Start a diary when you’re young.

Fill it up with your lonely secrets and your scintillating dreams.

Grow up a bit and watch it swell and morph into a dark nightmare.

And then, when you’ve had enough of your filthy secrets and misplaced thoughts,

BURN IT ALL UP. CRY. LAUGH. LET GO. LIVE ALL OVER AGAIN.

I like my doors exciting. Especially when I know they won’t lead to much excitement.

It may sound less like enchantment when you have to make things in your life seem so; but for all the good it does you at the end of it, it is fulfilment enough.

So what I did one day was to create a door for myself. Now, each time I pass by it, I feel a flare of satisfaction flood my mind. It’s brief, but it’s mine to savour.

Last night, as I was making my placard for Slut Walk and tweeting, a random person on Twitter who barely knows me told me this.

I was a tad bombed, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what my drinking had to do with anything. I tweet the same regardless of the presence or lack of alcohol in my blood. 

But what gave this stranger the right to say a thing like that to a woman? 

What gives men and women the right to judge a woman’s sexuality or her expression of it and shame her for it?

I refuse to believe I offended this person. I refuse to hold back from expressing myself the way I want to and in a manner I feel is completely natural for me.

Just because I’m a woman/wife/someone’s daughter/sister etc. doesn’t mean I have to shove my thoughts and opinions under the folds of some mental veil spun out from someone’s ridiculous and outdated notions of propriety.

As a girl brought up in an Indian small-town, I have heard notions like these bandied about nearly all of my growing life. They hurt, they cage, they anger, they suffocate.

I may be living in a different country now, but thanks to last night, I realised that this warped mentality still hounds me.

I’ve had enough.

Project: Blue

Captured by the blues.

My heart ripped through, all red robbed, all emotion drained. My soul stripped of its white, my window barred from the Sun’s yellow. My eyes no longer find the greens beyond my territory. My cheeks losing their usual pink glow.

All I’m left with is blue. The color of eternal disdain, regret and disappointment.

Project: Blue

No one talks about the blues.

They play them.

They wax lyrical about them, they make hearts shed tears that blaze trails down pale cheeks. 

But nobody talks about the blues.

They are always sung as a song, written as a searing stanza, put together in a perfect poem, or punctuated with breaks in a heartbreaking haiku.

The blues are always a basic outburst rendered art. 

No one speaks about the blues. They play about them. 

Or if they’re me, click a photo all ‘bout them.