Lost and Found
Somewhere along this road
Somewhere along these treacherous ravines
There lay scattered, all the remnants of my perfect life
This is where someday I’ll find
All the unaddressed questions of this unaddressed life
Countless are the memories of those sleepless nights
When I scalded my fingers sifting through these sands of time
And then the morning came, changing with it all the landscape
Lost in the whirlwind of time I found
Everything that I thought could never be found
I know someday these days will change
And I would move on to some other land
But now all I want is to stay
Hold on, while the world drifts away
For I know, this is where I will find
All the forsaken pieces of my forsaken life.
Cemetery of Broken Hearts
Each of these wounds tell a different story
Of long lost love and relationship
Buried somewhere along my heart’s cemetery
Someday somewhere amidst all these graves
It will find its resting place
With an epitaph carved
By the very hands which killed this heart.
Sometimes when I sit alone
Staring at all these tombstones
With thousand knives piercing my soul
This is when I look up and cry
Hoping for the tears to heal
The bruises of my battered life
With each step that I take
A part of me dies a silent death
The people whom I left behind
Like the scraps of this broken heart
Lost somewhere in the sands of time
Some pieces which I may never find.
The Games That I Played
Childhood for me has always been synonymous with bruised knees and elbows and an occasional chipped tooth and broken ankle though I was a big time couch potato, watching almost every other movie on our dear old Doordarshan while guzzling copious amount of biscuits dipped in tea but nevertheless I was a restless kid, running hither and thither, pedaling and more often than not pushing my bicycle around the serpentine streets of our locality, playing and always inventing some new and equally unplayable games like the one which I christened to be The Grass Race wherein you have to cover a distance on your bellies and that too in our park which with foliage thicker than Amazon resembled a wildlife reserve. Well, my dream of taking my little games to an Olympian height never actually took off; more so because one of my friends got bitten by a snake and another got overrun by a herd of sprinting pigtailed girls and owing to this and similar incidents the association of stay at home moms (which according to my mothers was a nexus of abeyant and fat ladies who knew nothing better than to pickle mangoes and plan for there kitty parties) banished their kids (who were, again according to my mother, butt ugly) from playing with me but then I was the kid with the Cricket Bat and a Soccer Ball, so in the end I always got to not only play but also lead my own team and I don’t remember anyone having any problems with that because it was either this or snooping around some construction site and playing hide and seek or making sandcastles for those poor kids. Come to think of it, childhood’s a bitch because the neighborhood kid with all the nice toys and a Playstation always happen to be the one you aren’t allowed to play with and luckily for me, I was that kid.
I never made many friends though more so because there weren’t that many kids around, just a bunch of us brown, freckled and scrawny kids, zooming around the sidewalks in our shorts or half-pants, playing our own version of baseball with a cricket bat and tennis ball with an utter disdain for the streetlights and neighborhood windows. The auntie whose living room windows always lay along the descending trajectory of our tennis ball was the one who always dreamt of tying us all to that eucalyptus tree and having her way. She sadly never got her heart desire because pretty soon our park which was more of an empty plot was barricaded on all sides erecting a wall between reality and a childhood dream of playing into a glorious sunset.
That was the end of my lackadaisical sports career and also the starting of a phase that was marked with a string of failures as I dabbled, trying to find a perfect sport for me. I loved cricket but only till I was the one yielding the bat, my efforts at fielding and bowling left everything to be desired more so because I never believed in stopping or catching anything if it wasn’t directly coming towards me but then there were always some desperate times which always called for desperate measures, so I not only quite often found myself in the team but got to bowl as well and just before I was given the ball my captain always whispered to the batsman to try and keep the runs under 20. I played a bit of basketball as well but as every other kid grew up, my coach who was the only one to see through my pencil legs and wrists asked me play along with the girls in the school team and since when you play with girls basket ball is the last of all bouncy thing that you want to concentrate on, I never could make my name in the basketball and the world missed its next Michael Jordan. Failures never deterred me and I just moved on from one sport to another but then everything has to come to an end and my love for Martina Hingis proved to be my nemesis for as I watched the blood oozing out from my bruised knees and my ankle as it turned a deepest shade of purple I realized that the hard cemented floor of our badminton court was meant for just one thing, morning assembly and prayer service. I finally decided to call it quit, choosing a less illustrious and an unsweaty path with nerdy guys and pigtailed fat girls standing on the sidewalk as I rode myself to an awkward and zit ridden adulthood.
Games simply stopped being fun for me since then, hard to find fun in your ineptitude I guess, and I finally settled for playing far more subtle games, the ones that you play within the realms of your mind and I bet had there been an Olympic for these, I would have sure won another Gold Medal for my beloved motherland.
Ramblings of a Sleepless Mind
Could our thoughts actually kill us, I sometimes wonder especially, on those long and sleepless nights when my mind couldn’t bring itself to rest from inexorable and inveterate spinning of yarn after yarn of these intermittent and concomitant thoughts, won’t it be great if for once we can detach this jelly inside our head and store it in a jar like our mom used to store cookies for those special occasions but if only our heads came with a hatchet and in built IPods and plasma screens built on the insides of our eyelids, life really would have been whole a lot easier. I was watching Matrix( The Movie) the other day, which part well that I don’t know because all them seemed like equally incomprehensible to me, and there in one of the scenes The Chancellor tells Neo that it’s only human to be rendered incapable of sleeping, now I am not a savior, in charge of saving human lives and nor am I six feet tall to carry off a trench coat with a flourish and nor do I have a girlfriend riding a Ducati in a stretched tight cat suit, so I guess my thought process and my insomnia has something to do with me rather than the world. We all have demons of our past hiding underneath our beds, lurking alongside lizards and spiders to grab us as soon as we step down, you can’t leave your past behind and sometimes I feel as a human we never get to live in the present, we either are worrying about our future or we just keep on crying for our past, there is nothing wrong though for it’s not easy living life on an edge and when everything fails we can always look towards the future with a gleam of hope. The problem with people like me is, we can’t stop thinking, it’s something which keeps us going though later we all succumb to our addictions but like I said thinking never killed anyone though it can drive you insane and lead you to a brink of suicide but being on the brink is different from tripping over and seriously only a non thinker could ever come up with an idea so absurd because after feeling the way the things go around in this life, I for sure wouldn’t like to pin my hopes on finding salvation in some other life and if my close friend Constantine (Neo again, reincarnated) is to be believed, hell isn’t in anyway better than our life down here on earth.
I remember sometime back one of my closet friend asked me as to what I did for fun, his perspective being since I don’t booze and sleep around with girls my life should kind of suck, but one thing which I really wanted to point it out to him was even with his womanizing ways, his life sucked whole lot more than mine because you don’t get to live twice and you can either look for answers for your life’s question or squander yourself of, running like lesser mortals behind pleasures of flesh chasing your desires. I think because this I what I am and if it’s any consolation, thinking is for more fulfilling than sex because there comes a stage when your minds devoid of any thoughts enters a new and unexplored dimension and that thoughtlessness is almost like having an orgasm albeit with all your clothes on. I sometimes wonder, if thoughtlessness is the motive behind everything then what the difference between me and a non thinker, well not much I guess because ultimately we all arrive at the same point looking for same things, only thing that matters is our paths and how much we have learned along the way.
Sometime I wonder if life is nothing more than a shitty movie, the first half, the part with all the comedy and sex gets over pretty quickly and then you are stuck with all the melodrama waiting for the end to come. Some of us though get to watch this movie sitting in our leather recliners with a bucket full of buttered popcorns but like they say at the end of the game both king and pawn have to share the same box and that doesn’t change the fact that very few of us get the chance of being on the other side of the screens and play a part in our own lives. Most of the things which I have written don’t make any sense, I know, hard to find coherence at 3.00 A.M and that to with all the shops closed and your thoughts doing an arabesque inside your head but if only coherence was that easy to find then I would be the one sitting with a fedora and sunglasses, calling the shots.
Would You Die For The One You Love???
Sometime back, though I am not exactly sure when, I heard this story, story as in an allegory, kind of a rhetoric, a glorified question mark which makes you think and more often than not leave you feeling undecided about which side should you chose though your choice do not really matter for irrespective of the choice that you make, you don’t get to get alive out of it. It was, I think one of my ex girlfriend who told me this story and I guess it was supposed to be used as a trick question with a sole intent of eliciting my level of commitment and I won’t be far off making a conjecture that my answer did had something or the other to do with fact that we eventually broke up. The story was like, there is a flower and who so ever plucks it will die, now what will you do if the one person you love the most asks you to pluck that flower, would pluck the flower and chose to die for the one you love or you would chose life albeit without love, there was as well a belligerent couple almost on a verge of divorce thrown in between but I don’t think there part was of any consequence here. My answer and broken relationship notwithstanding, I thought of the story to be completely stupid but nevertheless I was left almost perplexed, unable to comprehend as to why anyone who loves me would want me to die and that too for a stupid flower unless it was my death and not the flower which they wanted. “Would you die for the one you love” almost sounded like a tagline for some Hollywood flick or like a line from some senseless Enrique Iglesias song or any Enrique Iglesias song for that matter but given the fact that after all this years I still am confounded by the question means that the question did had an impact on me and especially when I am unable to remember the name of the girl who asked me this. Come to think of it, the question above everything else is about the choices that we make at each and every step all in the name of love, we chose the people to fall in love with, we chose to be with the people we love and it’s by choosing to be there for a person we express our love, perhaps love is all about choices, all the intermittent and concomitant choices that we make along the path of love. Will I pluck that flower if someone whom I love asked me too, perhaps not because love for me is all about being alive and given the trouble we all go through to find that perfect someone, I would spend my life being with them and taking care of them, rather than dying at the hands of a stupid flower just to satisfy the whims and fancies of someone stupidly in love.
That brings me back to the question that what if I really love a person and plucking the flower is the only way to salvage a relationship, well in that case I would chose myself over the relationship and let go though my heart would be broken and I would cry for a day or two but I would move on because eventually, we all do and perhaps it’s better for such a relationship to die rather than dying for such a relationship.
Song of Broken Dreams
Oh, Father of the fair wind
Take my soul to those distant fields
Place where the songbird sings
Songs of an unbroken dream
Walking through the rain, sometimes I cried
Tears of remorse and blatant lies
Some place where I could run and hide
Away from the piercing shards of this shattered life
Sometimes when I look up, I find
Clouds of past filling the sky
This is when I close my eyes
Hiding the tears of my broken life
Sometimes when I woke alone
Like a traveler lost in the midnight fog
Searching for my last vestige of hope
It’s then I hear the songbird sing
Songs of loneliness and broken dreams.
Traditions, Non-Confirmation and Conversations with God
Traditions can sometimes be encumbering or downrightly ridiculous, more so when you are the one supposedly entrusted with the task of forbearing or upholding them and the situation become even more interesting or rather sticky when couldn’t bring yourself to care a dime about them and as to why, perhaps because you don’t believe in the things that your forefathers handed down to you, with an exception of family gold and that big farm along the national highway or perhaps you believe in finding and making and paving your own way and you can’t do so with the ghosts of irrelevant and inconsequential past still holding on to you like you are and will be their sole chance of expiation. Traditions or rituals or ethos or ethics or whatever euphemism or sobriquet, you may give to them, aren’t all bad, stupid, ostentatious or loud maybe but not necessarily evil more so, because more often than not it’s the intent behind rather than the action itself which are evil and what could be more rarefied than using traditions as a way of barricading yourself and all your iniquity and it’s always easy to give new definitions and interpretations for long standing customs to suit your own needs. What’s difficult is standing alone as a non conformist, in a complete defiance without giving so much of a thought about the world and what they think of you, it’s not easy though and more often than not people such as these either end up dead, means and method notwithstanding, or they end up starting their own cult, deluding and forcing their philosophies down the throats of already lost and hallucinating lesser mortals but since I am still alive and kicking and I still see no lines of ochre robed devotees behind me, I think I belong to the more and obscure third category, people who would rather be their only audiences and critic because they just think of this mankind to be completely vestigial and an excrescent waste of God’s time. We are the people who think rather than believing and bending down in genuflection, because our individuality is what that sets us apart and it’s by our defiance and recalcitrance we become what we are.
Traditions are not all bad, like I said; only the ones which are not started by me are the ones which I despise. I have this ritual of going to the Temple, every Tuesdays, not that anyone instigated me to and nor I am a God Fearing type but rather I am one of those people who love god, the same way anyone would love their friends and much more than that central entity, I am in love with this whole God the Savior concept because sometimes it’s good to know that there is someone watching over you and someone whom you could look in the eye and have a little man to man talk or crib on endlessly about anything because he knows what you have been up to, someone who looks beyond your actions before passing his decree and believe me there couldn’t be a better listener than him but just for the record, I do thank god about the things that he have given me though I haven’t as yet got my Lamborghini and that’s, if voices within my head are to believed, because owing to an hike in fuel prices and all the rich men becoming politicians and going to hell and an inflated rate of inflation, heaven is rather running on a tight budget but with the latest cost cutting measures in place and a promise from our Finance Minister, seems like I would finally be getting my Diablo sometime by the turn of next God year.
Another tradition which I never break is of never taking of armor, oh come on, world is such a bad place and everyone needs a bulwark of some kind though I did kind of broke this tradition and almost held my guards down because I wanted to feel the world the way a commoner would feel but guess what, world is still a bad- bad place, with people and girls who would dip you in their morning tea and probably leave you to drown there. Anyways, finally not all traditions are bad, seriously and there is nothing wrong in following them but a little thinking on your part goes around a long way, as a golden rule, remember if the path that a tradition foretells seems like something remotely similar to rocket science, than such a tradition probably deserves to be sharing space with hogs in the dumpster because frankly speaking even our forefathers didn’t have patience or faculty to come up with anything that fancy and when it comes to traditions simplicity is the virtue that must be practiced, so in case you belong to the second category of non conformist, as a memory aid keep Maggi or any instant noodles in mind because it will take an incredibly nincompoop and a nonconformist of a dumbass category to mess up something as simple as instant noodle because it’s not something awesome but rather something unpretentious which even a five year old kid can do, though it may be tough to combine simplicity and innovation but then who said it would be easy to stand your wicket against the tide of wild wind.
