First signs of withdrawal: Boredom!

If no one knew anybody, or if everybody knew everybody, then I believe, no one would have to eat alone tonight. 

Nor would anyone need to search for a face in the crowd. I somehow feel strongly that the first case might work out much better than the second one. 

I've walked the distance, I paid my dues and tried to have a go at what I thought I knew was real, 

held no appeal.
I've been to places, I've seen the tidings,
I bought a book of rules for every coin that I could steal
And so I came to gaze upon the stars, when they were yet unborn
And consequently, tear at my old scars, and the mask I had outworn

~Roses (Poets of the fall)

Of late, I've grown weary and bored. Of listening, and talking, and listening, and talking still. I want to slow down a bit, get off the train, and walk some distance on the two parallel tracks, barefoot. I want to sit on a bench and watch the world go by, doing what it does everyday, running. 

I want to lie down and watch the stars run on their routine course throughout the night and wish, that tomorrow they start from the west. I wish to unlearn what I have learnt, and learn all over again. I wish to read literature and learn to write, again. And I just don't wish to wish anymore.

I've heard the rumors, started fires, I sowed a sordid lot of plays for keeps for what I need,

behold the demons that I freed.
I've tried my best at wearing the hard hat, but healing doesn't seem to happen when you hide away the seed
And so I came across the medicine man, and he showed me what I'd forlorn
For if I'm stayed it happens by my own hand, and my own voice full of scorn.

~Roses

What did I just write? Nothing that was mine. I'm just breaking off from the yardstick straight line and headed out for a while. I have been bored for too long. Nothing happens, now might.

Hey clocks, won't you run on your legs when I set you on fire?

Only if some night, I destroyed all the clocks of the world that maintained good time. Only if someday, everyone woke up to the chirruping of the birds or the gleam of the sun than to the annoying alarms.

Clocks have been grossly misunderstood and utterly misused, ever since the idea of keeping time sprouted in someone’s mind. He/She must have been under a seriously funny spell, and then like any other poor joke, this too was shared and spread. ‘Keeping Time’? What is that supposed to mean? Time is supposed to flow; it is an entity in the space-time continuum, why would anyone even want to ‘keep it’?  

Time is supposed to keep us, it’s a one way street, and any entity trying to be on the reverse route is enroute to oblivion. Yet we tend to run on this conveyor belt in the opposite direction, seldom making progress, only to be prematurely being overcome and overwhelmed by its speed. Like dry sand through hands, time slips away.

Time, it is meant to be aware of something that is passing away, gushing by, like a rivulet. And yet, the gauge that was meant for mere gauging has been bred into an unforgiving master, whipping us, skinning us and we like slaves crawl on bleeding knees, in quagmires of time. The concept of ‘late’, though well established now, should not have been there in the first place. And now, we are too busy trying to avoid the repercussions of being late. Why do we want ourselves to be bound by the idiosyncrasies of time-keeping, routines that grow more mundane, the more rigorously and religiously we follow them?

I too am bound by these like many, only that I’d love to curve out and do something that I’d love to when I’d want to. (Though it is true that most of the time I want to do a thing that I don’t quite know how to do, nothing.) Other times, like days as today when a beautiful person (just because he/she can talk my subject with awe and spellbinding enthusiasm and glee, I’d call the person beautiful. They are like gardeners watering my zeal), I realize that I can never hate the subjects I chose to pursue and would want to give all my time to read them no matter how poorly I had done in past examinations, and yet I merely sigh, I am too engrossed, I have no time. Need to manage more time. And then I wonder, how can I do this to something I have come to love, there is time, and always will be, for everything my mind can crave for and desire for.

I believe, time is meant for historians. To maintain a chronicled list of events, that is all. For us, time should only be to flow with, in continuum. And as far as keeping time and punctuality are concerned, with the exception of commitments already made, I’d love to forget the watch.

Forever black?

My Naani's place has a dog. His name is Blacky. He's definitely not the one in the pic but bears close resemblance. His predecessor was also named Blacky. His predecessor was Jacky. And I think his predecessor was Rocky. But let the ‘key’s be in the locks and the ‘ky’s’ be in the adjectively chosen name’s suffixes because I am digressing. 

So I was wondering as to why his hair doesn’t turn white even as he ages. I want that formula. He's always black. Jet black! And no one can do anything about it. That’s it.

On a different note, I am off the hook for a few days now. My Mathematics teacher used to tell us how he’d just shut out everything and would go away without phone or any intimation where he was. Let’s try that on a controlled and confined scale. Let’s be lost for a few days.

Vacations!

Was it a dream? A photograph of you and I.

It was a long time ago that there was one fine summer evening, about fifteen years back.  I and my brother were playing cricket on the terrace. We played 10-10 wicket matches, and I seldom got a chance to play as India, I am the younger one. And I preferred Australia as a result. So it was this fine summer evening that we were still fighting over a petty LBW. No matter who was bowling, my brother was the first, second and the third umpire along with the whole Indian Cricket team, and the commentators too. I liked to bat more and bowl less, though on that field, the situation was always the opposite. I always had to bowl more and bat less, rather fight for the bat. So we were fighting as usual when my father came on his scooter and parked it on the terrace near the solar geyser, the place where it had always been parked. But that day, he had a little wooden apple crate with him, placed carefully in between his legs, where otherwise one of us would get to stand while going to school. That apple crate did not have any apples, but rags of cloth and a little woolen ball coiled up inside in once corner of that little box. It looked like a tiny cat. It was a 15 days born orphan leopard cub whose mother and other new born brothers had died. It was a survivor, it had to be. Such an evening never happened again.

I was quite young that time, and I don’t much remember what time I got to spend with him, but one thing is for sure, he had a room all for himself, and a little house in that room too, though it seems strange to have a house in a room, but it was this way for him. We still slept with parents. And he was fed with milk in a bottle, like babies, while we had started to drink in glasses. There isn’t much to my memory except for a few incidents which I think I would not forget, nor elaborate. 

He grew quickly in size and had to be sent to a place where he’d be taken better care of, for a vegetarian house could not feed his growing appetite of meat for long, and that too cooked. So it was this last day he spent interacting with the world on camera, much, much more shyly than his natural self, except for a few instants with his companion. He loved kids, liked to play, only that other kids would start crying the moment they saw him approach (In the video he makes a run once, towards a kid and his parents, not in the camera). You’ve all seen human babies cry for milk, probably puppies too, I’ve seen a leopard cry for milk and hold the bottle like any human baby would and I find it adorable.

It was after two years the later part of this video was taken, and he remembered us, even after a long long time.

And there is one thing, that he could teach anybody, speaking for a very diverse family, the wild life.

They are not humans, they remember things, relations, families, loyalty and love, and give it back no matter how much time passes in between. They are not hypocrites. They, are our true brothers, under the sun.

P.S. The video is the result of a one day fiddling with Adobe Premiere and Encore on the video extracted from a dying Video Cassette, and I know if I had given it more time it could have been better. Maybe I’ll work on it in a while and share, but at present, it’s not the video, but the voice of dying animal life that we should be concerned about.

I wandered Lonely as a cloud.

One night when it was sunny outside, I fell asleep running around in a playground so unfamiliar and unknown that I felt at home. I tripped over a ledge into the lap of a big mountain that had a face of a man I knew and did not remember who. I stretched out and crashed in a feline stance while the shrubs around lifted their bushy bottoms like skirts and rushed away on their woody toes, huffing and puffing throwing angry stares on me for disrupting the decorum of the place. I fled. I fell. And it wasn’t sunny anymore. I heard a siren call out and children rushed to play. My feet grew lighter as the walk turned brisk and I would never touch the ground again, but no one seemed to notice. The siren grew like silence as I started running while the rains started wetting my feet. I stopped and the silence was gone, the siren was gone. Now it was a distant familiar voice waving from a distance, calling out to me, ‘would you want some tea?’ I shouted back ‘Surely!’ and the voice was gone saying ‘be here in five’, but I don’t think I heard that. There was no playground now, and I was looking at myself from my back and sometimes from the front and side while I meandered the narrow tread onto a mountain placed in a place where it should not be, or had never been before. I was not thinking, just trekking it with ease, and yet the one who was watching my back, which was still me wondered that this is not supposed to be the way it is. And while I trekked on to the summit, the me left behind took my eyes off me and looked around and absorbed the striking similarity of the places I have been and the undecipherable amalgamation of all of them into what I was in. I was again in sight, now on top, when I blurted out, this isn’t real, it is a dream, shout, shout out loud, snap out of it, shout damn it. And while I tried to shout, my shouts were stifled and muted. There was this siren again, filling the place all over again, blurring everything, wanting me to jump, calling out loud. And while I did, the place starting folding like a crumpling paperwork, from between crevices of the mountain, from the plains, everywhere, and I fell, and yet…It wasn't night anymore.

 I pressed a button to turn off the snooze while Ma called out that tea was ready. Now I knew.

War of the Words.

The Sentencing goes blithely on its way,

And takes the playfully objected rhyme,

As surely as it takes the stroke and time,

In having its undeviable say.

~Robert Frost

Word, formed by the elimination of an ‘l’ from the world, in no mannerisms should be considered just a Word. A few words are all that takes to destroy a temple, faith or a world, personal or otherwise. Much in the same way, a few words would take you from rags to riches.

We hear people say things, and we think we are not listening. Alas, if the human brain was so comprehensible to the humans, then we’d have achieved the ‘Zero Kelvin’ perfectly ordered state long time ago, perfect sync, harmony. The Creator knew it. He made the laws, of entropy and of mass and energy alike. The entropy is ever dynamic, and ever increasing.

Let’s take the famous work of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. How many years did Julius spend, and how many wars did he partake to reach the zenith of his power? What did it take to topple him? Just a few words of doubt and misguided reason on the part of Cassius, and the history stands testament to how easily Caesar bled. How those three words, “Et tu Brute?”, gained such prominence to be used in every situation of back stabbing and deceit. How many words did it take Brutus to win over the Romans, and how many did Antony take to torch Rome in flames of mass upheaval and mutiny? Perhaps, only a few. Why? Because, these men recognized the powers of interjecting just the right words in the appropriate places. 

Courtesy: Google

Words are like arrows, once released from the quiver, will have their devious say, some time or the other. Martin Luther King planted a seed, by the mere words which are ever immortal now. ‘I have a dream’. Everyone, who listened him speaking those famous words there and then had a dream, his dream, his ambition. But these are the examples of instant action that are written upon the pages of history. But that’s not all to the words, they are doing what they were made to, or intended to, everyday, to everyone, slowly, stealthily and steadily. On one hand they are breaking friendships, relations, factions, ideologies, beliefs and bringing down empires, on the other hand the leaders of the states are honing to their lying skills, to woo the public.

John Galt said it just once, that he’d stop the motor of the world. He did it and how? What did he do? He himself admitted that he did not do much but slowly starve the society of people whom it depended heavily on, and yet shunned them as ruthless, immoral industrialists who had no sense of moral responsibility who thought only of filling their personal coffers. Slowly, over a span of many years, he did it, and yet he did nothing, but planted the seed in them. When they were ready, he reaped the crop. Words are one of the most powerful weapons that Man could have invented in all times. I believe there are only a few things that are immortal. Words fall in these few things. Words could be like a virus, they are entombed deep in the subconscious of the host, aloof, alive, and dormant. No remedy can ensure that the malady never thrives or sprouts.

There is this particular friend. Rather, there is this general friend about whom particular friends had been talking about. When I defended his stance, they gave me reason after reason to make me see the other side, which they called the real side. They tried to prove that he was a shrewd planner and a cunning man, who had this inner circle of a very few for whom he’d snatch opportunities from other outer circle friends, including us. While I believed him to be different, they tried to show me the other way around. I realized something that day, and I shared it with those particular friends, the same thing I’ll share with you too. From that day, I would not be able to look at him and his deeds the way I used to. Because, even though I vehemently defended him, and still had faith in him, but it is a natural tendency to test the truthfulness of the claim from time to time. His every action questioned, and every move dissected to find traces of the alleged real intention, just like we’d try to find traces of nicotine in a reformed drug addict. I told them that due to what had passed that day, I’ll never be able to trust him the way I did. What harmed me if not words?

But these are just a few manifestations of a much larger force at work throughout the entire world. The War of the Words, it began the day we started using them. It looms by and large and we all are just playing by the words so many architects ingrained in us. Does it await culmination? The horizons are still too far. But it is just the negative part of it, focus on the other one too sometime.

If I’d only carefully show you the kinks in my armour, even if I draped it in mirth and humour, the thought would still pop up in your mind every next time you’d read something I wrote. Go on, deny it, and I would not argue, I too did the same and would continue to do so. I think I have done what I had to by a mere mention of what I intended not to. I'd write more, sometime later, but when I could show you more clearly how it works.

But do you still think it would require going down three levels deep into a dream to make possible espionage, to plant the seed, inception?

Life's unfair, so are we.

Now this ain't any attempted poem, read it as a flowchart, without arrows. It flows top down and then iterates.

Curious Child

Gets a toy

Is curious about it

Toys with it

Is Fascinated

Is obsessed

Toys a bit more

Examines every dimension

Is obsessed all the more

Finally, has nothing more to explore

Leaves the toy

Discards it.

Watches as other little child comes closer, curious.

 

Lets him have it

Watches him have the same fun he had

Then some more, he watches unperturbed

But then...

The new child has new tricks

And the toy is doing them

The new child is obsessed

The old child wants the toy back

The new child is unaware

The old child cannot take it any longer

The new child resists

The old child snatches

Toy breaks

The new child cries

The old boy feels loss, does not cry

Back to square one.

The little story isn’t fair, but then the little child wasn’t fair either. 

What's her name again?

(Singing) “What’s my name, what’s my name… my name is Sheila, Sheila ki jawaani… “And dash dash dash.

Stupid, it is not like this. It is like “What’s your name, what’s your name? … My name is Sheila, Sheila ki jawaani”

“No, it isn’t, you are wrong!”

A little girl and her brother were arguing over this matter of immense importance with seriousness and reasoning that our song writers be put to shame if they realized how badly they have been screwing up with word and sentence construction and leaving these little future leaders with their innate logic to figure out the wrong from the right.

A few days back, I was travelling in the last row of seats in the bus, just next to the door. It is one of my preferred seats for being the most spacious one, a comfort for my legs and my chafed knee joints which would otherwise be twisting and turning every five minutes groping for ample space in the congested furrows between the seats. The other one is the seat behind the driver.

So, two seats to my left, there were these two little kids coming back from school and talking at the top of their voices in the otherwise almost quiet crowd. And they were discussing this matter of Sheila singing this song. It was the reason put forth by the little girl that caught my wandering ears off guard.

“Why would someone ask anyone else his or her name and that too twice? When we are getting acquainted with strangers, we say, Hi, What is your name, my name is XYZ. She too is doing the same thing, introducing.” I leaned forward to see the face of this little genius, she might have been in third class or fourth. I looked at their mother and saw nothing. Probably, the point had failed to register there. I looked out, to the fading sunlight on the distant mountains and chuckled.

Ah, innocent kids! But she’s right. This little lady has got a point. Either Sheila was a first class drop out in the English course at school or is having bouts of forgetfulness and panic.  Even master Yoda jumbled words, but at least he made sense. We all know what Seductive Sheila meant by that rhetorical question, but still, this-little-lady-has-a-valid-point-to-make. The SMS script has already started to seep into our daily writing style and has started to feed upon the ages old well formed (Not exactly, but still…) English. And now our Entertainment pundits are trying to tweak the correct speaking style too.

Another incident that I remember happened quite a few years ago. It was a singing competition on some channel and Salman Khan was its guest that night. And this guy was singing a song from A Salman Khan’s flick. I still remember the song just because of this incident. “Kyunki itna pyaar karte hain tumko sanam… hamare dil ki tum thodi si fikar kar lo” and then after the song, while all judges were giving comments on the raaga and alaap, Salman Khan pointed out, that it’s not fikar, but phikar. Well there not much difference between the two, the only difference being the absence of a single dot at the foot of the first character, and normally we don’t resort to much arbitration while using them interchangeably in day to day chit chatter. My Ma was never a fan of Salman Khan, but that night, she was amazed on seeing the Show Off Salman Khan having a keen eye and ear on details of this denigrate pronunciation.

We often admire people who have a clear tongue, and a subtle control over the words they utter, both in sense and usage. For example, a news reader, or the announcers at some event. A friend of mine pointed out how crystal clear and beautiful was the voice of the female commentator at the commonwealth games last year. And Republic Day is coming for all those who might have failed to notice it in commonwealth games.

I am not a purist (though I would like to be one) and neither are you. And if you are, then given the present state of affairs in language, you’d soon be bald by plucking out each strand by your very own hands in frustration (and that definitely does not mean that I want to be bald).

So let English, or any language in that case be a blossoming ‘phool’ (flower)in the garden of civilization and if you too are used to using language that might be considered gross, just think once, whom are you fooling?

And why do you think would Sheila say that her name is Sheila ki Jawaani? Is that some kind of surname she uses? Like Laalwani, Advani, Keejwani (ki-jawaani)? Sheila Keejwani, hmm?