I'm too spaced out to put anything down. Can't seem to organise my thoughts. It's thanks to fellow-blogger Pinku that I've picked up my pen...errrr...keypad. So, a poem it is, simply for a lack of incidents...significant or otherwise.

New Dawn

Incandescent triangles of honey gold

Stab and pierce the windows, 

Searching through every fold and every wrinkle,

Creeping under the covers of the unmade bed

Seeking...

To dry the tears of a crumpled soul,

Left over by a cruel night.

Diwali Blues

It's that time of the year again...when I get lower than an earthworm's bellybutton. Characteristic of a seasonal phase, I feel lonely and depressed and wonder what I'm doing so far away from the people I love. 

When I walk these streets and stare at cold, sterile buildings each trying to outdo each other, I miss Diwali all the more. And home.

I can almost see my little town's every street, every home lined with warm, glowing diyas. I can see mom greeting everyone she meets, sweets being exchanged and me gingerly waiting for the next big 'bomb'. I can still feel the unconfined excitement of the neighbourhood gang waiting for dad to bring 'patakis'. I can smell the crisp aroma of 'thukudis' and the sweet sensations of 'ladus' in your mouth. Every association of Diwali is nostalgic and inviting and lends a strange, warm glow that fills the insides of your heart.

Everyone's home and yesterday's phone call drove me to tears. Most of all my brat-of-a-niece. As she animatedly (& secretly) told me her plans to plant 'maale pataki' behind her unsuspecting uncle (read my bro), I remembered my antics. And the time I burnt the sole of my feet :) Mom complained about how 'electric' diyas were replacing the traditional ones. And I saw her point. From my very early Diwalis, I used to stay on late into the night, making sure that each diya being blown by the wind was replenished with a fresh flame. An act that gave me immense peace. We used to sit up and watch out for the last dying firecracker, leaving it's whimsical trail behind...signaling the end of another Diwali night.

I try at my end here to light a little diya in my home, but it's just not the same. Without the intangible warmth of family and friends to make it glow brighter, it seems incomplete and listless. 

A cynical old friend calls it my 'delusion' - typical of Indians living abroad who think it's romantic to sigh about India and home. Maybe it is, I don't really know...but as long as I still pine to be 'home' for Diwali (or otherwise!), I would like to remain in this perpetual 'state of delusion' :)

To all you guys out there, wish you a sparkly, bright and beautiful Diwali...with or without your loved ones.

How can a grown man cry?

Realizations sting the eye

Like a million pins

On a display board.

And you blink it away

Blaming the dust.

 

How can a grown man cry?

 

Your earth lies shattered

Beneath your feet

And you walk the shifting sands of time

Afraid of falling through

With every step.

 

How can a grown man show his fears?

 

Your heart has sunk to its darkest depths

And your soul tainted with grief.

You look in the mirror,

To meet the ghost of your dreams

And look away, lest he prods your heart.

 

How can a grown man look weak?

 

You smile and laugh

And say it’s all right.

Everything’s fine and never been better.

But it belies the pools gathering in your eyes.

 

And you blink it away

Blaming the dust.

 

How can a grown man cry?

The SRK routine

Some songs do it for you. The recent 'Khuda jaane...' from 'Bachna he haseeno' is one such number, methinks. Sure, it's no classic and months later I would have purged it out of my system. Really, it's not like one of those olden goldies that one can listen to anytime.

Right now, I'm in the mood for 'Khuda jaane'. It's expansive and makes you want to do the SRK routine. Let's try this together. At the count of 'Khuda jaaaaaaannnnneeee....', spread your arms, bend a little backwards, tilt a little to the side, head back and yenjoooooy (note: all this has to be done with split-second precision). The words, music swooshes over you much better that way. It would help if you had a designer sweater.

I do it all the time for appropriate numbers. No seriously, it feels soooo good. Stand in front of the mirror (or just about anywhere actually) for maximum impact. While in public though, watch out for passerby's who could be smacked in the face by your windmill-arms. Don't get too carried away in public or you could find yourself in a padded room.

So, swoosh, spread, pirouette...and fill your soul with feel-good numbers. 

Randomly rambling ahead...

O.k. I haven’t said this in a long time…but Gene Kelly is the original cat’s pajamas (although I have absolutely no clue why a cat would need pajamas, let alone boots). Don’t believe me? Watch him do the newspaper routine in ‘Summer stock’ and don’t you dare blink. You just might miss something. Watch any of his movies actually. He’s so incredibly fluid, agile and graceful…and he’s still ‘all man’. No effeminate vibes to make you cringe and ask “Why, God…why?”. Now, how many men you know can do that? Seriously? The swoon-bit is of course his impish, romantic, mobile face…hmmm…What a dreamboat. The kinds that make you sway from side to side with a loony look on your face.

I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t make men the way they used to. Probably has something to do with the fact that women have morphed into part-time men. Which leads me to another conclusion – men, as a species may soon become extinct. I mean, seriously…I change the light bulb, I fix the pipes, I handle my investments (a tad warily). Heck! I even open jam jars. And I know tons of women who do the same. And I also know we are an increasing tribe. 

So, what exactly would be the role of man in let’s say, the year 2080? Would we be walking on the debris of egos of men? Or would women have completely taken over the planet, considering they have superior manipulation powers and an overdose of emotional strength? With women growing more self-reliant, androgynous and independent these days, I wonder… 

O.k. this random rambling is going nowhere. I, for one despite my fondness and undying loyalty to my species, would still like to have men around (the more evolved ones, that is). I donno…life would probably be quite boring without them around. And it’s no fun blaming all your problems on a woman. 

But, I think the reason why I would like men to be around (and I’m not talking about the more obvious reasons!) all the more would be because they tend to bring women closer. Let’s face it. We have an invisible and strong bond because of men. Our easy camaraderie stems from realizing that quality female company can soothe any heartache. And more often than not, it’s a man causing it.

Conclusion to the conclusions? For all our claims, we still need men around. And if they look and dance like Gene Kelly, bring them on. Preferably to my doorstep.

Both sides now

I won't write a thing today. I won't even mouth a word (I know, I know, that's 2 sentences already). I will just copy-paste an all-time favourite, which a very dear and lifelong friend said was all 'me'. 

My dearest friend, this is in fond remembrance of those endless days of youth. With you.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I've looked at clouds that way

 

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now 

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels

The dizzy dancing way you feel

As every fairy tale comes real

I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show

You leave 'em laughing when you go

And if you care, don't let them know

Don't give yourself away

 

I've looked at love from both sides now

From give and take, and still somehow

It's love's illusions I recall

I really don't know love at all

 

Tears and fears and feeling proud

To say "I love you" right out loud

Dreams and schemes and circus crowds

I've looked at life that way

 

But now old friends are acting strange

They shake their heads, they say I've changed

Well something's lost, but something's gained

In living every day

 

I've looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all

I've looked at life from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all...

Rev. Spooner, my apologies

"So, what can I do you for?"

Nope...not a spoonerism, not even an unintentional typing error. At least not on my part. This was actually a sentence used at a very serious, prim and 'propah' board meeting. 

And guess who laughed??? 

30 pairs of disapproving eyes of all colours turned in a matter of seconds towards the source of laughter. I tried (a little unsuccessfully) to look back at the perpetrator and glare, only to stare at the glass door. 

A quick apology later, I was wishing the prophecies of doomsday were proved right at least this time. Of course, no such luck...just ended up cursing Nostradamus for misleading me. again.

C'mon people!! Where's your sense of humour? What's with these guys anyway? They look like they swallowed a septic tank...so poker faced! O.K. fine...i give in. The next pasty Korean who says 'boooss" instead of 'booth' doesn't even get a chuckle outa me. 

So there!

From the frying pan...

Yawwwwn. First day at my new agency and I'm bored to death. This place is so  claustrophobically professional, it’s weird! For the 1^st time in my life, after 6 years in the business, I have had a 3-hour ‘orientation’ with  133-pg. PPT’s thrown in for a major snooze fest. Seriously, who does these things in an ‘ad agency’??!!?? It’s unheard of and so pseudo! Who gives a rat’s ass for your KISS strategy? (which  if you are curious, is the ‘Key to Impact Sales Spots’. Why, oh why, does a writer need to know that fudge?? Although I admit the word shook me awake and I thought ‘now, we are getting somewhere!’ I should have known…)

Seems like I’ve signed up for the military, with a skewed helmet and without my camouflage. Serves me right for choosing a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate over a fun, mid-sized thought shop. 

Oh well…the decision was purely for the moolah and my plans to retire early. Or alternatively, to afford a toy-boy in my senile yet sensible years :) 

I miss my ol’ team though – a bunch of whackos, my partners-in-crime. We always dreamed up schemes to raise hell and I miss that – that whole ‘agency’ feeling of laughing as you work, fighting as you work, scheming as you work. The guys call me every single minute to give me updates and nostalgia bites me in the rear.  

Hmm…maybe it’s the first-day blues, but you can get a feel of a place from day one. I’ve always had a feeling of the ‘feel’. The ‘feel’ this time is of a laughter-less, jaded, hostile, pressure-cooker environment. And I don’t hear music.

 Sob. So this is fire.  

In the contingency of bekaari, I'm feeling poetic...so here goes.


A million stars skip across the water,
Glazing it with a silver hue.

Every night, I dip myself in this silver
And awake, to find me soaked in gold.

Back to the past

Finally! An impending and long-pending trip to Egypt materializes out of the sand. Plans, re-plans and re-re-plans later, we booked tickets. And that’s just about it. Now it remains to be seen whether we’ll actually make it. So often, our plans have come crashing down…much like the nose of Giza's sphinx.

Sigh! So many plans to travel and so little time. Between work and work and then some more work, there’s not much that can be done. But, hold it…I do have a list. And it's long.

I'll roll of just a few to keep you off a doze-a-thon. Some of my must-see’s and must-go’s include all the historical sites in India, Machu Picchu and the ruins of Petra, besides the valley of the kings. Being a complete sucker for history, I so often see myself brushing away piled on years to get a glimpse of the past. Watching the people of the Indus Valley lead their organized, urban lives thousands of years before urbanization. Or stumbling upon Tutankhamen’s tomb and dying of his curse, clutching a scepter, crying wildly. Oh well… :)

I envied Agatha Chistie’s life as the wife of archeologist Max Mallowan (of course, the lousy lout cheated on her…but that’s another story). Imagine what adventures her already fertile mind would have spun, while coming face-to-face with remains of the past.

The impact is best summed up by Christie herself while watching the city of Ur come alive –
“The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint through the sand, was romantic”

I couldn’t agree more.

Romance aside, there’s something of the past that’s searching and magnetic. It’s like this shadowy creature waiting to engulf you and take you away…into a world frozen in time. Waiting, watching…seeing if you ready.

And God knows I am :)

An ode to a Mockingbird

I'm reading 'To kill a Mockingbird' all over again...because years have let the little bits trickle out of my memory. I read it when I was 12 and felt closer to Scout than Jem, despite the latter being my age. Scout’s eyes always remain adult-cataract free, transparent, seeing and perceiving as is…and not what should be. Believing in good, its all-encompassing quality and its ultimate triumph, however long the wait.

On another tangent, it also gets me thinking each time…we, as Indians were victims of racial prejudice for years, but are we above it ourselves? I have so often heard the term ‘kaala’ (or ‘kariya’ down south) for an African, or even a dark-skinned Indian. I have a very dear friend who tells me that in her childhood, some parents didn’t allow their children to play with her because she was dark-skinned. The logic being that touching a dark-skinned person would make you one too!! (if you are lucky, you buggers…). We place ourselves a notch higher when we label somebody an ‘untouchable’, and although the bias seems to not exist on the surface, it still has its noxious seeds waiting to sprout somewhere. Trust me on that one.

Even a show of tolerance or brotherhood can’t hide a festering hideout of bias and intolerance…towards anyone who’s not as pretty, as smart, as successful. For me, racial bias is not just towards a particular nation’s people. It extends towards particular labeled ‘races’ as well – what we term the ‘losers’, the ‘poor’, the ‘disabled’….all those we wouldn’t associate with or touch with a barge pole.

How come we never have patience for anything less perfect, when we aren’t perfect ourselves?

What does it mean to be human really? Is it just to constantly hanker towards perfection or embrace everybody’s else’s so-called imperfections and admit to our own? What if we had a society full of self-confessed imperfect, flawed people, telling all and sundry their fears, doubts, hopes?

I have a sneaking feeling that the day we voice out our shortcomings and gather them to our bosom, we would be free of all prejudices. We would then refrain from derogatory terms and look instead at the richness in a person. At chocolate, coffee coated skins, at a struggle inside a pupa, at survivals despite the condition.

Maybe…just maybe...then, there would be no more ‘race’…except for the human one.

Confront or talk?

Today is the day...where i make a choice between 'confrontation' and 'conversation'. I would rather opt for the latter, but i also know there's a welling up of putrid and corrosive emotions that threaten to hit the surface. If that happens, i know i'll end up spewing venom instead of digesting it.

I want to just converse, i really do...i hope i can suspend my 'humanness' for sometime.

Sometimes though, i just wish i wasn't human.

Being Garfield

Like Garfield rightly (and insightfully) puts it "Am bored...am bored, am bored, am bored...". I would like to add a few more to that. I've been feeling supremely lethargic and bored to even stretch my imagination. The reason why my blog has been silent for so long. A good friend's blogging efforts (thanks Neeru) have awakened the blogger side of me again (Ahoy there! I see land :)

I am in a strangely transient phase - just 'put in my papers' and 'serving' the dreaded 'notice period' in my company. Between spurts of contained excitement and those darn fluttering butterflies, i don't really know what to expect. And i strongly suspect that the older i grow, the more averse i get to change. I guess we all seek a 'stay' after a point of time. Right now though, i need to metamorphose or be stuck around in my cocoon forever.

Well...i guess it's time to fly :)

Missing me

Was surfing meaninglessly, in my usual preoccupied manner when the remote froze in on ‘The Wonder Years’. The episode was one in which Harper Woods was to be torn down to make way for a shopping complex monstrosity. The woods – where Kevin and his friends lived countless childhood memories and lives. The night before the woods are to be reduced to nothingness, Kevin and gang land up there to reminisce for the last time. They play a final game of hide n seek. And then the adult voice of Kevin says something that hit the sleepy gong in my heart– “Growing up isn’t easy…And that night, we found something we had lost – the spirit of children…the spirit of memories…”.

I cried (yes, again…and no, I’m not pregnant…I’m just hysterical). I cried at my own lost childhood...the memories, the sights, sounds, smells..... I wept at spending another adult day bickering with taxi drivers and rushing indoors into A.C. environments to escape the heat. At another night used up in flipping channels back and forth. For all those childhood landscapes that have lived on only in the blind spots of memory….physically defunct, ethereally hung in time.

I cry…At having lost ‘me’ in a sea of frozen faces.

When it rains, it pours…

Leaving behind a wistful vapour trail, the day diffuses into inky blackness. It’s been pouring incessantly…the grey-black atmosphere coating everything it touches with a damp and gloomy veneer. The dark clouds form an apostrophe in the sky…like a million words have been left unsaid in between. I can’t get myself to speak and my words choke to death even before being born. Who knew it would end this way? Everything, including the relentless rain seems so futile…

Ehhh…Wassup Doc!!??!

Had been to my quack for a checkup on a perennial problem and instead of administering a cure, she took a complete U-turn of a deviation and settled in on her preferred choice of subject - marriage. She sort of suggested that my hormones would rebel like crazy if i did not tie the knot (around my neck). I looked at that implication a tad dubiously since she’s been a very vocal advocate of my marital status. Being tirelessly hounded by scores of homo sapiens on the same subject...I did something weird.

I launched into a revolutionary tirade on why marriage is not for the likes of me. And finished it with a smug and successful look on my face. She in turn, gave me a number that made me duck behind her desk with my eyeballs peering out.

I’m never gonna see that doc again. She’ll probably burn me at the stake.

Of Resolutions & trying to keep 'em!

Sigh...This is my 4th attempt at blogging...i never seem to keep up with it. And i forget all my i.d.'s and passwords. My new year resolution this year is to TRY (that's the key word) and write a blog atleast once a week.

Now to make this last more than a week...

One finger

I type on a second-hand laptop, a steaming cup of tea (yeah…I’m not in2 coffee…and no, it ain’t a sacrilege) by my side for internal tranquility and external warmth and with one eye on the blinking tube light. Almost Dom Moraes type, I type mostly with just one or two fingers. The rest linger restlessly over the keyboard, waiting for the chance to hit upon a letter…which never comes.

There are two bottles of mineral water standing like sentinels on either side of my bed. Why, you ask? Because I don’t know which side of the bed I’ll wake up on and when I need that blessed drink, I don’t want to turn to the other side. It’s too much work. A horde of books lie on a stand in complete disarray, some read, some waiting to be read. Clothes hang limp from a hook like they have been sentenced to suffer their fate. You may say nothing’s in order…I say it’s ‘chaotic order’ the kinds only I know. The drone of the old AC and the one blinking tube light are something I’ve gotten used to by now (each time, the landlord replaces one blinking tube light with another). The Venetian blinds are drawn ‘full down’ because it’s 12 midnight and I’m freaked out by shadowy things creeping up on me, even my own shadow at times. The TV’s on the blink and I don’t feel like reading.

So here I am, with my second-hand laptop, typing with one finger.