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We are an interesting society…

We talk most about ‘mind’, read most about ‘soul’, but think most about…….‘body’!!!

…While an SMS like “there was a time when every man wanted his wife to look like Aishwarya…Now Aishwarya looks like every man’s wife” was circulating all over, it was beautiful to see Aish enjoying her motherhood-bliss; not allowing anything to take her attention away from her ‘little bundle of joy’!

Kudos to see a woman rising beyond the ordinary ‘I-will-prove-myself’ career-ambitions or ‘How-do-I-look’ vanity-traps!!!

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Well! The longest running organized-conspiracy of society has been…‘caging woman in her own body’! By writing poetry around her beauty, creating sculptures on her gorgeousness and painting portraits of ‘love for her’, we have reduced her to a set of ‘Vital-statistics’ with her self-esteem becoming directly proportional to being an ‘Object of Desire’ to someone else but herself!

As a result we have two kinds of woman…One who is in inferiority complex of not fitting into the society’s criteria of beauty, and one who has confidence due to scoring high on them! Although she may not realize it but in either case she is trapped! In the first case, her mind is blocked in what she lacks and in the second her mind is locked in what she has! And the result is same…Now she doesn’t have much mind-space left for her soul-searching…or enjoying what she actually enjoys!

Well! If Soul is God then Body is temple! So the body needs to be respected and restored but not to be held in exaggerated importance over what it preserves! It cannot forget that it is also a vehicle for the creators whose adobe it is…the Mind & Soul!

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Let’s let woman celebrate her womanhood…Live…Create…Experience whatever she values! After all! Humanity cannot unleash its true potential unless one half of it is freed of herself…and that too when it is the much-mentioned…better half!

PS: If you observe carefully, the same ‘body conspiracy’ is now getting extended to men! A whole cult has begun around male ‘body’, diverting his attention from much more that he can stand for!

Amitabh Bachchan isn’t my favorite actor (as if he cares!)…

My problem with him is that in every character he plays, ‘Amitabh –the person’ is visible…

But that’s precisely why I love Amitabh Bachchan … Not for the characters he has played, but for the one he has…!

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…Due to surgeries ever since the Coolie incident, Amitabh now has two urgent hernias in the lower abdomen which have swelled up dangerously. He counters the resultant sharp pains with a hernia belt…

…After an infection, to drain out acute peritonitis, 18 holes were made in his stomach. Muscles never recovered fully, so he can now run, jump, get up and sit down at only one-third of normal speed…

…While removing a lump on his neck, the nerves that hold up his shoulder muscle got cut. So now, he can’t raise his left arm. As he is a lefty so he has to support it with something even for eating! (the secret of his style of walking…with his left shoulder drooping)…

…He suffers from Myasthenia Gravis, a muscle dysfunctional disorder in which if your eye shuts it can’t open on its own and if opens can’t close on its own; you have to use toothpicks to open them and then hold them up! It has been dormant, and can reappear anytime…

…In an incident, a filmi bomb exploded in his hand! The left hand got melted, with nothing left of it. No fingers, no nails, no nothing. After years of treatment, his left-hand’s web still does not open to capacity and his index finger has become crooked…

…He gets light flashes on his right eye as his retina has come loose…He is asthmatic so needs an asthaline pump in his pocket…his leg injuries have pulverized his veins and valves so there is a circulation problem…His L4 and L5 in the lower spine are damaged…Uhhh!

When his medical reports went to an American doctor in New York for an opinion, he asked – “Is this guy still alive?”

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Well! My regular readers can guess my recent back-problem weighing on my mind…Yes! True! But the bigger problem is that when it hurts, I actually get…inferiority complex! I hate Amitabh Bachchan for doing this…for making our sufferings look so belittled!

…But that’s precisely why I love Amitabh Bachchan!

…Was driving on a ‘relatively less busy’ road, possibly attributed to the day when boys  rather stay at home than risk being the prospective victims of girls’ sisterly aspirations!

My teenager nephew (cousin’s son) was sitting beside me, and when FM played the next song, I said ‘Wow’…! It was my favorite song from the movie Maine Pyaar Kiya! MPK heralded an era! When it released, I was on the verge of entering teens…So for us, it almost shaped our very idea of love!

To us, love was more of a noun than a verb…! It was still a larger-than-life phenomenon…inspiring a sense of awe! It wasn’t all platonic, but the notion of romance was surely less physical and more poetic! You would invariably ‘also respect’ the one you would love… As a result, the journey to closeness was innocent and dignified! In short, people were less in a hurry…    

I said all this and then ended with saying… “You know…It was an era (although we are not that old) in which ‘when the hero would apply Iodex on heroine’s knee…he would keep his eyes closed’ (I was referring to a scene of MPK)”

He looked at me and said “Mama! Don’t mind! But I think you all were dumb…wasting time in unnecessary details!”

I said “But it was worth the wait!”

He said “And what if after all that wait, someone else would walk away with the girl!”

I spontaneously said “Then………we had another set of favorite songs for that situation!”

……He looked at me agape, and both of us burst into the loudest of laughs!!!

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The conversation taught both of us a lot…

Not just that ‘sensitivity is a function of time’ or ‘a generation gap does exist’ but that ‘the Best way to bridge such a gap is…to have a nice laugh!’ …not on the other person, or on yourself…but…on the Gap!

PS:I didn’t mean to generalize my notions for my whole generation! So, if anyone disagrees…I completely respect it!

She was a Japanese Weightlifter…who opted to carry 80-Kg! She took stock of her grip, looked at the rod, blinked her eyes slowly and……

Well! The pain in her wrist (as a result of the jerk) seemed so petty in comparison to the extent of it she was feeling inside!

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Just imagine…For four years, you work for a moment which lasts for hardly 3 seconds! For four years, you wake up early every morning, unaware of how many more went to sleep last night with the same dream! And after those four years, in a moment which is wasted by billions of people in taking a usual breath, you either make history or…become one!

Spectators sigh for a moment, fans for an hour and supporters for a day…leaving with you, 1400 odd more days of lonely battle between your own doubts and beliefs (that too if you feel you still have it in you…to have another go at it.) Well…That’s Olympics for you!

For us, it is just another program on one of the 200 channels that our DTH receives…for them, those five rings are all they have thought of ever since they could think! It is their moment-of-truth, when either they join the folklore of tomorrow or slip silently into a bottomless oblivion!

Well! It is amazing how…when you witness such innumerable scripts, unfolding in the vastness of this huge world…suddenly your own struggle starts to look so overrated!

Someone said it right…To put things in the right perspective, it is important to look beyond oneself!

There are very few stronger head-turners for most men than a sensuous piece of iron called – Cars! Although, as a boy from middle-class I could never relate fully to that fascination but then I can’t deny the phenomenon…

The other day, as I was talking to one of my newer-friends, a Cool new-kid-on-the-block arrived in the parking! He swooned over it for a while and then looked away (as if it was getting difficult for him to bear looking at it) and said… “I got to get one like that!”…

Strange are the ways of the world! Why can’t we appreciate what we don’t have…or can’t get? When we find a beautiful rose then we say “I wish my balcony had it”…when we come across a swanky house then we say “One day, I would build such!”…and when we see a pretty angelic face then we look at his/her partner and say “Damn Lucky Fellow!”…

…Whenever we see ‘beauty in its highest glory’ then why can’t we simply feel the bliss of witnessing its blossom… appreciate God’s aesthetic sense…and experience the vicarious pleasure of being born in its ‘life & times’!

Why can’t we sometimes ‘just admire’ things…without a desire to possess them?

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U know something?

A saint was crossing a town when he saw that a cow was grazing and a person was holding the rope tied around her neck…! Saint asked “Hey young man! You own the cow or the cow owns you?”…Man laughed at absurdity of the question and said “Of course I own the cow!”

Suddenly the saint hit man’s palm, and the moment he lost hold of the rope the cow started running away…and the man followed briskly to bring her back…!

Saint murmured “Strange! If he owns the cow then…the cow should run after him!”

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So true! When you possess somebody…actually… it’s you who gets possessed!

Sunday was my B’day!!!

The day when you suddenly rediscover your importance to the world…Or should I say, the world discovers it for time being! So here I was…ready for my 24 hours in the spotlight!

Which…ironically…Wasn’t to be!

After some wishing calls, while sitting on a chair, suddenly a sharp pain arose in my back and before I knew it, I was confined to bed for the whole day…lying there on my back!

It felt miserable! There was immense restlessness…regret on what caused it and exasperation on what it was causing…I mean after-all, it was costing me my day of the year…Was feeling what you call ‘dumped-by-destiny’!

But then… it suddenly occurred to me!

Years back, on the same day…I was lying on a hospital-bed as a just-born, next to my mom…! Then also, I was confined to a bed…But Boy! How calm it must have been, how serene…No complaints, no compunctions…So assured I was, so Complete!

So…what has changed in these years? Why this feeling now? Now…what is the difference?

Well! All is same, except that one thing which I have acquired along the journey – A notorious web-of-thoughts in my brain…that of ideas, ideologies, expectations and evaluations…! The invisible web called…‘Mind’!

Possibly, now I mind too much! While I should rather take a heart…in what I’ve got in between the two dates.

PS: Although it did not ease the pain but I felt better, realizing that I can write a blog on it.

Why do we need people to go away, to become dear to us…!

Looking at the frenzy created around death of a long-forgotten Superstar, I could not help but wonder why when people die…they suddenly become so special to us?

The reason is simple!

Because now…it is convenient to love them as they can’t generate any more reasons to hate, it is convenient to talk about them as they can’t intervene, it is convenient to speculate about them as they are not there to retaliate, it is convenient to declare conclusions about them as they are no more a part of the analysis!  

Now…We own them, their persona is at the mercy of our imagination, we have all the control on who we want them to be to us! While their life was a process, after death it becomes an event… and it is always more fun to narrate events than to describe processes!

The truth is…It takes a lot of guts to love people the way they are, so we rather choose to love our versions of them! And when they are no more, there are no diversions…now we can love them on our own terms!

You see…It is all about us!

As an Urdu couplet says…

“Itni nisbat hai tere khayaal se mujhko…Tu bhi aaye to khalal lagtaa hai!”

PS: The couplet means “I love thinking about you so much that even when you yourself come, it seems like an interruption!”