Naina...

To know there is a person who knows everything about you. Who knows your deepest fears, the pain that was born in the dark and never saw light...till now, who knows your crushed dreams...to feel such lightness...weightlessness...

Like the tumour that had been growing in you, has been cut, removed.

To give your hurt, your fears, your broken dreams-a voice. To thread them into words and to have them turned into a garland of sweet-smelling flowers, by a gentle hand, a loving soul...like walking into bright sunshine.

A Literate Passion-II

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book...or you take a trip...and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."  

— Anaïs Nin.

*****

"And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world."

— Anaïs Nin

A Literate Passion-I

"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"Do you know what I would answer to someone who asked me for a description of myself, in a hurry?

This: For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark--my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become an exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking--passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still...only a Woman!"

— Anaïs Nin

Criminals...

Our shadows kiss, passionately.

But we stay away, aloof, fearful and separated; scared to let the other close.

Snow Clad Mountains...

I find it confusing how men and women take months and years to say those three words to the woman/man they are in a relationship with. Like really, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years and still no ata pata of "I love you"!


But you go have an arranged marriage, and lo! Your woman will confess how much she loves you, right on the first day of your honeymoon and your man will tell you he fell in love with you the very first day he saw you when you came through the kitchen with a tray of tea and biscuits in your hand.

Huh?


*****
A friend recently put up this status on Gtalk: "Sincerity is everything! If you learn to fake it...rest everything is easy".


And another one actually seems to be following the advice.


I wonder if it's really easy...I am sure happiness is not.


*****
Some days back I was travelling with two families, and one of the uncles asked us for names for their new dog. And everyone started with snowy, jenny, julie, tasha etc etc...you know the typical doggie names.


And I was about to suggest something on the similar lines and then I heard everyone and I stopped. Why do we always give Christian names to our pets?


I mean, most of them people treat their pets like their kids, so while we don't name our kids Freddie or George, or Patricia or Elizabeth, why our pets?


I think if I get a dog, I'll name him something Indian. Though I don't know what. Being the Anglophile that I am, I always thought I'd name my dog something like Shakespeare. But let's see, how does Chintu sound?


"Chintu come here!", "Chintu, jao newspaper leke aao!" and, "Chintu! Stop flirting with Betty!" Betty will obviously be the neighbour's dog who'll be eying my handsome dog.


Chintu sounds nice eh? I think till I find a new name, Chintu it is!


You know what, I think this naming business is quite fun! You should all send your dogs and kids to me for names. And I won't even charge you, promise!

Red Riding Hood...

The road to perfection is a long one, almost never-ending.

And when you reach the end, you die.

Love Me...

"One thing we do know for certain is that the body is the place where each of us lives, and the place where each of us will die: our body will always, in the end, betray us."

Beauty is a $160 billion-a-year global industry. The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become a new religion.

We live in a society that celebrates and iconises youth, where the old, the aesthetically average and the fat seem to have been erased from the pages of our glossy magazines, advertising posters and television screens.

The promise of bodily improvement is fuelled by advertising campaigns and a commercially-driven Western media, reflecting an increasingly narrow palette of beauty. The modern Caucasian beauty ideal has been packaged and exported globally, and just as surgical operations to 'Westernise' oriental eyes have become increasingly popular, so the beauty standard has become increasingly prescriptive. In Africa the use of skin-lightening and hair-straightening products is widespread. In South America women have operations that bring them eerily close to the Barbie doll ideal, and blonde-haired models grace the covers of most magazines. Anorexia is on the increase in Japan, and in China, beauty pageants, once banned as 'spiritual pollution', are now held across the country.


'Westernising' the human body has become a new form of globalisation, with 'Beauty' becoming a homogenous brand. The more rigorously our vision is trained to appreciate the artificial, the more industries benefit. The current standard of beauty feeds the fashion, cosmetics, diet, medical and entertainment industries, with the homogenisation of appearance becoming part of an increasingly globalised consumer culture.

But who creates this culture? However much we may confidently point the finger at certain industries, we can't deny our own tacit, albeit culturally conditioned, involvement. Like it or not, we are judged, and judge, by appearance. Perhaps we are obsessed with the way our own bodies look because we know how instinctively judgemental we are of the bodies that we look at.

A recent scientific study reported that we make decisions about the attractiveness of people we meet in the space of 150 milliseconds. This superficial appraisal has profound implications. Those we consider most beautiful not only find sexual partners more readily but studies also show they get better jobs and more lenient treatment in court.


We have created a world in which there are enormous social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties attached to the way we look. Can any of us honestly say, 'I don't want to be attractive'? Don't we all want to be loved? But have we been brainwashed into believing that in order to be loved we need smaller noses, bigger breasts, tighter skin, longer legs, flatter stomachs and to appear ever youthful? Where does it end?

The body has, in a sense, become just another consumer purchase. Everyone can, in the spirit of our age, go shopping for bodily transformation. Banks now offer loans for plastic surgery. American families with annual incomes under $25,000 account for 30 per cent of all cosmetic surgery patients. Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education.

As our role models become ever younger and more idealised, we are so afraid of aging that the quest for youthful preservation generates an almost pathological obsession with our bodies. As we align our sense of self-worth with self-image, the psychological and emotional consequences are tortuous. The one thing we do know for certain is that our body will always, in the end, betray us.

Check out the website: LoveMe.

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