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

I think this picture is quite apt for the post below. From a time long gone...

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance,
Never settle for the path of least resistance.
Living Might mean taking chances but they are worth taking…
Loving might be a mistake but it’s worth making.
Don’t let some hell bent heart leave you bitter………

Promise me The Next Time you will give faith a fighting chance…….

And The Next Time you get a choice to sit it out or dance.
I hope you dance……

Lee Ann Womack

It felt different this feeling……

Open Palmed.

The wind passing through the gaps between his knuckles….
The searching warmth of the sun enveloping his palm……
Her, hazel eyes caressing his hands…..

The uncontrollable ebb of emotion displayed only in the strangeness of the silence.

His spirit,
Soaring to heights, he had only dreamed of.
This feeling of oneness, to another being was new.
Yet it felt like forever…..At least for as long as he could remember.

Then like an ebbed tidal wave….
The emotion receded snubbed by stealthy creeping sorrow…..
The devious human mind steadily controlling his tipsy heart…..

Him and Her

Two disjointed ends. Spread across far corners of a complicated world.
Logically, there was No balance, No certainty, No tomorrow No future.

For Them.

The Choice.

He said.
It is better now, this way with happy memories. And little bitterness to mar the memories.

She looked at him, with eyes that begged him to stay. With a stance that was too proud to ask.

A Moment.

And then they turned at their heels and left.

People I Hang Out With

Everyone loves beer and rock music. Everyone thinks Jimi Hendrix to be the baap of his times. Ditto for Janis Joplin. Santana plays the guitar like God. Kurt Cobain makes everyone curious. Everybody loves to hate Himesh Reshammiya. And Rakhi Sawant. Gulzar is synonymous with Hindi film music and poetry. Ayn Rand is everyone's idol. Or at least was. Everybody loved Requiem For A Dream. And Fight Club. Everyone read Amar Chitra Katha in school. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes Collection is on everyone's wishlist. Robert Frost's words inspire everyone. Everyone wants to own a house in Goa. Some prefer one up in the hills. Everyone agrees that Delhiites are snobs and Mumbaiyyas are miserly. Everybody has at least three credit cards and the next is going to be an Amex. The Swift is the prettiest looking small car, Skoda the most reliable and everyone will recognize a yellow Lamborghini. Friends is the best sitcom of all times and everyone has DVDs back home. And favorite episodes. John Abraham is the hottest. Abhishek Bacchan too. So is Katrina Kaif. Golmaal and Hera Pheri is always funny. The N Series is uber cool. Everyone thinks they are underpaid and overworked. Everyone wants to love and everybody loves to hate...

When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
When you're sure you've had enough of this life, well hang on
Don't let yourself go, 'cause everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes

Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it's time to sing along
When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)
If you feel like letting go, (hold on)
When you think you've had too much of this life, well hang on

'Cause everybody hurts. Take comfort in your friends
Everybody hurts. Don't throw your hand. Oh, no. Don't throw your hand
If you feel like you're alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

If you're on your own in this life, the days and nights are long,
When you think you've had too much of this life to hang on

Well, everybody hurts sometimes,
Everybody cries. And everybody hurts sometimes
And everybody hurts sometimes. So, hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Everybody hurts. You are not alone ...

- Everybody Hurts
REM

Three differing experiences within the span of 24 hours can make someone think so much. Standing on the edge of a local train whizzing by stations at 80 kph, hanging out, feeling the wind in your hair and between your palms, death is only an instant away. One jump and none of it would matter, none of the worries for the future, regret for the past, joy at small things, angst at everything that seems unfair. One can easily be one of those numbers that get thrown about often enough. Of railway accidents, of youth suicides, or mystery accidents, or aged parents left fending for themselves, of youth and big city blues...just about any of them. And then one thought keeps it all at bay. That of life being a gift from a supernatural force that is well worth living through. It has to mean something, doesn't it, that you were conceived from an act of love and that a woman bore through the pain and weight of 9 months that culminated into a delivery worth long hours of pain.

And then happy memories follow, when one is ambling through the streets of childhood, where one took long walks on the pretext of brushing teeth and taking an unpolluted walk in the open lands near the house. Of how an year was planned around the routines of school, a few festivals and the season, which guided what you wore, what games you played and how inclined you were to study. And how one learnt the art of holding the cricket bat and whacking the ball so hard that it shot through the sky like a bullet and landed on someone's tin roof like a mortar shell. Well, at least in your imagination, you wished that happened. When you remember the brother you learnt it from, who, now can probably gain sit in the best seat possible for any international cricket match...from up above, so high, like a diamond in the sky.

And then, talk to a terminally ill relative, alongside an irresponsible out of work drunkard and the responsibility of two kids to boot, one of them quite inclined to follow in his fathers footsteps. A lady whose throat pipe blocked with a tumour, rendering even the simple act of drinking water seem like forcing a fork through...and yet, find an immeasurable sense of strength, the will to survive inspite of all odds, yet realize, that wishing something so hard does not always mean that really much. Death, followed by a strange act of good luck, as if He, up there, wishes to serve a consolation, His way to telling everyone of how hard some jobs are, yet they need to be done and if at least in a small way, He tries to be fair.