Take a walk all by yourself someday On those lanes where we played jumped around bruised ourselves laughed out like drunkards Close you eyes, carefully listen as you may Hear those laughs, delighted screams as if those four are standing at a distance of a few yards

that's something written by my dear friend Aruna.....Oh, those days!!!.....I'm sure everyone has had his/her days of gay abandon, but I would like to think that the time I had with my 3 best friends is the best anyone could ever have......

Aruna, Soumya, Harini and me.......DASH.....they came into my life after a particularly difficult year in school....and I would go through another 10 such years to have that time come back again....

Harini, my darling, I've known her since we were toddlers.....but still we never came as close as we came when the other two entered our lives....I've never told her directly but she's my angel, someone I always felt protective about......I still laugh out loud when I think about her train going through the graveyard(LOLzzzzzzzzzzz)....her mom's delicious sambar, and ragda pattice and those projects at her place(that finally her dad ended up making), her clothes i borrowed and still borrow,those "missions" we planned, the family photo she drew.......oh, so many memories.....




Soms, one of the strongest people I've met.....so down to earth.....Soms I wanna tell u that u inspire me and I know you won't believe me.....I miss your minute idlis, I miss the time at your place last diwali....The first person I met who likes history....I still remember how she answered all the rapid fire questions in the quiz and thought it was no big deal( how many people know which two countries the dead sea lies between!!!!)....Wen we meet. which is quite rare these days, we talk about everything under the sun..infact about everything under above and beside the sun!!!!....

Aru, I've actually seen this girl grow up in front of my eyes...am so proud of what she is now..... her weird dances, and her room filled with all sorts of personalized paraphernalia....we meeting late into the nite cuz she was feelin low.....our photo where shez standin behind me like my gaurdian angel....she always made me feel loved when I was totally disillusioned.....my pillar of strength


.....Christmas, a day to love a little more, a day to forgive, a day to remember all those moments am grateful for...

and the first people who come to my mind are my 3 friends......I know God loves me cuz I have them in my life.......there are these times in college when I want to be with no one except them, when my eyes fill with tears seeing people bitch about others cuz I jus can't stand all the negativity, cuz the 4 of us never did that....I keep wondering where all the love has gone, I keep wondering if others were not lucky enough to get friends like I did and I realise that I am the one whose been blessed......There are times when I am surrounded by so many people yet i feel so alone...

there are times when I can hear soms and aru singing those weird songs in my head when a lecture is going on and I have a smile on my face and tears in my eyes....When the result for any test comes out, I go back to the day when our 10 std results were out and the four of us were jumping and screaming in the middle of the road.......there are times when am walking alone and I see a familiar place where we had spent countless moments laughing, talking and doing nothing, never realising how these very moments would become the most precious of our lives...

I love you guys......and I miss all of you so much.....so much.....
A lotta people have given a lot of definitions to friendship....

but for me the definition of friendship is DASH....

To laugh often and love much,
To win the respect of intelligent persons and affection of children,
To earn the approbation of honest citizens
and endure the betrayal of false friends,
To appreciate beauty,
To find the best in others,
To give off one's self without the slightest thought of return,
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,a rescued soul,
a garden patch or a redeemed social condition,
To have played and laughed with
enthusiasm and sung with exaltation,
To know that even one life has breathed easierbecause you have lived,
This is to have succeeded....

      - Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

Reason

A reason to smile,
A reason to laugh out loud,
A reason to scream in elation,
A reason to dance as if there was no tomorrow,
A reason to live life as if it were the last day of your life,

These days, As we grow old
We need.... a reason for everything....

I yearn for the innocence lost,
I yearn for those moments of mad laughter,
I yearn for those times when I could dream high without caring about the pracical aspects,
I yearn for that effortless spirituality thats evading me now.

These are days when we don't smile,
and there were days when we didn't need a reason to smile..

These are days of material desires
and there were days when a mother's lap seemed like heaven...

Strewn apart from within we stand today...
and we have a million reasons....

"Heal The World"

There's A Place In
Your Heart
And I Know That It Is Love
And This Place Could
Be Much
Brighter Than Tomorrow
And If You Really Try
You'll Find There's No Need
To Cry
In This Place You'll Feel
There's No Hurt Or Sorrow

There Are Ways
To Get There
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Little Space
Make A Better Place...

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

If You Want To Know Why
There's A Love That
Cannot Lie
Love Is Strong
It Only Cares For
Joyful Giving
If We Try
We Shall See
In This Bliss
We Cannot Feel
Fear Or Dread
We Stop Existing And
Start Living

Then It Feels That Always
Love's Enough For
Us Growing
So Make A Better World
Make A Better World...

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

And The Dream We Were
Conceived In
Will Reveal A Joyful Face
And The World We
Once Believed In
Will Shine Again In Grace
Then Why Do We Keep
Strangling Life
Wound This Earth
Crucify Its Soul
Though It's Plain To See
This World Is Heavenly
Be God's Glow

We Could Fly So High
Let Our Spirits Never Die
In My Heart
I Feel You Are All
My Brothers
Create A World With
No Fear
Together We'll Cry
Happy Tears
See The Nations Turn
Their Swords
Into Plowshares

We Could Really Get There
If You Cared Enough
For The Living
Make A Little Space
To Make A Better Place...

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

Heal The World
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Human Race
There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

There Are People Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Living
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me
You And For Me




That's the song, "heal the world"... by the great Michael Jackson....
Michael Jackson.....I din know who this guy was for a long time....but i knew the name, cuz everyone knew the name.....and when I read "Michael Jackson's dead", I almost laughed out loud....It had to be some joke.....I mean Michael Jackson couldn't be dead....But Michael Jackson's dead.....I wasn't a super great fan of Michael Jackson cuz I hadn't heard much of Michael Jackson's songs....But Michael Jackson couldn't be dead....It was like someone telling me that the sun won't rise in the east anymore....It jus wasn't possible....


Anyways....Michael Jackson's life was marred by controversies....charges of molesting children, dangling his own son from the balcony etc....and yet Michael Jackson sings heal the world...I purposely didn't use any pronoun....



My holidays are on...and since I have nothing else to do I end up looking up the net for stuff I always wanted to know more about but didn't get the time...and I stumbled upon Junko Furuta...


Till then I was among the blissfully unaware crowd of people who didn't kno about Junko Furuta... about a crime committed 20 years ago...and now I'm among the unhappily aware crowd....


This 16 year old girl was tortured for 44 days in 1989 before she died.....and torture is a very mild word for what was done to her by these 3 guys in the age range of 16-18 years....


She was raped numerous times, she was beaten with bamboos, iron rods and dumbbells, she was burnt with cigarettes, her private organs mutilated...and when she died she was dumped in an oil drum and then it was filled up with cement....the body was found an year later...Writing this is so difficult for me and to imagine a girl 3 years younger than I am now went through all of this ....


The boys who did this roam about free in Japan today...don't they deserve death???...I'm no one to decide who deserves what but these people deserve death and nothing short of that....
this is jus one crime.....In Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia, a woman is punished if she's raped... a 100 lashes(that itself can do a lot of bodily damage) and an year of imprisonment...all this in addition to the mental and physical trauma she has to undergo....The charge???.....she enticed the men who raped her.....This is atrocious....Those idiots are jus plain horny and sexually deprived.....If a nineteen year old can understand this, why can't they???


Women are supposed to over up head to toe and even if an inch of skin is visible, the woman is accused of exciting men.....do these men have the same feeling when they see their mothers or sisters???....


and then there was another case where a father along some male relatives killed a young girl for wearing jeans....and called it honour killing....and buried her in their backyard....and when it was found out her mother jus said "She wouldn't obey"......so u kill your own daughter??.....in the name of honour??....what about all the sins you have committed in your life???....

There are at least 11 countries in the world where "Female Genital Mutilation" is carried out...it has various forms but the main idea is to cut off the clitoris and is similar to male circumcision carried out in Islam.....one of the forms of FGM is infibulation where in after cutting of the clitoris the labia majora are sewed up.....One of the theories behind this practice is that females are not supposed to take pleasure out of sexual acts...they're only supposed to bear the children...the pleasure is for the man....



the Bible says that God created Eve out of Adams rib.....that is where it all starts....Eve ate the forbidden fruit and committed a sin....women are still paying the price.....


There are so many things I read about and have been wanting to write this for a long long time because people generally tend to overlook these gory things.....but i had to write this post.... My conscience told me to...



There are so many more heinous crimes happening around us everyday.....the newspaper, the net is filled with stories of such crimes.....and we can jus imagine the pain the person had to undergo and we wouldn't even be close to the actual pain....does rehabilitation even help???......aren't these kinda thoughts instilled in the minds of people since a very young age and its very difficult and even impossible to change them.....
Healing the world is a distant dream...because our voice doesn't reach those remote areas of the world where people have weird ideas and carry out even weirder actions....


I now consider myself and all of us blessed to have a normal life, good parents, good values and a good life....Because there are many who are not fortunate enuf....there are many who don't relish the monsoon, go for long leisurely walks, watch movies and be happy because for some crazy reason God decided that they don't deserve it....



As of now sittin here in front of my comp and waitin for my newly married cousin and his wife to come home for dinner, I can't do anything for people who have suffered and those who are suffering as I'm writin this...
But one thing I can do and all of us can do is to spread awareness.....to make people aware...to raise a voice...it may not help a lot but it will help....


and we must pray for I think praying helps....


we must heal.....heal the world....

Shit happens....yeah well....it does..

sometimes you so badly wish for something to happen, or that nothing should change....you pray so hard and then....then what actually happens is something you never wanted. What do you do then??....Curse the almighty? Curse your fate?? Curse others??...or maybe do all of that...

Yeah right now I'm in a retrospective mood. Nothing seems to be going right. Something I so badly wanted is never gonna happen....Never...It makes me so sad...and it wasn't even materialistic.
Why did things have to be this way? What would it take for people to just change their point of view?....Coz from where I'm seeing it, its all very clear....yeah well it was jus a dream, a small fairytale dream.....and if things were jus a bit different, it would have come true.....and if it weren't to come true, why was it shattered??.....it hurts to have dreams shattered.....it really does...
Was I expecting too much??....NO...not at all....I've never in my life expected too much from life...or from others...
Was it my mistake??...Should I have never dreamed the dream??......Did I pray too hard??

After fighting so hard with fate, refusing what it was giving me....I had to take it finally..



So now what??....Do I stop dreaming???....Haven't fairy tales happened earlier??....OH yes they have...

I'm living a fairytale...Maybe that dream was shattered because I'm supposed to dream bigger and better...Maybe god has decided something else for me... and the other people in the dream with me...
If people can't see what I can now, then one day they will....and maybe then I will finally have my dream fulfilled....
Do I lose faith?....Nope....Its even stronger now....I haven't done anything wrong to anyone, have always done my duty towards the world and there is no reason why I wouldn't have the best in the world....There is no reason why anyone shouldn't have the best of the world...

And as for those who have no work but to make life difficult for others are all gonna have it back....with compound interest...LOL...

Do I stop living??....Nope...Coz my life is a gift from god and I'm not gonna waste a single moment of it regretting....I've already wasted a lot...


Do I curse people who made it difficult for me??.....Nope....coz they were doing what they thought was right....And if they actually intended to do wrong, they're gonna have it back..... God's partial to good people, you know...

So what do you do when shit happens???.........Nothing....you just clean up...

I'm not gonna wish anything bad for anyone....I'm not gonna curse myself or anyone else for things that couldn't happen coz now you jus have to move on....I'm gonna treat myself well coz I deserve it.....I'm gonna make every dream of mine come true coz i deserve it....I'm gonna fight what i feel is wrong if I think I can make it ok...

I'm gonna live my life with abandon, with passion and with compassion coz I'm worth it...and so are you..

I may not be pretty but I'm beautiful..and so are you....

Read this poem long back...don't remember who wrote it....but this is one of the most excellent poems i've read...
I'm not takin credit for this poem coz i don't have any contribution to it.....but i really do identify with it....here goes


Every time I'm ignored
I smile when my soul says I'm nobody
I pray for silence
I forgive my ego to be everybody.

Every time I' loved and caressed
I smile knowing I'm blessed
I pray for bliss
I forgive people for isolating me.

Every time I'm severely criticized
I smile at my ignorance
I smile at people's fallacy
I pray for wisdom
I forgive people for their bleakness.

Every time people boast about my abilities
I smile at my genius
I pray for humility
I forgive my pride.

Every time I collide with failures
I smile at my experiences
I pray for reinforcing forces
I forgive myself for lacking commitment.

Every time I' triumphant
I smile at my ecstatic blindness
I pray for sensibility
I forgive people for their change of opinion.

every time I get brutally stabbed by life
I smile when i feel like crying with oceans of tears rolling behind these eyeballs
I pray for replenishing trust
I forgive my sorrows.

Every time i remind myself that I can forgive but i can't forget
I smile at my guilt
I pray for strength to overcome delusion
I forgive my conscience.

Every time I search for clarity
I smile on myself for keeping such an amused soul, confused mind and a restless body
I pray for enlightment
Iforgive my illusions
I forgive all from the eye of god

I FEEL LIKE GOD.....

PHEW.....prelims done....and univs from 30th may....guess I can chill for some time now....

Its been so long since i last made an entry...so much has happened...Don't remember the last time I could relax without worrying about exams cumin up shortly....come to think of it, I have been giving exams since ages and ages....and ages.....and ages...
and now I've almost forgotten what its like to be doing nothing..
Doing "nothing " is a talent.....one I had in heaps once upon a time...
But it is a nice feeling to be constantly busy....yeah, well it isn't nice WHILE am busy....its just nice to think about....
It also is a way to escape the grim realities of your life....I like being busy....

Grim realities...huh...Someone who knows me from a distance may say that my life's all rosy...... and lemme make it clear that its quite good....there's just one thing lacking..peace of mind....

There is this group of beggars on one particular railway station....and believe me, its like 2 to 3 families of beggars....mom, dad and a whole lot of kids....I've actually seen the parents pushing the children towards people to beg....I guess they think people would give more money to the children.....anyways right now am not going to analyze beggars...
The point is that these families are very happy, at least it looks like they are happy....Whenever I see them they are laughing among themselves, playing, running....Even when people shoo them away they don't really seem sad....they'll dip their fingers into glasses of cold drinks people are carrying, so that the people can no longer drink it and give it away to these beggars...I know this by experience...all in all they are really happy....
And we, i mean the more well off crowd, need so many reasons to be happy.....I bet if we had a survey of how many people are actually happy in Mumbai, a very small number would actually reply in positive...
I mean there's nothing we lack....there's money, good clothes, enough to eat and drink, education, friends, places to hang out etc etc etc...
there's only one thing that we don't have and probably those beggars do, particularly those beggars on that railway station...That's peace of mind.....they may having a lotta issues like not having even a square meal a day....but they are happy.....

I turned nineteen on 22nd of this month....If I had to ask for something from the almighty....it would be..."Gimme strength to defeat all my problems. Gimme the vision to look beyond material gain. Gimme the tact to find happiness in small things. Lemme not get affected by people's jealousy, their success, their failures and my own...... Gimme peace of mind...."