Unwild Rumpus

Dearest "Friend-with-the-wild-hair", It has taken me ten years to do this. Ten years to even acknowledge that in some dark corner inside me, I have a bundle of emotions that I need to address. Ten years to deal with the fact that I wasn't there with you, for you, when you needed me and there's nothing I can do about that now. I was young, immature and took it for granted that we had our entire lives ahead of us - to talk again, to sort differences, to go back to where we started. I didn't stop to think that those pill overdoses and those slit wrists weren't just resolved incidents from the past but rather a warning that when things went from bad to worse, you had your own way to deal with it. I've seen you at your worst. I have very vivid memories of entering a smoke filled hostel room and finding you sitting on your bed, in the darkness, dark circles around your eyes, band aids masking your grim experiments. Vivid memories of being unable to get a wor...

I'm sure you've run into this person - the one who has an enviable memory. He remembers his first grade teacher, the place where he was when his first tooth wriggled and fell, the name of the boy who tripped him in kindergarten, the address of his first crush... you know the type. Well, I am the complete opposite. Sometimes when I am sitting around with my family and some old stories come up, I wonder if I even grew up in the same household! Some memories that I have of my childhood are not even my own - they are images in my head created after I've had those stories repeated to me/in front of me multiple times by my parents. I was a girl with her head in the clouds. Daydreaming was my favorite pastime and imaginary friends, my closest companions. We lived in the hills, amidst the woods, and when I wasn't in school, I was either hiking through the woods (imagining stories of adventure and exploration that awaited me beyond the next hill, around the next corner) or b...

When I posted my short review on Instagram, I started off by saying this - There are books that make you want to read differently; there are books that make you want to write differently; and then there are books that make you want to live differently. For me, Karukku by Bama definitely falls under the third category. I can safely say that it is the first book that made me pause and look back at my life through a different lens. All my life, I've been privileged enough to not have to pay any attention to casteism or bother about caste based discrimination. It didn't affect me at all. Actually, I take that back. It affected me. Once. When my ignorant ass ranted against the reservation system because I didn't get admitted to the medical college of my choice but a "less deserving" classmate of mine did because of reservation. She was a person from the Scheduled Caste community. It has taken me 18 years to realize how spoilt and ignorant I was then. How blind. Ho...

I have had enough blogs to know that the first post is the much dreaded one. At least for me. The pressure of setting the tone for the blog, of defining boundaries and parameters, of introducing myself in a way that would be the perfect balance of witty and mysterious and interesting enough to follow. And so, I have decided that I am not going to do any of that. No fancy quotations that define me, no poetic descriptions to "fancify" a mundane life, no limitations on what this blog might or might not cover. This is just me, writing things that come to my mind, because I love to write.