The alphabetical stir..

Y is for youth..when all insanity and craziness can be forgiven and the future still holds hope and hope still holds a future.When we still stand our ground on a chimerical existence..and live through it.

They are young again, back at that moment in life when someone else's body is a path that might be taken, with no chance of return.
-Anne Enright 'The Gathering'

P is for pain and we haven't a clue..We basically don't, and yet they are of different kinds and they can be categorized and sub categorized further and further until there is nothing left.
This is the one feel where standards of comparison don't work and even if they do they can't be trusted to be right enough,justified enough or tolerant enough.But pain does shape you.Pain is the essence of all human beauty,it is the survival kit we all carry with much elegance.It distracts quality.

And even then, it seems we always feel pain for the wrong thing
- Anne Enright 'The Gathering'

W is for waiting after having packed your bags..and the promise it brings along for a better life, an adventure, an untoward extraordinary journey mingled with the anticipation of an astounding discovery.

C is for the closet and the things that define you.
Fancy scarves,photos of your sweetheart,travelogues,an extra pair of glasses,lost keys bundled under an army of clothes,all colors- the blacks,the blues and the magnolias,passport and visas,your grandmother's bracelet that she gave you because she thought being old came minus the ornate and fanciful stuff and you wouldn't convince her otherwise,eyelash curlers and mascara's and concealers - everything that possibly made you forget that you were the same girl from school,a phonebook that contains birthdays,addresses and numbers of people you never call or talk to anymore- the ones you wish to never run into the streets anymore because then you'd get stuck talking to them..hey what's life if you get stuck up at one place? a beautiful trench coat - a Christmas present from your mom that you failed to acknowledge,wedges you wore to your first date after which you tossed them aside because things didn't work out the way you wanted them to,old marksheets that somehow highlighted your smartness but never your completeness and you wondered why you felt so empty when you sat down alone at your desk with a cup of tea....all truly yours

D is for detail..and everything you thought you'd missed.

H is for a half.Half a thought.Half a wish.

F is for fascination and at some point in our lives we always tend to overgrow it.

Q is for quality that you find easy to decipher and Q is for quantity that a few lucky ones assimilate.Its a life long battle between the two.

H is for home - a much needed fuel.

O is for an old woman and she sleeps on her back never on her sides..so close to death.

W is for the writer who is just an eccentric actually.He eats boiled eggs for dinner.He can flush his hard earned dignity down the sink with much ease.

R is for respect and respect respect respect respect what you've got.

B is for bubbles that you sometimes tend to blow in your cup of tea.

to be contd..

They don't laugh anymore when you fall..

I think in the course of our long jaded lives we hit that one particular stone..'The one' that is either kind enough to let you get away with just a fall or a few minor bruises or the one that is remorseless enough to never let you back up again..the one that buries you under forever.

The sky swelled up in an early morning despondent teal announcing the arrival of the monsoons. Savor the melancholic thought and detail.
Present day genre of deranged,maniacal bus drivers sped along the empty streets toying around with their beloved mechanical pets.Beware : the delayed brake syndrome is high and is spreading around feverishly throughout the country..it cherishes the true Indian spirit like nothing else.
Just when I thought he'd hit the pavement or run over that old woman or flipped inside out or driven right into the entrails of another of vehicle, worse masticated a few slum dwellers sleeping on the road sides outside their shacks - he stopped..just in time.Brilliant.

We are just a step away from being really bad drivers and one behind licensed streetwise daredevils.

Then it happened..in the midst of an empty street stood an array of vehicles predicting a possible traffic jam.A traffic jam at 7 in the morning..Jesus.
Damn I should have walked, I would have reached faster..you know how people always say that? I believe 80% of them think that too.
But that's not really true. If you act brave enough and really get down to doing it (ie stepping out of your respective vehicles and on to the road)..well then that's precisely the time the chaos starts clearing out and your not high flown anymore (are you?) infact you are plain stupid standing right in the middle of the street, your feet tightening underneath the classic burgundy leather, the 100 decibel plus racket trumpeting right through your sensitive ear lobe leaving you sore and ofcourse very very embarrassed.

Where was I ? Oh yes - the traffic jam.
The cause: an accident.
The cost: perhaps a life and a half.
His body lay sprawled on the streets..Da Vinci's Vitruvian man.Beside him lay his bag and the contents of it splattered all over the noticeably wet ground - a packet of milk (now diffused and half empty), bread and The Indian Express.Homespun and simple,its amazing how important a role the contents of your bag play in defining you.I might have been wrong there but then again that wasn't the point.He would be missed nonetheless and that's why the cost of an accident always comes at the cost of a life and a half.
His beige pants bore the marks of a probable truck tyre while the cuffs of his grey striped shirt stained blood red.
It was just another day afterall and he was just out to get breakfast.

There wasn't an ambulance anywhere in sight, just a few cops here and there patrolling traffic. Maybe there was one on the way.
'D' is for death and you don't have to go through it to write about it.
The alphabetical stir continues.
Maybe he didn't die..maybe they saved him in the nick of time.

Gone are the days when tripping on a banana skin was considered funny.Whoever called that humor? Fucking sadists.
The fall is for real.

It started with Slumdog..

Reprimanding Danny Boyle for showcasing Indian poverty on an international scale seems like the right thing to do .. but Mr Boyle couldn't possibly be responsible for your scarred sentiments considering the fact that you yourself can throw away 100 k for certain religious purposes and not bother spending a dime when it comes to charity.
However the movie was buried six feet under already and so was the the purpose and crux of it (the one that was supposed to pinch your soul and turn it inside out) and meanwhile you ran to your nearest music store to grab a copy of the 'shady but hyped and extensively publicized ' version of the very popular Oscar winning 'Jai Ho' by none other than the pussycat dolls.
(Wtf?)
Money in the bank for Nicole Scherzinger and her clan..bravo well done!
Zilch wisdom for the Indian audience trying to come to terms with their trendy lifestyles.

A firang,who I was friendly to, once said
Quote unquote 'It must be really hard for you guys to come to terms with what you see here on a daily basis.It has been two months since i came here and quite frankly I've been very disturbed.We should do something about it..'
I realized I hadn't even had the foggiest idea of what he'd just said.It finally struck me when he pointed out to a bunch of street urchins running helter skelter as massive drops of despair began pouring across the street.
So why does Mr white man have to bring to light our ignorance (well mine in this case) regarding a miserable affliction called poverty inhabiting this country?
Answer: We better start looking.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx

I would also like to lay bare another trend that has been pointlessly infused into our culture.
An xyz MBA training centre came up with a unique solution to cruise through an interview session and impress the interviewers."Reading" [as many books as you can] happens to be a very impressive hobby according to recent statistics.Never mind the fact that you bungee jump or surf or even cultivate mushrooms - you could mask all of this by undertaking the exhausting task of reading almost nine to ten books (fiction and non fiction included) before your CAT's and selection procedures and finally before your personal interviews.
(ps: for those of you not into reading the task may seem Herculean but hey in a land where unemployment is scanning new heights why take a chance? take note MBA training centres you might want to add this to one of your favorite tag line lists.)

Yes..and for those of you who qualify me as a hypocrite..I would like to make it very clear that I AM one.With that said you could start inspecting yourselves now.

I've been called a nerd,a boring hag,dork,dweeb,geek and everything else that could validate my congenital passion to read,my outrageous desire to become a writer or my impoverished myopic vision.
There it was-- back then, reading Atwood or writing poetry was the most melancholic and choicest form of escapism I could afford.Well if I could,I could have afforded bungee jumping or surfing -but I couldn't,meditation and yoga required more than commitment and I didn't even have the latter,wildlife wasn't really my thing..so i chose what I chose and I think I chose well.
And now a bogus trend is going to take all those years away from me?
Yes I maybe paranoid but I am my mother's daughter so you could blame the gene in my system.
So the question I am asking is- Would four to five months of reading fury truly collasce into a so called impressive passion for the same?
Lets wait and watch.

Wishlist 2009

1. A job
2. Alias Grace (Atwood)
3. Cat's eye (Atwood)
4. Oolong tea bags
5. Hope
6. Playtex tampons
7. Non myopic eyesight
8. True love
9. A pet goat
10. Hope
11. A yoga mat (fuchsia maybe)
12. A new hobby (photography maybe)
13. Bag pack adventures
14. Hope

Here's a good one..

Death is a door knob made of flesh

Death is that angelic farm girl gored by the bull
on her way home,crossing the pasture
for a shortcut
In the seventh grade she
couldn't read or write
she wasn't a virgin
she was 'simple minded' we all said
It was May - a time of lilacs and shooting stars
She's lived in my memory for sixty years

___Jim Harrison.

Crunch

# Cold cut chicken breast pieces (four or five maybe)
# one cup creamy mayonnaise or Caesar sauce splattered over its contents
# half lettuce head torn to pieces
# sliced tomatoes
# sliced red and green bell pepper
# grated Parmesan cheese
# salt,pepper and the likes.
I dug deeper into the my chicken Caesar salad. This was the first time I'd managed to get hold of a salad for lunch all by myself with my parents watching and not doubting my anorexic tendencies.'Healthy' was in. It was a substantial amount of salad anyway and as I toyed around with it I imagined the chef hurrying carelessly to gather the contents of it and then putting them together while other important dishes played at the back of his mind. My salad was not one of them, it was just another obligation that would win the restaurant another seventy odd pricey bucks.

And while our conversations didn't focus much beyond the unusual granite surface of the table, my career that was going nowhere, the elections and the unbearable heat of summer.. something that did capture my interest in the due course of time were the people sitting at the table to our left.
The table accommodated one man and seven women if I counted correctly.The slightly over dressed women with their hair oiled together and tied down by the weight of sweet smelling flowers,their bangles clattering against each other..they formed quite a chatty bunch.
(Now this aspect of being a writer I can never quite understand...ostentatiously elaborating things that don't quite get my attention or affection.)
What interested me was the diligence that the lone male entity commanded at the table.He reminded me of a king surrounded by eager wives trying their hardest to make the best impression.Ofcourse he wasn't king and obviously most of the women could have been his immediate family...but there was something so alluring about the awkward pride that he cultivated deep within himself.You had to see it to believe it.This odd mix of chivalry and gawkiness.
'These are my women...' I could almost hear him say..'They laugh when I laugh,they listen to what I have to say- it is important to them,and look how tremendously pleased they are when I address even one of them in public.'

'These are my women..' and the look on his face is even more interesting than the meek impersonation of a Giacometti painting that hung above him.
Giacometti and his remarkably twisted lonely figures.Isolated,oddly shaped,intense and anything but forgettable.
The immediate question following the work of of an artist that pops up into my brain dead head is..well..How did s/he die? I ridiculously can't stop myself from doing that or wanting to know that..I just have to know it.
Giacometti died of percarditis and chronic bronchitis. What were you expecting ?? Suicide??
Shame.That's all I can say.Shame.

'My women..' he still held his head high.
'Well..as long as you pay the bills..' I thought and continued to dig at my caesar salad for more chicken.

So I was browsing through the poetry section of the library the other day and this is what I came across..

Now it is important to know that these brilliant pieces are all by 'women.'
I suppose I have been evolving as a feminist.

Things
by Fleur Adcock

There are worse things than having
behaved foolishly in public
There are worse things than these
miniature betrayals
committed or endured or suspected
there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them
It is 5 a.m. All worse things come
stalking in and stand icily about the
bed looking worse and worse and worse.

Television - Anne Stevenson
Hug me, mother of noise
Find me a hiding place
I am afraid of my voice
I do not like my face.

Gray - by Alice Walker

I have a friend
who is turning gray
not just her hair
and I do not know
why this is so

Is it a lack of Vitamin E
pantothenic acid or B 12
or is it just from being
frantic and alone?

'How long does it take for you to love someone?'
I ask her
'A hot second,' she replies.
'And how long so you love them?'
'Oh anywhere up to several months'
'And how long does it take you to get over loving them?'
'Three weeks,' she said, 'tops.'

Did I mention I am also
turning gray
It is because I adore this woman
who thinks of love
in this way.

And this one's the best that I came across as yet.

Men, who needs them? - by Louise Hudson.

Now I go to films alone
watch a silent telephone
send myself a valentine
whisper softly 'I am mine.'