So long and thanks for all the fish

Well, before anything else, i must confess, i am really fortunate to have the friends and family i do. I dont know what i would be without them.
The last year had been torrid: punctuated by good times in Tavarekhere, Brigade Road, Vasant Kunj, Gurgaon, among others. Ofcourse, there has been the odd Jaipur and Patiala House and Mhape thrown in, when it stooped even lower that the usual low. There have been times when i refused to move and became even more taciturn than usual. Apologies to all who bore the brunt of it. I didnt mean to you know.
But true, there have been times of insane creativity (far from the realm of this blog) and morbid tardiness. What remained the same is the warmth and love of those around me. I change but it doesnt. Thats why i love and hold it so dear to me.

Well after a long period of vacant and pensive moodiness, there came the change. A week in Abu Dhabi(an obscenely rich city with appalling malls and highrises and fast roads), a breakfast in Amsterdam (i love the high cheek bones of the girls there), and then Bogota.
So far Bogota has treated me well. Blue mountains, green avenues, amazing food and dance, soothing weather, and beautiful people. What amazes me is how ignorant the English speaking world is of the non-English speaking one. I mean, i never knew such a paradise existed tucked away neatly in some corner of the world.
Well, i am off to Villavicencio tomorrow. More later

Postscprit: i didnt want to describe the place much, rather, i wanted to put in my feelings on coming across it. I hope i did disappoint whoever was unlucky enough to stumble upon this.

Postscript: I just noticed my life has been a like a surfboard tossed in a rough sea. Impossible lows, and unimaginable highs. Is it a coincidence or thats how i choose to live it?

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life in general!

June 10, 2009

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Blog is back!

Well, i need to put some pictures here. And i left my camera at home.

Anyway, life is good. At the moment. About the next. Well, think about that when it comes.

Post Script: I arrived in Bogota on 21st May. Just for the records, that is.

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life

June 4, 2009

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Axe for the frozen sea

Now. There are certain things a lonely man, a sad man, a man whose being the promise of hope is being slowly sucked out, should be allowed to do. Yet, he somehow gravitates to that, reading books that make him sadder, not about himself but at the irony and the strange overpowering nature of the world around. And he has the eternal company of Kafka.

No, he does not, as Kafka says, cannot force himself to use drugs to cheat on his loneliness — it is all that he has. He wanders along pathless lands and meets nobody, when there is nowhere to go.

And there is this meaningless dreams and meaningless daydreams, and meaningless awakedness.

There is this stubborn stupidity as well, which refuses to let go. It makes the days do round and round, till the nights and days look the same.

Yet, in the random cruel world he is, he sees a crucible of  joy, indestructible, which seduces and tyrannises him. He refuses to let go of the pleasure.

Maybe this is how man goes blind. Or he goes mad. Or both.

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March 6, 2009

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Realisations

Sometimes all of life’s lessions, all that one has learnt from it can be distilled in a moment, a figment of stray thought, and all that can be summed up in a line. Mine’s this.

No matter how bad life is, it is still good!

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crap, mood

February 1, 2009

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旅に病んで
夢は枯れ野を
かけめぐる

- Basho

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January 28, 2009

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The dilemma of a Tomato

Now, lets get our fundamentals right: a fruit is born a fruit, it is a ripened ovary of a plant, and serves as a nutritional support for the growing seed inside. Vegetable on the other hand, is a man made nuisance, purely dependent on how man uses it on his table.

Tomato, therefore is born a fruit, bears an ovary-full of seeds, among which a few would grow to be tomato vines, and some even give birth to tomatoes like itself. However, on a table, with cucumbers, onions, carrots, beet and radish, sprinkled with lemon and salt, it is no better than a vegetable, in fact, just a vegetable.

On a table, no matter how hard a tomato tries to proof itself fruit-worthly, it is resigned to live and die a life of a vegetable. To be eaten perfunctorily, without the usual relish one has while eating a fruit. No one says, “Oh! What a tomato!” like they say, “What a peach!”, or “Grapes, these ain’t sour!”, or “This is the apple that must have tempted Eve!”. No. A tomato is munched between the hotness of a cutlet and the yellowness of mustard, merely to keep the conversation moving. Tomato dies a vegetable’s death!

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crap, food

January 11, 2009

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The Juggernaut

I have known him since birth. He was unmarried, I am not sure if by choice, and had could talk about anything under the sun, and could repair any problems. He made sure all bulbs in the lamp-post of our narrow lane was in order. I dont know if he had any day job, though he fixed any electrical problems of our house, whenever needed.

He was the person, who saved me from floggings of my mom, whenever i broke a new toy. Like some pot bellied lungi-clad Batman he would materialize and lecture my mom about how beating a growing-up kid can severely damage his brain (his lectures were always long and winding, but were always based on a profoundly simple principle), and thereby encourage me to go on more ravaging rampages of breaking stuff. Soon I graduated from toys to furniture and then tube-lights(much to his secret pleasure I suppose),  and he kept on telling me how breaking down things is an essential part of learning. Destruction and creation, genesis and catastrophe!

As I was grew up, i thought i would outgrow the reaches of his knowledge, but I was wrong. For his was a pool of infinite wisdom. Once I remember, I had locked up a room by accident with the key still inside it. I tried for hours to manipulate  the lock, and even tried to fish it out of an open window. When he arrived on the scene(for he had to) he prompty sawed off a bar off the window, and pulled in his 42 inch belly through it, and opened the door from the inside. Coming out victorious, he chided me, “You know, I, as a man of technology, can do anything.”

It went on for twenty three years. Be it broken microwave ovens, be it snake attacks, television, computers, bee hives on trees, kali puja, street brawls, he was there to solve it all. He served egg rolls in Durga Puja, and crispy golden jalebis in Rathayatra after setting up shop on the main road. Everything was free for me, luckily.And the unending heroic tales, and long sermons of how nothing is impossible under his steady hand.

I had not seen him for quite some time now, and frankly, hadn’t been too aware of his prolonged absence. Last I met him when he was cycling idly down one of the billboard lit streets, shadow fighting pot-holes. He joked around with me, and then sermonised how important industrial development is for everyone. I dont know if he was fighting obsolescence, or he was looking for more lamppost to put bulbs on, or fixing some black and white television in some nondescript room, i don’t know.

What he told me, without revealing much being the staunch communist he has been, was that he was getting late for his Satsang and needed to push.

The species is extinct.

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non-fiction

January 8, 2009

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