HORIZON                                

Heart That Needs Heart

“My heart listens only to the music of heart. The language of mind just forms vague images and figures which I can’t get myself associated with. And for me establishing connection from my inside is very important”, explained he.

 He was in the business of selling hearts. Robust and man of sugar coated words has won many hearts because of his occupation. Like any other renowned man of caliber he too was treasuring gems of name, fame and recognition. That’s what he had longed for fifteen years of low profiled, low ebbed and undignified life. He was a laborer then. What he used to earn he used to consume the same day in eating and getting drunk and used to get mingled in slumber of carefree  life and never had any expectations from it. He had no liability but he was a burden on himself.

On the onset of every new morning he used to wake up with guilt, the biggest self invited ailment man feeds for himself. He with his closed eyes used to find himself in the crowd of world’s second largetst population. “What I am? I am sheer waste in the world full of best human resources. I must gather all my capabilities to be what I am.” He started excavating his real him. He was good in winning hearts, so he started selling hearts.

One came with eyes filled with tears, begging to save him from cruelty of his own people, relation of blood. They had all discarded him as he was not as rich as they were. But they were very poor in feelings and emotions. He was shattered when he came to the seller of hearts, who resolved his problem by making his own family bestowing all her love on him and for him. There was another one who came crippled, left rolling in the tides of time and circumstances. This seller of heart solved his problem by connecting him to a charitable organization and let his heart feel light and joyous.

There was one couple who came with heart rendering cries as they lost their nine year old only son to the most deadly disease cancer, and had no hope to have other child of their own. He melted and took them to an orphanage, where many parent less and homeless small and innocent children welcomed them with their willing hearts, and they left with smiles in their lap by adopting three year old girl.

That was not all. A wife lost her husband in war at border; he helped her to be self reliant for the smiles of her three kids and forgetting her pain of losing her brave husband. He sold her the heart which she had buried with the corpse of her husband. He only could do it in very subtle and quiet manner. He had the magical heart which listened to the untold stories of hearts only and to give these hearts the beats he used to sell hearts.

The buying currency for him was his soft words and ability to win the trust of others. People readily used to agree to sell him feelings, emotions, sentiments at the cost of his humanitarian bent of heart. He was not a preacher. He was not a messiah. He was not any guru. He was not a saint. He was not any leader. He was not a priest. He had no sect. He had no religion. He did not belong to any school of thought. All he was was just his own self: the listener of heart and seller of heart.

People invest in movable and immovable properties but he used to invest in making hearts, spreading smiling hearts and creating loving hearts. He was an illiterate but he started writing a new language: The language of heart whose alphabets were pity, compassion, empathy, sympathy, care and concern. The grammar of this language was connection and formation of relations only. He was so very happy to reside in the hearts of people.

Today he lies on the bed in a small hospital fighting his life because his own heart has failed. The machine is gradually forming a straight line but in between goes up and then down. He is in unconscious slumber, but this time it is not guilt that is taking birth. It is now the prideful heart: ailing but satisfied. It is going to die yet alive in millions of hearts.

He now knows the answer to his question of who he was. He is none other than our hearts which we have shut on the world seeing its brutality and coarseness. We have imprisoned it behind the bars of materialism and self absorption.

The present scenario of setting territories on the basis of religions and prejudices is failing every effort of this bleeding heart. Its business is now at loss.  The irony is it has solution for every painful heart but for its own disease it has no medicine.

Will there be any other seller of hearts born to render its self less care to heart in trouble? The blood is oozing out profusely.

Sangeeta Sharma

SOUL TALKS

 LOVE                                

                                                       

                                                                             Pic  Courtesy: ASHNA SINGHAL

                                                                                                                     DPS INDONESIA 

“Love is surrender”. “Love is care”. “Love is sacrifice”. “Love is selflessness”. “Love is all about pain”. “Love is unconditional”. “Love has no religion” and quotes are endless. People take love as per their notion and acceptance rules. To some it becomes walking talking dictionary of words on love. Are you surprised? Are you thinking that I am going to wrap the very word wearing attire of deception? No, for me “Love is convenience these days.”

You are in love, right? Let’s measure its force in your life. You have fallen in love recently and now trying to woo your partner. You text to your partner on one of the social sites,” Without you my days are nights and nights are days.” Your partner feels at the top of world. The technological heart pops up on the screen. Your technological loving efforts become part of FB messenger or what’s app chats. Love feeling words are read within lines. Your sacrifice in love is all about blocking some not very accepted friends by your partner and using social sites which he/she doesn’t approve. Replying back immediately getting message, talking for hours and sending best of images has become utmost care and source of joy. Your partner gets angry technologically by switching off the gadget. You pine and crave and miss his/her by becoming machine at machine. Love has become convenience in expressions and intensity.

Love tiffs over catching you online till midnight not with your partner but someone else take a turn of apologising and seeking pardon for days and night chats. No ego, you know. How blissful?

The time of writing love letters by pouring your heart full of passionate love has been taken over by “Google search Love letters”. Its softness is all about abbreviating the emotions and feelings attached to it in text messages. Its privacy has confined to thousands of minds working behind the technological set up. Love has squeezed itself to electronic gadget you are carrying and updating it as status on your FB wall. “ In complicated relationship”, “ In love”, “ Engaged”, “ Not single anymore” and these are not the only ones, expressions keep floating every third day rather in some cases every third hour, the most convenient way to let the world know about your love.

The most comfortable zone in this technological love is “Virtual Meetings”. Just Skype and distance will not be a hurdle at all. The plus is your date is not controlled by heavy restaurant bills, expenditure on gifts, nice looking attires, accessories and commuting expenses in its preliminary stage. Who has the time to run around trees and sing love songs or sit in parks to be absorbed in its existence? After all, all those are outdated and unconventional these days. Who wants eye contacts and real smiles on the face when there is variety of smiles on innumerable images of emoji in your gadget?

Love effects of sleeplessness are to getting awake and chatting with other friends and groups. After all you have to spend quality time with rest of the social relations. You can do it easily with your love talks with your partner and amazingly without letting him/her feel ignored. After all love means spending lots of time with each other and this way it’s so easy, as easy as falling in love.

Flirt in love too is effortless. Just two windows and the game of flirtation is on, provided your partner has not geeked on you. Do you think I am counting the blessings of “Technological Love”? Read within lines and translate its curses. Convenience is not wrong but its application is wrong. Breathe love in its beauty from head to toe. Mechanical love is short lived and full of impulsive feelings. It blindfolds you to land up in wrong love decisions and relationships as well.

One apple was eaten by Eve and we got that curse as legacy, and one apple is part and parcel of our life which would be inherited by our children. Give a deep thought over it.Experience love in its chaste being and not in its guised face and feel it’s convenient permanency in your life.

Sangeeta Sharma

Soul Talks

ACHE THAT PAINED    

                                                                

He digested his unseen tears. He was not to show his inside struggle, as he was a man. He plodded on the road which was dismal and dark. Thousands of images were crashing and making noise in his mind. The shadowed tree under the spell of starry night became his soul mate in concealing his ache, the ache of love for professional upliftment.

He entered in his house which would not be his in another two weeks. He saw at his wife’s smile less face, as she would be leaving him to drink his ache for lifelong as part of his uncommitted remorse. Things were out of control, as the string was in the hand of his family: family of his wife.

He threw his limp body, with boisterous series of his thoughts of past, into the chair. “Congratulations, Mr. Patel. We are expecting your join on first next month. Meanwhile you start preparing for the project.”

“Thank You Sir!” he chuckled.

He came with his mother’s favorite sweet box in his small cottage. His paralytic father gave birth to smile on his own face after twenty five years of his crippled, dependent and unproductive ailing life. Ayush Patel has seen happiness getting personified in his life that day. His mother’s swelled chest talked million of words of pride for her Son, General Manager: Ayush Patel.

Life on roll earned him everything what his parents desired and wished for him and kept his welfare in their blessings. He accumulated all materialistic joys and quality time for his parents. Their sacrifice for their son’s success started paying rewards. It was the time when destiny showed its deformity to him.

 “The project you were given has been taken over by Ms. Saloni Yadav, daughter of chairperson”, informed his Director to him.

“I have invested all my knowledge on this project”, he explained.

They were not ready to listen to him. He had to leave the company as his services were not required. He didn’t lose hope until he saw the advertisement in T.V and magazines, “FUND YOUR HAPPINESS WITH OUR CARE.” That was his slogan for his project. He felt deceived but not shattered. He was clear of the exploitation of his skill.

“Hi, Ms. Saloni, this is Ayush.”There was a smug smile on his face. She was not at all surprised. She did not offer him to sit, but he sat confidently in front of her looking straight into her eyes. The culprit in her made her take her eyes away on the door of her office. That was so easy for him to melt her with all her deception. They had a deal, deal of Ache.

He married Saloni’s elder sister, who did not know even a word about love. Arrogance, mood swings and power of money never let them smile. It was relationship of empty togetherness. He started suffocating. He was in deal. He was in a fix. In office his wife’s sister was sucking all his energies by over burdening him and selling part of his male ego each day. At home, his wife’s self absorption separated him from his parents, who shifted to their cottage so that he should be happy. Smile appeared to be her life -long enemy. She became more cranky and loud. His deal was getting out of control for him to handle. Yes, she was his deal.

“You are pesticide in my life, making me hollow. I abhor you”, she shouted at him after throwing vase from the table on the marbled floor. He was looking at her with his expressive serene facial gestures and not retaliating. She was just a deal for him and she too knew that he was sold to her. She was repenting her purchase and wanted to get rid of him. This is what he exactly wanted.

He calmly replied,” You do that life long.” That was taken as a curse by her and five fingers got printed on his cheeks. He smiled. She got more furious. She took iron vase from the cabinet and threw at him. He saved himself from the attack. He still did not lose his temper. She became wilder. She started hitting him with her fist on his chest and tearing his shirt. He was as calm and as composed as quiet rivulet. That was height of patience for her. She called her sister in hustle bustle informing of he being violent and attacking on her. He stood and listened everything smilingly.

His so called family of in-laws did not heard pain beneath his smile. They terminated him from his job and snatched every materialistic gains in the form of capital and assets. He was given two weeks time to surrender whatever he earned. He was jobless, homeless and family less person. Agony murdered his desires to be loved and to grow. All avenues of his progress were sealed. He made nightly strolls with deep contemplation as his routine. His solitude became chronic.

His eyes were getting closed in slumber. He wanted to have a long sleep and merge into inexplicable. Just then a cold hand came on his mantle. He smiled from his soul. He did not lose anything. He left everything and everyone to narrate story of his dry tears of unsaid pain he felt, being unloved, and above all of his sad smiles which he used to wear to conceal his attacked male ego. His untold ache left even pain to be pained.

Sangeeta Sharma

REFLECTIONS

LETTER TO AGE                       

Dear Worldly Wise Age

Hope you are ushering gradually in my life. Today morning only I saw that grey hair peeping out near my ear.Frankly, I was not happy to see you in your first stage.The very color gave me an insight of your effect on receding growth of my molecules, cells and tissues. I call this accumulation of damage as growth as you will grow as time passes by. Should I be happy seeing you growing or should I feel sad finding myself live for less number of days and inviting some latent ailments as unwanted guests? I am in dilemma. 

Its not that I don't feel happy at your arrival as you have made me more mature and sane. With you my metaphysical perceptions have widened too. I feel one with my spirituality and find emotions and sentiments taking practical turn, whose path lead to meeting with almighty. I might not be very religious till now but surely not an atheistic. I have started observing and comprehending with much rectitude and without any prejudice.

You want to embrace me with your firm hands and I run opposite to your hold as mentally I am not ready to be friends with you. Some fear of unknown insecurity grips me tight. Perhaps my adulthood needs more time to develop better quality of imagination, courage to face you and various undesirable things and above all make more choices, which I know at your advent will begin decelerating.My faculties of exploring, dreaming, discovering and  inventing will sit somewhere at the corner of my neuro system. My cognitive skills will start fogging. Even my eyes will have clouded dreams. Your length will clearly be shown on my face, on my cheeks and under my eyes. Still you'll have your beauty in the appreciations and comments I'll start pocketing. You will increase my smiles in pains and subtlety in  unsubtle. You will show me real behind every mask and brutality in the guise of compassionate heart. I know your powers, yet I feel so nostalgic in giving credence to your advent.

Ah! Why I find you so unwelcoming even when I know you are so beautiful in your attribute, though very ugly in your physicality? Why I make faces when you look straight into my eyes to accept the way you are? I will settle all the queries when you bloom, as I know you'll remove all my doubts then. And that's what make me feel excited to welcome you with smile on my face and anxiousness in my heart.

Please come tortoise steps as I believe in famous aphorism," Slow and Steady Wins the Race."

Yours newly born grieved Soul

Sangeeta Sharma

 

SOUL TALKS
Injured Wings,Strong Will      
 Ten long years of brutality was born with compassionate and concerned heart by her for her husband who was a schizophrenic. Not that she was vulnerable and paltry, but her family values had upper hand than her miseries. Her two sons, parts of her flesh cemented her audacity to face all the physical and mental torture imposed on her by destiny.
Running from post to pillar to treat the one who gave her worst treatment was her solo shot, as she had married him as complete man : with his virtues and vices. Social shackles of prohibitions on women were too feeble to stop her zeal to cure the incurable. She was not doing it for herself as she was bestowed with beauty with brains, she was not doing for her sons as she is their pillar, but she was doing it wholly and solely for her other half who required his other half's help, concern and care. She kept  tasting the pain with each passing day injuring the wings of her own personal aims and wishes.
He did not improve. Intensity grew in manly dominance over her. Every physical assault calcified her wifely feelings, but her motherly emotions and her own being boated her to safe harbor. She accumulated all her injuries and started healing by leaving all that was knifing her physically and mentally. Boldly she stood strong willed against time, people, society and values.

Law bowed to her for her endurance, pain and sufferings. She came out with injured wings from that matrimonial alliance which had soiled her all feminine desires of happy married life. Her two sons now become her destination. With her strong will and not taking care of her injured wings she smiled at destiny to over power its powers on her. 
 Through all odds she gathered all courage to be in one to one conversation with time and circumstances to show every one her own identification as bold mother. Her elder son got admission in DTU, Delhi in engineering course, guiding the younger one to follow the legacy. She proved that injured wings can't stop any one to soar high, provided one should have passion and belief in oneself.
The journey has just begun for her to bask in its all pleasures. She has bandaged her dark past with present blessings. She can fly.

Sangeeta Sharma

SOUL TALKS

Making of You                                                                        

We are what we have faced in our lives. Good and ecstatic moments make a happy person of us but sad and painful moments snatch all that is joyous and peaceful in our lives and give birth to turmoil of hardships and nostalgia. The process of our making undergoes a sea change. 

Change is unavoidable facet of life. What exists surely has to grow or decay. Growth is what we welcome but the moment decay starts our making dwindles.We feel restless, frustrated, sad and low. After all change changes the change even. Should it root deep inside in our making to let us feel helpless and vulnerable?

 Any change should not affect us like a blast. The capsule of acceptance must be gulped without waiting for its reaction on the change. After all it would be another change only that would take place.  If we cure ourselves of getting disturbed, we'll through changing in our making mechanism, can win the situation. The making will be easy and as per our traits.

Our making mechanism involves making our vices our virtues, negatives as positives and pain or scars as happy moments and success stories. For an instance, oysters make pearls so that they can feel better. When a grain of sand or debris get stuck in their bodies, they ease the pain and irritation by coating it with multiple layers of nacre, the mineral that lines the inside of their shells, and pearl begins to form. Basically, pearls are like blisters, only much prettier. Thats the making of precious out of painful change.

Our pains, be it physical, mental or at social level, should rub us to shine bright and sparkling than roughing us into shattered souls with loss of morale and deteriorated strength to fight the battle against any change that changes our making. Remember our core values lie in our making of ourselves tough against all that is odd and painful.That lays the solid foundation of " Making of You......Real shiny and precious you."

Be an oyster in your making and let the change be inviting in making you....better you....the best of you.

Sangeeta Sharma

WARM SHADES

Ma 

" You come, I'm just waiting for you." The words hammer these days in my mind, not because of her helplessness to see me next to her but because distance has distanced us enough to even let me go and hug my ailing mother and say consoling words of warmth to remove her insecurity where she thinks that every one would leave her because she is on bed, ailing and losing her memory, mixing words and moving in past and present to and fro.

 Her deteriorated abstract thinking and disorientation to time and space has given her, her childhood stage back. The stage of seeking everyone's attention, obstinacy, weird communication and blabbering. Her all sacrifice as a wife, mother and even other relation has all lost its value. All that is important is her present state-Fearsome, insecure and chaotic. Is this what for we spend our life dedicating and committing to our family, profession and social circle? 

She is lucky to have her kids tightly  clung to her in spite of distance, professional demands and family requirements. Her one painful cry is immediately reacted to with soft words and at times with angry words just like with a small child any elder behaves on his in genuine demands or stubborn behavior. My heart cries to see my tree whose shade I am, withering and drying.

Ma who sacrificed all through her life to see her kids rise and grow from all point of views, still is sacrificing her desire to see her daughter staying miles and miles away and sacrificing her wish to walk to places, sacrificing her slumber over some unknown fear, her beauty for wrinkles, her sanity for ambiguity and her communication for faded and bygone unreachable memories. Alas! her luck for unlucky situation in which shes now...Dementia.

 All around the globe there might be innumerable daughters and sons who might relate this situation as theirs. The pain is same. The tears are same-Saline and transparent, feelings are same-very abstruse and inexpiable, situation is same-clueless and out of reach to handle and yet very different in intensity and control. The very word " Ma" takes all pain away and wipes all tears and controls all uncontrollable and unreachable situations and feelings, even if she herself is declining in managing all these. That's the strength of the word "Ma" which shades us from this storm.

"Ma" is the complete cosmos in itself. "Ma" is the essence of our existence and survival." Ma" is one religion in all religions. " Ma" is one word of infinite words.

'Ma" is only love amongst all hate and " Ma" is the only creator among destroyers. Ma is just Ma-The creator of our little world. 

Sangeeta Sharma

 

Reflections

Why Arguments?

Sometimes we are in a situation where we have to establish our point of view through arguments not because we feel other is trying to demean us but because we feel what we know and have expertise over is taken other way around by the person.We feel our dignity immediately come in defensive mode and there starts exchange of words which gradually changes into heated arguments.

Argument...Literally means exchange of views esp. heatedly plus for or against the reason. Its a hard fact that everybody is entitled to have his or her views.It's his or her right of expression; the fundamental right. Trouble walks in when we meet someone having difference of opinion.The other person thinks his point of view is right and actually it must be as he has got the solid reasons for arguing for his motion. 
Problem is not to be firm with one's own opinion but uneasiness starts when we condemn other's point of view and forgetting about our own. That is the root of an issue. If we have control and grip on our point of view and if we are sure of what we treasure as knowledge than we'll not argue with others.I can illustrate it with an example. There's an apple tree and if some moron comes and starts claiming it to be a mango tree, will it be? It will remain an apple tree no matter what people say, think or throw at it.
If we understand this simple "argument" our communication with people will get simplified. We'll start smiling at the onset of such situations where arguments will take place. 
Saying "no comments" or simply walk out of the situation is not a cowardice but wisdom. After all "Speech is silver and Silence is gold." And glitter of gold can't be argued upon.
When we allow other person present his point of view with acceptance,

question of argument will never arise. I'm what I am. You are what you are. Adding or subtracting with the help of words will not define us, but how we react surely will.
Choice is entirely yours.You want to be you or be what others want you to be .Ball is in your court always.

Sangeeta Sharma