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