The Rohu that is me!

There are things that the human form of me will perhaps never get over. Though there are not more than a handful of them that genuinely ignite passion in the crab, but when it is up in flames, the most efficient of your fire brigades might just want to quit their jobs.  For once the claws decide to hold on…God bless!

About one of these obsessions, you will get a fair idea if you read the preceding para again. I am sickeningly proud and morbidly irritated at being born under the sign of the Crab. And even though I am a semi theist, I adore Linda Goodman. This may as well be seen as a highly narcissistic tendency. Even writing something of this kind is. Or perhaps it’s just a very crabby trait. Typical symptoms may be absolute loony tune like behavior, laughter that can scare hyenas away, bouts of incandescent senseless happiness and haunting baseless depressions, overwhelming motherly tendencies (more than a dozen people from a variety of age groups call up to wish me on Mother’s day), desire to live in the kitchen (if not nursery), fatal attachment to the place they call Home, tendency to hang on to old buttons and buddys, socks which have had their break up long ago, pen caps, strings, threads, bills, beads, tickets,  coins or even casual to-do notes written by a once close friend. If you happen to find a diary with a various denominations of currency, dried petals, coins, chewing gum wrappers and stuff with stupid things written beside them, you’d probably find me somewhere around. A drawer which looks like a lodge of a beaver high on marijuana, will in all probability have my third standard id card hiding in its depths. And yeah, I think more than you think I am capable of thinking.

Writing, hmmm… I am not really sure if it’s a lifelong obsession or a temporary Marilyn Monroe sort of an infatuation. I love writing but then it never satisfies me and I never trust the acknowledgement of the reader (sincere apologies for that). Nevertheless it makes me very happy that they take the time and pains and I am grateful that they are this generous. I feel my work is not really honest or profound, bordering on sheer dishonesty sometimes. It has an inevitable dark hint to it and is more than often repetitive. I hope to see a day when I might just be a little more capable with my pen and put a few of them together in print. For now, it’s more like a nightmare in which Don Corleone looks suspiciously like Mithun da.

Animals, them I love almost compulsively but very truthfully. It doesn’t matter to me whether they are giving 300 million bacteria and viruses a joy ride. Even my benevolent jyotshis suggest all animal friendly “upays” to me. So not only are they present in my history and geography and science (I am a zoologist by degree), but also they influence the decision making of my whimsical Rahu and Ketu. If you are an animal, pray to Pashupati that I am not in a cuddly mood when I find you, for you might have to end up in an emergency ward for the lack of oxygen (I'll save you anyway) . And you might like to have a conversation with Brandy Singh sometime, the female canine who would probably open a bottle of pink champagne if someone informs her that I was deflated under a road roller.

Kids are my favorite companions. Perhaps because my mental development stagnated very early during my growth years, I feel very very happy and calm when they are around. I can stay in their company for hours and not get tired. Thankfully after the various experiments which were potentially lethal at times, I emerged as an inevitable winner with kids. From solving weird puzzles to reading lines from Paradise Lost to finishing off their soup and toast, Kids do remarkably well in my company. And though I haven’t really arrived at a conclusion as to what the actual reason is. I like basking in the sunshine of their innocence. (Their blunt honesty keeps me on ground :D)

Food, I may be eating it or I may be cooking it. But food will always be in proximity. For this reason despite having a straight orientation, I feel I have a slight crush on Nigella… Absolute adoration. You will often find me repeating her lines, “Everything should be in moderation, even moderation”. Food fascinates me like the Moon does. I love giving it shape, I love giving it the taste, the form, the love, the warmth. My mother says I’d probably stuff up my hubby dear and kids to death. When the sane sibling sapien is talking about some cute guy at a café, all that I am able to think about is, his coffee. Whether it was Cappuccino or Latte or Irish, in what kind of mug, with what kind of art. And then I end up asking her if he took sugar. She sighs and turns around to sleep. I might be seen baking at 3 in the morning, or preparing shahi toasts, halwa, phirni, kheer, puddings, pies etc (my sweet tooth is gigantic! So is my waistline ;) ).

My name, Rohini (Rohu as I am popular as). It was Shubham when I was born, basically because my entire family for some reason had presumed that I will be  bestowed with the all supreme Y chromosome. Fate had other plans, and for that my dear family was almost unprepared. So unprepared that for the next 15 years they could not think of a more feminine name and I had to bear the almost inevitable comment “YEH toh ladkon ka naam hai! He he he”. Thereafter I was Rohini, which has a variety of meanings. Balram’s mother, Moon’s wife( as if my being the crabby lunatic was not enough), seventh nakshatra and all, but the one that intrigues me most is “Mother of all cows”. Almost incredible. The cows don’t seem to have any specific affinity to my being but then I think am afflicted with universal motherhood to an extent that it manifests itself in almost all spheres of my life. I often talk to electrical appliances when they are not working, and defying probability they oblige almost 70 percent of the times. My mother calls me before she calls “Bijli Dinesh”. My insanity. HENCE PROVED

Books I love. Until it has not got Mills and Boon or something of the sort printed on its cover. Poetry, prose and drama make my life much easier and uncomplicated than I would prefer it to be. “To Kill a Mocking Bird” is my my Bhagwad, and it puts me off when MS word auto corrects it to Baghdad! The piece of writing that I am currently obsessing over is an absurdist drama written by Samuel Beckett. It’s called "Waiting for Godot". There a lot of people including Papa Singh who think the play is “absurd”. I think I have never come across such a brilliantly thinking piece of the human mind on paper. There are lines that make my heart stop, lines that move me to tears, lines that make me twitch with their agony. And yet “nothing happens”. That is all what the play is about. The loss of purpose, the phases of conscious and unconscious hope, the endless wait of the unknown. The belief of finding light at the end of the tunnel even when you are not even sure of what will you do with it or what will it do with you. The pretence of living, the despair, the escape, all of it. Something that pulls all my nerves together and ties them up. Nothing has ever been able to penetrate my soul in the way it has. And the lines, the most stunning lines “We always find something eh Didi, to give us the impression that we exist”. I am not widely read. I know there may be far better things to come across. But today this play has its words written all over my heart. I can dedicate an entire blog to it.

There is so much to each of us. We are too vast for own selves to comprehend and consequently most of the time we are too much with ourselves. Of how good or bad, great or small, rich or poor, learned or illiterate, beautiful or ugly we are. It’s the story of all of us. There are always people greater and lesser than us. A source of continuous vanity or bitterness. And that how we like it to be. Thats how we will always be. In our own heavens and hells, decorating the interiors, admiring and criticizing them. Not bothering much about helping someone build theirs, but only comparing. The words which I have written today only prove to me my vanity. Of how obsessed I am with my own Paradise and the loss of it. My own Gabriel and Lucifer, my own left and right. But then it also gave me a chance to know what I am like in the written word. And after all dear reader, its my blog, my little Lilliputian kingdom, and thus to Monsieur Gulliver, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”. 

        

[A Carcinus rohinensis Bravery Award for you if you survived this. Even if you attempted. :D]