✫Love Letter to Mōnalisã • Örla • Miss Forrest Gump✫

Hola, Mōnalisã — Olâ, Örla — Halō, Miss Forrest Gump

You’re 22 today.

11 years, one-&-a-half months ago — 25^th Oct 2011, Marina Keegan turned 22. 

She wrote a beautiful letter —The Opposite of Loneliness— during her final days at Yale & weeks before she was about to step into the real world of jobs & bills, a.k.a the World of Wolves.

Marina never stepped into the World of Wolves. She never turned 23. 

Marina died in a car crash 5 days after she graduated. 

World will never know what she would’ve become.

In her last letter, she’s grateful, she’s scared, she’s starry-eyed, she writes about never-ever losing that sense of infinite possibilities.

Marina is spot-on about everything, but one — “the best years of our lives are not behind us.”

At 22, I was also like Marina. I ate cotton candy for breakfast & dined on fairy tales. But we can keep waiting for 77 virgins in heaven or Santa Klaus to place gifts under our bed on Christmas Eve, or we can accept the reality that life isn’t a billion-dollar Marvel superhero film — life, mostly, is dull like watching paint dry. 

College is the avalanche of orgasms in human lives. Nothing ever beats college. Anyone who tells me their life got more orgasmic after college are the humans who buy orgasms, not create them. 

College is the only time in human lives when we enjoy adulthood’s beautiful liberties & joys without being crushed by the grotesque & constant necessity to spend our most-precious gift — Time, towards earning money that we don’t need to buy things we don’t want.

All the inelegances we get away with in college, we can no longer get away with in the World of Wolves.

We’re expected to be exceptionally-educated, elitely-employed, eloquently-spoken, elegantly-dressed, & work every day with dimwitted dumbfucks whom we rather choke in their sleep at the first chance.

Does that mean, we shall all become Joker — chew gum, brew bedlam, chug cheetos & chuckle crazily as the world burns?

I was born thirty-three generations before the dinosaurs. I’ve willion gallons of wisdom as I’ve lived 2.73 billion years & chugged trillion tonnes of trashy taiwanese tequila.

When I was a young one-billion-year-old, I deciphered that — “The trouble isn’t not knowing what you want to be. The trouble is becoming someone you never wanted to be.”

As long as you don’t burn your little time on Earth doing things that crush your soul & make the world worse, you’ll be alright. And somewhere, if you’re in luck, you’ll bump into something that will make you come alive. Because what the world truly wants is for you to come alive.

Curiosity cures Boredom ✫ Nothing cures Curiosity. I love how you’re curious about bloody everything. In a world where selfishness is repackaged as self-love & injected into the plumpy bums of young humans of the 21^st century, you stand out as the real-life Forrest Gump & Örla McCool [Derry Girls]

When Prithvi & I cleaned the Saket bridge on 30^th June ’22, you were the only human I knew who would wake up at 4.45am & come with us. The ridiculous dedication you show while teaching kids in the Majnu ka Tila slums & the dispassionate precision of a surgeon you show while imparting Sex-ed to the slum savitris is a spectacle.

You sure have titanium balls, or you wouldn’t walk all day in the kachra-filled streets of Dilli wearing whitest shoes and deliberately spend the entire chilly dilli winters showering with icy cold water. You never wear make-up on your skin or your soul. You always come as you’re.

When you speak in real Hindi, I feel like you’re speaking Luxembourgish or Sankrit — making me feel clueless as Manmohan felt as the PM. You’re a no-recharge-needed storytelling-machine whose switch-off button is broken.

It’s really amusing that we get along as you’re super chirpy & I’m super morose — when I visit a cemetery, even the dead roll their eyes & turn in their graves.

You’re a beautiful-beautiful bush baby* — Thank devil, I met you, Mōnalisã, in my tiny little life of 2.73 billion years.

*Jury is still out if you’re really a human or an oversized human-like bush baby.

Bush Baby

Marina died at 22. You might die at 22, or you may live to 92.

Whatever days or decades you live on Earth, don’t ever sleep, wake up, or walk a day wearing someone else’s fears or dreams.

So long, Mōnalisã, Örla, Forrest

Me — the bloke with the voice for the TV — the bloke with the face for the radio ;)