Free? For Whom?

This has been running in my mind so much that I realised I needed to vent it out of my system. I don't know if I should publish this, cos I've got quite critiqued for being so public about my private life, by a couple of good friends, plus may be even you will understand just in case you get to lay your eyes on this post. They say its a free world and all. But damn it!I cant say one thing without being judged and dissected and analysed. Sometimes I feel like I've been perpetually strapped to the brain mapper or something.

For one thing, in my opinion I'm a relatively law abiding member of society, which means I don't do radical things like cut my hair short and colour it red . Neither do I do something like give up my super secure job just to sit home and write a book. I also am not 32 and rich and single and a powerful corporate counsel in love with a man 6 years younger than me. I don't walk around being atheist or agnostic or anything. Ya, I still believe that God will poke my eyes at night if I do something wrong. I still have not taken a drag from a ciggi or a puffed from a joint. I'm not "cool" if any of the above falls under the definition. Damn it!!Its long since I even had a beverage more interesting that the tea from the stupid stainless steel glass at work(here they believe at my grade, I dont even deserve a china cup and saucer).

I live a non-obtrusive boring life, with my greatest time pass being intently overhearing the banter on the table across from mine. Be it at work, where some of the guys here discuss their cholestrol levels and if they did their morning walk. Or another person who is competing with a female colleague in acquiring jewellery in dowry for his daughter. The fights between them usually relate to who needs to save more because she is Tam-bram and has 2 daughters or because he is Golti with a need to fulfill his daughters dream of going to "foreign country". Sometimes I hear some stupid conversation at a coffee shop or a restaurant which usually leaves me wondering whether I sound as silly or ever sounded as silly.

I am still grappling with completing my education. I'm not saying that one needs to be an expert juggler or anything. But I admit it really requires a substantial amont of motivation to look at more print once you get home from office, where you've already read enough monotonous print. I may also be a bit wierd in a way. To chase Bharatanatyam though I lack in totality the grace or the body for it. But since my brain does not get the point, it's intent on chasing its dream and I plithely oblige. I can't handle another one of those battles within my head. So sometimes its just better to shut up and do what your brain insists on doing.

Looking at myself, I don't even wear fun clothes. Here where I work, people think western formal is as good as being 'indecent' or 'vulgar'. Those words have oiginated from 3 generations before me and I can almost hear the words as I type them, hissing, echoing in my ears in heavily 'tamilian' accented voices. I'm not even the type to carefully match jewellery to my clothes. I know that makes me sound more boring than Eve- the female robot in Walle, but what to do? Thats how terrible my graph of evolution looks like.

I'm not a blogger who has some 112 comments..leave alone a 112 even 12 comments on my post! I don't think I ever do anything which ever attracts attention, except talking aloud to myself ocassionally, at which people around pucker up their faces as if I've landed here straight from Pluto or something!!!But still no matter what I do, I have eyes and ears and sometimes even hands and feet set on me, all ready to devour me. I know I've made myself sound so vulnerable. But I swear- no exagerration here.

I also believe in the right to privacy being the most fundamental right. By that I definitely mean able to publicly display affection without those gaping, gawking eyes on me. I mean being able to write about anything I please without being evaluated on my standards of adherence to morality or principles or such idealistic things, which sometimes makes people think of me as the diametric opposite of what I truly am - a pretty nice girl who is just so human after all, yet being discussed by fellow humans as if I am a specimen of research and analysis.