I swear…
By unseen faces and unheard places
By butts and buttresses
By demure dilettantes and their elaborate dresses…
By keen vigilantes and their stares
By the piano and musical chairs
By elevators and the bygone stairs
I swear…
By the parachutes and hot air balloons
By my friends and …buffoons
By the love letters and the different moons…
By the speed of light and summer heat
By the torn jeans and naked feet
By the kisses stolen down the ‘one way street’
I swear…
By the beer bottles and paathshalas
By the ‘angel eyes’ and late night galas
Let me not forget the so-called ‘madhubalas’…
By the classroom jokes and chocolate cakes
By the ‘people of fashion’ and the rakes
By the originals and the fakes
I swear…
By the times I felt alone
By the conversations on the phone
By my sweetheart and her finicky chaperone…
By the fast bikes and speedy cars
By the ‘body builders’ and ‘drug czars’
By the ‘hackers’ and my soccer ‘yaars’
I swear…
By the expeditions and the photos
By the ‘group leaders’ and their vetoes
By the ‘flirts’ and their false kudos…
By the slogans on the t shirt and the tattoos on the arm
By the teasers and taunts which meant no harm
By the skirts so hot and the smiles so warm
I shall never forget…these times I spent
I wish I could stay…buy time on rent
But I see moments disappear…as new ones take their place
I will collect all the beads I can…and then string myself a necklace…
Friday, April 14, 2006
Monday, April 10, 2006
zilch and then...hope
"yeh meetta meetta gana aapke liye leker aaye hain Mawana sugar....mithaas zindagi ki..." the static ended abruptly and the radio station buzzed again with a Himesh Reshammiya 'classic'. i looked outside the window....my eyes showed no surprise..it was as if they were accustomed to what they saw...they had about them the nonchalance of a sage...callousness of the owl and haughtiness of the eagle. i felt tension in my muscles, my memory ached from last night, i felt perturbed...i was in awe of telugu actress i saw on one of the rare posters publicising a film from the land of the nizams...inexplicabily.
i had never come to know and understand the infamous monday morning blues..but there was always a zilch which accompanied monday mornings...zilch of thoughts..zilch of memories and zilch of feelings. i felt robbed...every monday morning i would wake up a new man...a wanderer...a vagabond ....a peripatetic...
every monday morning brought with it another challenge...a journey so taxing that it could kill a milquetoast...i pride myself to be veteran of many such trials by fire...i found myself in the middle of another one....A DTC bus ride from delhi to noida...i suggest you donot laugh....
looking out through the stained glass provided me with distractions i relied upon to pass time...but today was different...it was as if i was i was watching a movie for the umptieth time over...the story, the cues, the dialogues, the sequence all seemed pedestrian....lousy-lemony...i knew it all...the screech of the tyre, the fuss on the rickshaw stand, the expletive of ladies, the keening and sniveling of little girls, the ruckus of the traffic, the clamor of bicycles, the hullabaloo of babus, the giggles and snickers of young boys....i felt the void again...the humdrum continued...
i looked at the book resting on my lap...'1984' the title read...i had picked up the book from my uncle's collection. 1984 had caught my attention...it incidently was the year i began the journey called life. I hadn't begun to read the book so i flipped over a couple of leaves and read arbitrarily...
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
something stopped me from going on...i felt i was not alone..it was as if a hundred eyes were zeroing on me. i felt the drops of perspiration flow down my back...the flow was smooth as smooth as jagjit singh's ghazal...as irritating as well...i looked up at the 'bystanders'...they all looked away...i tried to read again...and the vagabond pupils rested on me again...i could not read...i noticed a pink turban in the crowd...it brought a smile to my face...i stretched accepting the pain in my leg, the moisture on my back and my helplessness in the present situation.
i got myself to read again...
April 4th, 1984.
Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never --
i felt a sense of deja vu...suddenly i realized i empathized with the fat man, the child...there fated destiny...i looked up from what i was reading...i rejected my feelings as if they were not mine...there's a lot those people could have done to save themselves...there's a lot i go through everyday but i am guided by hope...hope that tomorrow would be a better day...that i would profit from every journey i undertake...i closed my eyes...i closed the book...i am not a fatalist i told myself...and i would not let me become one...
i had never come to know and understand the infamous monday morning blues..but there was always a zilch which accompanied monday mornings...zilch of thoughts..zilch of memories and zilch of feelings. i felt robbed...every monday morning i would wake up a new man...a wanderer...a vagabond ....a peripatetic...
every monday morning brought with it another challenge...a journey so taxing that it could kill a milquetoast...i pride myself to be veteran of many such trials by fire...i found myself in the middle of another one....A DTC bus ride from delhi to noida...i suggest you donot laugh....
looking out through the stained glass provided me with distractions i relied upon to pass time...but today was different...it was as if i was i was watching a movie for the umptieth time over...the story, the cues, the dialogues, the sequence all seemed pedestrian....lousy-lemony...i knew it all...the screech of the tyre, the fuss on the rickshaw stand, the expletive of ladies, the keening and sniveling of little girls, the ruckus of the traffic, the clamor of bicycles, the hullabaloo of babus, the giggles and snickers of young boys....i felt the void again...the humdrum continued...
i looked at the book resting on my lap...'1984' the title read...i had picked up the book from my uncle's collection. 1984 had caught my attention...it incidently was the year i began the journey called life. I hadn't begun to read the book so i flipped over a couple of leaves and read arbitrarily...
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
something stopped me from going on...i felt i was not alone..it was as if a hundred eyes were zeroing on me. i felt the drops of perspiration flow down my back...the flow was smooth as smooth as jagjit singh's ghazal...as irritating as well...i looked up at the 'bystanders'...they all looked away...i tried to read again...and the vagabond pupils rested on me again...i could not read...i noticed a pink turban in the crowd...it brought a smile to my face...i stretched accepting the pain in my leg, the moisture on my back and my helplessness in the present situation.
i got myself to read again...
April 4th, 1984.
Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never --
i felt a sense of deja vu...suddenly i realized i empathized with the fat man, the child...there fated destiny...i looked up from what i was reading...i rejected my feelings as if they were not mine...there's a lot those people could have done to save themselves...there's a lot i go through everyday but i am guided by hope...hope that tomorrow would be a better day...that i would profit from every journey i undertake...i closed my eyes...i closed the book...i am not a fatalist i told myself...and i would not let me become one...
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