Gotta get up and try try try

I first really really wanted to blog when, back in 2008, I chanced upon Girl With A One Track Mind and just could NOT stop reading it (go through the archives!). It was blocked in my office so had to go through proxies to read it. Hehe. Imagine licking clean the whole blog in your one month notice period, and gulping as you go. Also, stumbled upon Meenakshi Reddy's blog and it's really no surprise that my blog url has been heavily influenced by it.

What really captured my attention was with how much liberation these women were writing - about their careers, their sexual escapades, their families & friends, and as a limited 23 year old, I would vicariously live their lives, hoping some day I would have stories of my own as interesting or exciting.  

"Interesting" came fairly late, but did come nonetheless and maybe I should've just been anonymous to be able to discuss them here. Heehee. But with all the talks of feminism these days, I can't help but wonder if it's a privilege to be able to write that way or a necessity. Why should I be anonymous to be able to write freely? Why the mudslinging and the slut-shaming if one were to talk about their life? Maybe there are more female blogs out there (on such topics) because we feel the need to rebel against the current social structure. Sometimes we go out of our way to claim the rightful spot in this world, even if it means being ridiculed because you know someday your tiny step will lead to a larger change. Do you get me, dear reader?

Through a YouTube discussion on something as trivial as girls moshing to a metal cover of a pop song, I realized there are young, educated men out there who have no sense of the concept of equality. Let me correct myself because Joss Whedon said "Equality is not a concept, it's a necessity" and that makes total frikkin sense. Those men believe women have no right to "mosh" and doing so, they're making the metal fans out there feel ashamed. This is ludicrous! And I refuse to rant more over it. They've probably never heard that Music is Universal. They sound like those 10 year old boys from Hollywood movies who claim to have formed a ClubHouse where girls are not allowed because they're evil. 

Freedom. I figured we don't NEED freedom on a url or on a YouTube video. What we need is freedom in real life. And though my parents have been anal about this and that all my life (majorly because I lived in Delhi), they never made me feel like I can't achieve something because I'm not male or there are designated activities/careers for men and women, never made me feel like my freedom to express myself should be curbed because "what will people say!" or "this is not how girls should behave" and for that I will forever be indebted to them. And, funnily, because of the same thing, I don't understand when my fellow gender sharers are mousy and appreciate (or even ridicule) how "liberated" my mind and actions are, because that's the way I've been brought up. That's inherent in my nature; I genuinely don't understand when people compartmentalize everything into brackets of male and female. That's inherent in my brother's nature; in all my life, I've never heard him discriminate against women, and that makes me so proud of my family.

I once dated a guy who said to me "Don't get me wrong but I'm not sure how to handle a female personality as strong as yours". For a second I felt offended. But then I realized, perhaps he wasn't brought up that way. But he was making the effort to work around it. 

That's all we ask. For you to make an effort. Women and men alike. Me too, in some ways. Please keep an open mind. A mind without filters and prejudices. It's so much more easier than you think. Trust me.

Knife!

Took some rough lyrics, begged Prateek to help me out, put some melody to the words, structured out the thing and here we are.

Presenting...*ding ding ding* a rough recording of Knife
https://soundcloud.com/archita-trisal/knife

Like always, don't hate it!

Knife lyrics

I'm not going to ask you to let your sleeping demons lie
I won't let you to kill yourself a little bit inside
Every day, every hour

Mobbed by these thoughts you don't let peace get to you
You let the love of sadness to stick to you like glue
Every day, every hour

Where is your knife?
Murder it, murder it
Put up the fight
Step in the daylight
Who'll clean this up?
Icky cerebrum on your floor
Where is your knife?
Get up now.

Between gallows and being friends with your spirit noose
You pass your insipid life drowned in this abuse
Every day, every hour

One day this mirror won't reflect the romance in your head
Save yourself that moment when all you see is red
Every day, every hour

Where is your knife?
Murder it, murder it
Put up the fight
Step in the daylight
Who'll clean this up?
Icky cerebrum on your floor
Where is your knife?
Get up now.

Credits

Vocalist: Archita Trisal
Lyrics: Archita Trisal
Guitars: Prateek Dubey

Where is my mind

I'm not quite sure what to say or where to begin. There are days I love putting unedited thoughts here, without a care about who's reading and what you, the reader, interpret about my psyche or my personality, and then there are days I feel like I'm a prisoner to my own expression. Sometimes I wish to vent about certain people that affect me but they're all on my social network and I wonder if a public personal diary hung out to dry was really worth it.

Most times I feel even my friends don't understand me or find this funny and pull my leg or worry when they read something untoward and I know it's all in my best interest or jest but I find myself more and more vulnerable with each passing day. I've been told vulnerability is a sign of weakness, so I compensate for it in my non-virtual world. Not sure if this blog has done me any good by giving my passive aggression an outlet or changed the way people look at me and perceive me (for the good or for the worse). Sometimes it's just nicer when they acknowledge having read it with a 'Like' on Facebook (or not, no pressure) and don't bring it up in a regular conversation (unless to really discuss the subject matter at hand, to agree or disagree with what they've read). The discomfort of it all makes my non-corny side cringe. But, having confessed to this blog for over 4 1/2 years, to think of life without it, without an unrestrained and not-imposed-upon monologue, is a little difficult. Call it addiction, call it the voice that refuses to quit, I don't know.

What started off as a relentless quest to package my love in sweetness and in anger towards a particular person seamlessly became a platform for me to put out something silly, something I feel strongly about or an attempt Neruda. There have been tons of bouquets, few detractors and for them I'm thankful. Some views I still stand by, some views turned out to be more malleable, but over the last 4 year timeline of my life, I've had plenty conversations with complete strangers and that's a thrill hard to shake off.

I do, however, face a dilemma every time I write. Sometimes a post takes days or weeks for it to be ok in my head to be published. There's a fine line between narrating an incident involving certain people close to you, revealing things about them or about their lives they might not wish to and running the risk of offending them, because obviously it's my life too, my blog and I shall write the way I see things. My intention may not be malign anybody but it might come out that way. And that's why, even though I might have only about 10 people reading a given post, I'm not quite assured that the person it concerns will not read it, perhaps ignore it or be pragmatic about it.

So that's the reason why I blog, but don't blog as often as I did. I felt this was necessary just as a future and past disclaimer. And that's why songwriting and poetry can be such an ambiguous outlet :)