Crazymakers~

Ever lived with people who feel like impossible? The certain people who have unbelievable power over you? The ones who make you feel and act crazy, even though you are an otherwise balanced person? The ones who push you over the ledge and let you come back for more snubbing?


The kind who make you feel lost to yourself and to the world? The kinds who leave you dazed? The kind you have no defenses against? The men and the women you love even as they kill you? In your moments of madness you look back and see you have not behaved this way in any other relationships but in this particular relationship you seem to screw up royally every bloody time!Welcome to the world crazy makers. Well if you’ve read so far I am sure like me your addicted to them. And you’ve not been sure whether you should be killing them or killing yourself.

Let me give you the good news even as you sulk in the grey clouds of their recent company. The good news is there are very few of those crazy makers around.( not like one is any less to completely screw up your life but that’s another thing) At one time there can only be one crazy maker operating in your life. And recovery from them is possible.


So let’s go over and understand the symptoms first and then go into rehab together.

Characteristics of Crazy-Makers:


On the face of it the crazy makers and nice people:
They act nice, altruistic, empathic, concerned and caring because this is what they want people to know them as. They may have the softest voices and the most graceful personalities that you have encountered! When you first meet them you will have instant rapport because they can turn themselves into whatever you want to see, but only long enough to lure you in. Once you have been lured in you will see all things end up in arguments and your general emotional state becomes one of frustration and anger. Because they still have that ‘nice’ side you will continually justify your relationship with them and live in a world of confusion. It is a process of getting mad enough to leave the relationship to getting lured back in over and over.

Their time, schedules, energy, drama, and life issues always outweigh yours :
Crazymakers thrive on drama, and melodrama requires a sense of impending doom. Everything is an emergency, a deadline, a matter of life and death, or something they will get to eventually. Read ‘never’ … Nearly any situation can be cast as melodrama to support a crazymaker’s plot lines.


Lack of reciprocity: These people want life to be full of fun, leisure and excitement. Anything outside of fun is not their thing. They prefer for others to take care of all things boring or difficult. In other words they are allergic to the words responsibility and/or accountability. They are not in relationships to see what they can put into them. They enter relationships to see what they can get out of them or to how much they can get someone else to take care of them. Beware, they always get more than they give and they really do not care much how you feel about it.

They are selfish: Crazy-makers do not operate in relationships with an ounce of empathy or fairness. Their idea of fairness is they get what they want exactly at the moment they want it. They feel entitled to this. It is always their world and you are always just a visitor.


They expect special treatment
They demand special treatment in their daily lives:
■Ever met someone who grandiosely insists the dining party sit a certain place in a restaurant?
■Ever had a friend who insisted always to set the agenda of the conversation no matter what you are going through in your life?
■The ones who keep talking about their love lives and how many women/men fall for them each day?
■The ones who know exactly which part of conversation to recall for making you vulnerable at important points of your life?
■The ones who forget your birthday every bloody year and involve you in their celebrations in some way which is unavoidable?

They belittle and downplay your achievments and your life
“Crazymakers discount your reality. Your pressing agendas – however real – are never as real, as important, as critical as a crazy maker’s drama of the moment.” Your biggest achievements are discounted. The last really cool thing you did is something that they’ve seen everyone do! Whereas what they achieved they were the only ones in their times.

They praise other people in front of you and how
When you are in the company of a crazy maker everything other than whom you are and what you represent will get praises and accolades. Every other person they have worked with is creative, every other woman they have met was attractive( she had that special unexplainable something which you need to hear about off course) Every other project than the one you’ve got is cool and off course we haven’t even started about their world touring and Hiring plans yet!

They are not wrong EVER:
These egocentric creatures live in a world of complete distortion where they see themselves as the victims of their circumstances. From their perception they never make mistakes, they are never wrong and their motives always have pure intent. These people will not take responsibility for their own behavior. One of their more maddening qualities is they are unable to distinguish important from unimportant matters, making it difficult for them to give in on unimportant matters. Instead they argue over nothing, often reserving some of their most intense concerns for issues that are of very little significance. This deflects their responsibility off the issue at hand in an attempt to pull their victims off target. They will use anything to justify their anger and point of view and let you know why you are wrong. They only see certain facts and eliminate all other useful information. They are completely out of touch with the big picture and there is no one who can get them to change their thinking.


They know your strings!:. Their other favorite way to throw you off balance is to not acknowledge your presence. They can make you feel you do not exist. They will make noise in one form or another all in an effort to get you so far away from your rational mind that you will either attack back (so they can blame you for your “anger”) or you will give in because it is not worth the fight. Either reaction perpetuates the process because either way these annoying people are getting their way.Crazy makers behave in a covertly hostile ways so no matter what reaction you have it will be wrong. Some of their provocations show up in chronic forgetfulness. They are masters at using insincere apologies to appear innocent, such as “all I said was…” or “I only meant that…” which passively places the blame on the victim for being ‘too sensitive’ or ‘taking things the wrong way.’


They sow the wind, while others reap the whirlwind
A crazymaker is constantly stirring up storms.” Normal’ doesn’t serve their need for power.” “Everything is always their problem, but nothing is their fault.” They are often grandiose people with the flair for the dramatic. That’s why we want to leave our plain lives and run under their wings to get more out of life. What we end of however with is an empty feeling. A loss and sence of extreme bitterness out of failing at human friendship and equality.


Theirs is a world of trumped up conflict, confusion, and chaos.

RX-Prescriptions for dealing with them.


Observe- Look over above points. Keep a diary and tick each time above behaviours are repeated. Crazy makers are experts at using misdirection and confusion to get you off balance. Their whole objective is to get you on the defensive so you will begin to explain yourself. It doesn’t matter that you are 100% right these people get a rise out of you explaining your side and this is when they go in for the kill. The more you talk the more power they feel, the weaker of a position you will continue to create for yourself. Crazy-makers live to get people squirming. Because these people love attention, control and power


Don’t worry they are this way with everyone. It is not unique to you, regardless of what they may say to make you believe it is only with you they have ever had these issues with. Your best bet is to limit the amount of time you are around these people and/or to get them out of your life black and white. You will never change them.

For the love of silk cotton trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree
                                 Joyce Kilmer

I haven’t met too many people who have fallen in love with trees. I didn’t even know I would be one of them till the day I read some strange book from the musty attic in my house. The book was borrowed from the Punjab Agricultural University. No one in my family went to that university. It remains a mystery how that book got in my bookshelf.

So this book had pictures of the flowering trees in bloom. I saw this one particular photo and was absolutely blown. It was like recognizing from the shadow a face an old loved one. This I realised much later was the same tree that appeared in my dreams of heaven, where an avenue of cotton silks spread till forever connecting this world to that.

However the first time I really found that rapture of  delight was in 2006. I was staying over with friends at the DSSW Hostel in North Campus and was very sore and heavy hearted after a bad crush. We had gone out to the community canteen to get some chai right at the fag end of the evening.

Standing dispirited I suddenly noticed this hearty silk cotton tree standing with grace. I must have looked at it for some ten minutes in the mad stare that lovers give on recognising that first sight of each other. My heart stopped. Dropped its complains. Stood Still. Like a deer struck by headlights of a car. Many clouds passed through my life and bad spell broke! I feelt like a pink baloon growing bigger and lighter and lighter with this old/new love.

From sad tired and weary I felt reassured and and in love with the world again. Like an old friend from far away had suddenly visited with all his gifts and memories. Like a tall graceful spirit stood there in the campus calling out to my love

It didn’t do much or make any effort. It just went on being itself, big majestic and forever a silk cotton tree. And I struck by thunder stood there and stopped feeling cold and had this sudden strange urge of hurling myself at that tree and hugging it. I didn’t do it for fear of scandalising others!

The memory of that day still warms my heart. Just thinking about how this tree had followed me there, in that disappearing patch of sunlight always stays in my memory.

That’s the thing about silk cotton trees. They’ll appear in the strangest of places. Peeping into your tea from the picture window on a 6th floor of an apartment while you sit through an interview. In the dark shadows of an empty ground where road rollers hurl around earth to make a new building, standing tall and silent in the impending doom. In the junk yards of childhood where little girls with pig tails ran over their fallen flowers burying dead butterflies under them.

Much later I read about how D.H. Lawrence would go naked and climb mulberry trees so that the muse would strike him. I can completely understand the urge. The big smooth silver trunks of a tree do call for petting. At least the pulchritude is not alien to our species. We love butterflies peacocks and tall handsome trees!

But there is something more than sheer physicality. This tree talks to me! Everytime I pass them I sense warm whisper, and conversations much more heartwarming that human conversations. It affects me when it changes shapes, sheds its leaves, bounces sunlight off its glistening bare branches and then grown little fist sized buds like a teenaged girl growing breast. And then suddenly it would light up with those majestic big flowers and then blow the flowers and carpet the earth. Its tides affect me like moon affects the seas.

Have you seen the deep red of its flowers? Just the color an Indian girl dreams of her trousseau to be one day. The way its bare branches divide the sky. How the sky in frame of these branches gets different shades of blue and deep blue and white cotton fluff. Have you seen the size of its flowers? The plonk with which they fall on the ground AND STAY THERE for days till they finally become the ground on which they’ve fallen.

I talk like a love sick person. And I am lovesick for silkcotton trees. I hope someday they find the words for those of us who’ve felt the Eros for trees. For those of us who’ve blushed with delight at watching them…For those of us who write these love letters to trees.