a happy smile
a broken heart,
sinking fortunes
but flashy car,
a sunny vale
with a sullen tale...
what's your story?
What're you selling?

unattended

a train of thought

revisits the past

halting at all the Happy stations

lingering

as though visiting by appointment

feeding off distant memories

fading smiles

ah, but the times have changed now

it’s a different track

a collision course

on a cul-de-sac

Can you guess why the following letter, written by Okhil babu to the Railways, is of historic value?

"I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station.

"This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that damn guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report to papers."

Okhil Chandra Sen wrote this letter to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in 1909. It is on display at the Railway Museum in New Delhi...and, for doubting Thomases, I've seen this myself :-) It was also reproduced under the caption "Travellers' Tales" in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Anyway, apparently, it's entirely due to Okhil babu's efforts that we have toilets on trains! Some relief, eh?

a leap of faith
a cry for help
in vain
again

Do you have any regrets?

This is one question that every celebrity has been asked more than a few times. It creeps into every interview. Be it on television or in the print medium, celebrities, and even wannabes, are asked this with boring regularity. Most incredibly, their unfailing answer to the question is, “No, I have no regrets at all.” I am amazed that people can say they’ve gone through their lives without regrets. Not one lousy regret? How is that possible? An angry word, a little rudeness, a letter they didn’t write, something they said, a bad decision, tiny bit of indifference, a casual remark…there must be something they think they shouldn’t have done. There must be something they wish they had done differently. They cannot have lived without making mistakes. Me, I have plenty of regrets in life. Oh boy, there’re so many things I wish I had done differently.

But, really, to say that one has no regrets in life smacks of arrogance. Or, maybe these guys don’t even think about what they’re saying. Or, worse still, maybe they actually mean it. Maybe they really have no regrets.

For a long time after we broke up, I used to wonder what is that one thing I would ask for if I were granted a wish. I could ask for all my subsequent wishes to be met, but that would be greedy (and, also destroy any chances of ever being granted a wish.) I could ask for a lot of money but that wouldn’t have made me happy, although it would’ve certainly made my life a lot more comfortable at that time. Or, I could ask for the one thing that I wanted most of all…to get my relationship back! I could ask to be allowed to go back in time, to one day before it broke down, and save my relationship. To do whatever I needed to do to make sure that, when she came back the next day, it wouldn’t be to tell me that we couldn’t be together any longer. For a long time, I held on to the belief that there was nothing more that I wanted in life.

I’ve always known that you cannot make someone want you. And, honestly, I never lost sight of this fact even in the depths of despair. That you cannot make someone want to be with you. If someone doesn’t want to be with you, tough luck, you just have to accept it and move on. Or, at least, pretend to. You can cry about it, literally or otherwise, but there’s little else that you can do. But then, to accept such a situation, one needs to attain closure. The problem is I still don’t know why we broke up. Each time we met after that, in the little time that we had together, she would be crying and I would be doing my best to get her to stop crying.

Maybe I should have been tough, as much with myself as with her. Maybe I should’ve just let her cry and said everything that I wanted to say. Maybe I should have insisted…because, after those few times, we just didn’t meet. And, it turned out to be the worst time of my life. It’s now embarrassing to even think about it but I cut myself off from the world, living a near secluded life. The only thing that I really wanted to do was to have my chance to speak, to be able to respond. I seemed to be living for that one chance to say everything that I had wanted to say to her. And, just so that I wouldn’t fail myself when I finally got that chance, I would keep repeating the long explanation in my head day and night. Because I didn’t know when I might be given that opportunity. Gradually, it became an obsession because, no matter where I was or what I was doing, this long monologue would be going on in my head all the time. It really assumed a life of its own. I would wake up in the middle of the night to find my mind still motoring away, still trying to tell my side of the story. Over and over again. I knew what was happening but I couldn’t seem to stop it. It was almost like sitting there and watching myself flirting with insanity and, sometimes, even going over the edge. But, funnily, it was in those moments of insanity that I first noticed this dramatic shift in terms of what I wanted from my wish. I realised that I was no longer obsessed with getting my relationship back, not on a conscious level at least. (Maybe I flatter myself. Maybe this was just a smart change of tactics to try and negotiate with the one above – or, is it below? – because s/he didn’t seem inclined to grant what I wanted so badly.) More than the relationship, I realised that I wanted an opportunity to say all that I had been carrying inside for so long. If I had been given a wish then, for sure, I wouldn’t have asked for a chance to go back in time to fix the problem. Instead, I would’ve asked for a day with her. To make her sit down and to just listen to me and all that I wanted to say to her. After that, if she still decided to go the other way, so be it. But, sadly, I never got my chance.

Circumstances being what they are now, I will never get my closure. But, I’m okay with that now. In all honesty, I can’t say that I have accepted the situation…and I don’t think I will ever be able to accept it completely…but I have moved on. (Or, I think I have.) I still have my bad moments and my bad days, which is when I write crap like this :-) but, largely, I think I’m okay.

Or, maybe I’m just bluffing and pretending to be so noble and all because I know that I’ll never be granted a wish. Maybe, then, it’s time for the powers that be to call my bluff and grant me that wish :-)

To this day, I wonder what I'd do with a wish. If I were granted just one wish, what would I ask for? I wonder what everyone else would ask for...

The largest selling pen stand in Iraq...


Should've ordered before stocks ran out, damn!

THE COW

The cow is a successful animal. Also he is quadruped and because he is a female, he give milk, but will do so when he is got child. He is same like God, sacred to Hindus and useful to man. But he has got four legs altogether. Two are forward and two are afterwards.

His whole body can be utilised for use. More so the milk. What can it do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so farth. Also, he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankinds generally.

His motion is slow only because he is of aslitudinous species. Also his other motion is much useful to the trees, plants as well as making flat cakes in hand and drying in sun.

Cow is the only animal that extracts his feeding after eating. Then, afterward she chew with his teeth whom are situated in the inside of the mouth. He is incessantly in the meadows on the grass. His only attacking organ is the horn, specially so when he is got child. This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards.

He has got tail also, but not like similar animals. It has hairs on the other end of the other side. This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his cohoa body whereupon he gives hit with it.

The palms of the feet are soft unto the touch. So the grasses heads would not get crushed. At night time have poses by giving down on the ground and he shouts his eyes like his relatives, the horse does not do so.

This is the cow.

This essay, I thought, seemed the only natural successor to Neruda ...sublime and lyrical, just as good ole' Pablo. Believe it or not, this essay was actually written by an IAS aspirant...as a part of the Civil Services exam. Holy cow! :-)

Love
- Pablo Neruda


Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers I ache from the
perfumes of spring.
I have forgotten your face, I no longer remember your hands;
how did your lips feel on mine?
Because of you, I love the white statues drowsing in the parks,
the white statues that have neither voice nor sight.
I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice; I have forgotten
your eyes.
Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to my vague memory of
you. I live with pain that is like a wound; if you touch me, you will
do me irreparable harm.
Your caresses enfold me, like climbing vines on melancholy walls.
I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every
window.
Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me; because
of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desires: shooting
stars, falling objects.

Off with his head!

Apparently, M F Hussain has finally been booked for hurting public sentiment by showing goddess Saraswati in the nude in a painting. The BJP-VHP types will, no doubt, go up in arms once again. Protests are raging among Muslims across Europe and the rest of the world about the Prophet’s cartoons. It is usually par for the course for these protestors, whatever their religious denomination, to ask for the head of the offender. More often than not, there is nothing figurative about the demand. These otherwise very holy and pious people, even if no one else views them as such, take their protest to the streets, parading their wounded sensibilities and hurt sentiment, which, apparently, can be miraculously healed if the head of the offending party is served to them on a plate. Funny, I was thinking. These jokers believe they have the freedom to publicly demand death, nothing less, for the offender but are unwilling to extend the same freedom of speech to others. Hmm…

My own worst enemy.

I’ve come to believe that, sometimes, we’re our own worst enemies. I am, at least. My own worst enemy, I mean. Some of us tend to get in the way of our own success. And I mean success in the more conventional sense here, relating to work and not personal relationships or life in general. Because, as anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written here before will readily testify, success in personal relationships is not exactly familiar territory for me. That part of my life is pretty much in ruins but, alarmingly, the other half is also threatening to go the same way.

Many of us refuse to toe the line and define our own parameters of what success means to us. And, all of us being different and unique and all that, have different notions of what success is and what we’d like to achieve. Yes, there are a few universal standards that we cannot ignore and against which the world constantly judges us. But, then again, some of us will be who we are and tell the world where to get off. (Please note the confidence!) Of late, however, I’ve begun to tire of the number of times I’ve run myself into the ground. I’m beginning to realise what has been painfully obvious to those around me for long. That I’m struggling to meet my own meagre standards! (Ouch, that hurts!) The less said about how I measure up on the worldly scales the better. What makes it appear worse than it actually is the fact that I don’t deserve what I’m getting, or so I’m repeatedly told by almost anyone who’s bothered enough about me to comment and offer the customary two bits. Apparently, I should be doing a lot better. Because, apparently again, I can still make something of my life in anything I put my mind to and in any field I want…er…except in the one that I’ve chosen for myself. Hmm.

There are two ways to look at this but I won’t go into that…yet…because one’s attention span, I’m told, is directly proportional to the degree of success one has achieved. (If you don’t know better, accept it as one of the new theories that the Americans seem so fond of working out and unleashing on an unsuspecting world.) Going by the amount of success I’ve had, therefore, in serious discussions, I try not to let my mind digress or wander because, then, it becomes difficult for the little fellow to find its way back. Why burden the poor thing!

Anyway, the point, it would seem, is that some of us are pre-programmed to make the wrong choices. And, here, by wrong, as opposed to immoral, I mean any choice that brings grief, misery, ruin and all of those emotions that keep poets in business and make poetry so fascinating to read. For some of us, apparently, the lure of such choices is too difficult to resist. (No, that didn’t come out right, did it? What I meant was that those choices choose us…whatever…you know what I mean!) Faced with a fork on the figurative road, we invariably end up walking down the wrong one. Why? Because our sensibilities won’t allow us to go down the other. And, at times, these sensibilities let us down. Badly. Yet, we cannot abandon them. As a result, like silly moths to flames, we only learn a little too late that getting burnt isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

You’d never have guessed but I make films. The short, boring variety…at least that’s how the world treats all films that are neither Bollywood nor copy-of-Hollywood. For a long time now, I’ve also been trying to get onto the bandwagon and make what we call a feature film, based on my own script. It’s some consolation for me, and truly flattering too, that the best actor this country has produced is willing to act in it. (Note: Best actor is not equal to SRK. Or Big B. Or Big B’s overgrown baby.) The current messiah of what is known as meaningful cinema has also agreed. And yet, I’ve managed to get it only as far off the ground as the gravitational pull would allow an ambitious pig to fly.

Well, I can take the usual route and cry about how unfair life is. I can call Mr. Moneybags and Ms. Pursestrings dirty names (which, by the way, they thoroughly deserve) and generally blame the world for not making this happen. Because, after all, if you want something badly enough, the whole universe conspires to take it away from you. (Okay, I know…the twist is mine.) But, in all honesty, I’m starting to wonder…am I the one to blame? Am I too rigid and stubborn? Do my own sensibilities get in the way? Am I my own worst enemy?

That the above are all rhetorical questions will be conveniently ignored by those who know me, as they rush in to answer in the affirmative. For a change, I’ve begun to wonder too if they’re right.

After all, what does it take to “adjust”, as many put it? Make a minor compromise? Or, as a good friend, who’s doing very well in the television industry, often tells me, to try and change the system from within? Or, to give those who’re in charge what they want? Or, rehash 4-5 Hollywood films and pass them off as my own? No one will know and, anyway, no one cares. Or, better still, blatantly copy a non-Hollywood film because, as the TOI film critic will have us know, not many in India watch such films? (Incidentally, she wasn’t appalled that the film she was reviewing was a copy. Instead, she seemed to think that it was alright to have copied a film that no one in India was going to get a chance to watch.) Or, as my oldest and one of the closest friends tells me to date, to forget about all this and join the corporate world? All of this seems logical and right, I concede. Or, at least, most of it does. Then, why can’t I make amends? If I know what I’m doing wrong, why can’t/don’t I change it? What is wrong in going with the flow?

The way I look at it, the question is: Is that right for me? Unfortunately, not. I cannot change course. If I did, I won’t be being me. I’d be trying to live someone else’s life. Maybe I’ll make more money and live a cushier life. Maybe I’ll be seen as a successful person. But will I be happy? I doubt it. I know who I am and I know what I want. I’ll always want to be doing what I’m doing now. As I put it to a friend, I’d rather work towards what I know will make me really happy rather than follow a life that holds no fascination for me. This brings me back to where I started. Some of us are our own worst enemies. I am, at least.

It’s better to have loved and lost rather than not having loved at all…

I’ve heard and read this about a million times. Maybe you’re familiar with it too. I don’t know about you but, if you ask me, it’s a rather daft observation. It may be alright for those Romantic heroes but in the real world, losing the person you love feels pretty much like a knife is being driven through your heart.

It’s been a long time now but the pain just doesn’t go away. An old photograph, a shared song, a particular smell, the wretched dreams…each feels like a stab in the chest. And then, there’re the letters. And the memories. How does one deal with memories? Because they have this nasty habit of creeping up on you unannounced, at the unlikeliest of moments…and ruining whatever it is that you’ve been doing! It’s better to have lost? My friggin’ foot!

"Be thankful you knew her at all…" says a song. I’m sorry, I cannot find any consolation in the fact that I knew her once. That we were in love. Not a day goes by when I don't think about her. And, each time, I can’t help wondering why. If it had to break up, why did it start at all? Why? Because, to begin with, it was a one in a million chance that we even met! We lived in different cities, had different backgrounds, no common friends…it was truly a miracle that we even came across each other. But that’s another story…

Of course, I would’ve been the poorer for not knowing her…I would’ve missed out on the absolutely wonderful times I’ve had with her. The point, however, is…am I any better off today? What’re those wonderful memories, and the experience of being in love, doing for me today? What? NOTHING…that’s what they do for me. Absolutely nothing! Maybe I would’ve been better off not knowing her at all. Maybe I would’ve been better off not knowing what it feels like to be in love. Because, no matter how hard I try to move on, I always find myself looking back. I’ve tried getting into a new relationship…not once, not twice but five times. And, under normal circumstances, I could’ve got into a long-term relationship with at least two of them. (In fact, my closest friend is certain that I would’ve ended up happily married to one in particular.) They were really nice people but, if I were to paraphrase another favourite singer, I look for her in everyone. I know that’s not right but I find myself comparing everyone to her and, expectedly, they come up short.

The point I’m trying to make here is this…if I hadn’t known her, or what it feels like to love, I might have had a greater chance of getting into relationships. Sure, they might not have been very happy or lasting relationships, but I could’ve lived on in the hope of finding true love. At least, I would’ve had some hope…