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.

So many things

The topics floweth over. There are so many things I want to write about. On my way to the bakery at night I can spin up something or the other in my head and it all seems so good and I get real eager to put it all down in some form or the other except that I cant and it's all gone the next morning; the content, the fervor, the passion of storytelling as well as the excitement. It is as if no ripple existed where once a storm was.

The perplexing part is that there are always interesting things to write about and unlike dreams I remember all of them even after the desire to write them has gone prompting me to conclude rightly or wrongly that writing and writing well is more an indicator of mood and the desire to write as it is of what you write and how you do it. I know the next time I tread the same path I will feel for all things not written; things ranging from seeing four guys dining together in a strange manner in a house on the way. They open the living room door, stand in a circle and eat holding the plates in their hands. One fleeting glance and you would feel that there is indeed a short round table between them. This ritual of theirs amazes me every single day and my reactions now have moved on from bewilderment to appreciation. It is better to eat together, however oddly, than eat alone, something I usually end up doing.

Then I want to write about the day I felt everything was going to end that very instant. One of the most surreal feelings I have ever had, in fact my only one and the interesting connections it had with the 'deja vu' of Matrix but this all is so interesting that I am definitely going to write more about it soon than try and put it here in an edited way and spoil it all.

I want to write about my literary pursuits right in the midst of annual exams; an exercise aimed more at avoiding the task at hand than maybe genuine interest. I want to write more about the hostel life, in fact a lot about it because it had so much to be commented upon. Even as I write about hostel life I find Naved online because he has bunked his office to take care of his previous roomie's horrible CPI by running around teachers and clerks and I decide I SHOULD write about hostel and the people there.

However, the latest to occupy my mind is writing about various teachers I have come across, the ones that brought out the best, the worst or some inextricable parts of my personality to the fore either as a matter of survival, compliance, cooperation or sheer rebellion. It still is close to heart not as in getting personal but more so as a tribute to some of them. In fact I finished about a teacher and deleted everything because it did not have the likeability that it had the previous night.

The night that had me walking with air blowing in smallish gusts with a coldish nip, the silence broken sporadically by Cabs whizzing past with sleepy employees visible through semi-tinted panes sporting Company logos, occasional stray dogs and the entire atmosphere pregnant with mayhem that would again unleash itself the next morning when it's an hour to starting the day in front of your monitor.

I know I am going to lose the thread yet again...in another 6 hours
The morning rise a lifetime’s passed me by

Now look Hair Mr.

We are here not for random musings. We are here for a purpose so definitive that maybe once we are done, we will be looked at differently. But allow us to introduce ourselves before we start off what might eventually turn out to be a long tale of hanging on for a lifetime. A tale about living on the edge all the time and getting ruffled by many a winds. We are hair (or hairs) which again is a matter of immense consternation among us. We are totally against calling us in the same way in both plural and singular forms and hence would refer to a collection of ourselves as hairs, Grammar be damned, but let us come to the point.

We have been residing on the head of our owner ever since his infancy. We were shaven repeatedly when he was a kid and less regularly as he grew up and we grew up to be a plain lot of complaisant hair and were always limpidly hanging loose over his forehead in spite of repeated attempts to sweep us back into our place. We gave him quite a girlish look and we could guess he hated us for this. However we were just hanging around without enjoying our stay on his head, frankly speaking. Life was not exciting at all in the sense he never experimented with us much. He just went about his life without ever realizing that touching us up could change it for him. Anyways we got use to not complaining just like him. We were also grateful to him for the fact that he never misbehaved at school to get us yanked or pulled.

A change came when he was severely scolded by his dad for having the same hairstyle all the time. A pretty trivial issue and it was actually a case of anger spilling over but it resulted into a wave coming into his hair because the naïve barber clipped a section of us awkwardly while cutting the rest of us. The inexplicably emerging wave looked even more idiotic and we guess he hated it even more. Then came a pretty turbulent phase of his life when he moved into a new school which he instantly managed to abhor. It came as a breather for us however since we got to see a lot of interesting female counterparts of ours especially one of the many sets of them existing and we think it had something wholly to do with the owner of those hairs. It seems our owner was getting bonkers or something because for the first time in our/his life he was actually paying maximum amount of his attention to us.

We tried to tell him that we, that is, us and him were looking terribly silly and he would only get the kind of attention he did not want from the kind of people he wanted it from. He did not listen to us and we proceeded to make extra efforts to look uglier than we were as a result of which all his hopes dashed. We know we sound like some heartless criminals but that was our way of telling him he was wrong. Danger came in the form of an authoritative teacher who took it upon herself to get us trimmed. The rebel in our owner rose and he grew us even longer just to make a point that he would not be thumbed down. He was losing it all then and so he just clinched on to us as the only thing he stood for. After years of inattention we were the best of pals and we supported him to the hilt by growing up as nothing else can, much to his happiness and the squirming of that teacher.

Things got settled down and through an accidental occurrence/illness we were suddenly transformed to barely an inch long community and he decided that we looked much better than before and we stayed like that for a really long time. We liked it though it meant going under the scissors more frequently than ever before.
After we had reconciled to an amiable existence with that size, he started listening to strange music and made strange friends and suddenly he wanted us all to go as long as we were earlier. Now this was straining. We had lost out on our strength after his prolonged illness and we were old enough to be in the twilight zone of our lives where we did not want to be rushed around. Anyways we did grow as he wanted us to for old times’ sake but with disastrous results which he again failed to notice.

Let us come to the present when we are still in a longish avatar, considerably weakened, albeit better shaped than before almost thriving well in conducive weather. Everything seemed to be going well when this Mr. Being Whatshisname, a friend of our owner, came up from somewhere and called a tuft of us RAT and that too a pet, docile, no-nuisance rat of all the nasty ones in the world. Our owner pissed us off by laughing the issue off as he usually does. We mean he did take notice of the insult and tried to think of something to reply but since nothing fitting came up he just left it at that, occupied as he was in his silly work but we tweaked the necessary grey cells of his(yes we can do that too though he is not aware) and made him think endlessly of a reply so much so that he kept on Googling thus ‘rats, repartee’, ‘rats, humorous’ et el but could not get to a reply he deemed fit.

We were not satisfied with these meager efforts of his. We played on his grey cells, twirled them around till he wreathed in a fit of agony and revenge. So great was the effect that he went to each and every colleague (not senior enough to fire him) of his and asked them to form a sentence which had pet rat in it and the moment they formed one he would give a scathing reply and note down its effects on the person. He kept on doing this till he got ratty and then graded the replies based on their offensiveness but eventually left it all at that because they were not witty enough.
How could he do that? We knew he was useless but this incident not only proved we were right all the time but also, on a sadder note; put more than a hairline chasm in our relations.

Now as he rests his head on the table in a slumber, we grab our chance to type out this strong letter of offence that we take at being compared to a puny rat and Mr. Being XYZ, for all that has been swept and combed ever since our evolution, we take this opportunity to say that we, if not your friend, have been deeply offended by what you had to say about us. We know the kind of hair you have and we are in touch with them as a community through our own methods, so next time you do that, we will ensure that our counterparts desert you when you need them the most, in an extremely inexplicable manner leading to a radically bizarre situation.

We cut short our outburst since our owner seems to be waking up because every time we press Shift T, we stretch a bit too much for his comfort.

Am I blogging your view ?

The greatest reason behind writing a secret diary is a desire for it to be read.

This apparent paradox, though impulsively deniable is uncannily true and saw the emergence of so many diaries on the public scene each outnumbering the skeletons falling out of the closets with every emergence of secrets written during different periods of time with that same desire of being let out. Come to think of it. If a secret is to be maintained, why write it in the first place. It’s like that childhood story about a barber who unable to hide a secret goes and shouts it out in a well only to be overheard by a tree and revealed through the musical instruments made out of its wood. The desire to let out things kept bottled up in the deep recesses of the mind and heart is ever too strong to be overcome at all times by everyone.

Add to it an increasing emphasis on introspection of the self and an overbearing desire for incessant soul-searching and you have just the perfect script for a blog to jump on the screen and in a way that adds a new dimension to life as we knew it when diaries were being written. Blogs, unlike diaries, mirror life in a better way by providing different levels of ambiguity to a human being. So, you have blogs visible to close friends, blogs visible to friends from some other domain of your interest who usually are net friends and blogs visible/known only to you. The ones known to us only are the ones which bear the closest resemblance to the diaries of yore except that they are less likely to leak out and ready to be deleted into oblivion on a mere click.

That blogging is a phenomenon today hardly comes as a surprise. The opinions run thick and fast and quicker to say the least. It’s a throwback to the word of mouth publicity of yester years albeit at a lightening pace and has a rivetingly cascaded effect. The other notion of it being an opinion of a normal person just like you and me gives it a simplistic credence that does not reek of the sophisticated authenticity of corporate news with its business like indifference to emotions.

If you think this is all, you are pleasantly wrong. What started off as a simple version of a diary has now assumed interesting tentacles that look menacingly poised to multiply and sweep away everything in their deluge. From online diaries to discussion forums to literary clubs to photo sharing to vlogging, there is still some time before the last word is written on it. The creativity is buzzing at the sight of endless opportunities.

The skeptics are sitting up and taking note of it. We have existing media sources incorporating blogs to keep up with an audience that is getting disinterested by the day. Having said that one just hopes that blogging will lead to all things good and will be able to evolve a method to it to be more authentically accepted to the rest of the world without losing its inherent innocence. We need not worry about shortage of content. I am sure it will take an eternity if you try and next-blog your way to the end of the end of the Internet.

Here’s to meaningful blogs!

Nothing to bag about

This is how a conversation went between me and my AM when he came across my bag lying on my desk. He had to come across it because of an obnoxious abundance of blackish don’tknowat on it and an embarrassing absence of anything remotely green on it. I say green because that was the sprightly color when I bought it from Janpath in Delhi about ten years back (if you go by its condition) and a couple of years back (factually).

He came to my desk and seemed to be making his mind to say something. That set me thinking about all the traces I must have left somewhere about something I must have done sometime. Anyways this is how it went.

AM: Nice bag
Me : I am gonna wash it soon.
AM: No I did not mean that. . . . Anyways if you wash it all that is black would just smudge and it would get uglier.
Me: No it would be better if I could devote two full days to it. Anyways I don’t use it regularly. I had to carry some junk today (showed him some official documents for proof).
AM: Oh I just said it like that. Don’t mind

Is he thinking I am actually going to wash it?

Me: of course not. I don’t see a reason for that.

He thinks I am sulking now. So he launches into something totally unconnected to the 190 bucks now-black-previously-green bag

AM: We are all dirty. When we live in a country where the supposedly purest thing Ganga has gone dirty, what do you expect of everything else?

I just look at him and half nod and smile my way through before I realize that he won’t stop staring at me till I actually tell him what I expect of everything else in a country with its purest thing gone dirty.

I look to my monitor hoping , as if, for an answer to emerge from among the script that had chosen that precise moment to behave normally and hence was incapable of being used as an object of digression. I look back at him and stammer something about things having to change and human beings et el. I spoke half to myself in such a low voice that even I don’t know what I said to disappoint him enough to cut off any further communications on lines similar to the one used by blogs that turn you mad with their depressive leanings.

That was a steep learning curve for me. I come armed with my bag today to office but it is safely tucked away under my desk hidden courtesy its natural smoky camouflage.
My AM passes by me and I just move my chair synchronously to make doubly sure that the bag is hidden.

I am definitely gonna wash this bag once I fall ill next week for my medical unless I feel really emotional about this dirt thing and let the bag be like that to symbolize the common depressing grounds broken.

Is it a prefect book ?

I had three choices and they all seemed equally inviting. I personally wanted something very light that would not have me straining my mind at all and be a breezing read. "Accidents like love and marriage" by Jaishree Mishra then seemed an ideal choice.I had read her debut book "Ancient Promises" and I knew her latest book would be as light as the first one was dark,brooding and introspective.

I had almost zeroed in on it when I eyed Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake" and a quick mental calculation revealed I had been waiting for that book for five months now and I'd better take it when it was there.Now, I was in a dilemma since it was another of those "coming to terms with one's life" kind of a book,something I was not exactly looking forward to after ploughing through a thick book on best business practices.Then it was time to give a what-the-heck shrug and pick up both and later decide the order of reading. HAd this been the end of dilemma,I would not be writing about it. As it should not have been I saw "Bunker 13" a book that is claimed to be a catch 22 by an Indian author.Now this was getting interesting.It is one of the books that dont stay on the shelf for a whole lot of time in this library and I was tempted in three different directions and definitely I was not going to take all three of them because I have been seriously trying to cut down on my reading.

So what followed was what usually follows in such situations : talks . I started talking to this library guy and we talked about a lot of things well books basically and about a book fair in my office and he wanted to know which ones sold better than the others.Mindless talks,I should say but anyways one thing led to another and he told me about his latest buy and took out this huge greenish book that looked like a paperback Oxford dictionary at first glance.Top cover had a green hideous thing on it and a bold declaration "5 novels in one outrageous volume". Now I had enough of those three choices early on and I thought why not give this monster of a book a shot even though,being a sci-fi, it is not exactly about my domain of interest.Th book was an easy page turner inspite of being bulky and had a charm that all those new books have with dark black words neatly printed on a glistening white background and I thought those were enough reasons to make a seemingly wrong choice.

Last minute precaution.I casually flip through the book,pick out random pages and start reading.Long weird names,not again, of galaxies I guess and I start having second thoughts about taking the book with me and then I come across that line " The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" and I think I will survive.

PS : 20 chapters and I am kicking myself for putting it off for so long and I am kicking myself as hard as some teachers I know have not been kicked as yet unfortunately.

The Simoquin Prophecies

I was a bit apprehensive when my library wallah handed out this book to me.Not that his choice is usually bad but off late I was getting this notion that I had been used as a guinea pig on one or two occasions when I had to plod through two out and out romantic books and I remember going through them in a vain hope of finding some twist somewhere but it was not to be.Also,considering the fact that I had returned all three LOTRs after reading just 1.5 of them weighed heavily on my mind as I stood there thinking of reasons to turn it down.
TSP is anothere of those fantasy books like LOTR,Harry Potter and the Douglas Adam and Terry Pratchett series of books. However,shaking my head, I just took it and decidedly for the last time.

It took me ten days, a "nothing at all to do" itinerary and a lazy Sunday afternoon to open the book for the first time and my worst fears came true.The book started off by reeling off unpronouncable names and innumerable characters each from a different world and having different physical characteristics, weilding different kinds of powers and having different number of heads.I closed the book in disgust and and then on it took me another week to get to page 50 of the book.However,by that time I was able to identify a few central characters and I decided to concentrate on them.What led me on was an excellently dishes subtle sense of humour which pervaded throughout the book and made it see saw between being a genuine fantasy or a spoof of the same.

By the time I reached page 100, I was hooked to say the least and not even weekdays or busy schedules or anything could keep me off it. This book,written by a 23 year old Indian Samit Basu, is a brilliant attempt at writing fantasy books in a way which would appeal to both readers who love such books unconditionally and people like me too who hate them. The characters in the book have an inherent sense of humor which is never allowed to come out fully.It is there as an undertone waiting to be discerned and relished.The events unfold quickly inspite of an abundance of characters and there is a lot written about all the different worlds that are mentioned at any point in the book.The central characters have their own weaknesses and that makes them real.

The author borrows heavily from LOTR, Harry Potter and a lot of Indian epics too. He has picked up events from a lot of epics and eras and tweaked them to fit into his own epic. Having said that,this book is not a copy.Its like a movie that has some scenes interspersed with the themes of other movies to heighten some effects.Although,the whole book is great,there are episodes that stand out for their stark commentary.The best is his take on heroes in a fantasy book.He introduces a school that churnes out heroes who would later be written about.He also tells about the chroniclers who move along with heroes to record their feats and how they were not averse to tweaking them to hide the hero's cowardice or to exaggerate an accout of slaying of a dragon who could hav e died on its own due to illness.Also mentioned is the role of a central figure who is usually an Oracle and whose sole duty is tp predict falsely of a dark age so as to set up a perfect launchpad for a not-so-heroic hero.

One of the many hillarious episodes is the merging of Robin Hood and the carrying away of Sanyukta by Prithvi Raj chauhan,which is an Indian historical event to hysterical heights.There is also a preparation of a so-called hero and the existence of an understated one.It is through these two characters that the book swings between what could be called a spoof to a genuine fantasy tale.However,the best character is the female lead and her typically acerbic comments on why there are more heroes than heroines in history and the delightfully wicked use of her magical powers to get her ends unabashedly.The only possible chink could be the end which is not as grand as it builds up to be but the grandness lies in the sudden twist that the story takes towards the end and this is where he defenestrates all existing norms about grand stories having grand endings too.Infact the way he has set it all up,it is excitingly poised for a sequel which I hear is underway.

Next time I wont have to think at all if offered the sequel.

Nothing as it Seems

It’s all about pretensions. As the author of a "self-help" book says "You can fake anything" so why be anything?

The concept of personality getting molded by the prevailing social setup is as old as your neighborhood aunt, archaic but un-admitted. Touch back to the times when we were really our own selves and not acting it out to be pleasant to some and agreeable to others. Someone, who used to dope beyond sanity, once said that "trying to be someone else is a waste of the person you are”. I know quoting Curt Cobain wouldn’t exactly sway opinions but what I want to emphasize is that although his life may have been a mess (surely not the songs), he said these words of wisdom when he probably had just one fifth of his senses alive.

We were innocent when we were kids, when we were still coming to terms with our sensibilities, when all that we cared for was being inquisitive even at the cost of a few laughs at our expense. In fact we laughed with the world when it laughed at us and hence changed that laughter to love .Do you think it happens now? If it did you wouldn’t have thought twice before raising your hand to ask that seemingly innocuous question in class. This is the only reason why we have been reduced to students who ask only those questions whose answers we already know. We have stopped putting out our finger to the fire not for the fear of being burnt but for the fear of being laughed at.

We created an image for ourselves as we grew up but since then we have not been able to extricate ourselves out of it. At some point in life, we refused to portray what we were and instead superimposed on us the tag of what we would always have wanted to be. We refused to identify us with us .We judged ourselves on the basis of the evaluations, sometimes demanding, of others but missed something that was so obvious i.e. the limitation of the evaluation to be better than the evaluator. So ,in this way we shaped ourselves not on thoughts but on thinkers and ended being the oh-so-confused that we are today. No wonder we have always felt on the leash, in a cage, made by us and in front of an audience chosen by us and we have been performing the same old acts and trying to elicit the same old applause to the extent that now everything has become predictable even to our minds benumbed as they have always been.
Those who have been able to realize it have tried to break open the self imposed shackles. They are the ones who have been enlightened. As for the rest they are still competing to get more applause than the person in the next cage and are busy laughing at the attempts of those who want to get away from this "happy world”.

Even as I write this, I realize I am in more than countable ways one among those inside the cages. Just knowing that I am in a predictable existence doesn’t make me different till I make a sincere attempt to get out of it. Try and get out of this painted-rosy world of yours. Try and be your real self, try to break free. If you get time help others escape too from this artificiality, after all you too would want to increase your number.

Do meet me when you escape.We all strived for like-minded people all our lives .It would therefore be the greatest travesty if we flee to a brave new world and still don't meet.

Till we meet, as they say "Keep up the 'Good Act' ".

him,her and rgc

Her : It is the third day it has happened
him:I know. . . the third day
her-. . . and u don’t even feel wretched abt it
him:Oh I do. . its pretty frustrating just trying things out without success.
her:It wont be if u try well and I am smirking if u cant notice
rgc:I hv been noticing for quite some time now
him:Oh but why. . . I should be doing that. . it’s the third day my bike failed.
her:Bike ??
him:Bike !!
her:You don’t know wat I am talking about
him:I do of course My bike I thought
her:No you are late for the third day running
rgc: I feel like running
him: Oh, I thot you were more concerned than irritated about it
her: High hopes
rgc: I know
her: . . . and we haven’t eaten out in ages
rgc: 5 days back is not ages
him: I know I know
her: You know. . . that’s it
Him: See, I hv been beset with problems lately plus this darned bikeI guess I will hv to take an auto to see you tomorrow
her: I am not coming tomorrow
rgc: cool. . . some dough saved there
Him: Why
her: Just like that I thought u might need some time to reflect on things
rgc: How could you be so sensible all of a sudden
her: Actually I don’t want to tire you outWe have a big day coming up day after
rgc: Are we breaking up
him: What
her: Don’t say u forgot already
him: no I hvnt . . . I mean. . . . .. . . yes I hv I guess
her: It’s my bday. . . how cud u
rgc: Darn she remembers
him: Oh I wanted to surprise you that day
her: By actually remembering ??
rgc: She is getting caustic
her: So wat am I getting this year
him to him: Boy I love that smile of hers
rgc: You will get one more when u burn another hole in ur pocket
her: I am looking fwd to an extremely secluded and quiet dinner
rgc: GOSH Five Star this time!!!
him: Could we not postpone it to some other day. . . . you know wat day it is. . . 5 days to salary
her: We cud postpone for ever if u want
rgc: Say yes say yes you bugger
him: No of course not. . its just that I am a bit hard up
her: Its not about money. . its about the intent
rgc: Ok I hv the intent. . . so shall we drop it now?


...excerpts from evesdropping...to be continued

The 7 km Reset

Drat! I am not getting the requisite vacant space, if it can be called that, to write and so I will have to wait for some shift to come up where I can eke out some time to write about some of the things that have been running through my mind for quite a while now.

Last Sunday, May 15th, I attended the Bangalore Marathon which was one hell of a mega event. I ran in the celebration run that required running for a stretch of 7 km under not so hot conditions though it was a good 35 degrees that time of the day but I kept on egging myself by thinking had it been in Delhi at this time I wouldn’t even have thought of running.

I had been totally out of practice for a month or more then because I had stopped going for my morning jogs once she felt she did not need anymore slimming. However the sight of 12000 people running along you and some of them much older and more courageous was enough to not let the spirit flag and I managed to complete it without much ado and I guess I must have had a decent four figure finish which one of my colleagues refuses to believe. He says I must have been in the top half as I say but in the bottom drawer of the race. I don’t buy that.

I got a lot of plusses out of it. It has lifted my spirits for sure because prior to it I had been acting like someone who just lost the thread of it all. There was an indescribable pleasure on reaching the finishing line. This race was more about fighting it out, not giving up and I am happy I could last as I was hoping to. It didn’t at all matter that by the time I could reach the starting line, almost half the people had already taken off because there no one was competing against anyone. Everyone was running for something though it may have varied from person to person. I am still trying to figure out what I was running for and honestly I still don’t know except that I feel much better than I was before the event.

Somehow the immense pain that lingers on in the ribs and the chest does not matter. The fact that I still cannot stretch my legs fully too fails to make any impression because I believe the race was in one way or the other a sort of a RESET button which hopefully has reset a lot of things to a point from where I can hope to find my bearings again and fast too. I look forward to another one of them and hope that the next time I won’t be looking out for reasons to join. I will join it just for the pleasure of perseverance and the opportunity to be among a large crowd of extremely determined people.

I know I should be doing that in the future definitely and if not for any reason mentioned above then for that one reason that belies all skepticisms. It was the sight of a 72 year old man completing the 42 km run and the whole stadium erupting in a joyous uproar followed by an impromptu standing ovation. It was the sight of one man making everyone’s day…and suddenly the 7 km didn’t look that heroic anymore.


Real courage is not about a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.

---to kill a mocking bird

A bit of light

She raced headlong into the tunnel which was now her second home. Coming to think of it, she never had a first home anyway and no family tree to boot. The thought of it made her realize it wasn’t the ideal time to ponder over such trivialities for she was just her with no strings attached. She was a result of a minute difference between two entities over something and that’s all she knew or cared for. However, there was something she was sure of and that was her enlightened self. She made sure it never got unacknowledged because that was the only thing she could be proud of in the whole wide world of hers where time was everything and you were only as good as your last clocked time. So, right then she had a job to do. She had to rush past innumerable others like and unlike her in quick time.

Even as she raced ahead, she could not help glancing over her and looking at the competition. She saw him huffing and puffing beside her and managed to suppress a smile. He was the exact opposite of him. So dark, you could miss him if she weren’t around to spell out the difference. She curbed an impulsive ‘hi’ as she realized she wasn’t talking to him anymore. It hadn’t always been like that. They used to be friends. They had met a couple of times while running errands and she had managed to strike up a conversation whenever they had the same destination to reach. They complimented each other well and got along well and fast too till the day she told him how he depended on her for his existence as well as identification.

It had been a mistake mostly but she never realized it. He just left after that day though meeting occasionally, but mostly seeing through each other whenever their paths crossed.
She suddenly yearned to talk to him again, strike up a conversation like those days. She wanted to apologize, tell him that she had realized her folly and that she was just as indescribable without him. She wanted to tell him how no one could tell her apart when she would be with the fellow enlightened ones.

She had to decide quickly. He was already deviating in his path. His destination probably was different. As she turned he deviated too and she lost him completely. She wanted to go after him but she had a task to do and she could not dare to turn away from it. She erased all thoughts of him and rushed headlong into the pitch darkness that would be her destination. It was coming closer. She could not stop even though she wanted to. The end always scared her. It was hardly the reward for her good work but it happened every time. She knew she would vanish into nothingness the moment the job was done and would reappear some day somewhere else to again carry on from where she left every time.

The end came like it always did. The cold, brutal and thankless end. That didn’t bother her as much as her worthless life. She never knew if she would ever be able to help anyone anywhere.

She closed her eyes. The darkness engulfed her.

Meanwhile the screen of a monitor flickered to life somewhere. A message had come and was flashing bringing with it hope.

She had done her bit. That’s what bits do. Bringing people close without ever knowing it. If only she knew that she wouldn’t die a death of despair every time.

'Monitor'y Concerns

...Below is what happened when I tried my hand at poetry :)
I guess if you keep it simple it ain't poetry.As Afaq used to say "it is poetry only if it is infinitely interpretable".

So I guess my next attempt would be to write a poem as abstruse as possible using a lot of oxymorons...like cold sunlight,fried ice-cream and sensible SS to name a few.

Time to let white cylindricals pearls soaked in in unmistakably familiar grime to travel in extremely sinuous labyrinths of a cave whose outer walls have been contracting and expanding for the past 24 years.....well time to eat chicken curry with rice. Well it's only a hint of how obnoxiously esoteric one can get.

Time for some more poems.....will write.

How my eyes burn!!
Wish I could use them
turn by turn.

Staring so long,
is it a life gone wrong?
It stares back!
With a smirk, it says
“Whatever you do, you lose this race”

Day in and day out
I come back to this hideout.
I don’t have a choice.
I may get paid butI don’t have a voice.

From the time I wake up
till the time I collapse.
There is nothing humane
it’s all a digital mishap.

Somehow I reconcile,
drop ideas of exile.
I get cheerful again
thinking my worries were in vain,

I come back to my ‘work’,
but know there will be no succour
as I sit down resigned
and switch on the Monitor.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

I know I am getting stuck up on this but it has to be the best film of the year so far and also one of the better ones that I have seen.Riding high on a brilliantly written narrative it scores highly on so many counts that you lose count of it after a time.It took me back to the turbulent,confused and revolutionary world of 60s and 70s.The movie is about three people,their aspirations and their lives as the social order crumbles around them and how they chose to react to it and by the end of a gripping tale you get to know if they changed the way things were or they changed themselves.

The cast comprising of Kay Kay Menon,Chitrangada Singh and Shiny Ahuja complement each other brilliantly as they set about their lives guided by a set of values that crashes headlong against the acclivities of a fast changing political scenario of an extremely debauched society. Kay Kay is as usual brilliant without being noticeable.He is the one who believes in bringing in the change that his country could do with while Shiny Ahuja is on the other side of the fence who believes in wriggling his way to the top through any means necessary and represents the segment of society that tries to live off it instead of trying to change it. Chitrangada Singh,predictably the love interest of both, is the one who has to choose her way yet.She has to decide the path she walks and she needs reason for the same.

The film opens brilliantly and picks on pace with time.The events are spread out but at the same time connected through the recurrent theme of the youths yearning for a change.Although brilliant in entirety,three scenes stood out , each involving one of the main casts.The first one has KK smiling when he sees a group of villagers thirsting to chop off a zamindar's son's balls to avenge his misdeeds.As he recounts this experience,he is shown standing away from the mad crowd but smiling at the encouraging signs of an impending revolution.Its a brilliant scene done simply and it is followed by a perplexed side of his when he realizes that even though the villagers were angry a moment ago they became friendly with the zamindar the moment he is taken ill.He admits he cannot comprehend that strange compassion.Traces of left melting into a middle path.A scene with infinite interpretations.

The second scene that was a steal was when the leading lady shouts at a village thanedaar in Bihar for his atrocities.Though it seems routine the way she handles it makes for a rivetting watch.The third scene is right at the end when Shiny Ahuja is being brutally beaten up by two policemen and even as he is wreathing in pain,they search for a revolver they had dropped in the grass.Its a gut wrenching scene seeing that guy wait for a brutal and cold impending death even as he rattles off his high connections in a voice that is almost choked with fear and pain.

The film ends on a sombre note with an ending that may not be as surprising as it is thoughtful.

I have always been fond of this piece of literature which is "Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi " though I can't say I am capable of understanding even an iota of it.However it has always signified aspirations,dreams fufilled and dreams that remain so plus a lot more to me and I am happy that a movie based on it actually turned out this good.

Still waiting for my khwahishen to turn true !!!

Block the Writer

So much has been written about 'writer's block' that it almost seems like an excuse for not being a prolifically good writer but I dont mind till the time I can use it as a shield myself.The best take ,however, on it was probably in a strip of Calvin and Hobbes(the best thing to happen in the world of cartoons) where Calvin invents a 'writer's block' which actually is a block that you keep on the table and which obviously won't let you write.

I am talking about it because just moments ago I wrote and deleted a pretty hefty take on 'dreaming within dreams'.I wrote a lot and then deleted it because it just didn't look like flowing.However that doesn't mean I am suffering from writer's block because only writers are previleged to this affliction for one and secondly I am going on writing another something that has no central theme running through it.These kind of articles can make an RC section of aptitude exams so difficult because they would never have a central theme.Infact the central theme could be digression.Digression reminds me of operating system classes and ITAaaaP,primarily the latter.ITAP was a whole wide world of nonsense for an egghead to dive in and emerge everytime with a new slimy concoction of half baked ideas glistening allover a fully baked skin.There was a diabolical convenience to the way topics turned hands in a span of minutes.I draw satisfaction from the fact that no matter how much I digress I cant get better or worse than that.

Those classes gave me one efficient solution to the omnipresent problem of wavering attention.Whenever your attention is questioned,respond with a question which itself takes the attacker by surprise.I am making full use of it even now with alarming regularity and perfection,may I add.

Its too big a break that I have taken from work now and its time I went back to it.See, one more good thing about such articles is that you don't have to worry about giving it a propah ending.It can end the moment you want it to unlike the ITAP classes which would go on sometimes even after the alloted time because a certain soul would remind you of his busy existence and the network would go to the dogs.
"...well that's the way life is" remember ?!!

22:30

The clock on the comp says there is another half an hour to go before it will be time for me to call it a day.I kinda like this schedule because first of all it lets me write without having to worry about prying eyes and also it gives me a chance to be at peace with myself and be able to sum up the way things are going on at work and off it instead of just flowing away.I dont know if many will agree but starting and ending your day late should be the best work schedule because it gives you sufficient time in the morning with a mind that is mint fresh and helps you avoid those free evening hours plagued by a tired mind.

Well I'm saying all this with respect to my requirements and ofcourse it would differ from person to person.It has been a long time since I last wrote something and it is all crap that I am dishing out right now but anyways better to write something that not.I have been wanting to write about a lot of things but there hasn't been enough time and more importantly the requisite solitude to do that.I have wanted to write about my college days esp the hostel days ,the eccentric friends I had and sometimes the the tough balancing act that had to be done regarding issues that I might take up in detail later.I have wanted to write about the 'adda' outside our college that became a metaphor for togetherness.It served as a meeting point even when we were happy or frustrated...yes we were never sad , we were always frustrated.

Always maintaining a watch for policemen's eyes, the guy would sell Cigs and tea,two of our major consumptions,besides keeping a host of other dry things you could eat along with the tea.
I remember how a lot of my classmates had an aversion to this 'adda' before ultimately getting drawn to it by the time the last year arrived.It became a hub for everyone and a brief sojourn at it was a almost religiously observed everyday.It was there that policies were framed,ideas discussed and shot down,legs pulled sometimes literally and fights resolved or evolved.In short it was a melting pot of ideas in various hues.

Many a teachers' worst hours were plotted at this very place amidst clouds of smoke layered with disgust billowing from exasperated individuals who were probably at the wrong end of fun that very day.I was a passive visitor to this place,in only the sense that I did not smoke.Otherwise I too was an integral visitor of this adda.It was the perfect place to visit during the evenings from the reading room especially when the mind would be overflowing with photocopied notes and excerpts from borrowed books and those small sessions would provide enough time to recoup for another round of notes reading besides letting you decide on what to have for dinner.It would be the time too for a particular gentleman to go back home on his ricketty scooter but not before giving truly excellent ideas about mugging up the seemingly inane theoretical subjects and he was guy who led from the front on this account.He could rattle the best in the business when it came to cramming , the only hiccup being that he always crammed the wrong things.

Yes, Addy I am talking about you.You along with a lot of others made 'adda' special.I still wish I was sitting precariously on its fence dreaming about the future ahead and not writing about it as I am now. Even as I write i can recollect the scene.A group of 4 or 5 guys sitting on the fence or standing making fun of a scooter as well as the rider who did not seem to care and boldly goes on expostulating his greatest theories on every topic under the sun.The final shake of hands that signified the end of the quarrels for the day and evened the score till the next fight.The amble back to the reading room from the serene absence of light to an ugly overwhelming presence of it.Somehow the reading room would never look the same after that and we waited for the day to end and a new morning to arrive with loads of panic to get us started about completing unit two to five of the exam next day.

Time to go now....sorry about the sudden change in tenses that would make the reading a bit of a pain but I guess it is because I have written about it in the present while all the time yearning to sneak back into the past.

The fascinating FOUR play

Weekends have long ceased to surprise me because they always bring the same kind of boredom. It would have had been better if one boredom could be different from the other. It would at least ensure that boredom never spawned itself. However this weekend I found a way to get around this inevitable boredom by deciding to attend the play "Ismat Manto Haazir Hain".This play was not exactly the talk of the town but it did get some kind of a promotion in Radio City among the usual trash it dishes out and a small space on a prominent newspaper and luckily my boredom had ensured that on that lazy Saturday, I somehow came across that ad.

So the whole of Saturday was spent on acquiring the tickets for it. I had missed it when it came to Delhi but this time I was determined to put my salary to some good use. I then had to persuade a friend to come along by painting a rosy picture of the entire thing so much so that for once I was afraid about how the play actually would be. It was going to be a first time watch for me and as for my friend; he absolutely had no interest in theatre till then. So that made him a bit apprehensive. What, however, would comfort me time and again was that effortless smile of Naseer on the pamphlet I held in my hand. I knew he could not falter. I wished he were acting too in the play but all the same, both of us were excited enough by that time to lose our way twice on the way to Chowdiah(I am still trying to pronounce it correctly) Memorial.

We entered the premises much before the play was about to begin and immediately felt like complete outsiders in a place covered by people oozing with art. There is something about these "arty" people that makes them so distinguishable. It is their dressing sense. Almost everyone of their commune dresses up in one or the other kind of a "kurta" over a pair of jeans whose degree of deterioration would be inversely proportional to their ages. I tried to comfort my friend who was quite piqued by their attire because everyone looked the same. I think he was having problem singling out people for a second sighting.

Anyways, the signal for the start was given and people started trooping inside the hall in an Indian file. The good thing about theatre I guess must be the fact that unlike cinema halls, if you pay less, you get the balcony seat. However since there was a free seating for a change, we got to sit at a decent distance from the stage. The play started with a brilliant narration about what was about to unfold before us. The narration was in flawless Urdu and the mellisonant flow of it ensured that we were in for a comfortable evening. Sometimes, however, I would miss the subtle nuances because the meanings would get beyond me. I kicked myself for putting off learning Urdu for so long (long enough to see my first play).

We were told about the two great Urdu authors, Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai, and how they paid the price of being ahead of their times. The play contained four short stories, one by Manto titled 'Bu'(odour) and the other titled 'Lihaaf' (The Quilt) by Ismat Chughtai. These were the stories for which both writers were accused of obscenity in mid 1940s and faced trial in Lahore High Court which was humorously captured by another of the short story by Ismat titled 'Un Byaahtaon Ke Naam' (In the name of those married women) which formed the third story of the play while the fourth story was 'Titwal Ka Kutta' (The dog of Titwal) by Manto.

The play started off with 'Bu' which was mostly narration and that too by a single artist. Now, both of us were a bit surprised because our notion of a play was a that of a lot of people on the stage with a proper conversation flow between them. I strained to see the faces of art connoisseurs in the dark to look out for any signs of surprise on their faces but it was dark and all I could see were a few faces lit up by the light of their cell phones. However, I again turned myself to the engrossing play which was being led forward brilliantly by the only person present on the stage. I found the light effects brilliant and I kept wondering if they were effectively blending with the emotional content of the story or highlighting it. The play was about the recollection of a young and extremely handsome man of varied sexual experiences about a rainy night and his escapade with a rustic girl. The encounter between the young man and the girl was described in quite an uninhibited way and I could see why daggers would have been raised against it. However, not for even once ,did I find the story getting 'obscene' for which the author was charged .It always seemed to be "poetry in motion' to me though as I said before, the Urdu did get to me in that I would get the idea but miss the nuances probably.

The story highlighted how the artificiality of the protagonist's wife, depicted by the sweet smelling scent of 'henna' used by her, failed to ignite his passion and paled into insignificance in front of the so called 'bu' of the rustic girl who according to him, never tried to be anything special for him. She was just herself and somehow he admitted he could not get her aroma out of her mind and it continued to haunt him each and every second of his life. The play ended with this candid confession and received a deserved thunderous applause. The play was flawless and totally engaged everyone's undivided attention. There were a few mobile phones ringing in the midst of the play in spite of the pleadings for them to be switched off, but then I guess if you have costly mobile phones, there couldn't have been a better time and way to showcase them.


The second play was 'Titwal ka Kutta' which was about a dog that keeps roaming about from an Indian military position to the opposite one of Pakistan. It was a scathingly dark satire on the mindlessness of war. The plight of the dog which was being shooed from one post to another while guns were aimed on it was pitiable. The way in which the tone of the story would change from that of humor to sorrow was exceptional and raised quite goose bumps. This was evident in the scene when the first bullet blasts one of its legs. The play ends with one of the sides declaring it a martyr and the other as an enemy. It was touching to the core and in the manner of the previous play was single-handedly managed by a single actor who did a wonderful job.

The third play was 'Lihaaf'. It was about a young girl's experiences at her aunt's place who had taken to alternative pastures(notably her maid) after being totally cold shouldered by her husband, a rich man, with a 'harem' of young boys. The style of presentation again was narration combined with acting out the parts of the various characters which were being talked about. Heeba Shah was brilliant in her portrayal of the young girl and her plights on coming face to face with a perplexing trauma of living with an aunt who, according to her, was more dangerous than all males in the world combined.

The last play was 'Un Byaahtaon Ke Naam' (In the name of those married women) and was a satirical description of the days when both Manto and Ismat were called for trial in Lahore Court.This play brought together all the previous artists on the stage.It therefore had the amalgamated excellence of all the artists who had by then managed to enthrall us single-handedly.The play ends with Manto being accused of obscenity and he laments his life and says it's a miserable existence because he is not even being cursed in a correct manner.

The play ends on this note with a nazm by Faiz Ahmed Faiz sung brilliantly by Rekha Bharadwaj.I kept hoping that Naseeruddin Shah would come at the end of it but that did not happen. All in all, it was a memorable evening for us and we were glad that we made our theatre debut by watching something as great as that. I just wish there were more takers for theatre today which is an absolutely strong medium of expression but is being neglected by all and sundry who are blindly rushing to the charms of senseless movies that promise much but deliver nothing.

The Orange Seller's Wife !!

...I am copy-paste-ing it from my previous blog

Well it’s not everyday that you get smitten by an orange seller's wife. That explained my surprise when Aamir told me about his first crush (of the year 1998 A.D.).This guy is hopeless, or else how do you explain falling for an orange seller's wife of all the people, I mean whatever happened to your neighbor’s wife and unless they are out of town you don’t really need to look further. I know I am being harsh on Aamir.Sometimes even I have sneaked a peek at the maid that comes to my neighbor's place but that has never been a voluntary act. Tell me, can you help it if you are ogling at your neighbor’s wife and the maid comes on the scene. Collateral bliss if you ask me.

"Are you even listening", Aamir almost threw the words at me. I knew I had to give in then to listening to his useless pursuit but the thought of free oranges kind of hooked me."Begin", I said in a tone that was more excited than concerned.

"It all started the day I walked in to what would be my school for the next two years”, he began in a tone reminiscent of those boring translated Discovery wild life docus.However I tried to focus and let him ramble, I wanted the wife thing to come soon. I kept wondering if I was giving myself away by the eagerness in me. I was no good at simulations. I knew it the day the maid refused to clean my room anymore. It was a minor embarrassment of sorts for the entire family. They could have fired the maid but it was far better to swallow the bitter pill than to look for a new maid and on top of it there was never a surety, with me around, that it wouldn't happen again. It was sheer insult for me and I was really sad for quite a few days before the neighbor’s wife returned from her mother's place and her daughter started her yoga sessions again. Life was back to its lechery, ogle-y self.

"Hey, I missed whatever you said in the past two minutes or so”, I said apologetically. He didn’t seem too annoyed and did a parrot soon enough. I will shift over to his first person account because otherwise I would keep rolling back now and again to my own exploits. So here it goes: Aamir’s account of his exploits::

Entering the very school's co-ed compound was a bliss. Where else do you get to see girls all around you and I mean get to stare at them without being stared at? Studying in an all boys' school for 14 years sure had taken its toll. I felt like a kid in a sweet shop except that I realized that they still were not free. I was moving about dazed and somehow managed to reach the class after encountering "endless curves".Everything was so symmetrical.I immediately hated the edgy school I had left behind The moment I entered it, everyone turned around to look at me. Well I know I am smart but this was too much. “Avoid having your foot in the mouth fella, it would split you into two”, came this "wisecrack" from a guy who looked like King Kong just had an image makeover for the better. Then I realized that my plastered left leg was hogging more attention than me all the while. Anticlimax, right when it was not needed.

I moved on to a seat which stood at the last and was obscured from everyone's view and as I sat down, I realized, "hey I need to move on quickly and obviously not literally”. Sitting as a back bencher in an unknown world of strange people made me real edgy. I knew I had left all my reputations behind me and now I needed to recreate and even reinvent, what with the female angle being introduced. So, I took a stock of the situation and penned down my arsenals. The list wasn't big but it was something.

1:I was smart(Doubtful...only I knew that)
2:I had a high merit(It isn't out of this world) after a few enquiries I knew it was NOTHING
3:I could be the new thing here, after all people always want a change.(But they want a change for the better)
4: My English was good (prerequisites are not weapons)
5:I had a sense of humor(Ok agreed, but will the girls get it, I don’t know)
6: All the above mentioned strengths have to be seen in the "darkness" of almost the other half of humanity i.e. the girls.

That’s the trouble being a pessimist, your strengths sound like your neighbor’s .I read the list again and again trying to add something to it .I thought of adding the fact that I was an absolute ace at Ludo but my modesty got the better of me and I stopped at the existing list. Points 4 and 5 seemed to be the ideal props then for my calculated assault on that unknown citadel and I proceeded to give my hopes a push.

Since I was so intent on this whole thing ,probably the universe conspired to take me further.Well, not exactly the Universe but a really "smart" chemistry teacher who in her debut catwalk before me looked like one of those who are smugly satisfied with their life and insist on telling others how to live theirs fully.Still, she was a welcome change from the previous paan spewing teacher of mine who would read a newspaper wrapped Kama Sutra in class (I still feel he could have atleast shown the cover to us).

"Hey,another country,you might as well hoist your flag there in your corner",said an animated Mrs. Singh,obviously delighted by her comment and the laughs it raised in the class.Its kind of bad when ,everytime people turn around to look at you ,they are laughing at you."I did try to hoist it mam early morning but fell down and broke my leg",I said, raising my plastered left leg to her.The class again reverberated in laughter,I hoped this time at her.I could see her unease on getting her hard earned invincible reputation biting dust infront of the whole class by a new student, of all the people.She icily ordered me to sit on the first and middle desk of the middle row in the class (height of ec-centre-icity) and went away saying she wouldn't be taking the class that day.

Well, I guessed I had gained some kind of a ground in that class. Suddenly, everyone was looking at me, the limping fellow, who not only dared to take on Mrs. Singh but also did a one up on her. For me, coming from a school that encouraged healthy repartees between students and teachers in class, this was trifles. I felt some elation rising within me. I knew weapon number 5 would work after all. I moved to my new seat and saw this average looking girl that would be sitting on my right.” Not bad for a start”, I said to myself as I sat down next to her but all the time,
intently hoping that the seat to my left houses some Marilyn Monroe at least.

I asked Rimy(that was her name), in a very casual way, as to who would be sitting to my left. "Farah”, she replied,” she went for her Biology class and I guess she has been delayed”. I almost managed to catch the "is she sexy?" question by the skin of my teeth. I hope she didn't notice it coming out.” You were good with your answer to Mrs. Singh but be careful, no one stays happy here and answers Mrs. Singh like that at the same time", she said with a smile. It was the first smile that I ever got from a girl. I could feel the heat in my ears. "Shit, they must have gone red again”, I thought. Well, Rimy wasn't exactly average if you leave out her morose expression and a deadpan look plus hair that looked like burnt Maggy, she was quite good looking. Who says a smile cannot change opinions?

Pretty satisfied with the developments of the day till then I went out of the class to take a walk/view and kept my fingers crossed for how Farah would be. I suddenly had to balk and gape. There is something about seeing an awesome girl that makes you even forget having her for dinner, I mean taking her out for dinner. There she was, in all her splendor, her open hair all over the place. She was looking at a file she held in her hand even as she walked avoiding all the stares she was getting from me and fellow perverts. She must have walked this corridor an awful lot of times, I thought, the way she could maneuver past me without even looking at me (ok, at least my huge left leg). I did take a long drag to soak that heavenly persona in me. She seemed familiar. She looked a lot like Tabu. Now a lot of people don’t know Tabu because she works in only meaningful films which have no takers in India. I wanted to see how she would look when she would laugh at my jokes, how she would look when we would go hand-in-hand for a stroll with a lot of our kids playing around. For that moment, I wished she were Farah.


Ok I know it sounds filmy but I cannot help it. The moment I returned to the class after completing the stroll which was uneventful after that heavenly sighting, I saw her sitting on the seat to my left. I believed in the law of averages and now I was sure that after 12 years of abstemious existence, perhaps my time had come.

I went to her gaping and stood in front of her. Now, how the hell would a girl like that expect such a hunk to sit right next to her? I think this is why she asked "where is that ghost you just saw?" with her eyes splitting like the tyre of my cycle once did when it was bit to death by an attention seeking dog. "What is the matter with you?” she asked again. I got jolted out of my reverie and said "I want to get in”. I knew I had majorly goofed up. I should keep the truths to myself. Someone once said "you only speak truth when you are in love and hence fall out of it”. I shuddered at the noble thought.

"Hey, it’s his seat, between us”, said Rimy with a wink to Farah. I am glad she said it for me because I was totally tongue tied. What else do you say after you have said the truth? Farah stood up and made way for me. I dragged myself clumsily to my seat in the middle. As I breathed properly after a long time I smelt something strange. I inhaled again and inferred it was the amalgamation of two "intoxicating" perfumes residing on my neighboring heavenly bodies. I don't know what it is with girls and perfume. The whole school was reeking with an assortment of perfumes/deos. I wasn't sure and for once I missed the tranquilitycalmness and the natural atmosphere of my school.

“Screw her”, was Vakil’s only reaction when I told him about the crush, the cigarette smoke coming out of his mouth with a thrust as if to accentuate his feelings.I wasn’t surprised by his reaction.Only a week since we met and I knew that he had the same reaction for everything.He loved screwing up everything.His term papers,relationship with teachers and friends(he lost them as rapidly as he gained them),his image in school and at home and his new ricketty Hero Shakti( it looks like a mobike and moves with a lot of noise and smoke..for the uninitiated).I found Vakil interesting.Atleast there was someone who was willing to crib with me.Unlike a lot of other things, cribbing can be self destructive when indulged in alone.What drew me to him initially was his odd name.Actually Vakil was not his actual name but he preferred being called that.I once asked for the reason and got a reply I should have known.”Screw you !”.

Sitting under the shade of the old tin roof of our abondaned canteen, I felt a bit heroic playing truant in my Computer Lab, something Vakil did with exemplary consistency.Smoking a flavor of Wills, he would listen to anyone till so far as his cigarette got sponsored.So , here I was with the third cigarette I bought for him from my “punctured-tyre-crisis” money and I wasn’t willing to let him off with just a simple ‘screw her’.
....more to come

Invented newness

New blog,new mindset and hoping for better returns.Does it work?