  AN INTRODUCTION TO THIS BLOG Google is an amazing search engine. why?  BEcause I found few of my lost poems and articles that I had written over the Net.  There is this one article that I had written for Zatang. com which really defines bizarre and that is where it was put in the site anyways.  Ok I shall keep posting my inklings as I find them.
 for now:  GET BORED WITH THESE Have Lost -  Deepa Rajan Have lost my heart has anyone seen it.  Have lost my soul has anyone seen it.  My heart is an innocent being,  It knows not of this heartless world.
 My soul is the gullible one,  It gets charmed by poison smiles and beguile emotions.  The heart is a brave fool,  It ventures Unarmed,  into the deep unknown.  Foolhardy soul of mine,
 Thinks every other soul as a friend so selfless and kind.  Both my heart and soul are unsafe bets I know,  Without them life would have a smooth flow.  But they are the only possessions,  I can call my own.  Where art thou oh heart and soul of mine Return to me and my own.
 A Tale of a broken heart.  -  Deepa Rajan Once upon a time there was a heart full of mirth.  It dreamt of soulful music and ethereal ways.  It sang songs of hope and peace.  It fell in love and hoped like an optimist Little did it know that hope is always short lived.
 It knew not of the cruel tyranny of fate.  Oblivious it floated in the clouds of love Only to be rained out into the cold.  There it lay in mud and mire,  With a wistful look Broken into a thousand pieces.  Still waiting to be picked up,  All it had was a bag full of delusive hope.
 Clenching the bag it bled.  Not a single soul to its help.  Bled to its dirgeless death.  An Ode To The Child in Me -  Deepa Rajan An ode to the child in me.  An ode to the child in me.
 I am a grown up now.  But the memories of childhood still linger on.  The sugarcoated candies still cause a tingle in the tongue.  The swings in the park yet create a flutter in the otherwise rational heart,  Carillons of the ice- cream carts bring the wry silenced soul to yodel a merry song,
 The child in me still eggs me to give credence to the Cinderella dream.  She succors me bridge the chasm between the relentless world of rat races and the simple road to humanity.  As much I would like to be her all my life,  I know it's not possible anymore So here my child is an ode to u.  For giving me the verve to dream once in a while.  I might forget of your existence in the coming days.
but You shall always hold that very cherished place in the corner of my oh so grown- up heart!  Pensiveness Of An Enslaved Soul -  Deepa Rajan I am feeling like a charlatan today,  a convict who has gone unpunished.  Funny how I see myself,
 conning people whom come into my life.  I don't seem ever to feel anything I say I am feeling,  its as if a pseudo personality is functioning parallel to my own . Its as if this parallel person is the one running my life.  She is regulating my feelings as if it were her life.  It's as if I am supposed to feel what she feels,
 behave as she behaves,  Why do I feel so inept beyond any powers to win over my soul?  Am I going to be a prisoner to this pseudo all my life?  Whatever I am writing now is in one of those exiguous moments where she is probably taking a nap.  unaware that I am gossiping about her with my self,  am complaining about her,
 am making futile plans yet again to overthrow her and become the master of my own soul.  She is basically a nice person I know but something in her is wild untamed irresponsible.  Which stops her from submitting to the social obligations a human animal has to go through,  to become a socially accepted being.  She rebels at every occasion.  She questions my every move and changes the course of my actions.
 She has become what people prefer to call an Individual.  She refuses to accept that an individual has to accept society to be treated ad one of its members.  She fights with every last breath in her soul,  she accumulates all her energies into making me what I am not,  I am scared that this individual that I have learnt to love and hate at same time has become me or I am beginning to mold myself into what she is and am losing my self.  One instant she is making me a vagrant,
 and then in a jiffy she pushes me towards stability.  She has this uncanny knack of disillusioning me to believe in a world,  in which her flights of fancy,  which shall be otherwise considered,  unwanted creepers in the real world,  shall be the very Garden of Eden.
 This garden of thoughts seems green all right but somewhere it spells doom for my existence in the real world.  I am sure one day there shall appear a serpent,  which shall unshackle me into the realms of harsh reality.  To Adam and eve the serpent might have been a temptation to me he is my savior.  The messiah whom I shall owe my life,  my liberty to.
 I am fervently awaiting the serpent of responsibility to enter into my life to realize me from my precarious self.  He has to be my dream man for now for he shall lead me to the light of perfection and rid me of the vices of woolgathering and dallying my life away.  Yes I wait for him as Benhur's mother waited to get a glimpse of Christ.  Hope it is not a long wait.  The pseudo person has woken up,  I better desist my thoughts.
 How do I know she has woken up?  .  Well I have started hoping have I not?  For don't we all know things don't come to those who wait,  and are we not aware of the truth that God helps those who help themselves.  Marriage:
 the union of the mindless!  Deepa Rajan The process of life in itself is a series of vicious whirlpools that suck in almost every form of energy,  which we humans have been gifted with.  One such whirlpool is the process called 'marriage'.  Wonder why marriage is called the sacred union…  the way the before-
effects and aftermath ruin a perfectly sane and normal human it should be called the " union of the Scared and Puzzled"  Let us begin from the very beginning…  boy and girl meet,  boy an girl fall in love or think they fall in love.  Of course needless to say what follows is the usual episode of the Escapades of romantic fools.
 The long drives the phone calls hour after hour not to mention the mindless spending on cards and gifts for each other.  The boy proposes,  the girl accepts,  now it is time for parents to dispose the parents have to be told,  after all they are the ones who have to spend their life saved earnings to join their kids in 'hollow matrimony'.  Once the parents get fleeced to part with their hard-
earned money for a once in a lifetime marriage,  the wedding cards are printed,  the shopping done with such zest that could cause the worker ant to blush red in his tiny cheeks,  the groom rides into the sunset or should I say onset of darkness to the tune of wedding marches.  The bride decks herself in all the finery there is,  to the utmost queasiness of a person being strangled.
 The union takes place in wee hours of the time zone amidst sleepy people and even drowsier and whining kids.  The stage is now set for another debacle.  The newly married couple sit on an elevated podium only to stand every minute to thank the people who dared to attend the wonderful ceremony ( to be read as ceremony full of wonders!  Now you know how the peon feels every time he has to get to salute every person no matter what his worth.  The peon endures it for the sake of money,
 but please do explain to me why do the two people who commit t an error have spend a whole lot of money telling the whole world too.  The first act of this play called marriage ends here.  The second act is a separate story.  The first two or three years of married life are filled with mixed emotions of joy,  fear and expectations.  The joy of discovering each other exploring each other is what a new marriage is all about.
 He brings her flowers,  she cooks him his favorite food.  He surprises her with candle lite dinners,  she leaves love notes in his pocket.  The lovebirds are in a dream nest of their own.  The couple soon becomes a trio,
 the joy of bringing a life to this world is a miracle at first.  The hospital bills paid,  and how can one forget to celebrate ones second mistake of life,  parties given to the rest of the nearby world for the pains the couple took.  The realization dawns,  such miracles cost a lot.
 The craving to have more than simple delights of love and togetherness gives rise to the run for money and the third act begins here.  Honeymoons become bitter gourd moons love notes and cards are replaced by the every piling stock of bills.  The wife is no longer concerned with his favorite food.  The husband looks at flowers as nothing more than an additional expense.  the time they used to spend on complementing each other is now spend on calculating the budget an accusing each other of spending more and caring less.  Life become an expense list,
 all the hoopla created to begin married life drowns itself in the sounds of the baby crying an the couple quarreling.  In the end living the once helplessly in love couple to question the validity of the decision of marriage.  What began as a willful union now becomes as adjustment.  there remains only a single question is this a " marriage of the minds"  or a "
mindless marriage"  I can't help falling in love Deepa Rajan " Wise men sing …  only fools rush in…  I cant help falling in love with you…  UB40 definitely knew what they were singing about…
oh yeah romantic fools like me sure do rush in.  Love is probably the only sole emotion that actually can single handedly topple kingdoms,  and makes absolute fools out of sanest of men,  or else how can someone explain the sleepless nights,  the constant wool gathering and the mindless smiles that a person giving to oneself every time he or she thinks about the love of his/ her life.
 Look at me for instance I am one of those people who strongly believes in the :  " love that is logical survives.  yet all I seem to be doing for the past few days is float in a sky of my own…  I am being anything but logical… logic right now hardly manages to penetrate the outer ring of my brains an behaving like a zombie…
 with a pasted wishy washy smile on my face.  All of a sudden the birds seem to be so romantic ( actually its raining cats and dogs and the roads are al muddy and yucky!  But I don't have to walk on the roads,  I simply am flying high,  right above the "
oh so fluffy clouds"  Is this what love is all about or is this some king of psychological game that fate plays with us poor human souls.  Does every single soul feel this way?  I have lost touch with the real world,  since I am busy planning interiors of the castle I am building in air.  In fact I am so lost in my world that I hear music all the time and even the shrill cry of my mother seems so melodious to me (
I have never ever seen eye to eye with my mother and like all other daughters rebel with every ounce of energy in me)  Then there is this constant ringing of bells in my mind as if Christmas were being celebrated .  Every time the phone rings,  I run to pick it up thinking it must be him,  it has to be him.  Every time I log on to the messenger I anticipate him to be online and if he is not I leave nonsensical messages for him.
 I am sure that I am on the verge of losing even the little bit of rationality I thought I possessed.  This feeling ( god knows what it is)  has taken my life over and has made a complete bum ort of the otherwise sober me.  There is this air of wishful thinking surrounding me.  How I wish Barbara Cartland and the likes of a her could have written instruction manuals for "
how to behave when you are in love"  I am absolutely clueless as to why I am behaving the way I am behaving,  the strangest part of this whole story is that I know what I should not be doing and I still seem to be doing it.  I guess "  I cant help falling in love…  The sound of silence Deepa Rajan If one were to look deep into the meaning of silence,
 all one would find would be stillness.  That would be because one equates silence with stillness or noiselessness.  Silence means that absence of sound and that is all there is to it.  But for a person like me,  who has been a talkative person all her life,  silence meant boredom.
 It meant cessation of active life.  Communication is one of the worldly vices that I thrive on.  But like all myopia- stricken eyes in this world I have restrained myself to the traditional methods of communication.  No doubt,  the mouthpiece we have to talk in probably one of the most amazing gifts we as humans could ever be blessed with.
 And I am sure most of us are spend thrifts when it comes to this gift.  The technicalities of speech,  the minding of our Ps and Qs and the regular social faux pas we make while speaking,  all seem irrelevant inanities,  when all we want to do is to talk and to connect with people.  I have always been a staunch devotee of communication;
 in fact the only reason I probably put up with the gadget called telephone is because it makes communication easier.  The reason I could gloat about being communicative was because I lived under the misconception that I possess a vocal chord and that somehow makes me communication savvy.  I am a working girl and I often do not return home early.  That day was probably one of those rare days when I found time to relax and put my feet up,  and I returned home early intending to do exactly that,  somehow things turned our quite differently.
 Being the itinerant soul that I am,  I simply could not allow myself to stay home and relax,  so I decided to go for a walk.  There was no specific place to go to ,  so I let my feet pave their ways,  and they led me to a super market nearby.
 After spending my time in there,  doing a little bit of rack shopping I walked out of the place.  The popcorn machine caught my fancy and that I decided would be my next stop.  As I was standing by the machine,  waiting to have my fill of popcorn,  I noticed few hands waving in the air.
 A group of girls was standing next to me and I could see then talking about something and the excitement sparkled in their eyes,  as they communicated with each other through the hand gestures.  There had been a function that day in the nearby auditorium,  the annual day function of a deaf and dumb school and these girls were from the school.  The first thought that rushed through my mind was ii wish I knew what they were talking about.  The sparkle in their eyes was so contagious that it made me want to be a part of that conversation but my disability stopped me.
 I do not know sigh language and it never occurred to e that I should learn it as naturally as I wanted to learn other languages.  The distance between this store and the main road can be covered in a mere two seconds,  but that day it took me forever,  I was more kids standing outside on the road and as I walked past them I could feel them talk,  the moment of their hands made conversation like a musician makes music or a baker bakes a cake.  That is when I heard it,
 the sound of silence and believe me folks that sound is heavily.  Being able to talk nineteen to dozen without uttering even a single work.  It made me remorseful for not having been able to understand or talk and revel in their joy with them.  The sound of silence I heard that day taught me a lot.  It taught me the worth of silence.  It make me understand that there is a higher plane in communication,
 the very plane,  that forms the part of being its antonym:  Silence!  It takes a woman…  Deepa Rajan The great epic Mahabharata would have never been quite the same without Draupadi and we all know it!  Had it not been for her haughty and stubborn demeanor we would have lost on one of the world's greatest war sagas.
 Hats off to Draupadi for so innocently manipulating a bunch of men into waging the biggest war in the history of mythological fables.  The very first politician was born that day… and she was a woman.  Where antiquity gave us Jhansi Ki Rani,  Chand Bibi and Jodha Bai,  it paved way for Sarojini Naidu,
 Kasturbha Gandhi and the great likes of them who gave the word freedom a whole new meaning by walking and fighting shoulder to shoulder with men.  Independence was won;  we were a free nation.  Nehru became the first Prime Minister of free India.  And unknown to fate itself,  his daughter Indira was waiting in the wings to someday take over his reins.
 The first woman Prime Minister.  The first women in power who actually made full use of it!  Unlike her father's straight nature politics,  Indira somehow managed to be quite a politician and left a legacy for he son,  Rajiv who never quite could squeeze his feet in those shoes!  Enter Sonia,
 known only as Rajiv's widow.  Today she has come quite a long way from being 'The Gandhi bahu' to 'Sonia Gandhi:  the very influential Congress leader. ' Her critics refuse to see that she brought up two kids like any other woman,  was a dutiful wife like any other wife.  Shi too as it turned out had politics in her blood…
 which book says women cannot be shrewd or play politics,  probably the same which says women are the root cause of all evil.  Take Jayalalitha for example,  covered in deep- rooted grim of politics from head to toe.  That did not stop her from collecting n number of saris and chappals,
 did it?  No justification can be offered for her being so unscrupulous but at the same time one can't help but admire the guts of the woman to stand her guns and Champaign for the elections despite the Election Commission order that she cannot contest.  She wages the war of politics as well as she used to deliver dialogues in her movies.  While in the south,  men are still losing their sleep over this woman in the east it's Mamta Banerjee who has given the Railways a whole new track to ride on.  She might have been pushed off that track but that has in no way stopped her from fighting for her piece of political kingdom in the Centre.
 And whoever said that behind every successful man is a woman was so politically correct.  After all isn't Laloo who has probably scammed enough fodder to last seven generations of his cattle and himself,  basking in his wife's chief ministership glory.  Now that is some woman one great husband and 11 children later,  she still has the nerve to run a state like Bihar,  so what if the husband provides some political tips once in a while.
 All said and done,  while the woman in television is turning the Hindustani nari leaf with the advert of Tulsi and Priya,  the Nari of Bharatiya Rajniti is taking the proverbial bull by the horn and creating a dais for a lot of Priyanka Gandhis.  So even if the historians claim that Cleopatra was an ugly fat woman,  they cannot change history and the fact that the woman had 10, 000 men fall to her charms and the greatest for them all Caesar lost lot more than his heart to this woman!
 Astrological blues Deepa Rajan " Apka Rahu satve ghar mein.  Shani aathve ghar mein hai,  isliye aap beghar hain,  this is what the Sadhu baba told Mr.  Sampat.
 Mr Sampat has been a poor troubled man for the past few months.  His landlord is hell bent on evicting him and like all middle class men,  Mr Sampat has made no arrangements for a secure future,  not that he did not want to,  but the electricity bill,  the Vegetable prices and the school fees of his five children (
who by the way happen to be products of the family astrologer's prophecy that Mr Sampat was destined to have a boy!  simply occupied his wallet priorities.  Mr Sampat represents millions of those peoples who eke out a middle class living,  are God- fearing not to say superstitious.  So it was obvious,
 when the next door neighbor came rattling about a Sahdu baba having magical powers ( if reports were to be believed he would definitely win the Noble Prize for clairvoyance par excellence)  Mrs.  Sampat immediately broke her piggy bank,  almost broken her poor husband's already bent bones and dragged him to the Sadhu baba.  There had been many before this Sadhu baba other that the regular family astrologer cum pundit.
 Each had a planet- housing scheme to offer which of course involved giving up anything ranging from one half of your monthly earnings to your whole life.  Astrology is one of the biggest pastimes available to mankind,  for a cost of course,  nothing is free in this world.  But one has to marvel at the way this astrology has embedded itself in the human soul.
 Take Mr Popatlal for example,  he happened to have the unlucky/ lucky opportunity of having his fortune told by a roadside astrologer with a parrot for a sooth sayer.  Mr Popatlal was asked to avoid the color blue as one would avoid the plague.  So the went about eliminating anything an everything blue,  he refused to buy his wife blue saris and did not let his daughter marry the man of her choice because he happened to be working in a blue 'neel' ke factory,
 needless to say his wife left him,  the daughter ran away leaving Mr Popatlal to deal with those lonely blues.  I guess the astrologer was right after all!  What kind of mental mechanism makes us so scared of the unknown,  and why this curiosity to known and why this curiosity to know the future and then worry over its uncertain existence?  Marriages seem to have borne the most of the astrology brunt.
 Love marriages might be made in heaven,  but here on earth 'horoscopes' make marriages I would not even want to go into details of what goes into making the perfect match,  because for me it would be a personal nightmare.  Since I am of marriageable age,  naturally my mother is worried.  So as soon as some 'horoscope' lands itself on my mother's lap,
 off she goes to the astrologer wanting to see if I get a perfect ten.  Not to mention that just by chance if the 'horoscope' matches and God forbid,  nothing works out,  you can always blame poor god or fate.  God must forever standing between the devil and the deep blue sea.  Good things happen,
 bad things happen blame God or his deputy Fate.  Oh!  I almost forgot gemology,  one of the major sister concerns of astrology and one of my very dear friends happens to be a strong believer in gems.  He has all his ten fingers full of rings and is still lamenting about life being unfair!  Too much of the gem effect one must say!
 After all too many positives can always make up a negative,  can't they?  All said and done 'astrology' has firmly attached itself to the human psyche and now also the UGC syllabus.  So when Mr Sampat's back finally breaks feeding his five bhagwan ki den children he can safely blame it on God,  and his children can take over the astrological torch of living life according to the planets way.
