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

That's not what I meant at all, that's not it at all!

New Blog

You & I, we've been through this

It’s the way of this world, my friend
Making sense of what’s absurd
On a scale of one to ten
Life is just a four-letter word

You can try to give me reasons
But in the end it’s all a joke
There’s no such thing as a free lunch
Although all you eat is smoke

Yesterday when it was raining
The water came up to your eyes
And sanity is an insane thing
Truth is lie in a disguise

And I’m standing in the river
My cold feet shrunk beneath my soul
I’ve got nothing left to give her
This is where I lose control

Frogs - Alice in Chains

Shitty video, but the song is beyond awesome!

What does friend mean to you?
A word so wrongfully abused
Are you like me, confused
All included but you
Alone...

The sounds of silence often soothe
Shapes and colors shift with mood
Pupils widen and change their hue
Rapid brown avoid clear blue

Why's it have to be this way
Be this way

Flowers watched through wide brown eyes bloom
A child sings an unclaimed tune
Innocence spins cold cocoon
Grow to see the pain too soon

Why's it have to be this way
Be this way

"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

Brother - Alice in Chains

Here comes the ghost again

As far as he could remember, the ghosts had been around. There were three of them. One of them was always with him and looked just like him; the second was that of a monkey which perpetually clung on to his back. He could never actually see it but it kept reminding him of its presence through irritating noises and occasional scratches. The third showed no signs of its presence at all. The only way he knew about the third ghost was through the conversation between the first two. It was painfully elusive, yet the other two talked of it with reverence. Sometimes he thinks there was just one ghost, and his mental condition had tweaked his perception to impart it some sort of ghost-splitting quality which manifested three different forms of the same ghost. That theory would impart the elusive quality to all the ghosts, and nothing would remain with him, so he tried not to think that way.
Sometimes he wondered about the ghost that he was most familiar with. He realized that it had superhuman qualities when he tried to get rid of it but couldn’t. It kept running along with him and simultaneously staring him in the face even as he kept running past it. Although it was the one he knew the best, but he still didn’t really comprehend its nature, because it hardly existed at all. Its nature kept changing continuously. The fingernails of the two other ghosts kept tearing holes into his skin from both ends, and that’s when he realized that he didn’t know anything about any of them after all. This epiphany corroborated the one ghost theory in a way, although it was not meant to.
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
The ghosts had a messenger that ran very fast. He once tried running with the messenger. When he got reasonably close, the ghost by his side slowed down and fell behind him for the first time. The ghost is hard to comprehend because it’s not tangible, yet it is the only certainty, the only ultimate truth, if there ever was one.
The messenger was even more baffling in its behavior. It had the totally bizarre power of altering his perception. When he finally got close enough and almost caught up with the messenger, the three ghosts started to look more and more like one. The rules of the kingdom clearly stated that overtaking the messenger was not allowed under normal circumstances. But he wanted to find out what existed beyond the borders of this kingdom, and he could only do that by crossing the border before the messenger did. The plan was to cross the border disguised as the messenger in order to get past the guardians of the adjoining kingdom.
But there are two paths you can go by, and in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
He had heard about a cave between the mountains that formed the border between the two kingdoms. People had told him that it was very narrow and the messenger couldn’t pass through it. It was just big enough for a small child like him to pass through. Nobody on this side of the border has actually seen the cave, although some intrepid explorers who had ventured into the adjoining kingdom claimed to have found the cave’s entrance on the other side. It was hard to verify their claims, because the border is only selectively permeable, and the other kingdom denies entrance to skeptics. It’s easy to dismiss that which we haven’t seen as second cousin to Harvey the rabbit, but then can’t we say the same thing about the ghosts? Well of course we can, that is why they’re called ghosts anyway.
Epilogue
I guess the story of humanity is just a never-ending search for the cave – an endeavor to overtake the messenger and unite the ghosts.
The future of the past is eating away the past of the future.
The ghost of time present and the ghost of time future are both children of the ghost of time past. The roles may change depending on perception though.

Divine comedy

"Um, Death!"
"Yea?"
"Urgent call for you, man just got shot."
"Dude, I had just settled in the tub! The bubbles had only begun to hit the right spots, if you know what I mean."
"First of all, that wasn't very subtle. Everybody knew what you meant. Second of all, dude I'm the frikkin Alpha-Omega shit! I know what everybody means all the time, and I know a fuckload of other stuff too."
"All right all right your cockiness, what's the assignment?"
"Check it out for yourself."

(Cut to the hospital scene)

"Man I can't believe she shot me! Who would've fuckin thought that?"
"Dude you're dying and you still can't stop making references to Reservoir Dogs! Cut it out man!"
"Sorry dude, but it's just that my life was brilliant, my love was pure. I saw an angel..."
"Shut up, just shut up okay! And James Blunt?? Is that sissy the best you could think of on your death bed?"
"I'm dying okay, I can finally admit I really like that sissy. I also like Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, 911, 98 Degrees, Code Red, and all other hunky boy bands from the 90s."
"Whoa! Dude, you're lucky you're dying, otherwise we would've mocked you to death anyway."
"I know."
"Man you're such a loser!"
"Hey, I'm in pain!"
"Alright Edward Norton, just take it easy."
"You're the only one who understands me."
"I know, and boy am I sorry about that! Anyway, your girl is here, I'll leave you two alone for a while."
(Friend leaves)
"Hi baby"
"Hey Leslie"
"The doctor said..."
"I know, I'm sorry but this is it."
"This can't be happening. God can't be so cruel."
"Well, apparently he can. Anyway, there's something I needed to tell you"
"What is it?"
"Well, I never really loved you Leslie"
"What?"
"Yea, I don't even know what that word means. You were just hot and randy, and so...."
"I can't believe this Tom! Why would you tell me this in your dying moments?"
"Umm..I thought I should confess my sins on my deathbed. It was always about the sex Leslie."
(girl breaks down into a horrible cacophonous wail)

(Cut to heaven)
"Wow!"
"I know, that's really clever of him to insult her on his deathbed. There's nothing much she can do about it. He's dying anyway."
"Hey, know what'd be fun?"
"No dude, I'm Death, I only know what'd be tragic or gross or gory or.."
"Yea yea I get the drift. Anyway, what if we let this guy live?"
"What? How? He's been shot in the gut four times! Who would believe that?"
"Dude they believe the Rambo movies!"
"Good point. So what if we let him live?"
"Don't you see man? His friends are gonna disown him, his girl is gonna dump him, he's gonna wish for death but he ain't gonna get it. Oooh I feel so deliciously malevolent!"
"Dude you're pure evil! And to think the humans fear your poor helpless pet dog Satan!"
"I told you they'd believe anything. Anyway, you go back to your bubble bath. I'll stay and see how this plays out."
"Righty-O"

(Hospital)
"Mr. Tucker"
"Yes doctor?"
"Good news, you're gonna make it"
"What the fuck?"

(Song playing on radio stations all over the world)
"O mommy, o daddy, I am a big ol' baddy!"

There is hope aka Aila ek aur poem!

Into the depths of briny deeps
Into the blue cap overhead
A gentle whisper softly seeps
Shaking the souls of the undead

And no one speaks to break the lull
The half-burnt whisper turns to ash
And buried in the cold rubble
It marks the embers with a rash

In echoes of a distant time
Is veiled the final semblance
It rises from the past sublime
To clear the smoke of indifference

And tiny hope does lay afloat

Ca Ira, the heavens resound
We hide inside the snowy coat
Upon a cloud of eiderdown

Honey - and the meaning of life

She was just a maid. He had big beautiful eyes. She had seen him grow up into a handsome young prince. The queen couldn’t care less about her children. When he was a child, she used to feed him, bathe him, everything. He didn’t really know his mother. She was all he cared about.

Honey. She called him Honey.

Although she was considerably older, this feeling was as alien to her as it was to him. Love? She couldn’t be sure. What did she know about love? She was not meant to. He would someday be married off to a princess of some other state, someone of equal stature. She could never have him. But it was okay, she never had a choice. She was used to reconciling herself to her mundane life.

He thought he had gone crazy. To fall in love with a maid is the kind of thing for which the word ‘preposterous’ was invented. He never thought this would happen to him, but it did. He was the prince, the heir apparent, the cynosure of all eyes and all that jazz. Eyes. She had beautiful tiny eyes. He could marry any princess of any state across the country. Then why did he have to fall in love with such a lowly, insignificant life form? That’s what his mother told him about their ‘kind’. Oh Lord, thine ways are mysterious, and also bloody sick.

She was there when the dacoits attacked. She died defending him.
He was married to the princess of the neighboring state. She poisoned him on his wedding night and became the queen.

Epilogue

It all started with a desperate attempt at profundity on my part when I fired a simple query at the Madhabhushi (it doesn’t sound too good this way. Also, it’s a terrible comeback, I agree). What exactly is the motivation of worker bees? It may be noted that I had watched (re-watched, actually) Fight Club the previous day and the whole we are the middle children of history commentary had yet again managed to rattle the beehive in my head. Also, there’s a haiku in the movie that goes

Worker bees can leave
Even drones fly away
The queen is their slave

I spent the entire next day reading up on honeybees. Worker bees fascinated me the most. Their lives are kind of a throwback to the Sisyphus theme of doing meaningless tasks without any apparent motivation. And then I looked around me, at all the worker bees sitting in their tiny cells, working hard at nothing of any particular significance to anyone. As Chandler Bing puts it,

“If I don’t input those numbers….nothing much would happen.”

It’s an old analogy. We’re all worker bees, working without any sense of purpose is what we’re meant to do. Of course, actual worker bees accomplish a much more critical task than most of us – that of sustaining the hive. Sure, queen bee lays the eggs, and is critical for the survival of the species in a much more real sense. But worker bees do everything else. But then again, motivation is not so much about the meaningfulness of their tasks as that of their lives as a whole. Or maybe there really is no difference. Queens will lay eggs, drones will fuck around (literally), and worker bees will do everything else, including feeding the larvae, cleaning and guarding the beehive, collecting nectar, optimizing the hive temperature, attending to the queen et al. At first glance, workers may come across as the most important class among honeybees. The reason I thought of the worker bees in particular was that they don’t do the one thing that seems to be the only true purpose of the lives of most, if not all living beings – reproduction. Well, at least not normally. What probably helps their case is that they’re not genetically engineered to think about the meaningfulness of their tasks, or the lack of it. I don’t think the bees need to dwell on the question of hope or denial dude. That’s obviously a very specie-ist remark, and should the bees gain perspective – or maybe voting privileges – in the near future, I may be forced to withdraw it. Unfortunately, humans already have those things, and hence their case is more complex. So as much as Camus insists that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, it’s not as simple as that. It’s probably the best to not ever let the question enter your mind, but once it has, how do you get rid of it? Skepticism is not a choice, it is an affliction. You can go on pretending that you believe in everything.
But in the end, you can only pretend. (aila poem!)

I personally believe that you can only hope for something better if you keep convincing yourself that the current situation sucks. And I’m pretty damn good that way. I tend to run away from perfect scenarios so that I can at least look forward to those. If there’s no reason to be depressed, life just seems to stand still. I guess I’m actually an optimist after all, albeit in a very sick, twisted way.

Anyway, for those you who know me, this is all old hat, and I’m as bored of myself as you are.

Mayank Mandava Ullu ka Pattha

Disclaimer: Pardon the outrage. I really wanted the title to be subtler, sarcastic, clever and all. Something like “To Mandu, with Love”, despite overflowing with gay undercurrents, first came to mind. Then there were “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Mandava” and “In the name of The Mandu”. But I felt that the intensity of a title like “In-Yo-Fuckin-Face” and the seething umbrage oozing from every pore of something like “Eat This, Bitch!”, was what I needed to convey my feelings accurately enough. Hence this.

Now the issue. No, actually let me start with this.

Humse mat puchho kaise mandir toota sapno ka
Gairon ki baat nahi hai, ye kissa hai apno ka
Koi dushman thes lagaye to meet jiya bharmaye
Manmeet jo ghaav lagaye, usse kaun mitaaye?

And now the issue. As is his wont, He who has emerged from the All-American Beaver recently made another of his sweeping generalizations.

“Dude all Hindi song lyrics suck! There have been no good abstract lyrics in any Hindi song ever!”

Note the careful use of words like ‘all’ and ‘ever’. Also, note that He of the American Beaver has heard fewer Hindi songs than the number of times he has reinstalled Linux. Fuck the resolution to never use clichés! I can’t restrain myself from saying this: Surely you’re joking Mr. Mandava. Also, are you fucking insane?

The argument, I guess, is essentially that there are no Hindi songs that can be interpreted in multiple ways – y’know, that thing about rock lyrics. Abstract is obviously a much overused term that can be used to justify the inanity of stuff like

This machine will, will not communicate these thoughts
And the strain I am under
Be a world child form a circle before we all go under
And fade out again, and fade out again

Of course, it helps if the songwriter can spew horseshit at will.
Pioneered by The Beatles and immortalized by bands like The Doors, Nirvana, Radiohead and to a lesser extent, Led Zeppelin, the USP of abstract lyrics seems to be that exclamation from some retarded fans, “So that’s what the song is about! Du-hu-ude! That’s like totally the bee’s knees!”

Not that I don’t love these bands. Far from that, mate! I am the Walrus, Street Spirit (Fade out), Rape Me, The End, Stairway to Heaven – all of these are absolutely goosebumpy stuff to me. But then again not because I get the lyrics, or that I believe that only if you get the lyrics can you truly appreciate the song. The thing is, with the probable exception of Radiohead and the ‘poet’ Jim Morrison, none of these guys took their own lyrics seriously when they wrote meaningless stuff. Definitely not John Lennon, who wrote I am the Walrus to defy interpretation – he learnt that some high school teacher was analyzing The Beatles lyrics in English class, and he wanted to throw the teacher off course with elementary penguins, crabalocker fishwives and pornographic priestesses. Not Kurt Cobain either – there is no way you can get the true meaning of a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido. But that’s okay; the guy who wrote it didn’t know what it was about anyway.

"Teen Spirit" is widely interpreted to be a teen revolution anthem, an interpretation reinforced by the song's music video. When discussing the song in Michael Azerrad's biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Cobain revealed that he felt a duty "to describe what I felt about my surroundings and my generation and people my age." The book Teen Spirit: The Stories Behind Every Nirvana Song describes "Teen Spirit" as "a typically murky Cobain exploration of meaning and meaninglessness." Azerrad plays upon the juxtaposition of Cobain's contradictory lyrics (such as "It's fun to lose and to pretend") and states "the point that emerges isn't just the conflict of two opposing ideas, but the confusion and anger that the conflict produces in the narrator—he's angry that he's confused." Azerrad's conclusion is that the song is "alternately a sarcastic reaction to the idea of actually having a revolution, yet it also embraces the idea."
Cobain has said, "The entire song is made up of contradictory ideas [. . .] It's just making fun of the thought of having a revolution. But it's a nice thought." Drummer Dave Grohl has stated he does not believe the song has any message, and said, "Just seeing Kurt write the lyrics to a song five minutes before he first sings them, you just kind of find it a little bit hard to believe that the song has a lot to say about something. You need syllables to fill up this space or you need something that rhymes."

There’s nothing hallowed about the meaning of the stuff. It’s nonsense, and thoroughly enjoyable nonsense at that, but you don’t actually like the lyrics. You like the fact that you don’t need to like the lyrics.
My favorite rock artists lyrics wise? Oh well…Of course, Floyd and The Who can be occasionally dismissed as being too direct, not subtle enough and stuff. Which is why Dylan is the ultimate poet – all along the watchtower and beyond.

Anyway, what we’re talking about is good Hindi lyrics – even better if they’re abstract too. Hmm…let me start off with one of my absolute favorites.

Saahilo pe behne wale kabhi suna to hoga kahin,
Kaagazon ki kashtiyon ka kahin kinara hota nahi
O majhi re, majhi re
Koi sahara majhdaare mein mile to, apna sahara hai

The meaning is not in-your-face obvious, but you can sense there is a meaning. Very subtle, but definitely there.

Oh, another one just came to mind, albeit a lot more direct than the last one.

Kori chunariya aatma mori, mail hai mayajaal
Wo duniya mere babul ka ghar, ye duniya sasuraal
Haan jaake babul se najrein milaun kaise
Ghar jaun kaise
Laaga chunari mein daag chhupaun kaise

Gulzar is probably the king of truly abstract stuff – the Real Thing.

Dhundha karenge tumhe saahilo pe hum
Ret pe ye pairon ke mohre na chhodna
Saara din lete lete sochega samundar
Aate jaate logo se puchhega samundar
Sahib rukiye zara
Arre dekhi kisi ne aati hui lehron pe jaati hui ladki?

Oh and just in case one is thinking of committing suicide, allow me to recommend a little piece of advice from Kaifi Azmi,

ud ja ud ja pyaase bhanvare, ras na milega kaaron mein
kaagaz ke phul jahaan khilte hain, baith na un gulzaaron mein
naadan tamanna reti men, ummeed ki kashti kheti hai
ik haath se deti hai duniyaa, sau haathon se leti hai
ye khel hai kab se jaari
bichhade sabhee, bichhade sabhi baari baari

Of course, one may be instantly cheered out of one’s depression when one hears the line ek haath se deti hai duniya, sau haathon se leti hai. But then that is one’s own prerogative, isn’t it?
As for innuendo-laden desi counterparts to The Lemon Song, well, isn’t that what all of Mithun Da’s songs are about. But there’s some classy stuff too.

Ang ang mein jalti hain dard ki chingariyan
Masle phoolon ki mehek mein titliyon ki kyaariyan
Raat bhar bechari mehndi pisti hai pairon tale
Kya karun, kaise kahun, raat kab kaise dhale

More Gulzar

Aye Udi Udi Udi
Aye Khwaaboon Ki Pudi
Aye Ang Rang Khili
Aye Saari Raat Jagi
Halki Aye Halki Kal Raat Jo Shabnam Giri
Arre Akhiyaan Vakhiyaan Bhar Gayi Kal To Haath Par Dab Dab Giri

And of course, the truly immortal

Naa to chakkua ki dhaar, na daraanti na kataar
Aisa kaate ki daant ka nisaan chhod de
Ye katai to koi bhi kisaan chhod de
Ho billo, jaalim ja jod de makaan jod de

I could go on forever. But I guess this suffices for now. I had to do this because TV chided me with a mild “Behen ke lund tumne uss behen ke lund ko kuchh jawab diya ki nahi?”

Signing off with another personal favorite.

In bhool bhulaiya galiyon mein apna bhi koi ghar hoga,
Ambar pe khulegi khidki ya khidki pe khula ambar hoga
Asmaani rang ki aankho mein basne ka bahana dhundte hain dhundte hain
Aab-o-daana dhundte hain ek aashiyana dhundte hain

Jab tare zameen par chalte hain, aakaash zameen ho jata hai
Uss raat nahi phir ghar jata wo chaand yahin so jata hai
Pal bhar ke liye in aankhon mein hum ek zamana dhundte hain, dhundte hain
Aab-o-daana dhundte hain ek aashiyana dhundte hain

Flying Trapeze OR Iambic Pentameter

I like the way you swing
It makes me sweat
I’m cold and hot and I
Can’t breathe alright

The rope it breaks you fall
Into the net
You crash and break your head
I lose my sight

The Sequel

Woke up to find the plan gone wrong
The best-laid plans go oft awry
You thought of it as your swan-song
But you forgot
That there are two paths you can go by

Morning. That’s the word for the time of the day when you wake up. Although in this part of the world, that’s all it is – a word. He isn’t even sure if it is indeed morning or just some unearthly hour he has woken up at. The feeling is eerie, surreal, all that jazz, but not in a good way. He hasn’t seen bright sunshine for more than six months now. It’s obvious to him that time is a lie.

Why is it so cold? He tries to get out of bed and look outside but his legs seem to have gone numb. He can still feel the cold in his feet though. He can’t remember the time he went to sleep. His last distinct memory is of his friends playing the game of ‘telephone’ with two tin cans and a piece of wire. Not really his friends, actually just two people whom he can’t exactly recall right now, but whatever he can recall, it’s not very pleasant. Why were they playing the stupid game? They were right next to each other and could hear each other anyway. But he’s not worried about it, just curious. There are other things to be worried about. Like why is it so cold?

It’s been cold since that night. It just won’t end. No one is around. No one has been around for a long time. He tries to speak but he has this weird taste in his mouth and he’s afraid it will escape into the air if he opens his mouth. It’s not a good taste, but it’s the only ‘feeling’ he has right now, and he doesn’t want to lose it. Well, other than the cold of course. Also, there is no one around to speak to, so that’s there.

The ice, the loneliness. There’s so much of both.

It’s sad. It seems sad. He can’t remember much, but it’s still sad.
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depressive disorder that occurs in the winter when daylight hours are short. It is believed that the body's production of melatonin, which is produced at higher levels in the dark, plays a major part in the onset of SAD and that many sufferers respond well to bright light therapy, also known as phototherapy.
When life was around, it made him sad.

He was promised hell would be hot and fiery. What was that someone told him once? Oh yea, promises are meant to be broken. He knew it already obviously, just like he knew that cleanliness is next to godliness, love is blind, everything happens for a reason, life is a lemon (also a play, unfair, and many other things), shining sun is conducive to hay production and should be utilized for the same while it is still around, too many cooks spoil the broth, a friend with weed is a friend indeed (need, weed, what’s the difference?), a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Well, the difference he discovered was that this one applied to God too. The least he could expect from the giver of morals was to stick to a promise. That of a burning hell.

Why can’t he find his feet? Oh there they are, but why are they yellow and misshapen? Must be the cold, he thinks. And what’s wrong with his hands? He can’t feel his fingers. He tries hard to see. He has no fingers, just hands shaped like flaps. Flap, flap, he flaps them against his sides.
They seem like wings but he can’t fly.

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas, isn’t that what he asked for? Well, at least one part of one promise was kept.

Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man you’ve been a naughty boy; you let your face grow long

Epilogue
“Hey!”
“Wha…what?”
“What happened? Were you daydreaming again?”
“Uh…no I was just trying to work out the approach to this project. I guess I got a little lost. I’m sorry.”
He heaves a sigh, not exactly of relief, but maybe just because the dream was so overwhelming. He still can’t get over it, and he is still sure that he really had died and was reborn as a penguin somewhere in the Antarctic seas. It’s clear to him that time is a lie, that within each moment is another moment.
His manager is sitting next to him and talking over the phone to another manager, who is sitting in front of him. He can hear them both, and he is pretty sure, so can they. He is surrounded by people, but there’s no one around, and it has been this way for a long time.

Woke up to find the world turned blue
The stinging rain has made it blind
But that is not what bothers you
You just miss
Laying supine in the sunshine

Dear Mr. Adams,

I want to thank you. There are plenty of reasons. I'm going to list them below in a concise editorial style so that you may be able to gather the key takeaways with minimal effort and without expending too much of your mental faculty or bandwidth. Oh by the way, only recently I discovered that 'bandwidth' is the corporate buzzword for 'time'. It was by far the biggest shock of my corporate experience, because I don't remember reading it in any of the many Dilbert books I have wasted my bandwidth on.

Let me introduce myself before getting into all the comically misleading remarks regarding your influence on my life, wherein I'll try to disguise my sycophancy as sarcasm, or maybe its the other way round. I'm an IIT graduate. Guess I'll give you some time to let that sink in. I know you're particularly fond of our species. I passed out of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in June 2007 and am currently employed with.....well that's not important. What that actually means is that the job isn't good enough for an IITian, going by your portrayal of our kind (you know what I mean, don't you? I'm not exactly the heating-teacups-through-mental-radiations kind). I started reading your comic strip sometime during my preparation for the IIT entrance exam. At that time it was on and off, mostly during the times when I flipped through newspapers pretending to be interested in the business section. It was however during my second or third year in IIT that I really got into it. I borrowed The Dilbert Principle from somebody and went through it like a diamond-edged blade goes through a cobweb.That is to say that I got through it really fast but got badly entangled in the process, and never really got through it.

• I'd like to thank you for inhibiting my ability to quote appropriate and socially acceptable analogies.

It wasn't really the right time to get introduced to the absurdities of the corporate world, and it would be safe to say that you played a major role in screwing up my career by making me aware of the fact that everyone is an idiot.

• I'd like to thank you for introducing me, alongwith an entire generation, to the stupidity of the world at a time when I actually should have been looking forward to the excitement of professional life.

I mean, by my final year in college I was already aware of all the corporate buzzwords which ideally I should have known by experience, the way you did. While we still share the occasional smug smile whenever we hear terms like 'team player', 'key takeaways', 'quality control' etc., it's hardly the same as being bombarded with those unexpectedly.

But then, a lot of my friends had read the book, and apparently weren't so drastically affected by it. Probably because I then made the mistake of also reading The Dilbert Future. Yes, I found the last chapter to be heavily self-indulgent, much like most of the other readers, but somehow it attracted me. So it would also be safe to say that you are the only one responsible for making me the self-indulgent prick that I have become now.

• I'd like to thank you for making me believe that my opinion actually matters and that one day people might pay to read it.

But my transition wasn't complete till I read God's Debris. I could never have imagined that such an ignorant piece of fiction could drive me towards serious philosophy. Well, I read it at the same time as I was doing a course on 'Philosophical problems'. In the middle of all the skeptic Western thought about the origins of Life, the Universe and Everything (at this moment, I'd also like to thank the 'other' Mr. Adams on the other side of the Atlantic), came your heavily Eastern-thought-influenced commentary on essentially the same stuff. The thing that continues to surprise me is that despite me being a science student and all, and a serious one at that (this would be a good time to remind you that I'm an IIT graduate), the first time I actually became genuinely interested in the general theory of relativity was after reading God's Debris. It was the only reason I picked up Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality, or Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, and finally, Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.

Of course, certain other things followed logically. For one, I became an atheist. This is actually more surprising than you would imagine, because I'm a Hindu, and you have borrowed heavily from a certain Indian philosophical school called Advaita Vedanta in writing God's Debris. It would seem that your crusade against religion primarily stems from, and is targeted at, Semitic or Abrahamic religions. However, much as Eastern philosophy may fascinate you, it's not all that different. Yes, it gives you more space and freedom to believe what you want. There are even certain schools within Hinduism that do not believe in a supernatural being. The Carvaka school for instance, propounds materialism of the kind that even the Western world may find extreme.

But in the end, it all still boils down to believing in something, whether it is a Being or a scripture, just for the heck of it. I've read the Bhagvad Gita in parts and some portions are definitely soothing and uplifting. But then again, there's this whole theme of surrender-yourself-to-me-or-you-are-doomed-for-eternity that turns me off. Yes, it's there in Hinduism too. It is less forced and a lot more subtle. The chief difference is in the concept of eternal damnation. While semitic religions condemn a person to burn in hell for his/her sins, Hinduism broadly thinks of life itself as the eternal damnation. Only the all-powerful force - the Gita refers to it as Lord Krishna - can liberate you from the endless cycle of birth and death. Also, the whole concept of liberating others from ignorance is absent at the core of Indian philosophy and religion. Well, at least it used to be.

Anyway, I agree with a lot of stuff in God's Debris. But it starts getting murky with your denial of evolution. Oh yea, I forgot, I can't derive your beliefes from your fiction. Those are not really your opinions, right? That was a good one. Then towards the later chapters, I think around Fighting God, it starts more and more to feel like a religious scripture. And expectedly, I start getting turned off. I guess the first few chapters influenced me so much that by the middle of the book I had already become convinced about the pointlessness of existence.

• I'd like to thank you for making me an unmotivated loser who is totally convinced that nothing really matters, but still has to go around pretending as if it does, lest his parents feel guilty for his shortcomings.

Coming back from pseudo-philosphical musings to the normal, humorously absurd professional experiences, I am currently reading a book called Something Happened by Joseph Heller (better known 'that Catch-22 guy'). Have you read it? In case you haven't, I strongly suggest that you do. The style is more or less the same as Catch-22, and the content is essentially the same as most Dilbert books. But its not humourous anymore. It's kind of scary.

• I'd like to thank you for permanently ruining my taste in books. I would have been reading The Alchemist and other such motivational stuff if it wasn't for you.

Best Regards,

Avichal Chaturvedi

P.S. You may notice the writing style whereby I apparently curse myself for being a loser and generally indulge in self-pity, while actually I try to show off my wit and limited knowledge of pseudo-intellectual topics like religion and philosophy (not to mention general relativity). Even this postscript is part of that same strategy. Yup, Thanks for this too.

Virtual Insanity

"Hey, I'm in pain."
"You wanna see pain, swing by First Methodists Tuesday night. See the guys with testicular cancer. That's pain."

He switches off the movie, or puts the book down, or maybe just opens his eyes. At this point, all that matters is the thought and not the medium that brought it to him. He thinks, thinks, thinks, is he really in pain? Or is he just too self-obsessed to notice anything else but his own problems, which can be described as insignificant at best and downright stupid at better than best. Does he have testicular cancer? Does he even know a loved one who has cancer? Has he ever lost a limb? Does he have any idea what it means to be physically inadequate?

But fuck all that. Does everyone have to live the exact same life to feel genuine pain?

"Well, I mean isn't everything autobiographical? We all see the world through our own tiny keyhole, right? I mean, I always think of Thomas Wolfe, you know, if you've ever seen that little one page note to the reader in the front of Look Homeward, Angel. You know what I'm talking about? Anyway, he says that we are the sum of the moments of our lives, and that anyone who sits down to write, is gonna use the clay of their own lives. You can't avoid that.

So when I look at my own life, you know, I have to admit, right....that I've....I've never been around a bunch of guns, or violence. You know, not really. No political intrigue....or helicopter crash, right? But my life, from my own point of view, has been full of drama, right?

And so, I thought that if I could write a book that...that could capture what it's like to really meet somebody. I mean the most exciting thing that has happened to me, is to really meet somebody, you know, make that connection. And if I could....make that valuable, you know, to capture that, that would be the attempt or....

Did I answer your question?"

He destroys the TV screen (what's a better word for "destroying" a TV screen? He can't remember. Lately, he's not been so good at remembering stuff, the one thing he used to be proud of. It would be safe to say he's a total loser now. Not safe for him, though. If he can't be his own, he'd feel better dead). Or maybe he just opens his eyes again.

"There's no chance for us, it's all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us
Who wants to live forever?"

He burns the speakers and bangs his head against the music player. Or maybe, much to the chagrine of the readers, he just opens his fucking eyes again.

"When I grow up I want to be a little boy"

He bites into the book and tears off the pages with his teeth. He really does do it this time. He chews and feels his saliva making the paper into a lump. He gets a weird feeling, as if he is chewing the insides of his own mouth. The soft, red insides of his cheeks. He is reluctant to admit that he likes the feeling. Then another weird feeling, deja vu. He has felt this before. How weird is it exactly to have a weird feeling about a weird feeling?

Was he dreaming in his sleep or sleeping in his dream? Not that it matters. He wants to be Schroedinger's cat, make life and death a question of probabilistic equations.
He killed himself yesterday, but he is still awake.

He is standing in the shadows, his soul is hanging loose
He wants to shake it off, what he has long abused

It's okay, he just had a bad day....