That Wretched feeling

Sometimes this feeling of worthlessness creeps in your heart, casting a chill on all the other feelings. It makes you feel dreadful; it makes you feel negative and unable to understand anything that is going on in your life. You are unable to concentrate and get over it. Something or the other consistently bogs you down. And you… you just want to run away. Run away from everything and everyone who does that you to you; run away to a place that offers you the warmth of friendship and laughter. You long for a friend to come to your rescue and take you away to a place where nobody makes you feel uncomfortable, nobody discourages you and makes you feel wretched. Is there a place that can take this refugee and provide all the comfort and warmth, just to make her little heart feel a little less dreary?

A few questions...

Where do you belong… I mean which state? What’s your caste? What religion do you belong to? These are the first questions that one is asked.

How does it matter where I belong? Is it really important to know which state I am from? How much does my religion play a role in my being a good or a bad person? Why does my caste matter so much? I have often seen my mother bobbing up and down whenever someone mentions that they are a Bhatnagar, she seems so happy just to meet them as if they belong to her family. I feel a pang of pain whenever she says that she won’t give her daughter to a Saxena family. Heaven forbid if I fall in love with a Muslim or a Scheduled Caste. She doesn’t look amused whenever my dad even jestingly says that he will marry me to a Scheduled caste as that would be a quite advantageous for my kids.

People say that India is the most discriminating society in this world. And I seem to agree. We may all rave about the tolerance levels of our country, about how secular we are, about how India is a country of unity in diversity, that how so many cultures are blended within that Indianness, that how we are one; the truth is that we may be one but that one betrays the many decimals that make that number, the cultures may have blended but there are people who seem to know just how to disintegrate that blend, there may be unity but sometimes the diversity defeats that unity, our secularism betrays signs of pseudo-secularism, and the tolerance levels are nothing to rave about. Gujarat witnesses small communal riots on a daily basis, which largely go unreported. Malegaon in Maharashtra is a communal tinderbox.

Why is it that today every Muslim is looked upon with a suspicious gaze? Why is it that many Christians do charity in the name of their religion? Why is it that Hindus are treated as second-rate citizens here? Why is it that vote-bank politics as well caste-based politics is still practiced in India? We get the leaders that we deserve and today our politics and politicians are playing politics of hatred, then we are to blame. We do vote on caste and religion lines.

Why? It is time, perhaps, that we ask ourselves these questions before it gets too late. Too late for us to be called a nation.

A Crazy Saturday Morning

Sitting at the back and listening to a crazy woman speaking, can be like hell. But yes, being a devil, I am able to take things pretty comfortably at this point of time. That is beacuse, I am not really listerning to whatever crap she's belting out.

The crazy woman is talking about attitude, speaking all wrong English. I am trying to control my urge to go ahead and correct her. Hearing someone using all sorts of cliches like a glass of water half empty or half full, can seriously get you. But the fact that I am able to write without her noticing it, has come something as a fresh breeze of air. As it is the weather outside is so very 'sexy' (as my good friend Priyanka describes), I am really restraining myself to ask her to stop blabbing away.

She's asking me to bear with her, but I think that I really can't grant her that privilege. She's a nobody for me, and I don't think I can love her as a teacher because this God damn course has made me give up my weekends. And I hate anyone and anything that makes me do that. I love my weekends and giving them up is a pain in the most uncompfortable part (I think you know what part am talking about).

As another of my uncle-cum-classmate walks in, I wonder what made me crazy enough to give up my weekends just to let this shit of a woman spoil it by chattering her heart away. On this crazy Saturday, I can do nothing except repent at my foolhardyness