Endgame...

The spate of suicides we’re hearing about has added an edge to the current environment and I suppose the outpouring of emotion is also colored by our own exigencies.

Each of us is trying to rally on and believe that there is a swift end to the unreal world we exist in the now.

That there is a reason for this; from God’s wrath, Karma’s troth, Nature’s retribution and Conspiracy attribution.

Rationalizations we indulge in make sense to each of us uniquely based on our filters and perceptions.

Much as we’d like to extol our fatalistic and accepting virtues, mere mortals that we are rally against the eventuality of dying.

Among the most celebrated poems on death the one that stays with me is Dylan Thomas’s:

“Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Says much about our humble acquiescence!

We’re posting on social media about reaching out and being there for each other while trying to make sense of the suicides. I even received a call this morning from an ex colleague after a decade!

Kudos to the lovely gestures, here’s my two bit. I cannot swallow all the time, need to spit too. Well actually gargle. One of my loony friends believes that the expression of true love is not swallowing but gargling. So there you go.

While we’re passing judgments on SSR and lending a ear to those who may need it, let’s ask ourselves if we find it easy to reach out?

The dark night and the burden of its dead weight is the yoke my shoulders are insidiously granulating under

Desolate seems the landscape of morrow

Dying by the minute is the beacon of the lighthouse

Rally on you say and…why?

Walked a meter in my shoes have you?

Ever been the melted marshmallow in my s’more?

Judge if you must if it's cowardice or bravado…

I decide when my race is run

And with a slit of my wrist, the deed is done

Hello people… the above is NOT a avowal of intent NOR plea for sympathy, empathy, pathi and all that bull crap.

It’s an honest recant of how I feel sometimes and I’m not very sure of how many people have in certain times in their lives felt the same. 

Maybe my conviction was not very strong and that’s what stopped me or maybe I grew tired of my own drama and said to myself, ‘shake it off you little f*ck’ and perchance it’s my keeda that said, ‘oh but you have so much more havoc to wreak’. 

Playing out my funeral in my head has helped as well (I have cried such bitter tears for me in that coffin than anyone ever will for sure!) as I have imagined my parents and children’s countenances and ditched the grand plans.

Ah back to suicide, depression is an illness and let’s not discount that. Is it easy for someone to reach out to a friend or an acquaintance, may not be so. 

Have you been a friend who has been nonjudgmental, accepting and evoked a deep sense of faith and trust? 

Could I randomly call you with all that assails me? 

Will you call me when you’re in the dumps? Do you think I will hear and help? 

Will you feel foolish like I do? 

Are you afraid that you will be laughed at or worse a topic for gossip?

Does the admonishment or lecture you are likely to get stop you?

When your friend begins to isolate, rather than allowing your ego to chafe, maybe watch for other signals of depression and get them to accept medical help. 

Similar with us as individuals, when you recognize that you don’t have your game together, reach out to gossamer strings that bind your soul and towards professional help. 

It’s an illness like all other and if we can have no qualms about talking about a visit to the physician, why balk at an appointment with a psychologist/ psychiatrist.  

Finally, let’s stop passing judgement on the decisions people make, to live or die. To each his own.

Mine...

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I presented a book review.

The book I chose was Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ a book I read again for the fifth time and each time I find new meaning and takeaways.

I winged it like I normally do. Sigh! The universe however seemed to conspire in my favor  as I received decent feedback on the presentation.

Truth be told I’m a lazy f*ck. If I can get away with my apparent charm (sic!) or the apparent illusion of someone who’s got their game, I will.

I did spend some time on the speech draft and while I was writing it, a few hours before the presentation I was nervous (a rare occurrence) and worried that I wouldn’t do the book the justice it deserves.

Time to present and I do so with absolute joy, the abundance of which all else seems pallid and it did! For the 7 odd minutes I was in a state of pure euphoria and ecstasy.

Post the review, I got to hear that it was decent and was thanked. Which confounded me really, I didn’t do anything that stemmed from altruism, I did it for myself, for the absolute pleasure it gave me.

Books are my lifeblood, the gossamer strings that bind my soul and the juice that fuels my engine.

Ironic the choice of the book really. The Fountainhead is all about the individual over collectivism.

Posting below an excerpt from Howard Roark’s speech below:

“It had to be said: The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. I came here to be heard in the name of every man of independence still left in the world. I wanted to state my terms. I do not care to work or live on any others. My terms are: A man's RIGHT to exist for his own sake.”

The book review was what I did, for my own sake. Which got me thinking, in much of this drama called life we do things that resonate with us intrinsically. 

Yet we cloak it in a mantle of self-sacrifice and make it seem like we’re doing it for others.

Time to call out one’s bullshit, mine primarily.

I exist, for myself. Much of what I do is because it makes me happy. And I’m finally not ashamed to say it.

My choices on how my life should be and who needs to be in it stems from my need to feel fulfilled.

Within my core.

Fumble, stumble and crumble I will. But will find the faith that Christ’s doubting disciple lacked at first and discovered later.

Mine! and I claim it. Without apology.

Them Blemishes...

Growing old doesn’t plague me as much as growing up (not happening!) does. However, one must respect the law of gravity and what it does to one’s bodies.

I try not to look in the mirror often but when I do, the blemishes I’m developing on my face bother me.

Decided to check with my gynecologist who I was visiting for my hot flushes/ flashes and let me explain, not of the amorous kind, although these want me to tear off my clothes too!

Web MD: “Hot flashes are one of the most common signs of perimenopause, the years leading up to menopause. Intense heat starts in your chest and rises to your neck and head. Beads of sweat grow until perspiration run down your face. It’s a hot flash due to menopause, and it’s a loooong five minutes until it passes. Multiply that by 20 or 30 and you can call it a day.”

So my doctor grimly announces that it’s my genetics and perimenopause that affects the unbecoming blotches on the face and prescribes an anti-blemish cream. Hey Ho!

While I was applying it on my face after a shower a few minutes ago, the question popped, you’re working on eliminating the blots on the façade, what about those on your soul? 

Heaven knows there’s enough there to qualify for a many splendored speckled mosaic. Pun intended.

No seriously, why is the assiduity to the exterior exigent, while to the interior inconsequential. How am I working on refurbishing the innate quirks that desperately need redress. 

One of my multiple personalities is giggling like a meth addict while another has merely raised a lazy eyebrow languorously supine on a hammock, the other pushes the faith of my parents for answers and then there’s one who gently counsels.

The sully doesn’t define me, there’s room for improvement for sure and it may not be via enslavement, apathy or religion but needs to stem from the soul.

How I'm going to action the thought may well be the strength of my character (not from the theater of the absurd I hope) and the verisimilitude of my mettle. 

Blame-ish on me!

Know when to fold 'em...

Begrudged rumination is my bête noir, I swear. I’d rather flit through life blithesome or at least fake it till I make it. Sigh… the well laid plans of mice and men and all that jazz indeed.

Grand plans were and are explicitly not my savoir vivre. Darn the grand bit, them blasted plans have in perpetuum dwelt in the lower echelons of my peregrination.

Perchance it’s the fault in my stars or the genuine dope that the ruling Neptune of my Piscean star sign is farthest from the sun. Apt that. I’m equally removed from here and now.  

The current monomania is the desolate landscape, unrequited wasteland… to borrow brazenly from T S Elliot:

“I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”

Reiterates the everlasting trepidation that the prison bound by gossamer strands will be a forever Achilles heel. And what of that?

The lack of sentiment there and its paucity which demands the change that must occur seems like a strange blue hue of a celestial body of what children once believed to be made of cheese.

Yeah yeah I’m an aper and a shameless one at that.

So yeah… for once I’ve schemed a blueprint to this odyssey and the Greek goddess Moira decrees an ambush via a pathogen.

Downing white Moscato furtively is shoddy yet emboldens the pen I wield brazenly. Hic!

A tribute to Kenny Rogers and a lesson I’m ending this lachrymosal musing:

“You've got to know when to hold 'em

Know when to fold 'em

Know when to walk away

And know when to run

You never count your money

When you're sittin' at the table

There'll be time enough for countin'

When the dealin's done”

…hic!

Froggy Style...

So the furore over Priyanka and Unnao seems to have petered out and the brouhaha aborted. As is norm. Until the next Buzkashi is thrown into the field for the media and junta to drag around that is.

Opinions were strewn like a farmer sowing paddy and in Priyanka’s case, they were rather over shadowed by the end meted out to the perpetrators.

Of all the rinky-dink offered freer than condoms to sex workers, I’d like to sum my two-cents too!

I firmly believe that we tripped over ourselves in the rush to ‘allow’ our women privileges and forgot the poor bystander of a man holding lauda in hand wondering WTF.

I’m borrowing heavily from the paper published by Pennsylvania State University authored by Audra Hixson and Dr. Peggy Lorah, titled “Power and Privilege”.

A proverbial frog in a well has no awareness that it is in water because the water has always been there. It only notices the water when it is taken out of it, and then what it notices is the absence of the water, not its presence. (Spoiler alert! – the frog is the protagonist of this narrative)

We live in an environment that is infused with power and privilege where personal power often relates directly to levels of privilege. which we are unconscious of really, to us it’s the norm, it’s what was always done, what we know and is part of our DNA, pretty much like the frog! Take away the power and privilege and voila we flounder since we’re now made aware if its absence… it’s presence always goes unnoticed. Mais c'est comme ça.

Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they have done or failed to do. (Johnson, 2006, p. 21)

With this privilege comes personal power (did Spiderman same something along the same lines???) that has societal acceptance.

Power is better understood via familial and employment structures, parents have power over their children because they can set rules and dole out consequences and rewards regarding those rules. Like teachers over pupils and bosses over subordinates, husbands over wives ( largely) you get the drift.

We know that worldwide, approximately one in five women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape (UN Millennium Project, 2005). We also know that one in three will have been physically abused in some form, including beatings and the coercion to have sex (Heise, 1999).

I do not  have the statistics for women in India, I’d like to believe they are way higher.

The vast majority of these assaults are committed by men, a male in our society has power over any woman based on the reality that a woman knows that the perpetrator is likely to be male. A man may never assault or harm a woman, but the prevalence of violence against women by men automatically gives him power based on his gender leaving the woman less power as she is unable to  exercise the same freedoms as a man based on fear of being assaulted. Going out alone after dark is only one example of this dynamic.

Only rarely will a man go beyond acknowledging that women are disadvantaged to acknowledging that men have unearned advantage, or that unearned privilege has not been good for men's development as human beings, or for society's development, or that privilege systems might ever be challenged and changed. (McIntosh, 1998, p. 95)

Women are more likely to see domestic violence, workplace harassment, and wage discrimination as major barriers to their quality of life than men are owing heavily to the power and privilege associated by gender.

It may well be that a man is aware of a woman’s situation and yet might attribute it to her character rather than the environment she lives in.

-          She wore ‘revealing’ clothes and ‘asked’ for it

-          If a woman smokes, drinks, is gregarious: she’s giving signals that she’s game

Much of the privilege and power that men have over women in our culture today is unearned power. It isn’t just the man, a woman herself is the enemy of her own sex. Indian women largely support patriarchy and are brutally judgmental about their ilk.

To draw a conclusion, Milind Soman (sigh!)… ages ago when asked about the most definitive moment that changed the course of Indian society cited the advent of Satellite TV into the average ‘sitting duck’ Indian’s home that insidiously permeated and clawed into our psyche.

While I watched M.A.S.H and Remington Steele (sigh again!)… the Mangy world was enthralled by ‘Bold & Beautiful’ and ‘Santa Barbara’ as I imagine was, most of urban India.

Not to digress, but women of my generation began the advent into awareness… varying from career choices to sexuality and yet had to live with the truth that we were ‘underprivileged’ and  ‘powerless’ purely based on the fact that we had tits and a vag.

We grew daughters to whom we imparted in a convoluted and flawed manner that ‘you could be who you want to be’… if you followed certain ‘societal’ norms. A crying shame really.

Change is not like an orgasm, quick and fleeting. It’s a long drawn process much like foreplay.

Yes, it would be great if men recognized the ‘power and privilege’ they were born into by virtue of the phallus and testicles so as to enhance self-awareness of the bias.

More importantly it would be to educate the generation of boys yet to be men to share this inheritance with their women and for women to step away from ‘accepting their troth’ and believing that true freedom comes when we uplift each other, underwired bra fashion and abort froggy style!

Fail yours...

Three years ago we won the ICDC Debate contest of the Division in Toastmasters. Today, we were Runners up, which technically means that we lost.

So the sham philosopher in me preaches that the best learning arises from a loss. Damn I’m frikking ‘woke’ in that case considering that loss is my current posse.

But not. I’m a sore loser.

With things that matter. With the who that matter and the ‘it’ who matters.

So failure is my best teacher right… let me attempt to list down my learnings.

Life owes me nothing.

Irrespective of how much I invest, be it faith or emotion or sheer drudgery of chores… life dishes out mindlessly it seems, of what it deems fit.

Often quite the antithesis of my deepest desires.

Giving does not necessarily means that you will receive.

Patience does not translate into victory.

Love is not a lofty emotion that guarantees reciprocity.

This path you walk is solitary.

Effort no matter how deep and definite is not a formula for success.

And insidiously the desire to sink into the calm obscurity of defeat beckons invitingly.

Tentatively I test its tepid waters.

Oblivion’s embrace is welcoming, comforting.

Hamlet’s immortal question runs on loop in my head.

I want to shrug, like Ayn Rand’s Atlas.

The quagmire threatens to envelop.

Dimly in the distance as I flail I see beloved countenances of the pair that sired me, the pair that I begot and the pair that sustain me. My Alpha and Omega, unrequited.

From those murky, convoluted and turbulent waters emerges faith somehow…

That I’m a Phoenix… not Icarus.

I will emerge from the ashes and not burn.

That Scarlett was right… tomorrow is another day.

That the bane of my life are indeed it’s boon.

Faith as tested by Christ's famous disciple... is mine.

Fail, Falter, Fall... Fervently

Fall or autumn, as used by speakers of the English language to describe the season has thus far been for me an idea I had heard of and seen visuals of via media and not in person.

It has been a subject I romanticized about in my posts, poems and proselytizing eons ago without having the perspicacity of the real McCoy. 

Again a life lesson, that I have the tendency to shoot off my mouth on topics I have neither expertise or authority on. Sigh. Motor mouth. I could probably use this as an excuse for my bulk, it’s all those words that I’m forced to eat... and rapidly! Karma’s turnaround time is indecently rapid. 

The trees are pregnant with leaves in brilliant hues of red, yellow, pink, brown, maroon, mustard, purple, cerise, amber. Each trembling tentatively, I know not whether in anticipation or trepidation and my wild imagination demands that it’s the former.

As I tread on the kaleidoscopic carpet of dead leaves, my thoughts wander to the reason behind the season. 

By all accounts Fall is the beginning of the end, the harbinger of rot and decay, the living metaphor for death. 

Autumn is also the ‘Fall’ from grace, productivity, health, abundance and life itself. 

The wasting away sustenance and vibrancy of the spirit, the crumbling of set orders and the annihilation of existence. 

The end of the old order. 

With it, visions of the immediate future loom in 4D. 

Tomorrow’s sky is overcast with dark looming clouds and the sun fights a losing battle as it fights to permeate light through. 

Tomorrow looks lonely, desolate and desperate. 

Tomorrow sadness will be the cloak of comfort and no matter how merino the wool, I will be chilled to the bone. 

Tomorrow is the winter of my existence. 

I allow myself to wade through murky waters of self pity and melancholy and as I’m mired in the quandary of my own design. A state I could revel in like a pig rolling in muck. 

And when I’m depleted and quite frankly enervated by all the lugubriousness and thoroughly disgusted by the trajectory of my thoughts, chicken me berates self and I feel the Phoenix in my soul draw strength from the awareness that I may well be alone but I’m enough unto myself. 

I turn my gaze to the inevitable spring that must loom in the horizon, the hope that ‘springs’ eternal beckons gently and I allow myself the luxury of dreaming of a season that will bring a new version of me who, my fervent desire is, will be a better, refined and exceptional version of the current joke. 

“Spring drew on...and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that hope traversed them at night and left each morning brighter traces of her steps."

–Charlotte Brontë

I fail, falter, fall... fervently and I think that’s quite alright.