bs

I was in love once with an idea, a real idea, one in flesh and bones.

I dreamt and oh I dreamt! and then i killed it with a bunch of stones.

The flowers looked lovely once,  and so too the roads, loved the water, the air, the smell, everything i assure,

Then they grew so ugly, and wicked, and twisted – i wanted to puke -

now they are just flowers and roads and nothing more.

I had a book with me. I read it over and over. ah, the bliss, the happiness, this would last forever!

and then one day i made the mistake – i read it again. I hated throwing it away – but that’s what it was worth.

and now I long for the idea, the flowers, the book,

though I know in truth -

the  idea is dead, however long it had my imagination

the flowers are ugly, whatever their earlier deception

and the book – ah the book i loved and prized! – was just a bad book.

recommended : any of the Diamond books

Jared Diamond.

Guns, Germs and Steel was a great read, and so is Collapse that I am about to finish. Frikking sensible books. Have a read. I found both of them to be firmly in the category of  ‘world-view enhancing/changing material’. I’m a fan.

gloomy thursday.

 

gloomy thursday, why are you so?
there’s a coolness to the breeze, gentleness in the sun,
yet something inside me is sucking out the fun.

in the company of some old friends.

My eyes light up as I enter the softy lit enclosure ..

I can’t help but feel a rush of excitement as I walk in. I immediately get comfortable ..  my body seems to relax and I can no longer feel the weight of my backpack. I start walking slowly, gliding almost, as I cast my eyes around, drinking in the soothing sights and sounds of that quaint little corner of the airport.

I take a whiff of the air and that familiar heady mix overwhelms me .. I could feel myself smiling involuntarily, as if an invisible force were pulling at my cheeks.  My eyes dance around taking in as much as possible as I stand there for a moment or two .. and the world seems suddenly muted and slow.  The people become blurry shapes, outlines, and all the sounds one is accustomed to – the general chatter of people mixed with the whirring and grunting of machines – are barely audible now. blissful.

I feel invigorated. I wander around a little, feeling peaceful .. and time begins to fly.  Now I’m here, curiously flipping through the latest autobiographies and other non-fiction books .. and barely have I managed to glance at a couple of them before I give in to the irresistible lure of the Classics. Several  minutes spent  bewitched by the masters of the art is followed by surreptitiously finishing off the new Asterix in the store itself, before dearly hoping  for a yet-to-be-read Christie. Then there’s science fiction, fiction, fantasy, comics, science, romance, history ..

Every section has its own charm and familiar sights, smells and sounds.  There’s the sizeable group crowded around the Bestseller section, poring over the latest Jeffrey Archer or ‘The Secret’.  There’s the tall, adventurer-foreigner looking at the coffee-table books about India and its wildlife while flashing a smile at anyone who passes by; the regular self-help readers helping themselves at the self-help section ; the young guy looking a little awkward and self-conscious while having a look at the assorted books in ‘Business’; the group of forty-something fashionably dressed women, with gaudy make-up, discussing Arundhati Roy and the paucity of good recent Indian writing while not really trying to keep their voices down and  the young men trying to steal a read/look of the adult reading shelf – while trying their most not to appear to be doing so. There’s the chic/trendy teen crowd splashing the place with color and shrill voices, and the voracious reader in a hurry – who you see entering and leaving within no time with a whole bundle of books.

The hushed sounds coming from all the people, the gentle soft music, the low irregular whirring of the printer making receipts at the cash counter .. combine to provide a serene yet constantly-changing layer in the background as I happily flip through the innumerable books in front of me. The musty smell of paper transports me back to my childhood, reading Enid Blyton wide-eyed in the night with a flashlight under my bedsheets. Some books smell old .. their pages seem to be steeped in time and you can’t help but handle them as if their precious pages might crumble anytime. There are others that smell new and fresh and constantly snatch at your attention. There are books that smell like coffee and some smell like the beach. There are  books I haven’t heard of that are making a sudden entrance into my life .. filled with new ideas and themes. Books I’ve always wanted to read arouse my interest once again, making me resolve to soon set the situation right. Then there’s the books I’ve read and loved .. taking me back to times and places hidden away in memory, teasing me to read them again to see how I have changed.

I grimaced when I saw my watch – it was time for my flight.  After giving a few final backward glances at some sections, I smile at the assistant at the cash counter and leave. As I step out, I feel a chilly wave pass through me – and  I’m back outside to where everything looks grey and uninspiring, where the people look either dour or positively unpleasant. The blanket in my mind that had softened and tempered all the sounds around me was suddenly lifted – and a tumultuous rush of sounds and smells greeted my senses as I made my way through the people to an empty seat. My mind seems to be descending from some elevated plane of bliss to settle down in routine details and considerations of myself and the people around me. The cold-everyday world glares at me, and I stare back dispassionately.

I board the flight and take my seat by the window. I take ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ carefully out from my bag – and I feel a shiver of anticipation as I can’t wait to immerse myself in the next chapter – about the history of writing.

And everything else vanished.

Edit : not just old friends .. true friends.

One Monday morning ..

He was born.

He could have done anything, gone anywhere.. there was literally nothing beyond him. Others have gone on to lead lives of exquisite adventure, fame, success, riches … he too dreamt of doing the same.

I woke up and he died.

Did I feel bad for him? No. Why not? Well, I didn’t have the time. I had to rush to work, see, else I could have forgotten about that promotion.

And they all die in the end anyway.

What do you do in a prison?

Come up with things to do, so as to live (among other things).

And what do you tell the children you give birth to in prison?

That it’s not a prison at all.

 

‘free’-writing, whatever that means.

hot, so hot

its 4 56 in the evening. im in bed, lying down. the fan rotates ever so slowly. it’s much better than having no fan, but much worse  than it can be. just like life. so confusing, like it always has been, this life.

i breathe and think about stuff. not thinking because i want to think, but thinking because i have nothing else to do. before you tell me i can sleep, i just got up. you could take a picture of me now and call it the modern day “thinking man”. just that people wouldnt think too much of it.

all kinds of work i have to do stare at me. notes lying around to study for the test tomorrow, blah blah blah. but i lie down and procrastinate.

its apt that procrastinate is such a long word, putting off the end of the sentence, putting off the the utterance of the next word. it puts it off by too small an amount, you say? how long is it really when i procrastinate for 3 hours in my life?

i muse about something. i muse about nothing. i muse about musing. bad jokes fly in my head. a thinking dog = a-musing dog

yawn, i stretch. i just killed another 15 minutes. just like pain-killers, there should be time-killers. you know – time killers that allow you to skip time without aging. now, that would be awesome.

i can see the next block lying on my bed, through my balcony semi-french windows. it’s like a bloody prison. hall-block-wing-room number-id. fuck, they even take a mugshot of you when you get in. no, dont laugh. its not a physical jail. it’s the prison of the mind that i talk about. think about it.

anyway, through the window. the mirror crack’d from side to side. through the glass darkly. both apt for just now. and it’s a depressing sight. no life in what i see.

i look at my watch, half an hour gone. another inconsequential half an hour, spent by an inconsequential organism in a utterly absurd-fucking universe.

ok, im hungry. will go have lunch.

Cryptic Crosswords explained ..

I have started a new blog :

http://crypticxwords.wordpress.com

It explains in pretty simple language what cryptic crosswords are all about.  Check it out and leave your comments

How I almost got a brown dye, and then met a rapist Part – I

Yep, you read right.  And it’s not one those dirty tricks to catch your attention, the title is absolutely true. For example, I’m not going to say at the end that a guy “raped my mind” (that phrase is the sole preserve of a certain Mr. Abhishek Bacchan, who does exactly that whenever he comes on screen, more on that later)

I don’t know about you – but the first part of that statement is for me, as shocking as the second. Ever since I saw this guy, brown dyed  hair, has for me been the worst sin you can perpetrate on your fellow people. I swear it completely fucks me up when some stupid girl (i like to call em’ dick-chicks, cos they’re actually really dicks, and only dicks call them chicks), who, not satisfied with wearing tight clothes showing off ugly lumps of fat, has to on top, streak her black  hair a nauseating shade of bright brown and twirl it around now and then. I call them stupid because no-one with a three-digit-IQ would look into the mirror and think that is ‘hot’. And those clean-shaven guys, with brown dyed hair topped with gel, who look plain weird, but think it’s macho-cute or something. Oh  god, just imagine me with brown hair. I’m passing out at the graphic imagery.

Anyway, I went to the barber, to have him mow my head into submission, and evict the various species of organisms that have been camping in my beard for a month. What happened is pretty simple really. Guy spoke Telugu and didn’t know anything else, and my knowledge of Telugu is limited to counting up to two and knowing it’s called the Italian of the East. If I ever write a cook-book, I’d pencil this in as my recipe for disaster. I had closed my eyes, and once he was done shaving, I opened my eyes, and horror of horror of horrors, he was standing beside me with a brush recently dipped in brown muck, inches away from my hair. I let out a cry of pure unadulterated fear and quickly checked my hair to see if it had been polluted as yet. Thankfully, it was not. I gesticulated wildly that I did not want a dye. He tried convincing me, saying in very broken Hindi, that I would look real good, that all the girls will go for me, that I would look like a film star. The word film-star made me imagine Robert Pattinson and Abhishek Bacchan at the same time, and spasms of terror passed through my body, followed by waves of relief at having escaped.  I paid him and left, and my heart was still beating fast as I went out. Phew, that’s the closest shave I’ll have at any barber shop.

As an aside,don’t let anyone kid you into believing those guys whose eyes go yellow or who sprout wicked teeth are the most dangerous vampires in that stupid movie, when it’s actually that lip-biting female. ( Urban Dictionary lends us a helping hand. Vamp : short for vampire, this character is a woman who, while not necessarily attractive, has a certain allure (usually this striking, exotic, overtly sexy glamour), and is usually a heartless, man-eating seductress; a woman who uses her sexual attractiveness for the seduction and manipulation of others).

Will post the rapist story soon. Till then, beware of barbers.

Experimenting with comic strips

Stripper Aditya Navin sent me the link to this website called strip generator. The website wasn’t too great, but I tried it out. The result ? Some really #*@% comics . It was lying around on that website, thought I would post them here for the non-benefit of everyone. Click on the thumbnails for a larger view, in a new window.  If your brain does not hemorrhage by the time you finish reading this, you don’t have one.

Well?