"how do i love... "

i used to fancy myself as a poet once. i would make up verses – syllables carefully arranged, meters counted out, or sometimes deliberately avoid rhythms, just because – but, only when my heart would get broken. writing poems seemed the most dignified and creative way of getting back at the heartless men who didn’t know my worth. i haven’t kept those poems. i don’t believe they were worth keeping. the poems were basically angst-ridden, emotion-infested post-adolescence ramblings that wouldn’t have gotten me a Nobel or even a Booker nomination (i’m not sure if they give you Bookers for poetry).

in another phase, i used to be a conscientious keeper of journals. now when i flip through them, they seem to be overcrowded with men like a Blue-line bus bullying its way on a jam-packed Delhi road. It’s not easy to resist setting a match to these journals. to be less harsh on myself, the pages do have smatterings of my concerns for the health of the world and its underprivileged and how i could be the messiah and fix things.

however, on an average my ‘literary’ output seems to be proportionate to the intensity of the emotional shit in my life at that point. if i am not writing, that means i’m cruising along. since i haven’t been regularly updating my journal, that probably means life’s been treating me well for the past few months. or maybe, i’ve just grown up. and grown boring.