Faceless

I forfeited my face to the social media,
Immersed in the LCD screen of my smartphone
So have you, you, you, you and most of you
The "smart" generation; lost in the virtual world....

I was in a restaurant with my (now) ex-best friend
Four years ago we met; to chat and exchange pleasantries
All he did was to glance at his phone every now and then;
So much for best friendship....

I am talking to you, but you are looking down,
Looking at your screen, waiting for a message
Which will never come,  from someone far away
Completely ignoring me, pretending that you are listening.

Yes I am addicted too, to that screen
Which emits blue light; we all seek it
Like insects seek the light...
Yet the sight of myself or someone else
Looking down at it annoys me...
"Social" we are on the media,
Outside it islands looking down
Blocking out sights, people, life....

The screen is an excuse, to escape
And not face the world,
When I feel timid and lonely
In a group of people
Or just because I feel bored or left out
From a conversation everyone is having
Or just because there is no conversation at all...

My head is held low, not out of shame,
But I am trying to find a way in the world,
Staring at the Google map, instead of  looking out
Of my window seat at the sights on my way....

I see a person opposite me; I don't know who that is,
'Coz they are too "busy" browsing on their phone
Looking down, their face barred from sight.
I see another person, again faceless,
Busy posing for a selfie.
May be I will find out who it is on FB or instagram...
The places where I redeem my narcissistic ego....

I am eating delicious food, got to click it before I eat
Because no matter how good is the flavour
Click I must before I savour....

I have to "live moments" and "show" the world how cool I am
So I take selfies in places, infront of monuments...
But the frame is full of me and me alone,
But just believe me I was there just that the camera wasn't wide enough.
Adventures don't seem so without a phone video, a selfie or a groupie..
So obsessed am I with looking at the phone for that adventure selfie
That I can't see that I am falling off the cliff...
Oh wait I will go "live", hashtag this #freefallbeforetheskullbreaks...

Addiction, addiction everywhere, eyes kept open all the time,
Too much info all the time, relayed and relayed and relayed....
Never ending stream of pictures, lectures, opinions, news, controversies...

Makes me guilty of this OCD; of having to check that screen at times
Of having to feel "incomplete" without that droid, ignoring all the real humans,
Alive and around me...

So immersed inside that screen and the numerous apps,
I forget the sights and sounds of real life...
Would we be needing a handheld LCD device to understand
Smell, taste and touch too? Wait touch is already there,
The monotonous touches and swipes which make the addiction easier...

Addiction so severe, that makes me think,
Why can't I watch the sunset, without the urge to click
Without the urge to go online and share immediately
When I am missing the whole beautiful sunset
While I am busy sharing just one picture?
No a video won't help, because there are certain
Things like sunset or the moonrise which have to be "watched"
And "experienced", a snapshot won't help....

And there are other things like the feel of the wind
Against your skin; the feel of standing in the waves,
Which pull the sand beneath your feet away...
And the feeling of being in the rain....
Thank goodness I don't want a phone to experience them.

So addicted am I to the radio and electronics enabled technology
That I have forgotten about the EM spectrum and the electrons,
To gaze at the night sky and remind myself how much I love them,
To "see" the sights the visible range can show me back down on Earth,
To "hear" the real sounds around me; to come out of the 2D world
Into the 3D real world, savour it, love it and live it....
Am I a faceless addict or is this all part of human evolution?

Why I hate love : the story of mathematical induction...

I have been wanting to write this post for a long long time, deterred only by the hesitation that people may feel bad because of certain of my views. I apologize prior to proceeding any further if I have unknowingly hurt anybody's feelings. This post doesn't involve those who have found real love (real as in genuine soul to soul) and is only for those who have been hurt a lot because of love.

*********************************************************************************

The reason why I came to this issue was all the questions from different quarters "when are you getting married?", "why don't you want to get married?" and so on. Honestly speaking the only reason I won't wed anyone is just because I cannot marry someone whom "I" do not love. And I am a failure at love. If there is anything I cannot achieve with my own hard work it is to gain someone's romantic love, just because it is a two particle system and then the other particle also happens to be a human being with a will! So I have kind of given upon this and probably this is the only thing I have ever given up in my life and probably will be the one thing I will continue to give up in my life. I no longer want to love anyone ever again in life :

1) Because I cannot take the stress of heartbreak because it is very time consuming and too much labour for your tear glands.
2) There is no guarantee that this romance will last forever.
3) It is emotionally taxing to have a heartbreak if the other person breaks your heart and
4) Your realization that you were naive enough to believe that you need a partner because everyone else has when you actually didn't want one at all and deep down you are not someone made in the mold to love someone romantically.

   Love is an extremely overrated emotion. Atleast romantic love is. Because it is so fanciful that it sells well and people buy it because they want to escape the issues of their daily lives and who doesn't love the floss of a candy floss romance movie at the end of a tiring day? The images projected to us by movies (and other media but majority by movies and tv) make us believe that romance is an inevitable thing in life! And that those who do not have partners are weirdos or losers or "frustrated". As teenagers we start believing in these ideas, for, as being human beings we are gullible to these things. So in teenage you "love" someone but that someone turns out to have a "lover" and this knowledge probably brings  your first heartbreak. You cry over days on end, pray, plead to God and wish upon everything possible for this person to love you back. But no! Life is not fair; you will never be loved by this person no matter how hard your heart is broken. What choices does one have at this time? Will you commit suicide because your first love doesn't appreciate your love and has eyes and heart only for someone else? Or will you cry for the rest of your school days and ruin your studies? Or will you get depressed and fall into the dark pits of sadness that it is impossible for you to get back to your normal self? The choice is yours. But the choice has to be wise. I have gone through such a phase in my teenage (for which many of my friends still believe I am stupid enough to still think about that one person from school!!) I too did cry, I too did fall into the pits of darkness. My heart was torn apart. I endured watching the romance of the person on whom I had this feeling with pain and cried silently. But one day I stopped crying and pulled myself back. That was all by myself and I did not give up on my studies and stood first in school. That is something which I am always proud of doing. Had I took a knife and cut my vein or hung on a piece of rope, 15 years later I would not have been able to laugh at it and pat on my back for enduring this suffering (great suffering at the age of 15) and coming out as a stronger person.

      So much for teenage "romance". This teenage romance continues with age and as people grow up from 15 to 20s one can always hear stories like so and so ran away with so and so and all. So and so will run away and then end up in a messed up situation. Which used to make me wonder why did girls have to run away with someone and risk their life, education and a prospect for a good livelihood. Because sometimes you run away on adrenaline and then endure domestic violence, lack of job and so on for the rest of your life. That is not something good. So personally I used to dislike the prospect of running away with some random person just because of adrenaline burst. I cannot comment anything about what happens between 17-20 since I was in a women's college and had no chance to witness romance and such things!! :)

       When a person reaches the tweens they become more mature and probably the "romances" they pick up are mature too. But from my own experience I will call tweens also pretty silly. People do all kinds of stupid things in their tweens - like honestly believing in the spoon fed dreams of "happily ever after" and even "love" people whom they have not even met!! The other major heartbreak in my life came from such a friendship (the person was real but ironically it was a gmail/talk "love"). Now you can either call me stupid for "loving" a guy whom I hadn't even met. But now that I rethink about it, the guy also entertained and misled me because he could just have told the truth that there was another girl (makes you wonder why people think that telling the truth that there is another person is going to hurt you a lot. Is that because they think of you as immature as themselves?) That person could just have told the truth and I would have just accepted it and lived happily (ofcourse this person had to behave odd and drive me crazy:  a) because I was taking all this love business seriously (now I wish I hadn't wasted my time on this idiot; EW :/ ), b) because he probably had a screw loose and was not a straightforward person. It broke me very hard. I even felt depressed to a certain extent. And was really really sad and almost lost myself. Too many tears were shed, heart cut deep when pain flowed out of eyes like blood. It was hard to keep track of my mind. I felt I would never be happy again. But one day I just stopped crying because I had reached my saturation level and it had literally become boring. It was not an easy process to pull myself back, I had to read a lot, watch movies, clear my mind, write dairy, write a blog and had a PhD to do. But eventually I forgot this person and the associated people who criticised my character saying that "you chose a guy and expect them to fall for you"? Which actually made me think and this question always bothers me a lot. Is it not exactly what men/guys do? Don't they "mark a woman and make her fall for him"? Why does a women get called as a stalker but a man doesn't when he ceremoniously stalks a girl/woman and acts like a predator going for the kill? Then how does it make any woman who chooses a man and expects him to love her a creepy one when all she is doing is to sit and wish and probably express it with lot of tears (because she sincerely loves this person at that point of time) and have to undergo great emotional turmoil? Why does a girl gets told that she has to accept if a guy rejects her but she cannot reject a guy if he proposes her? This is complete inequality. The girl who churned out (I am ashamed to say that it was a girl, a member of the female gender) this bit of knowledge (and used the word "fall for" (which was very cheap) was probably very cunning and cruel. That's all I can think of that person now.

 Anyway after this painful ordeal of the second major heartbreaking I was extremely relieved. I again pulled myself up and got on with my research life which was more important. It was not a great experience, my heart got broken, a random person who doesn't even mean anything in my life insulted my character (as if I was a man hunter! EW GROSS!) But the good thing that came out of it was that I emerged as a very strong person. Infact I am thankful that the first one also broke my heart, the second one too and rejected me, because if they had accepted my "love" I would have been a divorced person or a jobless wrecked person by now. Look at my fate, I used to curse it that "there is always another girl". But now I can say happily, "thank goodness for my fate because I am not in a life threatening or heart wrenching mess right now, thanks to my being rejected by those people at that time!" :) Eventhough it caused me enormous pain back then, I am really grateful that I did not have to interact with them in any way looking what their lives evolved into as a result of their choices.

 Two minor heartbreaks occurred after these, but they were not so life shaping in their respects but again there were other girls!! :) But I am not sad now that those things happened to me. In a way it is good that my heart was broken because everytime it broke, I became stronger and stronger. To the point that I realized that I do not need a partner to be happy. It is not like the fox who said that the unavailable grapes are sour!! It is more like the fox doesn't want grapes at all. Because being fixated on grapes only will ruin its prospect of getting other fruits to eat. Just like grapes is not the only edible fruit out there, love is not the most important thing in life. And that none of these "loves" came true is a boon to me because men have a habit of showing their ugliest faces when a woman loves him and he doesn't love her back (in other words is fixated on another woman and wants to "get rid of" this woman who loves him). And that makes you wonder how well does this person treat women in general and what kind of a person he is.

 It is good that I was "rejected" by those people (moronic mcps)  because:

1) My love is not to be wasted on some random misogynistic person who does not know how to respect all women in the world.

2) But romance/love itself is a commodity to be sold as movies and novels and nothing else.

3) Makes you pity the women for whom he rejected you because there is no guarantee that he won't reject them for another person and so the chain will continue and in the end the world will reject this person!

4) It made me really actually realize my true feelings that I do not believe in love. I was stupid enough to buy the commodity called love thinking that it was inevitable in one's life and think that it will suit me and I needed it to be someone in life.  But it does not. Neither does suit me nor is it inevitable. I was the kind of person who did not believe in romance to begin with. The problem was that I was stupid enough to force it on me thinking that it is needed for a happy life in a person's life. It did not work also because deep down in my heart, I do not like the idea of "belonging to someone" ("What? Belong to someone? Am I an object that I belong to someone? And who is this someone anyway?!!")  The only person I truly belong to is me and me only. This is true for all people. Everyone truly belongs to themselves only. Everyone else has only partial rights on your "belongingship". If that is the case why can't I be single at all?!

            Honestly I don't understand the idea of a being "double". :D People say that you may feel lonely in your life. I have tackled enough lonliness in my life that I have come to terms with it and I know exactly well how to tackle it. Thanks to all the lessons I learned from my heartbreaks. It is better to be alone rather than to try to belong to someone who hurts you and brings you immense pain no matter how truly you love them. It is also better to be alone to avoid heartbreaks because it is a waste of time and you are not young any more to indulge in silly stuff like that. You have only one life and your aim should be to make a mark in what you do best and be remembered for that. Nobody remembers people for romancing someone. And as far as being lonely in life is concerned, how can anyone feel lonely if they enjoy their own company themselves. If you have enough books to read or enough things to do in life when will you ever have time to feel lonely? Loneliness is just a perspective. You can be lonely in a madding crowd and be sad or be alone and be perfectly happy.

           Everybody loves the idea of love; probably even more than a person itself! When you get rejected by a person it raises a lot of questions in your mind. The first thing which you think is "what do I lack"? Because rejection hurts your ego. Sometimes more than not "getting that person's love" it is the injury to your ego which makes you sad. This is to all people who might have gone through such a situation. There is nothing wrong with you. Either something is wrong with them (in which case it was good that you were rejected in the first place which means that you don't have to carry this burden around for the rest of your life). And in the case where nothing is wrong with anyone, it is just a person's freedom to choose whom they love or not. (The irony being, I have to reiterate, that if it is a guy who rejects and if the girls cries all her eyes out sincerely he will call her extremely bad names and the girl "must accept it" but if it is a girl who rejects it he will prey upon her, abuse her, assault her and try to impose his will on her because she "must accept his love". :X :X :X How unfair?!! This makes me hate love even more. Actually most of the time people don't gain anything other than useless feuds and heartaches in by loving someone. I still wonder how romance works. Is it logical? Is it predatory (most of the times when a man romances a woman I feel it is predatory : he prepares well, plans well and circles in on the girl, it is pretty predatory!Whereas women are very decent and love sincerely and get hurt by MCPs. :/ :/ :/ )

         It is not because my heart broke so many times or that I was a failure in love (ofcourse because there is always another woman and I am so decent as to give up my love for the sake of not hurting other women) that I have come to despise love as of now. It is because of the fact that it being treated as a commodity has caused so much pain to people who actually believe in it. (When people find true love it is not glossy or anything. It is based on mutual respect and real love.) But most of the time people have severe heartbreaks from which they find it difficult to recover. Sometime I also wonder what would have been my fate if I had given into such heartbreaks over a person who doesn't even care but flutter from women to women in a go!! Wouldn't that have been a real tragedy? Because we have so many other things to do in life, like have a good career, have a job and be independent, have moral values, have creative hobbies, travel, be kind, be responsible etc. If a so called "love" makes you possessive and negative and makes you cry everytime, what is the point of having it at all? In life we should have things which makes us better, not worse. That's exactly I hate romantic love. Why would anybody ever keep a love if it makes them a worse person? It is definitely not worth it. Even if it is "love".

 Also if you happen to be in a love "triangle" where there is always another person this whole love business will ruin your social relation with other people for no reason. Why should people do that? Everybody fancies over the idea of love because it is is soothing. But having complicated "loves" (simplest being a triangle) is terrifying.  And sometimes even when you don't want to love anyone and keep yourself away from lovers, one of the lovers may get suspicious of you for no reason at all and then it will create unnecessary social tensions between you and that person because they suspect you of loving their lover when you don't even want to look at the so called lover. :/ :/ :/  Obviously you hate love because you cannot be normal friends with people for fear of offending their lovers!!!

These are some of the small problems which causes me to hate love. But the major problem is the misogynistic aspect of most of the relations. Like I mentioned earlier a man's love has to be accepted where as a woman has to forget her love because she is a woman and the man is not interested. This is a real injustice! If you really believe in love a woman has equal right to "find a man and expect to love her back (in decent words)". As long as the disparity between the value of a man's "love (which may tend to be abusive)" and a woman's love exists, I refuse to love anybody. As a human being I have every right to wish that the person "I" love should love me back when I love that person. Just because a person is a woman doesn't mean that her choices have no values and that she can be called names and be branded as silly or bad. Then men who really prey on women in the name of romance should be punished aptly.

And most of the time when a woman is "bestowed" with love, in all the cliched cases (especially in movie field) she gets married and her "loving" husband forces her to quit her job citing that he can earn enough and it is "enough". As if his wife/girl friend is all a reproducing machine come full time maid who doesn't require a salary and does not have a brain or any other talent. Is this not a means of restricting a woman's potential? How can I not hate the idea of love/romance when I see such trends where a woman cannot have a career if she has to keep her love?!!! This is totally unfair. Why would any woman in her right mind keep such a love? This is not even love to cry out aloud. Would anyone who really loves a person do this? NO. So men not only prey upon women in the name of romance but use it as an excuse to limit a woman's true potential. I don't understand why would a woman choose such a man over her ambitions and live with him for the rest of her life. Will she even have a life is another question and if she does will it be a really happy one is something which I don't know the answer of.

Plus with age you actually gain enough wisdom to look back and laugh at all those heartbreaks that happened and contemplate how silly all those who made fun of you for loving someone were. Because their hearts were so narrow that they didn't know the true meaning of love and just took it to hurt another human being for being sincere. (But anyway such people are a text book of what not to become and how insecurities can make people narrow minded.) And you feel how stupid it was to cry for some moron! (That you can call them a moron now means that you have become witty.) Those incidents were some phases in your lives when you learned something. And it is even possible that those morons whom you loved at that point of time were just stepping stones which had a good effect on you at that point of time. Nobody carries stepping stones on the way to the top. They have to be left behind and there is no point lamenting over them too. They are just stepping stones. I am very thankful that these were all one sided and those people were "kind" enough to reject my "love" because I never had to endure any complication which people usually face in relationships. My life is very simple that way and looking at the current state of those people's lives I feel very grateful for not having been "loved" back. Infact I have made a decision never to complicate my life with "romance".
So I am not going to waste my time "loving" anyone, I hate love and I will hate love for the rest of my life. Nobody will ever be able to change that. (Unless someone redefines romance.)

So the whole point of baring so much about my (virtual/non-existent) love life was to tell people why I personally hate love/ have come to a point where I don't believe in love anymore and why people should not be sad at all if someone rejects them or some others make fun of you for loving someone. None else knows how much pain you go through when your heart breaks. Heartbreak or loving anyone is not a fault. If someone chooses to mock you behind your back and make fun of your love for them, that only means that they have no emotional range at all and are just insecure. Heartbreak happens, but it is not worth spending your time and energy and especially the health of your eyes and
mind brooding over it. If you find love it is ok. If you don't find love then also it is ok. Your merit is based on your talents and achievements. Not on whether you have someone or not in your life. It is just a matter of choice. Everyone may want to buy that fancy product called love once in a lifetime. But that doesn't mean that that product is inevitable. It can be done without. So I urge anybody who may be heartbroken and reading this post not to think that they are losers because they couldn't find love and ruin their career for love. Women especially, think twice when in love. If your love undermines your independence as a woman and your rights as a human it is not worth it. Just hate such loves and love yourself. No love should be so breaking that you wouldn't be able to look back at it years later and laugh at it and be proud of who you are now, because you emerged as a strong person out of it.

 PS : People can mock/laugh behind my back/ think bad of me as a person who was a love maniac in the past (!) after reading this blog. Just sharing some thoughts I have gained as a 30 year old person and especially for all those who may be feeling unbearably sad. :) Don't worry this too shall pass. And most of the time it is not the other person who makes you better in life, it is your own efforts to become a better person for someone else that makes you better when you are in love. Then why can't it be done for you and you only even without someone/ some love in your life? Life is to be lived for yourself primarily and then for others (I don't mean that you have to be selfish, cruel and greedy). Also if you cannot live for yourself you will not be able to live for any other person. (Because life is a perspective of yours resulting from the fact that you are alive.) If you forget yourself there is no life left in your life. You don't need to have someone else in your life to be happy! It will make you happy to have caring people around you and people to care for. But our happiness should never depend on who is there and who is not there in our lives or who stays and who leaves.

I personally want to thank all those people who rejected my love, because my life would have been a hell, had you accepted it when I was love sick! Thank you for not being part of my life (except for those time periods in the past ) and being the reasons why I have become stronger and stronger over the years. :) :) So by mathematical induction, I always failed in love, but each of those failures was eventually good for me. :) :) And it says that it will be true for n+1 also. So I am happy that I get to be alone and do not have to bother about someone else in my life!! Enough with all the melodrama! :D

PPS :  One thing about romance is that 99% of the time it is business like. That is probably one more reason I failed in love. I don't know how to like this businesslike love. I thought that love was like poetry or a painting or like a pleasant breeze or like the moonlight... But ofcourse it is obviously not. Hence I hate love. :) :)