Effect of Desert Flower

I am in one of my self righteous, idealistic phases again.... and am constantly pondering over ways in which to try to change the world. Normally these phases come and go very quickly (even before i start writing a blog over it.) This one has however continued for a relatively longer period ( 5.25 days to be exact). Let me try to explain what triggered it off..

Recently i happened to watch this movie called "desert flower" . Its about this girl from an african country who goes on to become a vogue magazine cover girl. The movie was good in a very disturbing way. It basically dealt with the issue of female circumcision or FGM ( female genital mutilation). According to the movie this horrendous practice is compulsory for the female members of that tribe and is responsible for the untimely death of approximately 1/3rd of them. Extremely shocked to know this, and being the curious girl that i am... i immediately googled it up and to my surprise it was true. Refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_cutting for more details. For a few hours i was in this strange trance like disturbed state as i struggled to comprehend the amazingly cruel things which people do to each other... It was not the first time that i heard of such atrocities against women and it definitely would not be the last. However Circumcision like honour killings had a peculiar charecteristic... it was done by the victim's own family members... or people who sincerely believed that they were doing it for the better future life of their family. A better life in terms of a respectable standing in their society and adherance to the norms which rule their collective lives. The norms which dictate that a woman's "purity" be considered more precious than her life. Purity in this case means "absence of premarital sex". When i thought of this more deeply i realized the origin of almost all such practices like Sati, honor killings, rape etc stem from the supposed premium placed on the female's virginity. It is not the individual solutions to these specific crimes that have to be tackled but this belief that the moment a woman has sex( even if it is against her will) before/ outside her marriage her worth as a human being diminishes to an extent that her own family members think of destroying her.

India's first Quadriplegic Mom :)

This is Moupee Prashant Jhadav…a professional writer who manages www.wewritecontent. She also happens to be a quadriplegic…paralysed from waist down. I first came across her as a client who ran her own content writing business in my initial years as a freelance writer. Now many years later she has become “my moupee di”…a friend, elder sister and a role model for all the qualities that a woman should stand for.
At the age 24, her cervical vertebrae were fractured badly during a road accident and the broken bones settled on her spinal cord impinging it disastrously...and permanently complicating her life. The doctors told her that her spinal cord was almost severed. Because of the severed cord her brain is unable to send signals to the rest of her body which is why she is paralyzed chest-downward. Even after a highly costly and long drawn recovery ...The injury caused complete immobility in the lower half of her body, drastically reduced capacity for sensation, frequent attacks which sent her reeling with pain or knocked her unconscious.
Life moved on for her...And finally one day she married Prashant Jhadhav…also a differently abled person whom she met through a matrimonial site. Their grit and determination to lead a financially independent life and to help others urged them to open their own content writing firm which employs differently abled people.
(Check out http://www.wewritecontent.in/ for details).

Moupee wanted to experience life in all it's shades and this motivated her to take a seemingly insurmountable task...Become a mother!! She struggled against the shocked expressions of society, negative medical evidence, her own fears and the insecurities of her family to make her dream come true. Near the completion of the term of her highly complicated pregnancy...Most doctors washed their hands of the case saying it was too complicated!! Finally her case was accepted at Dhakuria AMRI and a beautiful baby girl….Anayah.... was born!!

I have seen her using a prosthetic arm for typing. I have also known of her pain and sudden seizures and bouts of unconsciousness that she suffers from…obviously all these issues intensified during her pregnancy. But I have also never known her without her signature bright smile… Till date she hasn't used her limited physical ability as an excuse for anything and that’s something that I love about her.
Di….. you inspire me and I thank God for our random professional association that matured into a beautiful relationship. I am writing this today because I want hundreds of other people who are struggling with seemingly insurmountable problems to know that with a little (and sometimes a lot of) faith, hope, sweat and grit….dreams do damned well come true !!! Cheers to you and your journey 

longest post ever...uff...:)

Except for a brief appearance in Feb (due to excessive happiness attack caused by generous consumption of chocolate) I have been mostly out of bloggerworld in the past one year... There are many reasons for this disappearance but to sum up ... the elusive creature called life showed me her most unpleasant face. I was devastated, frustrated, angry, moody, irritable and spent most of my time sulking away and snapping at anybody who dared approach me. I had always believed nothing much could go wrong in my charmed existence and when it did I reacted pretty much like a little girl who didn’t get the latest version of the Barbie..... ( Sulk, sulk, sulk) I almost gave up all my favorite things... shopping..Reading...blogging....laughing in an unorganized vendetta against the world. I kept on wishing that I could change the past not realizing that the past has already changed me....Time however has a way of healing the worst scars and here I am a better, brighter, wiser and happier me. Well along with the invaluable contribution of Mr. Time there are a few other people I need to appreciate here.... the problem is most of them do not blog and will be subsequently emotionally blackmailed into reading this.... :) Here goes...
@ Debanjan Niyogi thank you for the counseling sessions , the much needed advice( even though I snapped at that ), for being there at the worst phase of my life. I know I have directed some of my worst tantrums at you.. will never be able to express how much I appreciate your sudden presence in my life...... oh and before I forget thanks for feeding me so many chocolates :)
@ Namrata Srivastava thank you for inspiring me to start blogging again. I promise my next post will be about "Purple". Those telephonic and electronic pep talks really helped.. Please start writing your book real soon.
@ Tapapriya Lahiri thank you for inspiring me to start shopping again. Only you know how incomplete I am without junk jewellery :) jokes apart thanks for being such a good friend and asking so few questions and helping me in some good therapeutic bitching.
@ Gincy S.G Thank you for coming here... it was a real treat and an amazing moral booster. am real sorry for missing ur wedding (appreciate ur understanding d reason) and promise to be ur bridesmaid should u get married again :P :p
@Debarshi Ray Thank you for coping with my periodic disappearing act and still being friends with me. Also I appreciate that u ask very few questions and need to be told so less. Am sorry I missed Ur wedding too and promise to come and eat chai biscuit as decided.

@Teddy Pathak thanks for cooking for me, making me cook, listening to all my pent up crap and letting me use ur pretty house as my haven. I miss working with u and eating ur lunch :(
@Supriyo Dey thank you for understanding me truly as I am. Always.
@Poushali Mukherjee, Samadrita Mukherjee, Sneha Banerjee.... my lovely sisters who encouraged me not to give in to pressure. And I didn’t, didn’t, DIDNT :)
@ Face book thank u... thank u... thank u... and u needn’t be told y..
@ Arjun Narayanan Yesterdays conversation triggered off this post as you made me realize how incomplete people like us are without the written word. Again please start writing . You are meant for it..

Love u all....will be back soon :)

14th april

hello world.....

This is the acceptance speech. The end of anger and denial. I accept that you and I will never be the same again. That while those days will live in my mind forever, they're over. I hate it. But I accept it. And I'm moving on now.....

peek-a-boo :)

Here i come again...desk stacked with a pile of papers, a horde of unwritten mails , a to- do list as long as my parrot green gypsy skirt and a perpetually disobedient mind. Well i guess this happens to the most constant and prudent of us sometimes..... but today "the other side of me" has absolutely decided to play truant. I keep on surfing irrelevant sites and giggling at all my collegues who are constantly giving me disapproving looks.
Hmmm.... lets see what would i have done today if not compelled to sit in this place for my daily bread and chocolate :)
1) Take a bus to some unknown destination with a W.H Auden book and listen to Green Day.. "Wake me up when September ends"
2) Happily consume a sizzling brownie with hot chocolate sauce oblivious to upcoming baby-fat attack.
3) Watch the sunrise... i know its not possible at 11.15 am but what the heck.... to watch the sunrise.
4) Braid my hair with yellow flowers
5) Sit near a huge fountain somewhere where the spray hits my eyes and feed pigeons.... ummm white pigeons...
I absolutely have to start working now... reality beckons.

Letters from iceland

I first came across exerpts from this book in the movie Away From Her. There was something strange and alluring about the language...thus began my obsession to find it. I searched crosswordz, Om book stores, Old delhi book bazaar only to be dissapointed. However being the strangely stubborn girl that i am... i didnt give up. I pestered my boyfriend at my regular intervals till he mainly to preserve domestic peace got it reprinted from the publisher(it had gone out of print). And what a treat the book is..... charmingly funny, irreverent and vivid...believe me its a sin to have it go out of print. Here goes....

Isn't it true however far we've wandered into our provinces of persecution, where our regrets accuse, we keep returning back to the common faith from which we've all dissented, back to the hands, the feet, the faces? Children are always there and take the hands, even when they are most terrified. Those in love cannot make up their minds to go or stay. Artist and doctor return most often. Only the mad will never, never come back. For doctors keep on worrying while away, in case their skill is suffering or deserted. Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they want belief again in their own size. .

I am lost in iceland.W.H.Auden rocks!

a note about d freewheeling laugh

friends, were you ever the victim of irrepressible mirth, convulsive laughter that creeps in at the most inoppurtune moments. Moments when you are supposed to be concentratedly focused on the enormous seriousness of the situation. You try hard to stifle down the little impish stream of giggles but they adamantly burst out noisy in thier uncaring abandon. It constantly happens with me like in.... labour law classess, convocations, poetry recitals, interviews and quite often in romantic interludes .... which sometimes leaves the other person quite mortified.
And how different is this laughter from the pseudo- pretty smile which i sport in my numerous photographs. I wear that smile as a part of my carefully assembled armour against God-knows-what and it is supposed to mean absolutely nothing at all. In fact i wear that smile when i do not care a bit about what is going on and want to show you, him, her and the rest of the world that it is, in fact very important to me.
So why is it that in all great classical paintings men and women are shown smiling perfectly and not laughing? Starting from Da Vinci to our very own Raja Ravi Verma the paintings have beautiful,peaceful,cunning,innocent,frivolous, holy,pitiful and wonderful smiles but i am yet to come across the truly thoughtlessly laughing face. How can we explain why great painters ruled out laughter from the realms of beauty?
The great artist Rubens once said "a face is beautiful beacause it reveals the presence of thought, whereas at the moment of laughter man doesnt think. "In the instant that man grasps the comical, he does not laugh; laughter follows afterwards as a physical reaction. Laughter is a convulsion of the face and a convulsed person does not rule himself either by will or reason. It is again the greatest unifier..... we differ from each other by our immovable features but in convulsion we are all the same.
On the sunny side i have seen many a quarrel ending when people give in to the dormant nudge of laughter. It is one of the few occasions on which i relax and completely forget about how photogenically disadvantaged my face looks and keep laughing till i can feel the salt of my tears against my cheeks. I am lucky to be in love with a man who appreciates the rich abandon of laughter more deeply than i do and hence i had more of these glorious moments in the recent past.But no more of this now. Customer Relationship Management class beckons and i must rush.... Have a laughably beautiful day.... cheers..