The filmy part of me...

I am basically an impulsive blogger….man me aaya bak diya!! This is written when all of a sudden I felt like blogging… and couldn’t think of any other topic.

This thing called love…it is the queen of all paradoxes. So much is written about it, so many mellifluous melodies are made out of it, almost everybody claims he/she has experienced it in some form or the other, and yet it’s such an enigmatic entity. (for more details, listen to the song ishq bina from Taal!) In fact, there is no single unambiguous definition of love in this world.

I used to think, at one stage, that the kind of love stories and emotions that are depicted in celluloids and fiction are figments of masala imagination. But I slowly started falling into the trap myself. And the funny thing is, I can’t say when this happened! (so typical!) It just started off as a casual acquaintance… she was my classmate. It was she who made the initial contact. She remembered me from a competition we both had participated in some time back. We started talking to each other and developed a good bonhomie. For some time, the relationship remained completely platonic. But slowly I began to realize that there were strong undercurrents of some unknown emotion that were pushing me towards an unknown realm. I started looking at the relationship differently. I realized I felt very comfortable when I was with her. My imagination started getting monopolized by a single track image that burst into the frame at regular intervals, sometimes at very odd moments, like in the middle of an examination or at a very somber moment. For an inordinately long time, I tried to brush this issue aside as a crush, so common in this age. But that urge to talk to her, the tendency to think about her, the habit of writing the alphabets of her name just didn’t die down. In fact, when I finished my high school and left home to study engineering, the distance magnified my feelings. I knew this wasn’t a run of the mill crush. Once this was established beyond doubt, the next step beckoned me. I had to know if my feeling were reverberating from the other end too. But this was tricky, because if they were not, I would stand the risk of losing a good friend by asking her. So I just waited for my answer to come on its own. But, it didn’t, and I realized she was waiting for the answer to come on its own too!! (so typical again!!) She probably took my silence as a negative and so she moved on…quite the right thing to do.

Right now I can’t comment on the future, or for that matter, even the present of our relationship. I just hope it doesn’t reach an end. But I surely feel the days that we spent together were the best of my life.

The Vandemataram hullabulloo

The Vandemataram episode and all the fracas surrounding must have really been an eyesore for any self-righteous Indian. It clearly exposed, on the one hand, the BJP's desperation to ride on an issue into public attention & the shallowness and insecurity of the self-proclaimed Muslim leadership, and on the other hand, the absolute sad state of affairs of our motherland. If this is an issue which grabs political attention and imagination at a time when farmer suicides are on the rise and foodgrain imports are soaring, we can very well kiss the dream of a developing India goodbye.

The views of eminent writer Javed Akhtar really set the issue in perspective, “If a Deoband maulvi asks me not to recite the song, I’ll recite all the verses. If the BJP says I sing the song, I’ll not recite even a single line.” The self-appointed Muslim leadership is still in the medieval and fundamental mould and can’t in the least claim to be the representatives of the Muslim fraternity. They are just disillusioned personalities who want to push an entire fraternity into an abyss of backwardness and self-ghettoisation. They are hungry for publicity and are basically insecure. It was this fact that was leveraged by the BJP to somehow prove they were still in existence. All they have managed to do is dent their already dismembered amour and stand exposed as a party facing its nemesis. This worries me all the more because such a state of affairs means that there is no competent alternative to the ruling power at the centre and that can be disastrous for the country.

On a personal note, I have a strong query. Just how many Indians know the entire Vandemataram by heart???