What you owe yourself at work, regardless of who is leading you.

Most conversations about workplace integrity start with leadership. The assumption is that culture comes from the top, values are modelled by the people in charge, and the rest of the team takes its cues from what is shown.

This is true, but it is also incomplete. It quietly removes the responsibility from the person doing the work and places it entirely on the person managing them. And it leaves you with no framework for the days when the leadership is absent, distracted, or themselves still figuring it out.

The work you do is not only a reflection of what you have been taught, or what someone above you has told you to do. It is a reflection of your own judgement, your own values, and your own ability to apply empathy alongside cleverness when you execute. Corporate politics is unavoidable. Your delivery, however, is entirely your own, because you are the one taking information, synthesising it, and acting on it.

There is a version of professionalism that is not inherited from above. It is held by you, for you, regardless of who is in the room.

A few things I think this version asks of a person.

1. Be a human first.

Before you are an employee, a teammate, a manager, a direct report, you are a person with a value set. The job is not the source of those values. It is a place where those values are tested.

One value I have chosen to hold, over the years, is to never be derogatory about the people I work with. Not in conversation, not in inference, not in the small ways that creep into how you describe someone when they are not in the room. When a colleague drops the ball, my default is to assume they have forgotten, or misjudged the situation, or had something else competing for their attention. Not that they are out to get me, and not that they are bad at their job. Generosity of interpretation is the first thing I extend, before anything else.

2. Empathy is part of execution, not separate from it.

The default story about competence at work treats it as a function of intelligence, speed, and cleverness. These matter. But empathy is what allows cleverness to land in a team rather than just in a deck.

A manager of mine spent years teaching me to pause, reflect on what was actually being said, and then respond. It took longer than I would like to admit to internalise it, and now it feels strange to do anything else. The pause is the whole game. It is also where empathy lives in practice, not in principle.

The harder version of this is detaching from a heated situation while you are still inside it. Stepping back enough to see the people in the room for who they are, including their strengths and their limits, and still doing your best work for them. Not just for the colleagues you like. For the wider room.

3. Your work is your record, not your manager’s.

The instinct to do work because someone is watching is a natural one. The instinct to do work because it is the work is rarer and more durable.

I am mindful of how I am perceived at work, because I have seen how people are described in their absence and I have been on the receiving end of perceptions that did not match my record. So my own conduct is something I lead from regardless of who is in the room. I do not bully. I do not refuse instructions. I do not make people feel small in a meeting, whatever their title. Dependability is my core, and I would hold to it whether anyone was watching or not.

4. Information is not currency.

Holding context close, becoming the only person who knows the brief or the client preference or the workaround, these things feel like power. They are actually fragility.

Some people sit on information because they think it makes them important, or indispensable. It does neither. Information inside an organisation is never created by a single person. It will come out. Sitting on it is just insecurity or narrowness of vision dressed up as leverage, and it tends to be visible to everyone except the person doing it.

5. Withholding information in time is a failure on you, not a strategy.

Not sharing what you know, when you know it, with the people who need it, is one of the more common ways people misread their own role. It is often dressed up as discretion, or judgement, or knowing how to handle things. Most of the time it is none of those.

My default is to communicate early and in writing. Email, message, voice note, whatever the channel needs to be, but always in a form that leaves a trace. I learned this from a manager who sat across many forums, gathering the small instances of what was happening around the office, and weaving them into her view of teams as much as her view of campaigns. Watching her work showed me how much of the larger picture is invisible to any single person, and how much of it depends on people choosing to share before they were asked.

A version of the same point shows up when people mistake politeness for authority. A manager who entertains your input, who hears you out, who lets the conversation breathe, is being courteous. They are not handing you the decision. The cleaner way to locate yourself is to look at the responsibilities you have been given, and the people you have been given them alongside. Your role is described there, plainly.

Your primary job, in almost every role, is to inform the right people at the right time.

6. Clarity about your role is a contribution, not a limitation.

A good employee is openly clear about what is theirs to do and what belongs to someone else on the team. Not as a way of drawing lines, but as a way of making sure the work gets done by the right person, in the right order, with the right inputs.

I cannot start a project, now, without putting this in place first. I assign by capability, I document what I expect from each person, I share the document with the team, and I treat the document as part of the foundation, not as paperwork. It is the thing I build everything else on.

The failure mode on the other side is when someone reaches above and beyond their scope, into work that is not theirs, or over the head of the person they should be working through. That is not ambition. It is a misread of the structure, and it is a shortcoming the person making it usually cannot see clearly until much later.

7. Having information is not the same as having permission to share it.

There is a separate discipline from sharing information in time, and it is knowing who you can share it with. People make this mistake often. They confuse being told something with being entrusted to pass it on.

When a manager raises something with you in confidence, even something that seems small, like timekeeping or attendance or how a colleague has been showing up lately, the confidence is part of the instruction. The conversation was had with you because it needed to be had with you. It was not a briefing for you to take horizontally to your peers.

The test I tend to apply is simple. Who was this said to, and was that on purpose. If the answer is “to me, on purpose”, then it stays with me.

8. Hierarchy exists even in flat structures, and reading it is part of the job.

A lot of modern organisations describe themselves as flat. The intention behind it is good. The misreading of it is that hierarchy has disappeared, when what has actually happened is that it has become quieter.

I recently set up a RACI inside my part of the organisation, because chaos was emerging from people confusing what input meant. Input does not mean the whole plan gets reworked. Sometimes input is a note. Sometimes it is something held for the record. Sometimes it is a perspective that will shape the next version but not this one. Conflating these is a hierarchy-reading failure dressed up as a process problem.

I also adjust how I work to the room. When senior leadership is in a meeting, I keep the language tight, because their time is short and the conversation should respect that. When I am with my team, I ask for full detail, because the failure mode at that level is sitting on things people think they are managing on their own.

9. Do not use other people’s mistakes as a shield for your own.

When a manager raises a concern with you about your conduct, the only useful response is to look at your conduct. Not at someone else’s. The instinct to deflect, to point at a colleague who did the same thing, to redirect the conversation toward a peer who was worse, is one of the most damaging habits a person can build at work.

Deflection tells the person above you two things at once. That you have not absorbed the feedback, which makes you harder to promote into more responsibility. And that you have misread where you sit in the structure, because you have started taking decisions on behalf of your manager, or escalating sideways and upwards in ways that were not yours to escalate.

The cleaner move is older and harder. To hear the feedback, sit with it, and address what is yours to address. Whatever someone else did or did not do is a separate conversation, between them and the person who manages them. It is not your inheritance to wield.

10. The exit is part of the job.

How you leave is the final piece of work you do in a role. Not a footnote to the work, part of it. This is as true of leaving a company as it is of leaving a team, a project, or a reporting line you have been part of for years. The handover, the last conversations, the leave you do or do not take, the version of the story you tell on the way out. All of it is observed and remembered, often more clearly than the months that came before.

I have always done full handovers, every time I have exited a role. Not because I had to. Because the discipline of leaving a role well has actually worked in my favour over time. It removed any perception that what kept me in my position was the information I was holding close. It made visible the part underneath, which was the version of me that operated regardless of the information. The handover became proof of what I was, not a cost I paid on the way out.

11. Your standards are yours.

It is not about carrying a rulebook of standards from job to job and trying to install it wherever you go. It is also not about killing yourself, metaphorically, in service of perfection. You can be easy about most things and that is healthy.

The standards that matter are the ones that come from your own reflection on who you are and what you actually stand for. Not the ones you have adopted from a culture, or a manager, or a peer group. The ones you have spent time with.

Where this matters most is in the moments when politics, hearsay, and noise are pulling at you. If you have not done the work of knowing your own value set, you have no place to stand when the noise gets loud. If you have, you can detach. You can let the work be the work, and the gossip be someone else’s project to carry.

The deeper standard, the one that travels with you, is different. Someone else will always come along and do your job better than you. What people remember is not the deliverable. It is the cohesiveness of who you were while you did it. That standard is yours.

12. Grace at work is its own form of currency.

There is something quieter that runs underneath all of this, and it is grace. The way you hold yourself when things are not going your way. The way you treat people who cannot do anything for you. The way you respond when a meeting goes badly, when a project slips, when feedback lands harder than you expected, when a colleague behaves in a way you would not have. None of this shows up on a deliverable. All of it is noticed.

Grace is not the same as being agreeable. It is not about saying yes, or smoothing things over, or pretending the difficult moments did not happen. It is about carrying yourself in a way that does not make those moments worse for anyone else, including yourself. It is the choice not to retaliate, not to gossip, not to perform an injury for an audience, not to score a small point at someone else’s expense when nobody would have stopped you.

The reason this matters more than people realise, particularly in the industries I have worked in, is that the rooms are smaller than they look. The same people come back into your life at different stages of your career, in different configurations of seniority, in different companies, on different sides of the table. The person you were ungenerous with at thirty often shows up again at forty, and they have not forgotten how the last interaction went, even if you have. The only kind of liking and disliking that should ever matter to you is the kind that follows you through these reappearances. The rest is noise.

The people who carry themselves with grace are not always the loudest in the room. They are often not the ones who get the most credit in the moment. But they are the ones whose names come up later in the quieter conversations that decide things, the ones people choose to work with again, the ones who never have to explain themselves twice. That is not a small inheritance to build over a career.

The work you produce is not only the sum of what you have been taught or instructed to do. It is the sum of your judgement, your values, and the empathy you bring to executing in harmony with everyone else around you.

That version of you is not built by the org chart. It is built by you, in small decisions, on ordinary days, when nobody is watching.

Worth being deliberate about.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Moment Already Passed. Were You Still Asking Permission?

When you move between categories in your career, you notice something quickly.

I have had the good fortune to pivot between three key ones:

Mobility, that teaches you how to build the pressure to sell something in a sea of products that are very similarly priced, designed and marketed to each other. 

FMCG, which gives you the rigour of a category where brands need to remain memorable, because despite the high rate of repurchase, when the customer enters the aisle and sees a discounted price on the competitor’s packet, he forgets everything. 

And then the automobile, currently led by motorcycling in my case, built on the premise of being a unique voice in a sea of products, staying ahead of the game by keeping the customer at the centre and never talking spec sheets. 

And what this exposure has taught me is that brand teams don’t all treat their audiences the same way. 

Some invest seriously in understanding the full person behind the purchase. Consumer research, live conversations, psychographic studies that go well beyond what someone buys and into why they buy it, what they believe, what they are quietly aspirational about. These are the brands that know their customer is a runner and a parent and someone who cares about where their food comes from, all at the same time. 

And then there are the brands that built their position on exactly that kind of instinct, got there, and stopped. Not out of arrogance. Out of protection. They have a cult following, films that perform, analytics that validate, and a community that reliably responds. So they shelter. They narrow the conversation to the things they know will land. And slowly, without anyone deciding it, the audience’s world keeps expanding while the brand’s world stays the same size. 

That is not safety. That is the beginning of a slow drift apart. And this is where aspiration starts to leak. The cult brand, so focused on protecting what it has built, stops reaching for what it has not yet earned. The younger brand, the lifestyle brand, the one with a fraction of the heritage and none of the history, steps into that gap. Not because it is better. But because it is willing. It shows up in moments the established brand left unclaimed, speaks to parts of the person the bigger brand stopped being curious about, and quietly begins to own the aspiration that the cult brand assumed was permanently theirs. Cult status does not transfer automatically to the next generation of customers. It has to be re-earned, in their language, in their moments, on their terms.

Cult status is not a destination. It is a pressure to keep earning. The same instinct that built the following is the same instinct that has to keep shaking the category, finding new ways in, new mediums, new angles of communication that make a person feel something about the brand in a context that has nothing to do with the moment of purchase. Your analytics will tell you what is working inside the world you have already built. They will not tell you about the world you have not entered yet. 

The brands that understood this did not wait for permission. Ariel’s Share The Load did not come from a detergent brief. It came from someone asking a completely different question: what does the person doing the laundry actually carry, beyond the laundry? The answer cracked the category open and made a washing powder brand part of a cultural conversation about gender that people are still talking about years later. 

Apple’s work around accessibility did not come from a product feature checklist. It came from a decision to show the world through the eyes of people the world usually ignores. One film. One day. An audience that felt genuinely seen, and a brand that earned something no campaign budget can manufacture directly. 

Neither of those moments came from community feedback. Neither of them came from watching what was trending and deciding it was safe to respond. They came from a brand deciding it had something to say, and saying it before anyone asked. 

That is the difference. Not budget. Not production value. The willingness to move first. Here is the part that nobody talks about enough. The brands losing ground right now are not losing it because they stopped caring. They are losing it because they started waiting. Waiting for the community to surface a moment. Waiting for a topic to gain enough traction that acting on it feels safe. Waiting for the very people they should be leading to tell them where to go. 

That is not community building. That is followership with a logo on it. The brands that built genuine cult status did not get there by reading the room. They built the room. Supreme did not ask its community whether a limited drop was a good idea. The Grateful Dead did not poll their audience on set-lists. These brands understood something that gets lost the moment a brand becomes successful enough to have a brand guardian: the job is not to reflect culture back at people. The job is to add something to it that was not there before. 

A brand that only speaks when the community has already spoken is not a cult. It is an echo. A good marketer is the one who observes multiple categories and challenges the norms of the system they are working inside. And a great one keeps asking the right questions, time and again, even when the resistance is loud, even when the answer is not yet yes. Because the marketer who gives up on the cause altogether is the reason the next generation on that brand stays in fear. Stays safe. Never builds on the cultural moments that could have taken the brand somewhere it had never been before. 

Some of that ownership sits specifically with the social and content teams. Not because they post the most, but because they are the ones closest to what is actually happening. And that job demands more than tracking trending formats, trending audios, hook steps and viral templates. It demands a depth of observation that most people underestimate. What is the customer feeling right now? What are they pivoting towards? What fears are they expressing, not in surveys, but in the comments, in the content they share, in the creators they are suddenly following, in the silences between the things they used to engage with and no longer do? 

Social is not a broadcast tower. It is the most honest focus group that has ever existed. And the brands that treat it that way, using it to listen as seriously as they use it to speak, are the ones that find the adjacent moment, the unexpected conversation, the cultural shift worth owning before anyone else has claimed it. 

That is where restraint becomes the enemy. Because the easiest thing a brand team can do is show up on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, every year, in the same format every other brand is also showing up in. It is safe. It is expected. And it is exactly how a brand trains its audience to stop paying attention. 

The job of a great brand team is to keep people on their toes. To find the moment nobody else claimed. To take the brand’s values and express them through a conversation that surprises, that feels instinctive rather than scheduled, that makes someone stop and think about the brand in a context they were not expecting. Not because it is provocative for its own sake. But because that is how you reach the person who is not thinking about your product category at all right now. The person who is thinking about something they noticed in culture, in human behaviour, in the world around them, and suddenly your brand becomes the thing that articulates it for them. 

That is the adjacency. Not a product extension. A moment of recognition. And sometimes that recognition comes from the outside in. A collaborator, a creator, a community that exists adjacent to your brand’s world, who sees a version of your brand that you have not yet allowed yourself to see. The brands that stay open to that are the ones that find new rooms to grow into. The ones that don’t, protect a universe that is quietly getting smaller every year, while calling it consistency. 

A well known brand, used well, becomes a sounding board for the cultural shifts its audience is already living through. That is a different ambition than selling a product. And it is a much harder brief to write. But it is the brief that separates the brands people talk about from the brands people simply buy. 

Social is where you test whether you have found that moment before you bet everything on it. Not to do what everybody else is doing on the same days in the same formats. But to try something that feels genuinely yours, watch what happens, and let that teach you where to go next. 

These are the questions I bring to work every day. Some of them still don’t have easy answers. That’s usually a sign they’re worth asking and pushing the envelope :) 

Retarded instances from my life, part 2

There are stupid things you say and then stupid but awesome things you do.

I'm thinking about this time,
Dad was based at Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
And i once touched a devil fish bigger than myself in 2 feet water on the beach.
I might have been only 4 feet in height myself back then, but once i realized there are 'actual' fish in the sea, i didn't ever walk into the deep like we all used to. I was petrified of sharks.
Or eels in the water.
All along i used to thing Jaws was made up.
In short i never believed in 'sharks' existing at all.
And by that time i had already done scuba diving, deep water diving, even tried my hand at surfing with the locals!
Gosh, i used to think the happy creature's from 'Little Mermaid' were all that existed under water.

When we shifted to Vizag, i learned the art of making clay utensils. Like literal clay utensils. Thanks to the abundance of clay mud in our backyard, i would dig it out, mold it and let it dry to perfection in the sun.
What more, I'd make small fires and pretend to cook in them even!
I had all kinds on utensils from mugs, pot's, pans, spoons.
You name it.
Once cooked rice in them!
Of course i hadn't ever thought of washing them so when i tasted my experiment, i tasted a whole lot of texture of mud.
This one time i found few of moms creams and cooked them as well.
I might have tried eating them as well, had i not opened the bottle of Fem bleach and cooked it's chemicals.
I distinctly remember seeing florescent fumes with this toxic smell coming from them when it began to cook!
And i think, that day was the death of my kitchen cooking madness.
Never again.

So far in my life I've only crushed on people twice.
The first time i crushed on someone, i slapped the boy in public.
And he was 3 years my senior.
It was a dare from his best friend and i swear i could tell he was interested.
Shit.
But thanks to first time love, I discovered i could write 'ok' sort of poems.
My first one i think i remember by heart.
It went something like this:

"What does it take to convince you,
That I'm really in love,
In liking of you somehow,
That I cannot shove.

And when i look at you,
The feeling i cannot explain,
I get rid of all my sorrows,
Sadness, guilt and pain........ .... "

Err..  Ok there was one more parra on dancing. But I don't quite remember it.
Come to think of it, it was thanks to him i started keeping a diary in the first place!
It was a love journal of sorts..
As lame and retarded as it may sound,
I still have it.
I have all my journals.
Stacked away secretly..

We had a golden retriever in our Himachal home (Rana Villa), and i swear it was the coolest and nicest dog I'd ever seen.
His name was 'Hero'.
And it loved eating green apples which came in crates and the sour grapes that my grandfather grew in the backyard.
And every summer when my parents would leave me there,
He was my best friend.
If it hadn't been for that dog, I'd have loved no dogs.
..
I used to tie a red Cape to its neck which would often fall to one side.
But when it had that on,
I would be fearless.
And even go wandering into the jungle on my own.
(i realize now, how lucky both Hero and i had been, there were actual wolves and panthers/leopards in those jungles... Which i found out about years later)

What really is this feminism we're all screaming from the top of buildings about?

I've denied being a feminist. To friends, strangers, lovers, et all. 

But through my own journey I've begun to question, think, map what might have given rise or even brought about the thoughts on the matter for people who declare or credit them selves as 'feminists'.. But that perspective needs a much more deeper understanding.

Let me begin to first explain how difficult and at times how convenient it is to dodge any responsibility. I can be rebellious and fight for equality in this 'mans world', forever more misunderstood than ever appreciated or i can simply choose to be submissive and leave it to others to be taken care of.

I'm not allowed to be rude or aggressive or hold my stand on issues and viewpoints and more often than not its taken for granted that i will eventually give up. 

That weakness is in built. 

That strength is a connotation of only physical endurance in opposition to being to my better understanding - empathetic, unbiased, understanding, vigilant, sensitive and forgiving nature which in a mans world are often traits marked by or connoted to great leaders.

I'm expected to know how to cook, clean, take care of the house, willing to bear children, maintain friendly relations and balance family dynamics before i express my needs and dreams as an individual in this world.

My persistence is usually labeled as a tantrum and my behavior classified as incompetent and unacceptable by people. I'm labelled psychotic, crazy, demented, slut and easy by those who refuse to peer deeper into my ambitions, what i want to stand for and values from the safety of their own environment and values they have been brought up with.

I have to battle being declared the 'weaker sex', eve teased, passed comments at, shown the glass ceiling at work, shown my place at home and even by those i chose to open up out of love...shown my place eventually if not gradually.

First appearances, looks, poise, manners even vocal pitch are put way before my achievements and personal strengths, character traits and individuality. Heck i should mention i have hooted right back on two occasions and once caught a guy by his collar for passing comments and making kissing noises at me. Only i can say how terrified i was inside to have tried something of that sorts in India and alone - where the onlookers do nothing more that stare back or look through depending on convenience.  

I admit, I've even told my should have been husbands mother once of his misconduct and been severely shot down for doing so. A woman cant even confide in another woman without her taking personal offense. Shouldn't she have simply scolded her son and empathized? I am not incompetent, I wouldn't dare ever question anyone's rearing abilities, but couldn't it have been considered that what the said boy was doing was so wrong that it drove me to complaint or reach out? Rather let me also tell you the outcome, i was accused for being disgraceful and burning the bridges. Even when i take into account that initial rage to my complaint might have caused a stir but a mother understands eventually, which also i assume is true. Or so i would like to believe. 

Human values do go for a toss really, i mean - would an 'ill-wisher' muster the courage to retaliate? 

Our actions are forever seen in different light. If i flirt easily or mix well with a large crowd I'm automatically declared 'border-line loose charactered' and then gossiped about or kept a keen eye on for any chances to reinforce the title with mistakes or events or instances. A boy or man in my position on the other hand might be called jovial or outgoing. If i pursue a love interest relentlessly i am called materialistic or greedy or delusional or crazy. If a boy does the same he always deserves a chance, because he is always suppose to be seen as going out of his way? 

No one takes into account that woman first focus on the smaller things, gestures, small adjustments, ritual's. We're far more practical even when romantically involved, somewhere adjusting and keeping our wishes second. But when and if a situation so arrises when we need support and it takes time to normalize   things, men are allowed to move on, give up, blame us for it all, not taking into account the smaller acts of love or kindness. 

Heck i say, if all the woman in the world took a week of from their PR jobs, the world would go to war. Social dynamics, eye for details, emotional intelligence are clearly not one of mans best virtues. 

And who says woman gossip the most? At least we do it in positive light or even just to close set of friend we would trust with our lives. We don't give away more intimate details till of course its something hilarious or something we don't have answers to. 

But men? Having experienced first hand, men will share everything from love life, money spent, sex life, even to the extend of showcasing how far a woman is ready to go, or fall or sacrifice without really understanding the underlying message - she's in love. She trusts you, ready to believe in you, she might have had a late realization even about how much. 

Of course that's unlike men, if they make mistakes they must be forgive immediately. Or a verdict must be passed with due consideration. When we make mistakes? The verdict and titles come immediately. (Ok, or maybe on the last 3 parra's I'm an Indian. And a mildly conservative one, but very sensitive to words and gestures and follow up actions.) 

I am a 'daughter' before i am an actress. A 'mother' before i am a CEO. And these titles don't just implicate the celebration of what i have simultaneously achieved, rather they have every now and then been used to show me my final position and role in society.

I have no personal choice when it comes to loving someone, be it our ethical tradition of arrange marriages where men chose their wives, or modern day love stories where the men feel so utterly flattered about being perused-ed that they will find all sort of ways and means to talk dirty about you, bring you up in conversation, keep you away, show anger, disgusts in acknowledged that its unacceptable. Alas, if i stand for a person i love and i'm shot down, how do i stand for things i love and still be accepted...?

If things go right in a marriage or relationships its his achievement, if something goes wrong its her fault. If a woman cries its a mood swing or drama, even manipulation! But if a man sheds tears its because he's been deeply hurt, done wrong to or been cut deep to his soul. If he did something wrong he was confused, if a woman did something wrong it was 'planned'. 

I am strong, i refuse to hurt myself to prove a point. To inflict self injury or pain. I refuse to sulk in sadness. Because i believe its not why someone fell in love with me, its not the woman who later in life would be able to bear the brunts of life along side her man, over bigger issues in life if she fails now. But more often than not - its easier to classify us as fast, heartless, emotionless than appreciate how we chose to project our internal struggles. 

Human values go for a toss when gauging our spirit in more humanitarian terms over issues closer to home. A mans feelings and efforts are kept way above a woman's. A taste of our struggles and feelings can send them running for the hills. Even when we constantly fight for equal rights for all, better living standards for all, equal treatment for all, in sense of greater issues and masses. This mindset starts at home, nurtured in everyday relationships, and far before they become dirty words and cause political up stir in a country. 

A minister might beat his wife everynight, or a boss sexually harass his secretary in the confined space of his office, a ex boyfriend might be relentless, even bringing down his entire wrath on to his ex-girl friend while proving an entirely different point or trying to project his greatness to his current love interest or larger audience. All becuase he moved on? And what a great struggle that must have been? (personally men who say things like 'my ex was psychotic, how much have they grown over years? Who is fueling their chuvanistic outlook? Its us, us woman, men and society at a much more basic level.) 

I am a woman, over history i have been labeled the cause of all problems somehow, somewhere, in someway or the other. We've made greater leaders, raised worriers, supported the ambitions of husbands and lovers, been the all knowing, all bearing wives of presidents, extra working hands on field's of landless farmers, supported entire famille in the absence of husbands serving in the military for decades at war. Silently, responsibly, but its overlooked. 

Acknowledgement often comes in much more shallow forms 'celebrating womanhood' through beauty pageants, ribbon cutting ceremonies, involvement with smaller matters of state, sidelined to the stands or magazine covers or used as hangers even.

What really is our stand? Where exactly do we stand? Where do we draw the line? 

Short story: You live a lie

You hide your true identity.
Your friends think they know you, but they don't. 
Your parents think that there isn't more to know about you, but they don't know. 
You kid thinks you're an entire universe in yourself, but you live a a parallel reality on the side.

Your colleges think you're unexposed, plain, self obsessed, cocooned.

But what they don't know is - you aren't.  

You beat women on the side.
You lie to your wife and while you wear her name around your ring finger,

You have the courage to cress someone else with that very same hand.
The same lips you use to kiss you young one, you use for purposes much beyond dirty words.

 

When you take off your clothes at night, you don't take off the pretense.

Never exposing your scars and ugly skin to your own life. 

Never at easy, fearing prying eyes. 

You only take that off in private.
But privet is never really on your own,
Never in the confinement of small rooms that suffocate your soul,  

Always in the presence of another being you delude and call your one true love.

Little do you have the guts to even look at yourself in the mirror 

To acknowledge that there's not been one but a series of such strangers.

Who you put down I in private.
Who you torture behind closed doors.
Who you hurt with all your strength, both physical and emotionally.

 
You've created monsters with void pasts. 

Their own reality and history diluted by your words.
Who are cruel to themselves and who ache to pain at your hands. 
On the outside no one will ever be able to see this person.
On the outside no one will ever know those strangers.

Those few quiet woman, fragile flowers silently writhing at your hands.  

You hide your true identity... 
Your friends think they know you, but they don't..
But i do. 

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.  -  Charles Dickens 

Zombie, Vampire and other things that scare me

Wondering if I've every been vocal or verbalized being zombie apocalypse paranoid..

Well not that I can remember. But yup...in my mind, I zombie proof every place I go, look for escape routs, check door strengths and blocking methods for SOS purposes.

Hey. Its a legit fear ok?.. The rising up from the sink after splashing your face to find one standing behind you!

After all, zombies unlike other mythical creatures are a byproduct of medical testing and 'things going wrong' in deep dark parts of big chemical plans or medicine research or army weapon development centers in some part of the world. Maybe our part of the world where human number in population strength is anyhow too high and a missing few can easily go unnoticed.

Well its not I don't have my own theories for vampires about being deficient in nutrients and further more the genes that breakdown and absorb sunlight and hence have to remain nocturnal and come out only in the dead of the night (or moonlight).

Yes, I think the most realistic things after zombies are vampires. But I'll come go that later.

What I do believe before zombies is in cannibalism. And it sure as hell freaks the shit out of me. Someone out there is currently reading this while chewing on a finger of a person half frozen in their fridges right now. Think about that. ... Or don't.

But what is one thing that ties zombies, vampires and cannibils together? They are dependent on human flesh and blood (involuntarily or by choice)

While a zombies body is disintegrating continuously and its own organs have become useless, probably due to organ failure or shock they undergo at time of inception or infection or contamination, a vampire I feel might not be able to similarity reproduce blood by itself and hence needs a dilation or blood transfusion and their body's over time have adapted to environmental conditions in such a way that it can perform blood transfusion through their front teeth itself. A fresh flow of blood..every week may also explains very good skin. Hmmm.. (No wonder beauty treatments around the work are moving towards it)

Fir cannabils it might be a lifestyle choice but it links back to zombies that maybe just maybe human flesh really is so tasty at the end of the day that ones you start consuming it, you cannot stop.

And since a zombies brain is dead due to lack of circulation of blood that also is a factor for disintegration of their own bodies, it's probably their natural evolution to graduate to human flesh over other animal flesh.

Yup, these are the kinds of thoughts that go through my head when ever I think of either, or, and of the three.

Though while vampires and cannabis can be reasoned with at some levels, I feel I most fear zombies because of their lack of though and direction and utter lack of pattern and un-predicatbality really.