The Opening Paragraph to a long experimental Short Story I wrote when I was unemployed¹

They were tired all of them and their shoulders all hung like the hangers we hang our clothes on. The stale smell of fallen beer pervaded the room. I am not talking about a certain, particular day. I am talking about everyday, right after noons, which in their world played the part of mornings. Let me continue. There were two actual ashtrays and a textbook doubling up as one, but there were no cigarettes anymore in the room to be smoked, only dead butts. Everyday at 1 PM, let me repeat. The glass window amplified greatly in hotness the hot sunrays beaming into the room and forming a distorted rhombic yellow on the floor into which they by turns all of them inserted their inward-sinking heads. They gleaned some kind of pleasure from the frankly harsh and intolerable heat seeping into them, their eyes, their malfunctioning noses. They fashioned themselves one with nature when they did such things, like imagining themselves a battered rock out of a volcanic eruption now resting in an undiscovered desert. Their throats swelled from cigarettes and alcohol disturbed their bowels and they thought they were somehow now one with nature, whatever being one with nature means. Probably they empathized with the similarly sad state nature is in now, but I'm not so sure about that. Anyway they were not all nature and sun and moon and trance. Some CDs lay strewn towards the laptop which in turn had been flapped open a little too much, at 130 degrees or something, as though they would climb up the wall and sit next to lizards to watch what they thought was a great movie. They were always watching what they thought were great movies. They were all for the most part living in a movie themselves, one which they thought great too. Great in a non-commercial, classic, cult, arcane, acclaimed, misunderstood sense, let me specify. That they were messed up and far from ideal and that the people they disliked² disliked them gave them the willies they truly adored. That while Orson in the next room got ready and bathed in perfume and tucked his shirt in and sung a sweet soft tune and winked at them as he passed their room while walking into a day full of painless although meaningless gestures and nothings gave them a feeling of spiritual superiority that as hard as I may try I cannot explain to you since to truly understand that part you've got to be one of them, like I am.







____________________________________________________________________

¹Now I mostly only write emails followed by Regards Name Designation.
²which happened not to exclude a lot of people.

Still Photography

Description of the face of Sandarbh Narayan
His face is what people call heavy, just as he himself is. A toddler's fingertip may take an eternity to start from his forehead and touch every square inch of his face until it reaches his firmly hanging chin. His brows the wings of a seagull guard his deep-seated, little brown eyes. On their own, his eyes are a picture of calmness; a calmness that's less an absence of worry than an absence of hysteria. But alongside those wide protective maternal brows, you think those eyes are just overconfident - lazily overconfident. His smile - childlike in its instant gleeful appearance at insignificant little things which when you grow old you stop finding funny - almost inches towards dimples but not quite forming them. What are formed instead are two symmetric depressions wrought with shadows; like two wet fingers had been tapped on and removed from a pudding the shape of his face. The said shadows are smudged by his stubble that's always three days old and never two or four. Its sepia tone almost belies the laze and calm of his eyes, because it makes you wonder if he bleaches it. His nose is straight, not blunt, not pointed, just right, and symmetric, almost too good to be placed on a face that can be described as heavy. His skin is soft, unmarred by what's called ageing but gently tanned nonetheless by pimples that once were; almost making him look a realist wax statue of himself.

Another Description of the face of Sandarbh Narayan
Chubby but with good features. Like Rishi Kapoor the colour of brown bread.

Yet Another Description of the face of Sandarbh Narayan
Fourteen inches from the top of his skull to the crest of his chin, all the colour of a rat washed with Fair and Lovely. A nose angled at seventy degrees from the ground when he's standing, and slanting at forty degrees on each side from the septum. The eyebrows are the shape of the symbol made by the key that's just on the left of the keyboard's tilda. The ears stick their neck out, as if he has grown up overhearing discreet conversations. Smiles like a true cute fool.

Bored into Blogging

Now the blog's design must make you think that the blogger in question studies in class four, and on being asked what class he's in, replies with a beam on his face that he is in class fourth 'D' but come April and he'll be in fifth 'E', while not forgetting to add: "which is the senior-most class of the junior school!". As much as I wish that were the case, the truth is the blogger in question is, sadly, already twenty five. A couple of weeks ago he had his birthday, but, he would like to make known that he's still keen on shamelessly accepting belated birthday wishes, more enthusiastically so if they come with something he can beautify his as yet bland and semi-furnished house with.

The next thing he would like to make known is his intention of discontinuing with the affected third-person manner of referring to himself in the post, because I think it's pretty clumsy and not very pretty.

What I'm thinking right now is that I can really waste a lot of time, and write a lot of words, without actually saying anything. And what do you know, I'm even feeling glad about it.

Here in Bombay I have been put to working night shifts at my workplace. And since you're wrong about always having thought that I work at a call center, there aren't many of us in the huge, labyrinthine office there at night. The facility that during the day accommodates as many as 300 analysts has, at night, only four of us. And since I'm the least busy of them all, I spend half the night (the other half spent working) getting up from my desk every ten minutes and going to one of the other three to ask them if they'd like to play TT for a while.

I wouldn't mind as much if they just said no. But their answers usually transform my consternation from one of boredom to one of linguistic torment. "No man" they say. This is how they talk here, everyone it seems. No man. It sounds a lot like going to a Juice shop and telling him "give me a glass of pineapple juice, Juicemaker" or going to a saloon and saying "I want a neatly cropped haircut, Barber" or going to a dog and saying "hey dog" or going to Alaska and saying "show me where you live, Eskimo." My point being, people have names for some reason. And even if it isn't advisable to take names all the time, 'Man' is no replacement for 'yaar'.

And neither is 'dude' any substitute, which happens to be their second most favourite address. Not like this dude, what are you doing dude, this is perfect dude, we have a lot of work tomorrow dude. You hear this and go in your head: Dude, don't call me dude. It is painful to see this address is so commonplace here, this address which in Delhi we employed only during sarcasm or confrontational repartee.

Ok, let's chuck that. Another thing that irks me about Bombay is how we're all so short of space here. Even the sacks at ration shops are much, much narrower, and thereby taller to fit in adequate grain, making them look like test tubes of jute. Oh, so now you think I'm nitpicking?

Huh.

Bye.

AK Called Today

I miss my college life. It was as close to [Jerome-ian, Wilde-ish (except the homosexuality), Chekov-ian] 19th-century as you could get in the 21st. It wasn't that our college was like that, it was my own little group's little way of life. The rest of the college, as best as I remember, seemed McInerney-ish in its pace and possessedness and, for lack of a better word, greed.

Which reminds me of A, who was forever knocking at the gates of our group. Not to enjoy being in it but to make it like the other ones. He was the kind of friend who added you on linkedin before facebook (while being active at both places, I must add). Eventually he trapped AK. Gullible little AK. Oh, dear, AK: he was one of those guys who walk holding hands, on roads, in busy markets, with another guy - without even being gays. Who are so innocent that it is weird. One day we were watching Dasvidaniya and AK started crying when the song "Mammaa" began. Ok, I shouldn't have been revealing that. Anyway, I'm cutting the names to mere initials now.

Anyhow, AK certainly belonged in our group. By now you must be thinking that our group wasn't all that great a place to be in anyway. And it doesn't bother me if you're thinking that.

The thing is I joined a new job recently. And dearest AK only got to find out about it through A! It was really embarrassing.

Film Review: Black Swan

Screenwriter Andres Heinz smoked up and wrote a story. He presented it to a drunk Darren Aronofsky who selected it for his next movie. Now Darren smoked up and made the movie. It would all have turned out perfect, but I hadn't smoked up before going to see it.

Hangover

His head buzzed and throbbed as if it were his heart, pumping blood. The clatter of hammers outside the window didn't much help. He thought of love in the sunlight that the same window passed to him. This is right after he woke up. Right after. Everything seemed to fade off into the distance. The sky turned lighter, went farther. And the buildings, they too all receded until they were little exhibitionist models of themselves, far into the distance, content with their new-found insignificance. The Sun still as big, or bigger, and its rays, red hot, fell on his face. He sat facing the Sun but closing his eyes. The clatter's still there, the head still abuzz like a radio tuned to the wrong frequency..

About Me

Dear reader,

I am 35, from New Delhi, India. For work, I run a team of quantitative analysts at an investment bank in NYC. My posts are probably a better indicator of who I am than anything I cook up about myself in an "about me" section, so let me just say I'm still figuring it out for myself. 

My only superpower is being able to recall what I was doing on this date 'n' years ago. For example, on this day 11 years ago, I visited an art gallery in Delhi. On this day 2 years ago, I was on a road trip to Vermont. There's nothing special to write about other May 26 days. As you may have sensed by now, as far as superpowers go, this one is eminently useless.

This blog is a bit of a chaotic collection of my thoughts on various topics over the years since I was 19, plus a whole lot of personal musings, in addition to half-baked attempts at fiction and poetry. Those fiction attempts are all quite old by now - I don't remember attempting any story in the last 7 years. 

The blog lacks an underlying theme or lasting purpose, other than to continue to live so that I can revisit it. I like being alone sometimes, and I particularly like being alone with my past selves.

If I can help you in any way, or if you'd just like to get in touch, you can reach me through a comment on this post, which enables me to get an email alert.

Thank you for stopping by,
he whose blog it is.

*Last edit: May 26, 2021

Yellow Page Tampered With

Dated 13th February 2004

Dear XXXXX,

I kept looking at you in the class today. Avanti was giggling the whole time elbowing you, but you - you think one sermonizing word you miss from the mouth of the Pope (that, face it, is what he is to you) and your board examsheets will get swapped with Raza’s. Oops. How would that be for Raza*!

Now don’t go and tell AKG, like your friend Sudhamini did with Birdie. Poor guy had only got wind chimes. Plus you know what, you guys don’t know that his Dad’s a PoW and his Mom’s not being granted compensatory employment by your revered Air Force. Ok, sorry, but this sucks. Although he sucks too. His mom’s sewing clothes now - and my sources are trusted: those who’re getting their clothes sewn! – and he’s spending the bloody money on wind chimes and a new suit for farewell. Plus for whom – Sudhamini! If I were Tony Greig I’d be saying Ooh La la, but of course I am not, plus of course you don’t know who Tony Greig is. No matter, I like you despite that*. But don’t you complain to AKG, I’m telling you.

I’ve heard your Dad’s been made an Air Commodore. Wow and kudos and ahaan big shot and congrats and all that but you know that I’m not writing to you to discuss your Dad’s wonders (except you). Just felt like giving the e-lovemail a wheedletouch. Ok, now. Don’t be angry. Just email. Your Dad rocks. Ok now don’t be angry. But it would be nice if he could get Birdie’s mom to be a sub JW ranked typist or something. I know he can.

But what the heck. This sounds like an e-lovemail to Birdie’s mom, not you. I really like you – all the crap that Sudeep and co gave you about me is shit and they’ll eat shit for being like this. I really do like you. I can’t get you what the primary whacko did, not for now, but I can - on a postdated cheque. But hey, a whack is a whack no matter how superficially special he might succeed in making you feel because his Dad has money, which, if chromosome inheritance is anything to go by, his dad must also have made by dubious, unintelligent ways – after all that’s where little whack gets his tomato-soft brain from.

You’re cute. I’m not uncute. Date me. We’d even go to see Main Hoon Naa if you want.

Your best prospect*,
XXXXXXX

*Not mean. Just kidding.

Observation 0588

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Only beauty, mind you. Ugliness is actually there.

Triveni

I

I seated myself, late to work, in the cab
One rascal trickled down my cheek
The driver noticed


II

آج آباد شہر غور رہا تھا مجھکو
کوئی اتلاف نہ ہونے کی کسم مانگ رہا
مہینے خود کو پاکد کے رکھا تھا
Aaj aabaad shahar ghoor raha tha mujhko;
Koi itlaaf na hone ki kasam maang raha;
Maine khud ko pakad ke rakha tha.
III

यह ह्रदय है वास्तव में बुलबुल जल का
इसके भी व्याकुल अंतर का स्पर्श नहीं संभव
पर इसको खंडित, आज्ञा है, कर लो निःसंकोच
Yah hriday hai vaastav mein bulbula jal ka:
iske bhi vyakul antar ka sparsh nahi sambhav.
Par isko khandit, aagya hai, kar lo nihsankoch.

Absentia

I sometimes write a rhyme with pen on paper,
then type it on this phone that you claim yours.
I stare at "SEND" in haze and feel zest vapour,
thinking that these lines don't have the force
that is possessed by my unmoving, almost absent-minded gaze
out of the window, seeking your face in skyscrapery maze.

Mind-Boggling

"The top 1% of households accounted for only 8.9% of the income in 1976, but this share grew to 23.5% of the total income generated by the United States in 2007."*

You would say that's quite a shift, but still not mind boggling. But what when you look at it this way:

"Put differently, of every dollar of real income growth that was generated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1% of the households."*

If that isn't mind boggling, the author of this blog certainly doesn't know what is.

And herein lies an intellectosocial question to the John Galts** and Alan Greenspans*** of the world. It is no CIA secret that Mrs. Alissa, through her model John Galt, almost came to the conclusion (or a proposal?) that the bottom inhabitants of the economic pyramid feed like parasites off the talents and enterprise of the top inhabitants. Although I have long doubted that she was a great possesor of humanity, I have no doubts whatsoever that she possesed mental faculties of considerable might. Which brings me to my question. Now did they, people well endowed with IQ that they were, did they really think the bottom 99% chunk was so utterly dismally unproductive that it could be responsible for (or be adjudged responsible for) only 42% of hard growth while the 1% of Galts accounted for 58% in the capitalist system that followed Alissa's vision almost to the T. I'm not questioning their conclusion****, I'm merely asking really? To this extent?



________________________________________________
*from 'Fault Lines', Raghuram G. Rajan, published by Collins Business, 2010.
**Read Alissa Rosenbaums, since John Galts are only their theoretical models.
***who led us through the great utopian-while-it-lasted, dystopian-once-it-didn't capitalist extravaganza, taking (more than) a leaf from the John Galts, and broadcasting openly their megafanhood to Alissa Rosenbaum.
****which I don't believe in anyway, and won't after four million liters of alcohol down my throat.

First Morning in Bombay

3^rd February 2010

It’s 6:46 by my watch. I found myself up at 5 today, even though I’d slept as late as nearly 1:30. I don’t know why, maybe I’m just nervous sharing the bed with a stranger. A male stranger, to be specific.

It’s seven now. In the fourteen minutes since 6:46 the sky has cleared from the grey of old, worn roads to the white of white shirts washed with Robin Blue. I couldn’t help watching the magic unfold from the window. By the way, he’s still asleep, my male bed-partner.

He looks like someone who worked hard at the gym, got good muscles and physique and everything and then gave the whole ordeal up to find that then the body took back on him all it’s vengeance of the years gone by when he tortured it. Sure you know what I’m talking about, haven’t you seen how bigtime gymmers all grow somewhat round in that peculiarly clumsy, unshapely way after they give up gymming? It’s just that kind of a thing with him. But why am I talking about him.

It’s my first day at work today. First day at work at this place I mean. Bombay. Crisil. Dad’s really happy with this job. Once thing he’s really happy about apart from it being a good company is that it’s an Indian company, he’s by design wary of MNCs and foreign companies. It’s the first day. I hope it is as good as it has been in my dreams.

Bombay’s beautiful but Delhi’s more beautiful. You’d never appreciate it if you always lived in Delhi, but Delhi has orderly, wide roads that cut each other at right angles. It has symmetry. Who was it who called symmetry the basis of all beauty? He had something there. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that symmetry is beauty, but I will say at least that symmetry is beautiful. But for all the breadth and beauty of Delhi, it, I must admit, lacks the vada pao.

Enough of peripheral claptrap. I miss my family. No, I’m not missing the rest just as yet but I’m sure as hell I will.

Making Tea

There was nothing to do today, just as there was nothing to do yesterday and the day before and the day before day before and so on ad infinitum. As he woke up the images of last night were still fresh in his head, of how he had spent the night changing channels on television: the exact perilous slant at which he held the remote control hanging loose from his fingers in a way you would think he somewhere inside wanted it to fall off and be damaged so he could not use it anymore and would have to explore other options for killing time than watching dumb chat shows on night television. What’s wrong with that, though, he repeatedly asked himself without opening his mouth; for someone who knows his great* education is done and being a parents’ kid time is done and employment is elusive and underemployment is offensive and, as a consequence, money is scant and girls are wary and friendships expensive, television can at least always be given a positive spin as informative and geekily fun and diverse while having one of those justifying, self-exonerating, vote-of-confidence seeking conversations, which thankfully** didn’t even take place all that often now. Every two minutes last night he would look back from the television to the housefly sitting on an arm of his sofa to see if it was still there eavesdropping on his pathetic boredom. It was always still there. He did not wave it away as he’d convinced himself that the very act of its eavesdropping on his boredom is meant to tone down his boredom, employing that same sad theory he used to give meaning to every random thing as something put in the precise place it’s put in and not the trillions others so that something terribly meaningful could happen according to God’s design. But he didn’t know if God was there or not, so the whole thing was a little messed up in his head. Like all the other things. Now when he’d woken up in this same place next morning, alone and workless and without something bad-ass to look forward to, he did once if truth be told consider switching on the television again for hope something tailor-made for his tastes*** would be playing on one of the four hundred fifty plus channels that his subscription made available to him, the subscriptions placard momentarily whizzing past his eyes with the letters Bring Life Home written in big bold bright red in the centre and two suggestively clothed, big breasted, all thighs and calves girls on both sides of the caption. But since last night’s dismal performance of the four fifty channels combined had totally turned him off, he instead walked into the kitchen to spend some time. He made himself a cup of tea; he did not particularly want to have tea but then it**** was something that as a child he saw his elders did every day and had made a mental note to himself to remember in his adulthood as a most noble convention: it always kept the atmosphere at home pleasant. For a while at least.


____________________________________________
*Really?
**Or not?
***Although if you asked him to describe what it was that constituted his taste, he would have had a very hard time.
****i.e. Making Tea.

Observation 0100

Two people who bond really well - best-friends, mentor-protege or a couple - are more likely to share a liking for the same jokes, than the same poems or movies or books or music or political parties.
Corollary: They're more likely to like the same sitcoms than the same poems or movies or books or music or political parties.

Observation 1000

Sophistication (when not of machines or mathematics) is hypocrisy.

Observation 0105

'Bored' is fast becoming the slang for 'lonely'.

Observation 0005

At the very extremity of sadness, the plea to cheer up offends.

Observation 0597

Few things please men more than their joke getting loudly laughed at, particularly so if it was an original. But even when it is not, the observation holds.

Observation 0690

Dating does a whole lot of good to one's self-confidence, and undoes it too.

Observation 0975

This store of cotton garments at Lajpat Nagar is so good and so reasonably priced that it leaves buying Fabinida the only reason for buying Fabindia.

Observation 0008

Even when people know inside that their qualms are dishonest they get very hurt at their qualms not being taken seriously, because they know that only they know that their qualms are a lie; others who don't, ought to still take them seriously, they strongly feel.

Observation 0360

The act of missing people (miss-able ones, of course) starts a little before they are actually gone.

Observation 0144

Truth is an addiction, fortunately the rarest of all, unfortunately the deadliest.

Observation 0500

The contribution of metaphysics to the world: vast numbers of trees felled just because some shallow people wanted to write vast amounts of sham for some hollow people in order to fail to help them understand some really critical issues that do not exist.

Observation 0025

If you love yourself too much, others will not; if you hate yourself too much, others too will.

Observation 0099

Few things in life are as pernicious as a second-rate dictionary got for a child.

Observation 0099

Few things in life are as pernicious as a second-rate dictionary got for a child.

Observation 0022

Those who are fervently into the business of speaking only the truth (very few, yes) are seldom into the business of trying to make people believe them.

Observation 0746

You frequent bad jokes or poor puns or pseudo-witticisms not so often from people with an undeveloped sense of humour, who in time normally realise their inadequecy and suitably abstain from much joking around, as from those whose well-developed sense of humour makes them think they should pun all the time.

Of Our Times: The Zero Zeitgeist

HEYY! WATSUP?? Nothin much. OMG. BRB. ROFL. TTYL. LMAO. UR NYC. AWW. UR COOL. U2. LOLZ. GTG. TC. CYA. BBYE. WTF. HEYY! WATSUP?? LYF SUX. OMFG. WOT HAPP??? ROFL. HAHA. UR 2 MUCH. LOLZ. BYE. WTF. HI! ....

Psychological Laggards

Dear page, your emptiness and mine
correspond, so I guess we're fine
when we bond. Bond we can't very
easily with others, can we? Merry

making of kids as a cracker burns,
we see, smile at with observant glee,
but we mostly can't partake in turns,
you and me, in that fun, can we?

This world's too fast for us for whom
a quick flutter of a cuckoo's wings
can mean a day's musings, or a room
opened after ages with a broom, brings

pictures of wilderness to mind to stay
for longer than with each other lovers do.
For now distractions galore, people stray,
and it's not even that their love isn't true.

Let's face it that we're from some other age,
that it's natural for us to be alone, or let's lie
to each other that our rage, dear page,
is a matter of mood, is a whim cap-a-pie.

A Late Summer Afternoon

The afternoon was hot; the ants had lost their paces, he observed as he looked blankly down at the raggedness of his old shoelaces. The leaves on the trees that surrounded the open air cafeteria were leaden, motionless, as were the squirrels on them that looked golden to him the last time he noticed them a few minutes ago. The place was mostly empty: an odd motorbike would pass at intervals. Every few minutes a distant laugh could be vaguely heard, or was it just the hiss of the cafeteria stove. It was hard to tell. The birds hadn't been chirping; their collective silence didn't stun or shock, but was conspicuous all the same. Yesterday had been busy: hurrying roads, hurrying people and hurrying he, and competition and race and ambition and blah. Suddenly, now, as he found himself in the midst of unusual quietitude, the incredible world within his sight seemed to him a vast oil painting of itself. As if in some other time-zone, he wondered. He couldn't tell whether all of this was ordinariness in the extreme or extraordinary, but was sure that it was one of the two. The bottle of water in front of him was softly warm by now, and an unremarkable uttapam was being slowly consumed by him and an unremarkable other. The afternoon was sleepy, or maybe, sleeping, when she walked in, and they conversed for the first time. Soon, much had changed.

From Yellowing Pages

Closed Clone Cubicles [15th January, 2009]

Four feet by four feet, can forfeit your sanity ;
can make feel like beggars those earlier full of vanity.


For DCE [23rd April, 2009]

Goodness, I am the river just before its coast,
the inexorable destination of most.
Now my bed will be bigger
and waves will spread.
So calm I will trigger
some deadly dread.
It proffers: riches,
sundry bitches.
I will be free,
and not me.

The Only William Zinsser Thing I've Ever Liked

Where did the summer go?

I thought it had just begun.

Somebody tell me I counted wrong

And it’s really still July.

Somebody tell me the sun

Isn’t really so low

In the sky.

Where did they all get lost,

The things that we somehow missed?

Somebody tell me it’s not too late

To cross them off our list.

Somebody tell me . . . but who am I kidding?

I feel that chill in the air.

Somebody tell me,

I’d like to know

Where

Did the summer go?

- William Zinsser

My Bicycle Story

I was in the seventh standard and beginning to lose interest in studies. Yes, that was the beginning of what’s now well realized. We had just moved into our new house, not big in itself, but twice the size of the hovel I lived in before. Excited initially by the possibility of spending time privately in this new house, away from the eyes of my parents, I had taken ardently to watching a lot of television shows that were forbidden, I knew, earlier, even though I was never explicitly told that they were forbidden. It wasn’t really this, either. What I had actually been putting most of my time into now, was daydreaming in a secluded corner about the girls in my school and around my new house: not the ones who were the most coveted since I’ve always kept away from crowded scenes, but the ones who were still cute, and, let’s face it, with whom I stood a chance. Was there any one girl I had grown particularly fond of? Yes, but mostly, it was just the idea of being boyfriend-girlfriend that fascinated pre-eminently. Now days would pass languorously in wondering about their likes and dislikes, and working out ways to mould myself into whatever they would like, and away from what they wouldn’t. Sometimes, I’d gather some aplomb and call up one of them, only to end up talking about assignments and projects and the eccentricities of our teachers, or bitching about this guy and that girl, and that guy’s fascist father, and this girl’s vain victorian mother. For six straight years I had been standing second in my class, but when the half-yearly results were declared that year, I found out that I was seventh, and from the bottom.

In my locality one lame, lanky boy had brought a really awesome bicycle, with gears and everything, and in those days, the concept of cycles that we children rode having gears was a little novel and somewhat awe-inducing. Everyone seemed impressed, even, sadly, the ones who mattered. Ever since this new bicycle had been got by Sudhanshu, for all the rest of us it was the cynosure, and he the eyesore. I went after my Dad to get me one. Not this, not really. It would be no special to get this one now that he already had it. I wanted one to trump this one. One of those days, I happened to visit a fair with my family where the cycle-makers Hercules happened to have a stall. I immediately rushed in to have a look at all of them, and closed in upon the best looking – Hercules Mongoose – yeah, this is what I am going to have, I decided. I told my Dad that I wanted it, but he said that I should take more time to explore other options elsewhere too, to find out which one I really want, and then go about it. It was really expensive, he said, and he wouldn't want that it be bought on an impulse, and then be forgotten about a few days later. That would never happen, I insisted. He stuck to his stand. Then all of us moved to a different corner in the fair where my family members all had ice-cream, but I didn’t want any. Mango Shake? No, no mango shake either, I want nothing.

The evening after, we were both on DTC route number 450, on our way to Jhandewalan, my father and I. Jhandewalan, I had just been told that morning, was the wholesale haunt of all bicycle manufacturers. What was I to understand from that, I asked them. Hundreds of shops, all cycles, cycles, cycles! Really? No! Really? Yay! The mere prospect that such a place existed and which I would be visiting was fairytailishly inspiring, plus, to be getting a bicycle too, that was just way too much for a day. I remember how I couldn’t even have my meal properly in the midst of all the excitement. Inside 450, both of us were talking about the popular types of snakes after we’d spotted a snake charmer on the roadside from our window: Rattle snakes, Venoms, Cobras.. ‘Is cobra and Ajgar the same thing, Papa’, I asked because I remembered a similar hype around Ajgar among the Hindi-folk as I remembered the one around Cobra within English leaning circles. No, said my dad, they’re different. No, said the old lady sitting behind us, they’re different. I didn’t ask you dear stranger, I went in my head, even as she gave her opinion of us father and son. ‘You’re a good father-and-son. You’re a good father’, she said looking at Dad, ‘and you’re a good soon’, she said turning to me. She must have been a school headmistress, I thought, but her pleasant comment had served to replace the intrusive impression she had left of herself on me moments earlier, with a polite 'Thanks Aunty'.

We reached. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. With every new cycle I looked at, my decision changed. ‘This one pucca, I’m not looking at any other cycle now Papa, I’ve closed my eyes and don’t ask me to open them please, I’ll get this’, I spoke aloud finally. I got it. Hero Hawk. Gears! Dad even rode it outside the shop for a while. It was an indescribable thrill to see him riding a cycle; if it were 2010, I would have taken loads of pictures of the same on my mobile, and spent the next few months looking at them every now and then and showing them to loved ones. But it was 1998, and I just kept smiling with my twenty-six teeth constantly visible, and then took an auto back, in which he, the bicycle and I were packed like carrots inside a pencil-box.

Two weeks later, the bicycle was stolen from where I used to park it, just inside the iron main-gate. I’ve been thinking of asking my Dad to buy me an Enfield for a while now.

Mersault

"And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive. It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into—just as it had got its teeth into me. I’d been right, I was still right, I was always right. I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it. I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which was to justify me. Nothing, nothing had the least importance and I knew quite well why. He, too, knew why. From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to “choose” not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Surely, surely he must see that? Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others’. And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end? The same thing for Salamano’s wife and for Salamano’s dog. That little robot woman was as “guilty” as the girl from Paris who had married Masson, or as Marie, who wanted me to marry her. What did it matter if Raymond was as much my pal as Céleste, who was a far worthier man? What did it matter if at this very moment Marie was kissing a new boy friend? As a condemned man himself, couldn’t he grasp what I meant by that dark wind blowing from my future? ... "

Lines from 'The Stranger', Albert Camus.

Phantasmagoria

In these sodden, tired afternoons with the smell of starch,
The callithumps of glee and glum in my memories march,
One footfall and I bathe with bottles emptied in ecstasy abound,
Another and I'm licking the glaring grog out of the fusty ground.

Parakhna mat Parakhne mein koi apna nahi rehta

Parakhna mat Parakhne mein koi apna nahi rehta
Kisi bhi Aainey mein dair tak Chehra nahi rehta

Hazaron Shair Mere so gaye Kaghaz ki Qabron mein
Ajab Maa hun koi Baccha Mera Zinda nahi rehta

Bade Logon se Milne mein Hamesha Faasla rakhna
Jahan Dariya Samamdar se mila Dariya nahi rehta

Tumhara Shehar to bilkul Naye Andaaz wala hai
Hamare Shehar mein bhi ab koi Ham saa nahi reht

Koi Baadal Naye Mausam ka phir Elaan karta hai
Khizaan ke Baagh mein jab ek bhi Patta nahi rehta

Mohobbat ek Khushbu hai Hamesha saath rehti hai
Koi Insaan Tanhai mein bhi Tanha nahi rehta

- Bashir Badr

The Facebook Schemer's Monologue That He Hides From Himself Too

I felt it important to prove that my pessimistic, low outlook for my future was not the loser-talk she had found it to be, or dismissed it as. Pessimism seemed - possibly, I wouldn't completely deny this, because I was pessimistic then - the only intelligent, scientific view on the future based on the past. Just as optimism seems the only intelligent view on the future when you are optimistic, I guess. I felt it very important to impress upon her that pessimism could be intelligent, but more importantly, that sometimes intelligence cannot help but breed pessimism. That some confirmed genius had said something similarly bleak and broken seemed a perfect example to rub off on her, to bring her to think the way I wanted her to. And what do I ever want, frankly, but to be admired. It was as though that example could somehow make what I had said perfectly justified; purge it of the mawkish stink she had smelled in it. I googled looking for all quotes hopeless - they have these websites dedicated to quotes of all kinds: emphatic, motivating, resilient, tenacious, as also lonely, sad, despairing and disillusioned. Probably they know, the makers of these websites, savvy businessmen, that the lonely may seek not togetherness, the hopeless not hope, the tired not resilience; that they may all be seeking just validation: something that could adequately tell those tired that they are justified in being tired after the plethora of cruel rigor they've been through, those lonely that the world is no longer a world that merits any intimacy, and, to people like me, in a ' just to tell you a little secret' way that they are hopeless only because there actually, really, frankly is no hope in the first place. So, I went to those websites looking for pessimistic things said by famously intelligent men. Or by those that she thought intelligent, at any rate. After much frantic searching I zeroed in upon a particularly dismal, pessimistic view of that particularly famous genius, and I remember feeling glad, even somewhat victorious. I spent the entire day wondering, off and on, how exactly I am going to paste it on her. I certainly wouldn't tell her that Mr.X said thing ABC, that would be too direct, as if I were asking for something, which although I was. What would be the point of proving a point if she knew that it was proving a point I had set out to. She mustn't know that, she really mustn't for the facade of non-manipulation to remain in my manipulation, which I hoped would make my point, maybe imperceptibly, but surely, stronger. After the whole day thus spent, I reached to the solution that I'd put that quote up as my status message on facebook: the whole world, at least whoever forms my world, is there. The effort put straining my head has paid off, I thought, and did a mental 'Eureka!' Rather astute of me, I told myself. Dishonestly, for I always knew that the idea was no novelty, everyone's doing it with or without their knowledge, and that it's just as trite as the Eureka expression that followed it. But I went ahead anyway. It's early morning now, and despite my realisation of the things I did yesterday as folly and silly and dishonest and selfish, I am keen to see what happens, if anything. Chances are one or two of the myriad adds on my list will 'like' it, and then, I meet my end. My life has purpose. Voila!

Echo

Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005, speaking to The Guardian:

When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I'd spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold. But as I've got older I think I've realised that while it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far because what actually happens is that you don't carefully chart your way through life. You are picked up by a wind every now and again and dumped down somewhere else.


John Banville, 2010, speaking to The Millions:

It’s an adventure I’ve embarked on, and whether I’m making a mistake or otherwise, I don’t know. But we stumble along in darkness. We think that we’re deciding to do things, we think that we’re directing our lives, but we’re not. We’re just being blown hither and thither by the wind.

Back from the rack

I never quite did make a new blog. No, well, I did, I did create a new one, never used it, forgot its password and everything, and blah, it's safe to say I never really made it. Because a blog is made not by signing up for a blog account and choosing an affected template and giving it an acutely affected title, but by posting stuff on it, coming back to it some times and putting down some good goddamn piece of your head on it. Anyway, I'm back here, the reasons are several, but the most important is that it's forgotten about, I hope, by people who I hoped would forget it. The last time I used to blog, I wanted the blog to be a certain type of a blog, and I was a bit of a (not 'bit of a', actually) fraud in that I wanted the blog to be a certain type of a blog in order I be seen as a certain type of a blogger. Really bad thing, I agree, and I agree that fraudulence is oftentimes called by names such as self-consciousness, political-correctness and etcetera and etcetera, by who else but we frauds ourselves, but, in the end, fraudulence is fraudulence, is, fraudulence. In the end it all gets down to the desire, the kill, the over-ambition to be seen as a certain type, the type that you saw someone else was and were smitten or awed or enamored by, or envied or liked or loved so much you resented. Anyway, so since this time, I would like to think, since I am largely free of the façade (although that's a dangerous thing to believe) I think I am likely to post a lot more frequently, because stuff that got held back earlier for reasons hideous as I just explained, won't any longer be similarly held back, like the post I am going to post right after this one. Besides, the fact that I am unemployed now means I have more time.

On Solitude

Two poems I've found of late and have come to like a lot:

How happy he, who free from care
The rage of courts, and noise of towns;
Contented breathes his native air,
In his own grounds.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide swift away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unheard, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

- Alexander Pope's 'Ode on Solitude'.


I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

- Emily Dickinson's 'I'm nobody! Who are you?'

For solitude to not feel lonely, art, I guess, must be on your side.

On Absorption and Reflection

I am gladly unoccupied today. It’s been a long time I last wrote a post, so long that I wonder if most of you have concluded that the blog is up and away: it isn’t. It was, I should add, deleted by me once in the interim in a sort of whim that looks very appropriate as long as it’s a whim, and looks like a whim soon after it ceases to be. I have said, in some now-deleted posts, that I miss blogging and writing so many times, that by now I feel something eerie and repulsively banal about the statement. No, I would spare you, gentle reader, the trauma of the same old sad story this time. Thanks for the relieved look on your face. What won’t I do for it!

I wouldn’t pretend that I have just now read my own blog and like a possessed scientist taken observations, but I do carry a light, dragging impression that all I ever do when I am writing posts here is recounting old experiences, trying to relive memories – although they are mostly not extraordinary but just dear, however matter-of-course and familiar. Why do we do that? It’s a truly fascinating question for me, almost closing in on how fascinating the memories themselves are. After much thinking and prodding, it always opens up this interesting paradox: Time. When we’re living in a particular period of timeº we are continuously lusting for a whiff of those other periods of time, those ways of life we’ve left behind. In a pleasurably wistful manner we are aching for a loss we ourselves facilitated, and sometimes even decided antecedently. Why is it that on these occasions of memory-living our fondness for the past keeps coming back to us, almost making it seem that there's nothing we want more than that period returned, while we are well aware that in some time¹ this, which is granted to us – the present moment, too shall be characterized as Past, this too shall come back to us, haunt and tantalize us and enamour us, and we shall crave for it, much in the same way as we crave for that which we are looking back at today. Unusually enough, how rarely do we, while soaking in the memories of our past, delve for a while into that time of the past which we spent back then remembering even older times, the times that were already a Past back then. Rarely. When we do that though, it is a memory of a memory, or a memory within a memory, a second order memory, if you will. The juice to be extracted out of such higher order reminiscences is singularly special. All such memories of having reveled in other, farther memories make you pine for both: that which you once had, as well as that which you then pined to have. It’s a complicated business, the human memory, so complicated it has a semblance of the complex swapping of gifts, no gaffe tolerable, on every year’s Diwali eve.

I haven’t written anything in a very long time. The last two times I did something remotely close were both in response to some interesting questions². Today, a friend’s interesting wondering on the simultaneous existence of roots and wings led me to say this:

“Roots are essential to the existence of flying, I would think. Without them, flying would be as meaningless as that of a meteoroid lost in the universe, which, the only time it is not meaningless, is when it is destructive. Besides, flying - the whole charm, the attractiveness of it - is because there are roots, I think. Do they call it the antithesis effect or anything? I don't know. Anyway, it's sort of like³ considering a prisoner prisoned at birth, so that his clogged life so clogged, almost choked, and his imprisonment so complete, that he doesn't even think or know or behave as if or believe that he's imprisoned. So completely devoid of wings that he wouldn't know that he's devoid of them. One might try, in the same way, to not be similarly, or oppositely, so devoid of roots when flying. Besides, isn't flying more perception that reality, there's a little bit of physics in there, no? If I fly* would I know that I have flown away, or should others think that they've flown away from my frame of reference.”

I feel thankful today that this was brought up, for it was only because I was impelled to muse upon it and reply to it that I was impelled, further, to write more, to write all this: blog post and all that.

I did write some poems in the meanwhile, whether they qualify as being poems, or whether they are just rhymes or scribbles, I don’t know, and shall leave that for the reader to take a call on, but for the lack a better term let’s call them poems for the time being:

The shades of the sky do not delight;
rainbows as such to me seem trite.
The gusts of air are an irritation:
the wind is heavy, my hair is light.
The rain’s a noise of falling tears,
I wonder why, but, no one hears.
You will want me to like all these,
but I can’t until our conflict clears.

* * *

In fifteen minutes, I'll leave for the workplace.
In five, I'll have shut the computer.
In ten, I'll have put my shoes on.
In twelve, I'll have combed my hair.
In twenty, I'll have broken a traffic rule.
In sixty, I'll have had a hopeless thought.
In fact, I've had it already.
In six hours, I'll have received more advice.
In ten, I'll have harmed myself a little more.
In eleven, I'll have cursed myself.
In twelve, I'll have broken another traffic rule.
In fourteen, I'll have gone to bed with unmet goals.
In twenty four, I'll repeat the process.

* * *

The depth of his sleep
is that of an ocean,

Maybe he’s got it
after eons of crying.

His swollen eyes -
big bulging waves.
Wonder what storms were they
that shaped them.

Each eyebag a beach
with countless, untold
footprints of time.

Don’t wake him up
for he may not sleep again.

Don’t wake him up,
why rob him of

his life.

* * *

It is no meditation:
Staring on into the eyes
of that little device,
Visualizing certain letters beaming on it,
Imagining the sounds, the particularly knit
voice loved by boys, the second take,
that crack in the voice you can’t mistake,
cracking from the other end,
saying what you want be said.

It is no meditation:
The mad optimism with unknown numbers;

Oh, what afterall might they entail,
that, in vain, every time, you go in your head:
“I knew it'd be from a new number!!”

Oh, really? B.S. What else did you know?

“That it is no meditation,
... On the contrary.”

* * *

I know, I know: not very lively things there. It’s quite alright, though. Serious isn’t necessarily depressing, I coddle myself. Or maybe depressing isn’t necessarily disgusting. I should change to this argument for coddling myself now, there’s no getting around from the depressing quotient I guess. By the way, these poems do have titles, they’re not unnamed. Naming things (and not only things) is always a whole lot of fun.

There’s also a painting I made recently that I am tempted to put up here. I will I suppose in some time. Anyone who says anything good about it, I am told, gets their clothes ironed by Prince Charles.

Footnotes:

0. ‘Period’ always gives the impression of a finite, well-defined interval, somewhat like the younger brother of the more lofty ‘era’, but I don’t mean it that way. In fact, it can be as short as a millionth of a moment, it can be a set of discrete, unevenly spaced moments, it can be anything, but importantly it should characterize a particular type of life in your life which is different from your present life and the other lives in your life.

1. ‘Some’ time, mind you, although can be a matter of years can also be as short as a matter of seconds sometimes.

2. Although I must admit it is very, very difficult to tell a question from rhetoric, in something written by someone else.

3. But sort of also the reverse of; but then so often whatever is a reverse of a thing is also strikingly similar in a curious, but important, way to the same thing.

*. This is how I would think by the way if I lived in the belief, that secretly many of us harbor, that they are the centre of the world with the world to the left, right, front of and behind them.

On Virtues

"Virtues are qualities or states, somewhere between reason and emotion but combining elements of both, that carry and convey us, by the gentlest and subtlest of means, to the outer hills of good conduct. Once there, we are inspired and equipped to scale these lower heights, whence we move onto the higher reaches. A person who acts virtuously develops a nature that wants and is able to act virtuously and that finds happiness in virtue. That coincidence of thought and feeling, reason and desire, is achieved over a lifetime of virtuous deeds. Virtue, in other words, is less a codex of rules, which must be observed in the face of the self's most violent opposition, than it is the food and fiber, the grease and gasoline, of a properly functioning soul."
- Corey Robin