i smile laugh easily
nothing matters

i rage easily
a storm inside

i lose interest easily
does it matter

i escape easily
where no one can see

i love easily
the whole world in my embrace

i trip easily
i get back on my feet clumsy and stronger

i lie spreadeagled over the sorrows
they are mine, alone

i hope easily
the blows i take on my chin

i stay true to me
always

hmm...

still in the middle of this huge Silence. nothing much to say ... the mother of all blog-blocks. but now that I am here, replying to comments, might as well scribble something.

am reading a rather dull book which I am to write the review for. actually, 'dull' might not be the accurate description...it has enough hormones-gone-crazy action, impossibly gorgeous hunks and babes, incredible slang words etc...but still, dull and pathetic. maybe the demography aimed at shd have been the antsy teens instead of those beyond...never thought in my teens that reading a book like this wd have been a chore, but maybe I would...I was always kinda strange, that way.

a package is on its way. hope it reaches safe and unharmed.

saw some bits of swades couple of days back...for a change, shah rukh acted normal without contorting his facial muscles into weird hammy expressions....decent movie....and funny, i felt kinda nostalgic, goose-bumpish when he spots the ole mother-land on the NASA map thing...missing my home while being right here...i should be committed i know. maybe not, if things in the pipeline materialize.

mixed feelings. been a long time since we wandered away.

../

just realized my last post was one of my longest, if not the longest. Am surprised I could sustain my interest in any topic for that long. Hmm, go figure.

I want the Unseen to give everyone I know a break - my man, family, friends, neighbors, domestic help, acquaintances, people I just smile or wave at, people my girl smiles or waves at, the dogs and the cat (that loots our milk...sometimes) in our neighborhood...a tiny, golden, happy break...not much to ask for, i think.

I hate feeling somebody's blues...cos I can't do anything abt it...i do realize that it is impossible for anyone to have everything they want from life at any given moment, that wd mean death of all evolution, but still....
a break would be good. And then they're on their own again, I promise. Are you listening, Unseen? Sometimes all you need is just one teeny chance to come good...if you don't...well, you don't.

I myself am at a pretty okay place in life, still restless, still lots to do, but the blues are just restricted to random days and moments...

the reason i write this...

years ago, read/heard (forget which) a quote by warren beatty, i think, he must have been quoting someone else,maybe:

"they all have their reasons."

pretty innocuous and not very brilliant wordplay. but it stayed with me.

a compassionate, non-judgemental, deadpan take on the several quirks and foibles that define our human race.

We all have our reasons for everything.

the salmon for swimming against the tide to spawn, die in the process and if they're lucky to survive, become lunch for the waiting grizzly bears;

paris hilton for staying in the news thru totally uncerebral, even unaesthetic means;

sanjay leela for dragging his ma to all the functions, his smirk and unceasing chewing of the gum (or cud?);
karan johar for his smirk too, his yuppie family flicks and his muse (?);

people on flickr who post provocative pictures, have like a zillion contacts and still like to call themselves introverts;

people who churn out asinine serials that i never watch, but hey, some do, i think


the striking students who've faced hunger, the sun, a battery of lathis and water canons;

arjun singh, though i really can't even pretend to understand it;

the terrorist groups who butcher mindlessly;

the young LTTE female soldier whose sole aim is to become a suicide bomber and attain glory;

the women who go under the knife or such to turn back Time, when they're all destined to dust;

people who think motherhood is a drag, and not so-kewl;

finally, i must have reasons for

not pursuing anything single-mindedly, not following through on the various passions i have taken up at different stages of my life, though I am yet to find out what the reason is;

not giving off yes-i'm-really-interested vibes and yet having people confide in me, total strangers too;

not giving off yes-i'm-so-serious vibes to teachers/lecturers in my past, and yet having some of them see through to some spark inside and actually liking me;

not disliking anyone enough to not forgive them. forgetting, well, now thats a different ballgame.


Yes, we all have our reasons. Am glad I got mine for scribbling this post.

he lives. truly

an amazing story of the bike man. and how his precious companion was stolen in london...they were eventually reunited.

people like him are actually living, squeezing Life to the last drop. when they get the cue to exit, they will have lived their dreams out dry.

That is not to say that I have not lived, but there is so much I still want to live through...some roles come with added responsibility, where your me-trip has to take a backseat for some time. which is done purely out of choice and love - thats the meat of another blogpost-to-be.

the important thing is to have some wild oats to sow...which can be grown again, at leisure. :-)

the tide...

what i miss most in my city is the ocean, the beach. have always been a beach-bum in soul...one of my lil utopian dreams is to have a shack selling knick-knacks on a beach somewhere. no pressures, no anxieties, just chillin. surviving on the day's haul, as it were. a hammock, a drink in hand, the sun sliding down the hemisphere, a storm. i know this dream visual will be flawed in reality, when business is bleak, the locals get antsy abt the new biz, and the rent isn't paid for weeks. but whats the harm in dreaming. maybe in my 50s, since I don't see myself getting the time to breathe till then.

was in a conversation with my better 1/2 last night, one of those times we connect like we did when we were younger, sigh! how everything is just an illusion, maya, quoting kabir, death the only reality - the great leveller. this instant, we're here, the other, gone, poof! puppets in a play, the scriptwriter Unseen...he said rather dismissively, that we don't come back, i that we, the soul bits, are regurgitated thru the ages...the zen stories came climbing out, time passed and we fell asleep.

another hot day and its mundane details. the world can wait, she needs a hug.

idyllic...

meeting a stranger. sharing a smile, or some words. or silence, even better.

no baggage, no reference points, no familiarity whatsoever.

no connections anywhere on political leanings or fave band or book read last.

no race, no gender, no religion, no social baggage.

no roles to be played, no masks to be donned, no preconceived notions.
nothing to impress or scorn.

just an impersonal reaching out in vacuum.

no addresses swapped, no traces. no expectations.

a complete lightness of being, for some moments.

travellers resting under a tree. ships passing by in the night.

rambling

have often tried to rub the sadness away.
a smudge remains.

it stays within, never lets go.
through the laughs, the conversations,
the good cheer, the shopping trips.

a moment alone, and I have company again.

happiness, jealous, tries to win the round.
succeeds, and slips.

it needs a new name, naah, not sadness. oh so ordinary.

a richness, deep and auburn.
like raindrops on the dusty earth. like a shadow on a wall.
the Self exults at this knowledge. till death do us part.

leagues below, at the core.

.../.

nat geo airs a special on how an english tourist went missing down under, concluding with enough evidence that deadly dingos got him. one man missing, and dead.

here people dying like flies every day. a bus falls into a ravine. terrorists massacre innocents in the name of religion. riots elsewhere claim more lives. if that were not enough to satiate the grim reaper, murders of other flavors abound.
the daily full of missing children and adults, rapes, accidents, murders, burglaries, assaults - not leaving out the gory details, ever.
a niece colludes with her boyfriend and robs her uncle of a hefty amount.
an elder brother shot by the younger, hanging by a ventilator.


a man beheaded in an alien land. a second wife surfaces, for the moolah. the first gulps the toilet cleaner and waiting to die. did she even think about the three lives that would have only her for a parent?


crimes of passion.
the seven sins on a roll.


4 (5?) year old budhiya runs his way into the limca book of records and gets violently sick after. his skinny lil body pushed beyond endurance. the vultures, sorry, cameras zoom into the puke and the disorientation. TRPs.
what kind of a sick mind would push, brainwash this tiny thing to burn records at the cost of his fragile growing body?

beauty and success are inversely proportional to popularity and likeability, that is, if you are a woman, in these neck of the woods. a man changes mates and is considered eligible and hot. a woman does the same, and shes a climber, a schemer.

funny. humans.

zen and a smouldering man

one of my ever-favorite zen stories is the one about the two monks and the young woman. >>

Obsessed
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two traveling monks reached a river where they met a young woman. Wary of the current, she asked if they could carry her across. One of the monks hesitated, but the other quickly picked her up onto his shoulders, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other bank. She thanked him and departed.
As the monks continued on their way, the one was brooding and preoccupied. Unable to hold his silence, he spoke out. "Brother, our spiritual training teaches us to avoid any contact with women, but you picked that one up on your shoulders and carried her!"
"Brother," the second monk replied, "I set her down on the other side, while you are still carrying her."
(some versions of this story describe the monk as carrying the woman across a mud puddle )

<< never loses its punch.

_+_

totally dig 'bheegi bheegi' from gangster...edgy, soul-angst song...and it helps that shiney ahuja's smouldering...this guy has that something...definitely sexy. hes done rather different offbeat roles before. if he plays his cards well, he could be a guy to watch out for. will be a change from the hackneyed shah rukh and salman and other khans...

the new pepsi ad is SO lame. its not even infantile in humor. shah rukh khan's aging. I used to like him a lot in his initial days...but now its like a crush-gone-horribly-wrong.

rani mukherji's hairdo doesnt do anything for her in the new 'fanta' ad...her shoulders look so brawny and she looks quite like a spud.

the new coke ad with aamir is pretty funny...a class act...wish he would push the envelope a bit more and take on some really challenging on-the-edge stuff.

yes, I am done.

collective unconscious

pretty sad abt kaavya's mess. 19 and screwed up bigtime. she didnt have to. could have just stuck to her own wordplay. immature, unintentional, whatever...plain foolish.
and what abt the publishers - have they heard of anything called editorial review which also includes checking for instances of plagiarism.

but am thinking at a real basic level isn't everything just a regurgitation of what has been said, written, thought about forever. say i read something brilliant somewhere or see a great pic and the next time i write or take a picture, i might be unconsciously evoking the other. a word, a tune, a color used artfully, just the way a poem's been crafted.

maybe not totally and not word to word as ms.viswanathan seems to have done in so many passages. what was she thinking?

i mused abt it in an earlier post.

a friend.

she has to be the oldest 'friend' I have.
and I do not have many that have stuck on through, moulting ace that I am. I use the word 'friend' loosely, as it should be.

given the odds, its remarkable that we still ping each other, across oceans and continents.

we have met once in f&b, and that was a rather gone-by-in-a-haze meetup. we think and speak in different languages tho we have adopted the other's language to communicate. same species, different races.

what started out with verbose letters (we were 'met up' to master the other's language) and pictures and postcards and girly things has filtered down to a card, postcard, pics, an odd package, a quick mail.

but everytime i think, well, haven't heard from her end for long, maybe shes finally dropped off the face of the planet, she returns.

one of the few constants in a world of variables. two decades is a long time...shes just got married and it makes me happy n sentimental in a corny way.

we may not know each other inside out or even connect in the same spots, but the fact that we have kept this silly fragile but strong as steel bond going, makes us 'friends'. touch wood and God bless her.

the reindeer totally gets it.

./

"who wants to be happy? all the happy people i know are idiots. i want to be miserable with you."

from a movie seen a decade ago, which I have no other memories of. a fuzzy idea of a man wooing a woman. these lines stayed.

the mind is rather grumpy when it comes to books, movies, songs, poems. though it has absorbed manyof these and relished them that instant, it only serves me these morsels on recall. stingy thing.

a journey, inside.

am I ...

a private person / an extrovert?

A. I would say, the former - subtly but acutely so. though, and this, my pop-astrological-gyaan tells me, my leo ascendant lends to my back-slapping, brash and make-pals-in-every-alley quality.

vain /wise?

A. I would love to say wise, but I humbly realize my ego still hasnt learnt not to swagger.

patriotic/ an evolved soul, dismissive of borders, a nomad at heart?

A. I would say the two are subsets in the same set...we are part of this huge human commune. asians, africans, hispanics, caucasians, all carbon-based organisms that copulate, defecate, ingest thru similar set of orifices.
but fact remains, that like my parentage defines me without holding my 'Me' down, my country does ditto. I can be a global citizen, travel extensively, learn languages, connect with people from anywhere at a basic level, melt into the relevant fabric and maybe not come back for aeons, but my being an Indian remains in the very carbon that makes me up.Could be social conditioning, whatever. The dressing remains buried within layers of sophistication, education and xenofriendliness.
And it will remain so. Unless some crusading we-are-one-species cult decides to pluck all the newborns from neo-natology deptts all over the globe in the next minute and nurture them in a cocoon suspended in mid-space, away from latitudes and longitudes.

a pathetic softie/a hard-as-nails bitch?

sane/ in the grey zone? again sticky territory - sanity and its inverse are social constructs. madness must be the consequence of sanity climaxing into itself.

Unanswered.

I realize, these do not in any way make a difference to the poor seals getting clobbered for their skins in canada(?) or the dam thats almost damned in gujarat.

I plead self-absorbed, as usual. The case rests.

Hmm, one thing I do know is that I cannot make myself like karan johar's yuppie-candy flicks!! - Eureka, after all then!

people continue to not surprise me. they haven't changed much, though i've ascended chronologically. now I observe clinically and detached, once I did not.

am dying for some rain...think it did, in the middle of the night. can smell the remains in the wind blowing.

A Study In Red - Grey

Red balloon in a grey sky
Floating to meet the winds

Rain, no rain
Where do the clouds melt to?
Tempt and mock my heart
Wretched cloud-sirens!

I wait to taste the rain on me.

++++
song playing in head - 'i'm a rock'

ja oder nein

so, medha patkar ends her fast. the SC delivers a safe, p.c., if temporary verdict, not ruffling feathers on either side. can't resist but wonder, what if all the injustices and crusades end, where will she and her ilk hitch their'fast'wagon too?...not to take away from her single-minded devotion to the underprivileged...but the only time we hear of her or bahuguna or any other messiah is when they fast...really need to know if they're actually do anything else besides anshan!
Maybe they are and the media isnt interested in anything apart from the current terrorist act-scam-scandal-celebrity news...its all abt TRPs at the end of the day.
clever chap, modi, used the same desi home-grown weapon and feels like a winner too. read that a displaced farmer got 24 hectares for his land from the state govt but wanted better ones and got them too...!

can't remember when I guffawed my posterior off, last. most of the stuff i read, see, listen to is just titter-worthy or at best a mellow gurgle.my stress-buster remains takeshi's castle on pogo...but it isnt the same without the jaffrey element.

archbishop of canterbury's planning events to coincide with the d.v.c movie...the world resolutely remains divided on almost all issues.

Sex and money will never get outdated.

The human species is getting closer, the globe's folding up in a bigger way than before...all thanks to blogs, photologs, podcasts etc...much like blogs, stuff onflickr and deviantartand other such virtual community spaces pretty much represents each of our individual personalities...we all want someone, in some corner of this world, to share our angst, see what we see,and most importantly, like us and be like us! Its a bit like the idea behind SETI except turned inward, STI maybe.

I must shut up. now.

coming up for air, and

Have to get this monkey off my back - this project thing thats almost done...the last bits hang on, maddeningly. Then theres another waiting in the wings to be born, reborn, rather.

duran duran's 'come undone' pops in. i remembered liking it. still do maybe, somewhere.
'who do you need, who do you love when you come undone '...
used to be quite into music - songs, lyrics...had them pat. have been rather detached from for quite some time. besides the odd stuff on mtv etc...but dont really mourn it, either. maybe someday.

my niece's 13th b'day happened...with her closest friends and us the family hanging around at a safe distance at a joint...her gang seemed so cool and clued in...thought abt when i was 13 and totally tomboyish, gangly,clumsy and whacked-out...hmm, i think i had more fun than she did...minus all the trappings of faddish clothes and accessories and teen must-do hype- she'll disagree, totally, i know! but shes not silly and superficial like most...devours books, has an overactive imagination and really funny n smart....God bless her!!

should get my ole nose back to the grindstone.

meter down...!!!

Spewing some...

Fixing leaks, html tweaks
Images appear, once the path is clear

I've got myself a deadline
By the time the light shows
Hope I don't end up flatlining

Roobaroo roshni
Echoing through the walls

I evade, I blog, I flickr
But return thou must to the editor

This is really pedestrian poetry, neighbor's moving furniture upstairs
The heat creeping up
DO I really care?

Words falling over each other, 'don't shove' says one, its a stampede, yells the other.
My head is a glorious mess of loose ends and to-dos.

Telephone rings, a friend, a quick conversation
Rush rush bye-byes

The page waits, stoically.

My tea's getting cold.

he'll agree...

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover
I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell, I'm your dream
I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way
So take me as I am
This may mean
You'll have to be a stronger man
Rest assured that
When I start to make you nervous
And I'm going to extremes
Tomorrow I will change
And today won't mean a thing
[Chorus]
Just when you think, you got me figured out
The season's already changing
I think it's cool, you do what you do
And don't try to save me
***