DO IT.

You know how they say "if you want to do something, do it." And we all think about it for a minute then let our thoughts wander off some place else?
Yes. Well, consider this one of those supposed-influential-intellectual-kind of-texts (not really)
Realization came to me at 2:45am, to be exact, when I was talking to this friend of mine asking him to study.
If you know me personally, you'll get the irony. For those of you who don't, motivation was being given to my friend by someone who hasn't opened her books yet and has her board exam due in 92 days, yes. How many of you want something really bad but not enough to get out of the bed or turn off the tv or get out of the house and drive a hundred kms for? I'm sure there's a handful of you.
Get this, we all want the same thing- money, success, happiness, power. But there's some of us that are actually working towards it and well most of us are convincing ourselves that we have enough reasons to start 'tomorrow'. But do we, really? You're sitting at home right now, crying, whinning, partying, playing, sleeping while someone else who, I assure you, has the same aspirations as you is getting on his ass to get some work done.
If you want something, go get it. If you want someone, go get them. If you want to earn money, work. If you want to become a soldier, train. If you want to ballet, practice. If you want to tell someone you love them, do it. If you wish to tell someone you hate them, go ahead. If you want to travel the world, go figure.
Don't let your dreams die before you do. 'Tomorrow' is a day, sure. But by tomorrow, someone would be one step closer and you two steps behind. Make a plan and work on it. Everyday. Life is too short to not buy yourself a Ferrari or travel the world. What was it that a go getter in silver dress with tainted lips said? Oh yes: "Believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will, honey?"
-A fellow procrastinator on hypersomniac pills.

'Muffin' is here!

Okay hi. As you may know, I've been working on a short film called 'Muffin' and, well, to be honest, it's the most fruitful thing I've done in a while, taking into consideration how absolutely useless I am, gah. Anyway, so the project, yes. So basically, working on 'Muffin' has in a lot of ways helped me grow. It has helped me rethink my priorities. And well it has made me realise that there's more to life than just sitting on a couch with a bag of popcorns. It’s actually kind of fun being the one who gets others to make the popcorn and sit on their couches.

'Muffin' directed and produced by Mudit Murarka, who is a dear friend of mine, is a short film based on how things change from when we were children to when we finally grow up. The movie is about how we are faced with challenges and the realities of life that we may or may not have been sheltered from as a child. Thought provoking, I know.

Apart from the lessons watching the movie actually taught me, I actually had a lot of fun working since it was my first time acting. And I'll be honest here, acting is a lot of work, despite the common assumption. I also worked as an art director on this project – I coordinated the makeup and wardrobe and was involved in the lighting design discussions during the production process, and I coordinated the making of the promotional artwork once the film was done. While definitely involving less work than acting on set, this was pretty challenging none the less. The film has been a grand success so far. It was selected to play at three locations in America during the months of September and October and bagged an Award of Merit at the Best Shorts Competition in California, joining the ranks of Oscar winning productions such as Mr Hublot.

The movie is out on Viewster tonight. You can watch it here – http://www.viewster.com/movie/1286-18995-000/muffin/
This is as part of the Viewster Online Film Festival – this is our fourth selection, and it is in Switzerland. We need your support to win the audience award so make sure you share it, watch it and leave your comments on what you think about it. Should we win the audience award, Viewster will donate USD 20,000 to War Child on our behalf. In other words, it’ll be a pretty big deal. Adios!

Pain- you're not the only one

There are days when we think our lives completely suck and days when we think that nothing seems to be going our way. 
What I'm about to tell you has probably already been assured to you some 200 times but I'm hoping this affects you in a greater manner. 
We all complain and whine and cry and kick and scream about things that go wrong in our lives. We become butchers when it comes to our own happiness. We become biased and ignore the amount of shit that others go through, thinking ours is the greatest of them all. We all like to believe that we're so important that all the pain there is in the world has been imparted into us. As if the entire universe conspires against our happiness. We do, do we not? 
Well, I'm here to tell you other wise. Up until a phone conversation with a friend today, I believed that I'd been through more shit than anybody out there has. That my problems are the biggest ones to have ever existed. But well, that's faux on so many levels. It wasn't anything he said or did, it was just a sudden realisation I got after I put the receiver down. 
I realised that I was too blinded by my own perspective and opinion of things. To me, the world revolved around me. Like a Radhika-centric view, as we shall call it. But that's no how things work. 
All of us, like I said, are butchers when it comes to our own happiness. Masochists, in a way, I guess. 

Anyhow, let's get down to it. The world does not revolve around you. And the problems you face today are not as huge as you may think they are. Sure, you're allowed to cry or whine every once in a while. We all are. But what I'm really here to tell you is, you can't compare your life with that of others and overlook the dark part of their lives and call them perfect. That's not how it works. I think everybody goes through shit, in different ways, sure. Some go through economic problems while others go through a heart break; some have an eating disorder while others are getting divorced. You may think that what you're going through is bigger than all of us but it's not. It's only as big as you make it in your head. At the end of the day, everybody has enough problems already and if we all came down to comparing ours, it would lead to a nuclear war. 
You may have every reason to complain, to break down, to feel lonely, to feel miserable, to cry or to scream out loud for help and I am in no denial of it. But don't we all? Even the person who you think has it all figured out has issues that you know nothing of; antidepressants whose trace you'll never find; and scars you'll never see. 
So stop. Whatever it is that you're doing. Whatever it is that makes you think everyone but you has got it all figured out. Because believe you me, we're all a little twisted in the head and we've all got monsters stashed somewhere in our closet.

Everytime you think things can't get worse, consider this: you're alive. How is that not a good enough reason to smile?

Education, or is it?

I've never been an A+ grade student. Ever. In these 14 years of schooling, I have never aced a single exam. Not once. And so they called me daft which I didn't have a problem with because I knew exactly who I was and their opinion didn't hold much importance to me. 
I knew that it wasn't for the lack of brains why I didn't ace an exam. It was for the lack of trying for I don't quite get the institution of education, in our country. Atleast not at school level, no. I fail to fathom how memorizing facts and theories counts as education. I fail to understand why we are forced into cramming things that are already written in books. That doesn't exactly make sense to me, however barbaric I may sound. 
At school, we should be taught to work on our skills. We should be taught to question everything in order to move forward. We should be made to work outside of our comfort zone rather than to circle inside it. 
How would memorizing a few formulas help us? The basics, sure. But I don't quite get the point of cramming things that we can already find in the books. 
I guess that's what's wrong with our society. We've been taught to spend a lot of time remembering things instead of questioning them and wondering why. 
I remember asking my teachers questions about a few theories and the only reply they seemed to have was "You don't have to learn this. It is not in your course so don't worry about it being there in your exam." It was statements like these that left me baffled because I wanted to know what I wanted to know in order to quench my thirst and not because it might be asked in some god forsaken exam. 
And so, I do not get the institution of 'education' for it is not educating us to question why a certain thing works the way it does. It is just educating us to learn what has already been printed. It trains us to continue living the rat race instead of teaching us to break the trend. And that, I cannot quite comprehend. 

Happily ever after? What

I remember how we held hands thinking things would stay this way forever. Do you? I remember how we used to nap together because we were extremely tired to go back home. Don't you? I remember all those promises we made sitting under the trees. Broken, are they now? I remember how we were convinced this would last forever. Or would it? I remember everything. From the first fight to the last laugh. I remember the good, the bad.
Do I want to? No. Do I miss you? Yes. Do we want to get back? Definitely not.

It is only after experiencing something do we realize how stupid it was, in the first place. All of us, we crave love so much that at times we accept whatever comes our way. We confuse love with lust or infatuation or just plainly, attraction. We are so desperate to be loved that we justify the actions of our beloved in our head, just so that we wouldn't lose them. I know I did. It's a very stupid thing, to do that. Why do, all of us base our entire lives on some romantic love, though? There most certainly is more to life than a puerile relationship. Why are we all so hell bent on finding our-significant-other-half?

Someone asked me what my bucket list was and as I stated it, I was astonished to find that it had nothing to do with my-soul mate, or whatever. I realized that I want to travel the world, party a lot, be good at what I do and eat loads and loads of food. That was when I realized that I don't need a guy to complete me or define who I am. That there's more to my life than a love that went wrong. That I'd rather travel the world alone than be stuck at home with a guy.

Like Lana Del Ray once said: It's good to love and be loved but it's better to know all that you can know.
There's no such thing as forever. There are no happily ever afters, either. You might think you've found-the-one but believe you me, you'll never find the-one, for that is not the purpose of life anyway. The people you thought would stay with you till eternity, won't. The people you thought were honest souls, aren't. So while you can't change the universal truth: Nothing is constant. Nothing lasts till the end of time, you can make yourself get accustomed to it.

So go ahead, live your life exactly the way you want to live it. Don't let anyone make you feel like you're not good enough. Travel the world, if that's what you want. Drink up, if that's what floats your boat. And just know that you don't need someone to complete you. There is no other-half. You're the entire picture, yourself. I realized that soon enough. Did you?

To simpler times

Do you remember the simpler times when we clicked photos because we wanted to preserve moments and not because we wanted to upload them on a social networking site? Or the time when selfies didn't exist because no one thought it was sensible enough to click photos of their own self? Or perhaps the time when all these Instagram filters and photoshop techniques didn't exist because no one thought it was important enough to edit photos. Because they were perfect the way they were taken. No one cared about their butt looking big or their shoes matching their clothes, at that time. After all, why would they? It's not like the picture was going to be shared with some thousand people on their Facebook list.
And believe me, I notice the irony too. This is coming from someone whose phone consists of 5600 photos at the moment.
We all do it. We all think we have some kind of a 'social image' to uphold. Or people that we need to impress by the wealth we have.
And you know what the worst part about clicking all these monotonous selfies are? We try to look happy. We try to look perfect in these pictures. And that is a very stupid thing to do. This concept has made us even more complex than what we already are. It has made us into these social beasts who pretend to be happy or partying all the time. It has inculcated the habit of us showing everyone that we're better than them. But are we?
They said it best in The Fight Club:
"We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like." 
We all do it. And we all know it's not a very clever thing to do. Yet, we somehow in that twisted little head of ours justify our actions and tell ourselves that what we're doing is different than what others do and that our case is special. But is it?
Are all of us not getting lost in the rat race to impress others? To pretend to be different?
There are a lot of complicated things in the world. Socialising shouldn't be one of them.
We shouldn't click pictures because we need to show our arch nemesis that we're leading a better life than him. We shouldn't care about the number of 'likes' we get on social networking sites. We shouldn't care if people think a picture of us is ugly. We shouldn't take down a photograph because someone tells us that our nose looks distorted. It shouldn't work that way. Somewhere down the line, we are losing our individuality because of it. We're forgetting who we truly are in order to impress others. And it shouldn't be like that. You should be able to dictate how your social life works and not the other way round.
Go ahead, wear sweatpants. Take down some of that mascara, you're prettier without it. Eat like an animal if that's what floats your boat. Tell someone you like them without thinking what they might say or who they might tell.
And I know that writing this won't change a lot of things. Not in your life and not in mine. But I'm hoping it does. For, I'm writing this for both our sakes.

Life is too short to be lived according to what other's definition of 'perfect' is.

My redemption

What do you do when you realise that you're not a good person? That all these years you spent thinking you're the nicest person this Earth has ever seen, was a lie? What do you do when you realise you're cruel? That you hurt people, intentionally mostly. What do you do when you realise that everything you do harms one person or the other?
Do you forgive yourself? Or do you continue living the same way? Do you try to become a better person?
I know not.
I think this is the worst realisations of them all. When you finally realise that you're a bad person. That you have been hurting the people you claim to love, so brutally.
And so I finally stopped looking in the mirror. Because what I saw scared me. It was as though I had seen a ghost. I couldn't recognize the person in the mirror. All I could see was a faint memory of who I used to be. Who I could never be, again.
I don't know what happened to the girl who cared about others. But I think, a part of her died when she was five, on a cool summer night.
All that remained of her now were shattered pieces of who she used to be. She still became that person, at times. But for the most part, she wasn't the same anymore. Infact, she did not know who she was anymore.
A part of her wanted to run away. Like she always has done. Like she did, that night. But her brain got the better of her, she needed to stay. And fight.