ONCE BITTEN, TWICE SHY

"Last Christmas", has been one of my all time favourite songs. I love the video, the lyrics, the rhythm and just everything about it. Yesterday I was just randomly listening to it when something struck me. It was this age 0ld idiom which comes in the lyrics of that song- once bitten, twice shy.
Very true, dont you think?

It is possible to really be naive again, when once we are bitten badly? I don't know. Does forgiveness and giving someone a second chance essentially mean the same thing? Come on, not many people can trust the same source of hurt or deceit a second time, can they? Being from a semi-christian background ( i will elaborate on that on a different post), I have been taught to forgive.God says, " Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us". I honestly feel confused. Am I just being a bad person when I refuse to trust again or is it just human? I look at my three year old cousin who has completely and absolutely refused to touch the candle ( Even when it is not burning!!) after she got a small burn around 6 or 7 months back. I feel like Arnie in "What's eating Gilbert Grape" taking his refusal to touch water and my refusal to give second chances.

May be it just the fear of taking risk. Rather, may be it is the subconscious fear of having to hold oneself responsible for all that could go wrong. Or may be it just being paranoid and shitty. A mistake is a mistake only the first time you make it. It will be a crime the next time. And here it will be a crime against oneself. It is almost suicide. If a person cheats you once, it is his mistake. If a person cheats you twice it is completely and totally your mistake. A fool is one who trusts strangers. A greater fool is the one who trusts false friends. I would rather give a stranger a first chance that a cheat a second chance. What do you feel?

Is this cynicism? In the never ending twists and turns of this confusing life how many times can we afford to take risks? It is like walking on a tight rope tied at the edges of two cliffs. Yes, life is that in short. You should enjoy the sights and the breeze you see. You should smile.It is important.But it more important to keep control. Over every single step one keeps, every breath one takes. It is important to maintain the thin balance that helps us move forward. Cheats are the occasional slips we face. Would you honestly keep your feet at a point that has been very shaky in the past or has a reputation for it? Would you let yourself fall? Specially when, as my dear friend Sandhya says, it is a fall with no safety nets? Would you?

I am confused. I cant as of now. But I don't know the correct answers to the moral questions behind such a decision. Once a person proves that he or she possesses no integrity, it is best to keep a distance. Anyway, this is desert rose's theory. Feel free to accept or oppose it.

Well, I am back to listening to "Last Christmas". Pausing occasionally like this, to pen my crazy thoughts in the form of a poem or prose. Well, it does make sense at times. Dont you think? When we act a particular way even without knowing why we do it. It is gut feeling really. And I know many would chose the path I have so 'wisely' chosen. Why else would they say, Once bitten twice shy !!

THE WANDERER

I was wandering
In myriad nights,
Under the stars and the moon,
And caught, each drop of dew
that fell from the sky

In the morns, when,
the horizon was crimson,
I dipped,
and emerged as a red bird
And flew in the bright blue sky

Night no longer remained
My feathers fell to the land beneath,
And there were red pools of thick water,
The blue sky was reflected red,
And slowly turned dark.


I saw the stars in the pool,
And swirled and flew,
higher and higher,
Until I was a step away,
and reached out,
and plucked a lonely star
from the depressing darkness
and hid it in my heart.

TO A DEAR POET

You lie on the poem,
and wink and smile, and twitch
and turn and touch me like
a fairytale feather.

You grab me,
on you I lie, exploring,
Each word, each syllable
and every possibility.

You mock me,
You tempt me,
you confuse me,
In each poem you
take a new turn,
I lose myself in the new sights,
that you so effortlessly show.

Every line reveals a little more,
Here a whisper, there another,
then finally with each step,
I fall, and blend, I am you,
Doors opened
I explore more and more

All the while
You lie on the poem,
your head resting on your arms,
I bet you are enjoying ,
aren't you, you heartless,
Watching how I struggle
to take the plunge, to blend, to find,
and not to fall in love.

SONG

I wanted to share this song with you. It is my favourite.

SHE

Her eyes were on the steam,
that rose from the glass of tea,
in curls like her panic, suppressed,
Her pain smiles.

The balding "boy" stares at her,
and the two sovereigns
of her father's sweat,
that clang on her shivering hands,
And her family home,
built with the toil of a lifetime.

He is now the "rightful heir",
of this much coveted prize,
that came with his permanent slave,
His people had bargained with hers
and settled the amount for the slaughter.

The cow moos in the yard,
And the curls continue to rise
higher and higher up from the glass
held tightly in his hands,
Like dandelions in the summer winds,
and her dreams,
floating far beyond her reach....

SELF INCURRED BLINDNESS

Kant speaks about the self incurred immaturity of man that prevents his enlightenment. What I want to speak about is 'self incurred blindness' which is not all that different. Now, what is my inspiration? Would you be surprised if I told you that it was my hostel mess. But yeah, it is. I mean, something that happened in the mess the other day.
Before I proceed, I want you to know that I am a connoisseur of good food - a foodie in unpolished terms. I like eating and I feel at the end of the day it is what all of us live for. We need to eat something - be it food or love (Don't ask me how can you eat love.... metaphorically you can, cant you?). So in short I think 'to eat' is the most important verb in human life. Ah ! I think I have started to deviate from the topic. Coming back to the point, so there i was, in the mess, not-so happily eating whatever they serve, when I saw something black in my Dahi (curd). On a closer look I spotted a martyred cockroach ruthlessly killed by the inconsiderate hands of the mess staff and served on my plate.

I am no vegetarian, but cockroach is definitely not a favourite delicacy of mine. And this one was pretty big I must say. Black, with its tentacles clearly visible. It boosted my appetite so much that I felt I would throw up (I had just taken a spoon of that cockroach flavored Dahi ). I took it and kept it aside , waiting for the mess manager to show up ( half wishing I could throw up on him and teach them a lesson for once and all ). Then a couple of friends came and sat by me ( with bowls of dahi sitting unsuspiciously on their plates). I told them and the people who were sitting in the next table not to have the Dahi 'cause I had found a cockroach in it. To my utter surprise one of my friends snapped , " Why did you have to tell me, I would have happily had my Dahi, I love it and now I cant have it". What an utterly irresponsible way to react!! I mean, look at it. I just saved her from something that is unhygienic for sure and may be potentially poisonous. I was taken aback and surprised. I didn't reply instead chose to take that cockroach to the mess guy ( who clearly had no intention of coming to my table). I really wanted to scream at him ( the spoon of dahi still swirled in my tummy) but he was an old man and seeing his face I couldnt really do it. So I politely presented him with the cockroach and walked back to my room.

I was reflecting all the while. Not on the mess issue but on the way my dear friend reacted to it. Where was the youth of my country proceeding to? How can we, at this peek age of our life, be so stoic and non passionate? Where has the boiling blood drained to? I cant get it. I see future citizens who would say , " Hey, why do you speak about corruption, I was happily minding my own business." " What do I care if that Minister stole from the treasury, I get my salary on time ". '' People get murdered. So what? They are not my relatives"." " I cant protest. I vote. My role in a democracy end there". " A kid got raped? It is not mine, so never mind." '' Human trafficking? Tell me if you can do something about the traffic jam in front of my appartment. I care no further."

WHAT IS THIS????.....What the f**k is this freaking attitude??....IF NOT US THEN WHO? Tell me. If we dont react, if we dont care, if we dont bother to atleast try to make a difference who would? If the youth, that is me and you- if we are so cold, then from where will the world get its warmth from?

It is easy to sit back and criticize everything that it is around you. What is difficult is to try to make a difference about it. It is important to react. To respond. That's what makes us different from inanimate objects. The ability to think, to rationalise, to be aware of who and why- it all matters. If we cant use these abilities that god has so kindly endowed us with, then we aren't all that different from the monkeys that jump around trees. A tie, or shoes, or shorts or mini skirts are not what define civilisation or what is 'civilised'. Just because we look in the mirror and find our features similar to that of the homo sapien species found in a science text book, we cant essentially call our selves human beings. Unless, unless we react. We respond.

So all I am saying is- please release yourself from your self incurred blindness, if you are suffering from it. If you arent, then react. React at every single opportunity you get. It matters. You matter. What you think matters. An ocean needs its every single drop. So dont hesitate- Raise your voice. NOW!!!

DO GUYS GET JEALOUS?

Jealousy has always been branded as a trait of the fairer sex. I mean, " girls are jealous", is a sentence that all of us must have heard at some point in our life. This is too a large extent true too. Jealousy is a trait that is quite common among girls. Not all girls are jealous though. We can put the ratio of jealous to non jealous as 60:40.

But I have no intentions of talking about girls in this article ( Why do I need to elaborate on cliched sentences?). Do men get jealous? I have grown up in a surrounding where jealousy was always seen as a non-masculine trait. Jealousy is beyond manhood I guess. Why else would I hear sentences like " We are guys, we are never jealous", " You think I am jealous! me! come on now, I am a boy!", " You girls get periods pain cause you have feelings like jealousy, We dont" ( Hello there Mr, You dont get periods pain cause you DONT have periods, or ehmmm......are you an exception? :P )

We have master pieces like Othello, which throws light on the fact that even men do get jealous. Freud speaks about Oedipus complex , which in a way implies jealousy to one's father. We can see that often in a professional environment men act more jealously than women do. Sometimes they get so jealous that, it stresses the hell out of them and often, all their hair goes grey with jealousy even when they are eighteen or nineteen. Why then do our culture have difficulty in accepting the fact that men just like women, can also posses feelings that may not be really positive?

I think this inability to accept humane flaws in a man is an aftermath of the glorification of patriarchy. There had always been an attempt to elevate the stronger sex into a cluster of super human beings. Luckily this has changed, if not fully, over a period of time. Society is opening up, and men are gradually welcoming their fairer counterpart into their arena. I must say, that at every point of my life I have been lucky to have associated with at least one man who has encouraged and supported me and urged me to achieve my potential. The problem lies in the fact that the number of such men are relatively less. May be even substantially less. Even to this day there are men who have difficulty in accepting women as their equals. They feel irritated and annoyed when a women out performs them in their field. Be it a classmate answering the teacher's question before they could, or a colleague submitting a project before they did or an opponent defeating them in an election, they just cant take it. They would rather have another man outshining them than a woman. A small defeat, or a small step ahead by a woman is taken as a ruthless stamp on their manhood. Sometimes men are more jealous of women than they are of other men. How can they forget the fact that it was from a woman's womb that they came, I wonder! I feel that such narrow minded men are an insult to the manhood of the whole universe. They insult men who are good and broad minded.

All human beings share similar emotions. Man or woman, we feel joy, sorrow, anger, regret, jealousy, lust and everything. Nothing is unique to a gender. Why do we need to distinguish certain things with a certain gender? It is human to feel angry or jealous. It is alright. Their is nothing wrong in it as long as you don't act on your instinct as far as negative feelings are concerned. Some women are jealous, some are not. Some men are jealous, some are not. In short some human beings are jealous, where as others are not. The green eyed monster hides in each one of us. The important thing is, to understand and accept its presence yet not be its slave.

So next time you hear a boy saying , " Hey I am not jealous cause I am a boy", or a girl saying " I am jealous, so what? After all I am girl" I request you to rectify them immediately and ask them to say " Hey I am (not) jealous 'cause I am a human being." After all, all of us are human beings. :)