The Five Loves of My Life
First of all, this blog isn’t a list of things which I like because for one lists are girly and second of all (irrespective of the trouble that I have gone through writing about the stuff which I actually like when it would have been remarkably easy for me to write about stuff which I hate) these five things or six maybe for I am still thinking just happen to be striking at all doors in my mind and there maybe probably another five or six more of them lurking just around some uncharted corners and I will get to them when I am ready to face them but as for now these whatever number of things represent perhaps everything that I love now in my life though I have kept my family and friends out of it more so because my friends are nothing but an absolute bunch of jerks and having not seen my parents for about six months and sitting at least two thousand miles away I do not want to talk about. Secondly and more importantly this isn’t a disclaimer and even if it feels like one it isn’t and lastly and more importantly this isn’t a bunch of advice that I am dispensing because I don’t give advices at least for free and that too on the internet where almost every blogger thinks of himself as the next Deepak Chopra in the making.
Well let me begin with the first love of my life, the trains not the those teeny weenie train set ones but the big real one with huge blue carriages and blue upholstery, red engines and oily black fans which seldom work. My love for trains has nothing to do with the pseudo psychotic serial killer on lose decapitating innocent passenger in their sleep kind of stuff which our Hindi movies so willfully portray though I can’t completely deny the romantic undertone and I do believe that trains can play an important role in your love story, particularly if you have a knack for conversation and making friends with the strangers but much more than that it is the prospect of journey that I l love the most, sitting by the window and staring outside at the fast fading world and wilderness just make me lose myself in this alternating landscape. It’s in a train you realize how ephemeral this life is, an instant the tree you are staring at dissolves into a cow and the another instant that cow becomes a lady with a bundle of firewood balancing on her head, if life’s a journey I would want nothing better than a train to traverse it with some book full of heavy and literary stuff lying on my lap. That brings me to my another love of life, books and when it comes to books my taste has more of a opportunist flavor for I could read anything and everything and though I have strong liking for Indian literature for I think Indian writers are in a dire need of bibliophiles like me and the way they go about Indianizing everything it’s not a wonder why though I prefer sleaziness that Sidney Sheldon so seems to be full off or the satirical rendition which seems to ooze out of everything with Salman Rushdie written on it and also if you might have guessed I like the simplicity with which Chetan Bhagat writes though I am still confused trying to decide between lack of plot or repetitiveness for his novels always have the same undertone about an underachiever sleeping with a girl a tad too beautiful for him and in the end achieving something which would seem like a rung higher than mediocrity.
My third love has to be the girls or the better and more beautiful half to our mankind, I love them irrespective of their shape and size though shorter the better and I like the ones with really, really long hairs though I have a predilection towards the ones with brutal short cut hairs and androgynous looks, perhaps it’s because of the suppressed homosexuality that we all seemed to carrying inside of us and living in a country where almost every contact whether platonic or otherwise with the opposite sex without a stamp of matrimony is frowned upon it would be no wonder if we all turned out to be people with a closet full of suppressed cravings and delinquencies.
I forgot what the fourth one was supposed to be so I will just skip on the fifth one and that is my iPod that has off late become my life all compressed in the 80 or so gigs, if I was to be asked by the committee dispensing Nobel Prize than for sure I would for sure nominate Steve Jobs because an iPod isn’t just a music player, it’s a phenomenon which allows you to stand away from the crowd, the prospect which allows you to carry your entire life in a something which is no bigger than your palm and given the number of people walking around with a pair of white earplugs and their thumbs circling the click wheel , I for sure want to request mother nature to fit us with inbuilt iPods and a plasma screen on the insides of our eyelids.
That was all about the loves of my life, though I want to add blogging to it but blogging is more of a stress release nozzle though I love writing and blogging isn’t writing and I seriously think we all are like Hank Moody says with our LOLs and FYIs and blogging instead of writing are contributing to a slow but imminent death of English as a language. Like I said before this blog isn’t a disclaimer, if it felt like one then deal with it and also never buy an iPod if you really love your friends and better believe me on that because that’s perhaps the only piece of advice you are ever getting from me.
A Cinderella’s Story
Fairy tales seldom come true and only a few of us get to live happily ever after surrounded by the sweet and secure warmth of love but nevertheless we all go about chasing a distant and forlorn dream, dream that someday someone nail bitingly beautiful would come in a carriage carved out of a pumpkin and that one person would give us all that we have ever desired. The reality if seen from those high and mighty fairy wings is bleaker than the promise of an happy ending, more so because we all at some point of time or other find the perfect person and just like a fairy tale, that person simply vanishes right at the stroke of midnight, leaving behind nothing but fleeting promises and we are left waiting with not a shoe but only our remembrances to hold onto. We move on albeit with a heavy heart deluded by the promises or hopes of an everlasting love, love which despite of existing in every nook and corner of this universe is still one of the hardest things to find more so because we don’t ourselves know what we are looking for when we speak of love, love which is nothing more of a glorified notion which we all invariably believe in without actually trying to live up to it. I sometimes feel people who stop searching for love are the ones who truly find it because when you look for a thing you actually are looking for an image, a replica of what is there in your mind and the only place where perfection actually exists is our head because it’s the only place where these fairy tales actually come true. What we look for is we seldom find, if only they have a lost and found store for love then perhaps we all would have found something or the other to fit our criterion but does that mean we should all stop in our quests and make peace with the lovelessness that exists? Perhaps, letting go of our inhibitions is the only way of letting love inside our life because sometimes much more than anything, it’s us and our ego that comes in our way of finding love, we never give love a chance to walk into our lives because we are afraid or rather debilitated by the notion of a happily ever after, we are so concerned with what lies beyond that we end up losing what that lies in front of us right now.
Love isn’t all about happiness or sadness, it’s about all the little things that lie in between, it isn’t just the beginning or end but all the tiny intermittent perturbations that define love and to find love we have to first believe in it. I know it’s easy writing about love then to actually find it and this where perhaps all these fairy tales come in for they give us hope that at the end of the day it’s nothing but love that matters, they bring about a gleam of light in our times of despair that sometimes even a beast within us can find its beauty.
We all make mistakes in life, that’s perhaps why fairy tales never come true and when I look back I find at least a million mistakes that I wish I have never made but ironically I don’t feel any regret because those times where different from these and even if I was to go back in time to rectify them, I would end up doing the very same thing and had it not been for my past I wouldn’t have become what I am. I do believe in fairy tales, especially the ones that my mother used to tell me and that is why I never commit the same mistake again with an exception of falling in love with the wrong person again and again but then I think, I am like the prince wandering with a shoe trying to find the princess to whom the shoe belongs.
The High School
If there is a place where the difference between various factions of humanity is stark like a naked butt then it has to be the high school, one look is all that you will need to differentiate between people for high school is the place where despite of everything we never want to break out of our moulds of sterotypicality, well high school or no high school we all I think never get to break out of the mould that our habits have set for us but that apart high school could be a real cruel place especially when you are a teenager standing on the cusp of adulthood waiting to explore all the uncharted waters but you can’t because you are disallowed because you don’t belong to a particular clique which by the virtue of its fake and over bloated air of exclusivity does not allow commoners to be a part of it. Group rivalries and mutual disdain apart when it came to high school I always and invariably divided our entire class into four prominent groups, first being that of absolute nerds who with their only motive of studying till they drop dead either by the smell of their own sweaty and stinky body or by the sheer jealousy owing to the incessant competition which in a way bonded all these nerds together, these were also people with the least amount of female contact and even the misfortune girls who happen to belong to this category where considered to be items of avoidance but that didn’t stop them from trying though in the ways that were comprehensible to them in their own nerdy world where bend over their notebook they would scribble neatly, paraphrasing, italicizing and underlining each word that would spill from the lips of our instructor, hoping for a redemption in the form of someone beautiful or at least cleaner than them who would approach them and ask for their notes so that they could with a smugness of a boisterous pimp would turn them down for least someone may study and end up a place higher than them. Then came the Rock Stars or the kids who by the virtue of the six strings which their fingers have almost perpetually strummed since they were six years old or all the hunks and wannabe basket ball stars who though never made it to the team but were pretty entertaining with their on and off filed hysterics or all the tall and handsome guys who planned on getting around just by their looks, well these were the people or A-List crowd, people who looked down upon everything that crawled or walked on this earth though the fact that they were as well the most dumbest of all specimen that god could ever have created never dawned on them. The deviants or the mischief mongers constituted the third category and the people who have just discovered anarchy and their raging teenage hormones, for them every rule, tube light or a window pane was worth breaking though their palms always ended on the swooshing end of headmistress cane but then again a warrior is incomplete without his battle wounds or this was what they used to think. The final category or the most prominent of all was that of mediocre, the average crowd and it is to this people to whom the treasures of high school belonged for they were the cynosures of everyone’s eyes, obedient and disciplined, who studied and lived a life with no high expectations, submitted their assignment on time and passed on with an average grade.
Group rivalries and mutual derision apart there were always some people who always have trouble trying to fit in because all the rules of conventionality do not apply to them, I for one was one of those kind, I never was able to find my place more so because I was too good looking to be a nerd, too short to be a stud, an absolute coward to be a deviant and a little bit too extreme to be a mediocre. I was one of the kids who were actually indifferent to the outside world and I never made any friends though I used to hang out with five jerks who were as well a perfect epitome of abstruseness and rarity with one of them having a face that more uglier than the sole of my shoe and another one who probably was shorter than my poodle and the third one really a masterpiece for he choose to run away with his so called girlfriend because despite of reaping grapevine he believed in her innocence but if only he would have heard would they used say about a whore always being a whore, he won’t have ended up making a mess of his life. The other two were actually taller and better looking than and also they were the one who found themselves to at the center of every girl’s attention and had it not been for their efforts I won’t have lost my virginity though the girl whom I gave my flower to, at an age of seventeen appeared to be like a gazillion years older than me and had probably more facial hairs than my armpits. Now, at least a decade and a dozen of hairy and flabby women later I think that the loss of virginity is the biggest eye opener in a men’s life because along with all the preconceived notions about your manhood it also brings down all the mental images for women in reality with their saggy bosoms or flabby tummies look like a far cry from their soft porn counterparts.
The best or the worst part about the high school is that it gets over ultimately but for some the actual nightmare begins the moment they step out of their small and constricted words especially for all those pretty boys and deviants because the world is too big and too conceited to actually acknowledge you. Mediocre though find it relatively easy to blend more so because they always tend to find solace in their mediocrity and also in the once a year blow jobs which their steady girl friend whom they later go onto marry and have kids with, gives to them. If anything my heart actually goes out to nerds for they never get to feel the life as the way it should be felt, they just move on from one expectations to another, trying to fulfill someone else’s dreams and goals though they tend to marry rich and get to grow old with a beautiful wife and kids but to what avail because your grades could only make you rich but they can’t possibly fill your life with happiness and fun.
Fight or Flight??
Fight or flight? Given a choice what would you choose the safety of your abode or slicker edge of the sword? More importantly I think, it’s not our action but the intent behind that matters because more often than not in our life’s most of the choices are already made for us, made either by the glorified hand of destiny or by the circumstances which are nothing but a culmination of whatever choices we have made so far in our life, we are nothing but a puppet whose strings almost always and invariably lie in the hands of someone else more so because most of our life’s we live to become what we are not, we live to become someone else, we live for an image and we try to live up to it, filling whatever gaps that may lie in between. As a human being our lives are pretty constricted and so are our choices and the worst part is the circumstances which dictate our choices have no effect on the perturbations that asunder through our lives more often ripping it apart because no one cares about the circumstances or the intent, what everyone is bothered about is consequences, if the end result is good then nothing else matters but sometimes the end could never justify the means for at the end of the day when you are sitting alone it’s not what you have but how you had that defines how far in life you have come.
The scaffolding that holds together this entire human architecture is a fragile one, just a misplaced step and it all tumbles down, we can choose though but again we never we as a human being are afraid of choices because we are afraid of the consequences and we are afraid because we don’t understand because we lack acuity and cognition to see through this haze of life. Sometimes I wonder about what I am and if destiny and providence has any part to play in it and yes to some extent perhaps because not everything in my life was decided by me but looking deeply I realize that this life is nothing but a web with thousands of crisscrossing, merging and diversifying threads, at each point each of these thread signify the choices or decisions that we are supposed to be making but at any given point the choices or threads that are apparent to us are very few but nevertheless the choice to choose a thread and walk along a path in life lies with us and come to think of it, destiny is nothing but a bulwark that time created against the vast indecision that seem to shroud this human life for you can’t always rely on the mankind to choose for themselves and believe me, had it not been for this destiny we all would have been living in the stone ages, too petrified by the travails of unknown and consequences of the unforeseen.
Fight or flight? If given a choice what will you choose? When the time comes for you to make a choice would you be man enough to make the right one? Choice is ultimately yours; you can decide to stand up against the slicker end of the sword or walk away and let the destiny make that choice for you but then you cannot always walk away for sometimes your destiny beckons you to stand against the slicker end and sometimes fleeing isn’t even an option. One lesson that I have learnt amidst all the iniquities that I gathered in my life and that is to walk away from my own battles and to stand up for others when the need be, for in our lives some people are indeed worth fighting for.
A Thousand Sleepless Nights
A thousand lies couldn’t have changed my destiny
A thousand broken dream
And I am still confusing this perception for reality.
A thousand words couldn’t have expressed the truth
A thousand forsaken roads
And I am still confusing this loneliness for solitude.
A thousand dying stars that lie somewhere in this galaxy
A thousand unrequited promises
And I still believe this love will last for an eternity.
A thousand boats that crashed along the straits of sins
A thousand candles that got blown by these winds
A thousand nights when I couldn’t sleep
And I still wish for this life to be true like my dreams.
The Five Questions of My Life
When I was young my mom use to buy me these color books with all those triangles, rectangles and circles and I would lose myself for several hours, trying to fill all these myriad shapes and figures with colors of my imagination. Some figures were meant to be filled with red, blue or green, while others needed more than one color like I always did triangles and rectangles with three and four different colors and that’s why perhaps my circle were always a mess because without edges I always got confused, so I tried several the colors one after the other in haggardly concentric circles but nevertheless with so many colors crisscrossing and intermixing with each other my circle always appeared more black than anything and then there were several places of indecision, where I found myself almost incapacitated to paint because I wasn’t sure about which color to use like the Mickey Mouse face which I could never bring myself to color more so because my dog happened to chew off my one and only soft pink crayon. Later in the life, as I grew up, I found myself an almost never ending book filled with almost infinite of shapes, figures and outlines, the book which we all refer to as the Life and the book which I colored using the colors of my logic, attaching meanings with each and everything or event in life, it wasn’t easy though going back in time and then sieving through all those memories and trying to attach an explanation with everything that I did. There was a vast starkness when I first set down to attach meaning with my life, everything was either black or white but slowly and steadily the logic started to become more apparent, there were patterns and numerous of them which began to emerge and pretty soon my life which seemingly appeared to be meaningless became all the more colorful. But of all the things in life, I still have trouble with these black and white spaces, black for sure I could never comprehend because they are like a never ending yarn, you pull on one end and you will keep on pulling until you exhaust yourself, these are the places which you can never associate with a particular logic, some places sometimes are never meant to be found because no morning sun is capable enough to illuminate the darkness within. I have come a long way and I have learnt to face the darkness that’s inside of me but much more than this darkness it is these white spaces which I live for now because this whiteness which exists between each and everything, between each and every stroke of logic, perpetuating this life with an almost endless and continuous chasm, chasm which I could never fill for my logic infallible, indefatigable as it may be could not explain each and every thing for their parts of me which I don’t know of but which I would nevertheless discover sometime later along this journey and then I will come back to paint this incomplete picture and empty gaps with the colors of my discovery.
I have moved quite a distance backward, painting and refilling and trying to reclaim what was once mine and I believe there is no better prophet for the future than our past but still amidst all those painted and annotated pictures I found a particular starkness which I never could define and this starkness pertains to all the unanswered questions which I encountered along my quest for love, questions like why the unselfish love exists only within the confines of our family, is it because of blood which runs through my veins or is it something much more deeper or questions like why we always find it easier to fall out of love then to stay in it and why is that people whom we love can never accept us the way we are or why can’t love be truly selfish and exist without the confines of an attachment or a commitment and more importantly why we always stand in the way of love denying it a chance to walk into our lives.
There are a lot of questions which I did find answers for, like the questions pertaining to the purpose behind my time on earth or the questions pertaining to destiny and choices and though still there is a lot which I may never find but one thing that I have learnt and that is love exists in gaps and as my one of my friend says it is not the abundance but rather the paucity which defines love and come to think of it our live as well exists within these gaps, somewhere in between the darkness and the light, in between the righteousness and iniquity. I know something’s in life are never meant to be found but I think sometimes it’s not the logic or the meaning but rather the journey, the path of discovery that matters.
View from a Park Bench
A dull ache permeates through these winds
As your feet rustle through these yellow autumn leaves
Silent clouds of melancholy filling your eyes
With unfallen tears
Waiting like a dry and yellow unfallen autumn leave
Hoping for a gust, waiting for a release.
Passing through those rustic gates
Looking for familiarity
Amidst all these strange inscriptions and names
Like a dry autumn leave
Trying to find a resting place
Far away from sheltering branches of a tree.
You bent down and place your rosary
With your lips moving in a silent prayer
Gently with a touch as light as this wind
You brush of the dust from the epitaph
Engraved on the tombstone of our beloved’s grave.
