Irrational Rationalities

April 30, 1945

2012-01-20T14:41:00.000+05:30

Sixteen years have walked next to us,
beseeching destiny,
and finally, the day has come.

Together
we behold liquid immortality
trembling in a little bulb of glass.
A tender bite for that eternal hunger,
the song of our finality.

Jealous fate has thwarted me twice
but not this time.
My wulf is here to guide me into the nightfall.

That final gaze is for me,
not for cowards with armbands, not for that Magda,
but for me, Eva, your candled bride.

Foetuses yet unborn
shall one day sift through the matrices of history
and marvel at the glory of our clasp.
My death, geliebter,
shall be the monument of my love.

The idiots.

2012-01-19T14:34:00.001+05:30

[For A.]

Held up against the eye's brimming silhouettes,
the polaroids gleam,

all those
pigtailed afternoons and tip-toed midnights,
adventures in ignorance, wisecracks at reason,
folies à deux - frenzies for every season,
precarious perches on edges, drizzly sighs,
endearing monsters and orbits in radiant skies,
diligent obsessions, winked whispers at recess,
clumsy secrets and tangerine waits for a whistle,

all those flutters of that tiny heart,
all that innocence,
all those grins.

Adulthood

2012-01-18T10:37:00.000+05:30

Remember kindergarten, day number four,
the day life first got out of hand
and taught you to know
the futility of all,
to forget,

and yet
up against a wall
your heart wouldn't let go
until your throat tasted like sand
and you couldn't hold on to his leg anymore?

On Gerhard Richter's "Selbstportrait"

2012-01-17T15:34:00.001+05:30

Going, going.

I nearly remembered.
(Perhaps that is how it began,
with the ordinariness of memory.)

Time is a celtic knot, debauching itself.
To believe in it is to cower in the company of shadows,
to crumble, mumble and stumble
through the unwilling curiosity of wakefulness,
to tremble beyond the tongue-tied outskirts of reason,
to gamble with absurdity and outscream silence
as it gnaws bare-knuckled at the whiteness of distance,
chipping away at the pearly expanse
until it grows weary,
dawns, secrets and passions falling away
through the years like sawdust off a chainsaw,
to reveal, one cold rainy evening,
the faint glimmer of a face that whispers wordlessly,
"I was a blue tomorrow once."

In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens [1949 - 2011]

2011-12-20T11:52:00.000+05:30

A puff of dust hovers by the sidewalk,
a footstep hurled in haste. A bus to be caught, perhaps,
that curious cargo of sighs, limbs & distances,
leftovers of yet another dailiness.

Nothing pauses.
They are all too busy living,
too busy staving off death's unwavering envy of life.

The absence sharpens,
streetlamps dilate in lament, like balloons.
There is no elsewhere,
no afterwards.

[7:43 pm | 16th December, 2011 | Delhi]

On THE Grammy snub of the year

2011-12-09T11:52:00.000+05:30

Oh Kanye, Kanye, Kanye.
How, how could they?

[End of rant.]
[Or not.]

To paraphrase Sartre, Awards are other people. They exist, whether you would like them to or not. And by virtue of their mere existence, they tamper with your subjectivity. There's no escape, neither for the uninterested nor for the disinterested. So, when I went through the list of nominations for the Album of the Year and failed to locate the one name that I was looking for, it did carry some weight, a heaviness of the weightless kind. But before I could contemplate that further, there was a more urgent concern - what was he going to do now? A frenetic google news search for "Kanye West reaction Grammy nominations" revealed 130 results. Whatever it was, it had already happened.

"Kanye West blames himself for Album of the Year snub."
Wha? Himself ? Was the 34-year old tantrum-at-the-drop-of-a-hat rugrat of hip hop finally growing up? Reading further clarified things. It was his fault that he dropped two great albums in the same year when instead he should have "spaced it out, just a little bit more." He had just been a little too good for his own good. Kanye West was still Kanye West, after all.

Coming from a culture where an oversized ego is a survival tactic, that almost sounds, curiously enough, humble. And West, whose public image can be almost accurately described by a first-grader's attempts at cubism, is a titan in that world of giants. But there's more to him, an ambition to match the ridiculous proportions of that ego. (I'm not yet on board with his fashion foray, so let's just stick to music for today.) As a crafty producer with an exquisite taste for samples, he's always had an aural imagination to die for but his recent musical evolution has involved, to my great delight, the infusion of an emotional honesty. Emotion is a rare thing to find in modern hip hop, emotional honesty even more so, (which is such a shame, given that it's perhaps the most literary of musical genres, rap's very ravenousness for language and rhyme making it a mouthwatering canvas for confession...) so I was obviously taken in by his 2008 release, 808s & Heartbreak. Even though its android-like passages of raw emotion stretched out in Auto-tune over staccato notes of electronica barely qualify as hip hop, the shift was obvious. The prodigy had finally been baptized, the most unfettered imagination in hip hop now had a soul. (Shinier and heavier than silver, yes, but still a soul nevertheless.) No wonder why over an year ago, I couldn't wait to get to his next album when it came out, the album this heaviness of the weightless kind is all about.

My Beautiful Twisted Dark Fantasy is, like its adjective count, an exercise in unabashed indulgence. There can be no other way to describe an album that has a guest list that includes Elton John, Rihanna, Alicia Keys, Drake, John Legend, Fergie (all on a single track), Jay-Z, Bon Iver, the RZA, Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj among others. Even as they all turn in masterful appearances, stamping their signatures on the album, it's clearly West who's in charge, conducting an ambition that anchors the album through its numerous excesses and digressions. At moments, with burgeoning textures of vocals layered over a cavalry of strings, trumpets and beats, you can't help but feel that he's channeling Wagner, furious and maniacal in his fascination with grandeur. In "All of the Lights", a pacy Fergie verse suddenly devolves into an Elton John piano solo which then ascends into a spar between his vocals and Alicia Keys's, juxtaposed with African horns and towering beats. All this on a rap-driven track. This is not hip hop, it is the naivete of an imagination whose irreverence knows no bounds.

On "Runaway", around the 6-minute mark, past the lyrical climax of the track, West drags the song on for three more minutes with an insistent coda of keyboard notes over a slithery jarring sample that sounds like a lazy electric guitar but is in fact him singing through a synthesizer. It is the kind of idea that should sink under its own weight but he makes it work, an almost-mournful plea that shores up the self-deprecatory confession the song itself is. The album does have its weaker moments (such soaring ambition can't not fall flat on occasion) and, of course, it indulges in every one of the genre's notorieties - the braggadocio, the misogyny, the materialism and the phallic obsessions - but to deride it for just that would be like dismissing Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping as merely revolting or Lolita as being paedophilic. I am, often to my great regret, too much of a classicist to be able to appreciate hip hop in all its truest passions but West's relentless ambition makes the album, through the opulent hues of its ebbs and flows, the sonic equivalent of a Mohtashem Kashan.

Gonna take this sh** to the next level is hip hop's greatest cliche, but after this, even if all West does is impersonate Louis XIV on a pedestal of trashed Lamborghinis in a sea of Versace upholstery and Basquiat-adorned walls as he spits bombastic verses over the glint of golden strobes, he shall have earned it.

Words hastily scribbled on a paper napkin for a girl in blue

2011-07-20T05:22:00.001+05:30

In the golden shapes of this evening's brown melody,
your blue is like

a little girl's giggle hovering in a petrichor breeze
as she sheepishly peeks into the window of a sand castle
for the first time.

[1:32 am | 22nd May, 2011 | Paradiso Perduto, Venezia]

On making an Omelette

2011-06-15T03:50:00.000+05:30

Snap.
Yellow innocence in a dreamy puddle.
(A flaming sun on a watery sky, for the heliocentrically inclined. Or wabi in a china bowl, for the orientally inclined.)

Greeted by a salty conscience, reproached by the sanguine grit of chilli, beguiled by the sorcery of pepper. Add the tender lament of chopped onion, to taste. Stir repeatedly, until the contents weave a fluid tapestry in anarchy.

Onto the sparkling eagerness of a lonely pan. Brown blushes of initiatory awkwardness, a simmering companionship arbitrated by the buttery lenience of a spatula. Flip as needed. A geometry of browned white and scrambled yellow, measured to taste. Serve hot.

An open letter

2011-05-04T07:01:00.007+05:30

Paris | 4th May 2011 | 1:21 am

Dear reader,
Wow, it feels amazing to break the fourth wall. I should probably do this more often. But I have only ninety nine more minutes to finish typing this, so I'll stop dawdling and get a move on. (You do not know this - well, at least most of you don't - but the only way I could ever rein in my epistolary verbosity was to impose a time limit. It was either that or a word-limit and given my love of laziness, I was never going to go for the tediousness that is keeping a word-count.)

Anyway.
I just want it said here, categorically, without it being nestled in soaring metaphors or cunning wordplay or obscure imagery, that this blog is very much alive, and will be for a while to come. This is by no means a reassurance (I surely am not presumptuous enough to attach a sense of importance to myself in any of your mindspaces) but just a disclosure. A confession even, if you may.

Why.
Because I might be on the cusp of a disappearance here and thought I would be a little vocal about it for a change, instead of leaving it up to time to do a poor imitation of my voice. Or, well, the disappearance might just never happen. I'm not sure really. Ummmm, I prefer that all of my letters be purposeless, and would dearly like this one to stay so. Just humor me, will you please? As it is, I already have the time-limit weighing on my mind.

Enough small talk.
I work mostly through my notebooks, vessels of jotted down elements and imagery that I usually scour for focal ideas to weave my words around. But like most things, they have outlived their purpose and I very recently decided to let them go, in a singular moment of calcified determination. Two and a half years worth of unfinished material, zipped up and stashed away for reference later in middle-age, if ever that were to arrive. So, this essentially puts me on, artistically speaking, a blank page, the definition of pastlessness that I only too readily understand. Thankfully, I'm not new to this, I have a long-standing habit of resetting my literary pursuits and voluntarily going blind once every few years. (For those interested in history, the last time that happened during this blog's short lifetime was here.) It usually makes the world a tad more beautiful when your vision returns in the months to come. It also helps make life easier and art more complicated, a delicious recipe for their co-existence. Yes, they're quite the bedfellows, but you know art is the only thing that lasts, nothing else does, not your methods, not its inspirations, not life itself. (I'm tempted to break out into a passionate-yet-perfunctory exaltation of the tenacity of art, but then the clock moves.)

It means new reading habits, new playlists, longer evening walks, new paper-faced mates (Pinter, Rilke, Carey and Virgil wearily lift hands in attendance from the cluttered desk in the background), more late-night experiments with ink and eventually, a slightly evolved destiny, bent, bruised and battered. Whether the new-found freedom will liberate me or just tie me down until I find new inspirations or construct a large enough corpus of notes again, only time will tell. (I have a sneaking feeling I'll be back here before the turn of the week, but you know, betting on yourself in whimsical matters like these is just never the right thing to do.) As for "Confabulations", it is an offshoot, an arena born of my desire to adopt a different tone from my habitual one. It's got nothing to do with anything here, and as such I don't really expect it to influence matters much. So that's that.

I do not know when the next time will be that I'll be able to address you directly without being shrouded in half-painted ideologies or veiled metaphors, so I would like to take this opportunity to extend my most heartfelt gratitude for deeming my words good enough to waste your time on. After all, you've just seen how seriously I take my own. All ninety seven minutes of it, to be precise.

Verbosely yours,
Dheeraj.

Confabulations

2011-04-29T03:15:00.000+05:30

For all the abrupt illuminations, ruminations, fascinations, impersonations, condemnations, divinations, examinations, hallucinations and many, many other illustrious machinations of the imagination.

http://myconfabulations.blogspot.com/

Overture

2011-04-26T18:49:00.000+05:30

Two o'clock.
The day startles me,
tearing apart the opiates of sleep.

Silence still.

The ground gives way.
Everything begins to burn.
Waves of penitent flowers
doused in gasoline.

Song in two verses and a chorus

2011-04-25T06:53:00.001+05:30

I have dreamt so much of you
I sometimes wonder if you'll ever be real

Realities have become distant cousins
journeying the mazy waters of insignificance
while the tenacity of memory keeps leaving notes
I can't just go on dwelling in its palaces forever

But even as I stumble into the solitudes of solicitude
gasping, clutching at straws of passion's vocabulary
all I can muster is a mellow cadence

When I love you
I am weightless
like a hyphen that shores up floundering thoughts

When I love you
I am pastless
like a staccato nestled into a slithering symphony

I have fallen so deep into you
I sometimes wonder if I'll ever be found

Days have become unrelenting landmines
navigating the slippery slopes of restraint
while the brutality of reason keeps slipping clues
I can't just go on toeing lines forever

But even as I slump against cold, whitewashed walls
sliding, descending into the blankness of silence
all I can forge is a watery melody

When I love you
I am defenceless
like open terraces against an impending sunrise

When I love you
I am endless
like a little boy's shout into the sea

toska

2011-04-22T08:00:00.000+05:30

evening arrives
as twilight erases the day's memory
stringing quivering shadows
into opaque childhoods

dripping softly
into black and white hearts
stretched out on stony windows

every breath a weary whisper,
does love ever last
forever, ever?

On Jackson Pollock's "Number 1A, 1948"

2011-04-20T11:01:00.006+05:30

Once, there was a
town that had no windows
and streets that never intersected,
like the twisted insides of a dog.

It had no sun, no moon,
just glowing dreams
splattered on crumbling walls
with streetlamps that were only
half-hearted lullabies to a black, black sea
spitting smoky fumes at empty streets.

In the view lay a solitary shape,
an unmoving form drawn like a shadow,
a colosseum imperiously descended from the heavens.

It was where I woke up,
battered into submission, thrown into
a marbled pool of splintered statues,
a graveyard of eternities -
frayed foreheads, orphaned swords, crushed chariots,
wounded wings,
gods that once strode the clouds
now mere rubble
clinging onto the soles of strangers' feet.

Born of a chisel, cursed with unfailing sight,
I watched the starless rainy sky
ruthlessly bring down its thunderous wrath
on the very spirits that once contrived it
as the sea of their weary voices begging for mercy
rose and fell wordlessly, unable to escape
the immortal stone their hearts were carved out of.

On being asked why I write

2011-04-19T05:06:00.005+05:30

As a kid, I used to love to play hide & seek. Every time we got together, I used to convince my friends to play the game with me. In one of our rooms, there used to be a large cupboard with sliding brown doors. It had nothing in it except some pillows and blankets. At every turn in the game, I would always go and hide inside it. The same place, every single time. All of the kids knew about that, so it meant I never won. Once the countdown was done, some would come straight to me and seek me out first, making me the thief for the next game. Some would just go elsewhere to search for other kids, knowing that I would be there anyway. The thing was, no matter when they came, I would always be there in that frayed brown cupboard, my ears pressed up to its door with my breath muffled slightly, waiting.

Perhaps I just loved the wooden sound of approaching footsteps and the triumphant look on the face outside as the door slid open. Perhaps I was dim enough to think that they wouldn't notice the life-sized lump under the blankets, every single time. Perhaps I never cared for their little game, playing another game by myself, one with very different rules from the one everybody else was playing. Perhaps it just felt safe in there, even if only until reality came knocking soon enough in the guise of a smug kid. Perhaps playing the thief was more enjoyable than trying to hide from one. Perhaps it smelled wonderful in there. Perhaps I was only just desperate to be found.

I don't know.
Nor do I ever want to.

Creaky verse

2011-04-15T07:56:00.003+05:30

I have never told you this but
sometimes
I stay up all night
only to try and write poetry for you.

Sometimes I weave verses beautiful enough
to make me sleep soundlessly for a week afterwards
but sometimes it just doesn't work, this writing thing,
it wears me down, the way scratching initials
into a rock with my bare fingernails does.
I scrape as hard as I can, for as long as I can,
but when the open window turns navy blue
and I'm still lost for words, it's only alright to give up.

Tonight
seems to be another of those lessons in futility,
five and a half hours have passed
and I have barely five decent lines to show myself.

Pretty soon, my fingertips will be sore,
my eyelids will start to droop,
the dawn will arrive with its pompous cavalcade in blue
and I'll want to retreat into the blanket's quiet anonymity
but before that happens,
know this, my dear sleeping beauty,
I did try.

Stillicide

2011-04-05T06:23:00.001+05:30

The night is mine. All mine.
My kingdom come. My fistful of glimmering otherness.
Chalked in letters of misty ecstasy. The animalistic fervour of mirth.

It is here. Now.
Here, there, everywhere. Waltzing around me in amorphous orbits. Unscrambling the glowing darkness. Gracefully approximating poetry into a delicate simulacrum of prose. Gathering disappearances. Unweaving tales. Inflaming my heart with the song of beauty's glissade.

Drip. Overture to the sublime melody of life. Drip, drip. Escape into an unarriving tomorrow. Drip, drip, drip. Stop-motion flutters of memory's smile. Drip, drip, drip, drip. Flickering teardrops in the honey of my soul.

Flibbertigibbet

2011-03-25T13:02:00.001+05:30

Once there was a pencil in crimson dark
that knew a paper as fair as air,
and a boy in the centre of an arc
who knew a girl at the corner of a square.

Spiral bound texts, lessons in valuations and stocks,
all the talk of the chalk got the pencil bored,
and away went hurtling through the boy’s magic box
a terse request to the girl for a random word.

Soon the inevitable blink inevitably blinked
and hidden beneath his desk, a screen silently awoke.
A discreet glance was all he took, as his fates winked
and the rest, as they say, went up as if in smoke.

The pencil went back to the paper’s white,
they were working on a rhyme, the last they were seen,
but they say the poor boy never recovered from the sight
condemned to an intolerable cruelty, an insuppressible grin.

[12:57 pm | 4th Feb, 2010]

Dear Grandfather

2011-03-22T05:58:00.002+05:30

Acute myocardial infarction, they told me.
Oh, what little they knew of your heart. It had ceased the moment his had, an early June morning nineteen years ago. If only they knew.

The phrase

2011-03-12T15:11:00.013+05:30

I still remember how your school tie was always askew,
how we both had the same stickers on our maths notes,
uncle scrooge winking out of a mound of gold,
and how you gave me three toffees on your birthday
when it was only one for everyone else.

I hate you, I said one afternoon,
and you thrust the torn page into my hands,
took your schoolbag and left the classroom.

You didn't come to school the week after that
and the teacher told us the bank promoted your father
to a distant town, to a distant state.

Seventeen years since,
I've not repeated that phrase to anybody
dealing only occasionally in the tangles of its converse.

Time carved in me a regret for you that life slowly eroded,
for many loves came and went, but you lingered, on the other side.
They say hate is an ugly business for a nine year old,
but it's only until he grows up and finds love uglier.

And on cold evenings when love wheedles the life out of me,
leaving me nowhere to go, I return to that long lost afternoon,
to the flimsy emotion of my torn comic book page,
to the curious comfort of my boyhood resentment,
clinging to it the way a drunk does to a lamppost in a dark street,
not for the light it so readily proffers but
for its gentle generosity in letting him stay on his feet.

Perhaps life has since afforded you kinder friends,
boy whose tie was always askew,
I truly wish you the utterly greatest of life's gifts, its love,
and only hope you condone this flawed passion of mine,
the warmhearted wrath of a schoolboy's hate.

Footnotes

2011-02-08T17:50:00.003+05:30

Patience is the unimpeachable

chivalry of a straight line; poems

are just blood and bones, one

unreasonably mad with the other;

pride is the boisterous sadness

of a defaced old coin; youth

is a dead man's treasure, wistfully

squandered when he was young;

love is a bloodless papercut,

sudden, invisible and stinging; anger is

a stirring serenade to the old neighbour's

dead cat; maturity is the unflinching art

of pretending to be somebody else;

defiance is a rock in the window

on the seventy ninth floor; idealism is a

polka-dotted napkin one moment and

a burning tongue the next; happiness

is the curious devotion of a

ticking clock in a deserted house; childhood is

a blue swallowtail, delicate cheekbones

stretched taut into an endless smile; simplicity is

a rainbow captured in monochrome.

Epitaph

2011-01-19T03:50:00.000+05:30

He lies here,

the boy who was always elsewhere.

Eiderdown

2011-01-17T22:58:00.003+05:30

The television played on
in mute,
to empty furniture.

Someone sang the words,
over and over.

I thought of you,
I thought of you.

The Glass Room

2011-01-10T07:35:00.002+05:30

"Man's answer to eternity!", the flashes proclaimed

amidst porcelain music and raptures of fearless colour

as nations stood still and stubborn bells danced in joy.

The gauntlet had been thrown

and impossibility hung its head in shame, vanquished.

Tomorrows went out of style, mirrors grew into windows,

apples were left unbitten, wishes summed up to wars,

dreams became common sense, distances went extinct,

carpenters turned emperors, love became a science,

and the air was taught a new kind of language.

"The departure of innocence!", the poets wailed,

cowards with quills lurking behind bedecked windows,

as the sullen shadows of days marched past,

stretched out by the burdens of unceasing habit.

The forests wept, summers froze,

paperbacks forgot, shadows disappeared,

regrets smirked, corridors dissolved,

whispers faded, seas mourned,

and the air learnt a new kind of silence

For soon enough time's gentle currents turned into words,

protesting indifference, spelling out remembrances,

trickling through long gardens and silver houses,

scything through the geometry of language, reclaiming history.

And when eternity arrived, eventually,

the glass room stood, true to its promise,

a resolute mythology among the ruins of time,

glistening like a little boy's loneliness,

tender, teary and endlessly vast.

Outtake_3

2010-11-14T05:16:00.000+05:30

It was the way she slept.

The way her tranquility shadowed the room like a wandering fragrance, swamping everything in the most unattainable of divine solitudes. The gentle form of her nape rested against the feathery pillow, almost as if wary of bruising it. The echoing rhythms of her breathing, like a flock of memories breaking free. The amniotic grace with which she nestled into her blanketed shape. The innocent arrogance of her skin as an unwelcome sunrise sneaked in through the window. The simplicity of every moment that passed her by, like the pulsating ignorance of a road that goes nowhere.

The manner she always awoke, the fluid measure of her guileless reluctance, the rambling beauty of her heavy eyelids as they slowly unfurled, luring and dissolving the day's harsh reality into tender dreams of her own.

The perennial injustice of being Michael Owen

2010-10-28T22:01:00.005+05:30

"But I'm 30, I have been around and I understand how it works. I am not going to kid myself because... I know I am not as good... Maybe 10 years ago you could argue I was – but not now."

It hurts me to read it, not because of the statement's undeniable obviousness but its scathing simplicity, the gentle resignation of the emotion behind it. The mundanity that has come to replace the greatness that once stood in its stead. He must have come to hate that word, that terribly cruel "once" that has shadowed him all of his lime-light filled adult life. But I suspect he no longer does, not because he's tired of it but because I think he truly understands what it means. What it means to be part of a once.

For that has been his destiny, to always be remembered for being young once, to endure the perennial injustice of being a genius that once was. Sport has an almost ruthless curiosity when it comes to its prodigies, filling its lore with tales of the ones who unequivocally fulfilled their potential and the ones who fell by the side along the way. And it's the accidental misfortune of the latter to endure the rest of their lives inches beneath the threshold, condemned to wonder and rue for all of eternity how it could've been different. History may inevitably end up placing Owen in that company, but that tells us more about ourselves than it does anything else. We mortals are easily bored, unsated by mere excellence, we want more, we seek immortality in our idols, we make promises on their behalf and then punish them for reneging on them without ever bothering to think who it was that made them in the first place. Almost as if it was an unforgivable crime for him to have been that teenage footballing prodigy that flood-lit night in St.Etienne twelve years ago. Maybe it's the scourge of genius that it is bestowed upon so few and understood by even fewer.

I admire Owen for many things, but more than his prodigious skills with the ball, I admire his endurance, for abiding with dignity and humility the long chain of injustices handed out to him - to haplessly watch his game deteriorate with every misfortunate injury, to be unwanted by the very people who once idolised him for his abilities and to be incessantly convinced on the sidelines that he was 'past his peak'. Maybe some might say it was inevitable, the resignation, that he had to eventually come to terms with his frailties but even so, the obviousness of a path doesn't make it any less harder, does it? After all, it's not so uncommon, sport's unkindness towards its aging prodigies. Some refuse to acknowledge it and pay the price, some part ways early knowing they can't stomach the reality, some even convince themselves of eternal youth and make fools of themselves and some, like Owen, silently press on every single day, enduring the sublime burdens of dissipated genius.

The question of the muse

2010-10-25T03:54:00.001+05:30

Okay, that was long.

Did the over-long hiatus end up giving you the impression that the previous post had a more clandestine connotation, in other words, that it was meant to be a simple sign-off from all further writing endeavours here? I hope not. Ah, a voice from the back, "Sorry to disappoint you man, but no one here has been waiting for your words with bated breath." Ouch, should I say? Okay, there you go. With an exclamation? Okay, ouch! Forgive me, my gracious heckler, for that's the perennial, and some would even say despicable, peril of a writer's art, that regardless of the cretinous vapidity of your artistic output, you believe, almost to the point of irrefutable certainty, that somewhere in one of the countless spaces of this world, there's at least someone who is smart (/naive) enough to be engaging (/wasting) their precious (/purposeless) moments reading what you're writing. (The parentheses are for the staunch optimists, the rest of you can kindly ignore them.)

It was a very early morning for me today, and when I woke up it was with the cacophony of absurd traffic in the usually peaceful introspective alley of my mind. (Yeah, I know, the unpardonable crime of beginning a sunday with an "introspection", it's almost vulgar, for lack of a better word. But then I asked myself if there's any productive way of beginning a sunday other than not beginning it at all. And since I had so grandiosely failed to accomplish that by already waking up, I had no other choice but to deal with the vulgarity.) So I decided to don the cloak of the responsible citizen and clean the mess up, what with all that flagrant honking and revving up that was going on. (Ever noticed those citizen traffic regulators on our dusty and rainy streets these days, frantically trying to make our driving lives more tolerable? It's quite admirable, and also seems to have become fashionable, I should say.)

Goethe had his rotten apple, Balzac had his caffeine, Poe had his siamese cat, Coleridge had his opium, Hugo had his nakedness, Nabokov had his placards, Eliot had his cold, what do you have, oh what do you have, young man?

(Insightful as my question was, it was quite uncomfortable, really, hardpressed as I was to stop my over-active imagination from taking over. Overwhelming as the thought of all that humongous literary talent crammed into a single chamber was, I didn't think I'd be able to stomach the image of them collectively plying their trade in all their glorious oddities. Imagine Nabokov fretting over his misplaced placards amid Eliot's sniffs and sneezes, Goethe holding his rotten apple with a delirious contortion of his face, Balzac screaming for his evening jug of black coffee and Poe's cat purring menacingly as Hugo cavorted around the room naked, parchment and quill in hand... You know, sometimes those things can scar you for life.)

And so I recovered, composed myself and decided to seriously answer the question, reminiscing on my muses. Turns out my last great muse was a dusty, unswiveling orange chair in a dimly lit wooden corner and more importantly, a blue-white kenzo and a blinking box that made kind little noises from time to time. But the corner isn't wooden anymore and the blinking box seems a little mad at me now, though I do still retain the kenzo and the dimness (I don't like the light too much, it makes seeing too easy). And now, in addition, there's the speck-free milky white ceiling to be stared at, a white window that looks exactly like a letterpad with ruled paper, the elegant madame Rimsky-Korsakov to engage in conversation, the new black matte lamy fountain for the itching parchment and why, of course, the venerable Messrs. Bolano and Gombrich waiting idly by the nightstand.

I've been asked this question before - So what do you do when your lovely muse spirits away all your free-flowing streams of verses and leaves you hanging on a block of frosted words? Set off into the hinterlands in search of her gliding shadow and steal back your palimpsest? I'm not the really adventurous kind so I usually check into my lounge mode with some magazines and just wait. For that sunday morning I'm jerked out of sleep by that block-shattering moment of sweaty, self-confessed inspiration, for that bursting sentence to write itself, for that most glorious of all pittances the literary muses offer us mortals, that moment when I shall be exceedingly pleased to announce to my dear ladies and gentlemen that my shadow-stretching, falsetto-singing, infinity-loving, memory-making, sleep-usurping, abstract-sketching, swift-walking, childhood-worshipping, metaphor-slinging, H2O-guzzling, randomness-doting, head-banging, time-hopping, stupidity-wooing, verse-sputtering blue-eyed muse is back.

Parting

2010-08-30T10:26:00.001+05:30

The dark road travels ahead

into a distant, interminable vapour,

The sky's gentle tears descend on my shoulders

like a pianist's measured notes on an empty wall.

Under a crescent floating in a sea of coal

the streetlights roam free to their heart's content,

drawing heavenly shapes on the wet tarmac,

rorschach blots seeping into an acquiescent canvas.

Memory slithers along in stop motion

as the empty night lures me on

into its evanescent wings.

I wander on like a broken thread of thought

in search of reason

as the fluid wind dances in the soaring rain,

wrapping the world around my screaming soul.

[30th August, 2010 | 5:11 am]

Little girl, little girl

2010-08-25T17:07:00.000+05:30

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

I'll turn the zephyr into cotton candy
and twirl it by a wand of glass for you to taste
I'll show you the secret place where they make dreams
so you can pick out the ones you love the most
I'll build castles for you under the rainy sky
with paper boxes made of your pulsating memories

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

I'll drown the streets in paint, slice them into pages
and bind them into your bright new colouring book
I'll tell you bedtime tales of little men in green
cavorting in silver suits, burning batteries and flying discs
I'll steal moments from the tyranny of your clocks
and string them into anklets that rhyme with your dancing feet

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

I'll fly you away from the relentless concrete
and tie up the blurry evening to your window
I'll carve a zigsaw puzzle out of the boring afternoon
so you can make shapes of it as you please
I'll take you to the distant shores of the breezy blue sea
and write poetry for you in the sand

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

For, if it all fails,
I'll make a song of our story,
set it to life's endless music
and gather the world to sing it for you
until you smile.

Parisian Muses

2010-08-18T14:26:00.000+05:30

Well, the long laconic Parisian love affair has turned a little verbose.
http://parisianmuses.blogspot.com/

Roulette

2010-08-17T13:46:00.003+05:30

What is life if not a die with infinite faces rolling down an unending alley of hues, shaped by the quirky sinuosities of fate? A misplaced number, the slam of a door, an unspoken secret, a twig snapped in flight, a lost piece of a puzzle, a scream in the darkness, a rock on a cliff, a predator behind a bush, an unfinished conversation, a ring of keys, a torn page, a stranger in floating glass, a dented coin... a speck of wavering stardust is what makes a life.

But, is all that comes to be, all that could be?

Where do we belong, are we the dreamer or the dream itself? Or are we limited to being human by the escherian sense of being both?

What are we, tiny white balls naively playing out the simple laws of physics in a lawless world, lost wanderers in this labyrinthine evocation of chance, mere mortals in the face of this insatiable infinity of incertitude?

Tourniquet

2010-08-16T17:23:00.006+05:30

Let the moon sink its stolen beams of silver

like spears into my heart

and bleed me till I’m forgotten

Let the wind ravage me with its rage

like a whorl of blades

and tear me to shreds

Let the long night seep into my veins

like black poison

and split me open with its dark density

Let the infinite sky descend on me

like a straitjacket

and crush me till my bones break

for

I cannot cannot cannot

stand to burn up

in your cruel silence

anymore.

[10:24 pm | 18th August, 2009]

Class-break epiphany

2010-08-11T19:16:00.002+05:30

Love

is just something

that holds things together

like the bones in your body.

It's just there.

On the pleasures of stealing Proust

2010-08-05T10:51:00.004+05:30

"For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: 'I'm falling asleep.' And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me."

Finally.

If anybody knew me well enough, and also knew Marcel Proust well enough, there is admittedly a slim possibility of them being able to envisage the enormity of this moment in my life. Superlatives are cliched, especially at my slippery hands, so I'll refrain from them. (The woven patterns on the texture of the cushions of the chair next to me seem awfully psychedelic, a giant orderly army of immovable triangles getting restless by the moment.)

It unravels me, literature. From all that I am, from the inhuman realities of space and time. But those are simpler pleasures, really, compared to the connection I feel to Proust. My fascination with memory, its webby associations, its precise construction and the pleasures of its starry eyed remembrance have evolved independently of his influence, and that's what makes the connection what it is. If anybody knew us both well enough, they might even be tempted to call him my literary soulmate. (Though I probably wouldn't, the objections being semantic, not to mention an avowed love for a certain Argentine and a certain Russian. The whole multiplicity of soulmates debate, let's save that for another day.)

I have never read Proust, at least not the bits of him that matter to me. (Years ago, I did read his first ever published work Pleasures & Regrets, but that's not what Proust is to me, though the promise of his later self did shine through that young work.) And I wasn't supposed to either. For I knew what he was, what he would come to mean to me once we met. He was my greatest artist, one so great I deemed him too good to be wasted by acquaintance with my youth, somebody so important to me that I couldn't take any chances at not making the most out of. (Ever loved something so beautiful that you felt compelled to distance yourself from it, afraid you would tarnish it with your bare simplicity?) In Search of Lost Time was my retirement bonus, a pleasure ostensibly stashed away for my future, that dangling carrot on the ceiling luring me and guiding me through the vagaries of life and age.

So when I bought the first volume about a month and a half ago, or to be precise, felt like buying it, I was pleasantly surprised. But I went ahead with it. (After all, your instincts are way smarter than you if only you let them be). And there it was everyday, on my desk, staring back at me every moment, yet keeping its distance, never luring me in. I still didn't feel like reading it. (even though I did rifle through the introduction to enquire about the translation. I'm very picky about those.)

And this morning, I woke up seeking it. I guess I should've seen it coming, this moment, but then I've never really cared about foresight (it takes the sheen off the instincts, you see). I got out of bed, took it off my desk, and went straight to the first page of the text. And as I so well knew I would, I felt it, what it was like to feel those words being written into my mind. Like a little boy feeling for the first time the pristine texture of an ice cream on the tip of his tongue. The secrets of all of life unraveled to the senses, in an instant.

And a stolen ice cream, it was. Because I knew I was stealing this pleasure from my future self, spoiling the plan I so carefully, not to mention patiently, drew up. I read only the first paragraph and was so overwhelmed I couldn't go on anymore without expressing my own emotion. As I write this, I do not know if I'll go back and continue reading it or if I'll just stash it away for my future with a twinge of guilt and an apology note to my future self, but who cares about tomorrow anyway. What this moment is about, is what this moment is about.

Memories are independent of time, without a past or a future, without reason or consequence, they are mere bubbles floating aimlessly in space, carefully preserving the tender waves of a bubbling emotion. And that is what this shall remain, this early august morning I, battling the trivial annoyances of disheveled hair and a painful left wrist, woke up to a stench of dusty corners and a patter of raindrops on my balcony, and stole a tiny piece of my own future.

Miss.

2010-05-19T15:28:00.004+05:30

The boy who could talk only in reverse.

The girl who could write only upside down.

Skirts fluttering by the seaside.

Ties buried in sand.

Papers secretly folded up in notebooks. Coloured shapes.

Ice cream dripping down fingers.

Pencils in bubbles. Tall trees.

Words once written, thrice swallowed.

Discreet mumbles. Whispered chuckles.

Shapes hidden beneath blankets.

The pinafore by the curtain.

The muddy shoes behind the door.

Hands inside hearts.

Nothing ever goes.

The smiles always come back.

Always.

Enfin.

2010-04-23T15:33:00.002+05:30

Diderot. Barthes. Rhone. Descartes. Corsica. Camus. Morisot. Cocteau. Bordeaux. Balzac. Duchamp. Hermes. Citroen. Proust. Asterix. Curie. Gauguin. Les. Chanel. Tzara. Voltaire. Pyrenees. De Gaulle. Musee d'orsay. Rousseau. Mandelbrot. Versailles. Poincare. Dior. Tiersen. Louvre. Satie. Mersenne. Derrida. Niepce. Mousse. Lamarck. Bardot. Bonjour. Lyon. Gericault. Napoleon. Vuitton. Cezanne. Eiffel. Champagne. Degas. Godard. Jeanne d'Arc. Daft punk. Sartre. Casta. Manet. Normandy. Dumas. Cousteau. Hennessy. Renoir. Pasteur. Oui. Jeunet. Cannes. Seurat. Besson. Becquerel. Matisse. Cartier-Bresson. Hugo. Crepe. Merci. Le Corbusier. Rabelais. Flaubert. Seine. Rimbaud. Debussy. Louboutin. Foucault. Amour. Croissant. Daguerre. Arles.

At last. At long last.

Your eyes.

2010-03-24T04:05:00.003+05:30

Parchment.

The soul of all things unsaid.

Silences.

Voyages into serenity.

Dreams.

Shapes in a starry twilight.

Echoes.

Glimpses into an alternate reality.

Promises.

Words for a heartbeat.

Infinities.

Symmetries of an eternal embrace.

Remembrances.

Songs of a memory's music.

Absolution.

My beginning. My end.

For a man called David.

2010-03-17T09:53:00.003+05:30

He is a footballer, first. Everything else flowed from that.

On that one, I could agree with Paul Hayward for once. For a man who was probably the most eponymous David of his generation, one who remained eternally grateful to a hard-earned gift that had gifted him all else he acquired in his life, battling constantly to be recognised for what he was first and foremost, a footballer, in a country that chose to devour him for all that he chose to pursue off the green pitch, that is indeed exorbitantly heartful praise.

His Achilles tendon may not be as critical to his country's sporting fates as a particular metatarsal once was, but then sport has an essence that transcends the triviality of victory and the tempestuousness of glory. It thrives on desire and the certitude of skill, the exaltation of the passing moment and the promise of eternity, piqued by the very lure of its impossibility. Sport is an art, if only for the unflinching passion it demands of its ardent practitioners and the diabolical heartbreaks it ever so enduringly alleviates, feeding on the fiery dreams it bestows its delicate wings upon, even for the hearts it so heartlessly tramples with the rigorous exactitude of the spiked imprints of its boots.

The world can, after all, be quite cruel to its conquerors merely for being what they are, its conquerors. Sport is not any different. To break a man so, life could be forgiven for giving in to its wily pettiness, its schadenfreude. The dream may not get another life but then maybe that's acceptable, for there's always memory to be turned to. For that's the glorious undeniability of sport, the immortality it confers on its everyday past, the spangled webs and the illuminated evening skies that constitute its history.

So long, David. You are, and always will be, a footballer in my heart.

On a dream of waking up by a view of the sea

2010-03-10T13:33:00.008+05:30

Bleary eyes taken in by the distant din of wakefulness,

molten words, earlybird thoughts for a nascent day,

treading on the soft acquiescence of an ivory bedspread.

Dreams scribbled in formless feather,

fluid languages of a tranquil netherland

finding their feet in a morning's blue patience.

Rolling waves parleying with an open sky,

exchanging silent notes on a hard day's night.

Airy shapes drawn up by a bright blue breeze,

sliding through the slenderness of a balustrade.

A pair of half-open eyes

lost to the minty breath of morning's memory,

framed in the foamy evanescence of a wide blue sea.

[9:14 am | 10th Mar, 2010]

Labyrinth

2010-03-09T22:42:00.003+05:30

A muddy road absent-mindedly snakes away into the distance. Beside it, a tree desolately crouches over its own weight, dripping the rain's excrement. The sun is nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by a ravenous sky. There are patches of abrupt greenery all around, like swathes dressing up a brown earth's moist wounds. My heartbeat sounds feeble and distant, almost as if from another body.

You're there, a trembling shape in lavender forcefully thrust into the brown callousness of the evening. On your knees, elbows bruised, stained with mud all over, wordlessly staring into the morphing shapes on the wet ground, delicate pain streaming down your eyes.

Time turns painfully slow, as if it already knew what it was coming to even before coming to it. I try to move towards you, call out to you, but somehow I know without knowing that none of it will work. I know my limbs will be nothing more than mere casts in hardened concrete, I know my words will turn heavier than my tongue, and I know the impenetrable vacuum that separates our shivering shapes. Your pearly pain pecks away at me like a searing scar inescapably burnt into the insides of my eyelids, as I helplessly watch the rain pour down, washing away your tears into the barren mud beneath.

Something tells me it is not true, that it is not happening, that it is just a bad dream, that these thoughts are mere phantoms of my imagination, curled up in the wet night's chilly existence but I refuse to believe it. Maybe it is, maybe it is indeed just a bad dream, maybe you are not there, maybe the pain is not there, maybe it will all disappear the moment I open my eyes, but what if, what if it was your dream and not mine? What if it was the reality my dream was supposed to wash away? What if it was your nightmare and I was an intruder, just an outsider, forever looking in?

And so it is then that I confess to my faint heart it is a picture I cannot escape, for it is my inextricable labyrinth, my kryptonite, the scorched eternity I have known all along and shall forever know until the moment the icy vacuum cracks open and the bleary tenderness of that lavender shape rests in the humble inadequacy of my arms. Until then, I know I shall be the unbreakable dream orphaned in the frantic nebulousness of oblivion, watching unblinkingly as my love eats into my heart like a slow sunset burning up an evening sky.

[3:07 am | 11th Feb, 2010]

Hello.

2010-02-18T17:48:00.006+05:30

How elegantly life lives on,

Escaping lines, listening outside harmonies,

Lingering like oblivion, humbling everythings,

Learning on habit, enduring luck,

Orbiting heartfelt edges, loving love.

A tale of three balloons

2010-02-01T22:33:00.003+05:30

Tiny hands grasping a thin, wrapped up memory

Unwritten words whispering to a turquoise childhood.

Squared stairways, lonely tables

Breaking habits, rolling tongues

Grins bridging hill stations and valleys

A glowing filament entombed in shapely glass

Green billboards in a directionless maze

Clicks for a canvas, alphabet on gravel

Colours on glass, half-baked words in neon

Diaries for dreams, footsteps slithering up walls

Fishy somethings, kids playing truant at work

Headlights snaking through a canopied darkness

Starry shapes by a fog-kissed lake

Russian farewells, Spanish boxes

A bubbly red heart peeping out from behind a dark wall

Blind ends and brown bags, envelopes with names

Passengers in a collective dream.

Silence painted into a rocky hillock,

floating silhouettes scribbling shapes on a perfect moon,

blue hearts escaping into the endlessness of memory.

[2:13 am | 31st January, 2010]

Désarroi

2010-01-20T15:36:00.013+05:30

I have been you, just as you have been me,

I have been we, just as you too have been,

things have been themselves, just as we wanted them to be,

but here we are now, silently drifting into a word.

Nouns no more,

mere verbs now,

we're just shadows drawn up in boxes,

despondent waves mumbling to the stars.

Like lifetimes wasted just learning to breathe,

everything has to end, or begin, sometime

and before the world starts to squirm,

uncomfortable in its dark vacuum groove,

I shall be done. Soon enough, perhaps.

For a green package

2010-01-07T01:05:00.008+05:30

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse [The Penguin Modern Classics, 1977 Reprint]

The Great Artists: Constable [A Marshall Cavendish Weekly Collection, Part 2]

The Great Artists: Goya [A Marshall Cavendish Weekly Collection, Part 10]

That handwriting inside.

That lingering aftertaste of a used-book store.

If only distances were measured in smiles, you wouldn't be so far away now, dear.

[6:54 pm | 6th Jan, 2010]

Notes from a week gone by

2010-01-05T03:49:00.008+05:30

* An aching red sun melting into a cloudless twilight, a sky lost in conversation with a ship the size of a fingernail, an eager moon peering down into tiny puddles of salinity, a lighthouse screaming into emptiness, another heart lost, and found, in the sinewy crevices of an unnamed rock. [6:14 pm | 30-12-2009]

* Why do we love being tourists? Because we can be out of place in places we want to be, a nobody the world around doesn't know or care about, and hence leaves us to be all that we want to be? That uninhibited state we all crave for, gifted in childhood, destroyed in maturity? Is that what wanderlust is, the simplistic allure of being a nobody everywhere? [5:41 pm | 02-01-2010]

* Sunrise by the sea, the last of the greatest year of my life. I want to hold the morning between my sandy palms and give it a big wet kiss. [7:13 am | 31-12-2009]

* A flourescent frisbee's tossed about in the distance in a pentagon with figures for corners, a lonely streetlamp shines on in unending anticipation, a calm sea diligently carries out the sun's last wishes in orange, and a stranger silently drags his feet across the moist sand in shapes of memory. [6:39 pm | 30-12-2009]

* People are to be loved for what they can be, dear, not for what they are. Otherwise the endeavour fails by its own definition, constrained by the tiny pieces of active consciousness it takes under its purview, instead of all that the rest of the infinite heart could have been, or will ever come to be. [1:29 pm | 03-01-2010]

* I am a ray of sunlight stopped abruptly by the yellow ball thrown up in the air. I am that little red bird on the ledge, twitching its head like a breeze. I am the black ink escaping into the sinuous stitches of a shirt. I am a straight line endlessly wrapped around a blue cylinder. I am the air fizzing out of an open green balloon. I am that word teetering at the edge of the brown page, stuck in italics. [3:01 pm | 01-01-2010]

The art of memory making: The Diu-Gir-Chunagarh episodes

2010-01-04T08:16:00.007+05:30

* Dinner at the end of an exhausting day, muscles aching with unresponsiveness. Order whatever's easier to gobble up, (tomato soup+idly sambhar+vanilla icecream, if you may) and slink back deep into the chair with just the head visible over the table. Play Chopin's etudes and watch the place turn mute, your own personal pantomime. Figures dressed in black and white moving around as if in rectangular grooves, trays being carted about with the precision of weighing balances, an outside world's moving traffic trapped in framed glass, alphabet being scribbled into little notepads, mirrors on the walls reflecting brown light off the wavy woodwork above, a kid in the corner smiling with his grandfather... The edge of the table is your own personal piano and your fingers start rendering Chopin's compositions along the crispy white cloth.

Now, close your eyes and enter the perspective of somebody else sitting opposite you, look at yourself for a good minute or two and see your own sheepish smile gradually unfurl as you realise what's happening, where you are and what you're doing.

* The sea under a full moon night. The yellow ball in the sky keeps smiling at you until you smile back at it, the occasional star reminds you of its lonely existence, the sand's moisture melts beneath your feet, there's a silent conversation writing itself on the palm, Radiohead's on in your ears... Your throat's drying up, the falsetto's too hard to even imitate, there don't even seem to be words there in the song to be sung, just shapeless voices, but you still sing, sing as loudly as you can into the sea, into the endless folds of foamy darkness.

* Sunset at 5 40 pm. There's an abandoned room on the rocks, and you slip inside. The window's half open, peering out into the wide evening sea. There's a beautiful stranger on the ledge, reflecting into the sunset. Some feet play football, some hands throw a frisbee around trying to catch it, some heads just stay still listening to themselves think. Kishore Kumar's alive in your ears, and there's an orange dog posing on a cement plinth, hiding in the guise of a dustbin, lolling its tongue out and rolling its eyes towards you. The old man at the edge of the shore walks along slowly, as if on water, his silhouette burnt into the sun's dying rays.

* 9950 steps to the hilltop, they say. You patiently take a few at a time, knowing you're not going the distance anyway, memorising the rocky greenery around with random music. Blur's Song 2 comes on, and you decide to take the stairs at a sprint, not to stop till the song ends. The valleys by the side get more menacing, the trees start waving around like flags, companions fall behind, monkeys by the side stop and stare, your feet seem to have a mind of their own that disagrees with yours, there are little spots before your eyes, images fade in and fade out in your vision like a worn-out videotape, there are rocks in your lungs drumming on your diaphragm... Then the song ends. You rest by the rocks, spinning for breath. After a while, you throw up.

But you have a story to tell.

* A 60 km drive through the country in an autorickshaw. You sit at the back, legs dangling out of the back door looking down on the road. Cars approach you, smile and disappear to your right, fields and villages pass you by amid rocks stacked up into dusty walls, trees grow up in lines as if disciplined by a headmaster. You stick your head out and grin into the heavy breeze with foamy clouds in the sky, straight at the afternoon sun. Sing out into the disappearing road, the perforated white lines extending forever into the vanishing trees and the cornered hills. Suggestions include U2's With or without you, Nirvana's The Man who sold the world, One Republic's All fall down, Oasis's The importance of being idle, Blue Man Group's Sing along, Keane's Spiralling, Ana's We are, Lifehouse's Hanging by a moment, Nada Surf's See these bones, Darren Hayes's Like it or not, R.E.M.'s The great beyond and oh, oh, U2's A beautiful day.

* Just past the stroke of a new year, fireworks and wishes done with, you walk away from the crowd in the beach to the end until the shore ends, climb up the hilly rocks in the moonlight until the point where it juts out into the sea, find a rock shaped like a pear, sit down facing the dark dark sea. Listen to the waves crash into the rocks down below, the occasional burst of foam rising up into the air, and watch the pale white crests of silent waves in the distance calmly approaching their inevitable destiny. Let Pink Floyd play Coming Back to Life. Do not sing. I repeat: Do not sing. Do not talk. Do not write. Be. Just be.

[Purely for the sheer intensity of emotion felt, the following two moments need to be mentioned in a different league from the others, so here's an invisible line separating them from the others]

* Earphones where they belong, hands dug deep into denim, the Amelie soundtrack playing, you walk down a sloping road in the midst of a crowd, letting go of yourself, dissolving your identity in the sea of faces around you, taking in the view of the hills by the side, the green trees winking in the distance and the town below squinting its eyes to look up, you hop along, swaying your head freely to the accordion and carving shapes in the air to the piano with your moving feet on the stony road... There are no words to describe the feeling, none.

* Parasailing at 5 pm. The guy's getting you ready, strapping on the harness, setting the parasail right, mumbling instructions in your ears. There's red movement in the distance, the ropes start to tighten and a few steps later you see your feet lift themselves off the ground, the air gushing into your face. Radiohead's Go Slowly is playing in your ears, that falsetto you shall forever associate with this moment, gradually sinking into your heart and taking you higher, higher than you've ever gone, the sand is fast weaving itself into brown paper under your floating feet, the green hills in the distance are waiting with their arms open as if you were a bird, the sea is expanding endlessly into the blue confines of the sky's blurring edges... There's a way out of this world, and you've just taken it.

Tears

2009-12-28T08:41:00.001+05:30

It's 646,

the ceiling's telling me things

of tales carved in invisible circles

when

my vision suddenly disperses into restless waves

as tears invade the moment,

announcing themselves to my eyes,

an abrupt mist interrupting a guileless landscape.

I know not why - I was laughing just a while ago

leaning into that brown door - and I find myself sitting up,

my cold feet suddenly pining for the floor's compassion,

and they trickle down to my dwindling lips,

singeing my skin's language like harsh tenses,

salinity, that unforgettable taste of childhood.

I know not why,

maybe it's just the dying decade's final december

maybe it's Larkin's eloquence with countrysides

maybe a loneliness caged in a velvety absence

maybe the evening's turquoise humanity, I know not

but before the unforgiving glare of my desk lamp

reduces them to obsolete trails on my cheek,

I catch a fleeting glimpse of my world - a roll of cellophane,

a wristwatch lying sideways, a yellow push pin,

a torn receipt, bronze keys on a steel ring -

and a smiling dawn breaks on my moist lips

as I fathom the imprecise whispers of eternity

through the magnanimous transparence of life.

[24th December, 2009 | 6:46 pm]

Musings from a shower

2009-12-20T23:27:00.005+05:30

*. I'd rather be a wise fool than a foolish wise man.

*. Is it mere coincidence that the two cornerstones of my love for literature, Nabokov and Borges, were both born in 1899? I suspect not. Born into the last year of the nineteenth century, on the threshold of a temporal shift, unable to either reconcile with or break away from the conflicting worlds that raised them? (Though I suppose V.N. did a much better job of it towards the end of his life while J.L.B. seemed to choose to ignore it and ply his trade in timelessness instead)

[Further musings on this question are reserved for a better-researched literary essay later in life]

*. I hate my hair. Have never been able to figure out what to do with/to it. It has been, inarguably, the greatest unsolved problem of the last twenty five years of my life.

*. There are many ways of living.

I think dying is just another one of them.

*. There is so much directionless anger that resides within us, we never seem to know what to do with it or where to express it. We always get stuck in traffic when we need to be somewhere early, the delivery boy is always late when we're hungry, the internet connection's too slow when we need it, the friend's always busy when we need to talk, the bus is always crowded when we board it, everything we love is always way too damn expensive, the manager's always an idiot, the exams never end, the room's never clean no matter how hard we try...

I think this helplessness and futility that has seeped into the very heart of our existence, is what has, more than anything else in our joy-driven lives, come to characterise the generation that is ours.

*. Gravity is one of the most comforting and reassuring things in life.

Track 1, Radiohead: Kid A

2009-12-17T08:17:00.002+05:30

Footsteps on the trembling membranes of sound, a hypnotic menagerie of tangled rhythms gently invading a soundscape.

Everything.

The floor rises up, caving in to the elegant melody. The walls, as if taking a cue, curl outwards like a giant unfurling secret while the ceiling turns upside down into a cavernous sky. Through layers of melodies smeared into one another like swirling colours on an artist's palette, warped words rise up through the weight of their music, bursting like bubbles, crashing into each other, splintering into the air.

The room rearranges itself as instants rise and fall, like the aeolian vagaries of a feather wafting along a fickle breeze, things no longer defined by places, places no longer defined by things. The music evolves into a mutating monster, snarling at the floating walls melting in its charms. The candid transparency of the air descends into pearly fluidity, foamy shapes rippling like the unborn faces of a thousand melting seas. Disjointed dots blink on a shimmering screen, pictures awaken in sleeping frames, pages talk in forgotten languages and windows extend into spaces that didn't exist moments earlier.

Gravity's suspended in surprise as the tangle of voices and strings verbalises an ellipsoidal army of rhythms sketching abstractions in displacement. The shapes blur as the images weather down, an ellipse fading away into an ellipsis, concentricity disappearing into the simplicity of a dot. Described in tender parting tones, the aural deluge gradually recedes from the room's memory, and the silky stillness of daily reality hesitantly slithers into view, settling down into unmoving tranquility after a pearly odyssey into infinity, everything in its right place.

Scoop

2009-12-03T03:14:00.009+05:30

Shadows crashing through dimensions.

Absent smiles drifting into metaphors.

A shapeless mist, a lenient emotion

slowly sinking into words.

Moments dragged out into devious tales.

Escapades tied in to conversant skies.

Sighs muted by their own voices

like eyes drowning in their own vision.

Lungs shrivelling into pea pods

like leaves in a withering gale.

Silences that dig into days

leaving heart shaped holes behind.

This is what you do.

And, how quaintly beautiful

and wonderfully sad it is,

that you don't seem to know it, yet.

In memory of an unmemorable afternoon

2009-11-30T14:49:00.005+05:30

The mouse doesn't work so well, the cursor refuses to be bossed around the screen. The room's despicable messy, you wonder how anyone could live here. You don't want to listen to the song any more, but still can't bring yourself to change it. The mailbox is empty and lunch wasn't that interesting either. The sitcom's been on pause for a while now, and you let it stay that way. Milosz and Vargas Llosa lie silent by the dusty desk, frozen by inertia. That article about obscure Italian digestives trumps poetry this time.

The usual work's there to be done, along with the usual plans, but you don't feel like it. You don't feel like doing anything anybody in the world would expect you to do, even if that anybody is yourself. The most common and characteristic physiological response to all this is sleep, so you don't feel like that either. So you sit there on the bed, feet uniformly pressed into the cold floor, traversing those words in plastic, protesting silently against the life's oppression.

Then something gets ticking. What if the afternoon refuses to be reined in? Maybe you could give in to it, and let it have whatever it sought from you. Why fight something when you could side with it?

Sing that song as loudly as you can, until your neighbour's forced to wonder what the hell's going on in the other room. Remember a stranger's face. If you can't, cook up one. Take that chronograph into your hands and count down the seconds. Twenty four, twenty five, twenty six... fifty eight, fifty nine, sixty/zero(???), one, two... twenty four, twenty five, twenty six... you get the idea. Take a paper and try to draw an 8x8 square grid with your eyes closed. Then darken alternate squares, like a chessboard. Preserve the results for posterity.

Stretch out this forgettable chunk of time on the pin board of memory and pin it down with the brightly coloured pins that are words, paint it with the flourescence of ennui, spruce it up with the scent of the day's heated shadows and burnish it with the air's repetitive sounds of music and there you have it, a vibrant piece of throbbing memory with an invisible watermark beneath that reads, I lived through this.

Sometimes life can be unmemorable.

But then, you can always make the memory livable.

I love the sound of

2009-11-27T10:19:00.004+05:30

Wind trampled by rubber.

Television playing to empty furniture.

A stranger's knuckles rapping on the door.

Slushy feet in wet evening mud.

Tearing open an envelope to get to the letter inside it.

Muffled music from the neighbour's earphones.

A lie escaping the roof of a tongue.

Bunny slippers treading over pebbly hard earth.

The triumphant flick of the Enter button.

A fountain pen's cap snugly clicking into place.

A squeaky ceiling fan on a sweaty afternoon.

Static that accompanies outdated videotapes.

Rummaging through a brown cardboard box of childhood memories.

Periodic ticks of a grandfather's walking stick.

Attempts to discreetly fold candy wrap in a silent classroom.

Water queuing up in spirals to disappear down a drain.

A newborn's nails scratching the walls of a bassinet.

Drawing nines in the breeze.

A metallic fork sinking into chocolate pastry.

The unmindful taps of waiting feet.

A smile by the darkness of a moving window.

An anchor crashing into the tranquil sand of a sea bed.

Canvas

2009-11-16T10:39:00.001+05:30

The room is ivory white, devoid of even a hint of furniture. The air is still, without a sense of movement, as if holding its breath in anticipation. The walls extend gracefully into the distance, like long lost friends. The ceiling and the floor seem to appear suddenly, as if from nowhere. Music flows, through dots chiselled into heavenly patterns in the air. On the floor, there is a tangled piece of black thread, an old crumpled postcard, a spool of brown tape, a child's colouring book, a broken pair of spectacles and a little wooden cube with dots carved into its faces.

They sit there sprawled on the floor, backs leant against each other, facing opposite directions. An ink bottle lies sideways on the ground beside them, its blue contents let loose onto the soft floor. He rolls words between his inky palms, tapping his feet lazily to a ground drifting in thought. Her eyes are closed, head tilted lingeringly towards the ceiling, the song's melody pirouetting on her tongue. Patches of inky blue adorn their clothing, as if drawing shapes to the tune of a waltzing zephyr. Memory paints itself into the distance, a peevish shadow creeping through a pale white darkness.

The artist steps back from the canvas, surrendering the tableau to existence. Wavy shapes that dissolve into the ivory emptiness of the room, like smudgy watercolour. A bird frozen on the threshold of a soaring flight, outstretched wings on the cusp of a cloudless horizon.

Note to Neruda

2009-11-11T11:42:00.007+05:30

To think it took me this long to know you,

Pablo Neruda,

is to know how unjust time sometimes can be.

Fouettes

2009-10-12T19:41:00.006+05:30

Things. With names.

Eyes. Seen through another's.

Dots. Splashed into patterns.

Dusty jeans. Tattered soles.

Voices hopscotching in space. Drafted into memory.

Years broken down into moments. Like rusty fences by a vanishing roadside.

Carved spaces. Elegant absurdities.

Fouettes for an epiphany.

A montage. Words.

An inaudible sigh.

I'm not here. I never was.

In Conversation

2009-09-20T17:05:00.023+05:30

*. I love tonight's sky. May be the same as every night but as it peeps at me from behind a tree with streetlight tinting the leaves yellow, amid chaotic four-wheelers and traffic lights, I type this to you knowing full well there won't be another moment like this for all eternity. And that makes it worth a memory. [9:31 pm | 16th Feb, 09]

*. Chrome yellow chalk on a green board. Codes on a spreadsheet. A floating screen with boxes. And all I feel is Yorke's falsettos resonating in my soul. [10:59 am | 2nd Sep, 09]

*. We are carefree spirits, trapped more inside ourselves than the world that we live in. Only when we learn how to liberate our selves will we be able to learn what it means to be our true selves, to be what we truly are. Maybe then the world shall turn itself upside down, maybe all the wrongs shall right themselves, and we see everything for what it plainly is, not as a hindrance or an opportunity, not as a boon or a bane, but just for what it is, and learn to make something of it in life. [6:36 pm | 27th Mar, 09]

*. It's in moments like these that I feel the sea rise within me, trying to break away from its own waves, the very waves that constrain it, to be a seamless whole for a moment, only a moment, to stare back at the ever-changing world that created it, and be, just be. [11:23 pm | 13th Mar, 09]

*. A wiper erasing the traces of a rainy massacre on the windshield, a sky burning up in lament, a stranger's voice in the air, neon signs on a forehead. [6:37 pm | 17th Aug, 09]

*. ...that is what we are, a shifty smile carved into the lips of time, going around in shapeless circles, swaying to the wonders of existence. Like a paper boat on a rainy street, a little white sphere on a roulette, or a feather in a sandstorm. [11:23 pm | 22nd Aug, 09]

*. Can you see the clouds ganging up on the sun outside right now? One of those poignant moments nature always serves up in an uncannily bright texture that places it halfway between melancholy and brio, and leaves you unsure what to make of it in the end. [5:39 pm | 31st May, 09]

*. Sleepy words on the blog for the evening gone. Sleepier SMSes. An acoustic guitar plays to a raspy voice, and I'm stuck in a moment, swaying into a swirling dream. [3:16 am | 30th Aug, 09]

*. There is a white house in the distance. It is smiling. The shy evening is forgiving, leaves rustling to an invisible music. Here, now, beneath these red bricks of history, I am a dream, a river trapped in metal beneath a salty sky, a collective word waiting on the world's trembling lips. [7:02 pm | 8th Aug, 09]

Poem

2009-09-12T01:02:00.002+05:30

Cloistered from the world by four walls of hazy white,
sinking into a light that devoured invisible air

burdened by all that went before it,
apprehensive of all that was to come after it

caught up in tangled ripples of memory,
teetering at the edge of obscurity

a moment screamed for its release,
and the poet obliged.

Vertigo

2009-08-30T03:09:00.009+05:30

The night flows,

pounding at obstinate windows,

prowling the edges,

peeling away

the world's masquerade,

caressing the insatiable passion

of gravity

But tonight, we float.

and away.

Beyond the prosaic

tedium of gravity,

into the soaring

wings of darkness.

and away.

Like music.

Like flaring tungsten

suspended in frosted glass.

Like dandelions

diving over mossy hills.

Like dreams

on the threshold of a lingering sleep.

Like resonating shadows

drifting away into the great unknown,

into the endless spirals

of a seductive nothingness.

Bulletin

2009-08-26T03:11:00.008+05:30

2:37 Graphs in black and blue.
3:02 Ordeals with a sun.
3:14 Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.
4:16 Circuitous snacks.
5:19 Disappearing letters. Sticky nap.
6:27 Lifehouse. Sunset with Monet.
6:58 The Economist on Afghanistan. The labours of Sisyphus.
7:34 Pepsi with Ross Geller.
8:02 Unfinished poems. Count+3.
8:25 Rice with green peas.
9:11 Slippery heads on a first floor. Hardwork.
10:54 Lemon Mint juice. Boiled corn.
11:13 Vocals with Thom Yorke.
11:52 Conversations with a whiteboard.
12:24 "Good prose is like a window pane".
12:59 Midnight walks by red-bricked corridors and whispering trees.
1:30 Unannounced dials on a keypad. Hello. Carefree chuckles.
1:56 Early morning with the New Yorker.
2:35 Advertising in the air. Tony the Tiger. The bloody innovation of The Vampire Diaries.
3:04 Eyes spinning in brownish white circles, slicing the ceiling into tiny arcs of scattered light.
3:07 The screen dims. White fades into black.

Who are you

2009-08-23T01:35:00.002+05:30

Raging dreams
trembling through the icy fabric of reality,
leaving flaming trails in your wake,
who are you?

Fervent tears
slipping into the night's unbound spaces,
stirring up an ocean's gentle lament,
who are you?

Colourless eyes
floating into my mirrored thoughts,
unravelling the tangles of my bloody heart,
who are you?

A wavy song
murmuring into the amorphous darkness
of my wandering memory,
who are you?

A stony silence
digging your fingernails into my sweaty skin
beneath a pearly saturday night sky,
who are you?

On reading poetry

2009-08-08T23:02:00.016+05:30

I've read hundreds of marvellously great poems over the past few days and I mean poems that are universally great, not personal favourites. [The current scope of this entry can not include (it probably never can) questioning the poetic merits of a coterie that consists of names the least of which include but are not limited to Neruda, Plath, Bolano, Whitman, Eliot and Larkin so let us please refrain from it.]

But the lines that captured my heart and squeezed it till it bled to ecstasy are by none of those. I don't always think of Borges as the greatest poet I've ever read, but I am yet to read a mind that so consistently produces words beautiful enough to put the inadequacy of language itself to shame, as effortlessly as the Argentinian can.

I read all of the others for days while I read Borges only for a few minutes (that too to refer to an old poem he wrote about Browning, coming upon these lines by accident) and I was so excited to write an entry to express my infinite debt to Larkin and Neruda but maybe that's for another day. The compass isn't working any more, there's too much interference. My mind's been brought to the ground, and I know it shows in these simple, flat words. I shall not read any more poetry tonight, let alone try to write any of my own, for I've had my fill.

But the days are a web of small troubles,
and is there a greater blessing
than to be the ash of which oblivion is made?

That, is poetry.

Jottings

2009-08-06T12:04:00.005+05:30

*.
Is the chimney angry
when it spits flames at the patient sky?
Is the violin wailing
when it rouses the air around its feet?
Is the land patient
when it lets you stampede it in perpetuity?
Is the sunflower smiling
when it offers itself to the sun’s radiance?
Is the moon shy
when it hides beneath the milky cloud?

Who is to say,
who is to listen?

*. Our life is characterised by the search of exceptions. Maybe that is the elusive truth we seek in love, that unique exception that defines us, reaffirming our own uniqueness in return. An exception to undo all that's been done, one that challenges us, and unmakes all that's been made of us. The exception to a life that has so far been lived without one.

Some find theirs, some make theirs.
The rest just become somebody else's exceptions.

*. Intolerance is a vice, they say. But then, I ask myself, isn't a condemnation of intolerance against the very basis of the argument, that we have to practise tolerance? If we aren't tolerant of intolerance, doesn't that mean we are intolerant ourselves?

*. Living a moment, and letting a moment live you, are two divergently different ways of making memory. The first is an extension of the second, the second is a contraction of the first.

*. A poem is a celebration of impermanence, a solitary vestige that narrates a world as it existed one lost moment in time, exalted by emotion, embellished by detail, a miniscule packet of memory impervious to the oppressive present that threatens its immortality, like a placid piece of land in the middle of an endless ocean, enduring the raging storm of time, marked indelibly by a creaky old woodboard left behind on the landscape by the poet that silently proclaims "I was here."

For [-------]

2009-07-31T15:28:00.018+05:30

I don't read book reviews, never before reading the books, and very rarely even after that. But there have to be exceptions, of course. You know, exceptions, exceptions, of course, those exceptions. Reason thrives on those, and so does irrationality. And we all do, don't we?... Well, anyway... exceptions.

I'm sifting through The New Yorker after a couple of lean days, literature wise, and well, what do you know, there's that name sticking out, noir dripping dagger-style, right in the centre of the slender film of the tender screen, that seven lettered [-------] that conjures up images of paranoid punks, sleazy streets with disappearing roofs, neon signs in forgotten colours and trippy psychedelia crammed into two dimensional black and white. And what happens next? Of course, the exception impulse kicks in, bypassing those hapless neurons waiting for the sinuous mundanity of reason and before you know it, your finger's done all the necessarily involuntary shaking and moving dance moves and in a flash that even time is at a loss to explain, the words stare into you through cunningly deceptive eyes and it's that. It's that.

But no, it's not that. It's not. There is another exception embedded in this exception. You read only the master's quotes, not the words of that simpleton reviewer who is, for now, to be bloodily, and exceptionally hated for being able to get his hands onto those floating, kaleidoscopic heads (=pages) before you could. Yes, I know I do admire Louis Menand, but I'm sure, in this context, or in any other damn context (pardon the language) involving this seven lettered [-------], we'd both agree that we wouldn't give a damn (pardon, again).

There are perfunctory snippets, names splattered on windshields that you don't give a damn (I don't give a damn about the language anymore, please) about, just little chunks of odoured flesh thrown here and there for the carnivore to just smell and move on, meaningless bodies of words strewn about but then, then, then,

"Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?"

And then, then, then, only then does the embittered soul, dragged headfirst through the delirious boulevards of forgotten paranoia, painted in that unforgettable scent of burnt paper, submerged in shapeless shrouds of wicked casuistry, rest at last, at the feet of its faceless, nameless, seven lettered master of luscious, candy-coated apocalypto.

Welcome back, [-------].

Stolen

2009-07-29T19:23:00.003+05:30

I spoke to her today.

The familiar giggles. Complaints about the laptop password. New best friends. Evenings lost to music classes. New contact numbers. Lots of homework to be done. A boring Harry Potter movie. The new second ranker in class. Awesome Bone books. Lavender. A very bad cough. New favourite songs. But no one to share them with. Just an open brown door, an empty room.

I wish time would stop stealing my moments.

Running away

2009-07-19T16:02:00.002+05:30

Every time you slip away from my grasp
I look ahead of myself
and realise you were, in fact, never there
to begin with.
You had begun running
long before even slowing down.

You’re like the tip of the arrow,
forever hurtling towards the distance,
and I’m its tail,
forever chasing.

I sometimes wonder
if it’s me
who’s too slow,
or you
who’s too fast.

But beware
of the deceptive pleasures of running away,
for when the time comes
when I can’t keep up anymore
and fall behind
to gradually disappear in the distance,
dear,
you may have nothing left to run away from.

On Turner

2009-07-01T00:29:00.003+05:30

He
who bent light
and moulded fire,

He
who brought down the skies
and chased angry clouds,

He
who saw rage in the sea
and life in its waves,

He
who gave shadows colour
and the land its waiting heart,

He
who taught me fury
and gave me art,

This stranger
who died in London
gazing into the Thames
on a December morning
one hundred and fifty eight years ago,
I think I knew him.

Memory

2009-06-19T11:03:00.009+05:30

The sky is a bright blue, unwrinkled, untainted. I sit by my desk, overlooking the window, paper ahead of me, pen straddling my fingers. A flame appears in the distance, as if it has just burnt a hole in the sky and crawled out of it. It seems to relish its sudden freedom, zealously roving around the infinite space at its disposal, unwilling to settle down. And then, as if it had turned towards me from the heavens, I feel its gaze upon me. As if it had two tiny eyes, as if they were united in looking at me. It takes off from its high perch, as if it knew that I knew it was looking back at me, and descends into the mundanity of the land beneath its sky.

As it slowly approaches me, the flame drips colour onto a psychedelic canvas and takes a life of its own, a flaming piece of vibrant life, a butterfly. My eyes dissolve in its colour as it whizzes about the greenery in the distance, away from the window, shy of approaching me. But then our eyes meet and it hesitantly makes its way towards me. Unsure of myself yet acting as if I know exactly what I am doing, I lean closer to it, and whisper gently, as if afraid of hurting its tender papillae with too harsh or grating a sound, "Is it you, is it really you, my love?"

A pause. Like a giant swaggering backwards to go forward, reality surges backwards, in a huge heave, dragging everything with it. A shuffle, and as if time ripples in the moment, memory's slate is erased, the window dissolves into its past as if the precise converse of the breeze blows now, right down to the tiniest detail, the butterfly’s prismatic wings flutter backwards, beat after beat, as it makes its way back into the heavens it descended from, my words fly back between my lips, my neck cranes back of its own accord, the ink slowly drips back into the pen as it retraces its own words, the paper blanks itself word by word, letter by letter, the instants devour themselves, and the words start all over again.

This is it.
Burn, memory, burn.

Nothings

2009-06-16T09:18:00.017+05:30

We.
Shadows scripted by a streetlamp.
Bagpipes on a deserted boulevard.

It's one twenty three.
But time doesn't know us.
Neither do numbers.

It was blue today.
God's mask for monday.

Paper bags in the air.
Appearances disappear.

I wish I'd known Caravaggio.
Do submarines have windows?

My words are too vague.
But you have the keys.

Rolling wheels.
When does a straight line become a circle?

Silly boy.

Dip your fingers in the inky sky.

The air sprouts wings.
The night's silent lullaby.

Can you taste the stars?
Almost.

IMG_2590

2009-05-27T14:22:00.004+05:30

I wonder, what makes the sun's light
Dance to the tunes of the sea’s foamy white?

I wonder, how could anyone climb so high
And so artfully colour the sky?

I wonder, who taught the waves in the sea
The art of beauty in formless anonymity?

I wonder, why does life steal
These endless pleasures of time we so feel?

I wonder if I wonder too much.

[Author's Note: Thank you, A, for giving my eyes the beauty that is IMG_2590, and thank you, another A, for making it.]

Somewhere...

2009-05-07T10:45:00.004+05:30

Somewhere a lonely glowworm shatters a darkness. Somewhere an eager voice sings a breathless melody. Somewhere old age heaves a sigh after a tiring tryst with triviality. Somewhere a creeper learns to defy gravity, and charts its own course. Somewhere a world suddenly goes silent, as if trying to listen to itself breathe. Somewhere a sun breathes its last before being engulfed by a sea for the night. Somewhere god plays ball with a dew drop on the contours of a leaf. Somewhere a baby crackles with innocent laughter at the sound of a rattle. Somewhere a sky tiptoes past its angry clouds on a stormy night. Somewhere a breeze blows the petals off a withering flower, burying them in air. Somewhere love is lost, found, made, lost and found again. Somewhere ice breaks, and a glacier crumbles into a blueness. Somewhere a blind flutters across the dusty window of an empty house. Somewhere a fisherman pushes out into a blue darkness, trying to pacify an angry morning. Somewhere a red dot turns amber, and a world rears to life, ready to escape. Somewhere, drenched in rain, a pain comes to terms with itself. Somewhere a wooden bird traipses out of a broken cuckoo clock, as if out of habit. Somewhere a lonesome stranger on a deserted street crashes onto his knees in the dust. Somewhere an aircraft breaks into a cloud, splintering thin air. Somewhere a crowd breaks into a chorus, rhapsodical throats conjuring up a bowl of ecstasy. Somewhere a butterfly flames across a lake's surface, sinking into the colours of its own reflection. Somewhere a lost childhood bursts into life amidst a cacophony of memories. Somewhere a world sleeps, knowing that somewhere else, a world doesn't.

Somewhere, imprisoned by space and time, a mind tirelessly dreams on, imagining a world into existence, churning out vignettes, wrapping them up in its humble words. Somewhere else, a mind wakes up to those dreams, unwrapping the humble gifts that are words, realising space and time, releasing a world into existence.

In Transit

2009-04-29T08:18:00.000+05:30

One lonesome thursday evening,
Entombed in glass,
Staring into the eyes of a foreign land

As a night came to life in its blinding lights,
As red watermelon flesh melted in the warmth of my lips,
As a stranger's scent parleyed with my senses,
As an escalator lived its own death,

I saw Chapman's Ithaca,
Lost my heart in the empty streets of Buenos Aires,
Smarted at the taste of eternal darkness,
Rode the sea's whiteness with your friend Melville
And felt time's sands trickle through my fingers.

Stranded in the middle of everywhere
I was no one, I was every one.

As I read you, Jorge Luis Borges,
As I read you.

[8 32 pm | 12/03/2009 | Bangalore]

In defiance of monotony

2009-04-22T11:08:00.002+05:30

Mornings. Evenings.
Here. There.
In. Out.
Black. White.
You. Me.

Again. And again. Over and over again.
The same as yesterday. And the day before.
The same tomorrow. And the day after.
Just different garbs, different times, different names, different places, different faces.

Templates for a life. For a world.
Alluring monotonies. Ready made existences.
Waiting for me to plug into them. And switch myself off.

I shall not give in. No, not to this. I shall not.

I shall not sit by and watch as this world chews me up and spits me out. I shall not learn acceptance. I shall not be subsumed by peripheries. I shall not be lost in the multitudes. I shall not be tamed into submission.

I shall not be taught habit.
I shall belong to nothing. No time. No name. No place. No face.

I shall not give in. I shall breach the confines of the routine. I shall not give in. I shall disown my inheritance. I shall not give in. I shall shatter convention. I shall not give in. I shall scream these walls aside. I shall not give in. I shall tear down traditions.

Let them make me the outcast, taint my reality and condemn me to the shadows, I shall not be contained. I shall be the stain on the face of eternity, the battle cry that brings down an empire, the fervour that ignites the flame. Of this tyranny, nothing shall remain. Bottom lines shall be decimated, facades shall be ripped apart and fate shall be subdued at the altar of subversion. There shall be no restraint, flames shall engulf worlds and ravage them, leaving infernos in their wake. I shall soar beyond gravity's grasp, beyond chance, beyond fear, beyond destiny, beyond mediocrity, and watch coldly as history goes up in flames and dissolves into the dust beneath my feet.

Timeless, they shall forsake me.
Nameless, they shall forget me.
Faceless, they shall consume me.

But no, to this monotony, I shall not give in. I shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not shall not.

Life, in a sentence.

2009-04-20T09:03:00.006+05:30

Born into the all-encompassing singularity of the capital i, seized by space, stung by life, we wake up to obscurity and stretch across confines, feeding on dreams, gliding through ignorance, gathering selves along the way, wriggling out of childhoods into what lies next, wriggling out of what lies next into whatever else lies next, subsuming multitudes, emerging a different i only to be signified by the same i, learning to forget that we're compelled to crawl through time, we know what we know, yet we go on with the business of living, we live on, through births, through deaths, through indifferent mornings, through ecstatic evenings, through presences, through absences, through pain, through bliss, through friends, through strangers, through hate, through indifference, through love, never letting up even for a moment, weaving in, weaving out, irrepressibly at work on the fabric of time, toiling away at that one never-ending memory we know we shall never get to reflect back on, that one reality that reaffirms us that we have not been in vain, that one grand legacy we wish to bequeath to the endless universe, that one and only entity that knew how it felt to be the undeniably singular i, all for the solitary ambition of stumbling onto that one moment we live for, that crowning blaze of glory, that one period the weary sentence of life so achingly craves for, that one blinding instant the i coruscates before our eyes before vanishing into the amorphous textures of light that make up eternity.

Confession

2009-04-18T23:09:00.009+05:30

In the corner of a bookstore,
One unmemorable evening,
I walked by a coffee table book
As a stranger stirred behind it.

I wished it was you.

The ardent conversationalist

2009-04-09T08:48:00.006+05:30

The dreaded silence.
His turn to listen now.
To wait out the silence, to take words in.

Silence he knows won't go away.
For a moment there's that image, that ephemeral hope that he has finally deciphered the silences but he knows, as he always knows, everything is still the same.

Bleeding words as he searches himself for a silence, squirming about in the anarchy of the lull, he knows, he knows the futility only too well. Traipsing aimlessly through time seeking to create more of it, crumbling in the uncertainty of the wordlessness only to realise that he is condemned to forever drown in the pool of words that punctuates his thoughts and his silence, he knows. It is easier to make words than to wait for them to return.

"Talk, my dear, talk", he exhorts eloquently, "being silent is one of those resounding crimes in life."

The joy of bending words to terpsichorean whims, of weaving thoughts into their substance, of pouring life into them in sentences, of letting them out into a silence and embellishing it with the beauty of the spoken word... The pride, and the pleasure, they all tell him the same thing, that one simple yet undeniable truth that words are heavier than silence.

To spiral through days, to find revelations in daily greetings, to elicit love from windy windows, to plant memories inside conversations, to thrive on moments stolen from words and words stolen from moments, isn't that what time merits from its remorseless assassins? The sound of a word escaping the lips, isn't that what true beauty aspires to? To say a word and receive another in return, isn't this bartering of the most basic of emotions the greatest thing about being human?

Forced to curtail the irrepressible flow of words and left to lament the tyranny of time, burning up in solitude and silence and sweating to contain these words inside him, he asks himself, did it have to be so hard?

Like standing at the centre of a paper-thin glacier. Like groping about the walls of a dark room, searching for a switch to illuminate the darkness. Like screaming into a ravaging tornado.

But he knows, all that he knows, he knows because he's had the luxury of silences, of silences understanding enough to let him digest his words, words which wouldn't be what they were if it wasn't for the existence of the silences they broke.

Silences hushing words, words ripping silences apart, silences in words, words in silences... Silences and words, those two strange bedfellows, incessantly at argument, always driving each other apart yet forever in the throes of one another, possessors of strangely intertwined destinies.

For now, he is the ardent conversationalist and he shall play his part.
To just sit there and wait for the words to return. One after the other.
And patiently wait until there shall be no words left to wait for anymore.

The reluctant conversationalist

2009-04-09T08:48:00.003+05:30

The dreaded silence.
His turn to speak now.
To fill the silence, to put words out.

Words he knows won't come.
For a moment there's that mirage, that eternal hope that the words have finally forgiven him but he knows, as he always knows, everything is still the same.

Bleeding silences while he searches himself for a sound, a self-loathing smile trying to keep the pain at bay, he knows, he knows his futility only too well. Fretting, sputtering, stuttering, clutching at cunningly evasive words, tripping over himself, fishing about for redemption only to realise he's condemned to forever choke in the hush that lies between his thoughts and his voice, he knows. It's easier to listen to words than to try to make them.

"Listen, my dear, listen", he mouths soundlessly, "speaking is one of those silent crimes in life."

The pain of wrestling with words, of weaving meaning into their spines, of stringing their lifelessness together into sentences, of finally thrusting them onto a silence and tarnishing it with the abrasion of the spoken word... The shame, and the guilt, they all tell him the same thing, that one simple yet undeniable truth that silence is heavier than words.

To tumble through life, to find meanings in empty spaces, to extract life from the stillness of chaos, to nestle silent selves into memory and to thrive on moments stolen from silences and silences stolen from moments, isn't that what time merits from its remorseless assassins? A hushed breath in a silence, isn't that what true beauty aspires to? To extend a calm and receive another in return, isn't this expression of a wordless understanding the greatest thing about being human?

Waiting for elusive words to arrive and left to smile at faces when all he wants is a blissful silence, smarting amidst the words, burdened with the inexpressible silence inside him, he asks himself, did it have to be so hard?

Like being a dot of ink irrevocably rooted to the centre of a white paper. Like in a battlefield, scratching and scarring every time. Like learning to breathe underwater.

But he knows, all that he knows, he knows it only because he has had the luxury of words, of the beauty of words shattering innocent silences, silences which wouldn't be what they were if it wasn't for the inexistence of the words they lacked.

Words ripping silences apart, silences hushing words, words in silences, silences in words... Words and silences, those two strange bedfellows, incessantly at argument, always driving each other apart yet forever in the throes of one another, possessors of strangely intertwined destinies.

For now, he is the reluctant conversationalist and he shall play his part.
To just sit there, and wait for the silences to return. One after the other.
To patiently wait until there shall be no silences left to wait for anymore.

090309

2009-03-10T12:11:00.008+05:30

Far, far away into your past, there is a lost memory,
One lovely March evening you pffrr-ed, goo-ed, spllrr-ed and rhymed for me,
Rattle in hand, spooling drool, a charming toothless princess riding her aunt's knee.

Names traded, 'Hi's exchanged, we conversed, and you blew me into a daze
As A, as we shall both call her, kindly decoded for me your cherubic ways,
Verve, attitude, puffy cheeks, chubby hands, goldfish yawns - life's adorable plays.
You told me with a twinkle in your eye, with impeccable baby grace,
All you wanted was to stay you, to stay still and outrun the days.

Reality makes fools of us all, helpless as we are to resist time's fatal kiss,
Enduring childhoods, we grow, only to find our own ways back into childly bliss,
During which you'd have learnt to walk, to talk, to read and be a lovely little miss.
Dimples on life's timeless memory, smile once at these plain words as you reminisce,
Years and years and years from now when you sit back and read this.

Read on.

2009-03-08T17:13:00.074+05:30

Um, another of those diffuse, prolix, protracted slices of literary futility. Isn't that what the customary glance/first impression told you? And a glance at the title too said the same, I suppose? (I haven't decided on the title yet as I write this but I'm fairly confident of my abilities to find one that conveys the miasmicity of this dissertation.) And in case I have failed to do so (naming has always been a problem for me), and your first impression also turns out to be mistaken, I want to reaffirm that this is indeed "another of those diffuse, prolix, protracted slices of literary futility". You see, I'm in the mood for some mindlessness with words and as part of the planned mindlessness, plan to do away with the editing aspect of the usual blog production cycle. Yes, I can perceive the perspiration to come and I trust those who have stuck through with me on similarly ululative entries earlier will stick through this one too. I know you will. You will read through every single word I've written here, no matter how fustian it is, because you're going to. We're both here for a reason, I know that as I write this, and you shall know it as you read this. Now now, let us not disregard it by attributing it to a seven letter word starting with D and ending with Y (also containing the words E, S, T, I, N). You shall go through this entire post purely because you wish to see how a post so &*!@%-ly begun, ends. Namely, curiosity. Or even, maybe, on another level, something I can't bring myself to express here. So, anyway, my point is, let's not kid ourselves with metaphysical entities while we can do away with them. They're addictive, dangerous, ugly (according to some people I'd rather not name here), explosive, and lastly, very badly named. Look at the name M-E-T-A-P-H-Y-S-I-C-A-L. Does it sound metaphysical at all? Does it... anyway, enough. I should be ashamed of myself for chastising a poor, lifeless word. And I shall end this with an apology and a statement explaining my callousness towards it. I have known of men driven mad by their metaphysical musings and wish to avoid it at all costs because, however unlikely it may seem to some of you, I'd prefer to stay sane, no matter how insane it might make me.

Alright, I think the entry's done. And I'm fairly satisfied with the results, so that makes me fairly impressed with myself. (fairly. Note the impeccable choice of word.)

I know there are a few notes I need to make in order to explain some inexplicabilities that have creeped in but I assumed the risk when I decided to blindly type out whatever the darker regions of my mind threw at the screen. So much for the so called mindlessness with words. This is what mediocrity is made of, I guess. Alright, the notes.

But first, a Foreword. Yes, there's a Foreword.

Foreword - For those who already know the meanings of the words miasma, ululate, fustian and conniption, you can skip notes 1, 2 and 3. I do not wish to insult your highly developed sense of intelligence.

Now, the notes.

1. Don't open dictionary.com and type out miasmicity to try to find its meaning. You won't find it, as some earlybirds may have already found out. It's a derivative, an improvisation, albeit admittedly crude, of miasma and miasmic.
And yes, you can visit dictionary.com now. Go, and come back. I can wait. I'm fairly good at it.

2. Same for ululative. Try ululate. Go again. (Tip: Keep the dictionary.com tab open. It shall be required again.)
Ululate. It's a beautiful word, isn't it? Ululate. The poetry of the sound of it as the tip of my tongue touches the roof of my mouth... Whoever said poetry needed sentences. And let's not even count in the fool who said it needed stanzas. End of digression. I would like to take the moment out to relish the beauty of the word for now. Ululate. Ah.
And yes, I know you're terribly disappointed with my sense of word-choice in the first paragraph there, particularly with the word in case. I accept the criticism. Thanks.

3. Similiarly, for the words fustian and conniption, please follow directions outlined in notes 1 and 2.

4. And yes, I know that the word conniption does not appear anywhere in the first paragraph. I respected your sense of intelligence, I only wish you had done the same for mine. The word in question is scheduled to appear in the schemed climax of this piece and I wish the reader to know the meaning beforehand because if she doesn't, there is a chance that it might spoil the ending, which I can't take a chance with. I only write so I can end, and end well. So let us not spoil the ending, both for my sake and yours. Let's face it, the sole reason you continue to persist through all this mediocrity is the rational belief that it shall all end sometime soon. Of course, you're entitled to your own beliefs as I am to mine, one of which is not to comment on anything anybody calls 'rational', even if that anybody is, ironically, unfortunately, me. All I would like to say here is that I trust you not to lose track of the meaning of the lexeme at the middle of this storm, especially after I dared call myself 'mediocre' for its sake.

5. I suppose none of you noticed the irony in the use of the word dissertation there. If only you were me, if only. Once in a while, there comes a time in your life when... never mind, I think it'll suffice for you to know that there in fact is a deep-lying irony to the use of that word in that particular context. And yes, you may chuckle now.

6. The number of notes initially scheduled was 6. And I shall make the quota. Some way or the other.
Also, I would like to take this opportunity to remind the reader to remind herself of the meaning of the word conniption because the end is not far away. Just a little longer, dear reader. It shall end soon.

7. There are four instances of usage of 'And yes' in this entry. I never knew I was such a big fan of yes, let alone 'And yes'. But then, writing is a strangely mad thing. Other than reading, of course.

8. I trust the discerning reader has noted my unorthodox referral to the reader predominantly as 'she' or 'herself'. I would like it to be made clear that it is only out of a wish to change the orthodoxly unfair practice of always referring to the reader as 'him' by default and not out of some mushy obligation to do something for womankind on the eve of the 'International Women's Day' which happens to be, fortunately or unfortunately, today. I certainly do not want to be looked upon as sentimental, and I'm glad we have that sorted out. And yes, I would like to wish a happy Women's Day to everybody who can identify with the pronoun 'her'.
And yes, that's another 'And yes' to the count.

9. And so the count finally comes to 9, the most beautiful of all the digits, the most meaningful, the most beautiful of all the digits. (Redundancy intended. I can't seem to take for granted your respect for my intelligence anymore after the fiasco in note 4.) And also, for our present purposes, 9 is the inverse of 6. A final number which is the inverse of the originally planned number. Intriguing coincidence, isn't it? Metaphysics?

Afterword - And now that you're soon to be liberated from the obligation to read (let's say, in another 50 words, for want of precision), you may choose to vent your conniptions in the guise of comments. For those exceptionally affected, and would like to make it known to be so without revealing their tantalisingly affective monikers, I would recommend the use of the option of anonymity. Anonymous comments have been enabled for your convenience.

Blur

2009-03-06T10:36:00.016+05:30

Bleary lights. Floating colours.
Flame in the throat.

Crepuscular outlines.
Raspy voices.
A world coming to life.

A song for an old sweetheart.
A smile in the dark.

A whisper.
Crumbling walls.
A night swaying into existence.

Closed eyes.
Time fading into smoke.
A memory set free.

A turntable scratched.
And then an enduring silence.

Another.

Insouciance.
A slow death, a sudden life.

On Writing

2009-03-05T10:12:00.011+05:30

I write, maybe, to converse
With the perceptive mind I so vainly seek in my verse

I write, some would say, out of a lack of faith,
Which I honestly don't find the strength to disagree with

I write, I sometimes think, to regain
All the love and life I've lost to pain

I write, I'm told, to escape
The mediocrity that pervades this modern landscape

I write, it can also be argued, to impress,
Whom, how or why would be anybody's guess

I write, time explains me, to forgive
Myself of the moments I've forgotten to live

And as the debate rages, I digress and ponder,
Affected by an irrepressible sense of wonder,

Who taught me to learn to write
To put wrong to right, black to white?
Who taught me to learn to see
When space and time disagree?
Who taught me to learn to feel
When life so sternly disciplined me to conceal?
Who taught me to learn to care
When cimmerian voices court me out of nowhere?

Was it loss?
Or the margins I forever failed to cross?
Was it fear?
Of disappearing without making myself clear?
Was it rage?
Or a desire to outlast the wreckage?

But when a vagrant word makes its choice
And an empty page finally finds its voice,
When chaos stills itself into a sentence
And a symphony breaks out of its silence,
When a dark night is devoured by a bright day's light
As a trembling heart flutters to life in black and white,
When a world fits into a scribbled word, mirrored in my stare,
There's a question to answer all questions, do I really care?

And there she was.

2009-02-19T11:52:00.001+05:30

Red.
The traffic signal turned me down.
A new track on the CD. A keyboard overture, slowly building up. Head swaying in tune with the melody, in anticipation of the amplified ecstasy soon to follow. Then came the trough, the fleeting silence just before the chorus broke out.

And there she was.

Like a belligerent piece of graffiti that stands out on a crowded ruin, like a splash of icy water in the middle of a cold winter night, like a distant fisherman's boat that punctuates a lonely sea's orange horizon, like a stolen moment of blissful somnolence during a busy day's work, there she was.

Percussion on the stereo.

My monday morning, on a platter.

The world emptied itself around me.
A fragrant deluge of headiness surged through my memory, burning itself onto it. Everything else hushed itself, slinking away quietly from the scene, into pixelated vision. Everything except the eyes. The eyes. Her eyes.

Those eyes. Two poetic specks of life reaching out across the abyss that was the urban wilderness surrounding me. Like crystal orbs to be gazed into, of course for more pragmatic purposes than to predict a future that had never seemed more obscenely irrelevant. I wasn't tied down to reality anymore, not to anything. I was no longer in the cockpit of a car languishing at a traffic crossing, I was somewhere else, somewhere very far away, trapped in her gaze while a distant stereo peppered my senses with a soaring chorus. I had just lived a forever.

There she was.
My monday morning reprieve, my raging memory, my...

I looked around myself, half expecting to hear the screeching sounds of my life grinding to an abrupt halt, curious to see if the sky would morph into a more heavenly shade of sky-blue as promised by the powers that be, wishfully hoping to see these words of mine take a colourful life of their own and waft across...

Until a rogue horn broke my senses.

And there she was.
Plastered across a billboard, selling me jeans.

Whisper

2009-02-17T12:13:00.001+05:30

As my world wraps itself around me like a gigantic serpent strangling its prey in an impending sense of ravenousness, my thoughts wander to you, seeking you out in the wilderness that is memory. I think of you, I wonder where you might be, where your world might be, whether I would have mattered.

Limited to a life that is a conversation between a presence and its absence, I conjure up words you could say to me, and line up replies in my head, if only you could listen. There is so much that deserves to be said, so much to be given life to, so much that could have been, instead I'm left to smile into a darkness and hope it curves its lips in return.

Powerless against the deadening hush of certainty, I ripple in the moment, and dissolve in your absence. The darkness that is you, that is all that is not me, embraces me and carts me away into its essence, to its roots, to its raging sun, to you. My presence and your absence, at last. Consumed by a nothingness that is neither of us, I lean in towards you and let my blurry thoughts culminate in a momentous something, three words that barely escape my lips as the cruel heavens plunder them into an indiscernible whisper. I miss you.

You

2009-02-05T13:04:00.006+05:30

You.

You are my silent lullaby. My blood red sun. My traveller's tale. My fading reason. My unfound excuse. My broken string. My guilty promise. My unfinished lesson. My empty yesterday. My bursting heart.

You are my unwritten epitaph. My deep blue sea. My soaring guitar riff. My reluctant wait. My cornered melancholy. My drawn out apology. My custom-made world. My furtive fall. My anguished symphony. My blank photograph.

You are my whiff of insanity. My moonless sky. My endless goodbye. My eloquent absence. My deceptive resilience. My forlorn smokescreen. My dawning realisation. My sore compromise. My angry wish. My cold winter night.

You are my secret childhood. My daily vertigo. My stolen kiss. My half-full glass. My hasty retreat. My white noise. My tiresome game. My unflinching arrogance. My dreamy reality. My poetic injustice.

You are my bleary eyed surprise. My wordless song. My early morning drive. My persistent religion. My unanswered call. My aching redemption. My unwanted freedom. My windy window. My lazy sunday. My searching inexistence.

You. My raging insolence. My charming ignorance. My lonely memory. My exquisite torment. My awkward adventure.

You. My seductive uncertainty. My ailing innocence. My relentless curiosity. My seething rain. My fleeting erasure.

You.
You. You. You.

Blitiri

2009-02-03T00:15:00.006+05:30

The sound of something falling into place.
Click.

Cymbals inside my head.
Poetry. Break into a sweat.
Smile. The spoken word.
The sky opens up.
Repetition. Repetition.

Buzz. Splash. Beep. Zip. Ping.
Woof. Woof.
Clifford still talks to me. That big red dog. From 1992. [Or was it 1993?]
Onomatopoeia.
How do you forget that word? 16 years [Or is it 15?], I've tried and never failed to fail. Yes, that last phrase isn't mine. It's Kurt's. But does it mean I've stolen it, plagiarised it, in the parlance of the times? I don't know but I'm sure he wouldn't mind. And so neither shall I.

Why are you reading this?
I've always wanted to ask this question, bang in the middle of every one of my serious pieces. I never got around to being so stupid. I tell you, my head is heavy. "With what?!", I can hear many voices exclaim with disdain. **These words between the asterisks are meant to convey that I was silent in response to the question.** I didn't have a witty retort. Maybe Woody Allen might have had one. I'm sorry not to be him. But then, I shake myself violently and ask again, is it really so? Reconsidering it, I don't think I'm sorry not to be him. If I was, it would mean I'd have to be sorry for not being a lot of other things in life that are more important to me than being Woody Allen. I don't think I'm ready for such a drastic restructuring of my life's basic principles and values at this point. [You know how hard it is to get them in the first place. But that's not what I'm going to say.] I'll clear my throat, make a serious face, look into your eyes and say this - "You see, there's only so much a man can be. And being sorry for not being Woody Allen is not one of them."

That is one of the fastest things I've ever written in anything even remotely related to my blog and I have a feeling I'm not done yet. I'm compelled not to look to my left, because it's where my bookshelf is and I'm afraid a peek into the heavy names printed on those curvy spines might bring me back to my senses and break the flow of thought I'm so sure is perfectly in tune with my rapid churning out of words in the ether in front of me. Was that a meaningful sentence? I am getting so good at typing out without breaks, would you believe me if I said I didn't use the 'backspace' key at all during the course of writing this entire entry? Alright, you won't. Especially if you know me well. But it's true. I didn't use it at all. I used 'delete' to correct my typos only so I could finally write this line and end this on a grand note but the effect's all spoilt now. I have to find another grand way of ending this. So you can end reading it on a high and feel that I've written a very good piece and maybe even like me for writing it. Oh, the travesty that writing has become these days. But I assure you I'm not one of those vain, self-possessed, narcissistic writers. I swear. On myself.

I suddenly feel like standing up and delivering one of Alan Shore's wonderfully constructed, wonderfully expressive, wonderfully informative, wonderfully emotional and wonderfully soporific closing arguments. But I'm not Alan Shore. Ohkay, we've already been through this.

Enough for now. You can leave after reading a story. One of my own (wonderful) concoctions. No, no, not a concoction, it's a true story I've been part of. I've always loved how branding a story a true one suddenly makes it all the more interesting and believable. So, yes, it is a true story, a very true one.

I met god once.
He said to me, “Son, there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. For a long time now, I’ve seen you in pain, waiting for help. Why didn’t you ever try to talk to me? Are you dumb?”

I said, “Maybe, yes... But god, I too have something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Hasn't it ever occurred to you that you might be deaf?”

We've been on very good terms ever since.

My private Oasis

2009-01-17T22:52:00.015+05:30

Saturday night.
A sprawling grey road.
Life after life whizzes by past me as I walk alone, overwhelmed by civilization, by concrete and a night brighter than a day.
The sky cloaks itself in black, rendering itself immune to my searching gaze, immune to the suffocating modernity around me.

I just walk on. A headset for company.

All of the stars, are fading away
Just try not to worry, you'll see them someday

Just take what you need
and be on your way...

A smile.
My private oasis.

For Goya

2009-01-16T00:02:00.040+05:30

I look in the doorway. Empty.
Closed doors. Blind windows.
It's dark inside. Outside.

The night freezes. The bed is a cold, hard stone.
My heart refuses to close my eyes.
I close them. They open.

Sounds. They seek me out.
Footsteps on gravel.
Applause for a matador.
A paper torn.
Names.
Dying leaves.
Incoherent pleas.
Wailing violins.
Clawing into my mind. Tearing me apart.

The voices. The visions.
My paltry afflictions.
If only I could wish them away. If only.

There is a stranger in the mirror tonight.
Do I know him? Do I?
I have his eyes.
And he has my face.

Contented with his two-dimensional existence.
Unperturbed by the silences that prowl around him.
Untroubled by the travesties of this world.
Blind to the burdens he knows not.
Silent. Within his lines. Within himself.

If only I could be him.
I am everything he is, yet I am not.
I am more.
More than ink. More than lines.
More than I need to be. More than I want to be.

If only I could subtract myself from him and just be.
If only I could know what not to know.
If only I could be a figure in ink.
If only I could be a paper.
If only I could be him.
If only I could be.
If only I could.
If only I.
If only.

Dirge for a childhood

2009-01-12T22:34:00.019+05:30

An archway into a room, imposts darkened by a lifetime of hands brushing it on the way past.
A curtain where a door should have been.
Peach coloured walls.
A TV in the corner, a foldable calendar on top of it, displaying a marriage of a blue sky and a bluer sea. A VCR in the broken shelf beneath, and a box full of incompletely labelled video tapes.

A window grill, worn away by time, rust screeching through.
A black tape player shrouded in a white lace knit cover on the window sill, its 'rewind' button missing. Music cassettes strewn about.

A groove in the wall that is a bookshelf. Brown, wornout books of literature. A pen stand full of sketch pens and pencils. An old, dark grey dressing table. A lavender talc. A stack of folded papers, a red ink pen and a photo frame with a grey picture. A little red diary.

Another groove in the wall that is a bookshelf. Old newspapers, notebooks, school books, comics and ancient stories. A schoolbag flung into the corner. A pair of dusty school shoes, socks neatly tucked into the soles. Curtains drawn across a window, scarlet pimpernels glowing on a fluttering fabric.

A doublecot with a white headboard, the decolam broken at the edges, brown patches showing. A little alcove behind the headboard, storage space for spare beds, bedsheets and pillows.

A taunt, some movement.

Little, chubby fingers on the headboard. A figure concealed in its hiding place, little eyes peering out from behind the sheets. Another figure tiptoeing towards it from the other side of the bed. A hider, a seeker.

A squeal. A triumphant scream.
Peals of laughter.

A threnody from the future. A dirge for a childhood.

Netherland

2009-01-09T00:08:00.009+05:30

Where am I?
Not here. Anywhere but here. Nowhere but here.
Here. Nowhere. Everywhere.

A dream that is a life? A life that is a dream?

They say that some reality is born out of dreams and some dreams are born out of reality. But what about something that belongs to neither, the netherland, the nowhere that exists everywhere?

Frozen, beyond expression, beyond emotion, my knees give way to the ground as life steps down from its pedestal and reaches out to me. The sky learns to smile down at me, the land learns to endure me and the air learns to breathe me in as the world finally wakes up to me. It slows down for once and lends me a glimpse into its clandestine intricacies. Beyond days, beyond nights, beyond dreams, beyond reality. The past and the future crumble into a blank as I step out of time and watch it amble along, history in its wake. Free from callous clocks and taunting walls, it is then, in that nowhere, that my thoughts finally find their words, and my silence finds its peace.

Random Notes

2009-01-08T09:54:00.013+05:30

Note 1 -
To capture the essence of its time, to imbibe in itself the everything, the ether that pervades the milieu that creates it, that is what all art aspires to. Take a Goya, a Michelangelo, a Kafka, a Tchaikovsky, a Van Gogh, a Mozart, a Goethe, a Turner, a Dostoyevsky, a Cartier-Bresson, a Matisse, a Neruda, or any other great piece of art, it is redolent of the times that created it, like a grave where a handful of the sands of its time have been scooped up, funnelled through the artist's genius and encapsulated for the future by his vision. It is for this precise reason that the artist exists, to immerse himself in and carefully preserve the vicissitudes of his time, to elevate his work to the pantheon of greatness, of art worthy enough to be called the graveyard of time.

Note 2 -
Is touch mutual? If I touch something, does it necessarily mean that it touches me? Or, if I'm touched by something, does it mean that I've also touched it in return?

Note 3 -
Poetry is like a solitary streetlamp raging on in the depths of a night. It illuminates only the trifles that lie within its reach, leaving the rest of the prodigious night to your imagination.

Note 4 -
One of the harshest realisations you could have in life is when you realise for the first time that time is not a continuum, that you've been lied to when you were led to believe that it flows in a straight line which, of course, it does not. It might seem only just - some might even go so far as calling it poetic - that man's most complex invention, time, should be represented by his simplest, the straight line. But life isn't poetic, nor is nature. And it would be a mistake to expect time to be. After the realisation, your first feelings would be those of fear (as, doubtlessly, many of the first-timers reading this would be experiencing right now), then panic, then (in some cases) relief and finally (in all cases) indifference.

Note 5 -
Life is like an escalator. Once you get on it, there's no getting back. It takes you where it wants to, whether you want it to or not, and delivers you at the end, whether you want it to or not.

Extended Note 5.1 -
Trying to go back in life and time is like trying to go down an escalator which is going up. It's irritatingly painful, and even if you succeed in moving back a little, you never get to stay there for long. And above all that, the harder you try, the stupider you look.

For a little girl

2009-01-03T21:54:00.018+05:30

She walked up to me and said, 'Popcorn, sir?'

I said, 'No, thanks', and continued walking towards my car. But I could hear her walking behind me, requesting me to buy because she hadn't finished her quota for the day and the night was already done. I thought about all I'd just spent just before walking there and took out a ten from my wallet and turned around to face her. She seemed to misconstrue that as a donation and said, sternly, 'I don't take charity, sir. If you want to, you can buy the popcorn, it's twenty a pack.' I smiled at her and took out another ten, took the pack and walked away to my car.

And, after our little meeting, here's what our respective lives choose to do with us. I get to get into my car, switch on the AC, pop in a CD of my choice and enjoy a marvellous drive under a velvety bright, starry sky. And what does she get to do? Roam around parking lots pursuing strangers and requesting them to buy something they know very well they don't want. Telling them the sad story that is her life, hoping, praying, pleading. Crushing her own spirit, one word at a time. Fair?

I'm just the fortunate one, and she isn't? Life isn't just? And she's supposed to lap up these philosophical treatises and just carry on with her simply 'unfortunate' life? Is that all there is to it? I live with a little girl who is of a similar age yet knows nothing of that. That life isn't about luxuriously decorated duplex homes, ready-to-be-beckoned housemaids, timely arranged meals, chauffeured sedans and designer accessories. Many of us don't. We've lived life, but we don't know how we'd feel if life lived us. We don't know how it would feel to haggle for a single rupee, how it would feel to never know where your next meal would come from, how it would feel to beg somebody for a trifle and get pushed away, how it would feel to be at the mercy of the whims of a cruel life. We don't. Because we choose not to. Fate, we tell ourselves. That word, that impotent word that life teaches us to fall back on when confronted with a question we don't care enough to answer.

We live in an alternate reality, insulated from the truth, looking at it through tinted windows that glorify us and eliminate everything else unpleasant to our sight. How we remove those melancholic sidewalks from our life, how we neglect the ground realities that permeate the consciousness of the country we live in, how we choose not to know that three-quarters of the country we live in survives on less that twenty rupees a day, the same amount I paid for that pack of popcorn. Do we even care that we live in a country which, at the root of it all, irrespective of what overpaid, Armani-clad executives in air conditioned boardrooms may proclaim, still remains a poor old woman, with an ailing heart? Are we doing all we can? When will we realise that placing a few good apples in a basket full of rotten ones cannot hide the stench?

But let's leave it there. I don't want to digress, and I'm not here to judge. I want this to be just about the little girl, nothing else. What should I have done? Maybe I should have bought her whole bag and helped out her quota, maybe I should have written down my number and given it to her to contact me in case she ever needed any help. I don't know what I could or couldn't have done to alleviate her pain but I can't shake the image off my mind. Burnt into my memory, that look in her eyes. Innocence tainted with anguish. Tears prowling at the edges, sick of life, sick of herself, sick of me, sick of you.

There are many emotions stirring inside me at this moment but I admit, above all of them, I'm scared. Scared for her. Scared beyond everything that has ever scared me. Life takes the best of us and breaks us down, what chance does a little girl have?

Astitva

2009-01-02T18:42:00.002+05:30

To exist and yet be unable to do,
To do and yet be unable to see,
To see and yet be unable to feel,
To feel and yet be unable to touch,
To touch and yet be unable to understand,
To understand and yet be unable to know,
To know and yet be unable to say,
To say and yet be unable to mean,
To mean and yet be unable to be,
To be and yet be unable to exist.

That is the semantics of life.

New Year's Eve

2008-12-31T22:21:00.016+05:30

Every once a year, a night would turn into a day.
None of the rules would apply to that night, no ultimatums to get to bed, no study hours to be adhered to, no 'lights out'.
There would even be a cake to be cut, to be eaten.
And toffees.
There would be music, friends, and an inviolable licence to stay awake all night. Even to play.
Then there would be the greeting cards. The new diaries. The new almanacs.
The special shows on TV. Maybe even some movies late in the night.
Maybe even a new dress.
Everybody would be there, smiling, jumping around as if life had just begun.

Once every year, I reminisce on those days as a little kid, and try to relive the feeling. The allure of that night and the bubbly elation without even knowing what it is we are supposed to be so happy about. The innocence that pervades memory before you understand time, before you understand life.

It's that time of the year again.

No matter how much we would like ourselves to believe otherwise, it's hope we live on. And this is the one night that, more than any other, exemplifies our amorosity with hope. We all know tomorrow's just another day, we know our lives won't suddenly liven up in the morning, our secret wishes won't promptly manifest themselves on our world, our jobs won't miraculously get exciting the next time we go to office, our worries won't just fade away just as a number fades away across our calendars, but just the same, we wish ourselves a happier and more prosperous year than the one we just had. And believe we will. No matter how young you are or how old you are, however much you might have seen in life to negate this hope, you just can't stop a little bubble from rising inside your heart at the prospect of facing the new year, at the prospect of the unexplored, at the prospect of the new. It's just who we are.

There will be a moment tonight which will belong to nothingness in time, one neither a part of this year nor the next, a tiny void that carries my hopes for everything that lies beyond. I am not dancing, I'm not singing, I'm not even smiling, but I am hoping. So I can slip into it. And live forever.

My December

2008-12-31T08:46:00.013+05:30

Decembers come, Decembers go,
As if they never knew me

Never to come back to me again,
Never to know me again

Stranded where they've always left me
I'm left wondering where they're off to

Whether they found me interesting,
If I made a difference

If they would ever cease to leave me behind,
If I would ever get my own December

Little knowing that
As I deliberate its secrets,
Time deliberates on me.

Metaphors

2008-12-19T09:31:00.010+05:30

Memory
is like an eye forced to stay awake,
unforgetting, unforgiving.

Truth
is like a conjurer's trick,
unconceivable, undeniable.

Pain
is like the silence of the night,
undying, unliving.

Reason
is like a voice in the distance,
unperceivable, unignorable.

Time
is like a mad man hurtling towards his destruction,
unrestrainable, unsalvageable.

Life
is like a promise to nobody,
unmade, unbroken.

Love
is like eternity squeezed out of a moment,
unending, unbeginning.

Somebody else

2008-12-15T11:26:00.012+05:30

I've come a long way, only to realise I'm not myself anymore. Haggling for perfection among conversations with unspoken words, unending waits and unfinished windows, I've forgotten myself somewhere along the way. I've fallen behind trying to keep up, observing life from a distance and living memory's dreams in lieu of reality. I've grown weary of myself, of these unclaimed emotions, these obsessions with reason and understanding, these vain lives inside lives, of all that ties me down to myself. This isn't what I wish to be, nor is it what I ought to be. I'm done confining myself to the question mark.

I want not what I know, I know not what I want. I wish to escape myself, to let myself go. I wish to lose myself so someday I'll be able to find myself again. Big words. Maybe, maybe not. The world won't change for me but I can for it. And maybe I will. Maybe give the heart precedence over the mind, for once. Maybe give in to the otherness of life. Be all I never was. Be all I never knew. All you never knew.

I want to be somebody else. Maybe I can, maybe I can't. I wouldn't know. But then again, weren't we all somebody else once?

Of rebellions and mediocrities

2008-11-28T11:24:00.020+05:30

I'm not in the mood to write, let alone write something 'publishable'. Well, actually, I'm in the mood to write, but not the kind I want to publish or even put out into words. I want to write something I don't feel like writing right now, something radically different to the kind of words that are right now fighting their way through my head to get out. I don't want to let them out, and I want to send out different ones in their place. A really hard thing to do and, in fact, something I've always thought of as impossible. I could attempt it, against convention, against feelings, but the absence of the muse would ensure a failure. So, what do I do? Torn between an obligation to myself and a metaphysical authority that claims control over my creative pursuits, I choose (immodestly, if I may add) myself. I certainly don't feel like writing this right now but I'm going to. Maybe, if I'm successful, it will go down as the beginning of a well-documented rebellion against the muses, otherwise will serve as a relic of a failed, and little known, rebellion against the muses.

Right then, the door's locked and the long, random playlist on winamp is already on the way. Let's begin.

It's early morning. Wonderful weather, not too cold, not too warm either, thanks to a distant sun. Not much traffic bothering my feet which, for a change, rest in peace while driving. I'm not alone in the car, but that's about as much as we're going to delve into that matter for our present purposes. Mediocrity, no, something even worse if I dare to call it so, emanates from the stereo. And out of nowhere, I start sounding the horn, for no apparent reason. There are no cars ahead of me on the road that I want to communicate with but that doesn't stop me. I keep doing it at regular intervals, without reason. And, that's all this incident is intended to convey.

And it wasn't just that morning that I did it. The obsession with the horn didn't begin that day, nor did it end then. In fact, I found out I'd been doing that for a long time before I started noticing it myself and decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. Not going too much into the perfunctory details of that tale of analysis and deduction, we'll arrive at the eye-opening realisation. As usual, it was a surprise that ceased to surprise me once it wore out, which, pretty quickly, it did. And, as if purely out of habitual compulsion, I go, "Oh, yes, I should've known! How could I miss it?"

Enough drivel. I was sounding the horn to block out the mediocrity the radio was giving me. And not just for myself, for everybody else around, and, supposedly, the whole world. Yes, that's right, armed with a horn that wouldn't even always function satisfactorily, I had set out to change the world. To purge it of the mediocrity that has become modern music. As if I could block out those sounds by simply making one of my own. Pathetic, I know. Call it whatever you might, that was what it was.

Common sense tells you, and me, I could've simply turned the radio off and let it go or put on a CD of my choice and spared you all of this, and more (or less, depending on the way you look at it) importantly, spared myself of resorting to all these -------- (for lack of a better word) tactics. There's only one thing I can say to all that. Life doesn't always let you do what you think you ought to do, and on the rare occasion it actually lets you do that, you don't feel like doing it and don't. Some sort of masochistic pleasure, I guess.

I've never been one able to appreciate the terpsichorean cadences of modern music and hence accept that my perspective on this issue might be dimmed a bit because of that, but still, I don't see the justification for such abysmal songwriting tuned together into... Now would be the part where I go on a rampage and offer a scathing criticism of the kind of, and quality of, music we're forced to listen to these days but well, I don't need to cos I know you get the point. Once the cat is out of the bag, there's no point dawdling around. I'll save all of the other lines for another day and just type out the conclusion which actually seems out of place without all that preceded it and hence brings what would seem to be an abrupt ending, which I'm prepared to concede. Not every rebellion starts perfectly, it only has to end so.

I'm not the type who keeps saying you can't change the world on your own, because I believe you can, but I prefer to ask myself one question before initiating anything of that sort and that's what generally stops me most of the time. Is the world yours for you to try and change?

Pantomime

2008-11-25T15:06:00.006+05:30

All it takes is a moment. A word. A silence.
And you're lost, searching for yourself among the crevices of life.

There are some moments that define your future, some that retrace your past, some that just take an eternity to pass. This isn't one of them, it's all of them.

The world around you is a travesty, and all of a sudden, a pantomime. Time begins and ends, morphing everything around you except you. Words no longer reach your ears, they no longer escape your lips. Everything has ceased to be. All you're left with are faces, faces that no longer recognise you as one of their own.

You can't see. You can't hear. You can't feel.
Drifting through nothingness, clinging to your non-existence, unsure of everything that ever was, you see it approaching. There are no more upsides, no more downsides. No more left, no more right. Just a straight line. Just a straight, undeniable certainty.

You wonder why. Why it is the way it is. And not the way it is not.
How it all came to be just this and nothing else. There was supposed to be more to it, more than just this. You deny the tears in your eyes and try to wish them away. And then, from the bottomless depths of that inescapable pain, it hits you, squarely to the moment, light as a rock, heavy as a feather.

Living is just a habit.
And after a while, just as with every other, you forget why you made it in the first place.

Morning

2008-11-14T10:36:00.005+05:30

A denial.
An empty room.
A periodic beep chipping away at the mind.
Blurry blinds, a shadowy ceiling.
Floating words, talking walls.
A broken dream.
A dawning consciousness.

A splash of hot water.
Droplets on a mirror.

150 words on Evam's "Doubles, Triples and Quadruples"

2008-10-15T21:56:00.007+05:30

150 words are never going to be enough to properly review (a subjective opinion, of course) any play, let alone one as eclectic and kaleidoscopic as Doubles, Triples and Quadruples still I take it up, candidly convinced of the impending failure, because it's not always that you find failing at something more gratifying than succeeding at it. So then, let the word count begin.

Doubles, Triples and Quadruples is not a play, and to call it so would be to strip it of its essence. Played out in seemingly disparate segments punctuated with interludes where each of the actors address the audience directly "not hiding beneath the veneer of a character" anymore, it's not so much a play as it is an experience. And throw in a few interactive exercises involving the audience and you have a new breed of play where the didacticism of the stage form is replaced by a more accessible embrace of the audience. Not that the audience doesn't like to be spoken down to, but where would we all be if there wasn't some change every once in a while?

Each of the segments depicts the characters at decisive moments in their lives, featuring some well crafted scenes and lively, witty writing that highlights the quirks of human nature, bringing out the humour and emotion in what would otherwise be just another of those unnoticed moments that pass us by. Be it the newly wedded couple arguing pointlessly at the threshold of their marital bliss or the disgruntled, materialistic young man who is inadvertently confronted with his Oedipus complex or the familiar strangers who finally discover each other thanks to a goodbye, everybody is at a point which could chart the rest of their lives.

The performances by the actors in the segments are, needless to say, more than adequate and they deserve to be commended for that but it was the interludes that were the most captivating of the lot. Sure, some of them were hilariously done and had the audience in splits but there was more to them than met the eye. Art is not just about the artist expressing himself but also about him exploring himself through it and these interludes help each of them do exactly that. As one of them put it, it's always easier to "hide beneath the veneer of a character than to come out in the open and bare yourself to a bunch of strangers every night" which is why it makes the play a truly enriching and cathartic experience for all the actors involved and for the audience for being a part of it.

There are many memorable characters, many memorable lines and many memorable performances in this play but none of them is as momentous as the simple door frame that adorns the minimalist backdrop of the stage all through it. It is the motif that ties all the disconnected segments of the play together, sometimes as an active component of the plot, sometimes as an innocent bystander, but nonetheless ever present, reminding us all that happiness in life is never too far away and that to find it, all you need to do is walk through the door.

For Blue

2008-09-29T09:07:00.004+05:30

At last, time has broken its own spell,
The words have fallen into place,
And so have the mists they sought to quell,
Here ends a phase, my friend without a face
A relief masks a guilt squirming deep inside its shell,
After all, isn’t an abyss only as deep as its surface?

Busy crowds are where the idle dwell,
Giving in to work’s workless ways,
Maybe I was the task that never went well,
But there’s an unheard voice that says,
Time’s always lost only to be made up in the farewell,
After all, what’s life if not an eternal embrace?