Zen and the Art of Being High Maintenance

2012-01-26T19:33:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of clever writing in the world. It does not say much. It preens on a page, dressed in clever alliterations and metaphors. It does not change much either. It's purpose is to fill space, fly off bookshelves and magazine racks. I do not want to be a clever writer.

Inshallah, Kashmir

2012-01-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

Inshallah Kashmir : Living terror - please read disclaimer from ashvin Kumar on Vimeo.

Don't live in denial.

You can also read about Ashvin Kumar, the documentary filmmaker who made Inshallah, Kashmir here.

2012

2012-01-26T11:32:00.000-08:00

Somewhere on top of the long list of things I'm trying to sort out in life, is, ' STOP WASTING SO MUCH TIME ONLINE'. Given the octopus-like effect the internet has come to have on our lives, it is harder than you can imagine. At the very least, I can turn some of the time wasted online (on Facebook and while watching random, mostly awful television shows) into mental-yoga and utilize trash to write interesting things. At it's best, the internet is my library, museum, amusement park and directory.

Another resolution, sternly-made but barely-kept, is to write at least 1000 words every day. I won't subject you to all of it, but the hope is that for every 10,000 words of utter nonsense, I will write a few sentences that I can be proud of, and that you might carry with you in your head for a while. The hope is also that this public declaration will gnaw at me enough to keep me writing.

Here is something I wrote for Tehelka a while ago, about what happens to Facebook profiles when you die. (Morbid, but what is worse is the thought of dying while actually ON Facebook. Can you imagine doing something so utterly devoid of joy at the moment life is snatched away from you? ) The edited version of the story is available here

To Mourn, Click Like

2011 has been the year of electronic grief. An icon passed away, a Tiger burnt brightly and faded, the voice of love and a thousand ghazals was silenced, the Junglee broke our hearts, and last week, an evergreen hero decided it was finally time to leave. As each legend passed on, we became sub-editors and video-jockeys — anguished, aptly worded status messages and YouTube videos were our eulogies at the largest funeral in the world — on Facebook.
The new age equivalent to ‘is a noise in the woods a noise, if no one hears it’ seems to be — did it happen if it didn’t appear on your newsfeed?

It is hardly surprising in a universe of blue boxes that ‘Death’ also has a page on Facebook . The latest of the morbid yet kindly updates on the page reflects, ‘When the rich and famous die, the world seems to stop to pay tribute. From substance abusing musicians, philandering tycoons to scheming politician to deserving humanitarian. But doesn't the impoverished mother who struggles to raise a child deserve to have her life remembered too? But hey, I'm just Death...what do I know.’

The sentiment finds some resonance in Facebook’s prism of faux-celebrity-hood. News — global and personal — is shared, photos uploaded and tagged with feverish speed. As our communication and memories become increasingly virtual, so do our imprints on the lives of others. We may not pick up the phone to call old classmates anymore, but we are aware of each phase of their lives as it unfolds — vacations, promotions, marriages and births, much like we would read about and ogle at film magazines in the past. Given this careful documentation of one’s life online, the question arises unbidden — what happens to your facebook profile when you die?
With the many painful logistics that the death of a loved one forces upon us (of the body, of possessions, of wealth), deactivating a social networking account should be the least traumatizing. But a quick glance at Facebook’s ex-Chief Security Officer Matt Keller’s blog in 2009, announcing the company’s decision to ‘memorialize’ profiles of deceased people, will shatter such insulated assumptions. ‘Memorializing’ is essentially freezing an account, once Facebook is informed of someone’s death, so that no future attempts can be made to log in to the account, or access prior conversations the user might have had with his/her friends. What well-wishers can do, is visit the profile as a place of remembrance, write on the ex-user’s wall, leave tributes like songs, poems and photographs.

Hundreds of Facebook-users have commented on Keller’s blog begging Zuckerburg and Co to revoke the memorialization — as one comment by a heartbroken mother states — ‘it may sound crazy but the amount of work and life energy that goes into some people's accounts is priceless. It is a shame to lose this information forever.’

Then there are the profiles that escape mummification. Pia Mukherjee (23) lost her best friend Karan to a car-crash when the two were eighteen, and Facebook had just begun connecting the world. Karan’s profile continues to be ‘managed’ by his friend — ‘Ocassionally, he gets new friend requests from people who want to reach out to his family. But every year, friends write on his wall for his birthday and death anniversary, sometimes just to share some good news,” says Pia. In her review, ‘Generation Why’, an analysis of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network and Jaron Lanier’s book ‘You are Not a Gadget’ ; Zadie Smith expresses her misgivings about people who will write ‘missing you babes’ on a murdered teenager’s wall. She asks, befuddled, ‘Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?’

Fiza Jha (17), who lost her best friend Aarushi Talwar in the country’s most hotly debated double murder barely had a few hours to grieve before images of Aarushi and her friends at birthday parties began flashing on news channels. “There were pictures of us in group huddles, or in sleeveless shirts being shown on the news with captions about her sexual orientation. Aarushi was relatively inactive on Facebook, and we immediately realized they were being taken off our profiles. We had to delete every one of our photographs with her at once to stop the rumours. I barely time to look at those photos and think about her or what I had lost.”

The caution was not misplaced. In one of its many blundering shots in the dark, the NOIDA police chanced upon a message from one of Aarushi’s thirteen-year-old friends that said “Argh! I’m going to kill you!’ and insisted upon interrogating the child to see if she had motive. Another email, from Aarushi to her parents, apologizing for something she’d done which she’d never repeat again (going for a movie alone with her friends and lying about the fact that an adult was present — not the gravest of sins a fourteen-year-old can commit) was used to insinuate that she’d had sexual relations with someone, which her parents had found out about.

The fact that Aarushi’s facebook profile still lies buried in cyberspace (her last status update, three days before she was murdered — ‘Yippee! School’s closing!’) is testament to the fact that as her friends grow up, they like the idea of having a space, even a virtual one — where they can revisit the memory of the young girl they once knew and the conversations they shared. “I wouldn’t want that last bit of her to go away. I have know that she isn’t around anymore, but I don’t want to feel like she never existed,” says Fiza.

If the idea of Facebook-driven existentialism sounds fantastic, consider the death of 21 year old Gudiya at St Xavier’s college in Patna. Gudiya had been seeing her boyfriend … for a few years when her grandmother betrothed her to someone else. Enraged, he waited outside Gudiya’s examination room for an hour armed with a khukri, seized her by the hair when she stepped out of the hall and beheaded her. Dropping the khukri on the spot, he began to flee the campus. Eyewitness accounts claim that outraged friends and faculty rushed after him, thrashed him and handed him to the police. The remaining students filing out of the classroom, gathered around the body, held up their smartphones and began uploading pictures of the body on Facebook. News viralled and condolences began pouring in as friends of friends began to be tagged on the image of Gudiya’s decapitated body. ‘Love Aaj Kal’, the image was captioned.

It’s easy to dismiss digital tears. They don’t smudge your make-up and you can always change the tab if the death-updates get too depressing. One can only thank the universe that Camus wrote The Stranger before Facebook and Zuckerburg could memorialize mother’s death.

So You Want to Be a Writer

2011-12-02T04:03:00.000-08:00

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

---- Dear God, thank you for Charles Bukowski.

Being Naked

2011-12-01T21:52:00.000-08:00

The bodies of two women have been on our minds this past month.

First, there was Aliaa Mahdy, the 20-year-old Egyptian blogger who got us hot under the collar — in a self-portrait taken in her ‘parents’ room’ — Mahdy stands naked except for black fishnet stockings, red ballet flats, and a red bow in her hair. She stares defiantly at the camera, one leg poised on a stool, and writes, “When a woman is the sum total of her headscarf and hymen – that is, what’s on her head and what is between her legs – then nakedness and sex become weapons of political resistance.”
Closer home, adult film professional Sunny Leone (An Indian-Canadian by descent), was invited to the 5th season of reality show Bigg Boss — ostensibly to hike the show’s flailing TRP ratings. In a bigger tease than Pamela Anderson’s barely covered bosom from the last season of the show, Leone turned coy from the moment she entered the house.
While dailies churned out gleeful double entendres like ‘Sunny Side Up’ and ‘Porn Enters Mainstream’, Ms Leone herself has divulged nothing about her career on the show. Not only does she deflect questions about her work with maddening vagueness, but even more schizophrenically — speaks to the camera every time she is alone, telling the audience that what she does for a living is ‘our secret’, and that she is a ‘good girl’.

What binds Mahdy and Leone’s stories together are the familiar tropes of ‘restive’ young girls gone awry. While thousands supported Mahdy’s political statement on her blog, (some even posting nude photographs of themselves in the same pose); literally millions lashed out at her for ‘belittling the revolution’ through her ‘attention-seeking behaviour’. Stories of how her rebel-blogger boyfriend Amer Kareem coerced her into taking the picture began to be circulated to make her story more palatable to the public. It is evidently impossible for a young woman to want to take her clothes off in the glaring public eye, even if it is for a cause as important as her life itself — or in Leone’s case, just to earn her a better life.
Born to Sikh-Punjabi parents in Ontario, Canada; Leone, a pediatric nurse-in-training admits that her family threw a fit when they found out about her career as a pornstar. ‘They didn’t know the adult film entertainment industry is actually that – an industry,’ she mentions in an interview given prior to her entry on the show. “My father eventually told me to do whatever I wanted, but to do it well and with honesty. I wanted to do this work because the money was just so good.”
But even a hard-headed and unapologetic businesswoman — (Leone speaks of the 60-70 hour weeks of work she put in to launch her creative label, Leone LLC under which she writes and directs her unique brand of adult entertainment and produces merchandise modeled on her body parts), used to taking her clothes off for the camera, otherwise comfortable with the distinction between pornography and prostitution, familiar with the willful objectification of her body, must play at being an ingénue to be accepted by a mass audience.

While Leone’s shyness might be the result of kindly warnings from her half Indian-half Canadian family; a well-strategized PR decision to ease her entry into tinseltown, or both — a side of ourselves is being bared to us as we watch her red-faced, waiting for the pornstar to tumble out of the smiling young woman. In covering up the bodies and individuality of young women like Mahdy and Leone, it might just be our own voices that we end up silencing.

Why We Dance

2011-11-30T03:06:00.000-08:00

The music hit Shonan Kothari (23) about a year ago, standing in the juice aisle of a supermarket in London. A group of people who’d been walking around with shopping bags a second ago, burst into song for no apparent purpose. They were singing a ‘made-up’ song about juice, and before she could comprehend what the universe was throwing at her, it was over and every one was shopping again.
She discovered that such ‘happenings’ were not infrequent, and had occurred several times in the world before (the earliest recorded ‘flash mob’ was held in 2003 by Bill Wasik, editor of Harpers Magazine). Shonan finished college at SOAS, became a researcher at Harvard CSR and came back to Mumbai. And one fine day, the music came swimming back. “I’d always wanted to be part of a flash mob, so instead of waiting around for it to happen, I decided to plan one.” At it’s inception — when Shonan began by sending out an e-mail to 20 of her closest friends, who forwarded it to interested parties— the ‘mob’ had no political intention, no statement to make. Flash mobs have traditionally lacked political motive (as opposed to ‘smart mobs’, which are driven by specific intent to spread a message) — and are recognized more for their pageantry than an overarching message.
For the group of 200-odd people aged between 4 to 60 that met for rehearsals every week for a month, skipping homework, household chores and official errands dancing to Rang De Basanti only took on special significance once the date of the performance was decided (27/11, a day after the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai).
Four days before the event, Shonan and her core team still hadn’t picked a venue — when they finally decided on CST (as their other venues began to fall through) it was as if ‘a whole lot of different energies began coming together,’ says Shonan. The Mumbai police, the BMC authorities, the station officers and staff from Indian railways — watched Kothari’s 10 minute video presentation on flash mobs and unanimously loved the idea of it happening in Mumbai. “It was slightly insane — we’d be at the station late at night, and the station officers would be climbing up on poles looking for the best spots to place cameras for us. They were thrilled about playing the song on the railway announcement system. It wasn’t just our mob anymore, each of them had become part of it,” Kothari beams. At first, the sight of thousands of people rushing towards the dancers had Kothari more than slightly frazzled, but she soon realized that the good cheer of the dancers was infectious. Before she realized it, the original mob had doubled in size — even the distant fringe of he 500-strong crowd was moving it’s feet rhythmically to the music. What began with a surprise in the juice-aisle became something more. We dance; the people gathered in Mumbai seemed to say, because we can.

Plan Your Own Flash Mob: by Shonan Kothari

1.Pick a Venue: CST is a beautiful structure that offers a great indoor space and high footfalls, so that was my dream location for a flash mob. We’d also considered parks like Priyadarshini Park and other open spaces. It might make sense to short list a bunch of venues because some may not grant you permission.

2. Make a Presentation and Show Up Unannounced: reate a solid presentation on what a flash mob is and how it will benefit the venue in terms of publicity, footfalls, virality etc. I didn’t have contacts or appointments at the cop station, railway station or park, so I just showed up during work hours and made sure they listened to me. I soon saw that everyone was super co-operative – that I had no commercial gain from this made it easier – and I received permissions from almost everyone I approached. If you’re planning a CST mob, Mr Atul Jani, Senior Divisional Commercial Manager, Central Railways is the man you should be looking for.

3. Sort out Permissions: You have to acquire three different authorisations - from the venue, as well as the BMC and police. In case of CST, there were a million internal departments that had to grant individual authorisations as well – we even needed a separate permission slip to get a ladder on the premises.
4. Recruit Your Mob: In order to make my presentation attractive I lied about having 200 dancers on board. Since I lied, I had to make it happen. The best way to do it is send out an email to 20 of your closest friends, and get each one to recruit 20 more.
5. Swear to Secrecy and Find a Good Practice Spot: It’s not easy to get 200 people to perform routine dance practises in public spaces and keep it a secret, but we tried our best. This involved not using any social media pre-event and splitting up practise into batches. Priyadarshini Park at Napeansea Road provided their grounds for the same.
6. Rope in Experts for Less: If you are able to sell the idea well enough – it’s still novel in India – you can get cool choreographers and film companies to shoot the event at a subsidised cost or even for free! Ours was choreographed by Bhaumik Shah (he’s worked on a bunch of music videos and Bollywood shows) to the Rang De Basanti song because I figured you can’t go wrong with AR Rahman.
7. Blend In: The whole point of a flash mob is to look like people at the venue, in our case, commuters. No loud or revealing clothes, no garish make-up.
8. (You Could) Sell Your Flash Mob: Although we kept it under wraps, word got out to a few brands who approached us for in-mob branding. I chose not to do it, but you could.
9. Crowd Control: Where we failed was to control the crowd, who formed a ring around the first five dancers, thereby ruining the initially planned formation, as well as some really cool entries and exits. Make sure you take measures for crowd control.
10. Make it Viral: You should have a multiple camera set up at the venue to get shots from several good angles, do a quick edit and put the video online as soon as possible.

Good Day Sunshine

2011-07-04T17:16:00.000-07:00

I know there will come a day when I crave the peace of this morning. The constancy of my room, my dog's excitement just at the fact that we are both awake and that a new day has begun. I will miss the little things like picking the color of my teacup and thus my day (red). I will miss the yellow roses my mom left by my bed and her lasting perfume when she hugs me before leaving for a trip.

May we always remember the simple joys of life and the great loves they sustain.

Good morning.

2011-07-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

It is a strange thing to write. On one hand there is the arrogance of believing that you have something of relevance to say, that you are the best person for the job. On the other, you must be completely ego-less to become a sieve through which the world tells its story. My new favourite writer, Ray Bradbury in (his aptly titled book, Zen In the Art of Writing) asks that you wake up every morning and explode. Let loves and hates and mysteries seize you so when the words come, they do not stop. Learn your craft well so when there are words, there are also people to read them. He types twenty random words that come to his head the moment he gets out of bed every day. He never knows why he chooses those particular words, the answers become apparent only when in the course of letting his muse take over, the subconscious weight of those words gives a definite shape and form to his stories.

Bradbury's enthusiasm is all the inspiration I currently have. My muse is trapped under piles of clothes and books that I have no time to clear away. (I had a friend who used to cover all the disorganized and distracting piles in his room with bed-sheets so that he could avoid looking them. In the end, we sat surrounded by small fortresses of paisley prints and stripes and dots, unable to look at anything at all). My muse is wasted on weekends when I seek to escape rather than find her. (I convince myself that I will go crazy if I think about work all the time. But it is hard to love anything else right now). When I start to write my muse takes one look at the cobwebs of unpaid bills and unanswered messages chipping away at my confidence, and flies away.

Like a zealot, I stare at the ceiling or my computer screen repeating to myself 'bad writing is not a character flaw' or just an endless string of 'itwillhappen's. I marvel at the effortless ease of other people's prose, and only feel relief when I chance upon one of my editors bent over drafts of her own work, or typing-deleting-typing with a wild-eyed look in her cabin. It feels great to have written, but writing in itself is not pleasant. It cuts and cuts away at you until you feel yourself standing in the middle of the room in your bare bones waiting for someone to read you and tell you it's okay, you can go to sleep now, we can start this all over again tomorrow.

2011-07-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

Can love turn to poison? Can someone you once loved and wanted to spend every waking and sleeping moment with turn into someone toxic that you must avoid at all costs?
There are days when the phone doesn’t stop ringing and there are days when it doesn’t ring at all. Today began with insistent flashing red lights and turned into a deafening silence. Sometimes the weight of loneliness is like an armor that you must bear, to guard yourself from words that you are not ready to hear.
The boy called, demanding to know whom I’ve been with since he left me on the side of the road, broken into a million shards. I tell him that I didn’t notice there were other people in the world until he left but he does not listen. He asks why I am happy and how I stopped reaching out with a million tentacles of love. He says it proves that I never cared, that he was the considerate one all along.
Perhaps we must build our own myths to explain why a particular love couldn’t survive, in order to survive. I do not care to labor over the darkness I plunged in to when he left. It took everything I had to emerge out of it. I realize now why it is important to lock your heart away, and how as you become more of a person, you learn to feel more, to love harder, to let someone in to places you do not know how to extricate them from. I worry about how easy and mechanical it has all become — a blinking green light that says 'online', a lack of grand gestures, the sufficiency of finding a common song that you love with someone you may never meet again. It seems to him, and to everyone peeping in, that all it took was two weeks in a city that was not mine, and the arms of a stranger to change my heart. In truth took months to stop seeing the world closing down before my eyes, to stop seeing his face at every corner I turned. It took endless mornings of cold realization. Even the arms that I found respite in only offer temporary shelter.
The Gladiator is perfect in his carefully maintained distance because he is everything I need when I need it, and completely absorbed in his own being for the rest of time. He taught me how important it is to be selfish and ambitious while continuing to be kind. We share a childlike greed for each other but exchange equally friendly goodbyes. The most important thing that he taught me was that the very same habits, once endearing in the fugue of love, can turn you sleepless with irritation when you do not want to be tied down.
I feel poisoned for having loved. But hopefully that will pass with tonight.

Working through Blues

2011-06-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

The thing about being an 'adorable little black hole of need' as my friend Aporia describes it as that you push away the ones you really need for the ones that don't want you around. Right now, I just want to push away everything. I don't want to utilize my time. For once, I just want to be. In the competition for worst day of the week Monday has already raised the stakes with its PMS and people-induced headache, the annoying whispering of million little monsters and a copy that failed to rouse any sentiment. Nishkamakarmayoga is a state harder to attain on Mondays.

Thank god for wine and stereomoods.

Exorcising the Demons

2011-06-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

For years at a stretch I have been thinking in twos. The colour of my day was chosen by someone else’s mood. I read the books my lovers read (usually great, in the last case, none) and listened to what they liked. I planned my time around their schedules, worried about their dreams and worried more about how to make my future coincide with theirs. We spent hours discussing the essentials of our future bookshelves and bedrooms and dungeons. We blissfully skated over the details of how to get there from our current frantic, hormonal and newly-acquired adulthood. I never thought I was the marrying kind. But god almighty I was the falling in love kind. And how.
Always, the sensuous pull of the waves lapping at your feet draws you deeper into the sea. You let the currents pull you in because somehow, you feel like this is what was supposed to happen. The worst thing about writers and poets and people who live in their heads is that you can watch yourself heading for a train-wreck yet thrill at the wild romance of it all. That must be why there’s always a background score playing in our heads.
Sometime a few months ago, sitting on a footpath and weeping bitterly in six-inch high red heels and a black dress, I realized with shock what I had become. The boy and I had got into some inane but violent argument again. I was hurt because I had worn my nicest clothes for him and he hadn’t noticed. I was furious because when we entered some brightly lit five star hotel full of diamond aunties and champagne uncles, his friend rolled her eyes and called me underdressed, and instead of slapping her painted face I spent the night wondering how not to stick out like a sore thumb. Finally, he had refused to come home with me and left me at my gate, I tried to take a taxi to his house for some drunken reason but finally wound up on the footpath instead. The footpath is a highly fetishized meme in Hindi cinema. I could find a soundtrack for it, but this night was not the kind of film I ever wanted to watch myself in.
In college, everyone I knew belonged to the same city, or at least the same world. Outside the bubble of Stephen’s, I realized the difference between people who were ‘from Delhi’ and the people who live here. There was a gauche ugliness to the city that nobody wanted to embrace, unless they were very rich and somehow insulated. The city is divided into zones and occupations that define your tribe, and so that asinine question — ‘Where do you put up?” — is usually the only important one. Day after day, at work, at parties, at dinners, at a bar, someone who had moved here from south of the Vindhyas or south of France would ask — “Oh, so you’re from Delhi then?” accompanied by a knowing, pitying look. Frozen in that look was the osmosis they expected to spot, the qualities of a place absorbed by its inhabitants. I must be Delhi. Flashy, stupid, dangerous, lazy, unprofessional, and power-hungry.
Yet to Delhi itself, or at least to the glittering, perfumed, page-three variety in that five star hotel, I was all wrong. I had too many corners, too few diamonds, and worse, a boyfriend who was turning squarer by the minute. On that footpath, I realized I had become what I unequivocally despised in all literature and cinema — the hapless heroine who wallows in her misery, inflicting her miasma on everyone around, until you finally want to throw some cold water on her, tell her to stop sniveling and find a job.
Fortunately for me, I had a job. After that night, I realized it was actually all that mattered. I hadn’t become so daft in love as to believe I actually was what I wore or where I lived, but whom I was with had somehow become more important than what I did.
The circles that I occasionally inhabit tell me that Tehelka reminds them of a cult — too much has to do with the personalities and beliefs and mythologies of the people who created the magazine. For someone who imbued even the most mundane chores with a supernatural urgency all her life (if I don’t eat this last roti the earth will be besieged by an epidemic of acne, etc) it’s a perfect fit. Then there are those who think that unless you are doing very very serious writing, you are wasting your time. Every once in a while, they will pick up something slightly newsy that I write and congratulate me for having ‘finally reached the next level’. My craziest (and therefore favourite) ex once told me that my problem was that I cared too much about getting people to like me; at Tehelka I learnt to let that need go. Every day, I meet people who are incredible in their own quiet and boisterous ways. Some of them like me and some do not. It doesn’t really matter. I shamelessly admire most of them anyway. Somewhere between that footpath and my last byline, I found the part of this city that is mine. The tribe of women who fight hard to survive Delhi, whether they are “from Delhi” or merely live in it. The ones that wear what they want in spite of all the invisible rules, go where they shouldn’t and write what they feel. Women who guard their independence as fiercely as they scrape out time for their lovers. I found the perfect man too (let’s call him the Gladiator because I’m a sucker for pop-culture references and role-play) but he is conveniently far away and that is probably what keeps him perfect. More about that later. There are more important things waiting to be said ☺

Personal History

2010-09-07T02:33:00.000-07:00

Of all the reasons that I love Tehelka - perhaps the most important one is that working there helped me find a part of my father that I thought I had lost forever. Given below is something I wrote for a section of the magazine titled Personal Histories, where people share transformative events from their lives. Read more personal histories here. Illustration by the extremely talented and lovely Samia Singh.

.........................

My mother tells me this story about how my father would wake her up every night when she was pregnant, so he could discuss the day’s events with her belly. Editorial meetings and deaths in the country, I would absorb all of it in grim silence, punctuated with a kick every now and then. Apparently, on the day I was born, shrieking at the injustice of it all — he walked in, smelling of smoke and said, “It’s me. I’m here,” and I stopped mid-howl. My mother swears it was because I recognised the man who never let me have a peaceful night’s sleep, but when I look back, those nights played a big part in our story.

Like most daughters, I grew up believing my father and I shared a bond that time couldn’t steal. Even when my parents decided they would be saner if they lived apart, I could feel his presence in my bone-structure, my speech and our shared love for words. When we were together, stories would rise off streets at every corner, faces would acquire imagined names and histories.

One night, after a long dinner at the Press Club, with my father gently swaying on the thin line between ‘Talkatively Tipsy’ and ‘Sentimentally Sloshed’, I insisted that we return home. As we got into the car, he sensed my anxiety.

Grinning in his characteristically mischievous manner, he said, “As soon as we get home, you can call Ma and tell her how responsibly I drove tonight.” Always a co-conspirator, I grinned back. When we reached home safely in less than 15 minutes, my 11- year-old heart swelled with pride. We were getting ready to sleep when the electricity vanished. The heat became stifling, and he suggested a walk. I was excited at the opportunity for another adventure. We crossed our house, he held my hand and pulled me towards the inside of the road — out of harm’s way.

On so many nights, I lie awake and wonder… how could he have known? It had to be that strange bond between us. Pulling us in directions we couldn’t see, only sense. Barely seconds later, a car came speeding out of the black night, straight into my father. The impact sent him flying to the other end of the road. The car vanished just as fast as it had appeared. I was injured, but conscious.

People surrounded us, silently taking in the spectacle of a sobbing child, cradling a lifeless figure on the road. After what seemed like eternity, a car finally stopped. Due to my state of shock, I could not give them any details. But these strangers dropped us to a nearby hospital, having shoved a few hundred rupees in my hands. My father survived, but his injuries were severe. His brain was damaged and his memory significantly impaired. He would have a hard time walking. He wouldn’t write anymore. Sometimes I wondered if he even remembered me. The night had stolen my father, and I didn’t know where to find him.

Until a few months ago, when I surrendered to an inexplicable call within and became a journalist. One day after work, my sister called me, sobbing. “Papa’s had a seizure, you have to come right now.” Unspeakable panic. Cold fear as I walked down a familiar hospital corridor. I swallowed a lump as I saw him on the white bed, a frail figure, tubes in his throat. “We’re doing everything we can,” the doctor mumbled. “It’s a miracle he’s made it this far,” but I couldn’t register a word. And then there it was again. Our strange karmic bond.

I drew close to his bed, and he opened his eyes. I couldn’t mistake that smile in his eyes. As my step-mother removed the oxygen mask from his face, it became a full-fledged grin, “Congratulations on your first byline.”

Defunct.

2010-09-07T01:48:00.000-07:00

Writing for a living makes you self-conscious about words. You can hammer away at the keyboard for all you're worth but a dim part of your brain mumbles and whines: "Where is this going? Headline? Blurb? Intro? Summarize your argument."
I have no argument or point to make. I feel defunct. I don't feel like getting out of bed. I am pacing through empty rooms. I want my mother to say sensible things to me. I want my dad to be normal again - whichever version of normal we both remember and is closest to the truth. I want to feel happy and healthy and whole and I know I just have to shove myself out of bed into the shower into the world and it'll happen, eventually. I'll remember how to laugh and cry and have fun and make love and be myself, whatever that means.
For the moment, it just means horizontal.

If it's not in Vogue, it's Here

2010-07-17T07:39:00.000-07:00

Around eight months ago, the unbearable heaviness of the TV remote began to take its toll on me. I had to get out of the house. I searched high and low for a raison de etre, joined French classes, and traversed several dead-end roads in the hope of becoming a professional writer. One of the paths that led nowhere was a contest by Vogue, which offered the winner an internship and eventually a job with the magazine. Candidates were required to write an essay on any subject of their choosing, as well as a fictional account of an interview with any designer of their choice.
Clearly, and perhaps fortunately, I did not win. Fluff can get tiresome.
Writing the essay and interview was fun though, so I fell compelled to share them here (the self-indulgent whims of struggling journalists. Sigh.).

Random Essay:

They say one is not born, but that one becomes a woman.
I was born deep within a space-time continuum in the creator’s mind.
Specifically, in New Delhi, India.
Going by the number of plates we laid out for meals, our “family” comprised of two women – my mother and I. But I found, as fortunate people sometimes do, that the strongest bonds have little to do with facts and labels. They are formed in the warm hands that help you cross roads and feed you, in the comfortable homes that welcome you like their own when your mother has to go to work.
Through the tumultuous course of childhood, adolescence and finally in my worldly twenties, I have been surrounded by the most beautiful women. Admittedly, none of them possess perfect bodies (in their opinion anyway), and most of them sashay down the streets in clothes that spell comfort not couture.
Yet through their lives, each gave me a unique glimpse of her strengths and fragilities. Mothers, sisters, teachers, friends… taught me how to read voraciously, love unconditionally, drink without making a fool of myself, dance, fight, dress…and most importantly – how to live, and not merely exist.

When I had just about perfected the art of making a school uniform look casual - chic (Oh don’t raise that eyebrow. Even schoolgirls have inner fashionistas.), the wrought iron gates of St. Stephen’s College swallowed me whole.
In class I discovered and fell in love with philosophy. Outside it, I warily lurked at the edge of the fashion jungle. This was a different world. The women were more self – assured, daring yet relaxed. The almost – men were cool, funny, intelligent (!) and exciting in a way that made even legendary school heart-throbs seem like Ken dolls - *boring*

Once again, the women came to my rescue. In addition to the flesh-and-blood ones, there were now also the ravishing creatures of literature, cinema and magazines. Women are shape – shifters. It is as if we possess the ability to absorb colours, songs, words, silhouettes and transform every day. Through the incessant flux and flirtations of college, I graduated having learnt the value of a distinct personal style.

In the midst of the revelry at my twenty third birthday, I was struck by an epiphany.
What I was really celebrating was another year of being me. Growing older means keeping more of the things you like, IN your life, and letting go of the things that you don’t. So while there will be lots more dreaming, travelling, writing, yoga and playing with dogs in my future - laziness, negativity, obsessing about weight and smoking are going out the window.
Currently writing my Masters dissertation on “The Feminine Subject”, an exploration of the philosophy of Simone De Beauvoir; I continue to “become” more of a woman every day.

Designer Profile : Stella Mccartney

(Note - Given is a fictional account of an interview with Stella Mccartney, based on sources from the internet, past issues of Vogue and other magazines.)

“Stella Steel”

The first impression one receives upon meeting Stella is not that of the unstoppable woman of steel which she is reputed to be in the fashion world. Her baby blue eyes hidden behind trademark Chloe aviators complement her white t-shirt and blue jeans perfectly. I covet her boots and she informs me that they are “cool because they are cruelty free” - being made of a pliable plant product that looks exactly like leather. This is only the first instance I am reminded of her passionate - and in some circles, scoffed upon - insistence to avoid the use of fur or leather in her line. All the shoes are made of vinyl, plastic or plant material and all the bags and belts are of fabric or raffia. A strict vegetarian, her fans include the folks at PeTA, who named her “Person of the Year” in the year 2000.

As the days work begins to roll in, and the aviators come off, I begin to catch glimpses of the “steeliness” I have heard so much about. Her ex - boss from Chloe strolls in for a meeting and as Stella rushes off to change the song blaring from the sleek music system, I take the opportunity to pop Monsieur Moufarrige a quick question. Did he have any misgivings about the baggage that would come attached with his rebellious ex-designer’s last name? “Well it wasn’t really an issue.” he shrugs. “I thought her name was Stella Mccarthy when I first heard of her”
Stella, who returns to catch the last bit of this quick exchange, rolls her eyes. Whether it is because of her title or her clothes, sales of Chloe’s labels increased five times over when Stella joined ship. Stella herself has no misgivings about this - she is certain it’s about her clothes. “I would be a fashion designer whether my name was Mccartney or not”
After a few chaotic hours of models flitting in and out, and umpteen song changes later, she takes a break with a cuppa green tea. “I’m kind of a freak about music” she smiles apologetically. Seeing her finally relax, Vogue photographer Jason Bell begins to take those spontaneously intimate shots he is famous for. She is more self conscious than one would expect from someone who has been in the public eye from the moment she was born.
“My mother really tried to keep things as normal for us as she could. We went to a regular state school like everyone else .There was lots of cool crazy stuff of course, like hanging out with Mick Jagger as a kid and thinking that was totally ‘normal’” she laughs.
There are other signs of her incredible childhood spent with the flower-power generation. Her clothes are famous for their rockstar meets vintage chic glamour. She admits that she has never seen herself as someone who is “revolutionising women’s clothing.” She designs exactly what she would like to wear, and is inspired by the kind of stuff her mother - photographer and animal rights activist- Linda Mccartney wore.
“I grew up watching her mix up styles. Hippie meets high street fashion. She would wear a thrift store sundress with a vintage Chanel coat.”
In her vision of the future of fashion, she sees women walking in “jeans and a long sequinned shiny capes” or “a classic gown with a rocked out denim jacket”.
Mixing luxury with non luxury. Perfect for the recessionista, I note.

Her closeness to her deceased mother is apparent in her adherence to a cruelty free lifestyle as well. “I do not understand how a person who has just been bereaved can possibly eat meat.”, she says seriously.
I ask her to tell me about how she came to develop the fashion sensibilities she is now legendary for. Stella Mccartney first began designing clothes at the age of twelve, when she made her first jacket. Three years later she went on to intern with Christian Lacroix, working on his first fashion design collection and honing her skills at Savile Row for a few years.
She studied fashion design at St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, where she famously did not obtain a first division. But even more famously, her graduation collection in 1995 was modelled by friends and supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. The collection was unveiled to a Paul Mccartney song - “Stella May Day” and went on to become an instant hit. The brand new collection was snapped up by a London Boutique. But the moment of glory wasn’t free of it’s share of barbs either. She grins and tells me how some of her fellow students sabotaged a scrabble display that was part of the show to read “Daddy’s Little Rich Girl.”
But two collections later, Stella had the last laugh as she was appointed the chief designer of fashion house Chloe, following the fashionable footsteps of Karl Lagerfeld. And as history witnessed, Mccartney went on to completely revamp Chloe’s waning image with her youthful approach. Even then, she had a tough time working the “no fur, no leather” clause into her contract.
“But that’s something I just wouldn’t compromise on. They were left with no choice.” She smiles cheekily. It was true. Mccartney was already becoming a fashion force to reckon with.
In 2001 she resigned from Chloe and went on to sign a four store deal with Gucci - in Mayfair, L.A., New York and most recently - Hong Kong.
Which brings me to why I am here. Stella, in collaboration with Adidas, is scheduled to bring her Soho Yoga - Gym Wear collection to India in the summer of 2009. The line, which was unveiled in New York only last night, is functional and sporty with the classic Stella Mccartney twists - a ribbon here, a frill there, a cowl necked sports jacket - all designed to make women feel glamorous even while they are sweating it out.
“I am so excited about going to India with this line. In addition to the fact that through this line we are promoting an overall healthy lifestyle for women, I’ve always been fascinated with my father’s stories about his time down there!”

In Which I Employ Skilful Means to Explain my Silence

2009-09-30T02:02:00.000-07:00

I had no reason to return here save the most unlikely one. Someone I have never met or spoken to asked me to write again, and I felt that if I had ever needed an impetus to break my silence, this was it. You understand of course, that a silence cannot be explained in words. A silence simply is. It is absolute, not a lack of.

The reason I could not write in the past year was in fact a chimera of reasons:
I was happy.
So happy that I was afraid to close my eyes and reflect on the past even for a moment lest I open them to find that the present had turned into ash and needed to be tapped into a dusty bowl.

I was angry.
Our month of absolute togetherness had been nothing but a tantalizing glimpse of the way our lives could be, maybe a million years from now, provided we survived the onslaught of of uncertainty, doubt, distance, time and other villains that haunt the paths of lovers. I missed it more than I cared to acknowledge, and decided that it would be best to seal the memory away in a jar of brine for another day.

And finally, I was saving up all my words and energy for the dissertation that I had dreamt of writing all my life, or at least for the last five years. I needed to be silent so that when the time came I could produce thirteen thousand words filled with love anger hate sex fear submission and revolt.
In the nascent stages, when I had just begun to read all that I would eventually write about, I met a man in a dusty sunlit library who proceeded, without much ceremony to strip me bare and whisper things to me that I had only dared to imagine in the deepest recesses of my mind. He spoke to me of violence and shame and the look of the other that reduces one to becoming an object. Of the pleasure to be sought in the pain of being a mere thing, and the core of nothingness which pulsated within all of us.
I met his lover, who soothed my shock at his words while she taught me how I could use that nothingness to conquer being. It was a tense, interlocked ménage à trois. Sartre, Beauvoir and I trapped in a tiny room for three months. At the end of the ordeal, all else seemed trite and insignificant and completely coloured by the words of those two.The depravity of their union, which seduced multitudes before me and will continue to do so forever, gave words and form to a paradigm shift which had already begun to bloom within me.
I fear now that the dissertation was only the beginning of our degenerate affair. They have taken up permanent residence in my mind.

So I finally stepped forth from the gates that had held me in for five years, and just as he had predicted, the weight of my freedom crippled me with anguish. I dimly recalled whizzing past a church one summer afternoon and reading a bizarrely masochistic message on the prayer board:

"True freedom exists in His bondage alone."

I was free of my bonds. From this moment on, there was no predetermined pattern of events that would lend meaning to my existence while I proudly proclaimed this is not who I am, I am more than this, I transcend my facticity.
From this moment on, I am exactly what I choose to become.

Goa II

2008-09-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, when the first faint visuals of The Trip had begun to manifest in our minds, we had planned to spend the entire month simply soaking in Goa.
Slowly we came to agree that it might not be a bad idea to include some more actual traveling in our vacation. The list grew longer, and the point where our journey would culminate stretched further and further south... but the point of it's origin remained the same.

It was natural then, that while we delegated a maximum of four days to most places on our list... Goa should deserve an entire week.

Now we needed that time to shake off the Sonic Experience:

"In spite of the painfully obvious fact that we are it's only patrons in a month which will see scarce business, the staff continues it's bizarre behaviour. Everything seems to have acquired an increasingly insidious tinge since the Night of the Leering Wolves.

The Sonic is located right at the end of a strip of markets and hotels. An entire beach separates it from Curly's. This doesn't stop us from making a daily trip there anyway.

We spend as much time outside the guesthouse as possible.
The scooter and taxi guys yell out to us every time we cross the market. Every day, they have a new sales pitch :

"Hey, take a scooter...very romantic, sit very close, brake very good!"
"Take a taxi sir...your girlfriend get tired otherwise!"
"Too hot to walk man...why you not take cab today?"

But we like being on foot. Exploring, soaking, watching, smiling at strange strangers, gazing at the sea and trying to decipher it's undulating song.

Eventually, we get tired or too excited...I forget which, and return to our room."

On the fateful day we finally decided to abandon Sonic's sinking ship, I remember waking up feeling ...too far away.
Everything I knew was half a country away, intact only in intangible memories. An inexplicable sense of panic quivered just beneath the surface of my thoughts.
What we needed today was something familiar. Comfort food.
So Kshitij decided to go with mashed potatoes. How much could they possibly screw that up, we naively wondered...

Until a steaming bowl of potato mulch arrived.
Unsalted. Un-creamed. Mostly uncooked, too.

The waiter/cook responded to our aghast expressions by smashing a clenched brown fist into his hand, bizarre and ominous warning.
"I hate Indians."

Dr. Shankaran appeared,blazing in a theatrical aside in my head:

"Have you not read Fanon's account of negroes who would burn their skins with acid to bleach it white? Why would a man do something like this? Not because black was the colour of slavery...but because white was the colour of the masters. The colonized longs to become like the colonizer."

This was our first encounter with one of the myriad variety of mental roadblocks we would meet along the month. The futility of pointing out that he was, infact, Indian was obvious. So was the futility of staying put at the Sonic.
It took us forty minutes to pack our bags, pay our bills and trudge off to find better lodging. The universe with her twisted sense of humour led us straight this time, to the (now more significantly named) White Negro Guesthouse.

........................

You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever,
But you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun.

And the colors of the sea blind your eyes with trembling mermaids,
And you touch the distant beaches with tales of brave ulysses:
How his naked ears were tortured by the sirens sweetly singing,
For the sparkling waves are calling you to kiss their white laced lips.

And you see a girls brown body dancing through the turquoise,
And her footprints make you follow where the sky loves the sea.
And when your fingers find her, she drowns you in her body,
Carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind.

The tiny purple fishes run laughing through your fingers,
And you want to take her with you to the hard land of the winter.

Her name is aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell,
And you know you cannot leave her for you touched the distant sands
With tales of brave ulysses; how his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing.

The tiny purple fishes run lauging through your fingers,
And you want to take her with you to the hard land of the winter...

Tales of Brave Ulysses
Cream

"Beautiful, breezy Palolem. Lazy drooping palms on a crescent beach. I've loved you since I first laid eyes on you, a sunny winter day, many years ago. My once-sister and I tasted freedom in your wine then, and vowed to return when we were wiser and older...our minds and bodies mature enough to taste the temptations that lingered in your sands."

While the sister and I no longer shared lives, my love and I were rediscovering the world together. We had nearly perfected our strategy of picking out the most eccentric and interesting people to talk to. Along with this we began to develop a shared understanding of who to stay away from. But more on those later.

"We trudged toward the beach dragging our backpacks and our sore behinds. As the stretch of huts, abandoned shack sites and assorted rubbish cleared, we stepped into a postcard.
An old man sat on the sand,in tattered shorts and a grey t-shirt, building a sand castle and brushing damp hair out of his eyes. A beautiful woman with golden hair, ocean blue eyes and a silver nose ring bent over near him, playing with a frisky little beach dog.

I liked her at once because of the dog and the nose ring and the fact that she was barefoot. I think the blue bikini won her a few points with Kshitij as well. She offered to take us to the nearest establishment that would provide us with what we needed - a cheap and clean room.
Said establishment turns out to be a hut, or rather, an independent part of the hut which belongs to a man named Fransisco."

(Every time I say his name I involuntarily begin to hum
"If you're going to San Fransisco...
be sure to wear...flowers in your hair...")

"...Fransisco is the perfect example of Goan hospitality. He loves his family and he loves tourists. He looks after all his guests with paternal concern. Every morning he cooks and feeds us a complimentary breakfast of bun omelette and chai, while enquiring about our parents, our jobs, our lives back home. This is the first of the many times we are told that our situation represents a bit of a cultural cliff. Neither Fransisco nor the foreigners we meet seem to have come across such a thing in India before.

Unmarried and backpacking together as a couple? In the South?
Did our parents have no objections? Were we of the same caste?
Was it okay for me to wear these shorts where I came from?"

Answering the wide spectrum of questions posed, I found myself wondering where exactly the typical urban upper middle class family fits in. Where do we belong, in the Indian scheme of things?
Our march towards increasingly "modern" lifestyles and values is based almost entirely on what the world markets our way. Indian soaps supposedly based on the middle class seem sickeningly kitschy. The world of saas - bahus and balika - vadhus is not one we relate to, it is nothing like the world we inhabit.
But switch on F.R.I.E.N.D.S., Grey's Anatomy, Sex and the City and you'll find us swooning with empathy.
Show us Amitabh Bachchan in a movie about the eternal patriarch - who lives in the U.K., prances about with half nekkid chicks but delivers monologues on the importance of "parampara" - and you'll have us nodding along.
We are stuck in a phase of transition...between two classes, between two worlds
and neither claims us as their own.

.....

"In the middle of not-so-sunny Goa, I wonder what's going on in your head. It feels so stupid being insecure when we have the luxury of this entire month together, but I am tearing your silences apart to see what lies behind them.

The paranoia begins to flood my mind so easily it's almost predictable. Would you rather have made this trip with someone else? Would you rather have made it alone and hooked up with someone along the way? An image of you with the blonde Marta sharpens into focus and I realise this is a one way street to insanity.
I need sleep."

.....

The Morning:
"Divesting myself of unhealthy thoughts, I woke up ready to party today.
We have found an entertaining ally in the old man from the beach. He claims to be a Spanish playwright on a working vacation. He is always in search of, in the act of consuming, or recovering from whiskey.
Through our varied altered states of consciousness, we have a considerably hard time understanding one another. We know we are all very high and only wish to get higher, and in this purpose, we are united. He claims Kshitij and I inspire him, and every now and then looks up from the whiskey to blurt out a famous name at us.

"Iggy Pop!"
"Genet!"
"Buddha!"
"Juliette Binoche!"

If he finds even a glimmer of recognitionon our faces, his eyes light up and he launches into an incoherent monologue on said individual, punctuated with "rat-a-tat-tat"s "parrrrum!"s and "PWOOF!"s and accompanied by frantic hand movements meant to indicate everything from sexual tension to nuclear disarmament.

The Afternoon:

Kshitij (shaking me awake) : Baby, there is this dashing naked young fellow sitting under our bed and I don't know what to do with him.

Me : What a clever ruse. I'm still not getting up.

Kshitij (laughing) : I'm serious!!

Five minutes pass and I become aware of a strange scratching thumping sound under the bed. I'm jolted out of semi-sleep.

Me : WHATTHEFUCKWASTHAT??

I leap off the bed and grab a knife. Kshitij is still laughing. I pull off the sheets to see this guy

staring at me with an irate expression at being interrupted in the extremely private act of chewing his tail. In some time he comes out and sups on biscuits before leaving for the outdoors to perform his toilet. When he is done he scratches on the door and returns to his bed-under-our-bed, nodding at us in polite acknowledgment on the way.

The Night
A fire on the beach under stars frozen in space. The taste of smoky fish. Holding your hand while we stood in the ocean, wondering what held it in. Trying to be quiet in our room when we wanted to scream and then collapsing into laughter when Fransisco's voice tore through the darkness
"Marta, when you are going to get married and have babies?"
Going out in search of dinner and returning with cigarettes and biscuits which Hampu insisted on sharing again.
We leave tomorrow. Palolem has been different this time. I've been different too. The only thing that hasn't changed is that I still leave it hoping to return someday.

"The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure.It saves on hellos and goodbyes"

Goa I

2008-07-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

With a trip and a bang and a sprinkle of magic dust...I am finally home.

I had ambitious plans of blogging through the month. How hard could it be, I reasoned. You can access the internet everywhere in this day and age.
It's true that most places we went to had atleast one cabin sized dingy room somewhere that offered a portal into the Wonderful World Wide Web, but I simply found myself unable to convey any coherent thoughts. I wrote every now and then, interspersed with sporadic picture-taking; but I think I have only just begun to see form in the jumble of myriad experiences.

Which means I must, with immediate efficacy, find a beginning. Sort through entangled dreams conversations hills oceans stars smoky skies...oh yes. I think that's where it all began.

Smoky Skies:

Through the haze of smoke - blue black traffic smoke and blue grey smoke curling from our lips, we looked at the city spread out before us. It had it's days. Days when the rain would scrub it clean and the people would seem inane yet endearing in their familiarity. Simple, rather than stupid.
But today, Delhi was at it's snarling best. The heat had turned the people into a pack of wild dogs. They snapped and foamed at each other with bared teeth at every traffic intersection. Sped past vehicles a hair's breadth away just to see who would dare to try and stop them. A raging sun tore through blinds, vents, curtains, skulls and plunged it's burning hands inside everyone.

But we didn't care. We were getting out of here. My backpack felt like a ton of bricks but I felt stronger than I really was.

Looking back, I think my mother considered the trip an elopement of sorts. Everyone gave us knowing smiles and snidely muttered "honeymoon" when they heard the plan. Ma always looked especially disbelieving when I told her about all the other people we would meet at various points of our journey. Of course we were excited about being together...but rather than making a romantic getaway, I think we were both setting ourselves up for a test of endurance.
How would we hold up under the intense pressure of being alone together in previously unexplored parts of the country, across the language barrier, away from our music, our computers, our dogs, our friends and our comfort zones? How would it change us?

I couldn't wait to find out.
(All pictures courtesy Kshitij Bal, Magician Extraordinaire)
...............................

" First Stop. Anjuna.
The air buzzes with excitement here. Non stop. A futile attempt to reach Lonely Planet's highly recommended White Negro, we decide to stay at the Sonic Guesthouse. The room hovers on the thin line between quaint and plain weird. The bathroom however, decisively crosses that line into weird. The view is fantastic. We check in."

At this point, our land weary eyes are seduced by the ocean and we choose to ignore what are quite evidently bloodstains on the wall above the bed. Yep, welcome to Junkie Heaven.

"The food is tolerable to begin with but progressively becomes worse. Maybe the management is expressing it's disgust at having to serve two relatively innocent and unexciting guests from Delhi, rather than Russian men with cold blue eyes and pale women aglow with intrigue. Although I'm uncertain if these people would favour the Sonic even in peak season.

[Note - "Management", at any hotel off season here usually refers to a maximum of five waiters (the young turks) and the eldest thus most experienced of them all, who heads the show.]

The "eldest and most experienced" turk(ey) at the Sonic is a senile man of about eighty. Kshitij believes he is permanently attached to an LSD drip, but I am of the opinion he is in need of no drug except the television. Watching the last few overs of the IPL semi-final with him is like watching someone's needle induced moment of epiphany. His eyes shine, glazed. A toothless grin gapes at the centre of his face and his eyes well up with tears as the ball flies over the boundary. He throws up his hands and mutters a prayer to God. He nods fondly at the actors in advertisements. I cannot stop watching him watch T.V. I feel unbelievably sad and suddenly irrationally annoyed.
And then I realise, I'm the one being watched. It's past midnight and while we were playing Sinbad the sailor and his Ship-wrecked wench, watching the old man and the sea...we failed to pay attention to a local drinking session that had begun to fester beside us. There's something about the insolent leer in those bloodshot eyes. I don't want to play anymore. Even the old man begins to seem sinister all of a sudden. It's time to close this day shut. Back in room. Goodnight."

The Sea:

The ocean breeze carried echoes of spells cast at a time when you and I were mere dreams in the creator's mind. It drew us close with a voice so ancient we felt it in our bones. At night, the ocean is a primal temptress. Thirsty. A giant mouth slavering to swallow the world. The rhythm of the waves caressing land lulls you into senselessness, until all you want is to be one with that sound.

As if the intense natural beauty weren't enough, the Goan flavour is made unique by a population of natives and tourists whose culture is centered around having a good time,whatever the cost. Even in off season, there isn't a day when the booze doesn't flow, or when someone with dilated pupils isn't watching the sky turn into a mixing palette of neon colours.
It's also easy to see the point where things can start going wrong. Everyone seems nice and friendly when you're high. I start wondering if they're being nice and friendly because they know I'm high. Paranoid, much? Nothing a walk on the beach can't cure. On the way back to the guesthouse a man with greasy hair sings us a tune which I later learn is Goa's favourite song:

"You like hashish? acid? ecstasy? Some co-caine may-be?!"

We step over a syringe in the sand and walk into the molten sunset.

....................................

Into the Horizon

2008-05-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

And so the gruelling trial by fire, otherwise known as the Second Term Examination has come to an end. My deliciously unholy libertine, the Marquis is away on a pilgrimage (wonders never cease), my mother is asleep and the zen monk has abandoned me for the cooler climes of a room where the temperature remains at an unnatural constant. I do get the nirvana is samsara, and samsara is nirvana deal...and that therefore to the enlightened being it doesn't matter whether the air conditioning exists or does not exist(or both exists and does not exist, or neither exists nor does not not exist) but I do believe Bono is taking the ascetic life a little less seriously this summer.

In upcoming events the Marquis and I have planned a month of mayhem, travelling through the heart of South India in the month of June(or atleast the places we have heard of and our eyes now long to see).
I am a firm believer in not jinxing events by overtly sharing my excitement, but let it be noted that I have looked forward to this for the last two years. The stars are aligned in our favour this year- having evolved from a complicated friendship to a union the gods must dream of. So with the end of this month, we leave the city.
As always, apprehensions surround the periphery of my thoughts.

A month is a long time.

We are warned every day about the merciless and humid southern summer, or if we're really lucky; the unrelenting rains. About touts and thieves and sleazy hotel owners. We are reminded every day of the comforts we'll leave behind and everything that we'll miss.

As the days go by, we come to terms with the fact that the journey will also test us as us.
(I see visions of myself waking up in an empty room, bereft of his luggage and him)

These thoughts need to go back to the periphery now.
To truly venture outward you must be courageous enough to face what is within.

See you soon.

"Human, All Too Human..."

2008-03-29T04:28:00.001-07:00

What does one have to do to find inspiration where there is none?

All it ever took was one good class. A stimulating conversation. The right mix of herbs. A decision.

There are days when you wake up and you just know it's going to be a good day.
The muses will sing to you. There will be no more of this insipid inanity.
Today, things will fall into place. The endless torpor will be crystallized into a conclusion and placed on the Shelf of Things Learnt.
These days of inspiration are usually cloudy days, or windy nights. I find they provide a better backdrop to exorcising the seething restlessness that simmers just beneath unaffected exteriors.

(This however, is a hot still summer afternoon. Unquestionably the worst time of the day and year.)

But what IS it with my generation and constantly trying to appear unaffected? Bring on the lust and ugliness, the greed and the jealousy, overwhelming love and it's invariable concomitant - pain.
Why bother dressing your wounds and locking away your desires when all you are is exactly what I am?

You poor thing, did no one tell you choice is an illusion?

Speaking of the insidiousness of mass - marketed illusions, I must pause and take a deep bow at the imaginary camera that follows me around. For I am finally free of the Curse of Social Networking.

(---: THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE FROM STUDIO AUDIENCE!:---)

---:Sudden Flashback:---
Girl enters arched gates of the Carnival of Painted Faces / clicks on LOGIN while El Tango de Roxanne blares from the speakers.

The colourful signs scream at her
Social Utility! fun way to communicate! share your memories! find your old classmates and neighbours and all the people you ever fucked over and ADD THEM TO YOUR FRIENDS LIST!

Several of my friends are self confessed Social Networking Addicts, and I have nothing against them and the ways they choose to spend their time. Perhaps they are simply better adjusted, more fulfilled Beings and do not carry the twittering monsters inside their skulls that recite wall posts and news feeds to them long after the screen has been minimized. Maybe they have never experienced that feeling of emptiness and self - loathing that creeps in through your fingertips, as minutes melt into hours and you lose your self in the voyeuristic labyrinth of Someone Else's life.
Slowly but surely, you forget what you're seeing is only a carefully edited and well phrased version of a Real Living Person... who doesn't always spout apt and lyrical quotes, who isn't really adored by everyone who wishes them Happy Birthday and someone who probably doesn't like what they see in the mirror just as often as you do.

The monsters cackle in glee:
he never looked this happy with You!
(I never looked this happy with Him.)
Did you know they were together last night?
(Stars.Exploded.In.My.Head.Last.Night)
Has she wasted as much time as you today?
(Ha. She's deleted her activities for the day.)
she's so much prettier than you!
(Hmmm. true.)
so many more friends!

a better body!

a better life!

will YOU ever be good enough to go to college there?

No, not if I spend all my time on Facebook.

The Girl stabs the monster in it's scaly green flesh and runs out of the arched gates / Clicks Deactivate to the rambunctious Finale...

...into the arms of better days and healthier ways to channel inherently masochistic desires.

Birthday Blues

2008-03-09T06:16:00.000-07:00

According to my memory...

(...Which may just as well belong to some other person, whose brain was once dissected into two neat halves, one of which was placed inside me while the other lives on in it's original body. Are this person and I then the same? If all we are is the sum total of our past experiences, this fiction of the Self that we create by stringing together stories collected through the senses, and remembered through photographs - then, yes. Were this person then to meet me and fall in love with my charming physical exterior coupled with their mental being, would this be the ultimate act of narcissism or of self-loathing? But that's enough fantasizing for now.)

So where was I. Oh yes, according to my memory, I've always been the sort of person who starts getting excited about their birthday six months before it actually arrives. I usually subject my mother and anyone else patient enough to put up with this sort of idiocy to a monster countdown...

"FIFTY SIX DAYS TO GO! ARE YOU EXCITED? ARE YOU???"

And the strange thing is, the excitement was never anti-climactic, for me anyway. No matter what I did on past birthdays seemed just perfect. Or rather, it didn't matter what did, because the day just felt so fucking special from the moment I woke up.

Here I am. It's less than forty eight hours away from what I used to herald with as much enthusiasm as the second coming of Christ...and I'm about as thrilled as Immanuel Kant, and roughly as much fun to talk to (i.e. No Fun At All).
The idea that I am perhaps too old, jaded and cynical to manufacture the required amount of adrenaline for my birthday this year keeps seeming dangerously possible.

That can't be it though.
I don't feel that old. I'm still full of plans of world domination and the delights of debauchery like any self respecting Young Adult. Numbers never DID make that much of a difference to me (Stop with the hissing, Pythagoras.)

WHY then, to the chagrin of my friends and The Marquis (purveyor of endorphins and dopamine) am I unable to muster even a wan smile thinking about Tuesday? What is this mysterious miasma that is suffocating my usual birthday cheer?

I feel like asking you to tune in to the same bat-channel at the same bat-time, but the truth is I may never figure out what's going on and be able to offer you a cathartic resolution - of - conflict type post.

Agony Aunt services are welcome. Uncles are a bit creepy, but mustachioed Beatniks will do too.
Ciao.

"Sit back and enjoy the ride. Remember to scream if you want to go faster."

2008-03-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

As the eloquent and insightful Therapy caused me to realise, sometimes one must simply live instead of trying to capture life through words.
Sometimes words can do no justice to the simultaneity of exhilaration and pain.

But I finally decided to stop being a lurker on my own blog, and in cyberspace in general. After the silent perusal of at least a gazillion blogs I have come to the conclusion that I love the voyeuristic ones that give you random and intimate glimpses into peoples lives. Of course there are Blogs About Things, and they are especially helpful for the unhampered individual or group perspective they offer...but those aren't the ones I'd choose to spend my time savouring.

Perhaps the only reason we have any concern for the other is that we see the fragility of our own beings reflected in their moments of strength and weakness.I'd rather read about what the priest wrote when he questioned his faith at lunch today, why the mother felt like crying when her three year old made a fish face at her from the window and why you feel like you can never love again.

A smiling boy who's face I wouldn't have missed otherwise, died in a car crash a few weeks ago. Suddenly, he's tinged my thoughts a dull unwashable blue. Every time I'm in a car that picks up speed, a knot tightens in my stomach. I think about that smile, the few conversations we had scattered over the years and the last few moments him and his girlfriend spent together in the car...the image is searing because it's so familiar. Alcohol fumes laughter and your hair flying in the wind. The lights flash by faster and faster but you never once doubt the false sense of security that comes with being young and feeling free.

It still doesn't seem to make sense. Standing at the memorial service of someone I saw every day at school, I found myself clinging to the same strange metaphysical explanations I've heard Adults offer.

"Perhaps he was only meant to be with us for this brief time to teach us something."

I'm not entirely sold on the idea of a Divine Design. But I believe his death has taught me something. That life is precious and whimsical. That it is entirely what you make of it, yet it is frighteningly outside of your control.

Is it a normal reaction to death? This sudden lust for life? Wanting to hold on to every moment of bliss, boredom, thirst and inspiration?
I feel insatiable and unapologetic. I'd rather be brutally honest than speak in well chosen words. I'd rather be ravaged by Nietzsche's carefree, mocking, courageous warrior than mother the tortured existentialist.
Maybe it's because I'm turning twenty two in eight days.

Or maybe it's just spring.

Kerplunk!

2008-01-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

I believe it falls within the realm of propriety to wish people until about mid - January anyway, so I DO hope the year brings you whatever you may desire, or not, if like me, you like to keep your distance from objects of fantasy so that delicious veneer of perfection never wears off them.

Not that I didn't have the time of my life bringing the year in, but there isn't that much that's new about it, really. I still use too many commas and write self indulgent prose. I have decided to start answering my phone this year though - mainly because I am tired of being emotionally blackmailed by people (which incidentally, is my no. 1 reason for not picking up in the first place) but also because I need to Get Real and stop being a space cadet.

But, returning to the self indulgent prose, I've been scribbling this one on and off for the past few days so I decided to put an excerpt here. Be gentle.

"Deep within a space time continuum that existed within the philosopher's mind, lived a princess trapped in an ivory tower. So high was the tower, that eagles alone befriended her. Them, and an Extraordinary Golden east that fed on love and fresh air.
Every time the moon waxed, the eagles would fly down to earth and bring the princess a young man for company; as they knew young women of a certain age must learn the rites of love.
The princess's room was a hall of smoke and mirrors. Anyone who entered would be entranced at once by their own reflection, and so cunningly lit up against the bare brilliance of the sky, would believe themselves to be Gods. They loved the princess for the image of their selves that they saw with her, and standing beside them, each loved her as a different reflection of himself. Him in female form. To each, she was a different person.

A cynic.

An incurable romantic.

A whore.

A mother.

A fool.

And each, upon his return to the earth, would tell a different story. A memory of her that was carefully airbrushed like the pictures of women in beauty magazines. Blurred to fit. Faults dusted over. Statistics exaggerated. All in preparation for that single moment when it would be presented to an audience - a roomful of drunken friends, a jealous bride, an excited brother.

The princess in the mean time, watched on, confused. The eagles were worried. When would this end?"

Shubh Deepawali

2007-11-09T21:47:00.000-08:00

How unbelievably retro we look.
I can't believe that that curly haired creature I used to drag around, pretending he was one of my dolls, grew into THIS good looking young man. Amidst all the drunken revelry of the past two days, I found myself frequently misting over with love for my baby brother.
Our families have been inseparable from the time Ma helped a shy young man from Ranchi elope with the love of his life. A few years later, this Brat in the picture was born and I fell head over heels in love with my new toy. Then Brat no. 2 came along, and Original Brat and I went psychotic with excitement. The three of us tortured, entertained, abused and comforted each other to a point where the lack of blood ties ceased to matter. We were family, no matter what anyone said.

It's true that real bonds, the kind that last for the rest of your life, are formed in the inner vaults of your being. They have little to do with facts and labels. They grow stronger with time, and sometimes even with distance.
When it was just Ma and I, the Nairs opened up their hearts and their home to us and never let us feel like we were on our own. Chacha and Chachi are always around to listen to nervous whining, offer advice and to just pamper.
The Brats and I, if it were possible, have only grown closer with the sharing of new secrets - of heartbreaks and clandestine smoking, failures, regrets and the vanquishing of our demons.

May this season of festivity bring joy to you and all those you consider your own.

Endorphin Rush

2007-11-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

Waving my arms in the air
love, my love, got no care
no care, no, no, pressing my feet to the ground
stand up right where you stand
call to you and what do you do
laying back in a chair?
she's so high on the air
she's so high on the air...

I've done no work for the past three days. Floating around in the sun, basking in the drunk happy feeling of rediscovering the rush that comes with hearing a deep voice say your name with a smile in their voice.
It's nice not to walk around feeling like rejected goods, as if there is something fundamentally wrong with you. It's nice to have someone else's over-sized sweatshirt for cold auto rides. Anti-feminist connotations aside, it's even nice to be called "babe" every once in a while.

There are so many images and versions floating around out there about what interactions with the opposite sex should be like, that you find yourself trying to straitjacket and label every aspect of an essentially fluid relationship.
To hell with the "Is He The Right One?" , "Where Is Your Relationship Going?", "Does Your Guy Get The Real You?" type Cosmo bullshit.
There is no such thing as the "Right One" (You should be glad to know Plato never did say that crap about "love is finding your other half"). A relationship is not a linear progression towards some particular point. The "Real" me? Don't even get me started on that one. Unless you want to read a 3000 word essay on how the world is an illusion (Jagat Mithya), Brahman is the only truth (Brahman Satya), and you are that (Tatvam - asi).
There are friends and lovers and people who used to belong to those categories and then just became a part of you. Why would you WANT to put them in neatly docketed folders?

Syd Barrett's surreal, magical - yet - laced - with - inanity descriptions from "The Madcap Laughs" do better justice to this winter's sudden warmth. Here's to a great something.

Seem Familiar?

2007-10-27T02:35:00.000-07:00

Read about Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps here.

Sting channels off air in Ahmedabad

Saturday, October 27, 2007
08:52 IST

Ahmedabad: The state government on Friday stopped cable TV operators in many parts of the state from beaming Aaj Tak and Headlines Today.

These channels had, since Thursday evening, been showing excerpts from a sting operation which claimed to reveal chief minister Narendra Modi’s connivance with the rioters in the February 2002 carnage.

In Ahmedabad, cable operators received written orders from District Collector Dhananjay Dwivedi to block these channels.

The order said the channels were “depicting visuals and statements” which did not conform to “the programming code” and thus violating ‘Clause V of the Cable TV Network Regulation Act, 1995.’ In most other parts of the state, the police verbally directed cable operators to stop telecasting the channels.

The Clouds

2007-10-25T05:37:00.001-07:00

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
- Confucius

Wikipedia informs me Confucius worked as a shepherd, cowherd, clerk and book-keeper.Also, as a child, Confucius was said to have enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table.

Kinky.

Interesting digressions deserve another blog.

Returning to the matter at hand - I'm not sure which of these jobs it was that Confucius loved so dearly, but I think I see the man's point.
Technically of course, academics isn't a job...however to paraphrase the eloquent Justin Timberlake:

"You see these shackles baby...
I'm your slave"

The past four years have witnessed the systematic destabilization of my entire being.

The seemingly solid edifice of "truths" taken for granted, crumbles to the ground in a cloud of dust upon the feather-touch of a closer glance. The effort required to let your self be decimated, and to then recreate a skeletal system of thought is colossal. Even as you take your first shaky steps towards a deeper understanding, the everydayness of the world constantly threatens to swallow you whole. Technicolour panoramic views of a glossy, unexamined (and thus flawless) reality seduce you with their naivete.
Pop art, pop wisdom, pop spirituality...when information parading as knowledge is just a few taps on the keyboard away, why bother to delve any deeper, right?

And then there are other minor glitches along the way...the top accusations hurled at philosophy students in particular and pretty much anyone who is - for the lack of a better word - possessed by their area of study, are :

1. "Pseudo Intellectual" - Although I've never understood the blurry line that divides the realm of "pseudos" from the "genuinely" intellectual. Grey hair, perhaps? Or balding heads (even better)? Surely our worthy detractors wouldn't make such an obviously ridiculous generalisation?

2. "Pretentious" - Ugh.

3. "Aloof" and / or "Snobbish" - Honestly, there might be some truth in the aloof bit. But rather than being produced by the notion that one is better than the rest of the world, it's produced by a conviction that one is sorely out of place in a world which after a point simply ceased to make sense.

4. And finally, if you're really lucky..."Crazy" - I'm partial to this one. Every one I love and respect is a loon in their own right. (No, that doesn't translate to "I love all you crazy people out there". If you're a psychostalker and are planning to contact me after this reading this, don't bother. I won't find you oddly charming and want to exchange neuroses over a glass of wine.)

The exact reason why I signed up for this lifetime of mental contorting to begin with is a bit hazy, but I have to say it was the best decision I ever made.

Of course there is the unlikeliness of ever getting an actual job.

Hmmm.

Screw you, you and you. (You however, are kind of okay)

2007-10-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

There's nothing quite like releasing inner rage to motivate yourself into producing results.

That Eminem dude has a point.

Eros Turannos

2007-10-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

("Tyrannic Love")

- Edwin A. Robinson

"She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost. --
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed of what she knows of days --
Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be, --
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen, --
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven."

Freaking brilliant, this.

The Trials and Tribulations of Geekdom

2007-09-22T16:08:00.000-07:00

My comatosed computer is finally back from SuperComputerMan's Computer Hospital for the Technologically Challenged. Apparently someone threw the computerised equivalent of a rock at it's Windows, and it was attacked by a Trojan - the virus, not the contraceptive.

I'm afraid I simply must pause to wonder why exactly a contraceptive is named after the devious method employed by the Greeks to gain access to Troy. I honestly doubt anyone mistakes that for a harmless peace offering, or is surprised when amidst the drunken revelry, the "Greek soldiers" come rushing out.
If you ask me, the manufacturers have clearly never had an honest amorous relationship in their lives to feel the need to resort to such devilish trickery and "Lay siege" to Troy.

But returning to SuperComputerMan, who is admittedly a magician when it comes to dealing with any sort of computer related chaos... Is it not possible, that like the darker side of all super heroes, SCM's brave, "cool-geek" facade hides the heart of a voyeur? What if the nights I spend anxiously waiting for my PC to be returned to me are nights that he spends waltzing through the corridors of my virtual memory?
Fuck. He probably knows every single thing about me.

Alright, I'm done being paranoid now.

I've done little in the past month except study obsessively (and still not enough), get maddeningly shpeech shlurringly drunk, stay awake for days then pass out for days and mope about my mother being away. I did get a haircut against my better judgement which I suspect makes me look like Amelia Jane. (I can't believe you don't remember her.)

But no, the haircut doesn't come with the ability to make snakes emerge from people's posteriors.

The first term paper I wrote for class was a miserable failure. Alright so maybe not a complete failure, but it certainly didn't make ASR swoon at my brilliance. This was particularly distressing because:

1. The paper was on Greek Philosophy.
To better explain the import of this; I have often - and not necesarily when inebriated - considered naming my child Socrates, Diotima, Dionysus (alright, that time I was drunk)etc. Reading fragments of Heraclitus and dialogues like the Symposium has the same effect on me as SRK's six pack.

2. The paper was on Love, and how it liberates you from the bonds of ignorance. (Oh sod off with your cynical scoffing.)

3. ASR, aforementioned prof, is the sort of demi - god who listens to Nietzsche when he jogs, speaks five languages, is passionately devoted to fighting for the rights of the underprivileged students of DU, and in short turns all cynical scoffing into eulogy-singing. Even in sky blue trousers and sunshine yellow ties he makes you swoon with every artfully phrased idea (Gk. eidos), witticism and smile.

And so many a day was spent gazing drunkenly into the depths of glasses of alcohol and telling anyone who would listen that the gods of Philosophy had spurned me. Sober moments were spent planning the details of how to buy myself an auto rickshaw and obtain a license (Dude. Fleecing the public is the most lucrative career in Delhi). Somehow these things always happen when ma is away, and living in a theatrically messy house adds to the sense of profound tragedy.

Fortunately for me, and all those that I exhausted with my tale of woe, ASR is not just the ubermensch but also a considerate teacher who believes in giving students a second chance.I got an extra week to tighten my argument and the result was immensely satisfactory, both because it hiked up my marks and prompted him to call my paper "very romantic!".

On that happy note, I leave to have chai with ma.
The song, as songs often do, eerily encapsulates all the inner turmoil.

Blah.

2007-09-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

We sit around the table as if nothing’s wrong. Ignoring each other’s gaping wounds. Someone tries to smile. Our wounds bleed. Slowly dripping down to the dust, the blood mingles with our abandoned dreams.
We are scared. Unsure. Each one as weak as the other, but acting stronger than everyone else. Someone cries out in pain. We shift uneasily in our chairs. Light up so the smoke numbs everyone’s senses. So we can no longer smell the acrid scent of our insecurities.

What is this strange game we’re playing? Why do we act oblivious to each other’s pain? Why do you pretend you don’t know what it’s like to love me and watch my eyes unfocus in ecstasy?

Fuck this. Everyone seems insane with their strange walls and invisible boundaries and obvious anguish. We don’t need a saviour.
We need to stop being insulated.

Tagged Again.

2007-09-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

Rules:

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog to let them know they’ve been tagged.
Eight random facts about me:

(This is harder than I thought. My mind is going awry.)

1. I like the word awry.
2. I might be the laziest person alive. Really.
3. Rain makes me insane.
4. I hoard bits of the past.(As if bus tickets and faded flowers ensured happy endings)
5. I don't answer calls because I like being by myself.
6. I lie when asked why I don't answer calls.
7. I love black ink and fountain pens but never end up using them because nothing ever seems to merit the occasion.
8. I'm sickened by rabbits.

If you read this and have a blog, consider yourself tagged. Leave a comment so I too can marvel over the Top 8 (not) random facts about yourself that you have chosen to reveal on the World Wide Web.
Love.

The Philosophical Society

2007-08-15T01:00:00.000-07:00

"This is not a pipe"

Male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, undecided, indeterminate, rich, poor, "only have enough money for a beer" , liberal, radical, Left Wing, "Right is Might is right", have something to say, just want to listen, have so much to say that words fail you, young, old, tall, not, beautiful but it matters so little.

We gather in a circle every Friday for samosas and chai. It is the truest example of freedom I have known.

Of Mice and Men

2007-07-11T03:55:00.000-07:00

They're back.
Tiny feet scuttling around in the dark. Chittering sounds made in that excited, conspiratorial tone that only the small and very ambitious have(Napoleon?). I could sense it even before I saw one devouring my copy of Machiavelli's Prince. Plans of world dominion were afoot, and my home was the all important academic research centre (that serves snacks, courtesy the Picky Peke who enjoys strewing the house with rejected Marie biscuits).

The other day, I tottered into the bathroom at 3:30 a.m. to find one of them enjoying an early morning swim in the "comfort station". I'm ashamed to admit it, but I yelped.
Ma appeared like Magic. Hair all over the place, pillow creases encoded on her cheeks, but still coldly and unfalteringly logical. She flushed.
The mouse, stunned that his serene dip had now turned into a minor cyclone, was chittering more furiously than ever. She flushed again.

I did rescue the swimmer with a toilet brush, but this can't go on.

"But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!"

Little did Robert Burns know how much I've been "guessing and fearing" all day. I have to face an interview to apply for my M.A. tomorrow. Philosophy interviews, especially with Dr. Tankha are as unpredictable as those temperamental zen masters. there is no way to prepare yourself for the onslaught. I could be asked anything from "What is a synthetic a priori proposition" to "Would you let Schrodinger meet your cat?". The past three years seem to have been wiped clean off my mind.
Eh.
I'd better go to sleep now, lest I appear to be even more like a drooly idiot tomorrow.

P.S. WTF is This??? hahahaha
excuse me, I'm Hysterical.

Waiting.

2007-07-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

To step out and be soaked in rain.
To find a moment so complete that my thoughts no longer flow with currents of the past. To wake up to a day perfumed with promise, to sleep sated.

For the water to set me ablaze.

Going To the Mattresses

2007-06-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

The thought that was just a vague, nagging whisper at the back of my mind has finally burst forth in all it's ear splitting, guilt inducing glory.
It's a Mastercard advertisement gone wrong. Everything around me seems to be wearing a price tag, and there's no warm fuzzy end this time. I'm sitting in a house full of practical and whimsical expenses, and the voiceover at the end sternly declares

"Your contribution, Nil."

So this is how it begins. One day you're just a college kid getting high and then suddenly you realise that freedom isn't about waking up at one everyday, but about being able to make every day count.

No holidays on the beach until I can pay for them myself. No staring at "curriculum vitae" with a lamb-to-the-slaughter expression. At the cost of great injury to my reputation, I must admit that lounging about is more fun when you really deserve a break.
It's time to see this Real World that they keep going on about.

Dear God. Please don't let me turn into a Square.

Sounds and Silence

2007-06-10T18:48:00.000-07:00

Why does music cut so deep? Why do words burn and images haunt and tunes torture?
How does the "perpetual elsewhere" of a song manage to fill a void that is so real?

The city is turning into a desert and i'm more convinced everyday that this is my private hell. Been falling in love with a song a day. Old favourites that feel like home, new sounds that tease you with the unpredictability of their arrangement, songs that sound so familiar they feel like they were stolen from the crevices of your soul.

Check out About Rain by Sequoyah Prep School.

Why do I like this one?

It sounds naive.
Sometimes I am too.

On a Different Note

2007-05-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman, is yummy.

The Demons Within

2007-05-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin 4

One of the occupational hazards of being human is the incessant rationalizing. I wish I could Switch the Voices Off sometimes and just surrender.

Have you seen A Life Less Ordinary? Quirky film. At thirteen it spun me off my pivot. Well, at least this bit did :

Celine: So you're telling me that successful relationships... are made in heaven?? Not founded on the daily practicality... of two people being prepared... to tolerate the imperfections of one another?
Robert: It's not successful relationships, Celine. It's love. And it comes from a strange and wonderful place... that we don't know about.
Celine: So you also reject the idea that love is merely an emotional adaptation to a physical necessity?
Robert: Completely.
Celine: Are you serious?
Robert: Fate intervenes in people's lives. In ours, for instance. Fate brought us together. It kept us together. We were destined for one another.
Celine: Fate had a pretty strange way of making its point.
Robert: But that's part of the beauty of it. It's inexplicable, unpredictable... and absolutely beyond control or understanding.
Celine: But you nearly got killed.
Robert: But I didn't... and here we are.
Celine: Do you have any substantial evidence to back all this?

Robert: None at all.

Celine: And you realize that it's absurd and irrational?

Robert: I know that.

Celine: Then why do you believe it?

Robert: Because, Celine, I'm a dreamer.

Celine: ....well, I guess that makes two of us.

Bleh. Stupid Effin' Movies.
If only life were that perfect. What I'm seeing at twenty one is a generous helping of love with a delicious side dish of false promises, jealousy, temptation, delusions, insecurity and other less ordinary words that chill the soul. When the Other Woman is a lingerie model, you might as well fold your cards, quit the table, go home and put a fork through your eye.
No i'm not blinding myself yet. Definitely considering moving to Columbia and restarting life as a peddler of vices though.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - The Zephyr Song

2007-05-13T06:54:00.001-07:00

FREE!!!!

2007-05-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

1.enjoying personal rights or liberty, as a person who is not in slavery: a land of free people.

2.exempt from external authority, interference, restriction, etc., as a person or one's will, thought, choice, action, etc.; independent; unrestricted.

3.able to do something at will; at liberty: free to choose.

4.clear of obstructions or obstacles, as a road or corridor: The highway is now free of fallen rock.

5.not occupied or in use: I'll try to phone her again if the line is free.

6.exempt or released from something specified that controls, restrains, burdens, etc. (usually fol. by from or of): free from worry; free of taxes.

7.unimpeded, as motion or movement; easy, firm, or swift.

8.not held fast; loose; unattached: to get one's arm free.

9.not joined to or in contact with something else

10.acting without self-restraint or reserve: to be too free with one's tongue.

11.ready or generous in giving; liberal; lavish: to be free with one's advice.

12.given readily or in profusion; unstinted.

13.frank and open; unconstrained, unceremonious, or familiar.

14.unrestrained by decency; loose or licentious: free behavior.

15.not subject to special regulations, restrictions, duties, etc.: The ship was given free passage.

So this is what being upbeat and cheerful feels like....mwwwahahahahahahaah!!!!!

Chick Lit and Being Chicken About It

2007-04-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

After having been immersed in the Vedanta Paribhasa, the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and The Sensuous in Indian Art for weeks, I decided my mind needed to unthink for a while. You know...float, not swim. Or is it thwim, not think?

About a week ago my sympathetic sister lent me a pile of Archie Comics, perfect for "break reading" as she calls it. Anything more gripping would have led to the temporary yet fatal abandonment of my books. And anything less gripping would have made dying seem like a good break activity again. Break reading, as she, at the tender age of thirteen correctly surmised, must be frivolous. Preferably, with a colourful cover that shows Cheryl Blossom in a tank top asking Archie's mom if he can "Come out and Play".
So in fits I would absorb myself in the world of Riverdale with it's endearing characters... who with the passing of time began to appear highly dysfunctional and clearly On Drugs. (No, it's not exam stress.I'd spend more time on this theory, but I'm sure it would only be stating the obvious.)

Until one day, the pile of comics ran out. And breaks became, once again, a dismal time that consisted of walking around the house (atleast when Bono chose sleep over me) with a glazed look and reading about random things on Wikipedia (check out this useful bit of trivia Adi directed me towards. Might save you from making a cultural faux pas someday.)

The television is evil. I try to avoid it's hypnotic stare as far as possible. It creates a void in your soul and leaves your eyes feeling sore.

Finally, after another morning spent ransacking my room for reading material with just that right level of intensity, I found a Book...(mind goes into flashback mode)

Sister (grabbing Book from shelf)- " You know what else you should read? This Book. I love the author. She writes like I think. But it's really interesting...so maybe I should give it to you later?"

Me - (making polite, snobbish noises) "I don't have time to read fluff when I'm reading about the Categorical Imperative and it's relation to the Bhagwadgita. But I'm sure it's lovely."
(P.S. The Categorical Imperative is not as complicated as it sounds. But it sounds complicated enough to make ME sound mysterious and complex)

The next day, when my sister was away at school and I was leaving my dad's house, I picked up the aforementioned book and absently put it inside my bag. Alright, not that absently. I can't make any intellectual excuses for it either. The Book is Hot Pink.
I cannot resist Hot Pink.

I had an hour to kill in the morning before I started going at my books. So I picked up the Hot Pink book, by a woman called Meg Cabot - unaware at the time that this was one of the writers Chick Lit Thief Kaavya Vishwanathan rather blatantly plagiarised.

"Avalon High" tells the story of a girl who moves to a new city, joins a new high school and falls in love with the Alpha Male of Avalon High, only to discover that (surprise!)he has a girlfriend. Strangely though, A. William Wagner is mysteriously drawn to Elaine (the protagonist, who considers herself horribly unattractive, especially when compared to William's main squeeze) and "Elle" (as "Will" calls her) finds herself in the midst of a raging soap opera involving William, his step brother, his best friend and the perfect girlfriend (yes, the girlfriend is a cheerleader. Yes, Elaine is the smart one. Yes, she gets yummy William, who I think I've got a bit of a crush on.)

Cheesy? Predictable?
Not entirely. Avalon High roughly runs parallel to the events leading up to King Arthur's death. I kid you not. The "A" in Will's name stands for Arthur. He's betrayed by his best friend Lance (remember Sir Lancelot?) who is "scamming on" William's girl Jennifer (Yup.That's todayspeak for Guinevere) and is finally exposed by Marco, his evil half brother (Mordred's cooler, tattooed and pierced counterpart).All the events in the story are choreographed by Elle's somewhat batty Medieval History teacher, Mr. Morton (Merlin?) who ends up being unmasked as a member of the secret Order of the Bear, a group of academics who believe a King Arthur (in this case, Will) is re-born in every generation as the power that must fight the advent of the Dark Age.
Meg Cabot manages, through the guise of her story about Elaine's troubled love life, to narrate a history that most thirteen year olds, given the choice, would rather have eaten glass than read. Each chapter also begins with a verse from Tennyson's "Lady of Shallot", as Elaine is believed to represent Elaine of Astolat (until the twist at the end, when she ends up being another character who was pivotal in Arthur's life.Borrow the book from my sister. Or read about King Arthur starting here.)

Actual substance underneath the fluff. AND with a Hot Pink cover to boot.
Chick Lit Rules.

Umm...I'd better get back to studying now.

*#@&##@@@!!!

2007-04-26T01:58:00.000-07:00

I hate bright hot still summer afternoons when you have to stay fettered indoors with the incessant drone of the air conditioner and when your brain won't function because it feels like it's turned into marmalade.

I hate the panic that reaches a crescendo in my head every half an hour because i'm not studying and then dissipates into thin air because I can't.

I want to stab someone with my pen.

My recently acquired friend Morg the Orc thinks I represent the figure of urban discontent, at odds with nature as well as society; trying to cure my ills with just the right mix of herbs and technology.
I love Morg but he's likely to get stabbed if he continues along this vein of detached dissection.
"Imagine yourself in nature's soothing embrace" he says.

I know there's a fountain pen with a sharp nib somewhere here...

fourmoredaystogo.

In Absentia

2007-04-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

The somewhat melancholic, contemplative nature of this blog has been brought to my attention and has bothered me for a while now.
I logged in wondering if I could perhaps make an attempt at being upbeat and cheerful today.

It seems unlikely.

Serious recharging necessary.
In time.

But for now, the eccentricity of Tori Amos makes me smile. Louis takes me on walks along moonlit cobbled paths, and Aretha sings me to sleep.

All the while pages and pages of information are sifted through and absorbed in silence. Angst-y writing in black ink appears on clean white sheets. The breaks are filled with Bono...always Bono, never people. People are full of complaints and suggestions and other distractions. Bono is self sufficient in dealing with his own psychosis and only offers love.

A boy who once glittered like gold now lies in a drawer of faded letters. After waiting years and years for him to offer an excuse for his prolonged absence,just so that I could go back to The Way Things Were, I realised that I know how to read silences just as well as words.

Speaking of which, I must return to my analysis of the silence of the Buddha.

A High

2007-03-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

The world is turning topsy turvy again and it feels so damn good the past fades away like old perfume and now is warm with the scent of anticipation.
solitude and mountain air and ocean breezes and liking being in my skin. restless summer afternoons that taste so familiar and the tingle down my spine when I meet the unfamiliar rest-of-my-life.

A Low

2007-02-13T14:09:00.000-08:00

"People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down
When you're strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name
When you're strange..."

I want to believe you.
When you tell me you're there for me, and that everything's going to be fine.
You want to help, I see that. But as you sit in front of me mumbling platitudes, I only float further away from you. All day long I suppress, trivialise, vent, pretend, distract myself... but the darkness in the vault of my thoughts is all consuming. It grips me with cold hands and whispers my worst fears until it's easier to just sink in to this feeling of despair.

Scarred.

2007-02-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

By the times I have loved and lost and by wanting to love again.

By being worthy of desire and being enslaved by it.

By believing people become who they are by the choices that they make.

I don't want to listen to your problems and to help you out. I hate you because you've made me hate myself. For some reason this feeling that's existed as long as I have, refuses to be erased. Love leaves permanent stains in your mind. I try to rinse you out but instead I find myself bereft of happy memories, childhood, strengths and beliefs.

I hope the pain you've given me takes yours away.

La Naus`ee

2007-01-30T01:46:00.000-08:00

Perhaps those who choose to taste bliss before their time is due must also accept the intermittent nausea that comes with it. Perhaps the world of the aesthetically perfect or the heart achingly profound is inseparable from the sickening stench of the real.
I am afraid.
I am burning out too soon…

…like a candle flame in fast forward. Destroying it’s own being in it’s attempt to exist.
I wonder silently if you can hear the desperation in my breathing. I know it’s wrong to wait for you to rescue me, but I sift through your words searching for a glimmer of hope.

“The human race is such…” you say. Then you remove your spectacles, clean them gently and continue.
“…We move steadily, inexorably towards our own demise…all the while, seeking more and more of the life that causes our death. There is dazzling beauty in transience which the gods themselves long for. Our senses are permanently heightened…colours are more vivid, sounds clearer, tastes sharper…because every moment that ceases to be, attempts to imprint itself upon a mind, to linger on. Perhaps human memory collectively captures infinity in a string of memories. To the omniscient, every moment that has passed or is yet to exist is the present. “

But these observations that you utter with an air of complete detachment, looking out of the window at the misty morning…they no longer reassure me. They only increase my impatience for the end. For the final chapter. The moment when it shall all be revealed, in a glowing neon montage…when I shall look at it and say, so that’s what it was all about.

Already, the world and its endless possibilities seem stale. Already, the whispering in my head is growing louder. Already, Insanity impatiently drums her fingers on the walls of my skull, waiting to claim her chosen daughter.

You smile indulgently. That smile conveys a million clichés. I know my earnestness seems foolish to you. I know you have lived through four decades more than I, and in those decades you have known chaos more intimately than any lover knows the mysteries of his mistress’s body. Yet, miraculously, you have survived self destruction. The disease that wastes your body is not a result of disillusionment, just a fluke of genetics. You are not jaded and cynical like me… You are still full of innocent laughter, of wonder and humility.

Can you not see that we are trapped? Bound in sentient bodies driven by pain and pleasure. Ensnared in circumstances that affect each other like a falling house of cards. Insulated in the prison of a mind that twists and contorts itself all day long for the pursuit of truths mundane and profound.

Nirvana- Ceasing to be. Like the blowing out of a candle.

Words of the Wise

2006-12-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

"It is better to sin and repent
than abstain and regret"

I'd quote you sir, but I fear you'll sue me:)

Winter Blues.

2006-12-22T06:12:00.000-08:00

Sick again. Ugh.
Have been communicating in unintelligible croaks and indecipherable expressions. Explains the urge to type out long words for no apparent purpose, communicative or aesthetic.
There are times when the futility of people's elaborate ploys to cover their transparent motives seems endearing. This is not one of those times. What a ridiculous species we are...how horribly full of ourselves and this notion of seeking deeper truths.
Growth, Reproduction and Metabolism. It seems to sufficiently explain the magical mystery of life right now.
Want to stay isolated in my room for the next fifteen days with sporadic pampering from ma and the demanding bundle of fur. Want sunlight and coffee and productive hours.

Suddenly Inexplicably Irritated.

Love ain't easy.

2006-12-10T10:24:00.000-08:00

"I was in the kitchen
Seamus, that's the dog, was outside
well I was in the kitchen
Seamus, my own hound, was outside
well you know the sun was sinking slowly
and my own hound-dog sat right down and cried"

I'm besotted with dogs. I've been crazy about them ever since i can remember. Spent hours playing with the strays around my house. Developed deep bonds with friend's dogs. Survived my entire childhood on the hope that I'd have one of my own some day.

I often tried to convince ma that a dog was the solution to all our problems. In hindsight, I see why a working, single mother with bills to pay and a brat to raise would shudder at the thought of adding another responsibility to the household. A responsibility that would need to be fed and potty trained and walked regularly...
I really can't blame her for refusing and putting on her "End of Discussion" face.

Until some stupid foreigner realised at the airport that he could not infact smuggle his exotic little chinese pet on the plane, flew off and left a bewildered puppy with airport security...
Security man, auto driver, kabaari waala, policeman and finally my uncle... Bono (then "Peter") was handed around from stranger to stranger until I walked into my uncle's house, took one look at him and fell madly in love. I can't say my feelings were immediately reciprocated...he was too scared and confused at the host of unfamiliar faces that seemed to constantly surround him.
But once I'd convinced my uncle to let me have him (not that dificult. His own beautiful labrador, a perfect lady otherwise, would scream bloody murder at the sight of this strange dog who was presumably trying to usurp her territory), I knew there was no looking back. He couldn't possibly live in the same house as me and not fall madly in love:)

We're obsessed with each other. I make kissy faces at him from every corner of the house. I talk to him about college, politics, music, philosophy,the latest scandals on The Bold and the Beautiful, about love and heartache. I can't live without him.

You don't realise how much love you have inside of you until you've loved a dog. To see someone go into a fit of excitement every time you walk into the house, kiss you every morning when you wake up...someone who thinks the world of you whether or not you have a bath, a job or a huge allowance. You don't even realise when your defences come crashing down. You learn to adjust yourselves to each others quirks... and pretty soon, you can't remember what what life was like when you had a dog-less existence.

I suppose this must be true of all pets. Unfortunately I, like almost everyone else, suffer from the delusion that mine is somehow absolutely unique.

Which is why, smoking out of my window on a wintry night (ma, if you're reading this...gulp. it was a stressful night. sorry:)), although i saw those puppies, I tried to ignore them. They were adorable...but i didn't want to, well...cheat on my dog. Bono is REALLY possesive ( I notice he's starting to sound like a big, burly boyfriend...hahaha).
The puppies had started crying now. I watched them for a while and realised that I wasn't the only one waiting for their mom to appear. It was a bloody cold night. They were probably hungry too....Goddamnit. I rushed down the stairs.

Ma, Hash and I found some old sheets for them to sleep on and fed them warm milk and biscuits. It was almost as if someone switched a button on inside their heads. Soon they were cavorting all over the place, fighting for biscuits, chewing on the sheet... acting like nothing had ever been wrong with their little abandoned existence.
I knew there was going to be trouble from the start... they were becoming dependent on us. Soon they'd climb the stairs all the way to my house and sit at the doorstep, waiting patiently for one of us to return. Bono would sulk and whine all day... wary of their attempts to befriend him.
But I couldn't help myself. I know there are more stray pups around than this city can handle. I know that the harsh truth is that most of them don't survive, and that they're fated to miserable lives even if they do. But I wanted Gel, Stamp and Cube to live. I wanted them to live below my house, and have a reasonably happy existence.

I wish I could explain what it felt like. I knew I was fighting the odds. The neighbours had no particular sympathies for them and thought they were a nuisance. The coldest months were yet to come, and whatever bedding I laid out for them at night would disappear by morning. It would get harder to sustain three growing dogs along with Bono...I kept waiting for ma to point it out, but she wouldn't. I know she'd begun to care about them inspite of the fact that she knew better too.

I was leaving for Benaras that day. It was a beautiful day...Sunny side up, just how I like it. Ma called when I was on my way home from college.
She was crying.
I wished the auto would never reach home. Passed one familiar bend after another, my mind shrieking silently with dread and grief as we approached my house.
There is something so disturbingly surreal about death. Gel and Stamp lay there in a pool of blood, while everyone went about their own work. Two motionless bodies. Suddenly non existent. The world continued to spin, but for me time had come to a screeching halt. I felt like throwing up, sitting down, screaming, running away all at the same time. Tears are so fucking inadequate.
Cube. I had to find her. I started walking around aimlessly, still sobbing, not breathing...thank god for you, Hashie. You keep me sane.
She'd been sitting outside my doorstep, as usual. I don't know if puppies understand death. I don't think anyone does, really.

We haven't spoken of it since that day... but as we sat in the park digging a grave for our dogs, I realised we weren't children anymore. The cycle of life and death is as old as time, and as inevitable. The certainty of death doesn't make life pointless, only more beautiful. They may have only lived for a short while, but Gel and Stamp are an indelible part of me. I will always know we made each others lives more worthwhile, in some way.
Cube? She's living at Friendicoes right now. I couldn't risk her chances of survival. I hope she has a good life.

A big hug to all the dogs I know, and others. Especially Bono, Cleo, Layla, Cube, Bruno, Precious, Puff, Nimboo, Imli, Caesar, Mischief, Odie, Toofan, Badal and Magic.

Trixie and Pixie, my ocassional buddies downstairs.

Wolfie, Handstand, Mary and Jane; the chillers of Delhi University.
R.I.P. Gel, Stamp, Tiffany, Boskey, Lara and the beautiful dog in D School.

Once more with feeling...

2006-12-06T23:39:00.000-08:00

"Work It
Make It
Do It
Makes Us
Harder
Better
Faster
Stronger
More Than
Hour
Our
Never
Ever
After
Work is
Over

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over"

Walked through narrow lanes
Woke up in someone's mind
Didn't know what to look for
So I embraced what I could find.

All I needed was some time away from the maze. The streets of Benaras offered revelations around every bend. I chose self preservation over surrender. The familiar convolutions of my thoughts over the twisted world you tempt me with.

Alone, overworked, happy and completely sane.

Lost :

2006-11-21T05:37:00.000-08:00

A pair of rose coloured glasses. If found, please return to Disillusioned Damsel in Distress.

I miss your lies.

For The Caveman

2006-11-16T07:21:00.000-08:00

In response to "So tell me an interesting story dude..."

They had been inside the cave for as long as they could remember.Immobilized by chains...staring at that same spot on the wall. Imprisoned for all eternity.

A walkway stood behind those bound, and behind this wall burnt an everlasting, towering flame. As shapes of plants, animals, guitars and other things recognisable to us in the non allegorical world were moved across the walkway, the prisoners were enthralled by the shadows that appeared on the walls.

You are infact the author of this reality you find yourself so firmly rooted in. The prisoners indulge in what seems to be a meaningless game at the time, but soon becomes the only truth they know. They name the shapes according to their forms or sounds,judge each other according to the names each chooses for the shapes... even begin to like and dislike each other on the basis of the shadows. The shadows are their world.

And then suddenly...one of them is freed.

Blinding light. Sudden mobility. Atrophied limbs. Unwelcome freedom.
The pain begins to subside and a strange new world opens up before him. Three dimensional forms...illusions, surely, created by the dark shapes they watched all day long? Yet tempting, somehow. Whispered promises of a newer world. His eyes water looking at the raging fire, his mind tortured by the million twisting paths that suddenly begin to unfold themselves...

He turns to the others, but they no longer believe what his eyes see. He is no longer one of them. He does not understand the shadows like they do. A pity.

Confusion. Madness. Anger.
He stumbles around the cave. Stripped of beliefs, chilled to the soul.
There is a crevice on the far side of the cave, and somewhere in his newly awakened mind he knows that it calls to him. There is another world to be discovered, in that crevice. Another spectrum of light, colour and sound that will claw his sanity away...
As he crawls closer, he realises that it is infact not a crevice at all, but a doorway. His first taste of hope. Closer to the gap, the light is more blinding still. Alien sounds seem to build themselves up into a crashing crescendo...and he steps out of the cave.

At first there is chaos.
One day at a time, the din of noise and colour seeps into him. His eyes adjust to the brightness and details around him. At last, he is able to look up at the sky...at the source of it all...

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel.
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save.
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy,
Beg, borrow or steal.
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All thats to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

Plato's probably weeping on his fluffy couch up in heaven. My sincerest apologies...I've always loved the allegory of the cave. Couldn't resist the urge to re-write it for a silent, brooding caveman I know.

Lady Starry Delight

2006-11-08T03:21:00.000-08:00

What's your pirate name?
Be creative, but brevity is the key.

A Long Long Time Ago...

2006-10-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

"There is darkness in the room.
And silence…
Except for the sound of you and I breathing.
Poetry is born out of moments like this one.
I am yours today
(and this is me without signs of the outside world marring my skin)
Just me in my true, naked beauty.
All of me that you'd never seen.
All of me that was hidden from the world.
All of me that was meant to walk proud and shining in the sun.
All of me here, beside you, today.
Love this moment, because right now
I am truly yours.
Celebrating my life and yours.
In this glorious, blissful moment.
Isn't it ironic that the only time you truly see me
Is when we are in complete darkness?"

We enter the room together, and conversation simply fills the silent anticipation of things to come. We stop speaking.Mid-sentence, sometimes...and just look at each other. Wonderingly. Even a little disbelievingly. That happiness like this was possible outside of television. A faint smile plays on his mouth…
and then we kiss.
I have never kissed like this. it's as if with that one kiss…
our first kiss, I am slowly dissolving into him. Cell by cell.
Every touch is imprinted in my memory forever. Though it hasn't been too long, I know I have come a long way. From feeling like I would never be able to love again…here in this room with a boy I know I love more than either of us can believe.
We are the same, him and i. We have known the same pain and the same happiness. We have dreamt the same dreams, and lost them. To not love him would be like to not love myself, and as impossible. There is nothing to hide anymore, nothing to miss…everything feels so complete.
Sometimes our need for each other is urgent.Thirsty.
An at other moments, slow…as if the eternity we have spent looking for each other is inconsequential in the face of the time we have together now. There is as much watching as there is touching. Listening. Now that he is here, and now that I have found him, there is no pain, except for the thought of losing him…and even that makes me happy.To love someone so much that the thought of them makes you ache…

As Robin the Wise said, it's not smart to dig for relics. In this case, my computer brought up the past whilst defragmenting drives, and here I merely acknowledge it's presence.

Torn

2006-10-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

My mind is blank (except for the softly fading,incessantly whispering thoughts of you). I expect nothing (but December whispers of treachery). The days grow colder (and your words warmer). I fold my dreams away every morning ( because they are tainted with you).

At the moment, I am content in this cocoon of feigned ignorance you have constructed for me.

Need. To. Sleep.

ARGH

2006-10-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

Im so fucking sick of the depraved, repressed, retarded, frustrated, psychotic assholes that live in this city. How exciting could a girl sitting alone in an auto, talking on the phone possibly be? If that arouses you enough to slow down your car, roll down your window,drive next to the auto for twenty minutes and make obscene gestures while your equally sub human friends ogle at her, then, dude, get rid of your penis. You clearly don't and will never know what it's meant for.

Jaded

2006-10-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

I hate this feeling.

Stare at the ceiling blankly. Fall asleep only at dawn. Wake up in the middle of the afternoon. Waste the day, feel bad about it, but take no measures to change things the next day.Wallow in pointlessness, repetition and inanity.
Everyone else's life looks like some ludicrous, exaggerated drama. Just nod at the right places and they sweep you into the heightened version of reality they're stuck in.
Blink.
The lights are too bright in here.
The noise and confusion makes me want to scream.
Need to get out before the intensity gets to me and forces me to really live.

Awake to greet the rising sun again. This is getting ridiculous.

Wonderland and Beyond: The Trip Report

2006-10-11T03:08:00.000-07:00

After the low dose of LSD, this spider like all others in this experiment, built a web which is more regular in central angle and spiral spacing, and has a larger catching area.

An altered state of Being. Does it take you closer to what you seek? Does it vanquish your doubts? Sing you to sleep?

"Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream- child moving through a land
of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast
And half believe it true..."

Perhaps my ramblings are still aglow with the quickly fading certitude they once held for me. Perhaps they are now completely devoid of meaning and full of false promise. Judge, dismiss, echo, mull over....do as you please.

Lodhi Garden. An asylum for lovers, trippers, dogs, artists, the dead.

"I sit on cold stone and bring out the tools of my trade. I know it's an illusion to be free. To be laid bare. Perhaps I am. No longer seeking but seeing. A silent flower in my hair witnesses the miracle. Spreading soft fragrance to senses that are alternately dulled and sharpened. Is this what I once longed for?

Like insects maddened by our own delight we scramble over the stone. Cold stone that covers the dead. Carved stone full of beliefs. Trees stand frozen as if in mute horror. Dripping leaves. My mind wanders without restraint. I will the pen to stop but it doesn't. Forms words that might be intelligible to some. To none.
Not profound. Not profane.
Sacred and mundane.
Will I want you again?

They capture time in their metal boxes. I let it slip through my fingers. It drips on the paper like acid and burns it through. Bears witness to the twisting turning hovering flying.
Not wrong. Not right. What's left?
Bring cheer and wrap up my mind.
Chew on paper and smoke my kind.
Fly with me?

Blueness. Greenness. Who made the colours? There's music playing in my head. Random words from another world, another time. Who wants to exercise their will? "Not I"

linger linger strum your finger
pass the bliss sealed with a kiss
wordswon'tstopmeaningtheyjustwon'tstop

lean back sit straight feel everything vibrate let it enchant you enfold you
love it hate it fight it crave it do it

Never stopped being a child played hide and forgot to seek.
Sat in a corner drew figures in the sand waited for the tide to wash them away.
Who saw you? Who knew? Do you see flashes of brilliant white light? Why do you stay quiet about it?

Lonely feathers lying in the grass. Do you want to breathe?"

"Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
It's quaint events were hammered out
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun..."

Invisible Apron Strings

2006-10-04T02:20:00.000-07:00

"You can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time...but you can never fool mom"
- Random profundity on a poster lying on the sidewalk, CP.

Up until the age of eleven I firmly believed I was smarter than my mother. I thought I was smarter than almost everyone I met, but that's an entirely different tale of disillusionment.
Anyway it was at that awful, precarious, self - conscious age, when childhood begins it's descent into adolescence that I realised I was infact, NOT smarter than the woman who had given birth to me. And that I was an idiot for thinking so in the first place.
Motherhood is an eerie thing.
They know when you're lying to them. They know when you're lying to yourself. They know when you're in love...when you're hurt inside but too proud to show it. They know when the world bewilders you and you just need to be held. They can see right through you, and they love you inspite of it.

Thank god (or whatever's out there) for you, ma. I'd be lost without you in my life, whether I admit it or not. Incessant fighting included:)

An Untitled Ode

2006-10-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

I do not want to open the locked doors of your mind. I do not want to fall in love with you. I do not want to possess your body or your soul. I do not want to live up to your past experiences.
I was not looking for you, and I don't think of you as the answer that i've found. The cosmic flow brought about a chance meeting- and like everything else, you too will fade away, leaving my thoughts tinted with any colour you like.

For the time that we occupy the same chapters in Space and Time, I wish you well. Although the game we play is a meaningless charade, I recognise the glimpses of a like mind. I know that darkness. It scares us both.
In a better world we'd be better people. I'd be a part of your story. I'd let you in.

Not today.

"Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can"

Echoes
Pink Floyd

The Rockstar.

2006-09-22T08:42:00.000-07:00

"The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"
-William Blake
"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

The first time i read that was in hash's room. I don't remember what I thought of it then. Was probably too overwhelmed by the assorted art in the room to really pay attention to the words that would later come to represent a way of life.

When people question my commitment to academics and to the subject I study, I wish I could make them feel the way I do after a good class. It's mind altering...the most fulfilling high I've ever experienced. These three years of studying philosophy have taught me who I am. Who I want to be. Why it's alright for you to disagree with me, and why I should respect your point of view anyway. I was you at some point of time.

This year, I realised I don't want a God that represents hope, because that's the most addictive drug of all. I don't want a God that tells me how to live my life, because no one person - embodied or not- can do that.
It's a creative process. Like Craft Activity in school. You make a collage of your thoughts and beliefs, get messy with the glue of conviction, scatter scraps of reflections trimmed by the scissors of reason...and there you have it. Your personal version of religion, god, faith. There are as many versions as there are people on the planet.

I still don't think of Shiva as the omniscient, omnipresent, entirely good, omnipotent God. But I do think he's pretty cool.
"You want to attain enlightenment man...but before that you just want to be a rockstar."

Presenting the Mahadev. A perfect aggregate.

Mysterious and complex. Bholenath, the innocent God. Rudra, the destroyer of evil and sorrow. Neelkanth, the one who consumed poison to save te world from destruction. Nataraja, the Divine Cosmic dancer. Ardha Narishwar, the perfect harmony between male and female energies. Trinetrishwara, the one with the third eye that looks beyond the obvious.
"He is both static and dynamic; both creator and destroyer. He is the oldest and the youngest; he is the eternal youth as well as the infant. He is the source of fertility in all living beings. He has gentle as well as fierce forms. Shiva is the greatest of renouncers as well as the ideal lover.
The tiger skin that he wears symbolises victory over every force. Tigers also represent lust. Thus sitting on Tiger skin, Shiva indicates that he has conquered lust."

Sounds like the kind of person I'd want to chill with:)

The distance in your eyes...

2006-09-22T04:54:00.000-07:00

Have i said too much?
Sometimes it feels like im just replicating a life that's already been lived. Even the wars i wage aren't new. They've been fought, and have met their appropriate ends. People have learnt and grown, hurt, recovered, wondered, wandered, gotten lost, found home...

The world I love
The tears I drop
To be part of
The wave can't stop
Ever wonder if it's all for you
The world I love
The trains I hop
To be part of
The wave can't stop
Come and tell me when it's time to

I don't know if the path reaches a conclusive end. If it's the journey that matters why do we fight so hard to reach the destination? A mass of writhing, twisted, delusional, tortured human beings. All struggling to grasp that ever elusive high. The feeling of knowing what your purpose is.

How far would you really go to find yourself? Does it really matter if your beliefs come crashing down? Has anything changed since yesterday? Do the black boxes that separate the days on the calendar really make any difference to who you are today?
Are things really going to be better someday?

Vivan asked me if i thought i was special. I'd like to believe i am. It's hard to reconcile yourself to the fact that the intense experience you thought your life was, doesn't actually matter at all.

the universe is a screenplay writer with a sense of irony.

Ubercool. Uberbitchy.

2006-09-17T02:05:00.000-07:00

Watched The Devil Wears Prada...regular chick flick,not that great. But Meryl Streep's character has provided me with a much needed role model:)

Cold Beer. Hot Joint.

2006-09-17T01:06:00.000-07:00

I can smell winter.I like winter.
There's something about the hazy yellow lights and the smell of roasted peanuts in the air. It makes me want to sing or sigh or hug someone or generally grin at the world. I know it's a blurry picture, but the photographer managed to capture a feeling...very good, hashie.

A sad adieu to C-502, Anandlok. Many a parched throat and sad heart wandered in here to quench their thirst and pour out their tale of woe to the sympathetic innkeeper. The door was always open for philosophers, travellers, junkies and the ocassional travelling junkie philosopher. There was always beer to be had and music to be heard.
Never any food, though... but Looking Back With a Sentimental Eye, these things seem endearing somehow.
I've spent countless hours in this room over the past year; giving discourses on time and transcience,rating hot chicks,staring drunkenly at the walls,choosing new things to flick for my room, watching life-changing movies,eating tongue scorching,brain melting spicy food from Hot Joint.
The sentimental innkeeper was right when he said, "it's the end of an era".
I'd like to point out however, that this band of merrymakers is going to follow you wherever you go. So if you thought your days of pouring out the booze are over...
*hic*
they're so not.

This Week

2006-09-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

The Pope behaved like an unthinking, irresponsible college student shooting off his mouth after one beer too many, and the Muslim clerics bristled appropriately.

A young girl killed herself because she decided failing the CBSE boards thrice meant she was unfit to live.

The CBI's dog trainer was sacked because instead of sniffing out narcotics, the doggy decided to go and sniff out a nice female friend to cavort with in the bushes.

I read Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, expecting it to be filled with impassioned metaphors, and a few scattered arguments that i would have to painstakingly sift out.
I found instead an incisive commentary on "modern civilisation" and the prophecy of it's decline, an appeal to Indian psychology too relevant to neglect. (Parts of it still make no sense however. Am not pro-celibacy. See no relevance in it whatsoever)

Caught in a Web

2006-09-13T00:16:00.000-07:00

I've only just come to terms with the fact that the internet is among the many fixes that I need in a day. I look forward to sitting at my computer in the same nagging, subliminal way I crave caffeine in the evenings.
Perhaps it's the comfort that a world of anonymity seems to offer.If you've struck up conversations with friendly strangers in buses, queues, etc., you know what i mean when I say it's a cathartic experience. It's alright to tell them you hate your boss. It's okay to say you can't stand the people who are supposed to be your friends. In a room with a million voices, you can share your darkest thoughts. What are the chances of someone hearing you over the din? What are the chances of someone caring? What once existed only in the recesses of your mind now floats out there with everything else. You said it out loud. And the world didn't collapse. The room didn't become silent. They didn't judge you. They didn't stare at you.
Nothing happened, infact.
You just became a character in an anecdote for someone you chose to reveal a glimpse of your life to.
Reveal yourself.Play a character.Lie.Voice previously unspoken truths.
No one really knows who you are anyway.No one really cares.
Right?

Not so sure anymore.
I chanced upon the profile of a twelve year old I used to know, on one of these networking sites last night, and was truly scared at how seductive the freedom of the virtual world is for children. Her profile says she's sixteen. Her album is full of pictures of women in suggestive poses, with captions listing what she'd like to emulate about each of them. Her online journal speaks of a boyfriend she's been a "biatch" to, and how she's trying to make him happy by becoming a better girlfriend..
It's natural for pre- teens to obsess about the world of adults, to try and live their lives with all the drama and angst and intensity they perceive among grown ups, mostly on tv. But it's the sort of thing that makes you completely vulnerable to strangers online who treat you like an adult,even if it's in the purely x rated sense of the word.
Damn. It's a twisted place to grow up on, this planet of ours.

A Memory

2006-09-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

One fine day Suvan and Surya, [who are littler than I, and were therefore very little at the time, when I was quite little (also a little quiet)]- came home bubbling with excitement. In the course of their myriad adventures in Mayur Vihar, they befriended a peppy dachshund puppy named Poochie. On this partiular day, they had tracked Poochie down to her home, and in the blindly oblivious way children have, had decided to go and spend the afternoon with her. They did not for a moment consider that Poochie might be answerable to some human adults regarding the boys that randomly followed her home.

With the worldly air that only ten year olds can truly possess, I pointed out this obvious fact to them. They stared at each other for a moment, and decided the only solution was to take me along with them, as their closest representative in the convoluted world of grown-ups.

We reached the house, and an old man answered the door. I narrated the story rather apologetically , expecting him to turn us away.

No one delights at the innocence of children quite like the old.
The man welcomed us in, gave us biscuits which we fed his ecstatic puppy. While Suvan and Surya ran all over the house, shouting and banging into things with glee, the man pointed towards his son's room, explaining why the noise didn't bother him.

I remember everything else faded away as that door came into sharp focus."KEEP OUT", it said, in big, bold letters.It was covered with pictures of musicians and random art. Red light filtered out from under it. The smell of smoke wafted through the air. I could hear music playing inside.

In that moment,with all the profundity childhood permits, the adult world I wanted to inhabit was defined.
I wonder if our lives ever make such vivid impressions on children. Are we as cool as the adults we looked up to as kids?

Heart Shaped Box

2006-09-09T02:23:00.000-07:00

I don't want to be locked in.

Eudaimonia

2006-09-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

(Greek. "perfect contentment")

If you had to choose between a life that was absolutely fulfilling at every moment, but one that you had no memories of; and one in which your memories were so incredible that they never let you enjoy the present completely- which would you choose?

Motion Blur

2006-09-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

Another night passes, and sleep is nowhere in sight. I toss turn read breathe think write....but nothing seems to work. Precious hours meant for rest slip away, and before i know it, it's morning again.

Woke up somewhat dazed, opened the paper and felt certain I'd managed to fall asleep and was in the midst of a weird dream... staring back at me from the infamous Page Three was none other than Cuddly Bhargav, chin raised proudly, cigarette dangling from her fingers, at the Skinny Alley concert.Im glad I got to her house and left it before Tani aunty went through her morning routine of going through every newspaper and marking interesting articles for her daughters to read. Now that's what i call a Kodak moment:)

The soap opera has taken a strange turn.
Scarface has taken to disappearing mysteriously from college (Illegitimate children? Hot alien waiting to propogate her species,hidden at home? Family feud? Clandestine raves?)
Mel shows up with suspicious bruises on his neck (probably an accident with the vacuum cleaner)
and Paris looks strangely content. It looks to me like the stage is being set for the entry of another character.

Trippy Trippy Day. After abusing us lengthily for being losers and for never having seen it before, Vivan finally let us watch the Wizard of Oz video with Pink Floyd.I remember wondering if I was hallucinating the entire experience. The only nagging reminder of reality were Vivan's inputs at every scene...
""Watch their feet!"
"Man...the tempo...it's too much"
"Do you see the symbolism or not?"
"But dyuuude....this is the BEST part!!!

So I reached home, tired, addled, and what Dr. Shankaran calls "mindfucked", only to realise I had my first driving class in half an hour. Made another futile attempt at sleep. Dragged my reeling self to the driving school, and drove around at the speed of 10 kmph for half an hour with a sweaty, fat, jovial man. Was certain I'd end up killing atleast a few people...luckily I only drove over one guy's foot. He grinned understandingly and didn't seem to mind.

In other news...the obsession with Bowie continues.
"It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine
I’m thinking that it must be love"

Obsession.

2006-09-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

"Memory Of A Free Festival"
-David Bowie

The Children of the summer's end
Gathered in the dampened grass
We played Our songs and felt the London sky
Resting on our hands
It was God's land
It was ragged and naive
It was Heaven

Touch, We touched the very soul
Of holding each and every life
We claimed the very source of joy ran through
It didn't, but it seemed that way
I kissed a lot of people that day

Oh, to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon
To paint that love
upon a white balloon
And fly it from
the topest top of all the tops
That man has pushed beyond his brain
Satori must be something
just the same

We scanned the skies with rainbow eyes and saw machines of every shape and size
We talked with tall Venusians passing through
And Peter tried to climb aboard but the Captain shook his head
And away they soared
Climbing through
the ivory vibrant cloud
Someone passed some bliss among the crowd
And We walked back to the road, unchained

"The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party."

Sigh.He's almost too much to take.

Dirty Soap

2006-09-03T04:05:00.000-07:00

Vanya Vodka (the vodka drinking, other Bhargav sister) and I are currently cracking up over the intense soap opera going on in college. The average Stephanian scoffs at all daily soaps and makes appropriately cutting remarks about the pathetic lives of those who vicariously live off their tv sets.
What the average Stephanian fails to realise however, is that along with the admission form s/he so eagerly filled out after passing out from school, s/he also signed away all rights to privacy that s/he may have had in school (unlikely. too many kids have camera phones these days). Absolutely any and everything about you is liable to be recounted over cups of iced tea. If you have any childhood friends in college, watch out, or stories of how you soiled your diapers at a restaurant, or had a nervous breakdown at the doctor's and needed your mom to drive you home- may just become the hottest new topic in the cafe. Who cares if you were six months old at the time?

So the latest episode is a love triangle :
CHARACTERS-
chirpy,blonde at heart,"Paris Anderson"
the brooding artist "Melancholia Morrison" (Mel for short)
and "Scarface",the peddler of vices.

Mel is loking for an intense co-mingling of souls. Paris is looking for hot love. Scarface is cool with whatever comes his way.

Vanya has sympathies for the brooding artist. I'm all for Scarface. Neither of us likes Paris, though. We're not into mannequins with oral fixations.
Stay Tuned;)

Down Came the Rain

2006-09-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

...and washed the chaos away.
Woke up in the morning and emptied my room and mind of the clutter that had accumulated over the weeks. When the silence and David Bowie on repeat became too much to take, I went in search of company. The zen monk followed, uninvited, and we went for a run on the empty streets. The amorphous golden fuzz sprinting next to me silently communicated a thought, and i agreed - the rain is a blessing.
No pictures yet:( thanks harsh.

Green God

2006-08-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

You....
drive me insane.
give me faith in myself.
make me ache with longing.
make me laugh like a child.
make me weep with love.
make me smile at strangers.
fill me with hope for the planet.
complete me.

Lux Aeterna

2006-08-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

Mornings laced with hope. The mind clings to the elusive memory of a time when things were better, and that memory only serves to make things worse. Lost sounds of laughter, afternoons of bliss, scattered moments of contentment...all spinning together in a downward spiral. Churning. Faster and faster. Till you're not even sure if that was the life you really lived or the one that you longed for. What's the difference anyway? In darkness, in silence, it's all the same. You in your head. Alone. Forever.
Been the worst fucking day.

Tagged by an Imp

2006-08-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

"So, this is what you're supposed to do.
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people."

"Sexual indulgence in public is an example of the kind of thing which Plato suggests should be discouraged by an "unwritten law", habituating the citizens to a sense of shame rather than by legal prohibition; and he cites incest as a case where such unwritten law is already an adequate deterrent. Aristotle however attacks the subject with his characteristic zeal for classification. He first, in "Rhetoric 1" divides law into particular and universal: "particular" is the written law of an individual state, "universal" embraces everything that is unwritten but agreed upon by all."

"A History of Greek Philosophy"
W.K.C Guthrie

hmmm...tagging

hash

and

cuddly

and any three people who chance upon my blog and are appropriately charmed:)

...and ne'er the twain shall meet

2006-08-23T02:24:00.000-07:00

And so it comes to be that I reached college and was faced with the proverbial fork in the road. When it comes to making difficult decisions, I usually just sit back and switch to auto pilot. Whichever path momentum nudges me towards must be the "right" one, somehow. So I looked towards the horizon today, where the dark brown of the football field merged into green which faded into blue, lit a match and chose the path of decadence.
I've tried to convince myself that this day of excessive wastefulness has taught me something too. Lessons that arm you for life, i repeat in my mind, are learnt outside the classrooms. Random words of advice and warning flit through my head and i look away guiltily. It is fallacious to expect one to learn from someone else's mistakes- the realisation of error is incomplete without the experience of it.
Or atleast i hope so.

photograph by hari potter:)

My Chaotic Karmic Bond Critter

2006-08-22T11:33:00.000-07:00

Got stuck in an NSUI rally on my way home from college.
For those of you who failed to tsk pityingly, a National Students' Union of India rally is essentially fifty jeeps and a dozen trucks filled with drunken, lecherous, violent, dumb, power tripping men. The reek of testosterone is overwhelming. For over an hour, they sang, beat people up, boozed, leered, littered, held up traffic and promised the students of Delhi a better future.
Belonging to an elitist college that doesn't participate in University elections definitely has it's advantages.

I've noticed though, that there's no level of jaded-ness that Bono can't vanquish with a wag of his tail. There are some things that keep you human...a heartfelt wag is definitely one of them. People say im unnaturally obsessed with Bono (one of the reasons may be because I find the description given in the title more acceptable then "my pet") but take a good look at him...Could you resist those eyes?

Today.

2006-08-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

Felt alone. Smiled at appropriate moments. Got high. Wallowed in inadequacy. Swam in and out of class. Wanted to shake everyone out of their self-conscious, smug exteriors. Became friends with someone i hurt badly. Grinned at my professor because i suddenly realised he was human. Realised how much in love i am, and how good it feels. Sulked. Wasted time.
Longed for better days.

Sending parvati home…

2006-07-28T04:38:00.000-07:00

(A gift arrived from the Parvati valley. The effects of which caused the following to be written.)

She poured the cold water on herself. She felt it soak her,chill her,make her shiver. As her body warmed up,the water felt welcome.The aroma of the soap felt too sharp today. She liked the smell of wet skin better. She stayed like that for a while, slowly pouring water on herself. Cascade after cascade of bliss. The sound of the temple bells brought her out of her liquid dreams.It was time.

She stepped out of the bath naked. She seated herself on a mat, while they blew the conch. they came forward with flowers and incense and perfumed oils. Anointing her hair, her breasts, her womb, her feet, they could not help but gaze at her with reverence.
She was as overwhelming as creation herself today.Tempting as the darkness of the night, refreshing as the dew in the morning...even the sun melted out of the sky in her presence, leaving behind a a blush on the horizon.
The women lit lamps in the room. Small, burning pin pricks of light in every crevice of the wall. As the first stars began to appear, her eyes shone with a glow that dulled all others. It was as if she turned herself deaf to all other sounds to prepare herself for what was ahead.

Lightning flashed in the sky to greet his arrival. His steps seemed to cut into the mountain itself.
She commanded the others to be silent and to leave. Smiling with secret knowledge, she pulled out a jade box and spread it's contents on the floor before her.

He entered the room and had eyes for nothing but her. He had seen her bathing from where he sat in meditation. Seen the water caress her. Smelt her desire.

She picks up the clay pipe lying before her and lights it.

He breathes in...
He closes his eyes.

She breathes in.
She looks at him.

The birth of desire.

An explosion of ecstasy.

They sweep the ashes....

Photo Op

2006-07-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

Walked into the kitchen to find chicken rice. Found her instead.Now i know where celebrities get their shocked tabloid expressions from.

Do Believers get stuck in Traffic Jams?

2006-07-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

I guess for me the debate has really always been, if God does exist, what is s/he upto these days? Why does this mysterious benevolent figure choose to let people kill, maim and fight over religion...isn't that what's besmirching his/her name in the first place? People are going NUTS all over the world...so what's keeping God?Wouldn't this be a sort of good time to swoop in, make a few announcements over the PA system in the sky...sort out all our issues..."You idiots. You're confusing me with all these prayers addressed to different gods.It's JUST ME up here.And yeah, Syd Barrett is fine."
Or maybe the traditional sort of miracles are too passe, too Last Season up in heaven. Maybe God looks at the Scriptures the way we look at old photo albums and letters..."walking on water? ?how gauche is THAT....what was i thinking back then,dude?"

Anyway, it's never been a highly charged ideological battle for me. Just a sort of confusing topic. I profess i am agnostic at the beginning of all debates on the matter...and most people think i'm taking the easy way out. The truth is...it IS sort of the easy way out. All my "religious fervour" is reserved for nature, music,love...my faith lies in my own will to make things happen.
At the same time, I do not live with the passion of a zealous atheist either.I do not flinch at the thought of going to places of worship...most of them leave me indifferent, others i enjoy for their energies or simply their architecture.
I do have trouble however, when i am stuck in Traffic jams. There is no greater power i can turn to for assistance in making me move faster. (Oh Holy Red Light...Turn Green for me?) Does God acknowledge the right to dissent, or do all atheists and agnostics go to Stuck In Traffic Hell?

Of Disillusionment and other Demons...

2005-12-01T00:11:00.000-08:00

This is what comes of drinking beer on cold wintry nights when conversation is the only thing that can keep you warm...

Approaching my twentieth year, and having failed as yet to make any noteworthy contribution to the world of literature or philosophy, as I had once planned; I often look back at past thinkers and wonder if they were aware of how deeply and indelibly they would influence minds in the future.

Did nineteen year old Mary Von Shelley for example, realise the significant comment she was making on the nature of man, when Dr. Frankenstein in her debut novel, allows his own creation to overpower him?

It is man's quest for intellectual growth that gives birth to the very bonds that constrain his mind. His creations, much like Frankenstein's monster, take on a life of their own, bend his will and become fierce and frenzied masters to him - language, for example, created as a vehicle for communication and reasoning, is so inextricably linked to our thoughts that it is near impossible to conceive of a wordless thought… and yet words are hopelessly inadequate to describe the wide spectrum of human experiences and emotions.

It is similarly, the sad fate of man that he can never hope to understand the inner workings of his mind using the tools of logic that he himself has created, for they are flawed with the same internal inconsistencies that he aims at analysing.

If one aims at creating an accurate representation of an object or phenomenon, then the only art required is that of imitation. If on the other hand, one's creation becomes more beautiful than the object itself, the representation is no longer accurate- and is thus flawed.

It is a cardinal rule with any art form that in order to experiment with abstraction, it is first essential to learn form. But artists will tell you that the engrained concept of "form" takes years to break out of -conditioning limits one's perspective to the extent that it becomes impossible to create something entirely novel. What thus began as art becomes Art, an entity separate from the mind of its creator. The creator, in fact, is now the medium of expression as opposed to his canvas.

2005-10-15T03:55:00.000-07:00

Adi and i made our rites of passage to the world of adulthood this week.
He got himself a proper, grown up job and learnt what a boon and curse money can be... on one hand there is the potential to buy endless plates of shawarma and multitudes of chicken mcgrills...and then there is the dealing with Provident Funds and taxes and debit cards and other such unintelligible things.
My entry to the grown up world, however, was drastically different.

Ma left me alone at home for a week, certain that i'd survive- having learnt the art of making rotis and aloo ki subzi. Little did she know - food was going to be the least of my worries. I have to admit though, that it started off quite sanely. There was no mindless consumption of alcohol...no wild partying or random wastage of money.
Then came Thursday...and the madness began.
So it started with a mindless consumption of alcohol, as these things always do, and then losing the house keys in the middle of noida at one thirty in the morning...strangely though, i was NOT completely frantic at this point. It was almost as if i subconsciously knew the worse was yet to come....sigh. The next morning i wake up at eleven, mildly hungover, very hungry- but realise that bono is hungrier still so head to the kitchen to make his breakfast...
lying in the middle of the kitchen floor,casually sprawled...almost in the manner of a tourist sunbathing topless in Goa, was a dead rat. And much like other not-so-liberated tourists who can't stop staring at other people's bodies, i gaped at the former rat-now pure matter.
"Oh F***..." i told Bono, and he agreed, still staring at me.No dead vermin was going to deter him from the twenty continuous hours of staring at me that he must accomplish everyday. I think it's some form of Zen contemplative meditation for Pekes.
So i did what anyone in my position would do. I called my mother in Bangalore.
"ma there's a rat in the kitchen...." i whimpered.
"I'm in a meeting right now, i'll have to get back to you on that one" she hung up politely.
For a stunned moment i wondered if i was infact adopted.
Luckily for me, i thrive on drama. Moments like this really get my adrenaline going. In my mind's eye i could see myself as the unlikely heroine of a thrilling story... the pampered young woman who wakes up hungover one morning and finds that the world has turned into a surrealist painting, and reality as we know and recognise it, has ceased to exist. A dead rat in the kitchen. A mother who sounds like an automated message.A staring,apathetic Pekingese. What will she have to deal with next?
It might not be an instant best seller but i thought my weirdness might grow on the audience eventually.
So anyway...as my imaginary audience watched with bated breath, i sighed (taking care not to breathe too deeply, ofcourse, given the situation) and rolled up my sleeves. Using a rolled up newspaper, and steeling my nerves, i coaxed the deceased critter onto a dust-pan.
As i turned to leave the kitchen, holding the dust-pan at an arm's length, Bono looked at me interestedly. He took a moment to take in the entire situation and decided that i had invented a wonderful new game for him- Knock the Dead Rat out of the Pan....
Walking rapidly, being chased by a highly excited puppy leaping atleast five feet in the air, i managed to chuck the poor thing outside the gate. let it be known that i did say a small prayer for it's soul...may the creature find peace and many unattended pantries in it's next sojourn into life.

I could barely believe how much i had grown up. I hadn't even cried. Ok, so i did call my mother who was in another state and couldn't really have helped...but i think i did fairly well for my first rite of passage into adulthood.

Smiling for my audience which was probably still gasping in disbelief, I went to the bathroom to douse myself with Dettol....
Socrates called death the ultimate reward for any philosopher. Men have spent years and pages wondering what it must be like to simply not exist anymore. Artists have mulled over it, separated lovers have yearned for it, stunt men have laughed in it's face ...yet the person who is dead is perhaps the least affected by it.

Lying on the bathroom floor, with what looked like an amused expression, it's arms outstretched- awaiting the next greatest adventure after life itself, lay...
yet another dead rat.

(I cannot further describe the horrors i suffered over the next three days. I single-handedly dealt with not just these two, but ten dead rats. But a year later, in February, i found true love. So it all worked out)

While violence played sweetly in the background....

2005-09-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

There's something to be said about the lull of apathy. It has the comfort of sleeping late on a winter morning...at the back of your mind you know you have to wake up,be stripped of the warmth of your bed and face the day...but it's so easy to forget that while snuggling in the covers.
It's been a strange day.

Hand me the map, please.

2005-06-10T03:53:00.000-07:00

I am not equipped to handle the world yet.
It's true. How can people assume that by the time you reach adulthood you will magically have attained all the wisdom and experience it takes to go out and face the world? At what point does your messy, tumultuous, icky adolescent angst get replaced by courage, dignity, patience, yada yada...?? At what point do you have enough foresight to recognise flaws in people yet know that you can ultimately accept them, for the entirety they represent?

hmm.worth a shot.

2005-05-31T02:12:00.000-07:00

This is an entirely experimental thing (<-------mandatory cautious beginning)

It seems a bit presumptuous to think that anyone would want to read about endless summer days in delhi...but that's the thing about endless summer days...anything that keeps you from walking around in the melting heat is "worth a shot".
These vacations have been terrifically boring, really...except for the trip to binsar...where we did the usual mountain routine...trekked,ate shocking amounts of food,sighed appropriately at the view and claimed we'd like to "settle down in the wilderness, away from the city etc. etc." Oddly enough, everyone seemed highly relieved once we returned to the "dirty,polluted city" and their cell phones were functional again :P
anyway, i suppose this state of boredom and lethargy is my own doing. in order for Things To Happen, it is imperative that one should Get Off Their Arse....so that is exactly what i'm going to do.

adios
(notice the subtle mention of you,bro.cheers.)