Random thoughts after walking around town in a storm....

There is no reason why it needs to make any sense!

Hope can be a strange thing at times… It happens all the time. One knows full well that one ought not or rather dare not, but one does hope a person might surprise you… The crux of the matter being that this can happen and happen in only one way possible which is when one is fully aware. You are so bloody self-conscious that it isn’t funny! There isn’t any other way you can be either! Ghalib once said- “Wafa kaisi kahan ka ishq, jab sar phodna thehrah? Toh phir ey sangdil tera hi sang-e-asatan kyun ho?” It’s the worst feeling to quote a friend- “There are times when you wish the person in front of you was a person and not a brick wall!” But then too you know the person in question is a brick wall and yet you choose to break your head against it. To quote again from Ghalib- “Yehi hai aazmana toh satana kisko kehte hain? Giri hai jispe kal bijli who mera aasatan kyon ho?”. I am a Ghalib obsessed nerd of sorts and so much so that I have a sher for ever occasion. Life is one big Melodrama as far as I am concerned… Par baat kuch aisi hai ke aisi baatein kisi ko kyon batau! You know you are unsure of yourself, so why go telling the world!

Life has been like one never ending Super Mario Brothers game… you cross ever god dam level there is! Get eaten by piranhas, get swallowed by man-eating (well Mario eating) plants, get blown around by a fire-breathing dragon, get poked by all sorts of sharp things and you make it to the “Enchanted Castle” and rescue the damsel in distress. So far so good, right? Then you are told that this is not the real Princess and that the real princess is actually being hidden in some other castle and your quest begins again… 32 levels! 32 levels and I still didn’t find the “Princess” or the “Enchanted Castle”… now you might tell me I gave up to easily and that I should quit rambling, cribbing and complaining… One knows yet again that one runs the risk of being called a whiner…. You know deep down inside that you are not whining despite the one million and one arguments people present you with…. They say it in such a mathematical fashion! You say this, ok and this is followed by that and hence q.e.d. you are cribbing… It’s strange how easily it’s said…

“Hazaaron Khwaishen aisi ke har khwaish pe dam nikle’

Bahut nikle mere armaan lekin phir bhi kam nikle.”

Main na toh shayir hoon na to hone ka dava karta hoon…. Mujhse lakh kasrat karne par bhi tuk milane ke ummeed nahi ki ja sakti… I can maybe relate to some stuff which I find really intense… It’s the sheer overwhelming feeling when you read something and are left completely speechless…. It’s quite like some feelings you can’t express to people… You want to and only because they matter. But then you hold back… At times one makes the effort and in spite of the mortal fear of being laughed at says some things…. But how many times… It gets bloody BORING! It’s strange how at times being fully aware you allow things to happen… People at some point begin to matter and it is but natural that they would and it wouldn’t be such a big deal if you weren’t so messed-up yourself! The question then is, are you really that messed-up? Is it strange that the smallest of things matter to you? There are some subtleties that you notice that no one else seems to notice. At some point in time being naive you expect people to understand… It is also at times about the kind of people you have been around, people who let you BE. They may not understand you but the respect the fact that you thing the ways you do and leave it at that. You go through life expecting that is different configurations. You obviously don’t get it and that too you get used to. But then again there is this little thing within you that just for once wishes, even hopes against hope to be surprised… That doesn’t happen! Then you really don’t know what to do… You know and yet you somewhere hope and it’s not like you are let down… Then what the hell do you call that thing?

People will always be full of good advice. They will respond to many things with their own theories on LIFE! They will say in response to certain things like- “It’s quite like some feelings you can’t express to people… You want to and only because they matter”, that don’t let things get to you or don’t take people so seriously, you are reading too much into things, logon ki itni ehmiyat hi mat do and so on and so forth… Ab koi inko kya kahe… “Poochte hain ke Ghalib Kaun hai? Koi Batlaya ke hum batlayenge kya?”. Ab zahir si baat hai ke aap aur main alag insaan hain aur lazim hai ke humara rawwaiya bhi alag hi hoga. How can you comment on the way I react to certain things if you are not me?! There are reasons for the things I do, they may be illogical to the world at large but they are reasons to me none the less. It’s like all the irrational fears people have, fear of heights, spiders, darkness, monsters etc. Your fears aren’t concrete fears like those so it’s impossible for people to say-“I understand”. It’s rather obvious that they DON’T! The next thing 9 out of 10 people will react to will be- “But then you hold back… At times one makes the effort and in spite of the mortal fear of being laughed at says some things…. But how many times… It gets bloody BORING!” It works like a charm. Aap yeh kahoge to log kehne ko beqarar rahenge ke iss bar aap bolne ki koshish kar ke dekhiye. This is when I feel like saying, I know it is mean but it must be said, “Please read offer document carefully before purchase”. Arre koi samjaho inko that one has been communicating till the point of being BLUE in the face doing so... and still no one has ever got it… At times you encounter a person or two who try very hard and with all the goodness of their heart want to understand it…. That’s what makes you feel ever worse! You feel out of breath and stammer and stutter while the person sits in front of you without batting an eyelash looking at your face as though with the hope of some patters revealing themselves. One is very lucky in a sense to have had the privilege of being in the presence of such people of extreme sensitivity. Its scary how tuned in they are and how much they take upon themselves. It is in such a situation that one is at a total loss for things to do.

How does one communicate the feeling of being in love? There are one billion and one ways of expressing it. Some will say the skies are bluer or the rose is redder and if you are a more complex being you’ll resort to the use of metaphor. There are unnumbered ways in which love manifests. For some it manifests in the form of personalized, custom-made dinner that took you 3 months to plan and 3572 bucks to execute. You buy the wine to go well with the meat and that does you out of some 2000 odd bucks. Then the scented candles and of course the food which is about another 1200 bucks then you have all the add-ons like a white silk blindfold. The last thing you buy is a single long-stemmed red rose that sits perfectly in a crystal long-necked vase in the center of the table reclined at an angle of 70 degrees. Then there are other timed when it manifests as a CD-compilation of the cheesiest love songs in a case filled with rose petals or a long walk down a starlit lane bound tied to each other by two ends of a set of stereo headphones connected to a walkman strapped to your belt. One can say all of this and more but how does one say anything more than this. You can describe the feeling when you are walking side by side on that starry night, you can feel the warmth radiating from the person next to you and even say it in as many words, but there is something that prevents you from reaching out and holding the other person’s hand. You look down at the road and look up, your eyes meet and you know that very instant that the other person too feels exact same pleasurable awkwardness. How do you put into words exactly what it is that stops you from reaching out and holding the other persons hand or the fact that you feel the other person also feels the same thing. What do you do then? You look away and the next time your eyes meet… the both of you are in splits of laughter. You look at each other’s maddest moments with adoring indulgence and you don’t know why… which when you say it must be love!

It obviously doesn’t work which is why you would sit and write all of this rot to begin with! Then you say my heart is broken and there is a whole “Devdas syndrome” that follows. What strikes one is the typicality of the whole thing… and what strikes one even more is when people expect originality and creativity from you even in terms of expressing grief! But what does one do when it’s a feeling not as obvious as this… For us “love-forsaken” beings as people say who are incapable of feeling emotions of this magnitude or for us who don’t make such a fuss about anything we feel…. What does one do? You don’t want to say things for you know they sound petty to you and you don’t care how it sounds to anyone else because you are not going to talk about it anyway. How do you explain to another person… the type you somewhere deep down inside hope will surprise you… that they didn’t surprise you. It’s not like it’s a Himalayan disappointment because you know and can almost see it coming at some point of time. While all of this plays in your head people around you whom you allow some space to get close to you in the sense that you talk to them see “changes” in your behavior. They come up to you and tell you and it must be said in Bangla for otherwise the impact is totally lost- “Tomar mon kharap…” the three dots are implied in the way it is said, as in I didn’t put it there just because I’ve put dots everywhere else. That really gets my goat! Who the hell are you to come up to me and tell me that I’m depressed?! How do you know what I am feeling and how the hell you decide on naming it?

Baat kuch aisi hai-

“baat nikalegee to phir duur talak jaayegee

 log bewajaH udaasee kaa sabab poochhenge

 ye bhee poochhenge ke tum itnee pareshaaN kyooN ho

 oongliyaaN uTheNgee sookhe huye baaloN kee taraf

 ek nazar dekheNge guzre huye saaloN kee taraf

 chooDiyoN par bhee kaI taNz kiye jaayeNge

 kaaNpate haathoN pe bhee fikRe kase jaayeNge”

Kash ke logon mein itni samajh hoti! Chehre ke taasur samjhna toh door padhna bhi kahan kisi ke bas mein hai? The point is that one is not looking for that.

“Yeh kahan ki dosti hai ke bane hain dost nahseh?

Koi charasaaz hota koi ghamguzaar hota.”

I am back I guess…..
I’m rather pleased with myself! Things seem quite nice actually. The more things seem to be ‘falling apart’ the more they seem to be falling into place.
What I mean is…… well you know what I mean. If you don’t then, my imagination is as good or as bad as yours’! Its been a while since I woke up in the morning “up as a daisy” and so I shalln’t allow it to go waste. So lets talk business. Lets talk about SORRY BHAI.
“Very sorry indeed!”
“Do the words painful and unusual torture mean anything to you!”
Were the reactions I got from some friends who watched the film, one of whom hadn’t slept in 24 hrs. Now you must thing that is no big deal! Yes for me it isn’t. I can make do with 8 hours of sleep over a span of something like 6-7 days and I’m still sane! Well almost sane, for how is one to define sanity. That’s a whole different debate. Lying in bed wondering when a rickety old fan is going to fall on one’s head isn’t exactly sane per say. But then again here I am!
Getting back to SORRY BHAI, being a person of a rather ‘sunny disposition’ I cant help but look at the ‘sunny side’ of things. It was fun! A whole bunch of people who went on a vacation to Mauritius and once they got there, having realized that they have camera, crew and the whole paraphernalia required to make a film decided to do just that while they were at it. Why does everything have to be logical and coherent?! This is what modern existence does to us; turns us in to material causality seeking creatures. Its like what happens when a cat sees a ball roll across the room, it runs after it. Similarly a kid runs after the ball. The ball is what is of any consequence to a child or a cat! But to us “rational beings” the ball is of no consequence but what concerns us is the source of the ball! Why does there have to be a logic or a narrative that connects a sequence of events? May be there is a whole different rationale in operation that we being “material causality seeking rational beings” absolutely fail to understand. Why should one have a character’s dialogues dubbed in bad Hindi when the actor is perfectly capable of delivering the same? Is it anybody’s fault that we find something predictable?
One thing I did realize from watching the film was that had I pursued science after 10+2 , I’d probably have ended up as a physicist trying to make a wooden dog fly, who plays the sax in his free time and fantasizes about women in red flowing strappy gowns. That’s one thing I did “carry home” with me from the “film-watching experience”. Boman Irani was simply brilliant in parts. All those parts being the ones in which it was rather evident that he had been left to his own devices. Sharman Joshi did a good job of looking clueless and lost, which personally I feel wasn’t bad acting at all, it was just true to the character. Shabana Azmi as the cranky mother who’s hit mid-life crisis and has decided that its time she got on a diet was …. Well…. Good I should say. I’ve been on the General motors’ diet and its not what I’d define as pleasant. So as far as I am concerned she has every right to be cranky. I you were living on fruits one day, salads the next, soup another etc. you’d be cranky too and for no reason, this woman at least has reason ( reasonable or not but reason all the same). In the midst of all the doldrums and the heightened psycho-emotional drama the “high water” water mark of the comedy is an exchange between father and son who stand by (at a safe distance) look on at mother and bride to be of well one of the brothers frolicking in the sea. The comic timing was just bang on when Sharman Joshi says “only one of them will return alive”!
Well all in all I wouldn’t say I hated the film. I didn’t love it either and I shalln’t say anything other than that “ It wasn’t bad, may be misunderstood, but not bad.” It was entertaining to say the very least and I came away feeling rather pleased with myself for two reason: a. I abandoned science after 10+2 and took up literature and b. I didn’t invest in shares when I had the chance.

It’s been a while I’ve been planning to do this but somehow never got around to doing it. Each time I would think of a tomorrow when I would get down to business. It’s anyone’s guess that, that particular tomorrow, never came. It is human nature to procrastinate. So can’t actually blame myself. A lot of people have been pestering me to write something; anything. They say it would be a cathartic experience and I would be a saner person if I did. I really don’t know if I could get any more or less saner than I am, but yes, I do miss writing. All of a sudden I find the only things I seem to be writing are academic answers. Not that I’m doing a bad job of them. Just that it’s all I seem to be doing. Reading is another thing I seem to be taken-up with. Read Milan Kundera’s The Book of laughter and forgetting and it was quite an experience I must admit. While reading the book there were many instances when I felt like, it’s rather difficult to describe actually, well let’s just say it wasn’t a very pleasant feeling. Then there were moments when I felt, “Why the hell am I reading this book?” and then others when I felt like the author had lost it! All the laughing and forgetting had gone to his head! One couldn’t blame the man either; imagine living under the conditions people did in the time he wrote. Then there were incidents that would repulse most but intrigued me. May be people are this way. Who knows? I for one felt like I must get out more often. But what struck me when I finally finished the novel was the sheer artistry with which all these bizarre events had be strung together. So much so that when each is viewed in retrospect linked to the other it really didn’t seem all that bizarre after all. What really took me by surprise is that at the end of it all I could relate to the emotions that underlined all these bizarre and not so bizarre events. I could go on, but actually that wasn’t why I began in the first place.
The whole big Idea was to try my hand at writing something. I have always held that poetry comes easier to me than prose. I lack the patience to write prose. That I shall work on. This is something I came-up with last night. I really don’t know if its cathartic and neither do I wish to sit down and make a Freudian analysis of it. A poem doesn’t always have to be about someone, but it has to be about something and more than just one thing.

12th October 2008
11:35pm.

For hours on end

we used to speak

Of things, strange, as,

a faucet leak.

Now all you seem

to do is whine-

“Give me back the

things that were mine.”

Bring me this today

And that tomorrow.

You say I am “Mean”

With endless sorrow!

Not a word I say-

In silence comply.

Because when I ask

You’ll have no reply.