Tag: Language

Life is but not an empty dream!

~ Soumya ~ Leave a comment

I was often caught off guard with this line! Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream! More often than less, I preferred the predicate than the subject itself! And today, a very dear one gave me an eye opener by making me read the complete verse. I see the subject now, with much clarity and bliss.

To my soul and my soulmate, for making me relate to this, and giving me those silent smiles of understanding, over the long long seven-eight or nine-ten years!

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the worlds broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howeer pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God oerhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing oer lifes solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

– H W Longfellow (Long sighted and large hearted indeed!)

Blog-o-phobia!

~ Soumya ~ Leave a comment

Nay, I am not afraid of blogs. But people at my home are. They are worried that I am spy to netizens, leaking news from their privacy. 😛 Lately, at the end of every conversation, my dad makes it a point to add, “Daivame! Sollandamayirinthuthu. Iniyippo ithum blog-la varume.” (God! Need not have said this now. This is also gonna come up in the blog!) While my dad remarks this jokingly, my mom’s is a serious concern. She’s worried I dont know to draw the lines of discretion. She’s of the assumption that I let out my ‘secrets’ out here in public and I am so exploited by my readers! What does she know! Essentially, I am proving their fears genuine, by posting this one too. Thank god my sister aint much bothered!

A part of me seems to be affected by the same fear as well. A hesitation to write, worrying if that one unnecessary line might slip off my mouth (fingers, for that matter!). The whole idea of staying wound up in the irrelevant concern is stupid and I obviously know it. Shedding the cloak off me, I am trying to pitch up. I’d rather ruin my blog with stained words, than spoil my life in strained silence. Back again, hoping to stay.

Limbo!

~ Soumya ~ Leave a comment

So now, Rekha akka, I officially lost the challenege. I didn’t write yesterday. Did I forget? Or did I run out of things to write? Well, in reality, I just slept it off. Like, 24 hours are really not sufficient for anything. Lately, I have been losing a lot of time in ways I can’t even identify. And lately, I am not being myself. I am suffocated with words brewing in my mind. And blogging everyday is really not sufficient expression of it. Words are enough to express, only, time isn’t ever. Lost here, with a deluge of words in my head, I can’t explain myself.

This morning, I was shook from sleep by something and the first thought was to confirm if I had blogged yesternight before dozing off. But I hadn’t done anything more than the title “Happily ever after!”. I always wanted to write,but always had excuses to run away from the actual act of it, with trivial justifications. I was of the hope that atleast a challenge of this kind would cheer me enough. An article for a major magazine, or so I persume, is due tomorrow and I haven’t even begun with it. And for the record, the deadline was a month ago, and by some luck, I just got it extended. As if even those magazine people were keen on publishing what I might write! And, I don’t write at all. My college magazine is on the go and I haven’t done anything there either. I have an essay competition today. What miracle am I expecting to happen in that constrained one hour and thirty minutes!

I don’t want to be here, caught in limbo. I don’t want to experience this block in the flow. May be, me writing or not writing doesn’t change anything in this big world. But, there was a time when it changed a lot of things in my little world, filled with satisfaction of having expressed myself! I am waiting to be once again back there. Waiting to be kicked out of this limbo!

The editor!

~ Soumya ~ 1 Comment

I always wanted to be an editor. An editor of something. The newspaper editor we see in movies, who make controversial story appear in their daily, and contribute in the making of a socially aware society! (Like Murali in the movie Pathram!). Or the magazine editors who cover interesting features and meet so many people, for every edition of theirs! Like my cousin Rekha. I wanted to be something near an editor at least. I wanted to read and filter what others might write. I want to make my own comments in the editorial, and still get people to read it. And on one awesome day, my English teacher asks me for an editorial for the school magazine! All the while, I was one of the two student editors who didn’t know what we were actually doing with the magazine. Coz, we never saw a single article in the magazine before its publication. And even to get a copy of the magazine, of which I was an editor, I had to pre-order with juniors and wait for, coz by the time of the magazine release, I was already out of school. That was one unfortunate editor experience, except for the joy, for God knows what, that I saw my name against the title ‘Student Editors’! The fellow editor also blogs somewhere here, but she is yet to grant permission to bring her out in public. Hope she does, at least after reading this.

So by ending up with a professional course, I almost fully bundled up my ‘editor dreams’ and was facing reality with a smile! And then came my second year of college, with a college magazine boom! So I hope, I work here now, and may be someday I can at least get into the editorial board of it! And guess what, I just back off and sit at home, teaching myself to forget about all magazines! I re bundled my ‘aspirations’, for which I never worked for. Yet again, the time came once again when I could unravel my bundled up desire! But not anymore, for I now realised final years are never gonna be editors, by University norms, and I have less than 2 months in my pre-final year! 😛

Need I say more!

English Vinglish!

~ Soumya ~ 1 Comment

Why do I do this? I so much dislike this practice of mine, where I use movie names as my blog titles! Why do I do this then? To increase the blog hit over search engine redirections? I don’t think I even knew of such a thing, until recently. May be it’s my simple liking for the movie? What about this particular one then? I’ve not seen ‘English Vinglish’! So may be, my affinity to movie titles may simply be as they somehow can be viewed associated to the actual things that happen around.

I am a Tamilian by birth. Brought up as a Malayali, often. Educated in English medium. Obviously, suggesting that I am pretty fluent in the three languages. Of course, there’s Hindi. And Sanskrit. And Kannada. Languages that I was exposed to, at various points of life, but could never gain enough fluency in. Language is just a medium to communicate. Conveying your thoughts to someone else, who might be interested, is the whole point. And the choice on the medium of communication,i.e. language, is often made based on the comfort levels of the involved parties, unless there’s a situational specification to it. But in the current scenario ‘here’, what we see is a totally stupid and twisted English drama! Like English is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to humanity! English is a good language. Awesome I must say, considering the ease of conveying intense emotions in simple words. Most of us would find it too much better and relieving to yell and shout at somebody in English, than in our own mothertongue. Coz it feels less intense and rude.You’d want to propose to someone in English, coz that takes away a good portion of the embarrassment. You’d want to dial up a Home Delivery service or go to a Customer Care Centre and talk in English, coz that’d keep the conversation shorter and crispier. And trust me, things get done easier and sooner, when you accentuate your tone!

But beyond all this, at some point all you wanna hear and cherish is your own language, in which you uttered your first words to the world. And definitely, from some people, you can’t even think of hearing any other tongue! That mishap was today! When someone screamed at the top of their voice, But is it lighting??”. For the record, that was a concern about the tube light. I didn’t want to laugh. It was not as funny as it was pitiful. Why do people put so much effort in mastering a language like it’s the end of the world! English Vinglish bina kya life! Indeed.

Seasoned!

~ Soumya ~ 2 Comments

I may not be a seasoned writer. Ah! That’s never the point here. That was so randomly stated just to go along with the title.Seasons are just so praised and so visualised as if they were the nature’s most true essence. Truly though, they indeed are something so. Poetry and literature, as I’ve always seen dearly embraced seasons and the change they symbolise. From summer to monsoon. To spring. And to winter. (I bet I got the order wrong!) The transition has been ever so slow and steady. The blunt curves of temperature and drooping scale of humidity. Seasons always mesmerise, with the awesome relativity we tend to establish with human lives. So much so, I’ve fallen in love with the word ‘rithu’ (In Malayalam, meaning season). Seasons are long. And take large radius curves to never let us feel the abrupt change. Truly a process of gradual transition. And hence it feels awkward human lives are compared to seasons.

People dont change so gradual. The sharp edges of moving on with things pierce everything around us. People are like weather. Short lived, miniature of seasons. The transience is so much similar to people and their contrasting thoughts, that change over an year, a month, even over a single night. Ah! That’s why you have fair weather friends and not fair seasoned ones!

These are a lot more about seasoned. I am really loving those yummy yummy seasoning over my double cheese pizza. I’m planning on making it something like my staple food or so! Rotflol. But idiotically, the primary seasoning that I was referring to, here, was the one that I caught recently in Hindi soap operas. However though, I dont follow the language and yet the ‘season’ was so obvious! Well the season was just about how romance blooms between the protagonists and how that ends up in the usual Indian style dimming of lights and kissing dolls!

Just a word

~ Soumya ~ Leave a comment

Words are few. To describe all life’s joy and sorrow, pain and agony, love and hate, words are too few. I have had the most of them. The best awesome wonderful words. People give it to me. Knowingly and unknowingly. Over the years, ‘people’ have contributed more than ‘reading’ in building my vocab.

The most amazing and most cherished words are given to me by my brother. I still remember how he used to make me run for the dictionary and search the meaning of every new word that he shoots at me! The abysmal fall to the oblivion is often broken by the obvious concurrence of our fragile existence and the omnipresence. Well, the sentence wouldn’t have made sense to many of you. That’s so many words that he gave me bound together! He told me how rendezvous is just rondayvoo, how sarcasm and pun are similar, what gerunds are and finally how beseech is the best word of expression! It doesn’t end in a single post. Half the words in my writing are stolen from his treasure. How many of you even know the precise meaning of vocab? Its not just a set of awesome brilliant words. Its the skill of using the right word at the place. He told me that and he gave me that.

There are more contributors. My mom gave me the second best word, solace. She instantly knew the word I was searching for! Lol. Reimbursement also owes its credit to her. My dad wasn’t any bad. He handpicked the toughest words from all available English write ups he read. In neatly folded chits, the language was flowing to me every evening, as a brook, as a river and now finally contributing to the ocean itself. He brought me paper cuttings which had English that he failed to assimilate. He’d still come to me for drafting and editing his official letters. Dad, you never knew how proud it makes me!

There was Neha of course, my closest ever friend or listener or chatter box. She called me a git and it took me five min to get the meaning! And I called her naive. And more words returned finally stuck at a loss of words. Not forgetting to mention Rahul for bringing back ‘status quo’ and ‘au revoir’ after long. More words. More people. From ‘alma mater’ to ‘iconoclast’.

Words are yet too few to thank them all and tell them how happy every single word makes me. Looking out for more words. Or may be, just another word!