Ritu Lalit's Blog, page 13

In Praise of Failing

Girte hain shahsawar hi maidaan-e-jung mei
Woh tifl kya girenge jo ghutno ke bal chale

(Only a fighter who rides the horse in a battlefield has a chance of falling, But how will those cowards fall who opt to walk on their knees)

I am pretty sure Azeem Dehalvi had me and folk of my ilk in mind when he wrote this couplet.  If anything, it has given an intrepid serial failure like me some sort of validity.

I am a bulky foodie who is a veteran warrior in the Battle of The Bulge.  My victories have been many, but alas temporary.  That is one failure in life.

They say failing is bad, one should never fall down.  I fail to see why.  If I fall to my knees, I normally look around to see if I can grab that elusive five rupee coin that rolled under the table a few days ago.  Since I am down, I may as well crawl to it, pick it up and consider the entire exercise profitable.  Oh, and it does give my knees the necessary exercise.

The first time I heard of failure being praised was when I stood first in class for the umpteenth time.  My mother was quite proud of my academic achievements.  She bragged about it incessantly and my teenaged uncle, no doubt sickened to the gills with all that took me aside and said, “Try to fail once.  It is kind of fun.”

I was in class V.  My eyes almost popped out of their sockets.

“Everyone will laugh at me,” I said.

“So?” he asked.

I sniffed a rat.  “You are only saying this so that you can watch Mama beat me up!” I accused him.

He winked and said, “Maybe.”

I was intrigued.  I had never stood second in class, ever.  And here was a whole new area waiting to be explored.  And maybe if I failed once, it would make me likeable.  Girls and boys would talk to me.  So I tried to fail, I seriously did. I entered the exam hall with the full intention of giving the wrong answers.  The question paper was so easy that I completely forgot my intentions and answered all of the questions correctly.

Let us say, I failed at failing.  Read the rest here

 

We have moved

Yes we have moved

[image error]

The author blog is finally up and running.

I am moving up in life it seems.  Up another level

I now have shiny new digs, where I’ve tried to put everything up.

So much luggage, so much moving shooving, so much planning.

I hope you like my new digs and keep visiting me there.

I am now at http://www.ritulalit.com/

I hope you visit me there, click on the links on the top, one of them is for this blog and the other for the cooking blog or should I say the Paleo blog.

I hope you like the design.  If you do, let me know and I can give Manik Jaiswal, my website designer a plug, some business and a little encouragement.

See ya people.

Much love

 

Book Review: Dinner Date by Ishaan Lalit, Published by Authors Empire Publication

Nice! Great review of Ishaan’s Dinner Date

It's a Chakras thing

 

“It’s a Chakra thing,” she said, her calm and serene smile making her look like one of the Mother Mary statuettes placed in various niches of the Catholic school Mama had sent me to as a child.

Our own goddesses looked fierce and had “Don’t mess with me” written all over them.  I wish I had the spunk of the goddesses.  With great effort I brought myself to the present, but tears filled my eyes.  I seemed to weep all the time lately, even into the dough I’d knead for our meals.  The first born kept getting into fights.  The baby tried to wipe my tears away, and failing that, he would sing to me or cuddle.  Just the other day, he had wept with me, scared and confused.  I had to snap out of it, for ther sakes.  This guru was my only hope.  I had heard she was good, but it wasn’t working.  She had told me “I can only help you if you want to be helped.”

Damn her!

“We are all creatures of energy.  We need to find our connection to the primal force, and once we establish the connection, we will shine. We will possess inexhaustible energy.”

I blinked and cast a surreptitious glance at the others sitting cross-legged next to me in our class, trying to visualize them as shiny round bubbles of something bright and pulsating, may be light bulbs on electricity.  Nah!  Too far-fetched.

That fat auntyjee looked like Pillsbury doughboy.  The old fella looked like a  candle with a dull yellow flame, bent, weepy and spent.

Here I was, age 28, mother of two kids, single and jobless.  And I had sold the last gold chain I owned to pay for this very expensive meditation course.  I had to make it work, or else.

“There are seven energy centers in our body. We have to keep them clean, powerful and pure.  They correspond with the seven colours of the rainbow.  They respond to external stimuli like music, simple music, wood sound, string sound.”

“I’m tone deaf “ my mind declared, rebellious and angry.

She continued, “Simple music puts us in a state of harmony, of peace.  Then we can meditate on the colours.  We will start with Red, the colour of the root chakra, and slowly progress upwards to violet, the top of the head.  Breathe deeply, inhale …. Exhale”

My mind was fixated on the colour red …. The colour of a bride’s sari.  Was it because she was stepping into a bloody minefield?  Was it because she was being sacrificed that she was wrapped in the colour of blood?  It was as though a dam had burst, I wept silent gasping sobs.

Somewhere music played, the simple soothing notes of a santoor.

Muscles of my back, neck and shoulders relaxed, the red lightened up, turned into orange, and then faded into yellow, transformed into green, the heart chakra.  I felt love, boundless love, joy, a connectedness.  The universe and I.

I was not alone, I had never been alone, I could never be alone.

The santoor kept weaving its magic.

Blue – communication.  The truth.  If we are brave to hear it, we can be truly free.  Free to understand the wind, the rustle of the leaves, even the blade of grass has a story to tell.

Purple and then Violet

Joy.

I smiled after being in a funk for almost a year.

I was reborn.  My life had begun.

Written for Indiblogeshwari’s That Tuesday Thingy

 

 

 

Catching up with an old friend

Chat with old friend who found me using Facebook Friend Finder ….

 

 

Old Friend : OMG, so you are a hot shot author now.

Me : (Trying to be modest and underplayed) Yeah, I have a couple of books published

O F : Well, you always wanted to be a doctor

Me : Yeah, didn’t everyone else?  It was a done thing those days ….

O F : What?

Me : Adults would ask, “Beta badhe hokar kya banogey?” and we would chant, Doctor, IAS, IPS, Engineer. 

O F : You always said Doctor

Me : The idea of cutting people open must have sounded like fun to me

O F : So how come you’re not one?

Me : (Trying to wriggle out of admitting that I dropped out in the second month of med school) You wanted to be in IAS, and now you’re in marketing.

O F : Well, it pays better and does not get me posted out of Calcutta.  You can’t take a Bong out of Calcutta

Me : So how’s Didi?

Nice try … but he did not take the bait.

O F : (Still persisting) Never thought you’d be working in corporates and writing novels.

Me : (Uncomfortably)  Erm I work in one corporate only.

O F : And your marriage broke

Me : (Wishing I could strangle him through the computer screen) Yes

O F : You are Ritu Jain from Imphal and from Hindu College aren’t you?

Me : (Scowling) Was.  Now I am Ritu Lalit

O F : (I could sense the avid need to learn more gossip) You have changed so much!  How could you?  He was your big romance, how come?

Taking deep breaths, reminding myself that I once actually liked this bloke, and preaching myself tolerance…

Me : That was then, this is now.  You’re right.  I changed a lot.

O F : Like how?

Me : I got infected by Black Spider venom.  So I have this uncontrollable urge to kill or destroy old loves and old friends.  It is a problem but I am learning how to control it, and to live with it.  

O F : You’re not serious?

Me : Try me

Facebook, I owe you big time.  Haven’t had so much fun in ages

The Commercial Pilgrimage

A very popular pilgrimage is that to the  four abodes in Himalayas called Chota Char Dham (Chota meaning small):Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri – all of these lie at the foot hills of Himalayas.  It is considered to be a journey that the devout undertake for earning punya … a term I have no English equivalent for – perhaps good deeds?  But then many undertake it in the summers, to escape the heat and placate the Gods at the same time.  Killing two birds with one stone…

Everyone has a personal religious journey to undertake.

There was a time in life when I was overwhelmed with life itself and everyone and everything that was happening to me.  I did what people normally do, when confronted by impossible odds.  I turned to religion.  Since I live life and do everything with passion, when that did not work for me … I went whole hog; I turned to world religions, to occult, to spiritualism and to astrology.  I wanted answers to the question that plagued me, “Why me?”

I did not get the answer to my question, but I got much more.  I got a world view on how human beings made sense of their surroundings, of nature and environment through religion.

In my humble view, all religion stems from one basic fact; it teaches us how to live in harmony with our surroundings, with nature and with each other.  It is a set of rules to live life by.  Rules which, when flouted, have disastrous consequences.

“Stop turning my Father’s house into a marketplace!” [John 2:16]

 The Bible says that Jesus cleaned up the House of God by throwing out the merchants, the money traders and people who were plying their wares.

Matthew 21:12 Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.

The Koran has very strict rules on attire, behavior and conduct when one visits the mosques.

The Hindu religion, like every pagan religion has its root in nature worship.  We have myths woven around banyan trees, peepul trees, tulsi plants.  We consider our mountains holy.  We have huge temples and shrines built on rocks and hill tops.  Kailash Parbat is the abode of Shiva, the Himalayas are given a religious significance.  We, by rights, should be a very eco-friendly country should we not?

How did commerce get into it?

I went to JagannathTemple in Orissa once and was put off by the rampant commercialism.  I came back upset; there was no sense of piety there.  I visited Vaishno Devi twice and then turned away.  I get more happiness chanting and meditating in the confines of my bedroom sitting on my bed than I get when I go to these places.  But then each to his/her own.  My purpose here is not to upset any one else’s religious sentiment.

Religious tourism is a huge commercial force.  And hotels have been built to cater to pilgrims who can afford to be the religious tourist, afford the Char Dham Yatra.  The priests in the temples almost salivate as they take our donations, by hook or by crook.

Everyone is familiar with the images of the buildings being washed away in those awful floods.  Six floors to a building, or more, and built so close to Kedarnath, that one does not have to walk too far.  Pilgrimage in comfort.

The images scared me and shocked me.  To me, they seem to be a scary version of our belief of washing our sins away by taking a dip in Ganga.

Are the Gods mocking us?

Are the divine forces sending us a warning?

Our ancients built these shrines with a purpose in mind.  The purpose was that spiritualism stands for harmony with nature.  They were situated far away in the lap of nature, where piety and peace would be found.

Nature is a stern taskmaster.  And a powerful one.  It is sending us a message … those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.  As a Devi worshipper I implore to all …

“Stop turning my Mother’s house into a marketplace!”

 

What's in it for me?

What’s In It for Me? … another post at Parentous where I talk about my kids when they were teenagers

 

Who but a teenager would think that if he hid his report card the parent would not find out?

And they believe in magic. It is not surprising to me that Harry Potter and Twilight did so well. Who but a teenager would think that if he hid his report card the parent would not find out? And who but a teenager would actually believe changing 30 into 80 on his class test paper (it’s just two deft strokes of the pen) would work?

 

Read the rest here

 

 

7x7x7x7

This post is for the Write Tribe prompt 7x7x7x7 To write a post in 7 lines … for a novelist who writes a story in 80 thousand words, a challenge!

Grab the 7th book from your bookshelf.

Open it up to page 7.

Pinpoint the 7th sentence on the page.

Begin a poem/a piece of prose that begins with that sentence

Limit it in length to 7 lines/7 sentences…. I used the 7th word of the Dr. Suess poem I was reading which is YOUR.

You’re off to great places

Today’s your day

Your mountain is waiting

So … get on your way … Dr. Suess

 

Your lucky number is seven

Oh really, is it like that IndusInd Bank corny ad?

So … should I eat seven chapatis every day?

Or cook seven courses for dinner?

What does lucky mean any way?

Bad luck is also luck, so is normal or indifferent luck, isn’t it?

Ahh, forget it, got too much to do to  think this through.

Why do you write?

“Why do you write?”

and

“What do you write?”

 

Common questions all authors face.

I write fiction.

I write adventure – I write of how humans deal with life and death situations.

I write of passion, even love,  but never ever will I write of  ever after, (that is a myth). 

I write stories

 

I write of personal challenges, things I have faced.

I write of the past, the now, and what I think I know about.

I write of family, of love and loss, of failure and successes. 

I write of my small family, of our bonding, of the crazy nutty interactions we have and celebrate the love we share.

 

I blog.

I write pedestrian poetry – totally inane verses

I write …

Because some nutty part of me wants to jumble the alphabets and come out with words that tell a tale

 

I write because there are people inside me

They want to live, they want to breathe, cry, love, fuck, fight and win

If I don’t let them, they’ll drive me nuts.

 

Why do I write?

 

To entertain, of course!

 

It delights me when someone – even a single someone emails me or calls me …

 

And says he or she loved my book or a character in my book

 

My crazy heart goes Whoopie-do-a-do!

 

I have made a connect!

 

Yes, I do something nice.  I write stories