To Be Criticised Demands Far More Talent Than To Criticise Someone Else.

The problem with being an artist is that you are expected to make pain beautiful; make your insecurities look drop-dead gorgeous, albeit knowing that with every stone turned to gold, you're deprived of using it to build a home. A good friend of mine once said to me that to make art is to bear a fruit. When the fruit fails to taste delectable, you don't say just the fruit is bad; you point out that the plant is bad. When the art doesn't relate to or contradict your own convictions, you don't merely complain the art is bad; you indicate the artist is bad.

Shayan Das

And as you dive deeper into love you get to know how standing by someone is far more consequential than falling for them.

Shayan Das

I know she's my type of girl every time she tells me, "Don't love me for the beauty I have but for the beauty I create".

Shayan Das

Sometimes even healing can go through breaking—as when the seamster stitches a tattered garment and end up making several smaller holes to repair a bigger one. Nonetheless, I've admired that breaking and oftentimes more than the healing expecting it to conceal my scars.

Shayan Das

Writing love poems without being loved is perhaps one of the toughest things I do as a poet.

Hey, I've loved love ever since I knew what love was. I love the thought of being in love or even the thought of someone truly loving something and you seem to feel the same. Romantic love is obviously glorified throughout all kinds of medium and is present every where around us and yep, despite never being in love I'm bound to believe it's worth it.

And sometimes, it just hits me, and there is this tiny tiny ache in me, desperately wanting something I don't even know how it feels and well, I choose to ignore it and move on. Do you ever get that? I'm guessing you do, but what I wish to know is how you deal with it?

Maybe by just bleeding out on pages or modestly moving on, heeding largely to things I've got control over. After all, 'tis not the first time and I've not loved entirely a single entity in life. Speaking specifically from the romantic aspect, certainly, there would always be that missing part of the puzzle so as long we do not get it. Being an only child, a sheer introvert and someone who's got so much to tell but no one to listen to, I feel like sometimes it's love and sometimes it's necessity disguised as love. I don't aspire to get someone who'd love me more than themselves but someone who'd dance with me in the rain even when there's lightning outside. Someone with whom I can contentedly do robbery over the apprehensions of death, someone whom I can love vehemently even 'fore I fall in love with them.

I was a dream until one day I had my own dreams. My peers thought I'd outshine them; my parents expected my light would embellish them until one day it blemished me. 'Cause to shine is to build expectations and to build expectations is to be vulnerable. You ascend, albeit you know that the higher one goes, the more bones he breaks each time he falls. You trade your ambitions to build someone else's, snivel in silence and make endless excuses to defend each catastrophe until one day you find yourself becoming them, exhausted and devastated, on the verge of hitting mediocrity, and questioning why you couldn't be that anticipated one. All you wonder is if only you could stop that 7-year-old boy from striving those extra hours to top his class, rip apart the diary when he wrote his first story at 11, fasten those lips that whispered in praise of him, burn the books that told a 15-year-old boy that he can be almost anything in this world only if he aspires to. You pray only if you could dissolve into oblivion until one day you get to make a noise and yet remain unexplored.

Shayan Das

The best way to see Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is to stare at the center of the spiral for 20 seconds and then look at the painting.