began with a wedding. My friend was getting married in Kerala over a lavish 5-day ceremony last year in May. I had never been to Kerala and jumped the opportunity to attend the wedding. I bought a one-way ticket, to begin with. Little did I know that not only my stay at the wedding festivities make me fall in love with the places I was at but make me want to travel more. I met two friends of the groom who were from Poland and on their very first visit to Kerala. We decided to travel together on the train; I was going to Kochi, they were going to Allepey. We hit it off really well through the journey, talking about poetry and cities, movies, and music. Midway through the train travel when the Ticket Collector approached them, they decided to abandon their Allepey plan and join me in staying at Kochi and exploring the city. Thus, began the Kochi sojourn for three girls without a map, without an itinerary. We landed up at 3pm at Kochi and went for a stroll around 5. The evenin...

The title has got nothing to do with the dessert and yet I choose it to describe a bad day today. It so happens that after spending too much time in a happy state much like a Gulabjaam/ Gulabjaamun drenched in the saccharine sweetness of life, the occasional bitter gourd pops up to help balance our sugar levels.  Sometimes fear can take away all self- confidence we have built up. It takes days and months and years of such sustained efforts to let go of our inhibitions and come up with a stronger persona that we reserve for everyone. Then there comes a day when this fear peels away our well-developed confidence. It is crazy how time is often the only constant when such a downfall takes place. Running away is out of the question too. Do people, the ones we consider our near and dear ones understand what we are going through? Would they know how hard we are trying to fight back this state of uncertainty? The chaos-filled in my head has distracted and disturbed the balance I soug...

It's a cold night. I am sitting by the window, and the house is alive with its sounds and smells. I bought some Champa flowers in the evening, promptly put one in my hair and then forgot about it. Just as I was thinking of putting on some music to relieve the drowsiness from the day, some other work has me distracted.  We are working on some wardrobe changes in the house. I promptly work on design software and show 3D images to my parents. They still trust and go with the word of the good old carpenter (Mestry) as we call him. While rethinking for the wardrobe, I realize the vast amount of old junk me and my Dad have harnessed over the years. His is from the late '70s and mine has been sitting there as beloved childhood treasure that includes books, magazines, toys, memorabilia in the form of medals and trophies. I remember what a source of pride it used to be to collect trophies for various achievements in school. Later as I grew up, during college times the sheen of tro...

I am sitting by the window in this computer lab, at 10 in the morning. Certain things never change. We get enamored and distracted by life and its extravaganza. As I think about what to write here because I do have a lot of things to share, I am taken back to days of summer and winter holidays when the thoughts from my head would find an easy outlet here. I could hardly contain my typing speed as I juggled to put everything on this screen. Lately, especially more in this year I have begun feeling a sense of loss about a lot of things that I did casually with an ease, perhaps, it mirrors my anxiety of not doing things too well. It's a certain reminder that things happen for the best no matter how hard we try to keep things organized and sorted. I always look at things from a very wide perspective or so I believe, and yet today morning as I sit here, there's a feeling of dread which threatens to change me. Can we ever get ourselves to become what the images in our head keep proje...

Finally, after a long, long time I'm writing here. Last weekend, I attended and volunteered at a four  day brilliant pop up exhibition of second-hand books at Twice Told at Cowrks in Worli. I met friends, fellow readers, and avid readers. My excitement and energy were all over the place as I interacted and had long conversations with people who devoured books like I do. We exchanged ideas and philosophies that ranged from Rumi, Sufi saints, Architecture to cities and urban planning. It was a sheer pleasure to spend my waking hours in the company of people who read and ruminate. This was about last weekend.  This weekend, because of the terrifying rain scare, I spent it indoors at home. There wasn't any electricity for a good part of the day, but I ended up reading. Went through newspapers and the book recommendations, reviews, also rearranged my shelves, took a look at Goodreads after a very long time. Realized that I hadn't updated it with any of my reads from this...

And, my long absence in March here made me long for April. Because somehow as I always feel and say, April transforms the mood magically. Something beautiful turns over and brings a vitality to the season. I don't mind the heat at all. My first Murakami is from a kind fellow reader with whom I connected after reading his short story revolving a cat. I immediately sensed my friend is a Murakami fan. And thus began my Murakami reading. For years, I have postponed reading Murakami under the pretext of doing it later.  ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ So, I wrote a year ago here and left the writeup as a draft. I am back now to this post after a year and let me see how I look at what I was writing back then.  I finished a couple more books by Murakami over the past year, indulged in passionate, euphoric talks of his writing style, appreciated his witty and sardonic remarks. Listened to Norwegian Wood more than I had ever...

Aging. Being in pain. Finishing. Rotting.              —Emmanuel Fournier Came across this on Poets-a-day on poets.org. I hadn't been on to this website for months until suddenly I started receiving the poems on my email. And, then I read another literary magazine in the morning, which celebrated the works of Vishnu Khare who recently passed away. I lamented abandoning my leisure days when I took refuge in poetry, esp, Hindi. It was about four years ago that on a December night I picked up some hindi literary magazines and was hooked on to their content from then on. I also wrote my first hindi poetry after a month of devouring poems by Chandrakant Devtale, Dhumil, Viren Dangwal, Anamika, Agyeya, Nida Nawaz and others. I distinctly remember being overwhelmed with the written word. I fervently copied their poetry in my little diary of quotations and from then on, I kept an art journal for all poems and literary verses that I read a...