Garden State blew in some hope.

On the last Sunday which turned out to be a homely Sunday, Garden State happened. I watched it for an umpteenth time and I fell in love with it, yet again. It dabs the sensibilities of life while it invents its own language, flavour and landscape. Going back to the titles of the movie felt like I was home. However, I felt few lines really needed to be up here on my blog. I have never been a cinephile and so is why, immortal lines from immortal movies never made their way to my blog. Garden State however stands out as an exception.

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But you know what? That’s all ego. None of that really matters. If I get to be with you right here and our beautiful baby, that’s all I need. - Albert

This necklace reminds me of a really random memory of my mother. I was a little kid, and I was crying for one reason or another. She was just like, you know, cradling me and rocking me back and forth. And I can remember seeing the little balls on this thing floating back and forth. And there was snot dripping down my nose. And she gave me her sleeve, and she told me to blow my nose into it. And I remember thinking even as a little kid, like…this is love. This is love. - Andrew

When I’m with you, I feel so safe. Like I’m home. - Andrew

I’m really messed up right now, and I’ve got a whole lot of stuff I gotta work out, but I don’t want to waste anymore of my life without you in it. -  Andrew 

Pact of Trade

When writing was just about to grab the front seat,
She entered into my life.
With love that ignited my senses & put me on heat,
Writing took a back seat 'cos I wanted to make her my wife. 


That one who can love me & write about it
was the one who I looked forward to.
She confessed she cannot write a shit;
I was convinced I'd tame her to.

We made a pact of trade.
I give her writing & she give me love.
But I didn't know it was meant to fade
Just like an autumn took away from us a dry clove. 

She decided to keep love for herself.
but I never wondered that she'd instead teach me how to hate.
I am stuck here with 'love rebuttal' as my motif.
She moved on to write a brand new LOVE on her slate.

I cross paths with strangers to accidentally discover her all over again.
But all I discover is a whole new bunch of faces.
Waiting to be found.
Waiting to be loved. 




Deekshith

The one-third shucks.

The world has seen Gandhis and Mandelas. With ll due respect, hats go off to their ulterior motives that changes the courses of mankind on a grotesque level. However, when it comes to the worldliness, the whole concept of 'work' & a man's definition that's conceded on the work he does & the way his life revolves around the work he does always eludes me.

1/3 - all it boils down to that fraction. 8 hours a day. All our lives. 1/3rd life a man lives, he works. To win his bread. His existence. Survival. Things might have been good if those were the only ones that could have been bought by work. It just has gone beyond. Overboard. Suffocatingly overwhelming.

Peer-peer relations are rather plasticized I would say. This thought struck me as I was coming back home from work & Mike Rosenberg sang in all his glory - "I walk past the businessmen, sleeping like babies in their cars." While the song always made me nostalgic for where I chose to emigrate from in search of love; London will always be special to me. That lyric depicted a London night succinctly.

First things first - coming back to 'work' & its correlation with a man's presence and his toke of being acknowledged by his peers, I find it absurd to determine the amount of respect he is entitled to receive stays directly proportional to the multi-national presence of his employer and the number of zeroes that are expected to be added endlessly on his pay cheque. I honestly didn't understand the gist but sadly, I live in a world where making peace with incomprehensible things makes life livable.

The thing that my chest was swollen with pride when a nameless commercial Telugu movie had its protagonist shouting out witty one liners about Dignity of Labor. Rebellion without a cause always gets bolstered by wit, I say. It does & so it did back then. But when Dignity of Labor is looked back at with rationale now, it enlivens a hope for Utopia.

I consider its the approach of a man to the incidents he gets subjected to, directly or indirectly - shapes him into what he actually is. His reaction to all such incidents. Each incident like a snow of flake being deposited on the mount of snow on a snowy London afternoon. Tonnes of it together forms a berg - A Man.

Let me save nobility for Gandhis & Mandelas. For us, the mere beings, the common men, lets welcome our hearts, gut & substance define us. Not the one-third of our lives. We acquire education, skill to prepare ourselves to work to make a living. Not to earn one. To make a life, work's plenty I suppose. To earn one, hearts should enter the ring.

Work is work & we are not always what we do. We are what we think we are too. 

Ignorance is Bliss

Mainstream has become mainstream because of all the sad elements it managed to attract while it always divulges from the river to cascade into the sea called World. When the good old men yelled that Good is Always Less in Number, it just seemed as a rant out of despair to see a sensible world, or what we call it in new age as Utopia.

When pictures are clicked only to etch onto the walls of facebook but infrequently eschew in the folders of dust bitten albums which can be viewed years later fondly to kindle such memories, 'memory' seems to have acquired a new definition & escalate the new age dictionaries as something that goes like this: "an event from the past which wins others' praise".

A tablet no longer means a pill for an ailment anymore but it reminds us of an oddly rectangular slate digitized to rob our privacy. The smell of an old book opened after years has got replaced by tapping fingers & scrolling text.

When social credentials make it opulently to wedding cards, hearts long stopped crying out love. The vastness of a groom's heart is measured by the vastness of a barren land he owns just around the corner around the city's ghetto.

The Green Card issued by American Embassy probes the underprivileged to go green with jealousy. When people are redefining love by stating that it's an "in-definitive symbiosis", old school chaps sulk into the unreachable depths of pallor.

The simplicity of a walk into the town down your street hold you up for your financial ineligibility to attain a better mode of transport. Blame the third world country and its subsequent problems. Royally.

Fake smiles decorate the profile pictures on facebook but they ridicule me every time I term their smiles indeed fake. When ignorance is blossoming smiles on their faces & if smiles are all that denote happiness, am I being compelled here to be Ignorant?

If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could have won

Apathy. Self loathing - probably the shortest way to destruction. Listening to somebody who sings about 'Apathy' when driving to office seems to establish the connect. But on the darker side, it has terrible aftermath. Ask me.

The guy who's on a pause on the stereo in my car was paused at 'If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could have won.' Or must I say I chose to pause him right after that line? To add meaning to the menace I was about to go through. To define namelessness of existence. to decipher the burden of freedom as the 'soul' (or at least I thought it was soul) eluded my being.

I look back & figure out that it's not even a week things changed. Changed in an incomprehensible manner.

While the 'soul' seeks the spirit of liberty few miles away from me, apathy somehow finds it way back to me.

The good ol' brother (people call him Ashok) once said to chase meaning than method. God knows I've failed but He knows I have tried.

While this piece remains to be the spit of self loathing, I struggle to keep calm. Though I know all this would barely constitute to a particle some years down the lane, particles are all you're made up of - reminds my naive heart.

As I move on from this with an angst unbeknownst to me earlier that breeds loathing, I walk back into the smudged alleys of future singing 'If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could have won.'

And thus the door clung in..

The guy lazily escalated three floors on the staircase when he knew the overburdened elevator would take a good 5 minutes to take him to his desk. As he made his way to the ground floor for his usual post-lunch smoke, he left his lunch box upstairs in the pantry. He asked his colleague to take it down to his desk. So he could directly go down for his smoke. 

He was right at the door that opened him to his floor when he realized he forgot his ID card that upon a wipe would let him in. He haughtily pushed the door, turned his head away from it in resentment. It was then his ears caught the pleasant creaking sound of the door opening. The door's swipe machine didn't work & it was like any other door then; not a door that led to corporate penitentiary anymore. 

Days passed & his smoke breaks increased - both in count & duration. The swipe machine fail made the door a pathway to his liberty. Liberation from imposed confinement of corporate etiquette. He jollily swung it in & out to make his way in & out. 

It was a bleak day when sun was lazily hiding behind the unseen curtains. Dusk was setting its scene. He swayed off the hovering mosquitoes over his head while he crushed his cigarette under his left foot. He made his way back to his desk and in habit, he pushed in the door without swiping. It didn't open. Through the glass that was encapsulated in the wooden borders of the door, he saw a carpenter holding a wired drilling machine in a brandished way. He realized that the swipe machine was fine & he had to take out his ID card from his wallet.

He swiped it, the door clung open & he trudged to his desk in melancholy. 

Tryin' to hang in there.

I have seen people letting people slip away from their clutches. When the slipped blamed the inertia towards personal success, my heart went with the defeated. I cursed on behalf of the defeated for bad timing they were subjected to.

When this thing comfortably slipped away from the folds of my brain almost 3 years ago, I suddenly recollected it the other day at noontime when I saw one of the 'defeated' drive past me on his bike. Everything came back in a frenzy.

Today I sit here with this stupid phone in my hand waiting for a response from her. I just realized how I have calmed down. In a way I feel lucky: to let myself grow with the relationship. To evolve as a person while evolving as a part of 'us'. I zero it down to this: who just don't grow old with their relations will encounter problems.

Three years ago, I used to wait for her reply with petulance. I now wait in a hushed way. Million things flash across my mind but they successfully fail to affect the existence. The knowledge that any wrong channeled emotions redirected at a wrong person might just get it all wrong - keeps me calm.

If they don't grow up with it, they proved they will perish. I am just trying to hang in there.