roadside streams

Growing up Growing up is basically about looking back at life and sighing at the fumes that are of the past, otherwise known as memories, looking back with fondness at moments that had otherwise been painful and torturous, missing what was and never will be. If life gives you that, then you are finally growing up. It is quite a slow and torturous process, where you weep over some stuff now and again, but if it reaches a point where you can look back and marvel, then that truly is growth indeed. Pain of the past is changed into something full of pleasure, and we get to marvel at moments that broke us in thousands. Well, it almost always takes time, but if someone is willing to hold on hard enough, time shall always get to vindicate them. Life is a very painful process, but as Sarah Teasdale says in the poem ‘It is forgotten’, time is a kind friend, and it will make us old.  Since it is a must for us to age, why not seize the moments while we are young? Why pick scars from life when...

Dating in the Village Dating in the village is a cat and mouse affair, an intricate dance performed by the roadside and inside bushes, one chasing after the other, the other learning to hide. It is akin to a rooster and hen scenario, where the rooster chases the hen till they are both tired, or till she yields and lays down on the ground in submission. Girls with heavily oiled faces and tightly held handkerchiefs stand by the roadside, shifting from one foot to the other as they await men with their bicycles to pop by, to serenade them with songs from old battered phones or Bluetooth speakers, of songs that have been around so long that they have bleached, and there they stand, hair like roosters, astute on their badly shaped heads, vague beauty hidden under layers placed on their faces by life and responsibilities. The young men arrive in baggy jeans at times and t-shirts with Chelsea logos and colours and Reebok shoes, half their body still on their bicycles, and as the songs begin,...