Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,


and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you


all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,


the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

             - Derek Walcott

Levis Go Forth Legacy Commercial

Your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

Be on the watch

There are ways out.

There is a light somewhere.

It may not be much light but

it beats the darkness

Be on the watch.

The gods will offer you chances.

Know them.

Take them.

You can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

And the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

Your life is your life.

Know it while you have it.

You are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

Inspiration

Where do you go looking for inspiration?

Inside a book? At a mall? The lyrics of your favorite song? In your dysfunctional relationships? Alcohol? Random drunken conversation with strangers? Your past successes? Failures? A facebook status update or a twitter feed? Gazing into the dark night? Or walking aimlessly on a busy street? The internet? Google? Observing people or ignoring their existence? Questioning your motives? Or letting things be? God? Religion? Going back in the past? Or trying to control the future? Staying up in a sleepless night? Listening to deafening music? Inside a movie hall? Amidst a crisis? By being spontaneous? Or planning your whole life? Doing what others are busy imitating?

There is no real answer, is there?

A Little Piece of Heaven

In search of perfection and happy endings, how often do we look past the seemingly meaningless yet short abrupt run-ups to exhilarating highs?

I wonder how we survive then, if we keep giving these unknown alleys a miss? We’re so scared of what we will lose that we don’t stop to think of what we will probably experience if we did have the courage to walk into the dark and twisted side of the world.

Caught up in living, we forget about letting go. Being real and feeling, for once, what we really want to feel. It’s not that simple, but then, it wouldn’t be half as fun if it were.

We deserve that piece of heaven. Even if it lasts for a moment.

What my To-Read list looks like

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The Curious Case of The Ladies Compartment

Dear Ladies-travelling-in-the-ladies-compartment-in-the-metro,

I’m confused. Would you mind answering this for me?

1.First you want reservation (which you obviously get) and then won’t open your mouth when a man enters and very comfortably travels in a reserved coach? What is it exactly are you afraid of? You are about a 100 against that one guy. Alteast stand up with the one who objects.

2. When one of your own does object to it, all the rest of you do is watch mutely or better still, turn your head away to the other side.Why?

3. Do you realise that when you sit in a seat specifically reserved for senior citizens, you have to vacate it when an older person boards the train? And by vacating, i mean getting up and not “slightly” moving your shapely behind to “adjust” someone to whom the seat rightfully belongs to?

4. When you ask me to make some room for you in an already overflowing seat, you realise that its ME who is doing YOU a favor and not the other way round? Should you not stop pushing me further and further into an immovable position that almost breaks ALL my bones ?

5. I understand that as women, we have this insatiable need to pack everything in our bags, hence often making it heavy to carry and hold onto for a long time. But before you place *that* heavy bag on me, shouldn't you ask me first? I am a person after all, not a random shelf inside the metro (which btw, they are yet to build!)

In name of sisterhood, motherhood or even Robin Hood (if you find him cute!), please help me understand your unnecessarily rude and strange behavior.

A frustrated fellow lady traveller.

Movie Marathon

This sunday was a movie marathon day. Here is a list of some of the movies i watched (at home) and how good/bad/ugly they were


1. Easy A

Started with this one as it promised to be a chick flick. And it was. Loosely inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel on adultery & romance,Scarlett Letter, this movie tells the tale of a high school socially inept teenage girl, Olive Penderghast who uses a rumor of her apparent promiscuity to climb the social ladder - stitching a red A to further add to her new reputation. The movie then becomes predictable on how she begins to  dislike her popularity, the guy she likes (who was uptil now ignoring her) suddenly falls in love, and other over-used plots of a teenage flick. The movie is a good for one watch- Emma Stone has done justice to her role- acting like a vamp in one scene and an innocent victim in the other. Penn Badgely (of the Gossip Girl fame) is totally wasted (though he does look good in his shirtless scenes :)) is the love interest of Olive. 
I'd give the movie a 6/10 for Emma Stone's performance only and making my Saturday afternoon thoroughly enjoyable.
(image source: mymoviecinema.com)


2. The Devil's Backbone

This one had been lying in my harddrive for a very long time, and i thought it was high time i watched it. This spanish horror/thriller by Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro is a MUST WATCH. Set in the Spanish civil war era,this movie is about a young boy Carlos who is left at an orphanage in the middle of nowhere  by his tutor and how he discovers that the place is haunted, what he does thereafter. Quoting AO Scott of the New York Times, "The director, Guillermo del Toro, balances dread with tenderness, and refracts the terror and sadness of the time through the eyes of a young boy, who only half-understands what he is witnessing".
I give the movie a 9/10 for keeping me hooked right till the end. 
(image source: moviescreenshots.blogspot.com)


3. Buried

This one is NOT for the ones who don't like closed spaces. I rarely like movies that follow a single character plot line and without many scene changes or character development.I tend to lose my patience watching such movies This one was no exception. While buried has received good reviews & it IS a good film, i fast forwarded it to the end mostly because i could not bear to watch any longer. It is about a truck driver (Ryan Reynolds) in Iraq who is ambushed and buried alive under the desert with a blackberry, knife, glow sticks, lighter & a hip flask. The ending is a surprise ( i read it in Wiki and then forwarded it to see it for myself) but is a good watch for those (especially men!) who like the how-will-he-survive kinda single plotline. For me, the movie is a 5/10.  


4. Animal Kingdom

I ended my movie marathon with this fabulous movie. Animal Kingdom is an Australian crime film which shows how a young teen is unwittingly caught in the drama that unfolds in his grandmother's life- who incidentally happens to be the matriarch of Melbourne's crime family. This award winning movie has Guy Pearce as the cop who tries his best to bring the family down. Watch the movie for its intensity & excellent character development. I'll give it a 9.5/10. An absolute must watch!

Free, is all you gotta be

We are born free & then as we grow up, we chain ourselves to self-imposed shackles. The need to be happy one time & sad the another, the desire to want someone & disown the other, attempts to trust & betray- all these emotions we build up to please others, ourselves, the society- unconsciously succeed in forcing us to become someone else.

Free. That is all that we need to be. Living for ourselves and doing what makes us happy. Free from the constant need to adjust to society & its norms.Doing what others think right.

Our time is limited. Do we really want to spend it inside a box?

Flashback of a Fool

Modern day tradition has it that we look back deep & hard at the year gone by & immediately convert it into a blog post. Sticking to convention, I am going to do the same. Having neglected my blog for over 2 months, it is only right that I give it the due attention it needs by a blog that sums up last year.
2010 can be easily summed up in one word- Change. It was the year that brought the most diverse experiences to me- some pleasant and some not-so-pleasant. I am attempting to put together all the things that defined 2010 for me - a year that was perhaps the turning point of my life.


1. Travel. 
2010 was the year of travel. From orlando, new york, to Ladakh, Mcleodganj to Chennai & Bombay- i had the best experiences of my life. I explored new cultures, cuisines, people & most importantly, myself. Travelling to all these fantastic places made me realise how little i know of this vast earth that we live in & how little time i have to see it all.
[Image][Image]

2. The Other Side of People
The past year also opened up a whole new side of people i had never expected to see. I saw some people behave, act & change - ultimately transforming into this new person that i suddenly did not recognise. This did two things - made me realise how bad a judge i am of people & that in life, as we move along, we are really all alone. We have to fight our own battles and no matter how much we want to help the other person, we have to let them fight on their own. 

3. New Career, New goals
What earlier began as a casual conversation with @_Anshul, soon turned into what would shape my career- Digital marketing. I moved from a role in organizational development into digtal marketing - the shift was dramatic. I did not know (and probably still don’t!) how would i turn a hobby into a career - but i guess i’m learning along the way. The proverb - “Find something that you really like & you will never have to work a day in your life” seems to be coming true for me. I mana

4. Books
The past year brought back my reading habit. As per my Goodreads update, i read almost 30 books last year (quite an achievement for me!) and managed to build up a small library of my own. 
5. Discovering new friendships
I made new friends - people who simplify my life and make it so much more fun. 

Looking back, i don’t regret a day of my life last year & would probably do over everything exactly the same way. Looking ahead, I hope for 2011 to be bigger & better & simpler- a year that makes me happy in all that I do.