God helps those who helps themselves

I spilled some milk today. Bending down to wipe it up, I found a tiny ant upside down struggling to get up on it's feet just where the refrigerator and the wall met. It was one of the red ones that stung,
unlike it's ticklish black cousin. How did it get there? I didn't see any other ones around; they were usually in a bunch. I held out my finger to it's legs clawing wildly at the air. It's legs found something finally and it grabbed on. I turned my hand and it scurried across my palm towards my wrist. I put my hand on the floor to guide it towards the ground. And just before moving across the pinky to the floor, it stopped where the finger started, right between the knuckles and stung me graciously.
There was no looking back, it was dead within a second from the slap that ensued.

Love, with a hint of salt

She was in the middle of eating dinner - nothing fancy, just something she had put together in a hurry.
He sat quietly by her side, looked at the traces of the bruise by her eye and took her hand in his own. She paused with the spoon halfway to her mouth and turned to look at him. He didn't let go of her fingers and stared into her brown eyes. She set down the spoon and turned around to face him, not letting go of his fingers.
With his other hand, he tucked the free strands of her hair behind her ear and caressed her cheek. She didn't flinch but stared right back at him.

"Do you think this is a good idea?" she asked.

Without a word, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. To his surprise, she grasped his curls and kissed him back.

The days passed in kisses and entangled sheets. She clutched him and he clutched back at her, no room for languid lovemaking. There was always a sense of urgency about the way they wanted each other; the feeling didn't even recede faintly. If they could have spent the day just with each other they would have but jobs called, life called, growing up called, responsibilities called. But as soon as they were done with their space and time, their worlds didn't just reunite, they crashed into each other, fuming and heavy each and every day. Love had more than a tinge of madness when it came to them.
Everyone knew they would be with each other no matter what.

They fought of course, but each longed to hold the other again even as they quarreled and so ever so sneakily, one would just touch the other in the middle of an argument and the fight would pause for a few seconds. In those brief seconds when time stood still, they would just stare at each other silently and the next thing you know, they were making love right where they stood - she clutching at him, he clutching at her with an urgency no one could fathom.

One day after five years in the world outside and what seemed like a five hours since they had met each other ( it didn't even seem like yesterday that she had met him! ), the fight got out of hand. Each had their unspoken limits and that day, the boundary was crossed. Engrossed in trying to be right and win the argument, she screamed and scratched at his face out of frustration. It was like his brain fizzled out in a flash, disabling rationale - he hit her back. The weight of five years suddenly came crushing down upon them in five seconds as they both plunged into black bottomless water and they stood still looking at each other in disbelief. He saw her hold back her tears as she turned around and picked up her things and blasted her way out of the house. He stood there in shock for sometime and then sat down. It was over, he knew she would never even reply to a text from him after this. She spiraled into her own space and her own time,  he zoned out into his.

After a few days, still wallowing in the ostensible futility of the efforts he was about to put in, he made his way over to her house, not even expecting the door to be opened. He rang the doorbell and stood there for a long time as she wrestled over her decision to open the door for him. After what seemed like an eternity, she opened the door, turned around and made her way back to the kitchen. He closed the door behind him, put down the pink gerberas he had gotten for her on the coffee table and walked into the kitchen.

She was in the middle of eating dinner - nothing fancy, just something she had put together in a hurry.
He sat quietly by her side, looked at the traces of the bruise by her eye and took her hand in his own. She paused with the spoon halfway to her mouth and turned to look at him. He didn't let go of her fingers and stared into her brown eyes. She set down the spoon and turned around to face him, not letting go of his fingers.
With his other hand, he tucked the free strands of her hair behind her ear and caressed her cheek. She didn't flinch but stared right back at him.

"Do you think this is a good idea?" she asked.

Without a word, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. To his surprise, she grasped his curls and kissed him back.

WrongChoice Man

This is a story from a parallel world. It is set in India, which in the alternate reality is still a booming economy ( oh wow). However, things are a little different there. The country in recent years, has had a huge spurt in private colleges that churn out millions of photographers, filmmakers, painters, writers, poets, musicians who somehow get a degree and end up working at call centers to start off their careers. From all these millions, among similar other dreamers, our main character is a boy named Gadadhar aka Babloo.

Babloo grew up in a house with a lot of sisters and unmarried aunties; his dad was hardly ever around and there usually was a general lack of  males around him. As a result, he was always being asked to fix something around the house and he learnt a variety of useful work like repairing fuses, fixing pipes, tinkering with the water pump to make it quieter etc. and since then, he had always wanted to grow up and be in a career that made good use of these skills of his. In school, once he got the hang of computers, he grasped it quickly and grew adept at programming and hardware technology. He decided he wanted to be an IT engineer.

As he crossed into high school to take up science in the last two years, his parents hinted that he should study literature. Babloo was annoyed AF but he understood the situation at home , what with his dad's early retirement and mom a housewife, and realized that studying literature would pave the way for a college which could get him a job early in life. He could keep up his coding and computers  as a hobby.

Fast forward 15 years later, Babloo is working as a literary genre analyst at a big movie production company abroad. Babloo is now known to his peers, colleagues and friends as Babs and he is still the hotshot guy who knows how everything works and is asked by friends to solve even the small everyday issues. The trade-off between money and happiness was huge and after 7 years in a corporate job, Babs was starting to feel the mental strain of it.

Some time after the famous wildlife photographer Stephen Hawking passed away while running a marathon for people in their 70s from a heart attack, Babs thought about how Stephen had once said in an interview that even though he enjoyed being a wildlife photographer, he could also have lived the life of a scientist; that had always been his second career choice. Babs mulled over this for many days and finally could not take it anymore and called up his parents one day.

Babs: "Hey listen, I'm quitting my job."
Babs's Parents: "What? why? Are you getting fired Babloo?"
Babs: "No"
Babs Parents: "Then? What's wrong? You have such a great job, a good salary, house and everything else."
Babs: "I am quitting to work on and change my career"
Babs Parents: "What new career? It is too late, this is not the time to make new changes in life and career, you should be settling down and getting married and living life happily with your wife abroad."
Babs: " Mom, Dad, I know how much you wanted me to study English and get this huge corporate job but I think I have paid my dues, I am unhappy in my job and need a career change.
Babs's Parents: "What is this new career then? Please don't say it's something to do with your computer things ! "
Babs: "Actually yes it is, I don't like my job here and that's all I have ever wanted to be and still want to be - an IT engineer."

*Silence*

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Like Babs, there are millions of other young boys and girls that India is churning out to be in the art industry and it seems like that area is now saturated. I hope many more such Gadadhars don't hold back and leave their jobs as musicians, poets, writers, photographers, filmmakers to realize their dreams of being an IT engineer. Babs now works 3 IT jobs and is happily married with 2 kids back in India. He was hailed as a superhero for his move by his friends and they even gave him a
superhero-nickname  - RightChoice Man.

I love you like a TV Show baby

The first time you fall in love ( as in the hundreds of first times ) is like signing up for a Netflix account. When you signed up for that shit, it was a plethora of emotions - you laughed with Dave Chapelle , cried with Dev Patel in Lion ( what a gem of a movie! ), goofed around with Adam Sandler, took it to the next level with 50 Shades of Grey, had some weird days with Black Mirror, had a Fuller House moment when you introduced them to your family, got angry again and again and again ( the franchise never seems to end )with Arnold Schwarzennegger in Terminator, got frustrated and left high and dry with Birdbox.

Then after that first 50-100 movies and shows, Netflix seemed to be as bad as coffee mixed with plentiful chicory, you kept drinking it and never got buzzed. It was just always there. The world changed, time shifted, and you tried STARZ , Amazon Prime and Hulu but after a while, you did come back to Netflix at times, reminiscing the good old days and just to check if there was anything exciting about it anymore.

The only difference?
Falling in love came free. Falling out of it cost so much more than signing up for 13 bucks and closing the Netflix account for free.

Giving Up

The first time I gave up was back in school. I just couldn't understand that computer language and how I was supposed to write lines of code to carry out simple tasks. "Write a program to check if a word is a palindrome or not - 15 marks"  -15 frickin marks - to know if MALAYALAM is MALAYALAM left to right and right to left! How about 15 marks for remembering Charles frickin Babbage? No, the cruelty and unfairness of life started to blossom early.

I was fifteen. Burdened with the heavy school bag, the peer pressure, board exams and of course, puberty, I tried not to get distracted. But who are those boys running in the field below while I scratch skin off my scalp trying to make a program that generated the Fibonacci series ( someone tell me what to do with that number sequence in real life, please! )  ? Darn it, they must have a free period. I wished Mr. T was absent. I looked back at the paper and suddenly, overburdened with seeming old age and the free will of adolescence, I gave up. This was not meant to be. Don't stress it, you'll mess it. Till the minute before, I didn't even want to. But that present minute seemed like the perfect moment since the Big Bang happened to give up trying to comprehend how to check if the given number was an Armstrong Number or not. (Yeah right!)

I sniggered to myself and looked around - in real life, KK's Armstrong Number was probably 100; he'd always had the largest collection of pornographic CDs. Sharma's Armstrong Number came close to KK at a possible 90. Poor Ghosh, he was probably at a meagre 5, tch tch.

So yeah, I gave up, somehow got through my exams and voila! Fast forward 15 years later, guess who works in IT now?

Fork

Why do I care if I find out you didn't get enough sleep last night?
Do I need to feel needed
and hence, keep inserting myself into your life?
Or do I actually want you so much that
I don't want anything going wrong in your life?
You are probably just looking for a hand
I came looking for a heart.
We don't have what it takes to make it till the end.
You will never be complete,
you are too far behind.
I will never be complete,
I am too far ahead.
There is never any white without the black;
they need to coexist if you really want me.

Itch

I don't hold myself back anymore
You did tell me to jump into the fray
"It's all about change" you said;
"being who you are, not being who others wanted you to be".

Now I am who I was "supposed" to be.
Why don't you like me anymore?
I can't retrace my steps; I have come too far.
I did turn around to look at the road I left behind
but I don't really want to go back that way.

I like who I am now.
It's a pity you couldn't accommodate
the change you wanted in the first place.
Like an itch that goes away
if you ignore it,
ignore me now till you get used to my
new self dissolving into normalcy.