The Jungle Book 2013

Disclaimer: There is no political agenda, no targeting any groups, and no support to any party (the only party I like are those with free food , dance floors and Dj’s). The intention of this post is to salute the spirit of bravery of those who want to make the world a better place but their Access Denied.
P.S. I love the men in my life- Friends, Family, Brothers, Batch mates, Crushes..Nothing against you at all. You guys make me complete!

I wake up and the world around me has changed. My hands tied, my mouth gagged,but my legs spread wide for reasons best known. I see my plight is just like the rest of them: the fairer sex known as  “woman”. 

“Woman?” I thought to myself, as thoughts are the only remaining freedom I possessed.
“Weren’t they the miracle workers, the life givers, the ones worshipped?”

Then why am I gagged? Restricted? Limited?

For a moment, I doubted my existence. Was I really the same woman visualised in my thoughts? Looking at my tied hands, I guess not.

It’s a jungle out there. Democracy lies only within a certain section of masculinity I suppose…. for the rest it is extinct. It’s not that attempts weren’t made to revive it but demanding what was our birth right doesn’t really go down well with the powerful minority out here.
We are promised change but when we don’t see that happening and protest, we are jailed. “So that explains the gagged mouth!” went the loud thought in my head again which I’m glad they can’t hear.

The roads have hounds waiting to hunt on bikes. I’m pretty sure they’re wolves,why else will they move in a pack?  They can’t be lions. Lions move alone fearlessly. But there aren’t any lions around in this jungle. Did the wolves overpower them too? Are they the new dictators of the jungle?

It happened one time I was travelling back home in the metro. It wasn’t crowded and yet I felt a sudden pain soaring from my bottom. In an instant reflex action I slapped the man back who was responsible for that pinch, held his collar and abused him left right and centre. The coward ran away but looking at the people around I wondered who the bigger coward was in the first place!

I have my hands tied today. The jungle doesn’t permit me to raise them any more. Nothing’s written about this restriction though but it is followed unconventionally like the rest of the society. The consequences will be dire if I dare raise them… who knows they might be twisted, turned or worst still…..held by the unknown.

We still have the freedom of speech existing though in this jungle and its freedom beyond limitations. Everyone has the right to feast their eyes on any creature, any body part desired and of course have no shame in “showering” comments or stating their intentions out loud. So what if it was a French woman they wanted to f*** or pick up a mother daughter duo as they sat in their cars.

It happened another time, I was out crossing the road from the metro station when suddenly I encountered the “humble” wolf (humble because he was on a bicycle instead of a motorbike- we still don’t have a classless society you see). He looked at what we consider the first meal for a child, a symbol of motherhood and said out loud in colloquial Bengali “oof koto boro aache!” (My they’re huge). To which being the brash individual that I am replied “Tomar Ma’er theke kom aache @#$&*” (It’s less than your mother’s you @#$&*). It’s shameful that I abuse another woman in my defence, even more shameful that I go down to this level and perhaps risk my life but how else could I subdue this overdose of “freedom”? If he can be limitless in his speech, why can’t I?

We’re equal aren’t we?  Going by my state and many others, equality had become a façade. The world has suddenly become so malnutritioned in moralities that we are envisioned as that last morsel of food available on the face of the Earth...

Someone asked me the advantages of being a man….I cited many colloquial reasons.
When I asked him the advantages of being a woman ... "To sleep their way to success, give birth, not sharing the burden of a compulsory earning and shop at others expense" was the answer. Although it was said apparently in "joke" having such a mind-set in a well-read urban society, seemed more like a joke to me than his words.

We were promised a change. They didn’t cheat us on that. We should have been more specific with our wish.

It’s a jungle out there. The survival of the fittest.

We ought to be covered if we don’t want out legs spread.

We must walk with our hands down if we want them untied.

We must not raise our voice if we want to remove that gag or else we’ll get to read status’ like this : “When a woman threatened to report a cab driver because he refused to take her to a nearby locality, he retorted by saying - Muh band rakho..! Aurat ho, apni aukaat meraho.. ..nahi toh ek kheench ke dunga.. (keep your mouth shut! You’re a woman,stay in your limits or else one slap I’ll give you!" Saying this, he drove off.. I was too zapped to react...” [Arjyesh Ray’s Facebook status dated July 25, 2013]

We can just be visualised as the Tandoori Murgi ready to be devoured with alcohol or perhaps an object in the household that doesn’t have a warranty or service centre hassles. Our “jawaani” is always “badnaam” in their eyes.

They say we cannot be understood not realising how opinionated and judgemental they are themselves when it comes to us.

If we have curves… We’re fat
If we don’t… We’re flat
If we wear make-up… We’re fake
If we don’t… We’re down market
If we dress up and have guy friends… We’re sluts
If we don’t… We’re narrow minded villagers
If we’re blunt …We’re Bitches
If we’re quiet… We have an attitude problem

My voice limits itself to just words now. Actions speak louder but a Pen is mightier than the sword for me to fight my way out of this misogynistic jungle.Whatever be the choice of weapon, “A hero can be anyone. Even someone doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around someone's shoulders, to let them know the world hadn't ended.."

Till then....this is what the living in the Dark Age feels like....

Pen-Seived

     "We write to taste life twice; in the moment and in retrospect”
      - Anais Nin

We let ourselves lose on a simple blank piece of paper. Our bodies spill the terror, the love, agony, anguish, laughter, hope.

 A PEN was another name given to our voice, another name given to our tongues. It didn’t matter how cheap or expensive, venomous or sweet that tongue was, the words that came out got all the limelight.

 Every notebook told stories—stories about those long lost days of the student life, stories of discovering newer experiences of travel, stories of close guarding secrets you’re most likely not to divulge, stories of sheer nonsense---- stories defining YOU.

 The advent of technology was a welcoming change. We got our first computer way back in the year 2000 and things just started changing from thereon. The pen lay motionless on the table for months at home while the notebook served its purpose only in school. Copying manually became a thing of the past. Xerox and printouts took on the front seat. As for writing……..it just got lost somewhere in the chaos……..


Flashback:

It was class V where a sense of growing up started to give its initial feelers. It's symbol? The transformation from pencils to something known as the INK PEN.

The device came along with an array of other attractions which included cartridges, nibs, ink erasers and the ink bottle of course. We also learnt the alternative use of our nose dropper---to fill up the think tanks!
We grew wary of smudged pages, to blow gently on paragraphs just written before closing our exercise books. The weather always played spoil sport with humidity ensuring yet another obstacle; as if picking up the correct exercise book with a precise thickness of paper to prevent ink bleeding wasn't hard enough.

 Moreover I used to admire my teachers who just grew to accept our Rorschach ridden assignments with immense forbearance and patience.


Present:

Times hav chngd. Sh8ning clothes, wrk, wrds has becum a fad. It's an age of SMS, Whts Apping, BBMing, Emailing. Letters on paper? Post cards? What's tht?

Growing up may include an increased height and age - in some cases even maturity, but for everything else Reduction of effort is the key mantra. No one enjoys getting mail anymore, or at least no one enjoys seeing a pile of envelopes nor a  brown cardboard box with a smiley arrow on the side.

The joy of flipping through your pile of circulars, bills, and statements and coming across with your name handwritten in red ink sometimes seems like it’s lost forever.

 We live our lives in public now. We check in, add photos, update "whats on our mind" on a moment by moment basis. The food we look forward to seeing on our plates are now just photos on Instagram.

The pen which was mightier than the sword once upon a time, has now reduced its worth .The device that meant pride, spoke of power, excellence, intellect today finds it utility in a to do list, taking down addresses and phone numbers.

 Every compulsion, every thought expressed rather seeks solace on Facebook than a notebook. Thankfully the hand that taught us the A..B..C's , still encourage the endearing commitment between the pen and paper.


After Thought:

Computers, smart phones etc have made our lives easier-jotting down faster than one thinks . But at the end of the day, is it a race between the thoughts and the written word or is it just the written word alone? Is manual form of writing becoming endangered?

I spend 12 hours a day behind a keyboard. Spiral notebooks and fine writing utensils won’t be found among my business tools. To get a glimpse of the future, just look at today's youth. The incessant use of emoticons for that personal touch in expressions instead of curly Qs or loopy Ls is proof enough.

So endangered is the written art that a century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts. When our great-great-grandchildren find that letter of ours in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist,or to an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them.

What are we losing by moving to a keyboard-based form of text communication? Does it even matter?

In spite of all this, I haven’t lost hope. I decided to write this manually first and then type for the online audience. Looking at the doodle I made while writing this note , I realize the presence of an involuntary smile and a sense of relief.

I’m glad man hasn't developed the art of doodling and writing at the same time technologically. No computer can carve your name on that bark of tree, it is you and you alone capable of doing this .

So what, I wonder to myself as I set a physical pen to an actual piece of paper, can I possibly have to say to my friend that she doesn't already know? And even that worry in itself is a symptom of this skill I used to have and use so well. I used to simply begin and then continue, fancy flying from my pen as often as fact, until I ran out of paper and squashed my superfluous name into the corner. I am out of practice. Which is normal and fine, because aren't we all?

We communicate more often, but the degree to which we communicate personally is lesser, surely. Everything’s in snippets and flashes: a hundred and forty character tweets, YouTube videos. No longer do we describe things in detail. No more the lengthy epistle, the expounded opinion, the exaggerated anecdote.

I may be worrying about this unnecessarily; it’s possible that this is a trivial concern. Certainly we've gained more than we've lost with all these new devices, but that’s no reason to let it go completely. And it’s so easy to bring it back.

Think about how nice it would be to receive letters and postcards again, unexpectedly. Not because it’s your birthday, not because of any reason in particular, but just because someone wanted to write their thoughts onto paper and send them to you.

I leave it to you now what do you want to do with that motionless pen lying on your desk for quite a while……..pick up and make someone feel happy or just make it pass through the sieve…..

Food For Thought

“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it”- Confucius


DISCLAIMER: Contains No preservatives…No added flavours…Just added Fa(c)t [of random thoughts!]

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.
WRONG!
Beauty lies in mass appeal.
Then again it’s the MASS that’s APPEALING or rather APPALLING  to the eyes for reasons not so aesthetic.

With the likes of recent incidents on targeting celebrities connected to the world of entertainment, it seems the very purpose of entertainment has added a new “Weight” of ridicule being labelled to its cause where it’s ok to have WEIGHT in your words but when it comes to body, WEIGHT and watch!

“Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction,” so says an online dictionary.
Well, Fat people are subjected to an “experience of pleasure or satisfaction” (in the form of ridicule) by the same people who came up with this definition, so why aren’t they considered objects of beauty? (They fit in perfectly well in the category as per the definition anyway) Why such hypocrisy? Why this Kolaveri Di?!

Society has this inherent quality of criticising – for being too fat or too thin, being employed or unemployed, being married or unmarried…the list never ends! There just HAS to be SOMETHING WRONG with you! After all Nobody’s perfect right?
For me, that “something wrong” was my weight.

It’s like a part of a PACKAGED deal, being subjected to silly taunts and ridicule comes with being fat- every Sonam Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Queen Latifa, Adnan Sami , even a former Miss World has to go through the PAIN GAME. “But as long as people love you for who you are, who cares!”
WRONG AGAIN
As long as you can be strong enough to answer back like Adele’s “I sing for the ears NOT for the eyes”, or to crack jokes on yourself like a certain Bharti, can one truly survive.


I’m a Punjabi girl and being a foodie is an inherent trait. I rather die eating Pizza than eating nothing at all. I always believed that true beauty encompasses things beyond sight or touch, something within---the light of the soul. Therefore being bred on movies like Beauty and the Beast, Shallow Hal, Shrek, I didn’t find my 93 kilo body posing a problem, at least not initially. Little did I realise later on that most fairy tales  have much more under the façade of a "HAPPILY EVER AFTER!". It's always the Prince who has to be poor, ugly, fat, geeky or a frog (I pity the men folk on this) while the Princess has to be beautiful, slim, trim and perfect-- doesn't matter if she's a poor servant or a mermaid!

Being FAT was never easy especially if you have a beautiful mother. Ask me!
From teachers in school, to relatives, to friends, I used to hate being compared. It’s not that I’m not proud of my mother, of course I am. But I did have a problem with people resorting to comparisons than accepting dynamism.

I never learnt how to swim. I’m hydrophobic but most importantly, it’s the fear of wearing a costume and being ridiculed that stopped me from entering the pool.
I feared gym, doctors and health clinics, only because I knew that standing on that scale is my passport to more ridicule or taunts.

I was never comfortable with a full body massage, because I was too ashamed to show my body..even to a woman!

There was always an unwanted consciousness whenever I went out to eat. In most cases people judge you by your eating habits. Fat people have an exception. It doesn't matter how they eat! what matters is what they eat and how much! There's a sort of assumption that Fat= Glutton.
You stand at a fast food joint people assume you'll order the entire menu! Go to any wedding receptions or buffets and the caterers assume that you are bound to take multiple helpings and give you such a look that forget food you'll think you've murdered somebody by picking up that one extra piece of salad!

You run on the road, people start making weird all faces and shower nasty all comments.

Oh GOD! What kind of creature is that!

Run for your lives or you'll die in the Earthquake!




When it comes to compatibility and love, I have rarely seen love stories being complete where the fat falls for the good looking and its reciprocated because obviously people ASSUME (and make an ASS of U and ME) that fat people don't believe in Love or Compatibility. Everyone is busy preoccupied with that PERFECT wedding picture. Who cares about exceptions?!


As much as I loved outings, I feared family gatherings where another aunty (it’s always the aunty never the uncle) would go up to mom and publicly talk about my weight in such a “concerned” tone that would even make a cat think twice before killing a mouse .
“Arre yeh toh pehle se kinni moti ho gayi hai, usko exercise kara… khana kam kara”(“She’s put on more weight than before, reduce her food get her to exercise)!

"Beta look at your mother, even at such age, she has maintained herself so well!Learn something from her!”
“Well Good Morning! I know this all too well, Come on I live with her! And most importantly she’s my mom! At least don’t embarrass her!” ---- I always wanted to say that but realised that the society which ridicules also teaches us respect! (Bloody Hypocrites!)

They say being comfortable in your skin is the key solution to ALL your body issues, but for fat people, your skin becomes a curse, a constant method of living in fear and taunt and so you have no option but to get rid of it. Its like being forcefully kicked out from a pent house to live on the streets for no fault of yours if you ask me!
I'm NOT promoting FATNESS but just making you realise how equally torturous the life of the Larger frame really is, not because one is fat and unhealthy…it’s ONLY about BEING FAT!

To please myself (by pleasing others..like I had a choice back then!) I tried everything, from crash diets, to protein supplements to slimming centres. A friend of mine used to tear pictures of models out of magazines and tape them to her wall. She said it gave her“inspiration” to work out and look good, and that resorting to this would help me lose weight. But how inspiring could it be, I wondered, to surround yourself with pictures of people you could never actually look like? (At least, not without surgery, or an airbrush on photo shop !)

It’s sad but the concept of beauty is usually discussed within the wider consideration of aesthetics.
Flip through any fashion magazine, one is bombarded with images of attractive men and women wearing, or rather not wearing any clothes. The models on the ramp with “PERFECT” washboard abs, flawless skin, the fact that they can fit into anything and look VAVOOM is pretty much what attracts the non-green grass on the other side.

Women have always wavered to whatever the media of their time viewed beauty. In ancient times, beauty envisaged a healthy body to be able to meet vital needs.Therefore women with wider hips and heavy breasts were considered perfect and beautiful.

Botticelli's painting of 'The Birth of Venus' for example, depicts beauty as a woman with porcelain fair skin,long wavy blond hair and a voluptuous lower half, alluring men with the promise of fertility. Today the same woman in the painting maybe perceived as someone with a lack of muscular form, someone with generous thighs and love handles. In other words, Venus would be viewed as plus size icon by today's standards.

But then again, must art be beautiful to be great art? What about the rest of us? Is beauty just an obsession? Or is there a deeper meaning behind our drive to appear younger and more ‘beautiful’? If you ask me, it’s the latter, where we leave no stone unturned to be one of ‘them’, but the more important question is - Am I doing this for them or for ME?

Current runway models get skinnier while designer labels cater for the tall and thin and women put themselves through various forms of torture to look like their favourite celebrity. The designers may flaunt their collection on stick figures, but their consumers are NORMAL people, as NORMAL as those surviving on home cooked food, those on a regular vocational routine…. those like YOU or ME!

Don’t believe me?

Do give it a keen eye during the SALE period and witness for yourself how the M,L and the XL’s fly off the shelves first and how the S and XS stay on XS-ively!

But such is life. When we don’t feel comfortable in our natural bodies, we deny our spirits everything… from dancing to delicious food. We miss out on all the sensuality and joy that life offers.
We deserve to have it all! It doesn’t matter if you are FAT or thin.

People ask me why I resorted to losing weight when I didn’t have an issue with my weight in the first place! (Funny things with people I tell you—you don’t change they have a problem, you change they still have a problem!)
I did it because I WANTED TO, not because I was forced! It’s my life for God’s sake, You can’t help improving it, don’t destroy it!

It’s only when YOU start loving yourself, when YOU start living for yourself,when YOU resort to change without being pressurised and when looking at YOURSELF in the mirror will soothe YOUR eyes is when YOU are truly at PEACE!

Perceptions are subjected to TIME just like everything else. So if a Asha Parekh, or a Silk Smitha bring an appeal to the curvy heavy hips and a Kareena snatches the lime light with Size 0, a Vidya Balan brings the oomph on voluptuousness back!
TONGUES and TAILS WAG! And will keep on doing so! WEIGHT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!  Anant Ambani is laughed at for his Body, he’ll have the last laugh on your bank Balance! BIG DEAL!

I REPEAT MYSELF when I say I’m NOT promoting heaviness but just making one realise how resentful and torturous the life of the larger frame really is! They aren’t aliens from another planet, they’re HUMANS and one has no right to subject them to any form of ridicule whatsoever! There's a reason why we aren't super heroes/heroines. God made us differently. Yet conceit leads in people in believing to be Perfect! GET REAL GUYS! Perfection is a myth!
So if you can’t be PERFECT, be an excellent example of Being HUMAN! --- if not pounds, you’ll surely GAIN respect!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT!