The Silence of My Voice

I found my time with myself over the years extremely edifying. Half-pint trips to cafes, the movies, the book shops, or even the local nursery lady for a cup of tea. Allowing yourself the time to cognize all that only merely floated through your mind amidst your dreadful industriousness tends make you feel freer, I feel. Of course, some esprit de corps is delightful, but once I started taking myself all over the city, I realised I wasn't appreciating my own presence enough. It's an unnoticeably tiny part of it, but it makes you comprehend the need for a lot of us to travel to places alone, because it's not the newness of an alien city you're trying to discover. Contemplation, and perusal of self is key. I've iterated this in one of the Blogmases - everyone should live alone once. As social animals, there's nothing more discomforting, and challenging than to accept your own company. I reckon, maybe that's why humans came up with the concept of gallivanting, i...

Hello. For everyone who is still under the perception that the amendment is right in its place, and the people who, or whose parents were born before 1987, are safe, then riddle me this -  Imagine me to be belonging to a Muslim family in a rural setup. The kind where there's hardly any electricity, infrastructure, facilities. The kind where babies are still delivered by untrained, or uneducated doulas - but you get the picture. No hospitals or infrastructure means no birth certificates. No birth certificates means no proof of "ancestry", or citizenship. What happens to that Muslim family? Better yet, is that family, in this moment even aware of what's coming for them? This is just one scenario. I can hypothesise multiple others. So, somewhere, in the back of your mind, store it - people are out there in nipping cold, not for kicks. And, the places where the temperature isn't dropping, the circumstances have turned the air arctic. I was at India Gate,...

Don't obliterate the memory of you being someone you'll never again be. The smallest of things have you gaping wide open, feeling all that air gush through you. But don't forget the person you were when you won something for the first time, no matter how significant or not it was. When you realised what you were meant to be doing with your life. When you felt giddy from finally realising what made you passionate about something. When you had your first kiss. When you slept next to someone for the first time. When you were there holding your best friends' hair back while they threw up all the remnants of all their heartbreaks ever. When no one ever told you why you had to go through with certain things; just that you had to. When you knew you were about the make a wrong decision, but you made it anyway cause you wanted some grave mistakes in your story to be told. When you promised yourself to never post that poem ever for the world to read, but you did i...

Everyone should live alone in their life once. All of us should once in life be unattended to, and isolated from human touch. Distance, I've realised teaches you lessons faster than even deprivation. Distance yourself from everything you've known all your life. It'll tutor you well to know how to really live for yourself. And there's a stark difference between living selfishly and living for yourself. We're social animals. Living alone or away just prods that button harder than anything else. We all try to recreate familiarities wherever we go. All that it does is puts us opposite more people than ever in our lives. It's a little shaky at first; though we get used to it. There's a certain novelty in opening yourself up to someone new so often. I feel it gets you more in touch with yourself. After a point, we're all going to question if our own introductions really are in tandem of how we verily are. It takes awhile, though, to really learn to be a plea...

Hello. It's Day Twenty One. Four Days to go. The year is just shy of almost a week from being over. No. No sharing resolution talk. And it's funny how most people resort to resolutions to bring about change they need in life only around new year. It isn't as if we live a programmed life so it's acceptable to choose one day and burden it with all you want to change in your life. Life happens all year around. It might be a yearly cleansing routine of oneself for some people, if that makes any sense. And, I know a few people who diligently follow their resolutions through to the end, and on top of that plan out what they want to achieve for themselves in the coming year. That's planning and resolving.  And the main criteria about resolutions is to understand that if life taking place takes time, then so does the changes you want to make to it. It's not an overnight process. Hang on a bit. And decide to your level best what is not good, but necessary for you. ...

Hello. It's Day Thirteen. Every time I go out for a vacation, or a getaway, my first feeling is of thrill. I like arriving someplace new. Where you know close to nothing about everything. Even a few hill stations I've visited multiple times, I've had to hustle against every fibre to leave certain nooks untouched so that I could come back, tasting the familiarity, yet titillating for the new. But it's not for too long before the need to return hits me, or the elation to barge in somewhere new sinks in. I've been very restless about being in new places. No place other than Delhi felt like home, neither did it make me fall so irrevocably in love with itself as Delhi did. I came a lot close to loving Dalhousie, just all the same, but Delhi calls to me at an incomprehensible primal level. I would occasionally presume that one is bound to love the city they grow up in. Unless it's in the wilderness of Chhattisgarh - then you don't love home. I dropped anchor i...

"Y ou are, at once, both the quiet and the confusion of my heart." – Franz Kafka I had to only close my eyes, and listen to the waves galore. The raised wall, separated me from the quaint water, as I walked the other side, mapping the circumference. The whiff of damp sand, and the salty water kick me back to the times when this used to be my home.  I remember the nights I've spent beside you, adoring your beauty, your sound as you convulsed a million times in your own folds, deep in sleep. I'd walk by you. You'd laugh as I scribbled on you. You always let it stay. You'd never smudge my identity, you let me be. Sometimes I'd sketch you, but you'd never stay still, always laughing, making strange faces. I wrote you numerous letters while being apart. I don't know if you ever received them. I never forgot you. My nights which have passed beside you are etched in my memory. Out of all the places I've been to, to make memories, you...