10 Pints And A Curry

'Anna'rchy OR Anarchy

2011-10-13T05:08:00.002+05:30

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence. 
 - Mark Twain

It seems we have both in abundance.... Ignorance of the masses, confidence of a team. 

After watching, hearing and observing the entire fiasco of the Anna Hazare anti corruption movement, I have come to a strong realization that, for one I do not support it one bit and that my personal assessment of the entire movement is that is is based around the principles of Mass Ignorance.  Before I get into the details of what I mean I would like categorically clarify that by no means are my views intended at hurting the people reading it at large and that I am glad that here was a team that has brought the issue of Corruption in India into the public intellect and space.

Ever since the hunger fast by Anna Hazare it was pretty evident that the movement was spearheaded by the team and not an individual. Anna Hazare to me was an empty vessel, a clean image in which you could have poured any issue and it would have worked. The big difference between Gandhi and a Gandhian is the lack of identity in the latter. While Gandhi had his own set of rules and principles made purely by his experiences and conscious, in the case of Anna Hazare - a Gandhian, there was no scope for any such possibility. Its like if I am a communist, I will follow Marx or Lenin or Mao. There are no or extremely few choices and even a smaller room for maneuvering. Thus in case of Anna Hazare he might have been the face of a movement but not the backbone, which is not entirely advisable and sane for any movement. The principles of the leader has to go down the ladder and fuse into the masses rather than a model where Anna is merely the face and the intellect. So, the first major reservation being that this movement is not a movement by a man but indeed one that is merely cast around the shadows of the integrity and the image of a Gandhian.

Moving on from the hunger strike to the core issue of Ignorance. When the movement started and crowds started to pour in support of Team Anna, one fact pointed out categorically by all media channels and outlets was the fact that most people present at the venues did not even know the difference between The Lokpal Bill and the Jan Lokpal. It was pretty common to hear news reporters interviewing people you said - "We are here to support Anna and we will do whatever he wants...." So rather than understanding what they were supporting people choose to follow a group of social activists and lawyers who claimed that they represented the civil society. There were facebook pages and clicking a like button seemed enough, or standing at the Lokhandwala circle in Mumbai, or some circle in Delhi or some venue in your town became a fashion that was perpetuated solely on Mass Ignorance. I am so reminded of a friend who put a status update on facebook during Anna's fast. She did not support it and had every right to express her view. She was not just filled up abuse, but hate mail as well. Thus, the second major reservation being the fact that not only are we marching along without knowing what we were marching for but we call anyone with a different opinion corrupt, anti-national, not patriotic etc....

My opinion is our opinion..... A trend that has come up all along this debate is the fact that one person's opinion becomes the opinion of the masses. Its not just surprising but shocking that a generation that tom-toms itself on Google and the internet failed to do its homework. Most of us rather choose to follow Kiran Bedi on twitter and her opinion of the masses. Thus without any adequate research one person's opinion was now the Laxman rekha for millions. Just yesterday when the government came out announcing that it plans to make the Lokpal a constitutional body rather than a statutory one the cynicism from Team Anna rolled down hill to the country. Kiran Bedi tweeted : Constitutional status for lokpal is cart before    d horse. It's like no  bread keep waiting for  illusionary cake! Who r they Fooling? Needless to say that most of us agree with what she says without even being remotely aware of what constitutional status means....

And now unfortunately it increasingly seems that what once seemed like an apolitical team is not entirely apolitical. Firstly by announcing that people shouldn't vote for the Congress (you have a lot to answer for) in the Hisar by polls are Team Anna endorsing the two other candidates who themselves have no clean records. On being repeatedly asked about this the answers now seem as ambiguous as the motives. And if this seems to be the trend going ahead looking at the UP elections it seems I will have to see a Mayawati back in power building more statues of herself. Thus why the sudden rush and the hurry when the government categorically through the law minister Salman Khurshid had said that they will bring the bill in the winter session.

Finally, a small note on the BJP throughout this movement. Personally, I am not too big a BJP or a congress fan or even a supporter. I am pretty straight forward - A Communist. But coming back to the BJP, it seems they are no longer the principle opposition party, Team Anna is... I haven't seen a single instance of any BJP leader having any alternate view than that of Team Anna and I am not just possibly but probably sure that the BJP does not agree with everything Team Anna says. But, it seems that the BJP's views on everything regarding this issue and in sync with that of Team Anna which unfortunately only lead to me a conclusion that all that BJP is trying to do is score political points rather than be constructive. 

To Sum up :

1. There are a lot more drafts of the Lokpal bill other than the government's version or team Anna's version. We need to look at other alternatives as well.

2. A movement can only be successful if it is based on collective intellect and not Mass Ignorance.

3. There always has to be room for alternate and different opinion. Agree to Dis-agree...

4. Following someone blindly is always a form of Slavery. No matter who ever you support, please study and research. It is not just a bill but a law that will affect all our lives.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I have come back to blogging after almost a year.... I have always had strong political views but I have tried to keep them away from from blog... But well, I guess the time and the occasion was right to jump into it... So what the heck...

Two rusty kids and a bin.....

2010-11-09T09:20:00.000+05:30

Sometimes the poverty of the mind is worse than that of the soul.

Traveling by bus in India has always been interesting but somehow this time around it was much more than just interesting. Of how sometimes things open your eyes, this one trip opened them wide open for me.

Its always been fascinating trying to understand the complexity of the sub-continent, and especially after returning from London, it was like a discovery all over again. Life seemed like it had come a full circle. Every little shed made out of tin, glowing with hope under the bright light of  yellow bulb passed along the silhouette of my eyes as the bus moved sometimes on the smooth plain road and others at the dusty bumpy road where signs read - "Today's pain is tomorrow's gain" 

We stop at a roadside dhaba for dinner. The place is such that everyone of every financial status can stop and eat but still seems worthy enough for people from the so called better off financial classes to stop at. Its like the road is also divided into different segments. At the small dhaba, an overcrowded bus comes to a haul. It feels like the people are riding the bus than the other way round. A lot of people who occupy seats in the bus do not get down as they know if they leave there seats they might have to forefeet them to those who occupy them. A normal government bus stops and than the so called expensive volvo stops. Kids at the small dhaba stare with wide eyes to the locked luxury looking bus that has just stopped. No matter how much I insist my mother has packed food for me and to my surprise you can eat your own food at the place. So I dig in, take a couple of bites and throw the rest. Wash my hands and I know one of the working kids has picked up my thrown packet from the bin as he knew there was some left in it. The irony of the bin and the two rusty looking kids pierces my heart out.

They pick up the bin with their tiny hands and start to dump whatever is being thrown around by people. Apparently, I guess the idea is to present a clean place to the ultra expensive buses on the road to stop. Somehow I have a strange feeling that the bin is newer than the kids. If the bin had a face I am sure it would have a smiling one. One of the kids jumps in the bin to compress the garbage so that they can fir in more. I sit in my seat watching as the bus moves, somewhere deep in me I now my dog will be eating better dog tonight than probably the two rusty kids who carried a happy looking yellow bin..... 

The Incomplete Monologues - 3

2010-03-23T21:08:00.000+05:30

My eyes close... 

And I see my spirit fly,

Break free from under my skin,

My body is no more, 

It feels as heavy as feathers, 

And as light as rocks,

I am now the wind & the Earth,

The fire & the water..

The flesh & the soul.. 

My blood melts into existence...

My bones brittle into the sand...

The illusion of life is diluted...

My spirit is the disease,

My death the Narcotic...

My reality is lost..

My hallucinations now the truth...

I have closed my eyes,

And felt my spirit fly,

Break free from under my skin.... 

The Incomplete Monologues - 2

2010-03-05T09:20:00.000+05:30

I inhale the narcotic scent of your body, 
My existence is surrendered,
I give in to the mercy of each touch,
I taste the wine from every curve,
My ecstasy is the beauty, 
My irony has become my sin,
I live deep in the silhouette of your eyes,
I feed on you, like a baby,
I bow in your valleys like a saint,
I look through you to find a purer me,
Somewhere in the abyss of this beauty, 
I have lost myself, my soul, my existence.... 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I am not really a poet, these are just results of sleepless nights, insomnia and sometimes alcohol....

Hate Is Indeed A Strong Word...

2010-02-23T05:33:00.000+05:30

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

Hate is equivalent to ignorance and lacking self worth; where to put down someone else makes one feel better about self. Hate is a base human emotion that many of us succumb to when feeling fearful and/or hurt by others. It gives a person permission (at least in their mind) to disrespect the rights of others. Hate often says labels are more important than human beings. Labels make it easier to ignore the humanness of each individual.

WHY DO WE HATE? - Hate is a distorted perspective of life. Some psychologists call it a MENTAL ILLNESS. It's directly related to fear, hurt, irresponsibility, and ignorance. Fear comes from feeling a threat physically, economically, socially, and personally in terms of self worth. Can I meet up to this threat? Am I good enough to handle my own? What are those things I might lose to this threat?

Hate is related to hurt out of a sense that someone has done you wrong and you deserve better treatment. But instead of treating others the way you wish to be treated, this is distorted in striking out blindly toward others who have done nothing to you and aren't responsible for why you hate. There are a lot of hurt people. Those who have been abused, sought love from an individual who hates and then models that behavior, and those who are scared that they don't match up to others or circumstances.

Irresponsibility and hate go hand in hand since the hater tends to focus on the actions of others for making their life miserable. They tend not to believe that they create their own reality through their beliefs and actions. It's always someone else's fault for the life they live. It's rarely of their own doing. 

The ignorance I talk about is three-fold: that of self, others and Spiritual Law. When one has self knowledge one knows they are connected to others through Spirit. That this energy is the same as the energy in others just going through life in another pair of cultural, social, economic, physical and Spiritual shoes. The reason we fear each other is because we've lacked information on each other. We haven't had many REAL experiences with each other. THAT'S IGNORANCE.

You have love and hate. Love is the thesis, hate is the antithesis; and       most people die caught in the struggle, conflict, between the two. They are never able to       see that there is a subtle connection between love and hate; that they are not two       energies but one energy having two polarities. They are just like the negative and       positive in electricity -- but it is electricity all the same.

Hate is also a kind of love standing upside down. It happens that you can forget your       friend, but you cannot forget your enemy. The enemy haunts you more than the friend. You       think more of destroying the enemy than helping the friend. The reason is that love is a       thesis -- simple. Hate is an antithesis -- it has become more complicated. It has become       negation, and negativity has an attraction -- for many reasons.

One is afraid of negativity because you cannot hate someone without creating a wound       within yourself. Nobody pretends hate. It is always authentic, because why should one       pretend hate? -- It hurts.

People pretend love; they may not be really in love, but the very idea that they are in       love is soothing. So love can remain superficial; but hate always goes deep -- it cannot       remain superficial. That's why one becomes more concerned about the enemy than about       friends.

Man has to find a bridge between the dualities,       because without finding the bridge he cannot transcend them, he cannot go above them. And       the bridge is there -- it has only to be discovered. One has to see how love becomes hate,       how hate becomes love -- that they are capable of transforming into each other. Naturally,       they cannot be different energies; just different situations, states, of the same energy.

As you become aware that love and hate are the same energy, then you are not to be       concerned with love and hate, because those are only two poles; you have to be more       concerned with the energy of which they are the poles: what is that energy? Watching it,       you start a new force within yourself which is synthesis. 

You come to a point where you know love and hate are one.

Hate is indeed a very strong word.... 

So who do you hate ????? 

The Incomplete Monologues - 1

2010-02-19T22:36:00.000+05:30

I have killed murdered you with my own hands,

Sometimes I have killed murdered you in minutes,

Other times I have made you suffer for years,

I have killed you with my ideology, with just being me....

I am responsible for genocide over the years,

I have brutally murdered a part of you with each sunrise, the day & the approaching dusk.

To me this is genocide of the soul, 

Probably death would be a comfortable bed than my act of murder genocide.

I don't know whether I am Sorry or not,

I don't know to feel guilty or to be liberated,

I don't know how to live under the shadow of uncertainty.

I have stolen from you, each day, each second...

I have taken away something each moment, and never given back a moment of solitude.

This emptiness has taken over me,

You are not wrong, you never were,

But, am the one to blame...

I am burning at both ends, and melting you simultaneously,

I can't help being faded away with the smoke & the night,

But I want you to stay, 

I want you to live,

I want you to see the sunshine.

For after years of darkness, I want to be in the dark,

But leave you at the brim time between the dusk and the night,

For when you wake up the following morning,

I would have faded in the dark night.

Identity Crisis...

2010-02-18T03:57:00.000+05:30

Everybody is condemned from his very childhood. 

Whatever one does on his own accord, out of his own liking, is not acceptable. The people, the crowd in which a child has to grow has its own ideas, ideals. The child has to fit with those ideas and ideals. The child is helpless. 

Have you ever thought about it? — the human child is the most helpless child in the whole animal kingdom. All the animals can survive without the support of the parents and the crowd, but the human child cannot survive, he will die immediately. He is the most helpless creature in the world — so vulnerable to death, so delicate. Naturally those who are in power are able to mould the child in the way they want.

So everybody has become what he is, against himself. That is the psychology behind the fact that everybody wants to pretend to be what he is not. Everybody is in a schizophrenic state. He has never been allowed to be himself, he has been forced to be somebody else that his nature does not allow him to be happy with.

So as one grows and stands on his own legs, one starts pretending many things which he would have liked in reality to be part of his being. But in this insane world, he has been distracted. He has been made into somebody else; he is not that. He knows it. Everybody knows it — that he has been forced to become a doctor, to become an engineer; he has been forced to become a politician, to become a criminal, to become a beggar.

There are all kinds of forces around. In Bombay there are people whose whole business is to steal children and make them crippled, blind, lame, and force them to beg and each evening to bring all the money that they have gathered. Yes, food will be given to them, shelter will be given to them. They are being used like commodities, they are not human beings. This is the extreme, but the same has happened with everybody to a lesser or greater extent. Nobody is at ease with himself.

I read about a great surgeon who was retiring, and he was very famous. He had many students and many colleagues. They all gathered, and they were dancing and singing and drinking — but he was standing in a dark corner, sad. One friend came up to him and asked, “What is the matter with you? We are celebrating and you are standing here so sad — don’t you want to retire? You are seventy-five; you should have retired fifteen years ago. But because you are such a great surgeon, even at seventy-five nobody can compete with you, nobody comes even close to you. Now, retire and relax!” He said, “That’s what I was thinking. I am feeling sad because my parents forced me to become a surgeon. I wanted to be a singer, and I would have loved it. Even if I was just a street singer — at least I would have been myself. Now I am a world-famous surgeon, but I am not myself. When people praise me as a surgeon, I listen as if they are praising somebody else. I have been given awards, doctorates, but nothing rings a bell of joy in my heart — because this is not me. This being a surgeon has killed me, destroyed me. I wanted to be just a flute player, even if I had to be a beggar on the streets. But I would have been happy.”

In this world, there is only one happiness and that is to be yourself. And because nobody is himself, everybody is trying somehow to hide — masks, pretensions, hypocrisies. They are ashamed of what they are in some way or the other.

We have made the world a marketplace, not a beautiful garden where everybody is allowed to bring his own flowers. We are forcing marigolds to bring roses — now from where can marigolds bring roses? Those roses will be plastic roses, and in the heart of hearts the marigold will be crying, and with tears, feeling ashamed that “We have not been courageous enough to rebel against the crowd. They have forced plastic flowers on us, and we have our own real flowers for which our juices are flowing — but we cannot show our real flowers.”

You are being taught everything, but you are not being taught to be yourself. This is the ugliest form of society possible, because it makes everybody miserable.

To be what you don’t want to be, to be with someone you don’t want to be with, to do something you don’t want to do is the basis of all your miseries. And on the one hand the society has managed to make everybody miserable, and on the other hand the same society expects that you should not show your misery — at least not in public, not in the open. It is your private business. They have created it — it really is public business, not private business. The same crowd that has created all the reasons for your misery finally says to you: “Your misery is your own, but when you come out, come out smiling. Don’t show your miserable face to others.” This they call etiquette, manners, culture. Basically, it is hypocrisy. 

And unless a person decides that “Whatever the cost, I want just to be myself. Condemned, unaccepted, losing respectability — everything is okay but I cannot pretend anymore to be somebody else”… This decision and this declaration — this declaration of freedom, freedom from the weight of the crowd — gives birth to your natural being, to your individuality. Then you don’t need any mask. Then you can be simply yourself, just as you are. And the moment you can be just as you are, there is tremendous peace that passeth understanding.

So,

Are you living the life you want to ???

Are you living the way you want to ??? 

Are you a victim of your own IDENTITY ???

The Never Ending Honeymoon ...

2010-02-13T02:55:00.000+05:30

LOVE          IS NOT A RELATIONSHIP. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. A relationship          is something finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come,          the honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is          finished. You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry          it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy. You can carry it on          because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because if you          disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you… Relationship          means something complete, finished, closed. 

Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river,          flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never          ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at          a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues–          it is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun. 

And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we          in such a hurry? Because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a          security. Relationship has a certainty; relating is just a meeting of          two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say          goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid          that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would          like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom          to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.

You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you start thinking          of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How does the law come          into love? The law comes into love because love is not there. It is only          a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear. Before it disappears          settle down, before it disappears do something so it becomes impossible          to separate.

In a better world, with a little more enlightenment          spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love          will remain a relating not a relationship. And I am not saying that their          love will be only momentary. There is every possibility their love may          go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of intimacy, may have          something more of poetry and more of godliness in it. And there is every          possibility their love may last longer than your so-called relationship          ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by          the policeman. The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commitment from          the heart, it will be a silent communion.          
If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and          more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy          more and more. And there are a few flowers of love which bloom only after          long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too; within six weeks they          are there, in the sun, but within six weeks again they are gone forever.          There are flowers that take years to come, and there are flowers that          take many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes. But          it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not          even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has          to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being.          It has to be understood, not said.

         Forget relationships and learn how to relate. 

Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted–          that's what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the          man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either! It is impossible          to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other          for granted is insulting, disrespectful.

To think that you know your wife is very, very ungrateful. How can you          know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are          not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much          water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different.          Relate again, start again, don't take it for granted.

And the man that you slept with last night, look at his face again in          the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed. So much,          incalculably much has changed. That is the difference between a thing          and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the          woman, they are no more the same. Explore again, start again. That's what          I mean by relating.

Relating means you are always starting, you are continuously trying to          become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each          other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other's personality.          You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of inner          feelings, into the deep recesses of his being. You are trying to unravel          a mystery which cannot be unraveled. That is the joy of love: the exploration          of consciousness. 

And if you relate, and don't reduce it to a relationship, then the other          will become a mirror to you. Exploring him, unawares you will be exploring          yourself too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his feelings, his          thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will be knowing your own deeper stirrings          too. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation.          Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.

Hence I say relate. By saying relate, I mean remain continuously on a          honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other, finding new ways of          loving each other, finding new ways of being with each other. And each          person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that          it is not possible that you can ever say, "I have known her,"          or, "I have known him." At the most you can say, "I have          tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery."

         In fact the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes.

Then          love is a constant adventure. 

Then love will become a never ending honeymoon... 

Have a great Valentine's Day ;)

CHEERS !!!!! 

Is There A Son Left In Me ???

2010-02-11T21:45:00.000+05:30

God could not exist everywhere, therefore he created Mothers.

Having spent all my life away from home, I have a very special relationship with my Mom. From her bringing me chocolates at the boarding school when I was in Junior School, to coming to the school to celebrate my birthday as I reached high school & later in life to try and talk to me about the girls I had a thing for. Our relationship was mostly over the phone as I went home only twice a year.

My dad is a very strong human being both mentally and spiritually but Mum's have to be Mum's. I remember my Dad often asking me to keep calling home every weekend to talk to my mum, make it a point that I don't forget any important dates related to her life, I remember how my Mom would cook stuff for all my friends when she came to school to visit me every once a month. It was special, it was absolutely amazing as I have never really had the opportunity to spend time with her as I have always been away from home and yet we have had all the time in the world, stories over the phone, fighting over the phone, crying over the phone, my high school love stories and her opinions, We shared a life together yet we were apart.

She cried when I came to London, I still can't forget her moist eyes and for some reason her cheeks become red when she cries, as we stood outside the entrance on the Bombay International airport. There is a warmth we shared, a bond that is really never spoken off because of the physical distances we have had but its there, somewhere in our subconscious mind it is always there, I know she has sacrificed a lot to keep me happy, most of times not even letting me know what she is doing and I having to discover all of it later in my life. I struggled a lot when I came to London, it took me almost a year to find a job and not having a job in a city like London can bring the best and the worst out of you. I remember once crying over the phone as the overwhelming feeling of giving it all up had taken me over. I struggled for words and though I cry very rarely, the time around I just broke against the continuing struggle to keep pace with life. A couple of days later I spoke to my Dad and he told me how my mom would each day fast (not eat) & read the Guru Granth Sahib (holy book of sikhs) as to my well being, she is not the kind of person who begs rather the kind that says give my son strength to get up and come out of this phase. I don't really beleive in God or religion for that matter but for her I would happily enter the Gurudwara (temple) and sit there pretending that it really matters to me.

She is the strength of two people in the world, she is an unspoken solitude that holds me and my dad together, and I am probably the worst son she could have asked for. 

I called up my Dad this morning to discuss with him my further studies in the field of music and we have been having an argument as to what the future prospects are and what will I be doing after I finish my studies, and in the heat of the moment two days back I had a really ugly conversation with my Mom, I could figure out that she was falling short of words while speaking to me, and probably she wanted to hang up the phone as continue the conversation at some other time yet I kept speaking as if I wanted her to hear what I had to say and in a way make her feel guilty in the entire argument. I did not speak to either my Mom or Dad yesterday and today morning (11'Feb'10), I called my Dad and he didn't answer the phone, I called him again an hour later ready to burst at him as to why can't he answer my calls or at least call me back, but before I could the tone of my Dad's voice sunk me down, I knew something was wrong and when he told me that he has just returned from the hospital with my Mom, who had extreme heart pain since day before yesterday night and has now been asked to rest for a couple of weeks, I felt a burst of shiver down my spine because I know she generally has heart pain after she takes way too much pressure & tension and I am responsible for this.

And the most difficult part of all of it, is that life still moves on, I still have to go to work, I still have to make music and I still have to pay the bills, eat, sleep and act normal, as if nothing is bothering me. May be at this point I want life to stop, just be stuck in this time, act abnormally, not eat, not sleep, not live but exist for this moment. 

If something happens to her, I have no clue what will I end up doing. I am sorry Mom I could not be a better Son to you. You deserve to be happy & I took it away from you..... 

Is there a Son left in Me ???

My Life & The Unberable Lightness Of Being...

2010-02-09T09:20:00.000+05:30

(One can say that Flajsman had acted promptly and with great presence of mind. There was one thing, however, that he wasn't able to record with a sufficiently cool head. It is true that for an instant he stood gaping at Elisabeth's naked body, but shock had overcome him to such a degree that beneath its veil he did not realize what he from an advantageous distance can fully appreciate:
Elisabeth's body was magnificent. She was lying on her back with her head turned slightly to the side and one shoulder slightly bent inward toward the other, so that her beautiful breasts presses against each other and showed their full shape..)
- Extract from Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

When I was reading this paragraph, I was in the tube at the East Acton station, it had just started to snow and it was a beautiful yet it felt sad, the entire surrounding, the opening and closing of the tube doors, the train, the platform, all in motion yet motionless. I paused for a moment trying to realize of how beautiful the portrayal of the human body could be when put in context. Off how words weaved in the web of beauty give bliss to the most taboo of human life & existence.

I could see her through the glass from sitting in the tube, she was standing right there, small flakes of snow were touching her beautiful skin as she stood there on the platform, and every now and then she would reach for her eyebrows to clear of the snow, it was beautiful yet deep down it felt sad, as if I was reading in context, as if I was reading Kundera's work in the realm of modern day life and the few moments of serene beauty is had to offer, though there was nothing at all erotic or sensual about what I saw in her as compared to the paragraph I was reading yet the very moment was so intense and filled with raw passion & desire that it became as fictional as Kundera's work and as real as I could possibly make it.

I have to admit there is nothing more total than the body of a woman, for it combines almost every emotion together, from being absolutely raw to being erotically pure, its complete, and when put in the context , it can take the feeling of love to an entirely religious, spiritual and a  godly experience. 

I guess Life has new dimensions when looked from the eye of a writer such as Kundera, for its just an experience after all, but what really matters is how the sub conscious recalls that experience when you want to feel life again, Is the recall merely based on the sexual act of the two humans, or does it stimulate a human in totality i.e the emotional, physical & the spiritual.

Well, there are numerous ways of experiencing and interpreting the human body. Some erotic, some emotional, some beautiful, some filled with desire & others filled with raw passion, but its not the beauty of the woman but the way one sees it that matters the most. And beauty may not always be physical and sometimes physical may be unimportant. Man is weak, weaker than he thinks, weaker than women, weaker than his own gut, weak to the core and thus he solitudes in the feeling to prove that he is the man, whereas always being aware of the fact that the man in him may give in and crumble to any act of passion or raw desire and thus he blames the eroticism of women to cover up his own weakness. And thus history, poetry, literature, art, love, life, sexuality all become a slave to feminism yet here stands the man still trying to prove a point.

Does this really make any sense at all.... Well, I got no clue...

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.  
- Milan Kundera

So, How often do you read something & try and put it into context ??? 

Reading Between The Lines

2010-02-04T20:20:00.000+05:30

I can't see the lines I used to think I could read between.

According to the first definition I found on google - "This expression derives from a simple form of cryptography, in which a hidden meaning was conveyed by secreting it between lines of text. It originated in the mid 19th century and soon became used to refer to the deciphering of any coded or unclear form of communication, whether written or not." But I guess within the range between the 19th century and now, the definition might have changed considerably, at least on a very subjective account.

I recently got into this very freaky habit of trying to look beyond what a person writes on their blogs, I would try and read the post over and over again to figure out what state of mind that person was when he/she wrote this, I am not trying to be some psychic here, but just trying to understand the reason as to why we all behave and respond differently to the same situations and write about it from a lot of different and varied perspectives. We are all similar as humans yet so different, like the fingers on our hands they are all similar yet so different. 

Here are some words taken from A Leaf Of Voices a blog I love reading :

Call me,

Save me,

Teach me,

Lead me,

Rape me,

Feel me,

Help me,

Love me,

Take me to life,

Bring me to you !!

There is so much that comes to mind when you read these words, a cry of belonging, a thought of acceptance at any cost, a feeling of purity in the desperation of the human soul, an insight that is begging to be loved for who the person is and not who that individual may seem to be. The most interesting part of the entire piece were the two words "RAPE ME" as if they scream at you, trying to plead that accept me even if that means to be accepted forcefully, not just being loved but also surrendering oneself to existence, surrendering to very ways of human empathy, surrendering to the ways of oneself, in a way loosing a battle with your own existence. There is mixed feeling as to what the person must have gone through while writing this, happiness and joy on one hand solely because of the expression of unconditional love, a feeling that transcended all bondage that held her back, announcing to the world that here I am, and I am immortal in my own ways , in my own senses, in my own feelings only when I am with you I can feel life, only when I am with you my existence has a relevance. And probably there is a sense of deep sadness accompanied with the overwhelming happiness as to why at times more than enough is just not enough, as to why is it that life always brings you as crossroads where the only thing you can see is reflections of the subconscious mind. A state where happiness dissolves with pity and remorse, a state where you simply surrender to the ways of life and existence.

Sometimes we fail to express what we want to, like as a music producer there are so many times I fail to get the rhythm or the harmony in my mind anywhere close to the result, thus I guess in the same way the actual message we want to convey most of the times is the one that is between the lines, its just that the overwhelming feeling of trying to put it in the right words is so unbearable that we end up with a vague representation of what we actually intended to say, and sometimes there are the lucky ones, the ones who just get it all right. I guess I belong to the category where saying life is messed up will be an understatement.

I guess in all our lives, and probably more to do with my own, everything can be read clearly, and then there are the sides that lie hidden between the lines. Sides to us, our personalities that are reflected in words we write, in thoughts and in perception. I personally have to come to realize the fact that not always would we appreciate the fact that people read between the lines, i.e I there are certain people who will be able to look through what I am trying to say and at most times I wouldn't mind them discovering the meaning behind my words, but most of the times I would hate to be interpreted in such ways by people who could form an opinion by reading what I write, or what I say etc... So, to be very frank I hated writing this post, but the entire thought process was so overwhelming that I wanted to do it, though being completely aware of the fact that I hate this feeling of guilt within me and probably will have to now deal with it for a couple of days.

So Reading Between The Lines ???

What do you think ???

---------------------------------------------------

Do check out  a guest post on the 6th Feb on  jessica marie taylor 

Love Is Freedom... Isn't It???

2010-01-14T06:13:00.000+05:30

Man's greatest desire is for freedom. Freedom within thyself is a longing within humans.  Freedom is the very essential core, the soul, the driving force behind human consciousness: Love is its circumference and freedom is its center. These two fulfilled, life has no regret.  And they both are fulfilled together, never separately. The very essence of love is being free, is being set free, the very point is the feeling of being able to spread your wings and fly freely, to be liberated, to be able to feel existence in purity.  

Trying to fulfill love without freedom is an exercise in futile. Such love is not beautiful, its actually not ugly as well, its horrible, its unbearable, and where such love exists it brings more and more misery, more and more bondage, it becomes a liability, love turns into something ugly, something you want to get rid off, something you want to shed or get rid off, you want excrete it, you desire to cry it out because if there is no freedom to go with it, it ends up being a mere commodity or an obligation. Then love is not what one has expected it to be;  it turns out just the opposite.  It shatters all hopes, destroys all dreams, it gives you the unexpected, it destroys all expectations, and life becomes a wasteland, a groping in darkness and never finding the door to an endless world of arguments, fights, sadness and unspoken misery. 

Love without freedom naturally tends to be possessive.  And the moment possessiveness enters in, you start creating bondage for others and bondage for yourself, because you cannot possess somebody without being possessed by him.  You cannot make somebody a slave without becoming a slave yourself.  Whatsoever you do to others is done to you, and that is when the freedom you feel irrespective of being with someone starts to suffocate you, the feeling of beauty turns to frustration leading to slavery of thyself.

  
This is the basic principal to be understood, that love without freedom never brings fulfillment. And to be able to love and be loved the feeling to be fulfilled is essential, its important to feel content and satisfied yet free & in harmony and rhythm with thyself and the partner. 

And there have been people who have tried the other extreme, freedom without love.  These are the monks, the escapists, the people who renounce the world.  Afraid of love, afraid of love because it brings bondage, they renounce all the situations where love can flow, grow, can happen, is possible.  They escape into loneliness.  Their loneliness never becomes aloofness, it remains loneliness.  And loneliness is a negative state; it is utterly empty, it is sad. Solitude within an human being is an essential character and an element of self discovery but loneliness ends up bringing misery. Solitude and silence within oneself is way of being in peace, loneliness the complete opposite. Solitude has its own spirituality, it has its own beauty, loneliness simply haunts you.

So, simply Love and freedom are not separate things, you cannot choose.  Either you will have to have both, or you will have to have dropped both.  But you cannot choose, you cannot have one. 

Love is the circumference, freedom is the center. 

One has to grow in such delicate balance where love and freedom can bloom together.  And they can, because its not rocket science, its merely letting go, its about being in love for being in it not for societal norms. Its like the good comes with the evil, the day and the night, the roses and the thorns, so simple as that freedom and love.

So what do you think - " Are freedom & Love inter-related or have I just lost my mind ?"

The Fine Line...

2010-01-10T06:01:00.000+05:30

Sex is a slave to pleasure, Intimacy a freedom to desire.

Lately when someone asked me what is the difference between no flings attached sex popularly know as a one night stand and Intimacy between two lovers I was quite shocked to realize that the two might seem the same but are actually quite different from each other. Passion is  common in both of them though the form of passion itself might be different. The fine line that separates the two is in itself a highly subjective form of separation or measurement.

Intimacy can be about sex, but sex isn’t necessarily about intimacy.

The thing about intimacy is that it can encompass not just the physical but the emotional as well. You can be intimate with someone without being physical. Sharing in your inner most thoughts and feelings with a person is just as deep an act of intimacy as baring your entire body to someone you trust.

Then again, what is sex? The act of it? It can be about control as much as it is the sharing and trust between two people? It can be non-consensual, it can be forced, it can be a whole lot of other things that have nothing to do with intimacy of two people, or it could simply be a form of expression to the intimacy two people share physically, spiritually and personally.

I am reminded of a scene from a movie, where the actor has sex with a prostitute without being aware of the fact that she is a sex worker, after the act of sex he sits on the sofa and stares at her body which is bathing under the orange lamp, he sits and admires the beauty of it, of how her body is moving rhythmically to the rapid breathing, at this moment there is Intimacy without any physical contact or any act of love making, though the intimacy turns to just raw passion when eventually he discovers that the woman he has been sharing the bed with does it for a living.

A state of intimacy is achieved when the two parties are “naked” to each other. I don’t mean we open up our clothes to reveal our bodies. Intimacy is where we open up our heart, our soul, our authentic self and, being totally vulnerable, share that part of us not shared with others. The more intimate we are the closer we get to the core of this kind of sharing, and the closer we get to our personal authentic core. Intimacy requires trust in the person we are sharing with. Intimacy can happen both in and out of bed but it seems that intimacy, in a loving relationship, would naturally move toward sex. 

Sex on the other hand, is a sharing of the body. Our mind and heart can be turned off or re-tuned to another channel during sex. In our mind we might not even be having sex with the actual person pawing our body. We may be using this surrogate to mentally be with the one we really desire. Sex is an act of the body.

When the two overlap, there is oneness, there is spirituality, there is creation, there is purity. Where sex and intimacy overlap, there is an abandon of self, a surrender to the act, both in giving and receiving, that brings sex into the spiritual realm of making love. In this, trust accompanies vulnerability, a vulnerability that is cherished and safely treated with warmth, acceptance, and loving tenderness. Making love is a different thing than sex. Making love is an intimate, sexual expression of heart, soul, and body, between a man, a woman, and their God. It is an act of worship.

Intimacy, in the end, is what each partner desires most. Defining that ‘end point’, I submit, differs for each individual, regardless of gender. What one persons finds intimate may be just the start for one person, or too far for another. On the other hand well SEX is just SEX...

So where do you draw the line ???? 

And Life Just Moved On ..

2009-12-17T02:25:00.000+05:30

She had got accustomed to the habit of taking really long baths. This had nothing to do with her enjoying taking baths, or anything to do with hygiene or cleanliness but more to do with the fact that this was possibly the only time of the day she could really be wit herself, be with the soul that lie dead somewhere within her, be with the part of herself that she kept buried in the abyss of the human life, a life she wanted but on her terms, a life she desired but hated, a life she loved yet felt helpless.

It was quite strange to understand her perception of privacy, to an extent it could be termed as an illusion, an escape from reality, a hallucination, a drugged state of mind, but it was beautiful to her and that is all that mattered to her. Its all that made her feel alive even when a part of her was dead. Her privacy was a delicate balance between the secrets held deep in her demented soul and the thin line that separated reality from illusion. The bath was more than a moment, it was a liberation, it was freedom, it was life at a given point and death at another. The moment was a way to discover the real her behind the flesh, behind the clothes, behind the values, behind the religion, the naked in every sense, it was her sense of Moksha. It was the immortality of the dead.

There was a beauty to the way she went about the entire process of taking the bath. From, the very moment she entered that space, it became sacred, the click on the door was more than a sign of privacy, it was the first sound of self realization, the sound of freedom, the sound of the mind being free of all thoughts even when the body felt trapped. Her body was not just an artwork, it was symbolic, it was the beauty of life and the silence of the dead put together. Every step she took was like the careful walk of a leading lady deserted on stage watched carefully by a thousand eyes waiting to criticize. Every part of that entire process was an act of Escapism, from the shedding of the clothes to the enchanting aroma of the water and the scents mixed perfectly with the musk of her body.

The water rushed down her body, teasing it, feeling it, experiencing it, a part of nature dying to feel its own creation, every drop that came of her body felt more purer, more clearer, more transparent, the sound of the water rushing down her body created a musical masterpiece. She loved water as much as the water loved her. Water to her meant more than an element, it meant purity, it meant the soul, it meant pain and beauty, it meant freedom yet bondage, it meant life to her both eternally and  naturally. She relished every moment of the water slipping down the curves of her beautiful body, she felt every touch of every drop, from the hair, down her forehead in the depth of her eyebrows, down the peak of her nose to the touch on her lips. She would often take in a few drops of the water that went down her lips as if to try and seduce herself. It made her feel lost when the steam from the hot water would cover every mirror in the bath with a sheet of partial existence, it made her feel helpless yet in peace, all this meant more to her than probably any other activity during the day.

She surrendered herself to every trick the water played on her and the surroundings, she on the contrary enjoyed every bit of it, from the water in the bathtub to the drops that rolled down the mirror, to the water that had spill on the carpet, every part of the experience was sacred, like a prayer, a solitude, a poem, a sonnet, it was the two most pure objects in harmony, it was water and the body of a beautiful woman, and she always believed that no two elements of nature create such beauty and peace as water and a woman's body.

Her beauty melted in the surroundings, wet yet dry, warm yet cold, painful yet relaxing, every thought was blurred, every thought was pure, it was like drops of blood on ice, something that is painfully beautiful, something that speaks in the silence, a moment that holds you by its beauty, by its essence of life, she was in a world of her own, this was her privacy, her moment, this was her way of feeling free, her way of feeling special, feeling alive, feeling beauty, her way of feeling life, her space.

She ran both her fingers through her hair taking it back from her forehead to the the back of the head, she stood there staring at herself in the mirror, her image unclear, her silhouette blurred, and she had no urge to wipe the mirror clean, she loved this unclear image, it was easier to deal with herself when she did not have to stare into her eyes, it was easier to move on with life when she did not have to take her palm and wipe the mirror clean. She ran her fingers down her forehead, to the tip of her nose, down to her lips, she could feel the warmth in her breath as the fingers reached her lips, she could feel the musk of her body, as she glided those fingers down her body, from her neck to the depths of her curves, down to her navel, it felt like running down a feather down her body, it teased her, made her feel enchanted, it loved the touch of her body, she was breathing rapidly, and right at this moment she opened her eyes and realized it was time, time to get back and as she wore the mask of the human civilization, she heard footsteps going down the stairs and she knew the day had just begun. The same click of the door that once felt liberating and free now seemed suffocating and ironical.

And life just moved on..... 

The Beauty Of Being Alone !!

2009-11-24T05:23:00.000+05:30

Sometime trying to discover a part of myself, I end up with more than I had asked for ...

Aloneness is our very nature,      but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we      remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our      aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace,      at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness.      Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand      your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes. 

Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is      poor, negative, dark, dismal. Everybody is running away from      loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the      only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to      have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to      have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will      be able to forget your loneliness. But nobody has ever succeeded      in forgetting it. That which is natural to you, you can try to      ignore -- but you cannot forget it; it will assert again and      again. 

People are so afraid to be by themselves that they do any kind      of stupid thing. I have seen people playing cards alone; the      other party is not there. They have invented games in which the      same person plays cards from both sides. Somehow one wants to      remain engaged. That engagement may be with people, may be with      work.... There are workaholics; they are afraid when the weekend      comes close -- what are they going to do? And if they don't do      anything, they are left to themselves, and that is the most      painful experience.

You will be surprised to know that it is on the weekends that      most of the accidents in the world happen. People are rushing in      their cars to resort places, to sea beaches, to hill stations,      bumper to bumper. It may take eight hours, ten hours to reach,      and there is nothing for them to do because the whole crowd has      come with them. Now their house, their neighborhood, their city      is more peaceful than this sea resort. Everybody has come. But      some engagement....

People are playing cards, chess; people are watching television      for hours. The average American watches television five hours a      day; people are listening to the radio... just to avoid      themselves. For all these activities, the only reason is -- not      to be left alone; it is very fearful. And this idea is taken      from others. Who has told you that to be alone is a fearful      state? 
 
The people who live in      misunderstanding are in such a majority. These single individuals can      be wrong, can be hallucinating, can be deceiving themselves or      deceiving you, but millions of people cannot be wrong. And      millions of people agree that to be left to oneself is the worst      experience in life; it is hell.

But any relationship that is created because of the fear,      because of the inner hell of being left alone, cannot be      satisfying. Its very root is poisoned. You don't love your      woman, you are simply using her not to be lonely; neither does      she love you. She is also in the same paranoia; she is using you      not to be left alone. Naturally, in the name of love anything      may happen -- except love. Fights may happen, arguments may      happen, but even they are preferred to being lonely: at least      somebody is there and you are engaged, you can forget your      loneliness. 
 
This seeking to relate to others is nothing but escapism. Even      the smallest baby tries to find something to do; if nothing      else, then he will suck his own big toes on his feet. It is an      absolutely futile activity, nothing can come out of it, but it      is engagement. He is doing something. You will see in the      stations, in the airports, small boys and girls carrying their      teddy bears; they cannot sleep without them. Darkness makes      their loneliness even more dangerous. The teddy bear is a great      protection; somebody is with them.

And your God is nothing but a teddy bear for grown-ups. You      cannot live as you are. Your relationships are not      relationships. They are ugly. You are using the other person,      and you know perfectly well the other person is using you. And      to use anybody is to reduce him into a thing, into a commodity.      You don't have any respect for the person. 

"In addition, "we are usually attracted to      being intimate with one person in particular."

It has a psychological reason. You are brought up by a mother,      by a father; if you are a boy, you start loving your mother and      you start being jealous of your father because he is a      competitor; if you are a girl, you start loving your father and      you hate your mother because she is a competitor. These are now      established facts, not hypotheses, and the result of it turns      your whole life into a misery. 

The boy carries the image of his mother as the model of a woman.      He becomes conditioned continuously; he knows only one woman so      closely, so intimately. Her face, her hair, her warmth --      everything becomes an imprint. That's exactly the scientific      word used: it becomes an imprint in his psychology. And the same      happens to the girl about the father. When you grow up, you fall      in love with some woman or with some man and you think, "Perhaps      we are made for each other." Nobody is made for anyone. 

But why do you feel attracted towards one certain person? It is      because of your imprint. He must resemble your father in some      way; she must resemble your mother in some way. Of course no      other woman can be exactly a replica of your mother, and anyway      you are not in search of a mother, you are in search of a wife.      But the imprint inside you decides who is the right woman for      you. The moment you see that woman, there is no question of     reasoning. You immediately feel attraction; your imprint      immediately starts functioning - - this is the woman for you, or      this is the man for you.

It is good as far as meeting once in a while on the sea beach,      in the movie hall, in the garden is concerned, because you don't      come to know each other totally. But you are both hankering to      live together; you want to be married, and that is one of the      most dangerous steps that lovers can take. The moment you are      married, you start becoming aware of the totality of the other      person, and you are surprised on every single aspect --      "Something went wrong; this is not the woman, this is not the      man" -- because they don't fit with the ideal that you are      carrying within you.

He has left the world; he has gone to the caves, to the      mountains, to the forest, just for the sake of being alone. He      wants to know who he is. In the crowd, it is difficult; there      are so many disturbances. And those who have known their      aloneness have known the greatest blissfulness possible to human      beings -- because your very being is blissful. After being in      tune with your aloneness, you can relate; then your relationship      will bring great joys to you, because it is not out of fear. 

Finding your aloneness you can create, you can be involved in as      many things as you want, because this involvement will not      anymore be running away from yourself. Now it will be your      expression; now it will be the manifestation of all that is your      potential. Only such a man -- whether he lives alone or lives in      the society, whether he marries or lives unmarried makes no      difference -- is always blissful, peaceful, silent. His life is      a dance, is a song, is a flowering, is a fragrance. Whatever he      does, he brings his fragrance to it.

But the first basic thing is to know your aloneness absolutely.      This escape from yourself you have learned from the crowd.      Because everybody is escaping, you start escaping. Every child      is born in a crowd and starts imitating people; what others are      doing, he starts doing. He falls into the same miserable      situations as others are in, and he starts thinking that this is      what life is all about. And he has missed life completely.

Once you have entered your innermost core of being, you cannot      believe your own eyes: you were carrying so much joy, so many      blessings, so much love... and you were escaping from your own      treasures. Knowing these treasures and their inexhaustibility,      you can move now into relationships, into creativity. You will      help people by sharing your love, not by using them. You will      give dignity to people by your love; you will not destroy their      respect. And you will, without any effort, become a source for      them to find their own treasures too. 

Whatever you make, whatever you do, you will spread your      silence, your peace, your blessings into everything possible.      But this basic thing is not taught by any family, by any      society, by any university. People go on living in misery, and      it is taken for granted. Everybody is miserable, so it is      nothing much if you are miserable; you cannot be an exception. 

Good Night .. 

:)

The Silence That Spoke ..

2009-11-18T06:31:00.000+05:30

For that one night I felt I was a man with No Balls !!!

I saw her trembling, I saw her trying to say something with the silence around her, even in the middle of a tube station with so many people walking by during rush hour and the announcements on the speakers there was a strange silence around her, a silence that I felt, a silence that said more than words could have said, the silence of beauty in an ugly world of reality, the silence that merged with the spatter of every rain drop, the silence that merged with the tap of every expensive shoe or a sandal up or down the stairs, the silence that broke all barriers of speech and simply said - "HELP ME". I saw that her eyes were begging for help from every man that passed by, each wrinkle on her face told a story, its like how when you see a old woman you can tell by the way her wrinkles look whether she has had a happy satisfying life or whether each wrinkle is a line drawn on the surface of pain, misery, guilt and sometimes anger. And, I just walked right past her, like everybody else, all along the way I kept thinking how is she going to pass the night, will she be alright, she looks too pale to even get up, her fragile body seemed like the newspaper she was sitting on, the rain might just melt her into the paper draining away every chapter of her life with the ink that comes of paper when it is wet, as if nature was saying to her - "it is time", and every breath she took said - "one more day", she won't be able to take it, she is just too weak to bear the chill, and after the station is closed where is she going to find some shelter?? She might be able to find a roof or a shed under the outdoor of any road side cafe but no matter what the rain will get to her, the wind will force that thin sheet off exposing her body to nature. I am sure she was not wearing any clothes underneath that thin sheet and I could imagine the state she would have to go through if the rain did not stop. 

I had just got off the train and was walking out of the station to my way home, and before I even reached the exit I knew the rain was too hard and like me there were others waiting for it to slow down, and as I stood there I felt the water under my feet, and I rushed to a dryer spot not to spoil my expensive leather shoes I wear to work, and as the thought of luxury lifestyle collided with the thoughts of a human soul on the mercy of whether it stopped raining and someone gave her a pound to eat, I was taken over by guilt, by humiliation, by anger, by anguish, by disgust, by pain, by sadness and at this moment I could feel my eyes filled with tears that quickly disappeared in the wet face and I realized We I might have big words to write on my blog, I might have views against injustice and against poverty, I might feel sad & depressed at the state of humanity but,at the end of it I am a small yet a BIG part of the sick behavior of every human that passed the old lady. Men with their fancy cellphones and sophisticated accents, with their expensive clothes & their pseudo-secular views and yet no one saw the mirror in the eyes of the woman who probably might not survive the night.

And, by the night I went off to sleep after the real good meal I had and the cozy duet I was to lie in and for one moment I threw the blanket(duet) off me, I buried my face in the pillow and yelled as loud as possible, I simply lied facing the ceiling while I could hear the rain pour down heavily outside and the gushing of the wing against the tree in the front lawn, I probably lied there for just over five minutes and I got up to pick up my duet because I was feeling the chill, and I thought to myself if nature made me a slave of the warmth of the duet and the bed, I am happy to be a slave because a few miles away on a deserted street by now is a woman who is not fortunate enough to be a slave, a beautiful face that will haunt me every time it rains this hard, a face that probably had turned my love for the rainfall into a feeling of sadness & pain every time is rains now.

I may be man enough to make money, or man enough to be in power, man enough to drink alcohol & sometimes even brag about it, or man enough to talk of justice & equality, but I am certainly not man enough to save or help a small yet a beautiful part of humanity.

I am a mere prisoner of my own world, 

To define roughly I am a human,

To live - I am bonded,

To exist - I am just a specie,

I feel only after I am feed...

I am just as human as you are,

The Question Is:

How human are you ????

And, for the rest of the night the silence spoke for itself..

******************************************* 

Mike from  picturewortha  was kind enough to nominate my blog for an award.

There are a couple of things I am supposed to do :

1. Copy the image and paste it on the blog.

2. Give it to 7 other people

3. A list of 10 creative things about me.

Well, I guess I will pass it on to 3 not 7 people, and skip the creative things about me part for now...

The Life And Times Of An Indian Homemaker 

Vidhupriya 

Amycrispfife  

So What Is Love To You ???

2009-11-11T20:53:00.000+05:30

When, we are apart I love her, when together I simply make Love !!

Love is a old story! Love is an old story. Nothing is new in it – it is always the old and the same pattern, and everybody repeats the same thing. Nothing new ever happens in love; it is just a rut… A few things to be understood….    

One: love is always beautiful in the beginning, very rarely beautiful in the middle, and almost never beautiful in the end; that’s the whole process of love. So there are two ways: one is to go on changing the partner. Each time you think that the beginning is ending, change immediately. That is one way, and is what the west is doing. The moment you feel that the love is no more the same as it used to be, that the honeymoon is over, you change the partner. Then again you are at the beginning and you can go on changing… but you never grow like that. 

The East has another trick: get married to a person with whom you are not in love. Then there will be no bad ending because there is no beginning: it is just finished from the very beginning, it has ended before it begins. That’s what the East has done… but both the eastern and western ways are meaningless. The third possibility – and this is my suggestion – is to be in love but not to start thinking of marriage. That’s what you did – you started thinking of making a home; then you are getting into trouble, the old rut. 

Be in love as birds and animals are in love. Be in love but don’t start thinking of settling. Settling is very unsettling, because once you start settling the romance is over. The ordinary life is so heavy that it crushes the flower of romance and kills it. Once you start settling, small things become very important and love becomes secondary.How to manage for money and where to purchase a house and how to manage for furniture, and these things become more important, and love becomes secondary. These things are infinite – the list is long – and love comes only in the end and so it never comes! By the time you are finished with the house and the money and the furniture, you are falling asleep.By and by you completely forget that you were trying to make this house to love this woman.

So don’t do that again – remember it! Always keep a distance between the person you love and yourself. There is no need to settle: settling means that you start taking the other for granted. 

That is the meaning of being a wife and a husband: the other is taken for granted. 

You are only lovers if you don’t take the other for granted. Being in love means you have to seduce the other person every day: you cannot take him for granted, you don’t have any property right, you will have to persuade the other, so the cooing continues. And that’s what love is. Once things have settled and you know that you possess the woman and the woman knows that she possesses you, then through that possessiveness all sorts of jealousies, anger, hatred, fight and nastiness arise. 

Then you will start repeating the pattern that you have learned from your parents and she has learned from her parents. Remember one thing: you don’t know what your mother did when she fell in love, you don’t know what your father did when he fell in love, but you know what they did when they were settled. You know them as wife and husband, you have not known them as lovers. This is something very important to understand. 

You cannot repeat anything when you are a lover, but when you become a husband or a wife and a householder, then you know. And you have only one programme, your mind is programmed. … 
Friendship is always good. It is more civilized than love, mm ? 

So What Is Love To You ????

Marriage, The History & The Present

2009-11-03T23:28:00.000+05:30

After reading the post on What Would You Not Change For Love on The Indian Homemaker blog I was kind of taken by surprise & irony to the fact that How almost everyone who commented loved the post, agreed with it to an extent but at the same time gave away the feeling that this is how it is...

And, then we kind of come back to the fundamental question that if this is marriage no wonder I want to run away from it. So, I kind of did a little research & came to realize that marriage as an institute, hold on... I think that is where the problem lies it is not an institute, its not public for everyone to join in, its personal, its just about the two people, its not about aunts & uncles running around looking for boys/girls, not about grand ceremonies or luxury parties, its just simple, keep it simple.

Way back in time, there was no question of marriage. People lived in communes, tribes; people loved, people reproduced, but in the beginning there was no word for "father." The word "mother" is far more ancient and far more natural. You will be surprised to know that the word `uncle’ is older than the word "father" -- because all the people who were the age of your father... you didn’t know who your father was. Men and women were mixing joyously -- without any compulsion, without any legal bondage, out of their free will. If they wanted to meet and be together there was no question of domination. The children never knew who their father was, they knew only their mother. And they knew many men in the tribe; someone amongst those men must have been their father, hence they were all uncles.

As private property came into existence with cultivation.... With hunting, man could not survive long. People have destroyed complete species of animals. Hundreds of species which once used to dance and sing on this earth... man has eaten them up. Something had to be done because hunting was not reliable. Today you may get food, tomorrow you may have to be hungry. And it was very arduous. The search for animals did not allow man to develop any of his other talents, his genius. But cultivation changed the whole life of man.

AT THIS POINT, 
LET ME REMIND YOU,
THAT CULTIVATION IS THE DISCOVERY OF WOMEN, 
NOT OF THE MAN.

The woman was confined -- she was not able to go hunting. Most of the time she was pregnant, she was weak, she was carrying another soul within her. She needed care, protection...so she was living in the house. She started making the living space more beautiful -- and this you can see even today, after thousands of years.

The home, the village, the city and the whole civilization are because of the woman, because she was free from hunting and she had different values of the heart and of the mind -- she was more aesthetic, more graceful, more earthly, not at all interested in hell and heaven and God and the devil and all that crap! No woman has written a single religious scripture. No woman has been a philosopher thinking about abstract, faraway things. 

Man continued to hunt, and the woman started looking around...the man had no time. He has always been busy without business, but the woman had all the time there is. The basic work of hunting was being done by the groups of men and the woman started looking around. She discovered cultivation because she saw wild fruits growing, she saw many other things growing and she also saw that every year the crop dies, the seeds fall back into the earth and when the rains come, again those seeds sprout in thousands of plants.

There were people who were powerful people and there were people who were weak people. The people who were physically powerful managed to claim much ground as their property. They earned much...slowly, slowly the barter system started, because when you have too much of one crop, what are you going to do with it? You have to exchange it; then you can have many more things. Life became more complex, with more excitement.

But a problem was felt: after a person dies, who is going to inherit his property? Nobody wanted their property to be inherited by any XYZ. They wanted their property to belong to their own blood.

It is out of economics,
not out of the understanding of love that marriage came into existence.  Its very birth was wrong,
 under the wrong stars.

And because man had to agree for marriage.... The woman was very willing for the simple reason that for thousands of years in the hunting period she was not financially a part of the society; man was all. Man continued his power, although the whole social structure changed. The hunter’s nomadic life became a peaceful life in a village but man’s concern about his property.... He wanted a contract with the woman to be certain that the son she was giving birth to is not somebody else’s, but his own. For this simple purpose all the woman’s freedom had to be destroyed. She had to live almost like a prisoner, or worse.

Man agreed -- under compulsion, he compromised. If the woman was losing a few things -- her freedom of movement, her freedom in changing lovers -- man was also ready to sacrifice his freedom. They would remain devoted to each other forever.

But it is against nature. Even if you want to do it nature is not going to support you.

Nature is for freedom, not for any kind of bondage.

So new problems started arising. Men started finding prostitutes who were no-one’s wives, or as it was phrased in India, the prostitute was the wife of the whole town: nagarvadhu. She belongs to anybody, she is a commodity; you have to pay and buy her time and her body. Because of marriage it was very difficult to find married women because then there were more complexities: they had their husbands.... Prostitutes were good.

And you will be surprised to know that in India every city had its topmost prostitute -- she was the most beautiful girl born in that city. Because she was so beautiful it was not right to let her get married to one person, she had to be shared. She was so beautiful that if she got married there would be trouble, there would be problems -- people would go on falling in love with her. It was better to keep her free for anybody who would pay.

Marriage created suspicion. The husband was always suspicious about whether the child born to them was his own or not. And the problem is, the father had no way to determine that a child was his own. Only the mother knew. Because the father had no way of being certain, he created more and more walls around the woman -- that was the only possibility, the only alternative -- to disconnect her from the larger humanity. Not to educate her, because education gives wings to people, thoughts, makes people capable of revolt, so no education for women. No religious education for women, because religion makes you saints, holy people and it has been a male-dominated society for centuries and man cannot conceive a woman to be higher and holier than himself.

Man has been cutting from the very roots any possibility of woman’s growth. She is just a factory to manufacture children. She has not been accepted by any culture in the world as equal to man. And, even today with all the 21st century & the modern society crap there are new ways found every day to keep her confined, to keep her from being equal.

EQUALITY  is merely a MYTH.

*******************************************

Note : I got my first Blog Award from Vidhu who writes at 
Vidhupriya.blogspot.com

Thank You so much, I am kind of supposed to give it out to more people but I will reserve that for some other time.

*******************************************

Wow, I couldn't beleive it but Thank You So Much !!
Blogadda's Tangy Tuesday Picks

Am I Loosing It...

2009-10-27T14:43:00.000+05:30

How often do you feel that there is too much to Handle ???  

I kind of have that feeling more than often these days. My days & nights have pretty much dissolved into each other, my conscious, the sub-conscious, the unconscious have all melted into a single entity that is always a moment behind each moment, a state of mind where I feel like I am tiding the mess around the clock. A realistic yet a virtual race against myself, against the truths of my own life, against the fact that I don't feel like waiting any more but I don't want to run either though it does seem the most comfortable option at times.  

So lets see, I have got eyes that are red across the day, I have terrible head aches, I have got dark circles as dark as my eye lids, my body aches trying to tell me all the time that its needs some rest from the constant pushing round its been lately exposed to, I take pain killers to get through work, hardly sit at work to avoid passing out on the counter, drink lethal quantities of coffee, have no time for anything other than work & music, try and squeeze in 4 hours sleep a day, and yes really happy to finally see you, what if its just virtual, but just the feel of you being there works well (Who!! Some other Day).  Oh, Yes I got around to completing The Suitable boy, quite liked it, but not really my kind of book, wonderfully written, extremely expressive, but I prefer books that have parallel meanings behind the words that are visible to books that are just straight up. Started reading The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, seems more like my kind of book.  

So, why am I suddenly telling you about my sleep deprived life, well, because how often have you realized that life seems more real when you are in a state of partial insomnia, when you feel human yet behave Zombi, when the sub conscious feels like the conscious, when you notice things in grey rather than in Black & White, when alcohol, women, intimacy become secondary and the experience of living each day feels like the last one before you pass out on the table, the bed or the train and yet find yourself in the same state the very next day and you keep going on because you are following an aspiration, a dream, a state of mind that you would rather shed like a snake shedding the old skin, you would rather shed this sub conscious, half dead state and come out a fresh, reinvented you.

I don't feel at work, when I am at work, I don't feel at home when I am home, I don't feel at ease when I am in the realm of comfort, I no longer feel the head aches, I know that they are there but probably I am so used to them now, that they just stay, more or less like a necessity. The music keeps every part alive, the aspiration drives each part of the body, I no longer speak at the right time & the right place, I feel numb, I feel Dead yet I feel more alive than ever before. 

I am truly lost for now & for how long is unknown. As someone said to me a couple of weeks back - " Anyway, I have decided to take a brief sabbatical and hence stay away from a lot of things."  Well, My life seems like a never ending Sabbatical..

Have I Lost The Plot...

Sex, Love & The Human Mind

2009-10-19T05:31:00.000+05:30

The energy of the universe lies in the details of the hidden spirituality of the human sexual nature. It is indeed sexual energy that transforms into human life, love, birth, death, lust, beauty and the blissful. Its pure in nature and absolute in its form. The human mind is continuously trained at each stage to reason, to fight, to deal logically, to conflict within oneself and the with the outer world, never once realizing the fact that the human mind and the body is far simpler to understand if we get rid of all conflicts, the arguments, the fights, the complications & live as human bodies with transparent souls and exist in harmony both sexually & spiritually.

This continuous rebellion against ourselves has lead us to the stage where we are the question and we are the answers as well. On, one hand drive people mad with the endless rage & violence, with the inequality & the injustice and on the other hand open Asylums, have NGO's and charities for such madness, on one hand spread the germs of sickness, on the other open hospitals.

Its extremely essential to understand one point at the very core and that is that human existence cannot be separated from sex & the energy of love that transcends all barriers of human conflict, its simple, one is born out of it, no matter what, we are a part of it, when existence has accepted the energy of sex as the starting point of human and world creation, then why do our holy societies still consider it a sin, why the expression of sex or physical intimacy is still a taboo in the sub conscious collective minds of our present day modern societies. And well if we as men consider God to be the creator, and if God considers Sex to be a sin, then there is no greater sinner than God in the world, no greater sinner than God in the Universe.

You see a flower in bloom– have you ever considered that the blossoming of a flower is an act of passion, a sexual act? What is happening as the flower blossoms? The butterflies will sit on it and carry its pollen, its sperm, to another flower. A peacock dances in full glory– a poet will sing songs to it, your saints will also be filled with joy at the sight of it. But aren’t they aware that the dance is an overt expression of passion, that it is primarily a sexual act? The peacock is dancing to seduce its beloved. The peacock is beckoning to his beloved, his spouse. The bird is singing, the peacock is dancing, the boy has become an adolescent, the girl has grown into a beautiful woman– these are all expressions of sexual energy. These are all different manifestations of sexual energy. All life, all expression, all flowering is basically sex energy. And it is against this sex energy that religions and cultures are pouring poison into the minds of human beings. They are trying to engage human beings in a fight against it. They have entangled people in this battle against their own basic energy, so they have become wretched, pathetic, devoid of love, false, nobodies. And, eventually that is all we have turned into, Hippocrates that breed generations and generations of more Hippocrates.

We have filled humans with antagonism toward sex, and the result is that not only has love not flowered in them– because love is an evolution beyond sexual energy, and can come only through acceptance of it– but their minds have become more and more sexual because of the opposition to sex. All our songs, all our poetry, all our art and paintings, all our temples and the statues in them have directly or indirectly become centered around sex. Our minds revolve around sex. No animal in the world is sexual like human beings are. Human beings are sexual around the clock– awake or asleep, sitting or walking, sex has become everything to them. Because of the enmity toward sex, because of this opposition and suppression, it has become like an ulcer to their being.

Sex is merely an expression,

Love is the poetry.

Drop the antagonism towards sex and the way civil society behaves, let humans be free and live in a world that is both spiritual yet realistic. If you want love to shower into your life, accept love &  renounce and celebrate the conflict with the holy, the ugly and the sexual. Acknowledge the purity of it, acknowledge the bliss & the sanity. Go on searching deeper into the realms of the absolute energy forms and you will realize that intimacy will become more sacred than renouncing the creator because the creation lies in the essence of human intimacy. And the more you are in conflict with it, the more you fight within yourself and with the world, the more dirty it will seem, the more sinful and the more ugly.

RENOUNCE !!!

Note : The image used above is a painting by MF Hussain & is not meant to offend or hurt any sentiments.

The Rhapsody

2009-10-15T15:02:00.001+05:30

Alright guys, I am not kind of big on writing poetic stuff, but I love what Vidhyu Priya Bhadgal writes on her blog vidhupriya.blogspot.com, so I asked her to write a guest post for this blog & the readers up here, so enjoy yourself, and do check out her blog.... CHEERS

Him - All I see turns to brown...

Her - all I dream of is green...

Him - let thy dream cometh through...

Her - it floats for now on silvery planes,

waves shall bring them home soon ...

Him - ...And lights will guide you home

Her - what if the wind changes face?

Him - Nature doesn't betray us...

Her - and if Zephyr wants to play?

At mortal’s risk, he wants to take?

Him - Surrender yourself to him... for he won't take your life...

Her - his ire makes me shiver with fear,

surrender would only give him power,

the urge to tamper more ...

Him - Only way to go is to fly away...

Her - but d damp wings hold me back...

Him - Chop it off... let the wind carry you away 

Her - the wind conspires with them,

hear closely, they whisper to each other,

but too much fear I have lived in,

free me away,

carry me on your wings ..

Carry me to the shoreline

Bury me in the sand

Walk me across the water

And maybe you'll understand

Come hither, I wait for you,

aloft on your shoulders, I wish for land ...

Him - zephyr listens to your chant,

And takes you away to the shore...       

The Truth Behind The Truth..

2009-10-10T17:25:00.000+05:30

 I am a small part of a BIG lie, that the world calls The Truth.

Everyone of us has truth hidden behind the truths. I could possibly bet anything if I could find one human being who could say with all his dignity that the truth within me is the truth I bestow & live by. Things in an individual's life are never Black & White, there are always the vague but visible shades of Grey. Truth, is merely an attempt to tell ourselves that we are the society, we are good people, good sons/daughters, good husbands/wives, good brothers/sisters, simply good humans, but somewhere between the human soul and the sub-conscious mind lies the truth behind the truths i.e the reality. I actually had no intention of writing this one but I guess I needed to create some space between the abyss of lies & the reality of my truth & so I am here writing about the truth behind the truths.

If you come to think of it there are innocent lies which a lot of us may also term as the manipulation of the truth, lies that in my eye are acceptable, for eg: lying to you parents about going to a party, well we all have done it & I guess such lies are a part of growing up, or lying about your results, or your grades etc... & I have always felt that these are not lies but simply a part & parcel of human growth, we all do it & frankly it isn't any harm & then there are Macro manipulations of the truth & when I say Macro I do not mean lies that bear any resemblance to societies though there is a category of them as well. But, when I say Macro I mean lies in the life of an individual that are hidden behind the string of smaller lies he/she weaves to make it sound like a small truth in the realm of the Big lie, the lies that keep reminding us all the time that you may be perceived as good or as noble or as trustful but somewhere behind all that lied truth lies the reality of our/your/my existence. I had said this in one of my earlier posts that when we live and when we exist are two totally different phenomenons. Existence is a part of the world that is Big, there is politics, corruption, work, poverty, policies, immigration, mass murder, high sky scrappers i.e the world that is MACRO, whereas human living is in the smaller versions of joy, happiness, beauty, kids, love, intimacy, sadness, depression i.e the MICRO world. But, then the truth is the truth & the manipulation is just a lie whether the Macro or the Micro. All, that matters is what is convenient for an individual. Of, what suits his/her needs, of what Macro lie is needed to hide the Micro truth or what Micro manipulation is needed to change the Macro world & we comply accordingly.

So here are two truths behind the truths of my life that I think I must write off:
1. I have come to London to study Music Production but I have come to realize lately that I haven't been able to give sufficient time to it because of my job, which I need to pay my bills.

2. I have lied on several occasions to my Dad to get him to send me some money, irrespective of being aware of the fact that how difficult is it for him.

Now, if you are thinking that sometimes it is necessary to lie, well I agree. In the words of my Dad - "You should know when to lie, where & how much to lie.." The world is not a perfect place & manipulations are an integral part of our lives whether subjective or on mass scale by our leaders & world politicians. So, the matter of the fact is not that whether we lie or not, its also not that how much we lie or we don't neither has it anything to do with me or the society, it is purely about the fact that when at he end of the day you look back at your lives you should be able to see yourself in Black & White and not in the vague shades of Grey, you should be able to face your Silhouette & be aware of the fact that tomorrow lies in front of you a full day to deal with the abyss of the human manipulation of the truth. Its always very hard to beleive that a m an is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

The are are three kind of Lies :
1. Lies
2. Dammed Lies
&
3. Statistics
[attributed, perhaps incorrectly, by Mark Twain]

Lets Not Talk About It...

2009-10-08T04:22:00.000+05:30

You might get to make your own choices, but remember you got to live with them.

" Lets not talk about it... " - A response I recently have heard more than I would have expected to in conversations with an old friend of mine from high school. Of how, I felt that she was just simply trying to run away from the world, probably bury her self in a grave of silence & peace, of where there was no one to question & no one to answer to. Of, how she gave me the feeling that at times running away is the only option left, a simple solution to all the problems, of how how I felt she wished someone could come & erase our minds out like a sheet of paper and at the I did for some time feel that how at certain times we are successful in running away, we are successful in dumping all of that life related crap in some sub-conscious corner & forget about it all, but then the only issue with running away from life is, that you can't run forever & the life doesn't allow hiding, sooner or later we all have to come face to face with all the big Question marks that seem to be stuck in our heads, the questions that at times feel too much for the human logic or the emotional stimuli to deal with & the unbearable weights of our emotions & sometimes even our existence comes under the scanner of our own lives. And, how the rendezvous with her made me realize that I might as well make blunders & mistakes and have incorrect/ugly choices to my record but at least I have the freedom & the right to make them & live with them, whether good, bad or ugly, whether they lead to desired goals or messed up ends, at least I control the pace, the direction, the mood of my life.

She used to work in Bombay,she loved her job, had fun going out with friends, enjoyed life & partied hard, we spoke often and she had very less time to spare, she would ask me of London, and how she had plans to come here. She would work hard, party harder. I remember speaking to her of how life had changed since high school for her, and she would tell me how she had broken off with her boyfriend from high school, of how now she had become more serious of life & how she wanted to have a great career, be independent & live for herself, her desired & her dreams, we talked of her brother, her sister & the family, of she felt that she was the lucky charm for every one around her & she would tell me the names of everyone who felt the same, including her father & her family members. Of, how I could feel the happiness in her eyes when we spoke because of the fact that she was doing what she wanted to & how and when she wanted to without having to face questions or be put under the judgment scanner. She was full of passion & joy and, then she quit her job & we didn't speak for quite some time for no apparent reason & the next time we spoke she was back at her home with her parents in a small town in Central India. Off, how I remember her telling me about certain issues in the family & they(the family) wanted her to come back and stay with them and she had agreed without any hesitation, I never tried to speak to her of what the particular family issues were but always had the sense that they meant a lot & she was ready to sacrifice her life for some time to get it all sorted with & out of the way, and as I remember vaguely she telling me about how a lot of her family issues did start getting resolved & every one emphasized the fact even more that she brought good luck to people around her, and started forcing her & pressurizing her to stay and not go back to Bombay & work. And, life moved on.

Her sister recently got engaged & she now has been back at her home with her parents for almost a year & depression mixed with lethal quantities of frustration has started to take over her & I can feel it almost every time she speaks to me or we catch up online. She wants to work but there isn't scope to grow in the small town, she wants to be independent, earn for herself but at he same time doesn't want to go against the will of her family, to disappoint them and go off to Bombay or Delhi or even come over to London. She wants to make up her mind & come to a decision and then hold on it, be firm & do what she desires to do, but at the same time, the family obligation pulls her back & every time we speak we end up at that one response - " I know I need to do something about it, but lets leave it for now..." & time and life keep ticking & moving on.

I hate it even more because I have grown really fond of her friendship & I feel sad when she gets so frustrated & depressed, off how I start to feel lucky that I control what I want & when I want even if that means paying the price of my own actions & facing some unbearable consequences, rather than be the superstitious lucky charm of my family & be around them for eternity. I mean, we all just got one lives & who knows what tomorrow holds for us, of whether we will exist tomorrow or not, of whether how many times are we going to be back in the twenties, and I know no one is growing younger for a fact, so Yeah family is important but sacrificing everything you desire & wish for including a career, well if its worth it, I don't mind but the big question is- Is it WORTH it ??? and I try and keep telling her to take a stand & do she wants with her life & well life just doesn't seem to change, stop or just be a little simpler.

Brief Smile :)
Good Night...

Love, Lust, Alcohol & Music..

2009-10-05T01:13:00.000+05:30

Love is Over-rated,
Lust is Relative,
Alcohol is the Element,
And 
Music is Absolute...

I kind have come to realize that clubbing gives me a lot to think about, I guess my mind wanders more when I am in loud music with chaos all around and alcohol flowing like water. Another Saturday night at Jam Bar and I have come to realize how we tend to forget everything in a club on a Saturday night, the work, the problems, the worrying, the fiances, the bills, sometimes even ourselves. I guess, probably clubbing is just another way of getting away from one life to another, a life where there is chaos yet we are at peace, a life where emotions flow through dance and where bodies are an illusion and the intimacy merely a way to feel the lust that lies buried deep within. I really wanted to write yesterday, because I think my emotions are more true and honest with me when I am under the influence of Alcohol, they kind of feel like feeling, they are raw yet pure, but I guess after being hammered all that was left of me was the Bed, a good night sleep and a terrible hangover the following Sunday morning.

As, the party progressed, I kept noticing different couples and how they behaved as the night grew darker & wilder, of how alcohol mixed with music, love & lust made us behave like split personalities in a time difference of a couple of hours, and as the music got deeper and harder, the alcohol started to sink in and the chaos became a part  of you and the chaotic silence that lies within thy self. So, when most of these couples walk in, well they are kind of cute, they seem in love, the kissing is gentle & blissful, the hands are held, the heads are resting on shoulders, and the glass of alcohol is been consumed with taste & time. My friends who are behind the decks have just started playing so even though they are playing house(electronic dance music) they are trying to keep it alive but not go into hard madness, the mood is wild yet gentle, and you know and feel that any moment all this going to change, and now we approach somewhere around 12:30 and the behavior has started to change, some lovely women have taken off their shoes, the random moving next to your table is now replaced by dancing on the table, the gentle and cute looking women are rolling there hands up their skirts teasing men, at times lifting their t-shirts to show just enough for their men longing for more, the music mixed with alcohol has started to show that it is absolute, the gentle kissing is now wild smooching, some of it can be termed more as licking,the hands are no more together but working around under t-shirts & in some cases even the trousers, the eyes are closing in ecstasy, the music has got harder, the bass is pumping and at this moment life seems irrelevant, Moksha is right here, right now, its in the very second, the very minute, its in every kiss, its in every touch of the hand and the body, its in every movement under & over the clothes, its in each second of the lips locked together, its here and its now. Its for you to Experience...

And, now on a Sunday night as I write about this I have come to the theory that when Love, Lust, Alcohol & Music are put together the logic of the mind of the soul within the soul melts away and all that is left  is the absolute form of an individual, stripped right down to the core, to the element of his/her life, soul & the body.

From, how that one Saturday night shows the so many different colors of what human beings are capable of, of how we have layers & layers of skin, of trying to tell ourselves that we deserve this, that how alcohol is merely an element, and we are a part of the collateral damage of the chaos with us and within us.

At the end of all I had to go to work on a Sunday morning with a hangover & the routine headache and as I reach work I discover that its in these little moments that I have here and there that Life reaches an absolute and the rest that follows is week of work, that merely takes me to the zero level of Love, Lust, Alcohol & Music...

CHEERS..

The Wrongly Placed Mirror..

2009-09-30T13:47:00.000+05:30

The image in the mirror is me naked in the absolute.

9:55, Bank tube station, Central line, I enter the coach and see two seats empty, I am dying to sit down as my knee has started giving me trouble as the winter approaches, the only problem is right opposite the seats are seated two men, holding a huge, kind of vintage mirror, with a lovely hand crafted wooden frame, something I would love to see in my bathroom, but not look into it when in the tube, but I just had to sit and then started the eye ball dance with the mirror and the other eyes in the mirror.

Have you ever thought of the fact that how important is it to have mirrors at the right places & positions, of how wrongly placed mirrors like this one which I was sitting opposite to created awkward situations. Alright, lets see, I was sitting kinda right in the middle, on my right was a black woman, on her right was a lovely looking girl, on the left was white man, probably in his early 30's, goti beard, tattoos all the hands and neck, probably a crack addict and on to his left was a Chinese girl. Under normal circumstances, I would not be able to look at this lovely looking girl sitting on the right of the black woman, but today I could and guess what, she was trying to cover her legs while looking in the mirror, she was wearing a lovely executive skirt but while seated her thighs were visible more than she would have liked and  thus she would glance up in the mirror for a second not making it seem obvious and keep pulling down her skirt, she finally gave up and kept her hand bag on his legs. Now if my guessing is correct she does not stand in office all day, so when no issues there why here, and that's when I realized that when we look in the mirror we just don't look at how we are dressed, or how we look, is the hair right or not, or whether the tie is correctly placed or not, of does it need to go a little right or left, what we are looking at is an image we generally want to get rid off, an image that haunts you every time you look at it, an image that looks right in the eye and tells you look this is you, you may be wearing clothes and you may be looking good, but under all this you are still as naked, as nude, as exposed you could possibly be, because this time around its not anyone else staring down at you, its your own conscious and these few seconds with ourselves are a very private moment and well is a part of our life we wouldn't want some one peeping into, sometimes not even the people we trust in becuase this helplessness is a part of us and we have an agreement with naked bodies and blank thoughts that this is only between you and me and well when you place a mirror where I happened to mention, well we all peeped into each others life knowingly or unknowingly. I saw that you look lovely, I did see the amazing eyes, the sharp nose, the luscious lips and whether seperated by that one seat between us I still felt the musk of the body and the hair, but I also peeped into a part of your life who wouldn't want anyone to peep into. I saw how you felt exposed both pysically and emotionally, I felt that you felt vulnerable to the judgement of the mirror and the eyes that looked at you through it and that is when a thought just rushed across the mind that wrongly placed mirror can lead to more awkward moments than you could imagine. The lovely smile I would have passed at her if, I was sitting opposite her was now just an akward grin through a pair of eyes that stared through the mirror, and I felt disgusted to have seen a part of you I wouldn't peep into but at the same time I Thank You... For what, well I am not too sure about that.

And, as I look at myself, in the same way the you just did, only looking up every few seconds, well I kind of realized I should just get back to the book I was reading, there was no real point in looking into my messed up life I am anyways looking into all the time and thus I melted away as a part of the mirror and was actually really happy to see that the guys got off at the next station with that wrongly placed mirror which had probably given us all a look into not just ours but each others lives and I learned  an important lesson as to why mirrors are perfect for bathrooms, because when you stand naked, stripped physically and naked emotionally there is nothing to hide and no one to watch. Proabably, the lovely lady will enjoy the mirror more in her bedrrom or the bathroom, but on the tube, not quite sure about that.

And, I am off to work.
Brief Smile :)
CHEERS !!!

Random Thoughts...

2009-09-29T06:34:00.000+05:30

I have way too much to say & too less to express..

How often a man has that feeling is entirely a matter of subjective analysis and psychological debate but as far as I am concerned, well my words today seem as messed as the thoughts they try to express, its like when as an artist you have an image of the result and the final product is always far different and less attractive than what you would have wanted it to be. I have had a long day at work and there were many things I wanted to write about, and the choice feature of my on sale discounted brain doesn't work quite well, so I will try and keep it random & raw.

At 7:30 in the morning passing from the Mile End station on the London underground I saw a couple kissing passionately on the platform, for one moment I was taken aback not because this was new to me or to the air of London but 7:30 in the morning and as I boarded the tube I had a sudden moment of bliss, a thought that provoked the senses that are generally numb and in the depths of the pages of the books I read on the way, and I suddenly closed the book looked back from the window on the platform and realized that passion or desire is not bound by time or worldly obligations & sometimes its best to let yourself remain raw & unaffected by the obligations life and societies bring upon you. And how this reminded me kissing early in the beautiful Indian mornings riding a girl on an Activa(scooter) to tut-ions we would attend together & I remember how at that time I would close my eyes even while I was riding the scooter, tilt my neck backwards and kiss her passionately, later to realize the fact as to how warm our lips, our tongues and our mouths felt even in the coldest weather and not to forget even more warmer in the heaviest of downpours.

K***y : You must be Kamal.

Me : Yup, thats me, traveled all the way for over an hour to do what... Well, Take bets... "

A few minutes later a beautiful young girl enters the premises, initially I thought she must be one of the security or the head office staff and will just go behind the rear door to their office.

K***y : That's my daughter B***y..

Me : OH...

Later during the day we talk about sacked employees, gossip around, chit chat about music, DJ's, races, bets, money, profits etc.. when all the while my mind wanders around, completely blank, bored and almost dead by the monotonous voice of that race commentator and later the noise of the scanner and that thermal printer, I am at work and yet not there at the same time.

Later in the evening when the shop is completely empty K***y tells me about this crazy millionaire who feel in love with her, to the extent that he would send her flowers, chocolates, gifts, jewelery, all this on the counter of the betting shop. He would come in, and place bets on horses whose names made up the overly popular, universally accepted and used " I Love You " & spend a £100 on the bet, enough money to supply clean drinking water to over 200 families in India for a month. She told of how he would take her out for lunch and spend a £180 on french cuisine which is less food and more decoration with some leaves and a liquid pored around the plate, its actually more jing-bang than the food itself, and all through the conversation I am thinking to myself of how sometimes it is so relieving to talk to complete strangers, people who just have no clue of who are or what you are, its just that life has put you in a scene together at a given time and at a certain place, so play your roles, and you know they wont be judging you, they wont have an opinion about you, your life will be like a new story to them later which may be subject to judgmental scrutiny and how I felt so great about the fact that how a 22 year old & a 21+18 year old lady felt at ease while talking about their love affairs and their blunders, their future plans and K***y children, her little argument with her husband & various small & big, regular & irregular experiences with life & the day by then has turned dark as if it is an indication of the nature telling you its time, its almost time..

So I guess sometimes its just best to let your mind wander where ever it wants to, leave it open, wild & raw. And, as far as passion is concerned well whether it is a young couple at 7:30 in the morning or a man in love with a 21+18 year old lady, its simply Passion.

Note : 21+18 feels younger than saying 39...

The Party !! The Emptiness, The Silence...

2009-09-28T05:23:00.000+05:30

A human being is always empty & silent in its own ways...

How often do you have a rendezvous with that empty side of you, the silence that dominates within you, the hollowness that you try and hide from the world all the time. The feeling of being in the most crowded of the places, the loudest of the music, and an endless crowd made up of random people all with their hands up and dancing to every move the DJ makes on the DJ console, of how every time you cut the bass out of a track it feels as if you took the life out the crowd, you took the energy but then as a DJ & a music producer I have always been taught that both the art of spinning records as well as the art of producing them thrives on the basic emotion of anticipation, the psychology of the taken for granted fact that the best is yet to happen, life still has that one final surprise for me, that one moment of magic, that spark in the eye of my dreams & yes my dreams have eyes, and these eyes which show my dreams where their true place is & that obviously would be my real world.

So, as I get back home at 7 in the morning, high on music, alcohol, life, beautiful women, I look back after I wake up as to how our entire life works on the same pattern as a great Saturday night out. We all work through every hour looking forward to the end of the day, every day to the week, weeks & months to holidays and how just the mere psychology of anticipation keeps us alive. So, as one of my friends spins the craziest house music I take a moment to pause and look around and realize that for some reason I feel numb within, I feel empty, I feel lost, or the world is I feel SILENT standing right next to DJ monitor which I hear yet not hear, but still feel the cone vibrating from the speaker, of how a beautiful girl falls over me and mistakes me for a Muslim and greets me by saying - "Saalam Walequm" and I stand there trying to make sense out of this chaos which I am part of. And, I just picked up my jacket and went out on a walk, actually on roads I have no clue of, I got no directions of where was I walking, but I walked for over 2 hours, I felt helpless to the fact that I was so helpless, it was like a vicious of the feeling of helplessness within me to an extent that I felt like crying as I walked and then somewhere within me a part of me died and the emptiness suddenly collapsed, I could hear people talking on the side walks, I could listen to a bottle of beer rolling down, I could hear a drunk girl abusing the bouncer, and I walked back to the club where my friends were playing and the music, the chaos, the alcohol all suddenly made sense. It felt like the silence within had made peace with the chaos.

And, this is when I met Anticipation, of how we all are empty because as humans we never be satisfied, we all are silent and we all live for a better tomorrow, a Saturday is just a way of reminding ourselves that at the end of every week there is a party or a family waiting for you. There is a world out there that you have one life to experience, whether drunk sex leads to new lessons in life or pregnancy or whether you get too drunk to get back home in order, or you end up in sleeping in the toilet, there is always the bass in the music of your life ready to pump in and keep the anticipation alive.

So fight with the silence, fill the emptiness with alcohol because as my Dad always says - " We all have masks, the mask(face) we truly are, the face we actually put on & the one we desire to put on " and trust me no better place to put on the face you truly are than to be at a place that reminds you that there are always ways to tell yourself: 
The Party.... The Emptiness, The Silence... Well, its the beginning to a new end...  

The TUBE, The People & The Randomness....

2009-09-26T04:28:00.000+05:30

Endless faces, twice the number of eyes and countless dreams behind these eyes is what I see & feel whenever I travel by the underground here in London. As, I sit back and flip through pages of 'A Suitable boy' by Vikram Seth I realize more than ones that its not the time to read the book but the time to read the faces. Some tired, some bored, some dull & some bright & some just blank. And as I sit back and see how a black man sits next to a white woman who sits next to the arab guy who is sitting right next to the sikh man, all in a tube that is being controlled by a woman of French origin(judging by the accent in her speech), I wonder is there any other place where you would have found such diversity , I mean could anyone in the late 19th or the early 20th century even in their remotest dreams imagined a place that would become a platform not just for togetherness but also music, life, culture, diversity & togetherness.

There are various facts that the Tube has brought to my attention:
1. The Tube is a better place to meet women than cafes or clubs.

2. The tube promotes literacy & helps in building public opinion because people read the free newspaper to pass time. (Most of the time it is the celeb gossip pages)

3. The music at the stations played by buskers is AWESOME, sometimes Extra ordinary.

4. We Smile more often when in the Tube than any place else.

And, then their was that one weird incident which I will never forget. Well, the corner seats are priority seats, so if they are empty you can sit on them but if someone old or somebody with kids or pregnant gets on you are supposed to leave it for them actually just offer them, so a pregnant woman got on the tube (well, she looked pregnant to me) and I offered her the seat, and this was rush hour so the tube was packed, and I got up and said - "Please, Why don't you take the seat?" & she replied back - "I am not pregnant.." & now by this point I had already got up and I kind of insisted her to sit and yes that was the last day I sat on the corner seat in the tube even if at times when it was empty.

And, as I fold into the warmth of my duvet I realize that how the every face in the tube has a story behind them, if lazy because they have got off a hard day at work, adding pennies each day by day for a better life when they are on the verge of death, if into the pages of a book or the paper because the journey is seems too long without it and how the destination is all that matters and the means to get to it which ironically has always been the human nature from the early days of existence, if sleeping in the arms of their loved ones it reminds them that no matter how tiring the journey is my eyes are closed and the head lay in the safest place I know off and at the end of it when the eyes open they will open in what they define to be beauty and so how something as obvious & non relevant suddenly when thought upon seems an integral part of experiencing life in thy self and other fellow beings, of how suddenly the word travel merely doesn't mean the means to a destination but the happiness, the joy, the pain, the feeling it took to reach home in the true sense.

Oh!! By, the way
MIND THE GAP

Women are always beautiful..

2009-09-25T04:52:00.000+05:30

Random memories of my graduation years and the English literature lectures suddenly struck a chord with the pseudo feminist part of me & I realized how every poet, author, philosopher who had written of women always made it a point that the women they wrote of or spoke of always came across as beautiful & serene. And  by beautiful I do not mean just the physical embodiment of the female body but also the fact that they made it a point that women were compared to everything blissful & pure and yet the comparison always lead to the conclusion that women are more beautiful, bold, pure & individualistic than any other element of life like water & a wet woman, fire & the passion, wind & the fun, earth & the beauty...

As, I turn pages of books these days irrespective of the author and the country of origin of the book or the author I find women an integral part of all of their writings, Milan Kundera or Khushwant Singh, Vikram Seth or Tarun Tejapal, the description of the experiences with women and the different shades of women in their lives form an important aspect & part of their writings whether directly or in the third person. From the beautifully described verses on eroticism to the painful yet compelling paras on the emptiness of the male existence  without the presence of the female, not merely the fact that women are a part of these writings printed on paper but they make the paper come to life with the raw energy and passion the pen puts in their characters. From the passion to the sacrifice, the thought to the body, the feel to the rage, the love to the erotic adventure, she just seems to complete very emotion with boldness yet purity, more or less like a free flowing river which is bold, strong, full of rage yet still, pure & serene. And, as I look back at my own life as a Radio Presenter I realize how boring would radio be if there were no women, I mean imagine just talking to men all day about men, around men and with men... Kinda CREEPY !!!!

But, then why at the same time as I write about the female embodiment of beauty & pleasure I pity, when I leave work and see an Arab lady dressed in a traditional outfit sitting and begging at Edgware road, London, right opposite posh cafes where people sit out smoking Shisha, and drinking expensive coffee & with their arms around each other and their tongues exploring the lips of their loved ones, with their hands trying to make way up and around T-shirts and their eyes closed in pleasure, and right in front of them sit a helpless woman whose innocence, purity and beauty strike me and yet I can't do anything. Her fair face, the deep eyes are sharply visible in contrast to the black outfit she is wearing, I didn't even understand what she said but I knew she asked for money from the hand motion, and I gave her 5 pounds and she looked at my face & smiled and how I could see and feel the pain behind her eyes yet the smile on her lips as if she was trying to tell me I am beautiful under the dirty outfit and my desires are as pure as they can be, and she leaned a bit & kissed my hand, and I felt the helplessness in her trembling lips as they touched my hand and I felt the chill run up my body and I pulled my hand back & probably she realized why I did it  and when I say her desires I do mean the desire to be felt and feel, to close her eyes and know that when she opens the world will be a better place for her, that she will someday be a part of the society that looks down on her.

The world has come a long way from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw, it has developed and grown, the desires have become endless and the feelings of human beings somewhere suppressed or sometimes lost in the concrete jungles oh human civilization and then I see two women right opposite each other, one on a raised deck in an expensive open air cafe, the other under a tree trembling in the cold,  one of them kissing in pleasure, the other kissing to express gratitude, both right next to a structure that holds a casino, I realize if their is some place where beauty, pleasure, pain, ecstasy, realization all come together, it has to be in a woman,   because she not only reminds me of the beauty left in the world but also of the fact that beauty is not just merely the color of the skin or the shape of the body, beauty is the feeling a woman gives the world..

No wonder, "Women Are Always Beautiful"

Brief Smile :)
Goodnight....

Exit Here

2009-09-21T17:59:00.000+05:30

"So, Beta(Son), Which is better London or India????" One question I should have had an answer ready to on my recent trip to India. Not just relatives but also random people in trains, buses, cafes, actually anyone you happen to have a conversation had the same question, what was different some asked it straight up, some weaved it in a complex web of conversations and they made it sound so simple & not so confusing, whereas I seem to find this question almost as confusing as which is better Irish or Bourbon whiskey, do i buy the Jamesons or do I get the Jack Daniels's.

Life's has been kind of strange lately, and as I sit here in London writing this post I realize how suddenly I am listening to Indian classical whereas generally I would be playing banging Minimal/Tech, I guess it will take me a day or too to get out of the abyss of choices & habits that we(I) so conveniently get used to. But, as I sit back in London I realize that how certain things spelled out in the most simple of words & squeezed in the most casual of conversations may have the most difficult answers, and by difficult I don't mean examination style difficult but subjectively difficult. For when I left London, I was reading Milan Kundera's Laughable Love but when I landed I had Vikram Seth's - The Suitable Boy, and there was something strangely common between the two books, I could relate perfectly well to both of them, one a collection of short stories set mostly in the Europe of the 60's & the 70's filled with raw yet compelling words describing the complexity of human relations irrespective of age, sexuality or societal norms and the other set in post independent India about a young girl Lata & her family's endless efforts to find a suitable boy to get her married to and as I tried to explore of how boundaries have not just divided the world geographically but also intellectually & psychologically,I found myself in that endangered rare specie of the human race which is lost somewhere in the middle of nowhere, an individual who enjoys his alcohol, late night outs but also at the same time misses Ma's home cooked food.

I want to be lost, Truly... Let the world find me & not the vice-versa. There is no balance here, you cant have a society that thinks liberal like the western world, that gives an individual the control over their life and on the other hand a society that believes in the concept of compromise and adjustment to keep everyone as happy as possible, a society that has managed to keep itself together on what you may see a heap of sacrifices of individual desires. There is no balance here, there is no way you can blend them both its either this or that, more like a coin, you toss it, it has to fall flat, no miracles, no magic, there are no shades of Grey here its just Black or White.

Life will simply move on whether here or there, it will always be beautiful, till you know how to define beauty, it will be just as complicated as always and whether sandwiches in lunch or home made curry the purpose will always be attained, to fill the stomach, in the same way as the world thrives and moves on results and not on intent, so what difference does it make of which is better, life will just be life.

Recently, someone almost (I will write about the almost some other day) very to close to me went through what I could say a phase of tough choices. And, if I had to choose my answer to the question of which is better based on what she had to go through I would choose London, because I know for a fact that she would be treated as an individual, who can make her own choices and not just have the freedom to choose but also if they turned out ugly, still have the feeling of an individual who happened to make a mistake and move on,the society wouldn't be giving her & her family bullshit about it for eternity, they wouldn't brand her into carefully chosen words of disgust & shame,
not talk about her for ages & toss it around like mere gossip and label her with hollow words of shame, character, disgust and for what - CHOICES.
I never really understood why do we have to brand individuals on mere characteristics, as to why do we have to put them into labeled compartments of good, bad or ugly or beautiful. Something good for you could be bad for me, someone ugly to you could be beautiful to me, someone with no character according to you may be someone with more character than a society put together as I beleive is the person almost close to me. And, on the record she was beautiful in all ways, not just beautiful as defined by hollywood, garnier, loreal or any of these so called beauty brands but in totality of the human existence. It wasn't beauty or character you could write poetry on, not meant for songs or ballads, not beauty compared to the sunrise & the sunsets or to the skies or the elements of earth but this is beauty that transcended the definition of how we per sieve beauty as a collective human conscious, beauty that is beauty itself, beauty that is pure in itself, of it didn't matter what anyone said or felt because there is no way you can destroy some form of beauty that is beauty in itself.

And, here I sit trying to figure out of how both Vikram Seth & Milan Kundera have more than writing ability in common, of how I deeply feel that their writing is merely a way to fill their voids of a world & society that is broken yet together, shattered yet happy, deprived yet loved, beautiful yet ugly and I quite never understood the word ugly, of how do you define ugly or in reference to the description of the human body all that matters is how beautiful you look and by beautiful we mean the eyes, the lips, the breast, the legs or for that matter even the hair, feet, nails and so on and how suddenly beauty had become a social conscious, a mob rage rather than the fact that it is subjective & it always will be that ways for me and that is the reason I have never quite agreed that the eyes serve their true purpose when they tell our minds of what is beautiful & what is not and thus I realize even the ugly is the beautiful & at most times the beautiful the most ugly.

So don't ask me to choose I might just make the right choice or by my calculations based on my past records I will make the incorrect choice but I love the incorrect choice because you know that its the incorrect one but for me its just a choice, I grow into the incorrect, my correctness is now a part of being incorrect and gradually I find the choices fading and I come to realize the fact that the incorrect to you was correct to me from the very beginning.

So then what was my answer to which is better - simple.... 

To be Happy is not a feeling but an ability, so it doesn't matter where you are as long as you are able.

EXIT HERE !!!!

The Suitable Boy... The Dead Calf...

2009-09-17T23:28:00.000+05:30

Cold words will break a fine heart as winter's first frost does a crystal vase. A false friend is like the shadow on a sundial which appears in very fine weather but vanishes at the approach of a cloud.
- Vikram Seth (The Suitable Boy)

I kind of wonder as I write this post as to how many families in India are still looking for "THE SUITABLE BOY"... As, I walk through the section on Indian Fiction at the book store, I stumble upon probably one of the thickest books I have seen in a long long time, I guess probably after the brief period when I studied science in high school & gave it up later to realize I was using my biology books for body building, but this was Vikram Seth, a mane that sounded familiar, a name somewhere is the sub-conscious, well a name I had heard in junior high while studying English lessons, the poem - "The frog & the night angle" .. And, as I picked up the thick piece of literature, the first thing I noticed was the cover page, an image of a vintage painting of the maharani of Jodpur, a black & white image that gave the book just the right feel to begin with, I kind of always like old things, grand paintings, hand made, custom made stuff, the smell of old paper, the older the paper the better and the book just gave that right old-skool, vintage, royal feel and YES!!! being almost 1400 pages it feels bloody hell light.

And, now as my friend, my parents look at the new book in my hand they cant help but ask - "How many years will it take to finish it ??" Well, I guess not long, coz I am enjoying the book more than I imagined, set in the early 1950's the book explores the almost nude, naked politics of India, the politics which still needs diapers to keep it going, families that have lost a part of their world in the Indo-Pak partition , and how important is it to find just that right mix of looks, education, charm & money i.e the suitable boy, more or less like preparing Indian curry, just the right mix of spices.

Well, I stumbled upon an article where I read that Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to the book, and frankly I have just read 26 pages of The Suitable Boy& I cant wait to finish it and wait for the next...

The Dead Calf is no book, its just something I saw today on the roads of India, a country where I was born, I love but ironically I hate the fact that everyone driving is in such a rush, such a hurry, for what I got no clue??? I actually had to park my car to soak in the fact that someone had hit a small calf & it lay dead on the road, and the cow stood there just looking at it, watching a part of it dissolve in the mist of the the country on the crossroads of development & change. Off, how I could feel the cow cry, her eyes seemed black, and stood their helplessly as the traffic passed by and I was soon taken over by a feeling of helplessness & remorse as I realized of how sad I felt all I could do was stand and stare....

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Well, I am just a Pseudo-Human in a world of almost Humans... 

BHAGWAN (GOD), Masturbation, Life & Sex...

2009-09-13T20:08:00.000+05:30

Having spent the majority of my life in a boarding school one big secret of the student houses were secret porn magazines & films, when moving from junior school to senior classes, how life changed, I still remember the first time our seniors forced us to watch a porn film & all of us were looking at each other with freaky expressions on our face, with trying to shy away from it, to realize later in life that how the same porn & the magazines had become an integral part of our lives.

The girls boarding houses had become fantasy land where every kid wanted to go, kind of like the movies where you show those kids who get into some land made of chocolate, we all would die to get in there, from trying to sneak in, and other times making crazy assumptions like how the breasts of all girls just kept growing at supernatural tornado rates. SEX became the ultimate fascination of life. Off how an actual kiss became a wild story when asked by friends and how we started building our small innocent kiss experience into full porn films, off how when the teenager us ran entire scripts in our minds as to what would we try and do the next time around.

AND THEN, Life gives you the DISCOVERY of the art of Masturbation..

Suddenly, everything changes from innocent stories to wild fantasies , and now you are dreaming wild, suddenly you got sex education classes, the class 8th biology books have lessons on Life Processes, and how kids shy away from reading out the lessons when the teachers ask them to read it to the class. Life is changing so are you. And now SEX becomes a necessity. (If you come to think of it there is actually an entire industry that thrives on this aspect of life, parenting books, sex education, self help books, seminars...)

And, now you are experiencing something so divine, off even after numerous arguments with people I still stick to word divine. Come to think of it there are no couple of seconds a man experiences MOKSHA, other than the time he masturbates or a woman feels an Orgasm. And, trust me if you are feeling of how disgusting I can be either you have never experienced the bliss or you are not human.

Lets try and look at this from the angle of life, the GOD angle. In the Hindu culture the word for god is Bhagwan (Hindi) which a lot of people know, but what you may not know is that Bhagwan originates from two Sanskrit words Bhag & Wan. Bhag meaning the male testicle organs & Wan- the female. So, when these two come together it gives birth to a new life, i.e the creator i.e Bhagwan.

So, then where is the fine line between disgust & the divine feeling of love, sex & Life. Well, that is more subjective than societal..I mean I don't think you ever get the feeling that time stops, almost freezes other than the time when a man masturbates. For those few moments life stops, of whether its a man or a woman, life comes to an absolute standstill.

Masturbation than going to the next level of physical intimacy becomes the most divine form of Meditation. Of how when you experience love in the arms of the beloved the world melts, time stops, eyes close, the heartbeat races, with very touch the logical choices of the mind fade & the emotion of the human heart takes over  every sense of the human body, the smell, the eyes, the taste, every word whispered, & every touch of the human skin makes it most blessed meditative experience, more godly than god, more pure than purity, more harmonic than Beethoven, more intoxicating than the smell of hash or weed. God(Bhagwan) seems irrelevant...

So how life links up from divine feelings of going to a temple to the bliss of two human bodies coming together.
Intimacy for sure is not over rated.

An Abyss Of Human Civilization

2009-09-11T15:34:00.000+05:30

Conspiracy Theories or Political realities of the modern world, 9-11 changed the way world boundaries are marked, not just on paper but also in our sub-conscious mind.

I remember being a junior high kid, when the September'11 disaster struck, never realizing then how BIG a deal it was, never realizing how global events had local consequences, off how the world politics was changing, how cameras were becoming an increasing necessity of the modern world, off how security became more important than individual sentiment or belief, off how the world had changed.

I am not a politician, nor a conspiracy theory guy, making mad documentary films, I am just someone who had no one at the disaster site & still had almost everyone there, from innocent values to skyscraper size dreams.

I remember seeing an interview by the Pakistani rock band- Junoon, who performed a tribute to the 9-11 victims after almost 7 months of the disaster and how they felt that a few fans felt they had done the right act by paying a tribute to them and how a certain group felt they shouldn't be performing in the US. Well, it divided their fans for the rest of their music careers.

So did 9-11 just bring the word Terrorism in more media reports than any other word, well for me it killed a part of the human conscious, a part of human psychology where in junior high you are taught how all humans are equal, and then you see the exact opposite when you put on the Idiot Box, of how true unity only exists in books and not in real life, off suddenly how cynical have I turned in the recent times.

Well, 9-11 took a lot away from me, even though I was a 1000 miles away from it.

People in India always say - " Whatever happens, happens for the good "

Well, I am not quite sure of that...