Good Shit. Finally.

The reading for the Nineteenth Cenury Novel paper has been boring till about 6 hours before the end semester exam. Just then I read Dorothy Hale's summary of Benjamin, Lukacs and Jameson's Marxist approaches to the Novel as well as this-

http://thowe.pbworks.com/f/WattNotes.pdf

Kind of cool, no?

These are the moments I look forward to before every exam. Which is when I take away some theoretical formulation which will prove useful in life and not just for those measly three hours.

Here comes the Sun!

There's something extremely refreshing about a hot bath on a winter afternoon in Delhi. What is it, I dont know. But the activity cleared my mind and gave me a new perspective of things. I have reading novels about adultery, of late. Also something called Triangular Desire. I have come to the conclusion I have not been in love so far. Just like the characters in those books who seem brilliantly confused. Now This is not my bildungsroman, so you cant expect me to jump onto railway tracks or be guillotined  or undertake community development projects. I shall not be unhappy about nothing.

Only the best lies ahead of me!

This is not pOetry

Get into a new set of clothes. Exchange your shabby sweater for navy blue thermal. Be superficial enough to wonder whether you should paint your face before you meet the friend. Take up strip of bamboo, dip it in white poster paint, make a magnetic field around your left eye, accentuate the fact that you were wearing lenses by putting on kohl. Smudge it out, in a vain attempt to hide the crow's feet. Leave.

Stagger a hundred metres, push through a line of bodies, wondering when to blow up the tightly surveilled entrance to the metro. Wait in the queue to check into the station, before flashing your Metro id, check your sms. If your friend has fallen asleep, take a step back. You put your feelings to sleep the night you confessed it again. This time, the Big Sleep. Because it clearly aint a person you'd ask to call you up when you see 5 deaths back to back.

Mashup your thoughts. Second image.

Text to clear up confusion. Clarify your position with regard to an event, maybe a sheaf of poetry mistakenly addressed to the wrong person. Clarify that you like the imagery, you like the thoughts, you like the textual help that person can wield. But clarify as well, you dont give it much of a thought. You'd rather figure out people who come across as complicated. Because complicated people are the most perceptive and the most sensitive and well its important to put on a sad face when somebody dies. 

Somebody jumped to his death. Three deaths in four months. Three suicides. Three people away from exams, misplaced feelings, failed ambitions, and the tiring business of proving yourself everyday.

Actually three human deaths. 

Repeatedly insist on the fact that you need to find an answer to your dilemma. Depend on human beings to hand you the golden ticket to soul satisfaction. Get bewildered knowing that the world actually speaks your language of there being no-labels and shit. Live and let live. Meet people, smile, be friends, be like a breeze, never be a storm, pass. 

You are in control of your life. Not your death. 

Sit by your lover. Gently caress her trembling legs. Realise you are sitting in a pool of blood and that you'll start feeling cold soon. Be dumb so as not to realize that maybe you could've prevented this blood loss or whats to come after that. Dim the lights, when you smell the odour which greeted you as you trapezed down the hospital morgues. Watch your friend get afraid and rush out of the room, when the first still born arrives. Put on your headphones, shuffle your blues playlist, and pick your lover up and place her on the bed. Get down on the floor and read british modern poetry while the children arrives in kidney shaped packages, dead and hanging from a lifeless umbilical cord. Smile at your lover while she stops eating her children and looks at you. Go upto her and kiss her and when her mouth's adequately bloody with the flesh of the newborns, gently sing her to sleep. Pick up the remaining two babies, place them close to her deflated tummy. Assure her its alright and leave for the friend's place. Its time to sleep.

There are so many lives and deaths to choose from. Its pointless wasting words for people who are vague or beside the point. Travel for yourself. No use compromising, no use pretending that this companionship means anything to you.

I never thought I'd deal with horror with the help of a blogpost. I am attempting that right now.

Winter's here, getting food for you has become tougher than useful. They have installed artificial eyes all over the place to keep track of rationed food being used for non-human purposes. I stopped eating the juicy pieces of chicken or weekly quota of eggs that I am allotted as part of mess food. I pack them in tiffin containers when apparently no one's observing, hide them in my jacket and rush back to my hostel room. You aren't always around and when you are, you seldom listen to me. Tasty food is all that  you look forward to.

This evening was supposed to be like the previous few winter evenings. You'd express delight on rediscovering the weekly mess food, wag your tail while you munch on it and after some time, you'll doze off to finish your daily habit of 15 hours of sleep.

It didn't go as planned.

I returned to my room to find the entire placed bathed in blood. I have seen bloodshed in my life. I spent half my childhood in operation theatres, observing my father sew mutilated limbs and reset bone dislocations or mend fractures. Blood used to flow out then but there was a very strong disinfectant used all the time which masked the smell of warm blood.

The eternal search for the next stranger. When does 

The Show

A large portion of our facial expressions are lost if we wear glasses. Those of us, who bear the scars of ageing, look like wizened old fools with glasses. And if we don't clean our glasses everyday, half the things we want to communicate gets lost in the process of face to face conversation or even acting. Over time, our facial muscles freeze. We stop trying to emote with our face, rather we modulate our voice or control our unforced bodily impulses. But our faces express so much! How can we not desire to let go of glasses and reveal our entire face to people.

My naked eyes have a dreamy lost expression chained to them perpetually. Maybe, this expression was evoked because, on reflection from a mirror, the eyes were looking back at themselves after a lapse of 14 years. Eyes finding eyes. Realizing they are not the color we supposed them to be. Realizing that the face beneath the eyes has lines which mark the moments when we had to tighten our faces and bear through the best or worst of times. With glasses, you fail to share yourself completely with people. But who wants that part of the bargain? I took off my glasses. I wanted to put down my guards and meet you with all my troubles, lining my frame  like a silhouette. Till I realized, that silhouette, like my pair of lenses wont come off at the right moment.

Because you just wanted the happy moments between us, when we shared interesting or funny thoughts and laughed or lamented together. You never wanted to know you might be the cause of the lament or the reason behind the happy thought.

As you rightly put, its fun knowing me as a person, talking and learning about so many new things. An intellectual companionship. But that's about it! Don't overstep because there is nothing more for you.


I will go back to my glasses. I realized there is no point revealing my eyes to everyone.

Because the eyes express so much. 

Hailey's Comet

Sometimes when I am feeling jobless and just plain ignorant, I go through the contacts on my phone. I dont like playing mobile games much, Snakes is okay but Sudoku is too demanding on one's lack of concentration and that music thingy is noisy. I use a basic nokia handset. I think in this relatively pointless exercise of going through these names and their numbers I do something more productive than fantasise about my past.

Its surprising the rate at which people zoom into our lives and then fade and then in some strange cyclical fashion come back. Really strong emotions like love, hatred, disgust, lust are experienced with such  Hailey's comet like personalities. You will stay up nights and talk with them, wait outside their house or hostel (if you are not let in past the curfew hour), imagine breaking into the same residence, text till your phone runs out of text balance and you resort to mycantos or way2sms. After all this talking, when you have find each other interesting and all, someone makes the mistake of liking someone else. Then suddenly the conversations stop because feelings have got involved, feelings of a definable nature. Expectations have been created, routine affections need to be expressed! And then the comet departs and we wait till the next new comet arrives.

But in all of this, there are some people we think about all the time. Or maybe things they said or ponder over, repeatedly, a moment we spent with them. It can be simply a moment when you stared into their eyes, from behind dust stained glasses, wondering whether they are thinking what you are thinking at that point of time. Or it can be someone standing outside your door, pretending to be a weight-lifter with a tiny umbrella.

Change is a vital force in my life. Its positive effects make me realise that loosing sleep over failed relationships is not really worth it because hardly any relationship fails per se. Maybe the way we wanted to remain in the other person's life changes but seldom does anyone leave completely. Because even the strongest of bonds becomes loose and transforms with time. I like the idea of stimuli jumping over synapses from the loose ends of dendrons. I have a feeling that after a point, my best interactions with people are like that. Jumping stimuli. If it comes for a sustained period, my nerves become tense.

The value of departing from a person's life at the right time, with just the right amount of information left behind becomes all the more essential now. I have embraced the traveller side of my personality. Two rejections in ten months was quite enough to make me realize that I'll not find happiness in love. And I have an excuse from God as well. One ex notes, "Being in love with you is like being Man Friday on an island, where you are Robinson Crusoe." I guess that has changed in several ways but its a handy divine excuse, through a human messenger.

So I leave. Knowing that the person I care about has other greater problems than me and I can visit other planets for the time being.

And text people or call those who still haven't appeared in their scheduled time.

"Like many folk, when first I saddled my rucksack,
feeling its weight on my back-
the way my spine
curved under it like a meridian-

I thought: Yes. This is how
to live. On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow
and Zagreb, or the Serbian white
cells of scattered airports.

it came clear as over a tannoy
that in restlessness, in anony
mity:
was some kind of destiny.

So whether it was the scare stories about Larium
-the threats of delirium-
and baldness-that lead me not to a Western Union
wiring money with six words of Lithuanian,

but to this post office with a handful of bills
or a giro; and why, if I am stuffing smalls
hastily into a holdall, I am less likely
To be catching a greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee

than to be doing some laundry
is really beyond me.
However,
when, during routine evictions, I discover

alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway
comment-on a postit-or a tiny stowaway
pressed flower and bottom drawers.
I know these are my souvenirs

and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest distances I've travelled
have been between those people. And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their lives."