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What amazes me about hard days is how they always end. Hard times may continue longer. The dark mood may prevail, the legacy of sadness might linger. But the potent hard nugget of pain that you have to go through will begin and end. It always amazes me how that happens. You can be bracing yourself for that shard to pass through and then, slowly, slowly, time will pass and it ends. 

Maybe that is how time heals. By showing you how stuff ends.

Back in Bombay.

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What I wrote: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-after-last-mukta-raut?trk=mp-author-card

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Last night, I'd gone for a late night movie, 'Dhoni'. I parked the car some distance away from the mall because I thought the parking would be crowded (since it was Dassera).

I watched the movie and loved it. I think Sushant Singh Rajput is deep in a way that is hurtful. It's as if, from this point on, whatever he does will necessarily be visceral.

Anyway, the movie ended and I walked back into the little dark lane where I had parked the car. Except that I couldn't enter the lane. There was a forest of dogs barking loudly and charging towards me until I had backed off on to the main road completely. Late night is when the pick-up trucks and other assortments of vehicular contraptions are seen in Aundh. (They work on the roads at night to make them worthy of the video-game obstacle status you encounter the next day.)

Anyway, I looked around for a stick or a stone to scare away the dogs with. But the horde just kept growling so I was scared. Meanwhile, from the corner of my eye, I could see a cab coasting back and forth around the area where I was stranded. It stopped. A man rolled down his windows and asked me what was wrong. I told him that there were these dogs I was scared of and my car was parked in the lane.

He parked his car, got out, and told me to walk with him. He shooed the dogs away. I thanked him, got in my car, and left.

Some days one is just so glad for the kindness of strangers.

something i wrote

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/metrics-success-mukta-raut?trk=hp-feed-article-title-publish

Here are mine:

• Never get on to What's App. Never. Even if I ever have to write content for What's App, I'll never get on to it.
• Have a difficult conversation - with client, parent, rickshaw fellow, canteen guy, colleague, lover - and not worry about whether I came off seeming really shrill and horrible.
• To write. Just write. Take as much time as it takes to write something. Not talk, not work for a living, not discuss, not explain, not hang out, not travel, not worry, not hurry - just write.
• Work only with people who have read Salman Rushdie. Especially 'Ground beneath her feet' and 'Shame'.
• Work with/ for Salman Rushdie.
• Write my novel, a collection of short stories, a play.
• Live free. Of fear, of doubt, and of my own blooming prejudices (which stem from fear and doubt).
• Have a new set of friends every 6 months. Have a new identity every 6 months. Leave the home, leave the familiar, leave friends, and leave work contacts. 6 months later, will get out of bed, draw the curtains, and look at a very different city. The mobile phone has no numbers stored. I could have any name and any background. I have different favorites - different songs, different skills, different goals. (I am only in touch with family and we write letters.) Every six months, everything changes. Every six months, I get a different sort of transfusion.
• Control my temper and be kind.
• Create something every single day.
• Invest in the making of an instructional designer.
• Work for a couple of years with start-ups only. Exclusively.
• Make lots of money - so much that I can be a hermit whenever I want, for however long I want.
• Have lots of post-cards of the sun, the rain, and my favorite cities.
• Be able to paint sound.
• Forgive into the wind.
• Take care of a baby girl.
• Write for videos. Make videos.
• Retain the capacity to be happy for someone, irrespective of whatever is going on in my own life.
• Keep that quality of being a sucker for art. To look at every opportunity to suspend disbelief and willingly get tender - at the first blush of music or when the lines of a poem stick or a story leaves me sad.
• When I die, should be able to look back and say, "Oh! That's what it was all about!" and quickly scribble something before I pass on.

Hopefully, the scribbled piece of paper finds itself in the hands of a traveler who comes into my room for his or her six month break.

Ode to a tentative forever

Image from www.pexels.com

October and red halves of dried leaves. 

Pockets of ponds from retreating rains and mighty ships made of cellophane. Poetry scribbled in backs of books. 

Flashing numbers of forgotten friends. They come from times that are now ghost towns. 

October and blue shadows on playgrounds. Sweet children with lollies and slices of oranges. 

A sun that seems to melt and harden into a North Star against a theatrical blank canvas. The sky is bizarre. The sky is the sky. 

October and deep loves. October and deep memories of deep loves. October and deep wounds caused by the deep memories of deep loves. 

October and music. October and hope. October and the year has not yet ended. 

October and the year has not yet begun. Yet October and a returning of some kind is happening. October and hope’s final address. October and hope’s last destination. 

October and the lost gypsy of our dreams and the tribe of nomadic fears have finally come home. October the cemetery of a careless summer. 

October and red halves of dried leaves.