Zee Studio is doing re-runs of this show. It is like a song, you hear it once in a blue moon, and you remember a lot more of time you thought you had forgotten.

Look what I got for my desk...

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps

I don't know why nobody told you
how to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
they bought and sold you

I look at the world and I notice it's turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps

I don't know how you were diverted
you were perverted too
I don't know how you were inverted
no one alerted you

I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at you all
Still my guitar gently weeps...

- The Beatles

Sometimes there are so many questions, that there remains no point in asking...

Arbit

How much is enough? How much is the past? And what, of the future? The many people we meet, zigzag roads across paths of time, intertwined, weaving a web of complexities. Sometimes they burn through, sometimes they simply collide and deflect. They leave a scar, a dent, sometimes. Sometimes they just kiss each other by. Like fingertips touching, while we drive through, while the wind courses through hair.

And one lady was made to wait 40 years before being paid her dead husband's pension...

There is so much of a difference between me and you, what I think and what you think. Of what we aspire for and what we cherish, what we are besotted with and what is dispensable, what we perceive of that beggar on the road and of the sky reaching skyscraper. There is so much of a difference when we look into a mirror, you yours and me mine. What does one make of all of it.

I think I'm too scared to be honest, too scared to admit to what I really feel. I am even scared to admit that I'm confessing.

Drunk on Life

you know...all of it doesnt matter...there are times when it doesn't matter what you want or what you wanted..it doesn't matter what you wished wouldn't be true and then it ultimately was... it don't matter that you thought the world was inherently good and sometimes it was vicious, to the extent that it made your abdominal muscles contract, as much as you thought was possible...and it doesn't matter that if you've believed in karma, not all that you wished for will be true...and it is no big deal for dreams to be quashed, daily, every moment, different places, all the time...

and yet, the inescapable spirit of what we call the most intelligent living things on Earth, strives on...trudging along...sometimes drearily...and sometimes with a little more of Hope...

Mission Impossible meets James Bond meets Silence of the Lambs

Madness is like gravity. All it needs is a little push.

- The Joker

Dhandha

Back in Baroda, they used to say, 'Sahvaar sahvaar nikli pade che, kai kaam dhando nathi?' which loosely translated into 'Do you not have any business, that you get out to loiter early mornings?'. I get out every morning and I still don't know what my 'dhandha' is. I feel like a whore, my company, a US MNC is my pimp, who pays me at the end of every month. My work involves deceiving a lot of people, making unsubstantiated claims and maverick presentations, fiddling with numbers to derive a result that I want and make tons of money for my company and some senior people alongwith.

The urge to get my hands dirty with some paint, or get some clay underneath my fingernails, or to have my thumb smudged with charcoal, or the floor littered with crayon shavings, or to have my wrists hurt from hammering away at a wooden block for hours into the night. It is getting stronger.

wishful thinking

Sometimes one wishes conversations were one way...and one didn't have to really deal with what is said in response...

of when there are words but no sound...

Don't let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories

I'm so tired but I can't sleep
Standin' on the edge of something much too deep
It's funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word
We are screaming inside, but we can't be heard
But I will remember you, will you remember me?

Don't let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories

- Sarah Maclachlan

11:40 AM - I receive my cellphone bill on my official email ID
11:44 AM - I receive an SMS from Vodafone informing me of my bill being dispatched.
1:10 PM - I receive an SMS from my bank informing me of phone bill received for netbanking payment.
1:30 PM - I receive the hardcopy of the bill in my office.
1:45 PM - I receive a mail from my bank informing me about the bill to be paid by netbanking.
2:10 PM - I receive a call from the Vodafone executive to confirm if I have received the phone bill.

Talk about convergence.

The Scale of Solitude

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Lecture, 1982

Inert, yet an energy.
Tired, but a hope.
Calm, but for the coming storm.
Dull, but anxious.
Taut, but in control.

un-insipid times.

Today, the only man convicted of the Kanishka bombing will be able to walk scot free after being jailed for 15 years. He wanted to avenge Operation Bluestar. Another man, a political leader, has been convicted of instigating communal riots. The sentence - 1 year. Time it took for the conviction - 16 years.

You meet a Gujarati anywhere in the world, at any place and if he's eating something, he will always offer it to you and people sitting nearby.

The canteen for the final 3 years of Architecture School consisted of a few stone and brick parapets that were built in the corner of the campus adjoining a small room that served as the pantry for 'kaka' to make some basic snacks. In the monsoons, the ground was littered with rotting leaves and insects of all kinds. One had to watch out for those large ants (makodas) that would crawl up over legs and reach behind ears and over necks. The smell, that of rotting leaves and fried snacks, of sugar laced tea, was quite intoxicating. Though such breaks were supposed to be small and in between lectures, i can remember times often when one has rested along the exposed brick wall (century old) and dozed off till the sun rose too high for comfort. It was a time of waking up late, attending a few lectures one felt could not be done without doing so and of spending long hours just doing nothing...one could then count the days passing by and realize the seasons changing, assignments completed, wardrobes turned over...college life.

someone says its better to wait out while another urge tells me carpe diem...of how one seconds insanity can alter the life of so many. I think its time for a short but very important conversation. but in all likelihood its not going to take place today. Today, i begin a different life when an innocuous little wire transfer heralds a new coming and this transient time shifts into another era of being a man. The tide goes out and the tide goes in, a whole new circle of life begins...tick tock tick tock...tick...

Today
Im thinking of the slums that I pass on the way to office. How they've expanded. Also, of midnights children and the jallianwala bagh massacre, of school history textbooks, of bdays today and tomorrow. I am thinking of resumes and media and entertainment, of movies, of retail, of visual merchandsing, of aperture and f-points, of black and white and sepia. of Ceejay house and credit suisse and of the sea and of the beach. Change is in the air, friends, job, colleagues, city, perhaps...thinking of blogs and old post, lovely conversations and sweet nothings exchanged over a period of time and how convictions alter and so do life plans...how important things turn inconsequential and random thoughts occupy centerstage...i can fling all that away with one stroke and yet i wont...and the meek shall inherit the earth?

One of the first assignments that we did as part of Architecture school was to use a ten by ten cm cardboard with a white background as a canvas and stick small ‘punch’ dots and narrow strips of black paper on it with a glue stick. The directions were clear. There would be no restriction to the number of the dots and stripes we could stick onto that cardboard square. There was also no guiding instruction to what ‘pattern’ or ‘design’ we were to create. Being the first year students that we were, none of us had a clue why we were doing this exercise and it was pretty much a surprise to be made to do things without ‘rules’ so to speak. For example, in school, essays always had a ‘number of words’ limit set which had to be adhered to. After the initial confusion died down, more so after the guy teaching us told us to be completely free, we got down to the task of ‘creating’ something out of seemingly ‘silly’ tools. No one probably imagined that such an exercise could be part of a 5 year course that would enable us to visualize and design iconic architecture. A few stuck to the time-tested ploy of sticking to symmetry, creating patterns with the dots and stripes that resembled some kind of a twisted ‘rangoli’ or ‘mehndi’ design, while others focused on creating as much ‘disturbance’ as possible. It was a game to compare each of our ten square cm ‘murals’ with each other and try and imaging an object or an expression within the random stripes and dots. Finally, we realized, at the end of it, that what we were creating were in fact ‘compositions’. Which in turn led to a long debate on what exactly consists of a ‘composition’. Words such as harmony, flow, rhythm, emotion, balance were thrown about as easily as loose change, without it impressing much upon the minds of us novices. Just as it is difficult to teach a kid to appreciate world cinema, it was difficult for us to understand why a Hussain painting fetched so much on the arts market while others who painted nice landscapes to adorn your living room didn’t. At the end of it, all of us were told that by exposing ourselves to varied forms of art, we would eventually develop an eye that could discern between the mundane and the creative, and learn to recognize true creativity, that we would in fact grow more sensitive as we progress and channelise our thought process to think more, think differently, and yes, think ‘out of the box’, as the jargon goes. In the coming years, it was amazing to witness the output of 30 students from varied background collectively create so much of output, through wooden sculptures, through clay murals, through water colors and pencil sketches…simple architectural designs to complex landscaping, skews and Bauhaus’, all of it was a collective repository of thoughts leading to output leading in turn to further thoughts. It also led to some weird things, like one student opting to spend extend periods of time ‘meditating’ and living like a ‘hermit’. Others got hooked to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. Some were disillusioned with the process of starting with something completely abstract and then converting them into built space that was habitable, while others stuck to grids and practical architecture. It was a curious mix of ideas, each of us learning more from the students than from the teachers who merely facilitated this learning process by introducing us to involving design briefs and literature.

Photoblog updated.

One of The Reasons I Started Liking SRK, After Thinking That He is an Idiot...

Watch out for the frames between 2:10 and 2:45