Yours Specially

"Get this straight first. They are called special children because they make YOU feel special"

As welcome as those colorful balloons are to a naughty kid with
a pin xD

And how true it turned out to be =') Never in the 16 years of my life have I felt this welcome. Just proved that you do NOT need a welcome mat , the costly and cozy things or even politeness (the quintessential host 'etiquette' ) to make a  person feel more at home. All you need is some love , which would permeate in to your surroundings like a pepper started sneezing bout , however bad your habitat may look extrinsically.






The thing which annoys people like me , who were blessed enough to meet these children , is the large
scale amount of stigma and ignorance looming around them , the thing which proudly goes around with its ballooned chest swelling with ridiculous rumors  and  a very long nose poking into every person's private life , which goes about the all important name 'society'. I really want to meet those 'four people' , one has to be constantly wary and worried of  - . -
It is just sad , this inborn/ in place tendency to ridicule the different (and therefore) discriminated amongst us. And funnily enough , my usually lame and spammy sociology book came up with one of the best put lines ever.

"The disabled are rendered disabled not because they are biologically/inherently disabled , but because the SOCIETY renders them so". 

No fancy words , one might argue. But it hits the bulls eye in terms of delivering the intended message. Yes , there are some kids out there who have a predisposition for certain problems , but it is us , the all ominous  society , who act as the pathogenic stressors most of the times. The family and social support system one gets born into makes a whole world of difference. For example , one of my new friends Varadharajan ( :D ) although born with severe mental retardation keeps asking for his parents  in his own distinct way (for he is not gifted like us to form coherent words.)
It just about breaks your heart when he points outside the window and shouts 'drrrr' to enact a bus engine.His parents who are just a bus drive away are allowed to meet him only two times a month , unlucky them x/ The deal is done , when he repeatedly taps yours shoulder and calls you 'amma' ...

"Well my friend's name was Nikhitesh, and guess what? He can dance for 40 minutes straight, and is an avid folk dancer.He can draw, and he can sing. I can only shake myself a little bit and say I can dance,I can copy and say I can draw, and I cannot sing. And still people call them inferior. They call people like Nikhitesh as victims and pity them. But then we are in the wrong people. We need to learn a lot from them, and no one is superior or inferior. Everyone is equal, but they still outshine us. And guess what, Nik ( I gave him this name, thanks to my North Indian accent I cant pronounce this name) is just 11 yrs old. And me? I am 17 yr old. Need I say more."

shares our friend prerna , who was also privileged enough to meet and interact with one of the special ones.
One of my friends ran up to me after the visit and asked me one of the more poignant questions in life ,

"Dude ,  how lucky are we to be  born  normal?" 

Problems.

By the time you finish your first meeting with them , you would most probably be ashamed for thinking that you had 'problems' with your life. Don't get me wrong , to his / her their problem is the utmost important and requires not to be shooed away without any thought. Yet , the mountain looks like a molehill , when you interact with others , who endure more than their share of problems , from the nature and society , for no mistake they ever did.

We miss the innocent times x)

And to top it all off ,  THEY   don't seem to actually have a problem with the life they were gifted. Not one child in that mental health ward looked sad , even the ones affected with depression taking an effort to be amiable with the strangers who were visiting them . Their innocent and simple outlook in life is what we are sorely missing in our over complicated analysis of our life and problems. Please! , ones who think their lives suck because of inept boyfriends/girlfriends , over workload , body weight , skincolor or sheer boredom , i again say Please! please visit these mental health care centers and spend a few hours with these children. Else , you would be needing to meet a counselor yourself real soon.
Visiting these places is a two way thing.
a) It would make these children or even adults ( with the heart of a child) unconditionally happy! You are actually doing a service and great help by showering some attention to ones who are being grossly overlooked by negligence and selective blindness.
b) The thought of some one  to share their time with , gets such unanimous support that it is bound to make you feel someone special :) It is a beautiful cycle .
c) You would mock your problems rather letting it go the other way and mock you! At least you would be shamed and humbled enough for the time being to not let such petty problems invade your thoughts.
d) You are playing your small part in removing this stigma attached to being different or deviant. By becoming aware about the true meaning of mentally affected people you are passively help bring a change so big that one day a society where everyone would be  accepted for who she/he is. ( Utopian indeed)

I do not know what I plan to achieve with all this rambling. If at least one of you become sensitive enough to other people's weaknesses and stop making derogatory statements pointing to it , you receive my utmost respect. Also children like varadharajan , nikhitesh , kalaiarasi and rakshitha.... are waiting for you to visit them!

You can contact organisations like
Andhira mahila sabha 
here
here

Pls do join the community 

Yours specially
Semi 


(A big thank you to anthara pathak , for letting me put her beautiful pictures for this post x) she is a fast upcoming photo blogger . Catch her work in her blog, Shifting focus )

Stressbusters! ~

Time is NOTHING.

Yes...I am late again. But just learnt there is no such thing as time. It is a relative thing =] and just for your information, although studying psychology is cool and all it has some repercussions on your mental health. It makes you think too much. And we all know too much of anything is never good.

This must explain it 

Maybe I found an exception! Too much of fun is surely never bad! :@ And following the Freudian theory of regression ( yes , we have cool words too B) ) it is found that Individuals who find it difficult to deal with a certain developmental stage REGRESS backwards to their earlier stage. To make it simple: - exhausted overworked professionals giving it all up and becoming fun loving :D

Whatever pussy says :*

Although , I am not exactly under a pressure cooker here , I can see many others feeling the heat already and surely there are many little wonders out there who take life too seriously. I have this aunt who actually has no problems in life and so obsesses over the kuttiest of things like me calling her boring :P Ok that was a badly made up lie , but there ARE some among us who needs to bust their stress before the stress busts them!















When was the time you had the most fun in your life until now?

I confess. Its fun even now!

Anyone who had a decent enough childhood would say they had fun they were ten! When else could you be lame enough to jump on the puddles which have water logged after yesterday's rain (filled with malaria and dengue) and still love it? When else could you make 'four cups' out of paper and predict what you're friend would become in life? xD My favorite one was 'pichakari' :P ( beggar) This one send me to splits even now - covering the table with an enormous bed sheet and going underneath it and having your own 'tent' made B)Surely while all these bring forth a smile in your face , they cannot be practically practiced without you being kicked back to kilpauk mental health facility or worse , being preached by our wise teachers and parents. So all this while , while you were thinking semi was one lazy blogger , I was busy formulating my very  own list of  games which does a balancing act of barathanatyam between being stupid and fun. Beware . this line may not be the same for everyone , but at least we are TRYING to have fun. So please don't comment on how juvenile this is..

1. .      
What to do when you have a very lame English teacher, trying to DICTATE answers for an English lesson? :/ Simple enough. Take out your English notebook ( i.e.  if you have one , any presentable looking book with a not atrocious cover is fine) and open a random page approximately close to the no. of times you have had a boring English class. Take a 30 cm ruler and a sharp apsara pencil or use your almost alcoholically behaving hand and give the scale made straight lines a run for its money. Draw four of these imperfectly perfect straight lines. And name them NAME, PLACE, MOVIE, THINGS. Heard of it before? It is the cooler sister of the lame ‘name, place , animal, things'. Name can be a celebrity's name or better if you live in a country of a school like me - name of school mates :P Surely there would be one rajesh , ram or rhea! Place can be anywhere from mundakanniam koil street to Luxembourg or Vladivostok. It all depends on your creativity. Movie is of course the coolest. Often amateurs find it difficult to spontaneously fill these columns. That is why one should read cinema plus and Chennai times regularly. And "why THINGS?" you may ask. For many interesting combinations arise when one has to write the name of a thing. According to our law. "Anything which is called an it IS a thing" . And we are still debating whether igloo is a thing.  Btw, I forgot to mention how the game works. Choose an alphabet through some method and fill the columns according to the topic. Ten points for every right answer which isn't the same as the other player's2.         

2.What do you do when you have a bunch of bored and tired looking people near you. Play LONDON LONDON STATUE. One must act like a statue and not move , even if the 'catcher' guy is laughing at your face/ catatonic positions / the seemingly determined look not to laugh. If you are stupid enough to not laugh , people start taking pictures of your pose =} There , there. How it must feel like to be the statue guy in VGP amusement park :O      

3  Bingo. I am not explaining this classic. GOOGLE it. Even though it seems like what you should be playing when you are retired and seventy it is not bad. Devising algorithms and formulas to attain bingo is just not possible. This girl called chandy has been winning it since she was born (ok, konjam exaggeration) and she does it effortlessly. People call it luck .I call it filling the blanks as one shouts the number :P And there is always this poor kid who never gets Bingo however hard she tries =)

 4.

Its that simple :)

Wink. However precarious ;) smiley is , the game is not bad. There is this killer guy and the cop. The killer has to wink at the poor kids who are nothing but blank chits waiting to be winked at by him. The cop who announces or doesn't announces himself catches the cheeky criminal. Caution - Don't get angry at the kids who wink with both their eyes , blank chits whose normal blinks looks like an intentional red herring of a wink , and the cowardly criminal who takes too long to  wink. Its all in the game pa.  

5.Dumb charades. Since your class has been officially banned from culturals for their 'behavioral problems' , it is time for them prove that they have what it takes to form the best DUMB C team xD Divide the already 'divided' class into two groups. Do it in the traditional way of having two captains who pick their member one at a time. Eg " Myself , myself , Tom , Nooot tom ok Dick , Harry B)" :P Giving the tough ones like 'apocalypto' or 'eragon' seem like humble shepherd's pie in comparison to the hindi ones like "howrah bridge pe latakti hui lash". The war is on my dear soldiers!! B) 

Even google couldn't find "howrah bridge pe latakti hui lash"

If these awesome games do not bust your stress then you are beyond redemption or in the principal's office why london london statue required to act like a fly stuck to the wall :D

Se you soon

SEMI \m/