Regrets

Some memories are shadows that grow deeper in the dark.

Irony

I am so obfuscated when people use difficult words

Humble bee

Except humility, I have learnt everything.

Job Satisfaction

My job won't determine the fate of this world.
But I am afraid it would be as insignificant to mine.

Rewritten

Leftovers from a beautiful dream
These memories are getting stale
Too precious to let go
Too fake to cherish
Blessed with a lie
And now stained by the truth
I want to wash my love
And let these memories dry
So I can forget at last
That I was replaced in my own past

210 minutes

Will their clocks ever tell the same time?
Will their thoughts speak the same language?
Will the perfect strangers remain strangers?
Or will they become perfect?
Will their pasts slow them down?
Or will their future ask them to hurry?
Will their legs make the last mile?
Will she smile?
Will they swim again?
Will it rain?
Will they keep their words?
Will they have the right ones when the moment comes?
Will they hug?
Will they kiss?
Will they remember?
Will they forget?
Is it time yet?
Will they find what they were missing?
Will he heal her soul?
Will she make him a whole?
Will they put everything else behind?
Will he learn to be kind?
Will they mess it up?
Will it be a beautiful mess?
Will they caress?
Will they cuddle?
Will they touch?
Will they talk?
Will they open their hearts?
Will they close all other chapters?
Will she cast a magic spell?
Can he really tell?
Are they really meant to be?
Can they see?
Maybe he should fly
Maybe he should walk
Maybe its time to adjust his clock.

On Travel

My legs take me where my mind can't.

Mercury Rising

Disease
Behind its pain
Beneath my throbbing vein
I can see in guise
The lessons learnt by the wise
Friends? Foes?
What separates them, who knows
But the tired bones and the burning skin
Makes me remember my kin
My lungs scream at deaf ears
My face betrays my smile
My breath is no longer silent
And takes more than just a while
There are those who call and those who don’t
The ones who don’t, I knew they won’t
The ones who do, prefer to seek my mind
Mortal issues, they’d rather leave behind
So I hush my lungs
Smile a bit longer
Hold my breath once more
So they can ignore
And as I lie down to sleep
Hoping in my dreams
Someone would come along
Maybe sing me a song
Pay me a compliment
Pour the healer on a spoon
And bending forward, say
I’ll make you get well soon

Unconditional love*

Do you care only if you are there?
Do you listen only if you are spoken to?
Do you see only if you are shown?
Does it matter now that we are alone?
Has your love developed amnesia?
Has your concern met its expiry date?
Was this really meant to be our fate?
Is our past sleeping peacefully?
Have the demons been laid to rest?
Or is this all for the best?
Has the bitterness turned to indifference?
Or are you being more bitter this way?
When you don’t have much to ask
When you don’t have much to say
Are you being formal?
Are you being aloof?
Are you being vengeful?
Are you running away?
From what you might see?
Or from the woman you might be?
Or am I reading too much?
Is it such?
That maybe you don’t care a thing?
Just because I can’t ever buy you a ring.

Notes from the hills

Two hours and a few suburbs away from Bombay, I found refuge 2636 feet above the filthy sea, in Matheran. With 38 vantage points standing guard over the hills, it was a quiet trek to these bastions of nature.

Seeing me stand at the edge of a cliff, the clouds climbed upon me from the valley below. They kept hitting me with renewed vigour time and again, but I refused to budge. Disappointed, they gave up and moved on in search of a less stoic spectator. It felt like sitting in the centre of a large natural sauna. Much cooler, of course.

My visits to the vantage points weren’t without a dose of manmade irony. For example, my stag visit to the Honeymoon Point. But I guess there’s always a vacancy for a voyeur in such places.

Then there was the Monkey Point. But the name turned out to be misleading. There were no monkeys as promised, except for one of their highly evolved descendants who lived to write this story. But why the name, I wondered? Maybe once, the place was inhabited by apes who, like humans, later moved to the cities in search of a better future. And all they left behind was a false legacy.

Or could it be possible that just like technology, even names become obsolete?

I trekked to Echo Point in the hope that some more adventurous tourists would do justice to its name. But upon my arrival, I could see no more than four guys, busy talking to each other than to the hills across the valley. Maybe this had something to do with the veil of mist surrounding us. Maybe the guys reckoned that the hills, unable to see who had called them, would not bother replying back.

Being in the presence of the hills, birds and the clouds, I realised I was also in the company of my self. It was like being split into two. When I was a tourist, I was also the guide. When I was the talker, I was also the audience. When I cracked a joke, I laughed.

Early signs of schizophrenia? Or the hidden joys of solitude?

Natural? Calamity?

We like to believe that we all live in our own separate worlds. Isolated, protected and distanced from each other. Almost as if we have stepped back into a womb. We close the door, roll down the windows and switch off our phones; proudly reminding ourselves of how we as a society have successfully managed to stop acting like one. We think we are free. We think we are independent in more ways than what our forefathers wanted to be.

Are we?

Every time a calamity strikes, the lessons to be learnt are far beyond the obvious. True, the damage to lives, property and morale takes time to recover from. But beyond the debris, above the pile of unclaimed corpses and silenced by the wails of shocked mothers, lies a hidden secret visible only to the witnesses, not the victims.

Throughout history, man strived to carve out a niche for himself. First he separated himself from the apes. Then he spent the rest of eternity separating himself from other men. Gender, religion, profession, faith, philosophy and other such tools enabled him to distinguish himself from the herd. And as years turned to eras, this process of division and sub-division became even more specialised and aspiring.

But time and again, we are forced to remove our masks and stare at our sameness. We start looking, feeling and behaving less like ourselves but more like one another. We are forced to agree that freedom is an overrated value.

Calamities, more than religion could ever achieve to do, bring people to the lowest common denominator. No one swims differently in a flood. A famine makes people equally hungry. Incessant raindrops don't wet one person more than the other. Earthquakes don't shake a palace any less than a slum. A wildfire cooks any human flesh with uniform heat.

So are we really so different from each other? Are we really that independent? Are we really so protected? Even in our self-made wombs?

Anonymous

It’s wonderful to be a nobody.

It’s wonderful when no one looks at you with anything more than a fleeting glance. No one remembers your first name, last name or your nickname. You mean nothing to anyone. Except to those who sell you food, drinks and shelter.

For once in your life, you could be anonymous. And it could be fun.

You don’t run into someone you like. You don’t bump into someone you’d rather avoid. People don’t stare at you. But it’s you who stares at them.

You stare back to realise you are safe among men who owe you nothing and you owe them nothing in return. You can leave your hair open, you could walk on one legs, you could walk on two legs; frankly, no one gives a damn.

People can give you so much by not giving a damn.

A Tsunami account

It’s been 4 days since I was back from the Tsunami-affected regions of South India. And even as the killer waves recede to the inside pages of newspapers, I am still struggling to make sense of what I saw.

To give a day-by-day synopsis of our journey would be impossible simply because the images we saw ran riot in our minds; too overwhelming and numbing to keep a chronicled record of.

On the 31st of December, five of us who had volunteered for relief operations in Chennai and neighbouring areas, embarked on a trip we wish we never had to take. For most part of our stay, we were distributing rice, daal, bed sheets, mats, soaps etc to the affected villagers along the eastern coastline. Most of them were lying on the burning sand, with a flimsy plastic sheet acting as a roof above their heads. It’s difficult to fathom what they felt as they saw us approaching their misery. Was it hope? Was it indifference? Was it gratitude? I guess most were still too shocked to express an emotion.

There was this one village where we were to exhaust the last of out relief supplies. In the beginning, the villagers maintained complete decorum by standing in a queue and waiting for their turn to receive their packets. These were people who furnished their ration cards, which we ticked to prevent any duplication.

Once this lot got over, the ones without the ration cards started coming in. Fearing that they may not receive the supplies, they refused to form a queue, which resulted in complete chaos. We were running out of ideas to distribute amongst them in an orderly fashion. Marking their palms with a pen proved futile. So did distributing coupons that could be redeemed from the back of the truck, where we were standing.

Before we realised, there was a mob of more than hundred villagers, which had completely encircled our truck. Suddenly there were people pulling me from everywhere, begging, pleading and vehemently demanding their share. It reminded me of one of those photojournalistic shots where a hundred pairs of hands are outstretched towards just one. It pains me to think that I even had to shout at them, hoping that would push them back. But my voice drowned in their rancour just as easily as their families were drowned in the waves. It reached a point where I had lost control over my hands. They just naturally reached out to those whose faces screamed more than their throats.

It’s the closest I have ever felt to being hypnotised.

To prevent an imminent stampede, we kept moving the truck every hundred metres or so. Finally as we doled out the last of our packets, we decided to leave. Only to see that the entire mob ran after us, men and women, young and old alike. Not even your mother can make you feel as important. We realised just in time that we were also carrying some utensils. But too scared to stop, we ended up tossing them out of the moving truck into the hands of those whose legs refused to give up till we were no more in their sight.

Once, there was this elderly woman who, after receiving her packet, came back again for clothes for her grandchild. Since we had already given her some before, we tried to explain to her that the distribution has to be fair. But she didn’t relent to our logic and kept requesting for more. I managed to pick out some clothes, which would fit a 5-year old girl and handed them over.

To understand what happened next, imagine your grandmother touching your feet.

On the last day we surveyed the Karaikal district of Pondicherry. That’s when the extent of the devastation truly hit us. Only an air raid could explain what we saw.

It was tough balancing ourselves, as we tiptoed over at least 3 feet of rubble. The only things that could be seen standing were coconut trees and the bunch of us. Even the concrete houses were reduced to powder. Strewn around the beach were personal belongings of those who once lived there. Music cassettes, utensils, clothes, photographs were the only clues of the destroyed civilisation. What disturbed the eerie calm were three women who were still in mourning. One of them was standing with a young girl on the rubble of what was once her home. She was beating her stomach repeatedly and spewing abuses at the sea. Even though we didn’t understand the language, we knew that no man in history would have ever abused another man as much.

She had lost her husband and six of her seven children.

One of the few structures that had somehow survived gave us goose bumps. Inside was a boy not a year older than 10, cleaning his home. This was an ordeal since the waves had brought a 1-foot thick layer of sand, spread across the floor. What was even harder to explain was an ominous layer of sand lying untouched on the ceiling fan.

In fact, even the ones who knew how to swim couldn’t keep their heads above water, since the muddy waves sucked-in those who didn’t drown on their own.

Further away from the coast, one could see boats, trucks and other vehicles lying smashed and broken like toys, in fields, which were at least 2 km away from the sea. Driving past a desolate medical college, we saw lab reports, notebooks and answer sheets floating on the water logged fields.

Some fishermen weren’t too taken aback by the loss of life or their boats and nets. What they couldn’t come to terms with was the fact that the sea had deceived them; the sea which had been their benefactor and god for generations. It was like someone whom you’ve loved and trusted for all your life suddenly stabs you in the back.

These scenes will never fade from memory. It’s still tough to grasp that water could suddenly rise up to more than 20 feet and commit a massacre. Suddenly, everything else in life seems so insignificant and trivial. Humility comes easy once you’ve witnessed such scenes.

But it’s so wrong that more than 1,50,000 people had to die to teach us this simple lesson.

A girl, a gun and a friend who pulled the trigger. (Monster review)

The girl
Loving someone can be a virtue. Loving someone too much can be a crime. Love usually transcends age, religion, caste, colour and in this case, sex. But where does one go once you’ve crossed the line with your beloved? You simply draw new ones. Etched so firmly in the ground that you fail to see them yourself. So you draw them again just to be sure. More like concentric circles, they pull you closer and closer to your beloved, but at the same time, leaving her little space to shuffle her feet.

Then every morning, you revisit the lines, like a devoted gardener, making sure the plants are doing fine. “There! That one’s cracking up.” Just a little touch-up and it’s ready to scream at trespassers again. But slowly, the weeds start growing alongside the roses. The weeds are unwanted, so are the trespassers. And since both learn little from their uprooted predecessors, fingers wrapped around metal are kept busy.

The friend
Money bought her a pitcher of conversation. Many refills later, it bought her a friend. One night later, it bought her love. But can the need to exchange words be misinterpreted as the need to exchange vows? Can a finger, after stroking her cheek just once, decide to hold her hand forever? She confused friendship with love. Some of us confuse love with friendship. So which is more confusing?
If you share the bed after sharing a joke, and repent it, you haven’t lost much. Revisiting the crackling laughter can silence the previous night’s moans. But if you can't share a joke after sharing the bed first, you didn’t have anything to begin with that you could have lost later.

The trigger
She killed him to keep her promise. She killed the rest to keep her friend alive. Did she refuse to sell her body because she’d had enough? Or because she wanted to reserve this privilege for someone special? Knowing what would make her friend happy was more important than what it cost. So she kept paying.

When does love stop being possessive and become protective? When does a kiss on the lips get replaced with a kiss on the forehead? When does love become maternal?

You can buy her flowers but can you save them from withering? You can buy her clothes but can you stop them from fading? You can love her all night but can you fight the dawn? You can talk to her forever but can you listen?

She could and she did.

Dear...Uuuhh...Hmmmnn...

I am bad with names.

In a country where more people share their names than their love for cricket, my terrible memory does deserve some benefit of doubt. Besides, the human mind is immediately tickled out of its slumber when something interesting is brought at its doorstep. And since most people are not loved enough by their parents to be bestowed upon with an interesting name, my ill manners become even more pardonable.

A case in point being that no one ever seems to forget Rishabh.

Having scraped the surface of the problem, I am, but tempted to dig deeper. I would like to present a corollary to the statement penned by Shakespeare.... what’s in a name....

Seriously, what's in it? When someone introduces himself merely with a name, I tend to be sceptical. Does his identity start and end with a mere whim that his parents had when he was born? Is that identity enough for me to add another piece of information in my brain, which will elbow out what is already inside it?

I don’t think so.

I don’t know the names of all people working in my office; even in the creative department. 'Who’s he' seems to be my only contribution in an office conversation.

The recollection of someone's name is a mere testament to the fact that the person, in some way, is important or whom I deem to be important. In that case, even a whisper of that name paints his picture in front of my eyes, along with all emotions that I have experienced with regards to him or her. It’s more like a trigger that in an instant, displays the profile of someone whom I thought deserved to be profiled in he first place.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that my amnesia is just a filtration process that keeps out unwanted information and people out of my conscious or sub-conscious self. This theory is proven when I simply get pissed off with myself when I fail to recollect someone's name. This obviously implies that I ought to have remembered, given some special importance I have attached to that being.

There’s also another angle to this. I never ever remember the names of people and places that embrace the pages of a book that I have enjoyed reading thoroughly. This used to really bother me, especially if those characters have left behind an impression on me, why do their names fail to leave even a trace?

I think its because I get so engrossed in the story, the character and his activities that an effort to take note of the name would take away from the effort to remember what they did. The latter being more important, it seems pointless to pay attention to the former. Since the picture of the character, which is already framed in my mind, is absolute and poignant and compelling, I find it useless to define such an all-encompassing visual with a pithy word.

Sure, the flip side is that I can’t drop any names in a party.

No virtue

Don’t praise me for being patient.
I am not.
Being patient is a matter of choice.
But when all the doors seem shut,
you have no choice but to wait
for one of them to open

Full Circle

She tried to show me
But I refused to see
She tried to hold me
When I thought I was free
She tried to tell me
But I wanted to talk
She wanted to run
When I needed to walk

Soon dusk broke to dawn
And I noticed something wrong
That when I was ready to see
When I’d left me behind
She said she couldn’t see me
She said she was blind

Calendar

Browsing through paperbacks, hard bounds
And bestsellers hard to ignore
Leafing through the pages, wondering
Why we didn’t read them before

Waiting for the lights to go dim
Our palms thirsty for some sweat
Just before I could steal a kiss or more
The lights came on with deep regret

When music filled our shared silence
As the teacher taught the student
Choosing cheaper cassettes over CDs
While I figured what the songs meant

Cruising the city in a silver grey vintage
Stopping behind buses and in the rain
Nudging her to the garage nearby
So I could hitch a ride again

Today I think of all that
We did under the sun
Today, when a table for two
Has become a table for one

The Hungry Crow

Unsure, yet determined
To peck at a god-sent morsel
It inched forward
And then backward
It’s beak, hungry
But eyes weary
Tempted by impulse
But wounded by the past
Of morsels snatched
And betrayals cast
But faith overcame fear
And a bite replaced the tear
Free from the pain it never earned
Crossing bridges it never burnt
It had finally come home
Where it could rest its tired wings
And play with pearls
Hanging from its broken strings
Then did my smile
Turn into a sigh
Or did the rustles of nearby leaves
Echo a familiar cry
The morsel became a risk
My shadow became a threat
Faith bowed to fear
And love lost the bet

Broken by the last straw
It refused to eat
Finding the only shelter under its wings
It unburdened its shuffling feet
That morsel was its very own
Maybe too little
Maybe too late
But never unknown

If you fly far away
To find a new morsel
In a new land
I wont chase your flight
I will understand
But if you can ever trust my shadow
And if your wings bring you back home
I promise I’ll feed you
With my own hand

Swan Song

They say, when you can't say it, write it. But if you don’t know what to say, you can't write it either. If emotions are the first clues to your mind, then I guess I am completely clueless. I don’t know what to feel. It’s like going to a restaurant and being challenged by a menu card that throws dishes at you, the names of which you can't even pronounce. But indecision can't keep a man hungry. So I guess I too will aim a shot in the dark.

I wish every man’s actions, decisions and intentions came with a little footnote; stating the possible implications of each. Much like the statutory warning on a cigarette pack. At least then we can't we surprised and angry about not having been warned in advance. Innocence is the greatest weapon of defence against man’s guilt. But a defeated soldier has no option but to lay down his weapons.

I haven’t read Shakespeare’s ‘A comedy of errors’. But I wish mine were laughable too. I guess they are. When foolishness repeats itself, the only way to accept it is with a chuckle. That way it becomes a little more palatable. But this is strictly a privilege of onlookers. The fool can never smile. Because the day he realises his foolishness, he doesn’t find anything funny about it.

Jonathan Swift wrote, “ The latter part of man’s life is taken up in curing follies, prejudices and false opinions he had contracted in the former.” Suddenly I feel so old. And like all old people, I feel sad that in spite of changing my opinion, I can't change history. This belated wisdom comes with it’s share of wrinkles; a bleak reminder of the fact that you can't go back to the place you came from, but you’ll keep visiting and revisiting it much like a ghost. You can, when you have memories. Memories that you can touch, hear, see, feel and experience in a way you never did when they were alive.

Thanks for the memories. All of them. Even the ones that died an early death.

Dear Mom, Dear Dad

Parents’ anniversaries can be really confusing for kids. That’s when, at least for a day, they don’t see them as mom and dad but as husband and wife; two people, who were perfect strangers before they become perfect parents.

And I get a feeling that you too have slipped into the latter role far too much to notice how it all started. Remember the first time she smiled at you? Or the first time she cooked for you? The first broken button she sewed back on your shirt?

I’m sure you remember. These and many more memories that a bachelor can’t even begin to imagine. In the past 27 years, you must have built a sizeable bank of the same, many of which lie frozen in the photo albums. I’ll tell you my favourite. It’s the one that was clicked on Holi in Rajinder Nagar on the Grovers’ terrace. Both of you are painted in various combinations of CYMK. And you are flirting with her and she is blushing in approval. That’s probably the first time I saw you as a couple.

The greatest compliment a man or woman can pay to each other is, “I want to grow old with you.” And the two of you have already fulfilled that unsaid promise like few others have.

As someone who’s been a witness to 24 of those 27 years, this is what I have to say with a tinge of envy:

You guys still look good together.

On my marks

It seems like a race against time.

As I grow older, I discover far more things that I could do than maybe when I was younger. But I also feel far less enthusiastic than when I was in my teens.

So as we get exposed to greater choices, some promising to make our lives better, we also get caught with excuses and chores. And blaming a busy work schedule isn’t simply good enough. Actually, blaming anything or anyone doesn’t do any good either.

My fanatic commitment towards my work is waning almost as quickly as it shot up. Not to say that I don’t look forward to a good brief or working on one…just that the silence I have been living with for the past 8 months has been speaking to me. Probing me, hinting suggestively till I see what I’ve been missing. And now, I sometimes flirt with the idea of simply calling it a day at work for a lot of days and just pursue whatever I couldn’t at work.

I don’t mean retirement; it’s more like a sabbatical. Except that I have realised that I cant take those breaks, say once or twice a year…but I have to do it everyday. Little by little build upon all that I wish to build, acquire new tastes, test new abilities, tickle passive aptitudes. And understand that not all can be fulfilled by my job.

So what do I do?

I’ll just say that everyday I try to do something, no matter how little in effort but resounding in effect, something that lets me know more about the world, and at times, more about myself. And I know that I am not getting any younger. And I sometimes get overwhelmed with the feeling of the effort being too inadequate, too slow, and too little to make much of difference too soon.

But considering I have come a long way in the past 8 months to acknowledge how much there is left to do, I know I am getting there.

I think it’s not really a race against time as much as it is against yourself.