An attempt to unweird stuff

-

 I am feeling a little nauseous today. Went for a rickshaw ride after a workout. The world just felt very sinlike...all smokes and mirrors. And it felt as if everybody's faces were gnawed flesh and the more their faces were rotting, the brighter their masks were.

I cannot explain this...but I feel a certain hollowness in my soul...that we are collectively scraping the bottom of a barrel. 

I don't like this mood. Don't like it at all. So I will write about a couple of cheery things.

There was once a sweet little buttercup called Maafi. It grew by a school that was so dilapidated that children came there to play with snakes. Maafi had a ton of friends. Children loved the little buttercup because of its bright yellow petals and its shy and stubborn hope with which it bloomed everyday. When the snakes were put to race, Maafi would be at the very end of the stretch, swaying like a cheerleader who also doubled up as a finish line.

One day, out of nowhere, the world started frosting over. Sparkly sheets of ice started covering everything. The slide looked like it was coated with crushed cold diamonds. The snakes seemed to be crusted with crystals. But something strange happened with Maafi. A sturdy block of ice had become a bell jar and covered the happy, yellow flower.

Some fifty million years later, it would be said that the world began again with the help of something soft, warm, and yellow. 


Comments

Anonymous said…
I promise I tried hard to not comment, but the whole vibe of this piece along with the fact that you chose buttercup as the subject presented just too good of an opportunity for me to pass up and not say "Suck it up, buttercup." If there ever was a place to use that slang, this is it!

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=suck%20it%20up%20buttercup

Kudos if this was intentionally, even if subliminally invited. Or really serendipitous if you just happened to go with buttercup as the flower for no apparent reason.
10:35 PM
Mukta Raut said…
Nope. Not intentional.
1:53 AM
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