"Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

I just watched this for the first time. I always knew there must have been a version for and by the Americans, the world leaders in the propagation of sentimental bullshit, but I had never bothered to find or watch it. 

One of my friends works for a corporate consultation firm. He likes to humor us and himself by watching videos of smiling suits buying coffees on the streets, ruffling a little beggar child's hair, entering office full of grace and good spirit, shaking hands with the boss, and returning to a fully furnished, beautifully painted house full of the smell of steaming food and the voices of happy children.
I was watching one of those when I stumbled upon this.
It is INANE.
Bring together a bunch of cute singing kids and buy a stuffed animal for every time someone loses their head in a war, or better yet, eat a piece of cake or watch a video of a funny baby on the internet!
What is disturbing to me is that this advertisement states the evils, but manages to cover them up with stills of coupling partners and images of red balloons.

While Coke is killing millions in Mexico by thirst, there are countless of us pintresting 'pretty things' all day.
My mother wants me to send in an entry to the Hum mein hai hero contest.

Also, http://kafila.org/2009/02/12/interview-with-jacques-ranciere/

Another 'it's exam time' post.
All I have done today, is obsess about myself, freak out in different rooms, stare at the ceiling for very long, take photos of my sleeping dog on photo booth, watch parts of the notebook (which is a good weepy day film except they keep shifting focus from the beautiful people to some old people who are the beautiful people 20 years later and NO ONE WANTS TO WATCH THE OLD PEOPLE, OKAY!?)
Fuck, I'm becoming a horrible person.
Then I opened more tabs of universities I wanted to go to and imagined a life there, then I felt bad that all the post-colonialism that had moved me to grins in the middle of class because of the very intelligence of it was lost on me. Then I looked at old photographs and compared people's lives on facebook. I discovered an ambition and another and another on a second and third google chrome tab. I clutched my 10th anniversary addition of American Gods and talked to it. I imagined what it would be like to be the love between Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman. Not either OF them, but the air of the room in which they breathed together. I sent an email to my friend at Cambridge asking him if my chances of applying were officially over forever. I licked the Guardian opinion clean for articles on facebook and saw myself as a conscious victim of the opressor. I finished half a season of Game of Thrones and decided which Dungeons and Dragons character I wanted to be. (For now I am half elf, half human, Sanza Swifteye, taken prisoner at a young age, archer assassin and barkeep, in search of her parents, on the way I win the dancing sword from a weak young prince and fall in love with fallen Icarus after I rescue him from the sea.)

My brain feels dead and my hands itch to flip pages and feel words pop out of my head like in a Lichtenstein. On a note of melancholy that I feel no more because I have exhausted it by doing the afore mentioned and weeping on my bed as Chet Baker croons about looking for the silver lining, I have watched myself being unable to move, bathe, I have felt a battle raging inside my head, I have set expectations and failed them in a second, and by the end of it all I have been able to laugh at it and myself and look at the clock and it is 3 a.m and I have another episode left and I hope that I will wake up tomorrow and do something differently. I am constantly amazed by how quickly moods change but maybe that's just me.

you know how I keep saying my blog isn't pretty

I know I've said this before but I REALLY want to get rid of the black and orange. I think I'm going to make some blog and life changes tonight. Now I'm going to write an 'its exam time' paragraph(!!). (and my loyal friend is going to be here any minute connecting with my laziness and promoting our prided stupidity)
It's exam time and all I've done all day is listen to itunes radio (DID YOU KNOW THEY HAD OVER 365 CHANNELS FOR EACH GENRE??) and lie around in different beds in the house. Then I proceeded to sulk and yell at my sister because she's been working like a dog on something called a body scape for over ten hours. I console myself as I see my eighteen year old sister finishing assignments and waking up on time by believing that I am automatic smarter than a fashion school student as I live in the realms of philosophy and unknowable meaning.
Then I occupied hours of my day by dreaming about travelling to Europe and magically being able to write well and falling in love and claiming the love I have already fallen in. I ate from my precious box of chocos that I share with no one.
But it's not all bad.
I've been thinking about working for a year, I've bookmarked tabs of universities on my google chrome, and drafted emails to my ex-editor to ask her if I could be employed again. I have changed my desktop wallpaper from Foucault to Kerouac to Beckett. I have day-dreamed about various jobs-environmental lawyer, political journalist, supercool professor, comedian, movie star, revolutionary.

My uncertainty in real life flows into blog life and as I look through my drafts, all I can feel is sheepish.

A couple of days back my friend Fish and I went to another friend Jess's grand-aunt's prayer meeting. Jess is Fish's girlfriend and despite being told he didn't need to go he was determined to as an effort on the good boyfriend part. We sat in church, trying to catch up with the hyms and reading them as everyone else chanted. There we were, two young students, one who believed the world could be solved by logic and the other believing that life was without meaning and faith was just another way to fill a void. We left not-so-quietly, smoked cigarettes, drank horrible coffee and bounced off each other's energy for a while before we left for home. While driving back I stuck my head out of the window in the rain and for a rare twenty minutes everything seemed perfect. I noticed how horribly inappropriate it was regarding the days past events. But Delhi was having one of its good days. I smiled to myself while driving remembering the theory of transient happiness I was trying to explain to Fish in our quest to pretend like we were in Coffee and Cigarettes. That any happiness was transient and arbitrary, it stems from a glimpse of beauty, that we on our part try to preserve in the hope that it will last forever. We refuse to recognize the inevitability that it is momentary. Which is why we live in despair. Attempting to stretch love, joy and ecstasy throughout time, looking for it wherever we go.

I don't know much but doing a choreographed dance in your room alone can solve anything. FACT.

I sit on my bed all day charting lists of travel making plans of adventure dreaming dreams of change but by the end of it, I am exhausted by all the virtual activity and take a nap.

I don't know another way to say this, but I'm terribly bored. I am also sick of this generation's extended, self congratulatory, inactive existentialism. I am tired of taking a back seat and being amused. But I'm not really ready to play front. I want to be able to write long sentences, sing whole songs and physically move whenever I want. 

My four, should've been three years of college are finished. I was trying to forge a pun on that whole ends and new beginnings thing but my fingers dangle over the keyboard and my brain stops and all I can do is re-use that metaphor of an itch that you just can't seem to scratch. 

4 am online hysteria is the best shit ever. I had forgotten. 

Today I was driving to college and some man in a long golden car decided to reverse randomly. So I had to swerve and drive my bonnet into a tree. I got out enraged, and tried explaining to the relatively harmless man the trouble he had caused me. I didn't want to fight, I just wanted to say something because otherwise this would piss me off all day. Initially he looked a bit worried but when he saw a young girl step out of the car he sighed with relief and drove away to whichever tall glass building he was driving to.

My friend is a transexual. When I met her last, she was a he. She is more woman than anyone I have met or known. In the two times I have met her, I have listened and learnt only as one can from another woman. She writes, speaks, bleeds, like a woman. She is overwhelmed and infinite like a woman with more to her than most. But now she has been dragged to Jaipur and forced to dress like a man. She says its hilarious and is pretending this is her dyke phase. Her mother, wants to force her daughter to be a son. She thought she was fortunate to have given birth to a boy, and cannot believe her ill luck that her initial fortune would fail her. 

Why should all women in Gurgaon not work after 8 clock? What if they work better at night? What if they like being bartenders? What if working at a club is not about being around drunk men and just enjoying mixing drinks? What does legalizing prostitution have to do with preventing rape? Rape is about the exercise of power, not the actualization of a man's desire to fuck. Women like sex. But who would be okay with abuse?
The Delhi Times for today seems to suggest that women in the capital suffer from crime against them because they are 'just not interested' in taking self-defence classes. It seems to say that if we (as i did once) are taught how to fight, then the problem of rape and murder will be solved. Why must the violators be taught anything? Men will be men afterall. 


Why did I grow up believing that being beautiful and being intelligent are two mutually exclusive categories?

I have hi-fived my guy friends when they told me about their boners but been afraid to admit that I had cramps. We are constantly driven away from our bodies for reasons we cannot understand, but which are prescribed. 

I have controlled strong impulses to kiss someone or tell someone I love them because I have to wait for it to be done to me. What if I don't want to be told it to and want to tell it? What if I don't want to be driven but drive because I like it, not because I want to be in control. What if I don't want to get married and have kids but I still want to be bought flowers? Even something as universal as falling in love and having your heart broken has rules of behavior.


All the women I have known, including myself, have had things to say but not said it. They have sung, drawn, thought and lived incredibly but have been too dismissive of their own selves. They have waited for boys to crack the jokes they have already deciphered, explain theories they have already known.

Helen Cixous in Laugh of The Medusa says that the world cannot deal with the infinite passion of the woman. There are no words to describe the depth of emotion of feeling of thought that a woman can sink into. A woman can find her heart racing, wrenching, and exploding but not find the words to articulate it. This is when she is called abnormal, her mind is called hysteric. I'd like to repeat again that this is a lack in the ability of the world, of language, and not of yourself. 


None of this means that I hate men. As most female outbursts are taken as a lesbian realization, or someone who has just been dumped, this is none of that. I also haven't had a bad day, actually one of the better ones. I love men, as I do women. I love the ones who are my friends, who have been, the ones I have been in love with, and the ones I am in love with. I dislike some, as I dislike some women. Personal interaction has nothing to do with gender. I am just sick of walking out of the house in fear, and not being able to scream, laugh, weep, express when and how I want to. 

My new favorite person:


SPELLING

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.


I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.


A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.


I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.


Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.


A word after a word
after a word is power.


At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.


This is a metaphor.


How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word. 

- Margaret Atwood