Not Yet Titled

Drunk. On freedom, on life and style.
Wasted. De-hydrated, distanced, what not.
Dance. I spun on my feet all night long.
Hung. Now the world spins, over and over.
Your face, flashes by, flashing in my eye.
Lovely face.

Love. Your love, it made me live, but
Dreams. My dreams, they made me die, everyday.
I could not let you enter my head, to see
The wretched dreams forbidden desires, you see
I didn’t think you would understand, may be
But I couldn’t take a chance, don’t ask me why.
Honey.

And now, all drunk and smoked up, in promise land
No home, no joy, no life, no you,
My dreams, I can’t remember my dreams.
I run around, a wild goose chase, where are you?
May be, beyond this door, may be beyond that one, oh no,
I turn around, and you’re always, on the other side.
Of the door.

Life. They say it goes on, no matter what
Happy. Forever after, will be happy, what?
Life. It goes on and that’s the trouble, with life.
It goes on before I find a solution, to my trouble.
Forever after. I will reach the forever after,
Happy. By choice, but not without, you see.
Do you see?

Ginger and liquorice

We are two people who know,
The things that we know.
That we know are true, that are right.
We are two people who understand each other,
Know our future without having to know our past.
We are two people who know our pursuits.
We are both like that. We know, we are alike;
We are different, in a way that is endearing
I like it that you’re bold, you like it that I’m sweet.
We are two people who are two different people,
And we don’t see why we have to become one.
We could be friends if we tried. May be,
We will be friends even if we didn’t try.
We could care for each other; if we wanted to
We are two people. Like spirit and splinter.
But we wouldn’t know what to do with the fire after.

EnLightEnment

If you stop thinking and become really quiet;
Empty yourself of feelings so you’re lite,
Look at the light around you and really look:
You’ll see the normal and wavy E and M
Now squint a bit and you’ll see ‘em photons bright!

I say

As I grew up everybody told me that there is no hope for those who are lazy. I’m beginning to understand that that’s a big lie. There is no hope, actually, for those who cannot dance.

I’ve got to admit, I feel good!

Today a stranger asked me
Where the bus stops on my street
I was late to work than usual
But I walked her to show the stop

Today a friend wanted some of mine:
A sum of money, and some of time.
I had other plans for the cash, oh well;
Sure! I said, and gave it all.

Today a friend told me she’d host
An awesome party, what fun it’d be!
More social skills than I care for and yet
Slapped a smile on my face and said – awesome!

People say this a lot, it’s cliched,
But honest to God, I’ve got to admit,
Today I did three good deeds
And I feel pretty darn good!

Staring into space

When passion takes over the body, mind and spirit and when every single thought and action is directed towards fulfilling and honoring this passion, one is compelled, at some point, eventually, to stop and ask what this madness is all about? The answer, almost always is, I don’t know. When one begins to live too much in the moment, it is hard to see the direction in which you are headed and when one indeed stops to see and ask – where am I heading? – the sadness and emptiness in the answer cannot be put out by the infinite satisfaction that this single passion is nurturing. I write this in pencil, with the hope that someday, I can erase some parts of my life today and fill in with what should have been. To lose myself in the paece of mind that the madness is giving me or to lose my peace of mind to find myself, is the question. where can I find the balance? Is it necessary to find the balance? Is it true that everything that needs to, will fall in place and happen and that, meanwhile, I just need to do my job? Or is life, like everything else? that you need to ask for everything you need, you need to strugglen and go on a search? Are the questions going to vanish if I do find the balance and if not, do I still need to struggle to find the balance?

I do not know, but I have a feeling that home is going to be a remedy to everything. Well, that’s a lie. Home is going to be a remedy to some of these things. If nothing, for a month in my life, admist the madness, I will be able to tilt the balance. I can go back to the land and times of infinite and unlimited day dreaming. To the place where  interaction and expression will be as easy and natural as learning. For once, I would like to think that spending time with my own, random and particularly useless thoughts are as fulfilling and satisfying as pursuing the passion that seems to be blinding me. And that will be okay. I have lost many priviliges I had earlier and i do not hope to recover all of them by any magic, but I will now have time and resources to take stock of what I actually still have and strive to be in full awareness of them. Cannot wait to get back into the reality that not everything has to be defined and quantified, not everything has to be concise and meaningful, because life is neither defined nor quantified; neither concise nor meaningful. It is these imperfections I need to take stock of. These winding long thoughts that are highly perceptible and yet unclear, so much so that you never know which way they are headed, where they will end up, that after a while you will ask yourselves what you were thinking anyway and come to the blissful realisation that you have no idea. Ah! The space I stare into!

The importance of not working

I suppose the motivation behind this article will be very evident when I shall go on to tell you that the reason I haven’t updated my blog in a long time is because – I was very busy at work. Perhaps I should also mention that I was busy at work, not because I had a lot of stuff to do, but because I wanted to do a lot of stuff. Of course, that’s just a fancy way of saying that I am a workaholic. Gives me a very false security that if everything is excellent at work then there is nothing to worry about. For a long time I would tell myself that work is a huge distraction from life itself but, I never really told myself to do anything about it.  And then, suddenly, floating everywhere around the web was this article: Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone. If your web circle is anything like mine I am sure you read this article. To me, the most important idea in the article was that: there are a few activities that improve the quality of your life. Work is not necessarily one of them. Spending quality time with close ones is, for instance, one of these activities. If I work for 18 hours a day, then I do nothing that will make my life better for me. So the lesson is, I might work hard and be satisfied by the amount of progress I am making and grow as a researcher, blah blah blah, but if I don’t stop working for a while and find time to bring some quality and meaning to my life, I will be dying within.

But understanding the importance of not working is only half the story. What is it that I shall do, in that time, that I will be happy about when I am older? I have several things in this list. One of the most important ones is, ofcourse, staring out of the window. (not lying). The challenge I find, is to do all of these things, without compromising your work. And vice versa. The truth is, there is a list of minimum activities that I need to be able to do to be happy. And ironically, it is not as easy as it sounds. Committing to ones own happiness is essential and I believe, as of now, that this is the biggest challenge I face.  You would be surprised to see how much your happiness demands from you. The comfort zones you need to get out of, that one uncomfortable conversation you need to have, one little value you need to defend, that activity you need to try out, the mental blocks you need to get past. The list is endless. And it never ends, well, because we are humans and our desires keep growing. And I believe that that is the key to peace of mind. That there is something more that you always want to do and this something more gives meaning and direction to your life.

The lives of others

He had plugged on and tuned in to.
A wary spy in a lonely room;
He heard nothing he hoped to hear,
And heard everything he hadn’t the ear

No truths or lies or plots or ties;
Through the silence of pure conviction,
All he heard were the crushing heartaches
And the melancholic notes for lost lives.

There he sat, staring into the impending doom
That is not his’ to have, but his’ to create;
Losing the power of making his sinful judgement
To the passion and pain he knew he would never have,

Even while they never wondered
What happened beyond the silent rooftops,
The mutedness darkness and the echoing doorways
What happened to all the noiseless sounds?

To where did the songs flow from their lips?
Who stole the secrets their tongues let slip?
What soaked in their whispers of fears
Before they barely reached the ears?

He listened to the notes of the despair
That he was about to unleash
Till he could listen no more
And fumbled for the button
That would tune him out

Of the lives of others.

A thanks to the year that was..

 

Every body seems to be writing about the great year that 2010 was and everything they did last year, how much they learnt and how exciting it was. I am compelled to write too. More for myself, rather than to share with everybody. I will not write about everything I did, but some of the moments I had last year, that are very strongly imprinted in my memory.

January of 2010, I was to fly to boston for my higher studies in chemistry. All my relatives had come to visit me and wish me great luck and good fortune. Some of the really close ones drove along with me to the airport. My flight was around 2-4 AM. This fact is somehow important and I don’t know why. My dad had booked a taxi-cab to the airport (that’s probably the first and the only time that would happen) and around 6-7 of us started off late night after dinner. The drive was for atleast an hour and I was very nervous. I was going away, to the other side of the globe to do I don’t know exactly what and for reasons I’ll never be able to explain. It felt like the longest ride ever and I was sitting in the back seat desperately hoping that the ride would never ever end, so that we keep driving, forever, to reach the airport so that I would never ever had to decide on whether I wanted to take that plane and no one would have to shed a tear. The vision of the light shining off the reflectors on the route to the airport from my seat, while my stomach felt like it would turn inside out, still flashes into my mind today. Thank you Mom and Dad, for all the blind trust! Love you both! (I can never say or write this without tears! Pfff!)

Some time before summer, at a bus stop in boston: An old lady in the bus stop is yelling at me and cursing me, the accent making it really hard for me to place her exact reasons of displeasure. I would try to ask her what was wrong, but she did not seem interested. I heard some phrases like ‘people like you’, ‘call the cops on you, you wait right here’ and I don’t remember what else. What I cannot forget is how I could not help the tears rolling out of my eyes, unstoppable, as if I was not being humiliated enough. I went and stood at the other end of the bus stop just to be far from her. But the tears wouldn’t stop. I realise that no matter how much I do or change myself, I would always be a guest. I told myself, I am not going to live my entire life as a guest. The bus seemed to have taken ages to come and a nice couple who witnessed everything told me – ‘beware of that lady, she is mad!’ Thank you, you are very kind. I forgot to smile at you!

Summer: I had recieved a surprise gift package from a cousin (Thank you!) and I unpacked it to see what it was. The package came in plenty of bubblewrap. Me and sisterfox innocently burst some of the bubbles. Suddenly out of nowhere we were overcome with joy about this blessed abundance of bubble wrap that had entered our lives. Ecstatic, we franctically started bursting the bubbles, first with our fingers, then palms and then we started jumping on them. I almost had tears of joy in my eyes. Eventhough it was only for under 5 minutes, the amount of joy we shared is unforgettable, may because it brought us each out of the frustrated phase of life we were going through – her more than me. I never knew bubble wrap could do so much! Thanks for all the fun times babes!

Late summer and fall: A glimpse of how my whole life ahead of me might turn out to be. Friendless and hopeless. Serious doubts on myself and my social skills. Nothing or nobody around me or anything they were doing was helping me at all. I sink into a trough and I seem to be sinking forever. I did every little thing I could do. My violin, blogging, reading, working harder. Every little conversation – or the lack of it – with anybody at all, got magnified a 10 times in my head. I was stressed out, always sad, may be depressed. A thunderstorm had built up till I spoke to my best friend over phone and cried like a baby. After a few weeks of accepting how things are and how they were going to be, I was able to relieve myself of all the blame I was placing on myself and saw how much unfair I was being to myself. I do not mean to narrate this as if it were tragic. Not at all. I learnt how important it is for us to embrace our weaknesses, live with them being fully aware and grow stronger inspite of them. I never say this enough, but, thank you Vindy! I Love you!

Birthday: My happiest time in the US so far! I was at my cousin’s place on christmas eve and they had a cake for me and stayed awake for me till midnight! You may  not realise it, but the little time spent with kids is always magical. They make you forget about everything that is not very cheerfull in your life and they inspire you to live in the moment. To laugh heartily at a funny gesture as though you never saw anything funnier and to cry soul-fully at the hurting toe as if you were going to die. But forget about the painful incidents of the past and never care about what the future is going to be like.  I was at my friend’s family house for christmas. They had a cake for me too and a present! We had a great traditional feast and before that we joined our hands and said a little prayer. I felt truly like a member and someone who belonged at that table.  We played monopoly and watched a few movies from their awesome DVD collection. It reminded me of my own family, how they would play rummy all the time and how we would watch movies together. Her place was really quite too, just like my home and the view was splendid. Imagine living by a frozen lake with a shepard dog for a pet! Great time, Thank you Shonda! Just as I told all my friends: People always ask what is so significant about birthdays. What can I say? This is the best day I had this year!

I may have made it seem like 2010 was not a very great year for me, but it was. It probably is one of the most important ones. I had many many happy moments too. It’s just that happy and really personal moments are very very rare. Like my birthday. A big thank you to everybody who brought me this beautiful year and all the goodness in it!!

Happy new year to all of you! And to me!

The Big Picture

There is no person that is not lovable;
There is no person that has not an adorable trait.
Sometimes there is so much we see of what we don’t like,
That we don’t see, what we might quite like.

We like to hold on to the doubts
We like to hold on to the lies
We like to hold on to everything that is not nice,
That we begin to see only what we want to see
And hear to only that we want to listen.

Sometimes, we need to get away, far enough
To see that, from a very great distance,
The doubts and lies seem to be diminishing very fast
But all the adorable traits are still aglow,
And if possible, seem brighter. Like a halo.

Sometimes, all we need is a contrast.
A contrast between that trait and everything surrounding it;
Because traits can be hard to see to the wit.
We just need to get far enough to fit in
All the infinity around into the picture.

Sometimes, my friend, we just need to see the bigger picture.
Like the little star that looks around to see
The enormous darkness surrounding it till infinity.
It strives to look ahead through the abyss
The darkness only seems to get thicker and it thickens.

It just needs to see to a great distance, just far enough
To see into my eyes, into the vision in my head,
Where, surrounding it is not any darkness, but,
The great, fierce and alert hunter, the Mighty Orion.
Where, to me, it is not lost and forgotten in the ingnominious sea of darkness,
But is a star in the belt of the Orion, shining in strength and robustness.

The traints are now clear, as I point at it
And show it to whoever beside me;
‘Look, that’s the Orion. There.’
And in my eyes it can now be rest assured,
That we hold on to the doubts rather strong,
But we hold on to the hopes much stronger.