Uncomplicated

Stiff grey cells, awkward glance
So aware, he fakes a trance
Well, nice to meet you
How are you and how is life?
Let me take your leave before
My silence causes strife

Wait let me guess
No you don’t need to press
I do know what’s in your mind
But if you tell me it would be so kind
I fail to second guess the theme
The complex wiping out the clarity
Which seemingly screams.

Uncomplicated, probably clear
Limpid laughter, blissfully unaware
One last favor.
How do we get there?

The ghost of the year gone by...

The sand drips, unleashes new shapes
and with it a vacuum of things gone by.
Look at the hollows of anticipation
as the fulfilled sand recedes to shape up
in a soon to be upturned volume that’s Life.

Wave at events as they corrode
the venial past and pave way for
new mistakes committed only to
remind you of their ghosts.
The ghosts that haunt till eternity.

Raise thy hand to pledge for a
whole new insanity called improvement.
Close you eyes to fake determination
as open ones see through reality.
The sights that is so ethereally real.

Exult in joy of crossing a border
made by yourself that’s as meaningless
as its intent.
Exult in relief of having crossed a milestone
even as you squint to see the writings on the wall.
The walls that are all botched with ugly nothings.

Oh what do we see in this new time?
What benefits disgusting or sublime?
I have no real joy leave alone something fringe
I smile, I wave say Happy New Year and cringe.

Lithium

Why 'Lithium' ... I dont know.I was listening to it and I thought why not?


I'm so happy 'cause today
I've found my friends ...
They're in my head
I'm so ugly, but that's okay, 'cause so are you ...
We broke our mirrors
Sunday morning is everyday for all I care ...
And I'm not scared
Light my candles, in a daze
'Cause I've found god


I'm so lonely, but that's okay, I shaved my head ...
And I'm not sad
And just maybe I'm to blame for all I've heard ...
But I'm not sure
I'm so excited, I can't wait to meet you there ...
But I don't care
I'm so horny, but that's okay ...
My will is good


I like it - I'm not gonna crack
I miss you - I'm not gonna crack
I love you - I'm not gonna crack
I killed you - I'm not gonna crack


I'm so happy 'cause today
I've found my friends ...
They're in my head
I'm so ugly, but that's okay, 'cause so are you ...
We broke our mirrors
Sunday morning is everyday for all I care ...
And I'm not scared
Light my candles in a daze ...
'Cause I've found god


I like it - I'm not gonna crack
I miss you - I'm not gonna crack
I love you - I'm not gonna crack
I killed you - I'm not gonna crack


A song from the group Nirvana

Choked in Jam

Lemme show you how to drag this thing through the nose, said Abby. There was a slow murmur of life in the room as almost five guys shifted their weights to see Abby’s triumphant face, centre of attraction, for the moment what with the left nostril flaring like it was nobody’s business. Any more pride, I thought and I would have a friend with a single-hole nose.

The scene is set in late 2003 in our Univ. hostel. The exams were still 4 months away not that they were a problem. The classes were going on in full swing. For the uninitiated, swinging from all eight classes a day to all ‘wait’ classes a day. ‘Wait’ classes again were the classes where we waited for visiting facs from other places who usually never arrived. I liked it that way. I could tell my conscience, hey look I am regular so what if on wrong days. The labs were the tour de force of our curriculum, the kinds that could scare the crap out of someone with no crap at all. A sample graphics assignment could be to shoot a flitting duck from a spaceship. What the photon, I throw the towel. Understandably, almost all who were in my motley circle had their grades screwed up. We had no hopes from our performance in college and an MBA seemed to be the only way out. Yes, and we all needed a girl, I mean a separate one for each. It was under this gloom and the just finished Graphics lab that Abby’s nostril was gonna be taxed.

I was sitting on my bed, my back against the wall. Abby was on the floor resting against my bed. Harris was exactly opposite me as if a mirror was between us except that I don’t look like an alien. He was dreamily looking somewhere above my head. Vakil, my room mate was sprawled on the remaining bed. He had gone to the reading room and back. It was as if he had taken admission in the reading room. He did not like his class and we understood. He looked sleepy as always and was hence normal. Raool had taken off his shirt which was a sign that he was looking to hit the bed for his siesta in his room. However he stopped and looked at Abby and said you think all are idiots here to believe you. Oye you wait, you are dealing with a pro here, was Abby’s retort. Anyways everyone looked towards him and for once Harris too shifted his gaze.

Now this is how you hold it, said Abby as he cupped his hand and held the sutta between his ring and little finger of the right palm. The left palm blocked all exits at the bottom of the right palm. There was a hole between his coiled thumb and the index finger where the left nostril was placed. Abby oozed confidence when he was doing things like these, ya’know sex appeal and all. It was the way you like Saurav Ganguly when he lofts spinners for a six. People look good when they are doing a job they are good at. There was a sharp intake of air as his eyes closed and we all saw the burning end glow brighter and there emerged a triumphant face of his exhaling quite a lot of what had gone in. Bhains ki ankh, Saale how did you do it? Raool had put on his shirt. Siesta cancelled!! . Lun you never listen to me, told you I can do it, Abby chanced upon the few moments he got when he could speak with authority. I know he was the best brand ambassador for smoking; he made it look so dreamy and cool.

I had not said a word for the last 15 minutes and I knew Harris would notice. What are you thinking of? Nothing I said. I was in fact. It was a decision I had to make. The kind that have to be made, no matter what. I had to weigh the options available, figure out plan Bs, think of consequences possible and then decide on a topic so seemingly monumental to me. I knew that I had to take them into confidence on this. That would be much better. Should I attend the next class? I asked. I am not going Abby said. He needn’t have. Raool realized he had just missed his siesta and he looked so much weaker just at the thought of it. Why do you ask? Go if you want to. Harris was not my classmate so this was evidently not his concern. Raool seemed perturbed. I had disturbed his excitement, the one he had derived from Abby’s nose. It’s TSN, could be important, he said.

I have not attended the past three classes. How do you think my attendance will look end of the year? I voiced my concern. Pretty much like your marks. Vakil could be deadly with his jokes even while half asleep, you could never underestimate him. However, I needed suggestions not smartass comments. Well I guess I will miss this one also. I won’t understand a word anyway because of the missed classes, I opined. As if the classes are connected, said Abby who was feeling more and more confident with every nasal inhale and had started intruding into unfamiliar territories. Look, you don’t tell me about TSN. I look to your attendance to take comfort, I snapped as Raool and everyone giggled. I don’t attend classes but I know, said Abby who probably had decided to take the plunge by then. Yes, he knows, spoke Harris, from all the IGNOU material he keeps studying and which hardly is TSN that you study and went into his kind of laughter which was more of an irritant than an impulsive reaction. IGNOU notes were Abby’s Achilles’ heel. He used to study from these notes for each subject till he’d realize he was on a tangent.

Well, I am not going. I flopped on to the bed in a more leisurely manner and simultaneously Raool redoffed his shirt in a real matter of fact way. Anyways I have Dhobi to get the notes. Now Dhobi was our new supplier of class notes and had almost ended our dependence on the class toppers for the same. It was always more feasible to have equally good notes from somewhere because everyone would be lining for the toppers’ notes anyways and turnaround time was more. Additional benefit was the fact that he used this real large register of clean paper hence was very cost effective and clear. Saved quite a buck for us plus he had these costly pens which he used to draw and hence ensured more clarity. They were not like the cheap pens we had that had to be humped from behind to get something going upfront. You know it would be better if I don’t make notes at all if I have to get it all copied at the end. Waste of time and labor. The fact that I was giving so many excuses was a cause of concern to me but I shrugged the feeling. Look at Saif, he carries all those fancy file covers and makes notes on bond paper and ultimately he too ends up like us, getting everything copied. Lessons to be learnt boy. I beamed.

Mera to dhobi se jugaad hai, his are the notes I will take besides my own IG... notes. Abby almost could not suppress the IGNOU. So let’s sleep all of us and be real fresh for the MBA coaching in the evening. I can’t wait to see Karishma. Abby liked them large and we did not need no more proofs for that. He wistfully cocked his head and went to sleep in that awkward position while I, glad that he was not sleeping with me, took a more eased approached to sleep. Raool went to his room, shirt on shoulder and Harris started to move out for another cig. As the silence descended, Vakil woke up that is if he was asleep and put on a song he so liked. As for us, we just went into a slumber as if nothing had happened to the croaked crooning of ‘I am so tired I can’t sleep’.

Let's just omit the title

Let’s wait for things to happen
Let’s be lethargic
but not let the spirits dampen
Let energies lie low
Let’s just linger and laze along
Look the sun in the eyes and sing a gloomy song

Let's not retort
Let's give some space; let us not throng
Let's laugh at inanities
Let's be unsofisticated and not worry
about the spellings gone wrong

Let’s wave and wish strangers
and smile more often
Let’s not send lifeless emails
Let’s be back to that pen and paper


Let’s walk under the tress
and notice the green canopies
Crush the yellowed leaves and see the music
Let’s down endless coffee
And think of days gone by
Let’s call up lost friends
if only to say ‘Hi’

Stand in a daze
Get lost in the maze
Let the world swivel by
Let time fly
Feel numb around your head
Let no thought invade
Look through your desires
Just say it’s all fate

Be confused for a change
Dispel the surety away
Let’s not think even
Five minutes ahead of us
Let’s be lazily agile
To evade all the fuss

Lets write what we feel about
And when we feel like it
Let’s go act in a theatre
Let out the poet inside us
Yes, the one without the meter.



Inspired by an AD campaign

Fictitious viewings through red mist

You wake up and realize it hasn’t been more than even 4 hours since you plonked on something you thought was your bed in pitch darkness. You feel around and realize with a reluctant gratitude that it was your bed after all and surprisingly clean. You see the mound of clothes on your chair and you know why your bed is so clean.
Your neck pains if you try and move it to see who is howling away at the top of his voice. Turns out its Sonu Nigam trying to be mel-odious and bloody way too early in the morning. You shrug and go back to sleep. There is a buzz in your head accompanied by a relentless confusion about whether you are feeling fresh enough to rest more or distressed enough to wake up and shake off the feeling.

You have to rush to work in another couple of hours. You feel the pain in your right elbow every time you bend it. You realized it last night/this morning when you finished keyboarding. In a moment you realize you were wrong. It is not your right hand. Your left hand pains too. It is just that the pain was too meek to register itself and had to wait till you got used to the pain in your right hand just as you had gotten used to the pain in all the joints you never knew existed.

You rush to work in some time. Your eyes are blood-shot but no-one notices, not that you care anyways. You settle down to work immediately. You open up 15 windows, many consoles among them. Lot of work has made you stinking smart. You open them up in a particular sequence everyday so that lying down on the bottom of your screen they represent the debris that your life lately has become. You know exactly how many alt-tabs would reach you to which window and what exactly you have to type there. It works. You realized it last night when after 7 hours of such expert window switching you actually saved 15 minutes which you promptly lost waiting for the cab. You had let out an ironical laugh then. You have in fact started laughing in various modes lately. It has started coming naturally to you.

You are too immersed in your work to notice the hoopla around you because people are going early to augment their already long vacation. You don’t notice or you would rather not because it reminds you of your cancelled vacation. You just slug it out. The pain in your elbows disappears as your fingers type away sometimes injuring the keyboard probably; if only it could hit you back. Your neck anyways is incapable of turning around on its own without you swiveling on your chair. You crane it anyways as you calculate the double digit times you have spent in the office for the past double digit number of days. You shrug and wince at the same time and decide not to shrug again for sometime with a shrug. You get stares from others around you for the way you have looked and acted for the past so many days. You are perplexed. You have been much the same as before with just a scowl being an addition to what you bring to office besides sleepy eyes and a distorted metabolism that is perfectly out of sync and has no clue what is going on. You get strange delusions. You leave the office on Thursday morning and come back to office the same day thinking it is a Friday before the terrible realization hits you that it is still a Thursday.

Your to-do list increases beyond control and you know it has reached a staccato crescendo when one of the tasks in your to-do lists is to “clear up the to-do list”.
You mop up the work, postpone the dinner because of alt-tab reasons, and have it late at night when they are doling out midnight snacks. It actually becomes the best part of the day because you see a lot of interesting faces lining up for the midnight snack. They are less haggard than you and give you the who-left –you-behind? stares.
You finally make your way back home and again stumble your way to your bed leaving the clothes on top of an existing heap; reminds you of another to-do at hand.
You brush you teeth and see blood oozing out through the white foam. You spit it out in disgust. You don’t care to see what could be the problem.

You sag on your bed once again and think about good things that you have always thought about for yourself. You try and go to sleep. Even as you do that you just hope things will look up and the Mr. Tyler Durden would sleep on for a bit longer.

You don’t hope he would invite you rest in his palm of perfection. Not just yet.

Disclaimer: Everything fictitious...well almost.

My own Halo

...something I was inspired to write after listening to 'The End' by Jim Morrison and then gave up writing more of such kind after realizing just how easy it is to be so bland/bad.

also one of the 17 reasons I got less( pathetic ! ) marks in AI.

My own halo blinds me
What brings me complete freedom
is the approach that binds me

The applause would never be gone
but disturbing thoughts my mind spawns.
In search for everything in front of me....
I can never retrieve what I left behind me.

I never realized the agony would be endless
when I traded my peace for success.
Will that dawn ever come?
when far removed from this scum
I would be innocence in my own right
and dance about in the cool sunlight
of the rising sun that was once mine.

Forgive me if I was proud,
if I trampled on the vulnerable
to rise above the crowd.
Forgive me if I thought
I could be what I wanted to
without letting things happen
the way YOU wanted to

Forgive me if I thought
I had too less to lose
It was because
I put my head more than my heart to use

Now that I have the halo
it scathes my heart and drills a hole.
I got over losing everyone
but now I lost my soul.

I sit alone with my halo
I caress and talk to it.
Its heat burns my hand
and dries my throat.
I sit like this waiting,
hoping the ordeal would end.
And I keep asking myself
“Can a halo be a friend?”

...in which she takes over

He saw her and he had the entire 200 odd people spinning around him. He was simultaneously scaling heights of dizziness and the abysmal lows of the pits in his stomach. There was only one word for it. He was enamored and if he could even half describe how he felt, he would be Shakespeare minus the accented spellings.

He looked at his watch again. It was almost time. He inquired once more about the food he had ordered showing the urgency which was quite real just moments ago but had to be faked ever since she appeared and placed her order. She had come along with two of her friends, equally good, but somehow she just stood out in spite of not trying at all. Maybe it was her height or the features which swung dangerously between being termed mellow and stiff at the same time. She had the kind of features that get you bit roles in one of those Hollywood flicks about Egyptian queens where you die in the first reel and the special effects take over. In short, she had an aura about her, an elegance which somehow seemed totally out of place on the ninth floor of his office in the hustle of that food court.

He could not help glancing at her time and again quite oblivious to whether he was being discreet enough about it. He stole a quick glance at her ID but failed to get anything beyond some snatches of her name. He wished he had cheated more than he had in exams all his life. Suddenly he felt it all over again. The same exhilarating feeling he had around six years back when he first moved in to a co-ed. The blood rushed to his head. He knew he must be looking all red all over the face but he could not help it. He knew he was going to go nuts in a short while. The last thing he wanted was a distraction. She had provided just that and more and she was being pretty ruthless about it by the way.

Minutes later he was trying to eat and forget about her but his eyes were following her as if they were on their own. Sometimes it was difficult to even keep pace with her. She seemed to be just all over the place even when she was, well, being just static.

One look at her and it seemed that she was wonderfully aware of everything going around her. It was as if she already knew everything and was just playing it up so innocuously well. It was as if she knew how he was looking at her all the time, how he was going mad about her, how he was already masticating not on food but on plans of getting to know more about her. It was as if she was Luc Beson’s Fifth Element.

He saw her again the next day, same time and same place and there seemed to be a familiarity to their strangeness or it was just his high hopes. He just shrugged. He knew this was again going to be a case of Appetite Lost.

However, even as he shrugged, he could notice a firmness in it that usually comes with determination. He sighed.