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."