Too early at the altar - The Hindu

Girl fights child marriage from 14 years of age. Maharashtra
Too early at the altar - The Hindu

A village that plants 111 trees for every girl born in Rajasthan - The Hindu

Oh well. I'm going to begin adding some of these articles in!
I started my collection of random acts of goodness and nice people on my phone.
Will update that someday.

A village that plants 111 trees for every girl born in Rajasthan - The Hindu

Little Bird

                                                                 
Penning words may or may not come naturally to me. I have debated upon this, with myself- countless times. But it is of no import, to anyone but myself.

The pensive state that I find myself in threatens to take over me. It is of old friends that I think of. Those that I still hold close. It will all be alright, when I see them again. But, that too won't last.

Leaving doesn't hurt. Knowledge of having left precious souls in (seemingly) another universe, dawns on us much later. The wistful need to try to grab at the wisps of memories, result in  tiny notes of love. It is but a relief to an itch that seeks to bundle all the loves together and tie them up tight, so You can be with them, all the time. The futility of this is far too apparent to ignore. We will all begin to detest each other, feel bogged down and create a mental prison break for ourselves.

As Human beings, We are the stupidest creatures possible. We can think. So we think, we are one of the main few that can think deeply and have memories. Elevating ourselves above other creatures, we call ourselves the masters of this world. We are strange creatures, stupid enough to destroy all that we love. I found a poor little sparrow that ended up as roadkill recently. Cars kept driving over the little bird. People walked by it, stopped to look and walked right past. Some stepped on it, by mistake of course(or so I hope). Poor little bird, we gave it a burial under a tree freshly budding. I had to scoop up its insides onto a dustpan. I felt like a good person. But its my human self again. I'm assuming that is what the bird wants. I tried only to give it the same respect, that people in this part of the world give to their own dead. For all I know, that kind of a burial, or any burial at all might be offensive to them, or their gods. I do hope, my poor little friend- who I happened to meet only after he died goes to his own kind of heaven- where cars don't exist.

No, I'm not trying to appeal to some kind of a person who enjoys seeing things that make most people cringe. Not with this bird. Gareth Jones[my professor] and Sydnie supported and helped me bury this little bird.

Animal sketches

A subspecies of the large coastal bear- The Grizzly bear

The American alligator, managing to avoid extinction for the past 65 million years, when their contemporaries, the                dinosaurs died out.

Blue bottle flies of the Blow fly family, eat off carrion or animals with open wounds

 Northern Pike- A freshwater predator
Preliminary study for the poem illustration

trapped in a bubble.
nowhere to go.

Melancholy pervades my life. Yet it is surrounded by great lengths of happiness and of hope.

Juxtaposition

A multitude of images-

                                                                Of a kissing breeze and

                                                                Of a haunting misery.

                                                                The ulterior motive defeated 

                                                                For a purpose of minisculity.

                                                                A summit of voices,

                                                                Rending their grief into a never-ending pit;

                                                                Ripping apart rust-hardened souls!

                                                                A troupe of busybodies

                                                                Detached from a well-established reality

                                                                Sounds ready to shatter their trance;

                                                               The clang of a metal window,

                                                               And the ripping muscle of a fleeing doe

                                                               Amidst all the twisted loving sound of doves.

Madness quotient on the increase

                              A mere moment in time,
                              Captured in a tiny bubble of memory-
                              A still-shot of a souls turmoil,
                              After all the self-inflicted restrictions,
                              Ready to burst, devoid of the eyes,
                              Of all the watching eyes.
                                                          - July,2009


                        It's either just me or the world is going absolutely mad!

      It might be something as insignificant as my blog not allowing me to reply to someone's comments[It really is the case. Everyone who has been kind enough to comment, I'm grateful and will reply once the random moments of luck touch me again], or something as big as my bus tumbling over to the side. Obviously my world is terribly small. Sometimes I wonder why we fret so much, pace around, scream out in anguish or hold it all in and suffer. William Shakespeare might be over-quoted but yet, he gets to the essence of it in his play Macbeth - 
                               Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
                               That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
                               And then is heard no more. it is a tale
                               Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
                               Signifying nothing.


     Macbeth's speech and the morbid emotion in his bleakest moments strike us lesser mortals at times. When it does though, we wish to escape; we wish we could announce to the whole world that their attempts are fruitless and their problems all silly. We feel like we know all there is, to know. What right do we have to judge someone else's emotions and troubles. Take Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of "The catcher in the Rye" by J.D Salinger, and his belief that the world was full of phonies, and he saw naught but sorrow in his own future. Even in such an extreme pessimist, the feeling does not last. All we need is a small motif from our own past or some such that strikes a deep chord within us. It can be a four month old baby holding onto your little finger, or a ride on the Ferris wheel with a never-ending supply of cotton candy. Or maybe a foot massage for some of the mad people.


   Maybe its just me having a strange complex- but i still find pretty much all arguments pointless, even mine when I think clearly. Its such a sheer waste of time!

'I have spread my dreams under your feet

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams'
                                         - William Butler Yeats
                                            [He Wishes for The Cloths of Heaven]

   I was at the beach. I sat on a beach-mat watching the waves fight it out... racing each other to reach me first! I was waiting for my dad to come and take me to them. I watched them, as their lulling waves waited for me to rush in to join them. The blue green waves enticed me and compelled me- pushing me backwards and pulling me inwards. So I drew closer and began doodling in the sand. Pouring all my childish creativity into it, i created an enchanted landscape with elaborate details. Just as I finished my masterpiece, my betraying friends- the gray-green waves rushed over my masterpiece diminishing it into mere clumps ofsand dotted with seashells, with slimy seaweed winding around my castle.I kicked out at them and screamed fiercely, challenging them to a fight unto death. Their indifference angered me. i was all of six years old then!

  There began my battle with the world to protect Dream and Hope. Eleven years down the line, I found myself penning a poem about Hope, with an ever-growing list of Dreams that I could not formulate.

                         A fleeting Hope nuzzled my back.
                         Its intensity startling me out of my pondering.
                         I let my foreboding slip past and
                         Turned around.
                         We played together in the shadows of the rainbows,
                         As we danced the shadows shrunk
                         We took it for a good omen then
                         And laughed.

                         We leapt onto the rainbows
                         and skipped around on them.
                         The Blues welcomed us,
                         The Reds overwhelmed us,
                         The Greens tranquilized us,
                         But the Purples remained silent.
                         We looked upon them in awe,
                         Ready to follow them to the ends of the Earth.
                         They regarded us-with silence as always.

                         But Hope found another friend to play with,
                         It left me suddenly, not caring to say goodbye.
                         Loneliness clambered over me.
                       
                         Today, Hope is back to flirt with me;
                         The same irresistible friend it was before
                         I wonder for a second if it missed me
                         But too late!
                         This time the Reds are beckoning to us
                 
Note: This is something I wrote for an art school application essay. Do leave a comment, good or bad. just so i know how i'm doing!