Yeshwanth

Aren't words supposed to be a writer's best friend Ready at their beck and call Walking with each other hand in hand ... But then why do words suddenly abandon me hiding behind , running free I coax them to come back To sit with me and help me write ... To make themselves available "You are my tools" I tell them No, Scratch that .. You are my love You help me create whats beautiful and ugly Sometimes a poem, sometimes a story You help me create people ... you, my dear words, are the life in my people But hardly do they listen ... We sit all day ... the blank page and I staring away After sometime, when the emptiness starts winning ... I force myself ... to force my words But,they still peek and run around me teasing like children enjoying this little game and I, like a tired mother, finally sit down, apologizing to the page promising the next time my words will behave just then I feel a tug a small word stands giving me a shy little smile...

“My friend is fairer than me. Why am I dark?   He has got a promotion last year and I have not. Why is God so unfair towards me? Omg!! He has got an onsite and is travelling the world earning lakhs and I am still in this small town earning peanuts!”  Are these not the thoughts of all of us? Comparisons, it is said, are odious. And yet this is the criterion we use to judge every aspect of our lives. We keep in mind a frame of reference for almost everything – happiness, success, peace, pleasure, pain, accolades and yes, even loving. You may be successful, but another’s greater success makes you uncomfortable. The mind has an inbuilt comparative calculator. First it would be school grades, then comes the job title, income level, promotion, and onsite of our best friend, house size of our relative and worldly successes of everyone we know. We all do it; we look at what others are doing and wish we were doing that too. Or, alternatively, we scoff at what they’re doing ...

WOW.. Navarathri springs up many memories for me right from my childhood days.. This time it is Navarathri away from home. Coimbatore is not a happening place for Navarathri like Chennai. Navarathri days in Chennai takes me a trip down the nostalgia lane. The nine nights that are dedicated to the Goddess of creativity in our country. The nine days of vacation after the quarterly examination when I was in school.. Every household during this time, dusts its collection of dolls for the annual event and buy the newest one in the market for the year; it could be one from the epics or even one on Bush and his war on terrorism! When I was young, I would always pester my mom to buy the biggest doll in the market for our house’s kolu. Bigger like the dolls in my friend Manoj’s home. The excitement in helping out mom for arranging the steps and the dolls was priceless. I have been re-creating all the gorgeous idols in my mind; their colors, their contours. It was always ...