A Singular Truth

Truth is. Lies are.

A linguistic aberration? A whim of chance? Or something more?

Can it be that grammar teaches us the indivisible nature of truth? And the recurring, many-headed character of lies?

One God, one Truth and only one measure of success. We are taught this in a world where all that we see is a contradiction of all three. There are atheists and there is polytheism. There are gypsies and there is the Housewives Association of Victoria. And there are many versions of Truth – each one equally real and alive to its owner.

How about Lies then? They multiply, duplicate, add-on, and ultimately – divide. We have all experienced the futility of killing a lie, while so many of its insidious relatives fill the world, like Indians filling America.

The question is – have few ever really triumphed over many?

Perhaps the clue to the identity of the final victor is also buried in grammar. You lie. But you have to tell the truth. Or be truthful. The first comes naturally, but the latter needs conscious effort. Truth costs us.

Then again, perhaps it’s not really a victory for Lies as much as a reversal to his true nature for Man.

Because the real Singular Truth is: Lies are us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An exercise in futility

Life is incredibly frustrating. All the while you sit, and to an extent it allows you some amount of freedom to believe whatever little insanity you call a philosophy, and to use that as a coping mechanism, and then when it really starts to settle in, and you get comfortable, you get hauled out and you have to start all over again, you would think that this is a solid warning to not go i nthe same direction again, but no, the mind is an incredibly fucking stupid organ. It will go the same route, saying "I'll fashion something different this time, albeit with th same tools" , and 2 years later you'll find yourself in the same ditch you had to dig yourself out of some time ago. It's general really. It could be love, relationship, falling for the same psychotic women again and again, it could be a career, not knowing what you want and so condemning yourself to the tedium of basically raping your soul everyday when you get to work and have to deal with people you'd rather see under a tombstone with a cute little epitaph marking their unremarkable lives, and then making that statement, looking at the elitism and arrogance that caused you to say such a 'mean' thing and then realize that that arrogance is contributing more to your isolation from all the things that life on this planet is about.
The more miserable you get, the more you surround yourself with this wall of impenetrability, the more you try to appear composed to people around you so they wont see the cracking foundations within, the more you try to keep up appearances, to hold on to concepts you consider "constructive" while desperately trying to hide the big gaping holes of doubt that come across whenever you or someone else deliberately or innocently questions a core fundamental precept of whatever crap you chose to call a belief.
Life doesn't suck though, it can be nice, but the head won't let you see that, and when you are down, it will kick you in the shins some more so you can crawl a little longer. But eventually you have to crawl out, you either do that by abandoning yourself completely to nihilism, which is really not advisable, because then you have a "nothing can stop me now cos i don't care anymore" attitude, which makes you into a pretentious little bitchy goth, or you can say "we add our own meaning to life" and embark on your own quest to redefine your concepts again and again and again till you either go mad, or weave something so durable that it can withstand anything life throws at you, from random deaths of people you love, to instances that appear out of nowhere and have no tangible lesson to offer. Naturally, this does not happen often, many people who do try have incredibly ridiculous (to me) ideas wihch do not stand up to any form of scrutiny. These people are best left alone. These ar enot the only two methods. I am sure there are more, but unfortunately my moods are being severely limited by my criticism of every observation i make. I am stuck at a stage where I am trying to build something stable. A concept that involves having no concepts of life, which well, is completely self-defeating, and yet i do it, for the few moments I am able to look past that paradigm i am able to experience balance equilibrium, and this fleeting feeling that maybe life is not an ordeal after all, that it can be pleasant, that there are squares of light in the dark. But like all things, this too will pass, and it leaves you again with the uncertainty of doubt, the vulnerable feeling in the morning, the pain on seeing someone you don't wish to speak to anymore, the hundred things that make existence a roller coaster, and they keep washing on over you and spinning you around in an unstoppable vortex of change. I am desperate to get out of it, to be in it, yet be outside it watching myself be in it and not feeling numb, feeling things yet realizing the futility of emoting about something that is entirely out of your hands, yet I realize that that very desperation also keeps me very firmly in it.
Unfortunately, I fail to see the point in many things these days,love perhaps being the only exception, because it has some good benefits as far as mental health is concerned, other emotions,anger,rage,despair, they come, they stay, they go, and i still stay the same. I won't say i don't care..i do care, but there is only so much you can do for yourself and others. The exhaustion that follows the realization of futility is indescribable. I feel it pretty heavily now, so I think I'll spare you the torture of reading more of this tripe, not because I am kind, but because I can't go on without sounding like a complete charlatan.

Out here in the living planet

“Out here in the Living Planet we come to grips with life in all its ferocity… we see all the majestic power of God’s creatures… the Living Planet… out here, with me, we will meet life itself in the Living Planet…and…”

I watched, entranced, as the little man shouting these words leapt from continent to continent. Sometimes wading across the cold waters of Siberia. Now slashing his way unconcernedly through the forests of Africa. Now again, somewhere on the plains of India, surrounded by idiot natives gaping at his antics, and the colour of his skin.

And yet, while I watched, something in what he was saying bothered me, like a discordant note being played repeatedly by the idle finger of some musical madman.

A discordant note…what was it?

“Out here in the Living Planet…”

Where was I then? And where he?

As I sat there, watching him cross continents at the whim of an editing machine, I realized that to him, I and all the others who were moments ago getting our daily dose of indifference, and are now being subject to him, are not in the living planet. To him, we’re the ones through the looking glass. As surely as he is the same to us – ethereal, made of light.

But isn’t there more to it? Has he ever been a part of this ‘living planet’ to which I have membership?

Oh sure, he must have been living at some point. When he was struggling to reconcile his parent’s expectations with his dream of being an actor. When he was wandering the long road to success, with obscurity and failure awaiting his every misstep. Sure, he must have known what it is to live once.

Or have I got it all wrong? Is he truly the one living now? Living his dream. Wandering from place to place, with the firm conviction that millions across the world tune into his words and are affected by his view of life in some way, never realizing it to be a figment of the producer’s greed and the statician’s necessity.

But perhaps that is the life. It may not be the ‘real living planet’ but where is that to be found anymore? All of us live our dreams in one shape or another. The chosen few, like him, live a beautiful one. The ordinary, like you perhaps, are trapped in their nightmares.

And then there are the rest, who merely flip channels when the commercial’s done.

"We now return you to our regular programming..."

And then the ink ran dry

On nights like these, I feel equally close to greatness and insanity. On the brink of madness, I fling my arms out, ready to take flight. Or plunge to everyone’s doom. Is this delusion of grandeur? Or the elixir of Supermen? Perhaps it’s whatever I want it to be, and I don’t have a clue.

On the halfway point between insanity and greatness, I pause. The forks clear but my path isn’t. I hear it in every empty laugh sent echoing across the deserted house. I see it in the monsters lurking in the dark corners. I recognize it in the fly I just killed. I drink it out of my fridge everyday.

My pen says “Experience the Power Within” and the ink has run dry. I still continue to write. The patterns on the floor fascinate m…

8 steps to being a better corporate whore

These are some random guidelines i have compiled that might help you be a better employee/manager, and might help you prolong your stay with your company, for upto two weeks at a time.

a) Kiss your director's ass thoroughly, reaching into every cobwebbed nook and cranny, make sure there is no kidney stone left unturned.
b) Never turn down a promotion by saying "i hate the people, i would rather work in my old group because atleast i didn't want to die everytime i opened my eyes in the morning". It will cause people to say untrue things about you..like "he is negative. unnecessarily mean, rude. not a team player" that last sentence is pretty much the nail in the coffin by the way. if you get that not a team player tag around your neck, you may as well go shoot yourself.
c) Never ever ever ever say "dude this code is totally gay man!" to a gay guy who has stopped by to help you with some fuckup. It will make a serious difference in both your day(s).
d) If some senior management guy has no teeth and happens to be gay, do not make statements in public relating the two *seemingly* disjointed facts together. Sorry, i can't be plainer without being disgustingly explicit.
e) If big bitchy senior lady asks you why you have turned down a promotion, focus on the positives, the positives of being in the older group as opposed to the newer group, never ever say, "There wasn't enough work". you won't appear honest. you will simply be looked at with the "too good for himself" lens, which as you know, is notoriously misty, and will get you fired before you can say "hello HR guy. how are you today?"
f) If someone in the toilet did their big job all over the floor instead of in the pot (as people are apt to do when they simply forget the purpose of a toilet, a common enough occurrence in IT companies, owing to people being too full of it), make sure to send a lot of company wide emails lamenting the fact that you've never had to write an email like this in your entire career. If you are a manager, and you want a headcount of all the kiss-asses in your company, simply wait for the Reply-to all mails you get from various employees who say "Well Said!" or "Hear Hear!" and do a brief count, and there you have it.
g) Fire those bastards the coming friday, because they wasted company resources saying well said and hear hear when they could have used the bleach and the mop.
h) The HR manager in every company is usually a sub-human product of his parents' lust, often a symbol of failed family planning programs. Have him do it. This will also give you a chance to glow from within, and feel warm and happy when you picture him muttering to himself.. "chief recruiter..and i am fucking cleaning up shit. This wasn't in my job description you goddamn sons of bitches"

That's about all i can think of. I might add to it from time to time, but don't count on it. I have a job to keep too.

Disjointed

It's like awakening from your dreams. Except things aren't the same as they were when you went to bed. It's like awakening from your dreams, into a different world. It's like awakening for the first time.

This world was built for giants, not squirrels. But life makes squirrels of us all.

So busy gathering twigs to build the shelters for old age, the summer of youth passes away. Unnoticed and unacknowledged. All that I could, or almost could be, lost in the pages of books never written, lost in the verses of songs never sung.How do you stop life, and start living? How do you break the bonds of love, and habit, and custom, and certainty, to become all you were meant to be? To give all you should, and taste all you can?

The lands have been discovered, the stars breached, the elements conquered. Where do I turn to for inspiration? For divine intervention? I wish I was a rock star. I wish I was a highlander. I wish I was the song of the ages, the eye of the prophet. I wish, I wish…

I wish I were alive.

This is no story. Nor yet a piece of poetry. This is a plea for help. This is a dark room, a strange bed. This is a mind struggling against itself. This is not me. This is not you. This is us.

Peace of Mind: And how to ruin it

I am at the beach. It is a beautiful morning. THe sun is coming up. There are glimmers all over the ocean, which is as placid as a millpond. There are dolphins in the distance, about 4-5 of them, and they're performing interesting maneouvres, either mating or feeding.Neverthless, it was fascinating to watch their bodies gleam in the sunlight and to watch the spouts of steam issue from their blowholes as they frolicked around. The pelicans were gliding along the waves. There is something very elegant about pelicans. I could go as far as to say that they are the only elegant denizens in this blighted marshland otherwise known as florida. Everything was all right with the world, and to amplify my good mood, the beach was deserted. Perfect time to do a little bit of self-hypnosis/meditation to steel myself up to face the idiots at work. But no, trouble looms on the horizon..Since i face the sun, whenever i close my eyes i can feel the light hitting my eyelids and everything is a brilliant red with eyes closed, but this time there was a shadow looming over me, for a while i thought it was a passing cloud and continued my ruminations undisturbed...then that somehow didn't feel right...there were odd sounds..and something licked my face... I turned, and there was a species of mottled old lady standing behind me. I winced and prepared for the worst.... No, she didn't lick me you perverts, it was the bloody dog.
"Are you meditating?" ....well, not anymore woman...
"I just saw you sitting there and felt like I had to talk to you"
I don't know what it is, but there is something about the sight of a person sitting alone and for once, enjoying the fucking solitude that seems to rankle the spirit of every ditzy sociable person within a 50 mile radius and makes them want to go about spewing chaos and irritability into an otherwise peaceful melting pot of emotions.
Then she went on about how she was from new york city, and then people around her had started dying, and about how it really got her thinking about the purpose of life, and about how she wanted answers....good god..
anyways...i kept thinking...'so where lieth the barbed point buried beneath honey'd words?'...and promptly enough it poked through..."then i found christ"
ugh.
At that point, i had to intervene, i had to tell her i was meditating for a reason,something...i hadn't said a word throughout this soliloquoy and unless cut off, she would continue to extend herself and nail her toes to her pedestal. The only thing i managed to bleat out was..."Well i have."....that was enough for her..for the next 20 minutes, she went on about the king james bible, and about how I should read that instead of other bibles, and then she also told me that she doesn't read that bible but instead reads the original hewbrew, whereupon i had to politely interject to find out if she really was a learned lady, in which case she'd have my respect, or just another locust from the Religious Yahoo swarm that's currently ravaging the country. No, she doesn't know hebrew, she uses a lexicon. A pretty nice way to describe a dictionary with frills. How do you appreciate prose if you translate everything to english anyways? I decided not to ask her that as that would only add to the fire...so on and on she went...at one point i had to stifle a giggle, i was thinking of odd things to suddenly yell out loud about...something on the lines of, "The Asiatic Lion was once a majestic species, its range stretching all the way to Rome! It's chief diet consisted of antelope, buffalo, and also the occasional Christian at the local Colosseum."
instead, like the idiot i am, i said.."I know all this. You see, I Don't like religion. I grew up a hindu, in a muslim neighbourhood, and went to a jesuit school where i saw priests doing bad things. I don't like religion" "but religion is a guideline, life is so much better with God"........i love you god, but save me from your followers. It was a long time before i could get rid of her. I totally lost sync with the mood, had to go late for work, and listen to the ceo of my company make it sound like his company was actually a charitable organization that brought happiness to so many people. in short, my day sucked.
Anyways, the point of the whole thing is, if you have peace, and if you are at an easy equilibrium with your surroundings, please, keep it to yourself. There is nothing that betrays insecurity as effortlessly as proselytyzing, besides, people can sympathize more easily with your pain than with your pleasure..and well, use your head..anyone who tells you that they are right and that most of the world is wrong is either fantastically arrogant, in which case they should be trucked off to Auschwitz, or they are hopelessly insecure in which case they have no business feeding you bullshit they wish they bought, and that brings me to the point of religion. I hate it. For all of you in other countries who think somewhat highly of the Indian diaspora in the US, i have some jarring news for you. They are a bunch of putzes. No doubt they are educated, but so is every mugpot who can learn hamlet by heart, miss all the beauty but is perfectly capable of telling you on which page Polonius got poked hiding behind the tapestry, but that's not what bothers me. IT's their religiousness. I should be tolerant you say, but i can't be tolerant of intolerance, and i tend to get very worked up when i go to someone's house for a nice meal of sambar+rice and end up listening to bullshit like "WE MUST STAAP THI MUSLIM APPEAJMENT!! NAUW!!".."we must build tembil in ayodhya"...." all muslims in india are muslims first indians later" ...?!?!?!?! This VHP poster-boy stuff coming from graduates from good colleges who've spent the better half of their lives in good families, you know, middle to upper middle class people, the arterial blood of the country..first of all..everytime you make a statement beginning with all or most but missing a reference to observed population, and not estimated population, it is patently false. to know that all muslims are bad, or most hindus are idolators, you'd have to know all hindus, or all muslims, and out of that you must have done a percentage study to determine the true opinion of every member of your subset and then have these facts on hand to support your argument, and even THEN you could be wrong, because some dick in that subset would have lied. That does sound ridiculous, doesn't it? To me it sounds about as ridiculous as "All muslims hate hindus"

not everyone is like that of course..there's also the daler mehndi crowd and a small section of the population that actually does think straight. you'll know them when you meet them by how refreshed you feel after a 10 min discussion with them...not the daler mehndi types. You'll know those by how refreshed you feel after getting away from their clutches and their "what yaar that bhangra beat is classss yaar..oye soni kudi" words of wisdom.

but anyways, religion has done nothing spectacular for india within the past 50 years...unless you consider Partition movies mesmerizing. We have "rich cultural heritage ok", which is basically our crutch. No power, cultural heritage. Poverty, cultural heritage. It's like a kid who fails in all subjects but does excellently at english grammar(i am using a real example. that kid was me). "You FAILED MATH???AND PHYSICS????" "but mommy..i did so well in Make Sentences!!"... Religious riots, cultural heritage. Our answer to everything, and no doubt it is there. I love it. I love going to temples. I love reading old texts and getting in touch with a forgotten past, it is no doubt very exotic, but when i am woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from my mom asking me to listen to "vishnu sahasrananams because it spreads good vibrations around the house", i tend to go on my God is dead trips....but otherwise culture can be very refreshing, and gives you a good feel for what you are, and what you can or want to be....but at what price? There are more widows than there are buddhas. Is it worth it? Give a human being an idea and he will corrupt it in an instant, and that's what's basically happening. Why does being proud about hindu mean having to hate muslims/christians for so many people? Why this (check previous post) binary logic? Why can't people follow the middle ground...actually, why be proud about anything? why be proud to be hindu? is it a culmination of personal achievement? born 30 seconds later you could be ethiopian, or worse, catholic..

anyways, i came out of that discussion feeling thoroughly disgusted. It's things like that that make me feel disgusted at everything that goes on back home. I love the country so much, and it is really painful to see it get raped by people like this, in the name of religion/caste/creed/. I don't have orgasms if i see saffron but I am a hindu, in terms of my upbringing,the sense of comfort i feel in sitting by myself in ruined temples, praying to gods that i am on more familiar, personal terms with(when i am content or afraid enough to believe in one). i don't feel a need to be proud of it, the same way i don't see a reason to be proud of who i am. We're six billion insignificant little shits swirling around in a universe that doesn't give a damn. It's about time we realized that if we're insignificant, so are things like caste,creed, race. Nobody cares, least of all your God. What's better? Dying and killing for a god, or living without one?
I'm done. I don't feel like I've done complete justice to my feelings, but if i continue i risk being stoned, or worse, sound preachy, which is exactly what i want to avoid.
Moral of the story: If you see a person sitting alone on the beach, or in any place of scenic beauty, and he/she looks happy, leave them alone. That way, they will have one less reason to post stuff that ends up making you wince.

The link I wish would go missing

It's 5:30 in the evening, and I've been trying to crack an idea for a well known laser printer brand for the last 2 hours. The client doesn't know the difference between a landing page (single html page) and a microsite.

Neither does the sales guy.

My opinion on these specimens wandering around in their starched shirts and boring ties keeps oscillating between repulsion, for so much ignorance in such diminutive packages, and regard, for managing to actually sell something they don't understand.

My opinion of the clients never wavers though.