Nothing

This empty moment also flits away as I’m still trying to fill it with desultory busyness. I watch the moments accumulate to form periods of ‘nothing’. My nebulous thoughts and erratic emotions collide with and morph into each other, and we soon find ourselves on a slippery slope of meaningless mulling – meaningless because I’m mulling over the empty moments that are passing by. I realize that over the years I have gathered growing piles of ‘nothing’ – of guilt & inertia, which keep fading into the bottomless pits of time. 

This is my addiction - my addiction to Nothing.

My addiction to an involuntary urge of pondering over everything and accomplishing nothing; to the discomfort of hunger past meal times and the accompanying nonchalance; to the perfect vision of a productive evening and the emerging void.

I fight it day in and day out - accept it and deny it, suppress it and feed it, resist it and give in to it.

It's always Nothing.

The Deluge

The mind falters as he struggles to keep pace with the deluge of information from his surroundings. In one sweep he attempts to comprehend the article on the laptop screen, conjure a reply to the message on the phone & absorb the songs on the playlist.

In that one second the cacophony seems exhausting simply by its presence, without any active attempt to draw attention to itself, and he wonders why he refuses to walk out of it. He narrows down the scope of his vision for a few minutes and it hits him -  the scarcity of minutes. The tunnel vision morphs back into the ever widening, blinding glare of information overload. He takes a moment to wallow in self-pity & longs for the simpler times.

We have definitely progressed backwards, away from us.

The Bridge across Time

I feel I've grown up too fast. Not because I feel old. [I don’t know how to describe “old” anymore. Time & Perception seem so amorphous & vague; I will never be able to refer to them with any certainty.] It is because my life has flashed by and I’m trapped in an illusion chasing after Time with a frantic desperation.

I’m standing at the edge of a rickety bridge connecting my Now to my Future and all I can see is a maddening medley of rediscovered wants & desires vanishing into a haze. There is no horizon and no pathway leading up to where I am standing or who I am today. I try to piece together what could have led me to be the person I am today and led the others to a different shade of humanity. But the harder I struggle with the answers, the faster the pieces crumble in my hands. The bridge appears more & more to be a pier leading into a whirlpool of shimmering mirages & it is unsettling that I’m alone in each of them. Any alteration to the lone figure dissolves them into gaping holes & the bridge turns into a chasm.

I suppose I would like to reach a point in my life where I don’t want things to change anymore, where I’m content with the firm ground beneath my feet and I no longer want to cross shaky bridges across the yawning gaps between my dreams &  my reality. That I would love to settle down in the quietude of that point & rest my anxiety.

But would I still be alive if there were no bridges to cross & no mirages to congeal? Would I love to exist?

The Night

She enters the room and settles down in one corner of her bed. The laptop flickers to life and her universe shrinks to the size of her laptop screen.

She starts rummaging the bottomless pit of information for the irrelevant, unproductive bits – the ones she finds interesting. She finds a page on a theory binding the characters of a movie studio, a list of books and a video on swords. She makes a mental note to share all of these. She moves on to the bits that make her real life more interesting for her – movies, books, plays, concerts – anything that charms her for a few hours. She shortlists a few of them and starts planning for these months ahead.

She finds a list of exotic destinations and picks out the ones that she will add to her bucket list. She selects one to plan her next trip and looks up flights & hotels. She appraises her bank balance and sobers up.

She moves on to YouTube and streams the videos for the first 5 songs that come to her head. She continues to stream songs in batches of 5 and stumbles upon one she hasn’t heard in years. The initial euphoria of rediscovering the song quickly gives way to a mild pang of loss. How did she lose the song in the first place? She wants to carry her music with her, all of it, everywhere.

The hours pass by as the night weaves a spell around her – of a life which awkwardly and abruptly blends in with the one she lives by day. It paints her universe in myriad colours that stand out against the inky blackness in which the world sleeps around her. She finds the songs have more soul and the books more wisdom. And so she clings on to the stillness of the night and tries to stretch the inky blackness a little wider.

But it slips out of her hands to give way to the dull bustle of the morning.

The myriad colours dissolve in the sunlight and the spell wears off.

It hurts.
I don't know what it is or where it came from.

There is no regret, no longing, no fear and no love.
And yet, it really hurts.

It haunts me in rushes and goes away.
It doesn't go away for long,
just long enough for me to hide it
- to pretend it's not there.

But it is.

Write or Not

“Why don’t you write any more?”

“I guess I’m just lazy”

“But you write well…”

Is that why I should write?

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

“Why don’t you put all your articles online?”

“I don’t like discussing what I write about.”

“You don’t have to justify what you write.”

“That’s why I don’t put them online.”

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

Why should I write?

I have been writing since I was seven. Or at least I have been composing prose in my head with the intent of putting it on paper at some point. Sometimes I managed to turn it into a word document and post it online. At times I just put it on a paper and threw it away. Most of the times I just left those words swirling in my head.

I’ve heard women never stop thinking. I think about the same things over and over again, from different angles and perspectives; build a train of thoughts, one linked to the other until I am thinking about something completely unrelated. And after a while I’m back to where I started. The questions remain unanswered and the dilemmas unresolved. But the words keep swirling in my head.

I think that is why I write - to stop those words from churning in my head.

That is why I should write.

Remind me...

I wonder why it is so easy to lose yourself in the doldrums of everyday life when you've spent so many years trying to put a label on who you are.

Somehow, we never take advice we definitely should; we stick our heads out to defend ourselves exactly when we shouldn't; and always forget the person we can be, right when we need to be that person the most.

I guess that's why it's good to be home. Because it all comes back to you as you shift your gaze from the uber-cool collage of yore to the fridge magnets you gifted your parents, to the picture frame your best friend gave you.

And you know... Who you are, who you can be and who you want to be...

The Living Playhouse

We attach a certain hipness to some things we love, develop an inexplicable fondness for most and harbour a silly longing for their permanence in our life. And in a moment, it all turns to hurt when you try to move away from any of them.

It is warm, strange and sad, all at the same time, that a song fills you with an aching memory, a crowded room fills you with an empty hollowness and the sights & sounds of the past slowly attach themselves to every piece of your changing life. Your world turns into a living playhouse of forgotten images, fading emotions and distant sounds.

And as much as you want to walk out of it at that moment, you just can’t...

And it makes me wonder...

I still shy away from calling myself a woman; partly because it’s an embarrassment to womanhood and partly because I’m still struggling to come to terms with the phenomenon that is womanhood.

I’ve known so many girls - girls I loved, some that I hated and a few I never noticed. And as I fish out a handful of memories from the past, I find them giggling with abandon, running wildly against the wind, screaming at the top of their voices and desperately pretending to be important.

And yet somehow mysteriously, subtly and yet suddenly, the giggling has transformed into an assuring smile, the run has given way to a gait, the screams have turned into silent discontentment and the pretensions have become overwhelming real. The deeper you scratch the surface, the more you realize they’re all pretty much the same – unconstrained, naive, compassionate, protective and petrified.

And the girls you loved, hated or never noticed have become women you always looked up to.

Stumbled

I stumble, tumble and lose my way;

I don’t find my way back - just another way out.

I run behind, besides and ahead of people;

I rarely win, but always complete the race, at my own pace.

I learn, mislearn and unlearn things;

I don’t know it all, but just enough to get by.

I get loved, hated and ignored;

I play the wrong notes, but learn to touch the right chord.

I obey, disregard, disobey;

I make my own decisions, I make my own mistakes.

I’m happy, hungry and complacent;

Am I arrogant or simply ignorant?

Reprendre le Travail

I post this to blow away all the dust my blog’s gathered in the past few months which now seem like a hazy eternity (aren’t eternities supposed to be hazy anyway :-/).

I had sincerely hoped the previous post wouldn’t be the first post that the few new visitors read on my blog, especially considering how irrelevant and meaningless it must’ve seemed to them. But my barbaric schedule walked all over my hopes and my indolence made sure they didn’t raise their voice any time soon. Now that my barbaric schedule’s on a vacation, I hope I breathe back some life into my blog...

Ya Bitch!

“I wish that life was like it is in the movies,
´cause the hero always gets his way,
No matter how hard it gets on that dark lonely road,
At the end he´s got a smile on his face...”

I can be pretty tactless...unreasonably candid, at times to the point of being rude. Yeah, I know it’s not a good thing. I’m old enough to “know” when to keep my mouth shut; but then I’m often tempted to do the exact opposite. More often than not, simply because it makes things easier. It makes the other person see things exactly the way you want him to; you don’t have to keep spinning a pack of lies; and it takes just a fraction of the effort it would’ve taken to put things otherwise.

I see it as normal to get annoyed & angry once in a while, to hate somebody for some time (I don’t hold grudges for life. I’m not a baby, or a dork!). I’m not a saint. I can’t lovingly embrace the entire human race & I have my own pet peeves. Unfortunately I, all too often, get caught in a position where I just can’t explain to the other person the “why” of my displeasure without coming across as a complete bitch. Over the years I’ve almost stopped caring about what people think. But then I am a social being and for all I say or all I do, I won’t pretend it doesn’t matter at all. At least it matters to the extent that people think I’m as evil as I actually am, and not any more so. Especially when I’m willing to accept and admit that I am evil.

And then I come across people who are unrealistically good. Their string of sacrifices and their heart-rending thoughtfulness betrays no limits; their frustratingly illogical ideas of right & wrong never cease to amaze; and somewhere it starts bordering on & eventually translating into pretence. Sometimes, it is downright pretence right from the start. For sake of political correctness (if there’s any left) I won’t go into the details of the pretence. But it is astounding to watch the perennial saint turn sinner; it is exasperating, if anything, to hear their irrational explanations for playing the perennial saint; and it is tragic when you don’t figure in the fan club. Needless to say their fan club spans 90% of the face of the earth. Thank you, remaining 10%!!

My harebrained idea of diplomacy is withholding information. Sadly that’s as far as I can go. And so, I’m often left wondering how sick people think I am :-? And I wonder why others can’t see through the absurdity of the entire situation... and finally I wonder, is it me or is it them...

The heat, the heat!

I say it’s easy to write bullshit. Needless to say, it’s absolutely unnecessary to prove it and hence I shall gladly go ahead and do so for next few lines :D

It touched 47 degrees today I heard. Yeah, it might be 47 degrees in other corners of the earth, but unfortunately for you I’m caught in one of ‘those’ corners.

For the past few hours, I’ve been subjecting my already erratic brain to stress it has not endured in quite some time. Now the heat and the unrelenting “stress” has set the molecules (or is it atoms :-? ) of my brain into a state I would like to refer to as plasma. I love saying my brain is melting, but today it has gone a step further and done me proud. In fact if you look closely you might observe a magnetic field developing around my head.
I wonder if Thing (“Thing” is an adorable li’l, violent, spastic robotic arm that keeps coming after me) needs the nuts & bolts to hold it together any longer. I think the joints might just fuse together if left in the sun; it must be the evil AC working against the joints!

Ahhhh, the AC...

After the sun roasts all human functions into a state of uncontrollable malfunction, the AC slowly entices the brain into a near-permanent (fairly recurrent) state of inactivity. The sudden (unbelievable) relief penetrates your skin, seeps through your bones and steadily makes it way towards the entity I mentioned is now in the plasma state. Time comes to a standstill, as does work (huh?!) Life goes on peacefully for the next few hours (hours did you say!) as I shrug off a few irksome attempts to disturb the tranquillity around me.

Then, a sudden tornado starts taking shape around me and before I know it, the calm’s replaced by a blast of heat and my brain cells, already deep in their slumber, start jerking spasmodically. It works like a nuclear reaction and soon all my brain cells start flying about... oh wait! I think I hear a thud... awww, another cell hit my skull walls... these cells I tell you... tsk tsk tsk...

And coming back to the point...

There was none to begin with! Hah, gotcha!


>> Those who think scientific terms & theories have been misused above can go take a hike... maybe in the afternoon sun tomorrow, that’ll teach you a lesson!!

And those of you thinking it wasn’t 47 degrees today... Why are you even reading my blog?!

Jeena ECE ka naam hai...

I have to say adversity really kicks up my creativity quite unlike anything else. Right when I should “not” be spending time pondering over my verses, not surprisingly, that is exactly what I end up doing.
And so, whenever my brain starts to melt and tries to wriggles its way out through the pores of my skull; or when my eyes feel like dried lemons, my inner creative voice carelessly takes me the precipice of sanity and then follows an SMS enthusiastically forwarded to ‘fellow tronixians’ (God bless free messaging!) and a few elite others.

I don’t recall all the messages I’ve come up with; but, as I end four excruciating years of writing exams for utterly, bitterly delightful subjects and lovable teachers (tormentors?), it only seems fitting that I put up the few that I remember.

V Semester: Before Control Systems, the 4th paper in a row after 3 miserable others...


Glug, glug...
.
.
.
Glug
.
.
Choke, sputter...



gulp, gulp, gulppp...


Drowning in the ocean of mind-numbing drudgery and brutal torture; poor, agonised soul bids farewell to this world. May her soul rest in peace. Amen.

VI Semester: Before a midterm

Clink!

Proposing a toast to all fellow ECEians who are embarking on an eventful journey spanning the 3 most uncertain days of their lives!

Hail Mogambo!!

VII Semester: The night before submitting a ludicrous Networking assignment with mindboggling pie-charts & diagrams that made my eyes feel like ‘dried lemons’ although I’d completed barely half of it...

Shaheed XYZ...

Networking ki assignment copy karte karte insaniyat ki sarhad par 21 october ko apne praan tyaag diye...

Jai ECE!

VIII Semester: Another midterm, that barely felt like one ;)

The woods are lovely, dark & deep,
And all I ever want to do is sleep,
Lord, no more grades do I want to reap,
Then why am I drowning in exams neck-deep?!

Needless to say, I rose from the ashes after every demise...
Yup, I’m a tough one, just like everyone else! :p

These last days...

Another leaf spirals to the ground; another ray fades into the sunset... Another drop into a pool of uncertainty and another war with obscurity begins as I count my last few steps towards it. Something hits me and gets lost in a blizzard of occasions and celebrations. I feel the voices turning into echoes and my life as it has been shrinking into a memory. I like the blizzard around me, it keeps me occupied. It’s the calm after the blizzard I don’t want to wake up in.

I walk towards the horizon; I stare at the setting sun. It hurts my eyes. I turn away my face and stop for a moment. And then I open my arms and start running towards the fading sun...
I want to see the sun rise again.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do”

John Locke keeps saying that throughout L.O.S.T. And with such fire in his eyes, it’d give anybody the creeps. It made me think he was psychotic! I guess I’d forgotten what it is like...

I don’t need to be told what I ‘can’ do. I can do without the usual morale-boosting, adrenaline-pumping “you can do it” routine, doesn’t penetrate the surface much. But that’s what you get more often than not (and it’s a good thing! It means people care for you).
Try telling me what I can’t do... that I’m incompetent, I’m not good enough; it sets off a wild fire through my nerves. In that one moment I’m no different from John Locke. I might not make it, but I’ll die trying.

I don’t want to launch a feminist diatribe on how girls grow up discriminated against or how we lose our identities amidst all the morbid generalisations, but if there’s anything that keeps women going it must be the seething frenzy set ablaze with every ‘ladki hai...’ and the laughter that follows the bitter mockery.

I maintain that I’m not a feminist. I’m an individualist. And laugh as much as you want at that, but imagine for yourself what it must have taken for an individualist to change her stance from almost- anti-feminist individualism to dangerously-bordering-on-feminism individualism...

Lost & Found

There are a lot of things I’m fond of; many that I’m crazy about. But somewhere on my journey from childhood to being a twenty-something( :-!) these things that put idiotic grins on my face have faded out of memory, stumbling out of my happiness-basket one after the other.

I used to be crazy about reading books. I started reading in kindergarten. I remember I used to hold my library books like trophies (it was after all the first time in my life I got to choose anything). Later in school, I started gobbling books. I’d scout for fat books, so I could wander about in my parallel universe longer and I’d mourn after every single book got over.
And then I stopped reading books for the same reason I loved them so much. I’d drop everything and anything to get back to them.

I used to be crazy about computer/video games. Some of my happiest memories are those of me and my brother playing for hours together. The Prince of Persia gave way to Tetris, and then a bunch of others till it finally stopped at NFS. And then they evaporated out of my life. It’s been quite some time since I played any of those games. But I remember how the joystick would be my ticket out of the real world.

I still have that little diary of poems and snippets I spent years collecting. I’d actually thought I’d get my collection printed some day. I still read the diary. It still makes me smile. And I still wonder why I never continued. I can’t even remember when that journey hit a roadblock.

Of all the things that got washed away with time, I never imagined sports would be one of them. My idiotic grin grows in direct proportion to my proximity to the sports field. And when I’m on it, you’d probably think I’m on morphine. Incredibly, I gave up sports for some 2 years. And a part of me died without my realising it. Fortunately for me, it came back from the dead after 2 years and my frayed memories turned into a new Technicolor movie.

I’ve decided I’m going to find those missing pieces of me some day. Maybe they will show me the way back to my lost parallel universe – my childhood Utopia.

I’m working!

I wanted to call this “A 101 ways to pretend to be working”, but I realized (and quickly enough) how disproportionately ambitious the task was. It was like aiming to land on the moon after having invented the bicycle :D I know how silly it is to even have come up with the idea in the first place, but then I’ve already touched upon the astounding effects of boredom previously.

During my training, I found that when staring at a PC starts to lose its appeal (not that it had any), watching nameless people move back & forth suddenly becomes remarkably interesting. In fact, I watched these nameless-people-who-look-all-the-same-in-formals so much; I could identify them by their footsteps and even their hair. A bunch of people I’d take special interest in tracking were the people I was answerable to. They’d bring out the best of my ‘I’m-very-busy-doing-something’ acting abilities.

[Having said that, I solemnly hope there are no potential employers reading this. If they are – “Sir/Ma’am, I’m a very sincere, industrious individual, please do consult my superiors & associates in case of any reservations. And do not hassle yourself by reading any further 0:-) ”]

For example, jotting down or typing completely random stuff provided an excellent cover for my joblessness. I could glance at the screen from time to time (or all the time, if I was typing) and it looked like I was taking notes. I took to doodling and sketching absurd geometrical forms like I was a professional. It was akin to making an intense effort to sketch a beautiful woman and ending up with a stick figure instead. But in the unbelievably dreary environs of the place I could call an AC prison, anything & everything except work revealed entirely new, exciting dimensions.

I stared at the tube lights wondering if there was a glass cover beneath their holder and marvelled at how pretty they looked. If I wasn’t already finding the sight of the monitor revolting, simply staring at it blankly did the trick at times (that’s how most of the people looked when they were working). I scrolled up and down the PDFs, edited the Word documents, and dug up the entire hard disk in search of adventure.

I wouldn’t say that the exploration of the PC was entirely futile. I did discover an incredibly amateur game of Snooker, which would take a minimum of 15 seconds to start and shut down. Nevertheless, the programmer was considerate enough to have included this feature called “Boss” where the ESC key would minimise the game to a nameless tab in the event that your boss interrupted your game. Except that the game was to be played using the mouse.

I tortured the MS Office assistants to no end (Animate... Animate... Animate...), every single one of them, till I actually started feeling like a cold-blooded despot. It reminded me of “Naach, Basanti, Naach!” Except that these poor fellas didn’t have much of a choice and seemed quite willing to oblige. I must admit I really miss them on my Vista system; they were, after all, the only companions I had in the solitude of my deserted semi-cubicle.

Back!! ...without the Vengeance!!

No, I’m not jumping on to any bandwagon this time; I’m just stepping out of my slumber as usual... I started blogging couple of years back and while I ‘did’ continue to write all this while, I just did not put in the effort to post all the stuff online. And although I managed to “pour my heart” into a lot of pieces of paper, a lot of the pieces of my liquefied heart have been misplaced. I just have one piece remaining, the one about my training. So I’ll just start with that one and churn out more with time...
And yes, I am not promising any interesting reads here. It’s just convenient to announce the link so I don’t have to keep repeating it to people (now I wonder why I chose such an ornate name for my blog :-? ). Do drop in comments. That would be really nice. And if you don’t, maybe I’ll start badgering you and “that” may not be so nice :D

The clock is ticking
faster than I could ever want;
My footsteps are heavy,
And everything around me seems to taunt…

I know this poem is childish
but so is my dilemma,
It’s early in the morning & my mind screams –
“Why 8 o’ clock classes mammaaahhhh…?!”

Once in class
I wait for the projector to flicker to life,
So I can slip into oblivion,
And tune out the unrelenting tripe;

As though by magic, the clock drops dead
Mocking at me in gleeful disdain;
And beg & coax & plead as I may
to bring it back to life
It’s all in vain, all in vain…

Somehow the endless torture
screeches to an unseeming halt,
But my mind is so numb, I simply wonder –
“Is all this really my fault?!”

Slowly & gradually,
I come back into being,
As we scuttle back to our nests
to do what we’re best at doing,
Mocking back at Time & doing nothing…

>>> I tried hard to get the lines indented "appropriately", but then the damn editor doesn't have any poetic sense, so just bear with ze fragmented rhyming (and the inanity as well:D )