I belonged there.

A god five minutes of bargain went into convincing the auto rickshaw guy to invade the proclaimed 'old side' of the city at 10.00 in the night with me riding pillion.

The chariot moved forward. It entered the lanes of an avenue which is comfortably far from the high road yet it managed to possess the charm of life.

There was an inevitable gloom on every shopkeeper's face & it took me a while to decipher a common cause for those discrete phenomena. One with a horror - stricken face; other with a hopeless one and so on. I turned my heard away in helplessness to find a young boy commuting in the opposite direction with two buckets of water held in his hands firmly. He was dabbing on ground which propagated his motion forward.

I was travelling on the road which stood as a gulf between inevitable melancholy on one side & a fast pacing hope on the other. I bent down a little to pick up the dropped lighter, pulled out the last cigarette from a day old pack, lit it, blew off & asked the rickshaw driver to slow down & drive at a lesser speed.

I knew I belonged there. 

The invisible burglar.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I thoroughly lived through my coffee breaks at work & my drives up to workstation & back home. The reason was simple. I was im-mobile. The pseudo, crispy term to be devoid of a mobile phone. And thus devoid of the strange, inconvenient sense of being connected always.

When one of my hands is immersed in my lunch plate, the other is safely rested on my pocket to feel any possible vibration of a text or a call. The mobile phone safely sleeps beside me despite my father's warnings that mobile must be far off at night to avoid its consistent emission of radiation. That's 'cause I don't want to miss her call.

A little insight opulently knocks it all off. Where is this taking me? I don't read as I read till a month ago. I never make an attempt to write. Comfort of instantaneity seamlessly replaced yearning for quality.

On top of ensuring connectivity & occupancy of the universal set of information out there, it just makes life shabby. I mean the mobile phone. I mean for me.

The core emotion that drives every pursuit of technology is restlessness. It can make more sense if I say impatience. When optimists see that as an advancement, I, being an Eeyore and a man of realistic melancholy, see that as a burglar that robs away my space.

I want to go out with her for a day without our mobile phones & I am shot with looks like I'm wanting to be a Nobel laureate overnight. Status updates are frequent that unsettling tidal motion of seismic waves. Pictures are clicked to obtain 'thumbs u' points rather than to save them & revisit them fondly in memoir. 

A day without mobile phone - A day well lived.   

Hearts says NO

Its funny to observe what money does to one. I have a classic example which is very personal and I wouldn't want to to quote it here. But yes, moneys trips you endlessly & its likely to be very non hungry like. You are hungry, you eat an opulent meal. It ends there. For once. For the next half day or one. But what money does to one is contrary. The more you consume, the more you turn hungry.

First things first; I am appalled by the gruesome things money does to blood ones. It just builds unseen walls between people, reality obscured & truth silently fades away. When one has money, the earth seems paradise to live on. Each rupee slipping out of your account adds to the increasing apprehension to live. Finally, there comes a phase where the natural joy of being alive gives way to the inconvenience cos' of materialistic discomfort.

Libraries are replaced by virtual carts already. Shelves of local deli already transposed into thumbnails on websites. Human relations are quantified largely. The amount of money pooled in to save a relationship stands as an unfailing testimony for one's love towards his loved.

When there's a positive side of saving lives with money, there's a dark side of building them as well.

Talk about me. I write this piece eschewed in a comfy revolving recliner. I couldn't (or wouldn't?) have done that if I were a struggling writer searching for undecipherable feelings to be articulated. Money brings in the adequacy in necessity. It shouldn't be left o itself to go & conquer the abstract.

I stand on the end point of the thin line that separates the purpose of money into two: Necessity & Luxury. Extrinsic forces are pulling me towards the latter but this time, heart says no.

Propensity towards Karmic Theory

As days are rolling by, I guess I am turning into a firm believer in Karmic Theory. Karma - an uber cool word for westerners ever since it gained fame in late 60s has a long history in the country of it's origin.

Karmic Theory states that everything has a reason for its occurrence, existence & perishment. I shared days with people who were nihilists & I rubbed a little of their '-ism' to my shoulders for a while. It didn't take long for me to comprehend that things happen in a pattern & it can be deciphered only looking backwards.

Why do I get caught by cops only on my pay day for jumping a signal or for not fastening seat belt when I do such deeds everyday? Why do people pitch in at the most desperate times to save me from grisly errors? Their intrusion initially irritates me but leave me silently thankful after figuring out what I was saved from.

When a firm & unflinching believer in God is doing everything in power to accomplish something, efforts consistently prove futile. But they seem to reap when everyone inherently knows that its now the time or else never.

Its sometimes good to blur in the immediate things to gain a view of larger picture. Larger picture is like a painting or a piece of music or even a book; to that point - any consummated piece of art. Each shard that contributes to the piece discretely looks shabby but upon falling in its place gives way to a meaningful collage; also a memorable one more often.

I believe in time & its unfailing nature in unlocking riddles. Human efforts go in first, ramshackle the firmly held interiors of a mine, pursuit slowly transposes into an unrelenting one, outcomes arrive, fail people, efforts continue & eventually they arrive at the desired. There's no unified pattern to comprehend the desirable outcomes of human pursuits. They stand as timeless tests for human mettle.

The bottom-line happens to be this; for me. Human life when metaphorically compared to a diamond mine whose depth at which diamonds are studded is unknown. All it takes to be enraptured with handful of diamonds is firm belief in Time. Diamonds shall fall off the dusty walls of the mine. Because diamonds surely exist.

In search of lost, unknown & concealed.

When every new word I come across pins me to surprise, when every usage of its leaves me drooling for more, I stand with an unsettling desire to just give away myself to writing. I know it sounds a bit far fetched but I can't help shrugging it off either.

A good quarter at work station is dedicated for the personal quest of discovering the lost,  digging the unknown & unveiling the concealed. What puts me through 9 hours of strenuous (comfortably risk-free to others, otherwise) is the hope that I shall I one day run away from this. Into far off fields. Into distant meadows.

When I write guides for daily bread which nobody follows, I dream of writing the intertwined tale of overrated totalitarianism & underrated poverty. It remains a dream but the guides etch onto portals, thus onto web & finally read by 'users' who don't know what their author is going through, or to that point, who under sun he is.

The work places resembles London in its smell. In its ambiance That nostril disturbing caffeine hovers in the air, remains still, justifying the much quoted plasticity of work stations. Its painful to read emails which have subjects lengthier than their bodies.

I get back home to read something or watch something but eventually end up sleeping into a slumber. An early morning call from her wakes me up to put me through another day of never ending torment.; of whose extermination I can barely dream but not blessed to live through.

People are talking about friday releases in the loo when jitters cause them to shake their heads before tucking it in. Is it an attempt to establish two unlikely phenomena & desperately trying to make their ends meet? I wonder.

Documents confiscated, schedules upheld & life suspended in disbelief. I dream of her & a day out with her but that too seems like a far off bliss.

I try to put up a smile to every bystander's face in which I am keeping it up; the only thing at which I am recording some consistent success. I dread a phone call & rather am happy keeping to myself. She is an exception though.

Where would all this reflect? Should I stop for once, look back & feel gifted to write this? Or should I curse my agonizing irony that compels me to write 'that' ?

Three figures!

It being a Saturday and me being an employee of the most generous organization I've ever come across in my life, we were fed with hot pizzas in this cold weather. I pushed down one through my throat into my stomach but the walls of throat were asking for me; this time in the form of not a substance but a fluid. I fathomed its requirements and walked lazily towards the cafe.

There's a paan shop adjacent to the cafe where I trade in money for cigarettes and as I was lighting one, I overheard a vehement discussion going on among three familiar voices and I readily knew whom those voices belonged to. They were Seniors.  At Work. Equally generous towards a young and freshly recruit like me; always. I hung my head while the first wave of smoke escaped my lips and walked towards the entrance of the cafe. The voices were still on top of their optimum; catching the momentum of crescendo that was ignited by the collective denial of new formation of Telangana.

Three of them; let me name them Ram, Shyam and Kishore. Ram and Shyam occupied one side of a table as they share the brotherhood of smokers and Kishore on the other side; to spare himself from the adjacency of smoke that runs through his ears!

Ram and Shyam were facing their backs at me; and so Kishore's face complemented mine. There was a hiss Kishore let out and that alarmed the other two people and the voices dropped flat like an insipid kite that drops flat when its string loses the connection somehow with the anchor.

I knew it was about Telangana - the region where I hail from but not one of three seniors. They belonged to the counterpart of Telangana and boast the vainglory of being belonged. I never cared less about that. I always saw myself as the resident of the Capital. But not pertaining to any specific region to be judged by or to judge.

I slowly occupied the same table but on the other row, and they threw smiles at me for which I responded with a faint one. When all our brains were running the film of Andhra - Telangana; none had the capability to pause the film and to bring the concept of 'co-worker ship' onto the forefront.

They emptied their cups of tea, blew out till the stubs in their hand died and walked away past me towards the counter to clear the bill off. I sat there. I stared at them; they were dissolving into obscurity. They were merging into oblivion. Three figures. Yesterday they were colleagues and today, they have been counterparts.

How I wait for tomorrow to run into them with a smile and I'd love to see their faces changing colours. But I always see them amiable co workers who always smiled at me with pure hearts. Should I now say Jai Telangana?

God must save us.

Its amazing how change seeps in when its expected the least. Change in perspective. Change in outlook. Change in perceiving things. Change in interpreting them. Wonderful. With such lives of span a water bubble, we give it serious thoughts and much serious plans we draw.

We plan almost half a century of life from now while driving back home and none can assure that we drive straight back home without any cliche in between. We are too occupied with our thoughts that we take trivialities for granted. If only we live each second of our lives, in constant pursuit of being better, informed human beings tomorrow.

We establish likes, interests and we reinforce them with experiences that encounter us everyday. Each experience counts in some way or the other; adding strength to our interests or blowing them away to pieces by establishing newly discovered ones.

We chase people, we ignore the chasing. We begrudge things and but we invest in owning them. But a time comes when we realize all that but by then, the bubble will be ready to explode. We look back in retrospect on death bed. Moments count then. There. When they say they do, we laugh them off saying 'Words on Death Bed'.

We are too busy in trying to be informed that we lose track of common sense. Too much of knowledge is also too bad, in a few cases. But the 'few' has become mainstream. People senselessly chase flashy dreams that they forget what constitutes the ground.

God must save us!