दोपहर

भरी दोपहर में

A C गाड़ी के अंदर

कला चश्मा पहने

ठंडी कोक की घूँट लेते हुए 

मैंने फल वाले से कहा,

"भैया आम ज़रा ठीक लगा लेना "

दौड़

दौड़ शुरू हुई जब जीवन की

तब वह छोटी बच्ची थी,

चुनौती स्वीकार कर ली  उसने 

कर्त्तव्य निष्ठ वह सच्ची थी 

मंज़िल दूर है, राहें  मुश्किल 

सबने उसको ज्ञान दिया 

चोट से कभी न आहत होगी 

मन में उसने ठान लिया 

शतरंज सी हर चल होगी 

समझ यह आ गया उसको 

प्रतियोगी तो वार करेंगे 

दुर्ग बनाना भा गया उसको 

भागी दौड़ी पुर ज़ोर लगा 

मंज़िल उसे अब दिख रही थी 

बस चिड़िया की आँख देखती 

भली भांति वह सीख रही थी 

ओह ! मंज़िल नहीं पड़ाव था बस 

यह सफलता जो अभी मिली 

ख़ुशी मानना व्यर्थ है लड़की 

तेरी मंज़िल वह दूर खड़ी 

नए सिरे से, नयी उमंग से 

मंज़िल पाने फिर चल निकली 

सुगम राहें भी आयी सामने पर 

रुकी नहीं, पकड़ी उसने राह अगली 

दोस्त , मधुर पल कितने ही मिले 

मृगतृष्णा जान छोड़ दिए 

मन ना डगमग हो कभी 

कितने बंधन तोड़ दिए 

"कैसी अजीब दौड़ है इसमें 

ख़ुशी तो हाथ ही नहीं आती है 

जब लगता अब मिल जायेगी 

मंज़िल आगे बढ़ जाती है "

"मंज़िल आखिर है क्या तेरी ?"

इस सवाल से कातर वह जागी थी 

कोई और था ही नहीं दौड़ में 

वह अकेली प्रतिभागी थी 

ठिठक गए कदम अचानक 

स्वयं को यूँ अकेला पाया 

ज़िन्दगी है कोई दौड़ नहीं 

अब तक क्यों समझ न आया 

"क्यूँ  दौड़ी मैं इतने वर्ष 

क्या मेरा  इरादा था ?"

"हरूंगी न कभी  किसे से "

क्यूँ यह ख़ुद से वादा था ?

असमंजस में खड़ी है वह 

कोई जीवन के मायने बता दे 

दौड़ने में काट दिए इतने वर्ष 

कोई धीरे चलना सीखा दे 

दौड़ नहीं तो  क्या है जीवन

अभी समझना बाकी है 

कितने प्यारे अनगिनत पल 

अभी परखना बाकी है। ....  

Realization

Hum ek baar jite hain, ek baar marte hain, First job bhi ek hi baar hoti hai, aur company se pyaar bhi ek hi baar hota hai. Little did I know that like Shahrukh Khan in the movie I too would fall in love a second time. The cupid struck … in the last hour.

Yes I love Aricent… my second company. And I did not realize it until now. The uneasiness had started creeping in as no dues clearance started arriving from all the departments one by one . As I handed over my id card to the office security personnel I suddenly felt orphaned. As I lay one last forlorn look on my seat, my floor my building and finally my office campus I could already feel the pangs of separation anxiety. All the time I kept telling others and myself how relieved and super glad I was that my daily tryst with noida gurgaon traffic jams was finally going to be over.

Back home, in the late hours of the night the first thing I did after switching on the computer was to login to my office mail account just to check if could still log in. The SAP action had not run today and I found that I could still access my office email id. This surprisingly pleased me and as I started browsing through the mails I saw the parting mail that I had sent to the team. This mail had been a shameless and thoughtless copy –paste of the numerous good bye mails that keep flooding our inbox every now and then, with a few minor changes to suit my purpose. I actually read the mail now. Word by word. And this time each word weighed so heavily in my heart. It was then it dawned on me that despite my best efforts of keeping the professional me and the emotional me on two different far away islands, I had become emotionally involved with my company. I was in love with aricent. As I write this I am still head over heels in love with the company, my work and everything that is even minutely e related aricent.

Not that I regret resigning. I had to do it to give a new direction to my career, to be able to fulfill both the personal and professional responsibilities with equal dedication and most importantly to avoid wasting precious hours in the traffic chaos day in and day out.

My first job as a fresher was at naukri.com. After clearing two hard to crack written tests and then being grilled in interviews for what seemed like centuries when the HR person finally told me “Congratulation you are on board now”, I immediately knew I loved naukri.com, my first job. But It was not so with aricent. I always treated it skeptically and took pride in saying that Aricent in spite of being a big company can in no way match the work culture of naukri. As I crossed one milestone after another (both on professional and personal front not once did I feel the bonding with my job the way I used to feel earlier. I attributed this to falling in love only once theory.

Now as I look back into the three years at aricent I cannot recall the exact moment when I might have shed my initial inhibitions. May be it was when I got an appreciation card from my skip level or maybe it was when I attended a training via video conferencing or maybe it was when my manager and the whole of the top management took extra efforts to move me on to a different project in the time of recession or maybe it was when I availed a maternity leave of more than six months without any hassles. In spite of the work pressure and stretched hours I fell in love with the company for its transparency, its well defined processes and its employee friendliness.

I love you aricent and I am going to miss you!!

Left to live... or die?

Another woman left to live only to die every day for the rest of her life.

It was about two years back. She stood there near the ICU, teary eyed, trying hard to smile, a beautiful red bindi adorning her forehead. She was in her early 30s with 2 kids married for not even 10 years. I remember her small beautiful face and her soft voice as she just clung to her father saying nothing but looking at him with imploring eyes. The look in those eyes still brings me to tears. The eyes were begging him for life - the life of her husband who had been hospitalized earlier in the morning.
Reason: damaged liver.
Cause: alcoholic.

My cousin was widowed the next day. The beautiful red bindi would not be there on her forehead again. I have not seen here since that day in the hospital. I could speak to her only yesterday. Not that I did not want to but did not have the heart to.

What grieves me the most is that the one at fault is gone away and she is the one left to suffer. What right did he have to drink himself to death and leave her to bear the brunt for ever? While having fun with his one peg after another did he realize that he was killing not just him self but a wife and two little children as well.
When I heard the news of his death, I wanted to really shake him alive and ask him why did he do it. She was my favorite didi and on that account he was my favorite and only jija ji. I wonder if didi has forgiven him or for that matter if she was even cross with him for having caused her so much pain.

Now after two years it has happened again. Last time it was my cousin this time it is Mohit’s.
Same age, same bindi and same reason.--- alcohol.
Another woman will face hardships of life without her husband; two more children will be deprived of their father’s love.

Alcohol has taken its toll yet again…

I m loving it !!!

I had always wanted to write software that could directly control the hardware. M finally very close to it if not doing it already. have just landed myself into a project in telecom domain and right now am baffled with a jargon of acronyms of all sorts. from 2 letter to as big as 6letter acronyms. BTS, BSC, MSC, TRX, ME, OMUSIG and what not. it is like studying A B C all over again.
Till yesterday I believed that GSM stood for geosynchronous mobiles but but was amused to know that it is global system for mobile communication.
Just the fact that i will now be writing code centered around GSM is giving me goose bumps and a crunching feeling in my stomach.
but i know i'll crack all the jargons.
I am loving it.

Shaily

Every one who knows me knows her. At least everyone with whom I have had even a single personal conversation has heard of her .Every friend who calls me up even if it is after 10 long years always asks me how she is doing.

She is my lifeline. She is best thing that has happened to me and she happened at a time when I was so young that I don’t even recollect it now. The farther my memory goes is of her wearing a short green frock and sporting a pony tail which I would pull when ever mummy was not looking.

My primary school was very near to my house and I would walk to the school every day with my neighborhood teacher. And Shaily was there every day holding my hand or tugging at my skirt to see me off till the colony gate( This never changed even as years changed even as colonies gave way to societies and blocks and cities). I felt so proud and confident on being able to take care of her.

She would hide in my lap when ever mummy was in a do-not-spare-the-rod mood. She would wear all my hand me downs and look so boastful. We played all sorts of made up games where I created the rules and twisted them in my favor whenever I was loosing . we studied together, ate together, slept together, grew up together. I as the elder one ordered her around , bullied her, teased her till she cried , made every attempt to eat her share of goodies, called her names , helped her with her maths, spanked her when she wouldn’t understand the formulae. In spite of the monster I sound like I loved her and protected her and pampered her.

What inspired this particular post is the fact that she hates reading and doesn’t really care for blogging thing. I thought so until yesterday when she told me that she went through my blog on here own(every time I write a post I coax her to read it and grill comments out of her). So I m writing this to let her know whenever she browes past my blog next, that I love her. I adore her like I adore no one else.

Shaily, by now those who don’t know me must have guessed is my sweet little sister. She as I would say in technical terms is my metadata. She knows exactly whether I mean a yes or a no even when I say ‘no’ to something. She knows exactly what I want to buy even though my stingy self would not let me go for it. She knows exactly the points she needs to press when ever I m down with head ache and she knows exactly how to calm me down whenever I let go of my temper.

Now a days whenever the recession blues hit me and I tell her I wouldn’t know what to do if I were to be handed a pink slip, she looks at me bewildered and says as a matter of fact “how can u not get a job? You are so intelligent.” And I believe her. I have to because I want to live up to the idol like persona she associates me with.

I am glad for the bond that we share and the emotional fulfillment that she brings to me. As I shuffle through her cupboard, I see old dresses, hair clips, nail paints lipsticks, which once belonged to me and which she could not bring herself to throw. I know for sure if that if ever the entire world were to turn against me one person would still be there walking along with me holding my hand or tugging at my skirt.

I am high on confidence again . The world is at my feet again.

I miss the smile

I was enchanted by her smile the first time saw her. She sat on the living room carpet, cuddling a white polythene bag under her arms, eyes moving from one artifact to another quickly . She was a very tiny little thing about 4.5 feet tall and so thin that the thickness of her hands was just about the thickness of my two middle fingers. But she was beautiful in spite of ultra small eyes and slightly flat nose that gave away her nepali origin. Her exceptionally fair complexion, translucent glowing skin, long silky hair and childish ways set her apart.

Her eyes lit up the moment I entered into the room and she smiled. Her smile had a pristine child like innocence, stretched from one ear to the other and exuded a welcome warmth.
I myself couldn’t help smiling at her.
I knew she was the maid that the woman from the placement agency was talking about.
But this one seemed too little. I had placed a request for a semi skilled 15-16 year old.

“tu kitne saal ki hai”,?I asked her.
“13”, she said and smiled .same charming smile.

It was impossible to believe that she was 13. She looked like a 9-10 yr old kid too fragile to even hold a broom let alone sweep and mop the 3 bedroom house.

I immediately dialed the agency to tell that I wanted some one who could handle all the house hold chores and not a kid. Since the lady did not have any alternative option and I was in dire need of an extra help we decided to give her a try.

“Tera naam kya hai?”, I asked.
“Khushi”, she said and smiled yet again.

The smile tugged at my heart. I gave myself all the reasons to think of it as a cleverly crafted mechanism to win over hearts but all I could see was dewy-eyed innocence.

Khushi took over all the household work from day one itself. She would skip around from one room to next grinning, smiling and singing. She had a melodious voice and crooned incessantly.

Added to all the adjectives attributed to her is the word chatterbox. She would talk endlessly to anyone and everyone who was in the proximity so much so that one reached the brink of exasperation. Soon she took over almost all the work and we became dependent on her for even the basic necessities. We got so used to ordering her around that we even forgot she was at the end of the day just a child who claimed to be thirteen just because her mother told her to do so and actually she might have been younger than that.

Slowly khushi started shirking from work. The initial enthusiasm had been replaced by the daily monotone of the tasks. She desperately missed her family and my heart bled to see her shedding silent tears for them. But the child that she was she would forget all her sadness immediately and start playing with neighborhood kids when they came along.
She would dance with my 2 year old niece oblivious to the fact that she was a servant or that we might be watching. One day you would see her howling with brazen impudence saying that that she did not want to stay and the next day she would claim that she was never ever going to leave our house.

Meanwhile I did all I could to ease her workload. I even argued with other family members when she was laden with extra work never consenting to the fact that she was a servant and be treated like one. Though there were times when I too found her ways bit annoying. But her evergreen smile always wiped out all my anger.

There used to be days when we would see the broom stick , dust and dustpan all scattered in the center of the room and Khushi absconding. Further investigations would reveal that she had forgotten to complete the work and was either picking up flowers, or rearranging pots or making jewelry out of wheat dough or just staring at the sky. Some harsh words and tears later she would get back to her smiling self. Khushi had a bag full of all kinds of hair clips, earrings ranging from studs to danglers, lipsticks, bangles and what not and her considerable amount of time was spent in admiring them and then ofcourse trying them out on herself. She was very fond of dressing up and would spend hours styling her hair obviously at the cost of time spent in cleaning. You could see her flaunt her new hair do almost every other day.

I reasoned that she was not clumsy but just bored like any other child. I reasoned that she was not irresponsible but just not old enough to take all the responsibilities that had been endowed on her. Seeing her smile fade away, some times I wondered if I should send her back or probably send her to work in some family that was less demanding but my own selfish interest held me back. Who would work here if she left.

She would never take any kind of pampering. If we ever said thanks to her thinking that it would make up for the extra work load on her and make her feel better, she would curtly reply, “mujhe thank you kyon kehte ho. yeh to mera kaam hai”. I so wanted her to know that I felt deeply for her but she was too naïve to understand that.

And then one day when I reached home from office I came to know that Khushi had left. She had taken all her dresses and her dear makeup kit. She had gone with her parents to her native place somewhere in Nepal. We had let her go because we had found a better skilled resource than her. The new maid took the reigns in her hand from that day itself and harnessed her duties very efficiently. Things became neat and orderly once again.

All remained well except for the smile that has been missing since then.