Coje:

The smell of pears soap on freshly bathed skin.
A tree lined avenue in a different city with houses similar to mine.
The smell of roasted appalam and rasam.

Three random sensory events that have triggered coje in the last few days.

Decade of Decadence.

If I become a famous Musician and produce many albums, then that is the title I shall give for 'greatest-hits-over-the-last-ten-years' album.

Wonky Blogger. I threaten to move.

I'm afraid the edit button refuses to work. ( I must confess I discovered it only today) All those minor grammatical errors that I would see when admiring my posted work can now be fixed if i can get that damn button to work. Damn push-button publishing.

Anyway, the point of this rant is that I can't understand why parts of the last post are appearing in capitals with different font.

The Looking Glass

by Kamala Das

Getting a man to love you is easy
Only be honest about your wants as
Woman. Stand nude before the glass with him
So that he sees himself the stronger one
And believes it so, and you so much more
Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your
Admiration. Notice the perfection
Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under
The shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,
Dropping towels, and the jerky way he
Urinates. All the fond details that make
Him male and your only man. Gift him all,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers. Oh yes, getting
A man to love is easy, but living
Without him afterwards may have to be
Faced. A living without life when you move
Around, meeting strangers, with your eyes that
Gave up their search, with ears that hear only
His last voice calling out your name and your
Body which once under his touch had gleamed
Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute.

*Poetry I stumbled across. On an entirely different note, am I violating copyright by posting the entire poem on my blog? Maybe, I should have linked- links come under the fair use exception. However, this is a fairly private blog so that might help meet one of the requirements under the fair use exception...

* I'm extremely pleased with the above thought. I normally have little or no interest in the legal aspect of anything. My law degree might be of use after all!

Today

Now:

Monsoon clouds with promise of rain. Acoustic guitar and a husky voice. Book that makes you happy, then sad, then happy again. The smell of rain. Hot Chai. Unexpected chocolates.

And to think I thought I had woken up from the wrong side of the bed this morning.

The still afternoon of the Deccan Plateau provides plenty of time for ruminations on the past, the present and the uncertain future. It has me accustomed to a sedentary rural life where I covet my spaces with a ferocious intensity. It has, over the years, become what I call home and my comfort zone. The past 4 and half odd years are a bit of a blur with no real spatial divisions. Spending last semester away did not rupture that continuum either. ( I sound so post-modernist dah-ling!) But apart from the obvious differences that the changed environment of last semester provided, the lasting flavour from that season, for the lack of a better way to describe it, is masculine.

The sense of "liberation" in walking the streets without a millions stares, the beer guzzling, the general unkeptness ( I now do my eyebrows regularly, and wear heels occasionally), the casual sex. Fine, maybe not the last one- but the general feel of not being in a relationship for the first time in my adult life all combined to give a sense of being that for some reason I seem to associate with maleness.

This conclusion seems entirely contradictory to any feminist stance that i claim/purport/aim to possess. Why do I associate confidence, being comfortable in your skin and a lessened sense of emotional vulnerability with masculinity?

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes

*thanks to s for the poem

Habits

I know that in a few years, or sooner still, I'll look back at this time and giggle about it with my friends. Wonder how I could have been so silly, so confused and so.. immature?

To be fair to myself, I wouldn't have imagined myself to be in the situation that I am in a few months ago. I didn't think I could. Or maybe the idea was germinating in my head all along. To rebel, to experiment. To not be boxed in.

I keep coming to the realisation again and again that we are all stupid creatures of habit. From missing pale blue fluffy towels that we abandoned in far corners of the world to habits that are of greater consequence in our lives.

M, paternal wisdom I fear may be true. I do think we would fall in love with donkeys if we lived with them for three months.

Lesson of the day

The world is as slimey a place as they make it out be. Stereotypes are real. Are people never change.
Now that this epiphany is out of the way, I need to stop acting like I know better/am smart enough to handle it all.

Lets take the Sunday back.

The bugger-all thing about being ahead of the world ( as far as time zones go atleast) is the fact that your sunday is over before everyone else's. I want my sunday back. I want to re-waste my sunday in better ways than today.

What I wanted.

What I wanted for this blog initially was to be able to rant to an anonymous world, and to have random solutions, from complete strangers to all of my existential angst. I debated as to whether I should publicise it. Advertise on my orkut and facebook accounts even. Now it's a semi-public ish thing. Haven't gone all the way, but far enough ;)

Now my problem is that I'm writing for an audience. An audience I know. I don't want to do my usual self censoring. How do I discard my veil of reservation?

The promise of the morning,
Lulls by noon,
Is put to rest at night.

............................

Nappasai. This shall be my undoing. I've realised that most decisions I make are guided by it.
Rational objectivity is tossed away with a whiff of it.

................................
People are better sounding boards than blogs. These are purely for work-avoidance purposes, attempting to coax prose and inner conflict out before breakfast.

Umm, I need to learn to work those link thingies. Some day I shall be a kewl blogger. Redesign my own template and have fancy things. For now I'm content posting.

http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/Classes/Summer97/SemGS/WebLex/OldPossum/oldpossumlex/oldpossumlex.html

The joy between an awful lecture and hitting the library again.

Unleashing the inner hippie

Went for the cheap all you can eat veggie buffet run by the Hare Rama Hare Krishna on campus. Read Marx and discussed the environment. Unleashing the inner hippie!

Where does a bourgeois consumerist vegetarian fit in- Bhraminically inspired vegetarianism hardly fits in with Marx does it?

This is simple.

Wow. This is so simple.

We all love the sound of our own voices.

My very own diary. So very private.