‘In Celebration...’

When I cried and spoke of my fears
When I laughed and could not stop rolling
When I thought and thought and thought unaware
When I took my name and made sense of my being
When I spoke of the world only I had seen
When I started my journey of unwinding this life
When I figured I was not alone on it…

You walked by me as I walked by you
You heard me and I heard you
You felt me in your heart and I did that too…

My fears were gone and I shone as the sun
My love had a new face - no form no pun
Away from the fixtures, away from the game
My strength had faces, voices, names

I flew, I dived, I basked, I danced and ran
Through my soul’s new found country land
Let’s not spell it in a name or two
It’s abundant as life and delicate as dew…

shopping for love n life

We all ‘fall’ in love, more than people we fall in love with the idea of falling in love. It’s beautiful to belong, to belong to a tradition of falling in love and becoming a love sick puppy every so often. It starts in our teenage (well mostly) and lasts well throughout our lives. While some people fall in love with the same people time and again, some vary – they prefer a variety to select from, a choice of people, activities or even material things. So what is this love? Especially the ‘romantic love’ that has consumed the fancy of the whole of the world for most of the time??

For the longest time I believed in all the Yashraj movies and songs… ‘somewhere, someone is waiting for you’ and you will find that someone someday, u will get a sign and u will know, just follow your heart. Ummmm sounds so heavenly, perfect and effortless…but heart I guess isn’t really the benevolent guide to be trusted blindly ;) But I waited, many mornings, evenings and nights passed. One after another ‘signs’ came along and with them came the ‘someone’(s) … I kept wondering if the previous one was the one or the one has yet to come along! All signs and ‘someones’ looked exactly like the ‘the one’, mostly on retrospect. Very confusing! This formula wasn’t working; I had to think. Maybe this time a little on my own.

Then thinking and exploring led me to finally stop relishing the very addictive pre digested diet of bollywood and venture into other definitions of love. I asked my parents, followed my teachers’ advice, my elder sisters’, my oracle, some not so ‘mills and boons’ but still romantic novels and much more. These ideas of love were very fresh (as they were for me then!), very tempting and were larger in range. ‘Love is devotion’, ‘love is sacrifice’, ‘love is being there for each other’, ‘love isn’t just romantic’, ‘love begins in friendship’, ‘Oh love is nothing but hormones!’….?! There were a hundred definitions of love, all very well reasoned, but not even one suited my life! ‘All words! Nothing’s true!’ I used to crib always to be labeled a useless skeptic when I shared my agony. Nothing really told me what I wanted to know. I then realized that maybe it was time to find my own definition of love, not take up what’s given or try to fit readymade fixtures into my life. There are so many packages u see, if not one then the other should definitely suit your condition and then you know what to do…u prescribe to the kind (its free) and it tells u hw to live your life, how to find happiness, how to avoid sadness and how to measure each and everything that life shows you, how to say ‘I knw wat I want!’ and go for what 90% of the world is going for, but sound as if you are the only one who knows, like it’s yours and your partner’s little secret! Now, I was eager, very eager, but not just about as eager as to be pushed to buy stale food! So I decided I was done shopping for love in the market! I’d now have my own home made recipe.

This home made recipe thought was very exciting initially but being a part of the world I was out to scrutinize, time and again the project made me feel ridiculous! Thanks to some of my friends and my horribly incredible and endless capacity to hope, however bruised, weakly and rickety I felt time and again, I made it through.

I realized I was different, but no different than anyone else around me. The only thing that was different was that I wanted my own solutions, my own language, to be able to understand, perceive and define for myself things which are intimately mine, love and life being the primary two! Who gives a movie maker or a novel writer or even a greeting card company and a dress designer to tell me what love should feel like, or how life will flow? I guess we all want to rebel and reclaim these concepts every now and then, but as we are getting out of the awesomely tranquil high of one shot of this ‘love n life can all be shopped’ drug, we are (without even knowing it) in for another. Engulfed by a world where almost everyone is out to sell ‘love’ just for the sake of selling their manufactured goodies with them, where is the hope that we will one day realize, or even notice our robot-isation? The universal doping with its aggressive, proactive drugging awaits us at every road turn of our lives!

For a lot of people in India love means marriage, if it’s your true love, u better be married to him/her, otherwise it’s a lost cause! But what does love has to do with marriage?? While one is a very private and intimate emotion, the other is totally public and risen out of the sickly need of some men to ensure that their private property lands only in the hands of their own sons, the fruit of their sperm, essentially! And while love reaches out and includes, marriage divides and excludes. The problem with the association of marriage and love isn’t just conceptual, it is also pragmatic. When marriage becomes the sole aim, meaning and consequence of love, hetro normativity becomes the sole way of life! Now believing that this way as the only way is certainly like fooling yourselves and not just is it an illusionary bubble, it’s also extremely tragic! Imagine a world without any colors of difference, all men married to women and all women giving birth to eligible sons, who are out to catch some more women to create another boring and colorless generation!

I think the meaning of love is most amazingly defined in the concept of non normative, homo or bi sexual relationships. Without a condition that you will sacrifice for me and I will provide for you, ‘I love being with you, sharing my life, my bed, my thoughts, my happiness and my ideas with you.’ Now that’s simply what love is all about! Love hasn’t a gender, it hasn’t a name, it hasn’t a color, it hasn’t a condition, its hasn’t an age and therefore it hasn’t ‘a definition’!

It’s beautiful to belong, to belong to love solely and not to any ideas or definitions or concepts or packages of love! I am so glad some people realize this before their lives are over because arriving at this means having dodged all the road blocks and hurdles created by bio politics and consumer culture (the two hands of patriarchy) on the path to your freedom! Finding your own language, love and life has to initiate with giving up of all the borrowed dazzlers of consumerism. When you know, you will really know, and you will never have to ask ‘do you love me’ or even say ‘I love u’, you will certainly still express the feelings meant to be behind these phrases, but maybe in different words and very different ways, ‘coz more than anything else you had set out for, you would have found - yourself!