House like a Coffee Shop

It all started a long time back. When exactly, I don’t know but it was always there, that thought at the back of your head which slowly steadily becomes an attribute. It just happened one day, the realization, of course, sitting in a coffee shop and telling the person, whom I accidentally happen to love, about how I would love to live in a house such as that shop. A glass front, a walk in kitchen, a small living room with a spiral staircase leading to a bedroom and well, I did muttered something about a Ducati parked in the driveway but that was it. All I wanted was a place for myself, a place where would exist as I have always wanted to, a place which I would fill with my books, my music, my iDevices and my idiosyncrasies. I place where the only sound would either be that of mine or guitar strumming punctuated by drum beats.

I often wondered when people said they needed to be alone, to think or to do whatever they do. I wondered because solitude always quietened my thinking. Only thing I need to think when I am alone is what to cook for myself or what to read next and yes I do think about what I read but that’s just a part of the process. I read, I think and if I like it, I let the idea lie at the back of my head. It’s not that I don’t like people or that I am anti social, well I am to a certain extent which involves eschewing all forms of meaningless conversations and goodbyes and I often don’t say hello to people because I don’t like exchanging pleasantries post that, but it’s just that I don’t feel the need to go out, extend a hand and relate.

That brings me back to the thought that became me, the thought that I could possibly live alone for the rest of my life. The thought that I am complete in myself, that what I need is within me. Companionship, appreciation, belonging, the feeling of being home, the things which people so desperately crave but even after trying hard, walking round the fire or down the aisle or accepting someone through a muslin cloth, still couldn’t find. To be content you have to be complete and you have to be complete in yourself, thinking someone else would come along and fill the holes in you would just leave you with a perforated yarn, scaffolding so fragile that an iota of doubt could make it shiver.

I want to be alone and free until I outgrow the void inside me, until I have been and done what I wanted to do, until I have fulfilled every last desire inside me, until the fork between solitude and companionship becomes one, until I have something to share with someone, something which begs to be shared not for the sake of an entitlement but just for the sake of sharing. Until then all I want to do is live in is a house just like a coffee shop.

The Table Art

“Impossible is possible”, this was the line scribbled alongside a quirky remark about life and girlfriends and how they both sucked and an almost defaced, probably by a jealous lover “Kiran loves Shobhana”, there were several others as well love notes, phone numbers and lots of names, all scribbled across the desk I was sitting. The drudgery of endless classes and lectures could transform a simple student into an artist, I wondered as I thought about the school days when almost each of us wrote our names as well as the name of the girl we had a crush on, all inside a tinny weenie heart across each and every desk in the class, perhaps we thought scribbling or engraving our name across the desk would reserve for us a place somewhere in the memories of people, it was like immortality was just a stroke of scissor away. I as a matter of fact never got to do that because I always had a strong predilection towards falling in love with the girl sitting next to me and writing her name alongside mine, much more than tacky felt dangerous because what if the girl read it and complaint to the teacher. So more often than all through the childhood and as well as a greater part of adulthood, my love went unrequited more so because of my propensity of losing the people whom I loved the most in life and partly because I feel love is about happiness and keeping your beloved happy and I think people are happy without me being a part of their lives. Our class room desk weren’t the only place where this war for immortality was being fought because all we needed was a pen or a compass and then almost every empty wall felt like an empty canvas waiting for our master touch, so even the walls of our school toilet were filled with endless testaments about an undying love to an extent that my school people have to tile the restroom walls ceiling to floor but who so ever came up with that idea perhaps has never heard of a thing known as permanent marker and pretty soon the walls were once again painted in black, red and green albeit this time it was the name of our principle along with vituperations in seven different languages that was scribbled to the depths of infamy.

 When I was a kid I remember engraving, much to the dismay of my mother for I used her favorite scissors, the names of all my friends along the bark of our garden tree, the names are still there but that insouciance is now long gone leaving behind just a remembrance etched somewhere along the bends and corner of our minds. One place that I tried but could never leave my mark was the Delhi metro, compass, coins, scissors, nails or keys all redundant against god knows what resistant paint, though that didn’t stop us from using markers and crayons but the cleaning staff was so damn efficient that not even a single mark survived of our delinquencies but this summer while commuting I found the spot where my girlfriend once scribbled our names in the space between the backrest of the seat and the compartment walls. The heart and the name was all effaced like the last remnant of our relationship and as I ran my hand across the emptiness where once her name had been, I wished for a worm hole to suck and take me to the time when we sitting huddled together have tried to immortalize our love, one thing for sure that permanent marker was a damn good one for its ink after all this year’s refuses to fade at least from the tomb stone of my heart, something’s you just can’t leave behind especially the engravings and scribbling  along our palms and forehead, itched by the treacherous hands of fate.

Love and All That has been Said

Love is the most diaphanous of all emotions more so because I don’t really know what the thing which makes you transparent is known as but that apart love is a kind of emotion which shows through everything be it the springs in your feet or the stupid smile that plays on your face the whole day. Love just finds its way to creep into every corner and fill every crack and space, there isn’t probably a thing which love may leave untouched and it has a tendency to make even a simple walk along the park seem like something more than simple. If my beloved friend is to be believed love is more like an endless Christmas which people in love celebrate almost every day but then even Christmas isn’t what is used to be especially after the truth about Santa Claus, outsourcing his job to some toy factory in China, came out. Love is more of a virtue than an emotion and I think and like my 10^th grade English Literature book said like every other virtue such as honesty or truthfulness, love is pretty much easy to lay but just a few drops of cold water and a gentle brush with reality is all it takes to bring all your preconceived notions tumbling back.

So what is love then is it as Dr. Deepak Chopra proclaims, a constitution of five stages of which I only remember the last one and that is sex or is it something more profound, something which cannot be found in books of literature? I think love is something more personal and each of us has our own way of loving, we have to give our definition for love and more importantly believe in those definitions. Like for me love is when the answer to “Am I in love” comprises of just a single image instead of the usual slideshow of faces that plays around my mind. In this world chances to find love are few and far in between and it doesn’t pay well to engross yourself in a book selling idiosyncrasies of some modern day seer when the love of you have been searching for is about to disappear along the next bend or corner of this life.

Love is really diaphanous or transparent, you may actually look right through it and may never know but there is someone who always knows whether it’s the air or your rose colored glasses which have made this world seem all the more prettier and that someone is the tiny little voice inside of your head. Do we get a second chance when it comes to finding love, well I don’t know for I am really waiting for my first but like a thousand before me must have said about love being elixir of life, so just open yourself and accept whatever love you can find. You may not get what you are looking for but then no one knows what they are looking for and really why not make the best of what we have rather seeking the happiness which we may never find. I know what I am saying goes against the basic dictums of taking risks in life but then haven’t we scalded ourselves enough by trying to live up to the prophecies of these new age Armani clad soothsayers.

Finally, try spreading love and not just because it’s Valentine’s Day but because love begets love and really this world could do lot better with another few billion doses of it and this is a piece of advice for all my fellow Indians who plan on hanging out with their beloved this valentine’s day, do carry a divorce lawyer in your tow because returning home married and that too forcibly on a roadside by people proclaiming themselves to be the custodian of Hindu tradition, isn’t probably the best way to scare the life out of your parents.

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.

Movies, Books and Reviews

Ever being caught between a devil and a high sea? I kind of landed myself in a similar quandary when my friends asked me to come along for a movie, imagine my predicament trying to decide between a movie so full of clichéd plot and grossly overrated actors who know nothing better than to dance around with a turban and suits on a bare chest, add to it wooden planks for cushioning, big giant fans for air conditioning and mosquitoes for that additional surround sound effect. There shouldn’t have been much to decide for or this is what you will say but me being left alone in the house and trying to sleep with all the lights on because I am afraid of the dark and being left alone in the house, pretty much gave me courage to brave through those three hours of absolute tyranny so much so that I even gave up on my beloved book and seriously I would have done me and my semi autobiographical book that is already suffering from lack of ideas and characters no good had I been eaten up by some insatiable and blood thirsty vampire or a ghoul. The book is about my female counterpart and the way if she ever exists is going to be and since she doesn’t exists so I have absolutely no idea what she is like apart from the fact that she wears Converse All Star sneakers and low rise’s and has long hairs streaked with a shade of golden brown. Sometime it just happens that you read or watch something fascinating and you too want to create something as beautiful as that. I for crying out loud have tried to create enough Mona Lisa’s and paint endlessly the walls of my living room like Michelangelo doing the Sistine Chapel only to be thrashed or later reprimanded by my mother who as a matter of fact still wonders about the traits that I never inherited from her until I found my true calling my true calling. Just the other day I was watching “Wanted” and I can’t help but be fascinated by the unrealistic reality it portrayed, a movie so well sculpted that it could even make Angelina Jolie’s butt and tattoo adorned body appear pale in comparison, a movie that goes beyond your perception and renders you incapable of even blinking your eyes. A few movies such as these a month could even make a guy consider giving up on his porn collection.

Though I am no good at directions, but then all the typical human stereotypes with an additional Y chromosome lack this trait, I am equally capable of appreciating something as simple and fascinating as movie as long as I am not supposed to leaving my brains behind, more so because my refrigerator is broke and electricity is rather erratic and I have a serious disdain for movies which depict the actual life as if we are blind and deaf and complete imbecile and incapable of realizing the reality around us and movies based on books or novels are seriously a waste of time, the only exception to this dictum being the lord of rings trilogy, I loved book and I loved the movie, those innocent eyes and red and rosy cheeks of Liv Tyler almost made me fall in love with her. That apart, I find Harry Potter movies better than the book because Hogwarts and all those dragons and centaur’s and Quidditch look far better on screen than they ever did within the realms of my mind. One book that I really loved and couldn’t bring myself to forget is The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie, it’s almost like a rendition, a poetry, something rhetorical and magical that would sweep you off your feet and make you fall in love with the characters, it’s a book about love and it being the symbol of our humanity, the book tells a story about how love transforms itself at each step, it’s a story of love, hatred, drugs, music, sex and death.

The movie that I so last night was like cold shower on an equally cold day, kind of shower which makes you question your sanity and makes you bang your head against the wall. It was a kind of movie where you wait for the intermission so that you could find some respite in watching those movie trailers, kind of movie that could make guys break up with their girlfriends or make all those desperate’s call up their ex because all along the movie you keep on waiting for something to happen and by the time you realize what a waste of time and money it has been, the movie ends with Snoop Dogg staring at you and leaving you high and dry and with an acute sense of frustration and suppressed anger with nothing but yourself and your hairs to pull and vent it on. Seriously had I got a punching bag at my house, I would have for sure beaten the fucking sand out of it. I don’t do advice but this movie has changed a lot in me, I now have learned to never believe in a movie review which does anything but berate a movie and word of advice for Mr. Azeez Bazmee, next time you go about making a movie, do contact me for my 3 chapter novel has better plot and storyline than the circus you orchestrated for us.