Limbo and love

MRR33

Days are easy to get through: the hectic hustle-bustle, activity, bickering, ranting, sleeping!
Hardest is the silence of night, the limbo while traveling closely at its heels!

Occupied and busy, it's easy to pretend that you're over someone, or are making a good progress!
But in the smallest of caesurae between two 'jobs', in the most small intervals like while looking up after washing the face, as you look up into the mirror, the realization hits!
The sense of loss consumes you, silence engulfs and breathing once again becomes the hardest thing ever to do!
There's only so many times you can fool yourself, repeating the cut-and-dried consolations of "It wasn't meant to be", "something better WILL turn up", and the most fably one, "I'm better off without..".

But as you stare into the mirror, tracing the water droplet on your own face the way you once wanted to do on theirs, you know it's all a sham, a lie you keep on repeating to yourself, hoping that someday your heart would buy it, even though you yourself know that it wouldn't! 

दिल देके तुझे हम तन्हा हो गए

MRR32

दिल देके तुझे हम तन्हा हो गए
कहाँ ढूँढ़ें तुझे हम अब
हम खुद में ही खुद से खो गए

बोलता मैं नहीं, बोलते तुम नहीं
फ़िर रोज़ क्यूँ बात हमारी होती है
मनाना हमने कब का छोड़ दिया, पर फ़िर
रोज़ ये तकरार क्यूँ होती है

"GOODBYE, 'HONEY' "

MRR31


Alright! This is gonna get whiny- a lot- so I advise you to get the fuck out RIGHT NOW..
If you haven’t, you’ve had your warning..

Today, I’m all alone- completely. Even my own soul, my very self has deserted me. I’m shattered to my very core- with nothing but hollowness inside. The one single person who meant the world- my “honey”- has ended my world.

“Honey”, you’ll never realize- just like you never did in the past- how much you- your love, your bloody ‘attachment’- meant for me. And just like before, it wouldn’t matter a grain to you- because you’ve ‘risen above’ the petty human attachments, and don’t feel any “attachment or obligation” towards anyone!
After teaching me to love myself for the first time in my life, you left me not only lifeless, but hating two more people- the two of us.

Where did I go wrong? In making it the mission of my life to see you smiling? In putting you before myself every single time? I killed, rekindled, then again killed, and killed yet again many times over, my feelings for you- to suit your needs! Is this where I had “sinned”- by worshipping you as my only God?

You’ve destroyed me not just for another person- but for myself as well! I gave you a person I admired, respected- albeit my doubts-, turned him into a monster that I dread spending my life with, and have left me with it- all alone!
Didn’t you used to say that arranged marriages are hell because the monster in husbands ‘raped’ the wives every night? Did I deserve to be left with this monster of me, to be raped by myself with every single breath that I took?

I never knew I was sealing my own doom when I helped you deal with your own darkness, which was tearing you apart! You’ve shattered my faith in a lot of things that I still ‘worshipped’ and recommended to others- meditation, sharing pain, introducing people who needed help to those who could help, friendships, second chances, and selfless love.
Never again would I be able to help a person in pain, lest they get so strong that they would destroy me because they wouldn’t need me anymore.
Never again would be able to trust a person’s tears, or when they would ask me why didn’t I ‘wait’ for them a bit longer!
Never would I be able to see anyone smile and allow myself to feel happy just because of being the reason of their smile!

Is this what I deserve, to hear that you “don’t want to see my face anymore”, after devoting an entire lifetime to seeing just your face, in every face I saw in the past three years?

No matter how much you deny it, you’re not the “Honey” I fell in love with- the “Honey” whom I found worthy of seating next to my mother in my heart, the “Honey” to whom I bared my soul like I hadn’t ever before, not even to myself. That “Honey” would have never deserted me in my darkest, weakest time. She would have told that she still loved me, and would have meant it from the bottom of her heart- with all the attachment. That girl died a long ago. No matter how much you look like- or even better than- her, you’ll never be able to come anywhere near that person for whom only death could have parted us!

It took me just one sob of “couldn’t you have waited for me, for just one more month?” to throw away everything I ever wanted- just because it wasn’t you! Did that mean nothing to you?
How easily did you accept my “My feelings are dead”- like you were already waiting for something like that, so as to shift the technical blame on me! Is that all I ever was to you- a game of technicalities? Or another name in the list of your ‘butlers’?

It’s been over a year that I have even smiled genuinely- let alone have a hearty laugh. Every time I tried, a pang in my heart reminded that I am not ‘in a relationship’ with you, and that was more than enough a reason to turn me dark in all the glaring brightness around me. Gradually everybody stopped trying- including you.

Even you- to whom I had conferred all my laughs and tears the moment I heard “I love you, Minaaaal” for the first time! And now, I’m looking ahead at a life where every upward curve of my lips will be a slap on my soul, along with being the single most difficult thing to do.

Was it so hard to understand that it was nothing but you ‘not being with me’ that has been eating me away, over the weeks and months- physically, emotionally and otherwise? Or, perhaps, you knew but didn’t care! I mean, for four years, I have always been on the lowest rung of precedence in your life- if I ever featured there, that is to say! First I was below S, then one exam, then another, then some other people! Even the girl we you hated  was more important a person than me!

“Honey”, do you remember the watches that I purchased with you? I can neither throw them away, nor wear them- or any other watch, for that matter. Not just in my heart and life, you have carved out an irreplaceable gap in my wrist as well!
(Do you know that kissing my watch was the first thing I did when I saw the Wipro results, or whenever I had any positive response from any publisher?)

You may pride yourself at having made it on your own through these four years, but let me tell you one very bitter truth- you made it because you had a “Minaaaal” watching your back every second, awake or not; you had me!
And me? I never had me, because I was too busy with you, and I never had you- not even for one second; like the way I needed you to be, like the way I was there for you! All through the three years, I starved for one look, one touch of the same love, same care, same affection, the same attention that I was drenching you in! Was it too much to ask for?

I feel violated, “honey”! Violated, exploited, milked and then thrown out! And not just emotionally or psychologically, but from the very core of my soul.
All I can feel is a pain- that doesn’t even hurt, because there isn’t enough left in me to feel the hurt.

All I can say is, “Honey”, that after whatever I have been through, for you, for three years- all the suffering, sacrifices, devotion, care and UNENDING, UNWAIVERING ATTACHMENT – I didn’t deserve this- what you did to me, the way you insulted and left me. I deserved much better than this!

Spirituality of Convenience

“Moving on”! “Getting Detached”! @whose cost?

It’s easy to ‘rise up’ in life when you are standing over people- the corpses of sacrifices others made, for your dreams, for your rising! “Moving on” is not just easy, but also definitely luring, when

the alternative is to face retribution for having used others to achieve your own ends; to face your own ugliness and see how not-so-different you are from the people you have hated!
New-Age spirituality, anyone?

In the world of skewed relationships, self-centered thinking and disappearing, wispy commitments, the ‘easy-way-out’ is fast becoming the ‘trend’ in psychology and spirituality all around.. People, now, come pre-loaded with the advice of “just forget about it and move on”, without even listening to the story- not an iota of interest in determination of the guilty one! And who would risk doing that, when the word ‘judging’ has become such a taboo all around?
A girl uses her boyfriend like a doormat and later leaves him alone to bleed, but “Hey! Let’s not judge her! Let’s-not-fucking-be-judgmental, because she’s our friend and we need to turn a blind eye to whatever harm she does to anyone!”
A boy abuses his friends, bullies the juniors and bruises egos of introverts around for no reason at all, but “Let’s not jump to conclusions and be all judgmental! Let’s not call him a useless blotch on the society! He’s our bro, and that means we support him in diminishing the quality of the world we live in, because that’s what friends do!”

Nobody has any more will to even tell people that they’re wrong, let alone leave the side of the wrongdoer.. The concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, sin and morality mean nothing to people today, because that’s what is more convenient- not defining right and wrong leaves a much wider room for easy choices, isn’t it??
When nothing is wrong to you- cheating on, using, lying, hurting- you don’t need to abstain from anything that furthers your interests, without even a conscience pricking, because any sound conscience would’ve long ago committed suicide, after seeing such loose morals and character!
And that’s what passes off as ‘spirituality’ nowadays- advancing yourself at the cost of duping, using, and then dumping into pits, others!

Man had always been, and would always be, a sinner. He kept on committing mistakes, and hurting others around himself! And that hasn’t changed one bit! What’s changed is the advice he received afterwards! Saints and Gurus of yesterday shamed him for it, condemned and made him go through the same pain that he inflicted on the other. They criticized, judged, and atoned him only after having suffered for his sin! This not only actually enriched the sinner’s soul, but also satiated the pain of the victim as well, having seen the justice actually delivered!
But now, the focus has shifted- the ‘Gurus’ now rush to the side of the victimizer first! They are in a greater hurry to forgive him than to check upon the ones actually hurt. They “never judge the sinner”, trying to understand his viewpoint is the foremost important thing. Making sure that the sinner forgives himself and moves on, without facing any retribution or pain, is the life’s mission of the new Gurus.
And, if by mistake, they do come across a victim, all they have to say to them is, “forget, and forgive!” Rubbing the salt on the yet-open, and now gangrened, wound, they narrate the tales of how wonderfully happy is the one who destroyed the life of the victim, after he ‘forgave himself’- as if that was the hardest thing to do, for a selfish, cold-hearted person!


The New-Age spirituality’s blurring of lines, and promotion of gray, has little- or probably nothing- to do with actual spiritual illumination. It is just a sick mentality that is seeking to equate the sinner and the sinned-upon, the victimizer and the victim. It is seeking to create a society where the hurt people would actually be afraid to open up to others, lest they be the ones judged ‘spiritually backward’ and “vengeful”, “stuck-up, stupid idiots” for seeking a justice that would soothe their hurt souls!
Deriving its prophets and Gurus from the erstwhile, and probably continuing, for all we know, sinners and victimizers themselves, this new spirituality is absolute shit!
If, as a society, we let this thinking stay, a day would come when the families would be torn asunder, nobody would trust anybody, love, loyalty and commitment would actually become a joke, and we would be no better than animals and robots!

‪#‎Suicide

MRR 29

‪#‎Suicide‬
Ending one’s own life is never an easy decision- and neither a one that’s taken ‘rashly’ or ‘heat in the moment’!
One has to have every single shred of hope from one’s soul, in order to snuff out one’s breath! 

Whose fault is it??

Survival is the most basic human instinct- one that kicks in, almost, every single time, no matter how weakened the body and mind are! The will of a person to live is usually one of the brightest flames that burn, and for the most of us, it never goes out- even in our last breath.. Even in our last moments, most of us have that instinct that wants us to live on for another day- no matter how fulfilling, or shitty, the life has been so far.
And if somebody decides- in a cold, calculated manner- to give up on life; if someone had planned, and executed, ending their own lives, it means that THAT very instinct had died.. It means that they could see nothing else that life had to offer, that they would be interested in! 

I’m no expert of either psychology or life, but I do know this much- suicide is NOT an act of cowardice, or having “lost one’s marbles”!
It’s the closure one seeks, when every single door of hope has been shut down, when all have abandoned you, to writhe in your agony, to suffer and bear your pain alone- even though they (at least they pretend and claim so) haven’t realized it. 

The one who commits suicide is rarely the one to be blamed at- it’s SOMEONE from around them!

It could be the parents- who never taught to fight on, to live on, to hope- and/or failed to create a pillow for them to fall back upon! 

It could be the supposed ‘significant other’ who, in today’s world, is there just to exploit you- and do the lip-service of “sorry! It’s not you, it’s me”, and ‘move on’ (read ‘run away from owing up to, and suffering the punishment for, their sins, leaving you to pay for them’)! 

It could be the fake friends- who don’t think twice about the consequences of their betrayal on you! 

It could be the society, with its stereotypes and cut-and-dried, bigoted rules (viz. “If a girl breaks up, it’s her life and she should have the liberty of placing her happiness first. But if a boy does, he’s a man-slut, who never deserves another girl”, “Women are the one who deserve the benefit of doubt”). 

It could be the religion- which forces down the dogma of ‘just and loving’ God down your throat, thus forcing you to seek reasons to be happy in the most unimaginable horrors; which laughs you off if you suggest that perhaps the reason for so much suffering in the world could be that the God is indeed a sadist, who can’t see people happy, and that’s why he created negativity! 

It could be over-liberal, over-forgiving, and victimizer-biased philosophy and spirituality, which refuses to acknowledge that normal hums don’t give a damn about which life’s Karma are we paying for, or what ‘lessons’ are there to learn; which turns a deaf ear to the writhing cries of vengeance emitting from the agonized hearts, which is too busy trying to humanize and defend the perpetrators of hurt, to see the crimson tears of the ones hurt! 

Another interesting pattern is that it’s always (or nearly so) the idealist and moral, selfless and gentle people who commit suicide! I’m yet to see a “me-first”, ‘practical’ (read nearly moral-less), badass person take their lives.. Is it because they value their own skins and comfort over everything else? Maybe they always find a reason to go on, because they can find something in there for them, in everything! Or maybe nothing, for them, is more important than themselves, nothing worth dying for.. Maybe they’re never that much attached to anything that it becomes more important to them than themselves! 

Idealists, on the other hand, have a little (often bordering on none) regard for themselves, their well-being, their happiness or comfort! There’s always something- or someone- else, which/ who represents a higher calling to them. Generally, idealists believe in giving their 100% to everything they do, to people they’re with- and thus, by the virtue of the human nature, end up expecting the output to be at par, especially if they were not the ones doing anything wrong! They never compromise on the part of their input, so naturally their worlds would come crushing down if they’re told to suffer for no fault on their part..

Since they haven’t compromised on their efforts, so we have the hardest workers, most sincere employees, and “nice guy” boyfriends who are mostly found with a self-fashioned noose around their necks, with slashed wrists or with white froth bubbling out of their lips! In contrast, the ‘practical’ people are always the morally uncommitted, dishonest ones. They are never bummed out for long because they know that they have something stashed away in their larders, which they hadn’t devoted, which they can fall back upon and rebuild from!

So whose fault, in reality, is it- the suicide?? The person, who was stupid enough to take the religion and moral education seriously, to believe that if you do give your 100% with entire heart-and-soul, uphold the rules of goodness and be the one to bring happiness to others; you’ll remain untouched by pain, hurt, rejection, betrayal and dejection?? Or of the society’s- ours- that we encourage people to live with these untrue, hollow notions, so that we ‘practical’, ‘moving on’ people could live-off them, reveling while they suffer on our behalf??

A suicide is not the failure of a person- it’s the failure of a whole society, the nation, the system and civilization that we are living in! If seven billion (and yet fucking counting) people cannot pitch in together to give a little bit of hope- just enough for a person to carry on with fighting their battles, for a person to keep going- then we have absolutely no right to call ourselves a society! We are as selfish and beastly as the other animals who live and die for their own selves- or, at max, for their own cubs and ilk!

Mrinaal Prem Swarroop Srivastava

Mrinaal is an author, a story-writer, poet, lyricist- basically he loves to pen down anything and everything that crosses his mind. He has previously been writing for magazines and newspapers like Suman Saurabh, Jansandesh Times etc., apart from writing for school and college magazines and on his own Facebook blog. He’s doing his graduation in engineering.

Tracing back his roots to Allahabad and Jaunpur, the voracious reader is always on a lookout for new people to argue about things.

With avid interest in occult arts, Indian mythology, superheroes and discussions on politics, Theology and Philosophy, he can be reached at www.facebook.com/therandomrambling. Prince (C)Harming is the debut novel of this twenty-two-year-old philosopher-at-heart.

Navpreet Kaur

Navpreet never wrote for anybody else except her own self- before she came up with the idea of this novel. An almost-ready Aerospace engineer, she loves reading at her own pace and leisure.

Hailing from a nondescript village of Punjab, she enjoys endless dancing more than anything else.

At twenty-one, Prince (C)Harming is her debut novel as well.

MRR3

Dated 28th February, 2015
Self-preservation? Or outright selfishness?

Remember the scene in X-men, 'Days of Future Past', where Wolverine tells Magneto that he (Magneto) is just like him (Wolverine), a survivor? Well, Bullshit. Magneto is nothing like Wolverine,who's much, much better. Wolverine is the real survivor. The selfless, protecting, caring person.
Magneto, on the other hand, is just a coward who uses his past to justify his heinous present, future and animalistic nature.
Although one cannot deny some similarities in their past, but their attitudes towards it are poles apart. Wolverine lost his father, saw him killed in front of his own eyes, mutated and killed the murderer, only to learn that the murderer was his real, biological father. That he is a bastard. His own mother threw him out, partly because of her fear of his bone claws and mostly due to the fact that the boy killed her darling lover (so what if the poor boy had witnessed the man, whom he thought of as his father, being murdered in cold blood just moments back). But Wolverine didn't get back at the world for it by tearing apart every family he could get his claws on. I also never saw him go on a killing spree against all the mothers in this world, or even all the infidel ones!!!
He lost each and every women he fell in love with- each more tragically than the previous one. Jean, Kyla Siverfox, (maybe) Rogue; and (I'm presuming a bit, that he wouldn't have remained single all those years- before and after Siverfox, and before Jean) many more the movie series couldn't show. In fact, he lost Siverfox twice- both times to brutal murder by someone he once trusted.
And the worst part of the ordeal was his immortality. He couldn't even commit suicide when the pain became too much to bear. But he still remained (mostly) untainted. He is the real survivor. Not someone, who would commit any horrific sin, just to keep intact his cocoon of comfort; but someone who would preserve both himself and his ideals,with whom he wouldn't compromise, no matter what the world does to him.
I may not admire Wolverine totally, but I do love some things about him. Firstly, he knew about, believed in and protected innocence. He went against his own brother when the latter was about to slaughter the innocents. He fought the world for Rogue, and later for the granddaughter of Yashida, who wanted to take away his immortality and kill him. He even went out to avenge a grizzly bear. He didn't go on a killer rampage just because some people had been bad to him.
He was subjected to the most inhuman experiments in William Stryker's lab. That too, under a false pretext. And he did avenge himself most brutally, to which he was entirely entitled. But he did it against the right people, and not any random, innocent bystanders.

Magneto now. Yes, he did lose his mother, had to see Sabastian Shaw kill her in front of his eyes. Yes, he too was tortured inhumanly, was made an insignificant lab rat. But that justifies just the killing of Shaw and his henchmen- or at the maximum, firing those nukes against the human allied forces, who deserted and plotted against him. But whatever he went on to do later, was just him and his lust for power. He tried to kill a 16 year old Rogue to harness her mutant power, in order to kill humans. He manipulated Jean when she was mentally unstable, causing Professor X's death, for which he had almost no regret, and most certainly no guilt. He made Mystique, who was Professor X's adopted sister, poison his cerebro, thus poisoning the relation between a brother and sister as well. X had saved him as well, from himself in a feeble attempt to get back at Shaw. And how was the professor repaid? By being crippled, forced into hiding and having to fight a man who not only owed him his life as well as his greatest obsession- revenge - but also the one whom he loved the most in the world, more than a brother.

So, you see, it's not the circumstances, but what you decide to do after them- that has the final word in who you are. You can protect, and cherish innocence the way Wolverine did, or you can trample it and make people stop having any faith in it, the way Magneto did.
You can fight for what's actually right, like Wolverine, or you can conveniently drop them like hot potatoes, for your selfish ends, no matter what fancy name for them you might come up with. There's always a choice- between being Wolverine and being Magneto.