08/27/2006
Aye chand khoobsurat
Single people have a lot of time on their hands, who, if they are brainy like me, will use it judiciously. By single people, I don't necessarily mean those who are not (yet) hitched. I mean even those who cannot stand the sight of their spouses or better-or-worse halfs for reasons only they know and have mutually decided to take a break. But for simplicity's sake, we'll take single to mean single, as in unhitched. We the single belong to the lowest stratum of acceptable society. And by acceptable society, I mean the one that hasn't yet heard of six degrees of separation. I mean, it's just five intermediaries standing between Gorg Clooney and I, going by the six degrees theory, right?
Coming back to singledom, we are either shunned by our well-meaning friends or invited to dos out of pity or downright ignored, as if to convince themselves that if they ignore us long enough, we'll perhaps slink away to get hitched somewhere somehow somewhat somewhen. Even worse, when we are invited to dos, it's because they've come to know of another single Sad Sack (all necessary references to straight, gay, bisexual, trisexual, etc. are left to you, the reader) who's kind-of-but-not-exactly-looking to get hitched. It's worse when you're older and they want to hook you up with the next available single guy or girl they meet. I mean, don't they know at least by experience that two potbellies do not an ideal mating situation make, pun intended? I'm not being a bitch. Really, I'm not. It's just my way of telling you how I spend my spare time, which I have loads of. I mostly spend it overanalysing people's attitudes and actions and how they adversely affect my chances of getting, um, hitched.
From different windows
We look at the same moon
Together, apart
Okay, I can't rhyme for nuts
Single people write crappy poetry. Most of them, at least. I mean, anyone can write about 'waiting for the day my inner demons meet yours' or 'invisible ghosts lurking somewhere in the shadows that follow me around'. But how many are brave enough to write about living amidst the people that they have to for as long as they're alive? They overlyricise sometimes, I feel. Why am I writing this? This is to tell you that I cannot for the life of me write a decent rhyme anymore. When I'm bored with overanalysing, I spend my time blaming my shortcomings on the world and its ways and generalising it till I convince myself that I'm not the one who's lacking in anything, it's the world that is.
The moon's shining bright
My love's taken flight
And there are a million stars
All aglow in the sky tonight...
Along with getting to the point of being totally jaded, reaching the pinnacle of cynicism, going through catharses galore or at least pretending to, finding, losing and regaining my sense of humour, and still waiting for an ideal tomorrow, I seem to have lost my ability to easily spot the lesser of two evils everytime I have to choose between two. I mean, which is more overwhelming? Too much too soon or too little too late? Yes, when I'm not doing the first two, I ask myself these inane questions masked as introspection. Two-bit philosophy, if you please. I mean, why should I be scared of the moon one night in a year when I spend the rest of the year marvelling at it? Yes, there is a rabbit inside it. I'm convinced of it. And I'm sure it's made of cheese. Cheese should at least be reason enough to want to look at the moon every chance I get. And it is tonight that it will be at its most beautiful. But would I rather look at the moon tonight and chance an unpleasant episode in the next one year or would it be better to sentence myself to house arrest post noon?
Of rabbits and shimmer
And warm, melted cheese
And tiny little pieces of romance,
If you please...
I'm sorry, Mr. Moon. I just can't see you tonight.
Tu bhi akela iss duniya mein
Main bhi akela(i) yahaan
Yeh bebasi ab hum dono ko
Le jaaye jaane kahaan...
00:00 Posted in Life | Permalink | Comments (29) | Email this
08/15/2006
India, my own
When I was in school, Independence Day meant waking up early on a school holiday (blasphemy!), donning Saturday whites and going to school by 8.30 in the morning to witness the flag-hoisting ceremony (never did understand the fuss then) and being forced to sit through a really tedious lecture on the importance of our country's independence by some dignitary I really didn't know from Adam and didn't particularly care to. Before puberty struck, post-lecture session with my schoolmates putting on a grand show with hoops and flags and other paraphernalia was something I looked forward to. I became a snickering know-it-all once I hit puberty, though and I-day celebrations at school meant gawking at the boys in pants in high school and laughing at the antics of the younger children, a routine that they were forced to perform every year by our physical education teacher. But, one thing I waited for every year of my school education was the doodh-peda that we would get for putting up with the torture we were made to go through every single year on I-Day.- He was good-looking
- He was a smooth talker
- We didn't realise he was going to make money off it
- We didn't particularly care, for it was not our money we spent in buying the crummy T-shirt
- We just needed a reason to rebel in our last year
Three years ago, as a newbie to the world of blogging, I wrote (paraphrasing here) about showing secularism in more places than the office lunch-table. I wrote about not slinking away from bearded people because your community or your boss or your immediate circle demanded it of you. I wrote about not having a jingoistic sense of patriotism, but how I was unable to swallow the lump in my throat every time I heard Ae mere watan ke logon or whooping every time Sachin knocked Pakistan's balls off, pun intended. Because of blogging, I made new friends, some of whom have stuck around. (Happy anniversary, Prats and Hyde). Today, I still remain an idealist but I've undergone some refinement over the last three years. For example, I vociferously admonish all those who jeer our cricket team, especially on days that Sachin isn't in form, whereas I would have joined them three years ago. I'm not known to make racist remarks, but someone passed a callous remark recently about the recent spate of terrorist attacks in the country and my reaction surprisingly was that we were in no way sullying the name of the Muslim community - some of their own were doing a mighty fine job themselves. But it doesn't alter the fact that they are no less human than you and I, however you look at it.
Sitting down to lunch, I'm amazed at how our staple fare has so much of white, green and saffron in it - rice and curd, greens, green chilli pickle, 2-minute lemon pickle, coloured papads, carrot and cucumber slices, the kesar and pista in our kheer, and so on. Looking at the gulmohur tree outside my house that has seen better days, it strikes me that when they chose the colours of our flag, the tricolour as we call it, a lot of thought must have gone into it, apart from their symbolic representation. The soldiers of our country never did have the chance to listen to Jab anth samay aaya toh, but they gave up their lives so we could have a free land, a land to call our own, a land where even if you worked for an American company, you couldn't be made to work on the day our country gained independence. 16:25 Posted in This land is my land | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this
08/13/2006
All kinds of everything
This is about nothing at all in particular 'cause it has a bit of everything in it. The bell of this church near where I live, inside this Christian missionary hospital where I was born, has been ringing for as long as it's been there. But off late, I long for its cheerful chime at 12:00 every night. Something about the uniformity between each "GONNNNNNG" is beautiful. It has now branched into a couple of hostels and dormitories, so that Christmas decorations are not restricted to a cosy corner in the hospital and the church anymore. There is a statue outside one of the hostels, of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus under the shade of a tree that is lit every Christmas, so that it fills the whole area with light and good cheer now. The lights are on throughout the year, I guess, but it somehow seems brighter during Christmas. Something to look forward to. YAY!!
Sometimes, the toughest decisions you have to make are when you have to choose between letting your sense of humour talk and saying what you truly feel. Most often, my funnybone wins. The remedy for the scheming voice that whispers in my ear at night when no one else is hearing is usually a good song that I listen to over and over again. Once the song starts buzzing in my head, Mr. Voice goes to sleep. But the side-effect of this is the complete antithesis of the said song buzzing in my head when I wake the next morning. Now, THAT I hate.
Current flavour of the month is he, the leading man of this. I'm truly jealous of all of you in the UK. I love this show!! My happiness knows no bounds at work nowadays, though this might jinx it. But since I already said it, no one else can hex it. (Please, God.) Which brings me to my hero, Krishna's birthday. I always hated it that it fell in the last week of Aug or first week of September every year. But this time, he is a LEO!! How cool is that!! I just love that brat to pieces. Isn't he the most awesome thing about life?
And while I go on rambling about nothing at all, elsewhere in the world, maybe in a parallel universe or in my own via the cosmos' ripple effect, someone will read a letter for the last time before crumpling it and throwing it away with the hope that memories get erased too, while someone else will lock the letter away in a box that will never see the light of day again, but lose those memories forever; another will marvel at the sheer force with which a waterfall hits the earth, while yet another will make out shapes in the waterdrops over a dry surface that a dripping tap sprays all over, maybe pictures he will never draw; and maybe, someone will fall in love with their own self for the first time, enough to not hurt for someone else's affection and just maybe, someone else will realise that a broken heart is not the worst thing that could happen.
Like my good man Dave says,
Take these chances,
Place them in a box
Until a quieter time...
And the ants go right on marching.
20:20 Posted in Life | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this