Pretensions...

I was watching T.V. and for a change there was this program different from your usual "saas bahu" pollutants.

It was something called "Mahi Way", about this fat girl and her ups and downs in life...

At first it made me laugh, but then she said something about how we pretend to be someone we are not because who we are is too scary to be...and I realized how true that is...

I realized that sometimes we pretend so hard not to pretend that we almost make ourselves believe that we are not in faact pretending...

So I am going to take a leaf out of her book and let it all out of my tummy up into the air:

1) I am not as sad as I make myself believe I am or should be and I am not as happy as my laugh is loud.

2) I make fun of me being fat not because I am cool with it or because I don't care, but I think doing it before anyone else does, makes it less humiliating (it actually doesn't, I just like to tell myself it does).

3) I pretend that I know I am ugly and that I have accepted it.

I actually think my cheeks are the prettiest shade of pink and my slightly upturned nose is like a cute cherry, that I have the sexiest of lips and the sweetest of smiles, that the fat gives me curves and that my hair (though i like to call them unmanageable) form the most gorgeous of curles the night after i wash them... I truly believe I am bautiful, I am just waiting for everyone else to wake up and see that...

4) I pretend that I love serious books and that MBs are just for brainless chicks... nothing beats a night spent reading one of those old timer MBs, full of subtle romance and grand gestures...

5) I have always said I like rock music, because I thought that is what cool people do... it gives me a headache

6) I pretend about the number of guys who asked me out...

7) I love walking around my house in my bathrobe, not because its comfortable, like I like to say, but even though it makes me sweat like a pig in the summers, it makes me feel like one of those heroines from old English movies, sensual and graceful.

8) I pretend that I am all grown up and mature and am sooooo over mush...

the truth is sexually explicit flirting turns me off... I would rather be called a doll and pampered than be called a bitch and fucked

9) I don't give myself roses because I love them and like giving them to me... its just a way to tell others to give them to me and make me feel special

10) I tell myself over and over again that I hate Hyderabad and want to move closer home, the truth is I love the freedom it has given me

11) I pretend to be sooooo happy when my friends are happy and fall in love...the truth is I feel jealous that its not I who am in their shoes...

12) I pretend to be a cynic who doesn't believe in love anymore, the truth is I am still waiting for my prince to climb the tower and carry me off to his palace in the skies, to love me and cherish me above all else...the truth is watching pretty woman still makes me laugh and cry at the same time...

13) I pretend i never dream, the truth is every night before I sleep, I like to think one fantasy love story... I actually have an imaginary guy, who loves me and hugs me to sleep, everytime the real ones break my heart...

14) I pretend to be a miss-know-it-all, but the truth is, most times, I am like a rabbit frozen in front of a pair of headlights on a dark summer night...

15) I pretend to have more friends than I can count, the truth is I am just that little girl, whose Birthday party noone wants to come to...

The teddy...

“It’s been a long time since I wrote something…”

This has been the starting line of most of the little I have written in the last 2 years.
There was a time when I would churn out two, three, sometimes four posts a night.
I could wake up at 3:27am on a black summer morning and find inspiration in the blank, except for the rotting bloody bodies of dead mosquitoes, walls of my minuscule hostel room.
Today, I lie in my plump bed, fatter in both body and experience, no not wallet, do you know the ratio of the salary of an ASE to her cost of living?? Its 1:38 (No I was just trying to be witty, no I did NOT calculate it, but you get the point right??)Ah! Well! I digress, so where was I? Yes I was in my plump bed with a fat body of experience, a fatter body per se, a blank page and a printed keyboard, in short all the tools required to cook a delicious literary broth.
Yet, the page remains bland and the words in my mind half-baked, because my kitchen is out of stock of the one key ingredient, “Inspiration”.
What is inspiration anyway?
Is it a strange face in the crowd that is gone forever in a span of a heartbeat, or a familiar stranger we sit next to every day on our way to work? Is it a little voice we hear inside our head, or is it the God whose existence we all try to believe in? Is it the smell of rain in the air or the colour of the sky on a sunny day?
Is it a broken heart or the edge of a tapestry you see through the half open window of the apartment in the building opposite to yours?
Is it hope or is it life itself?
I do not know…
All I know is that there times when everything feels empty and meaningless and life feels like a dream trapped in an eternal repetitive cycle. You crave for a way out, to write something anything yet everything eludes you, it’s like you are empty of ideas, empty of ability, empty of life itself.
You remember, how when you were little
life meant a cute cuddly teddy bear with a pink satin ribbon we loved to run through our fingers, ‘coz it felt so soft and shiny. Today, it is a monstrosity of unspent tears and dusty emotions, of broken hearts and discoloured dreams…

And then comes a day when you are sitting at your window, listening to the thunder of a rainless sky, as the sun takes a deep plunge down the horizon, feeling the wind whip your hair around your face. Your legs are cramped, your laptop at the verge of becoming extinct, your view is the same empty plot/garbage dump, you try not to look at every day, yet for no reason you feel this faint stirring of something, like hope, like just a faint hint that something other than emptiness still resides in some hidden corner of your being…

And in moments like this, you almost believe, that under all that grime, under those broken pots and disfigured pans this monster still has that little cuddly teddy curled up somewhere, a little too dusty, a little too frayed, quite a bit thinner and very wobbly… but with that faded pink ribbon stills blowing around its crumbing ears, just as soft if not as shiny as it was…in moments like this you almost believe in belief