Over everything else

If you want to truly feel the pain, love someone.
Give them the power to destroy you both physically and mentally, let them burn your world down to the ashes, watch them break down the castle of your dreams in front of your eyes and not do a thing. They will make you feel guilty as if you were the reason behind this fall. And you will do what you have had always done in your miserable life, you will down on your knees and beg them to stay even after this carnage that they have pulled off. Not everyone is meant for a relationship, it's just plain and simple but the problem is that we lot seldom understand. Relationships are a beautiful thing if they are with the right people. Sometimes in life you end up being in a relationship with someone who doesn't want you to be yourself, but to be a better version of you. They see you as a project which they will undertake and customize you as per their experience and liking. And you being a love deprived, emotional wreck you would feel that all the attention being showered upon you is because of love; it's nothing but a facade, a play, a distraction for them; a distraction from their own miserable so called perfect lives. A perfect relationship or life is desirable for many but what we don't know is how much one has to sacrifice for having that. A life built on fake relationships, compromises, deceit, lies and social slavery. Like the charm of a new toy the love for this dual life also wears off easily. For some a few months are enough for reality to kick in, but for a few of the many a lifetime is not enough to break the shackles of this self proclaimed Utopian lifestyle. This utopia doesn't shatter all at once, first to go will be the relationship. In today's society, we seldom give importance to the intimacy and love in our mundane lives. Slowly, distance creeps in and this perfect relationship looks to you as a burden or a cage from which you want to escape from. You are hesitant at first but as the desire to escape grips you from within you become a bit more daring and adventurous. You will somehow enter a relationship with an ex-flame to be safe because you have been burnt already by that fiend relationship so you need to be with someone with whom you had. This infatuation which you mistook for love will wear off as easily as when you moved on from one relationship to another. But this thrill of being in a relationship apart from your toxic plastic one had fueled you enough to continue again with the fake one. The second barrier to fall with the materialistic way of life. People sometimes get so consumed in life with money that they give up on their love, country, family and what not so that they could live a life which the society deems prosperous. But just like the relationships, slowly they realize that all the material whoring that they had been doing in order to gain acceptance from the society doesn't even matter. So, now to cleanse themselves from this filth they indulge in giving back to the society by going to charitable events, paying for expensive dinners in the name of donations and what not. To be honest if you have to give something back to the society give your time. No need to fake for the society's acceptance of good Samaritan.
I started this with love and longing and ended with describing the reasons why one should not settle for anything other than love. This is the reason I have accepted for me and maybe that's enough for my limited understanding. I don't want people to accept or contradict this. It's just what I feel, maybe like these Utopian relationships I may also evolve and my perception towards this may change, but until that time I am taking this to the grave.

A new beginning

“The world would be a different place if every couple who loved ended up together,” she said with tears in her eyes. 

“We are meant to be together Malvika,” told Rohit with a wavering conviction in his voice. 

The night was young, the full moon was making the dark sands of the beach shine. The waves were caressing their feet and going back to the ebbs of the sea. With every receding wave, they could feel their love getting lost in the vastness of the sea. This holiday had been the last retort to salvage their relationship. They both had agreed upon this, a thing which was an achievement in itself. The secluded beach resort at one of their favorite destinations; Bali. They had their honeymoon over here, so it was an obvious destination choice when they decided to give their marriage one last resort.

“Rohit, we have to realize that this is not working anymore,” said Malvika fighting back her tears. 

“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that its over,” said Rohit with a lump in his throat.

“Don’t make this difficult, Rohit. We are poles apart and I cannot live a lie forever.”

He did not need to say anything; the tears in his eyes had said what he never could. It was over. He knew her well enough to know that once she had decided on something then seldom would she balk from it.

The wind had stopped and the silence of the night could be felt. Once they both longed for this peace, wanting to spend time at places where they had nobody to bother them. But tonight the silence was not romantic, it was just awkward. The ship had sailed and there was nothing that they could do now to make it work. She slid her hand into his, she always liked the way he held her fingers, softly caressing the inside of her palm by tracing the lines back and forth. He was staring at the dark vastness of the sea. He turned to look at her and asked,”How did we end up like this?”

Malvika gazed into the eyes of Rohit. She knew that there was love in their relationship, but sometimes that is not enough. They wanted different things in life. After more than ten years of knowing one another, today, they were mere strangers to each other. She wanted to scream that she didn’t know the answer, but all she could do was kiss him on the cheek. “I wish I knew the answer, Rohit” she whispered in his ears and started walking back to the resort. He wanted to run and hold her back, but all he was able to do was cry. Tears rushed through to soothe the pain only to find themselves failing miserably in doing so. The thing with relationships is that when they are over they leave you scarred. Heartbreaks and separation are beautiful only for the poets, not for everybody. 

Digital love

Nita flipped through the pages of his husband's diary reminiscing the yesteryears, a time when he used to express his love to her in more than three words. These are the thoughts of a woman who wants to be wooed, courted, and pampered again. She longs for intimacy and love. The same can be said for many unhappy couples these days. And the thing which all these people have in common is the too much dependency on the tech stuff of today.

  In this tech world, where nowadays nothing is impossible, it may be delayed for a few years, but eventually what you imagine today becomes a reality tomorrow. Here, love can be expressed in many ways from emoticons to text messaging, from sharing pictures with love messages to audios with songs for the loved ones. Expressing love has never been easier, just at a few clicks or taps on the phone will do it for you. But if you look carefully, this form of love is shallow, lacks warmth and it doesn't have the same long-lasting effect as love had for the previous generation. Sometimes I feel that we don’t give them the credit they deserve. They really are heroes and we should respect them for that. Not only did they educate themselves without the Internet; they also expressed their love for someone in an old-fashioned way, with love letters, bouquets, chivalry. I can say it must not have been easy for them back then also, but they still mustered up the courage to ask the man/woman of their dreams out on a real date in person. Today, how many could do that, asking someone out for a date in person is a tiny bit different from asking someone on the Internet. Even a right swipe on an app could bring two people together, but this love is based more on what you see and not on what you feel. With the rapid advancement the world changed from analog to digital and in this transition, love changed too.

I am not against the tech-savvy generation, but this over-dependency is ruining the beautiful art of courtship and wooing. Life has become a digital platform, and love and emotions nothing more than a digital signal. The internet is turning us all into emotional hypocrites, we fake smileys to hide our true emotions and reply with cute little messages even if we may not feel that way during that moment. Today, mobile acts as a medium to convert our feelings into digital signals but as it's impossible to convert from one form to another without suffering any losses, and in this case, feelings are somewhere getting lost, little by little, with every tap on your mobile screen, with every press of a key on your laptop, and with every click.

Writer or God

Do you ever feel like a single line from one of the novels will have such a lasting impact that all the stuff you read after it is just mediocre in comparison to that solitary profound line. This line is intertwined in your memory so deeply that it may never be forgotten. Whether the writer knows about the magic of this one line or not, does he feel the same way as you do about that line, only the writer knows.
Every great book has it fair share of good lines for which the writer has put an effort and weaved his magic into it. But what makes it special?
The writer who writes the line or the character who speaks it. The writer speaks to the reader through the character he has created but as a reader we connect to the character and more often than not we put ourselves in place of that character. If you look it from a third persons point of view, it would look like writer speaking through the character which has turned out to be the reader or you. One can even say that the reader and the writer are one or the same person.
The writer is like a God who has created the characters and in turn created the disciples or the readers for his story.
That's why every story has an end and it completely depends on the writer/God to give it a happy ending or in some cases even a sad one.

Alive

'Bang' the sound shattered my ear drums.
'Bang' 'Bang' two more shots.
By the time I realized what was happening, it had ended.
All that remained was eerie silence and white noise.
I tried to shout but couldn't my voice.
I opened my eyes to everything white. No other colour except white. It was like all the other colors have been sucked out of their glory and all that remained was white; only white.
As I inhaled it was like the first time my lungs have tasted the oxygen. So fresh and so pure, I was getting high by just breathing.
I was alive for the very first time.
As I tried leaving the bed I felt pretty nimble. It was a different feeling, it felt ethereal.
My senses were hyper sensitive. I could feel the rustle of my clothes as I walked, the twitch of the bones as they bent and even the sound of blood flowing through the vessel's.
As I walked, everything felt altered and for the first time I was closer to reality.
It surely felt lively being dead.

Parallel universe

I think I would envy the life of myself in a parallel universe.
He must be living in the flat with his wife; Maa, Paa and bhai would also be there with him celebrating the festival of lights.
He must be working with that Italian company raking in big bucks which allows him to maintain that lavish lifestyle and social circles.
He may have learnt playing guitar and he plays it to her on rainy days. Maybe he goes to wine tasting with her on weekends or do some charity work or go on long drives in his convertible.
I wonder whether he also thinks about his life in a parallel universe, I know he may not like the decisions I have taken or the life I have chosen but one thing is for certain;
I have lived and loved with all my heart.
I may have faltered a few times but I am still here living and fighting each day, every hour, every minute, every second.

Intruder

Love. Hate. Dreams. Reality.
What's the meaning of all these words in my life?
Whom to love and trust?
Why have I started to hate my life?
What happened to all my dreams?
Is this the reality where I have to suffer everyday?
What have I changed into?
And that too without even trying.
Everyday has become a struggle to find the very reason of my existence.
This is not the person I was before or the person I ever wanted to be. This is not me.
This is not a rant against anyone; this one is for me.
This is me trying to get hold of things.
This is me trying to understand life, this is me trying to be real.
This is me trying to fight off this guy with a facade who has taken over the real me.
Because this all ends.
Now.