Barriers

to wake up one morning and find barriers around you may be a more conducive environment to swallow the fact that there are boundaries that must never be crossed. but to actually have them round you since the moment you first wailed, while being swung in mid-air and not to be told what they meant till you understood on your own. to see it there and always be told how wrong they are, to be allowed the freedom to dream that they'll vanish into thin air some air but then to be reminded that dreams just acts you'll never accomplish, hurts.
it hurts far more than what it must to have them imposed overnight. at least in that case you have the option of tearing your lungs out to make your voice heard, that that what happens is wrong! in this case you can't even say you didn't see it coming. it was always there for you to see. it was you who chose to ignore.
what difference will it make if someone is so narrow that they fail to acknowledge that dark ages are over. what do you do if they refuse to believe that their understanding of liberation was justifiably valid some ages ago when man knew only a few desires-power, food and sex. i can't disagree by saying that man has in anyway changed his priorities or ambitions, but i do believe that they do not employ any kind of force to acquire it from unwilling people. again psychopaths abound. but what i question is can we let fear and socially acceptable behavior rule our lives? especially in a world when you're not sure who your next door neighbour is.

School-revisted

its been over a year since i left school and stepped into a place they call college. saying it is quite a change will be an understatement, it is a revolution! The Mother's International School to Delhi College of Engineering is a major jump, to say the least. i have changed into someone who no one from school would recognize and if any one from college were to see me backin school, they'd laugh their guts out!
this is not some revelation that dawned on me in the early hours of my sleep like other ideas i get, but something right in the middle of the day. my two better friends and i were having a girl's day in...eat, chat, gossip and indulge. so in the middle of all this we decided to pull out the school album and see all our friends again. so out came a big album full of pics, mostly of class 12 and voila! all three of us suffer from a bout of something that can't be explained. it was definitely not nostalgia(we weren't quite missing the people, coz those who matter are still in touch), it was not depression(we're butterflies now, not caterpillars), it wasn't even a regret as to what we are, but something absolutely inexplicable.
looking at those pictures and looking at all of us now, its really a magic of a newly acquired fashion sense. not just the three of us...but each and everyone that i've happened to meet this summer from school. be it long unruly locks for the guys or some hippy skirts for the girls, everyone has a new identity beyond the daily white yarns we all ever saw the others in. and everyone seems to always notice the other person's changes more prominently than their own. i thought i was still the plain jane, the goodie two shoes i always had been in school. but no i am not.
i personally have undergone a metamorphosis of sorts. looking back at my pics from school, i could only cover my eyes! i looked so terrible!!! not that now i am in any position to give any one a run for their money, but still i have some sense. back then i was the trouser wearing, plait porting tomboy! at least now i can say i have some female clothing of repute. i can behave like a girly girl too. something i never could back in school.
so ignoring the academic parts of school and college, the two still stand apart with which shivani they know. the dumb looking smart fatso or the not-so-outstanding female with some brains. two worlds apart yet ingrained in me. a part of me that shows as and when i need it. but i still wish i never look the way i did back in school!
but i still love my school!

Love is Blind

It’s a quote immemorial-Love is Blind. Well I happened to live through it. So I sit here, listening to my any time companion, the very musical radio, and I wondered what made me not to notice the obviously flawed little creature that is so very dear to me-my teddy.

Now King Kong is not an ordinary teddy. Starting with the unusual name to the incomparable little tweed pants he wore when he was first gifted to me to even his inane ability to cry like a little baby, he has been quite a part of my life. To put it quite simply no one liked him-not my mother when she first set eyes on the crying monkey (yes he’s not a bear! I discovered it to my horror only recently), not my grandmother who noticed his flaws like they were mentioned on the packing. The only exceptions were the men in my life because one of them had bought it for me and the other didn’t bother to notice! Even I never realized how much I loved my King Kong till I grew out of my Barbie world and stepped into teenage holding onto the faithful monkey for my life.

To mention his flaws is just to prove how love is blind. King Kong is a monkey-not that it is bad but it is shocking. I mean people always say a teddy bear (thanks to the Yankee prez) but you don’t quite associate a stuffed toy a decade back to a monkey. I am still to spot a stuffed monkey like mine and I certainly abhor those chocolate coloured swinging chimps you find everywhere. My darling is different. He has a squint too. And this too surprised me…I never noticed it all of the eleven twelve years that I have had him. When I did mention it to my mother, she just smiled and said,” You noticed that today?”

This lovely teddy of mine has seen me through all the clichéd teenage events of my not so eventful life. I have cried gallons of tears into his fur, clutched onto him for moral support esp a night before the exam, shared my deepest fears and uncensored comments on everything around me, pretend he can talk to me when I need someone to say exactly what I want to hear and more recently used his expanse of a belly as a very comforting pillow. And then I innocently took him to the family doctor to say he’s lost weight!

He’s more to me than most other people I know. He’s precious and I just have to kiss him good night before I sleep even if in the morning he’s on the floor. It’s hard to imagine spending my life without him…so maybe you’ll just see him shuttling like me between home and hostel every week. Love seriously requires no criteria and never any biases.