Master and the Margarita

Have you read or watched The Howl?

2012-01-29T16:40:00.000+05:30

Every once in a while when I go through a sporadic bout of literary crisis, which is to say I feel utterly devoid of being able to write a piece of fiction or a poem, I watch the film Howl (2010) for inspiration. Based on the life and times of American poet Allen Ginsberg, played by James Franco, on his most famous and controversial poem Howl, the film is a pure celebration of cinema, digital art and poetry.
It also chronicles the 1957 obscenity trial faced by San Francisco poet and City Lights Bookstore co-founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, over the publication of the poem, which is hilarious and ironical as it’s based on actual courtroom records. Adding to this is Jon Hamm from Mad Men, who plays Ferlinghetti’s lawyer, and is sort of vindicating to watch on screen.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the poem before you watch the film, there are brilliant animation sequences that give a stunning, breathtaking visual interpretation of the poem, and the deftness with which the narrative and the poem are stitched, it quite literally blows your mind. And apart from the censorship and politics of Howl; the historical relevance it had on independent publishing; the film also deals with how Ginsberg comes about expressing his homosexuality and mental health through the poem.
Most of all, the film works for me as an edgy romanticism of writing and poetry that I find lost today in the world of publishing formulas and multi-cultural literary festivals. In faux interviews, Franco-Ginsberg likens the urge to write as a sexual feeling that springs from the pit of a stomach which travels to the mouth and is let out in a sigh in search of words.
Franco’s haunting voice and the rhythmic, tumbling, hallucinogenic howl of the poem is also a fresh introduction to the jazz and psychosis of the literary movement in the 1950s called the beat generation, coined by writer Jack Kerouac. It was Kerouac’s fictional memoir On the Road that set the map for a bunch of writers that came to be regarded as the beats or beatniks.
Howl has the same effect on me today as it did when I was in school after discovering the works of Kerouac and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. They inspired Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, and led me to smoke my first chillum at the Pink Floyd Cafe in Pushkar followed by disastrous bus journeys. On YouTube, you can listen to some of the other famous poems by the beats, including Ginsberg’s America and Gregory Corso’s On Marriage in their voice.
On the Road, the film, is finally set to release this year. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now fame has had the rights for years and has made several attempts to make the film, but failed. It was only after he watched The Motorcycle Diaries (the bike road trip of Che Guevara in his youth), he roped in Brazilian director Walter Salles, and a cast and a script have been put in place. The film was set to release last year, but for some reason has got pushed to this summer. I’m not sure what to expect from it, the few unofficial trailers I’ve seen on YouTube seem strange.
For now, I’ll leave you with the opening lines of The Howl by Allen Ginsberg.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix/angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night/who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...”

Capital of rape, shame & squalor

2012-01-10T16:50:00.001+05:30

Not long ago, a close friend and her elder sister were having a drink at a popular pub in a Gurgaon mall waiting for friends to join, when they attracted some unwanted attention. Few guys on the other table offered to buy them drinks and got refused, they then began to pass snide comments and tried to sit with them, when all hell broke loose. The staff was asked to intervene, the entrance of the pub was sealed from allowing more affiliates of the ruffians in, and the girls were ushered to hide in the kitchen and finally led through the fire exit to their car. As luck would have it, they escaped without harm.
The incident came to mind after reading what happened on New Year’s night when more than 30 men were lathi-charged for attempting to molest and abduct a girl in the parking lot of a Gurgaon mall. The incident got caught on video by the name ‘Delhi gang rape disrupted by police’, which has been doing rounds on the web causing great outrage; newspapers also report that the hooliganism spilled on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road that night. Inebriated men were restrained by the police for halting cars on the highway, causing traffic jams and shattering windshields because they were not allowed entry in nightclubs.
Over the years, I’ve spent living and shuttling between Delhi and Gurgaon, the city has acquired a fierce reputation for crime against women. I don’t know a single girl who hasn’t complained of either being teased, stalked, harassed, or faced some act of molestation. As a journalist, I come across horrific stories of rape in the Capital that often leaves the newsroom cold. It’s a crime that shouts for harsher punishment, no less than castration if it must. Unfortunately, rape cases are not only sensitive in nature, but a majority of them in India are never solved. Years ago, I think, a law was proposed that sought to sentence life term and capital punishment to all accused of rape, but got shot down because of loopholes. The major argument against it was that the accused would now be compelled to start killing their victims after rape — as they’re the main witnesses in the crime — to avoid incarceration.
It doesn’t matter what women wear in Delhi, whether in a bus or bar, there is always someone out there waiting to act weird or funny. This reputation of Delhi men of getting drunk and misbehaving with girls, says a friend now settled in Mumbai, is infuriating as well as hilarious. But what’s worse is that women in the city live in an unspoken spell of fear, one that threatens their every day independence and varies between pronounced and subdued if they aren’t cautious of the time and place, always conscious of being followed by a leering male gaze where ever they go. According to latest Delhi Police records, crime against women, including rapes, is on the rise in the Capital. Statistics show that 568 rape cases (including minors) were reported in 2011, as compared to 507 in 2010. 653 cases of molestation were reported in 2011, while 601 were reported in 2010. What about the incidents that get hushed up to save humiliation?
Something has gone horribly wrong in our attitude towards women, love, sex and dating in recent times. The teeming frustration in young men is seen from largely those hailing from conservative holes where a booming real estate has brought affluence to the rural-set satellite towns and villages; the women here have had no say and been subjected to abuse for generations; the boys here are forgiven for being headstrong and macho, and it’s begun to rebel with the modern (city) ideals where young girls are growing more independent, fashionable and self-assured by day to make it big, be appreciated, and desirable.
Leaving no room for sense and sensibility.

2011-12-30T16:39:00.000+05:30

A drink tonight at 4S.

It takes you a while then you're lost,
In the fog, in the cold,
Looking for love, and literature,
It lets you go. You miss her,
Alone, in a bottom of a drink.
In this bar with laughter,
And failure. No one to sleep with,
But your mind
With song, smoke and sex.
Dogs and dates.
You wish to let go.
Not be remembered.
So you put on your smile
And peel the mask.
Fuck crazy.

Notes from sick puppy and more

2011-12-27T15:42:00.000+05:30

I wasn’t planning on breaking this made-up rule, but a week ago I went online and purchased my first book. The idea came to me when my mother enraged on seeing a man spit on the road while driving was reminded of a book she had read long ago called the Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen. The premise and character sounded awesome, so I immediately checked with F&F to see if it was still available, but on hearing that it’s out of stock, and being told that it wouldn’t be available in any bookstore across India if it weren’t with them, I decided I might as well click on it.
Before I tell you how delightfully funny the novel is, I ask how furious do you get when random people around you behave outrageously insensitive towards the environment? What do you do with people who litter the streets or threaten to ruin the natural flora and fauna of a place?
Not much, I assume. Most of us who care and want to do more than Facebook activism like whine, curse, fight, strike, take up PhDs or join NGOs are good with causes. But we don’t deal with issues first hand. We don’t teach idiots to be environment friendly with hard lessons and immaculate vendettas.
Not Twilly Spree though — the eco-terrorist with a trust fund. When Spree learns his uncle’s bank has loaned millions to a company to drill holes on the basin of River Amazon he bombs the place with explosives on a holiday. When he sees a man throw garbage out his car window after consuming burgers and milkshake on the highway, he not only stops to pick it up, but dumps an entire truck load of city waste on the litterbug’s hot pink BMW convertible.
Things heat up when Spree gets involved with Florida’s political big shots when he learns that the fate of an unspoilt island is at stake.
Sick Puppy is easy to read, hysterical in most parts and zany from start to finish. The week long wait for it was not the same as the thrill of skipping lunch to save money to buy a book and then doubling back home to read. It was new and different. When the book arrived by post, and that too a day before Christmas, it brought tiding of immense joy, like a gift from a loved one, except that, well, I know I ordered it. But since it came way too early in the morning, while I was fast asleep under layers of blankets, my father, Delhi’s dearest bookseller, missed the irony and paid the bill. I am yet to pay him back.
Book buying has always been awkward affair. I don’t have the liberty to pick books at my fancy, sometimes not even when I offer to pay. Once in a while I am allowed to pick one up on good behaviour or when I make that sick puppy look. Sometimes for the absolute must-haves I secretly go to other bookstores to build my private collection. As for buying books online, I’m going to tweak the rule for good now and buy only those books that are not available. Next on my list is to get a good edition of Carnacki, The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson, my grandfather’s spooky book which I lost after lending it to someone I broke up with. (Aah, so many books to read, re-read and so little time.) As for now, I wish you a very Happy New Year. jairaj.singh@hindustantimes.com

2011-12-26T23:02:00.000+05:30

If only my words could wet your thighs. If only this song could bring you alive. If only a drop of ink could soak this sky. If only I could have you longer than a dream. If only I could sleep tonight..

It's complicated

2011-12-26T19:52:00.003+05:30

A long time ago, in our father’s generation, when an average guy finished his education, secured a job, his parents would help him find a match. He would settle down and have children. If he grew up to be rich and successful; that is if he owned a large house, a nice car and wore a good suit, he’d be looked upon as a complete man, a Raymond’s man.
This was a generation bereft of mobile phones, emails, web chats and Facebook. Most guys then had little independence in matters of fashion, lifestyle, disposable income, travel and relationships and were confined to convention. Yet, they became men molded by experience, culture and tradition.
Somehow as time drew, narrow minds broadened, foreign programming streamed through TV screens, food got instantly heated in microwaves, travelling abroad became frequent, clicking on internet for information became faster than holding a thought — the identity of the young guy got lost in the deluge of change. He became the complicated man.
You saw his first avatar in a cold drink ad, which featured a face-off between Shah Rukh Khan and a youth with hunched shoulders, gelled hair and an attitude problem over a can. Today, that dude is everywhere: he’s in the malls, on the streets and even chilling on your sofa. This is who he is.
He is self-indulgent and vain; extremely conscious of his status, influence and affluence. Most of all, he cares for his looks and what clothes he wears. He takes most people for granted. Most of all his parents, who let him do whatever he pleases and with a generous allowance to suffice for their absence.
He has servants for every whim, who have raised him, but he doesn’t know where they come from. He doesn’t like to read books and has friends who haven’t touched one since school. He sports an ‘out of bed’ hairstyle, a designer trimmed beard, waxed chest, owns the latest iPhone, drives a flashy car and has an opinion on all things money can buy. He’s usually fun to hangout with; that is if you like going to clubs, drinking vodka, snorting cocaine and that too on weekday afternoons. His only problem is that he doesn’t know how to talk to girls. Not the ones in Thailand; the ones he meets in cocktail parties.
He wears a lot of perfume and wants to sleep with girls. Has only made out in his car. Sometimes he’ll pick up a eunuch for a blow job. His ideas on sex are summed by years of watching porn. He feels all white women are easy to sleep with. He doesn’t wish to marry, but is sure his wife will be a virgin and indulge in him the way his mother does.
His image of self is usually split into two, a virtual one — like his Facebook profile with a cool picture — and the real one that works overtime to cast this much desired image. In his mind he plays a lead role for a situation comedy show that demands recorded laughter at every punchline and a dramatic twist for every emotional outburst. And when he doesn’t find life to be so, he feels different, misunderstood and disconnected. He also feels cut out for acting.
He likes to fill boring details of his time lost in the glare of an iPod, iPad, BlackBerry and X-Box for constant stimulation, instant gratification. He wants to constantly stay connected with friends, to stay in on this private party where only those with a net connection are invited. He doesn’t care about politics, but will wave the national flag at India Gate for Anna Hazare. He lives for his friends who live for his indulgences. He is unfortunately a grim picture of the youth today. The future of tomorrow. He is the very subject of coolness that Bollywood apes, reality TV shows create, ad-men invent and village boys from across the northern country aspire to be.

2011-12-11T00:13:00.001+05:30

On being dumped

I had no intention or design to write or call again. Your message has left me broken much worse than quitting cigarettes. It has also broke some sense in me. I know I crossed the line with you. The mortification it's caused has been unimaginably excruciating.

I wish I were cleverer to have foreseen this, however one tends to lose one's wits and become foolishly optimistic when one's drunk on affection for the other. You would know this if you've ever felt it, even fleetingly for someone else. That's the way I have always behaved with you.

In all these months you've told me how uncool, closed and old you found me. I admit to evading reality and reason for feeling close to you. The impossibility has finally caught up with me. We were on the same page once. You closed the book on me. If you truly meant about still being a friend, forgive me.

2011-12-01T23:29:00.000+05:30

This evening is lost to another memory of yours. The foggy streets of time and ruin don't change. Your prince of gloom hides in the shawl of darkness. He knows you're afraid to love. Afraid to give in to the moon. You're deeper than the ocean; on your surface reflects the soul of those who sink within.

2011-11-19T21:35:00.001+05:30

I wasn't really planning to write here again. It didn't make much sense. There was some contradiction, a knot, a lie, a sense of loss and reason - it went. I now write a weekly column for the paper I edit. The paper isn't very well read so I have to put it on Facebook a lot. Most times I like what I write, the rest snuggles in deep perversion. Yet it's writing which keeps me on.

In ancient times, the lines between art, writing and magic weren't blurred. Today it's much the same, but the belief is gone. They call casting magic spells (spelling), don't they? The purpose of art is to directly or indirectly create illusions. Any piece of art, writing, music or stage that distracts or stimulates you is in one sense or another a show of magic.

I'm not going to bother to read back what I've just written. Hopefully, you find some sense here. Although readers of this blog would know that sense is always frowned upon and blurred with obscurity. Reason is merged with darkness. What could one liken to moist thighs?

I've quit smoking btw. It's true. It's been about 10 days. It's killing. I feel so exhilarated at times. There's been an immense rush of energy. Cravings stab me sometimes. I can't go back to lighting up because the doctor says it'll kill me. I would much rather die. But I can't or I won't cause I'm in love. Not love, love. But a very hopeless love. Very broken love. Goodbye for now. I'm back because you asked me so. And there's no artist who doesn't enjoy an applause even after the curtain falls.

2011-05-25T22:19:00.002+05:30

You might ask where I've been? Why I have stopped writing? Or if I still write, but just not for you? But what if you don't ask at all. Or that I don't have answers.

Maybe there is no one out there. I just have all my words to keep for myself.

Great flames engulf the sky, somewhere in the night lightning threatens to strike. Dust threatens the dreams away, dawns come and go. Sometimes I drink, most times I smoke, when I think of you. Life has not got better, my back hurts now. I work hard. Not hard enough.

That I'm in love. Is perhaps true. Though it makes more sense when you say so. Even when you don't say so. So I forget what it feels like. Knowing that I know you're going to go. And I'll be left with my books and thoughts. When will this summer end?

It's been a while I've been to a river. The river calls me. It's been a while I have been left thoughtless, not caring, not wondering, and if only, not wanting. If only tonight could be different. An end to all. How wonderful it would, just me and you. No one, but us, committing murders or discussing new religions.

If only..

2011-03-13T23:58:00.002+05:30

There were times when it was all simpler. When one spoke and people heard. Now there are more voices, more noise. What is like when one decides to write about death? Is it just a loss or hysterical effects of life upon? Perhaps, I am young. I know as times gather wind, it'll come to me through the window at night.

Why is it that we choose hide? We somehow choose to not look below at the underworld or above to the heavens. Where is the meaning? When grieves for nothing, lost in dream and looking for another, like a passing cloud. I have stopped writing poems. But my heart still bleeds as a poet.

Good things do happen. Bad things are just there. Can it be put on a scale and measured to know how it's been for us? And yet we seem to manage so well. We don't really talk to ourselves.

Is it going to change? Will we be responsible? There is meaning in small things, it's the big things that aren't meant to make sense.

2011-02-14T19:45:00.002+05:30

There's man in my head which is screaming for life. I have denied him his constitutional rights and he might take the matter up with UN. I have told in as many words that he may do whatever he pleases. In other words, fuck off.

There's been confusion unfolding in the past few pages. There's a new form of darkness that engulfs us, exposing our conflicted selves. We may have heard this song plenty of times. But tonight, the mood is different. For one, there no other people around. For another, we're trapped in a tower gazing at the broken moon reflected on the water.

What was it that made us write in the beginning. That simple feeling to articulate thoughts and images, hoping to search for a superior being hidden in us, deep below the layers of ego. That made us looking beyond the skies in search of a meaning.

Save us!

2010-11-23T20:44:00.002+05:30

Once again I find myself broken. Each word feels like a jagged piece of glass pressed against my throat. Each thought seems disconcerting and distracted, dipped in the tar of dismay. November arrives with her misty coat. The winter chills adorn the city and love can be sometimes found in a cup of tea. I don't know whether the answers are. Truly. I began reading Kafka's diaries written exactly a century ago and I can at times feel the same, before I sleep.

Heard Kerouac's words with jazz on Sunday, after a couple of rounds of rum and smoke. People seem to dissipate around me. I felt I could look through walls but not their heads. It's strange. Everything. How songs give meaning. How conversations bundled with contradictions give colour to the clouds. There is no meaning, I overheard her say. Her finger locks easily on the handle of the mug.

Who are you, the raven says. I am no one, but a voice in your head. There are dreams which are like watercolours, when your mind is blank as a canvas. But oft I find myself so wrapped in the misery of aspirations. The cage is only a metaphor.

Your writing has no meaning, they say. I know, I know. These are just fragmented thoughts written between 8.30 and 8.45pm, in the middle of work. Just plain writing because it's so simple. Like looking at the sky, as though to check if it's still there. Alas, here I go again.

2010-11-18T03:35:00.002+05:30

It's 3.30am and I thought I might as well give my two bits before I lose myself to the realm of dreamw and lose you forever. It is often so easy to say the simplest things to you in my garbled ways -- and know that you would only say the same. And never change, like a photograph.

So I thought I should say I'm well. Not doing too bad, but only robbed of being very clever. But as long as you know I'm trying. Trying to let you know that I'm there, in my own ways, and not saying goodbye, not in that farwell way. The only way I know they always say and never pick up another thought.

Why is it so sweet? Your thoughts confused with mine, and yet I don't even know you as well as some of your favourites. It's like everything is illuminated for this one mone. Just you and me. And we can never be together, but can we?

2010-11-11T23:39:00.002+05:30

Someone's broken the spell tonight. The fire within you has died, left you nothing but mere thoughts of ash to hide. Old memories come to haunt you of a time when you longed for someone, for sense, when it was like some battle and you could've won. And now, they stand besides you, with their arms crossed, like some angry witch at a half-eaten moon, just like when we part at times on promises to meet soon. What is love, you say, to a withered rose? Where is beauty, you say, when the sun has been swallowed? Tonight could've been different, Neruda would've said, but if only he knew...

2010-10-01T02:57:00.003+05:30

Something doesn't feel right tonight. It is as though you felt someone leave the room when you're sitting alone, smoking a cigarette and for once not care how late it is. That you don't have work. But left thinking about someone. And you can hear a violin being played from across the street, and who could be that. You know you've never felt like this. So alone and yet not afraid of the dark. As though all your fears have been trapped in a jar and kept beside you to peek into once in a while. while all the humour and tragedy slips pass by you, and yet you don't even smile.

You're ready for the world now. But the world doesn't accept you. Because something's changed while you weren't listening. When you weren't ready to quite give in. So you slump back into your chair, into your thoughts and all these voices sorround you. Mere gossip about your intricate selfish little life. All your dirty thoughts being played out loud to you. But you aren't afraid, you see, after all what could be so different. It's just a blank piece of web space, you say, no one's going to give quite a fuck about it. Even if it is with what you got to say, not the crap that's uploaded on your twitter and facebook accounts. But something more profound, that voice that's been muffled for so long beneath the coats of nicotine, caffeine and dilapidated self-confidence.

It's like you don't care all of a sudden. It's like you're waiting for a miracle, a trick, a clap ready to get you back on your feet again. A reader's digest article about how you lost your pride in the company of some fine women. But they don't say. They wait for you to hum along, and wait for the next song. Like a poodle strapped to a chair, ready to stroked of some ill-gotten guilt.

And all this for what you ask? Am I making sense now? Am I fighting a cause now. When wars are being fought about for oil. Old temples that no one quite cares about being broken and remembered. When hundred people are dying in a place you'd go for honeymoons, for something that's dabbed with pride, hurt and life. What can you say to these children. This world which isn't meant for you, that it is all so incroguent for you to not only grasp but set it in your own ways.

And hope. What is hope. It's a poem that Kipling or Eliot could've written about. Yes, you see, it doesn't get quite write. The Horror! The Horror! Who sared to sat that, but what did he see? And am I being too cryptic or a little cynical because I haven't been out this week, or got a clue to what this fine dining culture of cretins is all about. But just strapped in this metaphorical chair, caught in a vortex of spite and other's people's opinion, Owhich is so carefully researched and articulates based on the simple assumption and statistics that people want to hear everything, quite all at once.

Yes, yes, so that no one's got an original thought left in their heads. But you want to rise and shine. Be like them and talk like them. When it gets worse, even look like them. But that's all hogwash, like Harry Potter or pansy looking vampires that everyone seems to be after. That they make, because your life was so incomplete otherwise.

Aah, I know you are clever with your words. Now, can you change anything, make people feel something, know something, learn the ways, and then completely obilerate the last chance of a profound human moment. The gods chose not. The people think otherwise. A hung parliament. Let's all cry foul.

There's more to it in these thoughts. It's just that the words aren't right, the song doesn't play the same, the senses are dumbed by human expression. Go ahead and reclaim your life. While I fish another cigarette.

2010-09-10T22:56:00.002+05:30

It's nighttime in New Delhi. The streets are empty, the winds moist with the afternoon rains and I could do with a cup of tea. I know it's been a while since I muttered my thoughts here. And I don't quite know why I've been robbing myself of such pleasure, of such gloom. But then it doesn't quite matter, as long as I know you're there.

Things have been strange. But when have they been not? Everything just seems to flow like a river, a poem. While I burn, song after song. I know it never quite mattered but every once in a while the ash settles around. And you learn to wake up when you sneeze. I know, it's true, I don't quite think of you so often. But I know that's what you truly like. And a gamble ain't a game, if you aren't playing.

My mouth feel so bitter with tar. My thoughts seem to be swirling down the drain of patience. But you should know I read Dostoevsky, and even he says that he can't understand what is it with words.

The greatest trick the magician ever pulled is that it made you believe.

2010-08-10T19:16:00.001+05:30

That's the way it is, the way it should be. Right. The jokers are serious. The poets are drunk. The writers are right. They played strange music tonight. The rest I'll tell you some other night.

2010-06-09T22:53:00.004+05:30

You took away the chair and now you threaten my room. I walk from one corner to the other to see if you've changed. My world is locked inside a glass jar and still it rains. The windows of this mind is somehow open. Even in lies we speak the truth, they say. But we think we cannot be forgotten. They can only toss their words and let the winds drag them away. How can anyone be yours? What must you give to take and not look back? How can you care but not so much? The birds are never alone in the sky. Morning comes in every death, or something like that. I am an old fool and you are my song.

2010-05-12T21:42:00.000+05:30

What's the point?

Death of Indian Rock

2010-04-05T14:13:00.000+05:30

Rock music in India is finally dead. Three weeks ago, Rock in India, an annual music festival held in Bangalore, which is known to invite some of the biggest heavy metal acts of our times, actually killed it for me. This year the festival decided to bring in a has-been pop sensation boy band of the late 90s, the Backstreet Boys, to headline and mainstream its act in New Delhi. A city that doesn't get acknowledges to be the home of where the first movement of contemporary music scene took place in India.

The festival, of course, not only proved sad by the dismal numbers it brought in, despite two emerging Indian bands, Indigo Children and Swarathma, opening the show. But the festival proved to be ominous of sorts for the murder it or I or someone had to commit.

Independent Indian music bands – and when I say this, I don’t mean Bollywood music, or even remotely close to it – have finally come of age. Today Indian bands spend a lot more of their time tucked away in small rehearsing studios, called jam pads, across metropolitan Indian cities to find their own sound before they come out to play.

What you consider rock music today, the Hotel California and Roadhouse Blues kind of songs, which you hear in dingy bars where beer is relatively cheap and women are most-definitely not to be seen, is a far cry from what they are doing. (I don’t know how to tell my father this.)

Any band worth mentioning today is either working on an album or has cut one and is onto working on the next one. The Rock Street Journal estimates more than 400 bands on its website, but there are probably twice as more on MySpace. Last year alone saw the release of some 40 albums by independent bands which wasn’t even the case the year before that. You wouldn’t have even heard of some of the bands and yet they have an easy following that runs into a few thousands on the web.

This has happened despite the fact that CDs in India, like in the rest of the world, have stopped to sell. At best what a Delhi-based band like the Them Clones sell is not more than 2,000 copies of its debut album, , released by Counter Culture/EMI Music last year in October.

The promoters of the band, Only Much Louder, were only too aware of the fact that if the band has to live by the mere album sales, which costs Rs 195, they will make pittance.

Anyone who listens to the band, even a hardcore fan like my colleague who sits across me at work in a darkish corner, would go on the net, fish the album online and download it. So in order to fight piracy, they came up with an idea that along with every album that they sell, they will package a blank CD along with it. Their idea was for every one CD they sell of the band, some bloke like me will happily make a copy of it on the blank CD and distribute it to one of my friends.

But recording an album, with professional studio sound worth shelling out money for, is definitely not cheap. The band is gradually recovering its due by the 40 to 50 shows they performed last year.

At the moment, Them Clones maybe ‘basking in the glory’, as the vocalist proudly put it. They bagged the JD Rock Awards for as the best song of the year, among a few others. But their fees for a performance, set by their promoters, can vary from Rs 60,0000 to a lakh to even more. It all depends on whether they are performing a corporate gig, a pub rock show or a college festival. These are, unfortunately, the only few viable spaces left for a band to testify its worth against that 15-minutes-of-fame curse set by pop artist Andy Warhol.

For Them Clones, as for many bands of its kind today, their only jet engine of hope is the web to reach their music across to a sea of unreachable listeners. Today you can find their music on websites like gimmesound.com, last.fm, Facebook, MySpace and CDBaby.

Most of its band-members have diligent nine-to-five jobs to keep. They live with their mummy and daddy and practice from ten at night to the wee hours of the morning. Their parents, who are on the cover of their album, are naturally proud.

But not everyone’s folks are. Mine weren’t and I didn’t even play in a band. Three years ago, when I reviewed pub rocks shows and heard a cult indie band like Menwhopause, or Parikrama that could actually pull off some decent covers or the blues-rock band Half Step Down do some trivial injustice to my sanity, there were still very few shows to hear. Today there are some 50 shows that take place in a week and it’s not just in Delhi, but Mumbai and Bangalore, and it has rolled into cities like Chennai, Hyderabad, and even Chandigarh.

For a relatively younger band, Indigo Children, formerly known as Superfuzz, the stigma of an irregular income still creeps in. This is despite the fact that they have won a few competitions; performed internationally, have promoters to look after their shows and an album to work on.

It’s a reoccurring a dream that haunts many bands today, much like how drinking alone in a bar that only plays hip-hop is for me. The Indigo Children is, after all, only a bunch of kids who live at home. They have barely finished college and have not played longer than four years. It is another reason why their band line-up has seen just about as many changes as fashion trends for girls on Delhi streets, but another why their music constantly reinvents itself and is unclassifiable, yet very punk.

As of now they have done what every young band does in India: cut several copies of a demo at a studio that charges nothing more Rs 1,000 per hour, put their music on MySpace, float the links on Facebook, and distribute free copies of their demo at gigs where they perform.

“Piracy is here to stay. There are no two ways about it. Playing music is our only source of income and we’ve only played a couple of good shows,” says Nikhil Rufus Raj, 23, bassist of Indigo Children. “But if you ask me what happens after we cut our debut album, I don’t know. At the moment, we’re trying not think about all that, but just the music for our album.”

There are so few independent bands in India who have actually made it that you can’t actually think beyond one. For me to have met Dhruv Jagasia, manager of Indian Ocean and the successful electronic duo Midival Punditz, was uncompromisable.

The Indian Ocean started in 1993 but went practically nowhere till 1998. They were one of the earliest bands to breakaway from the standard verse-chorus song format, their songs ran an average length of six minutes and they refused to play covers.

In better times they have managed to sell close to 2 lakh copies for each of their five albums. Their second album Desert Rain – one of India’s first live record albums – was the seventh best album to download under World Music on iTunes in 2008. They are the first band to have sold over 5,000 copies of their DVD. An outcome of a ‘golden deal’ they struck with EMI, to distribute their self-produced DVD. A deal now a lot of bands follow with their independently released albums.

“Once the band produced the soundtrack of independent filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s (2004), physical CD sales were still a norm,” says Jagasia, after coaxing me twice to drink beer on a late February afternoon at his bungalow in New Friends Colony. “Till then the net hadn’t gone crazy on us,” he adds, twirling his moustache.

“We’ve seen the industry switch from CDs to Napster to the web. We have learnt to move with the times,” he says, as I sip a dodgy lemon tea, looking mildly disappointed with me. “Which is why we have something planned for Indian Ocean’s next album, <16/330 Khajoor Road>, out later this year. Since we don’t want people to download the entire album in one go, we plan to release a new song at the end of every month on the website till the album is finally released on the whole.” The album will be monumental for the band, as it will feature some of the last recordings of its founding member, percussionist and vocalist, Asheem Chakravarty.

No musician, Indian or otherwise, can deny the overwhelming role and effect the net has had to play on the record industry in the last decade. Music piracy leapt upon from nowhere at the record industry and spread more virally than swine flu. Today this 125 year-old industry in the west, whose etymology races back to the late 19th century to the cash-driven invention of the gramophone by Thomas Edison, has crumbled.

This may have caused the industry some hard times, with all the suits cut loose from their commissions, but it’s been one swell time for musicians who are now free to do whatever the hell they want with the net and the social media to promote them.

Three years ago, the English alternative band, Radiohead, set the paradigm shift by independently putting their seventh album, , as a digital download on their website. Anyone and everyone could go on to their website and download their songs for whatever price they felt like paying, or nothing. Their website simply stated, ‘it’s upto you’. Nine Inch Nails did the same thing. They put their entire album, , on MySpace, to cheese their label off and, of course, to reach out to more fans.

All this struck me a few of moons ago, while I was on a desperate hunt for the new White Stripes album, , to impress a pale-green-eyed girl I had then just met. I went to a music store so many times to check that even the guard at the gate knew what I was looking for. When I was about to give up, a Mumbai-based music blogger, Dead Flowers, whose obsession for Keith Richards’ guitar riffs and indie cult leaders Velvet Underground was pretty self-evident, offered to mail me the entire album. Two weeks later, I read somewhere that even Jack White didn’t know how his album was leaked out of his studio.

On Chennai-based band, Junkyard Groove’s blog, ‘the fate of middle class musician’ is a running didactic theme. On their posts you can sense a delirium many independent bands face today when pressed upon the problems of how they can promote their music online.

Junkyard Groove is at the moment working on their second album. If you write to them, as I did, they will send their entire first album for free as they have done so for a database of about 10,000 people. The band is also working on starting an independent label, Mongoose Clan, to help other bands to release their albums.

“I don’t want to go to any label because the net assures me a creative license that no one can promise,” says Ameeth Thomas, vocalist, Junkyard Groove. “The future for us, musicians, is to go online. For my next album I plan to hire a cyber PR that will manage all my music content. We don’t make money because anything we make is spent back on either instruments or equipment.”

Thermal and a Quarter, a cult progressive jazz-rock outfit from Bangalore, which set out in 1997, too went independent and released their fourth album: , last year. They mixed their album at A.R. Rehman’s AM Studios in Chennai. Their music is up for free to stream on their website, although they sell on iTunes, CDBaby and Amazon. For a performance at a college festival they earn upto Rs 2 lakh, though they make most of their money touring around the world. They sound incredibly bitter if you talk to them about piracy because they say they feel too old to relate with a generation born with an email account but know better to sift along with the times than fade away.

TAAQ for their last album were keen to increase the production value of their album so they got multiple Grammy award-winning producer/engineer Jeff Peters to mix their music. Similarly, Kolkata-based The Supersonics, formed in 2006, got the help of music producer Miti Adhikari – who in the past has worked with some of the biggest international music acts including the Pixies, Nirvana and the White Stripes – to produce their album , released last year by SaReGaMa, for Rs 125. Their album sold close to 2,000 CDs and has 9,000 downloads as of now. The band claims that they are not any richer but they are a happier lot.

In the case of Shillong-based band Soulmate, one of the most electric blues acts of India, a complete opposite has worked for them. Their league among the Indian bands today is entirely different and not web-related. They have for the second time taken their blues to play in Memphis for the International Blues Challenge. For an international blues band to play in the challenge it has to be registered under a blues club. A registered blues club has to have 3,000 members.

Founder of the Blues Club India, Kiran Sant, first heard the band four years ago and brought them to play at his Haze Blues and Jazz Bar in New Delhi and hasn’t ceased to pursue them since. Today Soulmate comes three to four times a month to play in the city and earns up to Rs 70,000 a night.

Younger bands were for long recording at home at cheap systems with a basic sound card to distribute their demos that cost them nothing more than Rs 35 (the cost of a CD-R). Today as more bands are coming about, and dying to sound better can get competitive, they have graduated to independent studios that charge by the hour and more if you want your music professionally mixed.

“Few years ago bands would shy away from studios. Today bands know that they get only one shot to making it big when they record an album,” says Gaurav Chinatamani of Quarter Notes Studio. “The albums are important for bands because they get taken more seriously and paid more. Bands are slowly realising this and coming out to look for producer.

Rock music and its culture are dead in India but if you still see someone who denies it than you are allowed to smack them once on the head (politely) And because I develop superpowers when I listen to music, and I don’t need to gaze into a hazy crystal ball for this, I can even tell that the future of the Indian music scene is undeniably metal and electronic music. Their growth has been spectacular in the last five years.

Grey and Saurian records, an independent label run by Anupam Roy and Shashwat Gupta, manages, records and promotes eight metals bands including Bhayanak Maut, Scribe and Third Sovereign. They make sure everyone has a blog and a Twitter account to update as homework. Here’s the twist: most of the band members are bunch of clean-cut corporates. Much to yours and my dismay, they don’t spew aggression – they leave all that for hard rock outfits such as Bajrang Dal and the VHP to handle it. (I never said that.) So what next? No one can tell, not even the avuncular figure of modern Indian music, Amit Saigal.

2010-03-04T16:36:00.003+05:30

Death in March

At times like these,
when the weather is warm in March,
I feel like jumping out of the building
and dying.
I know when they find my remains,
no music will play,
no circus will rise from the ground,
only a crowd will gather.
They will pretend not to look,
but they will look all right,
and murmur, what a shame, what a shame,
while the police and ambulance arrives.
Someone will have to call my folks,
someone will have to pick me up
and put me in a plastic bag.
I know it because I will be there,
standing next to them all,
with not an ounce of pain in me,
as clear as daylight,
till someone flicks the lights off.

2010-02-18T15:07:00.003+05:30

A poem in a bar

Drinking rum alone in a bar
is like writing a poem
on a paper napkin.
It's pointless.
But every once in a while,
you see someone smile,
someone laugh, or look at you,
and you raise your glass
for every word you write.
Time slips
through the fingers of mind,
people enter and leave,
till they are there no more.
And you can't tell,
if its happy hours,
or climate change,
or forgotten words,
or listless songs,
just lights begin to blur,
when you know its, its time to go.

2010-02-06T20:56:00.003+05:30

It's four minutes to nine on a Saturday night. I should be leaving any minute now for home. But I'm not. Maybe I'll linger a few minutes more. A few minutes more to have the canteen dinner, listen to one Kishore Kumar song stuck in my head since this morning and, of course, pour my bickering over here.
Although I don't really have much to say. It's just that you know once in a while it's nice to write. Just write. I used to do a whole lot of it when I was in school. Every night after dinner, I would write pages after pages, in the form of letters to childhood sweethearts, writing whatever struck my mind. I guess I miss those days, when writing was simple as pen and paper, and there was a certain innocence to the whole setup. I guess I don't find it anymore.
However, I find it increasingly difficult to understand myself. (I'm not lost, I mean it strictly in one of those metaphysical things that you and I know nothing good about.) Maybe it's because I hear voices in my head. It's like there are some five people, with respective politics and crimes, trying to get their point across. Sometimes I just want to jump out of my mind, you know like one of those things. Maybe you have no idea.
Enough about me.

2010-01-31T15:09:00.002+05:30

A cup of coffee or a shot of rum, whatever it is you drink tonight. I know it's not one. The barber returns home with a silver blade. The mist were in her eyes. But I'm on the dreamy streets below, lit by the moon and crayon. I know a song or two. I saw a tree shiver. I don't wish to be here long. Who can ever tell.

2009-12-30T16:00:00.002+05:30

Honestly, 2009 was a crap year. I know 2010 is going to be very wired. But maybe things will be different. That's what I hope. Some of you may think that I drink with Charles Dickens, talk death with Edgar Allan Poe and smoke with Leonard Cohen. That's all true, but it's all in the head.
I have started work with my old newspaper (rag) again. Yes, the same one, which led my frustrations to scribble here a long time ago. But apart from the cheap pay, it's not that bad to be back (at least I hope so.)
See, there's so much hope. That's what writing on December 30 does to you, you end up hoping. Hope is not a bad thing. It can be a little pointless, but what the f, everyone's gotta give something, to take something.
I miss writing here. I miss a lot of things.
But there's so much to do. So much to write. So much to finish. It's almost like you forget what its like to be lonely. But Delhi is cold, it's blue. And I just like a good rant. There's so much beauty in drinking tea at a stall and smoking a smoke, while everyone drives over flyovers through the streets lined with mist covered trees. How could I say it better. I don't know if I know myself any better. It doesn't really matter now. It won't matter, as long you are there with flowers and poison. I could go round and round.
But what about all the mathematics in school? And what about the girl? And all the sadness in Christmas cakes? Will we be free? To see that everything has to be. And so many Facebook friends. And so many songs.
Happy 2010.

2009-10-04T00:56:00.005+05:30

Stage of Age

You know you've reached that age,
when you know you're not old,
but you feel cool and otherwise.
And you've felt happiness
and some gift-wrapped sadness,
which tosses inside of you
like a coin.
And you've been down on women,
like with a beer bottle,
several times, so far,
but they still don't make sense
of you, at all.
And you have had friends,
who say you've changed,
but it's nothing like that,
if only they could understand.
And mornings seem cruel,
and nights seem so long,
when the ground beneath you
shifts like sand.
And nothing seems like a movie,
or that one song,
when all you can do
is watch the gray moon,
dressed in a petticoat of clouds.
And you wish you threw your phone away,
closed your Facebook account,
not thought of sending flowers,
or that well-meant text message,
but thrown a cat instead
called Edgar Allan Poe.

But then again,
you've never felt like this before,
or looked so good,
or felt so...
so much so, that even though
the man in the mirror doesn't smile,
when all the rum gets you glum,
you still wouldn't give a fuck,
or turn, twist or care a flying duck,
and you could say the last two lines,
because it rhymes,
sit and blame the times.
So what,
you say,
fuck you.
The poets have died,
light a cigarette,
or go to a gym,
or buy shoes,
you've been through this before,
and you drift again on it,
like a miserable ghost,
because you felt a little pain.

2009-09-23T14:58:00.004+05:30

Bickerings

Every night clutches me in sweet misery and despair,
while I toss and turn in bed,
mumbling words that strung to a prayer,
wishing to those who cared, I was dead.

And then I thought of you again,
and how you used to call and cry,
and what it was to feel your pain,
and how I tried to try, with each fallen lie.

I swore once that I was in love,
and then I swore I knew none.
It was easy to fall and look above,
to see the moon, still, undone.

Your eyes haunted me in darkness,
and in only dreams we met to kiss.
We're all lost in the wilderness,
gambling hopes to a flash of bliss.

As morning filled the room with light,
the shadows of memory began to hide.
I saw death dressed in white,
reaching her hand out to guide.

I dreamed no more,
as we begun to apart,
to be pulled into some open door,
in an audition to read a different part.

2009-09-20T12:41:00.002+05:30

Catching up...

My days have been reduced to waking up late, watching crappy television shows, reading books, working on my book, drinking copious amounts of beer, looking for a job, writing bad poetry, occasional smoke haze, SMS drivels, fucking Facebook, late night Jim Morrison songs, ghosts from the F train, rough dreams of school, Neil Gaiman's imagination, return of her beauty and her eyes, unfolding mystery and simple lies...

2009-09-15T03:24:00.005+05:30

The Measure of Crime (edited)

Ordinary questions seem trivial and boring.
My mind is a fish net tonight; dreams are blue as water.
Every morning a crow croaks horror.
And they are bringing us in for the slaughter.

There are voices on the hill that must be met,
Along the old twisted cunning streams.
Sometimes a light glows among the trees,
And I hear you whisper from your dreams.

Of madness and in hope.
The flickering dance of shadows.
The tunes of forgotten lore.
The gardener comes to sow your woes.

When I awake, I think of Edgar Allan Poe.
I see him walking around the grave.
His misery, your beauty and a question on life.
And I lose you in an ocean wave.

Ode to the Romantics

2009-09-04T23:52:00.003+05:30

Falling in love was once easy and cheap,
But all you taught me was how to weep.
And now there's a price to pay,
And now there are words you must say.

Yet each to our true we sin,
Of empty hearts we carelessly win.
But your love is the dust of an old book,
And I a thief, who took to took.

If only you let meaning meet with reason,
Your smile could save this season.
But you sit in that room of despair,
With shawls of sadness that you choose to wear.

What glory is now to be craved,
And what misery is now to be saved?
In one moment you could so easily care,
And in another, you wouldn't dare.

You may have played with the moon,
And slept till every noon.
But one June, someday soon,
You will know what it's like to croon.

But I'm a poet, so I suffer,
But each thought of you makes it tougher.
And it isn't that you know no joy,
For you I'll still be a glass toy.

2009-08-30T19:55:00.003+05:30

And it's perhaps perfect in that moment of guilt,
when it's sometime after three in the morn,
and I've been drinking whiskey since seven,
on a hot, humid trembling night,
watching silhouettes drape the irony in the hall,
and I've nowhere else to look or feel,
and nothing to really do but watch an hour wheel,
caressing the creases on the sofa,
and nodding to an old fool sitting in the corner
with a stuffed chicken tikka smile,
wondering if that'll be all,
contemplating whether to head to the loo,
or will I ever be able to sleep again,
or thinking about what it was like
or what I used to do on such evenings,
while you light another cigarette
and touch your foot gently against my leg,
and laugh till your laughter fills the room.

And then suddenly we find ourselves alone,
first in a dark room,
then on the roof,
in a house which could be haunted,
and I think about a poem,
the raven, which I once wanted
to be read on a night like this,
then I feel the breeze among the grim trees,
and then I look at a broken moon,
while you rest your back against the rail,
mumbling sullen apologies,
of some previous evening, of some childish play,
you with your quivering wine lips, pale,
and your sweet vodka breath,
which I gently meet to kiss,
and will forever miss,
because I have someone else beautiful in mind.

2009-05-18T14:54:00.002+05:30

In a month's time from now, I'll be in New York. And from there I'll be off to Vermont for a writing course. It's a six weeks course at the Bread Loaf School of English. I'll be doing a graphic novel writing course as well as fiction writing. Besides, well apart from this, I've sold my soul for work, handful of financial assistance and an air conditioned room where people turn serious in the evenings.
I'm on the edit and oped page, and I also make a feature page. On the feature page, I write whatever comes to my mind. It's fun, different and the employers seem to have no issue with the twistedness of my words.
Lately, that's what's been up. The nights are late and smoky but at least I'm covering some reading which had led to some despair. When you're writing a book it's extremely difficult to follow books because they constantly make you over-think.
I don't think I'm getting the time to do exactly what I want to. It's upsetting to know that we -- humans -- are so ready to fuck our lives up. But that's life -- you got to what you got to do, and hopefully the side projects outline you well.
In other ways, someday soon, something should work out. An intangible theory to crack the eternal code of life should breakthrough the consciousness, I hope.
I can't tell more. Sometimes I think I'm not there.

2009-05-06T14:07:00.001+05:30

The fiddler, he now steps to the road/He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed/On the back of the fish truck that loads/While my conscience explodes.

2009-04-05T15:03:00.002+05:30

They say there's a time and place for everything. Well, honestly, I think this isn't it. We're all victims of a global financial meltdown one way or the other and it caught us at a time when we weren't even thinking of pulling our pants up, let alone the socks. It's good to know that people who read me are still around and even though I'm not the most committed one here -- it's good to know that you have your priorities cut out and stretched. I can start by telling you that life is fucked up. But then that's what I always say, maybe in different words though and you seem to have got that well covered. As a writer, I have writerly pains. It's like arthritis but I won't tell you where it hurts the most. I feel embittered mostly but life has a strange way of humouring you, even if you're out there to axe your feet. I am well behaved though. The trouble is that apart from my use of prepositions and my unique subsets of attention span -- all's pretty cool. I'm around. I still keep a sharp look at you. I just know how to get my kicks!

2009-03-30T12:44:00.003+05:30

For those who care, I've been caught up. Enough to not care about you. But now I return. I've been around the twists, hunchbacked the turns and now I shouldn't push the good times.

1) I've finished the first draft of the book. I won't give the title here -- you bloggers can be plagiarising assholes, if you know what I mean.

2) Columbia school of Journalism rejects me because everyone in the world wants to study during the recession.

3) There's a newspaper where I've been interviewed twice and tested once. Everytime I call them, they say they'll get back. I won't even tell you about the rest.

4) I've met someone to turn your head twice.

5) The unemployment period has been awesome for me. But I want this period to switch off than start fading. I don't want to hate this.

2009-02-28T13:37:00.003+05:30

So I write in afternoons. It's nice to wake up in the morning and know that you don't have to do something because you have to. It's fun to forgive your past and listen to Dylan's To Ramona and see winter dying in front of my window. It's good to remember all the things and then not give a fuck. It's good to meet new people and forget yourself in them and then sleep in your bed alone. We wonder the what-ifs, but the what-ifs are swollen and lifeless. Words and more words, cam you write every single day with a hope that you're making sense, when you know there is no meaning in anything else. Yet it's beautiful as how I remember your eyes but now there are too many distractions and bitten fingertips.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I went for Siddharth Dhanvany Shanghvi's The Lost Flamingos of Bombay and the reading was horrid, yet if you like your literature to be written, prepared and read out as soft-porn, that's up to you.

2009-02-12T13:08:00.002+05:30

a) I lose my job.
b) A book I'm writing destroys me.
c) DU misplaces my provisional degree and it's my fault.
4) I don't have internet at home.
5) People are such idiots.

2009-01-23T16:42:00.003+05:30

Too many loose ends. Torn cigarette packets. The Clash's I Fought the Law. Soul of beer bottles. Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries. Two spliff ends. A one-legged lamp with a tipped shade. Drifting dust. A turquoise carpet. Broken spectacles. Listless staircases. Forgotten bills. TV show seasons. Sighing curtains. Burning angst of poets in a wastepaper basket. Cobweb dreams. Curls of smoke. Surly fridge. A straight moody road. Mirror and death. Boredom. Coca Cola walks at midnight. A twitching left-cheek. Cryptic mobile messages with a smiling face. Darkness wrapped in chocolate. Cindrella's wet dreams. Lynchian irony. The Master's guileless Margarita. Rolling Stone tshirt. Gurgle of an empty shaft. The pounding of one floor above. Crime and police torture. Electric madness and job interviews. Circles and squares of definition. Burnt or soggy food. Stolen wine glasses. Shit, fan and fly squatter and a nail cutter. Blood and clogged arteries. Leonard Cohen sniffing a skirt. News blogs. Endless Indian Express. Swollen will. Slit coats and hot rocks. Blocked nose, hurting back and the eternal flow of urine. Loss of science. Weapons of mass domestication. Obama. Apocalypse. TS Eliot whisperings. Hemingway's bullet. Dragons and drivels. Darkness and enchanted trees. Red lips. Golden apples. Seven dwarfs. Snow White. Grimm Brothers and war. Death of winter news. Death of summer and global warming. Pilate and Jesus arm wrestles. War, war and world peace. Wailing and howling dogs. Tears and terror, film and abuse. Beckett's pillow. Sadness and melancholy, Shakespearean. Fatwa and prissy prats. Prepare and prepare. Strong coffee and lemon tea. The raw beauty. Her eyes. Late night cries. Seasons of the witch. The Horror. The Horror.

2009-01-20T19:58:00.002+05:30

Uncertainty stands in the doorway. Then a hand appears and shuts the door. We stand not knowing what to say to each other. This morning a storm came and wiped our smiles. Then came the rain and we cupped our hands and tastes tears. We saw a slab of stone and there was love rubbing its greedy thighs. There confusion which wore an old cloak of noise and we dreamt fear. When we rise we taste copper in our mouths. There was no sun today, just a mist of despair hung on us. The river came with noon. The ancient guard looked back and then we never saw him again. There were ghosts that kissed you. They wanted you to reply. Their message perhaps meant nothing, nothing of consequence. But now the towers is locked and you have the keys. The spells don't work and their is no music. Everyone wished to die or be forgotten. Faith stoops, honesty is on crutch and promise just a hunchback. The wizard's got swollen fingers and his words is a yawning chasm of disbelief.

2009-01-02T16:38:00.004+05:30

Today we're broken. We are divided by narrow strips of land. There are boundaries around us. Our innocence is stripped and we stand empty as scarecrows on a field. Music died last evening. There was a fire and everyone watched it whimper and gasp in a sorrow tune. We were among them but we chose not to think. Our thoughts like flies stayed glued to a light of misunderstanding. We tried to hum a funeral, but all we did was spit kerosene when we opened our mouths. We saw the clouds swallowing us, a column of birds chose to rest in the sea. We saw rattle snakes and howling wolves, and we tried to trample our shadows but we lost in the sand.
We were lost then. We are lost now. We no longer see a reflection of ourselves in rivers, we only see a glint of crimson and sometimes tears. Your picture is forgotten even though its kept in a room I promised never to look. I no longer see a promise, but what's wrapped around my head is a satyr that spreads dreams. I rise to hold a string that cry to pull me to a curtain where you hide. But I fall as many others have and many others will. When I fall, I see the remains of everyone that tried to reach you. They tell me to unite them and stand in a line and wait for the eternal bathroom door to open. When I fall, I see my past flashing in a liquid light. There's arrogance in the air and humility in the storm. It's no longer important what becomes if it rhymes. In strange battles and angry times, we follow crimes. We chose to rise and sink in a sea where such things can hide.

2008-12-30T15:41:00.002+05:30

Ladies and freaks,
It's good to know you've been around. It's good to know that you've kept yourself awake in such tedious times. What would become of us? Day after tomorrow another year comes to end. I know New Year parties turn you around -- so, well, do your bit and I'll do mine. Let's not fuck things up. We were all put on this planet to meet the biggest idiots possible, I am for you what you're for me.
Nothing can possibly change -- nothing ever shall, well, until, a nuclear attack.
What have we learnt this year? How have we screwed things up? What will we never try? Who will we lose? Who shall we war? Who shall cry? All this and more awaits you one more time. Bring it home, light the candles, sip that wine, blow the smoke and wait for it....

2008-12-15T20:41:00.000+05:30

So, I hate you. I'm the doorkeeper.

2008-12-07T17:01:00.001+05:30

Long time, eh?
Sure.
Where you been?
Been around man.
Travelling?
Nope.
Where then man?
In a room.
All alone?
Four shadows and a goldsish bowl.
Crazy!
Sure.
Cya around.
Cheers!

2008-11-12T15:29:00.002+05:30

Here in the sanctuary people don't exist. Their memories do stretched from a remote sense of belonging to an overstretched feeling of nothingness. When music plays from a beaten record player, one can hear movements. Movements different from the newly-dead stirring in disbelief as the morning breaks. The plague burns the land and the cancers spreads in the limbs. The doctors are nothing but old-world romantics who've given up arguing and sent the missionaries back to their soil. In a world, the only faith in belief is in the absence of it. There are babies in the river and the sun is covered in blood. The only dust rises in the moonlight when rabid dogs howl and foam on lonely desert nights. What spreads in the mind is no form of conceit but a vague transient of discomfort of what was promised and taken. The land no longer depends on men but mere imaginary boundaries that separates between the good and evil. Even in sadness, a momentary chasm drills into the consciousness. Poets end up taking their eyes because they no longer rely on what they see. A commotion of abuse runs in the streets, silently ensuring that everyone feeds and turns to mud as the rest rise and fall in darkness.
The sanctuary is a grave. Where no morphine can put any to rest. Here people only moan and groan, those who ramble are no real talkers. They are shifty drifters waiting for acceptance and denying boredom. Their potato wine is no posion but a declaration of war.

2008-11-05T16:00:00.002+05:30

A graveyard is not normally a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy, and each of the dead had a voice, and an option as to whether the living child should be allowed to stay, and they were each determined to be heard, that night.

Is children’s literature only for the likes of Tiny Tim and underage toddlers? Take for example, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — see how twisted and surreal interpretations the story had over years?
Even writers like Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton — the classic children storytellers — wrote fantasy in such simplicity, it was as though they were writing for two parallel worlds and that they could maneuver conveniently between them. That some of their works have had graver undertones, an imagery of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in them. (Dahl would write short-stories for adults as well, and those gave a clearer sense of macabre with knife-like twists. And an allusion to Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree in Alan Moor’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, would surface a strange irony.)
Much to that effect is Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book which, despite its structure, can be argued that it isn’t just a children’s story. We meet Nobody Owens, our protagonist, a ghost-like kid, who is not a wizard, but is better mannered than Harry Potter.
He, too, like Harry has a past; at a very early age, Bod (short for Nobody) escapes death as a man called Jack slaughters his family. This is how the story begins. Little does Bod know that as he crawls into a graveyard late at night, the graveyard would be his new home.
Bod finds a ghost couple who start taking care of him as their own. His guardianship is taken care by Silas who is a quiet, wise and much-travelled ghost, and one whom Bod turns to with his child-like existential questions. Silas also provides the bare essentials that one needs to grow up in a graveyard as well as his strange education.
The beauty of Gaiman’s storytelling is again in its simplicity — Bod’s little misadventures while growing up as well as his search for his family’s killer are shown almost sympathetically. The story also tells the tale of ghosts, in a way, paying homage to the spirit of the dead. That those misunderstood in life and buried in the ground also live by certain arrogance and principles; that despite the secret why Bod can transient easily between the living and the dead, is eventually revealed when he has to leave the graveyard.

2008-10-27T20:36:00.003+05:30

Usually things appear sorted then a cold gust of wind turns things around. Where you want to be is on the Magic Faraway Tree to a land with a friend called Saucepan Man. You could dream if you like and be on the Wishing Chair, but if that's not your thing, then you can smile and look away.
In a moment there will be madness. And we shall allow it, or we can if we make the effort. Sit in circles, light the torch, play the guitar, sip wine, get lost in eyes -- a new pair of eyes -- or we can break the rose petals and believe we weren't there. It's easy, if you may. Follow the beat through the forest. Cinderella seems weepy, and Rumpelstiltskin thinks that life's nothing but an anomaly of twisted fingers and gold diggers. They want him, he knows, but not for his soul. For he's trapped in the ground. And Red Riding Hood is at the Vagina Monologues.
There will be darkness, my friend. But if the chimney is burning and all the children are sleeping, then the garden will rise and death will play chess. Cats and dogs -- sleeping crows and angry turtles, the crawling king snake slithers tonight, darling. And in a moment, I will want world peace. To break the chain of command and follow the orders of forgotten politicians, kings and popes -- who've got nothing else but a couple of coins and a cloth of luck.
Dreams and despair, songs of love and hate. They open the gates tonight. And in a moment, you will see.

2008-10-20T14:35:00.002+05:30

I picked The Bucket List to take home this weekend. My visits home have become less frequent now and the city life seems to grow duller. My parents aren't great movie watchers. But they've grown up watching, so they know their stuff. Meanwhile, my learning films is all self-taught. Working in a news channel gave me a decent basic understanding of editing, camera and shots. (These days every second person I meet is a film collector -- so I get recommended a list of directors and films I should check out and I trade my favourites.) But mine is really a recent obsession. I look for cult films -- some of my favourite filmmakers are Kubrick, Scorcese, Allen, Lynch, Tarantino, Coen Brothers and the sorts. Mostly Hollywood, as you can gather. Quirky, a hint of noir, blood, sex and method.
Now The Bucket List seemed nice and it was rather an obvious choice, it has Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. And there are few ways they can muck a film. The plot is essentially easy. Two terminally patients in a hospital room know that they have little time. So before they kick the bucket -- they list some of the things that they always wanted to do.
Jack Nicholson plays his classic best -- an embittered man; rich and pissed off with classic liners. Morgan Freeman plays the humble good guy, his voice is golden as ever. The chemistry between the two is like two goldfish in a bowl that aren't the best of friends, but somehow have only each other.

Here's something to remember when you're older Thomas - never pass up a bathroom, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a fart.
(Jack Nicholson as Edward Cole)

2008-10-16T16:52:00.002+05:30

And in walks winter. Cool and gray. Silent and recluse.

2008-10-13T18:33:00.003+05:30

In a moment there will be chaos. In a moment there will be a smile and in a moment you will be served a bowl of tears. Now the papers are burning in wastepaper baskets. A melancholy that lurks in an empty room now hangs above us. There are passionate sighs that play from the ghost clarinets. There comes confusion bending upon a broken rod of reason. A rubble of understanding. There is mutiny in the kitchen. The bookstores are empty. They've closed down the gates. The emperor wishes to call the listless knaves. The Queen of Hearts is broken. The Jack of Hearts is caught in the ladies room again. The jokers are clumsy. The Horror, The Horror!

2008-09-30T15:04:00.004+05:30

What is it like to be when you're alone? When you're not really alone. When drinking is just a sport with the guys. A coffee keeps your mind torched through the entire night. You see people you don't recognise. And for once you've begun to overlook their pecularities. You see them in crowded places and you see them in cafes. The young and the old. In contempt of each other. You are a stranger, or an insider and you you wonder how things look from the fish bowl. You listen to music to give some theatrical influence to life. You hear about blasts and encounters yet you feel distanced. You're emotionally recharged and ideologically crippled. You feel no one's around because you aren't really there yourself. You've stopped writing notes and messages you aren't going to send. Your skills and arithmetic have loosened over the years. You carry pouches of under-or-overslept misery under your eyes. You like to walk in autumn. There is no character in piss stains of the walls. The fruitsellers are tired and the paanshops are worried about banning smoking. There is arthiritis and cancer just like in life; just like in dreams. You feel like you can write. Your imagination is a smoky voice of a writer which talks to you. Tells you stories, gives you imagery. The iPod just gives you music. The internet, history and lies.

2008-09-25T14:59:00.002+05:30

Oh lord. I miss writing. It's been more than weeks since I've opened the laptop and started pushing buttons. I had good news earlier this week. One of my short stories is being published by Penguin. It's going for their annual collection of short fiction and non-fiction stories for new Indian writers, First Proof 4. Some of the few Indian writers I admire have written for it. I even met an editor later and on -- she said we should soon start talking a book out of me. It felt good. I just hope it kicks in some inspiration to start really writing. This writer's rock I'm sitting under and this quarter life crisis I'm undergoing -- I need to get over it.
I know my writing is actually quite different from here. But I quite like writing the drivel here. It's my black page space in this big, bad world of web mess. But more than that, not that I know how many of you come here and read, I like to keep the engine of this boat running.
Speaking of which, I need a muse. Maybe it's about being alone. It could be overrated this alone-ness. There's Facebook and a strange impulse to catch up with the list of numbers on my cell phone. But still, I need to find me one.
Sure I think we're living in some strange times.

2008-09-22T18:26:00.002+05:30

Generally I don't like Mondays. More importantly, I don't think Mondays really like me. But today seems ok. I suppose if you work on Sundays, Mondays don't have a terrible way to deal with you.

2008-09-17T13:18:00.002+05:30

When your skin is burning. Your mind is a temple of fire. You lie for hours on sweat stained sheets. You're caught in a crossfire of fever. Your dreams are nothing but of an athlete running on a track. Your lips are broken and your tongue is bitter. You want death, but you feel something else. And only thoughts haunt. I've forgotten how you look. Your name is whispered by ghosts in my sleep. There is darkness behind the lampshade. Beyond that I feel weak. I am lost. I walk from one room to another with flowers looking for the perfect funeral. In front of mirrors I softly cry.

2008-09-08T18:05:00.003+05:30

There are jokers in the hallway. The poets are drinking wine. The funeral is ready but the princess is laughing. The army has been called. The staircase is dripping blood. The violinist is a dreamer. The room has got new curtains. A list of hobos are singing and smoking dream pipes. The writer is weak and lonely. They are selling candy in the store. The napkins are red with lipsticks. The washbasin with semen. A wizard's lost his tongue. A strange fragnance fills the room. The choir group is getting to leave. The princess reappears again, but then slips back in the shadow. The camera is finding a frame. A dream is being trapped in a jar by the window. Snow white is feeling blue. The priest has a story to tell. In the woods someone's screaming. The dogs and the hyenas are around. There are headaches and there are storms. There are letters and there are answers. There are burning witches. There are dragons and caterpillars. There are mushrooms where I sit. There are roses where you lie. There's death and there's a silk pillow. There are words and words. There's melancholoy. But there is happiness. The princess smiles. The widowers hide. There's beauty in autumn. There are bending trees and swollen lies. Deciet. Gamble. Prose. Everything is blue, gray and lonely. Yet you smile. You don't want to paint a picture. A picture of Dorian Gray only this time you start to age. What trap in crap. The whistle blows. The train leaves at 9. Why don't we see dead birds drop from the sky. Why do we sit here.

2008-09-07T18:47:00.003+05:30

And things are different? Perhaps. Perhaps they are. I don't know what sense you can draw from it. But they are different. Oh! I now have the entire Firefly collection. I've written my draft of essays. I met another old classmate; strange, but some women can look fine.
I trip on Oasis, goldfish and the little pleasure one obtains from watching people do silly in dark dingy places called nightclubs.
I also bumped into three school pricks of mine. Who at the fine age of 23 looked pretty messed up. I wasn't happy to see how they were. But I did realise that things come around. In the sense that when I was in my Woody Allen looking days in class 7, I remember being pushed and shoved around by a prick who didn't take things too politely when people asked them how they were.
The same lot not seemed as though the boats been upturned. Cheers to you mofos!
It's a Sunday. I'm at work. But it's ok. Things will change. Then I will look for a change again.
Okay, be cool!

2008-09-03T16:34:00.002+05:30

Life lately has been slightly confusing but better. It was pretty low last month. But now at least the thoughts are settling in like cobwebs. I didn't really fuck up I suppose with what I did. I could've bottled up things -- and I thought leaving would've been easier -- but things slowly turned. I suppose turned for the ok.
The weather in the city has been intolerable. I have a cold to make matters more unpleasant. One of my closest school friend is in town, he's just got through Oxford. I have started to write my essays and hopefully in some months I'll catapult from this desolated city of love and squalor.
And in these strange times, I'm losing and gaining friends. The trouble is one gets so emotionally bankrupt and smitten with smite, that you lose people as you make your entrants into the strangest parts of paradise -- and you get old.
Work sometimes gets fascinatingly slow like the net here. The people are all right. I have neither bad things or particularly good things either to say. Besides, I now realise how impersonal print actually gets to tv.
Jo has become my a pretty close friend. In the sense that I hang out with him all the time -- he's been a bit frustrated with the trade. Sometimes Russled catches up -- but mostly it's just Jo. We've watched all the Californication. The second season should be out soon. And he got me some South Park.
I miss the old lot. Sometimes they make random scenes and I get to catch up. They all look happy but are actually all underslept and basically kind. I suppose the hours kill them a lot. Here I shall stop.
Otherwise, my place is well. Rolling and Tumbling end up trashing the fish bowl. But I seem to be getting good at cleaning them up. I feel sort of relieved that they've lived on. I mean I thought gold fish would just die on me. But it's been more than two months and I feel sort of glad.
Headaches and wedding cakes -- they sort of rhyme. This post was to basically catch up. So that you lot, whoever you are, known and unknown, know the faintest picture.

2008-09-02T13:45:00.003+05:30

For weeks I have travelled from one room to another. I have nothing but memories, dreams and cut glass in my hands. I have the taste of fear in my mouth. I have one dark thought that hangs above me which thunders when it rains. Everything is in ruins. The morning has been covered by a blanket. The rivers are angry and the ditches are dry. We are in September now, weren't we here before? The Writer's Anonymous is in session -- all quiet and rise.
How exclusively lost are we.

2008-08-26T14:43:00.002+05:30

I wish I could tell you that everything's all right. Everything is a clear as a blue stream. I wish I could make sense to you and you wouldn't have to worry anymore. That hope is a wonderful but you don't have to hope anymore. I wish I could tell you everything and you wouldn't find a reason for asking more. But how can I? It's not my role, it was never in my script. Even I flung myself on a cross, you wouldn't take me seriously.

2008-08-25T00:50:00.002+05:30

It's sad how some Sundays end. For some reasons I wanted this week to run over. But somehow Mondays are never my days -- it has some cheesy optimism in its smile, and I'll just watch myself groan over it. I suppose I can't really be honest -- but it doesn't quite bother me. Everything's terribly ordinary. But if you think about it -- it's quite terrific in a twisted sense. Of course you have no idea what I am talking about. Isn't it like overhearing someone's conversation and trying to find a string of sense in them. And you think you have some right to because of course the internet is a graveyard where anyone's writing grave can be dug. You can hear the ancient dead's stories -- and then you can slip back into norm. But what about the imagery of it? Was there happiness or was there was some funeral. Of course, I'll just sit here and wait -- think about rhymes.

2008-08-24T02:03:00.002+05:30

Sometimes you're a dog, other time you're everyone elses. It's not a bad way -- there's some give and take. You eventually pick the pieces and you pair them up. What are the odds? The chances of everything?

2008-08-18T14:47:00.004+05:30

A long time I posted this poem her on my bloggie-woggie. I would like you to read it again. It's by my favourite singer-poet, Leonard Cohen.

My life in robes

After a while
You can't tell
If it's missing
A woman
Or needing
A Cigarette.
And later on
If it's night
Or day.
Then suddenly
You know
The time
You get dressed
You go home
You light up
You get married.

(Leonard Cohen, A Book of Longing)

2008-08-17T18:31:00.000+05:30

You feel strange? You feel alone and yet you like it? You feel you've done something wrong and yet see nothing wrong in it? You feel you don't care and yet there's a bit that's still attached -- that still wants to know? You feel that alcohol isn't doing you right, the j only smogs your thoughts and coffee tastes right after abstaining from it for a month? You feel like listening to songs that offer you different imagery each time? You feel you you can write but you don't have a story? You feel your lowest low but it doesn't end and you only wallow? You feel you only see contradictions and you feel you reflect it? You enjoy obscurity cause you realise nothing makes sense? If you do then tell me where to find a gun?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
It's over. You're lying on a road. You see a crowd of people around you. You think you can get up but you feel tired. You're hurting a bit and your silence is being understood as death. It was not your fault -- it wasn't anyones, really. Of course, you could say, that the Gods could argue about pre-determination and free will, but at this moment all that would make no difference. You know there are some seconds or a few minutes and even though you see someone trying to call the ambulance and the police -- you feel like telling them to leave you alone. To clear the road. You don't like people stepping on your pool of blood or cars going over your spilled brains. Besides it's for the first time you can see the skies open. You can see that the night is approaching and you can see reason. You've stopped feeling alone; you've stopped hearing people around you; you no longer breathe; but you can see everything slowly, clearly with every possible visual definition. You no longer want to be understood. You have nothing to argue. You see everything in it's most natural way and you accept it for being so. You don't have to turn around and tell anyone what you see because not only will it not make sense but it will make them feel pointless -- and they don't know because they themselves will so. You feel a bit lifted and then you see light. It feels like the universe was one big womb and now you're being pulled out if it. You don't know where you're going but you do know you've left something behind. Something you knew would happen, but you never really thought about it. Something you didn't plan to. It was a night which had no morning to follow. Nothing to plan or to do. It was only an end to a start.

2008-08-16T15:58:00.001+05:30

So tell me what you thought? That's it.

2008-08-14T19:36:00.000+05:30

fUCK!

2008-08-10T15:15:00.002+05:30

People knock on doors. The corridors keep empty. There are two bees that hum in your head. You feel you're older than yesterday. Your voice is deeper. And when you write there's comfort. You associate to words, but only written ones. You listen to meaningful songs by cheap bands. And then you dip your head in a fish bowl -- see things clear -- and you feel better.
You feel some remote sense of happiness. You bought it in a black plastic bag along with rum and chips. You spend hours on your own -- listening to people talk around you. You've been alone before in a crowd. But now it doesn't matter -- if it rains or someone smiles.
You've stopped looking for answers. You carry your copy of Albert Camus's The Outsider (Penguin) You've reached a conclusion. A conclusion which starts from a point of a pencil on paper. When you stretched that point, it became a line. You see definitions. Obscure and clear. But you now see two points, the line between is awkward and you let the words slip into you.
Does it seem pointless to you? That you spend several corporate hours and fill web space just to fit your words in a oblivious sea. When there are two points. A start and a finish -- which your fair eye allows -- but the in between just pointless. Everything ends. Everything must. But you're happy, and you wish to be. Because there's is no larger truth. There's no room for it. And this point it doesn't fit into the frame. The frame that you have for the painting to fit. One could go on and on. But there is an end to a start. One only hopes there are cracks. The chips in the China glass. Like dreams, water and other such things to continue. Why are 'good evenings' so full of approval and 'good nights' so dismissive.

2008-08-06T14:46:00.002+05:30

Ladies and pricks, there comes a point in life, where one likes someone. The liking is not ordinary and it weakens the man. You can't tell the woman. Because she is no ordinary woman, and all the worry makes you no ordinary as well. Every single day, you write countless of mental notes, you document and build screenplays around a confrontation, till you sicken yourself. The woman looks no less than Rita Hayworth and you feel you look no worse than Woody Allen. It gives you some respite, and then you start all over again.
What you wish is no candlelight dinners, or what happens in movies just before the credits starts to roll. You desire acceptance. An acknowledgement. You don't wish to propose -- and you deny every thought of it -- you wish to elaborate on how beautiful they are. On how they matter. That despite the world, with its sea of people, they alone look different. That they should know that; that they deserve that exclusive happiness, and how unfitting it would look on others. That every thought of theirs gives you lines, that if you sell to Archies cards, they would never go out of style. Or so you think. That you don't deserve to be a J Alfred Prufrock and you wish that it could be just a poem than a running summary of your mistaken and miserable life.
You are an old romantic of an ancient forgotten world. It's not that others not look at you. But your vision is blurred, and your intestines have somehow climbed up your windpipe. You feel weak and could merge with your shadow.
Somewhere along the line, you hear an old distant aunt has died. You didn't even know her. You feel a collective cloud of despair looms above your head. And that it only rains on you, while others carry umbrellas to shield off the rain. You wish to tell, in some happier times, but all you look for is shelter from the storm.
Maybe you've been like this, maybe you don't remember. Maybe you feel death on your lips, or maybe it's missing sleep settled under eyes.

2008-08-04T15:50:00.003+05:30

If you looked at the last decade, my home, outside of the city, had a whole army of pets. When I was born we had two dobermans. One was called Mumu, and if I look at my childhood snaps, it seemed I was deeply attached to her (when she died, I remember it was the first time I was explained what that meant), the other was Tan. He was one crazy mutt. My grandfather then went travelling and got us birds. Then one day he got us a parrot that would mumble something, which my brother drove mad. The parrot would sometimes sit on our shoulder and peck our ear lobes, but other times would rip apart the upholstery in the drawing room. The parrot then went so mad that it started mimicking birds that would come around the house in the mornings. We then got two two cats, one was called Cat Stevens, the other Sheru. I don't know about Sheru, but Cat Stevens disappeared for about a year or so, then returned with a litter of kittens and a really ferocious introverted tabby. Then our domestic help one day went to the market and got back with him a few chicks that were in red, blue, yellow and green. He thought they were cute. In a week, the colour had been washed away, and we left them in our garden. When they were mighty cackling hens, they started making a mess and I don't know where they went (we also noticed how they would eat Tan's droppings which was a bit sickening). We then got a stray looking dog (that had the features of a Labrador) from a very decent place. The dog had an unusual habit of opening the washing machine door and pulling the clothes out and dirty them in the mud and then tearing them. We called him Trusty. Trusty also had another habit, he would like to stick his leg out and trip people. He had free access to all our shut doors, because he could open them really well. Sometime later, a friend of ma's took him to keep at her farm.
Now we don't have pets now.
But yesterday Surd Man and Kake got me fish. (I forgot to mention but we also had gold fish, for a very brief time.) But personally, I have never handled fish. I know they are delicate. But I have always been fascinated, and I always fancied the idea of watching them swim around a fish bowl, I was pretty happy. I call them Rolling and Tumbling (from a song).
And my writing is continuing.

2008-08-03T15:23:00.002+05:30

Despite the humidity in the evenings in Delhi, there's a cold despair that lurks in its shadow. The city has grown older. The street beggars are poisoned and are lying wasted on pavements. The traffic is loud, unclear and angry. There are angry dreams that covers the city's moist crimson sky like a shredded shawl. A group of people are sitting in corners but haven't exchanged a word. There are countless beds where love is being made, and promises are being burnt.
A murder is being committed in a street behind temple. A young naked girl has hung herself in a park with her hair neatly combed. The police are drinking and looking for balls to burn with electricity.
A prostitue is travelling in a rickshaw around a colony. An auto driver is being stabbed by three men. A Russian woman lights a smoke in a bar -- someone's eye begings twitch. A group of 14 year old girls disappear inside a smoky blue lit club. A young boy is puking in his car while his friends are glugging warm beer.
There's a hint of opium in the weed distributed underneath the flyover. The smack heads are tearing the metal bits of buses to get a fix.
Three dogs are feeding on garbage while cloumns of mosquitoes settle on a ditch. There are cafes where writers are writing novels and drinking overexpensive coffees, while an old excited gentleman is playing chess with his son. There are theatre halls where people go to hide in the darkness. There're bookshops where people hide from the sun and break the spine of books they never read.
There's a crooner at a restaurant whose singing to no one listening. There's lady who's been selling chicken tikkas for the last 30 years to feed a group of drunk teenagers who are as old as her children when she lost them.
There's political activism with suitcases and and broken promises. There's death in the house there was birth. There's emptiness, there's marriage and there are Sundays.

2008-07-31T16:30:00.004+05:30

Well, things get hectic. Pages have started rolling -- and I'm back to ol' Quark. Everything seems pretty decent for the time being. Sometimes a little boring. The net keeps slow -- an old print office problem. But gets you to do your basic work. I keep myself removed, from the usual shit and get over work.
My Old Man's got my laptop -- he needed to do some work -- has kept me away from writing at home. Soon I shall have it back.
An old friend of my Old Man dropped a tv series -- you see these are his different set of friends. Since he's been working in a bookstore for the last 20 years or so, he has a handful of people who have been coming in for years. Now that they know that he sits there, they walk in, find their book, sit next to him, drink coffee, listen to music and talk about everything under the sun.
These friends are mainly well to do people -- but when they first walked in, they come in as readers sniffing for a good collection. Some of them are senior beauracrats, senior journalists, writers, thinkers, students (JNU?), and sometimes riff-raffs -- but they all have to be welcomed by him.
If he likes you, he lets himself break the rules -- he smiles at you, would even talk to you and help you around. In return, and over years of knowing him, this lot offers him their music collection from their hard drives, rips movies for him, point's him out to some gizmos that they have bought and so on.
I don't venture there often. I used to when I worked for the rag earlier on and I would head back home. But ever since I shifted out of the rut, and got my own place in Def, my route's basically northward in the city.
So this tv series is pretty cool, it's called Californication. They haven't aired here in India. Perhaps because of its content (good sex on it). Basically it's the star of X-files; he's an been a bestselling writer who chills around. His ex girlfriend with which he has a little girl is a rocker is about to marry some dickweed. He wants to sort himself out and get back with her (meanwhile he sorts of fs around) while his literary agents tries to get him to write around. It's pretty cool, somewhat a bit better than Enterourage. If you can rip ot.

2008-07-26T18:12:00.003+05:30

It's really strange but I never got the whole deal of messaging. At one level it seems to be one of the greatest inventions -- you can send a message to someone, cutting the opportunity of the bullshit of talking to that person. On the other hand, it can be quite corny as well. You can say the sweetest darn thing you like without slurring, coughing and pausing on it.
I don't wish to talk about the language. That's a seperate issue. I keep the dictionary on (which sometimes is of no help) -- but I let that work my spellings.
But I seem to have made several fuck-ups along the way. Well not serious fuck ups like sending a wrong message to someone else (that worries me sometimes, especially when it's derragatory). But fuck ups in the sense of letting people know that I'm fond of them. Maybe I don't do it right. I sometimes send random messages. Poetical messages. Messages for random talk, than anything else, that suggest nothing really. Talk about some song, poet, book, quote -- and then I suffer over why I sent it. And they're not like your drunk messages.
But they aren't sent to random people. They are sometimes attempts to be in touch, through poetical talk to someone you think you can relate to in some proverbial darkness. I don't know if it makes sense to you.
Some people don't reply. Now don't think I'm some lunatic who gets after you, that's not the case. Some people just don't reply. You know every once in a while even I get one of these random messages. Not that they have to be poetical or anything, but merely random for sure. They often don't even say a hi. They're from someone you know. Someone who you have come to realise is fond of you, and sending you that is a sudden show or a glimpse of their desperation. I hope you get what I mean.
Do you ever get random messages from people; those one's that you dismiss by wondering why someone would send you some garbled words, at an odd hour? Or have you sent someone a random message? Hoped for a reply?
I think there are people who use messaging to keep it as objective as possible. There are months when I don't send send random messages, I keep it as objective as possible. Sometimes I throw an extra line; a line more than the needed.
But you know, I don't know if you would, but I make it a point that I reply to random messages I get. Messages that perhaps have no question, no point but are attempting. I suppose sometimes it's some comfort you can give to people. After all, I've always been fascinated with words. And words do give comfort. Think about it. This is really random.

2008-07-23T16:53:00.002+05:30

Maybe I'm an outsider. A misfit. Or maybe it's a strange dream. And maybe nothing is of any importance. You see there's either a Kurt Cobain way or there's a Virginia Woolf way, anything else is just a poster of Albert Camus with a cigarette.
There's differences and then are opinions. And there's you, a memory, more plastic than ever. More unreasonable and then I hardly know you, I hardly know myself. But wasn't this what he whispered was the fun bit?
There's a bit of everything. It's all really confused. There's absurdity. There can't be reason. We were all there (and we were laughing) when she was taken on a horseback facing us. Maybe all the pity on her face contorted into some beauty. But when the fire was burnt, when the witches were tied, the river was not up in flames she did let her complexion reflect it.
What trash. Utter crap. It never makes sense. But I should stop.

2008-07-14T15:22:00.002+05:30

And every once in a while there are headaches. Headaches and mistakes. Suddenly your life's different. You wake up at 11 am. Your head's not spinning cause somewhere down the line you know how to avoid hangovers. You're sleepy but you know it's the same bed that once thanked five undisturbed hours of sleep as a blessing.
You make your own tea. You've come to live with that. You open the balcony door and find the newspapers rolled up in a rubber band. You're fortunate that despite last evening's rain the papers aren't wet by the damp balcony door.
You spend the next couples of hours reading about how the Left has been trying to fuck with the Centre -- and now has fucked everyone up. That politics is somehow the most unclear gamble -- and we coexist with the deception that we're removed from it.
The morning it self is far removed from reason. Reason apart from the fact that the maid would be coming to clean the rooms soon. That there's work today and that there's work to be done. It's not too much but then it depends.
And you wonder if you're unhappy. You miss those eyes. You also miss that old world. You miss being mistreated and you can't hurl cuss words accompanied by a long rant. You miss that old lot. You miss the stairs. You miss those mornings, afternoons and sometimes even those nights.
And then you don't. You forget the eyes. Or you try to by what you read now and what you have to write. You look for them in others. Desperately seeking comfort. When they get too close, you look away. You always look away. You blame everyone for losing the shine in their eyes. As I persist to be in the shadows.

2008-07-06T15:07:00.003+05:30

And things change. It's been a week at the new place. And I'm back in the writing factory. At the moment, settling. Getting used to getting at 2 pm, leaving just a bit soon afterwards. I'll be working for the Sunday section of the tab, the section will be launched in a month's time.
Everything's pretty decent for the moment, apart from the fact that I have an irritating cold. Can't really write -- feel my head is stuck in a fish bowl. You shall follow soon.

2008-06-23T10:17:00.002+05:30

Oh it's terrible writing here. It's my last few days at the rut -- and frankly I don't know why I'm still coming. They seem to have accepted, and come to terms with my announcement. I think my lot will miss me. We've cribbed for so long, I suppose this had to happen. I'm just taking a couple of days to wind up.
The desk seems to be thinning with people. Some more people are threatening to exhibit their frustrations, and also find an exit.
I'm on the morning -- and that's perhaps the best shift to have been on. In a few days it wouldn't even matter. A year back I had got the offer -- then last March things changed drastically. And I suppose that has been one of the biggest determinants of leaving.
I don't blame them, in this terrible corporate world -- such shit hits the fan. I don't know who flung it in the first place. But does it matter. Everyone's now in their respective corners, and each to their own.
But there's some stillness in this room while I write. There's a picture -- that collects the remnants of obscurity and turns it into some lesson. You can call it life or something textbookishly similar.
I'M NOT THERE.

2008-06-18T10:24:00.002+05:30

The war is over. Both lost. But the world is not coming to an end. Too many corporates around. So I'm out, out and out. You see I was in the hedge taking a leak when the war broke out. When I finished my cigarette, it was all over.
I've been good. Back from the hills. Spent six quick days in perfect lonliness. Watched the angry clouds, broken rain, smoked eight smokes with a tight budget of a few matches and damp matchboxes.
You'd be surprised, I was, I read a paperback after a hectic decade (last was the The Godfather, I suppose). A Prisoner of Birth by Sir Jeffrey Archer, and I just thought I'll tell you that he writes like a movie. A decent read and I'd suggest you have a try if you're not too political. Apart from that JD Salinger's nine stories -- which are quirky, but then when I was the best judge for short stories.
Which reminds me. I need to get the book in place. A few evenings back, and I was at Amitav Ghosh's launch of Sea of Poppies. I was a bit lousy. But I head my way there. Vaz, Idiot, Mad-hur were there, besides them there was the old lit-lot, old faces, and besides that the rest of the world we see but don't meet.
I played safe, drank beer, quite amazing though as I got some fantastic help from Duck. Duck was probably bored, but he sorted some issues out. And then offered some literary advice. Ink Man was there. And things like always, on other people's alcohol of course, things get blorred, so they closed the bar and we were out to hit the Beer Bar.
Things are well. I miss you. You look away. So I'm going to hide.

2008-06-03T23:59:00.002+05:30

Life gets hectic dear brothers and careless sisters. So much happens -- that it gets a bit difficult to fill in all here. Besides it happens in such a flash, that to quibble more is a bit pointless.
What can I say? It's all over a baby blue. Well that's what it seems. Nothings confirmed, a lot of sweet tooth-fillings and promises. This comes after an episode day before of an hour long of quizzing and finally giving me shit stuff to rewrite by hand (aren't we in the effing 21st century, assholes?)
And when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. So I'll be leaving with a stolen necklace of broken promises, crushed ego, dead flowers, hopes and fears, sweet angels, dark angels, good assholes, bad assholes, tears and peers, and a hope that everything burns to dust. But this is the way I had planned it, the phantom of the opera stumbling on the doorstep of the green room.
And most of all it would be an escape.
But how would it matter -- more distant are we now.

2008-05-30T09:11:00.004+05:30

And suddenly there's hope, there's some light, and then the tubelight flickers and the lights are out. The scene is shot long, the hospital beds are filled with sufferers. Someone coughs, someone takes a mighty gulp of water, and there's a sense of brokenness as the clock tower strikes eleven.
You've been here long, you've been waiting, you've been looking for answers in toilets where some haggard souls have scribbled meaningful poems in 4 letters. You're not old, but you've begun to look older. Your stomach is an angry pit that starves, and when you throw something in it -- the soup pot declares mutiny. You don't care to shave, the man in the mirror looks away. You talk to yourself, you console the friend, you lose the friend. You take the thought of love and gulp it down your windpipe -- because you never felt it any. It's a sheet of white toilet paper waiting to be smudged.
You wished everyone, and sent them off to a kinder place, while you locked yourself in a room. You swam in a deep dark ocean of unconsciousness, with sharks, and a bucket of blood in your mouth.
And everything is meant to be this way. Then there will be a Holocaust.

2008-05-27T08:50:00.002+05:30

I've realised that if you drink substantial amount of beer, and table hop in the beer joint, you not only realise that you get to meet a whole lot of people. But you also have a pretty decent head spin -- and have too many dog eared thoughts flitting in and out of your metaphysical self. Also if you eat South Indian food despite knowing that you will be having the same stuff for breakfast morning -- you're not only overdoing the facts -- but you're also living in a world of oblivion.
Somehow this tiny intriguing detail fits as a chip glass to my glass memory of last evening. This also stems some progress to my recently recovering life in Def Col -- and since my khopcha is the subject of curiosity I get visited. Which is fine, everything is decent.
Tomorrow's the Red Herring book launch, which means I have to shack up in the afternoon -- as discussed with Ami, we have to have a post-party. It was good to meet the crew from the old news rag. Ami and Sush, two extremely delightful people to have as company when your moind's resting on a sandy beach of consciousness, while the ebb and flow of beer caresses the shore. Sush was in an old element of hers, and it was fabulous apart from the tiny detail that she sent messages all over the world including Niv (or so she told me) that I had the hots for this Wild Child. And sent another to The Emperor asking him if he knew me. naturally he didn't reply.
Before that I was chilling with Eye and her friends, she was around this side of town, because the hours have really stretched for her this week at the rut.
Meanwhile, Mr Dead Flowers has introduced me to this really killer band, Black Keys. Since I've been pretty much out of listening to some new music -- this band is mind effing. They've been touted to be as good White Stripes, semi-indie, and know how to bend the strings when it comes to blues. He says he will drop in when he's around -- which will be damn cool.
Besides, all good.

2008-05-25T06:44:00.003+05:30

The first night was decent, a bit obscure, but it was the first night at the new khopcha. And I seem to like the new setting, of course to set up requires a whole lot of work.
Kake, Randy as we now call him, and the Hobo boy, lit the housewarming flame. The trouble is it dragged on for a bit -- and I was mostly out, as my morning continues. But I seem to be up. Yesterday, an off, was basically gathering and dumping. Getting acquainted -- and making it live for a night.
Today it's mostly about what fits -- and where the posters go. Till now its fairly easy, and since I'm not a pansy, there are a few things that will really hassle me.
Apart from that there's relief -- relief of having a place where I can stack my books. I brought a small load of favourites, and its sitting pretty on the shelves. And, like I said, I need to bring a whole deal of stuff from the Big Surd's, when he gets back.
Sir Vaz is in town after from Scotland, and it's always good to have him around. He brings everyone together. It's just that with my terrible work shifts, I don't know how much I will get to chill with all.
But that's not hassling me much.
Having a place of my own will help me set a few things right to the agenda. Perhaps a book for instance. Catch up reading, but essentially get over the rubbish my mind's been for so long wandering about. I've said this before, but it takes time I suppose to rid the ghosts off.

2008-05-24T11:49:00.000+05:30

The clown says anyone can post comments now!

2008-05-22T14:59:00.002+05:30

"As Calcutta’s star begins to fade, with the capital of His Majesty’s India shifting to Delhi, Abani Chatterjee’s is on the rise. He is well on his way to becoming the country’s first silent-screen star. But just as he is about to find fame and adulation, absurd personal disaster—a recurrent phenomenon in the Chatterjee household—strikes, and Abani becomes a pariah in the world of the bioscope. In a city recently stripped of power and prestige, and in a family house that is in disrepair, Abani spins himself into a cocoon of solitude and denial, a talent he has inherited from both his parents.
In 1920, German director Fritz Lang comes calling, to make his ‘India film’ on the great eighteenth-century Orientalist Sir William Jones. When Abani is offered a role, he convinces Lang to make a bioscope on Pandit Ramlochan Sharma, Jones’s Sanskrit tutor, instead. Naturally, Abani plays the lead.
The result is The Pandit and the Englishman, a film that mirrors the vocabulary of Abani’s life, hinting at the dangers of pretence and turning away, the virtues of lying and self-deception, the deranging allure of fame and impossible affections.
Afterwards, Abani Chatterjee writes a long letter, in which he tells his story.
Witty, at times dark, and always entertaining, The Bioscope Man is that story."

Published by : Penguin Books India
Published : May 2008
Imprint : Penguin
Special Price : Rs 299.00
Cover Price : Rs 299.00
ISBN : 0143101749
ISBN13 : 9780143101741
Edition : Paperback
Format : B
Extent : 320 pp
Classification : Fiction

2008-05-22T10:58:00.002+05:30

Checked out two posters at I liked at the market. very decent. One's of ol' Morrison and the blues-acid rock band, and the other of none other than the Stones. As gritty as ever, it's an ol 70s snap, when the ol' boys were just boys. I've called home and mum's bringing my Exile on Main Street poster, along with the necessary linen and the general details to pull the place.
I'm sort of thrilled. I paid the money yesterday. Fat Man has left the place, and avoided all sort of dealings going through a broker -- who would have skimmed off more money. I paid a decent lump sum -- as you have to on the first go -- but things seem sorted out.
Once Big Surd's back from Chandi, I get a whole lot of my wardrobe back to the new place. You see he's been ill, after his job got the better out of him. And he just fled town without tellin anyone cause he was so sick (sick in both terms.) His office's pretty desperate to get people -- a lot have left, some are joining or have joined my rut -- so they tried to coax me as well. But it doesn't make sense.
If I'm out -- I'll make sure I'm out.
Meanwhile, Nicks seems to be making a lot of sense lately. I'm not following what she says though -- but when I at least nod my head, it comes out of some approval.
I sort of feel sleepy a lot these days, I've been, somewhat willingly, on the morning now for the 3rd week. You see I get the afternoon.
A crazy thing, but thought I'd let you know. And one more thing now that we're a bit sentimental about being frank -- you listen and get written well dear bloggie. The other day I picked up a notebook to fill sometime at the coffee shack, so I started penning this story. Hope it makes sense, cause at the moment I seem to be just filling the pages.
Okay I'll head to do some work...

2008-05-21T07:22:00.004+05:30

Everything is cool and gray. Just like a Leonard Cohen song while you sip tea. You're alone, and in some way you seem to like it. You're broken, like I was once. I seem to have pieced the puzzle and I know that it isn't this room, this life, why the watercolour weeps in the rain. In many ways I tried, in many ways I try, I'm chasing dragons, from one ring of smoke to another.
I know I don't fit in. But when was this about me. It's about you. Your dreams are glass. Your shadow is a curtain of doubt. And I know you will recover, like a morning after an evening storm. So sweet Persephone, take us to your underworld. It's one of these months, and then one of those. You will see the light, and I'll be back to live in my beer bottle.
My words smudged on the walls of a crumbling tower. And sweet memory and her petty calling -- what season could this be? I'm stuck in this very room with this one thought.
And I'm followed with another and then another. Remember the eyes I do not meet. Remember when we heard, or read, let us go there, when the evening spreads out against the sky.

2008-05-20T14:40:00.002+05:30

It's nice and cloudy, a bit chilly inside the ice box. That never changes. But outside is pleasant, and since the shift ends soon. I'll be out. I'm about to get my own place to stay, and I'm a bit thrilled about that. A place where I can stack my books up -- and all the relevant stuff. At the sake of not soundin like a woman, I'll throw in a couple of lamps, put posters and do it up.
When I started working -- which was some good 4 years back, my folks didn't plan for me to live outside home. But circumstances changed, when job shifted to the suburban mess. And even though I've been living in and out of friend's cupboards, this will make things really cool.
The sudden, unexpected sight of what looks like monsoon, in the wretched May just makes everything pretty and decent. Although the humidity rises as well. But what do I care -- ice box will ensure that one of these days I'll die of a pneumonia attack.
I'm at a stage when I'm reconcilliating -- standing at a stage, all alone. And just before the curtain falls, the music softens to die, and I've wrapped the plot -- I shall disappear. I'm looking forward for that.
I've become too common. Too plebeian. Too susceptible to petty emotions. I need my writing back, my music, my films, my dirty fantasy women -- so I can dissolve in a room and sink. I shall then commit a spiritual suicide of self -- to resurrect like a Methodist actor.
So I can no longer be recognised at all. So I can forget you.
I'm quite done, with my headaches, with your headaches and how we all still sit -- and share misery like cigarettes.
I hope one day you'll listen to Desolation Row. See the beauty of a lit Victorian lamp in a dark room -- and everything smoke. Oh bliss. I can't write sense. Which is why yesterday, I bought a pen and paper and I wrote. To know what it's like.
I'm only good when it comes to write meaningless shit like this. I'm done with this murder, I feel like I'm done with this all.
One of these days...and one of these seasons.

2008-05-19T14:39:00.002+05:30

I'm not really writing. I think about writing. Random things -- essential things. Things I like to talk myself to sleep. I have these arguments, conversations, poems, songs I take my head to rest. But when I sit to write them down, they seem to die perhaps in exhaustion of being played over and over in dreams.
What do I dream about? I dream about dragons, fairies, witches and dogs -- not in an Enid Blyton sort of way -- but exchanging them with people I'm with. They're good dreams, pointless dreams, but most time just a mere plea of confusion and anger.
What is it? I can't get myself to tell. I want you to read to go on and on. But I'll take my mystery to the grave, just as I know you will as well. You and I know that even we don't know what how glass walls keep our heads in order.
I've been messed. Messed as I picked the stray remnants of my mind that has broken too many nerves in order to understand a question I have an answer.
Over beer, smokes, special smokes, on dirty white walls, with a broken grey sky, I've looked. Looked, looked, looked.
And I saw nothing. In one room filled with ancient art, tired songs, rusty books, and a dripping tap -- I saw nothing.
In so many ways I try to tell, and I in so many ways I hate the thought of you. That everything is burnt

2008-05-07T07:07:00.001+05:30

Good morning fellow miserables.

2008-05-06T09:09:00.002+05:30

Last movie seen in a theatre:

The Simpsons (Can you beat that?)

What book are you reading:

Big Sleep: Raymond Chandler

Favourite board game:

Chess

Favourite magazine:

MAD

Favourite smells:

Oh I can't tell.

Favourite sound:

Dylan's harp

Worst feeling in the world:

Office

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up:

How many hours have I slept?

Favourite fast food place:

Italics, Flavours, 4S

Future child’s name:

Wait, son.

Finish this statement, “If I had a lot of money I’d…”

be thrilled."

Storms - Cool or Scary?

Cool

Favourite sports to watch:

Football

One nice thing about the person who sent this to you:

Aaki writes exceeding well. It's strange that I've known her for so long, and I've never met her.

(I'll stop here)

2008-05-05T00:21:00.003+05:30

I'm back home. Folks called me back. I'll stay another day, cause I got nothing to really head back to work in a hurry for. They put me on morning now. The last few days were tough -- sleep was bare. In a strange turn of events, I was reporting a bit. Which was good -- cause I got to meet a whole lot of fellas I hadn't met for a really long time. Besides seeing my face on tv was fun (not when I fucked up, but the whole 'hey, look at me, I'm on tv bit.'
But things caught up. Work was some 15 hours -- but I guess I managed. I'm sort of tired at the moment, it's around 1. But I'll keep up for a bit, it'll take a bit to get used to daylight, and well that's what I plan.
Watched a cool movie, that my dad who had been talkin a long time back found for me -Vanishing Point. It's totally 70s, but you if you can download or something. You might like it. It's about an ex-racer driving across the American desert, when the cops get after him. The movie ends in a strange way. It's sort of cool the way it does -- a little existentialist.
Lately Percious and I have been playing a little game. It's truth and tell. Basically you get to ask the other person a question that requires some honesty. We were getting good at it -- and it makes me realise that how many times in your life, you actually want to ask a person you know. But never get down to it cause you know the answer won't be straight. And then imagine if you once in a while ask and you gt a straight answer. The game's not about lying, it's odd but important questions, and you get a drive home answer.
So Precious learnt my little secret. But you know, starngely, it felt good tellin her. Originally, this blog was meant to be a space like that. But I sold it. You see I'm the guy who sold his soul to the devil, who was basically a joker playing on the highway. So it goes as Kurt Vonnegut says.

2008-04-30T19:58:00.002+05:30

I shouldn't be writing anything at this time to you. But it's ok. I don't have anything to write. Apart from the fact that I might be sending Dear Dr Filth in for a writing competition, under Flash fiction, for this Platform magazine event. If I can brew up something for the rest of the categories, I might as well do that.
I have to also come up with this piece I've been meaning to write on IPL for the old paper, but I need some time for that. Time before the clown starts to jump on my head at night. But I need to get that done soon.
So well I have to cover my very first book launch tomorrow for the rut. It's grumpy ol Sir Vidia I meet. And he's a rotten prick -- who I had an opportunity to meet when I started out. Luckily for me he was pissed at the organisers, and I got my story. Then another when his book, Magic Seeds, was launched, when he declared that he was done with writing and that was his last book.
And that's about all.
So this is something different I'll be up to, after being in for solitary for 2 weeks. Apart from that love's low. Same old jokers, same old beautiful-yet-unattainable dames and that old luck that frowns when you hope.

2008-04-28T04:25:00.002+05:30

I'm taking some extra time out of my night to write here. Last night was my off. It was quite uncool. It was also my parents anniversary. Which just went all wrong. But I don't really like to talk about it. I didn't know when to sleep. I was sluggish, I was tired but it all happened. And it happened ok.
Went on bought a Raymond Chandler today and the all favourite The Element of Style. I'm really looking forward to work with Philip Marlowe -- haven't read Chandler for ages. Besides Kake's done me the biggest end-of-April gift -- he's found me some crazy Chinese link that has all the My Name's Earl episodes. And since I've talked about how cool it is -- I won't waste your precious time on it.
The night was a bit bit pissin off to begin with, I came in feeling like Marlon Brando and ended up looking like Steve McQueen. My shift in charge is sweet, she let me be -- besides the whole crew went and got a brick of ice-cream which they've been lickin' up since it started. So I decided to put some in my black coffee to at least feel the rush before the first light of day hits the first step of the office building.
Why am I not leaving this rut? Well let me tell you that apart from working for the last 4 years in the same line -- I don't have options. I haven't advertised my displeasure to the market so there aren't many takers -- and I sort of need this time to be a bit more pissed -- but it's on its way. I'm still quite fresh here -- it's been a few months. So I want to make it last till I suffer a decent enough haemorrhage and then call it quits. By then the time will seem right. I think it's going to happen sooner than you expect it.
Precious' been looking low, yep that's her new name. And it's quite crazy but I seem to be person who feels that I should take up the world's entire role of feeling miserable. So when I see her like this I feel it's just wrong. You see when she's low I just seem to end up looking happier in order to cheer her up. It always goes like this, so the emotions between us oscillates in a matter of minutes.
She has a wonderful smile, I look like an idiot when I try to pull one on. She's the closest I got now here. And I'm not cribbing, but then why would you mind reading a good crib.
She says it's a phase and I shouldn't entertain it much, so I hope she wears it off soon -- cause I like the way it works then.
See that's what the cards read now -- I am meant to sit quiet like Cronus, father of Zeus. I hate to say it but they do make an awful lot of sense lately. And I seem to be making some progress with coming to peace with myself, or well for this moment yes, and so I know you got headaches and so do I.

2008-04-24T06:59:00.003+05:30

It's 7 today, and I'm not feeling any better if you ask. But if it weren't for Sir Carlsberg wisdom last evening, I would've been foul the entire night. Really this rut is just brilliant -- it's like a prison. You become institutionalised in days. More people join -- sloppy of course. They got to start from somewhere.
I'm waiting for Marquez to get over now. Really. The book's wonderful but it'll always a map period in my life where I felt like Florentino Ariza. My life almost ran parallel to the plot. It just that Marquez's years took about that long for me in days as I suffered and I fell. And now it's difficult but I think away.
Of course to even feel oppressed was comforting. It's like being swallowed in a roomful of rose petals -- and when you die, you at least mutter to yourself about how it at least smelt nice.
Sometimes you can tell -- sometimes you're not meant to. It's not your role, not your lines -- you're just an actor with someone else's script.
Anyway fuck that.
Watched the match last night: Barca Vs Man U while on the shift. The Red Herring was too rooting for Barca -- and even though the match sort of fell in no one's favour. It was good to jump around and feel like I have some life.
Back's been hurting, the paracetamol worked the mind and everything was wrapped. Now I need to head back for my fractured sleep.

2008-04-23T05:51:00.002+05:30

It's 6 in the morning, a completely unnecessary time for any blogger to write. So what am I doing here? Well for me -- it's actually sometime around late evening. I'm back on night shifts, and this time my company has decided to screw me over with two weeks of it. Not cute.
So what has life been? Life's been sleep through day, I brush some 4 times, counting all the times I wake up to have something to eat, and when I find myself back to bed, I lay visuals over my mental tv. Ensuring there are no jump shots, no incoherency, and the eternal wait for conscience to slip under the playground of oblivion. Sometimes I let a nice beer help.
Work's been crazier. It's a complete madhouse, we still lose people everyday. Some give up, some get fired. It's a real war, both sides seem to be losing. And I seem to be sitting right through it.
Shitty if you ask me. And NF still thinks I shouldn't leave this rut. Bah! But why shouldn't I? I get practically mothered here, day in day out. My role is nothing really significant here. I'm not particularly contributing anything editorial here -- I've proven my potential to so many just-left bosses that I'm honestly bored of doing it again. I know that sort of kills the whole opportunity thing and that you work for the larger good, but I guess right now just let it get stuck in your asshole of reasoning. Besides I learn that the only two people who actually fancy me in the rut is a loony woman who talks too much and has an attention problem and the in-house fag who makes them look like fairy's on screen.
Sad.
But I don't know the way out. I can't haggle for a decent post because I can never seem to do that. It's sort of a pride sort of a thing. But tv's like that, they don't really give a fuck about you. You just make friends more easily because you find 3 or 4 common thinking fellows who crib with you on the same lines. Then after a while you're a bit sick of them.
But that's aside the point.
Right now if it weren't for chocolates and black coffee, I'd be spinning and fuming, writing a wicked post that you would choose to ignore. But then when was the sentiment last changed. It's boring ok. Everything. Just look at Friends -- my theory of life just gets affirmed!
I need a way out. An end to misery and all her 7 sisters...

2008-04-19T14:19:00.005+05:30

I see blood in your eyes. Love in your washbasin. And hope choked in your chymney mind. The circus is still alive. The jokers are angry. The music just wrong. Wisdom smeared across your dreams. There's chaos and there's a hint of smoke. And there are hopeless and the cripples, your lovers, who were once poets, but now in gutters and drains. Swimming in shit, their minds knocked up with rat poison and nail polish.
There's beauty and there's darkness in eyeliners, but we fall to an empty void in your sock. But there's sweet death in your smile. There's fear in your sleep. You are nothing but an image of a princess that never found a place in the pack of cards. The poor Jack of Hearts is nothing now but a philosopher. He lost his mind the night he slept on your pillow.
They stayed up all night, smoking, drinking, wondering what's it going to be. Till morning came and took them away. The sweet angels of death dancing around the fire -- playing with another century's fashionable Lucifer. The fire burned so well, I slipped and it was over. But there was only mist, but no sign of rain. The animals were howling, the birds broken and sunshine lost in the hallway of your love.
This was it, this could be the only way. For a suicide or a religion a key swallowed in an anguish of hope. Destiny's nothing but a word. A promise that took you to bed with a dragon who lost its breath.
There's romance in roses, and ugliness in clothes. Perfume in murder. You know what I mean, we all felt it that day when the dogs fed on us. We were young once or so we would like you to believe. We write to tell you, but are so afraid to tell you. Oh how can we tell you. To tell you how beautiful you are. That are kisses would be bookmarked in books instead of flowers, if only they changed the law. But so did Shakespeare did dream -- and we still can't find him.
We are strangers killing each other. Feeding on each other to steal some moments to believe. But you look away, is it easier to see a dying man collapse or just a walk across a room of glass orgy.
What slips must be rich. What dips must be mere loss. For nothing really makes sense, nothing really can. I am here and you are there, and we are all together. Just like the song once went. In beauty or in disguise, nothing's true. I'm afraid not ever your tears. You will part and I will crash my knuckles in the sandpit of time looking for skin.
Save us, we are nothing but fools. We just want to believe you. We want this to end. End in bed, with flowers, and a river. River of thoughts, why is it so impossible?

2008-04-18T00:32:00.003+05:30

I wish for all of you to stand up and bear that stiff, sudden moment, on the fresh demise of my two day off. The days have gone in waking up late, drinking wine, eating red meat and reading. Besides attempting to catch up with parents and worrying who my shift super will be on Saturday morning (for me it'll be a Monday) -- and the gentleman who makes the roster would consider giving me an off a year or so later. Oh what a rut. I hope you're all here for the condolences.
It's such a pity I have nothing to write here, but the love I have for my work. And what more -- I don't know what would be a way out. Folks are suggesting to apply now and shift to the western continents. But what the rut has managed to do is to bring my self-confidence to an all time low.
My days are pleasantly bleak and I have nothing really to look forward for. Sleep has become my pinnacle of recreational activity -- which too is harbouring on a disorder.
I'm grumpy and incapable of humouring anyone. But if you listen to The Clash's I Fought The Law three times over, like I did, you may be granted relief.

2008-04-16T20:05:00.003+05:30

Young that I am perhaps. When I look back at my ol' school life and now. A few years have clearly passed. Considerable time to see me as a different person. Well that's not the point, the point is that an old school girlfriend called last night. Which is fine because I, in my whimsical style, have kept up with mostly all - and even though all of them hated me at that point -- seem to have got used to life and speak quite politely to me.
What robbed my attention perhaps was that she in complete randomness read out a few lines, which seemed nice to me. They were of course love letters that I had once written. But what surprised me was that when she first started I was unfamiliar by the intensity of the writing. I had always thought that I was incapable to write so well at that point. Then perhaps my writing now. My writing now which has been conditioned by time, professionalism, and hardcore subs breathing down my neck, highlighting my mistakes and making a mockery out of honest attempts.
There were too many 'loves' in the written of course. But more than that, some lines were really good. Lines that I would have liked to nick now and scatter them in writing. Perhaps they were written in absolute solitude, to a particular person, and written in a determination that creeped from my frustration and repression.
Those letters mapped an eventful and a heartbreaking time in my life. (And hey who says you don't have real bad days when you're young.)
But those were dark.
It's difficult to get my hands on them as they've become a reading material to my friend who wishes not to part with them. But I would one day like to read them again. The sentences were short, nicely written and extremely poetic.
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It's Eye's birthday, I hope you've wished her. I am at the moment waiting for Russled and Shwats to get done from work -- so we can head to her place to chill -- she's having a party and called some of us over. And having chill for an evening without worryin of a morning I haven't done for a bit. Then go home and sleep in my bed. Not worry about work and anything that remotely relates to the sheer assholeness of it.
I got Eye a Zippo. A slim one. Somehow I had always wanted to pick one up as a gift. It's black -- better than the pansy ones they had in the store. And she seemed quite thrilled -- which sort of felt good.
She's been somehow special to me. One of those people that you feel attached to. The good thing is in this royally effed up rut, is some people like that. In old paper, I had a few which I gathered in a period of 3 and a half years. Red Herring for instance, of course The Queen, Purple Monkey, Office Poet, Sleeping Sunday and a whole lot others. Who were of course a lot elder, but just made my day for being around and also ripping me apart at times.
And here I gathered them more quickly.

2008-04-15T07:02:00.002+05:30

Write. Write a song, a poem, a letter, a story, a short story, a long story. And it's difficult to lose your mind now. There's a dodgy person that sits inside your head and talks down to you. You think about it, sometimes argue about it, but most times you're an outsider. You can only witness the rise and fall in history books, wondering what's it going to be then, eh, droogies?
Nothing. Everything is simply, plainly and nicely obscure. It's like being a plumber in a whorehouse. Perhaps it's The Tower.

2008-04-14T19:40:00.002+05:30

Wicked. The channel's on Tata today. Got back, spotted a wrong headline, heard Eye's VO, and didn't have the heart to call back office again to correct another miss. Which doesn't go to show how incredible my love for the rut is. But what can I say --for the time being, I really don't see a change.
So 5.30 in the morning it is before I get a 2 day off, for being patient and not seeing home for a good month. Nothing is really right, nothing wants to be so. I miss basic life, basic time to meet some devotchkas, slurp fancy cocktails with em and the forever lookout.
But then that's that. Thinkin of makin some switches -- open some stitches. I don't think I'll be ever to tell. Maybe the truth's slipped. And if that's so, then it shows how pathetic it really is. Which says it isn't what the dream really said. And then like all smiles, and all smokes, the morning distress clears meaning for another labyrinth.

(if you're seeing some basic typos here, please message 8888 and you'll recieve something or the other to waste your time)

(no i'm really sorry, not been minding that, hope you get the point)

2008-04-12T06:32:00.003+05:30

Morning. Morning Earthlings, do you have to start life so effing early? Coffee, smokes, headspins and the grand old question: the meaning to life? It's a bit strange. I seem to have been pushed further into a corner. There's a chaos and riot, a dragon and a sparrow -- and I'm in this mess.
What's it going to be then, eh, dear droogies?
And what could have been better is spoiled by deception. Sweet cold deception. Which is still fine. Just leaves me wondering, what then. Haven't written, last read something was last Saturday.
And if I'm rolling out of this rut. Then what next?
The very law of probablity.

2008-04-08T10:22:00.002+05:30

I feel much better now with only disgust over my ridiculous emotions.
So the Surd Man has decided to gift me his Mythic Tarot -- he said he wasn't reading it. And since Ma, has been reading the same one's for a while -- she's really good --I can interpret them fairly. Although I need to get my hands on the Mythical Tarot book -- which sort of makes things clear with the perfect Greek annotations to it.
I'm just extremely tired. From the afternoon shift which was 1 pm to 12 am, I'm on the 5.30 am to 4.30 pm one. Which is cool because I get a fair portion of the evening that I had been craving for, but find me exhausted.
Me and Kake, whenever we can, play 100 points. Which sort of keeps our heads levelled. But besides that me and Big Surd took one night talking of writing a tv sitcom script that formulates on 5 friends that return to India after studying together. Circumstances get them all together.
The trick is that they aren't the average American sorts with fucked up accents like Apu in Simpsons. And the other thing, the mentality is sort of fresh. So it's alienates from the saas-bahu and their children sort of thinking.
It's comic, supposed to have good lines, and doesn't in any which way exhibit orthodox views. Now we just have to put it all together.
The trouble is that Big Surd's got the same job in another channel, and to find time in our effing miserable lives to figure that we're actually doing shit stuff is depressingly pissing off.
Which reminds that I watched Natural Born Killers last evening, and it pickled my brains. Stone, sort of kills it with the visual imagery of America that loves and loathes the art of violence and blood.
I don't know what pissed Tarantino off it -- but I thought it was effing cool.