Catharsis

I am staring at this computer screen, the blinking cursor, waiting for that bolt of inspiration to strike me. Not that there isn’t anything to write, the country is in shambles, Kashmir stand-off, common wealth games fiasco and may be when you think about all this, another thousand or so things that seem to be going awry but then politics, socialistic non-socialistic happenings, travails of a common men, never actually went through the thick skull of mine. So yes, having excluded almost everything that keeps the bread and butter coming for a common journalist and so called, self acclaimed socialists, I am still trying to delve deeper through certain realms of my mind and find at least a coherent thread, a yarn to pull on and stitch a nocturnal cardigan or a scarf or at least a pair of gloves.

If ever we were to write down everything that we thought about then for sure each one of us would have, other than a really tired left or right hand, a never ending book that would stretch through, covering, bring to front, all the dimensions of our consciousness and maybe then we could find ourselves in a place where we would know as to what is exactly going on with our lives. All the things, emotions, feelings that we suppress, putting forward a façade, a semblance of happiness, the smile that we play on our lips making other believe that all is well in our lives, believing rather playing the ideals that were never ours to begin with, if only we could put it all into words then we would find the truth that we have so successfully corralled ourselves from. And I say write because all of us too caught up in this quest for individuality that we have all begin to look so much alike. I say write because somewhere deep down we all are trying to fit a particular stereotype and the world is ever so often coming up with never definitions. We are all a product of conflicting notions and we too caught up in suppressing one over the other that often end up losing something or some part that could have made our lives worthwhile. I talked about the yarn and yes, at each point in our lives there are a thousand paths that fork themselves and what lies ahead is akin to what lies with us, it’s not the end but rather the beginnings which define the way things are and we end up losing so much to discomfiture that we feel in letting go and holding hands with what’s about to come. If only we could write, all that is going on in our head, if only we would document as a notion slays another one with its objectivity then maybe we would now as to why we are in where we are right now. And to what point you may ask, well I would say life’s too long and it’s always possible to change the path you are on. Just branch off ever so slightly, take a step, walk over the edge and before you know all that’s around you has changed.

Let go off whatever you are holding onto, shrug off your smocks, whatever falls down let it fall for what you need will always find a way to stay with you and whatever is that you lose will always come back to you in some other form.  Life is too short and our relationships much shorter, so whatever is that you wanted do, say, feel or make someone else feel, do it, say it now because you never know what your words or your action may set in motion. And if tomorrow it all doesn’t work out, like I said shrug off your smock and move on and maybe you would end up in a place better than you actually were.

Everything in life comes down to the relationships that we built and memories we create and if only we could take the hurt out of the bad relationship then maybe we could remember each other through all those good memories we shared. Because when you are sitting in your bed, staring at an unyielding cursor, with a part of your mind trying to curb all that it wants to relive, it gets a lot easier if we could just let ourselves be lost, chasing one thread after another, reliving one memory after another, finding a cathartic release from the government that doesn’t function, a paradise that would always be a paradise because you couldn’t think about it without first thinking about the Kalashnikov’s and the games that seem to have raped the city which you so much loved.

The Lost Desert

Rajasthan, it’s beautiful. Well any place with a couple of trees and a grassland stretching for anything more than a yard or two looks beautiful in monsoon but still there is a thing about deserts and the rains and the way they both blend together in an inexplicable way to make even the most protean of sights breathtakingly gorgeous. And yes I did felt cheated when the ever stretching lush greens met my expectant sights that have waited for almost an eternity to feast on those arid and dry wasteland that have become synonymous with this part of my country. And there wasn’t a stretch left untouched, it was all green. Fields, mountains, flats, lake side and for crying out loud there were trees growing atop a palace. Like someone with his water canon went on and spray painted this country side in an ever variegated ever stretching shade of green. And it looked beautiful, beyond word, so gorgeous that even a philistine would have stopped in his steps to admire, so spell binding that even a heart as broken as mine felt newer buds of hope, love and happiness surfacing through these thousand layers of deceit, betrayal and dereliction. I stood there staring at those  mountains that looked not so formidable under that green onslaught, so unlike their arid or snow capped counterparts, and I wondered as to what ails this human heart, as to what wounds do we carry inside of us, as to how irrevocably are we actually broken inside and when a desert wasteland could so easily transform itself, can’t we give up on the all the hurt inside and accept this suffering to be of our very own making and let our tears glue this world back together. And yes I thought of all this and more in an instant and this brings me from my self-absorbed excursions back to the beautiful Rajasthan.

Once upon a time there was a prince and that prince ordered to be built from the state funds, two of the most exquisite palaces. One with a thousand windows, euphemistically named The Palace of Air, with each window covered with multi hued multi colored glasses, so much so that the filtering sunlight and more importantly the moon light, rendered everything so ephemerally, so colorfully, in the shades of, red, green, blue and orange. And in the second palace was erected a room of thousand mirrors, each cut in so many different shapes, and all put together to form so many shapes and of so many sizes.

Now each generation interprets history in its own way, so what follows next may not have a semblance of truth to it but this is exactly what I would have done had I been the prince and yes, I would make for a lousy monarch for people like are for too busy thinking about things that have nothing to do with this world or the next.

So our prince had two of the most exquisite palaces and what exactly our prince did with them? Well what exactly would you do, if not make lie down with your beloved somewhere along those thousand windows,  in the filtering variegated moon light, turning a shade different from the other, making love in that colorful, ever-changing moonlight. Or would you rather watch your reflection as you lie down underneath a canopy of thousand murals, watch your reflection as it breaks down into a thousand pieces and becomes a part of all those peacocks and elephants that form an almost infinite mural. Imagine waking up each morning to the sight of the majestic Aravalli’s as they perforate through those clouds. Could a sight be more spectacular than this, I wonder.

There was something which I learnt standing at the windows where our apocryphal prince would have once stood and that was the realization that how every trivial experience in our life stretches along into making what we are. If for just a moment we could stop ourselves from labeling whatever is that we are experiencing, then maybe we could someday become a trifle of what we actually are capable of becoming. The best thing about this life is the fact that you are alive, rest all will fall into place once you start living your experiences out.