Dawn Of A New Day

Another year wanes to the blitzkrieg of a realization that one-thirds of my life has passed by, with few things worth remembering and nothing significant accomplished for the third year in a row. The year has not been unique, or even kind to me. I have pondered and mulled over this many a time, over an assortment of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages in the company of ‘fine selected tobaccos’.

There is this pattern to everyday living, whose essence is the list of things one would want to do. Things, one needs to do in order to get a wee bit closer to our short-term and long-term goals. Things, one must do in order to succeed in life as defined by the not-so-set parameters of our so-called society. One continually analyzes these things, assesses limitations in achieving goals and revises the ‘list of things’ or overcomes limitations. 

This pattern, to me, has become constant, annoying. Like the background hum of a computer that one doesn’t usually notice unless explicitly spoken or thought about. I would go so far as to say that one’s life is measured by how well one executes this pattern caring two hoots for all else. Somewhere down the line, stark realities such as poverty in the eyes of a handicapped child forced to beg among layers and piles of human sputum and garbage-laced roads, and homeless people sharing space with homeless dogs have become secondary. Yes, they have become secondary.

Over the years, I’ve had this nagging feeling that I’m not doing enough to change things I feel strongly about, things that are secondary to our society and leadership. And when I did try, I was taught lessons on the importance of the self, the ‘I’. This conditioning has... tainted me, summing my life to negative.

In the face of it all, I wouldn't think twice to spend fifteen thousand rupees to liquid-cool my processor and lower its temperature by fifteen degrees.
In fact, in the face of it, I wouldn't twice that this money could be used to fund a couple of orphans for a year through an organization such as C.R.Y.
(I would pick the liquid-cooling system any day.)

As societies tend to haute-couture highs, economies to capitalist clans (Infinite profits/growth with the earth's limited resources? Another post, maybe.) and Machiavellian-leader-run governments to megalomanic machinations, we are left with a stark reality—the fragments of Equality that once were, is now dead. The ‘I’ matters more than the collective ‘We’.

This time, I want to make a difference.
This time around, all I want, is to effect change.

I hope for a better year to come. And if somebody out there is reading this, I hope the same for you.

Definitely not the kind of Birthday Blast I had in mind.
I can only pray for the ones who have been forced to suffer loss, and hope for a better tomorrow for them.

For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

-> "For The Fallen" (1914), by Robert Laurence Binyon

A red rose in bloom,
Severed, swept, by winds that lie-
All beauty must die.

55

Everyone I have come to know and love is transitioning, to new loves and new lives. I am the fool relentlessly moving on with my own life, clinging to fragile expectations of constancy in bonds that thin a little more with each passing day.

Everything fades, and everything dies.
Not so soon, hopes this fool.

Periphery Of Perception

One day I'll be in a state of inertia, oscillating unconsciously between thought and void with digital audio output at the periphery of sensory perception and Winamp in shuffle mode with its playlist containing every digital piece of music I possess. And that’s when a song from the past, a relic, will be sure to play and cocoon me in raw re-interpretation. For, the words, these words, will lacerate meaning, bleeding themselves dry to transcend the mind to new planes of appreciation.

That's when it'll move me after eons of not having done so , make me rethink who I am... adding itself to the previous rethinks, manifesting as a summation that redefines me. Not for the first time, and definitely not the last.

---

PS, to Manu:
When it is said “Let there be love”, the elevator doors shalt open. Heh.

Déjà Vu

There were mountains.
Tall mountains that looked menacingly black from miles away, on a long straight road that winds at its foothills. These mountains had a life of their own, a separate consciousness that somehow makes one feel that they’re living on a much lower plane of thought. They ceaselessly whispered to him in the night, egging him on, reaching the furthest corners of his mind with a smile so boundlessly evil and a hand so subtly outstretched, hypnotizing him, calling... calling him home.

He resisted, day in and day out, till one day his will broke and he reached out and accepted the hand of support that pulled him to his doom. Three motorcycles, engines screaming, did journey to their doom.

To this day, he does not remember the events that transpired or how the mountains murdered his friends. But remembered knowing he had to escape. And he did.

Spirits chased him, in the guise of humans carrying weapons. They surrounded every route of escape with military precision, focusing intense flashlights on their prey and howling like a pack of wolves so near their food. He was running, on foot, gasping, bleeding, and pulling thorns out of his bloody soles, covering imprinted stains of blood with loose sand from a bag. Bloodstains were a giveaway, he could be followed easily. His heart thumping, adrenaline fuelling his very existence he crawled into a narrow crevice where he hoped he would not be found.

The sound of spirits in the guise of men-with-weapons was drawing near. And the evil voice, oh so strong it was, fluidly shifting suddenly and constantly between demented cackles and screams, orders to return to captivity... and doom. At that point he thought, if he ever escaped the clutches of this damned place, he would christen the tallest peak of his nightmares, Mount Doom. He vaguely remembered a mountain with the same name in an epic novel, from which was fashioned a ring of power. He gazed at his palm, overjoyed that he had no ring until his reverie was shattered by voices circling in.

And the last thing he remembered was a blinding white light through the opening of the crevice, illuminating his face to an ethereal voice that commanded - “Kill him.”--some would say it was the white light at the end of the tunnel, symbolic of consciousness after death--before he woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by his two friends who insisted that they had rescued him after he crashed, and that the people with guns were a hoax, a delirium, an illusion that his mind did create.

---

Today, I dreamt of the same spot where I was so brutally hunted in my dream of over two years ago.
I told myself, rather, thought to myself or whatever mode one uses to communicate to ones’ own flow of thoughts in dream state - “I have been here before, in my dreams, perhaps an eternity or dream-lives ago.”

---

I was surrounded by loved ones when wheels revved past the spot that I sheltered in over two years ago, and a whizzing sense of dark familiarity crept in. Today, there were clusters of eerie broken houses in which were glimpsed people, huddled in terror on a bright sunny day-- victims of tyranny of the mountain, I later found, as the dream rendered itself unto a mosaic of sheer terror.

I vividly remember some parts of the dream. There were friends old and new, a sense of contentment and happiness flowing golden, so surreal yet so tangible that you could almost touch it. We were young, happy-go-lucky, we had aspirations and oh yes, we had dreams. Yet, there seemed to be no observable effect of any evil surrounding us. Days passed by with images mirroring lyrical words of “High Hopes” by Pink Floyd.

An eternity may have passed in familiarizing myself to these new moments when the mountains so dormant woke up, seething at the presence of someone familiar, someone from the past, someone who... got away. A haze of memories and loads of fear later, I was drowning, right near the crevice at the foothills of the black mountains I once sheltered in. Floods, torrential rains, a black night, fright, and wishing for this to end, to soak in sunlight. Doom drew itself near, and as I felt my life slowly escaping clutches of my fragile mortality, I let go of the cold hands of my two friends who saved me in my previous dream.

And just before eternal darkness set in, I could've sworn I heard a feeble echo of the familiar cackle of Mount Doom. And I knew then, I had witnessed the death of my dreams.

Rain Event

It was 6 PM.
And the end of a nicotine session with the Wabbster. After a particularly traumatizing day's work of aligning laser beams, there's not much one can ask of the day. So... birds were chirping, young couples with overflowing pockets in some corner of the city would have been getting cozy (and old couples too, I really have nothing against them), and leaves and flowers were oscillating into each other with such speed and stamina as to make Michael Phelps hang his head in shame--when suddenly out of nowhere, a monstrously huge drop of liquid ooze slams the Crapper's head with brute force and beats the living shit out of him.

And how it Rained.
Now, Bangalore has been prey to heavy rains for a while, and the posters of Lady Luck in all her resplendent glory that had so far adorned the walls of the Crapper's life and shielded him from the furious onslaught of the chaotic monsoons were blown away and ripped to shreds by a friggin tornado. Ergo, I found myself stuck in a 'Rain Event' (quoting Air Marshal Carlin.)

Half-an-hour's wait did little to ease streams of water that had somehow percolated through my waterproof jacket into places where the sun don't normally shine. On discovering the fact that my innermost layers of clothing had been compromised, I branded the activity of high tea on the low and sundry footpaths of Rajajinagar a futile exercise, and decided that it was time to move.

The last time I found myself trapped in a similar predicament was during a bike trip to Hyderabad in May, and in the perspective of that day, today was naught but child’s play. But that is the stuff of legend, and deserves a blog-post in itself.

Little did the Crapper know that the adventure had only just begun. An utterly defeated jacket containing a Nokia 1112, a Creative Zen Stone, 4GB of wet Data on a USB drive, and soaked books among other things--Buses and call-centre cabs rampaging every nook and corner of the road--autorickshaws, the self proclaimed Templar Knights of Bengaluru city, waging a crusade against other genres of vehicles--overly enthusiastic scooterettes surveying the topography of potholes by displacing their fluid contents on beings of the road, living and non-living. One and half hours to cover 12 KMs. One gets the general idea.

At this point, all one would wish for is to watch steam radiate from one’s body and sink deeper down into that warm sensation that only a hot bath can offer. Water, heated to the right temperature, to wash away life’s dull aches and pains, and all of the acid rain. But noooo, not me. I wanted to be a jackass. I wanted to recreate some magic. I wanted to face the elements--the howling winds, needle-like raindrops on my face, and challenging terrain. I wanted to feel alive.
And I did.

So, if you were out on the roads and you saw this biker, enthusiastic, drenched to the core, cutting foot-high swamps with a zest that would disgrace most 4x4's, humming songs of Black Label Society, Manowar or Fear Factory-- then know that it was me.
I felt like a child.
And I felt free.

Tip: Never mix whisky with weed.

Oh, the shame...

A reminder--from me, to me.

"Post."

Metropolis

On a newly-constructed pavement you passed
With a smile that, beyond the street-end, didn't last
You are the shaman, and I am the skeleton undead
Raised from your many adventures in bed.

Soaked by sights of your seductive glance,
How many more did take the chance?
Monuments to love, your kisses so deep,
Poisoned by venom, oh, the price's so steep.

This is our new superset, of moral value.
Suicide is on display, every afternoon.

This Metropolis has such lovely tales
Of human emotions sealed in coffins, properly nailed.
Disposable incomes and disposable friends,
Corporate communication, mixing dangerous blends.

30% off on Lingerie, the "implants" of Showciety,
And conflicting thoughts of consumerist piety,
Imprison once-free minds in urban structures--of Architects, these concrete scriptures--
Archiving their aspirations, lives and billions of sentences
On clusters of Terabyte-Servers storing Google's indexes.

This is our new superset, of moral bloom.
Fratricide is on display, every afternoon.

From their chairs in Ivory Towers of might and light,
And all that is supposed to be right,
Hissing Prodigals of Serpents bleed dry our lives
Crusading against gods they denounced as a lie.

Sometimes, one wishes for more
Sometimes, one wants to go... home.
But blinding lights have numbed the pain,
Souls have stopped crying in vain.
Love and hate have been found again,
In TV channels and spaces between static grain.

This is our new superset, of moral doom.
Deicide is on display, every afternoon.

Caught between the Devil and the deep sea, It’s true,
For the dead, I ain’t singing any prayer or two.
In this city of lights orange and fluorescent blue,
Superman saves souls no more than few.

55 Words Of Reality

He believed in the concept of a soulmate, and so did She.

They were just perfect for each other, living part-identical-part-different lives, completing each other in the right proportions--the balance that makes love so beautifully poignant, forging perfection within boundaries of reality.

One day, they passed each other on a street, and never met.

Child In Time

Consecrate
An eternal
Hate,
Liberate
A truth
Decayed.
Running wild
In time,
A child
Smiled,
Cried,
From humanity
Shied.
Pregnant,
With meaning
A forlorn life,
Pining,
For insight
Beyond divine.

Stars
Of a Heaven
So bright
Mocked
The little child's
Plight.
Hurt, its
Soul burnt.
To ashes,
It returned.
Bring it
To life,
Teach it
The lie,
And to Reason,
Defy.

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-- W.H. Auden

The Clock

The gold rimmed square clock--hanging on the pale blue wall, a few feet away from his cubicle--stared right into his two blue eyes. He found comfort in pretending that the monitor was staring at him, and not the clock. He gazed at the second hand of the clock, which produced a very perceptible, almost meaningful tick every time it shifted itself by six degrees and moved itself to the next marking etched. The second hand coincided with the minute hand, on the minute, every minute.

He’d been observing that for the past 22 minutes. And in roughly a minute, the spinning, eternally circling hands of the clock would all overlap each other. Within the vision bounded by those thousand and odd ticks, he realized that 22 minutes were just… gone. He smiled. It would be noon, soon.

He stood up, looked around his cubicle and relaxedly slithered back into his plush, padded chair amidst a euphoric rush of slackness. It seemed safe to loosen his tie. His tie, the ostentatious piece of clothing that tied him down to rules, regulations and belligerent bullshit. Everyone seemed to be busy. Busy, with this so-called pretentious word. Work. A society-invented obnoxious excuse designed to obliterate all knowledge and feeling, and fill that void with an insipid romance novel having platitudes on every page.

And as he thought these thoughts, he found himself tiptoeing to the wall, stealthily sliding the clock off its anchor and bringing it back, soundlessly, to his own cubicle. However, when he looked around, he found it odd that no one had heard a thing. Or even looked his way.

Upon examining the clock and having prised its face plate open--his proud face exhibiting a self-satisfied snort of derision--he said to himself - “Thank you Mr. Clock. It’s so easy to mess with time, and escape scot-free.” The second hand was just three ticks away from being overlapped by the other two hands. The moment they overlapped, he trapped all three hands between the thumb and the index fingers of his own.

And time slowed down till it settled into a standstill. People around him no longer moved. The silence was abnormal, albeit very gratifying. Mouths wide open in the midst of guffaws--the topmost button unhooking itself off its groove, of a white shirt a size too small for that well endowed corporate bosom--a drop of glistening black coffee originating from a mug pressed across a clumsy mouth, defying gravity, suspended in mid-air.

“Perfect Circles!”
With those words he pushed the hands of the clock, all together, with his index finger, in a delicate clockwise motion. It had to be clockwise. The very thought of anticlockwise motion was to him an anathema, an unjustified fear. A stomach clenching jerk, set in motion the mechanical whirring of all the gears, sprockets and other fine circular components that flung time into action.

And like video that’d commenced playing, he saw electrons spinning around nuclei, atoms and molecules spinning around to form living cells, himself circling the block for a morning walk, the earth spinning around the sun, the sun spinning around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the milky way, the milky way spinning around the centre of the galactic cluster, clusters of galaxies spinning around the centre of superclusters, and superclusters spinning around the center of the universe. And the universe, crunching itself into obliteration and reverting back to that single omega point from whence all life was born. And as he felt himself being sucked into the video, into the whirling inferno--flesh, bones and his very existence fragmenting--the sound of a sharp rap on a wooden surface caught his attention.

He spotted young, strong knuckles on his desk. The whirring of the fans in his computer, the electronic hum of copying machines, and the collective noise of the people around percolated into his senses. Perplexed, he turned to look at the face that belonged to the knuckles.

An exhausted sigh met his eye.

“It’s noon. Smoke?”
“Ah, one of the supposed “breaks” from the mundane.”
“What?”
He shook his head, and said - “Coming. Give me a mo’.”

The clock still hung on the wall. The guffaws had subsided. The drop of black coffee had been absorbed by the red-hued carpet that protected the floor from their merciless soles.

Half-hidden in the grasp of young, strong knuckles was a silver lighter with a mellow blaze. As he graciously accepted the gift of flame, and took a deep drag inside, he observed the topmost button of her shirt.

He said to himself – “Well, well. The shirt is a size small for that corporate bosom.”
“Loser.” She said, catching his eye and grinning.
He smiled back at her.

So you see, no matter what one does and where one goes, it looks like there really is no escape from the mundane and the boring.
So far, the constructs of society are winning.

Abstraction

Half-dreams and Deja-vu's,
Overlapped forgotten memories
And progressive views,
And birthed visions skewed,
Trances out of the blue,
Maybe even epiphanies few.

Translations of non-linear perception
Transformed subliminal imagery to Art in Motion
Obliterating stasis,
Causing paradigm shift from thought to action,
And metamorphosis from specific to abstraction.

Mind and Soul
Between planes, transcending
Between moments, convalescing
Between lives, oscillating
Between hopes. Clinging.

Half-Dreams and Deja-vu's,
Overlapped forgotten memories
And progressive views,
And birthed trajectories new,
Chaos out of the blue,
Maybe even redemptions new.

Mind and Soul,
Seeking purpose so frail,
In alternate realities that trail,
Of lives nothing but drifters' tales.
For the blind, this ain't no braille...

Obscured by opacity, Thoughts without tenacity,
Examining the deeds and the lies that breached
A salvation beyond dreamless sleep,
Floating further away and out of reach.
In Opiates for the Masses, solace we seek.

Half-Dreams and Deja-vu's,
Overlapped forgotten memories
And progressive views.
Emotions were few.
And there was nothing new.
There was nothing new.
There was never anything new...

Crap, again.

The morning filters orange? I'd say red.
Does colour really matter to us, the dead?
Promises, prophecies, and hidden visions
Have left their bitter incisions.

The black of my hollowed eyes have lost their sheen,
And this morning's lament bleeds me deep.
The soul has been emptied and uncleaned
And this morning has witnessed the death of my dreams.

Old Crap.

Weigh words in gold
And meaning in diamonds,
Life exists on paper,
Legal, A4 and Bond.

---

Winter freezes me over
One last time,
For the rains bring forth
Whispers of destiny...
But spring brings forth a vivid beauty,
A beauty of age and mature love...
Love for the alma mater.

---

And this dance, done right
Takes away my rage, my light...
Swaying in the pale moonlight
This happy tale I write...

Scorpion?

There was a man who saw a scorpion floundering around in the water. He decided to save it by stretching out his finger, but the scorpion stung him. The man still tried to get the scorpion out of the water, but the scorpion stung him again. Another man nearby told him to stop saving the scorpion that kept stinging him.

But the man said: "It is the nature of the scorpion to sting. It is my nature to love. Why should I give up my nature to love just because it is the nature of the scorpion to sting?"

Don't give up loving people... Don't give up being good... Even if the people around you hurt and sting, love them.

-> Source Unknown.

Confession 22

It's been six years since I first saw you.

I remembered you today. In fact, I remember you every once in a while. You're the ghost... haunting me, making me restless, sometimes even long. You meant [maybe still do mean] a lot to me and you would so unwittingly swirl around in my dreams, enchaining this captive with your hypnotizing words. The captive that I was, the captive I longed to be. Back then, we were young. Yet, you stopped me from killing myself. My zest and my wonder for life is something that I've learnt from you.
You've taught me much.

My heart would skip beats every time we spoke, and irrationality would creep in, and so would possessiveness. Your seductive smile--the smile I loved so much--would always invite me to dive into your eyes and see oceans of something I could never comprehend. Maybe it was wisdom in there--connected to your experiences of life, and to the deepest throes of your mind. Sipping on the perfect coffee your mom always made for us, I enjoyed our endless conversations on chaos, politics, music and life. Ah, and there was always my frowning upon your incessant nibbling of the gold chain that hung around your slender, seemingly-fragile neck.

But now, you've disappeared into obscurity. And if I look up to the star-studded sky and ask why, I will not get any answer. I think things like "Maybe it wasn't meant to be" or "I wasn't good enough"... They're just shields behind which I can hide and run away from it all. Maybe I did wrong you in a way that I shouldn't have. But there have been too many maybe's in this story. And now, it's too late for forgiveness or reconciliation.

"When you lie down on the ground and look at the stars, don't you feel you're falling into the infinity of it all?"
Oh, what I would give to hear those words again, only I know.
And why you aren't with me now, only you know.
Sometimes, I miss having you around. Badly.
And every time I look into the night, and gaze at constellations of small specks of light, I remember you.

It's been six years. It's time I finally moved on.
No. Not just yet.