Would you die for love????

If the kind of movies watched had any effect on what people turn out to be and believe in, Indians would be the ideal people. Honest, good humoured and very tolerant. Because the average Bollywood movie plot is girl meets guy ,they fall in love, a villain opposes but he fails and they live happily ever after. Never does evil win and murder go unpunished except when they are the viilain's goons.

But sadly that is not true. India is a harsh harsh place divided along casteist and religious lines . While we may like on screen social barrier breaking love stories no one wants to tolerate one in their background.

As an idealist, I believe in the supremacy of love. I believe in the romanticism of the idea of love as the purest emotion.


Maybe I am living in the wrong place. In fact maybe I should migrate to some idyllic liberal country where no one gives a damm what anyone else is doing!

Because to break barriers in India can be dangerous. Because this is India. A place where village panchayats sentence young lovers to death. Where parents murder their daughters and even sons in the name of family honour. Where women are seen as inherently weak who need to be protected and guarded by fathers, brothers and other male relatives. Where marrying outside the caste or community gaurantees social boycott.

And the toll only climbs higher every year. And mostly these murders go unreported , justice is never served and a travesty is called a suicide or a mystery death.

While the metros have become swanky , cosmopolitan places India for most of its part remains heart - brutal. Like an illiterate clothed in a three piece suit, appearance does not matter, the devil is always just below the surface.

Every time I hear about a love for murder I feel anguished. It is the ultimate price to pay for love, the ultimate sacrifice. And I see it daily. My morning dose of newspaper is like a dose of bitter milk. After having read it all, I wish I had not read it just to avoid the senseless pain and disillusionment.

Recently the case of the murder of Nitish Katara got over and thankfully justice was served.

Nitish Katara was a 24 year old business executive in Delhi who was murdered in the early hours of February 17, 2002, by the son of an influential Indian politician. The son of an IAS officer in the Ministry of Shipping, Nitish had recently graduated from the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad. There, he had fallen in love with his classmate, Bharti Yadav, who comes from a criminal-politician family.A trial court on Wednesday found Vikas Yadav and his cousin Vishal Yadav guilty of killing Nitish.

In their own words in a recorded confession which was leaked to the media but could not be used as evidence due to a legality.
"The affair was damaging my family's reputation. I never approved of their relationship. ... Using all my strength, I hit Nitish's head with a hammer. He fainted and after a while he died. We drove one kilometre and then we threw his body onto the road.
Then we took the diesel from our car's tank, poured it on Nitish's body and we set it on fire. Then we drove to Delhi."

Such a tragic waste of life. Tragically the girl retracted her initial statement during the trial and denied being ever involved with Nitish. He died for her but in his death the idea for which he died itself became questionable.

The Yadav family never liked Bharti's liaison, and Nitish had received threats several times. However, he was an idealist, and believed in "standing up to injustice"

But lets not demonise a girl who lost the love of her life. She must have been under immense pressure. It was family after all. Still I wish instead of a life sentence, the brothers had been given the noose. And maybe as a revenge for the act inflicted on her by her family she should have snapped all ties and instead herself asked for the noose for her guilty family.

But why is it that India still cannot accept love marriages. Because love has to be celebrated. We celebrate the love of a mother for a child,love between two siblings, love between friends and so many other places. So what is so wrong about love between a guy and a girl when its not 'arranged'. Cannot society accept them.

"Agar dil mein ho zor to duniya se dushmani kar lo,
Warna jahaan maa-baap kahen wahin shaadi kar lo"

And the above line is true. To marry for love breaking across the hypocritical social lines can be fatal. Nitish Katara could have been any of us. Bright and well educated, his relationship with Bharti was nothing out of ordinary.

No one deserves to die like he did-"hit by a hammer and burnt by the roadside."

In India there is an emphasis on arranged marriages. They worked for our parents and even at 22 or however old I may be it seems I am incompetent to choose a partner. I say this. Love is finally the pursuit of happiness. As parents if the child decides to pursue happiness himself it should not be an issue. They should be happy. But parents seldom are, forever warning boys of morally loose girls and girls of being fooled by guys. Also only an idiot would deny inter-caste marriages face a lot of pressure and lets not talk about inter-religious marriages where I think all couples should be given a gold medal for bravery. They after all crossed the final lines.

So I ask my musing "Was it worth it?" Is love worth the ultimate sacrifice? Or can we simply move on throwing love in the closest dust bin when the going gets hard.

And maybe the question we all have to ask ourselves. How far can we go for love.

What Dreams May Come!!!

As a kid I was plagued by nightmares. They would haunt my nights an there were times when I was even afraid to go to sleep. Now this is a long long time back . I was around six seven years old then. Of course a reason could be the fact that I lived in the mountainous regions and at night it used to be dark as hell. During winters lions and tigers would come down from the higher altitudes and there would be frequent wild encounters. Enough to scare a seven yeaqr old.

So my dreams used to revolve around being chased by ghosts and getting lost in the jungles or getting separated from my family at a railway station(Coz I was hopelessly addicted to getting off at stations to run to the magazine n book vendors and a train we frequentely travelled with used to be divide into two trains heading to diff directions at a station. U could get into the wrong coach n end up elsewhere).


Anyway once we left Joshimath and I added some more years, the nightmares decreased and my fears lessened. Nightmares were not an issue anymore.

But I still had dreams and a few nightmares on and off. However I beleive in will and when I was in class tenth I desired to control my dreams and end them. Now this is a big secret that I am letting you onto but the fact is we can control our dreams.

I read about an experiment where flashing of red light on patients during REM(rapid eye movement ) phase i.e. when they are dreaming instantly ended dreams.

I relied on pure logic. Before sleeping everyday I used to tell myself a dozen times I am going to sleep. Also I came to the conclusion nothing illogical could happen. SO now when I
used to dream I started trying toi ask myself how did I end up there. The moment I used to reach the blank part I used to realize it was a dream. ANd voila immediately that dream used to stop. It was not necessary that I would wake up, sometimes one dream would be replaced by another ,often very pleasant. Also like if I was being chased I used to suddenly say "what the hell" and stop running. This one dream when I did so I still remember the abrupt end of that nightmare and the change to another dream. It seemed everything around me dissolved and a new landscape formed on a blank canvas.

However with time my nightmares became less frequent but so did my dreams.
And then a time came when there were none at all. For months I did not have a dream or at least one that I could recollect. The sleep was good. I used to wake up refreshed.

But there is something about dreams ,they have this magical quality that real life can never replicate.

And after many years I started missing them. So I stopped reminding myself that I am sleeping and also searching for arbitrariness during sleep.

And the dreams returned. Slowly but surely. And now again my nights are filled with dreams.

I have debated about it but I am sill unwilling to start controlling them again.

Anyway what I also want to speak about is this dream I had so50-60 days back. There is this gal, I was senti on big time but it ended at that only. I gave this crush a quite burial and moved on.

Of course she also did something that I felt humiliated me and though she apologized, some things are jhust too bgrave to be forgotten by an apology.

So I buried her, as a matter of saying of course.

Or so I thought.

Anyway I slept in the afternoon one day and I had this dream that where she was there.

We just walked around hand in hand and even in the dream a warm feeling enveloped me.
Then I woke up.

However I felt good for days afterwards, cheerful like a bird. What i had thought was dead had risen from the grave. This despite the fact that I am reconciled to the fact that nothing is possible on any front. The power of a dream

So here's my musing "what is it about dreams that we can't live with them and neither without them"

Photoshop exp

I had always wanted to dabble with Adobe Photoshop. Its great I am finally doing it.

Here is some of my stuff

Trip to Haji Ali

{The pics are not mine. They are sourced from wikipedia}

Some months back I ended up at Haji Ali , a dargah in Mubai when I went there for a b-school interview.

Haji Ali is a dargah about 500 meters off shore. I had hoped to visit it and I was lucky that my interview venue was just off Haji Ali street. However I did not know this and after my interview was over I tried in vain to get a taxi to take me to the venue. Only after a helpful taximan gave me directions did I realize that the dargah was only walking distance.

Anyway I start walking and only when I reach the end of the street do I see the Arabian Sea and the Haji Ali Dargah glistening in the sun. It was a rather hot day and I had wore a blazer to the b-school interview which of course I had in my arms but I was still sweating from all the walking.

As soon as I got onto the pathway leading to the Dargah I could feel the atmosphere change. It became pleasantly cool. I then walked to the dargah , entered , took off my shoes, paid my obeisances at the dargah and basically stood around savouring the environment. There was something spiritual about the place. Since it was near a time, I also did vazu and offered prayers.

However the dargah held in esteem by millions is in a dillpated state. That is simply unacceptable. Reading up on the web I realized that the management of trustees are suspected of embezzling money that comes in daily. Also there are some permissions which need to be sought.

Its sad though how the protectees become the exploiters. Great power involves great responsibility. It would be nice if people were to believe in it too.

I think its sad how trustees misuse funds meant for charity. There must be more accountability and stricter punishments.

Anyway hoping renovation on the Dargah is done soon.

Ameen

Bomb Blasts in Jaipur

Breaking news has it that Jaipur or the pink city as it is sometimes called has been hit by serial bomb blasts. The estimates that I just read point to 15 dead and over a hundred dead.

This would be the another of a series of bomb blasts that have rocked India in the last couple of years. While some have been solved, most of the bomb-blasts cases remain unsolved. Unknown and outside forces cannot be forever blamed. It has to stop.

Bomb blasts are one of the most dastardly acts of terror possible because unsuspecting innocents are its victims. The condemnation has to be strong. However when the political bitching starts tomorrow, let instead of pointing fingers the emphasis be on cracking these cases. And as I have so recently pointed out let there be sensitivity while doing so.

Anyway the point is there are too many terrorist attacks in the recent past which have simply been lost from memory. No trial, no one to blame , nothing.

This has to stop. The life of the innocent is as precious as that of the VVIP.

Hoping that the dead find peace, the injured heal and the terror attacks cease.

Signing off or now.

What I want to blog about?

While I have not been blogging much recently because of a serious time crunch and more tragically hardware problems, I have nevertheless a lot of topics in the queue that I want to blog about. Before I loose them as I surely will lemme list them so that I can look it up later and keep cancelling those done.

By the way have an oral exam tomorrow and have not studied one word. Its going to be a long night.

1.) Visit to Haji Ali
2.) Holi at AIT
3.) What dreams may come
4.) My this years ghazal
5.) Farewell , graffiti and the tragedy at my college
6.) Why I blog??