Homeland

What is to be at home in this world? Is it a person's historical position or the much celebrated conviction of  'same pool of blood' ? The midnight oil kept on burning faithfully leaving me ever vigilant  for getting an answer. After much drilling all I could settle for was the penchant for feeling 'rooted into' , a place which smells of one's desire, the gentle blossoming of early knowledge and not yet fully developed fantasies . It is the land where the diasporic lot wants to come back and die. It is a geo positional entity which exists not only in map but also in mind. Let me put it into some rhymes and give it a name ...

     
                  Coming into Being

    The journey was arduous
    But she kept me in care
    Opening the door to my new being
    Made me feel precious and rare
    Started with a bang I cried,
    "Mother, let me slip into again,
    It seems so barren and dried ,
    Clutched all in vain ."
    Kissed my forehead and blessed the angel
    Held me in coiling hands
    Muttered , "Child you need not fear
    This is your Homeland.
    Kings have come, crowns have gone
    Leaving shadows behind
    Gushes of blood , forces of love
    That'll keep you bind .
    A twitch in heart , a bloated throat
    Leave you with a smile ,
    Away from it in a far away land
    You will feel exile ."


And this careless verse of mine helped me to be landed as  the winner of a Creative Writing Competition organised by British Council Kolkata and Outset India. More than the chunk of  silver what I got was a newly earned confidence to follow 'the road less travelled'...
               

      

The Fact Penetrating

Tonight let me talk about something still considered formidable in Indian context, the much thought about and hardly spoken about subject 'Virginity'. Just a while ago some lines written on a friend's wall on a social networking site caught hold of my notice. The person who happens to be male by gender stated that all the women he had already slept with concocted some false stories about tearing of the hymen thereby claiming their state of being still as a virgin. 

VIRGIN... Yes, that's the word creating all illusions and their later transformation into disillusionment .

Virginity according to popular concept is a state of being virgin that is determined by the inexperience of penial-vaginal penetration , connected with the sexually inexperienced women. But the term has not confined itself within physical definition . Down the ages it has expanded itself to traditional ethical concepts which are culturally specific. As culture and religion are interwoven , so as virginity, sex and society. 

If we go by the jargons of societal norms ( specially in a country like India ) then sex is something best preserved for marriage where an important precondition on the part of the girl is purity and physical self restrain ( however misleading the terms are ). Another important contributor to this whole concept is the omnipotent hand of religion that tries to regulate every aspect of human life. Leave apart Christianity , Hinduism or Islam, even a religion like Buddhism that is considered favourable to progress or reform instructs the monks and nuns of most traditions to refrain from any sexual activity. 

Now the question which haunts me is that " what is the yardstick of the state of being pure? Is it only the lack of sexual activity before marriage? " If it is so then marriage can be taken as a mechanism to loose a girl's virginity thereby giving her a coupon to gratify her sexual desires. This I think narrows down the beauty of marriage as a union of two souls to the union of the private parts of two individuals. 

I am quite apprehensive about this degeneration of man woman relationship owing mainly to the concept of Virginity and Sex. In a desire to prove herself chaste and pure girls often tries to take resort to false stories by faking virginity thereby failing inadvertently the foremost stipulation in a relationship and that is honesty. The consequence reaches far beyond than this making woman a puppet in a show case incapable of voicing her wishes and desire... Here breeds the paternal hegemony of the society. 

Don't you think therefore, that the whole concept of Virginity is a conspiracy to propagate influence on people's choice of life in general? Time has arrived that we drag down the wall between falsity and honesty ... between virginity and heart's craving for liberation from any narrow confine.