ले देख तमाशा!

सुन रे सुन बेलिया
दिल ने धोखा दिया 
आँखें मिली तुमसे नाज़नी 
मेरे होश-ओ-हवास खो गए 

Have you ever felt that your heart cheats on you? Have you known that your heart is fickle? Are you aware that you've never really loved someone truly? What do you do when you know? Do you stop loving? 

You don't.

You search for faces. You search for faces to confide in. You search because you want to hide from the world the frailties that are a part of your being. You want to acquire power; power over someone else's being, their face, their pain, and their flesh. 

So you make a decision. You decide to fall. You fall from your own self-built castle of impunity and land into a pit you call love. Love, for all those who have felt it, is nothing more than an intoxication. It's just that the meaning of intoxication is subjective.

दिल ने रो रो कहा

ये आँखें हैं दिल की ज़ुबान

ख्वाब रोज़ रोज़ देखे नए।

You fall from impunity and land on a minefield. You look skywards towards the castle. You look towards the doors you'd barged through and you look at the mess that remains. 

And then, you look at yourself. You know that the mess up there is repairable. The mess down here- in your gut - isn't. You know  that there's no stairway to take you back there. And there's no highway down here either.

So you dream. You dream to find a grain of wheat to separate from the chaff. You dream of finding a silver lining, knowing very well that there's no cloud to find it in. But you dream, because you are a prisoner of your heart.

हो दिल का भंवर बोले सुन साथिया
छुप ना दुपट्टे में तू ओ छलिया 
प्रेम पुजारी के 
दिल का बयां 
होता रहा, 
रोता रहा प्रिये...

There are rules of the prison, though. Prisoners aren't allowed to die in peace. Death is a tricky taker. It takes those who love life the most. Death was cheated by its heart too. But for someone who walks down a minefield, life is only that valuable. So you tread. 

You get hurt, you get bombed, but you tread. You tread until your feet hurt and then tread some more. You meet other travellers. You crib to them about how you were tricked. You cry holding one of them hoping that they'd send you back. But they don't. Because they cannot. 

And that's how the world's been turning. We've all fallen into the pit we never knew existed. And we're too scared to end it all. So we walk. We walk down the boulevard, not just of broken dreams, but of broken hearts; or should I say, broken beings, tricked by the heart. 

In the midst of the chaos, you find stories similar to yours. You find scars and wounds that match the ones on your body. Once you find them, you hold on to them. You hold on to them until you realize that even they can't send you back. So you let go, and search for another one or two. You search for another face. You search for another story.

The heart tricks you again. But you couldn't care less. Because you know that all of life is a Tamasha, and we're here to build our stories. Only so that we can tell them.

Things that I'll have to be

How do you fight depression? At 2 AM, when the world is drunk on sleep- the most addictive yet pacifying drug of them all- I ask myself this question. The kid sleeping next to me doesn't have a worry in this world. He has an innately mundane routine, yet the most rewarding one that one can have. He has silly jokes to kid himself on, no real purpose to pursue, and most importantly, a day monotonous yet busy enough to reward him a proper night's sleep. He isn't depressed, but I am. Maybe I'll have to be mundane and monotonous enough to be fine.

The boys from my grad school are as carefree as ever. The world doesn't seem to have bothered them much. Chivalry and machismo surround them like moths surround lights. They just seem to have a magnetic connection. Smiles plastered along their faces resemble a childish grin on the reception of a toy. They're still young boys of five years back and not grown men of responsibilities- rough and rustic- sporting bright shades and even brighter eyes. They aren't depressed, but I am. Maybe, I just have to be a little old school tomboy to be fine.

The girl I loved doesn't matter much now. The years I wasted don't either, notwithstanding the knowledge of the prime that I missed. She's as indifferent as ever, busy making her own merry ways, making more acquaintances than friends. That's how she does it, I think- not carrying any burden at all; people coming in as fellow passengers with the luxury of leaving as and when desired; feelings too few to hurt, too restricted to matter, too selfish to give away. She isn't depressed, but I am. Maybe, I'll have to be a little selfish to be fine.

My parents are content- not necessarily happy, but content. Happy within their means would be the correct phrase- no fancy wishes, no extravagant spending, yet never short of anything. Mother doesn't remember a sorrow for too long, neither does she remember a smile. Errands, be it small or big, make up her day, home being a surreal respite, the kitchen- a hell within. For father, it is all about priorities- striking the proper balance, like a master administrator, between need and greed. Routine for him is as pious as God himself, and work makes the best nexus. They are cliched, just the way the world wants them to be. Maybe, I'll have to be cliched to be fine.

So, how do I fight depression? I become the world to do it. I become the tomboy who doesn't give a fuck, or a sixteen-year-old not really knowing how to give a fuck? I become a selfish girl, too selfish to be felt for, or the age old cliche of live and let live? By being any, or all of these, I become the world- the world that doesn't care, the world that doesn't ask these questions, the world that right now is too drunk on the life-altering drug, and that would spin mercilessly again to have some more of the same. Who's the depressed one now?

Photo courtesy- berlin-artparasites

Why does a writer write?

Why does a writer write? I have been pondering over this question for quite some time now. Does he write because he wants to or does he write because he has to? Do you know what happens when you choke on a piece of bread? When it gets stuck in the throat? You drink water to gulp it in or you try to spit it out. Either way, you try to get rid of what chokes you. And you feel relieved when you do. A writer is the one who has to do both of these things, because none of them, whether alone or collectively can bring him relief. He needs to gulp it in and spit it out; gulp it in and spit it out; and the cycle continues. The cycle continues so that he can keep the choking at bay. He still chokes, every day, but just tries to keep it at bay so that it doesn’t kill him.

But what is it that he chokes on? What is it that kills him? It is the same thing that kills all of us- Pain. Except for the fact that some choose to live with it and others try to evade it by surrendering themselves to the pursuit of happiness. But I question, why are they pursuing it? Why do they need to pursue it? Is it not something that naturally comes to them, like breathing? Like there is a class that pursues happiness, there is a class that befriends pain. They are writers. The thing that chokes them in the throat is pain, some of which, they gulp in, the rest, they spit out. Writers don’t write because they want to or because they have to. They write because they need to live; they need to survive.

They aren’t some benevolent magicians meant to save the world through their works. They are humans, who are just as fallible as the rest and are trying only to save themselves. They do not necessarily need to be polite, humble and generous people who are meant to be empathetic towards others. They can be rude, arrogant, angry creatures trying to battle these issues within themselves; or maybe these issues are what propel them to write. Maybe their inability to maintain calm in the state of chaos and loss thus incurred and the pain thus suffered is what they want to write about. They want to write down what they couldn’t speak and also what they did and why they did so. Why did the past creep in then and made them who they are? Why and how have they been moulded into someone they never were?

These are the questions that they can either choose to gulp down and store in some corner of their hearts as pain’s indifferent token, or spit the answers out on a blank canvas with such intensity and ferocity that matches the magnitude of the glitch in their throats. They keep the bug from troubling them for as long as the time that the bug takes to replenish itself, for the world feeds it a lot of fodder. It is the reason why a writer observes the dog limping, the child crying, the old man’s eyes, and a common man’s cries. He observes the world around him and feels sad. He finds that the others are no different. He finds that others are there, right in the eye of the storm; and he finds that they have no means to fight back. They are there as if they have been destined to be there. It makes him sadder.

But why does he write then? Does it help him? Or does it help them? Does it change the world? I don’t know. But what it surely does is that it changes him. The fits of the former self do come back to haunt him, but more or less he comes out reformed; not perfect, but reformed. He sees the bitterness around, and realizes that a moment of kindness even if that goes against his comforts and even if it doesn’t bring him any sort of relief, can do wonders. They feel good for the person, but they feel numb within. It is a strange kind of feeling that perhaps they themselves cannot explain. A writer doesn’t know what he wants when he writes, he doesn’t know how would it help him, or how would it help the world. He just writes; plain and simple. He is a wanderer, roaming around, observing the world, carrying another one within him, and trying to bring the two at par. All of this for what, he doesn’t know!