Author Archives: Anwesha Tripathy
In the heavens
Reunited
The sun shone all the way down the road. I looked at him and saw him smiling the same smile that would haunt me till I live. Our car reverberated with music that sang of undying love and beauty; my ears were in their own personal heaven as his laughter boomed in the car. So entwined were we in each other’s company that it wasn’t until I woke up on the hospital bed that I realized my husband was no more — that the smile and laughter that were still so fresh in my mind were just memories that would get washed away with time.
~
“Hey, darling,” he smiled, not realizing how much his smile scared me. It was that smile which made my heart almost stop as I’d try to resurrect the memories I had forbidden myself. So much had changed and not changed since the day he…
View original post 750 more words
Straight Men Explain Things to Me
A Little Improv Can Go a Long Way with Dementia
Credit: Tom Magliery
Most days, dad sleeps a lot. But today, he’s wide awake. He’s on the phone, yelling at me. He’s so angry, but there’s sadness in his voice, too. “I don’t have any money, I don’t have a car. I don’t even have any shoes,” he tells me. “And I’ve got to go down and see mom and dad.”
Now, my dad is 92 and his parents have been gone for decades. He has money in bank accounts that he doesn’t remember how to access, and he has a car he’s no longer able to drive. These days, his shoes mostly stay in the closet. He wears his slippers when he has the energy to walk down to the dining room to eat with his friends Leo and John, or when he gets the urge to bust out of the skilled nursing wing where he lives. He heads…
View original post 766 more words
Love, Despite
Before I married my husband, I told him to make sure that he was marrying me for who I was that day, and not for any future changes he hoped to have wrought in me through the “transforming” power of marriage. Though we were both young, I had seen enough unhappy marriages to make me wary of the institution, and who wants to be institutionalized, really? I had no question that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, but I wanted us to start off with as little illusion as possible. I wanted to know that he saw me, and not some airbrushed version of a girl to be placed on a pedestal. It is easy to fall in love if you believe all the fairy tales and movies. Beautiful women with flowing hair and flawless skin meet muscled men with pure hearts and chivalrous intentions and they ride off to his manor with servants aplenty…
View original post 668 more words
5 things about being a blogger
You love writing about anything and everything. You have this funny side you hardly ever show to people in real. You don’t live one life, you live two. Because babe, you’re a blogger!
1. Writer’s block
You dread this term more than you dread the zombie apocalypse. You cannot even imagine leaving your baby-blog for days, let alone weeks! Sometimes when you’re just distracted and can’t think of anything to write, you start to panic because no, nobody wants a block in their head when they are on a mission (getting views and shares in this case). When you actually have a writer’s block, you wish you were dead. No, I am serious.
2. Impatience
Oh, give me the views already! Do you remember that time when you stopped eating for two days because you were too busy staring at your computer screen checking your blog’s stats? You don’t? Maybe because you were unconscious for a week and had to be saved by glucose drips. Okay, I am not serious, but no, I am serious. About the impatient part anyway. You find yourself checking your blog’s stats every few minutes (maybe even seconds).
3. That one jerk of a friend
You have at least one (or more than one) friend who refuses to check your blog or read your stuff. “I am just too lazy for this shit, dude.” *Laughs* Yes yes, I know how difficult it is to keep yourself from punching him (or her) in the face. Bails are too expensive these days…
4. Social network celebrity
Be it twitter or facebook, you’re the celebrity of words. Swoon. People love your witty remarks and quick sense of humor. Your comments are one of the highest liked ones on any given facebook page. You are that funny guy (or girl) everyone loves to follow on twitter (and copy on facebook). So now you know who’s famous. You are.
5. Real virtual friends
The best part about being a blogger? You have lots of friends whom you’ve never even met. Come to think of it, you’ve more of these friends than your whole neighborhood combined. These people are mostly bloggers like you, or some other social network famous people, or maybe just some random readers of your blog. But you know one thing, these are definitely your “real” friends.
Anwesha Tripathy
Poet and Beast
It’s not about dropping words like stones down wells,
Listening to the clanks and clunks ricochet off the walls
As you hover near the edge, pleased with your senseless noise-making.
It’s about dropping yourself down the well.
It’s about human skin against stone –
That warm slap that wakens the blood
And can be heard for miles.
It’s about getting inside, you know?
Crawling into the English language
Like a wounded animal and
Curling up beside its pounding heart.
That’s the music.
The steady thump, thump of it going on
In its endless monologue.
You sync your words with the swelling of its lungs
And hope they sound like keys of an accordion
Breathing in dust and bellowing out clouds.
The beast at the bottom of the well
Has never bared its teeth at me.
At night I bury myself in its fur and
We move as one – a…
View original post 26 more words
Time Travel on Facebook
This is one of the best things I have read on wordpress by far.
I’ve written before about my aversion to some social media. Besides the conspicuous consumption of time, Facebook is how I found out that my best friend from 5th grade had lost the use of both her legs and arms in a car accident. Which led me to a search where I found out that another classmate and her brother were both dead in their early 40s. It was jarring and traumatic. These faces, frozen in my mind’s eye, were young and healthy and living happy lives in some far off world. Anything beyond that failed to reach my imagination.
When I was in my teens, we moved to a house, town and school far away from where I’d grown up. It was, in reality, only about 40 miles away, but rural miles. No public transportation or extra family car or cell phone plans to keep in touch with old…
View original post 829 more words
The Reason Why our Society should Stop Giving Excuses for Rapists who cannot Control Themselves
“I can’t control myself.”
So your sense of control depends upon the size of clothes the girl in front of you is wearing? You cannot keep hold of your hormones if the girl beside you is wearing something which shows more flesh than you are used to? What do you mean by you can’t control yourself? You’ll end up raping her? What are you? Some untamed animal? Years of education, nurturing and values can go down the drain because hey, who cares? She was wearing something she wasn’t supposed to, after all.
If the education system of this country, the moral background of the society we live in and the environment we grow up in is only producing people like you then I am very sorry to be born in a place like this. Even not ever being born would have been better (that reminds me we also have an arrangement for that too, courtesy our extravagant performance in practicing female foeticide.)
My country, India, is a proud (yes, that’s the keyword) rank holder for one of the most unsafe places for women on earth to exist. Politicians (ministers, no less) give excuses like “boys will always do mistakes” and some (a well renowned paedophile himself) even have the shame to say, “she (the victim) should have called him (rapist) bhaiya (brother)”. You see, madness is not a rarity here.
Yes you are the same people who’ll beat a guy to pulp if he happens to be your sister’s legitimate boyfriend, but you’ll shower a lonesome woman walking down the street with hoots of screaming lust because you can. Yeah, just because you can.
Yes. You, Sir, are a hypocrite of the first order veiled under the mask of some so called “traditions”. And I can give you no more credit than that.
Only if, only if parents taught their sons to respect girls rather than barking instructions to their daughters, we could have had a better a place to live in.
“Don’t wear that dress, your thighs are unreasonably exposed.”
“Don’t be so close to that boy. No need to have guy-friends.”
“Don’t go out that late at night. It’s not safe.”
Even if I did wear that unreasonably exposing dress, even if I did get closer to that guy — just as friends, no more — only because I thought of him as a good person and even if I did go out late at night, does that give someone the right to misbehave with me? Is it all that takes for a guy to rape a girl?
Here’s one tip to keep your “uncontrollable” hormones in check: imagine the girl you’re about to pounce upon, is your sister. Imagine the girl wearing that exposing dress is your daughter. Think of the mother you love who’s also a woman. Imagine someone doing something like that to your people. It hurt, eh? It should. And please, for God’s sake, do realize what kind of scum you are.
It’s only because of people like you, that parents think of their daughters as if they are some type of a burden. And it’s only because of guys like you, that there runs a misconception that “All boys are the same.” No they’re not. I have come across men who think girls are just like boys. There are some who think girls are even better than boys. And yes, even if a rare species, I know a lot of hardcore male feminists too. And they do exist — not in some parallel universe but in the same one that we do.
Anwesha Tripathy
image source: J. Schreier, Flickr Creative Commons
The Secret Diary In My Attic 