the un in the usual…

from the earlier post, it may have occured to some that i seem to be in a nostalgic mood these days. i realised that while writing this one… this one deals with something i’m finding difficult to think of these days.. guess it’s always best the first time around…

a daily ritual, observed religiously for years and years, seemed unfamiliar today.the usual precursors to the ritual were present well enough: the strange, contradictory combination of a monotonous, yet crest and trough like speech of the science teacher (who, in this particular case, only ever sounded fun while describing vectors, cuz she’d always say in her south Indian accent, “Vector Oh Yay” indicating vector OA), the weary sighs of my co-sufferers, the ocassional, yet
increasingly frequent yawns and the equally ocassional, yet equally increasingly frequent churns of empty stomachs.

Realisation

i really don’t think i have done justice to this one… simply because it means so much to me, but i am in a state of serious writer’s block.. still, i wanted to put something down, and took a while to write this… so what the heck…

the alarm of the phone went off, and as always my eyes opened with the sound of the
phone’s vibration that immediately precedes the ringtone. i picked up the phone and
looked at the time, blinking at me as if the phone was playing peek-a-boo.7:00 a.m.
time to get up. goddamit!! an early morning after a late night is one hellava
bitch!! but i had to get up today… i wanted to get up today… i had to put
yesterday behind me, forget the gargantuan fuck-up, prove to myself that we’re so
much better than that… today, i, we, had to redeem ourselves..

You flip, I’ll call…

They say life is full of choices, ones we have to consciously make… they never warn us of the impasses now, do they? but they do come our way, the impasses… and then you ask yourself, whatcha gonna do when they come for you… i get the feeling this one’ll not go down easy… for some, anyway…

Heads or tails? This or that.. black or white… door no. 1 or 2? the options are usually simple enough, in all probability one option is favourable. then again, if neither option presents a sunny side up, then atleast one will be the lesser of two evils. but the deal with a coin flip is that one option is favourable to both/all parties concerned. i win, you don’t.. you win, I don’t… a series of transient spins, trasforming a simple coin into the flapping wings of some intangible butterfly, with a dopplerised ping, accompanied by the collective gasps of those whose future course of action, or for all we know, whose fates hang in the balance. then of course, seeing as the stakes are so high (even if/when they’re not), there are ground rules to the coin flip. it can’t touch anything on the way down.. if you catch it in your palm, you can’t flip it over onto your other palm, cuz then “you’ve seen it” (i get the feeling stevie wonder might get away with this, soon as he masters catching the damn coin in the first place. the piano doesn’t fly). So a ‘safe’ coin flip predicates atleast 2 parties, who stand to lose/gain in respect of some third party/subject/object based on the result of the flip.
but what if the guy flipping the coin is also the guy making the call, cuz there is no one else to make a call?

Rono spoke…

when i used to read the words ‘with a heavy heart’ i never really got it. but on ocassion, i have had to do things which made me sad, and a strange, continual heaviness in the pith of my stomach accompanied such doings. i guess that comes close enough. this post was one of those times…

it’s that time again. it keeps coming every now and then, and it hurts like hell. one of those times when you have to bid farewell to a close friend. but what if you had never really given a thought to ever saying goodbye. you knew it would happen sooner or later, you just never thought about it. and all of a sudden you realise that the light will turn green, the whistle will blow and the train will take rono away for good. another one.. gone.

Take me Home, Alfred…

it’s been a while since my last post. so much has happened since the last time i posted anything… suffice it to say that i’m in a happy state of mind right now. that’s probably why i haven’t posted anything for so long. but due to some recent prodding by one or two people, i’ve put this one up. it’s kinda self-pitying, which pisses me off. but it’s all that came out after a considerable attempt at making myself write something. i still haven’t recovered fully from the mumbai experience, so i guess it’ll be a while before i can write again as of old. but for now, guess we’ll just have to make do with this…

It has been 3 months since the virus hastened my retreat from the city they call the land of dreams. The irony is amusing as always; dreams are born and lost perpetually in the city that never sleeps. Like so many others, I too walked along its heathen shores and gazed at the Queen’s necklace, as I had never done as a child growing up in that city, feeling back then that I belonged, that it was my home. Ten years after I bid goodbye to Mumbai, I realized that it was never mine, that I was nothing more than one of the drones in a mammoth ant hill. Life was a grind, one interminable, mechanical cycle. It was such that even when I had to meet the Faithless Freak, I would inevitably find myself doing a full sprint behind a BEST bus for the better part of a kilometer, just so that I could save some cash for the mandatory coffee, smokes and chicken masala fry with roti, the only escape from the mundane routine. Working for human rights isn’t lucrative for the little guy. And Dad has done enough for me, gotta start living off my own living sometime right?

Raging Tide

The faithless freak and i have quite a few things in common. one of them, which is becoming increasingly apparent, is that we’re both losing our minds. him faster than me, it seems. this city has gotten to us, and there’s no wasy we can deny it. we continue of course to fight against the tide, the rage, the insults, the stabs. we refuse to give in, and in each others company, and i’m certain privately as well, we frequently renew our pledges to effectively shape our destinies, conquer the ocassional nudges of hopelessness. for we both know that to turn back now, to leave these heathen shores, and return to the land of the familiar, the lazy and the comfortable, would be defeat. And defeat we cannot face. We cannot stand the idea.

Driftwood

I don’t know, it is strange. It has been some 78 days since i have left home. and for most of that time, there has been one feeling that has dominated my conciousness – numbness. i am strangely, inexplicably, somewhat frighteningly numb, emotionally that is. nowadays i get the feeling sometimes that the numbness is fading. but that is no comfort, for i am afraid of what promises to emerge from behind the shadow my mind seems to have cast over my feelings.

Konkan-E-Kashmir

wrote this one for a bulletin of a club i was part of last year. the rotaract club, to be precise. it’s a neat concept, the rotaract. but ya gotta have the right ppl in the club or running the club, otherwise, it might just be a waste of time. i’m done marketing the club. the article follows…


The problem in Kashmir rages on. Terrorist camps, bombings, shootings, atrocities by the army, civilian casualties, and recently the earthquake; everything in the papers make Kashmir out to be quite an unfriendly place to live. But I do not wish to join the mass of people who rue opon the problems in the valley. Let others talk of politics, of terrorism, of religion; these do not inspire me at this point of time. I would much prefer to write about my limited but fruitful contact with the valley, and this occurred right here in Maharashtra, when the Rotaract Club of Pune Ganeshkhind hosted 10 Kashmiri students and took them to Shrivardhan in the Ratnagiri district for the Rotaract Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) organised by the Rotarians there.

Gandhi Who?

i wrote this article for a magazine that a club i was once a part of used to publish. it didn’t make it to the magazine, cuz our club president thought that there was sufficiently enough inflammatory language to mislead our readers. just to clarify in advance, this is not an anti-gandhi article. read it till the end before pasing judgement. this article was written way before munnabhai 2, and at the risk of sounding boastful, i claim that i used the reference of gandhi on money for the first time, way before it became fashionable to do so. also, i’m no gandhian, so this article is no indication of my ideological inclinations. it’s just something i wrote, and wanted to be able to read once in a while…

Just Flinging It

for those who may have been following my blog for a while, you might remember a post which read “I’m in unlove”. in that post i was rather uncharitable to the person on whom it was written. i realised a while back that my unnecessary outburst in my blog reflected a certain amount of immaturity. so i removed that post. yet, as these writings are the only , though unsystematic, record of some happenings in my life, i felt it necessary to lay down my thoughts on the subject again.

a few months ago, i started seeing someone. it just happened all of a sudden. in fact, it was kinda strange. i met this gal on the christmas eve of 2006, and we sat over coffee and a sandwich, generally chatting up on a bunch of things. it is my experience, and i’m sure many will agree, that when a guy and a gal talk to each other for an extended period of time, the conversation invariably veers towards relationships. past flames, likes, dislikes, what you look for in a guy/gal, stuff like that. and this time was no exception. it was a few months before my finals. i was about to leave college life behind, and i didn’t know where i’d be after that, but i knew i wouldn’t be in pune. an era in my life was ending, and important era, one which is meant to be THE time in my young life. so far, i had had a great college life, although the really good stuff only started from 3rd year. there was one thing that i’d always wanted to try, but never did go for. and that was, the iconic, the legendary, the elusive, amorous, no-strings-attached fling. it was about time ‘ol Da got his ‘hands dirty’ and played the game for the heck of it.