Book trailer: SoPhia, the novel (2012)

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Frankenstein's monster...

Brutal imaginings
make their way into
my consciousness.
Sensation reverberates;
Blinding, Putrid, Bitter.
A final clang signals the winding hour;
I turn to clay; grey and cold.

The villain that hovered
as an image,
a formation of
words
and paper,
a scrawl of ink and graphite,
and yes,
someone elses dreams,
dashed-

Is a fluid vision;
a Flesh and Bone
Reality.

I feel like Frankenstein.
Please hold the champagne, though.

A lump born in the throat
falls into the
ulcer-ed pit,
heaving with
the knowledge.

Realisation
sinks
in:

So,
They do exist.
Beyond
my Wildest
Imagination.

Shhhhhh... Don't speak!

There are different kinds of silences. Sometimes, silence is like that clear pond that makes you want to look into its forever and ever kind of depths. It is still and deep and whole. It reminds you that you're linked in that still moment, to the beginning of time. It has that eternal feel about it. Sometimes, silence is a slap on the face. A gross act of retaliation. Nothing short of violence.

Mumbai's aftermath is a grating silence. The calm after the storm, so to speak. A symbol of shocking numb. The city is at a standstill. The problem with each of these varying kinds and degrees of silence is not in their base intentions or the reactive nature with which it may have begun. It is when silence is taken as a reason to point fingers and when it is seen as a weakness by those who will manipulate the space thus cultivated by it. It happens in the most petty instances. Politicians move in where there is panic, hoping to garner support for the next election. Other's with selfish intent use the space for silence as a tool to nurture their grab-all mentality.

In most cases thats what it comes down to; this warring for space and the right to impose ideals and ideologies on the world at large comes from a twisted kind of scarcity-consciousness. The mines-mines-mines mentality of the voyeuristic me-me-me.

Like I said, it happens in grave situations, and it happens in the most petty instances. Sometimes hundreds of lives are affected; other times only one or two. But it happens. And it hurts. It really does.

I don't know much about crisis management. And I have yet to fully embrace constructive grieving processes and networks of support. But I know this much: People who have that scarcity consciousness, who imagine that they should feel threatened by a particular status quo and who feel righted to upturn it in grossly violating ways, need to be weeded out from the thriving gardens of spirit and humanity that the rest of the conscious world wishes to cultivate.

And a momentary silence doesn't mean defeat; or admonishment. It is a moment to reflect. A time to grieve, and a reason to stand together and create those shifts in consciousness and infrastructure that will secure the future.

Silence isn't 'doing nothing'. It is healing. The calm before a revolutionary storm. At some point, all hypocrisy must die. Enough is enough. Eventually, only whats real will preside. The winds of change will make certain of it.

Provoked

What does it take for a woman of modest bearing, to wait till the quiet hours of the night until her husband of ten years is sound asleep, and to douse him in a carefully prepared mixture of cooking oil and other household flammable liquids, and then to drop a flaming candle at his feet, and watch in horror, and relief as the flames sieze and engulf his screaming frame!?

What does it take?

Insanity is a gleaming and rather self-righteous label designed by the self-acclaimed 'sane' and an appeasing banner to the designated who must wear it as a yoke. Why must some plead insanity to obtain justice? Or rather, as a human right's activist in the movie suggests, 'Why must women plead insanity to obtain justice, while men need only lose their tempers for the same?'

'Provoked' is the name of the movie that profiles a young Punjabi woman's plight to restore her dignity from within the confines of an abusive marriage, and in an act of being driven to temporary irrational insanity, she sets her husband on fire. He dies after some days in hospital. She is charged. This, she maintains, is her first taste of freedom.

Battered wife syndrome is, as a result of her case, a legally recognised condition.

Abuse is a messy subject, and many people will shy away from the indications to take the topic by the horns and do real battle with it. How do we break the cycle? We engage in abuse and are abused every other day when we choose to ascribe labels on each other, and when we carry those with which we might be branded. Where does it all stop? And how?