Guftuguu

From the book “The Help” ; my favorite dialogue.

The bane of my existence. Talking doesn’t necessarily solve a lot of things, but to know that there are people around who are going through something similar takes a part of the shame away.

It’s so important in our world what men think, what they feel and who they desire, we spend our lives creating our personalities around it. With all of our equal rights shenanigans, feminist and woke philosophy, the right to choose ultimately rests with men.

So much suffering can come from us feeling like we are too important to suffer.

There‘s plenty of content online , and books to read, about dealing with failures in life, heartbreaks and rejections. There’s just one thing I didn’t come across; that there is honor in failing, there is honor in being rejected, and there is honor in getting your heart broken. We don’t have to walk through it all with shame.

Growing up, I haven’t seen women who exist for themselves , around me , in movies, in pop culture, anywhere. It’s a tragedy because our generation must learn that.

A lot is said about the grief that comes with losing people. Nobody talks about the grief of lost time.

Why poetry and prose is so important..

Besides being shit scared, obviously..

Why is it so easy for a guy we like to come up to us and tell us that we aren’t attractive, or are fat, or flat, and completely destroy us.. or for a friend who we are very invested in tell us we aren’t fun, and give us very deep scars? I feel like, somehow, as we grow up, we lose touch with the part of ourselves that’s not sellable , but extremely priceless. We forget who we are without the parts...

We pride ourselves on being well-traveled. Travel can be enlightening and it can definitely broaden our worlds. But in my experience, a lot of times, as our worlds become bigger, each person in those worlds becomes smaller, and more replaceable.

Maybe in the end, it won’t really matter whether or not our love was reciprocated. It’ll matter what we leave behind when we are gone.

It needs no introduction. 

I feel that, for people truly looking for 'Love' , it is very important that they find this love outside of a person.  I kinda found a semblance of it in poetry.  "Hum Dekhenge" is a nazm by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, about and against the then dictatorial regime of Pakistan. It's like a reminder that freedom is always fought to be achieved and must also be fought to be maintained.

An Ode to Tuffy

“We fight , so we don’t have to”- My online Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructor.

The oldest weapon of war, since the beginning of time. Our ideas of how the state should be run have evolved. Political ideologies have evolved. The technology for wars has evolved. But a single war / riot , a little bit disturbance in the social order, and all that modernity cannot prevent the beast inside us from coming out. Rape as a weapon of war seems to be as old as wars themselves . And the...

Poem recitation ( Text available on https://guftuguu.com)

Every mental illness brings an isolation that , in my experience, can’t be opted out of. This is my journey with isolation and how I have , may be, learnt to work around it, over the years. There are really no solutions. Just maybe understanding the problem a little better than before.

For anyone who migrated thousands of miles away from where they grew up, how do you hold the two worlds together?

The most epic love story of my life yet… My longest and most transformative relationship has been my relationship with New York. It wasn't love at first sight. New York grew on me slowly. Over seven years and countless moments, a part of my heart lives there & with everyone I loved there.

Perhaps romantic love can be a little more than just a farce. Perhaps there is some truth to two people being able to connect to each other at the same intensity, and not all of it is based on selfish motives or hormonal urges. Maybe there can be something more real that draws two people together.

Power is never evenly distributed, in any ecosystem. In most relationships, there is a weaker half and there is a stronger half. What makes a person weak in the context of a relationship/ friendship, especially when, in most other areas of life, they may not be weak at all ( or in fact they may be stronger ) ?

“ Hatred cannot drive out hatred. Only love can do that”…..Anger cannot fight anger. Violence cannot fight violence. We have all been taught that since childhood. But there has to be a missing link to this argument that no one knows. Real life just doesn’t seem to work like that. ( P.S My very personal take)

For some of us, this state of relative ease with life, that is sometimes called ‘Happiness’, is just not so readily available, or it’s much less available than it is to some others around us. Is Happiness really so important ?