Goodness

How can silence create so much of love? You must have asked yourself so many times. Is there anything wrong in silence? For those who learn each other with time, love to sit silent and idle by each other. In their togetherness, there are no words nor there are promises. That's something you with your thousand questions will never understand.

But at times, I want to tell how much you mean to me, how the absences of day-to-day life spurs love in me and how I love even when you dream of freedom and of long-forgotten memories. You mean everything to me, even when you are silent, even when you are absent or even when you stop thinking of me.

Sometimes I feel the aura of your grace coming to mind as a picture of all that is good, great and nice- a big heart I have seen except when you are sad and your heart chokes with pain. But with all the goodness that you scatter around minute by minute, you know how to hide your self within those walls of goodness.

Tips for Good E-mail Writing

A good deal of communication takes place in the form of emails that you write to friends, colleagues and clients. In personal or professional communication through emails, you need to carefully follow certain guidelines that will help you write good mails while maintaining the etiquette of email communication.

• When sending a mail to a new email address, send a test mail first. Most of the time, errors in spelling can bounce the mail right back into your inbox.

• State the subject of your mail rather than leaving it empty. This enables easy search and retrieval of mails from a rather crowded inbox. Gmail has launched a feature called Inbox Preview that allows you to glimpse the first line of your recently received mails.

• Use the original mail thread while replying to a previous mail so that the receiver can also track the correspondence in case of any confusion.

• Customise your email by addressing the person. If at all you need to send the same mail to several people use the correct form of address and send it using the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) option. But don’t use the Cc (carbon copy) option unless it is necessary.

• Be precise and to the point. Use simple sentences to convey your message. A long mail is hard to read and remember especially for a person who receives quite a lot of mails a day.

• Write about a single topic in a mail rather than bombarding a single mail with a lot of information thereby helping the receiver to answer the relevant topic correctly.

• Delete the list of previous receivers while forwarding a mail so that you do not reveal a big list of addresses of people without their permission.

• Always remember that the web is a not secure enough to hold all your private details. Think twice before sending that angry e-mail or before revealing that extremely private piece of information in an email.
  

• Sound positive and energetic in your mails rather than depressed and drab.

• Re-read and edit the mail you have written, carefully going over the written matter for mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling.

• Using capital letters in mails is not advisable as such writing is considered as screaming in the internet lingo.

• Use the formatting tools but remember that the receiver may not be able to view the formatting. Take care about sending rich text to people who can view the message only in the plain text format.

• Don’t forward chain letters that are scary or superstitious.
  

• Don’t reply to spams either.

• Reply to important mails immediately possibly on the same day or the next rather than mulling over them for days together.
  

That Summer Long Ago

A long summer of uncertainties, 

Blazed many unquenchable fires, 

Many that burnt and scorched, 

Swallowing words and feelings. 

A thousand dreams buried soon, 

The flow of nature bottled up, 

In thick maroon curtains of silence

That hung quite out of place. 

A mess of life that stopped there,

In that long summer somewhere, 

From where it has moved hardly, 

An inch to gain back its momentum. 

The words have become sacred, 

The spaces no longer accessible, 

But memory brings back dreams,

In words said, words left unsaid. 

A few lines of poetry can't reveal, 

A love that lies dormant in ashes.

The Case of the Missing Po

There is a bird called Po (the one on the right)in my husband' s chidiyakhana. Yesterday, when I went to see the birds in the evening, I found that the cage was open and that Po was missing from the scene. The others were still there, though the cage was left open. All of us searched the entire corridor, where they are kept. We even searched outside though it was pitch dark and raining.

Finally, today Po was discovered in the room next to the corridor. It must have flown and hid there. Hungry and thirsty, it ran and ate seed when given food. Happy that it was only here and that it did not fly outside through the open windows.

Rivalry

Had you not swore rivalry,
My dear dear yellow rose,
Many lives would've escaped,
The tentacles of hopeless love .

You wanted to fare better
In all six pairs of male eyes,
To be fairer, smarter, lovelier,
Than me everyday of your life.

Your trials were not in vain,
But I would say you were,
Fairer, smarter and lovelier
Than I could ever be any day.

Still you crushed the dreams,
Of many embittered hearts,
Through your lies and advice,
Turned the heads upside down.

Looking back, I feel so foolish,
Surpass me in foolery as well.

Celebrating 200 posts

Journal: Serious and Trivial has reached 200 posts. On this day, the not-so-modest author has made a pick of what she considers as the best of her most valuable sacred space: potpourri blog of poems, silences, reviews and definitions of silence. Hope you enjoy them!

Definitions

Forget

Islands

Love

Meditation

Melodies new

My roots strangely

Needs

Our story

Remembrance

Seasons

Silence

Sublimation

Sweet nothings

The Year of the Metal Rooster

Tiny Feet

Tonight

Tribute to Kamala Suraiyya

Twilight Zone

Words

Yellow rose

Obsessions

You brought with you a little sunshine, a little laughter and myriad ragas of liveliness. Infatuated with you, I could never stop humming songs or stop dreaming of you. You come in those fantasies as an ideal lover, giving and receiving with full knowledge of a lover's desires.

The reality is a cruel world, broken by everyday hassles, mad world that has several faces of happiness and sadness in the single throw of a coin. You don’t appear at all in that cruel world. You like to hide your face amidst the sharp smells of newly printed books and clean sheets.

This love left unsaid has become an obsession that never fades or lets the heart live in peace. May be in the next life, you and I will not have all the words in the world to say why we don’t want each other in reality and might crumble in tears before the mighty silences.

Stories

The bliss ended years ago,
One fine day in March,
When beauty and brains,
Clashed with each other,
And you picked beauty.

What of a lovely mind?
I questioned you eagerly,
In my childish innocence,
I believed in every word,
Your lying tongue had said.

As the years went by,
Beauty reigned with brains,
Your heart was beaming again,
To make this love last, not,
To make excuses again.

This time, you schemed,
Taking days to work out,
The tiny details of your plan
That turned out to be
A castle in the air.

Beauty, brains, money,
What could make you happy?
Certainly not this broken life,
With you toiling everyday,
Far away from all loves.

For you have lost everything,
A soul of music now healed,
But I see life's bitter irony,
In your discarding all rules
To love what you'd mocked.

Less and More

You tease me as heartless,
I tease you as brainless.
This continual bantering lessen,
What was more in life before,
Aimlessness and hopelessness,
Many more sorts of -lessness.*
But this combo is more than being,
Heartless, lifeless and loveless,
As the bantering continues,
Day by day with more wit,
Energy, drive and spirit,
To find each other new epithets.
Still this world of less is more alive,
Than before the day I found you.

For my love on a nothing special day

Some days ago, I fell into a deep slumber,
From which I thought I would never rise again;
My limbs tied with some strange force,
My heart full of fears of the dark.

When I rose, terror flashed before me,
So did my love for you, my dearest,
What if you never know how I love you
More as days and weeks and months pass.

Memories of terror may flash again,
There is no restraining them,
Your love has been like an anchor,
A strong hold that I can depend on.

The words of anger may be a ruse,
For I know, you will be there always.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go, quote Oscar Wilde

Sometimes, I see that life works perfectly if only all the people that you associate with on a daily basis are in harmony with you. Work-life can be in shatters, if you have somebody who irritates you with persistent negativity. Not just me, a lot of people have this habit of blaming others and circumstances for not being focused enough. But how much is enough?


I was just a sit-at-home graduate in English who wanted to work from home for a hobby. I started doing some content writing projects and daily blogging. Nowadays, I am swamped with so many projects that I have forgotten the already rare visits to the beauty parlour, the occasional evening walk (the accumulating fat will tell the rest of the story) and unfinished household chores.

If you see no posts in a place, where there were regular posts (even though they were not great, but readable) please take remember that this idle singer of daily life in the form of writing has become a multi-tasker engaged in her struggles with Good English.

Bad days

Shell

Meetings with no purpose,
Words with no meaning,
Promises unkept and broken,
Intentions no longer clear,
Everyday has such ruffles,
Brain-devouring carnivores,
Who stop not at tears or anger,
But only at killing the heart,
Till you learn the best way out,
To resist this energy drain,
Is to go back to your shell,
Keep respectful distance,
From all and not wielding power.
For who knows with all these rules,
You will die from plain exhaustion.

Dieting

The thin bodies of models
Tease from advertisements;
While I try walking, running
Skipping, skipping meals,
Doing whatever I can,
To get slim and sleek.

But the chocolate cake beckons,
From the nook at Spencer's
So does Crackle and Five Star;
Not to mention the ice-creams,
Fruit salads and carrot halwa.

When I see these delights,
All ideas of dieting lost,
The dream of a thin body,
Purged of its extra roundness,
Lost amidst bites of sweet,
Forgetfulness.

So I binge more on sweets,
Think of exercising tomorrow,
While days pass one by one,
The models tease from ads,
With their thin sleek bodies,
But they can't have such delights
The way I can live on sweets.

Madness

The pale hairy hands stretch from a white coat,
A falsely made happy face enquires about you,
Was it yesterday that you had screamed aloud,
Asked for euthanasia and that you want to die,
While he looked worried and showed you
Pictures of shapes and spaces and flowers
Describe this: You told him of Carl Gustav Jung,
About Freud and what you have read,
Anima and Animus and the theories meant,
The male creative spirit in the female,
The female creative spirit in the male,
The pictures that Jung used to treat people.

The doctor ordered the nurses to sedate you,
Till you remember nothing of Jung or Freud.

The victim of a mousetrap

"An Introduction" by Kamala Das

I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don’t write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. Don’t play pretending games.
Don’t play at schizophrenia or be a
Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love … I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans’ tireless
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,
Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.

Tribute to Kamala Suraiyya

I want to be loved
And
If love is not to be had,
I want to be dead; just dead. (Kamala Das)

Kamala Das aka Kamala Suraiyya aka Madhavikutty reigned in Malayalam literature like a queen. One of first feminist writers in India, she was a prolific writer who wrote both in English and in Malayalam. She died today after being hospitalised because of respiratory troubles. A tribute to her, this afternoon on hearing about her death.

You were brave enough to bare your soul,
When other women played with hypocrisy,
You dared to speak of things that mattered,
To a woman more than anything-love.

Your quests for love shadowed your stories,
Poems revealed the highs and lows of love,
True to the dictum that poetry is a song
From a broken heart or a smiling mouth.

Others followed the trail that you had set,
In a land swallowed by traditions and rules,
You broke all rules to follow your own heart,
Frank, straight and a trigger of controversies.

Mother, your words soar like the eagle you're,
Lone but high above in the clear blue skies.

An empty garden pond

One single waterlily
In pond can splash colours,
Make a huge difference.

New god-daughter