Marriage-Old Testimony

Marriage is a character
you play in a carnival of cliff hangers
you are sought for slavery,
you are the dwarf in the pictures
made to wear spineless stilettos.

Marriage is a question
answers ail to escape from your mouth
with choices that have no chance
you become the woman
behind the successful man
is there anyone telling on you?

May Rain

On a rainy day once, time stood still

as the leaves clung to brown branches

we wrote poems on each other's lips

and drank from the chalice of our mouths.

In those days I wore purple

they said it will bring luck

Did it? I wonder.

In those days, lies cheated my tongue

writing fables that did not have a Cinderella

while I lost my shoe

In those days wet mud stuck on the soles

left brown trails along the pavement

those footprints don't live there anymore.

The Feminist's Love Letter

I have something to tell you today, my love. I don't know you and as I sit back to write this for you I wonder where you will be? What you would be doing at this time? What would be your name? And will you be as boring as me and maybe even brash! A lover of solitude,books and tea! And Plath!
This letter is a wistful confession,one I thought I would never write. I don't know if we have ever met and if yes when? Did we bother to look at each other or were we too callous to pass by without taking note. Don't know if you are my friend or perhaps an acquaintance. Although that gives me cold feet the thought of ever walking into you. Don't know if you will appreciate the extra kilos I wear and my shorter hair that bore the brunt of a scissor when I discovered the first fine line around my left eye. The thought of wearing my age proudly on my sleeves gives me sleepless nights for you might just not like the 'plain Jane' I am. Don't know if you will love me with the fifteen grey hair I have that now gleam through the black mane in a copper brown!

Acts of Everyday Kindness for the Enviornment

The other day someone pulled a joke on me for not having a pet. Keeping an animal at home and tending to its needs is 'animal activism' for some. But the truth is I am allergic to animal fur and an animal anywhere in my vicinity can trigger a sneeze more rapid than the rounds of a machine gun. That's why most of the times when a dog or cat petted at a home I am paying visit to, comes near me I pretend to have a fear for animals and try to shoo it away.

What embarrasses and irritates me more is the fact that these alleged activists who claim to be saviors are the direct reason for the killing of a lot of animals, butchered every year for food and fur. I recently happened to visit KFC, for the very first time and could see people gorging on chicken and other meat products sold there without any apologies. Don't know what kind of an irony is it? Saving four or five animals in your lifetime or maybe a few more by petting them at home and killing hundreds to feed your gastronomic gullibility isn't in anyway a step towards saving the fauna! The same holds true for the incessant cutting and destruction of trees and plants for food and furniture and such nubile necessities. While I turned a plant eater long ago, I knowingly have made sure that I do my bit for the environment everyday. 

Another Year passes By (2013)

It was a red-letter year for me. Perhaps the beginning in itself was so momentous that no other firework could have made it more illustrious. One more candle added to that cake and more learning lessons I have to add to this post. Don't know if anyone will bother to take a read, anyone other than me or will this just be another diary entry. After all, even my blog has a new name, for this space now just seems like a diary to me. The pages of which I often flip in times of boredom or on one of those burdensome days when all I want is to close my eyes and melt into the morning mist. Ah! Life! Being a woman is a serious business! One of the most important lessons that came back to me this year.

Business Sutra by Devdutt Pattnaik

Title: Business Sutra: A Very Indian Approach to Management
Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
Publisher: Aleph Books
ISBN: 978-81-923280-7-2
Genre: Non-Fiction, Management, Mythology
Pages: 437

Picking up a book written by an author who calls him the Chief Belief officer was a first timer.
And I was wondering what could a once doctor turned thinker turned an author could offer. Since business in an interesting area of exploration and Vedas and holy books from other religions than what I follow have always kept me hooked, this was a heady concoction that did keep me interested until the end.  Reading the book was like turning the pages of a moral science book, but not that redundant. There were some ideals that didn't support the stories they were trying to talk of, but then most of them were ethics one can follow in real life too. Like the best one in the lot was "If ambition is the force contentment is the counterforce. Enjoying what you have is the key and greed would only dash the ambitions, never drive them.
The other ideals I loved were as follows:

A Sold Out Idea

I have worn tens of hats before having met her. But never in my life did I imagine that the eleventh hat would come with a feather. Alright, I was aware of what the dictionary had to say about an entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, but then as they say to taste how cold the water is, you got to get into it.  In my graduation days, entrepreneurship  development was a compulsory minor subject that we passed as a last minute ritual to garner good grades. Other than the books on entrepreneurship, that I once read as leisurely as Chacha Chaudhary comics, business of any kind was rocket science for me.

Until one day on a cold December night, while dallying around my monday assignments, I got a call. For the first two times, I didn't bother to show any signs of euphoria towards that phone call. Although the third time, something ramified my head and I got up to answer to a vivacious Whitney Houston crooning in chorus.