Postmortem of Pain

I’m gonna begin this with a very trite phrase – smile and the world smiles with you…and you know the rest. Well, it’s bullshit. The truth is that the power of pain is much deeper and profound than the sharing of laughter. So you share a couple of beers and lewd jokes with the guys from work – you can do that with anyone. But with the people you forge the bond of pain, it’s longer lasting than any other bond, other than maybe the one of blood.

I recently learnt about a special characteristic of manic-depressive people. They are actually very charismatic, intense personalities – who draw people to themselves through their pain. I thought back to most of my relationships – albeit unsuccessful – most were based on this bond. Not that I am manic-depressive (I’m not, believe me…won’t u? batting eyelashes suggestively) but somehow my entire sex appeal was centered on my ability to express the pain that I have seen (I pride myself on having seen a few more bitter facets of life than most of my peers, and coming out unscathed). And men thought themselves to be giant grislies who could protect me from the big bad world.

And it’s not just men, true to Goddess tradition! You take friends – any friends – the friends who have known your bitter past and failed endeavors and known the pain you have encountered – will always be closer than the ones with whom you share the beers. Think of the people who were around when you flunked math, the people who took you home after you puked all over and passed out from an alcohol overdose, the guys who took you to hospital and stayed up nights when you had a liver infection and were away from family and got nauseous at the mention of hospitals, the ones who gave you a shoulder to cry on when your first crush started going out with the basketball team captain (assuming YOU were NOT the basketball team captain), when you didn’t crack that interview on which you thought your life depended, when your lover cheated on you, when your dad had surgery, when your business didn’t take off and you lost all your capital, the list is endless. The people who heard you cry in the shower, when you were turning up the faucet so that the sound of the water would drown out your moans of pain. The people who saw you curled up in the fetal position, trying to block out the rest of the world, because you didn’t have the strength to fight with it anymore.

Pain binds. And real strong. It binds unknown families together when they strive for justice when movie theaters catch fire and innocent lives are taken at Page 3 parties. It binds institutions together when they raise their voices against unfair reservations. It binds cities together when it’s flooding and family members are unreachable, nowhere to be found. When you wade through neck-deep water, it makes you hold hands and cross roads. It binds nations together when tsunamis happen, and little known people become famous overnight for the hand of help and faith that they extend.

Yes, there is a lot of fear, panic, resentment, anger, sadness, loss, hatred – but at the base of it is pain. Could be yours. Could be someone else's that you can feel. Just pure, inescapable pain.

Not for the Faint of Heart

The mind works in mysterious ways. I don’t know the way yours works, and you don’t have to know mine. There’s no way you’ll know mine. That’s ok. That’s what words are for. For bridging the gap between your thoughts and mine. Your thoughts have their own pattern. So do mine. I don’t ask anyone to decipher the pattern. I have a truly difficult and complicated one. My mind can flit from one topic to another, seemingly unrelated, but I can find, even develop patterns between those wisps of thought. I suspect most women can do that. And when they put it to words, they are accused of babbling. Because they touch a topic briefly, are reminded of yet another matter which in some inexplicable way, relates to the first, and take off on that. So the logic is not straight, but it’s present. So what if Mr-I-Look-Straight-Ahead can’t figure it out? My male friends have pointed out I blabber nonstop, although of all of them enjoy it. In fact, they actually ask me if I’m unwell, if I haven’t talked for ten straight minutes. Male critics of my writing have told me rather unkindly, that I lose thread of what I’m trying to say. Yeah. I do. Bite me. I also come back to the origins, and I have fun all along the way. Dude, if you smart enough to catch on, stay. If it’s too much, please run another way. At the end of it, I’m pretty sure I have made the receiver of the communication understand exactly what I was trying to say. Whether I had to talk too much to explore all my thoughts to come up with the exact topic, or whether someone had to ask repeated questions to figure it all out is immaterial. I have poetic license. Plus I have the license of femininity.

If you are male, and you got the above paragraph and agree with it, please tell your girlfriend/wife/lover, that she is lucky to have you. If you don’t agree with it, try and accept it anyway. You will be richly rewarded, I promise you.

If you are female, you know what I’m talking about anyway.

If you are either, and you haven’t understood, why the fuck are you still reading? Not reading this, but reading at all?

A Readymade Friend

My creative juices are certainly flowing. It’s amazing how a bit of Bacardi can do wonders. Or maybe I was just too frustrated today. Not that I’m inebriated…takes a lot more than a bit of Bacardi to do that to the Goddess. Anyway, tonight was spent with family. The only advantage of drinking with buddies is you can drink a lot more, plus you can light up. Drinking with family is a lot more sophisticated. No cigarettes. And very controlled drinking. Quarter the number of drinks i usually have. But Bacardi is Bacardi. Good music. Folks treating you like an adult. However, smart-ass kid brother is highly amused. Making faces at sis trying to be all adult in front of people for whom she’ll always be a kid. But the guy’s really cute. He was this cute when he was a lot younger. He would fall all over himself to please me. He idolized his cool-sister-with-all-the-answers. He used to make up stupid games for me, when we were latchkey kids, and we’d spend hours amusing ourselves after school, waiting for parents to come back home. Watching TV was always more fun with him around – we’d bitch about the same silly songs and ads on air, he was a gifted mimic, and whether he was doing a Dharmendra or Shahrukh, his mimicry was bang on. He’d always thought I was a brave lady, but it was always him who got rid of the lizards in the bathroom. He’d stroke my hair and put me to sleep, even fan me when there was no electricity.

When he started growing up, that was the worst phase of our relationship. He always talked back, and I never got used to not being fawned upon anymore (he did it a lot more than my parents). At times it was pretty evident he hated me. He refused to do anything that was asked of him. He refused to listen to reason. We’d go for months not talking to each other. Until one day I realized that I had felt the exact same thing from fourteen to seventeen. But too late, I was away at college. We hardly spoke.

Now that I’m back, he is a strapping young lad who refuses to let me out alone after 9. I’m some eight inches shorter than him now, and he crosses the roads with an unshakable grip on my wrist. He arranges for his friends to give me extra driving lessons. Tonight he and his friend came to pick me up from work, and then we drove around, (OK I drove hehe), each moment the realization seeping into me that these are two young men, with whom I now relate on a totally different level. Now I’m not annoying older sis who’s gonna rat on them. Now I’m cool young woman, and they have this strange sense of pride in being able to hang out with me and connect with me on the same level. It’s like the relationship was itself a fledgling, which has grown the way we have. I think smart-ass kid brother was actually showing me off tonight. Finally, something warming my heart after a totally horrid day.

Thank god for smart-ass kid brother. Growing up as a single kid would have been damn lonely. And I’d never have had a readymade friend when I came back home.

Keshta Beta-i Chor

Today is fault-finding day. Worst part being – I’m not the one finding faults with the rest of the world, like I generally do all day long. Today this bitch is having her day. Everyone’s bitching about me, and to my face! Is it my fault the bloody markets crashed? My fault that a rogue circular, some smart people who call themselves the Fed and the London Metal Exchange decided to ruin everyone’s day to the tune of 4 lac crore bucks? Dude, I can’t even dream up that kinda moolah. Still, the clients who used to swoon over my voice over the phone are calling and screaming at me in unattractively loud voices. And not just because of the crash. Part of my job as of now is to ensure a smooth handover from my predecessor, in simpler terms, weaning away clients from his old manager to a new one. Again, it is not my fault that I was a greenhorn, so this happened after three months of the last guy leaving. Not that it is my boss’s fault either, but a couple of clients who pride themselves on their financial acumen, and who probably fought with their wives in the morning or the night before or had their toasts burnt, decided to give me a taste of their medicines. Add to that the suicidal Sensex and voila!

To add insult to injuries. My Old Boss is leaving, and he is also undergoing a similar handover process. He has to hand things over to New Boss, who is one enthu-cutlet. In the last 4 hours he has poked his nose in my business about 400 times. Not to mention 4000 peeks in my mailbox. OK, so I exaggerate. Big friggin deal. And he’s not even cute. Anyway, when I asked Old Boss about mad clients, New Boss decided to amble in. I shut up immediately. Old Boss mumbled something like ‘vildikusitlettr’ and fell silent. Later, the man chose to call me into his cabin and give me what he thinks was a ‘fatherly chiding’ about me blabbing about clients in front of New Boss. I’m dumbfounded. Am I supposed to keep this data confidential to keep up the guy’s image, so New Boss can later make a fool of himself and then rip me apart further, because I’m the second-in-command? Nice try. And to think I had actually shut up when New Boss came in.

Now Old Boss is sad about leaving. He really loves this branch. He has become a father figure for his subordinates. And he is taking his depression out too, on poor-ole-me. What is this sponge-like quality I tend to display, that all and sundry can dump their misgivings on to me, so I can go ahead and post my own on this why-me post? If I wanna take off for a solitary drive, it’s my fault for not listening to daddy, because itty-bitty-baby-boo can’t drive on her own yet for chrissakes. If after a long day of dealing with clients, I don’t have the presence of mind to not babble in front of boyfriend, it’s my fault for not having the courtesy to string two sentences together coherently. If I ask for clarifications from Old Boss, (come on, asking questions is good!) it’s my fault for not selecting the right opportunity. It’s my fault I did my job and got people to invest, and it’s my fault that markets tanked. It’s totally my fault that Barca won. And it will be my fault when Spain takes home the World Cup. (I hate footy. I’m just doing this to seem cool, in retaliation to a ‘How to reach cool-dom’ post, which was plain uncool. But yeah, you can’t find fault with my general knowledge.)

Ok, I’m done. It’s Saturday again, and I drink to forget.

JA KICHHU HOLEI GINNI BOLEN, KESHTA BETA-I CHOR…

You've Got Blog!

One goes through life wishing it had some element of the movies in it. Waiting for a sweetheart who has gone on a trip for the summer, would be over in a cut to a storm and the lovers kissing in the rain. Growing up will happen in a victory run on an open road, where little pattering feet will grow into strong, capable legs. A plain-jane-Jassi transformation to a sexy, glamorous Jessica would happen in a toss of a glossy mane (and save us the torture of metal-flashing smiles in the process). Getting to know another person and falling in love would take one song only. A brilliant idea would suddenly manifest itself not while on the toilet seat, but while sipping a latte rather sexily on a quaint countryside café. And of course, love would happen over the internet.

In one of the most significant turns in the lives of the Goddess, she went to find her prince, and ended up falling in love all over again with a fellow blogger…and her life-movie began. No names, no identities, just a barrage of shared interests and a feeling of finally finding that kindred spirit. He religiously reads everything I spew. Consistently acts on my advice, as to him, I’m a veteran!!! Praises my posts. Flirts outrageously well. Strives to please me. Has that devotee thing nailed. Is quite a master of these double-entendres which even the Goddess doesn’t get. Till a few days back, he had me pretty riled with some material he had written. I was livid. So we had our first blog-fight. Happily, it didn’t blow out of proportion (like it always does with my real-life boyfriend).

Even he doesn’t know a few things. I know I act like this self-satisfied bitch who is bent upon being called Goddess and stuff. Maybe he likes that. Maybe he likes the insufferable arrogance. But he doesn’t know I visit him first thing every morning to see if he put up anything new. Check mail to see if any new comment from him came in. Go back to previous posts and try and find links to past conversations. He inspires me to write. He is making me fall in love with him everyday. I don’t know whether he feels exactly the same way though. Never had the balls to come clean and make an attempt to broach the topic so directly.

Meanwhile, Find-Prince-Mission wasn’t half bad. Had the time of my life actually. The man is quite a gem. But I think I have fallen in love with someone totally new. Sure, go ahead. Judge the Goddess all you want. Is she not entitled to choice in life? If an old relationship doesn’t cut it anymore, and something new, more exciting takes its place, can you blame her? Oh, and you can also laugh at poor Goddess, so naïve, so ridiculously naïve. Who even knows what kind of a creep he may be? Like in Indian chatrooms on the net, seedy men who are mirror-cracking material in real life and are incapable of carrying out a conversation with a woman, and not because of their looks at all. But I just know, he is a real person, and he will be exactly what I imagine him to be. Come on, you think Meg Ryan would have ever gotten any mail if she had started thinking like this?

What about my current guy? Oh, he is the guy who surprised me with his secret identity, this fellow blogger mentioned above, one of my ardent devotees. He started taking time out from his no-time-to-breathe schedule and began to blog, just to get a taste of my world…as I had started talking about it so much lately, just to be able to relate to how I felt about writing. Ok, I admit, I felt like quite a fool when I realized that I never realized it was him, and pouted and sulked till my roothna and his manana reached a satisfactory extent (satisfactory for me, that is), but how can I not fall in love with this man everyday, who finds something to surprise me with everyday, who is my inspiration everyday, who makes me fall in love with him everyday? Yup, this is my movie-love. I got my real life Tom Hanks.

(He is rather kicked about the success of his newest prank. And much relieved that I didn’t start flirting with the unknown guy first. Maybe I should give his PS2 a whirl??? Guessed correctly again…I hate it.)

Love Beckons the Goddess

I’m floating on air. Literally. I’m not walking on the ground anymore.

The past few days have brought enough to my plate, most of it meant to be good, but turning out disastrously unfortunate.

Had read The Mistress of Spices, and loved it, but chose to watch it as well, Aishwarya’s pseud accent and all. Decided that Miss Rai sucks. Her accent sucks worse.

Went through a ton of individual birthdays squeezed into three days. A lot of expenses :-(

Bought a shining new car. Banged it twice in two days.

A could-be devotee called. Goddess was fast asleep and gently snoring. It was but 2 a.m.

Got smart-ass kid brother out of my hair, and got him a part-time job. Turned out that the timings are so that I will have to drag myself from my snug environs to let him in at 4 in the morning.

But tonight, all of this will get canceled. The goddess is off to find her prince. (I coulda said God, but how cheesy would that be lol). Underground for a week, I’d predict. Don’t wait up…

Momo-Pyaar

Years earlier, I had seen this ad in HT, about how your kid was all drinking this smart breakfast drink which made him smarter…so smart that he pointed out typos in the newspapers. And yesterday, I saw the mother of all typos, in the same newspaper. Well, the mother, because it was directly applicable to me for all the digs I have to endure courtesy my blog identity. The review was of a new Chinese restaurant in Delhi, which apparently serves yummy-my-tummy WANTONS!!!!!

Ok, so I have opinions, I let loose on this blog, but I’m not that concerned a citizen that I’ll shoot off a mail to HT. (I did think about it, but naah.) But I am pretty sick of being jeered at with the name ‘goddess of momo-pyar’ by my smart-ass kid brother, and lots of other creatures who think I look chinky, so I must be talking momos. So once and for all, you lesser mortals with no sense of spelling, and especially HT,

WANTON = willful, unjustifiable, licentious, wayward, immodest

WONTON = what Sanjay Dutt needed to identify his captor in some godawful movie I saw last year. What was that again? Yeah – Zinda.

SO,

WANTON ≠ WONTON

I don’t think I’m ever eating WANTONS again!

Happy Budday Mommy!

Today’s my mum’s birthday. Old woman, that. Her body shows her age, has weathered two kids, multiple surgeries, and limitless radiation and chemo. But her face is a child’s, innocent and line-less. Her soul is clear and free. Her mind is still eager to soak in all the learning she can find. Nature would have been bang on target had I been made her mum instead!

There was a time when I was into poetry. But I used to write mostly about broken hearts – you know, how most poets begin to hone their skills. I had also noticed, I was a foul-weather poet – I never had poetry in me when I was happy. But the words would just tumble out when I was sad. Anyway, I wrote a poem for mum’s birthday. One of the few happy poems I wrote. And a happy poem, which satisfied my urges as a poet, somehow happy poems never seemed to justify the whole idea of it being a poem. I mean, woh shayari hi kya jismein kuchh dard na ho, kuchh sanjeedgi na ho…kavita who jo dil ko choo jaaye, aankhon mein aansoo bhar laaye…no angst, no torment, that’s no piece of poetry. But mum’s poem, was a happy-happy, skipping-along-singing-a-song kind of piece, I can’t imagine writing something sad for her, even when I saw her lying on a stretcher going in for her first surgery. She just gave you the impression of skipping-along even then!

Anyway, I wrote it one year, and she was touched. And she demanded that I write her a poem every year, whether there were any other gifts or not. I did her bidding for the next six years, if I remember correctly, but my reserves of poetry are dried up, and I can’t explain to her that I’m into prose these days. So today the tribute is up for the world to know what a special woman she is. My mother, my best friend, my kindred soul. Happy birthday, mum!

Have You Blissed Out Lately?

Haha…I know I got you. Maybe I could have got you by the you-know-what had I mentioned directly what I meant by blissing out – yeah, I’m talking about the big O-hhhh! Still haven’t got it? Log on to Wikipedia and search by keyword ‘orgasm’ :-)

I know I could have written about Suryanarayan (bloody where did the second wife tapko from???), or Miss-Unconscious-Internalization (I’m not a plagiarist just because I did cut-paste jobs throughout MBA!!!), or the reservation issue (now I don’t friggin care), or the massacre in Doda yesterday, or even the Armenian airliner that crashed into the Black Sea about 21 minutes ago (as I write this)…in fact, I should be writing about it, because it is the thing to do with a blog aspiring to be of note! But there are just too many people writing about the news, and they are doing a much better job than I can ever hope to do. So do please log on to them…although that you will be able to do only in a day or two if you are doing so through Achlandia, as I’m just learning stuff about Blogger and pottering around with links and templates in the temple.

Coming back to the orgasm. Haha…I know I got you again! I’m talking only about the female orgasm here…because hey, whaddya know…I’m a female! And anyway, the male orgasm leaves naught to imagination, so no point discussing it. I actually feel bad for Indian women. Too many of them fake it, not many know what it exactly is, most do not know how to reach it, and few can tell their partners openly about what they want. According to surveys, (let me specify here that I’m not plagiarizing if I pick facts from other sites), only about 25 percent women ALWAYS climax during sex. With the remaining it’s touch-and-go or missed completely. Apparently, compared to the male version, the female O is an ephemeral phenomenon. And oh, 90 percent of men have successful trips to the moon 100 percent of the time!! Another cool observation – the occurrence of climax has nothing to do with successful reproduction for the female, so biology is unable to figure out why women climax at all! Whoa, are you kidding me? So left to pure logic, women don’t need an orgasm???!!! See? Told you logic doesn’t work.

This is not the worst of it! According to Ian Kerner, Ph.D., a certified sex therapist and author of She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, "many women complain that a single orgasm isn't enough to relieve the buildup of sexual tension," which can leave us with our own "blue balls." Hahahaha! So now you are saying that science cannot figure out why women have an orgasm in the first place, AND also that tripping out once is not enough. Make up your mind, Ma Nature!

Now for the whole sex-love dilemma – the world is divided in its opinion on whether the deed can be done without emotional attachment, or must you be in love with your partner-in-sin! A recent small-scale study at the Netherlands' University of Groningen found that areas in the brain involving fear and emotion are actually deactivated during orgasm. The study does go on to also point out that it is not so if you fake it… :-) However, I’m not sure if that indicates that sex can be detached from the feeling of love and attachment, as the orgasm is merely the culmination of the act. There is as much pleasure to be derived from foreplay and such, as there is from the orgasm. The Goddess regrets that she is not refined enough yet to detach the biological needs from the emotional ones. But science is again confused on this one. During the Oooo-hhhhhhhhhh, the hypothalamus releases extra oxytocin into the system. This oxy-boxy (Gimme a break. You think the Goddess actually even knows what the hypothalamus is?) is also knows as the cuddle-hormone, so that is how she will refer to it. This hormone is known to be correlated directly with the urge to bond, project affection, and protect. According to latest news, it may even be linked with our ability to trust! So now research says that the orgasm is both related and not related to the feeling of love!

So in a nutshell, the female orgasm is just about as confused as the females themselves. Who was it who said, not even God can understand women???

(Achtlandia freely confesses that this post has references from a few good articles floating on the net. However, she has forgotten the links, and will put them up when she remembers. Oh, sorry, when she figures out the linking bit on Blogger. Any assistance is welcome. The Goddess hates to cloud her Inner Eye with these mundane details that must be taken care of. )

Reinventing the Goddess

Sex sells. And boy does it sell. You attach sex to anything and it WILL sell. People will watch it. People will read it. I had so many people complain to me that there was way too much sex in my first two posts. Yes, complaints. Stuff like:

‘'My god, do you ever think of anything else?’'

‘'Dude, it’s reeking of sex!’'

‘'The very name suggests a slut!’'

‘'Someone no mortal man can satisfy ;-) ????’'

It got me thinking. Maybe I was being too out-there. Maybe the whole idea of lust being sacred was too in-your-face. As I had promised, not all my subsequent posts were about sex. They started getting a bit more serious, somewhat slice-of-life. The minute it hit something concrete, something solid, something that real people actually care about (virtual people do not), people started complaining again!

‘'I thought u write well. What happened?’'

‘'I didn’t like your last two posts man. What happened?’'

‘'Why the hell you getting so serious on life man? Mutual funds and all? What happened?’'

What we see here is a clear case of brand dilution. The goddess must not waver from the topic at hand. She cannot be everything to everyone.

What the goddess wanted to prove, was that sex is not the only thing on her mind. She is of varied tastes and interests. And she definitely has a life out of the bedroom.

Will be keenly awaiting reactions on next post. It should be ‘mind-BLOWING’!