Alchemist

Prompt: Take a negative concept and turn it into something positive.

I am an altruistic alchemist

Can turn your grief into gold

locked in the four chambered

safety deposit box

known as your heart.

Yes, despite your baffling belief,

you definitely have one.

I can turn your alert anxiety

into adrenaline × agility.

Why lean into

artificial intelligence when

you can be a superhuman?

I can make you forgive

your parents —

they did their best after

all —

and most important

of all,

make you love yourself

and show yourself

the grace you extend

unto others.

I am your therapist.

Don’t forget our call!

Kashmir

                        Triumph or disaster?

Is it what I feel?

What I’m left with at the end?

A thing or an emotion?

A subtle sense of pride

Of besting the beast?

Or the harrowing pain

Of the tear in my stomach

Leaking more pain than I ever could handle?

Is it the result?

Or my reaction to the result?

What if I won Kashmir but

Lost the election?

Is it universal or personal?

A zero sum game

I am a hero sometimes.

It is how I sleep at night.

It can be neither

but actually it is both. 

                                        

As the crow flies

Clandestine creeping in

Of relevant restlessness

Growing apathy

Winged venom

Acidic antidotes

Sure seeping in

Of a crow’s courage

Just a tremulous throw away.

So bark away

I’m not an orphaned stray

I will stamp my say

For all those who stay

On a half moon day.

The Secret

By Samyuktha J

my response to the book I'm reading which really pissed me off with serendipity and positive thinking when what the world needs right now is constructive action. 

A picture speaks a 1000 words

An action speaks a 100 thoughts

How you treat your mother

speaks more than your tweets

On Feminism.

So rise and shine

And wake up to this universal truth

Packaged as a secret

To make you excited~

Action counts more than thoughts!

All the wishful thinking in the world

Will conspire against you

If you don’t walk the walk

Yellow brick road or not.

Serendipity may await the believer

At the end of the magical rainbow

Along with pots of gold.

Wash your face with the raindrops

And look at the reflection in the dirtypuddle

A lazy hypocrite praying without acting

Should not claim a windfall at all.

Also for Poet united's midweek motif The awakening

Golden Brown

All the gloss , glitter and glue

Cannot photoshop the sheer phobia

Lurking right beneath her skin

Forming a palpable layer,

They attack her

Only when no one is watching.

She seems so bold

But is actually quite brittle

Her quiet melancholy

Muddled by her extensive cacophony.

She is indeed a prisoner of her own device

Trapped in bravado

She just wants to cry.

Yet when her man is watching

She cannot let him see

If the truth is really exposed

Won’t he just flee?

Better to break it off

And be the bitch

Than take it off

And be his bitch.

Of course it is all very problematic

But who are we to judge?

We all mask our frail insecurities

 marinate them with worry &

deep fry it till it becomes golden brown.

Pia Pia

Writing to the tunes of a tamil kuthu song! 

Unleash the pyaar 

When the chest is too tight 

and future not too bright 

why so morose 

when you can write a killer prose

Get in the groove lady 

and do a bam chika bam bam 

dreams can be lost and won 

firstly you need to run 

Smile at the sun

we don't need another nun 

actually we do 

Amen! 

But first go 

nanananana

yah yoo

yipee 

whooo 

MEEE

Found a judgement I was searching for all day , so decided to unleash some silliness :P  

Hoping

Hope springs eternal they say

Only for those who bloom with sunshine

It didn’t

Give me a rope already

To hang ‘out’ with.

How can

Snaps and flashes of happy

Really compensate for this life

Which is so crappy?

Tell me really

I am trying so hard

To things not to get under my skin

Maybe a dark soul I am

For nefarious I feel

A true villain I am.

Insatiated with my genesis and growth &

Too proud to acknowledge my misery

I still give it company

I don’t want to give into this darkness

Where I seem to navigate seamlessly

When I see a happy person

I wanna dent their teeth and

Wipe that elusive smile off it

Thinking that I grit mine

And flash a fake smile and move

So what is the end you may ask?

To fit in by killing my self or

To stand out by killing myself?

Maybe it is to simply wait for a tomorrow

And hope that hope springs from within 

A dollop of darkness and a drop of sunshine.

It has been a long while my friends since I wrote anything in this space. Never has an injury to my right hand (which I have had one too many of ) affected me as much as now. I am impressed with the hunger I feel to write.

I used to be called callous, insensitive

Was never happier.

The minute I started to give a damn

The tragedy started.

The tragedy called life

Where people you used to love

Became completely different persons

So much so that

You think you wanted a disclaimer

That things could go horribly wrong!

But maybe this is the disclaimer

For the next time.

Writing all this, I look in the mirror

And see a completely different person

Than the years before.

Role reversals

Shape shifting

By the tendrils of time.

I want to be who I was

And also who I am.

A dollop of darkness and a drop of sunshine.

Aloof and caring at the same time.

How to achieve all this

When I can’t even tie my shoe laces on? 

And to my poets united friends. The post came before the motif. So the explanation maybe a bit contrived. So my take is that this piece is an appreciation of the effect of time upon our lives. 

Imagine Mountains

What do mountains mean to me?

Eons back! 

At my lowest they are insurmountable challenges that I look up at , with more awestruck worry than inspired determination. Being a fretful diva , I tend to feel that these imaginary mountains are firmly embedded on my tired shoulders.

I hate their stupid hairpin bends , which give my already motion sick tummies a valid reason to unburden themselves. I have a distinct memory of myself , a 7 year old shutting my eyes very tightly whilst hugging my dad’s lap as the auto went up the mountain. Like the tightness and resultant blindness has anything to do with my body’s capacity to deal with the stress of travel!

Oh how I hate the mountains.

Then I climbed a hill. By myself – 2 years back? Symbolism and travelling aside , they do have a plus. They have peaks!

The exhilaration you get when you reach the top , the air feeling fresher than it was a couple of feets ago.

The panaroma! Everything looks small from the top. It gives you perspective , humility – which I lack in abundance.

If you can feel that up a hill , you can definitely feel it up a mountain right?

I don't know why I trekked but I am glad I did. 

But Mountain is also the dude from Game of thrones who killed Oberyn Martell!

So maybe I have mixed feelings about mountains.

I scaled a huge mental mountain today. Scaled one without giving up , a bit battered and bruised and I am definitely feeling the high xD but what happens after this? Climbing down can be slippery , definitely if you’re taking the surfboard called fun down it. Imageries aside, being a beach person I wanted to thank all the mountain people who helped me in this climb. I didn’t necessarily enjoy it but it was an adventure nonetheless. Thank you.

Hope you all enjoy the high too. Think about that if you’re climbing a steep path yourself.

Okay I will stop.

Bye!  

So what do mountains mean to you? 

Confessions

 13^th may 2015

Wednesday

Forgive me father , for I have sinned. I have always wanted to go to a church and make grand confessions to a calm priest. But that never seems to work out in my favour. So in this mini diary entry , I register my random private thoughts – which are not sins per se and fit more into the heading of confessions. I want the inevitable someone who peeps into this diary to know that I'm not high , embarrassed or drunk – right now at this moment at least.

1.       I didn't learn Hindi not because of some big moral principle of solidarity for my state’s culture but because I was too lazy (still am) to learn a new language which didn't immediately affect my then near future . Although, necessity forced me to understand it somewhat eventually.

2.     

  I'm proud of being a ‘tomboy’ or the opposite of my general stereotype as a girl. And , that has led me to hide that I actually enjoy romantic movies much more than action ones.

3.     

 I'm ashamed of Surya as an actor nowadays. I fell in love with the guy who excelled in multiple offbeat yet catch roles. Either the star in him as eaten the actor completely or he has very bad taste in choosing his scripts. I just wish the old surya is back. I hate the post 2011 Surya. * That was tough to admit, even on paper* I still hope that his next movie will bring a turnaround. I have been waiting for 5 years now.

4.   

    I hate the Kolkata Knight Riders because of  a) Sharukh Khan b) their arrogance ( Cough cough Gambhir) and c) … because they are damn good as a team and the only serious threat to Chennai Super Kings overall.

5.      

I find it uncool to admit that I prefer Tamil music over English music. Harris Jayaraj any day . *sheepish grin*

6.    

   I don’t think I'm serious enough to be a lawyer. But I do know that I’ll get there eventually. If I start soon.

7.      

I’m a very self centered person and I really don’t listen when others talk about their life stories and that in turn makes me feel guilty because I impose my life story on everyone through this blog.

8.      

I can seriously can keep going. But sane enough to know that honesty is not often the best policy even in the seemingly safest places.

9.    

   I’m going to make this into a blogpost. 

 Final one - Nowadays , I enjoy Tv shows much more than books. And that is blasphemous in my world. So , forgive me lord for I have sinned.

So , in the spirit of confessions readers are requested to share some poignant truth about themselves :P can be pointless too. But an honest revelation!

Flashes in a pan

"People who abruptly change the name of their blog and not follow it up with a post for a month ,
are people who don't find a place in heaven"                                                                                                                                               - some old scripture of some old religion 

This has been the worst two months of blogging output , quality and feedback for me. I couldn't write , whatever I wrote was so bad that I had to delete it or forever revert to draft and my abrupt name change made a sharp decrease in page views. Yes , lack of pageviews affects me.

I I am still not in the best zone for writing , but any more procrastination will render my blog extinct - the possibility seems more real than ever this time.

< To all those who are surprised by the name change:-

1.     .    It was done to keep the blog ‘fresh’ ( It is nearing 5 years now)
2.      .   Semi’s Stories and Sharings…! was just sounding very juvenile and self-obsessed , two characteristics which the blog will be trying to break from in the very near future.
3.         ‘Steady Meanderings’, this name came to my head in a sudden flash when I was trying my hardest to concentrate during a lecture. And since this blog is an aggregate of sudden flashes in the pan, I hardly doubt this name.

   

   I hope

Steady meanderings promises to put out quality posts, while quantity will be determined by outside circumstances. I've been hearing feedback that last two posts weren't great. My posts are a reflection of what I've been up to at a point of time or what has been cooking in my head for a considerable period of time. An essential contradiction eh?

Talking about essential contradictions, I've started a group blog along with three other very talented people (very unlike me) and you can check it out -à here.

Talking about the quality of my posts, they were flashes in the pan gone wrong. Good seeds with bad germination, execution gone all awry. However, Steady Meanderings promises to do none of the other things.

OR else there will be another name change and we would be lost for all eternity. >

Steady Meanderings will be steady in creativity , if not output. So , we are beginning this new innings with a flash fiction entry I wrote for a recent competition. The prompt given to me was "I'm telling mom" and I had to write within 150-200 words. 

So what did I write? 

Neil Patrick Harris

"I'm telling mom"

"tell her what?"

"That I love you"

"...but you have to tell that first to me , you freak. "

* his face flushed a beautiful Bengaluru tomato red*

" Didn't I just? " he asked a sly smile brightening up his crazy , mischievous face.

" But ..but..."

" But what?"

" I am a guy" he replied his face aiming to encompass all the fifty shades of red.

" So am I? So what?"

" Being gay is illegal in our country"

" Baby it doesn't matter" He gave his worried lover a reassuring smile.

" Just because I'm fictional doesn't mean it doesn't matter" replied his now angry lover.

" I don't care, Neil Patrick Harris. I am telling mom that I love you."

What would you guys write with the same prompt? It would be nice if you all actually posted that or something else  in the comments column ( I know that the comments process can be a pain , but it makes me a writer infinitely happy when his/her reader leaves a response or feedback to their post. And I am in urgent need of infinite happiness) 

yours

Semi

Geography tests

I haven’t written in over a month and I sincerely apologize for that. To make up for this often committed mistake of not writing in SSS , I am going to confess to some of the (small) crimes I have committed in the past.

< Disclaimer: Personal Post coming up >

I know I should be writing about the increasing terrorist activity or the omnipresent rape fear, but I choose to overlook these topics (mostly because better writers have written awesome articles about them already) and am going to choose GEOGRAPHY TESTS instead.

Very Random Right? Well, expecting a sane topic from an insane person is well … insane.

Everyone has an Achilles heel , a special subject that they hate so much that they would rather burn in hell than study it for the test next day. Most people hate math , I also hate(d) math . But coming to think of it, I hated GEOGRAPHY the most. History was awesome;, math dumbfounding ; Biology insanely difficult ; BUT nothing was so irrationally hateable like innocuous looking geography.

I mean who wants to study about the rocks, climate , pressure, river delta estuaries or even longitude latitudes? I learnt so much, but hated every bit. I used to read the most amount of story books during geography. The teachers were actually pretty good but boy! I hated that subject.

(Don’t) worry. I am (not) going to ramble about my hatred and be done with it. Nahi saar, I am going to give two awe some/ful anecdotes about 2 amazing geography exams I wrote in school time.

THIS IS THE STORY OF WHY I DON’T CARRY WATER TO EXAMINATION HALLS ANYMORE.

1.    1   Water on the desk

Sounds innocent enough. But nothing is ever innocent  in semiland, my children J . I was in 8^th standard I think, the class representative – apostIneverdeservedbutdidnoworkanywayssochill- and had this geography test. Our teacher was Nirmala miss, an old but smart teacher who would sit at the back of the class so that copying was out of the picture entirely.

The fundamental duty of the class rep is to develop class rapport and I found that working towards an underlying common cause would incite us towards that direction. Henceforth, I decided to help my classmates copy. Out of 34 people , at least 30 hadn’t studied , I had studied enough to fill the pages but many were planning unsafe methods to copy.

Our class 8A , we were a pack. We made teachers cry in packs , we chewed gum in packs and we decided to commit this crime as a pack. Cheating in tests is a crime which I have later come to despise but as a 13 year old class student who hated geography , I had no qualms about what I was just about to do.

So how can the entire class copy without getting caught? We can’t all whisper – 30 whispers cause a scream , we can’t all keep the notebook underneath , even if we had a plan – we can’t all ever agree in unison .

I tried dividing the class into 4 zones – the quiet zone , nerd zone and the last 2 were the mad cheater’s zone. Whatever elaborate plan I made up , it all boiled down to the problem that the teacher sat in the back bench and could see the papers we kept below in the desk. Creating bits was logistically impossible and if everyone wasn’t satisfied , somebody would rat us out.

So , I poured water on the backbench and added a dirty paper and banana peel to it.

That was the most popular thing I did as a class rep and it had to go undocumented L :P

1. 2.       Water on the paper
2. 
   

This was when I was around the same age: 12-13 . Although , I showed criminal tendencies as mentioned above , I was pretty dumb. To prove the case in point , I am going to bring back to memory this painful incident which ruined my entire exams - almost.

We have established my particular dislike for geography already , so it isn’t entirely unsurprising that I didn’t have much knowledge of it on the exam day. However , I forgot to mention this – I am a nerd. On the exam days at the least :P

I hate leaving blank spaces in my answer, probably because I know I’ll never come back to fill it , as I never have the time for it. The exact same thing happened . For the first question on the first page of the first fricking examination! Even though, I answered other answers properly , it irked me that the first page was half blank and first impression matters.

So , I poured water on my first page.

I still haven’t figured out why I DID THAT. A blonde moment , you could call it -_- My thought process was this : If I pour a small amount of water on the page , it would be a legit reason to have omitted that space.

I forgot that

• 1)      I was a MESSY KLUTZ ,
• 2)      That water has absorbing qualities
• 3)      My bottle had a very big mouth
• 4)      I used gel pen.

So the water leaked on to all the pages I wrote afterwards and my mainsheet was a wet nightmare. I had to rewrite the entire paper in 20 minutes and the invigilator wasn’t ready to give me even 2 extra minutes.

So ladies and gentlemen, please don’t pour water on your paper . Maybe it was the karma of pouring water on my desk which led me into that disaster of a decision.

And that is why I don’t carry water to an examination.

yours thirstily ,

Semi

We could have it all.

Sometimes when your immediate environment gets entangled in a certain mood , the said mood tends to stick on to you. In this case, the death of a close relative of my friend caused the effect and set my mental wheels into motion. The following points are my abstract thoughts on 'loss'. There is no context for this loss - it can be something as innocuous as losing your favorite toy or something as devastating as losing your limbs. I have presented my thoughts to you in the raw form as it came to me . No explanation ; open to interpretation :) 

1.

When you lose something , it hits you .

Most often like an epilepsy attack

Ugly , painful and most importantly 

SUDDEN. 

2.

It is most important to acknowledge a loss 

when you're down and out. 

However more vital it is for you to 

appraise loss, from a position of 

strength - that so occasionally enraptures you and gives you space to lock up your unresolved emotions-.

3.

We actually never lose anything .

People - good and bad -

become memories - good and bad- 

Skills lost are actually just converted into new ones. 

Energy diverted from one focal point to another. 

4.

Sometimes some one else's loss hounds us so much that 

it haunts us to a point that 

we start imagining their losses as our own

or fantasize those losses in our already pitiable life. 

Not too healthy .

5.

People survive loss of limbs , deaths of loved ones , the vanishing acts of love and a 100 million more life changing horrors everyday and conquer it with panache. guess what? You can too. 

So just take a deep breathe . Close your eyes . And believe. 

Only your belief can save you from your mind manufactured hell . Reality is not the culprit it is your perception -who is your enemy. 

6.

Ain't nobody got time for feeling like a loser

when there is a whole world to win out there

or atleast live.

Chocolates AND strawberries

You all must know that there are two types of people traversing the earth. First, are the cool ones who love chocolate and second are the lame ones who love strawberries. And I hope you are intelligent enough to guess which type of person I am B|- Chocolate of course .

Every individual has a love story. More importantly and specifically – Every individual has a love story of how they fell for chocolate  or strawberry  We gift each other chocolates for birthdays – not fancy strawberries . Some may have strawberry flavored chocolate. But since the name chocolate is involved – chocolate rocks.

This is how I sounded for a long time . And then one day I tasted strawberries accidentally – it was love at first sight.

Okay , what is she SAYING?

For those who didn’t get it already , “I am using a metaphor to convey a larger social message” Those who don’t know what a metaphor means please  leave  google it.

Okay  I’ll cut the know- it- all attitude. Owning some blogspace can do that to you . Metaphors are otherwise known as examples / illustrations. Thu :P

Coming back to chocolates and strawberries….

Life goes like this ->

Like many , I fell in love with chocolates pretty easily and very quickly. And for strawberries.. they had a negative stereotype of girliness ( I am a {tom}girl though) and were/are very hard to find in burning hot Chennai. Whatever strawberry I did manage to taste were rotten by the chennai weather and more importantly by my unconscious prejudice against the poor fruit.

My point is not that strawberries are actually delicious. It is that I never gave myself a chance to enjoy it . I was so preoccupied on protecting my ideology that chocolates > strawberries and so obsessed on winning vocal battles that I closed my eyes to the obvious . If I had gone in with an open mind and hated strawberries – then that is my personal opinion- but since I hated it prematurely because it is in the wrong side of chocolate it is a social problem of stereotypes.

I didn’t even care to research or know about strawberries . After all that fruit would never be a part of my life. However one day ,my dad came home with ‘strawberries’ his boss had gifted him and forced me to take a bite. Reluctantly I took a bite. And yay!! I was right after all. The outer coat was so bitter and the inner part tasted weird too, Nothing like the strawberry icecream we taste in shops . It took me a long time to realise that I should have only the inner part. And it took me a longer time to realise that they were lychees and not strawberries .

I could blame the third party –dad for this confusion. But it is my own ignorance which put me to shame and not his. He in fact never specified what fruit it was. I just assumed they were strawberries – and hated them.

Chocolates and strawberries? They sound too trivial for us to even batter an eyelid. However in actuality there is a much larger problem in hand here. We’re brought up in a society where there is an invisible and ever existent divide between every object – man made and human made . You love pink? You must hate blue! You love Rajini? You must hate kamal! You love India? You must hate Pakistan! See how things escalate?

If we lived in isolation from these opposites it maybe okay (in the smallest way possible) to hate them .And more often than not we have to wear our least favorite color or watch a film of our ‘least’ favorite actor to impress someone. So it is better to understand if we truly hate something or not. I have a friend who hates Hrithik Roshan simply because she loves sharukh khan. Again..what?!

The other day , I watched the 104768^th tamil masala action film produced in the tamil film industry named jilla. The protagonist who initially supports his mafia leader father becomes a police officer (yes , it is indeed ridiculous) . When his don dad asks him why he has switched sides he says , “ When I was with you , I liked what you did. When I came here I just saw the other side and I like this better”Hardly an eureka moment but that is the maximum you can get from a yesteryear cheesy sentimental action film . It does make a lot of sense though. Only when he was forced to become a police, he saw the atrocities of a don (although the moral grounds are indigestible for this argument)

What I am asking is – Why should it be an or question always? Why chocolates or strawberries? Why not embrace all forms of yummy items? ( ignore the diabetes question here) Why should we be pushed to a corner to love something new?

We get too settled with our favorites. We must constantly branch out and experiment new flavors to remain exotic. Midlife crisis shouldn’t be the reason you go for a world tour.

Finally this is my basic thought for the day - Only if you can try you can taste , and only if you can  taste you can fall in love. Don’t let your love for something be the reason for you hating something else.

Hope you got my flow of thought

Semi