This year in pages

Everyday, around the world, a dreamer opens his eyes, weary of the day’s conundrums, decides that he wants to pack his bags and fly to you. You have so many aliases; lady liberty, land of opportunities, the united states, the freedom country.

They all sing your praises, you know?

They spend a year, studying their GMATs, watching your movies, worshipping your idols, saving every dime, to come fly to you. They talk about you, like you and they were always meant to be. They don’t cry at the airport while bidding goodbyes to their families who they know they won’t see for years and years. They dream their dreams in red and blue stripes and with stars in between.

They frame their perfect pictures in their heads. The one with a house facing an orange tree, by the concrete lanes, with two parking garages, ahead of the cotton white and plain blue skies with a sun peeping in. They frame their perfect pictures with happily ever afters.

They change their definitions of home, you know?

They come here, thousands of miles away from home, away from the life they’ve learnt to lead, away from the comfort of the known. Sometimes, they embarrass themselves. They have different accents and different words than you do. For you, it turns into a perfect joke in a bar. For them, it becomes a lesson learnt. They work really hard, to understand the culture, the perspectives. They burn the midnight candles in hope to survive their tomorrows. They give you their chivalry and they give you their hearts. You return the favor. You let them stay in your land for a few years as long as they continue to prove themselves.

But you refuse to call them by their names. You call them your beloved legal immigrants. And your relationship stays cold like frozen chicken, tied only with a piece of paper called ‘a visa’. You grade your relationship each year based on their performances with meaningless alphabets; sometimes the F, sometimes H, and some sprinkled Ls. But in order to marry you, they have to weed through a few different tests starting with a test of luck. They place their fates in your big bowl of lottery. You randomize your picks and you let the others go.

Yesterday, I met a boy, 27, grim eyes and a wrinkled forehead. I folded my arms around my waist and told him that it was going to be all right. He nodded sideways and then said, with a velvet accent, “they closed their doors. They denied me. They told me that I was a guest who had overstayed and it was time for me to go back. They asked me to leave.”

He’s leaving you, America. He’s leaving you. You gave him your reasons in the form of a dreary black and white packet of fifteen pages. You told him that he had no place here. He spent all these years, tossing his fate on a toaster. He got burnt and yet he sang his hopes.

As he goes, you won’t hug him goodbye, nor will you tell him that it will be all right and that he’s always welcome back. After all this, you won’t give him a nice warm bowl of soup. You won’t give him backup plans. You won’t try.

He’s leaving you, America.

quote-book:lickystickypickyme:

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.

Anais Nin

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”

- Dr. Seuss

Day after day, year after year, I see art being interjected with emotions. Let’s create a bookshelf with hands and eyelids, a chair with legs and confused feelings. Let’s create machines that can think. Let’s create art that lives. Let’s inject souls into the absolutely obsolete and the tranquil.

Day after day, year after year, I also see boys, girls, women with pink hair and men with purple ties, living their lives, one day after another, not questioning, nor raising their voices. Just drifting along the momentum that’s dictated by this thing called ‘fate’. Men and women and grown girls and little ones too, aspiring to be the furniture in the room. Look how shiny I am, look how rich-oak-like I appear, look how stiff I stand. We all think we are special, and yet we fail to act or revolt the norms.

I came across this amazing read a few weeks back that reiterates and reflects upon our generation: the glorious twenty-somethings. (http://www.eyeweekly.com/article/55882)
Here’s a short snippet:

“This phenomenon, known as the “Quarterlife Crisis,” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated; those who should be able to capitalize on their youth, unparalleled freedom and free-for-all individuation. They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.”

This read was soon followed by an enlightening movie ‘Away we go’, which amplified our stories and extended them into a 2-hour feature on displacement. We are all displaced and happy to be.

I digressed and mumbled something to my friends about the notion of displacement again and what it means now. As more and more tools for communication increase, the less human we become. We all want to become parts of the whole. Miniscule parts. Less human, more furniture.

Last night, I was at a bar and witnessed a strange incident. Bar brawls are common but I was shocked to see one involving a furious boy and a helpless girl. She was hurt and he was intoxicated. And everyone just watched, not knowing what to do or how to react. The music in the background lived on. And so did the ugly fight. Some of us stood on the side, and some continued to play with reds and greens on the pool table. I don’t remember if the DJ stopped to induce action or not but I do remember that the night went on. The victim of the fight continued to live the night as if this was just like finding a fly in the bathroom, you try to get rid of it and then you ignore it, then it just becomes a natural part of your bathroom. They all moved on. ‘That’s what you do’, my friend told me, months after I still wondered about the lost lives at the Taj, in Mumbai.

You become the furniture in the room. You witness but you don’t tell. And you definitely don’t do something about it.

As furniture and fashion aims to be more free and expressive, are we destined to be more silent and opaque?