Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 94

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 94: "Chapter 94 Molten wax, burning candle, intangible patternsShe watchedEver so quietlyEver so stillHer tears failed betraying her this timeShe..."

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 95

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 95: "Chapter 95 The quiet of midnight rolled on nighA solitary star twinkled in the night skyHer delicate wings found a flicker of lifeShe was we..."

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter – 96

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter – 96: "Chapter 96 Her delicate fingers caressed the rose gentlyThe petals were soft, like her skinRed like her cheeksHer tiny finger made its way t..."

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 97

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 97: "Chapter 97 She swirls, her flowing gown kisses the candle flames glowing all aroundA trail of tears wet her cheeksBurning eyes blind her fo..."

Date a girl who reads (Part Deux) and writes (Part Un)

You will never have to worry about using a perfect opening line because there is no perfect opening line. A girl who reads knows that there's more to you than an opening line. She's not big into impressions either; you are who you are. You don't have to look hard to find her - she's all around; in the coffee shop around the corner, in the mall, in the car next to you, in a fancy corporate office or a chilled-out advertising hub, on the street or busy reading and/or typing away at a nondescript address.

There's something about the written word that a reader and writer will never be able to explain. It's a love affair that begins as inconsequentially as the birth of a new day. However, that doesn't mean that she'll love you less. She doesn't expect you to understand her love for the written word; she doesn't even know if she understands it herself! All she knows is the enthralling, enticing adventure that the marriage of thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions and words create. This adventure possesses various hues - sometimes it's as wild as the African jungle, other times it's exhilaratingly joyous, ever so often it may be sad, heart-breaking almost, and at still other times it could be calm, peaceful, and silent. 

However, whatever journey she is on, she will hold your hand, embrace you and share her travels with you... only if you want. She may talk passionately about Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and his passion with books on chivalry, she'll wonder aloud on what Fyodor Dostoevsky was thinking when he wrote 'Demons', she hasn't even gone through Chapter One yet!, she'll talk about Khalil Gibran and his passion for love, and she'll quote Pablo Neruda when she can't find words enough to express how she feels about you. She won't expect you to know the writers she's passionate about, but, she will talk to you about them because she loves you and loves them too. 

To her, love is about romance and all the things that go with it. She doesn't expect you to act romantic if you're not, but be assured that she will. She may act all collected, but she loves all of life's simple pleasures, most of which she finds in your arms.

A reader and writer will be in a relationship only if she believes that it's going somewhere. It’s not about the time one “invests” in a relationship; it’s about how you feel when you’re with someone. If she's with you, you can be sure that she's head over heels and all the way back in love with you. Don't ask her to explain, for all this love of the written word, she will not be able to (though she will try, falling short of words, and then give you a kiss that seals it all)!

Her vocabulary may include words that often need a dictionary reference, but she tries to simplify her language in conversation and writing. To her life and love are intertwined, because she has learnt that life is love; there' no other way to live.

There'll be times when you lose her completely; in fact, she'll be lost to the world. But that's only because she hypnotised with the written word. Once she’s out of her trance she will look up at you, smile and thank God that she has your arms to fall into.

She will never expect you to live up to the protagonist from her books; she loves you for you, not for whom you may represent. Okay, so she understands syntax, but that’s only because she’s passionate about language. She may even edit people’s sentences in her head, but she resorts to that only when she’s bored. Literature, like all else personifies romanticism of an era gone by. Ever ready to love and be loved, this girl cried over Shakespeare’s writings and still wishes that she could change the end to Romeo and Juliet.

She won’t ever assume or perceive what you’re saying based on your pauses. She will hear you out, and have a heart-to-heart with you after. This is not someone who points an accusing finger based on her knowledge of syntax. She may edit the world’s sentences in her head, but you’re not a ‘part’ of that world – you ARE her world, and she wouldn’t subject you to that.

Yes, the girl who reads can probably feel the plot of her book in her very bones, she is also prepared for the end; but only because she knows that ends are ends only when she wants them to be. Books, plots and protagonists change, but her end remains the same, and that’s an end she sees with you. Only, she will not call it an end, because with you it’s never an end, it’s a fabulous journey with smooth highways, and curved mountain roads. But then, she’s loves it all.

Yes, we girls who read and write are storytellers. Us with Kafka, Nietzsche, Keats, Murakami, Neruda, Gibran, Hemingway and the rest! We’re everywhere, well, nearly everywhere, but not here to make anyone’s life a misery. Quite the contrary actually! So, we love reading, adore writing, and may even pen our stories, but, we allow our listeners and readers to make their own conclusions. They decide if the narrative is rich, they conclude if the story has meaning. No one can ever conclusively say that X story is one that’s as enthralling as Utopia. Utopia to us bookworms could be something else to you, and all of us respect that because that my dear is the beauty of the written word.

These beautiful words strung together through a fabulous marriage born from a writer’s imagination allow everyone to make their own conclusions, and dream their own dreams.

We, bookworms and writers do not expect you to live up to the protagonist in books; in fact, we don’t even want you to. No, we love you just the way you are, and if that means sprawling before the television and yelling at some sport, well, we’d sprawl with you. Sure, we accept nothing less than passion, and never will. We believe that you should be passionate about whoever you’re with and everything you do, if not, there really is no point, just reason.

Yes, we’d like to live our life like a story, but here’s one story that we wants to write with you; this is a story with two authors and both their names are “Us”.

We’ve got a couple of tickets on that southbound train, only we’d rather take the train up north. Are you with us readers and writers on this? Oh come on already, don’t worry about failing here, we’re certainly not worried. In fact, if and when you do we’d hold you tighter still because failure gives birth to newer dreams. You are allowing us our dreams, and you have already given us the most precious one yet, you.

So get on that train, make that proposal, walk down the aisle, have a couple of children (yes, we will play Mozart when we’re pregnant and introduce them to the written word), and make our own stories a reality. We may be readers and writers, but ever so often we like listening too, and when it comes to you, we’re all ears.

And, if you’re not much of a storyteller, you can just put your arms around us and we’ll watch our story unfold.           

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 98

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 98: "Chapter 98 As dreary as a starless night skyAs quiet as a barren desert where even sands fail to siftAs innocuous as a single dewdrop on a..."

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 99

Crimson skies...: The Unfinished Chapter - 99: "Chapter 99 One chapter ends and another begins Life she was told is about chapters But is it? What about the unfin..."

Crimson skies...: Incomplete love... thus eternal

Crimson skies...: Incomplete love... thus eternal: "Darling o mine, darling o mineHow much I love you soWords these words fail to me, O how they fail meMy love for will forever be incomplete,..."

The end then...

And this was it
She felt the ocean waves kiss her ankles
Outstretched arms, closed eyes
A sneaky tear slipped through

He failed to understand, he failed to even try
She lifted her head higher towards the open sky
The winds grew stronger as the sailboat sailed further... and further
Sailing to the heart of the ocean she wondered?

She hoped the ocean didn't have a heart
She felt her aching heart rip through her emotions
Wet her pillow, bleed, bleed, bleed
She clutched her chest, felt the heartbeat, felt the pain

She felt the ocean breeze caress her cheek
She was happy, this was her decision
She could take no more
She sailed further

If loving him was wrong, she never wanted to be right
Oh my God, how very much she missed him
She breathed him
She heard him, felt him in the words of every song she listened to and sang

She loves him too much to even consider this physical life without him
And then she collapsed
Her strength failed, her belief left her
Her will gave up

She felt her feet sink into the ocean
Oh the beautiful ocean, it embraced her
She sank lower, lower, lower, lower
She saw the ocean in all her wondrous beauty

The coral, the Dolphins, everything
Then she was rising
An ethereal force pulling her to the surface
She panicked, she wanted to sink

Was she sinking into eternity
Or was she being pulled to the surface...

Forever is...

He lay in her lap
Eyes closed
He seemed like he was sleeping
She was tempted to kiss him
Instead she ran her fingers through his hair
It felt like heaven
He then said, “I love the way you touch me.”
She wanted to say that she loved to touch him, feel him...
...his skin, his hair, his face, his body
This gentle act, those precious words...
...this is what forever is...

A Big Fat Punjabi Wedding

The morning after

Jairaj Singh

What comes usually after an office party is a hangover. It’s purely scientific to say this because you would least expect to have one. After all, anyone in their right sense would want to be at their best at a congregation that easily likes to confuse the lightweights among the heavyweights in the environs of a dimly-lit watering hole.
However, drinking for journalists tends to be one cheerful late-evening exercise that occasionally brings about ambiguity, incoherence and mindless happiness to an otherwise world that’s filled with trite sentences, bogus reports and unfortunate complexities of human nature. It is among those stern faces, of pragmatic nature and bitter smiles, to who you raise your first drink to and accept, for a fair moment or so, that you share a common ground.
The morning after the office party you realize you’re late for work. In one of those bitter moments of a working professional’s life, you also grasp how life can quickly revert to being boring after a long night of serendipity, adventure and debauchery. All this while you lie in bed clutching your head in despair when all the reserved energies in you have been drained the night before focusing on the ceramic texture of pots that deserve a good scrub.
When you finally make it to work, your sobering thoughts and your aching head offers an unconditional compromise that all events of recent undoing must be resolved in order to resume work like an ordinary day.
Fortunately, the conversation between the receptionist and the guard isn’t as off-putting, as you might expect it to be, but mildly uplifting, as they stand next to the medicine box. They muse over the increasing requests of Disprin and hand you on when they look at you.
Inside, the same partly-milky, partly-watery coffee that your colleagues had so often fashionably raised objections to, today have sent out scouts of peons with trays of plastic cups to get their morning fix. They are lined in front the coffee-machine table, sniggering at the irony of how expensive alcohol too give hangovers.
You casually avoid the glares of those who sit on their respective places and look naturally cheerful, well-nourished and well-slept. Somewhere in those eyes you feel a sense of contempt and disapproval being sentenced upon you.
And you, in your little ways, scorn their attitude in your haggard gait as you walk towards your cubicle to meet those familiar faces who will not only piece all your memories of folly together but will also wager how the last evening unfolded. It is of that you precisely dread.
Meanwhile, somewhere inside of you, you feel your brains are squirming, which are sending help signals in the forms of terrible quakes and icy shivers down your spine. For a brief moment, there is even clarity, and you almost make that promise to never drink again.
You rearrange and clear your desk a little, sorting piles of press releases from event invitations, to pages of layout printouts to the occasional postcard to the editor. Somewhere in the distance, you see the head of your editor bobbling from one cubicle to another, towards your direction.
Now, while on any other day you would have casually waved to him, talked to him at length about the stories you planned to do, and then lightly added to the list the ones you hadn’t been able to do. Today you pray you successfully avoid him.
This premonition comes to you with some vivid images that are less colorful, and which are accompanied by resonating Bollywood beats from last night. Your unanimous decision of having turned to whisky after downing four vodkas straight, in the course of a few stray minutes, surfaces on your conscience and creates conflict.
So you counter this conflict, in your mind and say, what was there to regret? After all, you had only played a sport to everyone’s amusement and frolic when they pulled you on to the dance floor, while the drink in your hand danced in the glass.
You feel a noose of compromise tightening around the neck of your moral system. You feel bad and then a lamp in the shape of an imp lights inside of you. You start to remember the smiling faces of a group of girls in office, who you never had the nerve before to talk or even mildly remark about the weather, dancing with you.
You also remember spinning around them – the way you had always wanted to spin – when someone had entered the magical circle and tapped you on your shoulder. But you were too lost in an outrageous tragic dance move that the remnants of your drink splattered against that man’s favorite blue shirt.
Yes, that man, your editor. You sheepishly remember you had seemed apologetic at first but then on an impulsive frog-moment you rushed to a dark corner hoping he might not have seen you. How could your judgment be so impaired?
As you slip further back in your chair, with feeble thoughts and momentary flashes of sadness reflected on your face. Two colleagues, Priya and Sonia, of the features team, you wouldn’t want to meet today or too often, invite themselves to review with you the rating of this year’s office party with the one last year. They forget you’re a few months old.
As you sit there listening to them, you remember how excited they had been about the party. So much so, that they had finished their pages so early that they had an hour for themselves inside the women’s loo to lift their faces, change out of their day clothes and plan in detail how late they could make the night, before the party.
Two minutes into, what seems to be a conversation of three, you wake up to realize that they aren’t talking about you. In fact they are talking about all those things that had happened while someone was helping you reach the loo of the lounge bar, after you had puked near the sofas, where everyone had left their bags.
In slow hushed voices Priya and Sonia talk about Ms Mehta, the sly quiet one, who had capitalized the most the previous evening. Allegedly she had made some extreme and suggestive hints, as she had helped the editor clean his shirt, by asking him if he went to the gym. Your editor, according to their sources, even sanctioned her leave.
By which time, Mr Sachdev and Gaurav, your local city correspondents, grinning like hyenas, pull their respective chairs to this small circle of your conversation.
‘I think she’s sleeping with him,’ chips in Mr Sachdev, speaking the unthinkable, taking a sip from the coffee.
Parul in order to change conversation points out that the dress Preeti Sharma, the fashion reporter, was wearing last evening was more revealing than necessary. To which Sonia adds quietly, ‘There’s more to her than meet’s the eye. She was only an intern a month ago.’
Then the conversation swiftly drifts to the music last night and how trashy the DJ Donny was but there is nothing like dancing to old Bollywood numbers. But the conversation is cut short by Gaurav who confesses that he saw Mrs Goyal from the desk leave with Mr Nanda from the sports section. It seems highly suspicious because Mrs Goyal lives in Rohini and Mr Nanda drives a white Maruti car to Patparganj.
‘They definitely have something going on,’ adds Mr Sachdev insightfully again. You look up again to see your editor laughing at his own jokes a few cubicles away. Meanwhile the mood of the conversation lifts and falls like waves in the sea, while your head feels as though it’s stuck in sand.
You bitterly realize how valid you felt your points were about the fate of journalism, while you chased beers with the editor-in-chief.
Meanwhile, Sonia turns to Mr Sachdev and asks him point blank, ‘You too were having a bloody good time Sanjay. You too were seen dancing close to that bubbly education reporter Priya?’ To which he gushes and smiles, but shakes his head to say no. ‘I am old, I have done my years in disco bars.’
Then you hear the hollow voice you the fear the most. It’s your editor. ‘Don’t you have any work today?’ he shouts well naturedly, while settling his eyes only at you. While everyone scatters around or turns to face the computers, he walks right up to you.
‘So, how are you feeling today?’ he asks, in a way a bully would ask after punching you in the stomach. You nod, smile and then end up not caring. Make plans in your head to join a magazine and never work in a newspaper office again.
‘I saw you had a hell of a time last evening.’ You are dead sure this is a trap. ‘You ruined my favorite shirt you know.’ You think you know he’s going to ask you to pay for it. ‘But that’s all right,’ he says, with a crooked smile. ‘I had actually come over to tell you that your internship ends next week, but if you like you can stick around.’ He then turns to walk to his office but stops.
‘You guys really don’t know how to drink and have a good time. Nor do any of these guys,’ he points his hand around. Somewhere deep inside of you a hundred men wish to die.

8 Alternate Names for 2012

1. How to escape utter destruction of the world without a scratch

3. Roland Emmerich destroys the world part 3

3. Americans save the world part 1000

4. There is no better way to reunite a family than destroying the world

5. Real daddies trump step dads any day (even if its a good step dad)

6. Be an eternal optimist - Learn to smile the next morning even if 6 billion people died the previous day including your father, mother, boyfriend, and step father.

7. ALL Aboard! We're Sailin' to Mount Everest

8. The Big Splash: Tsunami in Tibet

Any other suggestions?

Sam - The portrait of a living, breathing and annoying Id

Posted by: Retro Man

“If the cage isn’t driving you nuts, it’s the monkeys in them” – a recent Gtalk conversation.

I wanted to dedicate this blog to a colleague I share my workspace with - Sam. I like to call him by this name because I suspect his intellectual capacity mirrors the protagonist of I Am Sam. I've had the pleasure of being around Sam because the married woman he kept eyeballing over the cubicle decided she couldn’t take the attention anymore and had him shifted. He seems to manifest sloth, gluttony and lust of the Seven Deadly Sins pretty well.

Sam is a short and fat 40-something who’s single and lives with his mother. Indeed, fate has been unkind to him as he resembles a sullen toad. But it’s not his physical limitations that have thwarted him as much as his own personality. The most eventful time of the day for Sam is lunch, he must eat at 1 pm. His goofy and cherubic exclamations, “chalo dabba khate hain heehee” remind me what time it is. The other time for him to frolic is tea-time. He drinks about three cups of tea in office and slurps loudly while drinking them. If he doesn’t get his periodic fill, he pretends to wail like an infant at the housekeeping staff, “arreee atta chai yevu naa”.

Of course there’s more fun to be had for Sam in the day. When he isn’t indulging in his top 2 favourite activities, he helps boost the page-views of Zapak.com. He’s spent a few years playing games such as Dave, Pacman and Zapak Cricket. The cricket game is particularly noteworthy in it's limitations as it consists of a batsman standing at a pitch. If he connects the ball - the crowd cheers, if he misses – they sound disappointed. That’s it.

If Sam feels tired, then it’s time for a nice afternoon nap. After that, he proceeds to read the newspaper out loudly and thus summarise us with the current affairs, “Arrey Dadar mein do log marr gayein. Why these nasty, nasty things happen to people Uncle?” Uncle is the 70-plus Mallu colleague who’s spent a good number of years sitting next to him. Sadly, no amount of me trying to remain inconspicuous can let me escape his droll and utterly pointless conversation which he tries to draw me into. Once the clock strikes 6, Sam must pick up his bag and return home. If he doesn’t reach home on time, the aforementioned mother frantically calls up Mallu Uncle about his whereabouts.

Oh yes, Sam has been in the same company for a decade living this loop. But he doesn’t like to spend time browsing job sites as we do, he still spends his time looking up matrimonial websites. Nobody wants him to contribute to the gene pool as yet. Sam likes it very much when young women visit the office. He’s managed to frighten a few people I’ve known with his trademark big-eyed, happy yet very creepy stare.

So what does Sam do at work? The simple answer would be; not much. His shining moment for me took place when he called up his mother from the Hyderabad airport, to tell her to ready an order for a whisky quart and two plates chicken lollipop from the local bar. While a lot of folks find him obnoxious, for me, he also presents the embodiment of the Id. No self-restraint, no perception of time - only an instinct to gratify the immediate need.

Shadows

birds cast their shadows,
on the sunlit slopes,
shadows forever fleeting,
are all shadows thus fleeting?
joy the shadow of sorrow,
life the shadow of death?

(written by my mother)

A Little Bit of Me

Slow like a blur
the minutes move in reverse
bold, black
a shy truth hides behind
in carefully blunted pained eyes
worn like a divine snake
sits a curious expression staring back
wrapped around its blue nape
passive in its momentary solace
offering ignorant seductive chants

the self shrinks to the gaze
perspiring, stilling senses
old, and breathing somewhere
regurgitating in bowels
profane tongues, longing gazes
towards a pale figure
moves its shadow on its face

Oh Soul, thou art a vagabond

A walk down the long, winding road
No destination in mind
My journey now consists of brief stops
I search and I search but my soul evades me

Understand life I can’t and yet I can
Understand people I can’t and yet I can
Understand me I can’t and yet I can
Understand my purpose I can’t and yet I can

This journey I must continue I know
Away from home and the people I know
Until I reach the place of nothingness
Until I can hear the wind talking to me
Until I feel the earth embracing me

Underbelly of a life we choose not to see

Book: Eunuch Park
Author: Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Publisher: Penguin

Palash Krishna Mehrotra writes about men locked in the prison of their minds. His book, Eunuch Park, opens a tall grim iron gate that leads you into a dark morbid passage and before you can light a match to know where you are, the cold sweat rising from your temple tells you there’s no turning back.

If there’s one thing to gather after you’ve read his collection of short stories, it’s the stuff foreboding nightmares are made of. It’s original and even makes Shantaram shy away from a distance.

Palash is not writing to please you with purple prose and descriptive melting imagery that most Indian writers tend to write. He writes no far-fetched fashionable tales of slum dwellers, of ordinary hope or lush romance. Instead, in terse, short, simple and articulate sentences he tells you gory stories that you will never hear sitting in a plush living room. He writes stories in a manner in which it’s meant to be told, that gets you to sit on a dry, dusty hard floor dotted with cigarette butts and empty booze bottles rolling, with the taste of blood, sweat and tears in your mouth.

In his 15 stories, Mehrotra covers an expansive ground as smoothly as one flicks ash from a cigarette. There is murder, drug addiction, sexual abuse, homosexuality, prostitution, lust, bullying, stalking, repression that takes place in big cities and small towns. Hidden in his writing is a certain void of life, an irony within an irony that unlocks the myth from fantasy and upturns the underbelly of a life we merely choose to not see.

In all his stories, one realises in bitterness, that the events, instances or churlish situations are no vivid imagination of a sick writer that derives a certain pleasure by jabbing a finger at you. Palash takes you down familiar routes whether it is New Delhi, Bombay, Dehra Dun or Allahabad with a perspective of a person that easily slips between the barriers of class into a territory where perversity exposes vulnerability and honesty trips experience. Often the stories are told in first-person or in-and-out recollections, often they are so short and heady that they end up in a certain abruptness leaving a charcoal stain on your mind as you rush to meet the new one.

In Fit of Rage, the story is about a tenant, a murderer in the past, who lives in Defence Colony of New Delhi, and is taken into confidence by the servant of the house and his smack-addled friend who plot to murder the landlady and make a runaway with the loot.

In Eunuch Park, the story is about a Delhi University hostel student who is on the lookout for a safer option to make out with his girlfriend after having run into trouble with college authorities and the girl’s stringent parents. In Okhla Basti, the story is about the experience of an uneducated 26-year-old, who in order to wash away the memory of an old lover drowns himself in country liquor and chillums of ganja smoke, in one desolate night in the basti. In The Nick of Time, the story is about a student studying in Oxford, who recounts an episode when he cross dresses and has to make a dash to the loo without being caught. In The Other Evening, it’s an episode between a man and a prostitute, an indelible moment they share and the meaningless of it.

Palash in his style of writing brings a welcoming change in Indian writers writing in English. He has the ability of instantly captivating the reader by the sheer force of simple storytelling. Even the weaker stories, the ones that sometimes bounce on a thin line of obscurity covered in grime, resonates the continuity of the voice of a writer that’s taken some sort of a solemn pledge.

If one has to quibble about Eunuch Park, perhaps it is that Palash doesn’t dwell in his stories; these candid vignettes give a cursory peek of living on the wild side leaving the reader digging his fingernails in the pages wanting to know more.

What he does best is kill the concept of literary elitism, he shreds the aloofness and allows you to witness a spectacle perched in an amoral vantage point

The Unfinished Chapter

Chapter 99

One chapter ends and another begins
Life she was told is about chapters
But is it?

What about the unfinished chapters in between?
Chapters stay unfinished…till she’s ready to close them
Some memories make her smile
Others are like the treacherous sword on the gallows

A constant fight between happiness and sorrow
Hope and defeat
Is she really turning these pages?
Time is surreal

She looks at the eyes in the mirror
She knows the feeling only too well
She doesn’t need a bookmark for this
She goes back anyway

Is it her or is it life?
If it’s her, she has a solution
If it’s life, she still has a solution

No more going back chapters
No more bookmarks
This is one chapter that is compelled on staying unfinished
This is one dance she’s dancing alone

She laughs at the irony of it all
Her mind takes her back…but only just
Her aching heart and tired soul consume her
They bring that unfinished chapter to her fore again

Time, time they say has the answer
This is one time she quit on time
Will her chapter remain unfinished?
Or is the unfinished chapter really a finished one?

A Colossal Push

This might seem longer
but carry it with you
like a feathered sprinkle
touching your invisible wings
don let it break
this charm of a dream
it takes you where the world is
where everything works the way it is
make it grow
like a temptation in the dark worlds
but don't let the force tag you with it
else the fate of Icarus will be yours
keep the faith glowing

- Neha Arora