Successful Partial Detox

As against a Partial(ly) Successful Detox.

It’s been a month that I have ‘stayed away’ from Facebook, and have been successful at that. It’s a good feeling. As a mark of being away, I changed my cover photo and profile picture to reflect that, I guess it didn’t make much sense. Only one friend asked me about my absence and I pointed her to my Facebook cover and profile photo. That was my cryptic way of saying, “I am away.”

And, apparently, too cryptic.

My being away from Facebook was not a full detox (that should explain the “partial.”) Because I administer a photography MOOC on Facebook and my company’s page, I couldn’t be completely away. So it was only a detox of status updates and commenting etc, on my profile page, unless addressed directly. The need to share shifted a bit on Twitter for the month, but it wasn’t significant.

All of this meant that I wrote more on my blog (than before, not in absolute terms), had a chance to read quite a lot, support my Premier League team, de-clutter the space around and spend some time with myself, become better at cooking, learning the fundamentals, and start something new (at work). It also helped think about, to an extent, how to make optimal, non-intrusive use of social media. Of all the things, however, it lets you know the value of your presence in social media networks.

Walking away, in a funny way, is knowing where you really stand.

Message of Silence

Some messages are very easy to expect: festival greetings or other congratulatory messages, for example. Convention and empirical evidence inform us of the promise of their occurrence. There is calculated taking-for-granted in such messages. Some other messages are different: especially if they are a response to questions. There is not much in terms of surety that can be said of the content of the response; for that matter, there is no surety whether there will be a response.

Silence.

Now, that’s a form of response that is the most difficult for us to make sense of. Even more so if a festive or congratulatory promise exists. If you think hard enough, however, silence is easy to decode. You can make meaning of silence through the context and the circumstance. The onus of interpretation is now on you – that’s the implicit message of silence. The explicit, in this case, are just forms of excuses.

And of all possible meanings that we may discover, we learn that when we see beyond the excuses, the message is loud and clear.

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year, full of meaning, conversations, and great times with friends and family!

To Begin, An End

I wrote once about expiry — a long time ago. It was about conspiracy theories. It was about food. It was really an excuse to show-off my experimental cooking.

We are on the brink of yet another conspiracy theory. The end of the world; I am not sure though, whether it can truly be called a conspiracy theory. It’s more of a speculative theory. But then again, those who would bother to simply read the Wikipedia entry on the Mayan calendar would know that there is nothing to speculate.

The end fascinates us humans. Whether for a positive effect or a negative one, we are all fascinated by the end.

Race. Film. Book. Exam. Road. Life. Game. Work.

We are eager, whether with curiosity or anxiety, to get to the end or at least know it before it occurs. The usual philosophical maxim of journey vs. destination will not follow. I am sure you have heard it many times.

And we know that everything comes to an end. We learn that early in life, yet we seldom allow ourselves to come to terms with the end. Depending on what the adjective for the end is – happy or sad – we speed up or slow down towards the end. Sometimes things end by themselves but we do not recognise the end. We continue to live as if the end is a long way off. It’s our way of not allowing things to end: like dragging a corpse. Sometimes, things end the way we expect them to, and we are left with a sense of void: there’s no end to get to. Some ends are abrupt; they hurt the most, I guess.

And almost everything that begins must have an end. For good reason or not.

And the things that we must end consciously, by force, are the most difficult endings of all. Because these are the things that we probably do not want to end, but have to. Because certain things have to end before new things can begin. Some beginnings are contingent upon some endings.

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

As I was, for the Future

All the drafts have been either refined and posted or ruthlessly deleted. The emptiness of the drafts folder is scary. When the mind was blank there was always this folder to turn to and you could always pick out a draft and make tiny changes and entertain yourself in the false comfort that you were writing something. I never used to save drafts. If I did not complete writing something, I used to trash it. Recently, I have been saving drafts – for those times when I would come here empty-handed and gloomy.

The drafts were a faint reminder of a bygone inspiration and were reluctantly agreeable to being remixed like the re-hashed work of an outmoded music director. Now, even that thin thread has disappeared.

But, not the need to write. That has not disappeared. It nags. And even though the tinsel of readership statistics and social influence has long been discarded as worthless, the need to write is strong as it was, if not stronger. Its character has changed slightly, though. The urge is not to write more, but to write better. And the better seeks a dive deeper than the words that are written.

My birthday is coming, says my blog. Give me the gift of being myself, once again, for ever.

No Answers

There is something about a childhood memory of a room that is deceiving. When you enter the same room as an adult, it seems much smaller. I am not sure if it is about your size – then and now. But there is something about the dimensions of a room that makes the room seem much smaller when you visit it years later as an adult. Your childhood memory and the reality of dimensions are in significant conflict.

-o-

I was once made to sit in a communications training programme, years ago. We were supposed to become better at communicating. As a rookie, I was quite eager to give it my best. I don’t remember anything of that programme that I paid so much attention to.

Except.

She asked us a question about how we communicate when we visit someone who has had a death in the family. There was a tense, dense silence in the room. She knew the answer to her question. There is an awkwardness that pollutes our minds when facing the one who is alive who is grieving for the dead. We vigourously nodded our heads.

-o-

Unexpected late night calls are the worst. Before phones were commonplace – it was the telegram or the trunk-call, if at all.

-o-

Thankfully I wasn’t drinking that night. I had to drive at 4AM, 60-odd kilometres out of the city to attend her funeral. I had to pick up a relative on the way. There were a million things swimming in the mental pool of confusion. Facts, reality, tomorrow and such are the ways we keep ourselves away from grieving.

-o-

She lived a difficult life. I never saw even a frown on her face.

-o-

Sometimes, there are no answers

-o-

Because I do not know any better, I hope you are in a better place than this. Be in peace.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

Some of you may have seen (or been a part of) the recent Facebook experiment. The status message that asks your friends to dig up a memory of you that is at the tip of your brains. After only a few bothered, it seems my memorial ethos (pun, accidental), would be: conversations, and having them, under the influence or not.

Mighty chuffed, I was, after I read through the memories. There are a million others, which didn’t make it to the experiment’s venue, which however, I treasure with all my might.

These days, it is difficult to have a conversation going; haven’t had one for a while now, except with my artist friend. I don’t quite count IM chats as good conversation, though they tend to be interesting if you can manage the multiple threads caused by the delay, and suffer the typos caused by the difference in the varying speeds of thinking and typing. One such good conversation ensued a couple of days ago, unfortunately on an IM chat.

He and I usually talk of movies. We have had other conversations, like  “ethics of prevalent business models in the mobile communication services industry”, but, he fails miserably at those and it usually becomes a lecture series from us after a while, when he gives up, and we continue to talk of movies. So, after a moot argument about identifying a movie that excelled in (a) the art of film-making, (b) the presentation, and (c) the story-telling and wafting though elements of photography, lesser known Marathi film directors of yore, influence of critics and analysts on art, we ended up at “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey“

It was a lazy Saturday, three years ago, in London, alone, when, with the intention of spending the autumn afternoon at Trafalgar Square, I gingerly made way to the National Gallery that overlooks the square. I always thought of myself as a misfit in art galleries. I don’t understand art a lot (the technical parts), and I have a peeve about critics and analysts who usually tell us what to look for in it. I usually don’t see the way they do, if, I can extract meaning of the words they use to describe what it is all about, i.e. I like things because I like things. But being with an artist for long, certain thoughts and knowledge permeates through and sharpens your vision. In the aimless wandering around the Gallery, I was suddenly flush in front of this huge painting:

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Paul Delaroche, 1833. Source: Wikipedia Commons

It was overwhelming, to say the least. It told a long and intricate story in a single still image. When I wrote to her about this, I could not tell her anything about the painting. How big it was, the play of the light and such details. I could only tell her what I felt — and that I couldn’t explain it well, either. I only wrote that I was stuck on the bench looking at it for a very long time, and I cried.

This is a life changing painting for me. I am still the same as I was on that Saturday afternoon, however, what I have always believed about art became true that day. Art has a very personal meaning and good art is that that touches your soul. To be able to travel to 1553, the painting becomes a portal of sorts. Since then, I have been able to brave an entry into museums more often than I would have. Willingly. This painting opened a world of experience to me. I read a lot about the British history, especially Lady Jane Grey. I saw many other paintings, and found many, from different times, that made meaning. At the same time, I found many that didn’t.

I discovered that a painting or a photograph or music or a book doesn’t do anything to you, as such. It doesn’t do much to change the world, acting as an external force. It only provides an option: to you, to allow it to relate to you, if you will. If the connection doesn’t exist, you will feel nothing about that piece of art. You will only see its colour, brush strokes, and the artist’s intention, if at all.

If the connection exist, it gently evokes a feeling that you need to experience to find a little bit more about yourself.

The Answer of Silence

Silence.

Not the kind that fills you with peace, but the one that makes an incessant and intolerable sound; almost noise. The one that does not give you that conventional sense of peace. It is not the screeching sound of a braking vehicle, nor the howling of a banshee. Just a continuous inconsistent array of myriad noises that will not follow any perceptible order.

This silence is an impostor of its cousin — the silence that is known to ooze a sense of tranquility, even if there is sound around. Like the sound of the lazy roar of the sea or the vague whispers of the wind in between the hills in the valley.

A good impostor, at that.

But the good cousin is so overrated that the impersonation is worth forgiving. Where the impostor lives – in the same place that you do, this is the best possible silence that is possible. In any case, since we seek silence outside of us, the sounds always remain. We just legitimise a few, while bastardise the others.

And more often than not, the logic to legitimise one over the other is an inheritance of a borrowed experience. We compel our hearts to enjoy the dull roar and the vague whispers. Because someone said so, once upon a time and we live their experience once and then we live it over and over again. And we do a good job of it. We have logic and repeated experiences that prove it so — innumerable experiences in which we have continuously conditioned ourselves to believe in the borrowed truth.

No wonder, our quest for peace is always without, never within.

Trust’s Altitude

Where you stand, the power of your sight, the altitude at which you stand and the power that allows you to see, is all that defines trust. Many opaques will appear before your eyes, however, before trust is possible. Opaques that stay true to the purpose of not allowing you to trust; past experience and impatience, for example. They do not blind you, they only limit the distance of your vision. Not allowing the opaques to hinder your sight (by changing where you stand) is how you make trust possible.

Trust is not blind, so blind trust is an oxymoron for me. How can you trust that which you do not know, do not see? It may not use eyes, but trust is based on a perception; through senses other than eyes. It “sees”.

Blind trust is mutant-superstition.

When you trust a person, you trust a person. When you trust God, you trust God. When you trust medicine, you trust medicine. There is no preface to it, nor an epilogue or a summary. There are no footnotes, no disclaimers. There is no condition. “As long as…” and “if” never occur when you speak of trust. There is no time-limit. It starts at a point and stops at another, if at all. There is no because that explains why you stop trusting.

Trust supersedes belief, which supersedes hope. (Though hope seems to be an exotic floating emotion.)

To seek confirmation is to violate trust. To remind is to violate trust.

A Change of Religion

Posts like these will need to move to a different location. Not that they affect the genre of this blog in anyway, but these are precious, in the sense that they will need a platform of their own for them to transform into action.

My previous post has received some interesting feedback — emotional, even if it is.

In the previous post I was wondering what would fear (instead of resilience) in our hearts mean to the rest of country, especially the spineless Centre. More, an expression of, the heart crying out of the disadvantage that this city faces due to its resilience (Ironic, that in such times resilience has become a four-ten-letter word. One tight slap is due from Anumita, will take it willingly). The post was probably misleading, in a way. But then coherence wouldn’t be he hallmark of any expression in the last three days, would it?

Amit recently started a conversation on Facebook, which has the seeds of becoming something significant in the days to come. I spoke of political activism in that note. Not participation, necessarily. Joining politics is not the only answer. Being aware and active is they key. How many of us really know where we stand as citizens? Apart from our arm-chair views and our deep-hidden desire to shoot all politicians?

I am faced with a very interesting situation in the place I live. There are a few problems in the community where I reside. A microcosm of this country, run on similar precepts that keeps this country on its feet. These problems have been ongoing for a while. And now that I am residing here and becoming more aware of the intricacies of the situation, I realise why we haven’t ever been able to solve the problem.

In order as they occur to me:

One. There is no direct statement of the problem. We seem to be going around the symptoms again and again. We seem to be cursing (no, not looking to eradicate) the virus that causes the symptoms. Not even those that can solve the problem can do anything — they do not know what to solve.

Two. There is too much of noise. So much, that nothing can be heard. Chaos prevails according to choice and the reigning emotion. Any soft sane voice is drowned in the din. Anger spews out where it isn’t deserved. No one knows where it is deserved, it is just randomly spit in all directions, hoping the cause of the problem will stand somewhere in the line of fire; die.

Three. There is no participation. There will always be someone else who suffers as much, who will pick up the gun. From behind the cordons there is strong condemnation; or cheering. No one is willing to pick up the gun and go in; search the problem; shoot it down. Someone else will do it.

Four. No one wants to be the bad guy. We want cordial relations with everyone; we do not want to hurt anyone. Every person is willing to stand behind you, no one in front. Everyone agrees with you, no one is willing to stand by you.

Five. There is no knowledge of your own standing. Who are you in the community? What authority, representation do you have? What are the responsibilities of the office bearers? What is the method for communication? Decorum?

Six. Solution Fatigue. The most important one — the ability to resign to fate and manage a problem in a nuclear way. The easiest way out. Because the community cannot solve the problem, I will solve it for me, even if it is at the cost of other community members. A short-term solution. Call everything shit and walk away. Instant-ness of the world we live in is seeping into the way we look and approach and walk away from problems.

I?

I refuse to resign to fate and the possibility of someone acting on my behalf, unchecked, while I remain ignorant of my duties and rights in a noise that deafens a sane voice that works towards a better future, without fear.

I have a new religion and I follow a new book.

Make it Matter

In the mix of emotions that gripped the city for the last three days, one emotion stood out bold.

Anger.

I am hoping for another emotion to stand out high, in the days to come.

Fear.

It is the almost stupid bravado of this city that is cause for the repeated assaults on this city. Fear must grip this city hard and bring it to a halt. At least once. When the lifeline (Read: Money) to the Centre is cut off for good, I think they will realise that this is a city that needs to keep working; kept safe.

And if you are not willing to be afraid of terror, be very afraid of being ignored till yet another event unfolds.

My City is Hurting

My city is hurting, but seeing a politician’s (or a bureaucrat’s) car stuck with you in the damning traffic that you endure everyday, provides you with a very weird sadistic pleasure.

My city is hurting. And after a while, it ebbs — the pleasure — it is transient. A hundred and forty-five minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic is something you wouldn’t wish on your enemies. For Only Thirteen Kilometres, No way! But a politician? A bureaucrat? I’d think twice. Thrice. Four times. And more. After all, I have nothing else to do while harsh red brake LEDs imprint a permanent glow in my eyes. I resist, I relent, I don’t wish this on anyone.

My city is hurting. I sense the groan of the roads and streets that take me to work and back. I wish them peace. I wish God-speed to all morose vehicles who once looked beautiful in adverts. I wish them the existence they deserve.

My city is hurting. Reality has been sidelined. The cost of progress is what we are paying for. The most volatile currency in these times is time itself. And it is at a premium. Yet we have ample time for divisive politics. To read about it, to forward arguments in favour of regionalism. We have time to remind our recipients to read emails in favour of regional protectionism.

My city is hurting. There is a tear in the fabric, and thread I have none.

For now.

New Meanings

Space, environment, intimacy and depth have new meanings.

My Extended Toothbrush

There is a thin silk thread of an invisible boundary, about our things, that eludes others. There is, therefore, a similar thread of an invisible boundary, about things that belong to others, that eludes us.

The cautious stay a few feet away from the unknown invisible; some end up stepping on the invisible and the others walk in and out of the enclosures like a walk in a park on a nice spring day.

I have known of electrified fences, physical visible boundaries, that hurt those that attempt to cross. Jolt them into being where they should stop. Personal boundaries are the opposite. When crossed, they hurt the one being protected – the intruder often oblivious to the act of trespassing.

You don’t, for example, sit in the driver’s seat of a car, if it isn’t yours. Even if you can see that invisible boundary, you don’t venture permission to drive someone else’s car. The range of invisibility is a few conceptual feet ahead in space or behind. Very few who build these meshed fences ever tell you where they are; what they protect. The onus is on the trespasser.

Take books. Rather, don’t take books. That could be a boundary. Not everyone is happily comfortable lending books. If you do manage sneak through the barrier, it is worthwhile to understand why that wall came into place. Did someone else who borrowed a book once, blissfully forget to return the book? Did it come back to its owner with smeared butter and bread crumbs on page 52, as a token of gratitude? Perhaps, it is fine that I may dunk my book in a big bowl of stale curry; may not be equally excited if you did it.

Most of these things are comprehensible if you are aware of the people around you. Even if you can’t see the invisible, it isn’t very difficult to feel it. Sometimes, it can be impossible: to know what is personal.

Wallets and Watches.
Books and Cameras.
Computers and Music.
Phones and Towels.
Earphones and Purses.

The land-mines of personal paraphernalia. Some of them duds; some very potent.

Once upon a time it was just the toothbrush – the epitome of personal possession, passionately protected.

Eulogy of a Blog(ger)

Death is more than just the expiry of life.

Last month or so, I read a few posts that talked of blog-death. Some were questions, some were tentative answers. (It is perhaps, an inconsequential coincidence that all of these posts were by women.)

I left a comment at one of these posts, that blogs, like memories, don’t die. Or something to that effect. And I believe so. People delete blogs, they stop writing at their blogs, yet blogs themselves don’t die. They may be pushed back in the darkest deepest recesses of an inaccessible server somewhere, but they don’t die. At worst, they don’t grow – they stagnate for want of nutrition.

Blogs don’t die. Bloggers do. They die two kinds of death, one of which is certain.

The one which we all know of. The inevitable, as Agent Smith calls it. I have often wondered about this. What happens when a blogger dies? The physical death, i.e. How do we know that death has occurred? Unless the blogger has shared the blog’s log-in details with someone, to write about the death in an eventuality, how would we know? Has the blogger just quit blogging? Is the blogger dead? How will we know? More-so, if we do not know the blogger in the physical world. There are blogs I frequent which haven’t been updated for years. Though there aren’t any feeds, I go there to see if there is a recent hint of life.

The other death is the choice of death. It is not certain, well, at least not till the certain death reveals itself. The choice, not to express. In that sense, the blogger dies, even if the human is still living. The blog will remain alive even after you have deleted it all, in one of Google’s cached server. And even after years, when the cache is cleaned up, there will be a link, a quote, something, somewhere that references your blog. Even if it is a memory, it will always remain.

Neo comes out of the training programme and is bleeding. He says to Morpheus, “I thought it wasn’t real.” Morpheus smiles at Neo ever so slightly, “Your mind makes it real.” Neo is puzzled, without looking at Morpheus he asks, “If you’re killed in the Matrix, you die here?”. Morpheus answers calmly, the truth that we all know, “The body cannot live without the mind.”

Blogs, you see, don’t die; bloggers do.

The Heart of a Conversation

You have perhaps noticed the recent template back-forthing at Gaizabonts. And if you are reading the blog at the site, then you have perhaps noticed that it has reverted to its original. Well, the second original. Or something like it.

In the times of reading blogs off RSS readers, how does it matter – the skin and the template? Unless you choose to comment, you hardly ever visit a blog. (Unless you use RSSBandit, which allows you to even comment from your reader!) Only a half-feed forces you to go to the blog, if at all, to read the other half.

How does appearance matter then? You are on the chat, you are on a blog, on Facebook, or Twittering away or using some such Web 2.0 contraption. No one sees the appearance. The presentation layer is missing. Is that (also) the reason most Web 2.0 sites are bereft of visual design elements?

I don’t visit many blogs at their blog address – this has been the pattern for sometime. However, I read more blogs now, than I did before. Only since I have moved to the Mac, I have started visiting blogs, if I have to comment, i.e. (RSS Bandit folks, you listening? We need a Mac version!)

It is almost easy to believe that people don’t read your blog anymore. Almost easy to believe that your readership index is lesser than before.

I doubt, if that’s the case.

The comments, you say, the comments must be indicators of readership. Yes, to an extent. But most of the times there isn’t much to be said. After a while, you get used to a person’s writing (or get bored with the sameness and such). Either way, there isn’t enough motivation to comment, especially if you know that a comment like, “wow, wonderfully written!” won’t be quite appreciated. Obviously, I am not talking of topical blogs where every other person wants to be heard and has a right to express with gay abandon.

Recently, Amit confessed that his Fine Imbalance needed a balancing act, he called it “TLC for the blog”. Then there is the dilemma that most bloggers go through which was well captured by EU, when delirium struck! The last three comments on the post by Abaniko, Jolvin and The Phish are very interesting in this context. Phish suggests a theory that boredom is the one that breaks the backbone of the better bloggers. In a way, lower readership and lesser comments are a good sign for a better blogger – they are perhaps tidings of the good times that once were?

Elsewhere, motivated by the thoughts of some bright folks, I went down the route of extending the thought of enabling conversations, through technology. Wishful-technology-thinking, you might call it. While the technology itself may be made available to ensure tracking conversations, human will is at the centre of it all. How often you visit a blog, how well you read a post and therefore how well you respond is key.

Most of us think we don’t know how and what to respond – a factor of how well we read and relate to what we read. If we know the blogger well, we might take comprehension for granted – that we understand what the blogger is saying. Like EU says:

I like people visiting my blog. Making blog friends is killing the interaction on my blog. I don’t like that.

Attention spans are shrinking, and though it shouldn’t be the case, our ability to ponder over a thought and respond well, is diminishing even further.

Here’s to better conversations, whether in a coffee shop or a cyber cafe!

Allow the Light

Sometimes, we have to allow a small place – for the light to pass through. Every wall needs a window. A conduit to the rest of the world.

Mistaking Judgement

Not all mistakes we commit, come under the purview of the local legal system.

When they do, however, you are governed by them and there is a price to pay. Sanjay Dutt got to know that amount yesterday – six years of RI. While he seems to have a glimmer of hope with the Supreme Court, the meting out of the sentence itself must have been a moment of devastation. Such is the nature of hope, often. Yet hope is a bad customer, when dealing with death.

Apparently, all’s fine in the land of the much-delayed judicial system in the country. Apparently.

In a public court, you stand covered and protected by well-wishers and your legal counsel. What do you do in your own court? What about the crimes you committed for which there isn’t a penal code? For the hearts that you broke, for the lies you got away with. The harshness or the softness of the sentence is yours to mete out. Is that a conflict of interest when you are the criminal and you are the judge?

Depends – will you be more the judge or more the criminal? Where will your loyalty lie? And in being either, won’t you have a context to pronouncing the judgement? Won’t you have the context of being righteous, the context of being sensitive or the context of being politically correct?

And then, this.

The ultimate definition of work-life balance, the desegregation of professional and personal life; I once said the same thing to a person – don’t lose faith in yourself. The punishment and the motivating words contradict to a large extent – you can believe in either. Not both. I see that the person now lives by the applicable penal code. The defined standard is a known evil – recognisable, defendable. The motivating words have no standards – erratic, devoid of substance, undependable.

Where standard penal codes don’t apply, it is better to be human. Where they do, it is better not to be.

Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi

See this.

No, wait before you read the rest of the post. See the video first. (It’s in Hindi, sorry haven’t found a translation, for those of you who don’t know Hindi, see it anyway)

What is freedom of expression?

I think of the Ganguli brothers in this film and I allow myself to be transported to the late fifties (1958 to be precise). You may have often come across the obscure question of ‘what is that one thing that you would like to change in your past?‘. Not much, if you ask me, but yes, if such thing was possible, it would require a time machine. I’d rather use the time machine to transport myself to that era – the late 50s and early 60s or the late 70s and early 80s. Without going into my personal grouse against the changes in the world today that I detest, I’d like to use the time machine to transport myself to the sets of Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi. Take the song that you just saw. See Kishore and Anup Kumar and Mohan Choti in the video.

Tell me if you can script that; direct that.

The wonderful world of free expression is a lost world for us today. See the video a few times – and you will see some awkward actions (no retakes for the purpose of perfection). Ask yourself if it matters. If it does then you need to get back to some politically correct and scripted stuff of the 21st century. Let go of the rest of the post.

If the awkward actions don’t matter, again, ask yourself why.

I’ll give you my take.

It is because the action wasn’t determined by the future reaction of the observer, no polls, no ‘customer pulse’ – just pure passion. While the Ganguli brothers may have had a plan in mind while making this film, I believe it was the spontaneity from all the actors (oh yes, Madhubala too, how can you forget!) that made it the film that it was.

These moments are the ultimate cauldron of mixed emotions. I feel happy to see such a gay expression of performance, I feel sad at the constrained expression that I often exhibit and often see – the proper conduct, I tell you – gets to me. Is it who we are that inhibits us? Hardly! More often than not, it is what “they” may think of us, how they may feel, that dictates any action. Polite communication with hidden layers of seething anger or sarcasm is hardly free expression. Will the person on the other side feel bad? Will, what I say create a different impression of who I am? Will I become an outcast? What is the price to pay for being yourself? Is that expensive than the cost of my goals? Will those that allow me to reach my goals judge my behaviour or will they judge my talent? Will I be seen as a heretic, insane, a Bohemian – is that acceptable in today’s world?

There is better question than all those that may cross your mind:

Do I know who I am and do I know who I want to be?

A Week in Italics…

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying

 

It has happened many times before, but, then I only sensed the immense physical experience of it all. Felt the body, not the soul. That one evening was different wasn’t it?

I saw her briefly on the first day, I felt her near me. In her usual glory, she smelt of her untiring belief in tomorrow, her today, busier than she yesterday did. It was nice touching down at New York. That small fling, that long moment of yearning and the longer one that will be, of nostalgia.

Globalisation, the way the pundits speak about – has nothing to with countries, civilizations or people. It is a one big world in your head. The search is all inside. Violate the laws of anatomy and physics – twist and twirl your eyes inward and see inside – if your eyes strain to make meaning – then you haven’t seen anything.

Tom & Jerry are ubiquitous. It is not a cartoon show – it is the raw philosophy of communication and its misdoings. I saw, I didn’t need a TV to see Tom & Jerry. Sex & the City is a different version in the US.

I saw a country in untainted colour – without the tarnished colour of propaganda. I saw the colour as nature intended it to be. I saw humans without them being necessarily tagged by a country.

When the face of poverty becomes an intellectual discussion in an art gallery, the intellectuals miss the point. Poverty is pure and non-aligned in all respects; its misgivings are its own – they aren’t the shameful asset of any country or people. Poverty is as artistic as the ugly child who isn’t allowed to meet the guests.

I missed her more than ever before. More than I realised and even more than I could tell her.

Hospitality is now able to make a clear statement that you are unwelcome. That was a new one for me. Guests are coloured now. What happened to “cordial and generous reception of or disposition toward guests?”

Insecurity expresses itself in a seating pattern. Think about it.

There was a Celestine conspiracy to ensure that we got to where we were supposed to get. When you have only 15 minutes to board your connecting flight, it intervenes and the flight now leaves at 4PM instead of the scheduled 2:45PM. I love the game that devil and the divine play – the human is the bacon strip between the wholemeal and the white bread. I hate being that human.

Eventually, money doesn’t matter.

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees

 

Yet, every evening it comes to bed with you in the hope that you will nurture it, make love and make it feel alive again. Such a passionate love that is, it lingers every minute of the day.

Boston. I love it, what can I say.

In one corner in the heartland I saw hope. There is still a small space for the new minorities in an otherwise monotonous world of imposed beliefs. That I got to get to this corner because of a non-believer was a small triumph.

I saw death too. A slow, incomplete death of fear. I left it to rot on the side of Mass Pike.

Food is only as good or as bad as you imagine it to be. Taste is not an attribute of the tongue, it is an attribute hidden in your mind. Open your mental taste buds and you can experience a different world.

I’ll be back home the day after. That sounds really funny now. Even more than it did before.

Every moment was bloggable, yet I shall let it be. All’s well in the land of Gaizabonts.

Empty Post

Because I saw the stats go to 19,999.

Because I like that number better than 20,000.

Because it isn’t right to leave a Friday the 13th post on the top for a long time.

Because it seems to be living a misfit’s curse.

Because a misfit is it’s own doing.

Because not everything can be said.

Because of time – its abundance, rarity and transient nature.

Because of geography and it’s cruel character.

Because of the mystery of unknown roads ahead.

Because of decisions kept as drafts, unpublished.

Because it doesn’t matter.

But it does.