Painted love.

When you ask a man, “How can you sleep at night?” He, in all probability does sleep at night. Nothing wakes him up – not the sound of thunder or the prick of guilt. I knew a man like that. I knew him over and over.

It’s easy, I ask you to name things that sell. You name them like children, little boys and girls waiting for the last bus home.

Sex, violins, drugs, paperback versions of the book that changed your life, corporate services, an engagement ring, dry martinis, apple cinnamon martinis, Bono, love toys, broken boys, ideas that changed the world, wigs, chemicals, facebook, crude oil, research reports, mutual funds, communism.

Paper jewellry, playstations, cardamom pie, a knife box, olive oil..

Us.

You tell yourself you would leave, when needed the most. You'd be gone on a train to nowhere at the crack of dawn before the faint patches of sunlight gather enough courage to lift up the sky.

But you're never gone really. You stand right there at the kitchen sink, looking outside a window when the faint patches of sunlight begin to show.  

21^St century romanticism –the fashion accessory we could all do without

My Shoes Don't Fit Anymore

24. That time of your life when you ask yourself : What's another bad joke? What's another lousy try? 
24. When you are much 'funner' when you are more 'drunker' 
24. When the only thing that could cheer you up in the morning is the coffee machine whining
24. A time when the best of us fell apart
24. When words like 'xenophobic' and 'questionable' and 'pussyfooted' and 'tumbleweed' and 'moral policing' start making sense
24. When ramming into a glass door would technically be the only thing that happened to you all day
24. When one of your bags is always packed. You never know
24. When you succumb to the realization that there are other ways to forget than banging your head against the wall
24. When the law of inverse goodness holds true (something is so bad that it is actually good)
24. When you have dinner with an asshole, because despite the fact that he is an asshole he has something important to say
24. Words. They don't impress you anymore
24. You now know why Alice had to keep running to stay in the same place
24. Affirm. "Just because I haven't, doesn't mean I'm not."
                 "Just because I'm not, doesn't mean I haven't."
24.The shoebox. That's where your secrets lie. Not smothered under your chest. 
24. When the smell of rain did it for you. Saved your day 
24. When you still want to grow up to be a cultural evangelist
24. When sketchy details is all you have
24. You really thought I'd come up with 24 of these? 
Boy I'm glad I grew up. 

Of crash carts and more..

2.00 pm  a hot scorching Wednesday afternoon

A visit to the Clinical Pharmacology unit: Twenty odd crash carts stacked in one corner of a spotlessly white room.

All the while I wonder, to what extent could, standing in a room where the floors, curtains, walls and sheets – all spot-fucking-less white mess around with your head.

I’ve been spending my days trying to understand and make sense. I also very sincerely try to keep myself from being appalling, vile and second rate.

And as I enter into this phase of my life where I’ve gotten around to feeling largely irresponsible for myself, I can’t help but look around for crash carts.

You have friends and lovers, but do you have crash carts? I think we’d all better start looking..

I sometimes cannot talk to a person without a voice screaming ‘Would you be my crash cart?’ in my head.

On the other hand NOW is when I am ready to say I’ve finally moved in.

With a David Foster Wallace on my bed and a Radiohead on my wall and a flurry of post its finding their way on the doors and cupboards and bathroom walls- I am finally home.

The poster on my wall says:

Fond but not in love

Still kisses with saliva.

Is it just me or are we getting louder?

I think its just me then. I haven't been particularly television friendly for over two years now. I cannot be hushed into believing everything's the same.

I couldn't sit through Rahul Kanwal interviewing Mani Shankar (With Mani Shankar throwing his Let me speak, let me finish, I am asking you Mr Rahul Kanwal on national television to LET ME SPEAK much too often, you sort of tend to loose track of the discussion)
I couldn't sit through Arnab Goswami interviewing five people at a time either. It was impossible to make sense of it, it had to be considering one of the five people being interviewed was Renuka Choudhary. 
Of all the things I can bear (many among them being bad food, humming mosquitoes, rap music, pretentious social retards and mounting societal pressure) - the one thing I can't bear is Renuka Choudhary ranting on my television screen - it is redefining 'blown out of proportion.' 
And if Renuka Choudhary proclaims herself- a feminist then I would go back to being an inconspicuous bore. I would. 

I don't blame us for getting louder though, how long are we going to be buttoned up for? We have moved from a nation of dirty politics to desperate politics and it just keeps getting worse.
Now that worries me.  


Now I know what you'd tell me..you'd tell me that I have a choice..to flip a damn channel and save you the trouble of reading this post or probably you'd be nice enough to tell me to flip the damn channel to save myself the trouble of going through that drudgery. 
But somehow reading Kafka on days when you have nothing to do oddly dilutes your entire perspective on things. 


But 20 minutes of yelling and bawling was all it took for me to give up on my Kafkaesque approach towards life. 
So I just switched over to Bree (from desperate housewives) making the perfect watercress sandwiches, pushing aside a strand of lovely red hair from her botoxed forehead (I love you Bree, you know that) keeping up with her dangerously yet unfailingly perfect demeanor. 


I also think we should have more of Karan Thapar and his deadpan wit, gagging his guests to speechlessness. 

Crumbling Social Fabric

The unbecoming of a Hero

I’ll miss these dog day afternoons. If you walked into my room you wouldn’t call the bed a bed, the chair a chair, the table a table and the room a room. And while you stood in the centre of this mess wondering how wrong it could all get, I ‘d sneak out the door into the blazing heat.

This is as good as it gets. This post like every other dog day afternoon is pretty pointless.

It started with greatness, however it didn’t really end that way.

Greatness is outdated for now and so is righteousness. If you were to look around you the bigwigs, the heroes, the somebody's are all falling out of place. Greatness is- sprawled under a microscope, being dissected until disintegrated into utter meaninglessness not to mention stifled, having cracked under pressure. 

That is greatness for you, barely any takers.

And Righteousness? Antique literature we pride ourselves with. If you are looking for antique, you’d rather a bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc.

We are the wicked era of the underdogs, the nobody's, the dark horses, the down and under's..

Being famous, meanwhile is like being intoxicated. You are doomed to think that the guy who has it all has a dozen women up his sleeve while he sips on some dry martini. The guy who has it all was in his dorm room honey, while you were thinking otherwise building to break what there was and what just wasn’t enough..

I don’t think stilettos and pouty plum lips are answers to infamy.. I doubt politics in all its essentiality, is just another dirty word.

After all, I think there is a limited amount of damage we’ve been allowed to cause as citizens of this planet. It is our choosing and I only wish you the best by hoping that you wouldn’t wish someday that you should have chosen differently.

So there, politics is as much as a pre requisite to stay out of trouble as it is for getting into it. So if you have to get down and dirty you might as well like the whole getting down and dirty.

The other day I read an article in the Harvard Business Review that says ‘How not being nice is turning out to be more important that we thought’

It’s not the whole slipping away into augmented reality that bothers me, it’s the fancy imagination that comes with it.

Just like in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘What the Dog saw’ it’s not what the dog thought he saw, but what the dog saw. 

Are we leapfrogging from being ‘Homo hatists’ to ‘Homo Phobists’ to finally having settled for ‘Homo sadists’?

So yes, I might have to stay back to watch the weather grow from awful to wretched

And just as I was contemplating whether the consequences of not giving up were worse than the consequences of laughing it all off in my face, I decided nevertheless that all this angst could be organized counter productively.

Hence the writing spree, hence Will Self, hence the vitamin pills, hence insomnia, hence cough syrup, hence the cleaning spree, hence George fucking Orwell.

To start off, all this talk about sexual liberation gets me barking mad. Were we ever sexually liberated? And if we ever did manage to bring sex out of the bedroom why couldn’t we get around to bringing ‘being gay’ out of the closet.?

I’ve wanted to write about this, ever since I got back from a friend’s place about a month ago, when having woken up hung over (amidst people I don’t remember talking to the day before) I found myself in the middle of the most ridiculous conversation ever. Here are smart, well to do youngsters, armed with a rare ingenuity up their sleeve (IIM certified if I must add) who could not and would not respect the fact that they should just let people be sometimes.

 I’ve wanted to write about this post every awkward moment that left me scrambling for words. I’ve wanted to write about this every time I’ve blasted myself for being buttoned up about it. Trust me I did.

Mischaracterized and misunderstood, the third gender, the sexual minority (to sound more politically correct if I may)

Slapped left, right and centre with miscellaneous biological and behavioral perspectives.

Why couldn’t we, for the love of God, just let them be?

For those of you who don’t know (I discovered a few who didn’t today)

Balbir Krishan, a gay artist was brutally assaulted at his own exhibition somewhere around in January. The theme of the exhibition was centered on homosexuality (no surprises there)

There are however three things that leave me ‘ogling’ with fury.

1.   The attack was directed at him because he was gay (I mean come on, haven’t we blown this issue out of proportion already? Haven’t we made them suffer enough by abnormalizing them?)

2. The attack was directed at his art, a form of expression. and Art is really not answerable to anybody (underline)

3. The attack was directed at an amputee, who had lost both his legs in an accident in 1996 (even a low lying lunatic wouldn’t justify something like that)

Enough said.

 I love my friends.. Trust me at times I wish I could do more than tell my friends how much I love them and how proud I am of them for being who they are and not what others want them to be.