इजाज़त देखने के बाद, रेखा के लिए

कितनी बार तुम्हें मना किया
माया को मत आने दो इस घर में
पर शायद माया से यह तुम्हारा बदला था
घर बुलाकर उसे परायेपन का एहसास कराना
फिर कभी-कभी लगता था
मुझे समझने के लिए,
माया को समझना ज़रूरी है तुम्हारे लिए
उसे अपनाकर तुम,खुद अपनाया जाना चाहती थीं
एक रोज़ auto में
बहुत देर मेरे चुप रहने पर
तुमने दबे होंठों से मेरे मुस्कुराने के लिए कहा था
"मुझे भी bike चलाना सीखना hai"
और फिर ऐसे हँसी थीं जैसे
बच्चे को खेल में जिताके माँ हँसती है
ऐसा लगा था कि तुमने मुझसे कहा हो
"देखो तुम्हारी माया थोड़ी बहुत मुझ में भी है कहीं "
तुम्हें ज़ोर से गले लगाया था, प्यार किया था
फिर तुमने हँसी भरी आवाज़ में पूंछा था
" यह मेरे लिए है, या माया के लिए "
मैंने बिना सोचे बोला "माया के लिए "
"बडे कमीने हो तुम " , हँस कर मेरे कंधे पर से कहा था तुमने
आज लगता है वोह मज़ाक नहीं, सच में गाली थी तुम्हारी ।

तीखा वार

फ़ोन पर लड़आई ताखिये से कि तुमसे
बिल्कुल बच्चों कि तरह
न चोट हुई
न जीत कि कोशिश
बस डर था कि बगल के बूथ में
कोई यह नादानी सुनकर, हंसी करेगा
फिर पता नहीं क्यों
मैंने एक तीखा वार किया
"अब से तुम्हारी सब चिठियाँ बिन पढ़े फाढ़ दूंगा "
तुम्हारे जवाबी वार का दर्द
अभी भी तुम्हारी चिठियाँ पढने पे होता है
सब कुछ जान के भी
बड़ी नादाँ बनती थीं तुम
तुमने कहा था
"फाढ़ दो, तुम्हारी मरज़ी, तकलीफ तुम्हीं को होगी "

Non-man meets Non-woman part-1

I am a man of interesting stories and strange experiences। Someone who fits in well for well spent evenings but not for well spent lives. Across the dining tables and over coffee mugs, I have often seen them giggling, smiling with joy in my company. Amused they were, with my histrionics and mockery of my foolish self, clumsy and nonchivalrous ways and unconcerned ways of living. But that amusement is not to be bought for a lifetime. Only a few evenings can be spared for it. What do I choose now, the evenings, the lifetimes or my foolish ways. I guess none. I don’t want to choose, I want to be chosen on one such evening when the amusement I offer will be sold for a lifetime.

The woman who will choose such an amusement for a life time will be a person with an extremely sad life, a life lived unloved. Not hated, but unloved. She will be a beautiful woman who doesn’t know how beautiful she is. Perhaps because her sister was more beautiful than her, at least that was what all her relatives felt and eventually she agreed to it or rather made it appear true. She will be a wonderful singer but she would never sing for any body. She would dance like a mad man perfectly beat on beat but only at times when no one is watching or at times when she couldn’t care for gazing eyes. Her present will have no events of great consequence and her past will be a perturbed childhood.
Such nun like loneliness would accept my unmanly ways for a lifetime. Only a NON-WOMAN will accept the NON-MAN that I am. Sadness of a loner will be the breeding ground for a relationship with a sad man, a man or rather a non-man who is sad for not having met a sad non-woman. She won’t be amused with me like others who are not non-woman. She will be amused to see what she always saw in herself, her doubts, weaknesses, insecurities, pains, inabilities. And now she will know and understand that most of them were self assumed. She assumed herself to be a non-woman and kept hiding from a world of men and women. This one evening of amusement with me will make that non woman feel complete; make her know that she was always a woman, it was just that she couldn’t realize it. Men and women are very different. But Non-men and Non-women are not.

रिक्शे से मंदिर तक

रिक्शे पर मंदिर के सामने
तुम्हारे हाथ छुढाने से नाराज़ होकर
जब क़मर पकड़ ली थी मैंने
कितने घूँसे सीने पे मारे थे तुमने
फिर चुपचाप बैठ गयी थी मुस्कुरा कर
जैसे मेरे हाथ से कोई परहेज़ ना हो
रिक्शेवाले ने भी मुसकुराकर रिक्शा धीमे किया था
तुम्हें gate पर goodnight बोलकर
उसे पांच रूपये ज्यादा दिए थे
आज सालों बाद जब तुम्हारे शहर में रिक्शे से मंदिर गया
तो दिल बहुत भारी भारी था
सीने में तेज़ दर्द उठा
उस रोज़ घूँसे बहुत ज़ोर से मारे थे शायद तुमने

Honorable Dramatist

Is it arrogance that is making me wait? Arrogance, that I can’t accept anything lesser than you. Or is it the innocence of a strong headed child who sees nothing except for what he has liked once. Words, I thought would make it look small, stupid, disrespectful. Touch was an expression which cannot be replaced by words. May be you understood, may be you didn’t. May be the pretence of ignorance is important for your dignity, honor. Honor! What a trap is that. The honor of not confessing the need to be loved. The honor of not giving in to the desires which make you what you are. Make you the one who is to be loved by none other than me. Yes I know this is arrogance. To Love you for only I can love you. To love you to make you good enough for my love. To love you for you to realize that you are nothing without it. That is what my love does to you. That’s why you are so scared of it. My brutal honesty prevents you from believing what you want to believe for your pleasure. I show you your own face so clearly that you dislike it. Why cant you accept that, that is what is your beauty? Well, yes that is what I call beautiful.
Our definitions are so different!

You mask yourself because you hate to believe that emotions have a mind of their own. They have!! And they should have! You think it’s not honorable to think about yourself when love is what is expected of you, this is a dogma from which you can’t break free. Your masks are to protect yourself from your own vulnerability. You can’t allow anybody to know his indispensability and that’s why you wear those cold eyes to refrain from expressing too much. That’s why so many desired hugs are suspended, so many wanted kisses rejected, so many tears are strangled to death even before they reach your cold eyes, so many soulful smiles are turned into laughter’s of mockery, so many could-have-been-evenings of joy had turned into sleepless long nights, so many letters are written but not sent, so many questions of insanity have been answered with ruthless practicality. Why can’t you expose your madness, your needs, and your hunger for more? Is the dogma of honor to be big to be risked? Or is the sustenance of your enigma more important than its achievements? You are either afraid of your own emotions or you are thrilled by the hope that all of it will be discovered by them without your expression. Or may be not expressing it all is a trick to create the enigma, to maintain the curiosity.

You want to be controlled, but in a particular way which you have decided. You have set the parameters, the equations, the values which will be allowed to be manipulated, governed, and controlled. Beyond that and apart from that you are not ready to share, to allow the control in other hands. But I am able to snatch it. That is what is your complain, your fear. I might control too much to be within your control. You control others by allowing them to control you to a certain extent. The amount of control I snatch from you is more than that limit. When you say, you don’t want to talk, I reply "As you wish" because I know you can’t answer my arrogance with your silence. When you question me whys, I answer you why not’s. When you answer me with indifference I answer you with mockery, mockery at your feigned bravery of attempting to stand it all alone. When you mock at me, I laugh in amusement at this old trick which fails to hurt me. When you pretend to be in love, I know you are guilty conscious. When you ask for favor, I know you are allowing me a chance to feel important. When you ask for my hand, I hold you with gratitude for helping me believe my strength. When you weep in despair, I know that it’s because you could not hurt them enough to feel satisfied. When you laugh in hysteria, I know that you are hiding the pain. When you speak too much, I know you won’t be able to bear even a moment of silence between us. I play the innocent child by not letting you know that I know it all. Though the truth is, that you know it all so well, and that is what makes you stay away from me. The reason why I love you is the reason why I am not allowed to!

I fail to put in words and you deny the expression of touch. The audacity to allow the touch challenges your chastity, the insufficiency of words challenges my intentions. Honor, dignity, respect, conventions are nothing but the devices to massacre, to kill emotions which are not made by human minds. But may be I am disillusioned. Who knows may be my emotions are nothing but age old dogmas. May be I am feeling what I think I am supposed to feel, what I have been taught to feel. I have tried to sustain all my questions by not answering them, if possible by not asking them in the first place. Brutal honesty is a curse. Am I cursed?? Ruthless truthfulness, I thought was a device to unmask you. To let you know that I know you too well to not to love you. Your smile is no more a deception to me. It’s an acceptance of you weaknesses. To me your anger is your rage against your inability to live up to your desires. You laugh among men to make them believe that they amuse you. I know you are amusing yourself by laughing amongst them, a cynic’s laughter, a laughter of a murderer who laughs outside the court when acquitted. I know if I tell you all that, you want shy. You will hold your head in pride for ruthlessly running down those who seek your beauty. They might accuse of playing with their hearts, minds, of making them believe what you wanted them to believe. But I know that they are victim of their hopes. Hopes of seeking strength, heroism from someone they thought considered them a hero. They were not heroes on their own .You created heroes amongst them for fulfillment of your desire to live amongst equals. And in moments of indulgence you at times believed your imagination; you believed them to be real heroes which they were not. They should thank you for giving them the moments of glory in which they will bask through out their life. But they don’t know it; they accuse you of betrayal, infidelity. Oh! The biggest weakness of a man is to not know his weaknesses.

But then again I doubt, am I also an imaginary hero bestowed with qualities which I actually don’t possess just for your amusement. My brutal honestly, ruthless truthfulness, insight is nothing but just a manifestation of your wishful thinking. May be I am just being or believing that I am what you want me to be. Even if this is true, then I thank you with all my heart to have chosen me for your amusement. I wish I was insane enough not to question the reality of my existence for you. Do I exist for you as I really do or your imagination makes me something for your pleasure? Oh! What a great artist you are! a dramatist who has a stage in mind where characters enter, exit wearing masks of your choice, in lights you choose them to be in, on a background score which fits into your feelings. I wish I could stand up to the dramatist you are. I wish I could act well enough, long enough in your mind to let the play go on. !! I beg of you, don’t assassinate the character I am playing. I will improve. I will become better; I will be clown enough, to make u laugh. I will be murderer enough to thrill you. I will be lover enough to gloom you; I will be hero enough to make you victorious. Just don’t put off the lights, let the background music play, let me have some more lines. If not lines, just give me a coffin in your mind to lie down. I will wear a mask on my face that will keep your eyes unmoved for a long time. When you are tired of looking at it, I will become a ghost, a raven, phantom, a messiah, a wish, a fairy, and a witch ....what all I can be after I am dead. Even if I don’t have lines to say, I will be actor enough to amuse you. Just don’t let the curtains fall on me. I don’t mind co actors. Let them do their part .Let them be heroes for your amusement. Those men of honor and courage, who have been bestowed with the crown in the play with in your head, will finally be murdered secretly. Yes, they will be murdered; this is how you write your plays. I know your trick, your plots. I have always known them. Then newer heroes will be born out of your imagination. I just want to be the character which is used as a device to build the subplot for the emergence of heroes and for their murder. That’s how I will live, even in a coffin, or even as a ghost. That’s how I demand my existence.

Politics of Love-part 2

It’s during these experiments you experience your creative faculties. You learn to create. You have gone through too much to keep it to your self. Your knowledge is too powerful, too magnanimous to be contained. That woman fails to be a human being for you from now on. She becomes a character for you .Just a mere character. That’s the ruthlessness of love, of knowledge. You are in love with not a being but with an interesting character now. With the experiences you had with it and the experiences she had with other men. All the men in her life become your protagonists, villains, narrators…characters. You are the writer-lover now. That’s how love becomes an act of selfishness. It empowers you with the capacity to see beyond the feelings, feelings which are nothing but age old dogmas. The confession box, you were who acquired the knowledge of her guilt, crimes, joys, and struggles, has now chosen to use it for his benefit, for his enjoyment. He becomes a story teller now. You have so many characters, the ones who loved her, the ones she loved, the ones she deceived, the ones she couldn’t, the ones she desired, the ones she acquired…oh so many of them…and above all there is SHE herself. The biggest pain is to see your self as a character in her life. You have to be brutal with your self, merciless like you have been with her. It hurts to be just a character; after all you loved her to conquer her, to be a hero. But now it’s time to grow up, to be more than a hero. The desire to be just a hero is killed, and knowledge is to be given a vent to create masterpieces. If you can do that you conquer your consciousness. And then again the politics of love comes into play. At no time she should know about this aspiration of yours. Your conspiracy to attain your creative heights should be hidden. The moment she knows that you are using her for self actualization, she will become deceptive, untrue in her narration to you. Doors to knowledge will be closed. That is where you have to play the trick. You are a story teller only while holding a pen and not her hand. The moment she sees the pleasure in your eyes when she is narrating to you her tragedy, she will start lying, hiding. She is the one who has inspired you to write, to create. She is the one who has empowered you with knowledge, with courage to see the truth beyond it is seen. She has given you the chance to plunder, explore and experience. And it is she from whom you have to hide it all. She is selfish just as you are, you are there for her only till you serve a purpose. The purpose of comforting, strengthening, and helping her believe what she wants to believe. You have been given a role of a guardian, a sympathizer, a listener not for your amusement but for her pleasure. You are not supposed to be amused by it that is the condition which is placed when she confides in you. Confidants are not supposed to be story tellers. But you commit the crime of being one, and you can sustain it only if you are a smart and ruthless criminal. Love is blind and love is ruthless too.

Beyond this I think GB Shaw should take over, for he understands it more than any body else. I am quoting a dialogue from his play "MAN AND SUPERMAN", delivered by the character TANNER

“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them.”

The Politics of Love

Love is about the curiosity to understand the enigma initially. Then it’s about to live with the knowledge of your discovery. You start up with the exercise of solving the mystery, to know the hidden. To discover, to experiment, to try and to justify your own perception of life, love and god. In the process, your existing perceptions are broken and newer ones are formed. That adds to the beauty of love. That keeps the thrill. That insures sustenance of love and the desire for more. Its about the curiosity to know how she thinks, loves, hates, betrays, tricks, hurts, cribs, plays, selects, survives, fights, tries, loses, wins, assures, inspires... lives. That curiosity even goes to the extent of seeing her sleep with men. Yes it would hurt you but then that sight would tell you what a great choice you made!!
To hear the voice of her orgasmic pleasures with different bodies and attitudes. Sex is not only pleasure. It is the device to know, to hurt, to confess. Your turn would come and the orgasmic pleasures would be taken over by the pleasure of knowledge. Knowledge, that you know her so well, so completely. A slight twist here, an intentional mistake there, a mischief, a crime and she is pleading for more. She will hold your hand but her grip becomes firmer only when you firm your grip. When you know this before holding her hand, then you don’t enjoy the touch, you enjoy knowing it when the grip becomes firmer. That is the pleasure of curiosity, of love. Knowledge to me is the beginning of love. Once you know her whats, you have to move on to know her whys. You then know why she does what she does. She debates loudly because she had a sister who was more beautiful than she was. She fights so ruthlessly because she failed in pre-board exams in high school and then topped the boards. She hides so much because she wanted to love a computer geek but she could not. She betrays so much because she was accused of infidelity by a man whom she really loved. She seeks so much because she was 2 and a half years old when she fell in love with her cousin and lost him to the customs of the world. When you know it all, then she fails to hurt you, betray you. You will rationalize, explain, justify whatever she does. That knowledge is what makes you live with her for ever. Her betrayal becomes a part of your knowledge. Her ways of hurting, insulting become the part of her picture which was incomplete before she did that to you. The more complete the picture, the more beautiful it is. Besides that, you know why she is what she is. That makes it divine, unsurpassable.
And that amount of knowledge prevents you from loving someone else. You don’t have the capacity to love someone else, to know someone else so much. Yes you might still have the impulse to experiment, to try, to even discover, but not for the sake of loving but for the fun of using your knowledge, testing it as an exercise to hone your skills for loving the real women better. All other women become dummies, on which you experiment, test try, learn and prove your superiority by virtue of your knowledge. I don’t know if this is a crime, but this is the truth for sure. A man loves only one woman, the woman who gives her knowledge about herself, about love, about life, about god, and above all, about himself. Rest all women in his life are laboratories.

Love is a journey from knowing the WHATS to knowing the WHYS. If the answers to whats fail to keep your interest, it all evaporates. If answers to whys are not sufficient then it becomes confusing, disturbing, even hurting.





After you have known her so well, the enigma is gone. The divinity is gone, the magic is all so well explained. Now you have the desire to conquer, possess, plunder, play and make her suffer. Not only for your pleasure but also for her to feel complete. She knows that you know. You know that she knows that you know. That is the beginning of conversation without words. No relation is complete without the hurts. There is no relation which is just Love-love relation. It has to be a Love-hate relationship. She knows your weaknesses, and she knows that you know that she knows. But she never speaks of it. Though her eyes have spoken about it so many times. You know her deceits, her tricks and you know that she knows that you know. But you won’t mention it in words. You will mention it when you ram her down when she is layed. That’s the politics of love. She will cry not out of pain of the hurt but out of the knowledge that you have known it all and have forgiven it by knowing everything completely. Similarly you will grumble in frustration while you look at yourself in mirror for being inadequate, and you will love her for accepting you. That inspires you to be lover enough, man enough. You are not lover enough if you don’t try to win her completely. And no man is man enough to be loved by a woman without being hated at the same time. No woman is woman enough to be loved by a man without being punished. That’s the only cute-war known to mankind. Knowledge-love-justice. And the politics of it all.

All the pains, inspirations, crimes, punishments that you go through is what is the achievement of love. That is what love achieves for you. It makes you go through so much. It makes you a survivor. You love to survive. Though you can love without surviving. Its insanity to love and not to survive but insanity is also a kind of survival. Insanity, for some is inevitable, for some it is a defense mechanism and for some it is a device for creativity The experiment on dummies and in laboratories produces brilliant pieces of art work. The accidents with the real subject of love become experiments on dummies. Though the real subject of love is not spared of experiments. But fear of going wrong prevents the researcher or the artist from going to the limits. You write the most dangerous line in the message box of yahoo messenger and keep your finger on ENTER, that insanity of a lover makes him creative. In the moments before he presses the key or deletes what he has written, he giggles, enjoys and creates. The adventure of not knowing what will happen if he sends it. The pleasure of not knowing whether he will send it or not. On dummies, ENTER and on inspirations, its delete.

I will write more in the next part of the post but before that I will quote G.B.Shaw. have quoted this phrase of his so many times and I still keep quoting it because I don’t believe someone other than me has written it.
“The most treacherous and remorseless of all battles is the battle between the artist man and the mother woman”