It’s Better This Way

It’s better

That you are away

That I can’t touch you

Each night and day

 

Believe me honey

It’s better this way

 

I can’t hold you in my arms

I can’t feel your body and its warmth

I can’t wrap myself around you

And I can’t do you no harm

 

Believe me honey

It’s better this way

 

I want to love you fiercely

I want to stand up for our love bravely

Rather than complaining about the small things this time

I want to fall in love again gravely,

 

Maybe we’ll fight again

Put each other through unbearable pain

Overwhelming emotional and mental strain

Which makes me say, that

 

Believe me honey

It’s better this way

 

Better than love, was our love

Which made us develop a notion of hate

Better than compromise, was our compromise

Which made us adopt each others trait

 

Better than communication, was our communication

Which made us go silent when we ate

And better than burden, was our burden

Of each others’ expectations and its intolerable weight

 

So

Believe me honey

It’s better this way

You broke my heart

You came you left

You made no impact

I wish I could say something like that

 

Your love your care

All the victims beware

I feel choked I need fresh air

 

You took my heart

And made it of gold

It felt like it was ready to be sold

 

And then you broke it

You smashed it you thrashed it

As if it was a car, you horribly crashed it

 

It seemed unintentional but it was not

The thing we had was insanely hot

Would I do it again, I’d rather not

 

I can’t help

but think about it

Would I get over you, I highly doubt it

 

I need to figure out

What i’m gonna do about it

I know it’s not healthy

 

Its dangerously obsessive

Its a negative high

And its very depressive

 

Don’t know what the future holds

Whether good or bad

Just the thought of it

Makes me horribly sad

But it’ll be fine

Once said my dad

Whatever it is

That bothers you lad.

The Partial

Who’s At Fault?

I am a 24 year old girl, sitting in my room, in a house which I share with 6 other people. It is a big house and can actually accommodate 3 more people if we had more bathrooms. It is usually very quiet in the house. Everyone is busy with their lives, watching Netflix, or browsing the likes of Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat and Instagram. Nobody is interesting in knowing what other people are doing, or what’s actually on their mind, or how they are feeling. But I think that is the case with people in general these days. I used to like it when I was a child and we would go out to play, especially on a day like this, when it was raining. We would go out and dance, jump ropes, chase each other around the park, play hide & seek and yes, life was that simple in those days.

What changed my life and my perception of it, started on a day like this. I had just come back from the park and it was raining heavily. I was all wet from the rain when I came back to the house in the evening, only to find that my parents had gone out due to some emergency with my uncle, leaving our tenant’s kids, 18 year old Amit and 15 year old Aliya as my babysitters. I was 11 at the time. Amit’s family had been living with us for 4 years now, and we trusted them completely. Every time my parents had to go out and leave me alone in the house, Amit and Aliya would be my babysitters. They would not leave Amit alone with me as he was a boy and I was a girl, even though a kid, because as per Indian customs/mentality, it was not “safe”. They were true about it after all. Aliya would not come to stay with me alone, as she was a very beautiful girl who was used to get extra attention from every boy who saw her, and I was the kind of boring person she hated to spend time with alone. I did not enjoy talking about makeup or boys, while those were the two topics that topped Aliya’s list of favourites. Even when they both came to be with me, Aliya usually watched her favourite series on MTV and it was me and Amit who used to spend time together, talking and sharing what we did during the day and week, which I liked very much.

Amit was in final year of his college and was the exact opposite of Aliya. He did not like girls who wanted undue attention or used makeup to look beautiful, which is why he and I had so much to talk about. We both knew we were respectably fond of each other’s company. When I came back home all wet that day, Amit asked me what I was doing in the rain. I told him that I played hide and seek with my friends, enjoyed it very much in the rain and did not want to come back home. But as it was dark outside, I had to come back home. Understanding my enthusiasm, he proposed that we should play hide and seek in the house if I wanted to. Aliya wasn’t a fan of the idea,but she had to agree when her elder brother got offended at the rejection of his idea. I was very happy that Amit was taking my side against her.

We lived in a double story house, with 4 rooms on each floor. Amit’s family lived on the ground floor. On the first floor, where I lived, we had a bedroom for my parents, one for me, one guest room, a living room and a lobby. The way the rooms were designed, the builders did their best to give privacy to every person in the house.

We turned off all lights, except the one in the living room and started playing. When it was Aliya’s turn, Amit insisted that we both hide in the same place as Aliya would not guess it and it’d be easier for us to surprise her as she would be looking for us, one by one. We hid inside the closet of my parent’s bedroom and kept quite. Aliya, who was not that interested in the game at all, came into that room and paid not attention to the closet. Amit put his hand on my mouth, so that my breathing could not be heard by Aliya. She went to another room, but Amit’s hand was still on my mouth. I tried to let myself free from his hold, but he was too strong for me, and he was also trying to save us from getting caught. After some time, which felt like hours but were actually seconds, he put his other hand on my bottom and pulled me closer, whispering very slowly in my ear that if she comes back, we would be seen as one person and not get caught together. It didn’t make any sense and felt very strange as his hand was slowly moving up to my back, then to my belly, roughly passing through my chest, while his other hand still keep my mouth shut from making any noise. As he went down again, this time reaching my thighs and then between my legs, I jerked with all the force I had in me and let myself free out of the closet. Even though it was Aliya’s turn, I felt that Amit was the one cheating in the game. I started crying and couldn’t stop myself. Aliya heard me, came into the room and asked me why I was sobbing. Before I could understand what was going on and explain it to her, he said that I hit my head on the wood in the closet, which was the cause of my pain. Aliya, uninterested in me as ever, went to the living room to watch TV. It was very common for all of us in a situation like this that Amit would talk me out of my misery. Only this time, he added to it.

I kept crying for another fifteen minutes or so as he tried to convince me that such kind of behaviour was very common between friends. That if I don’t like it, he won’t do it again, although it would disappoint him that I was not behaving like a good friend. I was very guilty and scared that I was not able to maintain my friendship with a true friend I had, but there was also a feeling of anger which I could not understand. I could not tell this to my parents as they liked him very much and would end up believing that either I was lying or just making excuses to stay out later. To be honest, I was still very much in shock and displeased by what had happened that I was too scared to even think about it again. I thought it would not happen again and with time I will forget about it, which proved wrong very soon. Within a week, my parents had to go out again, leaving Amit and Aliya in charge of me as usual. Amit forced the idea of hide and seek this time, as I must be feeling alone, not being able to go out and play with my friends. It was impossible to oppose his aggressive authority. The same disgusting thing happened again, only this time he was more forceful, rougher, angrier. He would touch me in uncomfortable places again and again and would not let me speak or even breathe properly. He forced his lips on my cheeks first, and then lips and rubbed his body against mine. I cried the whole time but the voice did not reach Aliya and even when it did, she preferred watching TV over my crying which she thought I was just doing to get unnecessary attention. As I told him I do not like what he was doing, he grabbed me by my hair and told me that this was the least I could do after all the time he has helped me while my family was away. He threatened to tell my parents that I was making it hard for them to babysit, while it should have been the other way around. Nonetheless, I was too scared and ashamed to say anything to anyone. He had used my body to his pleasure, while I did not like it one bit, and I felt so impure.

This kept going on for another year, until Aliya walked in on him forcefully touching me again and ran downstairs, crying. I heard a lot of loud noises from the ground floor that day and Amit never volunteered to babysit me again. A week later, I saw him and he looked at me, grinning. It felt like a shock down to my spine and I could not look him in the eyes. I never told my family what happened during that year as somewhere in my subconscious mind I believed it actually was my fault. I couldn’t understand how, or why, but I felt ashamed for this mistake. The experience changed the way I felt about rain, the way I felt about myself, the way i feel about people and life in general. It changed the level of comfort I felt with my own body, the body which no longer belonged to just me. I was no longer in charge of what could happen to me and how easily it could happen.

It’s been 14 years since it first happened. I’ve seen so many people sharing similar stories on the internet, but I still cannot understand if it was his fault in forcing himself on me or my incapability to stop it. It was him who scared me or the overwhelming feeling of shame that still stops me from sharing it. Is this why I am not interested in talking to other people and asking what they are doing, because at least they are staying out of my way? Is this why I still can’t look my family in their eyes when I talk to them? Is this why I push away my friends before even I get comfortable with them? I am still trying to find these answers, but the only thing I know for sure is that I have lost myself somewhere along the way and I intend to find myself again.

The Partial

The Partial

Don’t know how to say this out loud,

Just want to be a part of that crowd.

 

When you couldn’t hear once, friend, you threw the speaker out,

Just imagine how much I am always stressed out.

 

I know it shouldn’t be a hurdle in my way to succeed,

How can the externals operate when the internals bleed.

 

I want to listen every time and not say sorry,

Not just once, each time I wanta feel the glory.

 

I see people that have far worse illness

And have succeeded in life,

I feel motivated by them sometimes

Sometimes I feel wounded by a steel knife.

 

To everyone else this is not big a deal

But I can’t eat peacefully even one meal,

Cause every moment from me that life does steal

I can do nothing but hide and conceal.

 

Sadness shouldn’t be too strong for a thing like this,

Even though it’s a small body part, but it, I DO miss.

 

When I go out with friends or to a bar with a girl

To a crowded area or at publisher lunches,

I put on a smile and they think I’m happy

But I feel like hit by a thousand punches.

 

I think of going away from everything

And start a life on my own,

I did that when I came to Australia

Believe me it nearly had my mind blown.

 

Maybe someday I’ll stop running

From the world and from myself,

That’d be the happiest day

As I’ll get rid of my cry-self.

 

I’ll muster all the strength and advance like a tiger,

I’ll do what I need to live in peace, and hold my spirits tighter.

 

She’s Not a ‘Girl’ Girl

Prostitution – Taking Our Blame

We are trained all our life to be hypocrites. This training is not conscious, mostly, but a sub-conscious one. We are asked or expected to believe in and support something, and yet when it’s our turn to apply that to our lives, we are expected to turn away from it. One thing I am specifically talking about here is prostitution, as you may have judged from the title.

It is rather sad that prostitution is still looked down upon as a profession. When you are in your 20s, you think that at least people of your and older ages will have the decency of treating prostitution as any other profession. But it is not the case. I have seen many educated, professional man women talking about prostitution as a service and supporting the very idea of prostitution. But when you ask them if they would be like to date a guy or a girl who used to visit or work in a brothel, they refer to them as a creeps and what not. This is the kind of hypocrisy I’m talking about. I understand that it is not possible to an average female to take up prostitution as a career, even in the times of need. There can be so many reasons for this, one of the most common being they don’t like the kind of intimacy the profession requires. Totally agree to this. Nobody is actually expecting them to take it up as a profession. But what we expect from an average educated person, both males and females, is not to exclude, the ones who have the guts to do this, from the society.

We can’t even imagine the magnitude of favour they are doing to us. I myself have visited a brothel a few times and there is this one particular girl I meet with. During our sessions, I had the pleasure to talk to her and this is when I came to know the dirty realities of the work, which I only had seen in movies previously. She told me about the kind of people who visit the place. I am going to define only 3 of those types and help understand what we owe to these strong women of the service they provide.

The first type is, the people who are living a repressed life. Due to societal pressure and lack of confidence and support, they have to hide their sexual identity, but cannot keep their sexual interests repressed. What they do is something I cannot explain here, which will be too controversial even with an anonymous identity. But the bottom line is they get the satisfaction they want. Should we be downplaying the service still? Let’s see. The second type is the people with rape instincts. They visit and ask the girls to role play as if the they are raping the girl. In the words of the girl who I meet, ‘I’d rather have him here instead of raping a girl outside in the real world’. The same real world who excludes her for knowing that she is a prostitute. The same real world who uses prostitute as an abuse. The third type is the prospective pedophiles who ask the girls to role play as a child. Again, the girl says that it’s better that the person is better off within these walls, where the girls has security and can say stop anytime she wants, rather than outside in the real world harassing some kid. This is just a small portion of life of one working girl in a developed country. Imagine the life of one in third world countries, as we call them where they don’t have any security, physical, emotional or sexual.

Can you believe how many rapes must have been avoided because of this one girl only, and how many in total? How many kids are walking freely this land without living nightmares in their minds with images of things that might have happened to them if it wasn’t for them? And yet we treat them as the dirty part of the society, we feel shame in openly talking to them, we hesitate in accepting them with open arms. If this isn’t hypocrisy, then what is? Is this the kind of education we are getting from universities where we pay thousands of dollars? Is this the kind of civil society we wish to remain? I don’t think so, or at least I don’t wish so.

So the next time you call someone a hoe or a prostitute in a degrading manner, just remember that they are just as human as us, if not better. They are just as fragile as us, if not stronger. They are just as vulnerable as us, if not more resilient. We are the ones who owe them a favour, not the other way around. They are the ones fulfilling our needs, absorbing the raw, rotten and evil side of ours in their small world within our ‘real’ world, not complaining about anything, just making a living. Next time you come across one, address them with nothing but love in your eyes, for we owe them for taking blame for our hypocrisy and cowardliness.

She’s Not a ‘Girl’ Girl

She’s Not a ‘Girl’ Girl

It makes me sad to see how we treat and stereotype women. We even stereotype women who are trying to remove these stereotypes. You know what makes makes me more sad – women stereotyping women.

As it turns out, it is not enough to be born as a women with women body parts. Nope. They have to behave like a woman, in a way which everyone else expects them to. This expectation is different in different countries though, or even different places within a country. The part of India where I come from, a women shouldn’t smile much, as they say. If she is smiling at something and accidentally looked at a guy at the same time, she is giving him the signal. Well, news for us guys, it’s the wrong interpretation of the signal. Maybe some alien came down on earth and sent you a signal that you are a freaking pervert, or a creep, or an asshole, or whatever the hell you turn out to be in life, but it was definitely not the signal you interpreted. This smile was just a basic example of how a women is supposed to behave in society. They shouldn’t smile too much, they shouldn’t be out too late, they shouldn’t be too friendly with people and the list goes on.

It’s quite different in Australia. The situation is somewhat better here, but not the best. They can smile, they can be friendly, they can be confident, but if they do all these things to a proportion where they are not intimidated by men, or even worse, the men are intimidated by them, then they are labelled. I want to share a small example here to better understand the situation. There is a girl in my office who I’m going to call Lauren for privacy reasons. Now as far as I know her, you put the cheerfulness, passion for fun, popularity, confidence, awesomeness of 20 people together and you have yourselves a Lauren. Everyone loves her and she is a star. She is just one hell of a person. She’s been in the company for 5-6 years so that makes her one of the oldest (not in age) and most connected employees as well. Nothing wrong in any of the above things according to me. But sometimes when when we are at pubs or lunches, I’ve heard some people say that Lauren’s not a ‘girl’ girl. This annoys me to so many levels that I can’t even explain. I know some people might think this is not a big deal, but I believe it represents the way we still stereotype and label women. Even in an advanced country like Australia, where we have education, freedom and everything we need for a so called civil society, people think like this. It is important to note that this comment came from a literate person who has a Bachelor degree. But that’s where literacy and education part ways, don’t they?

Just because a woman is too confident to be intimidated by men, or accept a men’s Alpha male status, or be cheerful that everyone loves her or has the power to not let other people say shit directly to her face, makes her not a ‘girl’ girl. It is depressing to see that’s how a woman can even feel about other women. We put all these labels on everything and it takes to our doom, nowhere else.

We have all seen men who can’t let a girl win in a game, men who will use all their power to open a bottle of jar to prove their manhood, who will feel like dying if a woman is able to do something they can’t do. I don’t know much about science, but people say all the time that men are naturally physically stronger than women. And where does this leaves women? Oh yeah, they have mental strength. Is that really true? I totally believe women are mentally really strong, but so they are physically. I have seen women at my gym who can make a guy faint with one punch, who can also take a punch like a goddam martial artist.

The problem is how what we were taught when we were growing up. The problem is that when we are kids, women get dolls and men get G.I. Joes or monster trucks. And if girls play with monster trucks, well that’s not ladylike now is it? The problem is we send most girls for self-defence and only some of them can make their way to kick boxing. The fucking problem is, we have manipulated their minds since it started grasping things that they are not as strong as their male counterparts. Yes, I believe that’s the root of the issue. Have you ever seen a person getting treatment for an addiction and actually getting treated even though he didn’t believe that he could be treated? No, and you never will. We have made women addicts of weakness, being ‘girly’ and self defence. Ask yourselves pioneers of self defence, how has it worked out for you till now? I know we have exceptions, but not enough. We need less self-defence more attackers. We need more Laurens. We need more people, both men and women, to say that those Laurens are ‘girl’ girls. Anyone who was born a women, is a women no matter how strong she is, how short her hair, how many guys or girls she’s fucked. No she’s not a tom-boy, not a manly women, not a slut. She is a woman who is beautiful either she has a 16 bicep or a 36 cup, or both.

This was just a minute piece of what women face and what we need to change our mentality about. Those looking for a wider perspective, go ask yourselves these questions. Although this journey towards equality is a long one and certain sections of both genders are a hindrance to it, we have small portion who is in the right direction. I’m glad we are on a path to turn this small portion into a bigger one.

Money-minded

Money-minded

So Tanya just said that ‘I hate to say this but everything does revolve around money’. I feel bad about this. As there’s no one else I can talk to about this, I decided to write.

The topic started when one of my good friend Rohan called me yesterday and gave me some advice on how I should buy a house now, work 2 jobs, earn shit loads of money, marry a girl who is capable of earning money as soon as she arrives in Melbourne, have a kid soon after marriage so that by the time I retire the kid would be ‘settled’ in life. Basically, it is crucial for me to ‘settle’ in life before 30 so that my kid can settle before I retire. I mean, fuck my future kid if there will ever be one, but the man’s got even his retirement planned. I mean FUCK. And the one person I thought should understand and agree to this was Tanya and she kind of agreed to Rohan. Irrelevant to the topic, but in her words, she don’t have to be money-minded as her dad can support her and I should be because my dad does not have the same amount of money. Now I’m the kind of person who needs someone on his side, need approval that what I’m thinking is right. Maybe I grew up with this kind of non-confidence and maybe that’s why I can’t do a lot of other stuff that I want to, but I’m not going to get into that now.

The point is I don’t want this life where every move I make is a step towards a planned life, and that plan is something which is so deeply indulged in materialism one can’t even imagine. This house, 2 jobs, settlement, where the fuck is time for oneself. I’m a 26-year-old who used to believe in planning. Seriously, ask my high school friend how planned my shitty life was. I was into music when I was a kid. Normal middle-class stuff: natural talent, performs in school functions, always screaming/singing at home whenever dad wasn’t home, parents not letting me learn classical music or any instrument as study is the most important thing a person can do. So my plan was to get out of school,move out of the city for college, then learn music and become a singer/music director. Yeah, that was the plan. The first bump in the road – how can a small town family let their topper kid go out of the city for college? The kid might get into drugs, girls or as my mother used to say the girls will manipulate me into doing bad things ( I always laughed inside at this and thought that if anything like this happens, it would be the other way around). “You don’t know about these girls beta, when they see a handsome guy like you who has money as well, they lure him into doing dirty stuff”. Handsome she said, you should see me sometime. Money she said, visit my place sometime. But yeah, that was that, and I didn’t get out of the city for graduation and stayed in the city.

Final bump in the plan, due to an incident that happened right after first year of college, I’m partially deaf now and have Tinnitus. This means my ears collectively work on 40% of the capacity and there is a continuous buzzing sound in my ears all the time. This consequently means if you speak low enough, I won’t hear you and if you shout, that buzzing sound will ring louder in my ear and I’ll have a headache and I won’t be able to understand whatever you just said. Yeah, forget about becoming a singer/music director now, I can’t even listen to music for a long time. That’s how the plan turned out and I have no intention of making another plan now. It’s not that I gave up. Nope, I have another passion, as our society calls it, now and you’re reading it. No matter how bad this one is, one day I’ll improve. Also, I don’t have the passion towards money from whenever I can remember. I want to live life with meaning, earn enough to feed myself, read enough to think with logic, and help some people in the world if I can. This last part actually is more about guts than money, which at this moment I don’t have enough of.

Let’s see how life will turn out, but the journey will be the one chosen by me, not some pre-defined path which we as a society chose many years ago.