Ennui-burned eyes peering out of a car.
Plimsoll, A child. His father, Hawaii chappals.
Sunburned feet.
Walking. Playing. Smiling.
Father doubling up as teacher.
Pavement. Scattered grains. Sparrows.
Drops of water down a random pipe. One pigeon.
The skirling screams of kids killing their days away
for alms.
Mercury.
Air conditioner.
The music from inside the expensive car
speakers - so advanced they produce notes to a clarity
the human ear can't even appreciate.
The sudorific sight of a cartpuller. A saliferous shirt.
Droplets on a dark nose. Oops.
Oops, fingers to the remote control. Now! Lower
the temperature.
Fold Economic Times. Peer out once more.
Indulge. Worry.
Recline better to worry better.
Relax. It's never too hot to wear your
pellicles of sophistication.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Search
On some unknown tree
there was a twig
which fell one day
and flew away
with the strong wind,
the westerlies,
and listen please,
to where it went.
It went far out
of country woods
and into fiery
neighbourhoods,
where it got stuck
in my fingers
and I thought of
the insects on
the twig that were
separated from
their families,
which now may be
mourning the loss
of their little-ies
and I felt bad
there was no way
I could google them.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Wish You Were Here*
My brother left for the US yesterday night, most probably for good i.e. to settle down. The last time he’d left for the US, probably for good, too, was four years ago. I was twenty one and I was there, I remember, at the Airport to see him off. No overbearing sadness had come over me. At the airport, as my brother made his way inside the doors beyond which we non-passengers were not allowed, my parents started shuffling here and there, away from where we had all been standing, trying to catch one more glimpse of him through the glass wall if they could. And then one more; and then one more, if they could. A portion of the long glassed wall along the circumference of the airport terminal was thickly filmed, which was where I chose to go, looking vainly at myself in the glass, marvelling inside at my long locks, thinking highly of how I looked in the particular pair of jeans and tee I had worn that day. When you’re twenty one, you don’t need to actually be good-looking to be obsessed about how you look. I wasn’t to see my brother until three years later, but that didn’t seem to inform me how stomping hurriedly to catch a couple more glimpses of him walking to this queue and that while pushing his trolley, could make any profound, positive difference.
I came home and read the first one-fifth of Catch-22, possibly for the sixth or seventh time. I was yet to finish reading the whole book even once.
An year ago, he came back on what he thought was a three-week vacation. Visa humdrum meant he had to in stead stay for a year. First he was pissed with the US, but later for the most part he was just pissed with India, an irritation that stemmed from his belief in the unforgiving nature of India’s socioeconomy for someone who was both a mediocre student, academically, and was not the possessor of familial wealth enough to start setting up, or even support him through setting up, a business of his own. We had some heated debates, my brother and I, over this subject, in all of which, I, although the less enterprising and entrepreneurial of the two, would firmly stand up for India’s great opportunities for its people, stand up for India’s great progress, India’s great democracy and above all, India’s great culture°. Very firmly. Even though inside, every now and then something he said would weaken my conviction in my stance. Anyway, these debates weren’t making any difference to our lives, let alone to India.
Three months ago I moved to Bombay. Three weeks later he came over because he thought – rightly – that I can’t manage myself living by myself. He was here for five days during which, every day, when I left for office he left for getting me things – cot, almirah, study table, hammer and nails, chairs, pillows, laptop accessories and much more – pretty unglamourous things all in all. It made me feel small inside that I worked, paid frankly more than I thought I worked commensurately for¹ , in a comfortable air-conditioned environ, on a cushioned, reclining, swivel chair, and he worked for me, thanklessly², walking whole days in the harsh, humid heat on the uneven streets of Bhandup, Kanjurmarg and Ghatkopar.
Last night he boarded his flight in Delhi while I was at work in my office in Bombay. It was a Saturday, and I was there for a specific if not special purpose, which meant that I was the only person in the office, empty cubicles all around me till as far as the wall on all four sides. After every two odd hours I’d call him, building up a stoic coolness in my voice, and say ‘how’s it going’, if the ‘packing’s all done?’, ‘hey so many people home to see you off, you’re so popular!’ and the like. People were home aplenty, and these phone-calls all lasted less than a minute each. Laden with background noise of cousins and aunts and uncles these calls were not exactly what I had wanted them to be. Or needed them to be.
Each time after I’d hang up, tears welled up in my eyes but did not fall. I was sad that he was going now, and as against most other feelings³ we casually call sadness, this was actually sadness, in its unadulterated form, the kind you cannot rationalise. For why should I be sad when this is what he’d wanted, and this is what I’d wanted for him? In that case, it would have been disappointment masquerading as sadness, not sadness. It isn’t even as if he’d be worse off without me, that I’m in a worry about. It isn’t even as if I’d be in any way harmed by his being in US that I’d be insecure about. I was just sad this time, no more, no less. There was no scope for analysis. Except that there was important work waiting on the screen in front of me that probably needed some.
Wish you’d have stayed here in India a bit more, Bhai.
____________________________________________________________________
*This is pretty much my most personal post of the undisguised type by a long shot, and naturally I have mixed feelings, apprehensions about posting it. But I'm emboldened by the fact that the blog is not known to many people. But more importantly, I'm motivated by the thought that when I look back on my blog many years later, I'll find this post here and feel better about the world.
°The last part really turning him off; he saw the culture as full of myriad hypocrisies stacked together clumsily, one trying to hide the other.
¹Which is, unlike most private-sector employees, something I’ve always felt. Although at the same time I don’t think I earn as much as I’d ideally wanted to have been earning at this stage. And that this is no contradiction, let me add.
²In the larger scheme of things, that is; not because I wasn’t thankful.
³Like disappointment, ego-crashing, failure, hopelessness, worry, insecurity, dejection – which are all distinct, independent feelings I think we mistake for sadness. For example, when a whiz comes second in a class, it’s not sadness that he feels as we normally presume, it’s actually ego-crashing. It can also be understood by considering that what we often consider happiness (such as a public achievement, like winning a hurdle race), is just an ego-boost; much more transitory than actual happiness. Five days later, you end runners-up in another race, and all that show of happy-dent-white jaw is gone.
I came home and read the first one-fifth of Catch-22, possibly for the sixth or seventh time. I was yet to finish reading the whole book even once.
An year ago, he came back on what he thought was a three-week vacation. Visa humdrum meant he had to in stead stay for a year. First he was pissed with the US, but later for the most part he was just pissed with India, an irritation that stemmed from his belief in the unforgiving nature of India’s socioeconomy for someone who was both a mediocre student, academically, and was not the possessor of familial wealth enough to start setting up, or even support him through setting up, a business of his own. We had some heated debates, my brother and I, over this subject, in all of which, I, although the less enterprising and entrepreneurial of the two, would firmly stand up for India’s great opportunities for its people, stand up for India’s great progress, India’s great democracy and above all, India’s great culture°. Very firmly. Even though inside, every now and then something he said would weaken my conviction in my stance. Anyway, these debates weren’t making any difference to our lives, let alone to India.
Three months ago I moved to Bombay. Three weeks later he came over because he thought – rightly – that I can’t manage myself living by myself. He was here for five days during which, every day, when I left for office he left for getting me things – cot, almirah, study table, hammer and nails, chairs, pillows, laptop accessories and much more – pretty unglamourous things all in all. It made me feel small inside that I worked, paid frankly more than I thought I worked commensurately for¹ , in a comfortable air-conditioned environ, on a cushioned, reclining, swivel chair, and he worked for me, thanklessly², walking whole days in the harsh, humid heat on the uneven streets of Bhandup, Kanjurmarg and Ghatkopar.
Last night he boarded his flight in Delhi while I was at work in my office in Bombay. It was a Saturday, and I was there for a specific if not special purpose, which meant that I was the only person in the office, empty cubicles all around me till as far as the wall on all four sides. After every two odd hours I’d call him, building up a stoic coolness in my voice, and say ‘how’s it going’, if the ‘packing’s all done?’, ‘hey so many people home to see you off, you’re so popular!’ and the like. People were home aplenty, and these phone-calls all lasted less than a minute each. Laden with background noise of cousins and aunts and uncles these calls were not exactly what I had wanted them to be. Or needed them to be.
Each time after I’d hang up, tears welled up in my eyes but did not fall. I was sad that he was going now, and as against most other feelings³ we casually call sadness, this was actually sadness, in its unadulterated form, the kind you cannot rationalise. For why should I be sad when this is what he’d wanted, and this is what I’d wanted for him? In that case, it would have been disappointment masquerading as sadness, not sadness. It isn’t even as if he’d be worse off without me, that I’m in a worry about. It isn’t even as if I’d be in any way harmed by his being in US that I’d be insecure about. I was just sad this time, no more, no less. There was no scope for analysis. Except that there was important work waiting on the screen in front of me that probably needed some.
Wish you’d have stayed here in India a bit more, Bhai.
____________________________________________________________________
*This is pretty much my most personal post of the undisguised type by a long shot, and naturally I have mixed feelings, apprehensions about posting it. But I'm emboldened by the fact that the blog is not known to many people. But more importantly, I'm motivated by the thought that when I look back on my blog many years later, I'll find this post here and feel better about the world.
°The last part really turning him off; he saw the culture as full of myriad hypocrisies stacked together clumsily, one trying to hide the other.
¹Which is, unlike most private-sector employees, something I’ve always felt. Although at the same time I don’t think I earn as much as I’d ideally wanted to have been earning at this stage. And that this is no contradiction, let me add.
²In the larger scheme of things, that is; not because I wasn’t thankful.
³Like disappointment, ego-crashing, failure, hopelessness, worry, insecurity, dejection – which are all distinct, independent feelings I think we mistake for sadness. For example, when a whiz comes second in a class, it’s not sadness that he feels as we normally presume, it’s actually ego-crashing. It can also be understood by considering that what we often consider happiness (such as a public achievement, like winning a hurdle race), is just an ego-boost; much more transitory than actual happiness. Five days later, you end runners-up in another race, and all that show of happy-dent-white jaw is gone.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Wheels
Yesterday morning, I whistled and Papa said don't. But I've just learned it, how to whistle. Raghu whistles all the time and his father laughs and sings and whistles along. Papa says it's bad. I ask him how and he just repeats that it's bad and looks at me with a look that says it's really really really bad, so I believe him. But I believe him only for the next fifteen minutes, after which I'm again all 'why is it bad why' in my head. It's such a pain. Yesterday when Raghu was whistling I told him it's bad, and he just laughed loud. He said if it were bad his dad would surely have told him. Right, right, I thought, and we both whistled to the tune of 'If you're happy and you know it clap your hands'. We're so good at it, both of us. He is a little better, Raghavendra. We've named him Whistlendra in the class. It's so much fun. I think it is. Sudeep and Upasana too. But I am going to make sure I don't whistle when I walk to the bus-stop in the mornings with Papa. Ever since I've learned it it's just become impossible to stop. I'm whistling in the bus, in the recess, in the playground, in the music period, and to tell you a little secret, even in the SST period, but there less loudly than usual, because she'd get really hyper and call my dad school and then he'll be really mad. Ok, he won't be mad, but still. Ever since I'd fallen off the rickshaw and cut a huge bad wound and caught an infection so they had to cut the thing off, or amputate as Dr.Salve says, my dad has never scolded me for anything. He behaves as if it were his fault. I don't even feel in any way incapable or in pain now, for a long time. As for being caught whistling by SST ma'am, and being complained about to dad, and him being called to school, and informed about how I'm not behaving: I wouldn't mind it even if he were to get mad, but that he'll also maybe be embarrassed, and I don't want that at all. It's really not such a big deal to stop, I think. I will.
Yesterday was a sad day. Sad and beautiful, my dad wrote in his diary. My dad doesn't know that I know he writes a diary, so obviously he doesn't know that I know where his diary is. So obviously he doesn't know that I read it. Sometimes I think that he'll get mad when he comes to know, but then I think he won't be mad at me no matter what. But then I think he will be, in this case. And then again I think he won't be, and it goes on like this. So for a lot of days I kept going crazy tossing between both possibilities all the time, but of late I've realized that there's no point to all this fretting and that I should go on reading them because I love to. And so far, in a way, I don't with confirmation know whether it's even a bad thing to do. Only after I get caught and my dad discusses matters with me, and specifically tells me that it’s a bad thing can I really know for sure and certain if it's even a bad thing in the first place to be reading his diaries, right?
“An amazing and sad and beautiful, beautiful day. Miss you a lot today.” he has written, to be precise. And he didn’t write anything more yesterday, which is rather unlike him, for all his daily diary entries seem to be longer than my English textbook’s stories, so much so that almost every day I find myself leaving them midway even though I’ve never found any of them boring me. But I think that I’ll never find reading anyone’s diary boring, whoever the person, however written, whatever described.
Omg I’m still on the subject of diaries. So yesterday was quite a day, if you know what I mean. Raghu and I were, what else, whistling. And joking and shouting. In the bus on our way back. This is when I’d told him it’s bad, whistling, and he had laughed and .. all that I told you earlier about. My brother was sitting on the window seat, and then I in the middle, and then Raghu next to the aisle. He kept looking out of the window, my brother. His name is Vartmaan and he’s really not like me, like he’s not always hollering and whistling and laughing to other people’s annoyance, like Raghu and I do. But today the way he kept looking out of the window -- with no regard or attention to our awesome frolic inches away from him -- he seemed a man who knew something no one else does. Morpheus. Not really, but sort of. “His silence was unsettling even by his own silent, unsettling standards” my English teacher would say, that sucker for alliteration.
I don’t quite understand him, Vartmaan. His life consists of, I think, acting subservient to hot girls and therefore often getting snubbed by them, while taking the ones who’re not hot for granted and saying them things he wouldn't to hot girls, basically being himself, and then getting snubbed by them too. And then being sad about the whole messy scheme of things and unable, I guess, to mingle with us kiddies. He doesn’t find our jokes funny, which confirms to me that he really must be a grown-up. Or adolescent. What’s the difference anyway. He says it’s a different world altogether in the senior school but that he can’t explain to me how. I know for a fact that our subject, Science, gets divided into three components physics, chemistry and biology, each of them bigger than our whole Science subject. And that SST will be divided into History, Geography and Civics, of which History alone is said to be bigger than all our present class 5 subjects combined. Said to be so not just by him but all his friends too. Even Dad seems not to disagree about it. But I doubt that that’s what he’s referring to when he calls it a different world.
He kept striking the seat ahead with his middle finger in a way we strike the striker while playing carom. And kept humming a low pitched English song. And intermittently writing something on his mobile phone. Which seems to be his most favourite pastime ever since Dad got him a mobile phone early this year. He didn’t look sad, but every time I noticed him in a small breath stolen between our raucous laughter and antics, he seemed to notice me looking at him and immediately looked back away out into the roads, as if consciously trying to keep me at bay. Don’t entertain me, I’m not entertaining you. Something like that. I couldn’t have guessed what awaited us, and I have a faint feeling now that he could.
When we got home we saw something that literally blew our heads away. Honda Activa!! Hotter than all the girls Bhai loses sleep over. I can’t tell you how awesome it looked. You’d be thinking ‘just like all other new Honda Activas, you jackass’, but no, it was prettier. The bike was there on the porch, a tilak under its headlight. Tenant’s maybe. And then we walked in and Dad was there to open the door, leave taken from his office. Now something’s the matter, I started to think. But he just opened the door and went straight back in nonchalantly after a brief “hey wash your hands kids, and remember to hang your uniforms properly in the almirah”, a novel in his hands, two of his fingers inserted into a particular page near the beginning as he held it. Now there I saw a cake on the table. It might not surprise my school mates as much to see a cake at home but at our place a cake means someone’s birthday at home. But it was no one’s. And just as we get close to the cake, glitter and ribbons all fall over our heads from a bag on the ceiling fan I hadn’t yet noticed, through a lever-and-pinion mechanism he’d got installed, maybe that morning itself, for such special-effects, and which he was operating from his hiding place inside the kitchen next to his room. Then he appeared in a flash and jumped happily while saying “Vartmaan’s Activa’s finally here!!” cheerily and loudly, especially the word ‘here’. He doesn’t usually act this youthful enthusiastic way, our Dad. I felt full of feelings that I couldn’t name.
Though now I think I could have, and should have, used the opportunity to whistle in front of him and he wouldn’t have minded.
This had been on the cards for a long time, I think. Ever since Rajat had got one last summer, my brother had been after my dad to get him one too, a Honda Activa. Rajat’s this guy in our tuition centre who has a big belly, and whose arms can’t help hanging away from him at an angle when he walks, because there’s so much fat on his chest-sides. He’s boastful of his Parker Pens, his swiss knife, his Activa of course, about that he smokes Marlboro, about his Dad’s three cars, about that he travels in Aeroplanes. I’m sure not even air-hostesses smile at him. He’s already ballooned to the point of bursting, but he still wouldn’t stop it, Rajat the boaster. But my brother doesn’t understand. He just had to get the bike, he wouldn’t have it any other way. My dad said he’d just got him the mobile phone, but no, he wouldn’t have it any other way. They say wisdom comes with age. What a myth. He’s more than five years older than I.
Then my dad came up with this bright idea up all parents’ sleeves. He promised my brother that he’d get him what he wanted if he scored eighty percent marks in his class Eleventh, first term exams. To tell you the truth, I’d felt vaguely wronged when I got to know of this arrangement, having got A+’s and A’s all my school life, and not having been offered great rewards at mediocre successes like these. And as much as my brother wanted the bike, I’m not very sure that the lure of it pushed him any harder towards getting higher, better marks. He seemed much the same to me and soon I got over my earlier vague sense of being wronged when I realized it was unlikely he’d get that far. But sometimes I did think how out of the world it would be if he did somehow get 85 or something and earned the Activa. I both wanted and didn’t want him to get it.
Wanting more than not wanting, that is.
Three days ago, results for the first term were declared in our school. Let’s not dwell over my results, I’d just tell you in short that they were capital A Amazing, my marks. My brother though fared not as well as I’d have liked him to, or as Dad would have liked him to, or as he’d have liked himself to. He’d got sixty eight. I was a bit sad about that. Like for a day and a half. That’s as long as I normally can be sad about a single thing. How my brother felt, and my Dad – I’m sorry but I really don’t know. They must not have been thrilled about it either, but as a ten year old writer that’s as much insight I can give you about others’ feelings. I really don’t know how they felt inside, though what I can tell you is that, I felt pretty terrible about not being able to feel, or even guess, how they’d be feeling about it. Perhaps it’s not a big deal after all, but sadly enough I was not sure about that either.
So basically the point I’m trying to drive home here is that it was a big surprise – the Activa that Dad had anyway got for him. Bhai, who of late had been pretty economical with his smiles, couldn’t control his beaming, all teeth and jaw smile. You could see excitement all over his face, eyes so joyed with disbelief that you’d think Shin Chan won the Nobel prize for Physics. Dad was … again, I’m so sorry readers, I cannot explain. I see a tree full of fruits, I love the tree, its fruits and its shade, I always want it to be there, I’d be really sad without the tree, but how the tree feels at any point I’m far too ignorant about. Did that make any sense?
Then Dad and he made each other eat the cake. And made me eat the cake, and rubbed cream on my cheeks, you know, the usual cake fun. No pictures were clicked, maybe because we were so completely absorbed in the present we couldn’t get out of it enough at that time to anticipate how dearly we’d reflect on it when it becomes the past. Now you’re thinking this sentence is not from a ten year old writing. This is. I’ve copied it from somewhere. Briefly, they left to get ice-cream, my brother and Dad, on the new bike. Meanwhile I rang Raghu up and shared the good news. Bragged, for once.
In the evening, Bhai left for his tuition classes on the bike. He would meet Rajat there, on his older, maybe less advanced model. I wished I could see for myself how it would all turn out, the scene, but I’d quit going to the tuition classes a couple of months after I’d joined when I’d met with my accident. I never started going back again as Dad and I both agreed I didn’t really need the formality. I waited at home to listen to the anecdote when Bhai comes back.
At the time he was expected to be back, Dad was waiting for him outside the house, sitting on his scooter. I fancied them having a race, brother and father, from my windowside study table on which I draw pictures of these old people whom news channels are always after. The ministers and statesmen and all. Yesterday, as Dad sat on the scooter outside, the wind giving his shirt many turbulent wrinkles, I was drawing him. Probably the need for recording the day had emerged by now. My sketch was interrupted when he suddenly stood up, smiling wide, waving his hand. In 20 seconds Bhai was in my view too, the two of them talking, same height, similar features, Dad’s smile much bigger though than my brother’s.
Dad saw that the bike was much soiled. Like an enthusiastic kid who has just got a new bike as a prize for his efforts, Dad cleaned the stains off the Activa with a duster, and asked him, my brother, to sit besides him for a ride. I quickly ran out to the porch to see dad flying it into the green horizon. A little dangerously even, like an adolescent maverick.
It was the happiest of all the days I remembered. I was doing my homework when they came back. We had dinner, and chatted, all three of us, about moviestars and cricketers and the programs I love to watch on TV. Then we went to sleep in our rooms, only no sleep met our eyes. My brother and I sleep in one room. As I pretended to sleep, I could hear sobs from the adjacent bed, my brother’s. What?!
My brother was sobbing uncontrollably. I asked him what happened, but he wouldn’t answer. I said I’d call Dad, which he was sure I wouldn’t, and said nothing in reply. He just sobbed, and sobbed. Tell me what’s going on, I demanded. “You’re a very good boy, Guddu.” he said. “That I am”, I said matter-of-factly, “but why are you all sappy”. No answer, again, but he did calm down in a while and went to sleep soon after. I don’t quite know what our relationship as brothers was, or how we were as compared to how other brothers are. Anyway, whatever we were we are not anymore.
In the morning today I saw Rajat escaping the school walls to go to Priya, the multiplex he’s always bunking and going to with his gang. Apparently, his dad has got him a car now, a beautiful, white car, into which he promptly dived and scooted around at mad, bad speed. A Honda Jazz. Till two days back, they made me want to whistle.
Yesterday was a sad day. Sad and beautiful, my dad wrote in his diary. My dad doesn't know that I know he writes a diary, so obviously he doesn't know that I know where his diary is. So obviously he doesn't know that I read it. Sometimes I think that he'll get mad when he comes to know, but then I think he won't be mad at me no matter what. But then I think he will be, in this case. And then again I think he won't be, and it goes on like this. So for a lot of days I kept going crazy tossing between both possibilities all the time, but of late I've realized that there's no point to all this fretting and that I should go on reading them because I love to. And so far, in a way, I don't with confirmation know whether it's even a bad thing to do. Only after I get caught and my dad discusses matters with me, and specifically tells me that it’s a bad thing can I really know for sure and certain if it's even a bad thing in the first place to be reading his diaries, right?
“An amazing and sad and beautiful, beautiful day. Miss you a lot today.” he has written, to be precise. And he didn’t write anything more yesterday, which is rather unlike him, for all his daily diary entries seem to be longer than my English textbook’s stories, so much so that almost every day I find myself leaving them midway even though I’ve never found any of them boring me. But I think that I’ll never find reading anyone’s diary boring, whoever the person, however written, whatever described.
Omg I’m still on the subject of diaries. So yesterday was quite a day, if you know what I mean. Raghu and I were, what else, whistling. And joking and shouting. In the bus on our way back. This is when I’d told him it’s bad, whistling, and he had laughed and .. all that I told you earlier about. My brother was sitting on the window seat, and then I in the middle, and then Raghu next to the aisle. He kept looking out of the window, my brother. His name is Vartmaan and he’s really not like me, like he’s not always hollering and whistling and laughing to other people’s annoyance, like Raghu and I do. But today the way he kept looking out of the window -- with no regard or attention to our awesome frolic inches away from him -- he seemed a man who knew something no one else does. Morpheus. Not really, but sort of. “His silence was unsettling even by his own silent, unsettling standards” my English teacher would say, that sucker for alliteration.
I don’t quite understand him, Vartmaan. His life consists of, I think, acting subservient to hot girls and therefore often getting snubbed by them, while taking the ones who’re not hot for granted and saying them things he wouldn't to hot girls, basically being himself, and then getting snubbed by them too. And then being sad about the whole messy scheme of things and unable, I guess, to mingle with us kiddies. He doesn’t find our jokes funny, which confirms to me that he really must be a grown-up. Or adolescent. What’s the difference anyway. He says it’s a different world altogether in the senior school but that he can’t explain to me how. I know for a fact that our subject, Science, gets divided into three components physics, chemistry and biology, each of them bigger than our whole Science subject. And that SST will be divided into History, Geography and Civics, of which History alone is said to be bigger than all our present class 5 subjects combined. Said to be so not just by him but all his friends too. Even Dad seems not to disagree about it. But I doubt that that’s what he’s referring to when he calls it a different world.
He kept striking the seat ahead with his middle finger in a way we strike the striker while playing carom. And kept humming a low pitched English song. And intermittently writing something on his mobile phone. Which seems to be his most favourite pastime ever since Dad got him a mobile phone early this year. He didn’t look sad, but every time I noticed him in a small breath stolen between our raucous laughter and antics, he seemed to notice me looking at him and immediately looked back away out into the roads, as if consciously trying to keep me at bay. Don’t entertain me, I’m not entertaining you. Something like that. I couldn’t have guessed what awaited us, and I have a faint feeling now that he could.
When we got home we saw something that literally blew our heads away. Honda Activa!! Hotter than all the girls Bhai loses sleep over. I can’t tell you how awesome it looked. You’d be thinking ‘just like all other new Honda Activas, you jackass’, but no, it was prettier. The bike was there on the porch, a tilak under its headlight. Tenant’s maybe. And then we walked in and Dad was there to open the door, leave taken from his office. Now something’s the matter, I started to think. But he just opened the door and went straight back in nonchalantly after a brief “hey wash your hands kids, and remember to hang your uniforms properly in the almirah”, a novel in his hands, two of his fingers inserted into a particular page near the beginning as he held it. Now there I saw a cake on the table. It might not surprise my school mates as much to see a cake at home but at our place a cake means someone’s birthday at home. But it was no one’s. And just as we get close to the cake, glitter and ribbons all fall over our heads from a bag on the ceiling fan I hadn’t yet noticed, through a lever-and-pinion mechanism he’d got installed, maybe that morning itself, for such special-effects, and which he was operating from his hiding place inside the kitchen next to his room. Then he appeared in a flash and jumped happily while saying “Vartmaan’s Activa’s finally here!!” cheerily and loudly, especially the word ‘here’. He doesn’t usually act this youthful enthusiastic way, our Dad. I felt full of feelings that I couldn’t name.
Though now I think I could have, and should have, used the opportunity to whistle in front of him and he wouldn’t have minded.
This had been on the cards for a long time, I think. Ever since Rajat had got one last summer, my brother had been after my dad to get him one too, a Honda Activa. Rajat’s this guy in our tuition centre who has a big belly, and whose arms can’t help hanging away from him at an angle when he walks, because there’s so much fat on his chest-sides. He’s boastful of his Parker Pens, his swiss knife, his Activa of course, about that he smokes Marlboro, about his Dad’s three cars, about that he travels in Aeroplanes. I’m sure not even air-hostesses smile at him. He’s already ballooned to the point of bursting, but he still wouldn’t stop it, Rajat the boaster. But my brother doesn’t understand. He just had to get the bike, he wouldn’t have it any other way. My dad said he’d just got him the mobile phone, but no, he wouldn’t have it any other way. They say wisdom comes with age. What a myth. He’s more than five years older than I.
Then my dad came up with this bright idea up all parents’ sleeves. He promised my brother that he’d get him what he wanted if he scored eighty percent marks in his class Eleventh, first term exams. To tell you the truth, I’d felt vaguely wronged when I got to know of this arrangement, having got A+’s and A’s all my school life, and not having been offered great rewards at mediocre successes like these. And as much as my brother wanted the bike, I’m not very sure that the lure of it pushed him any harder towards getting higher, better marks. He seemed much the same to me and soon I got over my earlier vague sense of being wronged when I realized it was unlikely he’d get that far. But sometimes I did think how out of the world it would be if he did somehow get 85 or something and earned the Activa. I both wanted and didn’t want him to get it.
Wanting more than not wanting, that is.
Three days ago, results for the first term were declared in our school. Let’s not dwell over my results, I’d just tell you in short that they were capital A Amazing, my marks. My brother though fared not as well as I’d have liked him to, or as Dad would have liked him to, or as he’d have liked himself to. He’d got sixty eight. I was a bit sad about that. Like for a day and a half. That’s as long as I normally can be sad about a single thing. How my brother felt, and my Dad – I’m sorry but I really don’t know. They must not have been thrilled about it either, but as a ten year old writer that’s as much insight I can give you about others’ feelings. I really don’t know how they felt inside, though what I can tell you is that, I felt pretty terrible about not being able to feel, or even guess, how they’d be feeling about it. Perhaps it’s not a big deal after all, but sadly enough I was not sure about that either.
So basically the point I’m trying to drive home here is that it was a big surprise – the Activa that Dad had anyway got for him. Bhai, who of late had been pretty economical with his smiles, couldn’t control his beaming, all teeth and jaw smile. You could see excitement all over his face, eyes so joyed with disbelief that you’d think Shin Chan won the Nobel prize for Physics. Dad was … again, I’m so sorry readers, I cannot explain. I see a tree full of fruits, I love the tree, its fruits and its shade, I always want it to be there, I’d be really sad without the tree, but how the tree feels at any point I’m far too ignorant about. Did that make any sense?
Then Dad and he made each other eat the cake. And made me eat the cake, and rubbed cream on my cheeks, you know, the usual cake fun. No pictures were clicked, maybe because we were so completely absorbed in the present we couldn’t get out of it enough at that time to anticipate how dearly we’d reflect on it when it becomes the past. Now you’re thinking this sentence is not from a ten year old writing. This is. I’ve copied it from somewhere. Briefly, they left to get ice-cream, my brother and Dad, on the new bike. Meanwhile I rang Raghu up and shared the good news. Bragged, for once.
In the evening, Bhai left for his tuition classes on the bike. He would meet Rajat there, on his older, maybe less advanced model. I wished I could see for myself how it would all turn out, the scene, but I’d quit going to the tuition classes a couple of months after I’d joined when I’d met with my accident. I never started going back again as Dad and I both agreed I didn’t really need the formality. I waited at home to listen to the anecdote when Bhai comes back.
At the time he was expected to be back, Dad was waiting for him outside the house, sitting on his scooter. I fancied them having a race, brother and father, from my windowside study table on which I draw pictures of these old people whom news channels are always after. The ministers and statesmen and all. Yesterday, as Dad sat on the scooter outside, the wind giving his shirt many turbulent wrinkles, I was drawing him. Probably the need for recording the day had emerged by now. My sketch was interrupted when he suddenly stood up, smiling wide, waving his hand. In 20 seconds Bhai was in my view too, the two of them talking, same height, similar features, Dad’s smile much bigger though than my brother’s.
Dad saw that the bike was much soiled. Like an enthusiastic kid who has just got a new bike as a prize for his efforts, Dad cleaned the stains off the Activa with a duster, and asked him, my brother, to sit besides him for a ride. I quickly ran out to the porch to see dad flying it into the green horizon. A little dangerously even, like an adolescent maverick.
It was the happiest of all the days I remembered. I was doing my homework when they came back. We had dinner, and chatted, all three of us, about moviestars and cricketers and the programs I love to watch on TV. Then we went to sleep in our rooms, only no sleep met our eyes. My brother and I sleep in one room. As I pretended to sleep, I could hear sobs from the adjacent bed, my brother’s. What?!
My brother was sobbing uncontrollably. I asked him what happened, but he wouldn’t answer. I said I’d call Dad, which he was sure I wouldn’t, and said nothing in reply. He just sobbed, and sobbed. Tell me what’s going on, I demanded. “You’re a very good boy, Guddu.” he said. “That I am”, I said matter-of-factly, “but why are you all sappy”. No answer, again, but he did calm down in a while and went to sleep soon after. I don’t quite know what our relationship as brothers was, or how we were as compared to how other brothers are. Anyway, whatever we were we are not anymore.
In the morning today I saw Rajat escaping the school walls to go to Priya, the multiplex he’s always bunking and going to with his gang. Apparently, his dad has got him a car now, a beautiful, white car, into which he promptly dived and scooted around at mad, bad speed. A Honda Jazz. Till two days back, they made me want to whistle.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
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.
____________________________________________________________________
¹Now I mostly only write emails followed by Regards Name Designation.
²which happened not to exclude a lot of people.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, March 28, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, February 25, 2011
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..
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
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.
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.
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
Saturday, February 19, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, February 18, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
First Morning in Bombay
3rd 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.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
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.
____________________________________________
*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.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
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.
Corollary: They're more likely to like the same sitcoms than the same poems or movies or books or music or political parties.
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 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 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 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.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
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! ....
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
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.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, September 17, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, September 3, 2010
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
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!
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