Darkness shrouds the landscape…

Rhythmic ripples tearing the silent lake….

 The ambience damp with an ominous scent…

Murky clouds camouflaging the crescent

The silhouette of the edifice magnified manifold …

Hell could freeze over but the biting cold

Nightly hues changing from blue to black…

The quiet amplifying even a twig’s crack…

Eons separate the broken heart..

But from me thou shalt ne’er depart

 

I roam the skies..

Cross the miles…

Waiting for thee

Devoid of glee

The strains of the songs…

For which the soul longs…

Frozen in the spirit..

Until thou shalt hear it…

 

Restless are the days..

Restless are the nights..

Mindless are the flights..

Between sorrows and delights…

Wherever you shall lay…

Wherever you are as you may…

I shall be there to remind…

With just a question in mind…

That thou shalt be mine…

 

                                                             Sukanya the lunatic bard

There are times when one would fervently wish that he or she can just get lost..

Escape from everything shrouding their lives, or rather the illusion that they call life…

Escapism has for long been deemed a weakness.. but I feel there is something novel and romantic about the whole concept..

Breaking loose, snapping ties, lightening yourself.. and achieving an equanimity beyond your own comprehension is what escapism is all about…

 

Every one of us , at some point of time if not now, perhaps in the  future would have felt the inane urge to leave it all, to run away.. to merge into oblivion… to be one with nothingness… to vaporize into thin air…to cease to exist.

 

There are times when you wanna hate yourself and you would love it if everyone else can exhibit such supreme hatred towards you.. self loathing is not the bane of the meek… it is a virtue that cleanses the ego, that deals vital prick to the precarious bubble of pride blown well beyond its proportions by every single individual.. when you learn to hate yourself , you perform the ultimate act of humility, possessing a capacity to kill your self esteem and bury it six feet under.

 

Freakish, that’s how all this may sound.. but it is truth stripped of all its sugar coating….truth that awaits some at many junctures , some at the culmination of their long winding journey.. truth that is a way of life for yet some more..

 

When life deteriorates beyond control, when things around you turn yellow and decay..When all you can possibly do is watch everything crumble… when you feel incarcerated without protest.. when you have become a stranger in your own world… what is left but to flee…flee from the truth that is not truth.. flee from danger that isn’t danger .. flee from mirages that aint mirages….. flee forever from the numbing senselessness…

 

Flee from happiness, run away from despair.... flee from everything that is left to spare.. leave things you own… give up things you love.. cut every tie, fly high like a kite gone astray, topple wobble sink down the abyss of a bottomless pit .. like a rudder free boat….

Float like a log bound by the fury of the white waters…being a vagabound isn’t a taboo, it is an emancipating experience…. Roam to live roam to die.. roam away from madness into the depth of madness….

 

From hell to heaven and back…. Back and forth , up and down.. with no periodicity to this oscillation… still highly undamped and never ending … till one day when everything goes kaboom!, nothing left , not even a trace remniscent of your existence.. when the final fullstop has been written to complete your incomplete sentence… only that it happens so suddenly, even if it is the only thing that is certain since your genesis… it still is unexpected.. unforeseen.. a severe shock.. no one feels they have come the full circle.. at this juncture.. though its been the same circle that they have been cycling all along , over and over again…

 

Great men , little men .. no one is spared this agony.. this agony of giving up too soon .. though otherwise they realize it has all happened… no death is welcome, no death is peaceful.. and no death can be more enigmatic than the other….

 

We are all funny creatures.. running away from the certain.. finding security in the uncertain… living a fallacy.. blinding ourselves from the truth that glares .. ever so nascent.. ever so pure… smiling accommodatingly at the futility of our childishness… at our insane grip on pettiness.. yet we fail to acknowledge its presence.. to realize its ubiquitous nature…

 

Wake up from your slumber.. open your eyes to the obvious.. await the end as though it is a new beginning… kindle the awareness in you… Amen.!

 

 

I am a very lousy person. I may not appear to be freakish, but my attitude definitely is. It takes a lot to get me to do something, with my conked up rationale questioning the utility of every twitch of my muscles.

But there was something that captured my attention today. I am usually a very lethargic person and wouldn’t get myself hurried for any reason. Especially in the mornings. If my bus is at 7.50, and there’s a two minute walk to the bus stop, I would consider it a criminal waste of time to leave at 7.47. It is this pragmatism that caused me to miss my bus yesterday and go to work late.

 

As they say, once bitten, twice shy. I did try, at least for today, to rise and shine as early as my questioning spirit would permit. I also spent lesser time straining my vocal chords and the auditory apparatus of those around me while I got myself cleaned for the day. I did steal a few minutes of my daily narcissism in front of the mirror, adding a couple of ticks from the clock by not picking up small talk with my drowsy roommates.

 

All this extra time that I happened to buy allowed me a more relaxed walk to the bus stop on the rocky terrain that they call roads in this city of silicon. My lassitude got the better of me, finally breaking the chains that had contained it for so long. I started to look around taking in the scenes of the morning lane.

 

The affluence of the intelligentsia here was a heartening aspect especially for someone taken to the pinnacle of patriotism ala post-republic day spirit. However the mindless westernization and the indigenous version of the ABCD [American Born Confused Desi] were indeed irksome. But alas, it’s a global village; ethnicity no longer holds any relevance.

 

Musing on this, devouring the scents of the sweet morning air, I ambled on towards my destination that was just a minute away. That is when I saw two urchins, barely as tall as my knee, dressed in the most untidy of rags, carrying pots many times their size. I have seen such sights in the city where I hail from. And being an Indian, these purgatory sights were some thing my senses had become accustomed to. But the divide between the classes, was more striking in this city of dynamic growth.

 

The papers speak of this city having reached its saturation as far as growth is concerned. But why does the society, the media inclusive turn a blind eye to areas where there’s not only room for improvement, but to areas which haven’t seen improvement at all??

 

I did speak about this to a couple of people. Some of them did fret over it, some just shrugged at the sorry state of affairs, while some were indifferent, some others going to the outrageous extent of scoffing at the underprivileged for having the unfavorable stars in their horoscopes.

 

I am an ardent fan of Ayn Rand and her objectivism. I glorify the individual. But I also happened to realize that the individual doesn’t suffer a blow when he extends a helping hand to those groping for a foothold. I feel such a gesture embellishes the beauty of the individual adding more meaning to the purpose of his existence.

This is supposed to be a hip and happening city, but I don’t see anything happening in the lives of these downtrodden people. Back home, the underprivileged looked upon the upper echelons of society either with awe, or inspiration or jealousy or with longing. When I looked into the lifeless eyes of those kids, I could sense neither of these. Just a sense of blankness, A mute acceptance of their predicament. When such a numbed countenance figures on young faces such as these, then that sends a chill down my spine. What has become of humanity? What has become of this country?

 

India’s decision to go for a mixed economy way back during her prime as an independent nation was something I had appreciated when I first came to know of it. Though the infamy of the license raj and the painfully sloth paced industrial growth, made globalization and a free economy necessary, it hasn’t done much good to the people at the grassroots.

Communism, according to me is a grand idea gone wrong. I am no economist, nor am I a political scientist. But the essence of the concept is out for any layman to grasp. These economies and socio political systems are brainchildren of a changing society, a society gripped by economic crisis that gave birth to Capitalism, a society grappling with monarchy, despotism and abysmal poverty mothered Socialism.

 

Uniform economic growth is a utopian thought, not all fingers of ones hand are alike and not all mouths can be fed always. But when a niche section of the society is surging ahead, is it not a colossal error to leave the rest of the masses gaping at them? I don’t want the movers and shakers to give up their game and drag every last one of gang along nor am I asking them to wait for everyone.

 

What we as a societal force, can and probably must do, is to just provide them with something to hold on so that, they can at least tag along. This something can be a monetary donation, that which not only brings you tax waivers, but a thing which you make sure reaches the recipient unscathed by the clutches of corruption and red tapism. Or it could be a fragment of your time, time which you give to impart basics of education to light up lives. But whatever one does, one should put their heart into it. I would even suggest the bigwigs of the corporates to proactively involve their employees in such activities.

 

According to me, service to the society shouldn’t be voluntary, it s something that should be made mandatory, if at all, anything concrete is to be achieved.

 

Writing this is probably the first proactive step I have taken, and I don’t think my conscience can rest until I do something more substantial. After all, there are certain things that could even set a lackadaisical person like me into action.

 

 

A funny thing happened yesterday. As is the livelihood of reserve resources like me, I was forwarding one of the multitude of forwards that I receive to every single person on earth I know who happens to have a mail id. I do have distribution lists but one of my school buddies gave me his id just a few days back and I hadn’t included him yet.

 

By a nasty coincidence, instead of sending it to him, I sent it to my boss, whose name also starts with the same letter , and me choosing the wrong person from the list that comes up when you type a letter in the To field.

 

My boss, is a much feared person, a kind of old world perfectionist who isn’t too popular amongst his subordinates…

 

I didn’t realize the whole fiasco until my colleagues started sending mails of bewilderment after seeing the manager’s name in the list…

 

One should have seen my face then , would be a picture worth the millions…

I started consulting my buddies on damage control measures, and advice started pouring in by the dozens.. ‘ just hush it up, he wont even notice it’ said a friend who is a guy, and the girl pal said “ better go and tell him before he opens it , cook up some silly story”…

 

As women, we trust the opposite sex less than our own brethren..

I went up to my boss with the most sheepish grin I could muster, told him I sent him a silly joke by mistake, implored him to delete it...and scooted from the place… I stayed out of his sight the whole day, seeming to have developed a new found interest in the lab which I previously shunned….

 

When I finally came in, I could see people smugly smiling at me, or was I being paranoid???

Nevertheless, my face turned an ugly shade of crimson and it was embarrassing to the core….

 

The boss is out today, and with a holiday of 3 days that follow, I really hope Monday helps the hatchet to be buried… for once I would know what truly Monday morning blues would be….

 

Fyi…

 

The incriminating fwd:

 

Once the owner of a local bar was so sure that its bartender was the strongest man around that they offered a Rs 10,000 bet. The bartender would squeeze a lemon until all the juice ran into a glass, and hand the lemon to a patron. Anyone who could squeeze one more drop of juice out would win the money. Many people like weightlifters, wrestlers, body builders, etc had tried over time, but nobody could do it.

One day this scrawny little man came in, wearing thick glasses and a safari suit, and said in a tiny, squeaky voice, "I'd like to try the bet." After the laughter had died down, the bartender said OK, grabbed a lemon, and squeezed away. Then he handed the wrinkled remains of the rind to the little man.

But the crowd's laughter turned to total silence as the man clenched his fist around the lemon and 5-6 drops fell into the glass. As the crowd cheered, the bartender paid the Rs 10,000, and asked the little man, "What do yo u do for a living? Are you a lumberjack, a weightlifter, or what?" "No," replied the man.

"I work as a project manager in a software company!!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm,./’;[]\=-0987654321`m…………………….

 

This is the output of staring too hard at the keyboard with a mind swept clean of all senses and their perceptions. Grey is the only colour that surrounds me, but there is a sense of all abiding peace in this shroud of dullness.

Such a blank mind is conducive to reflections and musings.

Stranded in the ignominious traffic jams of Bangalore, caught in an incessant torrent of rainfall, surrounded by sleepy faces, I stared at the gushing water making headway to the gutters down the road. The pitter patter of the rain drops on the rushing water was indeed mesmerizing. It appeared as though a fabric of fine silk studded with gems swaying in the wind. Lifting my head up, I happen to catch a glimpse of lightning streaking across the darkened sky. The mind-boggling potent energy of the lightning, the havoc it can possibly wreak sure seems to be a fact that makes one realizes their place in the grand scheme of things. Human potential is as great a force as that of the strengths of nature.

It has the same destructive as well as constructive as the five elements.

 

These are just random thoughts , and random thoughts by their very inherent nature should be incomplete.

I seriously don’t know what I am hinting at , but before my mind gets bleaker and becomes incapable of even this haphazard thinking, my leftover sensibilities compelled me to record them.

From the exponential rate of my mental decay, it is pretty much obvious that this blog is way past its heyday ( if ever there was any!!)

Time is a fascinating thing. I am currently frozen, yet ironically mobile in time’s domain. I move back and forth, sideways too, trying as multidimensional a motion as possible. Memories flood, sometimes cascading gracefully, sometimes gate-crashing without notice, but mostly sidling from behind unobtrusively.

Reminiscing the past, the trials and triumphs, is calisthenics of the mind, which eases the demands of the present, and the anxiety of the future. Not that I hold any grudge against the earthiness of the present and the excitement of the future, but the past can be the secret ingredient to make the other two meaningful.

The present holds you in its vice-like grip, you a willing prisoner with special privileges. The future beckons to you like a beacon in the dark, an alluring mirage, luring you to move, crawl, or dash ahead.

It’s the past that has let go of you, like a bird that lets its fledglings soar high into a sky of their own. But, the scent of the past lingers on, it watches you as you fly away, just a mute spectator at most times, sounding a silent alert at times of need, a life jacket in troubled waters, and a soul mate in the last legs of your journey on earth.

The present can get you moving on, the future can have you pepped up, the past always ends up leaving you disillusioned.

The assumptions that you hold, the flawless tenets of your life, can be ripped apart and proved fallible, by a simple intrusion from the past. Taking its several forms, the past, rebounds on you even if you try to do away with it.

As introspection, or a stock taking of the self, it leads many a man, barons in the world of business, successful scions of a proud lineage of greats, as well as beggars on the pavement, lepers on trains, blind as bats, beseeching for mercy, more enlightened than the rest of humanity.

As nostalgia, time catches up with you on valedictions, convocations, re-unions, bed time stories, a chance bumping into your best buddy of the years of yore, a bemused appraisal of a nephew or niece you last saw sucking her/his thumb and gurgling in a cradle, as travelogues you’ve always wanted to write, wrapping you up in its coziness.

As vengeance, time burns inside you, reminding you of hurt, breathing fire, staying alive as you try in all childish vanity to re-write the past, to set the wrongs right.

As yearning, time drags you a few steps behind, longing for what might have been, a passive wish for wishes made impotent by the master strokes of destiny.

As scars, time shows up a garish face, rubbing salt into wounds that had been healed by it, wrenching them open, letting a part of you die again, over and over again.
As relief, time makes you feel happy for the present, a liberation from tribulations, an exhalation at having made it at last, that its all finally over , a reiteration of the faith in ‘happy days are gonna be here again’.

I m not a person living in the past, reluctant to trudge on, but I feel that the present is going to be past someday, and the future too has to follow suit.
You can dodge future, you can let go of the present, but you can never disown your past, what has been done, has been done, and it belongs to you, credit or blame. There’s no way you can offload the responsibility for your past to someone else, it’s yours and its here to stay.

A value for the past that gets added or deducted as we progress into the present and the future is something each one of us has to acknowledge. This would probably enforce a sense of direction into our lives, a meaning for our existence, a purpose for living the way we do. The trails that you blaze, or leave behind may chart your path ahead.






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Coincidently, I stumbled upon this anecdote in a novel I m reading presently. The protagonist quotes a modern day ghost story for his companion as they stroll through the Versailles Gardens.

It goes like this:

There were two English lady school teachers, tourists with their sense of history limited to their travel brochures, strolling on the same lawns in 1901. All of a sudden, they seemed come across, daintily dressed men and women, and sceneries that were anachronisms to their times. Later upon subsequent research, and substantial evidence, they happened to find that they had indeed gone back in time, to Versailles of 1789.

The reason why I have added this here is not because of the fictional element, but rather due to a comment that the protagonist makes on the tale.

He, in his exasperation of the demands of his daily life [he happens to be President of the United States, a somewhat timid one jinxed with controversy] envies the two school teachers who jumped into a worm hole, magically escaping into the past, where all had already happened and there could be no terror of the unknown, unlike the realistic future, where there lurked tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. [A nearly verbatim quote]

I simply can’t help marveling at the hand of chance, which deftly got me to read this particular part after I had finished typing the above piece on The Past.

Something I would have brushed aside as being inconsequential, has now helped me in adding a new facet to what I was mulling over.