Tuesday, November 30, 2010

'Ol Yesterday

Hello to the saboteur of my panoramic lifestyle.
[we shake hands. I am reminded of “at laeva lacrimas muttoni absterget amica]

I work in a haggard corporation that finds hard to produce an involving film in its mission to educate employees about the way they do business. Somebody should get paid to keep an attention span through such an abortion – a polished and sterile narrator, sterile suits in sterile environs sermonizing, and such affectation that can only hint at drug abuse (sans the fluidity and originality of thought). Between the bouts of sleep and the bouts of diahorrea, I barely manage to grasp the revelation that we are a customer-centric organization with a zealous streak to succeed and drive the market - that was new, I didn’t realize that earlier, I feel enraptured.

Seized by these flashing images of snow fields inside my head – not vast endless snow fields, but in patches, like after a light round of snowing, where the charred ground and mottled grass feature in equal proportions with the carpet of snow. That is the look most villages in upper Garhwal region would bear these days, when the locals desert their villages for more comfortable ones at lower altitudes (they live in a duality), and first snows of the season have fallen. Even their Gods descend down with them. Much of the snow – or old snow – I’ve come across has been of this variety. Yes, I do not get to play in it or eat it or make out with some girl wearing furs, but it gives you boundless reign of adventure. Thankfully, it’s no sea.

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Monday, November 29, 2010

Our son is researching on outer space

All the sincere thoughts as a foreword to this day now possibly stand as mere rhetoric, knowing well that intrusive thoughts about intergalactic affairs would keep me involuntarily occupied. I should not be reading about sex in space, if I did want a sane day. Well, leaving out the recreational aspects of such read, it is an important research area on the future of humankind. Vomit Comet and The Uranus Experiment clips could give me more practical insight.
Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with 2,000 breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to every weightless movement . . . and I am the commander of the craft, and it is Saturday morning and time for inspection, naturally.
I wish, for once, my Saturday morning would start with such hilarious inspections.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Weekly moulting

Coming across idols from the 60/70s, one could feel having lost a track of our society's progression...what 80s and 90s came up with was the image of a cosmopolitan brute, quite another universe from the likes of then-existing gods - Bowie, Beatles, and Bond. For a scholarly discussion to its roots, please get in touch with not-me.

So it happens I had another unstable weekend, and it was exciting in the latter half, halfway-exciting in the former half, and somewhere in between the two jumps I lost a track of my life and lay googling, and ogling, and doodling.
It was reformatory, but a wrong reform in the context of my vastly potential life that everybody finds could be well spent in the sterile and formal corridors of our always-hot industries. Who distracts himself with soul food? Who finds time for nature? Who tries fingering death on a weekend? Who finds the world? Who thinks about the world?, ultimately, Who thinks?

With the mental grease off, I could help myself with some facts. At 1430 we think of moving out. At 1440 I start with some movie on Varun's laptop. At 1600-ish we're done with another hour and a half of hollywood inanitites; we dig out and feast on some peanut butter in the meantime, jump gently. Finally we mutually help dragging each other out in the open, beyond those doors. And we move for the greener climes in the distance - it's a reservoir/dam that we've to get to; it should be the East/South-East direction that Varun presently points towards.

On the bike, and off the slacking. We drive on for 15 minutes before feeling lost (the roads are there, but Varun's unsure); asking around gives us unsure remarks about the existence of that place. "Directions to the dam, please" soon changes its general form to "Directions to behind that cliff, please" ... we were using our instincts to map the location to our present position, which would put it right behind the cliff next to us. (In under the next hour we'd learn we couldn't have done worse - well, blame it on Varun.) We change directions from what the locals tell us. We tear out from the hustle bustle, and now are slowly winding along a dirt track that boasts of some horrible mud patches that could kill our journey. We enter and exit small villages, and by the time we're hesitant of going deeper in, we're almost there, as we find out from a stoned villager. Some of the worst roads, and we land up by a quarry - work on hold here on a Sunday.
A teenage kid Imtiaz sleeping atop a white, minivan-sized generator watches over the orange bulldozer, while the operator himself takes a dip down there in a pool inside the quarry. We exchange words, gather intel on the directions and surprises that lay along our path, and start our trek with a rough steep climb onto the hill that the quarry itself has eaten into. THE END.

When you climb to the top of the mountain
Look out over the sea
Think about the places perhaps, where a young man could be
Then you jump back down to the rooftops
Look out over the town
Think about all of the strange things circulating round

Look at me

I do my little ramp imitation as I walk back to my seat from the bay door; pronounced steps, a slight swagger; nobody takes notice, and my kick stays with me. Back on the seat, hunched, drowsy, confused, restless, wasted; you could kill me had you seen me rambling forward on the chronological axis in this state. Boss-gamma-mama tries taking interest in my assigned task for a while, and after a while of actually trying to explain him the task at hand, I simply hurl some tech jargon to see him scampering away. I love seeing people scamper away like that.

I barely invest my time in anything while in this corporate zoo. Even scribbling down seems tedious – it’s like the spirit of the working class enters my body upon an entry in the office, making me do all this ugly stuff that I don’t want to.  My technical bent is a long lost brother now, a castaway from my own heart, like a king impeached partially by circumstances, much by guile, waiting with its forces outside the town for the day when it could claim its reign again. I doodle these silly things on my table desk (right now it’s a bad conception of Shiv Sena’s snarling tiger), conditional on access to a working whiteboard marker, rub them away, maybe write words in strange/skewed typefaces, or something in foreign language (Arbeit Macht Frei seems appropriate atm); I have lately ended up messing my trousers or those lighter coloured shirts with a stray marker trail.

In some time we are legally entitled to leave. "Well, we could. But we won't." The people around are on track to be voted the best vegetables in town; no insistence or convincing helps; an imitation war of sorts. I can feel a Silence of the Lambs in here...

- What did you see, Clarice? What did you see?
- Lambs.
- They were screaming.
- They were slaughtering the spring lambs?
- And they were screaming.
- And you ran away?
- No. First I tried to free them.
- I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn't run.
They just stood there, confused. They wouldn't run.
- But you could - and you did, didn't you?

If we were a pill, we’d have tangibly seen ourselves losing our character with the daily circular motion of the sun that sets our lives stirring, dissolving us faster and faster in the ether of humanity, till we all contribute a common consistency to the impotent chemical solution called life that nobody would ultimately drink for no great thirst to satisfy. It’d just spill over someday, perhaps… as insignificant a moment as our entire lifetimes have been (or will be).

Friday, November 19, 2010

Occsionally white and nerdy

The 'Nerdcore being' dormant inside had a revision after "The Social Network" yesterday. Nothing great about the movie - nothing great about a standard plot of genius, success and betrayal combined with excessive depiction of women as fuck objects, - but it all was amazingly riveting - the direction, the camera, NiN, the geekery. I am a resurgent geek today, though still balancing my bitpop-and-API-doting in the office hours with an excursion to Mocha's for some beer and general life conditioning. Difficult times.

Have had plenty of prancing around since my feet combined with the cc-s of Rohit's Unicorn, and die wille fueled by Chandresh (major stakeholder of my weekend's fun), Shruti, and Malvika. Each day a different note, kinda like a disharmonious orchestra, a kitsch pop number. Hope it matures into a melody.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

On Kashid Beach

Afraid to die, or afraid to live? I have been having my rockstar day.
The sand all in my hair and the nape of my neck and in my toes giving that nostalgia of a couple of hours back. Lying in the ocean, periodically under and out of the sickly saline waters, staring up at the rising half moon, the soft cloud stubs that make shapes, and the burning humanity jamming out at far distance.
Now, the clapping of waves dominates the senses tonight. 0000hrs. Sounds of distant thunder do make you tingle in anticipation, but you know it wouldn't show up. A half moon brings some details to relief - like the shoreline, the ridges, and the tiny pebbles at the shore left behind now that the ocean has receded over the course of night.

My thoughts as tiny as those pebbles make it to the conscious. A muteness pervades - one that you get after a jump, bad T-rush, good fish. Oh how gladly I transmitted my head-load of thought/trash at a panicked pace to when over the phone with Anu and Ghoru (they must be thinking I'd just had sex).
//20101114

Sym Cam Lava

Oh, life is fun fuck.

Pa's karma has me sitting out here in Lavale, inside the ginormous Symbiosis campus, at the balcony of our trendy guest house, overlooking the landscape dotted by very few trees, and by symbols of human luxury - gold courses, homes of the rich (first thing upon my arrival, I was pointed out to the two lightbulbs that shine outside Jackie Shroff's home on the opposite hilltop), concrete industrial menaces, and ponds; that is just one half of my view - the other still lays enveloped in the morning fog that descended after a night of intermittent rain. It's 0900 but the air still conveys a semi-romantic, semi-obscure, somewhat broody mood. I bet the arrival of the glamour on the weekend does that - I could well imagine a Jack-Daniels-high Jackie Shroff in his Jacuzzi having a fuckfest with his half dozen women partners all day long, then descending down for 'a golf' at his own golf course in later half of the day, while his vaginae sober up for another evening's performance. Well, enough of my depraved self-projections; maybe Mr. Jackie Shroff is out there on his balcony right now, writing about the depraved, isolated, self-gratifying, ugly, and indulgent lifestyle of the new urban middle class (of which I make a part of).

In the meantime, somebody silently crept up to me, and called in others to join in, all outside my knowledge. I couldn't hear a single tick. As it happens, several ants have taken over my floor, clamoring for the cake crumbs which were a result of my morning tea out here with Pa. Ant lines on the marble floor reminds of "marching ants" - oh dear, I miss Photoshop.
A few birds - I can hear an owl or some deep hooting species, maybe mynah, and sparrow, and a peacock sometime back - contribute dully to this dull atmosphere. Sun has just been allowed a passage to the earth by the nimbus overhead.

Oh look, a first bird in sight, a white stork.

I will name my language Klingon. Wait...

Have been thinking of over-the-counter medication as a fad and for my pending (teenage) trip. It almost feels a necessity right now, when the weight of the world somehow gets lost in translation, and all that one interprets is a cured, filtered-for-consumption version of it.

Maybe I should learn a new language, because I have repeatedly found myself an F- student at my knowledge of words and phrases like 'future growth prospects', 'career planning', 'rat race', 'aspirations', 'life goals', 'compromises', 'being real', 'see Mr. XYZ's kid who's doing so well', 'marriage'. I should rather work on finding a langugage where all this condensed to 'जियो' or 'live on' and that would be all we could advise to our peers and the younger ones upon whom we see moralistic and idologistic-philosophy-pounding a prerogative.
Yes, indeed, Language is the solution to my situation - Let's invent one!

PS: the only other word in the vocab would be 'awesome'
PPS: In my context, certain words that should also be condensed whereforth they will lose their meaning - 'random hardons', 'stroking', 'alcohol abuse', '5AM-high', 'skinny dipping'

Friday, November 12, 2010

Burning eyes, the burnt rolled cigarette butts, and a pining to burn through the weekend. It's always interesting seeing where one branches out to, against the options available right before that instant (for me that instance would probably be an absolute confirmation/denial from Chandresh). Remember the Many-Worlds? The present possibilities look fruitful; even the present dejections seem productive. It's a simple equation - if I'm not on the road, either biking or biking, then I'm exploring the beaches; if not that, then I'm entering into the fictional world of Goncharov; if that gets a miss there's the terminal.

Time to write something long. Let me burn first.