Persistence

Persistence

Computer scientists talk of persistence
It is a thing you want
You want your data to stay
In a hard disk, or in some machine
But someone should tell them
Things shouldn't be persistent
They've got it all wrong

Because my feelings are not bit vectors
That won't change,
And I don't need to look back
And see who I was
Only to feel regret
Welling up inside

Because the past should be perfect
And the little nuances
That we endured from day to day
Should be smudged out lines
In a black and white photograph
So you can laugh and say
"Look how funny I look!"
And then whisper softly
"It isn't the same anymore"

Because words should not survive
The constant rub of time
They should mingle in the paper
Till all that is left
Is the sweet musky smell
Of yellowed notebook sheets
So you can believe the illusion
That yesterday is far away

Because when things persist
They are not memories anymore
They are truths, and sadly,
You can't feel nostalgic about truths.

Gently

Gently!
There are butterflies hiding
Beneath the leaves of the night
Gently! There are fireflies shining
In the shadows of the light
Don't flick your hand so carelessly
You know you'll scare them away:
These thoughts that hide in your eyes
Won't survive the light of day

You might not care, you might not know
Or perhaps you do, and choose to forget:
These dreams of yours show on your brow
And in what you choose to leave unsaid.
They hang like dew drops in the air,
These dreams of yours that you wouldn't say
And I know, though you deny them now,
You sometimes hope that they would stay

Well, perhaps, when we meet again
For a fleeting moment in the summer sun
And when we'll say those senseless words
And, as always, choose to run
You'll spare some thought to all this, I say,
That you whispered to yourself in the night
 And you will not laugh away
At these dreams that you held so tight

So gently now, before you start,
There are butterflies hiding in the night
Say softly what you will,
There are fireflies hiding in the light.


Endnote: In my defense, it is nearing 1 am :P

She was an angel, was she not?

She was an angel, was she not?

The winter's cold, the fog is dense
It was as dense yesterday.
I drudge along the road I take
Today, as always, as everyday

The chemist at the corner here
Has worn a scowl every time I pass,
But today, as I walk by near
I hear him break out into a laugh.

I look inside, but she's no longer there
Only the chemist with his toothy smile
But a silent whisper in the air
Tells me she stood here awhile

Further the road is crowded still
It is, as usual, a busy day
Yet, a look and I can see
Her footsteps all along the way

The beggar by the side is smiling, not
Because of the generous note he just received
But someone with a patient ear
Thought of paying a little heed

The man in suit right up ahead
Has paused in the middle of the road
Wondering, why on earth did that lady now
Smile at him with a smile so broad?

And everywhere where she walked past
Though the fog hangs in clouds of grey
She has left a trail of pleasant surprise
That something is different about today

She lingers in the smile on that woman's lips

A blink in the eyes of that boy standing there

A thought that just made time stand still

A faint fragrance that hangs in the air.

She lingers in the blades of grass
The dew that trembles on forgotten trees
Even the spider, busy on its web
Is surprised by the sudden breeze

She was an angel, was she not?
Perhaps she was just you or me,
But she left behind a little thought
As divine as thought can be.

The Devil's advocate

I intended this post to be about Anna Hazare's supposed fast, but as I write this post, I read that the impasse has ended, and the government will indeed join hands with civil society to draft the bill.

Should we be happy? I am tempted to say "yes". We seem to be firmly on the path of battling corruption. It seems the government will be kept in check by the civil society, and hopefully it will be hard for the "corrupt politicians" to  derail the process.

There are, however, several caveats. Involving the civil society in legislation is not a panacea that will rid the society of all evils. Not all members of civil society are of as spotless a character as Hazare, and more importantly, there is no law of nature that the civil society should always be right. All of us have very good intentions for the country, but as someone said, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Saying that there should be no corruption is easy, to implement a law that will be successful in eliminating corruption is definitely not.

It should also not be taken for granted that civil society is always correct in its intentions. Right and wrong are dangerous and slippery things, and this is especially true in a nation where the vast majority of the populace is not literate enough to log on to Facebook and air their views. It is easy for us to support the drive against corruption which seems very obviously right, but it is much harder if the issue at hand is, say, the Naxal problem, or, God forbid, the issues of Kashmir or the North east. Also, Hazare has a great backing now, but we are very likely to ignore him when the problems he is talking of do not concern us, us being the middle class, educated population that reads newspapers, logs on to the internet and signs petitions. Indeed, how many of us really knew about Hazare's work in a Maharashtra village?

It is easy to look at your Facebook page and be heartened by the flood of support for a cause. Yet the fact remains that the set of Indians who have the wherewithal to air their views, over the net or otherwise is a miniscule proportion of the true India. As such, chances are that a movement that agrees with the conveniences of the educated elite will be touted as a "revolution", and a movement that does not will be scorned upon as a "mutiny".

Last but not the least, we have to bear in mind that the ills we are fighting against are not external but internal. As someone pointed out in an article, this is free India, and the only evil empire that we can get freedom from is ourselves. When we say that politicians are corrupt, we have to bear in mind that we elect them. There is no external "pseudo-democratic" government: our country is the sum total of the people in it, no more, no less. We have to realise that the evil of corruption is not in some abstracted out entity far removed from the people: it is in every one of us. The law of corruption that we require is, technically, a few hours in front of the mirror.

I guess the thought that I want to leave you with is this: We all supported Anna Hazare's quest to get a strong Lokpal bill drafted, but why did we support it? Was it merely because we have all been at some point or the other been victimized by corruption? If the answer is yes, then it means that our activism is merely a product of the injustices that we perceive as being done unto us, and that what we are striving for is, at the heart of it, no more than our own self-interest. At a deep, and perhaps (but hopefully not) an unachievable level, what we should be driven by is a question of what the right thing to do is. If each of us tries to do what is right, then the politician and the bureaucrat are also not corrupt, and the civil society doesn't need to arm-twist the government into doing what it needs to do.

Memories

Memories.
Footprints left behind, that have long since been washed away. Fragrances left untouched, pressed in the leaves of books. Voices, unspoken, hidden in melodies and songs. Little joys that got lost in the cracks of life, but only to take root and bloom as flowers a long time hence. Gifts that come back every once in a while, just when you least expect them, and just when you no longer remember what they contained, and so you open them and it is all the same again. Words that form but lose themselves before pen touches paper, like a little firefly of joy that must perennially be just out of reach, yet bright enough to light you through the rest of your life...

Memories...

Timeless

There was a time when we had time,
To look upon the day,
To contemplate for months on end
How a game was played
To walk from home to the market,
(It wasn't ten minutes away)
As if it was a thing to do
And should take us all day

There was a time when we stood in wait
For a lazy winter sun
To dispel the fog so we might begin
That day's share of fun
Which wasn't anything but laze around
Till the day was done
And talk about how the winter's gone,
how warm the days become.

Not long ago, almost every day
Down the street we'd walk,
As the day toiled on around us,
For hours and hours we'd talk
I cannot count how many hours
I spent with you on the phone
And now you send me a gift and I say,
"Sorry, I must begone!"

And the clock hands run swiftly past,
Blink and the day is done
I only count my coffee last
And where I have to run
It's better this way, at least I forget
All that I leave behind
I don't remember what race I'm in,
But I must get to the finish line!

The beard

He stood in front of the mirror. He had grown a beard. He never thought he was capable of growing a beard.
He never thought he was capable of a lot of things.

"Bad things happen to good people sometimes, child. But good always wins" His mother had said that. When at the age of 18 he saw his parents divorcing each other he lost faith in that statement. It was a lie, he decided. His mother was either not good enough, or it was a lie. It was definitely a lie.

It was not that he did not love his mother. He loved her, even when he stormed out of the house soon after his father left, leaving her alone and stranded in a large, cold house. He loved Maya too. Back when she laughed at his jokes and lay her head on his shoulders, back when they exchanged marriage vows, back when they bought a new house, but also that hot summer day when the sun was so bright it made you think strange thoughts. But it wasn't the sun. It was he himself.

He held the blade in his hand now. He felt an urge to feel its edge. See how sharp it was. Would it cut skin? Was it enough to reach an artery? The blade he had used then was a kitchen knife, that most ubiquitous of weapons. He had been in the grip of an uncontrollable rage, he told himself later. The sight, the thought, that Maya loved another, was too much for him, he told himself. He told the people around him again and again. But it didn't make the nightmares go away. He could not forget the blood on the knife, the blood gushing out, almost laughably, like a water from a broken pipe, only it was redder, thicker, more vindictive. And surprised, alarmed; Maya's eyes were staring at hime the whole while, even as she fell. He stared back at her, stared at her and the knife, the knife and her, unable to comprehend that the blood on the floor meant that something bad was about to happen. Unable to comprehend that he was taking a life. Unable to comprehend that she had her hand in his sometime ago, that they had exchanged vows, walked round fire seven times, that her hair had fallen on her face just so, that she clicked her tongue to dismiss him when he teased her, that she was no longer here because the blade had killed her. He had killed her.

Through his prison sentence and even now, he saw her face again and again. Not her laughter that he had fallen in love with. Her terrified face, staring back at him, like him, speechless, too speechless to ask questions. Every day this past week he had held the blade in his one hand and the razor in the other, and he had remembered the blade of the kitchen knife. And had just stood frozen there, his hands shaking terribly as the whole day replayed in his mind again and again....

His mother was in the same house she had always been in, although creepers had begun to climb the walls and the drain in front of the house was perennially blocked. He hadn't talked to her since he left the house in the rage. He went back today. His mother opened the door. She was very old now, almost blind with age. She peered through her glasses at the face of her son. Do you need a coffee child? I can make one right now. She went to the kitchen while he looked around the house. She gave him the glass of coffee and sat on the sofa. He sat down beside her. He looked at the coffee. She had always made the best coffee in the world.

He lay down with his head on her lap. They sat that way for quite some time. She caressed his head, her wrinkled hands no longer possessing the strength of old. Yet it was just as the old times. Back when good always won.

He began crying. "I am sorry, ma" he whispered between his tears. She continued to caress his head. "Bad things happen to good people sometimes, beta. And sometimes good people do bad things. But good does win..." She smiled. "You are capable of a lot of good, A. Don't lose faith".

He looked at the mirror. He was capable of good. He looked at the blade in his hand and the razor. He put the blade in the razor and began to shave.

Endnote: Tried my hand at a very short(by my standards) story :)

Of fear and courage

I am just back from watching the movie "King's speech" and it is truly very good. It talks of the King of Britain during the times just before the second world war, and his battle against his own stammering and the associated fear of public speaking. The good thing about this movie is that it talks of the King in very real terms, terms familiar to you and me. Indeed there are points in the story when you ask yourself, "What wrong did the poor guy do to be forced to become King?"

I think fear is more universal than we care to admit. We might fear the most trivial of things, or we might fear the greatest. It might be the fear of height, the fear of failure, or the very simple fear of speaking aloud in public. But how we are limited by it! We skirt it, evade it, clothe it into so many different forms. We describe it as evil, put it beyond space and time and beyond our control. We talk about it, if at all we do, in hushed tones, angry tones, defensive tones. In extremes, we wage wars to convince everyone else it is not a fear anymore.

When we run away from our demons we make them larger than they really are. Even our own hands make scary shadows on the wall by the candlelight; not looking at our hands we cower away from the shadows. I can catch myself saying a hundred times in the past year: "Oh my God there were so many bad things happening and I have so many problems and someone please save me" when it is just a meeting with a professor that's fraying my nerves. I go hiking in the mountains and I cloak my simple fear of falling into anger at the clouds and the incessant rain and my friend who has forgotten the way. I turn my fear of telling the truth into a fluid definition of truth itself. There are so many little fears that would be really trivial to deal with if I could just look them in the eye and see them for what they are. Except that I don't because I am so afraid of them I just take the easy way out of seeing it all as a ploy by the world to get the better of me. You know, I would be the happiest man in the world if the world just stopped holding me down. Yeah, right.

It is truly a gift, to be able to hold your fears to the light. To be able to face your demons. And it is not that our fears are insurmountable; we merely lack the will to do so. I am not sure why, but many a times I feel I actually like being afraid. Maybe because it is so much easier.

"What are you afraid of?" asks the speech therapist of the King in "King's speech". So, what are you afraid of?