Genuflection

She was just another passerby, she almost remained one. But she was scooped up by an epiphany, ravaged by a singular instinct and tossed about in a vortex of improbable dreams. That moment lingered. Transfixed by its enormity, she stayed on.

"Life is just a series of choices. It's all very binary", had been her unequivocal stance for years. This time, there was no choice. Fate had gripped her by the gut and categorically handed her the red pill. Her feigned black and white life was drenched in a sudden spurt of color. Even beauty, as she reluctantly admitted when no one was listening. Red, purple and blue. Almost too true.

She unwittingly had something to hold, to crush and try to break if she wanted to; everything she could never do to her mercurial theories. Alas! This choice was but a mirage, vicarious and tantalizing. She rightly lacked the courage to destroy or even deny what threatened to be her only claim to truth. Such serendipity will not repeat itself, will it?

An unseasonal rain may claim her beautiful colors. Serendipity may not be eternal, after all. She could be reduced to a passerby again. But for now, the moment stays frozen, she stays brazen.

PS: Cryptic as ever, a rather vain attempt at capturing an indescribably awe-inspiring moment of submission. Brickbats appreciated...

Truth

Gladly, will I show you
newer ways to hate me.
Gladly, every day!
Who better than me, any day?

Tongue-tied

The ink in my pen has dried up. I have no words to describe this strange reality. I cannot wrap my secrets in esoteric verse anymore. Where can I hide in a room of mirrors?

I'm living my choices, of honesty and innocence. I'm living my philosophies, some hypotheses I hurl out the window, others, I set in stone.

I willingly handed over the reins I hitherto held on so dearly to. I readily became a powerless blade of grass, swaying to the whims of the wind, bending to the might of the rain, blending with the miscellany of the world.

I seek not to be special. I seek not the smallest of favors. All I want is a shield from the distant hopelessness that eyes me with threatening glee.

I was reborn today in youthful exuberance. But I relegated myself to a silent crucible to wait and watch life unfold. Stretching the tendons of my patience and will, an acid test of my hope.

Attack of the wee hours

And thus I relinquish
my jaded search for
tomorrow's foggy fortune,
to relish precious today.

And thus I recite
these garbled words with
ironically mimicked conviction,
to salvage deserting faith.

For how much longer
can they persist,
my borrowed smile,
and this stolen hope?

For the day is
not too far away
when truth decides
to rest its case.

PS: Travails of my sleep deprived mind

Enslaved

Smiles reign cyclical windows
of time, too fast and finite,
Nature curses me with
her precision clockwork.

PS: I'm probably enslaved by my four-liners too. I need to stop!

Escapism

Hiding in dark crevices
of cryptic verse,
belittling the power
of the truth, so naked.

Confession

Every faceless person-
a child of deception,
just a lowly pawn in
my checkered pursuits.

Craft

Clever camouflage
of feisty superlatives,
sprightliness that deceives
neither you nor me.

Lament

Can my words, hurriedly scrawled,
capture the pathos of
these trivial moments
I die to tell you about?

Can my thoughts, ardently willed,
travel long weary miles
without fear of wrath
for untimely transgression?

These days...

Lost in an ethereal
maze of words...
A treasure hunt
worth an eternity.

Unfettered by chains
of crippling want...
Freedom, akin to a
walk in the rain.

Sigh

Fervently, do I seek
long lost innocence,
albeit through designs
that defeat the end.

Estranged reality

So deceptively easy-
living a surreal life,
in the indistinguishable medley
of dying night and dawning day.

Irrational obstinacy-
the remnant reluctance,
to destroy the tangled web
of a misjudged past.

Such humongous effort-
turning a blind eye,
to the insidious enticements
of the wicked unknown.

My newest vice

I have long been resigned to the fact that I am not a contented person. I almost cherish and nurture discontent, for I believe it is a harbinger of ambition, and consequently, achievement. But for the first time in my life greed accosted me and now I know how different a beast it really is. Greed can seep up like the slow warmth of alcohol slipping down the throat. Warmth that rapidly becomes an unforgiving heat, a burning desire. What I naively imagined to be an ephemeral tryst with an unknown vice opened a Pandora's Box of realization.

I'm greedy for time. Time for pursuits close to my heart. Time for those special few. Such greed, only timelessness can sate. Even eternity is insufficient.

The times when I behave like there's no tomorrow. The uncontrollable urge to bare my entire self within moments. The involuntary rush to talk faster than my racing thoughts. The constant battle with nature to stretch time on the sly. All of this is greed indeed.

There is greed in the questions that haunt my mind. In my undying thirst for an instant answer to every question, every time. And in my need to dichotomize all of life into right and wrong. There is greed in my determination to wipe away every threatening hint of gray.

Greed rules the need for approval. The craving to be wanted, accepted and appreciated blurs the line between the normal and the irrational. Importance is an avaricious quest, the unfortunate weakness of our insecure race.

Restlessness is a form of greed. Impatience, its inevitable child. There is greed in the urge to second guess life, in the hunt for binoculars to get a sneak preview of the future.

Greed! My newest acquaintance. Greed! The mother of my insomnia.

PS: Musings during my flight down to Peru. Glories of wonderful Peru coming up soon!

Dearest Stranger

You trespass on territories of my mind I am yet to christen. Born in a moment of hopelessness, you could have well been the proverbial cul-de-sac. Instead, you brought with you a promise, an arcane wisdom I accept without question. You induce a magical silence... a reassuring calm that life will be recognizable again. You effortlessly paint a beauty you don't see yourself. You epitomize possibility. And a hitherto unknown desire for perfection. You lend me your ear and your voice. I know not your touch, or even your face, for that matter.

But thanks to you, I stop to listen to the spring bird's song. I hold my breath as I pass the river on my way home. I stand unaffected amidst milling masses, counting stars and searching the moon for your hiding face. I even smile as the chilly wind rushes through my hair. The coffee between my hands rouses thoughts of a lover's warmth. My snug coat feels like an embrace. The roaring airplane above makes me yearn to fly. The universe is enticing again!

Stranger who rules my mind! Who are you? How do you evoke such excess?

Delusional

I make half-hearted
promises to an
imagined god, a barter
against my dark demands

Powerless

I mutely watch flippant Fate tease, torment and threaten my tenuous hope

I meekly submit to a reign of reason, to the wisdom of age

I sorely nurse my thwarted impulse and my admonished whim

I bleakly dream of a forgiving life, a forgotten mirth

Transience

Rebellious,                        The night swirled,              And day broke,                  Motionless,
She sinned,                       desultory                           shattering                          He sleeps,
rejecting her                      words of                           the night's                         fermenting her
virtuous guilt                     whispered pleasure             fictive castle                      amorous mind

Reverse precis

The world tilted 45 degrees as we climbed higher in an upward swoop. Below me a polka dotted glory of lights shrunk rapidly and disappeared. I looked around at my fellow travelers, some with a book in hand, some with earphones plugged into their ears. Our iPods generated our very own personal worlds, silent on the outside, musical on the inside. Spotlit heads all around me, laptop screens lit up frowns of intense concentration. Smells arose of coffee, wine and bread. I drank my unwise but deliberate coffee, for I chose MS Subbulakshmi and Dostoevsky over sleep. Delicious bitter coffee, unknown companions, a caffeine-induced unreal alertness, memories of Fight Club! And MS crooning just for me, Kurai Onrum Illai Kanna...

My seat overlooked the plane's wing. I had borrowed those wings, they were mine for the length of the flight. I scrutinized the paneled wing, those metal sheets flapping mechanically under human control. I wished I had my own wings to flap and flaunt, to fly about as I pleased. But for now, even metal wings will do. Will this fascination with flying (or is it freedom?) ever fade? We entered a wispy cloud, opaque white below me, clear blue skies above. I searched for a crack in the clouds, hoping for a glimpse of the lovely land I left behind. I caught myself hoping and I smiled, so did my ghost in the windowpane. I hoped the roar of the airplane would magically turn into the roar of the wind in my ears. I thought about forty years hence and wondered what I should hope for. Bright kids? A private jet maybe? My own wings? I caught myself hoping again. It's amazing how dependent the human mind is on hope. Success raises hopes of more success in a neverending recursion. We resort to hope to soften the blows dealt by failure. Hope baffles me, cornerstone of ambition at one time, haven for the escapist at another, elusive, chimerical and indefinable, to say the least.

My neighbor serenely knitted. It was something in a lovely pale green melting into rich dark olive. I hoped it was being made for someone with shining hazel eyes. I squinted at my neighbor's beverage. Calories-0. Fat-0. Carb-0. Sugars-0. Protein-0. I smirked at the pointlessness. But then how often should I smirk at my life? I felt the outside of my bag, I traced a fully charged iPod and my books. I never travel without enough books to last me at least a week. I momentarily acknowledged my intense fear of boredom, paranoia if you will. But then it could also be a fundamental distrust of my own mind and of chance acquaintances, even of nature to stimulate my interest for long enough. Life, of course, has proved me wrong too many times. But we elect to just go through our entire lives lugging some of our fears and inhibitions with us. There is not enough incentive to make an effort to lose particularly this one when I can resort to wonderful books and music. Vathapi Ganapathim... MS keeps me special company.

Strapped into safe confinement in submission to tiny illuminated signs, I wrote a story. Can I call words separated by hyphens a story? I wrote it in blue on tissue that blotted. My absent reveries when I paused for thought took the form of live growing inkspots. Inkspots on blotting tissue, begging and teasing for interpretation. The story was really just incomplete thoughts jotted down in a hurry, lest I forget them as quickly as they came. Random thoughts to be fleshed out later in the comfort of my bed. I tried to capture her voice on paper, her brilliant rendition of Bhavayami Gopalabalam and the echoing violin sounding like it was moved to cry by her pious voice. A perfectly bronzed woman, in push-up bra and tiny thong smiled at me from the glossy magazine peeking out of the seat pocket. Sorry, no room for her in my story. We were inside a cloud again. And I felt suspended, motionless thirty-seven thousand feet above land. No frame of reference to gauge the motion. Much like life, I'm tempted to say. I never finish stories, I don't know if I ever can or want to. I didn't promise myself that I will, but I did carefully save those precious tissues. Bhavayami Gopalabalam... I retired to MS at her mellifluous best.

A year of resolve ahead?

Read more, write more, travel more, focus more, pay more attention to detail, step outside my cocoon and be aware of the world, cook more, become a fitter me, concentrate better, slow down, talk less, sleep (less or more???), life can be improved in a thousand ways...

Yes, it is that time of the year. I am not one to take stock of the previous year and I don't usually make resolutions. But today I am tempted. I embarked on the mental quest for a resolution and realized that a resolution is a self defeating entity. My premise is that a disciplined person does not need to put an oath down on paper, police herself and then reward herself to achieve something as trivial as a visit to the gym everyday or half an hour a day to keep abreast of news. Neither should she wait for a new year to begin these habits. Quitting alcohol or smoking or drugs are graver issues by virtue of being addictions and require more than just discipline. But it is her lack of discipline which gives rise to the need for alternate motivation to develop more mundane habits and to the procrastination until a new year or a birthday to begin. And this very lack of discipline will avenge itself by preventing her from keeping up the resolution successfully. Such is the self defeating nature of a resolution; it arises from a want of discipline which defeats the resolution itself. One could argue that we don't live in an ideal world and that resolutions serve as an anchor, a walking stick that abets noble goals which may otherwise not even be attempted. But unaccompanied by discipline, a resolution reduces to an anchor lowered on quick sand, a walking stick deserted by its owner.

This year I want to court discipline itself, wage war with it, conquer it and own it forever. I'm assuming that discipline is the starting point of achievement and hence can be acquired. For if it cannot be, then nothing can be changed or achieved by an aspirant who is not blessed with it. I'm putting this down on paper now, hoping that soon I will do away with the need to. I could call my quest for discipline an oath, hopefully the last one I will ever make. I'm also imposing on myself the onus of taking stock of my "resolution" a year from now. Sigh... my beautiful, ironical life!

Wish you a Happy New Year!

This blog

Every couple of months I spend long hours reading every post I've made on this blog. I do so to take stock of my writing but end up reliving the actual moments that made me write each post. Today as I read some of the posts, I realize what an important extension of myself this blog has become. I refrain from calling it a "part" of myself because I believe that it is a parallelism built around my commentary on life (in handpicked fonts and justified text). Every post on this blog is witness to ten others relegated to the recycle bin, deemed unfit for public display, at times too unbearable in its honesty.

I come to this blog to pen the unthinkable, to think the unpardonable. This blog is my irrational dream. It is a recourse for my restlessness. It is also my bruised ego. A cupful of joy, my unshed tears, my denied fears. It is my silence, my screaming pain sometimes. It is my unleashed anger at the aberrant world. My helplessness too. My insomnia. My cheated, defeated reason. My will to beat the odds, my intermittent persistence, my bent beaten resignation. This blog is my corner of the universe where reality submits to imagination. It is the reign of conjecture over fact, hypothesis over proof, rebellion over reason. It is a tiny tribute to the belief that Art is God, Effort - worship, Creation - sacred. This blog is the nonzero sum of my rationality, my curiosity and my insanity.

Ego! Welcome...

She: You are the single largest demand on my time
He: Come on! You have nothing better to do than talk to me anyway
She: If not for you I would be doing a million other things
He: Fine, so go do what you want. I am not stopping you
She: Yeah right, you are not stopping me. Just that you prevented me from hanging up four times in the past hour
He: Really? I can stop calling you if that's what you want...
She: You would? You can? (snickers)
He: Are you daring me?
She: Maybe...
He: Ok, so how long before I call you next?
She: Hmm... next Wednesday??? As if you can
He: So be it. Till Wednesday then...
She: Great! Bye
He: Bye (slams the phone)
She: (Hangs up with a mischievous grin) I give him one full hour (to herself)

One hour later, there was no call. Two full days passed without a call. The week trudges along, wearier than ever. She pointedly leaves the phone out of her sight all the time. He "distracts" himself through conversations with other women, conversations he neither cares to listen to nor remembers.

Villainous Ego pitching its tent in hitherto impenetrable quarters...

Windowpane wonderings

Her hands rushed to her ears. She tried to block off the noise, but in vain, for the clamor indeed was inside her head. What everyone construed to be excitement or zest was in fact an uncontrollable restlessness. She chose to fondly call it "infinite energy" instead. It was this restlessness that endeared her to the world around her, the same restlessness that wedged itself between her and the milling masses, immovably so... It instilled in her an undying quest for happiness and a compulsive need for direction. It evoked in her the anger she needed to transcend the hopelessness that surfaced unannounced...

...she watched the river, a thousand feet below. "Is it really flowing?" all the hours she spent staring into its dark depths still left her confused. "How can a river, a flowing river be so serene? Why didn't it bring on a gush of feeling like rivers always did?" She was petulant at nature for letting her down. On the bridge over the river, cars purposefully drove past at alarming speeds. The world within the river was moving equally fast,the cars in the river were racing too, the watery traffic lights turning from bleeding red to blotchy green with mind-numbing regularity. But the river itself, caught in a timelessness of its own, remained unfazed by the urgency of the world it reflected. It refused to be anything more than a faithful mirror that completed the symmetry of nature...

...her hands were still clutching her ears, but the noise had gone away. Her senses were lulled, her mind was fuzzy, the hopelessness had momentarily relented and her restlessness had momentarily receded. "Are you really flowing? May I not have some of your inertness?" she wondered as she enviously pulled the blinds shut...

Sleepless Blues

Light, uninvited, squeezes
through the careless window slit,
Yellow grids on vacant blue,
Stories- lurk between the lines

Fluid shadows, Freeze! Please!
Hold still, that sensuous silhouette
One moment to separate
him from her

The lone moon, steps
out of its wooly den,
My darkest thoughts revealed,
in its mazelike crevices

Hunger- Five hours too early,
Take your pangs, Be gone!
Sleep - Ten years too late,
Lend your dreams, Be gone!

I tried to peek into her mind...

She sat, a wasted pen grasped loosely in her hand. Her face was a cascade of emotions. Those eyes flamed with anger, tightly pursed lips screamed of recent resolutions, promises to herself perhaps. Frustration at the humongous effort that never paid back, at time that slipped through her fingers never to be had again. Questions contorted her features- Why am I here? Where am I going? Not a year ago, it seemed picture perfect. Is it just one huge mistake? A comment sailed by, that agreed with the cynicism she felt. Her pen moved on paper, I could discern the slant of her hand from yards away. I could feel the searing force of the pen as if it were piercing through my own skin. Resentment hung around her like an impenetrable curtain.

I wondered if these are just my inferences snatched away from the fleeting expressions on her face. These could be just my thoughts, isolating patterns from the kaleidescope of her feelings. This might be a futile attempt at mind reading. Or my faulty perception and skewed imagination jaundicing simple reality. I sat wondering, when suddenly a small smile, a happy one, stole into her eyes. Those lips, a thin line until then, perked up from that smile. Was it the beloved violin back home, beckoning? Was it favorites from Bach and Mozart, resounding in her head? Was it the sun that had just swam in and brightened the window? But she smiled, a happy smile. Aren't these the very moments that make life worth its while...?

Flouncing

Have you ever felt your life has become an exciting tug of war between fancies and reason... intensity and inertia... heart and mind (allow me the cliché)? It is almost as if someone, with the touch of a wand and a whispered spell, has rendered everything unrecognizable.

Not too long ago, I was young and important and thought I was the sole master of my life. But life has its way of springing these surprises. Surprises that could be nasty, or a much needed reality check, or just an amusing change of scene.

The cynic is tempted to wonder if as we grow older, we slowly spiral down into a vortex of ambivalence and uncertainty. Isn't that moving backwards? Where is all the wisdom I was promised will come with experience? Maybe those important lessons swished past me during an elusive woolgathering moment. Or is it too early for wisdom to reveal itself? I am still a child!

For a change, the cynic was smothered! There is a certain charm in the non-algorithmic tortuous flow of life. There is a promise entwined in the tangles of uncertainty - a promise of a memorable today, the tomorrow of my dreams. The fear causes an onset of boiling wrath that soon hardens into unbending obstinacy against the ravages of fear itself.

The illusion of success could paint itself real... The rainbow could come and stay on forever... Call it optimism, call it irrationality, call it lust for life. The proverbial speck of light gleams enticingly, maybe the tunnel will end in an ideal world?!