Life…

When I was young, I was dying to grow old and go to school

When I was in school, I was dying to finish studying and get married

When I was married, I was dying to have children like any other couple

When I had children, I was dying to see them grow old and have some rest

When they grew old, I was dying to see them happily married and with kids

When I was dying, I suddenly realized I never enjoyed life…

We rarely enjoy the present moment. We never appreciate the richness around us. We are almost always consumed by the regret and loss of something happened in the past or longing and wishing for something to happen in the future. What worry us are the uncertainties of the future and the mistakes of the past. These worries eat us up to the extreme that we sometimes lose insanity and give up on life. But the irony is that we can’t go back in time to change the past nor can we go explore the future to make things certain. It is out of one’s control. We can’t do anything about the past or the future. So why are we constantly thinking of something which we can do nothing about? Are we the ones making ourselves feel helpless?

Happy Endings ! or ?

I just watched a hindi movie. The very predictable sort of a love story where girl meets boy, boy doesn’t believe in love, girl makes him see a things in a whole new light and then unknowingly he falls in love and then they get together, vowing their love to eachother. But ofcourse, like in every exciting love story, there was the third person. There just have to be a triangle to complete a love story. In this case, it was the girl’s fiancé. He was portrayed as the perfect man and the story played in a way that it shows Mr Perfect is sometimes not the one who would make you happy. Life is real and mistakes and fights and emotions are realistic. Well, its is true. But what kept me worrying was, why in the world did I happen to have ended up with that guy’s role in my lifestory?

I used to dream of being the centre of attention. The princess of the fairytale. The heroine of the movie. I had all the prettiest things, the most beautiful and popular friends and held my head high and walked thinking I could never have to worry about being the girl who cant have the boy she desires. In my vision, the love triangle never existed, because there is no way the man I love will love any other woman and if a woman loves him, he ill be mad enough to tell her to face and get rid of the mess immediately.

How wrong I was to think that im the director in this lifestory. I was only helping with the story assisting the screenplay. I didn’t know what the ‘Director’ had in mind. I didn’t know how he planned to cast. I always foolishly thought that he knew I wanted the heroine’s role since I was helping in the story. I didn’t think of telling him of my heart’s desire. So here I was playing my part to the fullest, very much in the role dancing away with my man and then suddenly he met the ‘girl of his dreams’. The girl also having lost her first love and was clad in a white simple dress and looking down vowing never to trust a man. While the girl passed by my man, her dupatta flew past him and he looked up at the same time she looked at him. The sadness in her eyes struck at him at once. He reached his hands to brush away the sorrow. The girl touched it and looked at the strong hands before looking up at his eyes. His eyes gave her every reason to trust him. It was sincere. It was full of compassion. The girl smiled and he vowed he will never wipe that smile from her face. Their story began. My story ended. I was that perfect childhood sweetheart of this man, who had found his girl and opened his eyes finally, to the reality. So I had to be the one to walk out of this lovestory giving the audience a chance to see a happy ending.

Now, did anyone ever wonder what happened to the girl or boy who loved the heroine or hero? Never. The audience comes out of the theatre weeping in joy and shaking their heads in awe because the couple finally got back together after much hassle and misunderstanding. Every one’s just happy because the couple didn’t have to cry and doesn’t care to even wonder how the actual victim must have felt.

Is this the truth in life too? Doesn’t anybody care what happened to the victims? Is it the heroes and their fights that are only important? Like how the victims of poor and disaster are always easily forgotten or not even thought about often while if there is some man who is fighting for something significant or even insignificant, then everyone’s really concerned and interested with what happens next and how it all ends. Why? Is it because people don’t want to associate themselves with being poor, sad and humiliated? Or are we just choosing to be ignorant?

The Girl and The Book

I stood there watching a person not from afar. She was looking back at me with as much intense as I was looking at her. The more I tried to figure her out, she seemed to be more interested in what she was thinking too, squinting her eyes and turning the head slightly towards the right. Noticing that, I smiled. Then she smiled back and as if concluding or realizing something, before she twirled a strand of the hair with her right index finger. When she does that, I can feel her eyes are more relaxed and that it’s a natural way to portray her ease. Now her smile suggests that she has come to a conclusion on what she was thinking. I felt happy and turned back from the mirror and walked towards the black bag on a nearby chair and reached inside to draw out the ‘Book’.

The ‘Book’ is my life. It has been serving me as my friend, who I share everything with, my guider who helped me clear my thought and decide on what to do next, and my secret hiding place where nobody else can ‘find’ me. The book has seen me change transform into adulthood, from a little girl. When I started to write, I always address it as ‘Dear Diary’ and then I created a name for it and then later somewhere in the teens, I changed the name to that of a character I had created who is the hero of most of my stories. Now the book is closed. It contains stories of two decades. I call them two chapters of my life.

The third chapter starts from here, my ‘StoryBook’. I am going to be Thirty soon, bidding farewell to Twenties and welcoming a new decade, turning the pages to start a new chapter in my life.

But in this blog, I will not share my personal life story. I will share interesting thoughts about life in general, and stories I write to ‘escape’ from the real word – my hiding place.