filament2

I don't where I will go. And maybe, today I don't want to waste my time in finding out.

I can easily just play with magnets, just deal which things, which have a direction and then expect myself to be goaded. Knowing where I am going will not take me there. It will just create illusions in my head which then break down my navaigation system. So maybe it is good to not know? Decide turn by turn.

Rain will drench me fully - I can give up friendships so easily, sometimes I feel it is not these friendsips were coincidences. HAving lunch with women, sharing their food spontaneously and having nothing to share. Why do I have no control on my food? Why do I have to rely on whatever she packs for me, sometimes? Feminism is a strange thing to beleive in, if you are a woman with a wavering mind. You tap into being the best of the women-in-partriarchy and the liberated-woman.

I misplaced time, I asked you a strange question. When I look at you, you cannot weasel out.

Sometimes when we are sitting together, I feel frustrated that our relationship has been reduced to gender-roles, food-gathering, hunting and finding children to rear. What had we talked about, when we had met? Why did we hook-up like long-lost lovers, appearing to talk in synonyms. I have no answers. You do not judge yourself, I feel that is a problem, you feel that is a previlige. I will meanwhile, drive me to misery constantly grading my CV, making bugle sounds, hiding away in the forest like a porqupine.

If you live in a growing city like Ahmedabad. And you quickly grow out of your friends. Make sure you live far away from everyone else. Make sure you meet noone regularly. Make sure friendship doesn't become routine, drab, a ritual.

If you live in some other city. You can decide. Music, midnight, love in a bottle, confusion, loan of a 50,000 rupees. None of these things let you slip into a state of blissful foretfullness. A street is wavering in my mind. Where is this? Meerut? Where?

Maybe that is why I avoid my relatives. I cannot accept a state of normalcy very easily. I push my perspective onto people. Unless they are those, of whom I do not think in the same context as myself. I think of myself, how?

A struggling, toungueless writer, a starving artist, an over-productive introvert? I think of myself as a fantast on hot wheels and vinegar. When I am in a super-critical mood? Don't mind me tonight, I am in one such mood : )

Well, more bitching. I am this. I am that. I can't. I can. What does it matter who I am when I shit my poetry into the gutter. Find a way to sell into the world or suffer extinction. Annihilation.

She said "don't write on the walls of your room. Sleep when you have nothing left to say." So I will sleep. When I wake - the sun will again shower chargin in my eyes. I will again remember the pile of work I must complete, before I can smile. Why do I take everything so seriously? I feel - the wind is not good for me to fly. I wear a frown on my face as if my digestion was apathetic to my needs. I will hide my face into the pillow - refuse to wake up, until I can manage to work and stop planning the next day, the next day arranging this meuseum of farting governers, trapped in mouse-traps.

Clasped tight in my belly - a breath I was not prepared to exhale. Babies are honking the taxi-horns again. They want to come home, come home in a hurry.

Today around 1:50 / 2:00 p.m. I had a stomach-ache. I went out and stood in the balcony, I went downstairs, I fidgeted, I was restless. The earth was rising up from its somnambulation - every particle on the ground was remembering its thirst. Quite intense. And then, sitting across S. at my office, I commented - "It is going to rain today". The sky was overcast anyway. The light was soft and diffused.

It started raining around 2:10 p.m. andI felt, "PHEW".

My stomach muscles relaxed and I breathed deep, taking in as much of the fresh, moist air as I could.

Then it was time to take a break. Should one charge not-for-profits anythig. Sure, especially if you are a not-for-loss trying to piece your bare existence as a writer together.

Manju said, "Drive Carefully - humans are meant to be knocked down by trucks."

"Uh?"

"We are soft. Bone and cartilege. Trucks are iron."

"Horses are at least softer."

"They couldn't be mass-produced."

"Lets go back to horses."

It has been a lifetime ambition of mine to own a horse. To ride a horse, instead of the scooter. Sometimes, in delirioum it seems very funny - the way we ride around on steel scooters exhaling shit.

It makes me think - if humans were meant to be knocked down by trucks. Were horses kinder to our condition?

Don't know. The poor horses also hurt when they fell. They are more sympathetic.

"What turns you on?" It is who you are. I can stare at you, numb when you mention racing or working on a brochure for someone like Pramod Mahajan.

Like yesterday. I came back home in the evening and I was breathing in a fine, evenly paced manner. I was sitting in my living room staring at the TV. Happy. Relaxed. The sky was not falling over my head. I wasn't trying to win the war in my head, hunt in the forest, dance in the rain. No. Nothing. I was in the most reasonably sincere kind of silence. Silence in terms of motivation, fire. I had put on some good music and was singing at the top of my voice. "Hey, how does that sound?"

The curtains were drawn, there was no water at home. Yesterday I started the day with the news that the Ambanis had split the Reliance empire between them.

As a story element, I was last evening in the middle of a storm and a fever. I wasn't sure what I was closer to. I have so much work piling up, and I do not want to be a meaningless horse shitting in the same place. So I am pacing myself out.

Some friends, keep reminding me to reply to their mails and I keep procastinating. And then I write back and then they forget and then I forget and then we are all living in forgetfulness.

My workplace has a strong feminist orientation, the organization takes a pronounced stand on gender equality. I was reading of the journals in the resorce center, I discovered a lot of traumatic things men do, destabalizining, enchroaching upon others, especially women.

Earlier I was quite confused and stiff about everything "feminist".

"The Journal on Gender Studies," (Publisher: Sage) had an article about how the public spaces in our cities are esentially sexist. She quoted someone who said that most women face sexual abuse and harrasment at home by people they meet often and know well. And yet they are bound and restricted to stay at home for "safety". The article talked about the class issues which exist in the degree of freedom which women can enjoy and the degree of freedom with which they can use the city's public space. It had a lot of other interesting points.

The male gaze is unsettling and decisive (in unwanted ways) for most women. It makes "self-consciousness" a part of womens' identity. In some ways I feel, for some women 'the gaze' decides what they wear, how they look because the 'gaze' gives away for men look for in women?

A lot of generalizations here. Will try to post the name of the author soon...