Ekta Kumar's Blog

The desire to dress up and become someone else is one of the oldest human impulses. Which is why we crawl on the floor swishing our tails, and sail mighty oceans with feathers in our hair.

Lizard brain is the more primal, less thinking part of us. The part that hums with our deepest emotions and drives our most basic instincts. The lizard brain is how we sense the world, feel the edge of danger, the ache of longing and learn to survive. It is here that reason, logic and arguments are cast aside, and we learn to listen to our heart.

Freedom lies inside our heads.

The gendered identity of mountains is shaped by stories, symbols and cultural norms. Do you see mountains as men?

Khajuraho - men and women, in their splendid poses - fighting, playing, copulating and ignoring each other.

Khajuraho - men and women, in their splendid poses - fighting, playing, copulating and ignoring each other.

"Touch is the first language of love." – Unknown

Talking is hard. Too many words. Saying too much, or nothing at all. Long winded sentences, tangled into each other. Silent questions. Undecided pauses. Hurried explanations tumbling out of open mouths. Misshapen thoughts, spoken in haste.

How to make sense out of all of this?

Perhaps we should kiss instead.

When feet gently lift off the floor, and bodies curve to find each other. Warm mouths meet, and we softly float in the air.

There is silence.

No words are needed anymore.

This edition of my newsletter ‘Strange Ordinary days’ is prompted by Marc Chagall’s painting. In his autobiography ‘My Life,’ Chagall writes, ‘her silence is mine, her eyes mine.’

"In ambiguity, we can find infinite possibilities." - Anonymous

I like turquoise, because of the confusion around it. It is both green and blue. Ambiguity erases borders, and gives us the freedom to choose. Green or blue, there is no right or wrong answer. That is why I like turquoise.

But.

Mona Lisa (altered) - Leonardo da Vinci

Blue in the gemstone comes from copper, and green, is from iron. I’d like to believe that blue comes from the deep oceans, and the green from the land. But turquoise doesn’t belong to me. Colours are not possessions. Colour is energy. They are light waves, mathematically defined by the length of a wavelength. And I can’t catch light. On canvas, colours misbehave, blue tends to push out the green. And turquoise itself changes its shade, over time it shifts. Which is why, if you really think about it, the answer doesn’t matter. Our choices are irrelevant.

 

Mona Lisa (altered) - Leonardo da Vinci

But of course, we still choose, because making a choice is a fundamental human trait. That is how we define our lives, shape our identities and our future.

 

However, taking a decision is often hard. It comes with the fear of making a wrong move. It is tainted with doubt, regret and the desire to please someone else. Every time we pick a side, it has consequences!

The Confusion of the Tongues - Gustave Dor e

All of this can get very confusing. In Zen mode, choices seem irrelevant. In goddess mode, I slay. As a human being, I am afraid. Which is why I keep telling myself, choices are empowering, as long as we don’t attach too much importance to them. 

And also that turquoise, is just an ornament.

'There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.'

Leonard Cohen

Mornings are getting colder, fields are full of gold, and the mood is festive. Are you sorting your cupboard, airing the mattresses, wiping, cleaning, and buying shiny, new things?

There is so much importance given to beauty and perfection, especially in this season. We paint, polish, repair and replace things that are dented or damaged, in hope that Lakshmi will knock. Houses are decorated, women look like goddesses, and everything sparkles.

Three Pujaris - Jamini Roy, 1937

But what is real is often flawed. The moon would be oh so boring, if it shone without its scars. Frayed books, with yellowing pages, have stories within stories. And the prettiest flowers are the ones that grow on weeds.

Bauerngarten - Gustav Klimt, 1907

So how do we remember that broken can be beautiful. That our scars tell us where we've been. That we need not hide everything. That it is okay for cracks to show…because that is how light gets in.

Happy Diwali, Imperfect & Beautiful.

About two years ago, I lived in a house with a garden. Everything that died on my kitchen table, went back into the earth. I’m not talking about the fancy ‘go-go green’ composting bins, or artisanal organic manure. It just meant dumping vegetable remains into a far, forgotten corner, and feeding leftover bones to cats that came and went. Some days, just to play around, I threw things straight out of the window – a squishy slice of orange, rotten tomatoes, watermelon seeds and the like. Some of it was eaten by snails, some turned to dust and some, some blossomed into real, living things. I had a shrub of tiny tomatoes, an enormous pumpkin and a straggly papaya tree growing awkwardly in odd places.

The garden was chaotic and unruly, like a jungle, through which cats wandered in and out, like ancient predators.

Cats are beautiful, sensual creatures. They move and flex in ways that are unimaginable for us, mere mortals. It helps that they have 230 bones, versus just 206 for you and me. And since we are talking about cats and their bones, here is an interesting incident that happened way back in the 1800's..

An Egyptian farmer, digging and turning the soil, made a morbid discovery. He found hundreds of thousands of mummified cats buried in his village. Surprised, and perhaps also a bit overwhelmed with the sheer number of dead cats, he loaded the whole thing onto a ship, and sent it to England. The strange consignment of over 180,000 ancient cats was auctioned on the docks of Liverpool in 1890. Guess what they used it for?

Most of the cats were ground up and sprinkled over fields, as fertilizer!

 

My first reaction when I read this, was that of regret. Anything that speaks to us of the past is precious, and must be preserved. However, after the initial sense of dismay, it somehow also began to feel right.

 

The cycle of life continues. Dust to dust…

 

What about you, how did it make you feel? Do you like holding onto the romance of the past, or do you shrug your shoulders and move on?

 

Quick disclaimer - I now live in a very tall building, with glass balconies and manicured lawns. Garbage collection here is serious business. Trash is segregated, packaged, colour-coded, and handed over to a man in uniform. And as tempted as I am, I don’t throw anything out of the window anymore.