MissNoNotion

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A simple 2 lettered words like “ thank you” with a smile can bring joy to someone’s life. Words like “ love you”, “thank you”, “amazing”, “lovely” all these said with a smile can change the flow of the day for someone.

In a world where we all constantly in a hurry to finish all the job in hand and make the money we all wish we could earn someday, we often forget why we all are doing this in the first place. When a child is born the only thing the kid wishes is a smile back from his/her parents and that is the child’s only aspiration in life, is make his/her parents smile at him/her lovingly. But we get so lost in finishing our “jobs” because we all are too busy being focused on the future of the child that we forget the child has a present too.

We all are either too scared or regretful of our past or too frightened or scared of how future will unfold and therefore, we all have stopped living the moment, the present that we are breathing right now. This same present, in which chose to ignore the child, will become that childs’ sad past and their feeling unhappiness of your neglect right now, will become a part of their frightened future.

We all need to start investing in now, the now that we all are living in. Although its easier said that done, but its not impossible. The best way to invest in today is just smiling about everything/ everyone you have around when you wake up. If you have a big family, just smile looking  at them all, if you are a couple just smile looking at your partner, and if you live alone then just smile looking at your plants and everyone must smile once looking at themselves in the mirror.

Imagine having a bad day and someone just knocks on your day just to say “thank you”, or “love you” or “ you look amazing”, how it can instantly change the flow in your mind and you smile for no reason after that. Maybe we should start saying this to our kids, our parents, our friends, our partners, or just random people in a market or shop, you will not only change their day but also change the flow in your mind.

Money is very important, we all need it for survival, but let us not confuse it with source of happiness. We all need to take a shower but that’s not the source of happiness similarly we need to see money with the same light, we need to earn to feed, buy and enjoy, but true happiness only comes from within when others are nice to you and vice versa. Your husband/wife, kids, parents, friends will forget the expensive gifts you bought them after a while, but they will never forget the moments of joy you had spent together or words that made them feel special which will become a reason to smile not only for that moment but also years later. Its never about the expensive gift which makes people feel extremely good but the fact you thought about them while you were buying the gift that makes them feel special. We often just get confused with buying stuff over the feelings and stop expressing them and think its easier to just keep sending/buying gifts, which is why eventually buying gifts doesn’t make the other happy anymore, because there are no words spoken, there are no moments of joy spent together and it doesn’t remain a memory after sometime.

By being constantly trapped in stress/anxiety/regret/fear of the past and the future we are losing the touch with our basic core, core of living the present which we right now are actually living and breathing. If we don’t do it now, we will just die leaving behind nothing for anyone to remember us for, because we never lived the moment, there were no words spoken, there no moments of joy shared to become a part of our memories.

Do it today, Do it now!

What does it mean to truly love somebody? Well I have grown up having various images of what it feels like when you are truly in love. Of my childhood memories I think I believed what my parents gave to me was true love and what I saw between them ( I was too young to understand any fights between them) as true love for me. I think those were the simpler times 😀

Then came the teenage times which were the most confusing times because I was slowly making new friends and had started understanding televisions and movies and reading those romantic books and started understanding the concept of people being in love and relationships, but by the end of the teenage I had  I had defined true love for myself.

 For me true love was and still is 😊, about holding hands, giggling and laughing with each other, having little silly fights and making up after that, at times wanting to kill the other but never letting go, knowing exactly what the other wants with just a  smile, speaking rather cracking jokes through the eyes in a crowded place and even laughing thereafter, buying gifts for the other even without them asking because you could sense they want it, dealing with their most annoying friends and family just because you know they are important to them, the feeling of heart sinking each time other has to travel even though you have been through it a million times and always standing beside even though the other is annoying the hell out of you![ well with time your definition might expand but I like not to change the original and keep adding more to it:)]

During my entire teenage life, my search for the right guy was on and so no one could really fit into this definition of true love and along the way I had many heart breaks and broke many hearts as well, but determination to find the perfect guy was on. However, towards the end of the teenage life came a few serious relationships and most of them ended in heart breaks  but they taught me a few lessons about life which I guess I needed to learn before I met the “one”.  But like they say, when you are least expecting, you get the most expected,  so through the journey of one of my heart breaks, I met my charming prince! And he fell into my definition of true love just so perfectly that initially  I thought it was too good to be true. But again like they say ‘if you really do believe in something with all your heart, it does come true’ and all this while I was searching for true love and so it happened!. And it was a start of a journey full of happiness, laughter, joy and no amount of  distance could change it for either of us and the bond kept getting stronger and I was happy being in love, considering myself the luckiest :D.

But you see, one doesn’t realize that you grow older, you become more and more aware of the harsh truths or realities of lives of other people and at subconscious level, your thought process is changing with your each experience. One starts to believe mostly what the society or the people around you believe in and starts to become your reality and slowly your actions and reactions are guided with those thought process. So what you may have called “love”  earlier is now being defined as “puppy Love” or “ infatuation” or even ” initial flame” by the people around you and we also slowly start to believe the same. So all the actions or words you were blinded to initially because you were believed in your version, suddenly are the most obvious and hated actions /words, solely because now you follow, at subconscious level, what society is feeding your system.

And most of us, including me, are victims of this, that what we forget what we truly believed in and start to follow the society, which is commonly known as the “herd” mentality. When I had started to follow the herd, my world full of love had started to get cracks in it, I was finding most of the things I loved suddenly either annoying/egoistic/self centered etc and but kept demanding the same affection in return and I was feeling unhappy and suffocated in this relationship and I believe the same was going in my partners head as well. But it’s a law of this world, what you cannot give, you cant receive, so well since I wasn’t giving out lovable vibes or affection to my partner, I surely wasn’t going to get any in return. Henceforth started the arguments and the blame game and everything had to go downhill there onwards.

But only when you hit the lowest lows you either become cynical or you start to examine your own actions and just when I had felt my romantic world was over, I decided to opt for the latter. So after being away from each other for sometime, I met a few new people and initially it was all fun and exciting but soon I started to see either same or some problem or the other in them and excitement and happiness being with them faded away. And I started thinking over all the problems we both were facing now and what was so special about us earlier that we never had to face all of this earlier. And that’s when I realized that back then it was a world dictated solely by me and by my standards and I didn’t allow anyone to encroach upon it and that’s why he was perfect in my world, but  now it was all about what others expected a perfect partner to be along with my old expectations so it was all mixed up and none of it made sense anymore.

Honestly we all, at some point in our lives, start to judge our lives  by the measuring tapes that others create for themselves. I am sure while I was having a wonderful romantic time so many around me used my measuring tape to measure their own lives and some would have started to have cracks in their own happy land just by judging their lives by mine. Usually this happens when we let others take the charge of our own lives and let them decide what the perfect partner or love should be like. The thing is sometimes we tend to listen or follow those whom we can relate to, but the question is are you that person that you relate to or are you your own individual with your own set of ideas and thought process? So when we feel underconfident or miserable about any one aspect our lives, its just then we start to question every other aspect of our lives and that’s the time when either we let people control our minds or those  who love to dictate their terms on others, make use of the opportunity to change our mindset. People often say “oh shes/hes in their bubbleland” and we should make them realize the reality, but I feel that’s the worst thing one can do to anyone. If someones happy being themselves in their reality then no one should have the right to try to enter it or change or  worse burst the bubbleland. And that is the reason why kids are the happiest humans alive because they have their own reality and they always remain happy in it until the society or people decide to burst their bubbleland and dictate their own set of realities to them.

I believe  if we all strive to be so powerful and determined  that we can stick to our own reality of love and life then no one can enter it and dictate it no matter how hard they try and we all will be more lovable and happier people on this planet.

Stick to your reality of true love and you will never lose it 😊<3.

Well today my mom called and she wanted to get ideas from me on gender sensitization as she doing a workshop in school for kids aging between 14 years to 18 years old.

While I had truckloads of ideas to give her and even speeches which she could use to talk to kids about, it got me into thinking somethings about myself.
That I am naturally or rather was born as a gender unbiased person but all my adult life I have been forcing myself to be a biased person as I come from a society which is majorly into gender stereotyping.

As a kid I was never into playing with dolls or being fascinated with makeup or hairdos. My first best friend was a boy named Anirudh, and my mom recalls that he was always terrified by my stunts (poor guy, I was told I used to drag him to jump over canals even though he was terrified :P). Infact I had a blue baby elephant soft toy (it was bigger than me in size :D) which I would refuse to let go and would only play with it. My parents (guilty of stereotyping genders) tried a lot to make me like dolls or barbies but I refused and soon they gave up. Even as I grew up a little, both me and cousin would climb up trees, sit on the branches and talk , jump from rooftop to rooftop of houses and that was our idea of having a good time! Never once it occurred to us that we are girls and we should be playing more “girly” games like playing with fake utensils or funny named games like “house house or kitchen kitchen” :P. And for some reason I used to really enjoy the games that all the boys used to play over the games that the girls played and soon I was termed as the “tom boy” by many individuals.

I think my parents finally, through me( as I like to believe :P), learnt that it doesn’t matter whether you are a boy or a girl, every kid has his/her own unique way of looking at the world and there are no such concepts of what a girl should be like and what a boy should be like. Thereafter my dad started taking me for swimming classes, skating classes, taught me how to ride a bike, took me hiking, etc and never forced me get into anything which was termed “girly” until I showed some interest on my own. Also when my brother was born he was never forced to like or do anything that was meant just for “boys” and he was left on his own to choose whatever he liked and my parents just supported both of us with all the choices we made.

But as I entered into adulthood, I realized that they were every few like me and I hardly got along with any girls ( except 2 who are my best friends from school and are still the same in many ways). But entering into my 20’s was a different ballgame all together! I felt a complete misfit into this “world of women” as I had no idea how to make different hairstyle (except keeping them straight) or wear makeup or do my nails etc. And on top of that my favorite color was blue!!! so obviously my wardrobe was full of blues, blacks, greys and browns ( no surprises there I guess, haha). It wasn’t long enough that , I was also trapped into the gender biased world and forced myself to think just like the rest of them and I started to worry too much about my nails, hair and tried to pick only pinks, reds, etc (although I would agree getting colors in my life wasn’t a bad decision), concentrate on more household stuff etc. But still deep inside I was always attracted to blue, wanted to have a career, still thought that doing hair is a huge task!

I agree that certain emotions are stronger in men than in women and vice versa but it doesn’t mean that if a man/woman starts feeling some emotion less/more than other, they stop being a man or a woman! I think my brother is more emotional or rather cries more than me (although he would disagree :D) but I think that’s beautiful that he can feel the freedom to express it freely without being judged for it and I would never want him to change this habit of his. But does this mean he is not a man? Also in so many ways I feel my husband feels some emotions more strongly than I do and I would never want to change this just because he is a man. This makes him who he is and I love him for that [and guess what he likes the pink color more than me and boy! he looks dapper in his pink shirt with his suit :D].

Just because I feel that I want be financially independent and have a great career and cater to the financial needs of my parents, my brother and help my husband take some burden off his shoulders to always be the one to get the food on the table, make me any less of a woman? Doesn’t this imply that I am emotional, feel their struggle and that’s why I want to do this for them?

I think God created both men and women with all the emotions possible inside of them so that they can work in partnership. I feel partnership should be such that when one is down the other can step up and fill in and continue the balance of feeling all sorts of emotions and do things they like to do and create/achieve their goals together. By creating gender biasness we are putting the burden of feeling just one category of emotions and act just on those emotions and depriving every man and woman of feeling the other emotions and actions, which can be so liberating at times. Its ok if you are woman and suck at maintaining the house or cooking or you are a man who is emotional and cleans up the house stark clean.

I had read somewhere that Sweden is one of the few countries which is teaching children to be less gender biased right from pre-school and gives the freedom to the children to be just themselves depending on how they feel. This in turn has made the country one of the happiest in the world and a lot of women are performing very well in their career and men aren’t judged for taking time off for taking care of their kids. Now after reading this don’t you wish you could live in place where you could express yourself freely without having the fear of being judged based on your gender?

When my mother brought this topic up I realized that I have been living in this gender biased world for so long that I had lost my own identity of being naturally who I am. I believe if all could just stop this whole concept of gender stereotyping, we would all be more loving and would respect each other just as human beings feeling various emotions.

I say whether you are a man or a woman, love, laugh, cry, dance, be anything you want to be because this is only chance you will ever have to be who you are 😀 <3.

Have you ever wondered why it always takes women longer than men to get ready? And why is it that women are so conscious of their looks all the time while men even barely comb their hair in the day?

Well I think the reason for this is the ideology, that has been passed on from years and years, generations to generations that a woman, in order to look or be called beautiful, has to dress, behave, and most importantly look in a certain way, depending on their cultures. While the man has to simply wear nice crisp clothes and perfume and walla… hes all ready!!

My reason to write this article is because to me this somehow creates an image of women being looked upon as objects than human beings who are constantly judged and examined mostly on the basis of their hair, makeup, clothes and their overall looks. Why is it women have to spend so much time and energy in trying to look all glamorous and seductive while men have only one job to just ogle at them, as if we women are some delicious candy, waiting to be unwrapped.
[Well to be honest, I, myself, am guilty of this thought process and have been spending so much money and hours in the salon to look “beautiful and glamorous” and somehow never satisfied with my looks ]

While I understand that the laws of attraction requires you to look a certain way to get attention from the opposite sex but aren’t god gifted looks and smile and emotions inside, good enough reasons of make someone fall in love with you or get your attention?

Often, as a child, I used to wonder why is it that my mom took most time in the world in getting ready for her to look amazing( which she always did irrespective),  while my dad would take just 5 minutes and would still look amazing!. And I used to think I wish I had the power to look that good just like my dad just in 5 minutes so that I don’t waste my time and energy in trying to look good and I rather do something more meaningful.

However, as I grew up I realized that, from time immemorial, women all over the world have been taught since childhood how to sit, how to dress well (according to their own traditions), how to speak, basically all grooming is done in trying to make them better and more beautiful as well as attractive which includes going through some painful process of waxing, getting perfect eyebrows, nails and so on and without giving much importance to the god gifted looks, emotions and brains the women are born with. While the boys are allowed to be own their own, use more of their gifted brain muscles and little time is spent on them in teaching how to behave well in public (basically teaching them not to be rowdy and speak well) and absolutely no time is spent on “improving” their looks. The general thought process is , they always look good , till the time they have taken a shower and are wearing nice washed clothes!

I feel, we as women are gifted with attractive looks and we don’t need to work on us so hard all the time to look good. Our idea of “a beautiful woman” needs to be changed. We are not objects that we need a wrapper around us to attract opposite sex. Now don’t get me wrong here, I totally believe in the concept of hygiene and definitely believe one should be hygienic at all times. But we as women should learn to embrace ourselves more and more without being conscious of how our hair, nails, clothes or face should be all the time.

The idea of sexy, sultry women in men’s heads needs to be changed to beautiful god gifted looks, empowering, sentimental and understanding of emotions.  Because no matter how many layers of wrappers are wrapped around us or we as women wrap it around us with surgeries, makeup, sexy clothing, etc, in the end for us women it all boils down to the emotions and heart. If no men can respect us as human beings, then we don’t need to be around them.

I think we need men to tell us we don’t need to take that long to look beautiful because we look beautiful as who we are. We need men to encourage us to be ourselves in whatever form we are, like we give them that freedom. We need men to appreciate the heart, the smile and emotions and not our choice of clothes, or our madeup face or hair.

Most importantly we as women should encourage other women to live with freedom of being just themselves and appreciating the soul in them rather than judging them for not being dressed a certain way, or not making effort to “look beautiful”. We need to support each other, encourage each other, should remind them regularly that they are beautiful as who they are and they don’t need to stress on their looks constantly.

Our choice of clothes, hair, shoes etc should be a reflection of our innerselves and not a concept to look good or attract attention to fit in the world by the definition we only have created . We should learn to smile at ourselves when we look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning right after we wake up.

IF we want men to stop objectifying us women then we need to start from within. We need to embrace ourselves as who we are and stop glorifying the made up world in trying too hard to look hot, sexy, glamorous, beautiful, etc. just to fit in. Because we as women are naturally all of such things without even trying too hard and we don’t need to be stamped by men for approval.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton