Deyasini Thinks

I always wanted to grow up, wanted to turn eighteen. I felt that adulthood stores all the treasures that are forbidden in childhood. I could be anybody, do anything. I would have no one to hold me back, no one to stop me, no one to tell me Deyasini you cant do this and I would be free. The very thought that someday this freedom would be mine made me so excited to grow up, to turn eighteen .  Expectation Vs Reality  And then, one day, I grew up. It happened suddenly. Just one sunny morning, I woke up and looked into the mirror and I couldn’t recognize myself anymore. I chased deadlines as my life depended on them, continued to worry about things I never wanted to do, cried for failures in fields I never wanted to achieve in the first place. I stayed friends with people I didn’t like instead of just saying Katti , you hurt me I don’t want to talk with anymore. I kept taking all of the unnecessary advice acquaintances had to offer in the name of goodwill . I took them all. But lo...

Sitting decked up from head to toe My flamingo pink lehenga sits perfectly on me Diamond ring, bridal jewellery from Tiffany and Co. A strange heavyweight do I feel bearing this halo A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing and So can be said about a woman's mind Wherein lie deep-seated fantasies And she'll do anything to make them come true Now, look at me, I am getting married tonight My fiance is such a fancy man. But that's not why I wear the ring he gave This marriage is just a business deal.   I can never love him, I can never love anybody. My heart is devoid of anything, no, I don't have any soft feelings. He took my heart, my first lover and put me on the rack, He left me stranded in the green meadows and I thought it was love. He crushed my soul so hard, good Lord, I can breathe the same no more.   But what if staring at the large window from this second floor, I see the same man climb up to me and reach out for su...

And in the funeral service of his father, we met again. At the first look, I couldn't recognize him. That man bun, those blue sunglasses were replaced with a bald head and round glasses. Thirteen years of IT consultancy does that to a man, I guess; in this case, it killed the musician inside. In so many ways, I perceived myself as a lot luckier than my other counterparts. Living amidst people who constantly kept cribbing about how boring and unchallenging their jobs were, I got to live life on my own terms. Traveling between countries, meeting new people every day, making new ties, and breaking old ones in a wink; just the kind I imagined while I was still in college. In my case, I got to live the dream. Apparently, life was not that easy a cakewalk for most of the others. Otherwise, Nikhil would have been the greatest beatboxer ever. Only, at our times, nobody understood his art.  I felt a bit disappointed looking at him, the way you feel when a guest turns up not looking the way ...

Dear Rituparno Ghosh, I hope this letter finds you(if in some extra-terrestrial, ghostly way it ever does) happy, peaceful and above all, accepted in the new world you now belong to. I do not really believe in an afterlife but deaths like yours want me to believe in some sort of continuity. Something that my heart can still cling to because the blank truth of somebody's existence so blatantly wiped off from the surface of the world makes so little sense to me. In a historic judgement made by the Supreme Court two days earlier, gay couples are now legally allowed to get involved and married and live together happily ever after. Finally, they have the permission of the law to have their own fairy tale ending. But how much of the war is really won, I do not know. Law is a cold statement meant to be brought to life by the people meant to enforce it. You fought a lifelong war trying to get adjusted in a society that looks down at effeminate men with mockery and contempt, ostracizes peop...

At first, you don't see it coming. At first, the depths of your feelings are lost in the frivolity and the levity of your friendship. In the beginning, you're so certain of your existing love that you cannot believe you'll fall over or out. You believe that your sense of righteousness and virtue would bond you. But you are human, fallible, and perhaps, not half as glorious as you assumed yourself to be. So slowly, you give yourself away, secret by secret, pain by pain. Moment by moment, day by day you witness yourself fall for another man and you hate yourself, you loathe yourself but you are at a slippery edge and you can't stop falling. And then you slowly start seeing signs of the impending catastrophe but you are already enjoying the stolen time, the time you are not accountable anymore, the time you can be someone else and you let it be.  And in those moments, being happy becomes more important than being saintly. The jaunty conversations get breezier than the rest...

I have come to a point in my life where my happiness does not depend on other people anymore, where anything people say or do to me, good or bad does not affect me. It's not that I don't care.  I do, probably just as much as I did years ago but I just don't show it anymore because life has taught me that people will always think and speak based on their perceptions and I cannot really explain things to people who just don't want to understand. So I have just got a little cold about everything now. Not sad, not happy. Just neutral.  You want to talk with me, I'll be as nice as I can. You don't want to have anything to do with me, nobody's holding the door close. Leave in your time. And don't fear about how I feel because trust me heavily on this, I feel nothing anymore. I have come to believe that the actual root of life's many problems are too many expectations and I have admonished and corrected myself and no, I don't expect any more. I hope but...

A few days ago, in reference to sending speakers to an event, somebody proposed my name. I was happy unless in a different context, a male acquaintance said: there should be a female face in the crowd. At another time, a kin was shocked to hear that one of my girl friends has bagged a fantastic job. Often, I have heard people of my age and generation say oh she was a girl, that's why she got the job. Now, I really don't know whats sadder: the fact that men, even in our generation subconsciously weighs women by their looks rather than their brain or multinational companies have to give something almost like reservation for women to maintain sex ratio at a workplace. But one thing is clear, hypocrisy runs in our veins thicker than blood. We run campaigns of women empowerment but ask women in our own families to adjust to the male chauvinistic patriarchal society. We say women deserve equal opportunities yet every time, a woman gets a promotion or applaud, we so casually say oh sh...