A tender little flower, in the sweetest hour, lay down to sleep and dreamed up a lullaby

-
Today I finished my last day at the company I was contracted with. It was a three-month contract and a good stint. I really like working like that...one or two months at a time. I want to be so good at my work that when people engage me on a project for a brief spell, it should feel like a 'season of Mukta'. That's nice, I think...I like to see myself as a season and not a freelancer. The thing is that I have started feeling like I am not very good at my work anymore. Because it is coming too easy. And I am not giving the work to percolate inside me, stew a little, maybe even become rancid and acidic...but basically mingle with all the other words and failures and successes I have had in life. I want to do some work, some writing, some creation of course content - where the pain shows through but not the labour. I don't know if it makes sense.

Now, obviously, nobody on LinkedIn is really looking for a 'season of Mukta' or anything like that. (It is heartening to see that the delusion is restricted to myself now.) Or if they have worked with me and not had a good experience, then all of my procrastination, temper, etc. has just led them to equate the Mukta season to be some hot, sweltering mess. But actually, I have never worked for myself. I think I should do that now. Take some time out to pick something from my heart and write. Give myself three to six months to do this. I do think I deserve it now. I do think I have to build myself some more to do this. And I am working on it every day. So soon, I will be prepared and ready to engage with myself. 

I am having a nice cup of tea now and blogging. Today, I was really madly agitated about a hundred things so I wrote it all out in my diary. I think I will write some more. Right now, I do not go back and read back what I have read. I am waiting to finish the whole notebook and then I will revisit it. I love to see lines and pages get filled up with my handwriting. 

Sometimes people approach me for their start-up ventures or things like that based on what they have read on this blog. They want me to write like this for them. And try as I might, I can't. Rather, that request itself puts me off a little bit. I mean, I don't know why. This is something that I have always wanted - that my writing alone should get me work. But the blog - is not so much writing as it is living. Or maybe not. It is still writing. I think I feel a little anxious because I don't want to write like this for anyone else before I have written like this for myself. I don't know why I am referring to myself as two different people but ever since I have started writing my diary properly, I sense a certain detachment from the actual business of living.

So, interestingly, some people read this blog and they get a feeling of underlying joy. And they want me to bring that optimism and cheer to their venture. Some others read the blog and sense an underlying sorrow. And they want to bring that tristesse to the writing. I don't know what underlies the writing on my blog. I would think joy. But I have noticed that I do better writing for those who detect the sadness. 

I had seen an interview of Zoya Akhtar where someone asked her about the casting of MC Sher. When she talked to the actor, apparently he had asked her whether she wanted Sher the tiger or Sher the lion? She responded that she wanted Sher the lion. Apparently that was the question that made her realize that she'd made the right decision. (I had absolutely loved Gully Boy!)

I think even though I think I am fairly upbeat and cheerful, maybe I trust the instincts of those who see the sadness. 






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more