Limitless...

If you're bored this week, watch Limitless.

Broken Women...

Is buying sex a better way to help Cambodian women than buying a T-shirt?

Read the comments too.

What's the way out?

And So It Is...

Opium...

You know you're are truly addicted to something, when you can't sleep without having/doing it.

In my case it's tea. I was busy the entire day today and didn't get time to have my evening chai. I come home tired and exhausted and collapse in bed, then toss and turn in bed for 1 hour and finally, give up. At 12 am, I go make myself tea.

I don't know if I can be saved, and further, if I want to be saved, which is scarier. 

The Girl With Smiles...

Divya,

I can't write beautiful poems like you do, but I just wanted to say this: You always wanted to help people, save someone, and you should know that you have already, atleast one, by way of your friendship. Thank you for being there for me, thank you for always being so strong and courageous and kind and in turn being an inspiration for me. Thank you, for just being.

Wish you love, happiness, success, good friendships, health, wealth and peace.

Happy birthday :)


Love,
A

Clipped Wings...

I am scared of being caught. Scared of being put in a pigeon-hole. Scared of someone telling me, you can't do this. I hate that. I can do anything. I want to believe that.


Friends often make fun of me when I tell them I am claustrophobic. I don't like small cramped places. Small rooms. The first time I heard about Vaishno-devi, I was scared and amazed. There's a small hole you need to pass through to enter the innermost chamber, and that to me seemed impossible. Every time someone talked about it, I saw myself stuck in it, always. As a kid, and this is funny, I believed, ardently so, that I was some sort of an angel (well, not like a nice person, but someone who could fly) and that I had come to earth for some reason and having done my job, one day, I would fly back to wherever I came from (Yep, stories, stories, I always loved listening to them and making up my own). I once dreamt in college that I could fly. I rose above the ground, very ethereal, and flew away from the living room window, like I was a light bird and my dad was trying to hold me back, like a kid who is trying to save a balloon that has escaped from its grasp. I told this to my family once, and we all laughed at how silly it was. Why am I so scared of being caught? What is all this struggle about?


I love windows, big windows; they represent freedom, an escape. As long as there's a window in the room, nothing can keep you tied down and helpless and locked. You can always flee.


I think I am running away from me. I think I am struggling to be free from my own grip.


There are so many things I want to do, and the only thing that's stopping me is, perhaps, me.  

Unbuttoned & Attentive Red Lips...

Throughout history, women have been depicted in great works of art. There’s the Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, Virgin Mary and even the Statue of Liberty. One thing they had in common: They were all the vision of perfection through the eyes of a man. “Society has a problem with female nudity when it is not . . . ”—Badu pauses to get her words together; she wants this point to be very clear—“. . . when it is not packaged for the consumption of male entertainment. Then it becomes confusing.”

(Source)

True enough, womanly beauty has always been depicted and painted and poetised and talked about in terms that would appeal to men. You'll argue that beauty's whole purpose is to appeal to and attract the opposite sex, for a whole lot of evolutionary reasons. And fine, I understand the whole science behind "attraction". But we have been so brainwashed by what "men" find attractive in women, that we, women, have forgotten what we find attractive in us. We have come to see woman's beauty only through the male perspective. We don't understand beauty any way else. And everything from hair shampoo to foot crack cream is sold with a promise that it would make us women beautiful to men.


Ask me and I would talk about a woman's slender neck. Those delicate shoulders, those striking collarbones, the hollows at the base of her throat, the foot arch. I love curvy feet or then shapely calves or even a beautiful navel.


Why aren't there any women artists, women poets, women writers, women sculptors showing us what feminine beauty means to them? Has no one ever found it necessary to find out what women find beautiful about themselves?


Is a woman beautiful only if men find her beautiful?