Womanly wisecracks...

Here's a question.How many times in your life have heard the dialogue "ek aurat hi doosre aurat ka dard samjh sakti hai" or similar equivalents in other languages, in soaps?The answer, I'm quite sure, is a gazillion.

For those who don't really follow the national language, the line literally means "only a woman can understand another woman's woes".

Utter crap.

It would survive only in soaps where actors are too busy looking for reasons to hysterically howl and do justice to that damned bottle of glycerine they emptied into their eyes at the director's insistence ("More .More emotion, I say!").

The truth is most women can't stand each other.There are the exceptions of course.
I know guys really raise their eyebrows and protest when they're told this. ("But you gals have so much fun together!").To you all I say, well there's a lot more going on apart from what you see on the surface.

Simple case in point.I did half my schooling in an all girls convent and half of it in a co-ed .The convent emphasised discipline, a fact thats quite understandable given that most parents sent their daughters there to "evolve into ladies".Ahem....yes.

However, I doubt if I learnt anything even remotely lady-like.They tried really hard to make us all cut our nails short,polish our shoes till they sparkled, sit with our knees together and ankles crossed ("A proper lady never displays her underwear!").The result?Most of us ended up becoming rowdy things who very effectively acted demure whenever Sister Bernadette was around.What a waste.

We also learnt the womanly art of sarcasm, something no man can ever beat us at.

I carried the knowledge of that spiteful art to co-ed and found I didn't really need it there.Why?Because the girls in co-ed were too busy giggling,blushing and acting coy, all for the benefit of the boys.But the moment a dispute came up, ("why did you smile at him when you KNEW I was trying to flash my dimples at him for the past one hour???"), claws were displayed and the yowling could be heard in the entire corridor.

Then fate put me in an all girls college.This experience was slightly better since I did find friends there (the exceptions I mentioned). However, just like you can't taken Rome out of the Romans, you can't rid a woman of acid comments and back biting. The proof was everywhere. Gang wars in class (the non violent types), prominent students vs other prominent students, one committee vs another,even lecturers!!!

I thought it'd all balance out at work.Ridiculously innocent of me to have thought that.

A woman without some amount of spitefulness is, I suppose, like a bodyguard who cries for his mommy everytime he hears a sound.Pointless.

Sru was right.Women just cannot get along with other women.

All the scathing observations apart,given the choice,I'd still be a woman anyday :)

In unfamiliar territory

So here we are. Stepping into a new and very different life.Sampled some yesterday.The novelty seems exciting and there's the challenge of having to start from scratch at something you don't know jack-shit about. Yes,its very different indeed.

A place other than the tin-box we used to refer to as our campus. This one in contrast is HUGE and believe me when I say HUGE I mean HUGE.The sheer size is relieving somehow. It houses so many people, its actually like a freaking stock exchange!!!Of course there's none of the desperate madness,just a very orderly calm. Now THATS a little tough to get used to after being part of a 65-strong, extremely loudly opinionated fish-market-like class.

Despite all the friendly, open treatment, there's the constant feeling of 'you watch your own back'.It isnt a reference to malice of any sort. Just the realization that we are after all responsible for ourselves and how our lives turn out to be. Highly empowering and terribly frightening at the same time.

The 'fun' is different too.Its all grown up and carefully controlled.None of the spontaneous madness we've been so used to.

Being/acting grown up has its own perks.One finally gets taken seriously and treated as an equal.By most atleast.Decisions are left to you and what you do is entirely your problem at the end of the day. And if you find yourself in a barrel full of shit, you might as well climb out of it all by yourself.

Also,for once, my 'seriousness' doesn't seem out of place.Yay!

Once upon a time, I left my mother's safe womb to enter a strange, unknown world.I had help then to cope, to be taken care of, to be comforted and cossetted. Years have passed and I'm in a strange place yet again. Except that this time around I learn to cope, to take care of myself and be my own source of comfort.

And yes, emotionality is ephemeral.

Random rambling...

It was a lovely evening. Moonlight gently bathed the roads in the absence of the streetlight which flickered pathetically till it mercifully died. I switched off the lights in my room, as I always do on full moon nights, so I could see the patch of silvery moonlight that filtered through the window and fell across the foot of my bed.

The radio played some obscure songs and radio jockeys tried hard to come across as sparkling personalities through mere modulations of the voice. I love listening to the radio. Especially through those pocket transistors. The sound quality has an adorable old-times feel to it. More specifically it takes me to the times when Baba (my grandfather) would sit at his desk at home, listening to his transistor and writing little notes to himself in his special handwriting which was conscientiously neat, yet terribly cramped because he hated wasting space and he’d do those fancy cursive writing things as well. Add to that a lot of pressure exerted through his ball point pen and you’d know what Baba’s handwriting was like.

As I sat at the foot of my bed in the “moonlight spot” and looked out of the window, I got around to thinking about how I’ve changed as an individual in the last three years. Other than the fact that I’ve learnt a whole lot of cool stuff from friends I made in college, I realized that there’s been this very obvious shift in my mindset and thought processes.

Strangely, I’m able to answer some of the questions that rattled around in my sore head 2 years back.

http://imunleashed.blogspot.com/2005/02/questions-unanswered.html

acn, whoever you are, and if you’re still reading my blogs, I know what you mean now and I completely agree. Life, love and compatibility definitely are very subjective issues. There is no one-size-fits-all in these cases. Only thing that makes sense is to find out what they mean to you and take it from there.

So far, love and marriage to me have almost been synonymous. But I guess, love needn’t always lead to marriage. No, I guess not. As much as the very concept of idea puzzled me and even frightened me at times, the fact that I can choose what I want marriage to mean to me is a huge relief. I don’t really consider hormones and “the rush” to be reliable compasses in this aspect. I don’t need chemistry, I need companionship. I don’t care if the man doesn’t make me go weak at the knees but I definitely want him to be there when I fall. The idea of marrying someone who can converse, make me laugh and listen patiently appeals more to me than someone who can effectively deliver charming one-liners.

Another aspect that has changed in gargantuan proportions is my perception of friendship. I didn’t quite get the fact that I was supposed to ignore those who judged me for stupid things like “she wears huge oversized t-shirts and has huge spectacle frames”. I thought I was supposed to do everything I could to “fit in”. Thanks to the Landlord of the Cosmos, I met people in college who changed it around for me. Not that they don’t know my shortcomings, not that they haven’t confronted me about it. Not that we’ve never disagreed. But no matter how we’ve angered each other, we’ve always got around to talking and liking each other all over again. Its such a comforting and strangely enlightening revelation that despite differences, people can still be friends, lovers, spouses.

Also the “wanting what I can’t/ shouldn’t have” syndrome has gone away. Sru called me a ‘fighter’. Little does she know that I’ve been fighting all the wrong wars till very recently.

Life’s strange. The answers are always around right in front of us. Yet we choose to ignore them completely till we’re ready for the knowledge. And almost always, we’re never ready till we’ve put ourselves through considerable pain and misery. Hmmm