Footsteps in my memory

G

2012-02-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

Wrote a story! Read it here:
G.pdf

It's not a very good story, but it came to me almost whole, and I've learnt it's usually not good to stifle such stories.

Also it has a liberal sprinkling of science, mainly about vision science. I will not claim that the science is accurate, but it is accurate to the extent that it is based on reading half of a random vision science paper. If you want to know, the condition I talk of is, I think, called "visual agnosia", but I have had no interaction with anyone who actually has that condition; this is entirely my imagination. So pardon me if I am completely off-track.

Persistence

2011-12-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

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

2011-08-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-05-04T23:54:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-29T01:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-09T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-19T23:15:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-15T00:59:00.000-08:00

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?

Rain in Berkeley, winter in Delhi and other assorted thoughts

2010-12-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

Semester ends, leaving me with just about enough energy to write in bits and pieces. Also it is raining, which is stupid, because I find it hard to make sense of winter rain. I mean, of course parts of South India have winter rains, but winter in South India is no colder than summer in California (which is saying a lot, because summer in Berkeley was pretty warm), but rain in winter makes it all the more dismal, if it wasn't already. The days are way shorter, and my sleep cycle more or less attempts to follow the sun, which means these days I end up feeling sleepy sometime around 8 (the sun goes down before 5) and on days when it is cloudy and rainy(like today) I find it hard to justify to myself the need for wake-fulness.

Its winter in Delhi, and I guess that means fog and caps and gloves and sweaters and jackets (I haven't really looked at the weather reports, mind!) And there's just so many things I want to do this winter, apart from fulfiling the quite impossible promise of meeting each and every one of my friends that winter this year is going to be a blur. There's also a certain amount of "research" to be carried out, and the fact that I should be "self-motivated" means, as usual, that I will pretend that my ass is on fire.

Which it is not, to say the truth, because this semester has been pretty chill as far as courses and all are concerned. True, I have witnessed, alternatively, moments of crushing self-doubt and moments of inspiration, but I guess that is par for the course. Especially since my usually active emotional life has been flattened out, because of which my out-of-commission amygdala has decided to have some fun with my academic life.

I guess the intensity of my emotional life is pretty much proportional to the number of girls I have around me. I am tempted to qualify the statement to "the number of undergraduate girls I have around me", which becomes kind of like a tautology till the point I actually end up messing around with a graduate girl. However it is kind of true: there's a lot more "life, the universe and everything" quality about undergraduate life, mainly I guess because people around you are of a much greater variety. I mean, it's kind of hard to discuss the usefulness of a "conditional random field" to a physics student, but it is even harder to keep "average precision" out of a talk with a lab mate. Plus, instead of a coffee shop we have a coffee machine at the pantry, which cleverly translates into no more than a few minutes of conversation per coffee break, as opposed to hours of philosophy at the Nescafe stall. Also, they somehow managed to create a lab which has an awesome view of the whole California bay, and of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and in doing so completely removed the incentive to go out for a walk. (Why do you want to go out when you can see the Golden Gate bridge from your office floor?) Not that I am complaining of course; the sight of the orange sun falling behind the far away bridge and letting off crimson streaks into the clouds will make me sigh any time of the year.

And finally Berkeley is beautiful. It's an amazing campus, and it's one of the few places that seems as amazing when the clouds are low and the rain is incessant as when the sun is out and the dew glistens on the blades of the grass......

A-patriotic

2010-11-08T23:24:00.000-08:00

Suddenly for some reason I am seized with doubts about my own country. Is it because I never read the news very thoroughly back when I was in India? Has my sudden separation from India suddenly and Bollywood-ishtyle-ly inspired in me a desire to stay up-to-date? Or is it merely the fact that events in recent times have taken a turn for the worse?

Of course, that India is not utopia is obvious. Nor are all bureaucrats, politicians and the like benign. Nor is the general public sensible, or even sympathetic. This is not to say that I am willing to ignore all the glaring inequities that exist in the country, and that seem to grow with development, or the fact that in human development India ranks far far below. Yet, somehow the image in my mind was of a country, and a government, trying to take care of the people, in spite of its flaws. I always kind of assumed that we might be dumb, stupid and selfish, but nevertheless we were somehow in the same boat.

Two things have contributed to my growing doubts. The first was Arundhati Roy's comments about Kashmir, and the second was a talk I recently attended about human rights violations in Kashmir. Probably human rights abuses happen in almost every part of the country, in some form of the other; what shocked me was the constant reference to India as a "State", sometimes even as an "occupying power" that was systematically perpetrating these violations. It was weird to hear about the "Government of India" in the same vein that we used to hear about the "British Empire" in our school history classes. Are we suddenly an imperial power come to rule all the innocent Kashmiris, tribals and poor people, as Roy seems to make it out to be?

But who is "We"? What is the identity of this country that I call India? Am I not as much a part of it as a farmer in Andhra Pradesh, or Manipur, or Kashmir? Do I not share the identity of being an Indian with all these people? Why these doubts and questions and the injustices being perpetrated by "the Government of India"? Why is the problem suddenly external? Why do these walls suddenly crop up between the "have's" and the "have nots"? Or rather, why do these walls suddenly take the form of national, race or caste boundaries, as if somehow independence from "the ruler" automatically implies upliftment for "the ruled"?

I am not taking the side of the "Government of India", or the big "Corporations" or all those people upon whom we have agreed to place the blame. Nor am I attempting to take a stand on Roy's, or anybody else's, opinions about whether Kashmir should be independent or not. All I am asking is that, when every human being in the world needs the same basic rights to well-being and life, why are always battle lines drawn? How come that there is always that ruler who is a tyrant and the people who are exploited, and how come that no matter how many revolutions and freedom struggles come and go, the exploited always remain the exploited? Is it ever possible that there is "good governance", that the society is just and equitable, and that development reaches the lowest rung of the ladder as much as(and hopefully more than) it reaches the highest rung?

Did we not, when we became independent as a nation, found ourselves on principles of equality and liberty? Where then do such questions come from? Why are we not one nation on the arduous path of development; why are we a million nations fighting ourselves?

Naked

2010-10-01T21:42:00.000-07:00

Not through the walls of nations, or through the barbed wire that runs like thorns through the hearts of lands, tearing apart the world like a painting torn to shreds. Nor through the words of language, sounds spoken meant to mean something as if the beats of your hearts and mine followed a grammar and an alphabet..

Not through the glass of wealth, either looking down from palatial balconies or up from the footpath, not through the contempt for a class too ordinary, nor through the envy for a wealth ill deserved, neither with covetous eyes, nor with patronizing ones, neither with an intent to give, nor with an intent to take...

Nor with a critique of my knowledge, marveling at intellect or laughing away ignorance, searching for the genius or scorning the foolishness, neither to learn, nor to teach, neither to scoff, nor to stand in awe...

Not through the filters of morality either, not through the idiosyncracies of my beliefs, my opinions, my inclinations and orientations, moralities either true or imagined, principles either arbitrary or justified, not through politics and ideologies and calculations and ratinalizations, as if right and wrong were counters in a bank..

See me not through flesh, or cloth, or action, or habit...

See me as I am, naked. Place your hand against my chest and feel the beats of my heart. Hear my voice thickening with emotion or going shrill with joy, feel my hands clasp and my fists clenched in emotion. Stare into my eyes and feel me through these walls we have erected between ourselves; stare deep into my heart, know me for who I am...

And walk with me, like one human with another, like two living beings who share a universe, this planet, this sunshine, and above all, this moment....

On Gaia

2010-09-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I am no authority on the subject. I am not responsible for any loss of life, property or sanity that results from this post.

When sometime ago I was doing this course (rather notorious in IIT) on "Technology, Development and Society" (don't ask me why), the professor took upon herself to explain to us the Gaia hypothesis. This hypothesis, immensely controversial, to say the least, states, very loosely speaking, that the whole of earth is a single organism, and like all other organisms it seeks to preserve itself. That sounds so intelligent-design-y right? I thought so too..

Then at the end of the course one of my classmates made a presentation on the Gaia hypothesis, and one slide really stuck in my head. It drew a distinction between Gaia and Darwin's natural selection, and I remember my classmate's words: she said that Natural selection was about adaptation; the Gaia hypothesis was about adaptation and change. The idea was simple: we have a tendency to view natural selection as individuals competing in a static environment. That however can at best be an approximation to the true situation: we don't just compete and adapt to the environment, we also change the environment itself.

How does that change things? Weirdly, when you endow living organisms with the power to change their own environment, what you often get is a remarkable stasis in the environment. There is this mathematical model called Daisyworld. It is a planet in which the only living organisms are two species of daisies: white daisies and black daisies. The white daisies can survive in warm climes and by reflecting the sunlight they reduce the temperature around them. The black daisies can live in the cold and by absorbing the sunlight they increase the temperature around them. Now consider a situation in which the sun is constantly coming closer to the planet. When the sun is far away, the black daisies dominate, and they make the planet warmer. As the sun comes closer, temperatures tend to rise, making it possible, then favourable for white daisies to grow; the white daisies dominate, bringing temperatures down. The result is that temperatures remain steady for most of the time, rising steeply towards the end.

Natural selection, and most of our scientific thought, tends to view the environment as separate from the living organisms. It is assumed to be like an infinite source or sink of resources, passively playing its part, merely providing the stimulus for life to evolve. The truth however is that the environment is inseparable from the organisms that it supports. All the daisies in the daisyworld example are linked with the environment, and with each other. The heat that one black daisy absorbs makes life harder for another black daisy sharing the environment, and easier for the white daisy. Although this simple, rather local effect is easy to grasp, it leads to rather counterintuitive global effects: the temperature of the world remains constant, as if there was an intelligent entity trying to control the environment, as if the planet was truly alive, trying to survive.

But is it really so counterintuitive? Consciousness itself arises in our heads from neurons that have no idea what we are thinking about. This queerly magical notion of control, this "I" whom we call intelligent is emergent from the behavior of innocent neurons, in the same way that the temperature of Daisyworld is emergent from the behavior of innocent daisies. In each case, each individual component is prohibitively simple, yet the system of interacting agents is prohibitively complex.

The fun part is that this interaction acts at so many different levels. The daisies interact with the environment to generate Daisyworld, cells interact with each other and the environment to give rise to the entity called a daisy, molecules interact with themselves and the environment to give cells their meaning, and so on and so forth. There is a whole web of interactions, and it doesn't go wide as much as it goes deep. I would think that this interaction is critical to explaining the complexity of the world we live in, but science has always striven to simplify, to reduce the complexity, and we have always abstracted away the rest of the world when dealing with any system of particles, considering it as constant. My feeling is that in doing so, in our quest to simplify, we might have approximated away the very basis of nature.

Change

2010-09-09T22:50:00.000-07:00

Change.

Little by little, I bring myself to look at the mirror. See the man there without averting my eyes. Yes, not a boy anymore, but a man, at least physically. The stubble that the razor has a hard time removing is testimony to that.

I wash my face with cold water and think of the days gone by. For the umpteenth time perhaps, but it's different now. See, the future has caught up with the past. The circle is complete. It's time for change.

I get dressed, think absentmindedly of whether I should put a jacket on. I walk out of the door, find a cold but pleasant wind shake me out of my sleep. Pull me out of my dreams. Things have changed, no, go back, rewrite. I have changed. I hold the steering of my life. There is no denying that I always did.

Yes, I hurt you, you there, if you're reading this. I said I loved you and I hurt you. I have done that so many times now it doesn't even make sense to apologise any more. The only person I should apologise to is probably myself. Yes, dude, you're not a saint. You have a little bit of the devil in you, just like everybody else.

Yes, I lied. I lied so many times and when I said I will say the truth, I lied. I lied to myself and to everyone else who mattered. I am not the great guy you imagined me to be. Look at me, I stand naked in front of you, in flesh and blood, mortal and far from invincible. I hold no power other than the power I hold over myself. There are no great deeds I boast of, no overwhelming goodness inside of me, no superhuman ability in need of respect. Just me, with all the pimples on my face and my nails dirty and my clothes in need of washing.

And yes, I hold the baton for change. I hold the key to my own future, the same as everybody else. The tiny key made of gold that will unlock the pandora's box of possibilities, only I need to have the strength to face them. I stand at the helm of my own ship, the captain of my own soul and that thought is as terrifying as it is liberating. I can make anything I want to. I can create the world I want to live in, and I have done this all this while, without knowing it. I m holding my pen writing my own destiny and I've just realised the fact, I've just realised that I'm the only person turning the inexorable wheels of my fate. Not the system, not God, not you, just me.

I'm not perfect, I'm not ideal, I'm not perfect. I'm just here. At the forefront of my destiny.

And I'm here, holding the flag for change.

Blame

2010-08-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

She was born a bud, a single child of a long stem laden with thorns. Amongst the other flowers in the nursery she lay in wait, opening very slowly, layer by layer, to the gardener who tended to her and to the other flowers that bowed in respect. Her crimson petals glimmered in the morning dew, and around her her fragrance was carried away borne on the cool summer breeze.

As she grew she grew fond of her own beauty, of the tales they told her about her powers. She listened with astonishment of how her very existence had always been a symbol of love, of how the Gods were bathed in her petals always, and of how her nectar was the sweetest possible. She swelled with pride at the power she held, and she grew up believing that she was destined to spread good luck and love and beauty in the world.

They took her to the florist then, and then she lay in wait for her golden moment. She saw in her florist's eyes joy whenever he tended to her, and she responded to his love with love, smiling and shining, a Godess descended upon the world. She was thrilled when one summer evening she was chosen by her florist, her long stalk picked up in his careful hands, and as she crossed hands she looked into the face of the man holding her, and saw joy and hope and radiance. She swelled with pride again, and she shook her petals so the dew dropped from them, as an ode to her own beauty and to the joy she provided.

The man walked her through the street, his hand holding the rose behind the back, as if whatever was to come was a surprise for her. She waited patiently, and soon she found herself being presented before another smiling face, the man kneeling down, she herself in his hands, held up. But the smiling face in front of her stopped smiling, and lost colour.. The eyebrows knit together and the lips moved rapidly, . Then she looked back at the face of the man who was holding her and he wasn't smiling too, and suddenly she saw big drops of water, salty, fall down on her petals. She felt the man's grip on her tightening, stiffening, then letting go, so she fell helpless down on the street, amidst sounds of footpaths where there were no smiling faces. She felt scared, because she had always given joy and never any sorrow; no one had denied being overjoyed at the sight of her beauty, no one had failed to respond to her fragrance, and yet here she was soaked to death in the salty tears of a sorrow she had not known. What did I do wrong she asked, but there was no one to answer; there was no one to answer before shoes fell on her and sucked away her fragrance and pressed out her beauty, that all she had done wrong was to be born a rose.

4

2010-05-20T04:48:00.000-07:00

Author's note: I found this post buried amongst several drafts that I had left untouched, deteriorating in the drawers of my blog. It's more of a diary entry of the 4 years of life in IIT looked at in retrospect, but it's...slightly weirdly written.

Four years. Full circle.
Starting with studying following a long bout of even more studying and preparedness for God knows what. Before a blink and before your mouth can whisper the words "Physics" swept into the general mayhem of Computer Science oh my God Computer Science the El Nino of this day and age. Then induction and recursion and the world becoming clear to you no wait its gone again because here come AVL trees and that weird rotation and poof you're gone. Then back again through algorithms and languages and numerical computing and image processing till I close my ears and say no no no more trying to make the little numbers move faster and yet do that same thing looking at a computer screen full of numbers to make them behave they should behave. While I wait for the rest of my life to take off and let go.
Words on a black board, words on a white board. Words on a white board in Bangalore, sitting in Microsoft feeling all free and unreal and finding "Computationalism" a word that means nothing and yet so much because it is at the end of four years of that very word gnawing at your mind. And then a blur and a whiteboard again and matrices and classmates and photographs and thoughts amiss and heartbeats racing. Then back again through time and those thoughts you must not speak now because what's buried is buried but it wasn't at that time because everyone knew it except me and because it was me they were talking about behind closed doors into innocent ears. Then race ahead because memories have a habit of erasing everything just when you want those memories back because if memories weren't erased we would all be Turing machines with infinite tapes, not feeling anything because it hurts too much to feel. And memories that want to erase those parts too, the good ones that you want to hold on to because obviously good things can't survive without the bad. Errors go and so do mistakes, we converge to a solution we don't even care about because what we found has been erased. Little waves with soft white hands.

And down and down and further down where those hidden demons of guilt and self pity coil into each other like mating snakes. And the mistakes you did and the words you said because they were not spoken but typed and I couldn't look into your eyes when I said them and you were so far away you wouldn't have heard if I had shouted. So like words on a computer screen, commands that have no meaning but will go drive the little read write heads that will erase everything. rm -rf *. And then you can go on and put new stuff in there while I am left grapling with a connection gone bad which funnily is how everything else around is, the numbers dont add up, I'm not converging to a solution and the errors are not going down fast enough and what the heck am I doing the right thing?

Right thing, right thing, right thing, right thing and suddenly who are you kidding you've been a criminal all along. Tick tick tick tick then oh my god you've been Cross all your life.

Then four years later you realise we are all wrong, and the only task now to be done is to learn to forgive yourself.

Will you teach me to dream this once?

2010-04-22T07:12:00.000-07:00

Will you teach me to dream this once?
I knew how to, long ago
Sitting often, by the window
I wondered and thought and wished so
I never knew then that sometimes the night
Must go without its moonlight
Or sometimes the sun would come to the day
But leave it all a starving gray
I didn’t know then that roses too
Wither away like the others do
I didn’t know then that I would too
When so many dreams didn’t come true

Will you stay with me a little while?
Will you be there on those nights
When it’s all darkness and no moonlight?
Will you listen to me when I have stories to tell
Or when there’s nothing to say and its silent as hell?
Will, when it gets too real
When things start coming, crashing, down,
Will you help me put the bricks back
Will you help me once again off the ground?
These wings you give are all very well
The skies are blue and there’s lots to tell
But will you be there if the garden’s no more
And dreams have turned into nightmares sore?

Writing again!

2010-04-22T06:17:00.000-07:00

Just wrote a story. You can get it here: The Gift. Its my first foray into fantasy, so I hope you'll be a little lenient with criticism :P. Will blog again soon....

Life is beautiful

2010-03-11T05:35:00.000-08:00

Phew...what a journey it has been.

When I look back at the past two or three years of my life, and especially at the last few months, life has been a whirlwind. I have been working almost non-stop for the past year, and in the meanwhile my fascination with my work has deteriorated into disappointment, sometimes even disillusionment. In the backdrop of all this I have made the decision of going for a Ph.D, and at the same time been assailed by doubts as to whether this was the right choice. And somewhere down the line I have had a remarkably bittersweet experience with relationships.

Then suddenly, this other day, in the midst of all this chaos, I decided to take a day off. Off, not as in run off to a movie, or catch a hasty train to a hill station. Off, as in the idle, time-is-eternal off: grab a novel, sit down where the only company you have is yourself, and watch time fly slowly by.

It was afternoon, and the sun was out, strong, but not scorching. In front of our hostel is a small garden of sorts (a herbal garden supposedly), and strewn about are a couple of benches and swings. I sat on a swing, behind which towered a tree. The sun shone through the leaves, and made beautiful patterns of light and shadow on the book I was reading. Every now and then a cool gust of wind blew, brushing through the leaves and the blades of grass so that they rustled. In front of me a small ladybird toiled its way through the grass.

But it was the pace of time then that struck me most. Time did not exist here. Time was a concept unknown to this world. Here the wind did not care whether it was 1 pm or 1:05 pm. The grass did not care whether I managed to stick to a deadline or not. The ladybird had no assignments to make, no papers to publish, no goals to follow. They were just there, in the present, eternally in the present. Looking at that scene you felt that this here could never change; that this moment would go on forever, and that sometime after eternity you would look up from your tranquil reverie and find that ages have passed, that you are old now, and it doesn't matter that you spent your life looking at the blade of grass fluttering in the wind, for that was somehow what you were born to do in the first place.

How different this was from the world in which we lived! How different from numbers running down a computer screen: 27 seconds to run through 30, 000 data points! How different from assignments, projects, applications, forms, mails, letters and phone calls! How different from the constant second hand chasing you through the day, reminding you that hey, you have a life to take care of. Life? What life? Can life be spent chasing life?

Let us pause for a minute here. Let us not rush through life, let us not aim at accomplishing a million things in life. Let us just learn to watch instead of look, absorb instead of witness. Let us not, as Wordsworth said, lay waste our powers, getting and spending, late and soon. For life is not a trial, life is not a mission we have to accomplish. Life is beautiful, and it is meant to be lived.

Against Rationality-Part I

2010-02-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

I guess four years is a wee bit too late to vent my anger at life, the universe and everything in general and the engineering world in particular, but hell, better late than never. Plus, four years of harrowing experiences in the midst of scientists and engineers does things to you, and I have to say some things before I go a little balmy in the head.

So this post (and a few more to come) is about "rationality", "logic", "reason", "science", "intellect", "intelligence" and so on and so forth. It is about the standard dogma that is indoctrinated into so many Indians, most of whom land in such grotesque places as the IITs. It is about the belief, reiterated till it becomes fact, that yes, life is logical, that reason, cause and effect are things of infallible accuracy and unfailing integrity. More particularly, it is about the high status we accord to science, logic and reason, and the farthings we throw at everything else.

So let me start. Being, unfortunately, a science student myself, I will let this first post follow "logic" through science.

Science itself is logical, and so is mathematics, so what use would it be to look at logic within the framework of science? Actually a lot, and for that precise reason. Science is something we always regard as being logical, in other words, being derived from fixed, though maybe unknown, rules. Rules, of deduction, inference and reasoning. We science people like so much to lay down rules, to lay down formulae, and to exclaim with unabashed pride that, hey, this sequence of symbols on paper explains everything!

Towards the end of the 19th century, this was the general mood prevalant among mathematicians. Mathematical proofs were getting more and more formal, with fixed rules of inference, and mathematical logic had firmly taken ground. Mathematical proofs were becoming more and more "mechanical". Hilbert, as part of his 20 problems, asked the obvious question (Entscheidungsproblem): How mechanical are mathematical proofs? Does there exist a set of axioms and a set of inference rules that will lead, "logically", and hence "mechanically", to every known theorem in the book?
If Hilbert's proposition was true, all that you needed for mathematics was a set of symbols, and a set of axioms and inference rules operating on those symbols. Nothing more. What those symbols meant, or if they had any meaning at all, would be insignificant. Meaning would essentially a matter of book-keeping
Then came Kurt Godel, and his Incompleteness theorem: For any formal logical system that was consistent, there was always a statement that would be true if your axioms were true, but that you could never prove by the rules of logic. In other words, logic, the simple rules of inference, would not suffice to determine or prove this statement, and yet this statement would be true. The way you could prove this statement was to talk about the meaning of the statement, something that logic was incapable of doing.

The point I want to drive home is this: logic is not how theorems are proven. Logic is not how science happens. Science and Mathematics, though they seem driven by logic, are not driven by logic, or at least not logic in the sense of a set of axioms and inference rules. What it is that drives them, and what kind of "logic" is involved, well, I'll harp on that on my next post.

Questions

2010-02-03T22:46:00.000-08:00

What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose? Why the big deal about being born, crying and laughing, loving and hating, living and dying? Why are there relationships? Why are they so important? What is so unfathomable about solitude? Why must I need someone else?
What exactly is meaning, if I am searching for the meaning of life? How do I define meaning? Understanding? Truth? What is truth? What is reality? Is it confined to what we perceive? Or is it something other, our understanding of which is necessarily imperfect? Is meaning abstract? Is it tangible? Is it a mathematical equation that will crop up on running a MATLAB code? Can it be encapsulated in an equation?
What is my reality? Who am I? Am I just defined by how I act towards others? Is my identity dfefined only by my actions? What about thought? Am I defined only by my thoughts? Do I exist only because I think?
What does it mean to think? Who is thinking? Is the neuron in my head firing at so many times a second thinking? Does it know it is making me happy or sad? Does it have an inkling of the questions I am asking? Does the brain have an idea? Can I exist outside of my thoughts? Can I exist without my brain? I don't think during sleep; don't I exist in sleep?
Who is this I? Why do I keep saying I? What does this mass of cellls and tissues have to do with me? What prevents me from taking a scapel and dissecting myself to see what I look like? Why is this I so important? Why do we never hurt our 'I', but somehow always manage to hurt our 'we'? What is it that makes you different from me? Why are your thoughts your own, and why are my thoughts my own? If this I is embodied in a physical form why can't I take it out and keep it in a glass jar forever?
Is I abstract? What about thought? What about meaning? How much of it is captured in the alphas and betas of science? What prevents me from writing the Schrodinger equation for everything? Can this everything reside in an equation? Can this be a computer program, with an input and an output, and we merely players, chips in the Turing machine? Is there a tape running somewhere with a pattern of 0s and 1s that tells me everything about everything? If not, why am I studying science? Why am I looking at alphas and betas and trying to decipher meaning, if meaning doesn't reside in them? What does meaning, truth, reality, consciousness, life reside in? What are these words, and why are we so obsessed with them we write blog posts about them?

Signing off...

Brave new world

2010-01-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

This is kind of a response to a friends post in his own blog (see here). I guess another blog post on the same thing is not going to mean much as far as the general creative content of the web is concerned. But if some day blog posts were to count as votes, I would want this voice to be loud enough for the rest of the world (or at least the rest of the country) to sit up and listen.

The world is full of people who work for money, fame, power, or more generally for the carrot or the stick. IIT is especially bloated with such people. It is frustrating, stifling and depressing. I am more comfortable if no one worked at all. If no one studied, and all the IITs and every engineering college in the country ran empty. I am more comfortable with a half-wit who is enraptured by science than by a super-intelligent genius who has his eyes set on the 20-something lakh package at the end of his student life. Frankly, the latter kind of people scare me. Yes, I agree everyone has a reason for wanting fame, money, or whatever, but by that measure Pakistan wants Kashmir, US wants oil and Osama wants the whole world. I don't think I am exactly comfortable with the idea.

I hope you get what I am driving at. A genius working for money is more dangerous than the entire Taliban put together. He might work on a nuclear bomb and sell it off to the highest bidder. Okay, that was scary. On a smaller scale he will simply apply his brains where the money is, working for a corporate giant while the vast damned world waits for someone intelligent enough to solve its problems. Or perhaps he will churn out papers at an alarming rate on how to make epsilon differences to little-known algorithms that matter not except to settle arm-chair disputes over expensive luncheons.

Money, power, fame, papers, accolades. It is all the same. Work not for the motive, the Bhagvad Gita tells us. Work for work's sake, work for the joy inherent in the work itself. Learn for the joy of knowledge. Study for the sake of the joy inherent in discovery. Anything else you do is a sin. A crime. It is murder, of the subject of your study, and of yourself. Getting an A on the course does not mean you learnt something in the course. The grades count for nothing. Zero. Zilch. Anything you do, any work you do, must be done for the task's own sake. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise it counts for nothing. Otherwise you could be replaced by a computer churning numbers.

The thing that I want to raise my voise against is not just that. It is something deeper, although I hate to call it this: the system. The system, meaning all of you, me, the professors, everybody, we encourage this attitude. You get projects based on your CGPA. Why? Take it from me, I have gotten A's in courses I never learnt anything from. Why must a low CGPA mean a lack of passion? You get into IIT based on an entrance exam. Why? What does the entrance exam measure? Does it measure passion, a desire to know more? Will it reveal an interest in science? How? When did a pen and paper test ever measure interest and passion?

The professors look at CGPAs when they judge students. The students look at CGPA when they take up courses. In this shithole, someone who is genuinely interested is kicked out of the picture. To do anything he wants to do he has to put forward his gradesheet, and to make his gradesheet look good he has to take up courses he has no interest in. Slowly he lets go of science and looks at the little numbers that add up, like the speedometer in a car race. So many kilometers left, so many covered. Slowly he becomes one of them, one of those who work for the grades. He will pick up a job that will pay him well, bide his life like a fucking machine working for peanuts, even as the child within him, once open-mouthed in awe at the world around him, is stifled, smothered and killed.
Great world, this, the one we live in.

Bangalore

2009-12-16T01:16:00.000-08:00

Bangalore again.
Bangalore, colloquially known as the AC city. The city of a perennial cool breeze, cloudy skies and a very fine weather. The city where you will never complain that its sweaty, or wet, or freezing. The city where everyday the weather is delightful. The city where every day is like the next. Invariably.
Bangalore, the software hub of the country. The city of an Indianized version of an American dream. The city packed cinema halls and IT professionals with serious money to burn. And auto-rickshaw-wallahs and shopkeepers with an eye for that money.
Bangalore, the city of traffic jams. The city where the long transit hours have meant a family life torn out of context, or an office life forced into absurd timescales. The city that has learnt to live with one-way roads that curve like snakes, and yet bear such clinical names as “18th cross”.
And yet, Bangalore, the city of change.
I am here in Bangalore again, the city that was the beginning and the end of so many changes. I look outside from behind glass walls at the Gulmohur, and notice that it doesn’t have any more flowers. I look around me and notice that there are no longer many friends around me. The table I sat at in the summers, surrounded by so many people a colleague, also a Professor, called it a fish market, is now empty. Terribly so, in fact. Isolated, host to a blank computer screen already in disuse, it stands like a ghost, reminding me of what was, and what isn’t any more.
What was, and what isn’t any more, and what could have been but wasn’t. Wild swamps of buried memories suddenly come to life in this eternally unchanging city, and yet the city that played host to a revolution in my life. A relationship that sprang up way too quickly, and still refuses to die. A sequence of friendships that were never quite there, and that showed up cracks in my life and heart. An attempt to be something I can probably never be. A blossoming of hopes followed by a poignant autumn, a relentless winter and a cautious spring. An eternity of life lived between the summer at Bangalore and the winter at Bangalore, and yet the city is still the same. It’s almost as if the blizzards of change have ravaged my heart and soul, and yet have left the city around me mockingly untouched. The city looks back at me through these same glass walls, through this gulmohur and these clouds, and sniggers ruthlessly. Oh it’s you again, it says, and laughs, as I close my eyes and let the flood of a million memories drown me in their wake.
Bangalore, the AC city, India’s silicon valley, darling of the capitalists and software industries. Bangalore, the city that is too much with my memory, that I want to stay away .

On morality

2009-10-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

The minors are usually the time for a reality check. Dinner time conversations held over tables in a cafe or over walks to and from SDA, on life, the universe and everything fade away into the background. Philosophy restricts itself to the exam and how to get past it. Ideas of friendships and loyalties get morphed into hideous equations of allegiances and infidelities. Left to itself, mired in the swampy undergrowth of the epsilon's and delta's staring back in the unintelligible handwriting of a colleague of yours you don't probably know, abandoned in the sleepless loneliness of a syllabus that doesn't seem to end, the mind thinks thoughts, discards them, then thinks again.

Well, not exactly, and maybe this is a very gloomy picture of an exam that doesn't matter much, but look around you while the exams are going on and you will find an aura of “using” and “being used”. People who never talked to you ask you for your notes, and people you never wanted to face are sitting with you and studying the same things you are. And you have to bear with them because of course this is an exam right? This is reality.

On a larger scale, sometimes, I wonder how true people are to what people say, and believe, about themselves and about the world. If so often friendships and companionships are forged as temporary allegiances in the race to get better grades, to what extent can other human values survive? When people say they believe in something, (even I myself, to say the truth), to what extent will that belief be borne out by their future behaviour?

Sometimes I feel that belief, and principles, and ideals are nothing but matters of convenience. Your principles are whatever it takes to prove yourselves as right and the other person as wrong. You don't act according to principles, you principle yourself according to your acts. Viewed in this light, value systems are not absolute; they are relative, and they are relative in such a mindboggling, frustating way that to talk of them as anything more than the whims and fancies of a mad man that is the average human is blasphemous overestimation.

And this hypocrisy, this dichotomy, between something that is supposedly as universal as a principle or morality and something that is as personal as a like or dislike, permeates every level of society. If individuals hide behind protective armors of their own code of ethics, so do families operate behind the veils of honor and custom, so do religions battle under the flag of injustice and discrimination, and so do nations scheme and plot in the name of magnanimity and peace. Morality is nothing but what you hurl at the other person to win an argument. It is not that it is moral. It is that you want it to be.

We are all pleased with our own moralities, aren't we? So much so that we find it hard to digest that someone else might have a different view. We like to have nice little “pearls of wisdom”, and strew them on a thread and wear them on our neck. But there are no pearls of wisdom. There is no shining light at the end of the tunnel. There is no white, black and color. The truth, the reality, the unknown, unseen morality that we so unabashedly lay claim to, isn't shining or rounded, or consistent. It is not the pearl, it is that irritating grain of sand, an inconsistency, an abomination, is reality. It is hard, and rough, and difficult to digest, and to protect yourself from it you cover it in layers of ambiguity, the way an oyster covers it with its own secretions, till it hurts no more. We bend our pitifully illogical logic this way and that, back and forth, till it can explain what hurt us and what we cannot explain.

And so we “learn”, and forget, and move on. With a brand new philosophy, a brand new set of beliefs. A brand new pearl of wisdom hanging blithely from the necklace around our neck. This is philosophy. This is morality. And this is the quintessence of this world we live in.

Random ramble

2009-07-30T02:05:00.000-07:00

Walking shouting running screaming
Talking whispering laughing dreaming
Jumping sleeping smiling crying
Loving, hating; living, dying

Each day the better, each day the worse
Each hope a memory, each memory a hope
Each thought a million emotions in my mind
Each light so powerful it can strike you blind

Each road a circle, each end a road
Each freedom a noose, each noose a rope
To the rope I hang for the breath that ain't mine
To the hope I hang for the dream I can't find

Each moment an hour, each hour gone by
Each minute a painful reminder of life
Each smile a fear of the tears to come
Of what I am, and what I have become

This way is that, and that way, this
Hell is a tear on the cheeks of bliss
And joy must come with a thousand warning signs
But sorrow can sneak in, whenever, into my mind

Endnote: Just a random ramble...

The wrong side of the moon

2009-06-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

They said take the plunge, dont be afraid to dream
It all seemed so well, as it always seems
I told you all, once, beneath a full moon
Guess I'm looking now at the wrong side of the moon

I never asked for mountains or flowers
I dont think I ever wanted to touch the stars
I wanted, in your heart, but a little bit of room
Guess I dreamt of the wrong side of the moon.

I hold my pen, it quivers as it writes
As do the tears as they stand atop my eyes
Guess it doesnt get better so soon
Guess I was always on the wrong side of the moon

I lay down my head on a pillow at night
I close my eyes and I dream of you in the moonlight
You're holding my hands and I'm looking right at you
And I am dreaming of the wrong side of the moon

I touch your face and you look into my eyes
I wish I could hold on to this moment for my life
But its hardly morning and I wake up all too soon
And I'm still alone and on the wrong side of the moon

I get up, brush and bathe, life must go on
Stare with wistful glances at the growing dawn
At a fading image of you amidst flowers in bloom
I was always, always on the wrong side of the moon.

Endnote: Fictional. :)

Reflections

2009-03-18T02:23:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was the world.

It was a world, and that's all. An orb floating through the ever-changing continuum of space, a mass of physics revolving around a yellow-gold sphere of flames, biding its time. Like clockwork, it revolved, it rotated, it looked upon the rest of its kin, as they moved, enmasse, through the ether. A million orbs floating in the sky. In the beginning was the world.

In the beginning was the cell. In the poisonous, ruthless sea of the world, it gasped and panted as it negotiated every passing second, every passing day of its existence, counting its time in the revolutions of the world, in the ups and downs of the burning yellow sphere that dominated the sky, or the waxing and wayning of the calm white sphere as it went through its cycles. Day and night, yin and yang, dark and light, but there was no one to look at it. Yet. For in the beginning was just the cell.

In the beginning was fire. Time had flown past like a river in a hurry to meet the sea, or so it would seem hardly a few milleniums hence. For at no time before had the world seen so much change in itself, nor the cell seen so much of its kin. At no time before had the rapid change of the universe been so obvious, so apparent, as when in that blink of a cosmological eye, things changed forever, and suddenly a pair of eyes fell upon the miracle for the first time: in the beginning was fire.

In the beginning was: what? The world never could have thought of the cell. The cell could never have thought of the advent of fire. And fire would scarce believe that in her simple beginnings something as wonderfully profound as the human mind could take seed. That someday this very pair of eyes that stared at it so absolutely today would someday stare at a rocket fly off to space, at a canvas that would fill up with color, stare at a million things, take in, discover, invent.

That someday the first written word would appear. That someday the first painting would be drawn on the stone wall. That someday someone will start to dream. To love. To hate. To think. That someday, this whole mass of coincidence, would collapse into one single thought in someone's head.

So, right, I'll take your leave. Happy life!

I wish I could make you happy

2009-02-05T01:55:00.001-08:00

I wish I could be a butterfly
And alight upon your nose
And fly around your face
Till the happiness shows

I wish I could be a song
And creep into your mind
And fill it all up
So it's only me you find

I wish I could make u happy
But i am just this guy
Who saw your tears for a moment
And wondered why you cry

The art of storytelling II - Memento

2009-01-07T04:07:00.000-08:00

What makes a story a good story?
This question has been plaguing me, in a way, for the past fortnight or so. I started writing as a hobby, you see, and like all conceited idiots in the world I fancied myself a good amateur writer. A marvelous one, in fact.

There is, of course, a limit to the amount of self-deception one is willing to indulge in. So the past few days I have been trying to wade through the net, flounder, rather, trying to find that thing, that defining characteristic, that little magic that good, professional writers have and hobbyists like yours truly don't. I mean, ok, yeah, I have a way with words, but it is, after all, a teeny-weeny, cramped up way, and I would rather I got a little bit more ... writerish?...in my efforts.

So I took it upon myself to watch, and read some nice stories. (nice. talk about banality) I watched Memento. Yeah, all right, all those fans out there. I agree. It is an awesome movie. I have never so enjoyed being so confused in life. I mean, what better way to show "anterograde memory loss" or whatever the hell it was than to just put the audience in a muddle, running events in such an "anti-chronological" order? And what more? It is just such a great way to show memory loss, as in what memory would the audience have of events that haven't even been shown? Really, awesome way of making the audience associate with the protagonist.

And wait. That's not it, is it. The story is not just about a non-linear narrative. It is just so carefully written out, so carefully planned, sowing in the audience's mind the exact same kind of doubt that gets into Leonard's mind, and reaches such a wonderfully well thought out climax: making the audience question whether what Leonard calls "facts" are really so, whether he hasn't been manipulated by someone like Natalie, or Ted, or, in what was, at least to me, a brilliantly crafted revelation, himself.

And therein the story achieves its motive. It brings out anterograde whatever in such striking relief that the guy watching it knows, literally, what it would feel like to be in Leonard's place. Phew. No. I can never really write anything like that.

How the hell do they make such stories??

If Only

2008-12-03T00:16:00.000-08:00

If only
If only I could open my window
Look out at the sun
And manage a smile
If only I could mean my laugh
And not the tears
That spring from my eyes
If only I could lay down
My head on the pillow
At night, and not wonder
Of the day to come
If only I could sleep, dreamless
Not wish this day
Had passed differently
If only I could forget
And live on,
Catching hold, and letting go
If only I could say
It doesn't matter
As it never mattered
Until now
If only I could turn back time
Live those moments again
Differently
Happily
If only I could bring myself
To become other
Than who I've become
If only time had never passed
And those days of glory never ended
If only.

Writer's block!!

2008-11-14T03:06:00.000-08:00

Now this is insane. It's nearing to...what...two months since I last wrote something worthwhile, and still the world of words has not returned from its extended vacation. I mean, look at this. Here I am, with my beloved laptop in front of me and with my fingers itching to get to the keys, and yet. And yet! There, look at that. I couldn't even get past that "and yet"!!!

Any form of art suffers from a pathological problem of "whimsicalness", if you know what I mean. Now, it doesn't matter if you have the greatest story framing itself in your head. It doesn't matter if the Oscars and the Bookers are all yours for the taking, definitely, truly, if only you could get this one onto the paper. Ah, if only. But it is not in your hand, is it. God has given you the TV of creativity to play and watch while he keeps the remote control in his hands. Just like that loving, annoyed and absolutely useless father who has no idea of the importance of Pokemon. Oh come on!! Don't switch it off!! The fun was just starting.
But no, no amount of pleading will keep the TV on, no amount of pleading will keep the creative juices flowing. Sorry, mate. Guy's gone for coffee. Can't help. Yeah, we all know what a wonderful writer you are, the very best, surely, and yeah, definitely you will make for the "Lifetime achievement award" or something, and as you leave can you please pass me the file and we can do some work?
And so you gasp and sigh and yawn and cry..well, not cry, but figuratively speaking, just to keep the rhyme...and you rant and rage and fume and you get up to attend that stupid lecture course of yours and look at the professor and do the only other thing that is worthwhile in life, which is hoping that the cute girl in the back will fall for you...

And that, by the way is all the more interesting, because there is an awesome part of your brain which claims that, yes indeed, the girl loves your writing, absolutely loves it, and she fancies you, if only, if only you could write that story. Oh, but you are neither handsome, nor brave, nor well-dressed, and in every concievable way you are an absolute asshole, so what other reason, pray, might she have for falling for you?

And that's where you lose hope, and give up, and try to immerse yourself in the numbers and matrices drawn on the board. Such, as Lewis Carroll wanted to say, is Divine perversity....

And such, as I would like to say, is the miserable blog post that arises out of a writer's block!!

Nothing specific...just venting my anger....

2008-11-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

To Anger

Flow my lady, with wings of ire
Blackened raven of smothered desire
Flow red hot through my ashen veins
In these contorted times of pain

With bloody flames in this dark dark night
Set afire a million lights
Unsheath your sword of free disdain
Bring your thunder, your unforgiving rain

Wipe this smile upon my face
Bring forth your ruthless craze
Hold my heart in your iron fist
Take me out of this stifling mist

And on and on let your stormwinds blow
Till the lines of change have ceased to show
Till the dust's blown all out of town
And the whole damn paradise has been brought down

And cease not till the world, evil, vile
Has left its bed or ceased to cry
And, if only to seek revenge, the night
Has given way to harsh daylight

On love

2008-07-11T02:36:00.000-07:00

So here I go on the beaten track again, you say. So be it. People more...interesting?...than me have fallen the great wazoo, if I may say so, the great wazoo of human emotions, never again to return. Since times immemorial (or let's say times memorial, just to stay on the safe side of political correctness), the human mind has been obsessed with this cute little idea of love. Obsessed? No, not really. More like exasperated, flabbergasted, astonished, ecstatic, and acutely pissed all at once. Not that that is a new phenomenon, of course; we humans have a habit of being all that, and more, with almost every known subject in the universe, but with love this (love?) affair has probably lasted the longest. I mean, hell, we still want to know about Helen of Troy, or Cleopatra, or somebody else's girlfriend, so much more than we want to know about the next President of the country. We never tire of talking in hushed tones by the campfire on a conspirational nights, of the "things" that are "going on".
And above all that, above all the gossips and lullabies and nursery rhymes and unbelievable history, there is this feeling of love itself, that nice gooey(?) feeling that every man seems to chase for the whole of his life, falling so often into things that look a lot like love but most often are not, that most often are just muck, pure and simple. But in the end, the very end, you do fall into it. You do end up standing on a rainy day with a rose in hand by the roadside, not thinking about the fact that you forgot the umbrella by your bedside, thinking merely about the fact that here comes your sweetheart, laughing heartily or smiling shyly, or bumbling stupidly, as you please (or love), and wondering why the fuck does time have to go so slow, and why the fuck she cant run over quickly and come and stand by your side. And time does run fast of course, awfully fast, just while she is by your side and talking and laughing and here comes the bus so I have got to go, bye, tata, sweet dreams and all the other lullabies you have to exchange before the sun goes down. That is it, really, for the day, and you have to sit at night and wonder and remember and think how much you love her and there goes your heart all bickery and panicky and I-am-going-so-kiss-my ass-ey, not caring for that poor little body that has to go to sleep, so help you God. And so you lie blissfully awake while your heart goes on beating(which living heart doesn't, but, figuratively speaking) and your mind goes on dreaming.
And there are so many sides to it, so many to love I mean; you enter into it expecting paradise, but it is just Mother Nature at her most powerful. There are storms as you have never seen before, there is lightning, and thunder, and yet there are gardens, and lakes and sunsets and sunrises. The world is so fucking beautiful, so damn fucking beautiful, and she is too, and damn this short circuited brain that cannot put a song for her on paper. All that comes is a stupid I love her.
And so we all bumble through life, and through love, one day or another. But how we wish it would never cease. How we wish we could love forever, we could be close and hold hands and just plain be good. Somewhere deep within that is what your heart wants, inspite of all the storms and all the lightning, but like all joys love, so often wears out, so often becomes a thing of the everyday, a thing of the mundane. It so very is not, I assure you, so very is not mundane, it is as wonderfully exotic a thing that could happen to you, but no, it's getting over, we can't go on. And that is when you give up, poor soul, that is where you let go, but someday, someday lying on a hospital bed with a creaking fan above you and a death clock ticking away somewhere in the background you will know, know that you must never have let go, know that the sweet intoxication of love never ends, it goes on, wavy and intermittent, but it goes on, one long smile till eternity.
So hold that hand my friend, and kiss those eyes, and never let go, even if the storms grow big and hard. I'll leave you then, in the arms of love, that sweet garden of Eden, and take leave, but dare you take leave, dare you leave her, and, well that's that.
Funny really the way things work out. I did go on the beaten track again.....

Rebecca and me

2008-06-21T00:40:00.000-07:00

The past few days have been, for me, severely depressing. It has been an awful low, as in a really very low low, something like a low with a 40 million ‘o’s in between –loooo….ooow. That low. I have been spending my days in a lab, alone, with the only company on offer a chat, occasionally, on gtalk. I have had nothing to dispel the loneliness, and even less to dispel the boredom. A friendless hour and a half spent, every morning and evening, in a bus, looking out of the window without registering anything, or maybe sometimes taking in the sunset obscured so ruthlessly but the concrete jungle of the city. An hour or so spent staring at a television, looking but not seeing. A barren, uninspired field inside my mind.
Yesterday I started reading Rebecca again, the only novel except Harry Potter, four years ago, that I am reading more than once. Yes, I have read it before, and it is still in my memory, and yet the novel dispels all the unfeeling sorrow within me, even now, even when I know what to expect. This time, in fact, the novel seems to me even richer. Every line written, every thought expressed falls like a raindrop from the sky and alights like a tear upon my cheek; they hold a greater magic now, they are more real, so real I can feel them, see them, taste them.
You might wonder what is so special about the novel. Move among the circles of avid readers around and you would scarcely find Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca mentioned, except in passing. Oh yeah, I read it. Good romance. Or maybe, yeah, had a horror touch to it. People have read it, sure, and liked it, but no one has seen it as it really is, or rather, as I see it. Because for me, the novel is not horror, not mystery, even though there is a death and the associated mystery; the novel is about that one character, that single fictional woman that strikes a chord with me more than any other person, real or imagined; that twenty-one year old heroine that Du Maurier created for this story, and was careful never to name.
I have met no one till now who appreciates the depth and beauty of that character. Perhaps because no one understands. People who read the novel talk only about how Rebecca occupies her thoughts, what a surprising revelation it is when the true nature of Rebecca is revealed. True, they are the defining points of the novel. But Du Maurier’s heroine is not just that, not just a vehicle for us to know about Rebecca. She has a life, and a life that is so vivid, so exquisite that in the novel she dwarfs the tall, dominating Rebecca in her prominence. The way she pretends confidence when Frith suggests she go to the Morning room, even when she doesn’t know where that is. The way she runs into the west wing just to escape meeting Maxim’s sister. The way she is afraid that someone will discover she has broken a vase. Her shy, timid personality, her absolute decapitating, yet unreasonable fear, her childish, humble ways, her ordinary, chaotic appearance; these are the things that make Rebecca the novel it is. Not Rebecca, not tall dominating Rebecca, not those tall, beastly rhododendrons that inhabit Manderley: the soul of the novel is a twenty one year old who is shy enough to be afraid of her own servants; and who, throughout the novel must even share her name with Rebecca.
But what of her, you ask. Why am I so concerned about her? I don’t know. Somewhere the novel reminds me of me. The way, when I first came to college, I sat erect in a plastic chair, perspiring, when a couple of seniors asked me to get a pack of biscuits, no more. The way, when faced with the task of calling up a guy I knew, knew quite well, to ask some doubts, I procrastinated for a full fortnight. The way I avert my eyes so often on seeing an acquaintance, for no reason whatsoever. God knows that I would run into a west wing myself, if I had one, whenever I had to make friends. Yes, by some surprising piece of coincidence, when Du Maurier drew up a picture of her heroine, she drew an amazing likeness of me.
Of course, I am not entirely a timid, blow-and-I-will-be-gone guy, or else I will never be where I am, past the JEE and a good rank at that. There is a part of me that is outgoing, a wee bit arrogant, and professional, there is a part of me that is Rebecca. The fact of the matter is that the world does not tolerate shyness, or timidity; the world does not tolerate Du Maurier’s heroine. It wants Rebecca, the charming, tall, dominating woman, the lady of the house, thoroughly professional and up to the task. It needs someone who will not run into the west wing when guests arrive, and if you do something like that it will look at you with bewildered, scornful eyes. You need to go out, fellow, talk to others, be beautiful, be the master, and the thorough businessman; a bumbling, timid guy who is content with his little cell of solitary comfort just won’t do. To be anything at all in this world you need to be Rebecca.
And that is what pricks my heart. The world is a fascist shithole, it scorns and scorns at Du Maurier’s heroine, making her realize at every step of the way that she is not like Rebecca, not what it wants, not what anybody wants. Let go of yourself, you are not needed, we need Rebecca. So either be Rebecca, or be damned. Y-Y-Yes sir, we will be Rebecca, all of us, and somewhere down the line we have six billion Rebeccas, Rebeccas who will rise to the top, trampling on others, crush the very friends they make, and yet not give a damn, and yet they will be beautiful, and yet they will be loved. Du Maurier’s heroine may have won, if only slightly; in the real world, it is Rebecca who wins. You are either Rebecca or you don’t exist.
Screw Rebecca.

The Art of storytelling

2008-06-19T07:07:00.001-07:00

I wonder whether I am qualified enough to write this. I mean, hell, here I am, an amateur writer, and already I am talking anout the art of story-telling! Oh come on!
But, seriously. I mean, it is high time someone talked of story-telling. Not writing, not photography, not anything else. Just, plain and simple, the art of story telling.
For some reason it is a thankless thing in the world to be a good story-teller. There are awards constituted, big names like the Booker Prize, or the Oscars, but no one really cares about how well a story is told. All the world cares about is just the way you leave hidden meanings, for example, or how you extoll a burning issue, or, well, how well you manage to confuse the audience(!)
But people don't pick up novels or watch movies to think and ponder. Many a times whole novels are made and whole movies are shot keeping in mind that fictitious personality who is sitting in a library, wearing half-moon glasses and writing pages about how the hero represents a man in conflict with so and so and how this and how that while he watches a movie or reads a novel. Most often, however, the real life character comes from work, falls on the sofa, loosens his tie and switches on his TV. Or lies down in his bed, switches on the nightlamp, and picks up a novel. You read a novel not to know and understand, but,most often, to be entertained.
So, what makes a good story? There are, basically, three aspects to a story, or so I believe. One is what the story is about, in its most coarse-grained form. Is it a love story? An adventure? A fantasy? This is the thing that first ignites in the mind of the writer or the movie maker. When Douglas Adams thought of the Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy he didn't think up the entire compendium in one go. It probably started with a seed, an impression perhaps, of how the novel would feel. This seed must be of the best quality. You must know, and trust that what you have in mind is truly beautiful, or awe inspiring. You cannot start with a routine, bottomless thought and expect it to become beautiful.
Next comes how the story is constructed. Who are the characters? What kind of people are they? Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca scores heavily on this account. That story couldn't, just couldn't have been written with any characters other than what Maurier chose. Recently I watched Johny Gaddar. The film seemed totally flat, and this was the reason why. They had a good story, but never gave any thought to the way the story should flow. The amount of time they had to delve on a particular event. The kind of people they were talking about.
Last, but not the least comes the manner in which it is told. Is the writing too fast? Too slow? Too complex? Is the background too dark? Is the music inappropriate? The idea behind any story must be to involve the reader, to completely immerse her in your story. If in the middle of the narrative she wakes up and realises that the song wasn't good enough, there. Your story is gone. It isn't worth the effort. Yann Martel in his Life of Pi writes in such a simple but vivid manner that you don't even realise that the story is too fantastic to be true. That's how it should be. Fiction that looks like the truth.
That's all I'd like to preach my friends! Sermon over! But before I close: I think the motive behind a good story is to give the audience an alternate reality, a separate life. If at the end of the story a guy has not forgotten his wife's birthday , then all the above notwithstanding, the story is, really, a bad story.

Life is beautiful - a poem

2008-06-09T08:10:00.000-07:00

We sit here in our rooms
Wonder what has happened today
That the sweetest of our dreams
Has been ruthlessly brushed away
What will happen? We, afraid, ask
How, pray, will we live anymore
It is death that awaits our knock
And far away sits distraught hope
Outside, like a feather let go
Snow falls softly from the sky
And , silent, so as not to disturb,
Alights like a tear on the eyes of a bride
The sun, mellowed to a distant white
Lets the clouds take it away
And, from behind the shy veil
Watches the day take its shape

Do you think the world outside
Cares for the pain you clutch so close?
Do you think that God above
Gives a care for this sorrow?
Do you think the waves at sea
Will fall silent to let you cry?
Do you think the rains will cease
When you look up to the sky?
Behold, my friend, the snow that falls
The skies that, calm, perform this feat
Care not for the coming end
For the millions of tears that you weep
The mountains that stand, sentinels of the land
Care not for the shivering cold
But instead for the moment of grace
When God himself drapes them with snow
The birds that fly give not a damn
For the chains that hold you down
But only that, wing or not,
They may soar high above the ground
The sun neither loves nor hates
The night that subtly darkness brings
For all it cares is, at its birth,
That it gives the koel heart to sing
The flowers that adorn the gardens
The trees that grow large and tall
Live in bliss at the height of spring
And have no worry about the fall
All the world in this moment now
In the beauty of God does so rejoice
And must it be tears that wet your eyes
When all around you is heavenly joy?
Behold, open your eyes, my friend
What you grieve is not your own
But this, this world, these skies, the breeze
The snow that so adorns
The birds that sing, the flowers that bloom
The million sights that rush your eyes
The flood of joy that drowns you through
And screams the truth of being alive:
Life, my friend, is not just pain
Not merely a wait till death
It is a frenzied, passionate dream,
A flight of fancy before we rest.

Moonlight - a story

2008-06-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

There goes the wind again.
It doesn't howl, like it used to when he still lived here, about a year ago. It is subdued, as if it can guess that everything has come to an end. Can you read my thoughts, wind?
The house has been decorated lavishly, and so has the tent in the park in front, its pink cloth a mismatch in the black night. The light is too gaudy, the colours burn the eye; perhaps the occasion is not as joyous as the decor makes it out to be. But that, of course, was another matter.
Suddenly the sluice gates are open, and the memories flood through. Don't you ever stop? he screams inwardly, but they are already there, battering his eyes and ears.

He was sixteen when his mother remarried. His father then had been dead six years, or may be seven, and his grandmother had been prodding her daughter an equal amount of time to get another husband; the poor child needed a father. She died early, though, his grandmother; of a heart attack when he was thirteen.
Since then his family consisted only of his mother, and she became his friend, philosopher and guide. Everyday after school he would come and stand by the threshold of the kitchen, and while by the dusky sunlight his mother cooked he would tell her everything that was happening in his life, down to the minutest detail. Between them there were no pretenses of secrecy, no barriers of formality. He spoke freely to her, of everything from his new physics teacher to the war in Iraq to even his first crush. She would listen patiently, even during power cuts when in the darkness sweat ran down her face and down her side; occasionally she would advise her son, but it was never a binding, never a command, just words meant to help him through.
But then, almost overnight, everything changed. His mother did tell him about the marriage though. In the moonlight, watching him carefully to see his reaction, she told him that she was going to marry again, because he needed a father, and she could not carry on so on her own. To his mind then, it seemed like a dream; he could not fathom how any of this would change his family, he still pictured his mother talking to him as she was now, freely, with no walls in between. But of course, everything did change; when the stranger came into the house and began to live with them, Vinay realised his entire family had been torn away from him, torn away brutally. Every day now he would go to the kitchen again and try to talk, but in the presence of this alien man, their conversations became false, unreal, forced. It seemed as if they were in a play and this man was their audience, and follow the script or the audience will know. Half in anger, half in bewilderment he withdrew into himself, stopped talking to anyone but himself, and for most of the time he was at home he would stay locked in his room, pretending to study, for there was nothing else he could do.
This man who was now his father had a daughter too. Her name was Nikita. He knew because he had known her before; after all, they had lived in the same colony. She was a year younger to him. She boarded her school bus from the same stop as he, and over the years he had established enough of an acquaintance with her to wave a greeting whenever he saw her. Now, however, she was in it too, and he no longer knew her. When they went to school now, together because they lived in the same house, they scarcely talked, walking silently and standing apart. Sometimes, of course, he felt this was wrong, that it wasn't her mistake, that after all she was now his sister, but the thought brought with it so much pain and confusion that he let it go, and vowed never to think about it again.
His mother of course was worried by her son's behaviour, and it wasn't infrequently that she tried to draw him into a conversation. But every conversation, with either his mother or the stranger, sounded so farcical, so forced to him, that try as he might he could not help feeling that this was a different family altogether, not his at all; and in the night as he lay staring at the ceiling he wondered if this was the same house he had lived in for the past several years, and whether this was the same bed he had lain in and slept a peaceful sleep.
This affair continued for several months on end, with him alone and apart from the rest of the family, and then it happened.
The accident.
That night his mother had gone with her new husband to a wedding. He himself had stayed back on the pretext of studying, for he was in no mood of engaging in any form of celebration. At the time the call came he was switching channels on television with no intention whatsoever of watching, and Nikita, who had stayed back too, was in the kitchen fixing herself some lemonade. The phone rang, its jarring note annoying in the dull boredom of the night, and Nikita, glass in hand, went to pick it up.
A few words later she froze.
With a rising sense of foreboding he walked to her and took the reciever from her. The voice at the other end was still recounting the incident. “....They were taken to the Central hospital...and there they declared them dead on arrival...” He let the voice complete, then asked what had happened. His mother and her husband had been travelling to the wedding when a drunken truck driver had rammed his truck into them. His mother had died instantly. Her husband had died on the way to the hospital.
As Vinay replaced the receiver he searched his feelings for any hint of sorrow. There was none. He willed himself to cry, but no tears came. He willed himself to scream out aloud, but his voice was clear and calm. As Nikita, standing in front of him, fell on her knees with a long wail, Vinay realised with terror that somewhere down the line he had lost the mother he had so dearly loved, but his heart somehow was frozen into ice.

Ahead of him a frail old woman stands greeting the guests, and on seeing him, she turns this way and jostles towards him, and a few kids tag along.
“Oh, Vinay beta! You have finally come! Nikita has been waiting for you so long! She was worried that you wouldn't come....”
“How could I not come, grandma?” he asks rhetorically, a part of him wondering whether he should call her grandma; after all she was Nikita's grandmother. But he lets the question pass, fade away into space.
“It was Nikita's engagement.”
His words let go a million emotions in his heart, but he stifles each one of them, one by one. Why? A part of his mind asks and the question floats free, a soap bubble coloured in a thousand myriad colours. Why? it asks again, but of course he knows.....

After the accident, Nikita's grandparents took them under their wing. Vinay initially repulsed the idea, for to him, they were no more than strangers, but they were content with leaving him to himself, and did not mind his staying silent and not talking to them. So he stayed in their house, but not as part of their family; apart, as if he were a paying guest at their house.
With Nikita the sorrow of the tragedy was still large. Most of the time she would sit silently, staring into space, her lips pursed tightly as if to contain the grief, or fury, within. Her eyes stayed puffed and red from the constant crying, and it was not infrequently that she broke out crying, or started off into a series of sobs. Sometimes when he walked past her room, he would hear her sobbing quietly, or see her head buried in the pillow as if she was trying to stifle herself. Her grandparents tried to console her, of course, but Vinay thought that hers were wounds that would heal not by any cajoling, but by the gently lapping waves of time.
Vinay, however, remained, on the outside at least, untouched by the tragedy, or so he thought. Often he would see Nikita crying and wonder why, why he stayed so numb, why he couldn't feel for his mother as Nikita felt for her father. In the dead of the night, however, as he slept he would stand by the kitchen threshold again, and his mother would be standing by the stove with his back to him. But through the window would come not the red sunlight of the dusk but the icy silver of the moon, and he would talk and talk but his mother wouldn't respond, till when she would turn and the moonlight would reveal a corpse, and another standing by her side.
One day, perhaps a fortnight after the accident, Vinay went and sat on the stairs. The house faced a park that was almost treeless, with a few low-rise buildings beyond, so that when all over the city it was already dusk the red sun still shone into the house, and it was this sun Vinay watched as it continued its slow, leisurely path into the bowels of the earth. Across its face flitted a flock of birds, and Vinay wondered how they could fly, how they could let go so easily, when he was so bound in chains. He closed his eyes and tried to fly with the birds, forget his worries, forget the past that he was to be sad about, and tried to feel the wind rush through him and cleanse the soul within. Somewhere a koel sang, and Vinay let his heart sing with the koel, the past, present and future be damned.
The door behind him opened, and footsteps hesitated, then walked out. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw Nikita come and sit by his side. Immediately Vinay felt awkward; he felt he was invading her moment of solitude. Perhaps he should get up and go. But she didn’t seem to mind him, so he stayed, and continued to stare into the dusk. But then, there came the sound of sharp breaths, and Vinay realized she had started crying again, her head resting on her knees, and her hair falling ahead so he couldn’t see her face.
Vinay wondered what to do. A part of him wanted to walk away, something he had done for the past several days, and indeed for the past several months. Yet something inside him said that the girl beside him must mean something to him: if not as a sister then at least as a compatriot in tragedy. He tried to look ahead into the dusk again, ignoring both the voices, but somehow the scene had lost its appeal; Nikita’s sobs sounded surprisingly clear in his ears, and somewhere pierced his heart.
“I can understand how you feel”, he said, wondering if that counted as consolation. Apparently it didn’t, for Nikita turned her head at him and looked at him with venom, as if he had run a sword through her deepest wounds. Vinay turned towards the dusk again, and for a minute or so, silence prevailed, broken only by Nikita’s sobs. Then he started again.
“Some things have happened”, he began, and wondered how stupid his statement must sound. “Things over which neither you nor I had any control. Maybe…maybe you don’t want to listen to me. Maybe I am interfering….and you see me as a stranger perhaps….I don’t know.” He had said all this staring at the floor, and presently he turned to face Nikita. She was looking at him now, and though she had stopped sobbing, in her eyes he could see the tears poised, waiting to come out. He spoke carefully now, looking at her, as if his words were the gospel, and had it in them to make or break her heart. “True, I haven’t spoken to you for so long now….And you are probably wondering why I am suddenly warming up….But…as I said, things have happened….And I have seen you crying so often…..And in so much pain…..I ….I wonder if I can help…” With that, he stopped abruptly and stared stupidly at her eyes. He wondered what she thought of this little eloquence, this nonsensical monologue. Perhaps he had made some sense after all: Nikita looked at him thoughtfully, then averted her eyes and looked at the floor, silent.
They stayed like this for a few moments, she staring at the floor, he looking at her, waiting for her to respond. Around them night had finally taken hold, and the clouds and the sky above were drenched in the lustrous violet of the fresh night, except for a thin strip of grey-blue at the very end of the western horizon, where the dying sun threw off its final few rays of light.
Vinay found himself looking at the sky and wondering, wondering if the relationship between them had in any way improved. He turned and looked at Nikita again. Perhaps she wouldn’t answer. Perhaps there really was nothing to answer. He sighed and got up, and with a final look at the young night sky, turned to leave.
“Vinay”, Nikita called out, when he had reached the door. She was looking at him now, and Vinay noticed she had stopped crying. “It is okay to cry.”
That night, as he slept, he saw his dream again, saw his mother again as a corpse, and as so many times before, got up in a cold sweat. Then he lay back again, staring at the ceiling, letting his mind work its way slowly into reality. Over the walls the silvery moonlight threw weird shadows of a tree, and as it swayed to and fro in an unseen wind he saw the dream again, and saw his mother, talked to her as he had in the past few years. “It is okay to cry”, she had said, and the tears came today; at first a solitary one that lay poised over his cheek, afraid that it would fall down and shatter his composure, but then like the summer rains they came, and flowed easily and freely, washing down his sorrow, washing down his grief and dissolving all those chains in which he had kept himself bound, unconsciously, for so long. The voice inside him that had stayed silent for so long now screamed in agony, screamed that he had lost his mother, lost his mother whom he had loved so dearly, and it was his mother, it was his loss, and of course, goddamnit, it was okay to cry.
For several moments he pressed his face into the pillow and let himself out, let his sorrow speak its full. He did not know how much he cried that night; for all he knew, it could have been a few minutes, it could have been an hour. But he did know that somewhere the shackles had been broken, somewhere a river now flowed free and easy, and the grey clouds that had stifled so earlier had broken into rain. In a way that he would never be able to fathom, that night finally let him shut down the tragedy and opened the gates to joy. And that night, as he lay sobbing in the moonlight, Vinay finally understood Nikita's sorrow, and his heart went out to her.

“Where is Nikita?” he asks the old lady, and is in turn led, on cue, by one of the children tailing her, into the house. It is a festive atmosphere in the house, and everyone who is of any substance at all is either carrying things up and down or flashing smiles to the guests. There are a lot of people whom he does not know, and Vinay wonders again whether this is indeed his own family, whether he is not just an idle man coming to his office colleague's wedding. But of course, Nikita was different.
Upstairs, and into a small room Vinay recognises instantly as Nikita's, though in this night of celebration it looks surprisingly alien. There are a score or so women in the room, all huddled around the mirror, and in the centre sits Nikita, subdued as the women decide for her what she should wear; it sounds strange to Vinay, for after all this is just an engagement, but then he is unfamiliar with women's devices. So he stands by the side, waiting for Nikita to see him.
Nikita sees him, and for an instant her face lights up. But then, of course, she knows it all and she falls back into her languor, though she still stares at him from the mirror. In the commotion, they just look at each other; they are too familiar with each other's thoughts to say anything.
Soon however, the ladies notice him in the room, and a fuss ensues. He looks at Nikita as a couple of girls take it upon themselves to flirt with him, but the moonlight is too bright today, and it reveals everything. He would so very want not to see the truth.

Next morning, Vinay made it a point to greet Nikita in the same way he had done before all this had happened. As she came down for breakfast, he gave her his traditional bow-of-the-head and flick-of-the-wrist greeting. For a moment she stared at him, alarmed, then, somewhat embarrassed, returned his greeting with a nod. No matter, Vinay thought to himself. He had created this rift, it was his then to build the bridges.
Nikita had completed her boards two months ago, and was now studying in the same college as he. Which meant, of course that they would travel together, in the same bus.
When he sat beside her in the bus that day, he sat erect, looking straight ahead, as if he were the new guy in school facing up to the headmaster. It wasn't that he had always felt this uncomfortable; two days ago, he would have given her a massive cold shoulder. Today was different, of course, for as the bus picked on momentum, and Nikita turned to the window to look at the city pass by (or perhaps to avoid him, but it didn't matter), he tried very hard to wreck his brain for some topic of conversation. None came, of course, and with an inward curse at himself, he began, “What all courses do you have now?”
Nikita looked at him, surprised the question had been aimed at her. Then she frowned, thinking. “Hmm....we have a Physics course, and a Mathematics one, and there is also something to do with Electronics. And we also have to do English this sem. There are a couple more, the one on....wait...oh yeah, basic computer science and another on chemistry.” Her answer over, and silence again, as she looked out of the window, and he looked straight ahead. An old lady climbed the bus and sat in the seat in front of him, her slow movements irritating the impatient passengers of the bus. He wondered if, fifty years down the line, when he and Nikita were as old as this lady, they would still find it so difficult to talk to each other.
“There is this professor, who teaches us physics. His name is Saha, I think. Do you know what kind of a prof he is?” Nikita asked. She had turned fully towards him, and in her manner Vinay saw no hint of any reluctance or hesitation.
“Ah. Saha”, he replied, forcing a smile, “He's an item, that one. And he has a very absurd sense of humour. He will start laughing at that precise moment when you realise you don't understand what is going on. Once, he was taking a class on the general theory of relativity, and everybody is looking at him with rapt attention, trying to note down every word he says. And in the middle of an equation, he digresses, and goes out of the way to comment on a student's hair, and laughs out aloud. But the interesting point is that none of the students realise that he has moved away from the topic, and it is not until he has stopped laughing and started to teach again that one student, one solitary guy, recognises the joke and laughs out aloud.”
Nikita smiled at the anecdote, though he knew it wasn't so funny. Her smile, though, was free and easy, and Vinay realised that this was the first time she had smiled, in all these months. A current of joy ran through his body on seeing her joy, fleeting though it was, and a part of his mind cursed him for denying her this trifling moment of happiness for so long.
As she looked out of the window again, he realised that, for her part, she had talked freely enough, that she had erected no walls of formality between them. At this thought, he relaxed. True, she had talked to him as she would have talked to a stranger, but he knew that even that meant she had put behind her a lot of things: the remarriage, the accident, the loss of her father. Perhaps he would forever remain a stranger to her, perhaps all their conversations would be only this long, but he took heart in the fact that she did not repulse him, she did not avoid him completely, and that there was fertile ground in which the first seeds of friendship could be sown.
Those, perhaps, were the first steps taken that day, and slowly, but steadily, the bond between the two of them grew. Living as they did together, they couldn't but help running into each other; and it is often the case that a few run-ins is all that is required for friendships to blossom. With Vinay and Nikita, however, there also was a common tragedy that in some way held them together, although it fell like a shadow over their hearts. Their friendship, then, grew not as much out of the trifling conversations and the small talk they had on the way to the college, or over lunch or dinner, but more out of the moments they spent together, when, as one sat morose and sobbed softly, the other would come and sit by the side. They would just sit together, silent, for both of them knew that sorrow does not so much get extinguished as it dies out on its own, and while it does that, it is helpful sometimes to have someone by your side who knows your sorrow, who can feel the bleeding of your heart. In those moments that they spent, not talking, maybe crying, or maybe looking out into the moon, they would not wonder about each other, and yet they would, somewhere deep in their heart which knew that it was not alone. It was in those moments that the faintest of threads began to grow between them, the threads of trust, confidence, friendship.
They did come out of their grief, though, but they came out with the treasure of a new-found relationship glimmering in their hearts. The bond between them had been made and perfected over sorrow, but now it blossomed in their joy, as every moment, every hour they found free they began to spend with each other. In the journey to and from college they would talk profusely, talk of all that had happened with them, all that was worth discussing and all that was not so worth discussing. They confided in each other freely, they trusted each other blindly, and they enjoyed each other's company. Once when Vinay managed to escape flunking his exams, they did the most insane things possible that evening, rushing to the roof of their college and screaming out abuses aloud, and then dining at an expensive restaurant where, having squandered all their pocket money, they had to hitch a ride home from a bewildered old man in an ancient Maruti 800.
Often during the nights Vinay would lie on his bed thinking of Nikita. In a surprising turn of events, somehow, his life had come to revolve around her. Every trifling thing that gave him joy was in some way linked to her. Yet there was something, somewhere, that worried his heart. It eluded him, this little worry of his, but it was growing, and he did not know what it was. But pure joy has a way of muting your senses, drowning you in its flow, and even in those nights that this shadow passed across his heart, it would not be long before the memory of the moments that they had spent together that day would overwhelm him again, and he would drift into sleep, contented, satisfied, and peaceful at heart.

It is time.
The ladies have all gone away; only Nikita and he himself are in the room. Through the mirror she looks at him. Her eyes are wide, beautiful, but the maskara makes them look extravagant, almost indecent. He remembers her smile, toothy and jovial, but today with the lipstick on her lips are closed shut, unhappy. Her face, which he always thought was radiant, has been effused with so much powder and makeup it looks artificial. She is not beautiful today, he realises. A pang of guilt pierces his heart. Must she be?
For a moment images flash through his mind again. Nikita sitting on the stairway and crying. Nikita sobbing gently as she slept. Nikita in a restaurant, laughing aloud at a joke he had told, and he admiring the light in her eyes and the joy in her face. And now this.
She gets up to go, and without looking at him, turns towards the door. He doesn't stop her; he has no right to. It is her engagement today, he reminds himself, and tries to be happy, but of course he can't. It is her engagement today, and his blood turns a freezing fire as it flows through his veins.
Nikita is the best sister in the world, he tells himself aloud.
Who are you lying to, Vinay?

Two years and he had passed out of college, and was struggling for a job. He found one six months later, in an IT firm in Bangalore. Time flew by, and very soon the day when he was to leave, forever, because he had to live and work there, was upon them.
That day Nikita was so upset she refused to come out of her room. With his luggage in hand Vinay stood at her door, waiting, hoping that she would come out and wish him goodbye. She mattered a lot to him now; she was one of the few people in this world he held this close to his heart, and today, as she sat behind the door, he could not but help feel a growing despair welling up inside him. He knocked the door, but she did not open. He called out that he was leaving, but she did not reply. He pictured her in his mind, lying down on her bed and crying into her pillow, and he willed her to open the door, willed her to talk to him one last time, at least to say goodbye. But the wooden door in front remained steadfastly closed. He gave out a sigh that as if took the life out of him, and, with one last forlorn look at the steadfastly closed door, turned and left.
The next six months to him were agony. True, he and Nikita had been friends for about two years now, but this was the first time he realised how much she meant to him. Suddenly, with no one to confide in, no one to share his stupid anecdotes with, life seemed dull, a dreary desert with no oasis of emotion. Every night, and every day, whenever he would be free, his mind would wander off to Nikita, search for her around, and then sit down dejected. He relived all those moments he had been with Nikita, but this time out of sorrow, this time out of longing. His hand yearned for her touch, his eyes yearned to see her smile. And in those days, Vinay realised the tiny worry that had been nagging him at the back of his mind for so long: it was this, this strange storm that now ravaged the landscape of his heart.
He phoned her of course, often, every day, initially, but then every week. But she would either not pick up the phone or reply that she was busy, that she couldn't talk. Fine, he told himself; if she does not wish to talk to him, nor does he wish to talk to her. But that was a lie of course, and it only made him think of her even more, made him even more morose, nostalgic, sad. He waited for her, waited for her to call, or speak, or visit him one last time; he prayed to God to see her smile one final time, to send him that one last glimpse of her that he would clutch to his heart till he died.
She came of course, and one evening when he came back home he saw her standing near the guard's room just outside the colony. She stood looking at the sky, her frame silhouetted in the moonlight; he touched her on her shoulder and she turned, and looked at him, into his eyes.
That moment there froze in time, and it was as if he had looked into her eyes for all eternity. He looked into her eyes now as she sat on the stairs, telling him that it was okay to cry. He looked into her eyes as she sat in the bus, asking him about her physics teacher. He looked into her eyes as they sat in a cafe, sharing a joke about a common friend. And he looked into her eyes as they were now, wet, black, wide, the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen or would ever want to see. Somewhere something broke, and the dreams of a million nights shaped themselves in his mind, the thoughts of a million lifetimes when he had sat thinking about the moments he had spent with Nikita, when he had sat relishing her joy and his own, when he had sat with love buried deep in his heart. She had never been his sister, she had never been his friend; in that few moments that they spent staring at each other, the moonlight revealed everything, brought them to themselves, showed them the truth that blossomed so in their hearts, showed them the truth that was as beautiful as anything they could have imagined, and more beautiful than anything they could have imagined.
In a trance they made their way to the lift, pressed the button for the fourth floor. They got out, he opened the door, all this time not neither looking into the other's eyes, for they knew what they would find, they knew what was going to happen.
They entered the apartment and stood facing each other, the moon and the stars visible through a window by the side, the rest of the room plunged in darkness. Vinay looked into her eyes as she looked at his, and in the moonlight saw her eyes, wide, gentle, her eyelashes as they bobbed up and down when she blinked, like waves breaking on a calm sea shore, her hair as they fell straight over her shoulders, their feathery blackness glistening in the pale light, her lips as they shimmered. He stepped up to her, held her in his arms. She did not resist. Then he bent down and put his lips on hers, a light kiss, no more. His mind screamed, a million questions, a hundred clouds thundered over his heart, but thought was nowhere today, there was just this feeling, deep within, that bliss was right here, right now, and its name was Nikita.
He kissed her again on the lips. Her lips did not respond, but she didn't push him away either. His own stood poised there, his mind still short circuiting, but what was to happen had already happened; he bent and kissed her again, and this time she responded, her lips wet and passionate on his own. Suddenly Vinay found himself drenched in ecstasy, his heart singing a million songs, raising itself into an octave he had never thought it could reach. He closed his eyes, let himself drown himself in her, let his lips take him to what had been paradise for so very long, and let his eyes see a million Nikitas; Nikita in the bed, crying, Nikita beside him on the bus, Nikita through closed doors and Nikita now. There was only one sight:Nikita, only one fragrance: Nikita, there was only one feeling: Nikita, and there was only one truth: Nikita, and in the realisation he revelled her touch, lived her, and lived her a million times.
The night watched silently as they made love that night, not remembering the past, nor caring for the future, for the joy of the present was paradise itself. The moon came out of its veil of clouds to look upon them, to witness the one emotion that was divine. Far away crows crowed and dogs barked, and deep down the city squirmed and slithered in its gaudy light, but here was heaven, here was eternity, and here were two souls merged into one.
She stayed with him for the next week, and those days they lived not as friends but as lovers, in each other’s arms, in each other’s hearts. Their relationship hadn't changed; even when they had sat, almost a year ago, over a cup of coffee in the canteen, it was love that had blossomed in their hearts, and it was love that blossomed now. Neither heaven, nor earth, seemed to give them as much ecstasy as did each other's company, as did the touch of his hand or the feel of her hair. The prelude of five years culminated now in those few days of sheer elation; heaven as if had chosen their hearts to descend.
She had to leave then, and in the station they stood looking at each other while all around people hustled and jostled to get into the train. The train hooted once, and the jostling increased, and several passengers gave them irritated looks: they were standing in the way. But they were oblivious to it all. They stared into each other's eyes, remembering the nights past, living again their love. Hoot! the train cried again, and Nikita picked up her small suitcase absently. Then on impulse she hugged him, and he hugged her in turn, feeling her feathery black hair ruffle in his face. Then they kissed, for that one last time with the same overwhelming passion, on each other's lips, not caring that all around them people were staring, half with wonder, half with disgust. Goodbye, Nikita, he whispered in her ear, and let his heart soar into the sky one last time.

Nikita had called a month later, frantic that her grandparents were looking for a groom, so what should we do now? Of course, Vinay couldn't do anything. We have to let go, Nikita. Ours is not going to be. It would be impossible for me to marry you. Marry the boy your grandparents choose for you. The arguments had been heated of course, but Vinay knew that there was only this far their love could go. Someday, Nikita would have to marry, and she will have to realise that there are some people you just cannot fall in love with.
A card had then come some time later informing him of Nikita's engagement. He had torn away the card, not out of sorrow but out of anger, anger that Nikita hadn't cared to talk to him. Talk to you? Oh, come on.
He stands here now, in the park under the tent, and whatever little ceremony there is is in full swing. The people have all gathered around the centre, where Nikita's grandfather, now so old his cheekbones jut out like cliffs jutting out of the water, proceeds to announce the engagement. He then hands the mike over to Nikita's uncle, a roly-poly affair with a balding head that sparkles in the light. He cracks a few jokes, but of course Vinay can't hear them from here. He doesn't want to hear either; there is sufficient noise in his own mind to listen too.
Five years ago, perhaps, he would never have thought that things would come to such a pass. When he had sat on the stairs that fateful evening, he had never bargained for all the happiness and joy that Nikita had given him. Perhaps it would have been better if he had never talked to her. Perhaps it would have been better if the flames of love had never lapped the walls of his heart. Perhaps, but it was over now. There would be wounds to cleanse, souls to mend, but it would heal. Time would heal all.
But then the images come again, this time with brutal force. Nikita on the stairs, lying on her bed, talking to him, laughing with him, speaking of a million joys and woes, Nikita, Nikita, Nikita, Nikita. Her face swam around him in dewy circles in the light, her voice called out to him from the stars and the moon, her fragrance drifted from the flowers in the gardens of heaven. His eyes filled with tears at the thoughts of her, for though he might have tried to convince himself a million times that all would heal, he knew it would not. He knew that he would love Nikita for all eternity. He knew that this engagement was but the first nail in his coffin, the coffin in which he will be buried alive. And in a surprising clarity of thought he realised that this marriage could not, should not happen.
No, this marriage will not happen.
He noticed that everyone was looking at him now, staring at him. Perhaps he had said something aloud.
“What do you mean, Vinay?” asked Nikita's uncle, an edge to his voice. Vinay walked forward, into the merry crowd that had suddenly lost its mirth.
“This marriage cannot happen.”
“Why?” came the question, and Vinay imagined a guillotine around his neck. Dissent and you shall die.
“Because”, he began, mustering courage, “She is in love with another.” He looked at Nikita, and in her eyes he saw relief, and joy, and for the first time this evening he realised that she was beautiful, was always beautiful. She reached out and grabbed his hand, and pressed it. A tiny splurge of joy ran through his sickened veins, sick no more.
“Who? Who is she in love with?” Nikita's uncle was asking. But Vinay was looking at her eyes, at her wide eyes with their black pupils that looked like deep whirpools. They conveyed lifetimes to him, and even as the people around them watched with unabashed curiosity, Vinay pulled Nikita towards him and held her in a strong embrace. They stood like that for an eternity, or so it seemed to him, she burying herself in his chest, he feeling her hair brush gently against his face, each feeling somehow complete in the other's arms. The world outside, of course, stood waiting for an answer, but Vinay took his time, looking into Nikita's eyes as he spoke, his voice, though merely a whisper, echoing throughout the silent crowd.
“With me”, he said, and Nikita smiled, a solitary tear flowing down her cheek. He smiled too, and they both cried, because it was all over, because it did not matter, because in their hearts the sun was shining and paradise was restored. The crowd around looked into each other's faces, the groom, and the rest of the family stared at them alarmed. But high above the moon went on with the night, and through its thin veil of clouds looked upon the world, wondered how love could blossom in the murky waters of humankind, and smiled for them both, smiled for Vinay and Nikita, and through its pearly moonlight wished them the best of eternity.
“She is in love with me.”

Endnote -I don't think I can claim fully the credit for the idea for this story - it derives, more or less, from an ancient newspaper clipping that said that some celebrity had sued some lawyer for alleging that she had fathered a child with her own step brother.
When I read the news at first, I found it shocking. How can you hook up with your own step-brother? I asked. But when those initial waves of shock and alarm began to fade away, I realised it wasn't such an abominable idea after all. I have a tendency to look down upon romantic relations within the family, as most other people have, I am sure. But is a step-brother/step-sister relation really a familial tie? Or is it something that is forced upon us by the society? Is it something like those boundaries that we like to draw around ourselves, blatant fissures that prevent us from joining hands, that prevent those purest of pure threads of love from crystallizing?I wondered. And in a flash, this story was upon me, whole, almost exactly as it appears here. I was so stunned by the beauty of the thought I found it difficult to study for my exam, which was the next day (it goes without saying that I screwed it). When I actually sat down to write it, I found my writing prowess not quite upto the job. I had to rewrite it thrice before I could be satisfied, but even then, this piece of writing comes nowhere close to that sheer beauty that dropped like a meteor onto my head.

Remember - a poem

2008-06-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

Shadows speak, the nights whisper
They say to me, let's try to remember
In hushed voices like the sounds of doom
They pierce like bullets into my gloom

I shiver, I cower by the lamp by my side
I shrink from the darkness, I shelter in the light
I don't want to, I scream out aloud
But no amount of shouting can drown the voices out

They come, they sweep, they take it all away
They clutch hard my hand and bring me another day
When scarcely crying I let go of a hand
My eyes rigid, my face a sculpture of sand.

And why, pray, do they show me her face?
Why must I feel again her imploring gaze?
Why must I be forced to see the tears wet her eyes?
Why must I be forced to hear the pain in her voice?

They are acid to me, those images I say
I don't need to remember, throw it all away.
But the voices don't stop, nor do the sights cease
She looks back with a sorrow that seeks to burn and freeze

And sitting by the lamp so afraid of the night
A part of me is solemn; indeed I did all right
But something else entirely does my heart speak -
"That day, you rascal, you burned a part of me!"

Life is beautiful

2008-05-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

I would have liked to talk about me, about what I like or don’t like, what I do and so on and so forth. But no, not today. Today it can’t be about me. Today, it must be about Him. God. And Life.
Right now, I am sitting in a closed room, with only a small window to my back, that opens not to the open skies as I would have liked, but just to the garden in our colony. But the sights, the sounds, the fragrances are still fresh in my memory, burning brightly with an inextinguishable flame. I so very dearly hope they will burn forever. You don’t chance upon God so often.
Imagine. You are walking on a road that you traverse often, more like everyday. You are alone, or maybe with a friend. You are engrossed in your thoughts as you often are; life in recent days has been pretty hectic for you.
There is a gentle wind, not warm as is expected for this time of the year. Not cold either. It just is, a soft hand caressing your cheeks, soft lips kissing your brow. You don’t notice it at first, you hardly notice the weather: what more is it than just a noisy television playing in the background? But then, ahead you see a tree. The tree is flowering, little yellow flowers that you never found beautiful, that you in fact considered disgusting in the sweltering heat of the summer. But today they have acquired a strange charm. Today, the wind lifts them out of their home, out of the tree that they so serenely drape, and blows them around in the gentlest of swirls. You look at the scene and wonder. In those flowers, little yellow petals that seem shapeless and formless, you imagine you see a princess. You see a princess, smiling, draped in yellow, borne on the wind, playing with it, entwined in it. You see in that scene a glimpse of joy, pure, unadulterated joy that for a moment cruises through your veins like the sweetest of nectars, that swims in your head like the most enduring of dreams. It is gone, of course, for you have tripped over a stone; but wait, dear friend, for there is bound to be more.
Later in the evening, you are going home, swept along in that mundane drudgery of the city they call traffic, thinking nothing, seeing nothing. But today, my friend, you are going to lose yourself. For today, God has taken out his canvas, taken out his paintbrush. For today, God is going to paint.
The sky is overcast, or at least has been so for the past several hours. It is gray, the dull, steely gray that seems to mock the summer, threatening to wash it off in one single burst of rain. But now, the first shafts of sunlight pierce through the clouds; the sun, in its dying moments, will breathe one last breath of pure gold. Suddenly in a patch there, right ahead, or maybe slightly to the right, there has emerged a patch of blue. And no, it is no ordinary blue, it is flushed, it is the freshest, the most eternal blue you could ever know. That patch of blue, then, is bounded on its sides by little wisps of cloud: gray and white, they intermingle among themselves like tiny little tendrils growing into one another. They bring up in the sky a landscape almost as detailed as that on earth. There, there is a mountain, a peak of gray cloud, capped on the top by a wisp of white. There, then is a valley; if you strain your eyes, perhaps you can see a thin river of blue running through it. And perhaps that little strand there is a coast: a cliff jutting out to sea. You look at the sky, and little by little, you forget where you are. You are no longer here, in a Delhi traffic jam, you are there, among those clouds, around you their snowy fluffiness, and you hold in your hands little fluffy blobs of whitish gray smoke. You twirl it around, and it becomes a thin strand of rain, falling to the earth. You blow it out, and it becomes a veil of cloud, to drape the moon yet to come. You run, you walk, you fly, for in this world everything is possible; for in this world reality has melted in your hands.
And then you turn your gaze a little lower, and are aghast. Above you the clouds were gray-black, silently but firmly trying to restrain the sky, and the sun, but near the horizon, they have given way. And there stands the sun, like a bride parting the curtains, looking at her groom and blushing. There she is, brilliant yellow, the most priceless gold on earth, and around her that fitful yellow-orange glow, as if she has set fire to the sky. But no, the fire is not violent, for the light is gentle, the flame more like that of a candle, striving to light, yet too shy to push away the fatherly clouds that surround her, so that color dissolves into color, and like two hands holding each other, like two souls so different and yet so alike coming together, the sun unites with the clouds, the day unites with the night, so that the horizon ahead is that soothing, divine mix of an ancient gray, and a mature yellow that strikes at your heart, that shuts down every single thought that you might care to think. For what must you think, brother, it is all up ahead, the greatest painting, the greatest poem, the greatest song all rolled into one, right ahead of you, and it has all been created only, only for you. You look at it, and look, and look, and look, through the trees, between the buildings, from your balcony, every moment relishing it, every moment feeling contented that you are here, just here, even if here is a mundane house on a mundane road in a mundane city, for God is playing out to you. And as you turn away, the scene etched in your memory, you whisper, as if anything loud will break the spell – Life is beautiful.

The Window - a story

2008-05-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

The Window

I saw her first in the summer of ’99, a month or so, that is, before I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I must not say “diagnosed”, or so my psychiatrist tells me, it seems too “medicinal” a word. Perhaps I should say they discovered I was insane; the kind of thought that has the mild flavor of insanity that every self-respecting madman should possess.
But again, I wasn’t delusional, or something like that. I know, I know. I can almost see you shaking your head. What a pity! The poor guy! No, I wasn’t at that stage just yet. Not that stark raving insanity that people actually call madness; just a little off the hook. A little cuckoo, as my friend says. Meaning that I did carry about with my daily life as normal people carry out, but I was a little prone to, you know, imagining things. Whispers. People. Sometimes even plots and controversy.
But her , she was real, more real perhaps than anything or anyone I saw around me. Much of my life during that time was a vague mist of uncertainty, a foggy veil which would occasionally resolve into a familiar face, a well known voice, and at other times become a solid brick wall, or a labyrinth. But she, she stood out in the whole fogginess. Right there, so true everything else faded away into another world, another time.
Who was she? I do not know. I didn’t know her at all. To say the truth, I never even saw her properly. All I remember of her, as I put my mind to it now, is this dark shadow, standing in front of the window, silhouetted in the light from a nearby room. Yes, I saw her through a window. I always saw her through a window; the shape and form of her shadow etched deep into my mind.
I remember very clearly the day I saw her first. It was night, a full moon night I remember, and the unnaturally large disc of the moon stood poised on top of frail, listless clouds as I walked back home from the market. I remember the moon, for I remember having seen it and wondering why, after all, did the moon have to be so large, why it didn’t simply fall away from the earth, leaving the world in its well-deserved darkness. That was when I stopped, for some reason, in front of the house just opposite my own, still looking at the moon and wondering. It was then I had a feeling someone was up close, and I turned my head to look.
And there she was. Behind the window the scratches in whose glass reflected the moonlight in diffuse patterns she stood; all that was visible of her was a dark shadow, her hair fallen delicately on her shoulders, and ruffled slightly by an unfelt wind, her hands pressed on the glass, her fingers trembling delicately as her chest heaved gently in a slow, melancholy sobbing. I went and stood directly in front of her, imagining she would perhaps see me and back off from the glass, but she just stood there, even when I stood right in front of her; the weight of her sorrow was perhaps too large. There she was, still, yet so full of life that her sorrow pierced my heart, silent, yet so loud her cries banged into my eardrums. For some reason, I thought I looked into her eyes, her eyes filled with slow pearl like tears that stood poised on the cheek, the final stand of beauty as it fell to the harshness of the world, her eyes that beheld so much depth they drowned me in them completely, that held so brilliant a flame they set fire to my soul, that for several days, months, years to come would become the definition of life for me; the eyes that I could not see and yet could look at with wonder and awe.
That was not the only day I saw her. Throughout the next few weeks, I saw her often; sometimes in the divine light of late evening, sometimes in the darkness of a moonless midnight; always the same, though, the same shadow, sobbing gently behind the glass. Sometimes she would just stand there, looking, or so it seemed, at the far end of the road, her hands gently caressing the window sill even as her mind, I imagined, caressed her injuries. At such times, she would be more silent, less sorrowful, and no one who looked at that shadow of the lady behind the window would have refused to call her beautiful, and indeed divine; so perfect was the rustle in her hair as it fell on her shoulders, so true was the movement of her fingers. And at other times, she would fall back into her grief, crying softly as she pressed her hand against the glass; pressed it as if she was reaching out, wanting to come out, searching for that lone hand, any hand that would grasp hers and lift her out of her misery, bring her into the light that she so clearly deserved. That was the image she evoked, trying to reach out, and that was what prompted me one day to place my hand on the window exactly where her hand was. I wanted her to know I was with her, I would help her, bring her light; I wanted her to know that I would clasp her hand, but she did not notice. Perhaps because I never could do what I promised, perhaps because I never could understand. Perhaps because, somewhere, the chasm between us was more than just an inch-thick glass window.
Yet, that single touch on the glass sent tremors through my heart and soul.
And at all times, it was just a shadow. The same form every time, the same light from a distant room, the same silhouette that held me in its depth. And above all that same inherent sorrow that was so deep it drowned me, and yet so beautiful it gave everything a pearly, tear-like glow.
Then one day I stopped seeing her. Or rather, she stopped coming to the window. This was the time I actually started doing rounds of the psychiatrist, still trying to pronounce the name of my condition. The doctors were all very busy and helpful, playing as they were with a brand new toy that by a stroke of luck happened to me. Not that I hold anything particularly against them, or against my mother who took me to them, but they did seem enthusiastic to cure me.
But what they did or did not do to me was never my concern. There was only one thing that was real in my life, and that was her, and the fact that she no longer stood at the window left a hundred unanswered questions and a million shattered dreams. For hours everyday I stared into the dark, black void of that room, hoping that somehow the darkness would resolve into that familiar hair on the shoulders, the familiar hand that trembled gently as it pressed on the glass. For hours I waited outside, not knowing why I was doing so, not knowing who I was waiting for, except for that vivid fragrant memory of the days gone by; now nothing more than a silent reverberation in the depths of my heart. Try as I could, I could not forget her. I could not, because there was nothing else but her. Throughout the days she had been at the window, I had spent my day in anticipation of her, my nights in the revelry of her thoughts. But now, she was not at the window, and yet she was everywhere. The shafts of moonlight were her unseen hair, the fragrance of flowers her perfume, the sun in the day her face, and when I closed my eyes, the darkness I saw was but her shadow.
You must understand that this was not that once a day kind of love you come across. In fact, this wasn’t any kind of love at all. For here I was, getting insane, and knowing it, above all; and somehow this girl of my dreams was suddenly the girl of my reality. She was what truth, and reality, and above all sanity meant for me. She was the battle between reality and fantasy, she was the rift between truth and dreams. For even as I thought of her night and day, even as I let her hair run through my hands or put her palm to my lips, there was a dark undercurrent of doubt that nagged my mind: Was she real at all?
The knowledge that I was insane had split my world into two different universes: the real and the fantastic, the truth and my dreams, the real world and my world. To which world did she belong? To question thus, to wonder if the woman I loved was just a figment of my imagination; it chilled my bones and sent searing currents through my heart and soul. The questions would leap up like fire out of a volcano, burning all those thoughts that I was nurturing and reveling in. Often I would cower in a corner, afraid as much of these questions of doubt that screamed in my mind as of the less real ones that whispered in my ears; and yet I was afraid to answer, for I was afraid of the answer. Afraid, perhaps, of the truth.
But soon there came a time when the burden of not knowing who, or where, she was grew too much upon me. I could no longer cower inside myself, living in her memories, real or imagined. She either had to be part of my life, or not exist at all. So I mustered up courage and walked across the narrow road that separated her house from mine. First I looked at the window where she used to stand, but no, she wasn’t there: just a uniform shade of dull brightness. Then I walked around to the main door and rang the bell, but no one answered. I rang the bell twice more before I noticed the large lock upon the front door. With panic welling up inside me, I ran up to the neighbouring house and pressed the door bell frantically.
“Who is it?”, asked a frail, irritated voice from behind the wooden door.
“Umm...”, I said, “Can you please tell me where the residents of 96A have gone?”
“Who are you?”, the voice replied suspiciously.
“Actually, I owed them some money”, I said cautiously, hoping the voice would hurry up and start to trust me.
“They just left for New York”, came the resigned reply.
“New York?When?”, I asked, my heart sinking.
“An hour ago. They have a flight at six.”
A flight at six. A flight at six, and all my dreams and night mares waiting for that flight. I looked at my watch. It was already half past five. If I hurried...
I ran to the main street and jumped into an auto.
As I waited impatiently for the auto to reach the airport, my mind was surprisingly clear. The murky indecisiveness and baseless fear of the last few weeks had all but gone, replaced now by the clear, transparent thoughts of a man with a motive; what had been lurking in the shadows of the mind, waiting, stalking, was suddenly now out in the open. The moment of truth had finally arrived.
I paid off the auto and began to run into the airport.
“Sir, do you have a ticket?”
“Err...no..actually I came to see someone off...”
“Sorry sir, only passengers...”
“This is for the information of all...”
“...are allowed..”
“passengers traveling to New York by Air India flight...”
“...beyond this point.”
“IA 690. Due to technical difficulties the flight has been....”
“But sir...I have to, have to meet this lady....”
“delayed till 7:30 pm”
“Wait...is this announcement about the flight that was to leave at 6:30?” I asked, sudden fountains of hope springing inside my bosom.
“Yes sir. Now will you please step aside and allow the passengers to enter?”, said the guard, politely but firmly pushing me aside.

There it was. I knew now that the love of my life was inside that building. I knew she was waiting, no not for the flight, but for me, for that was what Destiny had meant i to be. Yet, all that remained between me and my destiny was this stupid guard, who just wouldn't let me in.
I came out restless and impatient. I had to get in somehow. I stood there making and discarding plans in my head when for some reason I turned to look at the lounge on the other side of the road, and in the far corner, speaking to the guard, was a young lady. Through the large glass windows of the lounge I saw her; the same hair falling on her shoulders, which I saw now were the darkest of black, the same quivering fingers. Another place, another hour. But the same. The very same. Her fingers shook even as she spoke shyly to the guard, clasping and unclasping each other in a fervent nervousness. I could see her eyes now too, wide open in childish wonder, staring as if even into the depths of mediocrity, her lips, opened into a slight timid, yet gentle smile. She wore a simple pink tee over blue jeans; her entire person gave no indication of any unnecessary adornment or jewelery. Unnecessary because even in the harsh white light of the airport lounge, she looked beautiful, far more beautiful, in fact, than when she had stood there behind the window, setting her hand on the window sill. It was as if the delicate melancholy that had pierced my heart then had crystallised now in her face in so beautiful a manner that all the goddesses of heaven seemed to converge into her, quiver as she quivered, stammer as she stammered.
A car honked and I realised I was standing in the middle of the road: I had walked a considerable distance while still watching her. I sprang off the road, my person electrified by her sight, the air fragrant by her presence. I had found her! And there she was, behind the window again, but now I could reach out and grab her hand. But first, there was the question that remained...
I half ran, half hopped to the door of the lounge, and caught hold of the guard just as he took his seat.
“The lady who just talked to you. Is she travelling to New York?”
“I..I am sorry sir... I don't know if I can give you that information....”
That was enough. That was it. She was real. All those questions that had been burning my heart and soul for all these days had suddenly vanished in a miraculous swipe of fate. She,she of whom I had thought day and night, dreamt even more, was real, and within my reach.
In the electrified ecstasy I was in, I walked gaily upto her.
“Excuse me”, I said gently.
“Uh..”, she began, turning suddenly as if from a dream. She paused a moment, looking timidly at me. Then, “Do I know you?” She asked it more as a question than as a demand for an introduction, as if she were wondering about the question herself.
“I don't think you do. You see, I live in the house opposite yours.”
“Oh”, she said, with feeling. “I am sorry I don't venture out so much.”
“Yeah I know”, I replied, “I haven't seen you much myself. I saw you today leaving with your parents in the evening...they are your parents, aren't they?”
“Actually no”, she said, easing up a little. I noticed that she had stopped clasping her hands, which now lay freely by her side. “They are my uncle and aunt. I had come here for the winters.”
“You live in New York?”
“Yeah, kind of. I mean, my parents live there, so that means I do, of course..but I do come here sometimes.”
“I get it you are travelling on this 6:30 flight everyone is crying about?” I asked.
She laughed softly, but her laughter rang out throughout the airport lounge, which had grown silent, or so it seemed to me. “Yeah. Though I am not exactly crying about it you see.” She looked at her watch. “Umm..I think I must leave now. If I don't get through with the customs check now I probably never will make it to the plane.” She took up her bags and started to leave.
“Wait”, I wanted to say to her. “Why do you stand by the window in the night?”I wanted to ask. “Why do you cry softly?Why don't you come into the light? Why don't you laugh as you laughed now? What grief do you even now suffer deep in your heart?” There were a million unanswered questions that screamed in my ears and swam unchecked in my mind. Yet I asked none. I offered to help her with her bags, but all she had was a handbag and a small valise, so she declined. I muttered a feeble bye, and she smiled in return, but none of the million conversations that were banging inside my head played out. All I did was watch her leave, her person leaving an indelible mark on my soul.

That meeting, however, had cleansed my soul, so to speak. The knowledge that she was real, that she was part of the sane part of me somehow seemed to imply that everything else was too. In the days that followed, my thoughts of gloom and conspiracy, the murky world of my mind collapsed, and was replaced instead by this brand new world, colourful, brilliant, vivid, in which I played in my mind that eventful airport lounge conversation again and again, in a million different ways; always seeing her, her lips, her eyes, her fingers, and often her fingers pressed against the glass. It was a relief to my mind to know its love was true; and it was all it needed. I recovered rapidly, or got cured rapidly. And all the time the psychiatrists looked at me and marvelled at their proficiency, I thought of her, I thought of her when someday, next winter perhaps, she would one day fall into my arms.

It was about 3 years later that the Malhotras came to dine at our house. The Malhotras, in case I haven't told you, is the family who live opposite our house(yes, the very one). It was some function, I remember; I think it was my brother's thread ceremony. We were dining at the table, and Mr. Malhotra was seated right opposite me. “Sir”, I asked,unable to contain my curiosity, “Is your niece still in New York?”
“Pardon?”, he asked, looking up.
“Your niece. Is she still in New York?”
“I don't know who you are talking about”, he replied, “I don't have a niece in New York.”
The sun sets behind me now as I write these words, making vivid red patterns of light and shadow on the wall in front of me. I look at them and wonder. Are these real? These shadows that flit now hurriedly across the wall, contorting themselves into wierd shapes, are they anything real, or just a figment of imagination? Perhaps they are neither. Perhaps life is so too. Neither true nor fantasy, but both, a splash of imagination on the canvas of reality. Perhaps, someday, sitting on an easy chair struggling to see these patterns that are so evident now, I will understand. Understand that sometimes, it does not really matter who or what you are in truth, what you see, hear or feel in reality. Understand that sometimes, shadows flit past that are not of anything real or true, and yet are more meaningful in their fantasy. Understand that, when all of life is flowing past in the blizzard of reality, perhaps sometimes we must accept whatever little warmth comes our way unquestioningly, even if it is just a fantasy, even if it is just a shadow with its hand pressed against the glass.

Endnote : This story has its origins in a kind of daydream I had one day, sitting in a boring Physics class and trying desperately not to doze off. To be fair, I had a fever of around a 102 that day, and in the delirium that accompanies such a high fever, I suddenly had this little vision, this image of a shadow, nothing more, the shadow of a girl, seen through a window.

I thought nothing more of it that day, of course, for I fell asleep soon after, but about a week later, in a sudden flurry of inspiration, I wove a story around it, and in a whirlwind session of writing (I had never before written so much in such a short notice) I wrote down about five pages or so of it.

At least half of the credit for this story must, however, go to my friend, whose name I wonder if I can mention here. I had written down all about this strange little love affair, all about the shadow, right till the point when the girl behind the window disappears. But where should the story go after that? What would happen to the protagonist? I asked this friend of mine, and in a half-serious tone, he said that my dear narrator would go to bed with another girl thinking it was her!

And that was when the whole story in its current form was framed in my mind. Suddenly, it was all in front of me, crystal clear, and it so infused me with joy when I wrote it that I mailed it to a couple of my friends, with the subject "The best thing I have ever written". In retrospect, perhaps it isn't so good, but it had me started on writing as a hobby, so I hold it close to my heart.

The Beginning

2008-05-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we never walked
Through the door we never opened
Into the rose garden

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

You might have guessed, perhaps, that the name for this blog is inspired from these lines above. No, don't ask me what they mean - to say the truth, I don't even know! No, that's not entirely correct of course; I do have a vague inkling, just a vague inkling, mind, of what these lines mean, and this first post is exactly about that very inkling.
When I had put it into my head that I was going to start a blog, and had come to this site and tried to follow their "3 easy steps" (Don't mind the sarcasm, you'll be irritated too if you were on a slow internet connection wondering if the LAN cord is even plugged in), I got pretty frustrated by the fact that I just couldn't get a URL for myself. I mean, I had tried to write down everything, everything, mind, that was even remotely connected with me, and here it is in blithe, red letters, "Sorry that url is not available"! And the whole rummy thing about it is that the stupid thing even gives suggestions, and - what's more- suggestions that sound like those weird chimeras they create in biotech labs. Anyhow, here I was, with a blog in my head, and without a name, and suddenly, this quote flashed by. Like, swoosh. And yes, there it was, all that was me, all that I ever believed in, written in four brilliant verses by (well, everybody calls him that anyway) one of the best poets the world has ever seen.

But what do these lines mean anyway? What, in other words, do I stand for?

Look around you, and what do you see? You are sitting in front of a computer, probably, so you'll have a screen in front. A table, maybe, made of steel, or wood. A room around, with a window maybe, showing the city skyline, something that, like everything else you have seen for eons on end. It is what I see around myself too. But that isn't all there is, is it? Reality isn't all there is.

It is surprising how many of life's greatest experiences are not experiences at all. You undergo an accident, but you have fallen unconscious, so you don't know what happened. You have passed the JEE, yippee, there's your rank on the screen. You have screwed up your exam, great, now sit up in the summer. And yet, when you lie down and close your eyes, what do you see? You see the girl you love, or would have loved, and play out conversations with her that could never be. You see yourself standing and receiving a prize, but that's yet to happen. You hear the next song you might want to compose on your guitar. As the first waves of sleep lap over your soul, you move farther and farther away from the real. You move into that magical world of thought, of fantasy, where a flick of your brush and your deepest desires become true, a blink of your eyes and your greatest fears are in front of you. What matters, in the night, when you fall off to sleep, when you bring out all those life's experiences that you have kept stashed in your memory, is not life at all, but what you saw of it, what you wanted of it, what you dreamed of it. What resides, my friend, in the deepest recesses of your soul, in the coldest waters of your mind, in that unerring servant you call memory, is not reality, not truth, but your very own, personal dream.
And that dream, my friend, is what Eliot talks about. Did what happened happen? Does what comes into memory actually part of our past? And the answer, according to me, is simple. It does not matter. It matters not what is real or unreal. It matters not whether your dreams come true or not. If in the dead of the night you can sigh, and fall off contented, joyous, even a lie told to your heart is a truth. If in its treacherous deceit, memory takes you to the rose garden, would you let go of its hand?