THE TRENCHLESS PEOPLE

FOUR

2011-11-02T02:18:00.000+05:30

"For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as dim ANTICIPATION and hope, in a good many earlier ages."

" When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all men obey their superiors in all their courses, then music can be perfected. Perfect music has has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos."

" Has the gain been worth the countlless victims? Has our present structure of the life of the mind been sufficiently developed, and is it likely to endure long enough, to justify as worthwhile sacrifices all the sufferings, convulsions, and abnormalities; the trials of heretics, the burning at stakes, the many "geniuses" who ended in madness or suicide? For us, it is not permissible to ask these questions."

- Hesse

QUEST

2011-10-22T20:01:00.001+05:30

If not now
tomorrow
day after
grand opera
Some files
lost and
ice creamed

BY THE RIVER

2011-10-18T05:39:00.001+05:30

_{The first time I met Orkest, a tiny egg lay curled up upon a mattress made of bad cotton. The second time I met Orkest I didn’t say a word, since he was an egg walking on his twos with no clue where he was. The third time I met Orkest I begged him to not drop for three days. The fourth time I met Orkest I didn’t know what to do with the egg I had ordered.}

_{The last time I met Orkest, I saw him rise upon an imaginary sunrise, as he was not real. He was a prophet, an actor, a comet shooting across eons, with no reason and no path, just a ball of energy that could swish and span in any goddamn terminology of science you can apply, just a ball of energy, magnetizing only that which comes in his spin, but burning those who dare to touch.}

_{I was still trying to be a writer, but I became a film maker, and I couldn’t do either, since both required a critical mass of people to at any given static observable time in my life be one with the mind, let alone the five people who know what art is, and how it requires silences stretching over centuries to be reborn as ART.}

_{However, the whole reason to still thrash around in an empty space was to make art, art that could only give me a reason to continue breathing, Something that gave me an illusion that saved me from receding to the call of the primordial.}

_{Ever since we all knew that that existed, that there was something we had but civilization was borne out of our incorrigible thinking only to ruin the passage of time. We became so obsessed with converting a simple cyclical phenomenon of day and night into an never ending quest into infinity, that we decided never to walk backwards, and instead destroy ourselves on artificial terrains. Time will prevail while this cosmos will recede into the darkest trenches of my mind.}

BEATNIK SWEETHEART

2011-07-16T14:31:00.007+05:30

I am going to tell something here. Most of it wouldn’t make sense to me either. But I have to do this.

I want to tell ten stories, I don’t know how I arrived at that number, but it could have been ninety-nine also, but for now I want to set my expectations low.

If there ever was something I couldn’t say, it is this. It is this end of the dead end that I seem to reach. Unfortunately others reached here before me and I cant seem to find the words. Discipline was a word I hated, from as long as I can remember. And I wonder how sure I was of it all. And then it was all gone.

This is the story of how all is gone and it takes quite a stretch of time to be standing at the end. It is the end of a line, the end of an era, the end of a dream, the end of a futile lifetime.

MILKY WAY

A great sorrow once struck a great man. All the other great men of the world felt that sorrow deep within, except they didn’t. A young boy set out of the limits of the city, to find the plague that had struck his kin.

The boy was a frail, little creature who had grown up with a milky white horse. The horse himself had come from far away, and found the boy walking down a dusty road, picking up every pebble, red, green and blue. The boy saw him and asked him, “ I want to find out, how big the world is, but it never seems to end”.

The horse stood there, majestic and sure, and the boy looked at the clouds above him pass. They passed endlessly and time seemed to be everything he could observe. He decided to take the horse with him and sleep for as long as he could. When he woke up it was five years hence, and all the men and all the women, all the horses and the mongoose called him a great man.

He woke up in a silk robe, with a big nose and long limbs. He looked around and found everyone except his horse. He knew now the world is as big as he wants it to be. He stretched his back and turned over to sleep again, for as long as he slept, his milky white horse could run beyond his dreams.

PEBBLES

2011-02-07T23:40:00.001+05:30

A little

One little space

To breathe

To eat

To talk

Silence begins

With no end

And everything begins

With no end in sight

A little

One little life

To live

To count

To remember

And the wind blows

Away and away to the far

A little

One little smile

To give

To bear

To believe

And love washes upon

Stones and pebbles in a sea

WHEN THE STARS GO BLUE - II

2010-10-22T01:03:00.000+05:30

Oye

I can't tell you... but I do.

CARNIVAL

2010-09-25T00:23:00.003+05:30

Oh sailor
oh sailor!

where you float away?

The hail and storms pass
your empty heart away.

KEG ON FIRE

2010-09-10T00:06:00.008+05:30

As I stood there, hiding the hole in my left shoe, the zebra ballerinas not able to stay secluded behind the black toe nails, an army of beer kegs came rolling, crossing my watery vision. The fifth keg came and slammed itself hard against my foot, now completely inept at saving my little remaining self esteem, and then I remembered. I remembered the joke.

For years I have waited to hear the punchline of that joke.

" There is an amazing lottery joke I know..."

" But I can't tell it to you till I meet you."

Then a black cat crossed me. It bought me back to the present that could not have been as past and present never exist. We believe its only the future that exists, which only disappoints but nevertheless, every time I fall to sleep gracefully with a silent smile on my face, I know that tomorrow will bring me the shower, the sugar water, the unknown wishes which always come true, but still there I was now, unaware of my withered toenail showing through the shameful black hole, as the keg rolled upon my unfortunate toe and I looked up. All I wanted was to know the lottery joke. And that is how this story begins.

AND ALL THAT COUL HAVE BEEN

2010-09-08T02:29:00.007+05:30

... and the stars will show
where the waters flow
where the gardens grow
that's where I'll meet you.

A minute, a little moment
a moment when the world collides
with fiction and everything in between
comes to play this song

A day arrives without the night
you wish to say it all right
and you say it again and again
it stays in your throat

A century passes by
when you read the cards of future
and everything is left behind
you watch them being all alone

A life begins and end
you watch silently and shed a tear
it was all that could have been
but for the words that were not there.

BORROWED WORDS

2010-08-10T13:13:00.007+05:30

SIT

Sit, drink your coffee here;

Your work can wait awhile.

You’re twenty six, and still

Have some of life ahead.

No need for wit;

Just talk vacuities, and I’ll

Reciprocate in kind

Or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque

Distressing and profound.

This twenty minutes’ rendezvous

Will make my day;

To sit here in the sun,

With grackles all around.

Staring with beady eyes,

And you two feet away.

- Vikram Seth

A friend of mine buried this in an email to me quite a few months ago, and as time always inflicts, it was ages till that email arrived and I even remembered ever coming across this short, precise little piece. Today, one of the rare mornings that I am blogging, these words just came back to me and resonate more than any song, any book or any conversation can ever dare to, but for the absence of a coffee maker, I wouldn't be typing here.

What is it that I should think about, since thinking has become a rare luxury for me, which I honestly believe is a better way of existence. Will I stand up for the Maoists or surrender to everyday rhetoric? Will I silently celebrate Walmart finally making it as my new kirana store? Will Obama matter more than the innocent families of Afghanistan watching the theater of absurd and taking bullets with their morning cup of tea? Will Nolan ever surprise me again or trade Depp for Di caprio? Will Tom Waits ever sing for me alone? Will I watch the Antartic shelf glisten in all its glory? Will Godard ever matter again? Will I ever read that Julian Barnes book? Will the world ever turn its face back around to me? Will I always laugh my laugh? Will I ever write on a paper again? Will I write again?

No more will is left, for I know better now? But there will always be a new story...

Do not forsake me O my darlin'
You made that promise when we wed.
Do not forsake me O my darlin'
Although you're grievin', I can't be leavin'
Until I shoot Frank Miller dead.
Wait along, wait along

- The Ballad of High Noon

IF WRITING IS THERAPY THEN I AM IN

2010-08-08T22:38:00.007+05:30

NOTHING CAN BE FIXED

A little brown drawer
creaks and screeches
it comes alive when I sleep
singing sweet cricket songs

A faded purple lamp
hoists its fabric like a proud sail
the flicker dies in half a breath
tick tock goes the thick black clock

A red rubber slipper
slips slaps with the morning rain
depressions etched on its spine
remind of a hundred miles left behind

BLUE NOTES

Paper clips have a strange way with life, more like with the potential to hurt and disember everthing around.

A man steps on a pavement, with neat new stone blocks paving the way only to find that his feet don't fit in the new maze of rectangles and can never walk again.

This saxophone I know keeps choking on me, every guiltless note sticks on the walls, sheets, books, air and everything in between.

The wet morning newspaper screams out strangely as the cheap print dissolves into one another and lies to anyone who would care to believe.

A dashboard clock decided to only show time when it is same, every minute and every hour is the same. Every time was same.

SOME VELVET IN THE MORNING

2010-04-30T16:13:00.006+05:30

Before this age is lost
on old couplets damp with love
djinns born of bored liaisons
singing soulful romeo songs
as granted was a dying wish
with end so near to me

They decided to meet on a hot afternoon, like so many others did before them, running into each other’s arms, their chests exploding with anxiety and happiness. The men and women judged them, just like they judged others who dared to defy invisible rules and gods. It was not important which of the two arrived, they both simply waited for the moment when they will cry and smile and blurt out I Love yous reluctantly, hoping that the words get stuck in their throats.

Sometime, long ago, you could sit with your legs stretched, invisible drops of rain tickling your feet. The road across dry, not a whiff of cloud above the tarmac, not a patch of grey turning into black. But for the orange terrace, drenched in a flash of rain.

Sometime, not so long ago, a wish found its way into tired palms, that squeezed cheeks lined with salt tears running down as disobedient tributaries of a long dried river, trying hard to erase memories. Memories of exchanged glances, words of meaning and meaningless feelings. The kind that centuries of artistes and poets, scribbled on papers that turned into gold, or other notions of preciousness.

On a terrace of faded orange that burnt to white in the strong sun shining through the remainder of centuries calculated as time born of gases burning into exciting sparks of life, in the month of September, while Sinatra crooned in some desolate corner trapped inside four walls of concrete. Some clothes fluttered in a silent wind, holding on to a plastic line clipped by plastic wings that wouldn’t let them fly. They were purple, red, white that is washed, and grey which was not faded. A smile came through regular cracks in the floating clouds, a smile she never saw, but pretended to replicate in the one hundred and seventy two conversations she had with herself.

“Of all the ways I imagined I’d meet you, this was not one of them.”

But memories of the future deserve their due as well, so maybe it would be more pleasing if they met on a strange night, in a crowded room full of friends and foes. She will dance her old moves while he will watch her indifferently, conscious of the bodies separating her from the others. Glimpses of his infrequent glances might frustrate her but it will be a perfectly rehearsed act. When she will walk towards him, smiling cruelly, as if mocking his lusty intentions, he will lock her gaze and strip her naked. No more pretensions. She will hold his arm and dig her nails into his flesh. He will hug her and tickle her waist. They will start laughing like kids who no longer remembered the rules of hide and seek.

They invented black canvases of papyrus, celluloid or silicon, unknowingly feeding delusions of grandeur, expression and human evolution. Were they to know the evil that was to be unleashed, the ordinary turning them, the extraordinary into mere languages of the masses, they would have stayed by wooden fires, inhaling the moist smokes of smouldering ash and sang riddles meant for only the very few, the few that could not sing those songs ever again.

And of the land that emerged from chaos to witness history. A history of ultimate demise, through fractions of time. Once they tried to teach her of division, the division of this very time, which only existed in the cyclical notions of birth and death. That history played itself through a play on a stage that only someone eons away could watch but never be close enough to narrate or reply. The land remains, waiting for that far away creature to find its way through galaxies and a non –existent span of black nothingness. Sometimes, when the four year old child tries to remember the white sheets of hair she combed as a childhood game, she never played but was told of, looks up at the dark night sky, a burden of thousands of tonnes falls upon her chest, as she tries to conceive of the shape of the blackness above her. The stars might twinkle, the wind decides to blow for a few hundred kilometres, but her heart shudders at the blackness abound, of where it exists in her mind which cannot conceive of nothing she can’t touch, she can’t smell, she can’t feel.

And finally when they met, the only company they had was an old mattress with wine stains lying in a cold bare room filled with her careless laughter. Their naked bodies not touching but her feet occasionally rubbing against his to keep them warm. His head was resting on her elbow and his eyes were watching her talk animatedly about everything and nothing. She talked about classic rock, chasing bees out of a hive, failing to buy boots and a long story about a man getting lost in Paris even though she had never been to Paris. He knew her eccentric tales, predictable moves and shiny eyes but could not remember her name. She knew his songs, his melody and the colour of his socks but was a stranger to her childish heart; the only one who fed on dry sarcasm and professed undying love for her. He hated her for chain smoking, smelling of mint and singing Phil Collin songs. She loved the moles on his chest, his condescending nods and bored eyes. He wished she would grow up lying next to him; she wished he would love her again. When she finally fell asleep, the pit of his neck was filled with her warm breath and his thoughts with her dreams.

Once, after cycling along with the rotating land, she allows another child, only in mind not in soul to touch her inside that darkness. Cold fingers turn moist and tickle the neurons that lay convoluted in a cavity and turn the mass of her scaled flesh, and thick red corpuscles into waves of common ecstasy. Her hair turns white and she longs for a comb to run through the million tangles, that are crawling all over shoulder, falling across a shrivelled bosom and a corroded spine upon the terrace that is now mere grey dust covering a skeleton of iron and rust. She looks up and catches the blue cracks in clouds made of rabbits, deer, jesters and rodents. The dying embers of her star filter through and fall upon her eyelids now waiting to shut themselves for what could be forever, but the dying wish will be granted, only when the traces of his body erase themselves, leaving only long forgotten scars that were cherished as love. Sometimes, eternal.

She now remembers the rest of the script.
She watches his naked back and a cloud of smoke as he leaves.
She kisses his forehead and the red bruises turning purple.

THE BASEMENT JACK

2010-04-14T04:17:00.001+05:30

I woke up once again with the sound of a drill going through concrete floors. Today, it seemed to be inside my head too. I lay motionless, waiting for the grinding to stop, or to prolong the arrival of what was to come. The day ahead.

As I lay there watching an innocent cobweb flutter back and forth like a dead captain’s sail, the noise started to fade into whiteness and the nausea in my head began to ebb. The workers started work at ten, and I had not needed an alarm for the past two months.

The construction began three weeks after I moved into the basement of (well it was only a basement with nothing above it), with a carton of books, three pairs of trousers, five shirts, two shoes, one music player and a toilet kit. The broker found me a broom lying behind the over ground toilet and took a year’s deposit in exchange. The basement was built over a quarter of the plot of land, a city regulation perhaps, and it served as an underground bunker with rusted iron beams poking out of its roof, or shall I say the ground, marking this unsavoury hole’s existence. My colleague had found the lone basement rather macabre and had abandoned me as his prospective roommate.

It wasn’t that I liked the basement. I simply did not want to ride the broker’s scooter for another ten kilometres and look at five more rooms, no better than the one under the ground. Besides, there was no landlord to avoid, no neighbour to befriend, no dog to beware. It suited me just fine.

When the workers arrived, they did not inform me and used my toilet at leisure. The contractor later reasoned that there had been no door bell to ring, and that I should argue with the landlord about my living situation. I would have done that had the broker not told me that the landlord lived in San Francisco and was dying of pancreatic cancer. One of his four sons had decided to build a fort above it, with a steel skeleton and tonnes of concrete filling the space between vertical rows of columns.

I decided to live through the mayhem for three months, the time I had to serve if I wanted to see the year’s rent I had deposited again. The broker gave me a glass of orange juice as he smiled and pointed out sub clauses in the rent agreement. I looked through him at the glass window behind him. There was a crow gnawing on the window sill at something that looked like flesh. The office boy came in to take away the empty glass of juice. He pointed vaguely towards the wall on my left filled with shelves, that were filled with files, and told me that since the vultures have disappeared, the crows have taken over and carry around bits of flesh from the nearby tower of silence. The broker had stopped speaking by then and was looking at me without expression. He must have finished what he had to say and I had nothing more to say.

The construction work did not bother me in the beginning. I would leave for work when they started slapping the day’s fresh mortar on burnt red bricks and find them gone when I returned at night. Only my toilet bore scars of dried up cement and a clogged drain.

But then I was told that great things were in store for me in Mr Mehra’s office.

I was the inventory supervisor at a garment factory. The work was simple and paid for my modest expenses with enough left for a visit to my mother once a year with a cheque in her name and three new saris. The ulcers in my stomach which I have carried since I drank a bottle of vinegar ten years ago ensured that I cooked my own meals, light and simple with only a tea spoon of salt every day. The one luxury I allowed myself was the nine o’clock drink of rum and water. It puts me to sleep in a matter of minutes and I am never bothered by dreams that usually linger in the morning and leave you exhausted for no reason.

I had visited the factory owner’s office just once before, when he had hired me on my distant uncle’s request. I was called by Mr Mehra’s secretary a week after the construction had started. I quietly walked up to the glass cubicle and sat patiently on the blue cushioned bench opposite the rather unattractive secretary who had decided not to look at me. Her name was Savita as I recalled from her phone call down to the inventory. She looked thirty five, with stretch marks spreading in concentric circles all over her plump waist that rested comfortably around her sari. It was strange that she did not have a desk, only a chair and a stool with a red phone on it. Then she spoke to me as if she had read my mind.

“Sir is re-furbishing his office. My desk has gone for repair and they are going to buy new chairs, the new designs which are good for the back. I saw the bills myself, each costs eighteen thousand rupees.”

I did not know if I was to congratulate her so I settled for a nod and a smile. She looked satisfied and went back to looking away from me at her red phone, waiting for it to ring. I too waited for it to ring, so that I could be allowed inside Mr Mehra’s office. So like I said, great things were supposed to happen to me in his office, but I could not fathom the coming of this greatness yet. He had looked at me with a bored smile and a cell phone pressed to his right ear. Then he told me swiftly that I had been promoted, and that I will make three thousand rupees more as the new chief of packaging and warehouse. Then he got up, shook my hands, told me great things were in store for me, and left the office, still waiting for someone to pick up his call.

Now a promotion after four years was overdue, and I would have celebrated with an extra drink in the night had I not witnessed the death of the old chief of packaging and warehouse the previous morning. He died coughing out some kind of pale yellow fluid which I was told later was a result of a ruptured intestine. He was a forty year old man who had worked in the factory since he was a ten year old boy. He must have started as a daily wage worker and climbed his ladder of success by following the work flow day after day, but in his case, night after night. The finished garments were always loaded in waiting trucks at three in the morning and it was now my job to watch and account for an endless stream of brown boxes filled with collared shirts, T shirts, undershirts and socks neatly stacked upon an army of trucks and leave after the trucks had thundered off at six in the morning.

The cobweb fluttering on my basement’s ceiling suddenly stopped its animated dance. I realised it was late afternoon and I had not left my bed all day. Maybe I had slept or maybe I had drifted in and out of a wakeful solitude, the only kind of sleep I had enjoyed since the promotion six weeks ago. Either way, the shadows across the ventilation windows had changed their course and now cast long horizontal lines on the walls across. The workers had cut off the electricity again and sweat was pouring out of my pores onto the pillow, down the steel skeleton of my cot and into the invisible cracks of the cement floor.

I was running away from the rhythmic hammering, the crushing drill, the shouts of squatting men, and wailing of unattended infants, the sweat from my chest now flowing into a deliberate trickle, soaking the faded photograph in my pocket of a group of young girls, smiling and posing against the whitewashed wall of one of the hundred tiny photo shops. My legs carried me faster than they had carried me ten years ago from a long forgotten town to the comforts of a forgiving city. They usually lifted and dropped themselves out of their own mechanical desire, but today they carried my burnt up intestines towards the one tower, men did not visit breathing.

As I climbed the twenty feet high wall, the last of my breath gave way to gasps made up of vacuum. The throbbing in my head had stopped, the smell in my nostrils had vanished, and the muscles in my legs had withered away to a static numbness. I lay sprawled under the evening sun that was casting one, two, three, four, ten... now a hundred circular shadows, of wings flapping, coming down in a spiral towards my heavy eyelids. I remembered the story of the French captain whose salt tears made the hinges of his door go rusty. I was no captain, no sailor, no survivor, no victim. My insides were flooded not by the harmless acetic I had tasted a decade ago, but were corroded with the acid they had left in the toilet today.

THE SWIRL OR OTHER STORIES - I

2010-03-26T01:36:00.008+05:30

As a five year old girl , when I had walked into the men's changing room with my father, I was confronted with the existence of gender and buoyant force for the first time. The 4'o clock swim in the gigantic swimming pool labandoned by the colonial overlords who had long left the distant shores of the Orient, but not their polished wooden floors, smoke filled bridge rooms, smooth, green billiards tables and golden scotch in our fathers throats, beckoned my family for years.

As a silent yet hurried ritual, I would jump in the grey Fiat wearing my black swimsuit to enter the men's changing room five minutes later for a quick shower and run towards the light blue rectangle. It was no ordinary pool. It stretched as far as I could see with swirling bodies and bobbing heads, poking through its clear surface like a ship wrecked crew. Friendships were made, enemies were tortured, fathers and sons raced, mothers watched with silent pride or absolute agony over empty conversations about their husband's promotions and mother-in-laws. I stuck to the edge of the shallow end, flapping my arms in the comfort of inflated green fins attached to my shoulders. It granted everyone the freedom to enjoy their laps to the other end while I stayed afloat. A convenient arrangement and I didn't mind. The ride to the deep end on my father's back was a good enough compensation and I was content waiting for that.

But there was a rude shock coming and now I wonder why didn't it happen at an earlier date. So, as I was going through the drill and standing under the shower, a young twenty year old man, screamed at me. I looked up through the film of water and made out a blurry image of a man in briefs ordering me to get out. When nobody came to my rescue I realised it must be the gold wire that had been recently inserted through freshly punched holes in my ears had stolen my immunity and I ran out crying. Eventually I rubbed my red eyes and prevented the flow of wasteful tears and walked slowly to the Ladies changing room

Now this changing room was empty, grimy, slippery and functioned as a sweeper's closet. There was nobody to pat me on my back, no excited shouts and banter over the deafening sound of thirty showers. No 'namaste uncles' to be said and no father or brother for company. I never did learn to swim until puberty hit me, but over the years when I step into an empty and ignored changing room, that man's voice bellows out clearly. It's not that it mattered, but there was something about a door being slammed on your face that stays. Not as anger but as a reminder of the futility of all our actions. I am sure, no boy will ever be allowed to shower with fifty women for over a year in any changing room. But then again, I was treated unfairly and separated from my kin. I am not making a case for any kind of injustice, just a statement of facts.

So even though, in later years I was mercilessly thrown in a pool with the dual choice of flapping or floating like a dead body, I was made to hide my erect nipples and newly erupted hair in various follicles, I still choose to proclaim the screaming man as my first enemy. The first faceless stranger who branded me as the other.

But there is a story here somewhere, one which is not a case for rights and justice. It just so happens that I was travelling along the Western coastline of India in my twenties, still a bad swimmer but nevertheless one that could and had spent the day in a nearly empty compartment on a train that refused to travel any faster than its dead counterparts proudly on display in the Railway museum. But apart from that slight inconvenience, I was enjoying the cool breeze from a window framing a landscape that can only be described as strong, somewhere near Ratnagiri, when I met him.

WHEN I FOUND THIS WORLD

2010-03-21T03:49:00.007+05:30

As I lay there wondering what it was that was said to me, I decided upon letting it go for a while. It was a feeling that can be described as lucidity. I was woken up by yet another call for hot samosas. They were relentless, hell bent on selling every last piece of a cold potato snack deep fried in unknown oils. As I lay there preferring not to spread my legs from a near fetal position, I decided to reminisce upon what was said to me.

“It’s not every day that this happens, but it was quite a journey.”

Nothing too profound to engage myself with, but that feeling of a boxer punching my insides ever since I left that quaint little village, too urban to qualify as a village, but nonetheless one, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something amiss, and I could do nothing to fill that void except to spread my legs and make the journey to a the toilet. As I sat there relieving my strained bladder, I realized I was in love for the lack of a better word.

GONDOLA no UTA

2010-02-26T20:14:00.007+05:30

life is short
fall in love, young maiden
before the crimson bloom
fades from your lips
before the tides of passion
cool within you,
for those of you
who know no tomorrow

life is short
fall in love, young maiden
before his hands
take up his boat
before the flush of his cheeks fades
for those of you
who will never return here

life is short
fall in love, young maiden
before the boat drifts away
on the waves
before the hand resting on your shoulder
becomes frail
for those who will never
be seen here again

life is short
fall in love, young maiden
before the raven tresses begin to fade
before the flame in your hearts
flicker and die
for those to whom today
will never return

(P.S. I couldn't find the Ikiru version, the one that moves me to tears, but this one isn't all that bad.)

BOYS AND GIRLS

2010-02-01T01:04:00.005+05:30

I hereby welcome myself back to my long forgotten world of the blog.

Turns out every blogger has to churn out one of these meaningless self-conversational posts, and well I stopped swimming against the tide of tradition long ago. Infact I stopped swimming an year ago, of course I miss the shallow blue waters, maybe I will get back to it. All those wasteful hours my father spent teaching me to flap like a dolphin only to turn me into a turtle should be honoured.

So, boys and girls, let's enjoy one of those 'personal posts'. Insert applause.

So well, film school is life, home, love, destiny , enter other words of praise and pride. I am old. Hell I am old. Not necessarily a bad thing but it needs to be proclaimed in any trivial form as it can be. The reversal back to infancy will begin after eight more months. All words of wisdom should be censored and any words of wisdom will not be found on my carefully censored blog either.

Technology keeps moving on, emotions keep trailing behind, life remains and so does words.

I write now in a disciplined manner, I make films with a similar sentiment. Someday soon you will read me on your e-book or regular book, watch my film on Youtube or cinema, remember me or keep me on Facebook, whatever works as Woody Allen said and now I say it too.

Come back for more fiction.

Photo you want. I give.

Poetry you want. I give.

Lost and found
key and chain
all the children smile
but love with refrain
we say goodbye
and kiss the rain

METAMORPHOSIS - I

2009-11-16T18:20:00.002+05:30

It hit me on a Friday evening, how it becomes impossible to turn around on your heels without hurting your back and starting anything new, anything at all, ever. Apart from the rotten joint in one of your knees or that strange tingling in your molar that you have been ignoring for the past eight months, the strain from the last year's right foot fracture to the back that will give way the minute your spine takes the shape of an airplane's economical seat, there is something else that gives way when a particular Friday evening hits you the way it hit me.

You see, I the twenty nine year old, sports columnist, ill-equipped traveler, trained corporate lawyer, amateur golfer, wine hater and nicotine addict, had a sudden, if you may allow me, itch to wheel around my black carrier, step off the escalator, throw the Blue Label at the ninety year old woman on the wheelchair (waiting for her loved ones to join her through immigration) and exit through the sliding doors, back to where I came from. Obviously, it was impossible as I would indeed need to go down those very metallic stairs, board the sterile flight and make it through a another set of sliding doors to be anywhere close to back, back to where I come from.

Things couldn't get any worse, considering I was complaining about nothing, yet, the black cloud descending on my not so black heart was beginning to trouble me. I had eight hours of flying, one twenty milliliters of whiskey and a bad Nicholas Cage movie ahead of me, but my feet seemed to not really care. They should, faced with the imminent danger of me getting either sucked inside the escalator shaft or being mercilessly thrown all over the red white tiles. There was the Blue Label also fighting for its existence. I still had a few seconds on my side, so I decided to regress into my past when my limbs had decided to freeze of their own accord and I had overcome the disability.

Drawing upon that wisdom seemed pertinent today, but for the lack of time. My enemy, my sole enemy, the invisible enemy, crawling upon my years like an incurable cancer, marking me with dark circles per annum like aging trees, stretching the nerves of my eyeballs to near breakage, stealing away precious moments a man devotes to his penis, all but for him -- the lack of time. And since he had reared his ugly head once again, and I had failed to find a cure for my newly acquired invalid status, I hereby lay sprawled on the shiny concrete, watching the ugly air-conditioning ducts hidden behind a honeycombed ceiling, but not for long as people had begun to gather and block my view with their oddly raised eyebrows on expressionless faces.

I expected the control of my limbs would have returned post the trauma, but as my lifeless fingers felt the trickle of golden whiskey grow into a puddle, all thoughts did a reverse osmosis on me and began to trickle out of my brain. I decided I am fainting and it would be futile to recall a previous fainting spell and save myself public embarrassment as there again was not going to be enough time to draw upon my memory’s rich advice.

LOVE SONG FOR LOVE

2009-09-12T20:27:00.004+05:30

I was too busy falling down after you, while you hid your wax wings and kissed me at the bottom of the star lit universe. You swept me off my brittle feet, held the wind like a baby in dead arms and rose up.

I smiled and watched you soar up, up, up and away.

I am waiting for the stars to die. They are getting dimmer by the century and my black eyes can't shine without them.

I wish I could watch you sweep around the world, enthralling your lovers under those golden wings. Your eyes are splitting into asteroids green and brown, my reflection cracking in each speck.

I can see you pass by sometimes like a comet without fire, a spent soul searching for my black hole.

FROM THE DESK

2009-09-06T23:05:00.004+05:30

When you love
When you don't love
You live. You die.

SO WHY'D YOU SING HALLELUJAH

2009-08-25T00:53:00.004+05:30

Life has a way of coming around and lifting you up imaginary wings. How can you ask for more? It has a way of finding you the one place, that one place that makes you so happy.

It is beautiful, to have your dreams, to live your dreams, to know you are going to live it to your fullest and more. More than you ever dreamt or dreamed.

Everything has a reason, to be, to play out.

Sorry Hamlet, maybe you got it wrong. Yorick was the one.

He laughed, he made you laugh, you knew him, more like you had the privilege to know him. He told you how it was to live, but you got it all wrong.

Stick to your ideals, your ideals, your heart knows it all. It knows it right. No matter how wrong it seems.

There will be you, changing the world, smiling in your grave.

Remember what your heart knew, what it felt.

Live.

Just live.

For we are the few people who know how to. Your life is not measured in coffee spoons.

You know how to live
You know how to write your destiny
You know how to love
So how can it be that you don't smile
It's you
Only you
Not your words
Only you
Only I

THE WRONG SONG

2009-08-24T00:59:00.004+05:30

Yeah baby! Dream comes true... my life has become a Radiohead song.

Been thinking about you
Your record's a hit
Your eyes are on my wall
Your teeth are over there
But I'm still no one
And you're my star
What do you care?

Oops! Wasn't hoping for this one.

I've been thinking about you
So how can you sleep
These people aren't your friends
They're paid to kiss your feet
They don't know what I know
And why should you care
When I'm not there

Funny thing... this life.
Goodluck with all the words you borrowed.

John Doe Way to Go

2009-08-20T00:40:00.002+05:30

He is no longer nameless or unknown. John tried for the past one year to find an original notion that could explain the current state of affairs. The stagnation and apathy that has become John’s life. Hence John borrows the same words again, what if one day you find that all your hopes and dreams were the wrong way around.

Wow!

It is a crazy place to be. Crazier than a school, more maddening than ambition, worse than ageing cells. It’s not that John has become old, nor has he matured. John has simply left behind pieces of himself, for no reason at all. As if he was too lazy to carry himself forward. Better to shed your identity than fight for it. John doesn’t lament this unknown loss. John just doesn’t understand how it happened to him.

This was John. Take it or leave it. John was perfect, untouched, lucky and brilliant. Oh God what did John do to himself.

I am John – John Doe. I have lost myself.

And it’s alright. I am like everyone. I am happy like everyone.

THE STATE OF DELIRIUM

2009-06-30T22:41:00.003+05:30

They say not belonging anywhere is a good and creative place.

The proclamation document of the State of Delirium adopted such a principle in word and spirit.

The island is situated not on a map but in the points of agreement that its citizens agree upon in their sub conscience.

A great surge in the population was expected since its formation hundreds of centuries ago, but lack of written archaeological proof has left its legitimacy in tatters.

Besides, the inhabitants are too static to venture on a validation trip.

People just belong, without signatures and anthems.

The politics are numerous, none superior to the other, hence rendering it all absent.

Religion was rejected sometime in its turbulent history, again lack of documentation has led to mere resignation amongst the populace.

The geography is complex, with constant transformations, eruptions and extinction.

Each generation re defines the topography, from empty forests, to boiling oceans.

However, the creative extinction of the rest of the world, points to mass emigration, causes of which can't be investigated due to lack of will and widespread delirium of affected parties.

Visitors are hence forth discouraged from seeking the El Dorado of the insane.

PURPLE

2009-06-12T04:15:00.008+05:30

I am dying of love.
It's OK.

(P.S. It just sounds great when you say it!)

GRAND ARENA

2009-06-05T01:11:00.003+05:30

And this is where this story begins and ends, at one point, one period, one breath, the end of one circle.

If there is the need to spell out people then she is her and he was him. She was standing, her wet, soft skin numbly plastered against the cream tiles with sunflower watermarks sprinkled judiciously.

The shower of cold, merciless water struck her face with the force of life taking with it her transparent tears down the pit of her neck, her navel, etching fine black hair in downward streaks trickling down her thighs and calves like first springs on green mountain slopes, swirling around her feet to end as a whirlpool around the sieve of a drain hole, down the rusty pipes to ancient sewers, pouring into the river Bega flowing to join multiple rivers of tears at the Danube, only to lift up as vapours on a sunny afternoon caught by ice cold winds carried over a city red with soot, and history, to fall playfully as pure globules of water running up clean, steely pipes that trickles into a glass touched by his thirsty lips that sip her while he walks above the ancient sewers on grey concrete drenched with the rain stinging his eyes for the moment he looks up to the dirty white sky.

And this story began and ended, at one point, one period, one breath, the end of one circle.

THE ICE FACTORY

2009-05-08T01:30:00.003+05:30

Gauri sat on a wooden crate, peeling the dead skin from between her toes. Not the greatest of ways to begin her Saturday morning, but the heat was too much for the scaling skin on her feet, while it promised greater returns.

The machines below the ice shed were happily buzzing away, churning perfect little hollow fingers of ice, laced in the mist of maybe cold mountains. But Gauri didn’t care for her brother’s enterprise, for she was the one feeding the pipes with water from a tap deep inside the municipal lane, and pacing in and out to stop adventurous thieves from getting away with the freezing crystals on their bikes and red blue cars. She had often woken up late in the night to the sound of metal lids clanging and hushed giggles followed by the rev of engines.

She failed to understand why the young boys wearing expensive clothes with their expensive girls in the front seat, bother to steal something so cheap. A couple of stolen kilograms of ice made no difference to her brother’s snores or to the wallets of the midnight thieves either. But her capacity to be surprised had reduced to near indifference, which of course surprised her.

The silent drone of the machines was too loud to lull her to sleep, but soft enough for a tiny mongrel that had appeared two days ago, from the dirty brown soil with a black tail, to curl up under the tin shed, its stomach rising and falling with Gauri’s slow breaths. A red car stops and a tall boy in a blue shirt pulled tightly over his bulging belly steps out. A girl with short hair and red shoes follows him. Gauri walks towards the nearest machine and fishes out several ice fingers into two polybags. While she expertly twists the end of the bags into a knot, the girl peers curiously inside the ice container.

“Oh, it’s so misty in here… look Rohan, they are so perfect in shape,” she says while tugging at the boy’s arm.

He takes out his wallet and pays Gauri, who walks back to her wooden crate, shifts it with her feet, away from the sun patch that had drifted over her comfortable corner. The two of them walk towards the car, and the pup follows them, shaking his tiny black tail vigorously, so that his tiny body inflates and deflates in a rhythm. He stands on his hind legs to reach up to the trickling ice bag in the girl’s hand and starts licking the wet surface. As she turns sideways to get into the now open door of the car, she let’s out a tiny screech and pushes the dog away with her ice bag.

“Oh god… can’t they even give the poor dog some water.”

Gauri ignores the girl’s stare and closes her eyes. A nearby machine rattles and clanks, the hum fades and silence follows.

BASKET CASE

2009-04-25T13:59:00.004+05:30

Flooded with diffused yellow light, the brown mock wood floor, glowed in spaces left empty between shuffling feets of the bookworms, and rows of books themselves. A silence of almost reverence clogged these narrow streets, with the merchandise tempting some of the passer bys with their tales and knowledge of centuries past, eras bygone and possibilities amass. An occasional head would emerge from this sea of knowledge, flipping through the fresh pages, with their hint of fragrance undefined and raw cut feel, to the bar code in the back and shake itself with regret or joy.

A few others wheeled their blue cushioned stools along the maze of books in a slow and deliberate flow, reading, sighing, smiling as they cruised along. The men dressed in blue shirts that have lost their crisp creases as the day has worn on, sometimes emerged from their hiding places between the shelves, to coax the uninspired buyer into carrying a red plastic basket around the bookshop. But often they huddled in there corners, quite helpless in fishing out an edition that had run out in the 80s, and tried to mind their own business. If it weren’t for another man in blue, distinguished only by a black name tag on his shirt pocket, rounding them up for incompetence, distributing the Catalogue of new titles and instructing them to learn them up by the evening, the men in blue could have spent their professional vocation with much ease and boredom.

But it is not the blue men and the multicoloured customers who inhabit the bookshop, that joy belongs to the books, for they lend the immaculate, sterile floor of concrete and steel, serenity, scent and soul.

The streets are marked with their own character, with literature boasting of a history of the past century, each out doing the other, with covers sprinkled with art of a new kind. Nevermind the words, the shelves scream out to you with imaginary appeal and millions of colours.

The Classics enjoy a quaint, yet vast corner, sporting books with bound necks and sweltry yellow pages. Doyle takes charge, and Conrad dispels, Nabakov tempts and Dickens mocks.

But ruling this proud display and a plethora of pulp, not just in terms of the books ancestry with wood, but with every honest intention, a dazzling display of adventure, experience and taste.

As for the growing beauty of Indian fiction, the books catch your eye as well as your imagination. With enthusiastic youngsters and a middle aged bespectacled woman, politely stepping around each other to flip through the many titles.

Right across magazines shine, with fashion magazines dazzling you with gloss and the Economist contemplating the movement of your hands. The adjacent shelf is oddly marked Feminism where The Second Sex sits comfortably.

A little further Graphic Novels take their rightful place, facing Anthology, the current and the past standing silent. While Cinema, enjoys a tucked away corner, Shahrukh, Scorcese, and Godard giving each other company, religion precedes the aisle, Vedas co-existing with the Quran.

Food and Drink and JAVA fit themselves somewhere in between, with a sprinkling of enthusiasts and experts turning the pages in their high quality print glory.

As they decide on their picks and pass the book display at the end of the stairs, a pyramid of sorts, a non-fiction title screams out to tell you another insignificant story about the triumph of the human will. And Adiga’s White Tiger towers over with its several copies and a medal of honour hidden.

The staircase leads you with a few bestsellers adorning the landing and you ignore Classical & Contemporary music, and film DVDs, which have amassed in your clogged silicon chip laden thingamajigs, to reach the billing counter. Nearly empty aisles marked by metal rods holding a red plastic strip across, lead you to pay for your precious finds or careless gifts. People swipe, people pay, people pack and people walk through sliding glass doors to the cool evening into excited anticipation for the city.

BREAK DOWN

2009-04-16T22:12:00.004+05:30

CRASHING IN EYES

2009-04-15T02:40:00.006+05:30

There he was walking, the man of the moment, ready to take his prize, bracing for the attack of that suffocating lump in his throat, the spotlight, always shining on him, without his consent.

Now if he was born blind, or with nothing in his heart, he would be fine, walking in confident strides, but that was not to be.

He hated himself this way, it was just about time for him to be himself again. The team rooted for him, the little ones cheered the way they were taught to for Christmas bonfire. The steps were red today with a fine sheath of velvet below, and his black leather shoes left a slight depression in that cushy walk to terror. He reached his pedestal, he couldn't hear what was said before or what will be said now.

It was just a minute he had to hold together and sufficiently satisfy the baying of the crowd. When did adulation become the complete lack of compassion. If only he was born without legs or limbs, if only he wasn't here, perfect as a being could be. He must have opened his mouth and made a noise, a noise the microphone was not trained to catch but they all heard it. He had screamed. It couldn't be anything else. It was a short, high scream, almost like a tyre's screech at the end of the drive way, with a smouldering of rubber and white plastic fumes. But nobody was testimony to the scream. He was their master, their faith, their envy, he did not scream.

He had walked on with his confident stride down the steps, through the strong sun overhead, smiling past the company and fitting in the empty patch, filing himself beautifully with gleaming gold pressed to his chest, burning through the green fabric, smouldering in the June sun, black fumes clogging his nostrils.

LULLABY

2009-04-02T01:18:00.002+05:30

Tonight I fly away

To the place you call paradise

Not a wink of sleep or dream

There is no sweet lullaby

Tonight you fly to me

No cruel words or sigh

Your wings won’t crash

Only sweat upon the clouds

Tonight we sleep aside

Not a scream or guide in sight

We fly out the window so wide

In the emptiness of heart within

EPILOGUE

"...take these broken wings, and learn to fly again, learn to live so free..."

I hope you cry.

LOST

2009-03-14T02:24:00.004+05:30

Yes. You are here. In my room. Sitting on my hand. Watching my quivering lips as they are speaking to your image in my dreams. You snatched through a plasticine screen to grab me by my teeth only to disappear in a rare moment of unity.

How did you lose me here. Right here in my corner. While I sat and waited, rolled and agitated, for you to come and take me away.

One day I was young. I remember from my window. There was a sheet of snow all over your grey land and green hills. It was no longer the dark December, but the sunny spring of our love. I was running on the uneven pavement. I fell with a bag of oranges rolling along the whistling traffic. You came from nowhere. You held me afloat where the sky met your red heart. The wind was out of my breath and the life out my death. You couldn't say goodbye. You never did.

It was seventy two years later that I met you again. Your fingertip touched my quivering lips that no longer spoke to you in my dreams. There was a potato sack surrounding my perfection. There was you.

But was there?

What we lost and what we will lose in the seventy two years till we meet will never be forgiven, never be forgotten, for we lost each other, in the name of what? In the name of nothing.

THE COMA

2009-03-03T02:08:00.003+05:30

Its beautiful.

No its ugly.

No but I can see it.

It must be somwehere.

I will tell you the story, the story of my childhood, my birth and the story of nature.

It was beautiful.

The light, the anger, the resonance, the fire, it all came out from the centre of my sex.

It gave it all. The purple creatures, the green fish, the peeping wolves, the beautiful trees, the blue leaves and the orange sky. It was all a light, the light of life.

There was nature.

Then there was culture.

There was you and me.

There were owls and sages

The ages passed.

We watched.

The sages came and went.

There was a light.

The light of life.

It gave birth. The womb was moist and fluid. We floated and thrashed around. We laughed, we cried.

The light spread through my body, the body rocking on a rickety boat, flowating through the ocean of civilisations.

Mother nature was one, mother nature was us.

We saw it all. We watched. We came. We saw. We left.

The purple sun, the red gnome, he laughed at me.

The vortex.

The coma.

FLY DIE I CRY

2009-02-26T01:43:00.003+05:30

blood bleeds

bad blood

evening sleeps

swimming flowers

moon lights

take a flight

world waits

world dies

love lives

people die

people cry

smile for me

smile on for me

dream the sky

dream my eyes

ROCKHARD NIPPLE

2009-02-22T00:14:00.002+05:30

In out

beat quiet

little strands

purple touch

Lonely sound

crazy face

grand sky

playing mozart

Switch bitch

snoring lies

rockhard nipple

stonecold heart

ARID PLEASURES

2009-02-06T17:16:00.008+05:30

So there lay Colonel Dudz, on a white metal cot with a white bed sheet and no blanket. The sun filtered through the blinds and the white tiles shone like mercury sticking off glass tubes, or something like it, but Colonel Dudz did not know or care. In his kingdom called the Head, he was the head and everyone his slave, embalmed in lymph and blood clots.

He remembered nothing of his previous life, not his wife or his three sons and one dead daughter in Congo. He did remember a certain Mister Billiard, for he sat beside his bed every day from eleven to noon and left after graciously eating the Colonel's orange marmalade from a plastic cup. The Colonel liked his margarine better just as they once made some from alligator fat stirred by wooden ladles which were just bones of men found floating. The Colonel was the last one to remember this atrocious recipe which was all but lost, save for an old diary his wife discovered in their wooden mansion below the snow capped Andean mountains.

23rd June, 1943

The sun is melting, not my crew for there is none left. I wrapped the last of them in a dried reptile's skin and set him afloat to sink. I have reached river so thick and the forest so sparse that a world of simians and amphibians has given way to mermen and wise sages in blue green depths of maybe my mind or my soul, I couldn't tell. There is a way to return ofcourse. There is wood to be found and boilers to be fed, but I'd rather drift through the thick river and find myself upon the ocean, than return. The sea is not far away. I can feel the salt coat my skin and my hair stick to my very brains. There isn't any margarine left, but that is not a worry, it's the ergot that we lost three months ago that bothers my insides.

Billiard had read the seven hundred and twenty six pages thrice over, while he smoked the Colonel's pipe, the Colonel no longer remembers he had. The disappointment this last page followed by blank ones evoked has robbed Mister Billiard of his smile and solutions he had thought of. The Colonel had to be revived, but there was no alligator fat or ergot residue to be found in the Asylum of Holy Benevolence. The answer was in the weathered diary that smelt of a new fragrance every day, from swamps to smouldering marshes, mountain gorillas to water snakes, morphine to melting snow, and Billiard missed it all.

It was fifteen past noon. Billiard got up, put the diary in a white metal drawer and left without a farewell to the Colonel busy staring at his own feet. But there were none, eaten decades ago by a snapping alligator's jaw, digested and excreted in the thicket of a river that met the sea and then the ocean on moonless nights, while mermaids sang melancholy songs and the waves beat on ancient reefs buried with the weight of a million plankton and seasick sailors.

DEAD PAN

2009-01-24T16:38:00.003+05:30

I am a dead pan. I was not always dead. But then one day she sent me flying across the living room and fortunately for him, I hit the wall and not his cranium.

Now the kitchen shelf has always resembled a half dead graveyard, with each one of us holding on to our dear lives.

Let me take you back a few years, when I was shiny and new like all the pans in the world. I was good at my work, the eggs were evenly fried and would slip off my silky skin with a ballerina's grace, the colourful sauces would bubble and spurt with glee and aroma, and I never needed any scrubbing. Just a lemony soak with gentle fingers caressing me every morning. How I smiled in my sunny corner, hanging on the brown hook, water dripping down my spine in a rhythmic pitter-patter.

But then the sun wasn't sunny enough, and the water smelt of underground sewer, her hands became a tough hide and my dark skin suffered under rotting oil muck. Like all the spoons and a few plates, the yellow bowls and the long dead knife, I awaited my fate.

And today she took me by my sturdy wooden handle and threw me with the force of a hurricane into the abyss of my afterlife. With a clang and two clonks I saw my spirit bade goodbye. It was happy while I was now a utensil -- a dead pan waiting for the rest of us to join me in my solitude.

TU CHALLI AA... LE CHAL VAHI

2008-12-25T23:51:00.003+05:30

My romance with the city of Delhi has come to its eventual and bittersweet end. The house that had become my home for the past seven years, has been packed up with all my memories and tragedies swept out the iron gate. Its all gone, wrapped in white in the dark basement. The best years of my life, all smug and lonely in a new damp world which will consume the remnants of my beautiful memories. I knew this day was to come. My parallel life in this city that I kept alive in my imagination will end tomrrow. I will never have another excuse to come back here. I have no home to come back to.

As I bent down to pick up Candy, for the last time in my life, her white coat soaked in my tears. She was excited with the prospect of her daily evening walk. As I handed her leash to her new owners, I couldn't spare her another kiss and ran back into the warmth of my quilt. She's gone to a new home I will never have the heart to visit. I will never be greeted by that crazy lil pup who came into my arms five years ago. She was the only family I had for years and now she doesn't have me. I will never forget my baby. I know she will.

Things changed in the last one year. It wasn't as cold as it should have been. I wasn't the same girl who had left. One last time I did it all again with the same heart and love, as we did for years. The hazelnut coffee, the disgrutled bank cashier, the steaming hot momos, the four ó clock car ride in search of anda paratha, the bolly clubs, druken conversations, warm hugs and sweet goodbyes. My world here will no longer exist. I can see myself at every corner, every turn, every place, with stories that no one will know. Someday that life will return but in someone else's life. Perhaps, the best years of my life will always play themselves out in a parallel cosmos, where we were all happy.

ROAD TRIPPIN'

2008-11-13T02:11:00.008+05:30

So far I have had a horribly boring vacation and I have been refusing to return to campus. A week with parents was a great but boring detox tour that ended with my laptop dying! I found myself stranded at the Mumbai airport with an unending immigration queue filled with Osho ashram wannabes (trust me this city is uninhabitable and gives me high blood pressure but more of that later) and against my better judgement I stayed in Mumbai at my brother's empty apartment which has become too boring as Shelly returns from work really late at night and my ATM card was eaten by an ATM machine and now its travelling all the way back to Delhi, so I am broke... still. Hence I couldn't catch a single play at the Prithvi festival.

But suddenly things are back to being WOW! (which is why an adrenalin rush induced post is being typed out, besides I won't be blogging for quite sometime now.)

You see Shelly just quit her job and from Monday we are going on a kickass vacation to Bangalore where we will just veg out and return end November, which is when I leave for good old Goa for a fortnight and then off to Delhi for a devilish December. I can't wait to go back after almost an year and that too in December. Its party time like never before.

I might just return to Pune for the New Year's (apparently it's a big deal on Campus, so I won't miss it). But then it gets better. PP will be flying down on 1st January and we are heading on a brilliant back pack trip through Goa, Gokarna, Hampi all through January ending in Mumbai where we will give big sloppy kissies to our Shelly baby!

My never ending vacation is going to be WOW!

Photographs and travelogues on return.

Poochie out!

BEAU

2008-10-20T22:31:00.002+05:30

If I were beautiful
We would be beautiful together

THE RIVER KNOWS

2008-10-11T02:05:00.002+05:30

Yes the river knows
How long we sinned and laughed
The stones jagged and rough
Smooth slippery grey mountains
Pretend to sleep in silent defeat

She waded through shallow rains
Dragging her veil along
Broken shards strewn in the depth
Secret keepers for the knowing river
Are creatures choking alone

Yes the river knows
When tides swallow streets and children
While we run across the bridge
She stands watching the cobbles come loose
With melting clay down her cheeks

TOMRROW I SHOOT THIS

2008-10-06T01:52:00.003+05:30

I am finally attempting to shoot a film based on a short story I wrote here a few months ago. I am terribly excited, as this story has been close to my heart for over two years now. This is literally my baby. This shoot and film marks the next step in my creative growth (or regression). In all honesty I am terrified about what it will turn out to be. I hope I will give my best with my crew being my equal partners. I can't wait for the sun to rise.

P.S. I publish the story again. Poochie out!

NO ROOM TO BREATHE (Complete)

“I wish I could have saved you.”

“But you did.”

The idea was simple. Go to a sleepy town. Find a cheap but clean hotel room. Sit by the window and wait.

Things would have worked just fine, had a pair of wayward feet not led me to the tiny book shop in the alley across the window. What can one do when the rooms with a view of the valleys and mountains are not really inexpensive. But neither were the books. Reading the complimentary ‘paperback’ Bible, strategically placed under the pillow might not have redeemed my soul, but saved me a few crumpled notes. So, I went back to sitting and waiting, with my back to the window.

The room was a green box set in a double timbered frame that smelt of mould and orchids. The net curtains, carpet, bed cover were all green with large floral prints. I recalled reading about the patronage of such patterns by the Soviets. The patterns somehow assisted in bugging rooms; not of much use in this tiny dot of red sloping roofs with rainfall overflowing the station master’s gauge upon the Eastern edge of the Himalayas. Or perhaps, half a century ago a Japanese soldier had seen the tears of an abducted girl melt in front of the candle wick and left the green room with his muddy footprints to remind her of good luck.

I closed my eyes and the newly purchased second-hand Ishiguro.

That morning had an ominous beginning, right from the decision to wear the new converse shoes to choosing the ITO route. Now the shoes bit with the vengeance of a crocodile fed on soy chunks and a truck decided to unload its merchandise of a hundred kilos of cabbage right in the middle of Delhi’s rush hour traffic managing to crush two men into a vegetative state and my hopes of making it to the 10 ‘o clock meeting.

It ended with a skeleton popularly known as Death masquerading as my editor in ill-fitting denims, demanding my presence at the garage sale of another bored socialite’s hobby classes. At least there would be free white wine and no byline, both rescuing my self-esteem from the very real threat of complete annihilation. I plugged in Prince’s essential collection and got downright busy playing Hangman. But wait, Death was fast approaching and I was stuck at _E_OI_ when the lightweight skeleton slips right on my red desk and starts talking while playing with the green cue chalk I use as paper weight. Not that it does a good job, it’s just that I don’t have much paper. And, I refuse to hear what she is saying, choosing to hear crying doves over orders for what would be another trip to collect glossy press releases praising another designer range of candles with hidden healing powers.

Maybe there was a knocking on the door which woke me up, but if indeed there was someone, he was long gone.

The room was dark and it was raining slowly and sarcastically, as if the sky was leaking and everyone will let the world rot than plug the black sky. Maybe I can blame the power cut but I knew I had packed a black jacket and a scarf, and that I will go see them play at Hideaway Tavern. Another room with a pretentious English name, plastic cues and varnished mock wooden panels displaying the exploits of a yellow submarine and velvet textured underground. The place was not yet crowded and I took a seat the furthest from where the equipment laid entangled in wires but closest to the bar. The drums were missing. A baby piano had made an expected entry.

And they played while we drank. And they sang while we cried. And they prayed while we clapped. And they watched us while I ran away.

Run away, you say, run.

Balancing the phone between my shoulder and left cheek, hearing the monotonous ringing and cleaning the green powder of the cue chalk I was digging from under the half-moons of my over grown nails, I hoped the person who answers will be more than happy to feed me the details for my new assignment. Of course you did not answer and after two hours I arrived at the auditorium I had never heard of for an event I had not heard of. This time there were no polished PR agents with bad English to greet me, so I dial the number again but I don’t bother to wait for anyone to answer as I had spotted brilliantly done up bikes with “Free Tibet” prominently displayed. I make my way to the white canvas tent, returning nearly a hundred smiles to sit on the green grass with a colorful milieu of monks and Tibetan students. Finally a leaflet reaches me and I know I am attending a spiritual speech by the Dalai Lama.

I start speaking to students around me, writing down their responses till the phone rings and it’s a familiar unknown number.

“Hi Tsering, I needed some information from you. I am reporting on…” I manage to spurt out before he cuts me off, “Oh yes, of course, I am waiting for you at the gate, where are you?”

“Oh, but I am already seated. Why don’t we meet after the speech ends?”

“Yes… yes,” he answers.

By the time I found Tsering who was surrounded by another twenty boys, I already had over a dozen interviews scribbled over my notepad. He swiftly cut away from the little crowd and greeted me with a firm handshake. he thanked me for our active interest in their cause before he answered my questions in his trademark soft whisper, feverish hand gestures and a hesitant smile never leaving the face. When your mother tongue has been ruthlessly escorted out with you, learning a colonial tongue just to communicate with a world that otherwise cruelly refuses to acknowledge you becomes another forfeit. You learn to speak its language, but with contempt that never allows your tongue to betray the mother tongue. And so Tsering spoke in this peculiar accent that I came to impersonate out of adoration over a million cups of hot tea on his yellow cot.

By the time I reached the hotel, I was drenched and the old men playing Dominoes at the reception could not make the tears from the rain drops. The books were still lying on the bed, reminding me of destiny’s wheel circling faster than ever to take me to a destination I didn’t want to remember.

The photograph on the poster in the bookshop was one of the many I had taken, when Pipe dreams had played at a local Blue’s festival at my favourite watering hole. Again the plastic panels sketched out the family tree of lyrical gods from decades ago, supporting new boys singing about another revolution that will never come, but for the suffocating by lanes of Majnu ka Tilla and the apathy of generations wrapped in a quilt of lost dreams.

“The funny thing is, don’t tell anyone, I am actually a royal descendant of one of the tribes.” A hushed whisper in the front seat of my moving car made me burst out with laughter.

“Yes, the Chinese have installed a spy cam right here, in the eyes of Lord Ganesha.” I said pointing towards the tiny yellow God affixed with superglue on my dashboard by an anxious mother. He didn’t laugh.

“Alright… where are we going, if I dare ask, risking of course the Chinese following us.”

“To the restaurant’s Opening, Choedan is very excited but some furniture just arrived and it is out on the road and I need to put it in very soon.” he replied.

“Does the girlfriend know I am invited too,” I asked trying hard but failing to not sound playful.

“Of course, a journalist at the opening, why do you think she is excited?” he quipped.

Tsering, the student of literature, spends more time writing worthless subversive songs than writing papers on Joyce and Boyle. Tsering, the waiter, spends more time discussing soccer with his employer than serving beef dim sums to the empty tables. Tsering, the activist, spends more time cleaning a shrine to the holiness atop a wooden stool in his room than preaching radical ideas to fellow comrades at the Tibetan Youth Congress.

But, just like life, Death need not bother, so the tenets of Buddhism being the antidote to cosmopolitan poisons, interspersed with quotes from the leaflet was ordered and before it could be buried in a corner column a brave attempt to chat over cigarettes and coffee was made.

“I already have the material… if you don’t like it, trash it, but at least let it be written.” I presented my case and a pack of cigarettes.

A week later between five cups of coffee and a new pack of Bensons, a death warrant was issued.

“NO! Still, there is some potential here. How about the whole mysterious ethnic culture thing… some stuff that can be turned into, you know like the Chinese coins Feng shui thing or origami or chandelier earrings or… yes, the food… you know move over Chinese, undiscovered little joints selling whatever it is that they eat, or music and the films, didn’t Brad Pitt do one on them?”

“I think I’ll just do Janpath, a hot kitten heels thing,” I tried my luck knowing well that this time I had tightened the noose myself.

“Really? Kitten heels? ...haven’t seen them around much.”

I don’t know what was tougher; allowing Tsering to be my enthusiastic guide or hiding the guilt on my face from the profuse thank-yous showered by his grateful peers. By the time ‘Shangri La is Hot’ appeared, the cue chalk and note pad were gone and I was free from the clutches of Death. And, as for Tsering I convinced him I had done my part of research for an earth shattering political piece being done by a senior editor and he must wait, patiently.

After playing Writing to Reach You, they told us he had been missing for nearly six months before his room mate of two years stumbled upon his pictures and a death certificate in his name on the internet. The photographs showed he was shot in the back of his head along with six more prisoners, while a small crowd cheered the firing squad.

“Only six! And your family let you go.” I asked, watching intently a bead of sweat form on his stomach. The single turn-table, left behind by the old occupant of the yellow barsati, just above Sonam’s little restaurant in Garhi had only one Grateful Dead vinyl to play, but I didn’t mind as long as the clutter of the community kitchen next door didn’t disturb me.

“It was my mom’s idea,” he said attempting to sound nonchalant. “You must understand, there is nothing left for us, no education, no songs, no God, no devil, only poverty and tears.”

“Will you ever go back?” I asked knowing well there was no answer to this question.

“I haven’t spoken to her in twenty years.”

The first time Tsering tried to kiss me, I punched him in the chest. The second time he told me Choedan is gone and he received no weak punches.

“You are just using me.” I blew smoke into his ear with the cigarette butt threatening to burn his eye through one of the sockets.

“Use? You can’t even stand the sight of raw meat, let alone cook pork.” He pinched my chin leaving the imprint of two joined commas of his index fingernails.

“I know all your plans, marry an Indian, get a passport, all of you. Remember what that lady doctor with her Tibetan medicine clinic said -- I am not a Tibetan, I am an Indian!”

“Aren’t you clever? He said.

“I wish I could save you,” I teased him tickling his stomach.

“It’s not your job to save me.” he said and kissed my gaping mouth shut.

With a new job at a news channel, the only spare time was late nights, which were exploited well in the back seats of old and new friends, and Tsering’s songs were reduced to just a distant buzzing on the horizon. Surprisingly, he did not clutch at the strings of my lies or linger on after his number was deleted from the phonebook. Once, he invited me to Mc Leodganj, where he was going for the funeral of his school headmaster. My silence ensured he wouldn’t contact me again.

I had fallen asleep on the bed with my wet shoes still strapped to my tired feet. I woke up with a sore throat and heart. I ordered tea in the room but drank only the warm milk. I stared at the bookshop till a third sugar cube had melted on my tongue. I decided not to find a grey stone bearing his name. There would be no body below it, just wet soil, even that which was not his to claim.

Sonam had spotted me in the corner last night and as he made his way through the maze of chairs and broken beer bottles, I ran out the door, up the hill, till I ran out of breath. Arunachal had been the state they had crossed into more than two decades ago. It had been the first home to the six year old refugees. Unlike Tsering, Sonam’s parents were already in exile and they took in Tsering like a second son. The yellowed, dog-eared picture taken in Hamburg, when both the boys had played a friendly match of football as members of the National team of Tibet, was always found in Tsering’s wallet. The team never played again. A customary diplomatic reprimand was issued by the Chinese Consulate in Berlin, as was a new black-list by the Chinese government in Beijing. Maybe it was the photograph, or maybe Tsering had tried to meet his mother in Tibet.

“Well, I know you must be busy, but… it’s just that… I am leaving. I am going to Taiwan.”

It was early morning and I had not even taken off my stilettos when I had snapped open the phone the instant it vibrated in my hand, expecting to read a dirty goodnight message.

“Don’t do something stupid. Please promise me, you won’t try to go to China, I mean Tibet. Fuck… I am serious. How much more do you want to study? Study here… why Taiwan?” I couldn’t wait for a couple of hours and called him right away, afraid that it might be too late already.

“I can make a lot more money there. And no I won’t do anything illegal, except maybe play football… with the neighbours,” he said and I pictured his mischievous grin and the tiny slits of his eyes narrowing, just a tiny bit.

“Take care of yourself and do write to me sometime.” I replied while something heavy crawled up my voice-box.

“I… I have to go now… umm… you should get back to sleep now. I will write… I promise… it’s… it’s just that I don’t have your mail id.

“I wish I could save you.”

“But you did.”

LIMERICK

2008-09-27T20:42:00.004+05:30

Once there was a girl…Who went to the beach.. went for a twirl…On the way back…to her shack...She chanced upon… a bead…..To her fading passion it seemed to give a lead…

Looking to her left she saw the distant ship….And immediately a wish arose from her lip…She wanted to head to her land. Where she could have the world in her hand … And now…the rest will be told when you accept the apologies that have been foretold.

- Sheleja Kapoor

AND NOW FOR SOME POP CULTURE REFERENCE

Lelaina:: I just don't understand why things just can't go back to normal at the end of the half hour like on the Brady Bunch or something.
Troy:: Well, 'cause Mr. Brady died of AIDS. Things don't turn out like that.
Lelaina:: I was really gonna be something by the age of 23.
Troy:: Honey, the only thing you have to be by the age of 23 is yourself.
Lelaina:: I don't know who that is anymore.
Troy:: I do. And we all love her. I love her. She breaks my heart again and again but I love her.

APPY BUDDAY NOT FIZZ

2008-09-22T22:11:00.001+05:30

So, I forgot this black page has now floated among the web of the web for two years now, and we already did my birthday girl post, so let’s evolve beyond human needs and recognize the next step in the virtual and infact recognize a blog birthday, despite the fact that this concept is just tearing up my insides, for how absured is it anyway. But like Shelly said, we’ll all be living in the centre of the earth and spending all our money on ourselves and not the children, just like the Japanese (and they are the most advanced, we all agree), so why not treat techie things like blogs with a little compassion.

Besides, something is wrong with mine. It is voluntarily advertising the existence of photobucket all over the damn place and I can’t get rid of it. Damn you hacker people, just çause the black hole didn’t suck us all because you guys dropped out of MIT to get laid, you put up some annoying photobucket stamps all over my people.

So, let’s humbly acknowledge the existence of my alter ego that hosts my writings, which are simply brilliant without recognition, but as I sit here with my chin resting on my knee, I let out a silent sigh and tell myself.

Ahh… the quality and content is not that great anymore.

Now I don’t want any Oh sweetie don’t be so hard on yourselfs. But it really isn’t the same anymore. I have to go way back in archives to find one piece of original prose or poetry. Damn this film school. It has sucked up my insides and put it in the purple bucket on the ground floor boys toilet. The consequeces are pretty grave, I am yet to come up with an idea for a script I have to submit in less than a week and not to forget, shoot it as my year end film (which I hope will not rot as an .avi file on my lappie like the previous three exercises I shot). Besides, this is my first ever film-film, so I am very very very enthusiastic yet pessimistic about it. Watching Scrubs is not of great help either. Need I go back to the Kieslowskis and Tarkosky’s?

Sometimes I wished I could just turn this thing into rant about how film school poisons, maims and kills every little ounce of you everyday. As opposed to the general perception, it isn’t a wild wild world, if you don’t get any you blame it for your lack of inspiration and when you get some, it’s a bigger mess. I went to an all girl’s journalism school, and now I am in an almost all boys film school, so I am in desperate need to buy The Second Sex and brush up on my gender notions but I don’t have Rs 695 and so I will have to just drag myself through the concept of Post Grad School and figure out the male species once again. It’s as if being in post grad means everybody’s biological clock is ticking and its now or never and so I prefer never.

So I think I have convincingly explained my lack for inspiration and decent activity on the blog. There is a new one I just started, wonder what fate is reserved for it. Let’s see what we have by next September, hopefully no Mc Cain, more Polar bears and ofcourse no Photobucket.

BIRTHDAY GIRL

2008-09-06T21:03:00.000+05:30

She sat reading a story with the same name by a Japanese maverick. Yes the one who traps you with his whimsical fantasy tales about a plain clothed Oz and midnight bakeries. So did she make a silent wish on her birthday?

The years have had a sprinkling of confetti soaked in spilled beer and pretty play things, sometimes masquerading as boys. He sneaked up from behind to wrap a gift around her neck, telling the crowd more than they needed to know.

When he finally fell asleep in the light of the dawn, his warm breath on her shoulder and his white body sculpted from what could be golden velvet merging into hers, she sneaked a quick look at the lines of his face. Another wish came true with not the candles but the phosphorus lights going out, another door unlocked, another stolen kiss in the clandestine corners of a suspecting crowd, only to wake up and remember, why make love when you don’t love?

EPILOGUE

There is always a plot. A plot for every life, common to a few, divided into a few sub-plots and further on. Some excite and entice, seeking attention at the expense of the worthy. Some, deliberately forgotten to make believe never ending interpretations, suiting everyone’s perception. Characters exhibit shades, rather than humanity -- a chaotic blend of lazy curators, stealing the spotlight for they challenge the supposed intellect. And as for the plot of a life, devoid of any sub-plots, characters, climax, heroes, props and morals, what purpose must a pen and paper have, if not to chart a desolate course dictated by its whimsical overlord.

- Anki

MY RIGHT FOOT

2008-08-23T19:25:00.006+05:30

So I broke my leg, but it's okey since it's just a ligament tear and my plaster is electric blue in colour. But now I am stuck in my bed all day with lots of books I don't feel like reading anymore and I keep thinking of the the last time I broke my leg and it was great fun, as I was in my bedroom surrounded by nauseating flowers. But the hospital trip was fun as the goddamn heartless Maharashtra cops decided to pull us over for being on a bike with a Delhi number (or maybe because my rescuer was French and all). Anyhow two hours on a wheelchair was fun especially when I was asked to sign a form telling them I was not pregnant.

Now the cast throws my shooting schedule in a tizzy which is very sad because I was damn kicked about shooting my year end film, (there goes the trip to Cannes huh!). What really sucks is my depressing match box of a room which I was going to paint Wizard Blue and Lilac but the paint boxes are lying among all the mess and Shelly has not arrived to sooth my jagged nerves. How I hate loving my friends. I really need to go home now, but I don't fancy some retard steward dragging me all over Customs. I have ideas about sneaking hash in my cast and dogs chasing me while I wheelchair faster away on the runway and then lightning strikes and I part my arms with a devilish smile.

So much for that, I will remain stuck in the matchbox which will look like a smaller matchbox after painting, like the wax one's which were probably designed for the Liliputians but they decided it was too big and dangerous for them and we use it instead. My nickname when I was kid was Liliput but no one calls me that anymore, since I grew up. Oh and this sends my birthday plans next week into a shit pot, with me sitting and watching while everyone gets drunk stupid and I worry about squatting in the loo trying to get all the shit out.

The doctor asked me to be a good girl again and again but didn't give me a lollipop, just a two grand bill. Now I can't be a good girl because I keep dragging my two kilogram heavier leg all over the campus, and I get kicks out of imagining myself to be a ghost that haunts the long dark corridoor when everyone is asleep with the sound of my dragging foot rattling them in their beds. But that doesn't happen really.

But I can see the bright side of the shit. Say like I don't have to worry about food and cigarettes, someone or the other keeps fetching them for me. Also, I can keep staring into oblivion and cook up new stories to shoot.

What I really miss is working. I would love to get back on freelance projects, writing an article here and there. I miss getting published and boy do I need the money now. Also, I miss being surrounded with my old Delhi friends, them fussing over me and imagine all that extra fuss with me having a broken foot. I would have been chauffered around to all my favourite eateries and I might have even convinced them to take me clubbing. I wouldn't have danced obviously. Not that my friends here aren't fussing enough, I just don't like being dependent on them, because I haven't known them for more than six months. The bike rides are fun though. Also all the online games I disovered last night, quite trippy they are.

Just found out I could have gone to Maldives to shoot, for a project my sister-in-law is working for, and their film guy left. But for my electric blue leg, Looks like the laughing Buddha I got is not working hard enough for my luck.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE SKY

2008-08-22T03:46:00.002+05:30

Cassiopeia went looking for water in the mighty black desert only to get stung by the red pincers of the powerful scorpion. Her anxious hunter wore a dagger embellished with three diamonds on his Orion’s belt and chased the cruel scorpion. Running through galaxies, pink, purple and white, suddenly everything was dark. The black hole took with it not only our lovers, kings, saints and enemies, but also the films we made and never made.

VANITY CASE

2008-08-19T01:55:00.003+05:30

What happens when she leaves?

You sit and wait.

When I first met her she was wearing a brown jacket with fake fur lining the collar and the hood. She had matching suede boots pulled tightly over her spindly legs and she was drunk as hell on not more than one tequilla shot. That is what girls with spindly girls get sloshed on and thus manage to save money in their fancy bags just to buy more of them empty bags.

Her bag had a box of tissues with German inscriptions and she swore she never went to Germany. She had illusions about learning German but they died when she watched Frida and decided she liked Spanish better. Pity she never mastered the one language she was meant to exploit beyond what Shakepere did. At least that is what I believed, but I am not good with spotting talent. If I were, I would have found mine in the last thirty years I spent believing I had a calling, but nothing better than crowing like a lonely crow found me.

This is not a story about the girl or my capacity to be nothing but a hopeless failure in not just my own eyes but yours too. This is a story about the tissue box finding her way into her blue mock leather bag and how it killed her.

Yes, a box of tissues can do that, if you indulge me further than three paragraphs.

So when I met her, I tripped and fell over the above mentioned spindly legs as they lay sprawled outside an Institute's depressing yellow corridoor. The name escapes me, but it was not in Germany. It was a chilly Delhi winter and she was staring at the massive brown doors of an auditorium, watching them pushed open by revellers escaping the blast of the same old rock music, clutching on to cellphones for their dear lives. I can bet my thick hairy calves, they had shot videos of the incompetent performance with the bad lighting preserved in millions of pixels. But, returning to my tripping and falling flat on my nose, the loud flat thump made her recoil out of her fake trance and scream.

"Oh!"

My nose was bleeding and she was teary eyed, not because of empathy for another fellow's pain, but because like I said she was drunk. She took out her box of tissues and gave me a whole bunch of them along with a bunch of sorrys.

I believe she was rendered incapable of threading together words into concrete sentences of remorse by her vagabond bloodstream.

(Will certainly be continued)

TO HOLDEN CAULFIELD LOVERS

2008-08-18T18:13:00.003+05:30

This is going to be damn corny but in a matter of days two of my favorite blogs have been deleted and its quite a loss to this obsessive reader. Scout and Big Eyed Fish or originally Slowhand, the way I liked him better, have for reasons known best to them stopped writing at some cleverly named urls, which is perfectly fine since I don't understand the repurcurssions or joys of blogging anonymously (as much as I would have loved to).

But yes will miss their honest and witty outpourings which helped us reflect on our own existence once in a while. Ok I suck at writing this. So, well, you guys will be missed, but don't make this the end of writing. All the best. Oh and Scout and Dhiraj's blogs were the original inspiration for me to blog. Thanks.

PRO PROCRASTINATOR

2008-08-06T00:01:00.003+05:30

When I was in high school, I refused to study as I was an art student at heart stuck in science. When I defied my family heritage and went to journalism school, I realised I want to be in Film school, and when I landed in Film school, I want to be in writing school. So well there is no end to my miseducation, and my laptop's sense of irony. Yes the song playing is Arriving somewhere but not here.

Now that I am doing what I always wanted to do (like always), I really have no excuse to sit and blog and prove to myself how inept I am at handling the fate of a crew. I just refuse to write down my script, which thankfully is playing over and over in my head, but the shots need to be penned down. And yet I type out a personal post.

See, the campus is empty (which is simply amazing; tea alone with Catcher in the Rye is heavenly bliss), as all my batchmates have dissapeared to Mumbai for a week long vacation while I stayed back to muse over my non-existent script. Poor me shoots first (16 mm baby... real film stock!) but I can forsee my bleak future when I eventually graduate to 35 mm and I would still be blogging. Stay with me guys. I need the virtual camaradrie.

NIET SAY

2008-07-28T23:39:00.013+05:30

"Neither the heavens are humane nor is life above or below, or within me."
- Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

My roof is leaking. It's always leaking. I cannot see its grey face and yet it keeps raining. I am always drenched and immune to the constant flow of water on the grey floor. But the floor of sponge has turned green, tired of soaking all the water. My feet squelch the water as it steps on a thriving habitat of fungi and lichen. I am woken from my slumber, when it stops raining on my shut eyelids. I ran out of mascara which is now mere lines on the spongy floor. One day the lines will dissolve and the eyes won't open.

My bed is white as sheets I don't wash. I never sleep alone on the steel mattress. A colony of dust mites survive along with me on the see-saw of a resting grave. Illusions of love making can be heard if I turn around alone in the dark, but the dust mites bear my load as one against a million never wins. Except Caesar, before Brutus stabbed his king and friendship was destined to be love followed by betrayal for generations to come. One day friends will dissolve in graves of grey stones and ashes of copper, eyes wide open, turning into dust without might.

My book is crying for cognition I cannot provide. Not yet. El Dorado, Moroccan binding, and whiskey and rye, all evaporate into grey vapours to enter my nervous system, exciting electric impulses traveling faster than light to stimulate the dark trenches of a fleshy brain, hoping to spread in my blood like a virus. But I stop the disease somewhere. I dream about the day a package of priceless books float down an abandoned boat for me to rescue and I spend an eternity and a day with them. Then I sit on a typewriter, with ribbons and oil. On the last night, the grey words will swell and dissolve as tears from the roof soak them, and the eyelids forget to flutter.

RANDOM DETAILS

2008-07-25T21:37:00.007+05:30

Bonnie died, Clyde was fried, how does it matter? My bag is a military green coloured, over priced piece of branded pretentious hippiness. Once a week I sling it on my right shoulder cutting through my chest diagonally, but usually its the left one. It is never heavy and not too light either. The bag serves no purpose except that my skinny jeans and unwashed pajamas don’t have pockets worthy of carrying the little left over cash and a cigarette pack. The bag with the butt of denim stitched over its flap preserves the few hundred notes I survive on and two rupee change to be spent on tasteless canteen tea. A rectangular slot carries the Mild’s pack and an over lapping slot homes AIM matchbox with my favourite joke on its back.

What did one ghost say to another? Do you believe in people?

The Mild’s pack is refilled twice everyday, but it’s never enough. It’s a black hole tarring my insides as black as black can be. The old mess guy catches me every other day to give me his well meaning advice.

Smoke a full cigarette and then kiss a white sleeve with full force. It will leave a black imprint that no detergent can erase. I never tried out the experiment not caring for the outcome.

I did carry around a lighter for a week. It said Goa and was stolen. It stopped working.

What if in the end all your hopes were the wrong way around? Murakami said so in the words of another anonymous, Beatles obsessed nineteen year old introvert, who probably existed in reality in the seventies or was just a concoction of his writer’s mind. I sipped my coffee alone for the first time since I came to school, in a chilly breeze that this city enjoys every evening, nevermind the season. I finished another book and stared at the fluorescent light in that tiny hut like construction surrounded by a little garden. It’s pitch black with the crickets chirping away freely, only the V shape of a nearby trunk is illuminated by the hostel’s dim lights.

I finished my coffee much before the book, much, too much to ask for, even without the good conversation I could do without tonight, wondering if the unintentional story about a boy mowing lawns has any hidden metaphor, or it’s just our fake intellectualism that deliberately lends them some meaning.

Subtext, sublime, tone, monotone, catch, resolution, plot all in our mind, never illuminated by dim lights from nearby but still afar. I sometimes long for my black iPod, but I don’t really miss it. It’s like it never existed and is now in a better place. How very superficial to lend a mere piece of plastic and silicon my precious words. But, I wanted to know who sang Karma Chameleon since his name slips my mind and I won’t Google it tonight, or ever. It was an unmemorable song which I heard when I was thirteen, only because it followed Still Loving You, in the Best College Rock Collection from way back in the nineties. I don’t listen to Scorpions either. I don't have the songs either and hence no iPod is missed.

I replied back to a few friends who have been making attempts to contact me, but the good thing is I don’t get connection anywhere on campus, and it feels good. I refused to go out for a night of club related debauchery. I might have turned twenty three, months in advance. I called up Ma and Papa, who are in India, yet so far away now. They were sitting down to eat dinner, so I ate my dinner too. Beans and curd, not a good combination, but tonight I didn’t want to order good food. The curd was thick and cold, yet I hate curd, but I ate it as a challenge to my guts.

I walked back, forcing myself to rid myself of my childhood OCD, counting my footsteps in fives and placing my fifth before the next strip of hardened tar appears. I over step often and my neurons go mad. I look straight and walk and the phone rings. Another plan ditched. I want to write tonight, about Bonnie and Clyde and my bag which carries within, light words burdening my mind and my shoulder blades.

I want to write more, but maybe tomorrow. Goodnight and Goodluck.

I AM SLIGHTLY DISTURBED

2008-07-12T00:42:00.006+05:30

MOODSWING NO. 746290
I spent the whole day with my bag packed, thinking, waiting and finally not moving my lazy ass to spend a fabulous weekend in Bombay. At least I watched Citizen Kane on the big screen.

WHY GEORGIA WHY
I need to find a way to get past this Sonic whatever firewall. Somebody send me the new John Mayer album.

FCUK IN THIS VILLAGE OF A CITY
I went shopping and couldn't find anything. I quote Marla Singer, "I am in poverty".

MASSIVE HEARTBREAK
Somebody just used Massive Attack's Teardrop in their film. Now what will I put in my Diploma?

EGO MASSAGE
I am wondering for the first time ever, do people even read this blog? Now where are those hitmeter things with maps and all.

LONG MAY YOU RUN

2008-07-09T23:19:00.012+05:30

They tried to close the Major's door, but salt water tears had rusted the hinges fast.

- Blue Fairy Tale from Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories, Boris Vian

A SHORT FILM

2008-07-04T22:07:00.005+05:30

Finally, the day has arrived. I will be watching A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, next week, on print! Add to that Tarkovsky's Sacrifice.

Till then enjoy the inimitable brilliance of Mister Gabriel.

In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
With the man in the woman and the woman in the man

- Blood of Eden by Peter Gabriel

WHERE I CONFESS TOO

2008-07-03T17:47:00.007+05:30

Today I cried for the first time since I moved to Pune. It finally got to me, and by it I mean people. There is just so much a girl can take. There is just so much damn I can give. But all the shit is getting to me. I have had the fabulous luck of having great people and friends in my life and so I have no right to complain even now. But like I said, there is just so much this girl can take.

I love and adore my friends here, and I have never been a fan of being liked by everyone. On the contrary I often wish I could be a loner, quite a cowardly thing to say, but I am no longer the strong and fierce person I was at nineteen.

Nothing ever got to me. Not peers, not career debacles, not even lovers. But now everything affects me. Some emotional floodgate has opened which has left me so vulnerable and weak.

I can no longer cling to that part of my personality that made me so sure of my principles and ideals. As long as I know I am right, I was happy and confident. But now even being sure of myself doesn't help me. People are beginning to get to me. And no matter how much love and adoration my friends shower on me, the foes are winning.

I am tempted to take a shortcut (namely running away to Mumbai and ruining my blog with all my angry ramblings which is fortunately keeping me from packing my bag and jumping on the next volvo), but I am hurt that people who care for me get flak over me. That they fight for me. Why should they? Why can't people bitch about me to my fuckin' face.

And yes, before anyone patronises me, I know these cowardly morons are to be ignored, which is what I do as I won't ever drag myself to their level. But how long can I be the mature one. How long can I take it?

I have finally taken a decision and I know it is the wrong one, but this is the only thing that can keep me from getting hurt. I have decided to break all bonds. I am going into a shell where no one can get to me. What if I can't be invisible, I can atleast pretend.

The sick insecure world can live in their ignorant fuck of a bubble, while I will soar in my own sweet mind, where everything is beautiful, where I can make everything beautiful and where no one can touch me. I know I am being escapist but in my beautiful heart I am still free and untouched.

It's raining outside and watching the sky cry is all the healing I need.

Have you come here for forgiveness

Have you come to raise the dead

Have you come to play Jesus, to the lepers in your head

Did I ask too much?

- Jhonny Cash

IRRELEVANT MONOLOGUES WITH A LAPTOP - V

2008-07-02T19:37:00.013+05:30

It has been an amazing ten days. Exhausting like hell, yes, but every aching muscle was worth the pain, and it wasn't even my shoot. I live for the celluloid and I will probably die for it.

And this time I get to come back to my tiny hostel room, which this rootless girl loves to call her home, to lie in the dark room, the fan forcing itself to complete every revolution, the excitement seeping in with every breath as I listen, and once again feel.

This is what the lost city girl wanted all these years.
And then her forefinger gently touches a metal pad.
The horizontal triangle sinks for a fraction of a second

"this time all I want is you, there is no one else who can take your place"

And a selfish girl has just one last wish. One last time she wants to share every little detail of her day with him. But she can't.

"But this is what you always wanted Naki."

"I only wanted you."

Too bad, she couldn't say those words. And so she still waits.

Take her away.

UNDERGROUND

2008-06-28T19:22:00.009+05:30

I want to be left alone.
I want to enjoy my solitude.
I want to find the words.
I want to understand myself.
I want to go underground.
I want to know how to do that.
I want to be invisible.
I want to feel the song playing.
I want to escape.
I want to go underground.

THE SICK ROSE

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy

- William Blake

FEELS LIKE I AM THIRTEEN AGAIN

2008-06-27T01:37:00.000+05:30

Honestly
the
human
race
sucks

I
have
nothing
more
to
say

BUY THE LIE

2008-06-08T20:35:00.001+05:30

As long as we remember them,
we can see the dead in dreams.

-Junichiro Tanizaki

How will we be remembered? The generation of bitter middle-aged underachievers, who rejected century old values to deserve the little bad karma left behind after the profits had churned forward wheels of development. The intellectually stagnant impersonators of the rotten and rejected American dream; making love on Ikea beds, exercising only our thumbs on ipods, facebooks, toll booths and microwaves, and falling prey to spin doctors with every cup of retail coffee served with breaking news. A generation that inherited a wall free Europe, a war-free Vietnam, a Nehru-free India, only to build a new one through the land of Abraham and Moses, wage another against imagined innocent enemies, and replace the yellow-washed socialist muck with narcissism seeped in consumerism. We are damned worse than the children of Marx and Coke. Even they found redemption. We couldn’t find forgiveness for Castro & Co. or a straw, so we sold the star of Marx’ protégé on T shirts and snorted what we believe to be coke.

OK DON'T WATCH

2008-06-04T04:09:00.006+05:30

We always remember our first kiss and the song that played. My first kiss was on the creaky, carpeted stairs of a despicable basement pub. After months of arm-wrestling, shoving, hair pulling and footsie kicks, the boy had pulled the girl down the stairs, held her chin up and kissed her lips. The girl had recovered from the shock and closed her eyes to the jeering glances of barmen and prostitutes posing with regular customers, kissing him with all her sexual sincerity. When the two teenagers had emerged, he smiled a victorious smile and she, an innocent giggle, running up the stairs to join her impatient friends. I don’t remember the song that was playing.

But that’s how first kisses go, some wiping away the world around you to a mute blur, others making you count the shadows of roadside trees racing across the wall with every passing car.

Some are meticulously planned, with perverse accuracy, and then an old man passes by the dark alley with every intention of peeking through the windscreen, and you quickly pull away reminding him to pull away his hands from under your shirt as well.

Some jump up and bite like a bullet, and wound you with precise pain. Strolling into a summer evening, the act of betrayal happens right in front of a five year old kid struggling with his tri-cycle and you pause a few seconds before pushing the bearer of uninvited display of affection away from your tender lips and memories.

Some linger on, long after your tongue has performed all its sensuous acrobats, but nothing can make him let go of the small of your back or stop your fingers from sliding over his downy Armani with the perfumes of erotica filling up your senses.

While others are dental examinations, mechanical and awkward, with the receiving end waiting for it to get over, praying the smell of onion is not poisonous. Of course we won't talk about the ones we don't remember, because if we can't remember it, it never happened, despite what the purple mark suggests.

And some are nearly orgasm inducing, wet and tight, your lips playing out what writhing bodies are meant to enact, till you can stumble into a dark corner and write another unforgiving carnal tale.

And then there is touch and go. You love those lips for the night, you caress them for what seems like a second stretched to eternity and then you leave with a goodbye and the promise to never return again.

But the best are the ones that almost happened but not quite. The air is heavy with everything from Annie’s song, but two shy pairs of lips keep mumbling incoherent gibberish, rather press into what could be poetry from heaven and beyond. And so we chew Mentos and we wait for the kisses that will be remembered as our own fairy tale, with the song playing out a fifty-two piece symphony.

NO ROOM TO BREATHE (Complete)

2008-05-28T02:55:00.008+05:30

“I wish I could save you.”

“But you did.”

The idea was simple. Go to a sleepy town. Find a cheap but clean hotel room. Sit by the window and wait.

Things would have worked just fine, had a pair of wayward feet not led me to the tiny book shop in the alley across the window. What can one do when the rooms with a view of the valleys and mountains are not really inexpensive. But neither were the books. Reading the complimentary ‘paperback’ Bible, strategically placed under the pillow might not have redeemed my soul, but saved me a few crumpled notes. So, I went back to sitting and waiting, with my back to the window.

The room was a green box set in a double timbered frame that smelt of mould and orchids. The net curtains, carpet, bed cover were all green with large floral prints. I recalled reading about the patronage of such patterns by the Soviets. The patterns somehow assisted in bugging rooms; not of much use in this tiny dot of red sloping roofs with rainfall overflowing the station master’s gauge upon the eastern edge of the Himalayas. Or perhaps, half a century ago a Japanese soldier had seen the tears of an abducted girl melt in front of the candle wick and left the green room with his muddy footprints on the giant green flowers as a reminder of her good luck.

I closed my eyes and the newly purchased second-hand Ishiguro.

That morning had been a rare rainy November morning with an ominous beginning, right from the decision to wear the new Converse shoes to choosing the ITO bridge. Now the shoes bit with the vengeance of a crocodile fed on soy chunks and a truck decided to unload its merchandise of a hundred kilos of cabbage right in the middle of Delhi’s rush hour traffic, managing to crush two men into a vegetative state and my hopes of making it to the 10 ‘o clock meeting.

It ended with a skeleton popularly known as Death masquerading as my editor in ill-fitting denims, demanding my presence at the garage sale of another bored socialite’s hobby classes. At least there would be free white wine and no byline, both rescuing my self-esteem from the very real threat of complete annihilation. I plugged in Prince’s essential collection and got downright busy playing Hangman. But wait, Death was fast approaching and I was stuck at _E_OI_ when the lightweight skeleton slips right on my red desk and starts talking while playing with the green cue chalk I use as paper weight. Not that it does a good job, it’s just that I don’t have much paper. And, I refuse to hear what she is saying, choosing to hear crying doves over orders for what would be another trip to another corner of the city to collect press releases printed on glossy paper praising another designer range of incense candles with hidden healing powers.

Maybe there was a knocking on the door that woke me up, but if indeed there was someone, he was long gone.

The room was dark and it was raining slowly and sarcastically, as if the sky was leaking and everyone wanted to let the world rot, than plug the black sky. Maybe I can blame the power cut but I knew I had packed a black jacket and a scarf, and that I will go see them play at Hideaway Tavern. Another room with a pretentious English name, plastic cues and varnished mock wooden panels displaying the exploits of a yellow submarine and silky textured underground. The place was not yet crowded and I took a seat the furthest from where the equipment lay entangled in wires but closest to the bar. The drums were missing. A baby piano had made an expected entry.

And they played while we drank. And they sang while we cried. And they prayed while we clapped. And they watched while I ran away.

Run away, you say, run.

Balancing the phone between my shoulder and left cheek, hearing the monotonous ringing, and cleaning the green powder of the cue chalk I was digging from under the half-moons of my over grown nails, I hoped the person who answers will be more than happy to feed me the details of the new assignment. Of course nobody answered and two hours later I arrived at an auditorium I had never heard of, for an event I had not heard of; thanks to Prince. This time there were no polished PR agents with bad English to greet me, so I dial the number again but I don’t bother to wait for anyone to answer as I had spotted brilliantly done up bikes with 'Free Tibet' prominently displayed. I make my way to the white canvas tent, returning nearly a hundred smiles to sit on the green grass with a colorful milieu of monks and Tibetan students. Finally a leaflet reaches me and I know I am attending a spiritual speech by the Dalai Lama.

I start speaking to students around me, feverishly writing down their responses till the phone rings and it’s a familiar unknown number.

“Hi Tsering, I needed some information from you. I am reporting on…” I manage to spurt out before he cuts me off, “Oh yes, of course, I am waiting for you at the gate, where are you?”

“Oh, but I am already seated. Why don’t we meet after the speech ends?”

“Yes… yes,” he answers.

By the time I found Tsering who was surrounded by some twenty Tibetan youths, I already had over a dozen interviews scribbled over my notepad. He swiftly cut away from the little crowd and greeted me with a firm handshake. He thanked me for our active interest in their cause before he answered my questions in his trademark soft whisper with feverish hand gestures and a hesitant smile never leaving the face.

When your mother tongue has been ruthlessly escorted out with you, learning a colonial tongue just to communicate with a world that otherwise cruelly refuses to acknowledge you becomes another forfeit. You learn to speak its language, but with contempt that never allows your tongue to betray the mother tongue. And so Tsering spoke in his peculiar accent that I came to impersonate out of adoration over a million cups of hot tea on his yellow cot.

By the time I reached the hotel, I was drenched and the old men playing Dominoes at the reception could not make the tears from the rain drops. The books were still lying on the bed, reminding me of destiny’s wheel circling faster than ever to reach the destination called my sin.

The photograph on the poster in the bookshop was one of the many I had taken, when Pipe Dreams had played at a local Blue’s festival at my favourite watering hole. Again the plastic panels sketched out the family tree of lyrical gods from decades ago, supporting new boys singing about another revolution that will never come, but for the suffocating by lanes of Majnu ka Tilla and the apathy of generations wrapped in a quilt of lost dreams.

“The funny thing is, don’t tell anyone, I am actually a royal descendant of one of the tribes.” A hushed whisper in the front seat of my moving car made me burst out with laughter.

“Yes, the Chinese have installed a spy cam right here, in the eyes of Lord Ganesha.” I said pointing towards the tiny yellow God affixed with super glue on my dashboard by an anxious mother. He didn’t laugh.

“Alright… where are we going, if I dare ask, risking of course the Chinese following us.” I asked.

“To the restaurant’s Opening, Choedan is very excited but some more furniture just arrived and it is out on the road and I need to put it in very soon.” he replied.

“Does the girlfriend know I am invited too,” I asked trying hard but failing to not sound playful.

“Of course, a journalist at the opening! Why do you think she is excited?” he quipped.

Tsering, the student of literature, spends more time writing worthless subversive songs than writing papers on Joyce and Boyle. Tsering, the waiter, spends more time discussing soccer with his employer and bandmate than serving beef dim sums to the empty tables. Tsering, the activist, spends more time cleaning a shrine to the holiness atop a wooden stool in his room than preaching radical ideas to fellow comrades at the Tibetan Youth Congress.

But, just like life, Death need not bother, so the tenets of Buddhism being the antidote to cosmopolitan poisons, interspersed with quotes from the leaflet was ordered and before it could be buried in a corner column a brave attempt to chat over cigarettes and coffee was made.

“I already have the material… if you don’t like it, trash it, but at least let it be written.” I presented my case and a pack of cigarettes.

A week later between five cups of coffee and a new pack of Bensons, a death warrant was issued.

“NO! Still, there is some potential here. How about the whole mysterious ethnic culture thing… some stuff that can be turned into, you know like the Chinese coins Feng shui thing or origami or chandelier earrings or… yes, the food… you know move over Chinese, undiscovered little joints selling whatever it is that they eat, or music and the films, didn’t Brad Pitt do one on them?”

“I think I’ll just do Janpath, a hot kitten heels thing,” I tried my luck knowing well that this time I had tightened the noose myself.

“Really? Kitten heels? ...haven’t seen them around much.”

I don’t know what was tougher; allowing Tsering to be my enthusiastic guide or hiding the guilt on my face from the profuse thank-yous showered by his grateful peers. By the time ‘Shangri La is Hot’ appeared, the cue chalk and note pad were gone and I was free from the clutches of Death. And, as for Tsering I convinced him I had done my part of research for an earth shattering political piece being done by a senior editor and he must wait, patiently.

After playing Writing to Reach You, they told us he had been missing for nearly six months before his room mate of two years stumbled upon his pictures and a death certificate in his name on the internet. The photographs showed he was shot in the back of his head along with six more prisoners, while a small crowd cheered the firing squad.

“Only six! And your family let you go.” I asked, watching intently a bead of sweat form on his stomach. The single turn-table, left behind by the old occupant of the yellow barsati, just above Sonam’s little restaurant in Garhi had only one Grateful Dead vinyl to play, but I didn’t mind as long as the clutter of the community kitchen next door didn’t disturb me.

“It was my mom’s idea,” he said attempting to sound nonchalant. “You must understand, there is nothing left for us, no education, no songs, no god, no devil, only poverty.”

“Will you ever go back?” I asked knowing well there was no answer to this question.

“I haven’t spoken to her in twenty years.”

The first time Tsering tried to kiss me, I punched him in the chest. The second time, he told me Choedan is gone and he received no weak punches.

“You are just using me.” I blew smoke into his ear with the cigarette butt threatening to burn his eye through one of the sockets.

“Use? You can’t even stand the sight of raw meat, let alone cook pork.” He pinched my chin leaving the imprint of two joined commas from his index fingernails.

“I know your plans, marry an Indian, get a passport, all of you. Remember what that lady doctor with her Tibetan medicine clinic said, I am not Tibetan, I am an Indian. Of all people...she?!!”

“Aren’t you clever," he said.

“I wish I could save you,” I teased him, tickling his moist stomach.

“It’s not your job to save me,” He said before kissing my gaping mouth shut.

With a new job at a news channel, the only spare time was late nights, which were exploited well in the back seats of old and new friends, and Tsering’s songs were reduced to a distant buzzing on the horizon. Surprisingly, he did not clutch at the strings of my lies or linger on after his number was deleted from the phonebook. Once, he invited me to Mc Leodganj, where he was going for the funeral of his school headmaster. My silence ensured he wouldn’t contact me again.

I had fallen asleep on the bed with my wet shoes still strapped to my tired feet. I woke up with a sore throat and heart. I ordered tea in the room but drank only the warm milk. I stared at the bookshop till a third sugar cube had melted on my tongue. I decided not to find the grey stone bearing his name. There would be no body below it, just wet soil, even that which was not his to claim.

When Sonam spotted me in the corner last night and made his way through the maze of chairs and broken beer bottles, I ran out the door, up the hill, till I ran out of breath. Arunachal had been the state they had crossed into more than two decades ago. It had been the first home to the six year old refugees. Unlike Tsering, Sonam’s parents were already in exile and they took in Tsering like a second son. The yellowed, dog-eared picture taken in Hamburg, when both the boys had played in a friendly match of football as members of the National team of Tibet, was always found in Tsering’s wallet. The team never played again. A customary diplomatic reprimand was issued by the Chinese Consulate in Berlin, as was a new black-list by the Chinese government in Beijing. Maybe it was the photograph, or maybe Tsering had tried meeting his mother in Tibet.

I know you must be busy… it’s just that… I am leaving. I am going to Taiwan.

It was early morning and I had not even taken off my stilettos when I snapped open the phone the instant it vibrated in my hand, expecting to read a dirty goodnight message.

“Don’t do something stupid. Please promise me, you won’t try to go to China, I mean Tibet. Fuck… I am serious. How much more do you want to study? Study here… why Taiwan?” I could not have waited for a couple of hours and called him right away, afraid that it might already be too late.

“I can make a lot more money there. And no... I won’t do anything illegal, except maybe play football… with the neighbours,” he chuckled and I pictured his mischievous grin and the tiny slits of his eyes narrowing, just a tiny bit.

“Take care of yourself and do write to me sometime.” I replied while something heavy crawled up my voice-box.

“I… I have to go now… umm… you get back to sleep now. I will write… I promise… it’s… it’s just that I don’t have your mail id."

“I wish I could save you.”

“But you did.”

END OF CINEMA

2008-05-25T03:11:00.004+05:30

Oh yes, I have decided to break my silence (or not), but blame it on Madonna going tic-toc tic-toc, and JT wearing a scarf in 2008! Also, I am on a pseudo vacation with twenty four access to internet, so I can bother to puke out a personal post. How we hate those. Still. Here goes.

Yes, for the uninitiated and uninterested we repeat, we now officially go to film school and yes we love Godard and co. and if you are wondering Godard who! you may shut your Firefox window and if you are wondering Firefox what! then you must asphyxiate yourself and spare me the effort. And yes we may love to present you with an essay on jump cuts in Breathless, but we won’t because we are not qualified to and we won’t even pretend we understand any of it, because not a single day has gone by when I have not emerged from a screening and said to myself, “How in the world did they even think like that let alone shoot! How… just how!”

And then I wish I can fall to my knees and cry out or jump out of my seat and just stand staring at the screen till tears squeeze out of my eyes for they gave me films.

But of course we do spend our time indulging in other interesting activities too, (no… not sex since the male hotness quotient on campus is limited to a few and those few are not in the mood to cheat on their girls for now. Sigh.) such as sleeping till five in the evening, banging your head against library catalogue (who makes search case-sensitive anyway!) begging for cigarettes, eating poha and vada-paav (yes we are poor), shooting your short film which turns out to be a disaster (its always the director's fault, I get it now!), feeding the dogs, rolling illegal herbs, not using your ATM when broke for the card also broke -- in two pieces, and being dead depressed all the time.

Now, this depression is different from what the Red Bull guzzling Chomsky quoting Tashan watching regular consumers of our decadent urban upper-middle class suffer from. I don’t even know what it is. It’s more like a PMS induced mood-swing, comes and goes, comes and goes, comes and goes, comes and sometimes stays, which is when the illegal herb rolling happens. Probably because we are in a bubble now, and all we worry about is our sick little existence within the campus, our scripts that have to be written, the team that will never materialise, the funds that we won’t have (which reminds me, this is an impassioned plea for funding of my diploma films, please do invest in an aspiring film maker, you won’t be saving the world, but, oh well go save the Burmese, I won’t beg, ok I will but after a few months) and above everything else, the very meaning of your existence and the impudence with which you presume that you can make films when you are nothing but a misplaced idea of an artist who was never meant to be here in the first place.

And time for a daru party. So that is what we do, either drink rum with water or catch the next Volvo to Bombay for a weekend of limited luxury and revelry (I don’t know any Bombay bloggers. Hmm... puzzling). And now I am bored of blogging. And so are you. BYE!

ABYSS

2008-05-16T15:17:00.000+05:30

In the depths of my shallow
I fly without wings
Riding with the stars
On a scorpion’s tail sting

I wait for you to follow
With charming bracelet rings
A cry and no sorrow
I fall in empty bliss

Upon the roadside borough
We walk without an end
My mind will shine tomorrow
On an ageless fiery sin

EXILE

2008-04-20T03:11:00.000+05:30

Put me to exile
through shards of glass
thin as crispy frost

My dream I live you say
and I break with the new dawn
joyless in your green eyes

I lie here on a white bed sheet gone yellow, in a blue room turned furnace. As much as I love Film school, which to the say the least is way too much, I can’t stop missing the life I bid goodbye to. I love the cinematic masterpieces I watch, the goose bumps on my thighs when the film camera rolls and the frames flicker to a rhythm only I can hear, the books I would have never read, the talented peers who have so much to share and teach, and the drunken weekend trips to undiscovered places.

And so I don’t wish to sound arrogant and elitist, but I often imagine the little and big things that would have occupied me, in my parallel life, where I would have never decided to go to Film school.

I can see myself in April, working in Mumbai, living with Shelly, cursing the traffic, drinking free coffee, dancing away the weekend. But more than any of this, I would have seen myself working for a future I always imagined for myself. I was happiest when I was working during the last one and a half years. I remember the thrill of having landed the next job with a better salary. The music in the iPod had changed and I sang along to Mika, loudly at the Munirka traffic light. Even my parents were beginning to be proud of me and the pay cheques I was earning at twenty. It was nice being a writer.

But at the same time, the fact that I wasn’t in Film school was eating me up bit by bit, and it is unbelievable that I am infact a Direction student. But as I lie here in my room, bunking my favourite evening screening, I cannot stop mourning the loss of my friends, a million cups of iced tea, cooking Sunday lunch, swaying to the whims of another DJ, driving through the rain on a green July afternoon and waking up in the middle of the night to his calls.

If only I had escaped a miserable life, then such blasphemous thoughts wouldn’t have occurred. I mean what the hell, I am living my dream at twenty-two. But I had to choose between heaven and heaven, and no matter what choice I made, I would have missed on the other.

And now I am devoid of all inspiration, so I can’t write. I just wish I can fuckin’ write again! How the fuck will I make films without a goddamn script. Not one word in the last three months. Arggggggh!

I know it is just a phase, and it will pass, till then I listen to Toad the Wet Sprocket.

ADIEU

2008-03-23T01:34:00.011+05:30

I have no idea what to do with this blog anymore. Now, even the sporadic posts have stopped coming to me. Yes, campus life has ensured that accessing internet is the last of my worries, but I keep coming back here only to find that I have nothing new to say. I could talk about film school, but then I am only beginning to know the place. I could talk about the films I have been watching but then most of the time I am too overwhelmed or dense to understand them. I am distressed by the fact that I cannot write anymore. Too many things are changing. I too have changed. I am lost. Completely lost. I will wait till I find myself once again. Hope it doesn't take too long. Thanks for all your kind words and bearing with me. I will return!

ANYONE, FOR EVERYONE

2008-02-07T19:26:00.001+05:30

fault me not,

for an imperfect face

single me not,
for a pretend life

prejudice me not,
for it's not my shining crown

save me not,
for I am not safe

hate me not,
for I am not here

DREAMING WITH A BROKEN HEART

2008-02-06T02:12:00.000+05:30

They joked about him being the anti-Christ raring to pull out silver pistols from his black trench coat. She couldn't laugh with them. Of course he was lost in this crowd of colourful brats, not to say he wasn't one either, just that he fared a little better with his long locks. They couldn't see his face, even as the colours tempted to bring him out of the shadows.

Her head was light and her feet were moving to their own rhythm. The throat needed quenching and so a glass of water was sought. Nevermind the thirst, humanitarian notions of communism and unforgiving capitalist interests reside in conflict amongst the bartenders and paying clients.

"What am I really thinking about? My need bears no profit, so I wait while the dirty martinis and Hannekens beat an angelic glass of water."

And she can see him beaming in the distance. He mumbles something and philosophical delusions threatening to interrupt another dance for the night were sacrificed for the sake of another story about a stranger by the bar. A worthy loss for he stood six feet four inches tall with some famed silver pistols.

"Can I buy you a drink?" and the predictable conversation began.

"Oh no, I have had enough." The reply and the cue to walk away.

"Well, if you won't let me buy you a drink, how will you bear me ramble away..."

"I am still waiting for a glass of water..."

And the devil ensures she is rehydrated within moments. The conversation flows smoothly, smoother than his or her words combined. She was unraveling the many strands and threads of his life and lies, all the while entangling him in a web of mysterious smiles and sharp glances. The two pairs of eyes fought concerned stares of protective peers, never letting each other go, for the first one to falter loses the battle.

The couch was all too familiar, the boy and the girl were not. He, a recent addition to the city, missing his guitar for a worthless night of psychedelic madness and she, spending her last night in the city she was leaving forever. She slipped comfortably under his shoulders, her fingers intertwined around his, unable to push back a lock of his hair from suffocating her while her mouth was busy whispering tempting tales to his ears. They were too confident, their lives worth talking about, tailored to seduce. She was the girl you pick up. He was the guy you pick up. Neither knows they both loose.

His handa on her waist, her lips gently caressing his, the night finally reaches its conclusion. Hundreds of spoken and unspoken words have proved their worth. The hours pass in warm embrace and as dawn prepared to defeat precious debauchery, the music stops and yellow lights flood hundreds of dilated pupils.

"You have to see me again", he said letting go of her hand.

"But I won't."

He smiles at her. She hugs him and plants a soft and slow kiss on his neck. She joins her friends and walks towards a cold morning waiting to tingle her sweaty pores.

"Nah! He had no guns, just another one of those metalheads."

MUST I EXPLAIN MY ABSENCE ... DUH NO WI FI

2008-02-05T03:40:00.000+05:30

Yes I come from nowhere
I will not see you again
I will miss you for life
But not cry for yesterday

I came here sixteen years ago, not realising I will never leave. This city is my home. Not because my parents built us a home here. A couple of months ago, when my flight was trying desperately to land, I was pretty annoyed, not only because the brakes weren't functioning, but because the near death experience was keeping me away from Delhi for another six hours. It was in that moment that I knew; Delhi. the city I hate to love has somehow seeped through my veins, corroded away my guard and become my home.

And, then I had to leave. I left behind cups of hazelnut coffee, four-hour long conversations about nothing, an empty spot on the orange concrete where the first drops of monsoons were eagerly awaited, unknown lovers waiting to caress brown Goosebumps in dark corners, new tunes enticing our lost souls while the city lights and strips of white lines zipped by intoxicated eyes and a girl doubling over as her laughter turned to gasps for fresh air.

The new city was easy to adapt to. It was as expected; a world unto itself; a bubble secluded away from biting reality and comfortable debauchery. Pune is what my jagged nerves needed. Time can be static here; if you wish to stretch it, you may, if you want to chase it, you can. And I can walk. I walk everywhere. I can look up and see the constellations in the sky. I can watch my ugly toenails navigate the weathered pavement. I can surround myself with black and green hills. I can walk through a rain fall of crispy brown leaves. I can watch a flower drop off a branch for it to find its way into my hand and walk with me.

And then I could not decide where to spend my two week vacation, so I came to Mumbai. And this insane city has got me floating, drowning and swimming in all its madness. I have jealously loved this city from when I was twelve and the unrequited affair continues. I walk around starry eyed, my open mouth gaping, embarrassed at a new world inhabited by brilliant colours, pungent smells, striking spirits and mind fucking experiences, every few kilometers.

There is an unexpected twist at every corner; be it the golf cart ride through Churchgate or getting swept away with a mass of impatient bodies on to the ‘first class’ without a ticket and destination; fitting your footsteps perfectly within the cobbles of Horniman Circle or a fisher woman offering you her seat in the local while you were cursing her silently for the unbearable stench; the magnificent buildings stuck in a time-warp with shadows behind half-curtains at Causeway or the playful urchin teasing a street side vendor wearing a mock-antique diving helmet; prawns and beer at Café Mondegar on a lazy Sunday afternoon or flaming Sev puri burning your insides in the suburbs of Kandivali.

I am dying to make this city my home someday. And yet, I suddenly find myself flying to Delhi for the last five days of my vacation. Prithvi, Irani food and the rest of Kala Ghoda is being left behind, but I cannot keep myself away from the city I can no longer call my home. I ripped myself away leaving behind remnants of my past and nothing to go back to and so I have no idea why am I even going back. February at two degrees might be worth it.

P.S I LOVE YOU

2008-01-30T13:57:00.000+05:30

You sit there listening to your Prince collection, and I try really hard to imagine your expression as Raspberry Beret gives way to Kiss. Perhaps, a hint of annoyance, joy or anticipation, even a smile as someone cracks a joke on your computer screen. The white fuzz illuminates your pale face, but I will never see. It's not my right, I would say. Not my destiny, you will reply.

How very cruel of us. It was our fickle minds, not a weak heart or meaningless lines of fate. The mind that lets imagination fly, centuries and miles, defying who we really are. I still see minute moles scattered over the perfect skin of your back. I can trace them silently, your skin twitching under a cold fingertip. I imagine grand constellations broken by the bumps of your spine. A white fuzz illuminates tiny drops racing down my face, but you will never see.

I AIN'T GONNA WISH YOU GUYS!!!

2008-01-01T04:22:00.000+05:30

"We hope you enjoyed your stay

It's good to have you with us, even if it's just for the day
We hope you enjoyed your stay"

I just celebrated the best year of my life.

Hope you enjoyed it too.

THE BEAST'S POISON

2007-12-22T11:43:00.000+05:30

Dusty winds blew over the scarred land, a desert not but barren still. Rail tracks stretched beyond the horizon, crossing the mighty kingdom, bearing the load of a temptress. She rode the train, for days and months, as it trudged along, transversing the desert from one corner to another. It never stopped for anyone, just maintained the pace for all of humanity to ride and leave as their destination approached. A constant flow of flesh and blood, frozen brown in the dust waiting for a familiar minar to pass by in the far distance. Men, women and cattle jumping and landing gently on the soft dunes leaving behind ephemeral prints in the sand as the muezzin called out from dusk to dawn.

She did not befit the company of slaves, so traveled heaving and loving the rulers of iron and fire. No one knew when the journey will end, but her dark eyes and voluminous bosom compensated for the long wait. Her legend was contained within the compartment closest to the heart of the train and its men. The windows shielded them from dirty pink mornings, searing yellow afternoons and fiery orange evenings. The nights stood proud in its lustful secret, devoid of any excuses. Through paper thin walls, men could hear them groan and satiate their hunger till she chose them next.

His hands polished her chocolate skin wrapped smug over her glorious body. His fingers kneaded her breasts and his teeth dug deep into her flesh only to make him moan like a dying hyena. The primeval animals rested on rickety benches, waiting to explode with the juice of their insides. She took him in her hands, piercing his grey eyes with her own, but the desert trapped her tonight. Her palms were stung by a hundred spines. She pulled down the cactus skin to find his fleshy head, her hands working expertly, determined to fight the agony. Her tongue touched the promised tip while her blood trickled down her wrists to tickle his thighs. One final cry of pleasure and she drank from him.

Her purple body will be buried by the mighty desert, first covered in a fine sheet of golden sand, then massive dunes till another poisonous secret is lost in the heart of the dark land.

IRRELEVANT MONOLOGUES WITH A LAPTOP - IV

2007-12-07T15:28:00.000+05:30

Symphonic rock is not all that bad. Mostly a girl singing about everything dark and burnt, but the synthesizer pieces are pretty interesting, especially the Scottish effects. But I am bored out of my wits. This four day trip to Kuwait is not doing me any good, except keeping me away from driving. Now, I have already done the shopping bit and now poor daddy has banned me from it. Why are mufflers so bloody expensive, they are just fuckin’ mufflers and my mojo is dying without new ones. I can’t figure how to transfer my phonebook to the new motorazr I bought, so I hate it already. The pod’s headphones have started behaving just as I expected them to. They are adding their own brand of music and will die soon. I forgot to download VLC player on the lappie, so can’t even watch the dozen movies I was saving for this trip. And so despite being surrounded by every pleasure inducing goodie in the world, I am stuck watching VH1.

Why JLo why! how could you release such a terrible single and wear those ghastly outfits. I understand your baby bump needs camouflaging but haven’t we learnt anything from Nicole Richie. And Geri Geri Geri, your washboard abs and black bras can’t get you your own Beckham. And, Posh was that you singing, well ten years too late. It really feels like 1997, even the Backstreet Boys have returned, if only they had gravity defying breasts. Sigh, Britney you would have been the winner, for your nipple sticker, torn fishnets and surviving liposuction yet again, if it weren't for Kylie.

Oh Ok, the new Paul McCartney song is worthless, Mister Tankian, why must you go solo, stick to the system, and yes Queen, I fail to find the magic, hope everyone else can find a condom. God, popular culture is depressing me, so I should walk into the sea, strip and yatch hike all the way to Dubai. Time for some Entourage therapy.

WHAT IS IT THAT A GIRL CAN DO

2007-12-01T14:50:00.000+05:30

She was indifferent to all her lovers. It was always a convenient arrangement, no strings attached, and they all fussed around. They all wanted the indifferent girl, because she gave the freedom and didn't care. She didn't say love yous. She didn't take the flowers home. She didn't see them ever again. Her heart was a fortress guarded by ice cold feelings. And so they came and went, only the names changed, the setting didn't. Flashing lights and erotic movements reaching out through disenchanted bodies, mocking love for a fickle pursuit. Till it was decided that she was to change; she was to cut out all the lovers she did not need.

The wheels of karma completed infinite revolutions and turned the tables. Now they come back to haunt her. She watches from the bar, ignoring the advances of new men, born to be lovers of the distant kind. She can't take her eyes off him. He was nothing to her. Tonight he was just a car ride and free cocktails. But she couldn't take them anymore. She didn't want his body, the body she always had. She wanted him, in a way she could never have him. It was years too late.

The conversation continued, while her eyes strayed around searching for him. She recognized his act, perfect in its seduction. Years ago, on a similar night she had been the chosen prey, it was another's turn tonight and it would be a matter of minutes before the smiles will be returned and he will return with another conquest. Yes, years ago he could have been the right guy but tonight he was the wrong guy. Of course she chose the wrong guy, while the right guy stood there watching her fall for him.

DREAMERS

2007-11-28T00:40:00.000+05:30

I want to take the notions out of my head and paint a picture of chaotic colours... insane sounds... maddening rhythm and beautiful tales... moving so fast... betraying me slowly... only to escape me... to explode in a dark room.

I will walk this earth alone.
Maybe you will watch...

I wrote this long ago, and I post it again. I am finally chasing my dream. I am going to Film school.

REGULAR BLOGGING WILL RESUME

2007-11-26T01:13:00.000+05:30

It feels like I have a Monday test and I don't care about it so I won't study but stare at the open book for another two hours. But it's not 1999 and there have been no tests since December 2005. But, procrastination is back, which means I must be bored of my current lifestyle, yet again. I just got over with the whole, let's get proactive and make serious changes in life process, and the next one was not due for another three-four months. But damn. I have pending scripts to write, which I think I will manage by 11 am, no issue, but its 1:17 am and I should write them, rather than write this useless post, but I am just too bored and there are no new fun applications to add on facebook.

I just realised the fun years of my life are behind me now. The whole no responsibility-party till you die years have stretched on, but now it seems it has to stop for the sake of maturity. It made sense to be 19 and to just live from saturday to wednesday to saturday to wednesday and so on. It was brilliant and I had a great time, knowing well that all my freedom comes at a price and so I will always be responsible in my own inane spoilt way which makes no sense, but still does. My closest friends moved out of town in the last year or so with the last one leaving last weekend. The old haunts don't feel the same anymore and yes I am suffering from painful nostalgia and very soon people will stop inviting me out, which is fine, but what am I to do with my brilliant existence. I just changed jobs, and I enjoy it, but boredom is setting in. Maybe I need to leave the city too, but for what. I hate taking decisions, I let destiny make them for me and right now everything is flowing smoothly.

Everyone is experiencing extremes, someone is job hunting, someone is passing out, someone is falling in love, someone is trying to get back, someone is secretly holding hands, someone is fighting, someone is crying, someone has an eating disorder, someone is studying for a dream, someone is sipping coffee, and I am just watching.

I am none of them. I am typing.

WTF

I am typing out a goddamn lame post here.

And I don't even know what it is that I am feeling to put in words.

Ok after ten minutes, I know.

I want to experience the extremes too.