A TALE OF MOUTH LOOKING ( ORU VAYANOTTA KADHA )

  
A train journey has something very special. A train compartment may transform itself to a meeting place where people meet, talk and get along, without losing anonymity factor. Yeah, a Social network on wheels! For some it’s a club to play cards or a reading room or a home away from home. What do I like about train journeys? Obviously it’s the many friends I made in the train and some of those grew beyond those railway tracks. The greatest thing that was obviously those hot chicks I loved to head on make short acquaintances. May be my youth is no longer young, I behave as if I am retired. Else I would have started ‘art of mouth looking’ gurukuls all over the county and have arranged a few ‘sri’s, swami and dev around my name.

But still there is something that won’t change. An observer will be a mouth looker forever. Actually a pragmatic mouth looker is called an observer. But this time in when I boarded I was no more interested in going for the chicks, but was in no mood to reject the lady luck if it decide to take my side. I know it’s really stupid to reserve train tickets for a day train, which will peg myself to a particular seat and may be among a boring company throughout the journey. But time and convenience forced me to seat no. W37 (w for window) of the penultimate compartment of Jan-shadabdi express.

It was a humid afternoon, I had to wait for an hour (just because I was early) which gave myself a shield of sweat over my skin. The train reached the platform No 5 in time (trust me!). I entered the train with scanning eyes and found my seat and it’s the worst seat to get in a compartment. It was the first seat near to the door separated by a barricade. I wiped the dust away along with illegal occupant of my precious side seat. I occupied my seat and a stinky smell occupied my nose. A pair of socks is the stinkiest bio-weapon of the sub continent, now somebody has placed it along with a pair of shoes under my precious window seat. I had a journey to make. I was struck by realization that there is neither a Kejriwal nor a Kiran Bedi around to talk ideally and extremely for me, no Prashant Bhushan will file a PIL for me. No Hazare will utter the f word for me.( that’s the way DNA loves to call fast) Only option left to me was to stretch me backwards and sleep. I followed it suit.

I had just caught sleep when I started hearing a fierce debate on changing political scenario. It was directionless and unproductive, naturally half awake I looked for a remote control, only to realize that my fellow travelers are leading the debate. Not even Markandeya Katju could save me from that mutiny in that air already polluted by the socks. I felt sad; for every one sad there is music. I plugged my ear phones into my ears, started listening to the Coke studio India songs (obviously pirate downloaded!).

I was left with my songs and scenic beauty of nature which ran away from my windows. Music gave me the deafness, which could alienate me from the noisy pandemonium. Somewhere the train stopped, many people entered, two good looking girls too , they looked like first year engineering as their body language recites. They found a seat for them in some rows behind. I was left with the music again.

Next station came, two girls boarded the compartment, and they showed their ticket to my co travelling Arnab Goswamis and claimed their seats. Smell of socks gave way to the smell of perfumes. Instead of debates, I got two mobile phone operators to share my seat. Both of them were Muslims. After a dozen of phone calls they got settled to their seats. They hanged thick cover of snacks in front of me. It was perplexing, I rarely found any college going students board with a big snack bag for a 4 hour journey, they looked like final year engineering students with their body language, so last minute preparation and no planning will be at the helm. Then how they came with this much snacks?

Girl who sat near to me was around 5’ 10’ tall, not so good looking, bit fatty, bit of caring type and very strict about neatness with skillfully polished nails. the other one seem to be of richer with two mobile phones ( one 2^nd hand mobile to use and a smart phone to be kept in the bag), had a laptop bag in hand. She had fair round face with chubby cheeks. her looks would have more than 75% from MalayalIs. They too smelled the socked, after first round of investigations they concluded I am behind the foul smell in the seat. I was tired and didn’t find them as an interesting company to mingle with. So I decided to stick to my ear phones.

I got interrupted by the tall girl; she was trying to say something. I unplugged the music from the ears.

Are you a MalayalI?

Yes

Are you W37?

No, I am Aby.

I mean your seat!

Hehe! Yeah, I am W37.

Would you mind sitting to seat no. 40, since my friend’s brother is about to board from the next station?

I looked to that seat on the left, it wasn’t a side seat! I gently said no, citing I want side seat. Then I felt like a few bulbs are put out in her face. I thought after should I change the seat for them? Shouldn’t I as a gentleman facilitate a good environment for the meeting of brother and sister? But I felt it’s better to stick to my precious window seat with my two female co-travelers. Let the brother take seat no. 40!

Why did she want to meet the brother in train? Why is she so eager to get a seat for her friend’s brother? My skeptical mind arose! It can’t be her brother, can it be? Anyway I must wait to know the truth. The next stop came; the girls stood up and went to the door to welcome the brother.

Then it was the entry time for the brother, the tall girl who sat beside me went to seat 40, and the brother occupied seat near me (no. 38). A well shaved face with thick moustache, not handsome yet good looking guy around 24, then the short girl began narrating the story of the travel. And she showed her friend who had to move seat 40 due to a heartless mean me. He sharpened his eyes and moustache to the maximum to give a look at me. Now it’s certain I am trapped between two love birds.

Two seats on my left has transformed from a heated debate centre to a park bench for lovers within a short time. Then it was the time for their intense love. She opened her large bag of snacks, thought it was a huge bag she had kept her miser signature on the budget of shopping. Then for about half an hour, their intense love was with the food. There was only sound of their crunchy bites much to put my poor stomach in great agony.

Then their love reached a new level in her smart phone. Her boyfriend was busy checking the contacts on her phone. I don’t know yet what prompts a boyfriend to do that. Then they were busy going through the photos. Then she opened her laptop and started talking about her project and complexities that came her way. Being considerate about her friend, she handed the laptop to her friend who was doing solitary punishment in seat 2011 and started watching a romantic flick.

Meanwhile I had run out of songs and battery in mobile phone and the shades of light dimmed to welcome the night.  Our lovebirds have moved their nest in to his laptop. My spying genes started activating. At first it was his resume that was being scanned. it was hell of bio-data resembling the menu of multi- cuisine restaurant(stop naming the platforms the name of food stuff!). But some other things came out while peeping into the laptop screen. He has abbreviated his name to a romantic hero who sank to the depth of the ocean while saving his love from a sinking ship.( narcissism has to be applauded when  the name Ja***** .C.K is turned to Jack!).

He probably met this particular girl among freshers in a ragging session by all Romeos of the campus. Usually done by rounding off all cute girls in a batch. I kinds remembered many Romeos I met in the campus. He resembled much like a guy who tried the trial and error method to woo all Muslim girls in the campus until somebody found his love. The guy on my left still had the pride the senior than the affection of a boyfriend. While on her eyes there was respect to him and gladness to be with him. Was that love? I don’t know. I have seen many loves within the campus failing due to the girl’s early marriage. Also found those senior-junior affairs bloom into marriages; though the latter evidently lacked cordiality. May be the marriage life doesn’t demand cordiality that much.

The girl’s excited voice and his over serious voice indulged in conversion for a while. Meanwhile they got calls from their respective homes and attended the calls after making sure that each other has got a closed lip. Same time her friend has got mad by getting bored at seat 40. The stop was about to come. He took out a large bag of snacks to her. It had some expensive snacks in it; my eyes got a glimpse of it to hurt the sentiments of my hungry stomach.

The train reached their station, all three of them left, leaving the whole seat for me; I stretched my back again in search of my lost beloved sleep. I closed my eyes dreaming about someone new to mouthlook.

FEAR .... ( POEM)

I have no dreams!

I just have fears!

I fear my shadow!

For whom it spies me?

Is it light?

Aren’t they the darts that pierce my eyes?

Are sounds to break my ear drums?

Do I fear too much?

Is time eating my life?

Are they clock handles or

The forks to devour me?

Do they show how much I am done?

I fear your lips

Will they tell me “good bye”?

I fear your love and care

Can I be the one you want me to be?

Won’t your warmth burn my heart?

Don’t these winds shatter my adobe?

Does this knowledge kill my fun?

Will this thought make me weird?

I don’t want to lose

Though I don’t want to win

Is failure a fear?

Is fear my failure?

World talked about terror,

Education taught me to fear,

Society frightened me with morality,

I was humbled by fear

I can’t love, I can only fear

I can’t give you love

I can only share my fears

Will you share your fears with me?

Yet I am brave

I know the fear

I don’t fear the fear

Isn’t that what is called courage?

BOYFRIENDMAN- A Lovestory of Controlling Boyfriend and His Girl

The doubtful husbands….. yeah obviously the same topic which literal and celluloid veterans used to make us think , introspect ,laugh and also bored us like hell due to repeated and repeated use. May be due to the awareness about the issue, such an aspect about relationships is absent in the main stream media though it still found to be working in comedy scenes of B and C grade films. (Don’t try to show your standard by saying it’s still seen in many soap operas that flood the prime time, you just need to evolve if you say so). What make men to be suspicious like that? Inferiority complex!!!  The single word answer for the issue is quite obvious. Isn’t it? If husbands are like that what will happen with the sugar coated boyfriends?

Love is a colour that touches every one, being extremely aware about the difficulty in removing the colour stains from clothes, our society is really careful about it. We must be the lone democracy in the world who still debates on “Is it love before marriage and life after marriage?”. Though there is no love, the marriage is somewhat certain, when love remains untold and unheard under the great culture.

Time changed, people too, but love didn’t change, never grew beyond its teens. But we always had Bollywood to prove the existence of love in the nation.

Our heroine is with incredible skills, commendable I.Q, kind hearted and great in understanding other’s emotions, often called “an angel on earth” by her friends. She loves to ‘crush’ the handsome boys (secretly) around with eyes like any other teenage girl. But she loved to be the Bella of ‘Twilight’ who got sandwiched in the love triangle of Jacob and Edward. Though her thick glass spects talked too much about her intelligence, her love for Edward, the vampire talked too much about her stupidity towards life.

The thickness of her spects was sufficient to pave her way off to a premier institution. The story begins there. The heroine with heart full of ambition, and with the dream of becoming someone whom the whole nation will admire and someone inspiring for all the women, entered her new arena. Her dreams walked with her, her ambitious eyes twinkled with curiosity. She met new people, explored the world around her. She was learning life. Among the friends she got in the new campus, there was him, our character in lead with killing charm.

A guy with the guitar, (ever since love incarnated in Bollywood, the romantic heroes are born with a guitar in hand, and sentimental and sad heroes with a violin) he was someone to talk in her mother tongue and a lovely company everyone will die for. Knowingly and unknowingly they came too closer.

Then it was a season of sweetness of love, bitterness of being away from each other, the fragrance of those silly jokes and melody of those stupid fights. They never knew how close they came. Then their first vacation came, according to the first law of romantic attraction which Newton didn’t or couldn’t postulate, intensity of love felt is directly proportional to the time and distance that separates one from another. They felt the love; they felt it in each and everything around them.

In that season of love the stupid low esteem love models in her mind was having a great time. Somewhere her dreams became smaller and she drew her horizons under his wings far before both of them could start flying. Meanwhile his mind had greater transformations, from having the best female friend as girlfriend was hell of a privilege for him and his egos bloomed with that. His fears over his authority over her, kept on nagging in his mind. When that thoughts gone viral!!!, then he became ‘Boyfriendman^’, to whom he assumed himself more powers than ZooZoo 3G.

At the peak of his egos he began his rescue operations. He realized he is on earth to save and guard her from the evils of the modern world and he should provide her the protection that even Life Insurance Co-operation and Prudential ICICI together couldn’t give. He realized that she spends much time online talking to all her friends and making new connections in her areas of interests and discussing about her literature and professional aspirations. Though he was well aware that she knew well how to manage the offenders and online trolls, he badly wanted to prevent her from talking to people he don’t like. He kept on spying those friendships he didn’t relish. After finding spying is tough job He asked her password, and deleted all the friends he found inappropriate, the number of her friends shrunk from 500 to the two digits on a night before her exams. Boyfriendman does the rescue!!!!

The days passed, he realized she has to be saved from wasting her time in talking to her friends and those annoying market calls, he took her a new SIM card and kept the old SIM card to himself, and put that in another phone and kept it with him, to make sure that Taliban is not giving any threat calls to her. Boyfriendman does the rescue!!!!  To those of her old friends who called the he behaved politely enough to make them pissed off or granted his a very honorary “asshole“ certificate.

She was much unaware about the fuss he does with her old SIM card. She didn’t bother much about the deleted friends, though she had lost many of her good friends. She was happy that she had her very own  Boyfriendman. Few of her friends who knew she was tending to be someone else, becoming someone under him, told her to be herself, love is all about accepting one as what one is. She gently replied “he is cool yaar, just he loves me madly, you know he is soooo possessive about me, just like that.”  Knowing that how dumb she became with the weed called love they kept themselves silent, they never had other options.

Some of their mutual friends tried to talk to him, but the boyfriend man had some more view “I know to whom my girl should talk, I can’t accept that kind of culture, I haven’t experienced such culture where a girl can decide to whom she can talk. You don’t have to bother about my business. Don’t you know that it’s bad to interfere in other’s business” They couldn’t ask him about the way he has controlled her life as if she is his colony. Only word they could utter was “asshole” when he spoke about his ‘Boyfriendman does the rescue!!!!’ attitude. He and his friends celebrated silencing the objections as the win of his authority over his most loved and cared girlfriend. After all in our culture it has been made sacred that “the male dictates and the female follows”.

There were many more ‘Boyfriendman does the rescue!!!!’s which bloomed in their incredible romantic life. It went on, he decided to whom she should talk, what she should do. He totally forgot she is a human being like him. She was much addicted to her dependency on him, which she termed ‘intense love’.

Seasons changed. She had to take responsibilities. It was the time to make her mark, then it became a season of realizations. He tried his best to save her from the burden of responsibilities. When his efforts went on, she felt that he has been imposing his silly barbaric egos on her. She found herself alienated from the world she belonged to. Finally she realized she is not she when with him and she started to ignore him. His missed calls and SMSs bundled like government files in her phone. That was the end of their romantic days.

He had a tough time without her, when he missed her it was tough for him to survive. It’s hard to face life, when we lose the love you adored. His friends tried to comfort him saying all the playboy jokes they have ever heard of women. That made him angry at her, but he kept on missing her while she constantly ignored her. That made his condition worse and he was desperate to have her back on the board.

Meanwhile she was reviving her spirits; she started enjoying the life without his prescription for her. She felt herself like a diamond that gave herself to a devil and blamed herself a lot for that. She was in the edge of depression when she sentenced herself to solitude. Her old friends tried the best to bring her back, by their efforts she came back to life and she dreamt of her goals again. But realized she has lost much of time and opportunities on his egos, and then she had to settle for something smaller than she really deserved.

Some of his friends tried to advocate for him. She said flatly that she had moved on and walked away from them. After that his situation got worse; he became a ‘Devdas’. For him it was tougher make his life greener again. His guitar kept on to be melancholic for a while. It was hard for Boyfriendman to be a man again.

Why love is like this around us? Why the girlfriend can’t be accepted as a friend? Why do good and well mannered boys become Boyfriendman when they are in love? Why does the culture tend to tame a girl with dreams? Is our culture pauper about love? Why girls go behind the idiotic romantic characters of low esteems? Why our culture has become the 4^th worst for a woman to live?

THE STORY OF INDIAN MARRIAGE-1

I was just hearing some marriage news. It’s not so long since marriages became something more than those yummy luncheons delivered to me. India is a nation which is always proud of its high family values. Due to that particular reason often we say marriage happen between two families, not between two individuals. I feel awkward with that statement, because actually marriage occurs between one and other’s family and other and one’s family. During these commitments to one’s and other’s families if one gets enough time for the other, there arises high probability of finding a life somewhere in between one and other.

Let’s take the life of a boy, let us call him Mr. Groom, who was in into the bone romance with a popular girl in the campus, who was good enough to control his quest to do the sin with her (usually misquoted as sex by western cultures) procured a good job after successfully completing the course. Soon after he joined the job, she called him since she is getting proposals. Her network of relatives has been showering marriage proposals on her. As her marriage is being delayed her father is getting quite vulnerable to heart diseases and family wants her to marry before her brother, who finally found the love of his life in one of his officemates.

Actually the green signal is delayed to the brother just because her marriage is delayed. The pressure is on her brother from the so called love of his life who simply reciprocates the pressure on her brother from his own so called love of life. Mr. Groom was upset, he managed to cancel some proposals which was on her way. Finally she had to engage herself to a pot bellied guy with golden teeth (courtesy – Mr. Groom), due to continued heart attacks of father and increased tendency shown by her mother to lift her body using a rope tied to ceiling. Hence Mr. Groom was happily broke up with the girl of his age who happily married someone who was junior to her mother, so girlfriend had to do a ‘happily breaking up’ with him.

He watched all seven film adaptations Of Sarath Chandra Chatterji’s famous book ‘Devadas’. After not feeling him sad enough to live a sad life, he even watched Anurag Kashyap’s ‘DEV D’. Simply echoing all sexist remarks made by legends about the way the female mind is mysterious,(surely being not aware about the fact that nowadays women take those as credit to themselves) he spent his time.

The days changed fast, but slowly to Mr. Groom till his family found that his mother is no longer healthy to do all the household works (or in incorporated terms ‘manage the household activities’) and family financial status is not satisfying, so the family passed the verdict on him to suffer more from women against which species he has been doing his silent war by emptying liquor bottles and performing the trick of filling ash trays with cigarettes.

Ms Bride had some boy with her to spot his pot belly and his golden teeth, the one whom she kept in her heart and mobile phone which she kept closer to it. Then came the scenario of a father without heart and mother balancing herself in air. Her family recited her the lessons they learnt about life which even lack the logic of a Sajid Khan film, may be due to avoid racial controversies they didn’t call that what they do emotional ‘black’mailing. Finally she agreed herself to tie the knot with a guy she never met before. But it is said men are from Mars and women are from Venus and marriage occur in earth, to be precise in India.

Ms Bride’s parents quickly recovered from the chronic disorders which were having free outing on them. They to arrange some pocket money for Ms Bride to in favour of Mr. Groom’s family. Due to low value of Indian rupee were humble enough to ask a small portion of it as vehicles and jewellery. Her parents made their greatest investment on that marriage, they outsmarted our finance ministers presenting populist budget with their fund raising skills.

All Tom, Dick and Harry which can be titled as ‘dear and near’ assembled for the marriage .

to be continued ......