A buzz and a whack.

He was reading "All That" written by that dead writer who killed himself at the helm of worldly indifference. Before that, he read "Amundsen" by that Canadian short-story writer. And there were others before these two shorts. For reasons unbeknown to him, his intrigue ceased as he strolled halfway into a short. Only his resolve to finish the unfinished was having him going on until their ends. He was so out-of-touch with pen that tiny muscles in his palm were beginning to yelp at sudden pressure the pen was exerting on them.

He long stopped having a tale to tell his world. When there's no tale to be told, narrative dies a lovelorn death. So it almost did. He was being delighted at the discovery of new sites that offered him endless avenues to newer unknowns of the world. He was being actively passive. So passive that he almost inherited a collaged perspective with nameless individuals contributing countless miniatures of perspectives.

Ask him what he had & he did what he had been doing. He kept to the silence & rejoiced in its warmth. The warmth was so comforting that it made him numb to bugs & their bites. Only the early morning's blood blobs, as small as those biting bugs, on his sheets, dried & stained on his calf muscles and ankles, spoke of the sucked blood. The blood was composed of ambition to explore, seek and write.

Sure, there were occasional attempts at reigniting the lost passion to write. But to write, he was in need of exploration. All he found were faces, inexplicably happy at the dusk of Fridays & predictably gloomy on Monday dawns. They were the very same faces, gesturing at him with their grimaces, perhaps welcoming him to join their mindless madness of living from one more dawn to dusk.

He sat down to write this with an obstinate rejection to join the herd. He once again determined, indeed staunchly, to keep writing. To stop the blood for being sucked out of him.

A month of Ramadan

I have always gainsaid ambivalence to any religious footing; for such mere footing inextricably entwined with subsequent political stance comes as a package, has invoked many forgettable societal hubbubs. However, I have maintained handpicked favourite aspects from every sect & in Islam and the musalmaans who practise it, my favourites are food & music. Their heartily belted Qawwalis and nearly heart-skipping food are elusively delicious.

I have lived through another month of Ramzan. The city acquires an inexplicable glory during the month. Being known for its indigenousness to Deccan muslims in the south, Hyderabad, in its literal sound, has always been a heart-warming place.

It ain't Hyderabad but the full cycle of moon that brings in Eid that kicked the idea. The month of Ramzan is a one-month long prototype of human endeavour I feel. Few souls may be stupefied by me writing about the month of Ramzan but compelling is the metaphor & too obvious to ignore.

I was driving home, passing through the city that has spread a translucent layer of laziness atop itself. Few shops, here and there, were shimmering their brightly lit lights & it looked like a kid playing on his brightly illuminated iPad under his mattress, beyond his playtime. Under the covers so as not to be caught & reprimanded by his stern mother.

The shops were like a strand or two of gray hair on the scalp of a post-25 young man. Here one & there another. Rare in occurrence but apprehensively adding age to a man's life. The month progressed as slowly and steadily as a man's life. With each passing day & night, the number of shops open wide at nights increased in number; like the number of gray hair strands that invariably appeared in passing.

They say a man shines with all his vigor and in all his vitality as death looms over him with only days in count. As Eid came off the covers with itself around the corner, all the shops were lit, gloriously indeed, reminiscing a revered professor with his scalp shining with gray hair, dancing to the winds. 

Koran permits onl three days of mourning, I read somewhere. 4th day marks the beginning of a moved-on life with memories, good ones, filling the vacuum left by the left. People exchange alai-bhalais on Eid, a strange yet fitting allegory of the life of a man well-lived.

And a new lunar cycle begins.

A man whose greed knew no bounds

It all started with the difference between expectation and reality as high as sky before he got into the most formal attire to step into college for the first time. The sky-high difference had only become increasing, if not expanding in all directions like few physicists prophesize about the universe.

There's a thin line between expectation and greed. Unfortunately, the great Indian middle class somehow could never grasp the thin line & has always wobbled with it.

He comes from the same lineage which doesn't respect the virtual thickness of that line. Today, when everthing that could've happened in the absence of that one life-changing decision has happened nevertheless despite the decision, retrospect is promoting reason.

He's arrived at where they wanted him to be. He has arrived where they have always thought he's ought to be at. Only at a grander expense. Costliness seldom is human-driven. There are factors that manipulate the cost someone's willing to concede to achieve something. All such's a part of bigger picture. Too big to be comprehensible for the micro organisms called humans.


However, something deadly had happened underlyingly through all these years. Yes. He too had cultured an indifference to that thin line.

He now sits at a desk that offers a breathtaking view into the green abyss. He does work that wins him bed and breakfast. Of course, he indulges in occasional gala. Except a twist of fate, everything's smoothly positioned and running.

And it took a series of sleepless nights with his chest filled with a persisting uneasiness for him to arrive at that perspective. It'd be prideful if we say he's earned but he's earned nevertheless. Never a single moment was spent all these days to rejoice the distance of the path he's come. He's always had his gaze fixed on an illusory destination. The adjective before destination had taken a tad long time to occur to him in its literal sense.

Obviously, there is ambition. Rejoice has only just been found. He thanked the chaiwala with a warm smile, as warm as the chai indeed & the monsoon morning's sunlight. He faded as the man whose greed once knew no bounds. 

A hostage of the winds.

Early onset of ordeals that you'd have never thought would come to you this early. People hit gymnasiums to get physically toned but he joined one to keep the cholesterol levels down to be up and running the next day. 

His colleagues at work regard him as a man who doesn't flinch much. He smiles if off while the warm wisdom burns within his inner walls. That all this is only a mechanism to stay away from ennui between waking up and falling back.

It's the purposelessness of what he does to win his bed and breakfast that kills him internally. Nobility has always been an unconquered fruit hanged to a tall creeper; so he thought adding inches on his knees to turn taller so that such fruit can be plucked.

The fruit has only been a mirage, Such stark reality is only coming off its covers. It is because it's a refracted image from altogether another tree.

Peace at heart us what he lacks. He's got everything else that's devoid of nobility; in modicum quantities though.

On hopeful days, he reads a page or two from a book. That perpetuates wishful thinking that only is more like a failing star that's way beyond its light years of glory.

-------------------------

So yes, he was thinking about nobility before lunch. The failing cause & the ensuing rage reminds him that what he does is absolutely inconsequential. His input of a few good hours of time in a day into something doesn't make a difference in whatsoever manner to this world.

Like a melting icing on a stale cake, there are acquaintanceships that depress him to no end. People go out to come home. A home is where people stay while their beds await them. For him, there's a cold bed that awaits, cold to an immeasurable degree. He's got no one to go home to.

One feels unbelonged at some place only when he feels belonged somewhere else. If the 'somewhere else' exists only in one's brain but with no physical address, belongingness remains enigmatic. His heart feels the heat waves of similar enigma.

He longs to be at the 'somewhere else' that's apparently nowhere. He ain't just displaced but he is just out of place. Occasional rubs with liquor coupled with nostalgia come a little closer in making him feel wishful but the wishfulness lasts only as long as his intoxication.

He still hopes that the new place is going to be nicer to him but the frequency of the hope is rapidly diminishing.

He seems to be on his way towards being a lost cause but he enjoys a history of revival. When hope is getting bleaker, history is getting richer to fall back on. 

Displaced

A new place. A new beginning. After a self-imposed hiatus that resulted in three-year long belongingness to the City of Pearls. Right now, in the happiest city of India or that's what a nameless survey has got to say about this city, Pune. 

It feels like life has come a full circle. Same old people; yet redefined friendships. Same pals in different countries although our origins remain the same. It feels very displaced to meet someone in a place which didn't cross your mind about either of you being in there. A traveller in no man's land. A settler on his knees near an oasis in the desert.

Age has its effect on me. It is visible in the receding hairline and declining patience to withstand small and inconsequential talk. It's amusing how coming around a full cycle leaves one with wisdom that he once never knew existed altogether. 

The quitter in me who had been dormant for a couple of years till yesterday almost woke up from his slumber but my determination coupled with Pune's sluggish monsoon climate could put him back to sleep for indefinite time now.

They, the buildings, almost look like matchboxes stacked up from some distance. Their mere sight compels me envisage a bustling life at the ground zeros but it's exactly the opposite. They are like the hospitals in Utopia where citizens are pink in health. Almost like a psychiatric hospital in a land full of psychiatrists.

Kin back home in Hyderabad feel happy at my eventual display of optimism, grit to secure a rewarding job. They say this is the beginning of something that's been absent to which I have been duly entitled to. But as the God once said, there's an upside down for everything except teen anorexia. I recall those wise words while wondering at their validity.

The eventual display of optimism and grit is turning out to be incessant; for this city is making my stomach sick - both literally and figuratively. With the recently found belief in the traditional virtues of patience and hope, I am hanging onto the last shard of a moderately strong creeper; which upon left, leaves me into a irreversible journey that's got no other side of the road.

The 20 year old version of me would have picked up his phone in haste and dialled all the dear but the now-me abhors the small talk in its entirety. It's unsparing even if its for injecting respite. 

That pushes me into a nook corner. The warmth that emerges out of constant friction between the walls and my back can be welcoming or the corner, in its essential virtue, can depress me. 

After all the novice attempts at haiku (if they can be called so), this again is a personal piece. Long due it seems but its occurrence had been doubtful; only till it has come now before your eyes.

Memories: from being painful to painless

The roads never change but the scape that's affixed to such roads does.
Paths acquire phantasmagorical changes in appearances but one's memories don't.
The same road which had me shuffling between her place & my workplace
now took me to a relatively newer place.

The same sojourn took place quite a few times;
& with each time, the pain was alleviated by a bit.
Till it came to today
where only the memories were felt
but not the pain.

The same cigarette spot once had me smoking without a choke
& lungs filled not just with smoke;
but memories of her rising & falling inside my heart;
& when I passed past the spot, surprisingly there wasn't a chest stroke.

The same lane had me staggered with a drunken swagger.
Oh those drunken evenings with displaced friends;
neither such swagger's alive these days;
not those friendships.

Her mere idea seems a distant past;
as distant as a ship's mast seems to a lost sailor.
However, all it takes is a drawl of those abandoned names
to make the memories rush back fast.

Memories did travel their bit from being painful to painless
but memories they are by virtue.
Same ones cannot be formed again
any attempt to wipe them ends in vain.

A Search in the Sea

The sea's surface was full on opportunists & its bed full of whales;
The endless search for an angelic mermaid never ceased,
although futility mocked with every stroke of fins;
it's the hope the finned him through the waters.

It occurred to him, indeed invariably, that hope is what that differentiates the living from the lifeless
Meddling with such hope with occasional concussions seemed to be the task of Destiny.
For the whales appeared better in gulping down the hope in one go;
Opportunists were too crooked to be whale enough.

Never did any such angelic mermaid appear in a whiz.
Fins were aging with each kick unto them.
His pace dropped by few nautical miles an hour,
until he came to a float-still from where the drowning had begun. 

A haiku or something similar to it.

When I stood there with two heavy suitcases in my two limbs,
the airport door opened itself upon my sensation.
The breeze splashed on my face the sweet smell of coffee beans,
I knew it was a world unseen but not unheard of.

Frowned faces by some, raised eyebrows by some more
"The Great, Old English Empire had me waiting to saunter on its soil"
and when I declared the same to those 'some & some more' back home,
those were the expressions that greeted me with unrequited hostility.

I took the chance like a fish took to water
with a seemingly giant hope that oughtn't falter.

The entry happened with no predetermined date of exit.
It's only the bouts of hope for a better future coupled with merciless English winds that drove me.

I did not know what was in store for me;
for I was a naif at life filled with post-teenage looniness.
One thing was for sure that it marked a new journey
on which I embarked with unconditional love perpetuated by the loneliness.

Now it all goes down from the racks of my brain into the stomach
with aging memorabilia in my sight.
That surge of anxiety entwined with curiosity seems so alien now;
for aging is not just for things but for their creators as well
And that is why art suffers a crushing death as their artists disappear.

Film Festival in the land of Internet

Ever experienced the power of internet? It lies in the download rate of media files for a technical naif like me. At least for me, that's how its power can be substantiated. All thanks to the much powerful internet, I've been able to watch some stunning films from their respective genres. Every weekend puts me through a list of films to watch. The list usually concludes on a Sunday night.

The Oscar nominations have had their due run-time at my film festival. I take this with apprehensive fingers as this is the first time I am going to brief about the films I've covered recently. I brace up with the quote - "there's a first time for everything."


The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman (2013): This American-Romanian thriller took me by surprise. Like they say that the Universe at times talks to you, it talked to me about Love on Valentine's day and fittingly, did I happen to watch this love story cum thriller. Fredrick Bond as the debutante director delivers with cooperation from the well-chosen and well-enacted cast. If you're in for a tightly packed thriller with elements of love, rebuttal and abuse smudged here and there, The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman is a Necessary Watch.

Bethlehem (2012): This flick took me by a ride of changing loyalties so sensibly narrated on screen. If war's ongoings & aftermath naturally intrigue you, I recommend it, indeed strongly.

Boyhood (2014): I have been waiting for R. Linklater to take me by a surprise but seems like the wait ensues. The same old on-screen portrayal of a boy's passage through his boyhood, adolescence & the early times of post-adolescence. If you patiently sat through the director's Before Trilogy which of course is a scintillating experience for many, I personally think Boyhood hasn't got much more to offer you. Patricia Arquette stole my heart with her stunning performance though.

Birdman (2014): Who isn't talking about Birdman? I see the frowned foreheads of counter-cultured films buffs as they the read the seven lettered title. Tinge of superficiality smudged to the perpetual faith of the protagonist in his underwhelming yet close-to-his-heart play. Felt Edward Norton was wasted.

Lakshmi (2014): Yet  another parallel (wonder if it can be called one) film by Nagesh Kukunoor. If tears won't well up in your eyes watching Lakshmi, I would have second thoughts about you being human.

Midnight After (2014): this film from Hong Kong shot in Cantonese language was directed by Fruit Chan. Relatively an older film dating back to the early days of 2014. Such complex, post modern ethics debated apocryphally on screen. A thrilling film & it suppresses your apprehension to watch it despite its macabre virtue.



More to follow.

He finally got it right.

The freshly whitewashed fence reminisced an unsullied spring;
although it was only a delayed monsoon in the offing.

That sickened him & pinned him to the floor in a room full of pallor;
yesteryear's wall-posters surprisingly came to his rescue that were full of splendor.

A sturdy fix with a hero's eye took him back into the times of glory;
only to let it all occur to him that it is all a part of the great grand story.

He sprang back to his feet to reestablish the squandered gaunt;
to go behind the self-inflicted misery to kill the spurious daunt.

He held the pen & it stroked the pristine white sheet
and the fears passed onto it in vain only to become beaten meat.

Ink dwindled in the pen to transpose into grids of letters;
he went on to impel with a hope that it'd mark him as a Man of Letters.

Writing continued.
Voices dissolved.
Purpose under progress.
Insult in digress.

Thousands of unwritten words & phrases in the making;
Millions of unseen plebeian faces in the baking.

To live was to write,
He finally got it right.