Wide-eyed lament

I’ve tried drinking
And I’ve tried music
But sleep, it doesn’t come.

I’ve tried vodka,
And gin and tonic
But sleep, it doesn’t come.

I’ve tried walking
And I’ve tried talking.
I’ve tried listening
And reading
Starving
And cringing.
I’ve tried friends
I’ve tried enemies

I’ve even tried cribbing

But sleep... it just doesn’t come.

H.A.T.E.

I hate the world, for all its people
And life, for its emptiness.
Work, for its pretensions
And God, for his followers.

I hate love, for its lies
And justice, for its keepers.
History, for our teachers
Religion, for the preachers.
Nights, for the insomnia
Day, for its length.
Friends for their absence
And doctors for their smell.
Relatives for their transparency
Children for their cruelty.

I hate time, for its elasticity.

Tragedies, for the comic-relief.
Bullies, for their fear
Movies, for the actors
Television, for the serials
Books, for the envy.

Smoking, for the smokers
Drinking, for the mornings-after

Jesus, for Paul
Ram, for Sita.
Faith, for its certainty
Music, for my inability.

Most of all, I hate me. For me.

Words alone do not a writer make.
Nor yet does a surfeit of imagination
or the art of a story teller.
But original thought,
a desire to see through to life's very core,
and having perceived the Truth therein,
to present it, with its lusture still intact,
to the world - that, is the calling.

Or, in other words, give me something to say.

Redemption

The stinging smell of cordite woke him from his coma, or so the doctors would say, when they found his empty bed. The fire alarms, his clarion call, had woken him from what seemed to him a short nap, but what had, in reality been a decade's slumber. Rumpelstiltskin, he thought, only, he had awakened to a dsytopian world where things seemed to be perpetually falling apart. But what sort of world had he fallen asleep in? For a decade, his wife had waited for him, showing up everyday at the allowed visiting time, and praying by his side, with an infinite patience, which was even now reflected on her peaceful countenance as she lay blown ten feet away by the full force of the explosion. This must be Hell, he thought. It would hurt a lot more if I remembered any of this. Thank God for small mercies, he mused grimly. He looked at her with dumb incomprehension, trying to remember who she was and what she meant to him. His brain was working overtime to protect him from regaining his memory. All he remembered was heavily censored and practically useless bits and pieces of information.
He tried to get out of bed, but slumped back, too weak to move, his muscles wasted by the immobility. He could discern hooded figures moving towards him a few feet away. They proceeded to yell at him. Who were these idiots? What were they doing here? Had they killed this woman? He found himself criticizing the choice of cordite as an explosive material. The fools, too much sound and fury signifying nothing. A strip of Semtex would have been more than sufficient.
Breathing was suddenly made exhausting by this attempt at movement, and he tried to fight off the mists of sleep that were descending upon his shrinking sight. He inhaled deeply, as the tunnel vision erupted into a white fireball of light, and the cacophony of yells and screams in a strangely familiar tongue gave way to the piercing silence of unconsciousness.

A twig snapped under his feet, as he found himself upright, clawing at the air to shield his eyes from the harsh sunlight. “Delivered again, from darkness into light”, he thought grimly, remembering a half-forgotten prayer from his childhood.
“What if this darkness is what I really want?”
A glance revealed a lot of details, but explained nothing. His brain was clever, a protective force that had recently run amuck, and much more of a formidable opponent than his waking self, if that is the term to applied to a conscious persona that is permanently marooned in the cavernous depths of an overactive imagination.
He was in some kind of jungle, cloaked in greenery so vast and bright that it made him squint. The air was blanketed by the fresh smell of the earth after a rain spell. He suddenly remembered what childhood was like. He remembered how it felt to run barefoot on the wet earth, with the mud between his toes, chasing after his accomplices, with the smoke of his village lazily wafting over the horizon. He remembered yelling with all the strength he could muster, out of the sheer happiness that belongs to a child who knows no responsibility, and has no concept of the idea of actions and consequences. Those lessons would come later. But for now, he could taste freedom and happiness, for this one brief moment. He celebrated it exultantly. It was a rebirth, the re-birth of an emotion he had thought long since to be dead.
He caught sight of a settlement in the distance, much like his own. Smoke drifted peacefully out of the chimneys, diffracting the rays of the reddening sun. He found himself gravitating towards it,as the Voice continued droning. All living things must eventually return to the place of their birth,to be taken in again in the arms of an innocent happiness long since lost, a place where all sins are forgiven, and the pain and sorrow of every lesson learned in life is washed clean by the swiftly raging torrents of bliss, of extinction.
He had not staggered three paces when ruins suddenly appeared all around him, rising out of the ground, the trembling earth torn and bruised as large chunks of rock carved out by forgotten artisans started crashing all around. Crumbling towers of granite shot upwards, seeking union with the vastness of space. Were they the pillars of his forgotten beliefs, so eager in their desire to reach upwards, to reach the nothingness above, that they cared nothing about the destruction they caused?
As he looked around uncomprehendingly, his flight instincts were suddenly suppressed by a new understanding that was dawning on him. His mind was playing out his life in metaphors. The village was now on fire. Children were running, screaming, on fire. Men and women were writhing on the ground in flames, trying to shake themselves of everything they could, to be given a chance to live again. The thick sting of cordite was once again in the air. “Things always start to crumble when happiness rears its head”, the disconnected Voice in his head lectured, as his disoriented stagger turned into a full fledged run in the direction of the town. Out of all this destruction, came discovery, the nauseating discovery that he was somehow responsible for all of this. He was responsible for the lives of those children. He was responsible for why there was a hideously disfigured body in the town square. As he moved closer, he started to recognize details about the corpse. It had once been known to him. It had once been a living, breathing, talking, moving mass, that had much to say about the state of the world, and what should be done to improve the lot of the people that it considered allied to the Cause. He found himself in tears at the sight, conscious of the fact that it had happened once before, yet, there was no memory of tears that time. “Why now? What is happening to me?”. He looked at the bodies of the children that were innocent casualties of his personal war. In each of those little bodies, lay his happiness, a happiness he had worked hard to build, as he remembered slowly, what he meant to these people, and what he had ended up becoming. A torn red vest lying next to the corpse caught his eye. Little details,colors and smells form the patchwork quilt of our memories, the Voice said. Out of this shredded and stained fabric, a myriad details were now unraveling, too swiftly for his dull mind to process. The sudden onslaught of memory pulled him to his knees, as shots rang out. Uniformed men appeared, firing indiscriminately at everyone and everything. Those in flames were consigned to the merciful hail of bullets that immediately cut short all their suffering. The soldiers seemed to be moving in his direction. They moved slowly, unsure of their surroundings, yelling to each other in strange tongues, strangers in these strange lands. But this was home to him. He felt he knew the land. He belonged here. He felt a connection to it, he had a stake in its prosperity, a stake these destructive strangers did not have. They were looking for him. They had destroyed everything trying to find him. A new word came to him. Infidels. His brain was now fighting a losing battle with his memory as the torrent of forgotten memories advanced, bursting with their new-found potency, in much the same way as he was losing the battle against the Infidels with guns. He screamed, the impotent scream of a crippled leader who is face to face with the inevitability of a defeat he had long seen coming. The more discriminating marksmen in the uniformed lot took aim, a burst of fire in his direction, and all was silence once more.

He woke up screaming in a tongue he did not know. A shocked old woman sat in front of him, the jar of water in her hand knocked off by his ferocious return to consciousness. Discarded explosives lay everywhere. Amidst the metallic clatter of the falling jar, he tried to come to grips with his identity. It could not be true. He felt like he had woken up from a slumber, and that everything bad was a dream, and it was his redeeming qualities that constituted reality. It could not be so, he told himself. One does not do these things, especially a person who has devoted his whole life to the betterment of younger, more innocent souls, so that the innocence he lost in the holocaust of his youth, could be preserved in these children. He had been a teacher before he had been overtaken by the madness “What have I become? What have I done?”
“You have done God's will, Brother”, a voice said from outside. A tall, bearded man walked in. Even though he had not seen his reflection in at least 10 years, he was struck by the man's familiarity, the resemblance to himself. It was almost as if this figure were an external projection of his own self. He did not know who his parents were, but he knew now that his mother had given birth to twins.
The man embraced him. “Your wife is dead, we did not know she would be by your side. We were given to understand that the only people around would be the prisoner detail that was responsible for your safety during your internment. She took care of you for all the years that we could not, and even though she is not one of us, we pray that the Almighty will make space for her in his heart. The world thinks you are in a coma and will never awaken. We must now continue the fight for the oppressed, and as soon as you are better, we will send you again into the occupied lands. Strike where it hurts, and again, do us proud. Brother, you are indeed back from the abyss. Our parents would be proud of you.”

Pride?, he thought. There was no pride left. What little that was left, had died with her. He became conscious of the realization that while his conscience was asleep, he had been little more than a mass-murderer. A sociopath masquerading behind a professorial countenance.

He remembered now, how he had met her. The long evenings spent under the canopy of the huge oak tree in the town square. He remembered the musical sound of her laugh, the idle chatter of the shifty-eyed village urchins who were jealous of him for possessing what they desired. He remembered how easily she submitted to him, how easily they fell in love. The long, seemingly interminable years of their romance flooded his consciousness as the tears freely rolled down his cheeks. In his re-birth, he had lost his soul, the one person who had given him the strength to carry on when the weight of his beliefs became too heavy for him to carry. She had never asked him a question about what he believed in. He wished she had. He wished he could have told her everything, he wished he could have confessed, that he was not just a teacher of science, he was also a maker of bombs, a “merchant of death”, that he was also an ardent fanatic, firmly committed to a Cause he had only the dimmest understanding of. A Cause that had destroyed his life so completely that only shards of the broken mosaic were left for him to gather. He wished he had surrendered, he wished could have given himself up early in the game, and not have had to suffer this crushing loss of everything he held close. His beliefs had destroyed everything. Reaching up towards the sky, they had left a trail of destruction in their wake.
The sunlight glinting off the barrel of his brother's discarded AK-47 brought him back to reality. There was only one thing left to do, the right thing.
In a hamlet 3 miles away, locals reported hearing a burst of sustained gunfire. The screams went unheard, as the leadership of an entire insurgency was annihilated. Witnesses reported hearing a solitary shot an hour later. Flocks of frightened crows flew towards the sunset. The scattered band of leaderless insurgents gave statements to the press, citing the insanity of one of their leaders as a reason for the alleged massacre. The occupying army countered, stating that a double agent had successfully infiltrated and eliminated the leadership. The woman was quietly buried in her hometown by her weeping family, and the world did what it does best. It forgot.

Revolutions turn this world around.

Ghosts in the mirror of what could have been

So many choices we have to make.
So many roads we fail to take.
Wonder how many lives I’ve already lost
in a lifetime spent calculating their cost.

The Man in the Mirror

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
– Aldus Huxley

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Ravi caught his eye in the bathroom mirror, as he prepared for his morning shave. For a moment, he couldn’t place the man. It was a common enough face, easily forgotten. He took in the graying stubble and the receding hairline, the face puffy from too many late nights in the office and too little sun. One of the many middle-aged men you pass everyday on the streets – of no consequence.

A common face, defined by a common name. And now, framed in one of the cheap plastic mirrors you find by the Bombay roadside in the hundreds.

Hell isn’t a snake pit filled with righteous fire. It isn’t a little red man wielding a farming implement.

Hell is a mediocre life in a planet of infinite possibilities. It is your bald landlord squeezing his luxury out of your necessity. It’s watching your dreams merge into grey nothingness, and slip away unnoticed among the cubicles. It’s the fourth seat on a Bombay local that feels like home. It’s winning a fight for love, only to lose it in the battle of life. It’s typing your name in google and getting 16,000,000 hits – none of them about you.

Hell is waking up one morning and finding a common stranger in your bathroom mirror.

Ravi stared at the man in the mirror. Was he trying to tell him something? The eyes didn’t look quite as dull as they had a moment ago. In fact, they were shining fiercely now, as if he wished to transmit his very soul through the glass and into Ravi.

Then the man spoke. “You don’t need to stay. There is a better world. All you have to do, is step through.”

The voice was his, and the words had come from him, but it was the man who spoke. Was he losing his mind? But he had always known that things weren’t quite as they seemed. He’d always felt the void. In a sense, the man in the mirror had always been there, watching him – waiting for the right moment.

The moment was now. Ravi felt it in his bones. He finally realised that he was the one in the mirror – on the wrong side of it. In Hell. On the other side, was the real him. The one he’d lost on the streets of Bombay a long time ago – the man in his mirror.

Once he’d realised this, stepping through was easy. In a way, he was already there, existing in both world’s simultaneously. It was just a question of perspective.

Reality is arbitrary – you can choose the one you want.

He was through. Everything seemed as before, but the man in the mirror was gone. Ravi smiled at himself, and felt ten years younger. He was out of Hell. In a new world, things would be different. He could be different. Time to change.

A little apprehensive, he headed for the door. He hoped the people would be kind, and not shun him. But he knew that however bad things got, they could never be as bad as Hell.

He opened the door and stepped out into the light, to find a sea of people prostrated before him. All of them chanting the same thing:

“Welcome, visitor from paradise.”

Inventory of a Wasted Life

I have sent 12 'business' emails today.

The primary function of 7 of these emails was to cover my quivering pink ass.

3 of these emails were sent to 'confirm' (read 'repeat') what I had already verbally communicated to the recepient. To cover his/her quivering pink ass.

2 of these emails were constructive, and hence could possibly get me into trouble in the days to come.

I love corporate culture.

15 Minutes

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Everybody will have their faces transmitted across the ‘global village’ to the proverbial idiot box for at least 15 minutes. Tom will finally have his day in the sun, Dick will not be denied his fan following and Harry will see himself lit up on every billboard in Jaisalmer.

The future is now. Today, so called ‘reality shows’ are just the rage. Even as I write this piece, some enterprising suit in some multi-million dollar media corporation is cooking up a revolutionary new idea for yet another reality show – shocking, scandalizing and even more titillating than ever before. And of course, it is going to star you and me.

Stars have to look the part. People are getting better looking with every generation, women get better looking every day. Pretty soon, ‘plain Jane’ will be extinct. Or as near extinct as won’t matter to the rest of the world. This genocide is, in part, the responsibility of the innumerable beauty products of numerous cosmetic and health care companies.

The gap between the faces we see on television and the silver screen, and the ones we see in our high schools, colleges and local pubs is getting shorter every few years.

Every once in a while, you are struck with the strange feeling that the World just got prettier. Well-proportioned, healthy people, with perfect skin and complexion. Above all, people who know how to make the best of what they already have.

Throw in the miracle of plastic surgery, laser treatment, hair replacement and the myriad other ingenious ways by which technology helps us regain our lost youth and beauty, and you have a pretty formidable mix. Especially when the new you can be a whole lot better than the real you ever was, at least externally.

Technology is the fountain of youth. And it comes with a price tag.

Value is always relative. If everyone is pretty, no one will be beautiful. If everyone is on television, it won’t be enough to make you famous.

Earlier, you had to be special to be famous. Now, you are considered special if you are famous. In the near future, you’ll have to prove yourself special if you want to stay famous.

The trend can already be seen. Most people who turn up for the American Idol auditions are not really there because they think they have a shot at the title. They’re there to be on television. But they won’t be, unless they make a fool of themselves in some outlandish way – unless they entertain.

And when all you have is 15 minutes, you have to be very entertaining if you hope to be remembered.

The conclusion? In the future, everyone will be Famous. And Special (in the same way that a child with half his brain missing is special).

But hopefully, the sun will burn out before that day dawns.

Bess

She came from darkness into light. But it seemed more as if her very presence had vanquished the night, and set the little room aglow. Indeed, the brilliant white light seemed but a manifestation of her inner fire.

Such was Bess.

She knew truth, she had the answers. In her, lay Earth’s eternal salvation. She was God’s chosen one.

But Earth is no heaven. God’s messengers do not have it easy here. And so it was with Bess. Her own people had shunned her. Her neighbours had derided her, and her parents had driven her out. You see, her society was a rigidly structured one, and there was no place for heavenly messengers there. Even ones so obviously touched by the hand of God. Such is the lot of all true prophets.

But she hadn’t lost faith, and God had shown her the way. He revealed himself to her in a dream, and told her to go to the Others – the only ones capable of ruling the planet if her people were not ready for the Message.

The devil had tried his tricks with her then, sowing uncertainty in her mind and hoping to reap her soul in return. The Others were very young after all, and fragile. They were of little faith, and even less wisdom. All true. But they had also accomplished much in their short time, and there were a few among them who were capable of higher things.

The devil retreated, disgruntled. Such was her spirit.

Her journey had been a long one. And without the support of her people, dangerous in the extreme. But she had climbed over every obstacle with courage. And gone around a few, with wisdom. In the end, she had prevailed. And God had shown her the way – a devout family with an intelligent child who showed much promise for her age. They were the ones who were to receive the Message first. They were to be her first disciples, as per God’s wish. But she only wished to be a true friend. Such was Bess.

And so the moment had finally come. And she stepped out of the shadows, and revealed herself to the family. ‘Here I am, the messenger of Truth and God. And I bring to you salvation, the hope of heaven. Wilt thou listen?’

“Eeeeuuu!! Mum! A roach!”

And so did Bess become a martyr.

6X3

“The magic of discovery is not in finding new landscapes, but in finding new eyes with which to see them.”

Sitting in the darkness, contemplating stories with roaches for stars and human vices for subplots…where are we going, you and I? Heading inexorably toward some nameless destination, maybe our destruction, why do we rush so? Where did the excitement go, the wonder of it all? Now the only wonder left to me is to watch myself go through another day without a clue.

I set the scene carefully – not too much light, not too little. Story of my life. Perhaps a life lived in mediocrity is a blessing not to be realised until harder days fall upon us.

And then there’s the music. Oh, the music! Sometimes I do think I am sick of it – those carefully arranged expressions of other people’s creativity. Nameless strangers invading my mind with their experiences, leaving bits of their souls to fill the gaps in mine. And yet I do need them as much as they need me.

Locked in a 10ft.X20ft. room I sit, my mind enclosed in a 3ft.X6ft. home. When will I escape? Where would I escape to? The questions are endless. The answers may seem easy at first but then I realise they don’t answer anything at all. A tangled web of lies posing as solutions that neither solve, nor gratify.

What is it to live, if you do not think of the after life? Always lived for the future, and now that it's here, I do not know where I am.

And here I sit, dreaming up stories with roaches for stars, carefully arranging sentences and subplots to express my creativity – baring my soul on lined paper.

And the world turns around once again.

Immortal

We are God’s middle children. Born into Man’s middle ages. Too late for heroes and rock stars. Too soon for eternal salvation.

There are no more world’s to be found, no more ocean’s to be navigated. The mountains have been vanquished, the skies conquered. The virgin forests have all been raped.

Where do we go from here? How do we find the light when we have forgotten the feel of darkness on our skin, in our souls?

How will we live, when man cures death?

I hurt myself just to feel alive. Like a lens focusing, the pain brings my existence to life. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

I want to run, the wind in my face, the devil behind me. I want to run, reckless abandonment in my stride and the exhilaration of fear in my veins. I want war, I want rebellion.

I want to die, but only as an immortal.

One

One life
One love
One dream, all our own
One place to call home.
One more day to take flight
One more gift to make it right.
One last day, before endless night.

In my twentieth year

I didn’t know a bawa from a tava
And I’d never heard of bawis.

The only Mac I knew was McDonald’s
And Reddy was a chap I went to school with.

I couldn’t tell the difference between a Muslim and a Christian
And didn’t know there was any, between Mangloreans & Goans

Today, I’m out in the real world
And know all this and more

And I’d just like to say:
Thank you to all my friends
Who shared my ignorance
Thank you to my teachers
Who encouraged it
And thank you to my parents
Who gave birth to it.

Writer's Bloc

I want to write. The ink flows freely, but the words do not.

I’m so ugly. But that’s ok, cuz so are you.

What do I say? How do I begin? This moment is the difference between genius, and a life wasted.

This, is Sparta.

The moment of creation, of birth. Everything could change tonight, if only the world would shift a little to the left.

I stand on the brink of greatness. And mediocrity. Tonight, is the difference.

Tonight, we die in hell.

Glory. Or eternal night. I can see the fork, but which one will my pen take?

One word, that’s all I need. A revelation.

Yea.

I can sense what is not yet here. I just have to dip into the stream and fish it out. But I cannot.

I need to write. I feel the night steal away, taking my destiny with it.

If I go crazy, will you still call me Superman?

How can you fear something that does not exist?

A portal into another dimension. A place where our thoughts have a life of their own. A stolen glimpse.

Sweet dreams are made of these.

It flickers. The trick is to watch with your eyes wide shut.

The creatures that live there are calling out to me. It hurts. It festers. It keeps me awake, and rules my dreams. It chokes me.

What kind of thought are you?

And still I wait for the word. A revelation.