Change The Music, Create Your Own Poetry
“Life will try to make you an uninteresting prose,
you need to change the music
create your own poetry”
I completed my school in 1981 to join college. College meant getting rid of Science and Maths. I had always hated those two subjects because I couldn’t understand those. Joining college meant no more school uniforms but dressing up with perfectly styled long hair along with studying my favorite arts subjects.
My mother was always averse to the idea of wasting time over fashion. She used to hate my standing in front of the dressing table to try various plait styles. I was bad at Maths, Science and sports because none of these ever interested me. According to mom, all I needed to do was, to keep solving mathematical problems and mug up science answers.
Playing outdoors to lose weight was the next most important task in her agenda for me.
The slap that still resounds….
It was my 10th board prep holidays and among other things what I remember with pain is my mother’s tight slap. The sound and sensation of it is still deeply etched in my mind. That slap was for wasting time on making a new hairstyle while I should have been doing “Maths Practice”.
It took me approximately half an hour of hard work on my hair to get desired results. Engrossed in my new hair style, I forgot the repercussion of my act.
Out there, in the lawn, was my mother, waiting impatiently for me holding a practice test paper for Maths in her hands. I made a royal entry like a princess, in a happy mood, with books in my arms.
There was a song on my lips from the movie ‘Khatta-Meetha’, “Mummy O Mummy, tu kab saas banegi…”. Now, that was more than what my mom could chew. The moment I reached near her and threw my books on the ground; in a flash of second, a tight slap landed on my cheeks. No prizes for guessing, who slapped whom.
“Oops! But why?” I cried?
“Instead of studying hard for exams, all you are doing is fashion and dreaming of marriage!”
“No, who said so?” I shouted rubbing my red cheek. Suddenly I remembered the lyrics of the song that I was singing.
“What the heck, like seriously? Singing a song like that meant I didn’t want to study and get married?” I cried and opened my ‘Maths’ book.
A rebel was born….
That was the day, I decided to chop my hair off. What was the fun in having long hair, if I would not be allowed to style them? I was so angry with my life with all the dreams of college life gone in the smoke of my burning heart and cheek. Though now I laugh like crazy remembering the day.
Finally, in 1982 I got my life’s first hair cut which was a very short one. Since that day, my hair became my platform to experiment with my life. Sometimes an outlet for my unutterable frustrations.
Hair cut provides me a subtle psychological relief as when I see my hair getting chopped and falling on the floor, it has a soul cleansing effect on me. A hair cut leads my life from the mundane to changed light head that can think better. It makes me feel empowered and happy to think that I still have some power to change a few things in life, if not all.
My decision to color my hair was another torture I made my hair suffer, all because of the rebel in me. Everything was going wrong in life at that point of time so a new color of my hair fed the ego of that helpless rebel inside me.
Recently while watching a Sandra Bullock movie ’28 Days’, I had a cathartic moment. There was a dialogue which got me crying and thinking….
“Don’t ever be someone’s slogan because you are poetry.”
Madonna, the pop queen, who turns sixty in August 2018 nailed it for the middle aged women when she said,
“I am my own experiment. My own work of art.”
It’s my own music, my own poetry…
Today I am a 50 plus woman, eternally striving and struggling for peace within, recreating myself as an ongoing poetry. Do I need a support to create my music and sing my song? Not at all. I just have to stay at the effort with a hint of rebellious nuances here and there, which only I can understand.
Here is the song that caused the flutter 😛 Enjoy.
