After listening to Porcupine Tree.

It’s been a long time since I have loved you. I guess with after so many years and so many other faces, I have somehow started forgetting how it feels to have felt for you. After all, even intensity needs practice.

I have bartered my soul and body to the gods of power and pleasure. It is easier to give up the purity and pain that comes with true feeling and just submit yourself to the comfort that comes with instant gratification. That is like a drug, and the resulting high is born out of a feeling of power; power over another being. Another being who is playing his/her own game and has probably no idea that he/she is being drawn into the moves of somebody else’s game. It’s an odd paradoxical process where the lines between the chess pieces and players are blurred beyond the point where you and the game are one and the same.

Yes, it’s definitely been a long time. I guess loving is also a habit, isn’t it? I don’t really know whether I have fallen out of love, but the habit is slowly fading away. However, since old habits die hard, maybe I have replaced that habit with so many other faces. The moments spent with those faces help me forget.

They help me forget the utter agony of having loved, and of having lost. They don’t matter, not in the big picture that I keep trying to hide in my mind-closet. Maybe I feel that the sum total of all these random moments will stuff up that gaping void. A void that I avoid. It’s like stuffing a bag with crumpled bits of old newspaper to make it look substantial.

A need to be touched, to be held and to belong; even if it is for a very short time. I don’t know if my break from you led to the birth of this need. It crosses all lines, breaks all the rules and oversteps all the boundaries.

Sometimes, I am not even sure. Sure of whether it’s your face behind all that’s been happening to me. That scares me because then it leaves you blameless and me hopelessly burdened with a character flaw that cannot be explained away. I mean, I cannot let you get away that easily, can I?

So, tomorrow if you come back into my life with a new light, will all of this go away? More importantly, will I be able to hope with you again? Will I be able to fall in love with you all over? And that is the scary part.

Because I don’t know.

Maybe I have stopped loving you but I will never forget you. 

“unforgetting”

The desert sands can do strange things to a person. The grains burrow deep into your skin to lend your face a timeless quality. The old man squatting opposite us was around ninety, but he looked older than anyone I had ever seen. Underneath a pair of bushy eyebrows, his eyes still retained sparks of a long forgotten fire.

We were in the middle of the Great Indian Desert, listening to a story being spun by the village great grandfather. We perched on a colourful mat in the courtyard, right outside a cluster of huts which belonged to his extended family.  I leant against a mud wall, trying to keep the scorching sun out of my eyes.

When he started speaking, we could barely hear his voice at first. Then slowly, we got used to the ragged, whispery tone that he spoke in. He told us of the times when India had still been under the British Empire. Stories which don’t make it to the history textbooks.

“We never had enough water in those days. There was only one well, many kilometres away. People would walk there and stand in queue for hours on end. Hundreds of thirsty men and women gathered there for water, not just for themselves but also for their families. “

He stopped.

In the distance, I could hear a faint sound of the winds blowing over the sands. If you close your eyes and think hard enough, it will remind you of the sea at night. Sounds of water rushing over sand.

He went on.

“Each person was allowed one pitcher of water for the entire family. We walked for hours back and forth in the burning sun. You couldn’t even leave your place in the queue for a while because someone else would seize your place. “

I stared into his face. It looked like an ancient parchment, wrinkled and frail.

“Do you know the thorns that stick to your clothes and prick your feet as you walk on the sands?”

We grimaced. Of course we did, those annoying little burrs were a constant bother. We would spend hours picking them off our clothes and feet.

“If you look closely, you will see that each thorn has a little grain inside. We used to go hungry for days on end and these grains kept us alive. “

I think he spoke in an alien tongue that day. Survival at such a primal level dealt a heavy blow to my urban naiveté. It took a long time for my mind to wrap itself around what he was saying.

“Those days were long and hard. But I am happy now. “

I took my eyes off this living storybook and looked at the hut he was leaning against. It was soot blackened and looked rather battle weary.

 Feeling guilty would be cliché. However, I had an odd feeling that being a hero was probably the last thing on his mind. The sands do that to you.

Written long ago.

Sometimes, the words don’t look the same. The same everyday words mutate into twisted creatures from a desolate netherland. That dark land is inside your head, painting your nerves and brains with a riot of colours.

You have given the artist, a ladder to your head. He’s gonna run inside your mind and splash off. That colour shall come seeping down your eyes when you are walking. That golden yellow is crawling down your eyelids, colouring your vision to jaundice. Your ears hear the sounds of death, slaughter and laughter. The red seeps in, closer and closer till she sees red for what it was truly meant to be.

Do you think he will leave your head? He already knows the narrow pathways of your mind, dousing them in colour wherever he so pleases. Move your head wildly from side to side. Let the colours mix up in a frantic madness of colour. The colours will seep in through your body, with fluorescent leaps and bounds. Your coloured footprints will be a work of art, with penniless artists feeding off the dried strips of colour on a dirty pavement.

Home, sweet soul

The city is lies, deceit and pretend humane. It is a complex machine of sorts, masquerading with a human face, a familiar place. It lulls its unknowing people into a complacent nap.

 Everything is alright because I am a happy place with a smiling face. Believe in me and the buildings that you see around you. You are mistaken. Behind those shut windows are not soulless souls who pretend to live. 

Brickdom

Six little bricks made up the tiny hut.

Some were crumbly and some were not.

I lived inside and hoped that the strong ones would stand

 One day, they all fell down on me

And covered me with a layer of fine dust

I stood up and realised

It wasn’t so bad after all.

A forgotten Ferris wheel.

Today, on my way to wherever I was going, I spied this broken down mini Ferris wheel. It was a tiny wooden affair, the kind you would see at an obscure little fair tucked away in a bylane. At some point in the past it had been a colourful affair; the seats still had the flaky remains of bright reds, greens and yellows. Some of the wooden planks were hanging loose and limp.

Looking at the thing, it was easy to conjure up a snap sentimental picture of a bygone time filled with the voices and faces of happy children with swinging feet.

Most of us are such suckers for a Lost Time. 

What does democracy mean to me?

It often strikes me that there is only one thing that man truly covets. You would think that the right answers would lie among the choices of money, power or immortality. The truth however, is rarely pure and never simple, as Wilde would quip. The truth is, men and women want to be free. That‘s what you will find when you scrabble through the gritty layers of human desire and greed; the longing to be free.

Wars, murder, competition, struggle with sickness, it’s all manifest with the human urge to be free. At this point one might ask the niggling question, free from what? This is where the paradox creeps in. You fight and you struggle, but what are you fighting for? Through our struggles, we often lose track of what we set out to achieve.

To me, democracy is another one of humanity’s experiments to gain freedom. I could list quite a few freedoms that we wish democracy would give us. The freedom of expression, the freedom of choice, the freedom from tyranny, and the bullet points could go on. These are only the sub clauses though. We often do that; mistake the smaller parts to be representative of a Whole. The bigger picture behind democracy ultimately lies in a desire which is achingly human.

To me, democracy comes down to one primal need. It is the freedom to be free. Isn’t that what we are all looking for? We want to be free  to be free. So it all comes down to this, the struggles, fights, the glories and the agony...all in search for a long lost idea. 

Freedom, a long lost idea? This premise probably makes this essay self defeating. I am not talking of the freedoms that we vicariously extract from our lives. It’s not the freedom we think we gain through wealth, power or even knowledge. It is not the truth that sets us free. At the back of our minds, we are all striving towards an ideal. An ideal of pure and intrinsic freedom which comes out of nothing, draws its power from nothing and has an independent existence. A freedom which is created ex nihilo.

To me, democracy is the flint stone that humanity hopes will create a spark which in turn will lead us to be truly free. Make no mistake; I am not idealising democracy as this philanthropic thought experiment that man is carrying out in the hope of a collective enlightenment. Each of us wants to free from everything that holds us down. The artist creates a world of his own where he can exist freely. The politician manipulates because he hopes that his power play will emancipate him in such a way that one day he reaches a level where he will not have to manipulate and politicise anymore. That is his definition of absolute freedom. Each of us has something that holds us back, and ironically we wield that very thing as our weapon to fight for our personal definition of freedom.

Democracy gives us choice along with a voice. We choose our leaders and exercise our freedom through them. When their definitions of freedom clash with ours, we bring them down and elect new mouthpieces. The whole thing from start to finish is a process of using freedom and moulding it to suit our needs. What is the point, one might ask? How does the practice of free expression lead us any closer to the Eldorado of ideal freedom of man? What does the freedom to vote have anything to do with an obscure notion of being “absolutely free”?

When I looked at some of the fundamentals that lay behind the idea of democracy, I realised just how vital the concept of freedom is to the essence of being human. Democracy was never meant to be a mere political instrument. It was/is meant to create a new ideal, something which would free man and woman from the restraints that held them back from being truly and essentially “human”.

In today’s complicated political scenario, it’s difficult to trace what democracy truly means to me or to any of us for that matter. Even if you leave politics aside, there are other murkier questions that one has to answer. Like what it means to be “human”, for example. What are we, really? Little bowls of consciousness trapped inside vessels? Or living beings with bodies that matter? Perhaps we will never know.

Till then, democracy has to matter, to me and to everyone else. If humanity does get to a level where it can figure out what “being human” means, then maybe this human experiment will have counted for something after all. 

Door

She never knew where to go.
Perhaps it was because she never knew where she was coming from.
In all the stories that she read, and in all the ones she made up in her head, the ending always told her that following one’s heart is the only way to find one’s destiny.
Does following your heart always make you happy? That’s what it is supposed to do, though.
She always wondered if destiny lay behind the door marked “Happiness”.
Whatever it was, it seemed to her that her heart had exceptionally poor navigational skills. In a nutshell, she could never find that door. No matter where she went or who she went to, what seemed like the door from a distance always turned out to be yet another staring wall. Of course, the wall was just inside her head. It was always made of grey bricks, a little crumbling at the edges.
And the sky, the sky above the wall was always grey.
In a story, she would climb over the wall and perhaps find a dazzling green field on the other side. Here, she was always too lazy. After all, it is easier to imagine yourself with superpowers.

Shut shop.

the stories are really being handed to you but you probably don’t know it yet

maybe when all the noise is gone, the music shall make sense

all the dance shall stop one day

that is when you shall start walking on a rather crumbly stage that shall smell of mothballs from past musicals

silver dust doesn’t last very long, even for people who never believed in anything but war

war and music make for a very strange marriage

one day is the day when the universe shall finally stop

and everything will be silent

you will stop dancing then

walking the old roads will be a thing of the past because the stars will shine down with a pathetic light

then you will want a war, a dance and all the other things that ran away when the skies shut down

they ran and they ran until they came to you

or atleast they thought that they came to you

it was only a wooden box that looked like the lost sky

the whirling slowed

and slower still

and slower and slower

and maybe softer too

you looked for the rhymes but they weren’t there

crash and burn, it all crashed and burned

so how did it roll when the dying star winked out

winked out for good

some of the debris trickled down to where I was sleeping

laughing laughing all the while

are you still waiting for the anarchy to shut up?

then the plans will go up in smoke, just like the crumbly stage where you used to sing and dance for the mad masses

look the light is fading just when you thought that it would last forever

but you always knew that forever never lasts forever

forever is just for the time that you are laughing out loud

one little star takes a fall just after that

the tinkling sound that it makes reminds me of a bad bell that rung at noon time lunch

Two weeks in Leh

I have been in Leh (Ladakh) for the past two weeks now. If one is looking for creative inspiration of any sort, then no place better than this. It is not the idyllic and expected snowy beauty that one looks for in the mountains. The place has an eerie and desolate feel. Think of vast and barren spaces, stretching over as far as the eye can see. Picture rows of black and brown mountains with their peaks obscured by mist. And then there is the odd black mountain standing out with layers of snow on it.

An Indian version of The Shining (God forbid that it should ever happen) can very well be shot in Ladakh. There is isolation and silence, all around and all the time.

I live in a village called Shey, where the Druk Padma Karpo School is located. If I step outside my room and do a 360 degree turn, all I see are mountains, and mountains. In the evening, as I walk across the school towards the dining hall, I see the light failing fast and the mountains slowly turn into looming black triangles in the sky. Behind the mountains however, the sky lights up in a strange luminous glow. If you stare long and hard enough, you can almost expect to see a glowing spaceship glide across the sky.

Sometimes, I stop in my tracks and stand there, completely still. All I can hear (and feel!) is a biting wind howling around me. At times, it seems to be strong enough to blow me off my feet. At night when I go to bed, I can hear the wind literally screaming outside my room.

This is a place of a violent and insane beauty. A picture that challenges your ideas of aesthetics and what is "pleasing on the eye".

Living somewhere is very different from visiting it. Mountains, happiness and misery make for a rather interesting cocktail.

Life, the mall.

Following one’s destiny is a hugely romanticised notion. It is not easy at all. They say that if you want something really badly, nothing can stop you. There can. Leaving everything behind in search of a so called higher truth, sounds good in all the road novels that one reads, and the films that one sees. Maybe there is no higher truth, no pot of gold, and no epiphany at the end of the journey.

Uprooting is always a painful process, even if the tree is sentient enough to comprehend that it is being taken to a place with more sunshine and water. At the end of the day, the roots are still sticking to familiar ground.

What am I looking for? I wish I knew. Sometimes I feel like I am in a huge shopping mall. I want to get something but I don’t know what. So I go into each shop and look. Life has to be more than one big shopping mall, right? It can’t just be an assortment of boxes where I open each one just to see if it has what I am looking for.

You tell yourself to do what your heart wants you to do. Your heart never wants anything because it can’t. It pumps blood to keep you alive. It’s your brain that does the wanting and the longing. There IS no tussle between the heart and the mind.

It’s just a civil war inside your head and one side wins, maybe.

Maybe, there is no destiny.

Of new tales.

"Button your lip don't let the shield slip"

There is something about good music. Something that fills you with regret. Regret for all the things that you have done and undone. There is something about the melody that makes you want to turn back time and do things all over again.

And when the singer sings, what happens to all your fashionable cynicism? The "shield" that only slips when you are all alone in your tiny room in the evening, staring at the glassy computer screen in front of you.

Emotion is the last child of a bygone age of corny platitudes and melodramatic soaps.

We are all confident and self assured people moving forward. Forever. Yet something happens when your favourite song plays at a time when you are sitting all alone. When there isn't a single person around to scrutinise your facial muscles. That is when you sit back and wish that you were a better person. That you had said things when it was necessary. And not walked away. Held on. Maybe. Been a braver person and faced the firing line.

Sometimes, a tune makes you want to rewrite the entire story. The story that has become you. It makes you want to read the older story, the story that was lost in the lanes and bylanes you left behind.

When the words fade into music, all you want is peace. Or a new story.

Is.

Isn't it that time of the year again for you?

Days of broken nights and dancing cheese?

Of plastic lungs and smoky smiles?

Of drunken miles with dirty dimes?

And of psycho rhymes?

Golden songs fail to please,

and what of floating sheets?

Tunes in buckets

and painful heels.

Isn't it that time of the year for you?

You with your sly-cream eyes,

and the rum-kissed miles.

The cigar streets

and the heavy beats.

The stringy suits

with the muddy shoes...

isn't it that time of the year again for you?

:)

Altered un-orientation, it is.
Destabilising but exciting nonetheless.
The little black sticks are breaking up.
Black, plastic and weak.
Neon weakness blinds sometimes.
The sinking started long before the waters rose
surprise me. surprise me. surprise my mind and what else is left inside the old house.
old houses hold a lot of secrets and broken corridors.
lying whispers run along with changed minds.
time ruins, time breaks and time bangs on the floor with a hammer made of air.
The hammer sings, loud and long.
It sings to the tuneless poems that people create.
Run, run and run to the broken corridor on the left.
Peek into the first door that you find.
the dead poet told us to shake dreams off your hair.
shake the cobwebs away and run inside the mind that you drew when I woke you up.
I tried jumping off the edge and danced instead. The dizzy madness has overtaken me
heat. the heat the heat and the heat. in the distance I see that the liquids have already married.
the awful offspring is mine now. To foster, to care and to bury.
It is a mad child.

Peace and disquiet can hit at the same time. How many times have you heard the few leaves rustling outside your bedroom at night? Most of the time, all I can hear is the sound of a car on the deserted night streets. That is probably followed by the feeble sound of a dry leaf moving to the slight breeze.

By then, I am probably asleep or too bored to care.

I hate writing ratty posts. They are too revealing and narcissistic. They also make you sound like one of those emo-punks you hate and love to trash. Some times it is better to be nasty and pretend-strong. Then you got the whole world believing that you are a fortress that they can hide in. You dole out a lot of advice to people you care for? Yes, I do that. A lot. The happiness that you get from un-fucking someone else's fuckup somehow covers up a lot of the misery that is inside you. Helping someone else is so cathartic that you almost end up convincing yourself that you are happy too.

But the crushing friend never fails. It is always there. After you are done injecting other people with feel-good nectar, all you are left with is your own bile. No drug invented for you yet, is it? The ether only works for a while. And after the effects wear off, forget quoting Comfortably Numb to yourself. The crushing pain inside becomes physical at times. You can literally feel it, way beyond all the self induced numbness. Nudity of all kinds is rather shocking. So is nude pain. We can almost never deal with it. Which is why we remain, yours truly and pretend-strong.

...

Its been a while since I have written. The last one month has been crazy, to say the least. I have always hated paperwork, and lately all I have been doing, is that. Running helter-skelter with this document and that. All I can see right now are photocopies and more photocopies. One of these days, I swear my birth certificate will develop a voice and start ranting at the number of times it has been stuck inside a photocopier. It is an utter sadness I swear.

My mind has been in a perennial state of funk and that has ended pissing off some loved ones. All apologies to them and they know who they are.

I have also being OD-ing on a number of television series. I suggest you OD on them too. It is great fun without having to screw your nervous system by overdosing on actual substances.

I like going places. It is the interim of preparation that I hate.

Sheer nightmare, this.

One lone voice

There is still hope. With people like Bloomberg, the Muslim-hating American stereotype does go down a notch. It is difficult to go against the flow of conventional thought and opinion without being politically incorrect. Bloomberg has managed to achieve the very opposite. 9/11 was as traumatic for the Muslims as it was for the Americans. What is interesting is the fact that Bloomberg manages to draw the usually much-blurred distinction between Al-Qaeda and Islam.

Thank you.

I have often wanted to write a long song for those who mattered. But emotion is cheesy and hence overrated. There is no way to express certain things without seeming pathetic. There are so many regrets, memories and wishes that I can scrape together from the past. Mash them all together and you will get one bowl of angsty teenage crap. The sad part is that all that crap has made me the kind of person I am today.

My antidote to the excess emotion is a state called hyper-rationality. Take out all that emotion and subject it to the operating theater and some cold formaldehyde. There is nothing more effective than that. Think of everything as being part of a chain of cause and effect and you will see that you have reduced yourself to nothing more than a machine with interconnected gears. One moves and then they all do.

Once you have been clinical to yourself, all those half forgotten memories, times when you should have apologised, moments when you shouldn't have stopped fighting, shouldn't have let go...they will all become nothing, but mere "anthropological inevitabilities."

Thank you.

The View From India: The Indian Railways; A Culture Chronicle

http://blog.gale.com/speakingglobally/the-view-from-here/the-view-from-india-the-indian-railways-a-culture-chronicle/