Life

Needless small talk be damned!

लायी हयात आए क़ज़ा ले चली चले

ना अपनी खुशी आए ना अपनी खुशी चले



बेहतर तो है यही कि ना दुनिया से दिल लगे

पर क्या करें जो काम ना बे-दिल्लगी चले



हो उम्र-ए-खिज्र भी तो कहेंगे बा-वक़्त-ए-मर्ग

हम क्या रहे यहाँ अभी आए अभी चले



दुनिया ने किसका राह-ए-फ़ना में दिया है साथ

तुम भी चले चलो यूंही जब तक चली चले



नाज़ान ना हो खिरद पे जो होना है वो ही हो

दानिश तेरी ना कुछ मेरी दानिशवरी चले



कम होंगे इस बिसात पे हम जैसे बद-किमार

जो चाल हम चले वो निहायत बुरी चले



जाते हवा-ऐ-शौक़ में हैं इस चमन से 'ज़ौक'

अपनी बला से बाद-ए-सबा अब कहीं चले



Meaning:

Life brought me so I arrived, and I will go when death takes me
Neither my arrival nor my departure was of my own will

It's better to not get charmed by the world
But what can be done if there's no other way

Even if I get an eternal life,
on my deathbed I will rue the fact that I didn't get enough time to live

The world accompanies none on the path to destruction
You too keep moving till life goes on

Be not proud of your intellect, whatever has to happen will happen
Neither your nor my intelligence will work

There'd be few gamblers as bad as me in this game
Each and every move of mine was extremely imprudent

I leave this garden with a pining for a whiff of fresh air
The zephyr that may flow hereafter be damned

For madmen only

"...Taken all in all, it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a day brightened by happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days on which the question whether the time has not come to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have a fatal accident while shaving should not be considered without agitation or anxiety, quietly and matter-of-factly."
- Harry Haller in Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

"It seems to me that of all my books, Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other, and frequently it is actually the affirmative and enthusiastic readers, rather than those who rejected the book, who have reacted to it oddly. Partly, but only partly, this may occur so frequently by reason of the fact that this book, written when I was fifty years old and dealing, as it does, with the problems of that age, often fell into the hands of very young readers."
- Author's note to the paperback edition of Steppenwolf

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
- Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

"7 am on a Tuesday, in August ...
Next week I'll turn 28...I'm still young, it'll be me...
Off the wall I scrape... you...I gotta wait...
Show me Your Irate
To cause this wake, Its my fate.
They.....They...Never going to fuck
with me again... My own clean slate...
Don't fuck with me again...I just want to go straight
through you....
Irate"
- Frogs by Alice in Chains

Value-add (on-demand)

An advertisement I heard today on the radio went something like this:
"Wanna drop witty one-liners and become the life of a party? Subscribe to Vodafone Tashan Pack...." (followed by some specific service details that I don't remember particularly well because at this point my brain cells were about to perform their "goodbye cruel world" routine, lemming-style! Obviously I had to concentrate on pacifiying them. It was a very intimate moment, and I had to summon all my charm to convince them that I still loved them and that everything would be okay. I'm surely going to hell for duping my own brain cells.)

Anyway, so I guess the you-can-buy-happiness brand of consumerism, better understood (by pop-culture nutcases like me) as the 'IKEA nesting instinct', is scaling new heights - actually entering altogether new dimensions - even as I type. The phenomenon is beginning to transcend the boundary between objective and subjective effortlessly, although I'm not sure I want to be around to see the results. You can simply buy being funny now. I'll emphasize that again in all caps just to drive home what is to me a very weird transition, even by the standards of kaliyug!

WIT IS ON SALE NOW!
Jerry Seinfield and Chandler Bing can go to hell.
(A side thought: This completely convinces me that there really is no afterlife, because if there was, the ghosts of Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Groucho Marx, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Ambrose Bierce, Douglas Adams, et al would have haunted the shit out of the Vodafone guys!)

So apparently, humour is not the bitch of those elitist fuckers anymore who think they're oh-so-ingenious. It's just another on-demand value-add to your personality.

Go to sleep, dear Cerebrum. All's well with the world.

In the rain

Do you think I’m not,
What I once used to be?
Can you sing me a song
And alleviate me?

Or maybe, buy me a shell that is thicker than this

Bid me goodbye and I’ll go amiss

Can’t stand to wait for the finish

I’ll do fine sitting in the rain

Can you give me a hand

With all this burden of lies?

Can you pass me the wand

That has me hypnotized?

I will run through the sky, like a tickled up bee

Is that a stupid analogy?

Can't remember last time I felt funny

Since you've been missing in the rain

Are you reasonably hurt?
Or should I try even more?
Try to see through the dirt
There's a castle of yore

We can build back this way, we can make it alright
You'll build the bridge, I can be dynamite
All this trouble to kill the boredom inside
It's easier sipping up the pain

Pigs on the Wing - Pink Floyd (both parts)

Easy now

The divine sigh

Chafing the skin

Exposing every sin

Didn’t mean to get so high

No choices anymore

No time for you or time for me

No pain, no joy, no epiphany

No hinges on this door

A different plane

Lines converge and lives diverge

Now cremate this final urge

Not easy being insane

This languid ride

Uneasy truths, unnerving stakes

Pummeled pride, broken brakes

Perched lonely on a tide

Dissolving light

Expanded eyes, dilated dreams

Loosely held by opening seams

Liberated, but not quite

Disjointed faith

Uncomfortable paragons

Immoral kings and shoestring pawns

Can't use much but wraith