2011, something you should know.

The secret is : there is no secret. There is no method to madness. Those lists won’t help. The post its on my wall have fallen away. 

What makes you write anyway?

What makes you write anyway? Is it a mouthful of distress that you just couldn’t swallow on your own? Is it sheer boredom that has you looking at a ticking clock like you’ve never seen one before, in your entire life? The fact that I couldn’t tsunami through a massive crowd drunk on ambition and religiously devoted to cut throat competition? Is it those unforgivably white, crisp sheets? Umm...  maybe not. It could be a book about an inconsolably cynical mother questioning the basis of parenthood and happiness that her son, now convicted of mass murder in his very own school, couldn’t justify.

If pretty was a face, I'd smack it. If pretty were thoughts, I'd probably drink them down.

Like anyone else now, I look for a job. Pragmatism and rationality all of a sudden surge through the particulars of an already misconstrued life.

Amen. 

Fragments of fiction

The room is all right, the laundry doesn’t sit at the side of the bed anymore. The walls are a pretty plum and you wouldn’t find much on them apart from the occasional post-it.

There is something about the windows that makes me uneasy though. They look empty, lacking a certain window like quality. They make you want to jump out of them.

She left a note before disappearing just like that. I try not to sound too dramatic about it, it takes a lot of effort and to make things even less dramatic is the fact that I had been expecting it for sometime now, quite sometime now.

I also knew where I could go looking for evidence, traces that lead me to her. Her journal underneath her pillow, it had been underneath her pillow all her life ever since I gifted it to her on her 12^th birthday.

She never was fussy about her journal. The room keys on the other hand were quite a big deal. They went into her jewelry box that sat at the bottom of the vase swamped by some moss and then the flowers. The dying flowers.

Did I tell you about the note? It said:

ZadieSmith. That’s my password. Just in case….

Just make sure you check my mailbox at least once every week.

Xoxoxo

I’ll try to be back.

What could I say? I just walked back to the kitchen with a heavy heart. I poured myself a cup of coffee. I glanced at the newspaper. I buttered my toast. I boiled eggs. I did everything and anything to keep myself from being a pretentious bore. But everything was like decafe, what’s the point? 

I wasn't sad anymore. I was actually taken in by envy. I envied her walking out of that door without ever knowing when she’d be back.

I dug dirt. She sank her feet in dirt.

I didn’t go to work the day she left, or the day after or the day after the day after. All of a sudden I wanted to go back, back to the good old days, back when we were young and drunk on everything beautiful.

I pour myself a drink and then two.

Its 2 am. I left the door open; she might just walk in anytime now and pretend nothing ever happened. Like it was all a big joke, or like it was all my fault. She always did that didn’t she?

I think I’ve had enough of drinks. I think I am done for the day, but the truth is you are never really done for the day.

To be contd.

The self immolation bid

For the love of all things strange and beautiful

It took one lousy question for me to reconsider my life. Once I was out late, drinking and this friend of mine who I’d known only for a couple of days spat out an absurd question: Do you believe in humanity?

The drink went up my nose and I snorted before laughing so hard that I fell off the chair.

Weird pieces of conversation fell here and there and after a few minutes I found myself staring at the mirror in the bathroom, tears spilling out.

I drove back home at two in the morning and the sky was flaming crimson.

Well it is how it looks. We haven’t met before, not even by chance. None of us were freaks or weirdos or nineteen year olds raging on hormones and the excitement of adventure in a very non physical sense of it. We were normal people, bored to death by our routine lives and looking to escape the misery of it all for just one night.

So there wasn’t a fuss. There were no roses or surprises or any other such menial formalities. There was cheap wine and an inviting jazzy tune that helped us settle to our chairs and conversation too, much sooner than we had expected to. 

None of this was going anywhere. I think we were both blessed by an ability to share lives over a couple of drinks and that was all there was to it. In a few hours we would get up from our chairs and leave our glasses and our lives on that table and drive home. No sex. No one night stands. No waiting for phone calls. No fights. No promises. No broken plates. Relief

.

I think he walked in straight from work. He must have done his hair up in the washroom, slipped them in place nicely with a few drops of tap water. He didn’t look the sorts to carry around hair gel or even if he did it probably got lost somewhere in the back of that buff colored briefcase he held onto. A copy of Financial Times peek a booed out of one corner of his briefcase, the one he told me he couldn’t possibly do without not even if he ended up landing on the Maldives, surrounded by breathtaking beauty.

I myself went to the bookstore before coming here.

Picked up a copy of The Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs, because I felt terrible about the fact that I had never been able to cross it off my to-read list. And as I was browsing through their lousy collection, I was incredibly envious and surprised at the number and volume of books writers these days were able to churn up in barely a month.

Look at Jackie Collins for example, I mean she has an entire fucking shelf of books. No I don’t care how old she is and I don’t care that she doesn’t have to churn out research papers every week. It just made me feel terrible. I paid for my book with a heavy heart and while I left the store there was some ray of hope that incase I got stood up that night I could have a glass of wine and some Ravioli while the book kept me company. Then I would go home and watch TV, make myself some popcorn, curl up under my quilt and act like nothing happened, because nothing really did happen.

There was absolutely no point in wondering whether he met with an accident or whether he tumbled down the stairs or whether his dog got struck by lightning. He didn’t show up because he didn’t show up and there was nothing more to it. How easy it is to come to terms with things once you grow older. To call a spade a spade and not think beyond a point that defines necessity. 

On the way I also stopped for cigarettes because I never really quit and bought some cheap candy. I am hopelessly addicted to cheap candy. When I buy them, I buy them alone, even double check to see if anybody is looking my way and when I eat them I eat them alone. I hide them from the world and relish them all by myself – they are my whores. Cheap does not necessarily equate to being awful.

Mannequins? I echoed.

Yes, he said very matter-of-factly.

Really?

Lying is exhausting these days. It tells me how much I’ve aged. I am still looking forward to setting up a new venture. I want to take the world by surprise and manufacture exotic mannequins; they wouldn’t need to dress to be complete. They could be anywhere – in a park, a mall, a bathroom. It’s frustrating to put out an idea when nobody is buying it. They all want the same god damn bloody things. I stopped supplying to medical institutes a year ago when I started developing a sense of pediophobia, we only do fashion retail and garment outlets now. You must understand it is anything but easy for a man to watch fiberglass being converted to a naked human form day in and day out.

Fiberglass? Is that what they are made of?

Yes. Now a days we do the fiberglass ones. These days we’ve started coating them with a granite spray called Zolatone.

Nice.

Well.

I dig into my Ravioli, for some reason it tastes divine, it has been seasoned to perfection. For a brief moment I wish to be reincarnated into a microscopic form so that I crawl into one of those mouth watering shell shaped raviolis and savor the rest of my life.

How’s the job hunt going? He drags me into his reality.

Going on. Positively, I could land one up with one in a week or so. A decent one, not a lousy one. The era of conventionality is fast declining. People do not want to know about boring beauty tips anymore; they want to know about vampire facelifts. That’s where I come in. In the meanwhile I am still working on my PhD.

Advanced topics in Sexual Issues is it?

Yes. Not as loose as you put it though. Culturally, biologically and psychologically very diverse, very relatable in fact.

And then there it was – We both grinned precisely at the same moment.

Two hours later I knew he never wore shoes without socks and once he swallowed his keys and got operated. The surgery went on for seven hours. His mom was bipolar and he saw his dad once a year. He had an African pen pal he grew in love with and she stopped writing and that was the first time a girl broke his heart and from then on it was quite a rage.

The time had come for us to depart. Going by the rule book for socially strange people, we did not exchange numbers or addresses. Instead as he grabbed his coat, I grabbed him by the hand which turned out to be surprisingly soft for a 32 year old man. I looked deep into his cloudy eyes and asked him the one thing I’d been dying to ask him ever since I first spoke to him.

Do you believe in humanity?

His eyes seemed to widen, a sense of conviction dissolving the cloudiness that haunted them before and now I could see they were green like my cat, only rounder.

Yes. 

Fragments of fiction

‘It was my madness that you took with you wherever you went. My madness left at your feet for mercy.’

All she left was memory. Hauntingly discontent memory. Six years is a long time to move on, not only from love but from the very evidence that you once loved and were loved briefly.

It felt like she shrunk with every passing day and then finally disappeared into nothingness. There was nothing I could do to stop the whole process.

I remember our last few days together, actually not very much together. We lived in the same house and yet two distinctly different worlds. I remember waking up one morning to find her in the kitchen furiously trying to bake a cake, only she couldn’t, not even close. All that showed in the end was a mess of flour, sugar, egg shells and Hershey’s cocoa and her own insecurities and shortcomings, her own frail tiny being working as hard as she could to justify her existence and herself.

Six years down the line she looked far from the girl who once vowed to love me unconditionally.

She looked smaller and smaller at times firmly rooted on her writing desk wanting to disappear.

‘I think I don’t have it in me to make any money,’ she once said chewing on an apple slice dipped in caramel sauce. I thought it was cute.

Nonetheless I took on two jobs. PR advertising was a drug. I got a kick out of convincing people to believe in something or someone that I thought was, quite frankly, a joke. A nobody. An absolute waste of time. It wasn’t a moral dilemma nor would I like to call it unethical. It was just a five year old gazing at the sky and saying ‘Look!’ and everybody saw. Only I realized you didn’t have to be five to do that, you could be thirty three and they would still look. Sometimes I find it incredibly appetizing to do things I hate. It just makes my hatred more authentic. It was how I fell in love.

Meanwhile at the house, she built time around her. She devoured books by the hour. She stopped biting her nails and chewing the skin around them.

She was the kind of girl who drank water not because she was thirsty but out of the fear of developing a kidney stone.

I kept her with me nonetheless. I know now what might be wrong with me, what has been wrong with me for all these years. I probably breed off the wrong kind of things.

Three weeks after she left her memory turned from being a haunting affair to being just a tiny prick. An irritable itchy prick.

Out of compassion I pour myself another drink. I can’t swallow much. Eagles eye me with disgust. My hands start to shiver.

Six years later the winds changed.

No she wasn’t very beautiful or intelligent or smart. She however gave me something to remember on a cold winter night, when I looked outside the window at a city swamped by the night lights and the icy breeze pricked at my skin. That was how random she was. She had bouts of nauseatingly crisp behavior and bouts of madness during which she expected me to keep her company.

She expected me to lock her doors at night because she had nightmares of the house falling down on her sending her into frenzy and out on the cold wet streets.

She’d create quite a noise when she’d walk in somewhere. Never to draw attention to herself though, she never really wanted that. It just came naturally to her like breathing and just about everything else that made her so stunning and crisp.

One Christmas, she chopped off her hair, igniting an aura of rebellion.

Sometimes in the afternoons when I’d boil water for my tea she’d walk in like the wind, grab a knife, chop off a few fruits, stack them up in a brightly colored bowl and leave like she wasn’t even there. Wild like wind and disturbingly precise, there is this gumption of how carelessly certain and adamant she is about everything.

Her absence drove me towards working harder. Hard work is hard work and surprisingly all this starry eyed success took a lot out of me. In the end I was a man, a tired man, too tired to smile or acknowledge his moment of glory.

The day I got promoted, friends and family celebrated at a fancy lounge down the street. As the party got louder and louder I found myself walking away, out of the room, onto the lonely street, turning eastward about a mile away from where I lived venturing out to witness the sunrise in the wee hours of the morning.

Whoever thought of this and I laughed out loud as I saw a tiny speck of orange grow brighter and brighter as it started to embrace the sky.

Here I was, a man too tired to acknowledge his success while on the other side of town people celebrated his success.

I thought of her. There was so much dealing to do. I couldn’t deal with all the dealing.

Flashes of darkness and color blinding me, I fancied not wanting and wanting. I glanced at a page I tore from one of her journals.

‘While you waited upstairs in your pretty dress, life was all that was happening downstairs in that dusty old basement covered with cobwebs. And all this while, if only, if only you’d gotten over your fear of darkness and only if you weren’t disgusted enough to take a crap on yourself, if only you had been brave enough to run downstairs…..it would have been entirely worth it.’

Love in the time of oblivion

I know that it is rather late in the day to be reading Gabriel Garcia's masterpiece 'Love in the time of Cholera' but I just couldn't get around to wrapping it up the first time I read it.


What he glorified as love seems to me as nothing more than an obsession, a perverted kind of obsession that lasts all life. So Florentino Ariza has to endure the curse of love and all its flu like symptoms for about fifty three years when finally a widowed and lonely Fermina Daza gives in to what she never thought possible. 


Our mainstay, Florentino would, after his first agonizing heartbreak, for the next fifty years use sex as a coping mechanism and fuck every department of womankind including the widows and the sweet sixteen year old's. He would however prefer the skinny inconspicuous lot of them who turn out to be most of the times as per his calculations astonishingly exceptional in bed.  


My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse, says a dejected Florentino Ariza. 
And if I could, I would ask Florentino Ariza only this... How many?


'Book Devourer' says D. Lets see what I was able to tick off my list this summer.

• White Teeth - Zadie Smith
• The Autograph Man - Zadie Smith
• Flesh and Blood - Michael Cunningham
• The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
• Still here - Linda Grant
• McSweeney's Collection Volume 1
• Who's Afraid of Virignia Woolf
• Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler
• Granta 96 The best of young British Novelists
• Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Well books are books nonetheless. They go with coffee, rainy days, hot summer days, likewise solitude. 

So I wasn't exactly as woebegone as I might have appeared to be while trying to sell insurance and working under someone who uses words like 'hardworkingly' and 'rememberable'. 

And Bangalore is quite a sanctuary for book lovers.

Oh yes, Bangalore..the new city, shining in all its eccentric splendor. All those assorted experiences that I would tuck safely in my memory box for now. 

Behind Closed doors

The doors are shut
They shut long ago
when you weren't looking.
The knocking ceased, when
somebody hung a DO NOT DISTURB
on the once shiny door knob
There is silence and sometimes
a creaking when you climb the stairs.
The stairs overlook a forgotten corridor
where you'd once count your stash of juicy fruit
or study
or kiss your lover
or sometimes a stranger
and once your own best friend.
or yell 'I'll be back in a while..'
Only, it was quite a while
In the meantime your mother prepared dinner
roast chicken and salad sprinkled with a bit of parmesan
the way you liked it
after which she waited
on that very corridor
Until the winds changed
and you came upon that shut door
Only this time you knocked
instead of barging in (and throwing your bags and keys)
or sneaking in (a shoe in each hand)
You knocked
and waited...

Words for sale

The Nuclear Aftermath

I try to sound poetic today

as I go about my routine chores

Right from the time I wake up

From that moment thereafter

A few split seconds I spend

Just lying in bed

Figuring out my life

Clouds falling from the sky

My memory failing me

These corners have gone blind

I lie in my bed and count polonium orbs

Twenty three and then I stop

My wife is fast asleep

Dreaming of the perfect breakfast

Breathing gently, her fingers outstretched

Like she was just matter-of-factly denied

The one thing she had yearned for all her enitre life

It stopped snowing awhile ago

This is no ordinary snow

Faint patches of sunlight

Uncover the earth

I picture my son in his uniform

And oxygen mask

Then glance at the newspaper

And read words that rhyme.

Culturally Defunct.

So its seven and I curl up with Granta on my bed. I've been meaning to write for quite sometime now and I have trails of thoughts on post its, behind magazines, in journals, on random pages, on my phone.. in short - everywhere. 


So here I am trying to accumulate details of this city when I hear a weepy voice. At first I presume it to be boy trouble, so I don't pay much attention and then ultimately I am forced into eavesdropping on my next door neighbor's conversation because My God her voice is beyond screechy,squeaky and loud. Really loud, and I wipe my hands off all the guilt because I am pretty sure the entire floor heard the conversation with amazing clarity as well.


Miss cranky doodle doo apparently had a tiff with her parents because her 'Chachi' or 'Booa' or somebody like that found a picture of her holding hands with some random guy on facebook who she claims to be her friend.


Boyfriend? A friend? But why would he hold her hand? And why would they go public? 
And why would they take a picture? And why would they go out together like that? So without a rhyme or reason I'm guessing this Chachi or Booa or whoever picks up the phone does what she saw her favorite vamp do in a serial day before and the drama painfully unfolds. 
So its been an hour now and my next door neighbor is still trying to convince her parents otherwise. 
Yes. Generation Y is going to hell. You heard me. Generation Y-1 certainly thinks so. Culture and tradition have literally evaporated out of our lives. We now shamelessly hold hands on facebook. God save us.


Now with all due respect,I do appreciate and respect culture and to an extent even tradition and religion. What I do not however accept is blatant notions and opinions we all know we are better off without. Perhaps Chachi or Booa would do good to society it they watched more of the cooking shows than those retarded soaps.


We wear masks and gather the dirty laundry in a basket that sits right at the end of the closet. We wear make up. We hide scars. 


What is the need for perfection when there isn't going to be any?


Something similar happened on my facebook page as well and I guess facebook is the source of all scandal, taking the social media by storm. It wasn't anybody's business but then through an unlikely source it just happened to be everybody's business.However I just wasn't into squealing and screeching and didn't have much of explaining to do because my parents knew that I was who I was and nothing I did and nobody I went out with was ever going to change that. So I am going out with a wonderful person for 10 months now and that hasn't made me any less of a feminist or who I used to be. Any less ambitious than what I used to be. Love isn't a temporary setback that happened to me. Love isn't something I would give up my whole life for. 


Culture is what you make of it. Tradition is how you define it. All of us have inherited the basic ability to know and draw the line between right or wrong, to call a spade a spade. Its a line you have to draw and not a mask you have to wear. 


Fall in love. Its hormonal. Its beautiful. 

The charming !990's revisited

I feel so 1990's today. It always starts like that : with D and me reminiscing about the good old days when dysfunction was just a figure of speech ,when life unfolded bit by bit and so did the journal entires.
With its feet held firmly on the ground, nothing about the 1990's was too fast or too complicated or too confounding.
Since I grew up in the 1990's, the nostalgia is bound to creep in. I mean the social scene might have been broken and scarred but TV was such a delight and PC's were coming to light. And yes I was a fan of rhyming poetry back then, now it just seems to much work. So I just took the time and patience to note down the things about the 1990's that I really miss.
Note that this list is not even close to being exhaustive due me staying way past up my bed time, and the fact that I would be ridiculous enough to declare it on my widely unread blog just goes out to prove it.

Nothing on TV right now matches up to what we had in the 1990's Not even the humour, not even close. So Stephanie Meyer decides to write a cheap ass version of Buffy, but really cute vampires were in vogue even back then (James Marsters aka Spike and Juliet Landou aka Drusilla) And before Bridget Jones was even conceptualised or was any such messed up woman who couldn't keep track of her life, who could turn the tables around or upside down..or simply throw them out of the window..there was ofcourse Ally. Ally Mcbeal. I also loved loved loved Caroline in the city. Ever since then I've known what I'd turn out to be, I knew I'd keep a cat and scoff at her whenever my life was a mess..and she'd look at me with those olive eyes that said : Get a life.

 

Britney Spears : when she was sane. Whoever thought she would turn out to be such a wreck.

Backstreet Boys back then when they were too cute to be so freaking gay

Picnic : What ass decided to stop manufacturing these? They were brilliant. I could have these for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then again for a mid night snack. I think they were taken off the shelves to save me from boredom and them from being sidelined.

Chic chich chich chich Chiclets : Everything about the way they sounded and the way they clicked was so fantabulous. It was like a must have at some point of time for no lame rhyme or reason

Doom : IDDQD, IDKFA. Yes I still remember those cheat codes, the former being the one for GOD MODE and the latter for unlimited ammunition. Those huge wobbly pink monsters shaped into a somewhat magnified version of the human brain, arms and feet sticking out and the bloodied teeth ready to tear you apart. Yes games were easy back then and there was absolutely no shame in using them cheats.

WWF : There was adrenaline in the air. Dreams are seriously made of some spunky stuff when you are just about 5'2 and ever ready to kick some good ass. The WWF as the old name went was at its meanest best ever, when brains were as good as brawns drunk on beer and steroids and skimpy clad crazy women rocked the rings as well. Present day WWE is quite a drag. Or perhaps I just grew up.

Baywatch : For once it was boobs with a purpose. I mean before this life guards didn't even matter. Imagine picking up something as insignificant as that and turning it around into a sensationally sexy experience...CPR was redefined, so were the beaches and so was the colour red and the very noble profession of saving lives. Hats off to the makers of Baywatch.

So with this so this quirky post (minus my melancholic self) I'd want to wrap up my thoughts by saying  that I terribly miss the 1990's and you would always always miss what isn't here than what is here even though what is here might or might not be better than what isn't here and what was here a while ago.

The trouble with thoughts

That's me. I step under the shower after a hectic day letting the droplets of water dissolve onto my skin while I trace out my life on those sepia tiles. Back. Forth. Right. Left. Turnaround. Never stop going left. Until you smash into a tragic dead end.


The trouble with thoughts. They keep coming back.

A moment

There is this moment, after I wake up and before I am fully awake.. this fuzzy little moment, dazed by the mere possibility of reality. That moment when I can't figure it out. Who? How? Why? Where? When?
Those breathing possibilities of me being anywhere and everywhere.
It is this fleeting moment that I wake up to everyday.

A random day in 1934

Words flow easy when you are angry, done with doing over and over, the same thing I would eventually forget.
Wake up on better days, not hiss at cats, not spill coffee or feelings because it turns out to be a mess anyway.
I scan the traces of my clumsiness - a bruise here, a bruise there. Tripped. Brushed off the broken frame of a door. Hit the the edge of a table. Drunk, yet so sober. So bloody sober.


I lie awake on a badly made bed that wouldn't and couldn't accommodate anything other than myself. Abominable thoughts scarring the entire process of imagination. What should I be thinking about right now? Possibly?
Human race? Dammed Human Race? Art? Cats? Work (that hardly seems like work)? What?


I forgot all that I read, all of a sudden it evaporated through my skin and bones into the mist that surrounded me. Left me pale on a hot sunny day, and I realized it wasn't sunny anymore. I was under a cloud. The cloud let me bask in a gloom of obscurity.


Breathe. I said to myself over and over and over. Until the words walked with me and became a part of me.


These 'maybe's' and 'if only's' that you carry with you around your waist, they clamber on your back, sticking to you like a leech, squeezing the life out of you. The life that told you to go watch a movie and take your girlfriend to dinner.


I would at this juncture want to be reincarnated into the Persian cat I found sprawled outside a magazine store, coming out of which I regretted not having picked up Tate? Why? Why? It was a good price. These were weird people who did weird things without ever having to feel sorry for themselves.


The cat, sprawled on the floor. How adorable are eyes that say to you - Nothing. I feel nothing!


Art scene : A splash of colors, form, shape, dimension, structure, a chromatic excess of bleh, worst of all .. price tags. Like inheriting some vague form of judgement that you were better off without knowing.
The more I found myself looking, the more I realized it wasn't art. Nothing was art and art was nothing. It was just meaning that wasn't undone.Couldn't be undone.

Am I the product of tragedy?

Note : This wasn't written to sound uncanny. This was written with a purpose to shrug off my MBAness for awhile.

One of the foremost things that MBA has taught me was to not care when nobody else cares. A very straightforward and material fact, but skim the surface to dig out the underlying emotion and write them off like underlying assets or worse hedge them.

Yes Miss Austen, as if literature wasn't polluted enough.

The second being the law of ten and the theory of never doing enough ie if you think you've slogged your arse off for five fucking hours straight I bet you I can find you over thirty people who've worked ten times harder than you, in short what you'd do would never be enough. So even 'trying' is a breakneck decision.

And pardon me for sounding very un MBA like but I just can't stop giggling when I hear the words 'cash cow'

In short if it hadn't been for the money, we wouldn't even have been doing it. Except for those bloodsuckers, ego ruminants, bland jays and crap a doodle doo's.

But beat this. I've met plastic faced 23 year olds who tell me that its just something they have to do before getting married. A degree equals bride evaluation criteria and not job evaluation criteria, I am surprised you didn't know.Its like they decided to mortgage their ambitions to nothingness. Well quite frankly my dear, they and not I qualify to be products of tragedy.

The last of my learning's (and I'd try not to be bitter about this one) was to never ever ever ever underestimate bad luck and never ever ever underestimate a terrible opportunity.

With that said and done, its time for me to sing a different tune. She is called the Crack fiction whore. Art whore. Period.

And I need an idea to start flirting with.

I'm off to Kala Ghoda on the 5th.

 And if you wanted to, you could check out this fabulous site.

http://www.anishkapoor.com/index.htm