Strategic Love

Among the other things we learn, there was this subject that talked about strategic alliances between companies. We had a lot of fun going through the course material slides as a lot of it was very applicable to modern relationships and matrimony.

The five stages of strategic alliances: Euphoria, Honeymoon Period,Dawning  Realization,Aftershock and Damage Control

The five C's that affect partner choice: Competence,Complementary, Congruence, Compatibility and.Chemistry

Another thing it talks about is having an exit strategy.
The terms on which you will part with your partner if it doesn't work out.

I guess that is where falling in love differs.
You have no exit strategy.
And there lies our fault and our ruin.

If you have ever done a puzzle you know that there is that one piece.
When you place this one piece in the puzzle,you instantly know that you have figured it out.
The whole puzzle seems easier after this piece.You can imagine the rest of it in its place, and you know you will eventually complete it.

You were that piece in the puzzle of my life.

When I found you, I could see myself building my life around you. Everything made sense, everything seemed possible.For first time in my life, I truly relaxed because I knew I had found you.

I don't know what was my intention was at that time, where I wanted it all to go.
I just remember that feeling.That relief, that lucky feeling, to have found that one piece.

I was 23 and I had never suffered an absolute crisis for words.

“Fuck! “  And “Shit!” came to my rescue.

You say these two phrases in varying tones of voice and you put everything you feel into them and believe me, they can be almost as good as shouting or bawling out loud. The pain alleviates and you transcend from one word to two words.

“Fuck you!”, “Oh fuck!”, “Oh shit!” and yours sincerely “Fucking shit!!!” lend you a hand.

I keep talking because I know that at this moment staying quiet can very realistically make me stroke or or send me into a comma or can give me a cardiac arrest. I tell A, “I think I’m going to die.” A smiles, staring into the dark road ahead of us .He asks me what would I like to drink. I say I need pain killers.I was in something like pain and my mind was logically offering solutions.

”We are not doping sweetheart, so tell me what you will drink???”I tell him I don’t think I’m going to be able to drink, eat or sleep for the rest of my life. He gets out of the car and is back with three cans of beer.

I can feel the air entering my lungs struggling to make me feel better, I realize my head is pounding, it is so loud, I wonder how the city can sleep when my head is making sounds of these bloody proportions. The pounding is becoming louder and threatens to explode my brains to tiny pieces. I start talking again. This time it is a merciless hail of questions.

“How the hell??”, “Why is this happening to me???”, “How did I get here?”, ”What the hell just happened??”,”What is this I’m feeling??” “Is this ever going to go away???”, ”how could I have not seen this”, “how could I have not known???”,”what the hell was I thinking???”

Questions, my brain reflexly answers by connecting the dots so fast. The split second muted answers leave me exhausted and turn down the volume of the pounding.

I can feel the confusion of my tear glands in the form of a stretching pain in the corners of my dry eyes. I want to cry but my mind tells me not to. The conditioning of years does not fail me, even though for once, right then, right there I could have really used a good cry. Then come the lucid conclusions.

“Dude, this is so wrong.”,  “I am so screwed”, ”This is the worst ”

The ,”I should have never done this and I should have done this” rant. Realizations. “This is why I did this and this is why I could never do that” rant. Suddenly you have one of the clearest moments of your life. It is like a whole new dimensional upgrade. Like someone giving you the 3D glasses in a movie theater and now everything that was hazy for reasons you could never understand suddenly becomes magically beautiful and real beyond your imagination.

You stand on a line between who you were till that moment and who are going to be beyond this moment. You look into the eyes of each other and you understand each other perfectly. You exchange that look of the eye that sworn enemies who have finally found their peace exchange with each other. You promise that you’ll keep these secrets between you and you and no one shall ever know the war you’ve seen, and the things you’ve been through.

“I’m going to be okay.”

A smiles.

I laugh. A tear finally escapes the corner of my right eye.

“One tear, I guess that’s all this deserves.” I say.

A smiles.

We don't get to a live an edited version of life, we get to live the full version.

Yes, for a while, you were my painkiller. The addictive sweet sedative that gave me dreamless restful sleep.
I got up one day and the pain was back.In spite of you.In spite of everything.
So i stopped taking you.
And I haven't slept since.

Life seems to be putting  a small * with everything good I find.And when you go the end of the text and read what the conditions are in the fine print of *Conditions Apply, you realize that theres nothing really good about it.

phone calls,chocolate cake, chilled coke, stomach cramps at 4am, pill popping at 4am,more phone calls at 6am,wind,non subsiding pain,another pill,rain,dancing in the rain,getting really wet, sleeping for a couple of hours,forgetting to dry the hair,getting up with the curliest hair ever,18 missed calls,3 new messages,fever,the mother of all headaches,talking happily,pretending to be "okay",body aches, damning the dancing in the rain,pill for fever,pill for headache, dragging to the washroom to clean up, cotton shirt, red walls, chilled water,nerdy glasses,glucose biscuits

She calls me an emo writer.She asks me to write love notes for her lover.

I plead with her that I am no writer,I write only when I am sad or overwhelmed. I cannot write on cue, I can only write when I absolutely need to.Its not a very comfortable thing for me.

The thing is that ever since I was a child, I have believed that there is an invisible force that reads every word that is written with heart. It reads every deleted word, every broken message that you type in your phone, every thing that you scribble and throw away in crumpled papers.It reads the words yo u trace out with your finger on a foggy glass or on your torn jeans on a bus ride.The things you trace out when you play with your food.Words you inscribe in sands and snow.The doodles in places that no one knows.

Its doesn't have to be a word,or a perfect shape.It doesn't have to mean something.This force understands what you meant and how you felt.You float messages in a bottle out to the sea of life, and this force is what is there at the other end, intercepting every kind of language every kind of code.I have no idea what it does with all these messages.Whether it judges us or not, whether it acts on our pleas of help, our desperate wishes.All I know is that it is my oldest most loyal friend, it helps me hold on the illusion that I am not alone.

There is a threshold for how much we can feel and keep within us.Most of the times it remains within us,but at times it oozes out of our fingers,dripping off us in spaces we occupy.It doesn't matter how it is written,all that matters is how purely it is you.

She has been listening with her eyebrows raised. I have realized that my rant is not working. She responds to it saying that it is bullshit.I tell her what she wants to hear.

"How do I write for your lover, when my heart has recently been blasted and lies plastered across the walls of my existence."

She says," Tell me when your feeling better, lets give Valentines day a pass. Its his birthday in March."

"You are cruel you know"

She smiles and says,"I know."

(A vegetable hawker yelling gajar lo mooli lo kheera lo tamatar lo)

I have been wake. He is fast asleep.

There is a spot above his right brow on his forehead, if I kiss it, his face lets out the most beautiful involuntary smile. He sleeps, unaware of the hundreds of kisses it has taken me to find this spot. Unaware that he is wearing a blanket of my kisses on his back.Unaware that I have kissed no one as much and as the way I kiss him. I sleep, laughing at myself, thinking, “and you thought you couldn't do this, you thought this was stupid, why can’t you stop kissing him???”

(palak lo methi lo saag lo)

I am awake. He is half asleep.

I softly untangle his legs from mine.As I gently pull away my head from his chest, his arm pulls on me, tugging me back to where I was, close.It’s like a kid and his rag doll, I move away, he pulls me back. I tell myself to sleep, wishing we could freeze in time here right now, sleep for a hundred years, this close, this way.

(gobi lo gajar lo mattar lo mooli lo)

I am awake. He is awake, talking on the phone to his girlfriend.

I whisper to myself,"Kisses don’t mark a man and rag dolls get replaced" and go back to sleep.

You are yet another dose of dopamine that wears out leaving me colder than before. As I pop pills like tic tacs in the single digit temperatures of the night I wonder if I know anything for sure anymore. You, me and this.. A beautiful firework that fades into nothing but ashes and smoke and I like a little kid still stare at the velvet blue sky,wishing I had made you some breakfast the last time.

                                            
                          And if I am abusing too much, and not being creative about their use...know that, what I really need to do is have a good cry.

If dolls could talk...and teddy bears could sing....

they'd tell you I wasn't always like this.....how easily I'd laugh and cry.....

they'd tell you I loved to talk...teach them stuff and tell them stories....

they'd tell you how patient I was....I'd put each one of them to sleep....

they'd tell you how I took care...patched them up...made clothes for them....brushed their hair

they'd tell you how worried I'd be when others played rough with them.....

they'd tell you I was never scared of the dark, the thunder,the spiders or the monsters.....just the teacher in school who would shout to bring me back from the day dreaming.....

If dolls could talk...and teddy bears could sing....

they'd tell tell you who I am.....not who I seem to be.

..in plastic and fur....recycled...or in the dust....

lie my purest kisses and caresses... tears for nothings..

 ...misgivings of a tender heart.

Men and women have the strangest effect on each other. It is overwhelming to truly feel how we are inherently meant to impact each other. 

You start from where you think you have everything in control, you have a map, a plan, and you know what you want and where you want to go and 9 out of 10 times you will execute it to a T. Initially you feel good, you feel that you are so good at this game, you laugh at the people who warned you about it and then some day either you will get bored of it or something will happen which will heartbreakingly reveal to you that you've been fooling yourself with demo version of the real game.

When you are most naturally and instinctively with someone, everything that you learnt most essentially needs to be forgotten and you have to get used to the feeling of not knowing things. It will make you feel utterly vulnerable, it will humble you like nothing will, and it will scare you more than anything in the world. If you are lucky enough to cross the threshold of the left handed lovers and flings into something real, I cannot promise you a chunk of that rosy picture they call love, but I can promise that you will feel something so shockingly breathtakingly real that it will make you wonder, leave you amazed about the world and your existence.

It will be so disturbing to your consciousness that it will make you want to puke, cry, shout and scream and sometimes do all four in the same unbearable moment. But in moments where you stop grappling with it, trying to figure out what it is, trying to name it, trying to sustain it, trying to run away from it, trying to control it, in those moments and those moments alone, you will transcend to a place, where you will feel peace, your mind will slow down yet you will feel so alive, like something just set your brain on beautiful blue fire. A quiet implosion that reverberates in every fiber of your soul, your consciousness will take over. You will smile like a crazy person, ear to ear, laughing occasionally to relieve the muscles that are quite frankly exhausted of the smiling and you will tell yourself to please remember this forever and call it happiness.

What happens before and after is all relative to the two fools involved, (and yes we are all fools), but it changes us forever, for the better or worse, I do not know. All I know is that you can choose to feel incredibly lucky and blessed to have lived or marred by destiny, cursed to carry the weight of the pain and misery that comes with living. I still for one choose the former to the latter most days. Helps me cope, helps me get out of the bed in the morning. You can choose whatever you please, but please do get up, do live your life like a crazy adventure, do take risks, it was who you were meant to be.

Life has an infinite potential to surprise you.

To the weirdos!

We are everywhere.
Burdened with intelligence,cursed with constant unrest.Thriving in the maelstrom of confusion.
Absorbing ourselves everyday,loading ourselves with what we discover about ourselves.This is the way we are,we constantly create and destroy ourselves.No, we don't resolve anything,we don't feel better,we are just getting denser,that is why we are so intensely nostalgic about our past lives.

Impatient and burning fingers, we are unbelieving.We don't verify,challenge or discover truths.We choose the illusions we want to play with,by the whims and fancies of our mood and only we know we play with fire.No, it not heroic, we burn ourselves every day.

Observant, we pick up how you want to see us, and we play pretend sometimes just to amuse ourselves and sometimes for the sake of your sanity,but we leave glimpses of our real selves like clues(we know you would never find) sometimes just for fun and sometimes hoping that someone from one of us will discover us.No we don't despise you, we envy you.We are the only ones who can see how crushingly beautiful you are and the comfort of mind you enjoy.We envy you because you can let yourself be loved so simply and you can be  happy.No, we are not happy, we only seldom smile.

Alone, we eventually stop complaining of the loneliness. It is an anomaly if anyone of us can truly sustain the feeling that he or she is not alone.For most of us it becomes painfully unbearable and we end up hating ourselves for involving you and making you bear our personal incompetence.But sometimes a few of you inspire us to transcend our nature,a few of you distract us and make us focus on you and your sake. It is only in those sometimes that we slow down and have a drink of joy.
But we can seldom sustain this pace, we are instinctively made to hunt for our own kind and when we do,we devour them.In between the sheets of paper and bed,we gorge on the soul of our own kind. Ravenously we consume our own kind and that is why our survival solely depends on you.No, what seem the most passionate tales of love to you, are in fact the annihilation of our kind.

You fondly call us the dark and the twisted.We provide case studies for your psychological and social theories.Ever obliging  you with odd behaviors, helping you define and discover symptoms of psychological and social disorders.You the normal, the ordered, the sane, the happy,the reality.We the inexplicable,  disillusioned, convoluted, despicably cynical, contagiously miserable yet can-be-so funny.
No, we are not you and you are not us, but you are the placebo that holds us off the impending enticing drug that will devour us one more time, so don't be afraid, we are not an exotic kind.,we have been here and we will be here for a long time.
We are everywhere.
  

Orange juice in a tea cup.A plate with leftover ketchup from the midnight snacking. A switched off phone and another with a dying battery.A lemon post-it on the wall with a things to do list scrawled in a handwriting that doesn't seem like mine.Newspaper with rape stories, people dying stories and people lying stories.A laptop that is everything except mine.Eight tabs on the browser with more comfortably important things to read. Two almost available and five idle friends on the instant messenger.

It's just an itch.

You don't have to do this.You don't have to write.It was a kiddie thing that you used to do.And honestly can you even write anymore? Do you even want to write anymore? Are you absolutely sure?

And honestly what do even want to write about? You don't feel things anymore,you don't see beauty anymore..and yes I mean the over-exaggerated,unreasonably oversensitive approach..the incessant unnecessary histrionics..that throw you into a tumble dry of confused emotions and mostly leave you shaken and numb.You really want to be in a place where a sound,a smell,a picture or some words can make you smile or weep like a kid ? Do you want to give words that power over you? You've been doing so well...you've been coping so well my love...this new you...so sane, so normal... is working so well for you...why go back?

Lets just go read something funny or smart, online or find a new sitcom or a movie to escape to.

Switch on the TV.Nature channel,cartoons,music videos, travel and food shows.No?
Talk to somebody? Flirt? Argue? Or just listen to somebody vent?

Or just read something...anything...classifieds in the newspaper...the ingredients of this ketchup you just consumed...Want to eat some more? Drink some more?

Do whatever you need to do...get yourself your daily dose of dopamine...and some more...quieten your brain....do not write.

It's just an itch.

Back

Because without you, no matter what I do...no matter where I go....I feel like a ghost.

18th November,2011

 Don't.
Just let me be here.I need to be here.
You know me.I won't cry.

I don't know who you had become all these years but I am pretty sure it was something more amazing than what I knew you to be.
It has been six years.I don't know the girl who made it to IIT D.I don't know the girl who studied there and got a job in Mumbai and was working in some premier software company.
I knew you from long before that.
You were my first best friend.
They say you were like my soother on my first day of kindergarten.I wouldn't stop crying and your Mom told my Mama to make me sit beside you and within minutes I was talking to you and waving happy goodbyes to our mothers.
We must have hung out together for almost five years.
I remember the little slide in th corner of the playground we used to play around.
I remember you always used to get a banana for lunch.You used to peal it all at once and then break it in pieces and eat it.
I don't remember what we talked and the games we played and the one reason I don't remember stuff is coz everything was so happy and smooth.I don't remember having even a slightest tiff with you
Then came the third form.You got an appendectomy done.You missed school.I missed you.And you called me from the hospital.And I was all chirpy and your voice sounded weak.I worried a lot about you.I'm sorry I didn't come to visit you.I never told you that but believe me it remains the first real regret of my life.Because of you I have tried to be the best friend I can be to all my friends thereafter.But you know what I never could find a best friend like you.
We drifted apart.Our sections wern't the same anymore.We had our separate runs in that beautiful school.
We fell in love with good books, good music,good movies and the mysteries of life separately.Most days I'd talk to you in the school bus in the morning.We were so inquisitive and curious then.We loved Harry Potter.You had a crush on Johnny Depp and his high cheek bones then.
March 2005, after the boards I gave a black small box with two nothings for your birthday.One was a moonstone heart locket and the other was a small wooden guy broken off a key chain.I gave you that coz those two were the most prized possessions of mine at that time and I had a feeling we would grow further apart like we did, so i wanted it to be most special, most rare.

I know you know it.You were amazing.
You were above the trivia.The real thing.
And now you've beaten us all to it.
You've flown.
They offer me details of the car accident but you know I don't want to know.I don't care.
They've all written on your fb wall, I don't like it.
I see in your profile picture.You seem to be flying in your orange graduation robe.Flying towards heaven.
That is what I want to remember.
I want to remember that you had a hell of a time in college.You had friends that loved you.You were in a beautiful relationship with some very lucky guy.You went to places and saw life...yes you were the pride of a small town...pride of everyone who knew you..but you know baby for me...all I wondered was about you..and it turns out you have done a beautiful job of your life and I am just so happy for that.

The kind of person I knew you were,I know you wouldn't mind leaving soon because that was just the kind of person you were.Above the grudging,above the complaining.

Of all the promises I didn't keep.Of all the times I avoided you.Of all the weird behavior.It wasn't about you and I am pretty sure you always knew that.

 I want you to know just two things.
I still love you from a four year old heart.Love that doesn't even know it is love yet.Love that knows no loss or complications.Love that is as simple as holding each others tiny hands for no reason.
I will take you in my heart.Wherever I go.As long as go.

Nunnu please know this.Please.Okay.

And meet all the fabulous people in heaven.I know you'll make the best of everything there too.The world is too shitty anyways hun' have fun watching us over and have a good laugh every time I screw my life,only you are allowed to do that.

I love you.

Okay

It is okay .It is okay if I was his mid life crisis and he was my PMS gone wild. I was the bike, he needed a car. 

I think it was enough, I think it was beautiful and in the end it was fair.

I think if you can find peace and comfort anywhere in your life that has to be good. So if you send me back in time I would still make the same choices, and the only reason why I am so sure is that I feel no resentment, or anger, or regret or anything even close to that. I am not a greedy person. I call him greed and not a want or a need because that is the truth. Greed harms you and other people .I can hang on to either one of those disillusions that I want him or need him but I choose not to. I choose not to spoil it by trying to make it last forever even when I don’t want to just because that would be the noble thing to do. I like it this way.

It is odd how you can find the most startling things at places where you least expect to find them, in places your not even looking. You stumble upon things, you hurt a little, but you walk away with a little dust of life. You discover yourself through people you least suspect can leave an impression on your life. Sometimes you discover things you like and sometimes things that break your heart. You see yourself; it is almost a biopsy, my disillusions, fears, vulnerabilities and all the other mess .Who I am, who I am not . Guess that breaks my heart a little but given a choice I’d rather know because knowing, helps me. I cannot choose my flaws and fears but I can choose not to be limited by them, dragged down by them. So, I don’t apologize for not being in love. I won’t lie that I’m not heart broken. Sometimes you don’t have to be in love to be heart broken. You end up heart broken anyway.

sab khair hai bass meri rooh par teri rooh ke kuchh nishan baaki hai.

No it isn’t heart breaking. It fails to satisfy my metaphorical needs.

The shattering and picking up shards of a broken “heart” doesn’t work for me.

I feel shot.

Shot at my chest.

And my gut.

....

"You know, every time I look at you, your eyes...I want to see him,I want to see his eyes.."

"Waaht??"

"I mean, if this the hurt on this side...what I see here everyday...in your insanely beautiful eyes...I wonder what his eyes look like...was he hurt as bad as this..or what does he feel... guilt...or denial...regret..anger..or complete indifference...what is there on the other side???"

"Okay, you just called my eyes insanely beautiful...so im just going to filter that out...and by the way why do you even care about the other side??"

"I don't care...you still do...I'm just curious.."

"So is it that obvious??"

"You could  wear shades in front of me...or I could start looking at the rest of you...which by the way could be interesting"

"Perv"

"What??...and now I've got you worried"

"Shit...i really wonder sometimes if it will go away...I really want it to..."

"Give it time...you'll grow out of it.."

"That's what worries me...how much will i lose myself...the child in me...to grow out of it..ahh forget it, life's okay...I love these jeans,I love this red wall,I still have two chocolate bars in my bag pack"

"Can I have one??"

"How could you even ask??"

My First Night (i mean night shift all you dirty people)

10pm to 7am

No,its not the same as spending the whole night doing things you like.You work and you can't sleep at all.

"Snuggle while you can"

Amen.

"I'm sorry,its just that I am contagiously sad right now...and I just don't want to rub off my blues on you or anyone...so could you just forget about me for a while...pretend I'm on a happy vacation or something...and we could pick it up from where we left it some days later???"

Dairy Entry

Some days I go out to the office just to find a reason to quit...and then i think, shouldn't this fact alone suffice my need for a reason to quit.

I'll tell you about my work today.I work as an alarm monitoring engineer in a leading telecom and networks company.
There  are sites from where your phone receives network.Commonly they can be identified as towers on which round and rectangular antennas are mounted.Among other equipment on these sites there is equipment that tracks the proper working of the site.When something is even slightly off than usual this equipment generates alarms.These alarms are transmitted to a central location where they are continuously monitored.I monitor these alarms in that central location.When I see something is not okay I inform the site engineers and tell them to go check if everything is okay at the actual site.We keep up the network so that your phone always has a good signal.So that you can always connect.So that people can always connect with you.So that you are never alone.
There are a lot of others things that I do as well but the rest of it is just process to make this alarm monitoring thing very efficient and well documented.

I work in eight hour shifts,almost continuously.I cannot let my terminal unmanned so taking even a five minute break is a problem sometimes.I was promised a five days a week schedule but till now all my weeks have been six days.My office looks and operates like a call center except they don't give us the earphone cum mike devices and the recognition that it is actually a typical calling center.
The work is repetitive and beyond a point there is nothing to learn off it.But then I guess it is like that with most of the jobs.

Some days I feel like a life saver but most days I feel nothing but a telecom coolie.(we come after IT coolies coz they don't do night shifts you see).Everyday I find new reasons and underlying meaning to what they make me do.Try and make sense of it but lately all the sense of it has started not to make sense to me and the first cracks have begun to show
Writing this down is one of the many things I'm doing to hold it together.

"I just saw you and was wondering ...if you could happen to me...and if you could let me happen to you???"