SLOW DOWN HUMANS!

“Everything has been figured out except how to live” - Jean Paul Sartre

I have never been known for my competitiveness, in fact i am the least competitive person you will come across. This is perhaps the only thing uniform across all areas of my life. I would rather let everything pass me by, waving cheerfully as they do so. ‘I would rather’ is the driving force of my life, i would rather listen than talk, stare at things than listen, lie on the bed and wonder than stare, etc. depending on the choices i have at a given time and what they yield. 
It has been years listening to and executing tasks that were ‘for my own good’, I actually never could. It just doesn't come to me to run after things, to do all that and be there only to feel nothing, to meet people and socialize only to agree with them ( and why is it so important to think the same things anyway ?), to eat out at expensive places only to display on social media so that we can make others  feel bad about missing  out and act it out too, to live under constant pressure to talk to people ( why is silence so uncomfortable?)
Maybe there are people who actually derive something worthwhile from it, i agree sometimes i admire people who never give up on things who achieve what others only dream about but then what if i don't want those things. The problem is that people are expected to ultimately have similar dreams. Our world has standards for dreams too. What if i want to stare at the dancing shadows casted by the trees in summer, what if i want to walk down the streets for as long as i want without being bothered by time or people, or look jealously at leaves falling from the trees as they are  blown from place to place as the wind pleases or just be! They say time flies by, make the most of it but they don't tell you how? Why can't we make the most of time by being actually aware of every minute, conscious of every breath as long as we can breathe. Why participate in the race to acquire more and more money only to exchange it for things we don't really need? 

In this world of haves and have nots, i feel like we are all puppets with invisible strings attached to us, but who is the puppeteer?

THE ANATOMY OF PAIN

WHY ME? That’s the redundant question associated with pain. When something unfortunate happens, that’s the question people ask; why me?

In the often long time relationships with pain there are so many questions that come out.

It is said that there are three stages of pain, and even personally I can say that they are indeed the inevitable truths. 

First comes denial, the ‘why me’? Why not someone else? How can it be me? Interestingly despite pretending to be empathizing all our lives, humans are quick to substitute someone else in their place. As soon as the tragedy befalls we wish that maybe, somehow, just somehow it’s someone else. Just not us! These are the times, which present us exactly how we are. Who and what would we not sacrifice in those moments of anguish, if we could?

Second comes aggression. The denial not so slowly converts into anger. This phase often makes people question their life long beliefs and a sense of aggressive rebellion towards the whole world. Every relationship that we have, that we once thought to be the strongest, goes up in smoke! And they are not often a result of the aggression as much as they are disappointments. At that moment the reason for our anger is not the only reason, it’s the culmination of the illusions that we have been entertaining our entire lives. In those days I hated everything positive, anything that signified the essence of life. Smiling faces filled me with intense bitterness, people in general felt disgusting, kids were intolerable, and flowers made me cringe. Solitude, however, was welcoming and eventually becomes our saviour.

The time spent alone, staring at nothing lost somewhere inside our own selves, wandering in the crevices of our small complicated minds we stumble upon the third stage of pain, Acceptance. To be honest I cannot imagine there is any respite from mental pain ever but there does prevail a sense of acceptance. After living through denial and anger for years we step out of the cocoon, at terms with life.

Its hard to say that things happen for a reason, even harder when we have just encountered pain in life. But after years of living with it even an agnostic person like me can’t help but feel that some events in our lives are indeed destined. No matter how much they leave us withered and broken, by the end they make us the best of people. Nothing can ever substitute the pain of departing with a loved one, but would I have been the same person otherwise that I am now?

THE JOKES ABOUT RAPE

                                                 

It often strikes us later than it should! 

As I stood engulfed in dilemma, staring at the enchanting fall of the leaves from the Ashok trees overlooking my department of journalism, I wondered about my choice of response towards my batch mate. There had been a brief but heated argument over the joke about rape. After the ‘nirbhaya rape case’, Jaya Bachchan said that men can sympathize but can never really understand the trauma of rape. The statement has stayed with me throughout the years because time and again some one or the other irrespective of gender has made sexual harassment a joke. It appals me even more though when women fail to understand or even pass on rape jokes as normal, despite being the centre of every form of harassment all their lives.

It started years back with one of the men I was dating; he randomly made a joke about several men raping me and insertion of unnatural things in my vagina. I was dumbstruck with terror. And as I often respond when I am angry, by being silent, I remember being horrified the entire day.  That was my first encounter with the ‘the rape jokes’ and it started with being on me. I could not decide which was worse, as it dawned on me that it was not some special kind of people who are labelled as ‘criminals’ that think like that but random ‘civilized’ people around you, including the boyfriend characters! Or that a person who I was so intimate with mentally and physically could think of such things about me and that too with amusement. However, I ignored and the jokes continued till one day when I wasn’t feeling particularly too cheerful that I responded to one such joke furiously in a rant that went on for quite some time. To my surprise he apologized and made a sincere effort to understand female perspective ever since, I know this because it has been years and we are best of friends now and I have seen him transform. But unfortunately my objections over rape jokes not always end up in realizations or even a little effort for understanding. Some people tell me that I just can’t get a joke and maybe I need to ’lighten up’ and there are some who just never talk to me again! Not that I derive pleasure in having conversation with people once I get a glimpse of their deep rooted misogyny but I feel guilty for judging men for something that they have been learning from society since childhood. Having said that I also believe that humans are a product of their choices and not really the consequence of society and environment, though the latter is perhaps the strongest factor.  

The media is so full of rape news and articles that it now comes across as routine, so much so that sexual harassment/exploitation or advancements are merely reduced to masala stories for entertainment. More than 34000 cases of rape were reported in 2015 by our country’s National Crime Records Bureau, the victims ranged from female children younger than six years old to women over 60 years. And it’s not limited to women; people somehow dismiss male sexual harassment as a myth which can be attributed to patriarchy of course. And then there are those that are not reported and the harassment that women live through every day. 

Rape victims live through years of depression in fear, pain, anxiety, loss of self-esteem and confidence, embarrassment, emotional numbness and innumerable other emotions. Some never come out of the depression, some commit suicide. If only people could feel a hint of what they go through, it would cease to be funny. We cannot get used to the idea of rapes and harassment as just another thing, sexually assaulting people is not a joke, harassment is not normal, there is nothing funny about genitals and also there is nothing cute about chauvinist boyfriends (and even girlfriends), if they choose to be dim-witted assess, dump them! And as for the people who think I can’t get a joke, maybe they need to raise their standards and make better jokes!