Monsoons

None could hear what the rain whispered to her in those dark nights.
He would follow her everywhere, with long fingers and intense gazes,
When she was walking up the road, his eyes would fall on her,
With a ravenous hunger, ravish and pierce her soul with agony;

How could she complain, for she loved him with her silences,
Gave him her heart and soul, let him own all her sacred spaces,
Whatever love was in her heart she gave without conditions,
So haunting was his love, his total devotion and his persistence,

In not letting her go that she couldn’t breathe a word to anyone.
Dodged everywhere and chained to him by each passing thought,
For one who never will turn up  when she needs him the most,
Lost and gone, this one dark love of her life, kills her the most,

Makes her forlorn, hysterical and desperate though lost and gone,
For a single tryst, a single glance and the soothing tone of his voice.

Confessions of a Female Quixote

You are in your twenties. You are a woman. You are single. You are crossroads and you are slightly confused with just one thing: love. What I mean is that you have a plain uneventful life with order and balance and all of a sudden you are unexpectedly drawn into a whirlpool of emotions, the moment you develop an interest in a guy.

Irrespective of whatever interesting adventures you are in the middle of or what work you are doing, this one person becomes the pivot of all your thoughts, so much that you are hardly able to find your balance in life and it becomes so obvious to the people around you that you are interested in someone. If it happens, not once but twice then you are done for and add to this, the fact that you are shy and find it difficult to communicate what you feel to the person concerned.

So the end result is a journal full of choked up tears of absence, kisses of fettered affection and unspoken love. Some of the agony is because of shyness but mostly because the person whom you attract is also of the same kind: shy, proud and difficult to understand. So, these definitions are a way of getting over what I know might be the best possible love in the world, of a magical chemically combustible kind, but mostly existing in the field of imagination and fantasy.

So, this female Quixote who reads too much, loves too much, thinks too much and writes too much. She has no windmills to fight for but her own personal fears and inadequacies. Rather than confiding in intimate friends or confessing your love to the person concerned, what you do is to scribble some loving thoughts in a journal on a daily basis, so much that over time you discover that the person you love has turned into a myth.

Then years later, you stand face to face with the person who provoked all this writing for years and all you want to do is laugh out loud because you feel like a teenager once again. Not just that you have made a myth out of the object of your obsession.

For us

You are my want, my need, my desire, my everything, my addiction that I never want to give up. May be the years, months and days might change this feeling for you.

But even after all these years, I want yours to be the shoulder where I return to with all the broken scattered pieces to be held close and put together; yours the eyes that hold the gaze and not hold anything back; yours the lips that greet me in surprise and yours the comfort that stays with me during the whole day. 

But right now, you don't seem to understand me and for now may be I don't want anything else either. 

Ahalya

A thriller by the Bengali director Sujoy Ghosh starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Radhika Apte and Tota Roy Chowdhury,  Ahalya is the story of a young policeman Indra Sen whose life and existence is changed, when on a missing person case, he meets a well-known artist Goutam Sadhu. 

The door is opened by a beautiful young girl whom he assumes is the daughter of the artist but turns out to be his wife. He sees a stone statue of the missing person Arjun on the table.Goutam Sadhu turns out to be a believer in magic and shows him a magic stone saying that he can turn into whomever he wishes to.

He is asked to meet Ahalya upstairs and she seduces him pretending that he is her husband. He no longer can make sense of the world he is in. This short film of around 14 minutes duration can stay with you for a day or two or even longer. 

Rain

Readiness is all

Hafiz

Quixote

Nostalgia

Always been a romantic

The solitary reaper

I am a solitary reaper, singing in the fields,
I keep pace with the sun from dawn till dusk;
I sing and speak to the hills and the dales,
And I hum all day to the beat of my sickle.

The valleys echo my solemn voice to me,
I forget the long hours as I keep humming;
My song changes its hue from hour to hour
And I love to sing of loves, lost or gained.

Sometimes, I sing of epic battles of yore
Bending over my sickle in the green fields;
Sometimes, a passing stranger stops to listen,
Lingering over the soft music that he hears.

I see him smiling at my lonely song and me,
As he moves away, I get back to work again.

Spring

Somewhere after the terrible times, after the turmoil is over, there has to be a spring,

When your footsteps will be like before, sprightly and fast not like the drag of feet across these interminable winter,

May be only you will be left behind to tell the tale, how this went from joy to misery in a single day.

Sense of loss

In a throw of a dice,
In a move of hand,
You threw away all
Went into sanctuary.

The songs of loss,
That spoke of you,
The tiny wings left
To learn to fly itself.

The seething pain
The story of losses
Come back again
In its full sense.

You choke your tears
Without a goodbye.

Ma

All I wanted was a pink book full of recipes;
Like the one she wanted to leave behind;
The family kitchen smelling of spices,
Christmas, roast chicken and plum cake.

The shopping spree just before Christmas,
Cake-making at midnight done together,
Your recipes followed to the last line
And the tweaks to the plans that I make.

This book of magic remains incomplete;
The Christmas flavours linger in the air;
Goodwill, happiness and the first time
I had celebrated Christmas with flavours.

The book of recipes, your cooking secrets;
All are lessons that I have learnt from you.

Pic: mariasmenu.com

Remembrance

You and I,
These magical words,
I can never utter,
About another.

You and I,
Like day and night,
Never meet but to play
Hide and seek,forever.

You and I,
Carry an unspoken love,
Unfulfilled yet deep,
Hidden like a treasure.

You and I,
Away but together,
In sleepless nights,
And lonely hours.

You and I,
Wordsmiths who love
To coalesce liquid pain,
Into songs of remembrance.

And you and I,
Like parellel lines,
Stretch across miles,
Strange before strange eyes.

Definitions

You were no bride in red;

Only a widow-heart unwed;

Yet with the seasons came

A spot of red in your hands.

I was no prince charming;

Only a lonesome wanderer;

Yet with the seasons came

A boat song on these lips.

We moved along these lines

Along these definitions;

In the end you are a wanderer

And I have turned widow-heart.

Yet these roles reverse and turn

Bring no comfort only despair. 

New Woman

This soul was once like a huge flame leaping to the skies,

Then it withered, dried and drooped to the very earth;

Sometimes, like Icarus, it leapt out of its many mazes,

But burnt out in the heady dash for total freedom.

Then she brought forth a new-born, a swaddled baby

She sang her magnificat of newly found motherhood;

The soul forgot its troubles for a joyous interval

And learnt how to escape the many mazes again.

Yet mostly this soul was a single-celled organism,

Cowardly and crawling in this huge universe,

Too silent, too shut out and too withdrawn,

Incapable of learning or making its way around,

Sometimes, it longs for the crazy days of yesterday,

When the sun of total freedom had burnt its wings. 

Wake up with the sun!

More than usual,
There is a need
To do something
Different ,
Out of ordinary
On a morning
Like this.

It's a bleak sky,
Hints of rain
Cloud the sky,
While I decide
To go on a walk
After a long time.

The roads are quiet,
City silent,
Signs of life,
Only a few,
Cycles on the road,
More walkers,
Regulars unlike me,
Who on a special day,
Has decided
To celebrate life,
With a morning walk.

Much is done,
Much accomplished,
On a day like this,
When I woke up early,
With the sun.

Sunrise

All smiles and bright;
The little one shines.
It's dawn once again.

Pensiamento Fantastico: The Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply

Vandana Shiva, the world-renowned activist and ecofeminist writer is an award-winning writer on issues related to women’s rights,. globalisation and the environment. She has written several books such as Making Peace With The Earth, Biopiracy: The Plunder Of Nature and Knowledge, Monocultures of the Mind, Staying Alive, Water Wars, Patents: Myths and Reality and The Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. 

In her book, The Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000), she describes the impact of globalised corporate agriculture on the small scale industries, farmers and the quality of food that we consume. In her enlightening book on some of the trends in food supply, she throws light on many of the problems faced by the common people in India such as stealing of the food produced in the country. 

Some of the issues discussed in the book are genetically engineered seeds, the controversy on cattle meat, the unethical ways of shrimp farming and commercial agriculture. She points out that the widespread conversion of land for food crops  into land for commercial crops has managed to wreck nature and also people who are dependent on these food crops. Though there is an increase in revenue, it is counterbalanced by a large-scale and long term damage to the ecosystems and their capacity to conserve soil and water. This kind of economic growth deprives forest communities of their sources of food, fodder, fuel. fibre, medicine and security from floods and drought. 

Vandana Shiva condemns WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement that makes indigenous seed-saving and seed-sharing a crime. She founded Navdanya, an NGO that promotes biological diversity and organic farming after learning more about the ways in which genetic engineering and patenting was destroying the local varieties of food. This organisation has thousands of members and several seedbanks across the country to conserve biodiversity, practise chemical-free agriculture and to save seeds. 

The most important issue that she deals with in her book is about her struggle to fight the multinational edible oil companies and their plan to completely replace the traditional edible oils The Oils produced in the local mills were replaced by cheap imported oils resulting in the destruction of the livelihoods of the local people. 

One central theme in The Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply is the need to have food that is free from genetically engineering and addition of chemicals through fertilizers. She emphasizes how it is the responsibility of the individual to ensure that the food we eat is safe, accessible and culturally appropriate and at the same time not at the cost of robbing the livelihoods of people dependent on traditional modes of food production. 

 

Pic: www.navdanya.org

 

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can  apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.