Wrath of Death : Road Accidents

India is a great nation where I'm guessing human lives aren't as important as the 'cultures' or the 'everyday protests' against simple issues of women's clothing or a celebrity couple kissing or hugging onscreen. A life just isn't valued. A general sarcastic line of thought is that, given the population of this country, a loss in that count doesn't really matter. We read about it in the papers everyday, happening to someone, somewhere in the city/country. But the intensity strikes only when it happens to someone we know personally. 

 

 I have seen two deaths in the gap of only over four or five months. One, a personal friend with whom I studied with up until my tenth grade. Till date, the image I have of him in my head is that of a smiling one. His was a hit and run case. The lorry driver who hit him riding the pillion did not even bother to stop and see what he had done. The second was that of my close relative who passed away only yesterday after he skid and fell off one of the huge mounds of earth that was dug out for some reason, in the city of Chennai. It saddens me deeply to see a spate of such happenings one after the other. To lose both these people meant a lot to me and many others like me. Both of them were college students and students came in huge masses to pay their last respects to both of them at the cremation grounds. 

   There are many reasons for such happenings in the city. When I was at the police station yesterday, I heard a policeman mention that there have been over hundred odd casualties that year. There is such an incident happening almost everyday. Everyday, some parent is lamenting over a lost child who they lovingly had brought up for over 20-25 years. To merely think about it overcomes me with grief. 

   I don't have statistics to support what I thus write, but a large number of the students from my knowledge don't wear helmets. Racer bikes with riders who don't know the difference between rash riding and speed, eventually end up getting hurt. Moreover, Indian roads are not suitable for such kind of rides. There is always some part of the road that is dug out for the one of the million reasons the Corporation has enlisted. But the speedy progress and the attention given to attend to whatever the problem may be before digging out the roads and while doing so isn't there after it is done. Mounds of earth lie on the centre of the roads, on to the sides and hard,rock jalli is used to close some of the dug-out areas. This becomes highly difficult for any commuter on a two wheeler or vehicle as even crossing the road becomes a worry. With the Chennai Metro Rail in progress, there are several one ways and the already shortened roads spell trouble with uncovered pits, uneven and extremely rough-terrain-ed roads. I wish the Corporation connects more with the people and finds out the root cause of all these problems so that they may be repaired. 

  This works on several levels. There are several cases of hit and run. Why can't there be a speedy nabbing of the accused personnel? I wonder, how do these people sleep at nights given the horror and grief they push on the family of the deceased. I don't know where to start and I don't know where to end. I just felt I had to write this at the least. 

Whatever may it be, I request all of you who are reading this to wear your helmets and ride safe. Indian roads are not for racing.

Cheers and love, 

Hemu 

(For Deepak and Pappu) 

 

At Sixes (and Sevens)

Someone once told me that the most important thing about the command over a language or your prowess is about how much you can condense your text and not in the many pages that you manage to fill up. It has been tiring to sum up my life so far in merely six words for the Chennai Bloggers Club's 'Six-word memoir' happening among the bloggers here, but it's definitely worth it as there is some introspection needed there.

Here go.

Insouciant gossamer of infinite ice-cream castles.

*BGM *

It was fun, this tag.The baton was passed to me from Reflections of my mind to you!!, which is a free hit information place for anything that you might need; views of the blogger ranging from movies to sports to philosophical inclinations in life. The tag thus follows to BeerSting ink , a blog as unique as its name that unravels into the creative imagination of the author in the form of articles, short stories and poetry which is a pleasure to indulge in. The blogger though, is not responsible for mugshots post luxurious drinking.

   

Love and cheers, 

Hemu 

Image credits : http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/09/six-word-memoirs-students/

   

Turning Twenty-Something

I am soon reaching the first quarter of my life. It sounded beautiful when I was fifteen. To be in the twenties. To be the woman I have never dreamed of becoming when the bob cut lived and dirty pants from the evening out relished the present. I never saw it coming. Never. Not this.

   It's beautiful, to be able to say that you are now a woman in a little more of a true sense than from the words that ring in your ears when people say it around after you have your first period. Well, to hell with them. This started out as a post to see where I am heading with this whole quarter life crisis, to analyze and see if there is any hope's ray hiding amidst the bushes, to wonder which other university will be ready to accept me after another year of undergraduate studies or if I should start working; you know- like trying the whole 'responsibility' thing. To give back something to my parents instead of taking from them all the time.
 
     An unplugged stream of thoughts flip around in my head. About this period full of magical twenties. It's tough. It's tough because I have no idea where I am heading to. I imagined that I would be globe-trotting by now, making new friends and getting drunk in an Irish pub. Wild dreams and could-be-made-possible dreams aside, I just want to share some of the best times in my life which happened when this number called 20 hit me a year or two back.

        Several things. The taste of knowing how it feels like to be in college. I most certainly did expect it to turn out differently and I completely blame the movies and all my books for it, not to mention my own imagination. This was an experience in itself. The day, that moment my sister got married and when I cried because I didn't know what else to do. To send her off to another home and for her to start her own life at her own accord. To feel in-charge of family.

Source: Google images 

  To fall in a possible whimsical version of love. Revelations all the way. As Scott Fitzgerald would say : ' I wasn't actually in love but I felt a sort of tender curiosity'. The many number of boys who might have struck my senses hard for just a minuscule side of them that was blown out of proportions in my mind. The way a strong rock spreads into dust after a blast, I had words escaping from within. I just had to put it down. Somewhere. Anywhere. In scraps of paper, tissues, my several diaries, the less-personal ones on this blog that you read. And once that strikes, you'll never be out of words. Twenty lent me more  mature writing. Or should I say this tender curiosity alerted my senses?

 
Growing up saw my elder brother confiding in me and treating me as an equal alongside the little sister look. I saw a change in the way he conversed, the way my sister told me about her happenings, the joy trip that I took with my cousins.. Just seeing that stroke of acknowledgement that you are old enough to understand what they say.. that's amazing. The way I look at my own cousins with a smile and understand what they're going through because I've been there and done that. To feel proud that your baby brother is growing up in the world's eyes, yet an immature kid in my own is all that you can perceive. Well, I don't know how to exactly classify this. Should I feel sad that I am growing up in numbers or gape at the progress in thoughts : emotionally, spiritually and befitting the age; passing on what I know to the other smaller ones.
 
   Twenty later told me it's okay to watch adult movies, it's okay to laugh over such jokes because you are an adult. Authorized to know. It sounds dumb, but I have always appreciated the way technological and other information reached me at the right age. It reached me right when it should have and when such an exposure would have made a difference and dwelled within. To just go through your own old books and realize how silly you were. To learn to remember that we enjoyed playing in the mud and making sandcastles. It's beautiful.

  There is a voice. There are people to listen to. My niece looks at me like I am from the outer space when I play with her. She's the first baby I have carried before the head would stay stable. To see the way her entire hand can't encircle even my little finger and her gibberish sounds- it's beautiful. To feel like a mini-mother, (Oh, not the complete one) to hold something so tiny in your hands and weep out of joy.. that's when I feel it's okay to grow up; when that little bundle of joy looks at you with big brown eyes and kicking your chest.

  For all this, being in this whole growing-up phase is lovely.

  But every other way, you're screwed. Pray your soul doesn't roast like the souls in hell.

Source : Google images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thegoodtribe/4470200634/

Untitled

Walk hand-in-hand with your fear and dump it in the nearest well.
Jump after it and push it underwater.
You might think you're the one drowning,
but remember,
fears never learn to resurface as will does.

Making love

She makes love all the time,
this girl I know.
Wavy hair on the rough side.
A clown adorning a crooked smile
that lights up really small eyes.
A girl who has already fallen in love with words
before, while and after she fell in love with a man.
If the first that peeps from the sky is a worm,
she'd write how beautiful it was
with its rings sparkling all through the night,
inching its way across the infinite realm of God.
If that little niece of hers puddles on her lap,
she jumps up in antagonising joy
while enjoying the warmth that lives
before she showers herself 'clean'.
While you only just read it in your head,
she articulates it in her heart and shouts
in passion that,
she lives in conditions unknown outside,
that she cannot track the number of words
nor the wrangling between her two different selves.
She cannot decide which side to go,
what to do about a boy she probably loved
and the rejection that sheathed itself in her heart.
Ramblings churn their way from her soul
losing its way in her blood,
sometimes hitting hard at the head;
which led some to think that
she has lost her senses.
I pity them,
for beyond a small nose and legs,
a large forehead and an independent stature,
they can't see that words swim inside of her
that give her more pleasure
than any boy EVER could.

~Hemu 

The Airport Effect

So, I enter through rotating glass doors to look unto a sweeping stretch of dotted spot lights in a high false ceiling,  white-marbled huge columns, steel barricades and the tiled flooring of the airport. I never understand what runs in my mind when I go to the airport. Technically speaking, it should be like going to the bus depot or the railway station. Why does it feel more enhanced here? All of them are sentimental at various levels of distances between dear ones and one thing always reigns everywhere : separation and reunion.
But those two words are the global synonyms for 'airport' all around the world, in particular. The first thing that strikes anyone.
   
             As I did mention before, I never understand what runs inside me when I go there. I love staring at the activity around me. I feel like I have been trapped beyond reason and have my eyes following the pilots in their smart uniforms. When I was young, I wanted to be a pilot...and now, for some un-understandable reason I am in the course of studying to be an architect, which I love too. I guess that patch of yearning remains in my heart forever. I stare at wide-eyed babies and old people pushed about in wheelchairs, newly wed couples excited, elated and nervous at the start of a literally and figuratively new journey, working professionals, and tourists trying to fit in with the locals with our style of dressing. It floods my brain which suddenly seems to becomes a blank canvas. For no reason at all, I visit the over-priced snacks bar and the probably-clean washrooms. I climb on the bars of the barricade and look around at nothing in particular. (well, there are the pilots...But other than that, nothing-I swear) I make faces at the kids when their parents are not looking and smile looking at sleeping passengers-to-be. I feel completely blank- a combination of nothing and everything.

     The emotions I feel cancel each other or fuse to create a sense of patience and un-bored nature in my mind.I feel yearning and loss, joy at the reunion, excitement and the heavy feeling that I have not yet begun to travel as I had always wanted to. Mere counters, paper money and cold steel bars in an air-conditioned volume of space has stopped me from reaching the corners of the world, you know.

   I wish there is a word for the tingling feeling in your stomach that feels full of nostalgia and curiosity, the heaviness of the heart at the brief separation with tears in the eyes, the hope that we'll meet soon again and the excitement of a start of something new.
  Do you have such a word or phrase?
   I call it the 'Airport Effect'.

P.S : I'm still under the airport effect and that has made me write this post. You'll have to excuse me if you don't understand the point of the whole thing. I don't too. It's some sort of a drug.

From google images 

Hemu

The Girl in the Mirror

I stared at my gymnastics coach with the a big puppy dog face. It was yet another of those times when we clash head-on in silence. Well, at least it was the language of signs for me. He generally won.
'Please Sir, just this once?' I pleaded with every ounce of yearning in me.Every single time.
I always got the same answer.
No.

I had never know how it feels to brush my hair all the way till my shoulders or more almost until I reached my  seventh grade. I never did know how it feels to even brush Barbie's hair. I never had one. I was curious to know how it felt like to have hair any more than the Bob style that I possessed. People would sit together- my parents, sister and my coach. Mother realized that in the daily ruckus I created every morning, it was going to be impossible to sit and plait my hair. My coach decided that it was too difficult for him to help me with my floor elements if my hair kept coming in the way. My father was fine with anything that got me out of the house in the right time in the mornings. (Why wouldn't he? He had to drop me at school.)
As for my sister.. she liked to see me go through the misery of having my hair cropped till my ears.
So,  that was decided then.

    It was not that I didn't enjoy the bob hair that bounced with my every step, but as you all might know, the grass is always greener on the other side. I was the tom-boy (girl?) at school and the short hair helped no more. When you're young, you tend to look at the fallen hair with attachment in the barber shop that your father frequents. There was only one hair style in that small saloon. He had no issues with me, that barber. Boy-cut for the little girl, every time. He did a satisfactory job, I must say. I was once approached by a curious boy after my gymnastics class who wanted to know if I was a boy or a girl.

   So, when you ask me my childhood stories, I'm all tears for the fallen-could-have-been-pretty braids.But there is a smile that assists me on my mirror. That kid smiles back at me all the time. She had a tiny comb the size of her palm and ran that through her thick hair and felt its bountifulness. It fell all vertical when she did her hand-stands, back flips and back somersaults.
 (Not to forget that fountain on my head when I attended school and classes.)

    As every story goes, I grew up. (Damn!)
   A small change in the scene that you see up until now.
  Now, this was when I wanted to cut my hair short while everyone around me insisted I grow it long. Beauty parlours became the new saloons and I had hair styles to choose from. Hair dressers got tired of waiting on my indecisiveness as I sit down with the nylon cape round my neck.
   I entered third year in college and sat around with Barbie dolls for the first and last time at my friend's place. I wonder if that exactly counts for growing up but let us just safely say I finally learnt how to dress a Barbie doll with different clothes and hair styles. (I still don't know if it's the right way to play. Like I said- that was the first and last time.)

    Again, the grass is always greener on the other side. I now want short hair. I want to go snip, snip, snip and my mother gives me deathly glances and amazing warnings that fall a little short of threat that my hair would never grow back if I cut it too short now.

  It's amazing how we grow up into something we were the opposite of. My mum wants me to nourish my hair until it falls till my waist and I want that bob cut from the times when the boy on the street didn't know whether I was a girl or a boy. Ah, how times change!

For now when I see the girl in the mirror, she tugs at her curls and smooths them over. She has three different types of combs and other materials that compliment what it probably was. She now knows the difference between ordinary braids and fish braid.

She's grown up now. And wants that hair short like the girl in the mirror from the fifth grade.

But for change, the world would be boring. But for some constant entities, the world would have now perished. Do you know that ever-changing and ever-constant girl in the mirror?

I really don't.

Image from the internet 

~Hemu

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