A hero: Found & lost.

As per my previous post, it's now evident that an ordinary man is my hero. It has not been 2 days I wrote that piece & I came across an epitome of the ordinary man. This is his tale, unheard hitherto, unseen & overlooked.


With the doldrums caused due to the slippage of a certain happening into uncertainty on my personal front, I need a boost to uplift my spirits. For years, there has been only one way to do that & it has been the combination of smoke and tea.

With some newly discovered music that safely settled in my ears, I walked to the tuck shop. With one string out of my ears, I asked for a smoke stick & a cup of tea; grabbed them & slowly trudged towards a bench made of cement slabs for people to leisurely sit on and smoke. 

I occupied one which was safely inclined against the tuck shop's wall & he occupied a wide slab which is obtusely inclined towards mine.

Some nice fusion piece was playing in my ears while smoke slipped through the hollow conduit of my throat. Initially the fine combination of post-lunch smoke, hot tea on an early winter afternoon and nice music added to the beauty of the scene.

He was unaware of my presence. He had his head peeked down into the cup formed as a result of crossing his hands around his pulled-up legs.

Sheer melancholy rose between us, still silent. The music slowly got fainter as it its player seamlessly shifted onto a hollow bamboo stick from the saxophone which I deliciously heard till I found him. My left hand involuntarily raised itself to my lips to affix the stick & removed it within half a second & my throat did rest of the task. My right hand helped me slurp the tea who's taste or heat I stopped relishing till I found him.

He slowly lifted his head from the cup of his hands to turn away from both of us. He dabbed his pair of slippers with two thumbs of his feet. Those slippers were a poor imitation of a big brand in Indian circuit. It was evident that the fact didn't bother to find merely the last place in his thought list.

He moved his right hand along his belly with a disturbing grimace in his face. His shirt ruffled with his touch & settled with greater folds.

The initial picturesque & its comely contents turned into callous presences with one such grimace on his face. It spoke of many things with no words. It spoke of foregoing; it spoke of endless compromises. It spoke of surly lampoons he had been through. Yet his face bore eyes with hope in them. It had temples with sweat droplets trickling down on his ruffled shirt. They shone with a strange faith in better future. 

He walked away when the muffled music was returning to its vigor in my ears. I stroked my hair & dusted my trousers when I was on my feet & saw him getting onto his moped.

He placed his right leg on his bike's kick rod, stopped for a while in patience to transfer any energy left in him to his right leg to kick the rod and ignite his bike.

He eventually did & rode away. 


He was an ordinary man. My hero.  

The fallout of a lunatic

There is so much that goes into being an ordinary person. Being a common man seems a seamless task but under the veil, a basket full of eccentricities & weird, yet not-uncommon traits lie silently. Amid the pandemonium of such things, its highly admiring to live the life of a common man. 

I believe every man is a lunatic inherently. The crazy demon inside every man breaks out more or less often; credit goes to compelling scenarios & their complementing persistence levels.

However the fall outs are rather intriguing. The world & its writers are busy weaving stories of rising up when the tales of falling out always remain unheard; deliberately at times & equally inadvertently at the other.

Take me for instance. I can clearly see myself shedding off the virtues of 'a-boy-next-door' to turn into 'a-boy-who's-alive-apparently'.

I am very happy keeping to myself though her untimely, irregular intrusions add a strange joy to the happiness of being left out by choice. I keep drooling for more of her before I realize its been a day I met her & life slowly etches onto the path of chosen confinement, yet again.

I walk lazily towards the tuck shop round the corner at work places for post-lunch smoke, sometimes accompanied by John (my newly found acquaintance {takes few more beer mugs, nicotine stubs & time stabs to be labelled a friend}). I take in a puff, expel it away when I catch him staring at me. I look away to find a lonely man holding a cup of tea between his thumb & forefinger of one hand while a cigarette burns in the other.

He is visibly attentive to what we talk but comfortably isolated at a distance of 2 meters. I see myself in him. I stare at him while he peeks his head away to blow out his bout of smoke; so I turn back to catch John staring at me. 

The cigarette like a dying man slips out of my hand to hit the dust only to die under my shoe. I stand up. John follows me; trudging our way back to office.

Didn't you see the fallout of a lunatic a few lines ago? 

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' ?