Random

Today
I am sad.

Purposelessly.
Without misery.
Without even the excuse of a treachery.

Today
I am sad.

Because sadness has come visiting.
And I must serve tea and biscuits.

Tears and misfits.
Awkwardly shaped thoughts.
Not quite fitting around the ankles.

So Chaplin-esque.
This whole deal.

Quote Hanger

Where the Mind is Without Fear - Rabindranath Tagore


Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my 'country' awake.

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I highlight the word 'country' in the last line, because it is so easily replaceable with 'mind', 'heart', 'soul', 'being'. Tagore is brilliant in his insights, that transcend time, space, context. This poem is an elixer of immortal strength for every human being in search of a universal truth; every person looking for an answer within the situations of their life.

Unfinished Business

There is unfinished business
That must be attended to.

There is a song to be written
A line to be remembered.
A scene from a movie
Sweet slowly replayed.

A love to be made.


Its all been left half done.
Unfinished.
Incomplete.

There is this urgent business
We must attend to.

Quickly.

Before the flowers dry.

So Full of You

I am so full of you today!

So full
With sepia tones
That colour bounces back from my skin

And to the onlooker
I am a rainbow.

Simply because I am so full with you today.

The grey black blue whiteness of us.
Left unrisked.

Don't Look Here

Search in your spirits.

In your temple bells
And your gated hells
And in the ghosts that you dare not know.

Search where there is no light
In the spaces where
You have been warned
Of maya, her maids
And of the shadows of past regressions

Search
Where there is no seeking
No fetching and no bringing

Of things into the light

But simply a touching
Of truths already known

And a beauty sown
Upon the graveyard of reasoning.

I Wish You Had Come Tonight

I wish you had come tonight.

There was a sadness sitting to be shared. Like an unfinished bottle of wine.

A sort of endlessness that made no demand, and had no expiry date, and yet wished to be drunk. And done with.

I so wish you had made it, without the cactus in your hair, the bludgeons upon your face. Waiting with impregnable arguments, daring to be felled.

I so wish you had let them fall. And allowed a surprise to sneak upon us like a black cat silhouetted against a moonlit night upon a terrace ledge.

Suddenly.

I don't believe you

I don't believe you.

I don't believe your reasons
And your analysis of the seasons.

And I don't believe that you know.

Perhaps
In inner courtyards
When the skies purple with ink

You show

But I don't believe you know.

The spirit touches upon infinite things
And baubles that a christmas brings

Drift to snow.

And yet, infinitessimally

I don't believe you know.

Why I'm not on Facebook!

Ok, ok. I can already see half my pals grinning. Why half. More like 2/3rds.

Like Sonia Gandhi, if re-election (for the post of 'with it') is inevitable, then we shall face it. But what to do. My 1-2-3 deal with Being Firmly Off the E-network is non negotiable.

1. I'm not interested.

2. It intimidates me.

3. Gosh. It has people. Eeeps.

I must therefore, (again, firmly) insist that I am not e-tarded. I do many activities on the world wide whatugot. From searching for information to googling any damn thing to booking movie tickets to ordering books to reading poetry to ho hum checking mail to downloading music to yesss..... blogging.... see? I am, net net, quite netted. And nettled therefore, by being looked upon as a retro-come-lately-there's-an-ol-kid-in-town.

Nobody asks these days IF you are on Orkut. They ask what was your worst scrap. And that does not point to bloodied nose and knees in an honest to goodness delhi road rage brawl. Nobody wants to know IF you're on facebook. They wonder who you threw a pie at last.

Uff. I din. I don. I won.

Why? Coz I am petrified of people I do not know. Most people don't believe that since I am so all over the people I do know. But truth remains. Show me a stranger and see me pale Ambika style. Or was it Amba? Or Ambalika? Whatever. I do the about-to-beget-pandu number faster than you can say Bhishm. Not Bhisham please.

And you see, this Orkut and this Facebook have people. Mummy! Not only that, they are allowed to get into your space whenever however. Dementors!! Worse still, the whole world can see the rest of the world trying to get into your world. Horror!!!!

Like a friend said about a friend who she was teasing about her latest male preoccupation - 'she told me not to reveal such sordid details on her wall since her dad was on face book too'.

Oh. My. Gosh.

That just about did it for me. Any remote plans I may have had to succumb went firmly out of the e bay. Sailing south.

Not that my dad is likely to be on facebook. Since he's dead. He's probably privy to all my male and other preoccupations in any case, wherever he is. Vantage point.

But since its highly unlikely that he will express his opinion - by throwing pies or scowling on my wall- at whatever it is that I am preoccupying, or occupying, or being occupied by - his Omni séance doesn't hassle me that much. If he were to pop up in my inbox through some mystic cross connection I'll be worrying about a lot more than privacy.

But that aside, this general bonhomie and cheerful camaraderie as we stealthily creeep into each other's most personal parts - pun intended - gives me the creeps. I realise that most people, when they are on Orkut or Facebook, are sitting alone. And its often pretty late at night. And they may well be a few drinks down. And in the relative safety of an empty room with zonal lighting and the alcohol coursing, many things are said, revealed, confessed....... into this mid day sun blaring fish market called social networking on the net.

Insane.

Hasn't anybody noticed the words? InterNET. NETworking. world wide WEB. Its a tangle. Its a trap and I am not stepping into it. Heebie geebies.

Parting thought? I have never ever understood the point of networking for the sake of itself. There are some words and phrases I just don't get: People-watching. Hanging-around. Doing-the-scene. And yes, Social networking.

I have never been a member of any social club. I don't much care for group or community activities unless there is an agenda. The only kind of group I've ever belonged to is a theatre group. Because one person cannot stage a play. Well, atleast, not all kinds of plays.

But why does one need literature clubs to appreciate literature? Or music clubs to hear music? These are solitary pursuits, best savoured alone. A cricket club makes sense. But who's ever heard of a Patience Group?

A friend, who's a rock music encyclopaedia, joined one of those rock appreciation groups once. And came away severely bruised. A Jerry Garcia guitar solo played plaintively in the background that nobody paid any attention to, and the conversation swelled around trivia one-up-manship and the competition for memorablia hunters. X was a dude because when he'd been to the U.S. last he had managed to wrangle a personally autographed LP left by the legend in some dusty store but than Y was cooler because he knew what the legend ate for breakfast every wednesday morning.... and Garcia played on, unheard, unheeded.

Sigh. Groups.

Give me a joy and I'll give you a group that can destroy it.