mumbai

Mumbai happened and woke everyone from their slumber. It has shaken every sense of normalcy, of sanity, of . Uunderlying the overpowering feeling of anger is the deep sense of helplessness in the inability to take any action to assauge the gnawing loss. The loss not only of the innocents who were going about their daily life, but the notion of daily life has taken yet another blow.
There is a need to look for answers - why did it happen? Could it have been stopped? Why didn't the intelligence get to know that something so big was being planned? Why didn't they act on what they knew? What are they going to do now? Who can we catch and punish? Who can we blame? This can happen again- what are they doing to make sure that it doesn't?
Can they - whoever the 'they' might be, make sure that something like this doen't happen again? The sad fact of the matter is that these strikes look for what you forget to guard. So, as Ratan Tata said... they had information, they put up barricades out in the front, they checked all the tourists and business travellers coming into Taj - the terrorists used a different entrance - they came through the back.
Can we follow the American model of protecting their homeland? All said and done, Bush, in one of his TV appearences spoke about some of the good done by his administration, and one of the things he said, which cannot be discounted, is that there was 'zero' terror in America after 9/11. No further strikes, no pockets of militancy, nothing. If left unchecked, the sheer magnitude of the initial attack could have created chaos.
SOmetimes the Indian philosophies that rule our mental attitude and the kismat stance may be good for the soul but keeps us crying for physical action!

two months!! ya right!

two months.... good intentions and all, blogging would happen very regularly if one had the habit of writing one's daily diary as a child. since one could never do that, so can not get around to doing this either!
overall it always felt like one was opening oneself out to the world, exposing a truth which one was not clear about oneself and therefore not open to any comments on - a kind on invasion of privacy, even if the diary was meant to be read by no one but yourself. writing about mundane stuff like - today i went to a movie, or i ate the best rajma chaawal... who cared! and writing down feelings and plucking out philosophical threads which weave between your actions and thought process... that took too much analysis and that felt like putting yourself out there. your inner travails open to discussion, your innards spelled out in black and white, your guts spilled on the table to poked holes into! (obviously too much inside me!!)
but the few times i have written for myself and on this blog, and went back to read it, it all made sense. why people write. the space to thrash out a situation and explore one's feelings and reactions to whats happening in one's worlds. the issues which one has successfully resolved and been able to move on. the mistakes which one used to make, and promised and swore never to repeat, and are still doing the same shit! its really like a conversation with yourself. and since it is being put down in writing, there has to be some semblance of ordering one's thoughts. it can be about nothing... but still needs to make sense. when its only thoughts in the head, mostly the chattering monkeys (see last blog) will jump from one branch to another and there is no link between the topics the mind throws out, so nothing is thought out clearly enough to reach some level of resolution. so, even if chequred, one should persist... writing.

so then what

so one day i wrote, and thought that this may be a good way to give some of the chattering monkeys of the mind a space to vent themselves!! but the monkeys dont follow a format. they don't make sense. thay are random in their process and its difficult to write about what the mind is producing. unless i have some way of coming up with a theory to understand the pattern in their randomness... see show called 'numbers' for theories on friendship patterns and major behaviour analysis using mathematics!
that is the problem with most of my life... lack of consistency. can't like one thing and stay with it. of course, today's gen would see nothing wrong with that. like many other aspects, i was too early for the times! could be the gemini trait looking at more than one exciting thing to do. or the supposedly high instant intelligence where the excitement comes in understanding a new concept, learning a new art, doing a new thing, and the challenge is in attacking the newnesss. perseverance and preservation of existing knowledge and furthering the same thing feels boring. or so i think.
what needs to be understood is that is it boring or basically requires too much of work for small gains which are not visibly noticable, so no 'wow' factor! basically do i still operate in attention-seeking mode ... parents, please note, i seem to be still looking for approval and reaffirmation of my goodness!
so grow up! move on. parents will keep doing the same shit unto you. thats their job! what about your job. do what you need to do. i can see two more threads emerging from this which i need to address - the blame the parents crap and the waiting for the world to right itself rather than taking proactive steps to do something about it state!
so i have two new topics i want to write about. its taken me more than two months to write the second piece. lets see what happens to good intentions and i can also blog this time. will i be able to come back to this spot soon or will another two months go by without realising it.

what's in a name

do i really want to blog? under what name?? i resisted as long as i could for want of a name, though actually i do have a couple of blogs i created somewhere in cyberspace which are lost because i've forgotten what i named them!! its the same with a couple of myspace characters! what is it with some of us that we can't really create a separate name and identity for ourselves without some variation of our given names while others are able to create completely new virtual personalities for themseleves?
what is it with the ones like me who cannot find another name to be used for an email or blog or chatname to save their live? is it our ego that will not allow us to lose the identity we have? do we so strongly identify with the name that we are lost without it? this makes me wonder what other labels are we living with in our heads according to which we align our lives. woman, mother, wife... what subconcious roles are we playing, keeping up with the images and personas ingrained in our psyche. Specially if they are sub-consciously motivated.
the funny part of it all is that as a person i am a rebel. i never do what i am meant to, i never accept the given, i'm always fighting against rules and realities which seem irrational to my own logic and values.
and i'm the creative type! or at least i think i am!! of course my education did all it could to kill it. the teacher who hated me the most and i had the distinction of slapping back was my art teacher!! and then i did the masters in commerce. that really sucked out the purity and randomness of discovery by training my brain to be business-minded! not that it was successful in turning me into a slick business woman! i wish!
so, here i am, at cross-roads. don't know who i am. don't know what i want to do. or which way to go. and it all began when my parents changed my name from sabina to subina on the spur of the moment to avoid alienating the Nehru family!
and now i struggle between thinking that fine, thats the name i was meant to live with and no, let me switch to what i was meant to be! and then i think, what's in a name! for a rose, that is.