chimes of a forgotten melody

PREFACE 15 June 2007. After testifying before court that they had married in conformity with the law, Manoj and Babli, a couple whose marriage was not accepted by their village’s Khap Panchayat, asked for police protection as they decided to move to Chandigarh. The same day saw police officers assigned to protect them stranding them midway, their relatives kidnapping them and feeding Babli with pesticide while choking Manoj to death. And the only mistake they did was they loved each other. INTRODUCTION We were not a society which believed in murder as a resort to any evil. We were not a society which believed in differences among people. And we were most certainly not a society which discriminated between men and women. Consider Swayamvar, the ceremonious and sacrosanct act of a bride choosing her apt groom. It was perhaps one of the earliest rituals practiced in our country, one whose prevalence was seen in epic works such as Ramayana and Mahabharata which dates back to the er...

Stars studded on your hair Guides me through seas of despair, Winds which graze your face Blows past me bleak. Freya. Light! Love! My life! Night grows around me, Your love holds me deep, Free me from your rune! Searching - I've grown old, Words slip out cold, And I swim towards you, On and on and on! -chorus- Freya. Find me. Hold me. Free me from your rune! Dreams push me down, Its weight make me breathless, I crawl onto you And you slip far away. Freya. Light! Love! My life! Silence cripples me, Your love makes me survive, Hold me close and never let go. Lonely- I've grown cold, Searched for you, never found, Still I swim towards you, On and on and on! -chorus- Freya. Blunt me. Daze me. Free me from your rune! How far away is your light? How much more should I try? Gently it fades away, And I fall apart. Freya. Light! Love! My life! Fear grips me tonight. Pull me out of my woe, Come. S...

Dear perpetrator of hatred, First of all let me say that I respect you as a human being and would not want to use violence or hate speech to raise my point. In fact I am not even beginning to think it would make a difference; you can shout, throw ink, deport to Pakistan or for that matter any country, assault or even kill a person but you could do nothing to his ideology. With that opening sentence I am sure half of you would call me everything you've been calling people and would move onto your own business, but somewhere down the line if you'd think about it again I want you to read this. Now, I am not claiming that hatred is part of a single community in today's society nor am I claiming it to be practiced by a single political party. Hatred settles in everyone of our minds at some point, even I would have had inclinations to hate people like you at times and may still have it. After all we are human beings, but what we do with hatred makes all the difference, which...

12 midnight. I am in an enraging conflict as to what allured me into the sphere of her charm. Was it the way she arranged her hair with a careless braid, much like my mother? Or was it my thoughts, my memories of my mother adding up with her profoundly captivating beauty? Maybe it is that vigorous yearning, not the kind you have for your mother, rather for a well paid whore waiting for you to devour her. I looked at her with a fiery intent. One gaze, one pause of her eyes is all I would need now. One small twinkle in her eye, one deep breath she catches, holds and spreads over her numerous cells, would tell me of her inclinations. Right then, she walked towards me, smiling, and caressed my body with hers. A sudden inflaming desire took over me as I found myself following her. Wherever she leads me I shall be content as long as her braids disorient my vision and her assiduity motivates my actions! . 12.01. No one stirred in the corridor. There was silence. She opened the door to the ...

. Dedicated to the person who forced me to write today! ;) . It was the third straight Christmas in which I packed a gift for myself and kept it hidden in the attic. There is a thrill to finding unexpected gifts, which rather ignites in me a mixed spirit of surprise and nostalgia. Now, it isn't that there was no one whom I could send gifts to, like there is this girl two houses down who smiles at me every time I go past her house. Well, she maybe three and probably the world hasn't taught her much, but I am pretty sure she'd be a pretty good contender for Christmas gifts even though like most people I don't think she would put much thought on my inclinations to be a loving person. Anyways for now I am trying it hard to pack the violin into the only box I could find after two hours of search, and I almost managed it when I heard the door bell ring for the second time. 'Is this Mr. James' house? You have a courier!' Now, like you, I had no clue ...

When you've been blind too much and for too long you tend to forget certain images, certain portraits of life which a normal person wouldn't or couldn't forget. I still remember that day, a busy Monday morning when everyone around was frantically in pursuit to catch up with time, when I tripped over some misplaced furniture, sat up and forgot my mother's face. All throughout the day when Alice and the kids were away, I was in a desperate search through the vaults of my memory from where I hoped to retrieve fragments of my mother. *** My mother called out to me, asking to watch how the bean seeds I kept in wet cotton opened its tiny little arms, stretched, grasped air, drank all the precipitation, took light and made life. I watched in awe at the origin of life, and absorbed the divinity of making it. Somewhere in between I would have looked at my mother's face and admired at how she created me as I created life. I could remember the seeds, but not my mother...

Yesterday night before closing my diary, my grandmother called out to me asking to help her lift a canister of water. It would have been just 1 or 2 kilograms, but the calcium deficiency in her bones made the task for her seemingly preposterous. The night before, she complained that the channels were all mixed up after the satellite dish was installed, 'What was the need of all this filth? Just to sell us these useless umbrellas!' Yeah, we all hated it in the beginning, we all dejected the transformation. 'So when are you going to convert from analog to digital?' they kept asking every time you turned on the TV. And it was becoming a very strange nuisance. 'Call the cable operator, Anand. Call him and ask them to fix this!', my grandfather used to say every single time those deplorable TV actresses would come up and campaign for the digital world. 'But we fixed it already', I'd keep saying but it never did sink in, even for a little whi...