The sacra terra to desolate souls

Hey diary,

What say? Shall we discuss about just me as a human being? And not one who is a damsel in distress? I know I have been whining a lot. For once I wish to stop it all and be a no man's land.

The days passing by have showed me how people around me are. But what I have forgotten to mention is the fact that I have changed so much over time as well. When I first met with an accident named 'men', I was behaving like a whiny horse uninterested in allowing a rider to strap the saddle on my back. But as time passed I realized that all of this is just a stage play. Everyone comes into my life with an assigned role, plays the part and walks away as soon as the significance of the role is no more. I realized that my life was to help people in need and then leave them without expectations. Some wish for me to stay throughout and some do not give a damn. It is as if I collect all the sad and highly remorseful souls and make them happy enough to continue their lives with or without me and for some reason, I feel happy that God chose me for such a noble cause.

It is so difficult to enlighten the lost hopes in some people's lives. But then my small knick knacks and highly horrible jokes wriggle people's stomachs and force the laughter out of their bodies which they imprison with the gates of grief. I know when people use me and I definitely do not mind that because if they are happy and joyful then who am I to snatch it out of their hands?

They say people who make other people laugh are seldom happy themselves and it pricks my heart because I may be one of them. But never mind, I can never be a disciple of evil and I can't forget my principles and rules of keeping others happy. If not me then be it her. I would continue being the way I am, only for the greater good.

Keep laughing, because laughter indeed is the best medicine. 😊

The harem of security

Today I won't be speaking to my diary. I expect an audience whilst I am penning down whatever I have been facing as a girl trying to find her own place in the society.

News channels are streaming the atrocities a woman faces everyday because she is a woman. Why should she? Just because she has a hole where anyone can insert their red hot iron rods mercilessly without asking the person in question whether she wanted it or not? 

All of this begins when we as mothers and guardians explain our daughters not to wear short and revealing skirts, place them under a curfew, tell them not to go out alone, etc. When we as mothers tell our sons to be however they want and explain to our daughters in law 'Men will always be men, just bear with it.' And yet here we stand talking about equality and women empowerment. Where will the entire essence of women upliftment come from if we treat our daughters similarly our ancestral women have been treated?

I have faced things that many girls face at some point of their life. I have never wished to talk about this not because it may char my dignity but because it still sends a chill down my spine. Does anyone, now? I have been lured into a web of lies and taken away out of my comfort zone and when I ran out of the place to escape because I was lucky as I realised 'something was not right' and I had my God with me to save me from something that was about to happen, I realised that the world was anything but a happy and safe place to live in. I still remember the paling of my father's face once he heard everything my mom was saying. I remember how he checked the already terrified 8 year old me for marks and scratches and possible DNA. It was my good luck that I had come out of the fire unscathed, but it had definitely left third degree wounds in my innocent heart. I still remember coming home and holding my mom and crying as if I had had a narrow escape from death which I knew not about. After all, no one had precisely done anything. Never in my entire life had I seen my loving father so furious, all he wanted was to maul the man's face like a hungry rogue wolf. But seeing me safe was more than enough to calm him down and hug me as if I were to vaporise any moment. Everyone right now reading this would have definitely started reprimanding the mother of an 8 year old child, a daughter per se the society's prejudice but no one knows about the newborn that my mother was carrying around. How can she be blamed? It was natural  for her to think I had grown up because now there was a tiny little addition to the family who needed her more than me. 

After such horrendous incident which thankfully hadn't turned gruesome, my father restricted me from exploring the world all by myself. But could I blame him? Could I blame him for being extra cautious? 

The things happening around forced my parents to jail me at home even more. I don't question the curfew, the wearing of full hand-sleeved kurtas, the surveillance of my phone etc anymore. My papa always says 'Beta, stay away from boys, Bloody uncouth street urchins.' Whilst him being a strong, egoistic, patriarchal and a staunch brahmin and the most important - a man, was foul mouthing the entire gender, the gender to which he belonged so openly in front of me. 

The incident that had happened had gone unreported because it was a mere attempt according to my mom and that I may face a lot of unrequired mental trauma or PTSD as some of them may call it along with a lot of judgemental looks questioning my chastity at the moment. But can my parents be blamed for trying to protect me from the harsh society first than the criminal? 

When we don't reach home before curfew, our parents begin to get worried and start calling up our friends and relatives just in case they may know our whereabouts. 

Now I want to ask just one thing - why should my parents or rather any parent who has a girl child be worried about their daughter's safety? Why should a girl stay budded and not bloom like the flower she is? Why should she need a chaperone - a male chaperone to be precise to accompany her at all times? Why can't she become something that she deserves to become? 

Every moment a girl is barred from going out with friends because men don't know to keep their valuables inside their trousers. Every moment a girl has to walk cautiously because men just can't keep their valuables inside their trousers. Every moment a girl has to cover herself up with the fear of being attacked just because men just can't keep their valuables inside their trousers. 

All of my fingers are pointing towards one direction. If this direction was cleaned up, none of this would happen. Right? 

Hence a sincere request to all the mothers and fathers out there - let your daughters blossom and leash those ferocious sons of yours. Then will all of you see, the eutopia that you all desire. 

Little Red Riding Hood

Hi diary,

How have you been, love? I have been following a really busy schedule and a peaceful life, hence I haven't felt the need to open you and fill you up. I flew home a couple of weeks ago and things have kept me quite preoccupied especially the kitchen and mom.

You must be thinking now as to why I suddenly decided to pick up my pen and fill yet another page thus endangering another bamboo tree. The only reason being, a friend of mine who texted me recently asking me how I have been lately. I should have been immensely happy because you know how I love it when someone from my school days takes the time to write down three to four phrases of affection for me. Sadly his intentions of poking me via my WhatsApp were anything but good. It felt nice to think that my so-called friends actually cared about me. Unfortunately it was anything but a gesture of love and affection.

After all lust rules them all out.

My friend has found his soul mate in an apparently 'sweet and loving' girl who couldn't satisfy his beastly needs. So me being the back up plan gets a ping. 

Unfortunately diary I don't understand how phone sex was going to help him relieve himself either. I mean you have a body laying beside you permitting you to wolf it down however you have wanted. Yet you are hungry asking for more. How was a mere thought of another body permitting you another feast for supper going to calm down your beastly hormones?

Apparently she has a low sex drive. So? You would go around man-whoring? What the actual fuck! 

That wasn't even the worst part. I felt so cheap. Did I look like a home-wrecker? Apparently the phone coitus was not equivalent to cheating. Was that so? At that point, I did not give a damn as to what he was doing with his relationship with that female. What mattered to me was the way he had prostituted me in a second, forgetting our years of friendship and those nightly calls when he used to cry and wallow in his self pity after his previous break up and I used to stay up and listen to everything and whisper sweet nothings hoping he would sleep and not harm himself any further than he already had. The things I had done for him never really mattered to him at that moment. What mattered to him was the fact that he was hungry and in need of more fresh meat and that had to be me, a mere girl, a mere side chick, a mere toy to play with. 

Men are supposedly very fickle when it comes to women. They feel women leave them to stick their hips to someone better. It is definitely true with certain modifications of course. Some women do not wish to try and leave when they find someone better. But some women stay put and push them towards the right path and make the same man thousand times better than what he was before. What men have failed to understand is the fact that we live in an ever evolving world where we are supposed to adapt and be the best. After all Charles Darwin being a man himself had said - survival of the fittest. Why just not be better for someone who will bestow you with their love for their whole lives only to make you more successful? 

At first I gave up on finding love and now I have given up on the fact that chivalry is not dead. Men are hounds and so will they always remain - vicious hounds.

My heart strings are still holding on to those last bits of love which are on the verge of becoming extinct. And I truly feel shameful to the way I shower my love on people only to be stabbed repeatedly from behind. When love fails, it withers away and ultimately vaporizes. But when love - be it any form - is lost, you can hear the clanking of those glasses and breaking off the glasses into pieces of shards which prick your heart and bleed it without you actually realizing it until your heart just stops because you have bled out completely.

And let me tell you even then my heart has not turned into stone because they mean so much to me. They are alive in my heart because 'I' love them. 

I wish I could scold him and hit him with a golf stick just to see how far I could hit those balls. Whether they actually fell into the holes of hell or whether into some wolf's stomach. But no, I couldn't because somewhere my heart explained to me why he did what he did. Because he is a man 'with needs'.

The anger I hold in my heart is because of the disrespect we still get from men in the 21st century. Men love playing around you for a couple of days and then they apparently lose 'interest'. How I have never understood nor do I wish to comprehend. How could he do this to her and to me I do not wish to know. But I have understood one thing - 

Men will always be men. 

No matter how gentlemanly they are, they know how to thread their emotional web of lies and blackmail. 

Such wolves in sheep's clothing tend to slaughter the actual sheep. The females being the herder slaughter a good man's image in their hearts ultimately guillotining their heads of self respect in a pursuit of odding out the wolves. I have done that too and it breaks my heart to see such a ripper born in the place of an innocent red riding hood. 

But what could the red riding hood do if every wolf she passed by looked at her as if she were their supper for the night? 

How would she believe that there was her good ol' granny waiting for her in the woods of betrayal and mistrust? 

Unfortunate are all those honourable men who uphold a woman's dignity and needs above theirs because they are barely so many to fight against a mob of vicious and filthy patriarchal canines baring their teeth at every feministic sheep. 

God save the Queen (women). 

- Akankshya Panda 

Fossilizing originality

Hi diary,

It's been really long since I filled you in with everything that's happening with me. Today I don't wish to rant or complain about how I have been ill-treated by the world. Today I want to be the grown up I should have become the day I hit my rock bottom.

I have drastically changed, seen a very ugly part of the world which we oh so adorably have named the social media and tried to search for truth amongst lies.

Moved on, that's what I have been saying myself that I have been doing, where I was actually running around in circles. Going back into the same loopholes and mazeing around trying to find that right door to get out. How have I never understood that the labyrinth I was in actually regurgitated me out of it while I was the one swallowing myself into the same darkness over and over?

I remember those voices asking me to stop, but it was another 'Quake 3' moment for me reviving myself full of truth again in the labyrinth that was filled with nothing but lies.

When in Rome be a Roman, was what our grey haired men told us. But was losing our originality just to fit in and be cool amongst cool people the right way to live?

People around me were hypocrites, eves droppers, back stabbers etcetera. So was I supposed to reform myself as a Roman in this sordid city of Rome?

I realised after plenty of wannabe trials, that I was going to remain an Indian in this city of Rome and I think I am mighty proud of it. I was a fossil of that culture which believed in humanity and being good to people, but at the same time evolving an impenetrable shell around trying to create my glide path in the forest of disharmony and wade off those that tried to penetrate the shell and colour code my innocence red.

Akankshya Panda

The screams of your inner........ Alexa?

Hi diary,

I want to share something with you today. I am probably developing a soft corner for a person. A cute male to be in general. I have been talking to him for a while now and I love his docile and gentle nature, his deep voice, his chubby cheeks and his cute little self. Generally men don't like it when they are called cute but what am I supposed to compliment if his face screams cute?

When my eyes saw him for the first time, they were already processing the image ingraining it to my head. I was supposed to be angry because he was late for the date already. But I don't know I was positively quite calm about this. I am generally the one who is not punctual at all and he was worse than me. The clock in my brain was ticking away and with every minute passing by I was losing it. Being short tempered definitely can be harmful in such cases.

I was quite calm and that was a first. I probably already liked the cute one I was going to meet. But the moment he came and stopped doubtfully staring through his huge-for-his-head helmet, I understood it was him and raised my hand to give him a short wave confirming his doubts. He took off his helmet and my my I definitely had not expected such a good looking simpleton sitting on that bike like the King he was. I was definitely happy after seeing him and my heart skipped a beat. I shook hands and got on his bike and I was already losing myself because this cuteness was too hot to handle.

The more I spent time with him, the more he seemed beautiful to me. It was that inner beauty in him calling out to me like a shewolf to her mate. It would not be a bad idea to fall for such a beautiful person after all. I would love to spend more and more of my time with him.

When I was done with my date, he  dropped me at my place and I suddenly didn't want him to leave me and go. I wanted to keep him with me. Tie him up with a rope if he would deny and make him fall for me the way I did. (of course this was my very vivid imagination)

And that was when it all crashed, my inner demons stared at my not-so-pitiful face and laughed while asking me, "Did you forget the last time you fell in love?"

Such a beautiful moment broken like a glass and its shards pricking me mercilessly, my blood oozing from my heart and mind. How could I forget the last time I cried a bloodied ocean for a person who never felt the same?

A totally broken and deranged person like me definitely had no place in the room of love. How could I love another who would probably never love me back? How would I love anyone apart from me in the first place if all I had in my head was endless insecurities and ruthless doubts? What if he never loved me back? What if I make a fool out of myself? What if I only saw things in those beautiful eyes which I wanted to see and believe? What if he is so scared of my deranged mind that he runs out of my life like The Road-runner?

I have not healed nor am I healing anytime sooner, I understood that much. Why was it me diary? Why did it have to be me?

The world is a stage and all the people in it are just mere puppets. While the inner alexa wants what it wants and ultimately wins the battle against us.

P. S. Sorry diary you know how much 'Seven ages' by Shakespeare means to me.

Akankshya Panda

Timing your very own tide

Hi diary,

I never thought I would come back to you to write about my sordid life ever again. But a drunkard always finds his way to his beer bottle, his only form of solace.

You never know when somebody just changes his or her mind about you and walks out on you whilst you lie there drinking your sorrows away waiting for that very person to turn his or her head and snatch that bottle of poison out of your hands and slap sense into you, telling you that they are there for you.

But are they really now?

My hallucinating mind wishes not to believe their well knit phrases because it has seen people spitting out a sputum of lies which clogs the listener's ears and they can't hear anything but those lies.

Love is not easy, I know that. It never has been. Be it in any form. There is always that constant fear of betrayal after you have faced it once.

Does this mean I will never recover?

A betrayal of your lover is nothing compared to a betrayal of your most loved friend. I felt that today. The lover can only slice the strings of your heart but your friend can squeeze your heart, like a sponge, completely dry. The fact that I don't deserve an explanation for what just transpired between us is making my head spin like a tornado. I so wish I never made bottle tornados when I was a little girl.

This tornado uprooted the trees of my life, the fruits of my happiness and leaves of my dignity. I cannot even wish right now that I never met my best friend ever because of the love I have for that very person. I would rather die than wish for that. I still don't understand where I went wrong though. Is it always me? The sole reason I lose out on people? Am I not worth trying? Am I not worthy of anything in this world?

I scream at God for always taking away those precious little gifts bestowed upon me by Him which I always treasure. Why give something only to snatch it away without even giving me a chance to treasure them even more?

I still can see that very person pleading for me to give him a chance. I am always ready to give them a thousand chances, after all I never like losing out on anyone. But am I ready to face that pain again? Maybe I am. Because I love them that much. But then won't that person take me for granted?

I remember that very friend of mine saying,
"Wait and see if people are willing to try for you."

I don't wish to wait. I want to walk ahead. If that person loves me then he will catch up with my rabbit-paced walk.

If time and tide wait for none, why should I?

Akankshya Panda..........

The importance of my personal August 15th

Hey diary,

I was so happy a few days ago because I thought the internal battle that I had been fighting has finally ended and I had triumphed. Yes it is true and I am quite happy but now I am facing the worst phase after a battle.

PTSD...  (post traumatic stress disorder)

This is something you will never ask even for your worst enemies. You will feel like there is a hurricane swirling and whirlpooling the last bits of your sanity. As you will be holding on to your sanity whilst it is getting pulled into the eye of your storm, you will realise suddenly that the hurricane was never there in the first place. It was just a hallucination of your deepest fears mimicking to engulf you as a whole.

The reason of the battle will be the thing you will try your best to avoid throughout your life. Like for me, it was being obsessed by something which was never mine to begin with. It was my own self that failed to come to terms with the fact that it was not meant to be. Self destruction is the worst destruction and I was destroyed beyond repair and i was the sole reason.

My dumb self waited and waited for my order to arrive which I had not even paid for and when the order never arrived at my doorstep, I yelled at the customer care appearing like a madman on the loose.

After several hits, I have come to realise what I am cut out for and love was definitely not on the list. Because love came with expectations and these vile emotions are the cornerstones to all of my problems......

Winning my personal August 15th was just the beginning. Sustaining my August 15th was what was important. As long as I jalbreak from the chains used to tie me up by my own monsters, I will always be the independent and peaceful soul that I have always wanted.

Akankshya Panda