Alone and alive (Final Chapter of Book of Romance-Part 1)

This blog is back in action with its original content, feelings and emotions from the bottom of my heart, bare truth for the world to read. I spent all of 2010 and 2011 so far worrying over the fact that everybody who knew me in real life, all the friends, the family members, colleagues, read my blog too often and so I couldn’t share everything that I wanted to share without inhibitions.

But of late I have started to notice that the readership of this blog is again impersonal, the audience is made up of faceless strangers like it was when I first started blogging 6 years back. Once again, like old times, when I come to this blog at the end of each day to share my thoughts and feelings, I feel there’s no one else around, at least no one that I personally know, its just me and my blog here. I feel alone again, safe and alive.

So here it goes. Reporting live from my heart…

The search, the chase and the soulmate

I don’t know if its a coincidence or not but I happen to write whenever it pours unexpectedly and beautifully in the National Capital. And these writings always come in mind while I am coming home from work. In 2005, I used to work in Nehru Place, I thought of this post while sitting in the auto. In 2006 I was stuck in a bus stop, unable to find any bus or auto to my home in Dwarka, the rain was so beautiful I took some impromptu photos.

Launch of Samyukta Media: My small step in a big world

Update:

Before you read this, may I request you to Like the newly launched Samyukta Media page on Facebook

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So it has been about 3 months that I have quit and an update is much needed on how has life been without a job. Life has been good, more importantly,  it has been exactly the way I planned. Sometimes I get worried when everything goes according to the plan, a voice echoes constantly in my head saying, “Something has got to go wrong somewhere.”

That emotional intimacy issue…

Its around 1.30 am, in exactly 12.5 hours I am required to give a presentation on the Business Plan at our 10000 women program, in front of a special panel. My B-plan is not even 40% complete. And yet I am on this blog.

I am here because I desperately needed to write, needed to communicate and I just don’t have anybody to talk to.

Here in this campus I am staying with 13 other wonderful ladies, each one of them are amazing listeners and even more amazing feed back givers. I can spend all day talking to them, laughing and cracking jokes every now and then.

But I cannot ‘talk’ to any of them.

Its that emotional intimacy issue. I can write my heart out on this computer, and as soon as I’d hit the publish button it would be up for mass public viewing and that wouldn’t bother me but I cannot talk to the 13 people I know for last 3 months staying in the next few rooms of this hostel. Weird!

This emotional intimacy issue, this inability to establish personal one on one bonding, with people of either sexes, it has trickled down from long lost past. In all of my 35 years, I have never established a single personal relationship. Tons of men, not one boyfriend, tons of friends, not one best friend.

The only person I could really talk to or bond with, until some months ago, was my sister.

“If you are not able to share your small or big moments of happiness and sadness, worries and concerns, if at the end of the day you are talking to yourself, fighting your own fears…do you still think that relationship is worth it?”

I asked that question on my FB and everybody said, “No. Its not worth it.” I am pretty sure the responses would change drastically if I mentioned that the relationship I am talking about is the one I have with my sister.

“Sister? What are you talking about, you shouldn’t even have such unrealistic expectations from your sister. That’s what boyfriends and husbands are for.” You’d probably say.

True, I expect too much from my sister. Perhaps sisters don’t need to talk everyday. Perhaps they are not the person you should feel the need to share your small and big joys and sorrows and all that jazz. She have tried to explain this reality to me too many times already, but I just don’t get it. I still wish she called and talked. She doesn’t like it if I call too much.

Oh well nothing is wrong between us. Its just that she lives away. In Dehradun, has a busy life, she’s an Assistant Professor and she’s also getting married soon. Her fiancee is her colleague also living in the same campus. So you know, its understandable why she hasn’t the time to call me.

Only I don’t understand.

Anyway, so if she did call,  I would have told her how all the women entrepreneurs gang here, all 13 of us went to see Agent Vinod, how much they all hated it and how thoroughly I enjoyed it, and how for the first time in my life I danced in a movie hall. Like those cheap boys who dance on a Munni or a Sheela, I danced on Pyaar Ki Pungi Bajakar. It was so much fun.

But you know, even if she did call, and even if I did tell her all this, she’d have probably not got it, wouldn’t have got what is the excitement all about. Dancing in a movie hall is not appreciated to begin with. Spending money on film like Agent Vinod is the other illogical act of the evening. And grown ups behaving like NOT grownups in public is something she’d never get.

Just for the records, she is 9 years younger to me.

There is one man though, he did understand why I was so excited. He’s been around in my life for over a year now, the longest anybody have ever stayed. For some strange reason that night when I shared all these fun with him, he was being surprisingly nice to me. He was being flirtatious, again, mysterious and charming. I felt loved again. I ended up being typically me though when he tried to be too mushy. I said, “Kuch zyaada nahi jata rahe ho aaj tum?”  I don’t know why I said that, what was my problem if he was being slightly possessive for the first time?

That emotional intimacy issue. What else.

The last thing he said that night was, ”I’d call you tomorrow and let’s meet  once your module is over.” Next  morning, before I could ask him, Were you drunk last night, or did you smoke up? Or were you just high on something new? his phone went out of range. Been 2 days, the phone is switched off.

He has disappeared. Again.

He had just come back from a 3 months sabbatical to Mongolia and Turtuk. A sabbatical for him means no phone, no internet. Pretty much no civilization.

These are the people I desperately need in my life, people I try to reach out constantly, at the end of every significant or insignificant day.  Would you look at my destiny.

Nobody knows how difficult it has been to overcome that emotional intimacy issue with this man and retain him for over a year now. A lot of credit goes to him. You see I am an hyper-reactive person. And he is one of those elements we read about in our chemistry class, those who don’t react to anything, what are they called, inert elements?

So he is non-reactive. All those times in the last one year when I flipped out and displayed some of my histrionics, he stood by inertly. He wasn’t surprised or annoyed or intimidated. He just stayed around.

For the records he is not my boyfriend. He could be, but he is not.

So if I could reach him on the phone today, I would have shared with him about the internal conflict Samyukta Media was going through since last 2 days. How I had a difference of opinion with the team and refused to budge, and so my team hates me. How I finally gave  in but only after putting some conditions which I am sure they would hate further.

But even if he was around, he wouldn’t have extended his shoulder to cry on. He would have said, “you should have done better, you have a bigger responsibility to resolve conflicts, it is not acceptable that you prolonged the conflict for two days instead of trying to find common grounds.”  And then he’d have quoted something from Herman Hesse or some other author and I would have bought into all that.

Back to talking about  the emotional intimacy issue, it doesn’t stop at personal life  you know.

As a part of our course module all of us here at the 10000 women program have been put in touch with a mentor who is committed to give us their personal guidance in nurturing our businesses, solving our problems  and eventually hand hold us to a level where we can confidently approach a VC or an Angel Investor.

The first time I met my mentor, he intimidated me. He was very forthcoming and out rightly rejected my business. I showed him my brochure and he said, I don’t have any sense of branding myself, how can I be in the business of providing branding for others.

That was the end of it. Through the next two modules all my fellow classmates told me that I got the best possible mentor, literally an angel he is, they all went and met him, held one on one meetings, all but me.

A huge opportunity lost purely due to my personality disorders.

Have you ever seen a fat black insect, the one that moves very slowly and if you poke it, it becomes still for a while, pretending to be dead or something. And starts to crawl back slowly after it has been left alone for a while. That’s me.

Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneur – Cohort 17 the BIMTECH, Greater Noida batch

A very rigorous week of study just concluded at the BIMTECH campus, Greater Noida where 35 of us women entrepreneur were attending the 1st module of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 women scholarship.

10,000 Women is a 5 year initiative by Goldman Sachs, the leading global bank, to provide “business and management education to underserved female entrepreneurs in developing and emerging markets. The program is designed to drive greater shared economic growth, leading to stronger healthcare, education and greater prosperity in the communities where it operates.”

The program is being conducted in collaboration with various educational institutions. The much prestigious Indian School of Business and Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH) are the academic partners for Cohort 17, which is the batch for which I got selected.

[Excerpts from a book I am writing]
[Part of the Manoshi's story thread]

“Always bid strong goodbyes. Don’t stand and stare. Just say goodbye, give a hug and leave.” Prithvi would always say to Manoshi.

But this morning’s goodbye was rather long. They had spent the whole of yesterday’s evening, night and this morning with each other and the purpose of their meeting was to bid goodbye.

Finally, after saying bye to Prithvi, with a heavy heart but lighter mind Manoshi sat inside the car to take it out of the parking. She had just put the car on back gear and looked up at the rear view mirror when she saw Prithvi in the mirror, walking back towards her car. She shifted the gear to neutral and rolled down the window glass.

Let a woman sing

Tell me of a female poet who wrote for her muse, a beautiful man. Tell me a song where a woman sings for the man’s beauty, his eyes, his lips, his arms, his shoulders, his heart.

Why don’t we have many such songs or poems? Why is there no female version of a love song like “Chaundvi ka Chaand” or “Chandan sa badan?”

In Abhigyaana Shankuntalam Kalidasa wrote verses after verses in praise of Shakuntala’s physical beauty, which included vivid description of her bossom, waist, bust and other body parts of male sexual gratification. But show me one piece of literature where a woman who is deeply in love praises the man’s body.

There aren’t any such literature because there is shame and taboo associated with a woman singing about lust and passion, a woman desiring the beauty of a man, the touch and warmth of his body.

Give me a song Kalliope, o goddess of music,
My man is so beautiful man and I love him so.
Give me a song of passion,
Give me a song of love.
Let a woman who sings for her man,
have no shame in her lust

“The heart is so not where my dick is.”

If I were a man, I would have said that about my current situation. So change the ‘vital instrument’ to something more befitting my gender, but you get my point right? I don’t know what else to call this but love and I just feel so ridiculous and helpless about it. I mean what is one supposed to do with this stupid feeling. All said and done, this longing has no future, this is a doomed love. I so don’t want to be in it.

I always had a lot of theories about love. “Love can’t happen one sided” said I. You need two people to ‘be in love’ otherwise you just love someone or is loved by someone. Not that the theory makes a lot of sense, but I at least had my ways to get around. I have never been in love and I was quite proud of that and never intended to change it. Even now I absolutely hate to call it love. Like Captain Sparrow said, “not quite all the way to feelings, more like stirrings.”

So its the weekend and my folks are gonna be out of town. From most perspectives its the perfect time to pick up a date and do what mature people do. But in all probability my heart would be somewhere else, a place where I would never be.

Manoshi’s story

[Excerpts from my new book]
[Also part of Manoshi's Story series]

“Are you over and out of love?” He asked Manoshi!

Manoshi wasn’t expecting such a deep question at such an arbitrary time, I mean she had lost the parking ticket and the car papers all in the same evening, her friends were currently busy arguing with the security guards of the hostel gate and he thought that was the best time for some soul searching.

“I don’t know, how can you ask that question just like that. You should’ve given me time to prepare for an answer.” She said it calmly but was restless inside.

He remained silent. She quickly spoke again. She does that a lot, can’t handle silence. “How does it matter? Does it matter?”

“Well we are spending so much time together. I mean…I am a part of this…”

[Poem] The poet failed me

I didn’t love him.
I certainly didn’t, for if I did,
there would be a poem for him.
But I didn’t write a poem for him.

I saw his pouted lips and wondered
How would it feel to kiss them?
But I didn’t have a song for his lips.

She became a tree

Thus Spake Me | XLX

Curiosity compels me to repeat certain actions adhering to the matters of heart over & over again, in spite of a closet full cats killed by, you guessed it, curiosity.