Saturday, March 28, 2009

Horrid and his Girl

Walking back into his room, Horrid was a population of conflicted emotions. It had only been a couple of hours into leaving her home, but he decided to flush the last traces of the rendezvous - so leisurely in their nature - and focus on a subjective view instead that would ultimately lead to opinions. He could not help himself, for opinions were a natural culmination of all his experiences, however inconsequential.

Horrid impulsively knew that she won't be the one, and now came to infer upon it, even though it had been a memorable day for him in a good sense. This top-down approach was suitable for him, for he would always find time at a later day to work on it, and he was now adept to the extent that his inference mechanism could not beguile the original feeling. Today Horrid had to de-construct a favorable situation into the greatest of risks, he knew he would need some work, so he brought in a glass of cold water and set himself to the task. It was hot and musty outside - there had been clouds through the day but it hadn't rained. Horrid also felt uneasy in his shirt, so off it went, bringing to his notice his own ever-expanding potbelly. He knew that he he'd never been that attractive a person, so it was a wonder as to why she'd gone out with him today.

They had been friends for a long time now, stretching into years. They both had been in touch much throughout, and had assumed that they will start liking each other; it had been so, which is why they had been together today. Their families were vaguely acquainted, but more importantly, carried a good impression mutually. Horrid's father was in a position where he could even claim to be superior and hold a greater ego over the other family; and everybody knew how much ego meant to his father. So even the imbalance here served to keep the balance.
Horrid knew that she was a smoker, but that only led him to think erotic thoughts of whether she believed in piercings as well, and had any down there. Moreover, she was more qualified and more capable a person than Horrid was as things stood currently, living an independent life, so Horrid could not complain much.

All that he could complain about was his greater love for his homeland, and her obsession for America. He let this thought suck out all the merit he saw in her earlier. He well knew that it was luck on his side that had brought her closer, for such girls generally get taken by the more aggressive guys and much too fast.

After these minutes of profound pondering, Horrid called up a friend and asked, "I've got this girl, would you like to take her?"
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Can't Learn to love/live with it

It is absurd finding the most exciting of people around you high on injecting nothing but air. All the great promise they hold about life is based on the great promise that it happened the same with a billion others before them - a shady decision since it's made on empirical evidence. In their current framework of things, they see progress - slow, but stable, but unsatisfying - an inevitable consequence, and adds the label of 'realism' to it to finally keep on living with that conviction. The majority sees progression as a chemical reaction - when it isn't. What is a certain chemical reaction is that inside me which triggers my emotions of anxiety/sadness on listening to friends professing about the 'you have to come to terms with it' aspect of life, which obviously means that my selfish genes see that as counter-productive to their proliferation... I'm on the fringes of either being awesomely right or going into a mental disorder here - when considering the consequences of my observation at a greater length - but will accept the way it goes with a great gladness.

Things are such a pile of shit right now, that if you still feel sane, you have to be either a great artist who sees great expressions of art in that shit, or that very shit itself. I'll be frank that I'm distressed at lots of things which aren't the way I thought they'd be; and irritated because now I'm being taught to take in that they are so. I think that underlines the character of the ordinary - internalising even the wrong out there is and assuming it to be an inseparable part of their character and hence taking offence at anything that ever complains about it. I wonder if they can ever be patriotic in the right sense.

rightnow: going to be sleeping at a friend's place, possibly with my head inside the helmet since there are too many mosquitoes in the room; got back from some great food close to Humayun's Tomb, racing along the Noida toll road and hitting 1XX kmph in the process - no way of confirming since even my speedometer's broke now, coming across a prostitute applying makeup by the side of the road close to Delhi Zoo, riding past surreal landscape of construction workers steamrolling a stretch of road at night under the lights and smoke. forgot gems back at home.
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

A Great Absurdity

In an essay titled "Curriculum Mortis" by a (anti)psychologist David Cooper in his book "The Grammar of Living" (1974):
"In early nineteenth-century England it (suicide) was regarded as a capital offense - one should be legally murdered for daring to try to kill oneself. For example, one man tried unsuccessfully to kill himself by cutting his throat and was sentenced to death by hanging - but before the hanging (in those days slow strangulation rather than death by rapid trauma to the central nervous system) his wound had to be carefully stitched up and bandaged so that it would not open and allow him to bleed to death from a self-inflicted wound. He could only die by the legally prescribed form of hanging."

Brilliant scheme for somebody committed to die!
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Warring for the Women

#1: Delhi seems safe (for women).
MIGHT BE BECAUSE
#2: I do not move about. AND
#3: When I do, its usually the safer locales; that is what the undeniable safety of the Delhi Metro does to you - now everything HAS to be within 20 minutes of reach.

OTHERWISE
#4: I'd have come across the common scenes of direct/indirect abuse of the women. AND
#5: I'd have had the chance to headbutt into some random repressed fucker(s) doing so. HM
#6: The last I felt like that was some morning of January, 2008, upon learning of the terrorists attacking some couple on the New Year's eve close to a 5-star hotel in Delhi.

This über campaign, and the amazing artwork that an associated art group created set me off to the fancy of physically assaulting those sad people.

Do I see a woman getting back even more strongly...the dainty slap taking shape of a punch? Yes.
Doing I see her knocking down those bikes/bikers that block her way and ask her to step out? Yes.
Do I see those bikers finding a new respect? No.
Do I see bystander stepping into the role of Heroes/Heroines? Maybe.
I just hope that such counter-reaction isn't met by counter-counter-reaction.
That rubbish party has already become a national face, henceforth holds more clout, and must be cashing in on more funds. The facade of culture is a great scheme for a business model.

My itch that is, is that there have been much severe incidents in the past (being sprayed with acid, burnt, abused, raped, killed), but the collective conscience only wakes up when it almost became a personal thing to the people who know how to make websites and write artikels. The sudden flood of sympathy seems confusing, and the keyword 'sympathy' only reminds me of an Amartya Sen quote:
"It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is egoistic, for oneself is pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action."

Now let's see: the victims were accessible enough, not deprived of the power to speak (physical restrictions that being sprayed with acid or being killed puts) and, most importantly, willing to speak (thank God for being progressive-minded!). So this has shades of ego-exercise about it. And no, I don't think such activism fueled by ego is wrong, but surely something that had been existing latently and would've been much better off had it come earlier.

Seeing it another way, this incident caught on as it involved large congregations over a large number of places and, more importantly, was reducible to a simple binary relationship - the abuser and the abused. What the latter means gets more clear if one recalls the twisted social nature (thanks to our nakedness to irrational arguments) that dowry deaths or family abuse assume in India, and only a few NGOs are left to fight over it for years at times. 'I personally believe' that we learn to have an immediate opinion in these smaller cases as well - without needing the necessary media to generate sympathy to decide of taking action.

If anybody truly feels humiliated at such an incident, then they will not be looking for such straightforward binary roles: because there aren't any. These people that did so are inflated balls of ego, and deflated icons of potency. They promulgate their ideologies in private circles, which often escapes notice right under our eyes; they live amongst us, and you see them doing small, irritating, cute, (assumedly) social things everyday to push in their ideology. We should work on showing them humans first rather than creatures from hell, and then work on a direction that shows their decline to that creature from hell.

rightnow: so happy at the thought of going Gail Wynand (junior years) at the goons for something I obsessively feel about. Such thoughts should not be restricted to 2AM in the morning.
As always, late by a month in reactions :(

[Hello David Cooper]
[Hello Ms. South Carolina]
[Hello WWE/F]
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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Wie Eine Blume

You are like a flower, so sweet, and pretty, and pure. I look at you, and sorrow steals into my heart.
I feel that I ought to lay my hands upon your head, praying that God should keep you so pure, and pretty, and sweet.
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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Wherever you are or I am is here
Wherever here is
But wherever here is
Let us not let it be anywhere else.
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Monday, March 09, 2009

Go See Tso

Today was spent making up my mind to visit the Tso family - the bunch of (remnant) lakes in a close cluster, lying in the the region of Zanskar/Leh, not far from the course of River Indus: Tso Kar, Startsapuk Tso, Thandsangkaru Tso/Kiagar Tso, Tso Moriri and the Kyun Tso. So far it's only wishful thinking, but if plans go through, it will sprout a halo of transcendence about me. Right now I'm thinking of my possible accomplices: there are a couple of friends who are all set for Leh, maybe I can flex their plans; there's a friend who will want to run away from the world for a couple of weeks come May, I'm assuming; and then there are some new candidates on the horizon, with whom I'm not that familiar with, but well aware of their unwavering passion for adventure.

Can you digest that the Tso Moriri is 30,000 acres in surface area? 3,333 of my (former) college compounds can fit into that! But in the name of fauna, there is mainly the Wild Ass, which, though a disappointing animal for all the other wealth our jungles offer, has been a favorite of mine since class VII, when our geography teacher - that hag - would tell us about the abundance of wild asses in the state of Gujarat. Yes I was that degenerate.

All these lakes are within 60km of linear trajectory, but as one is aware, that it comes to a few hundred kilometers of winding roads. Alternately, I wish I could trek all that distance, in the spirit of a wanderer. And then to add to the mystical part I'll have visits from the tree fairies on the nights when I'm out camping, and they will feed me berries and roasted venison. I hope they would give me a return air ticket from Leh as well, for I won't be having any energy left by the time I've seen it all.

ps: that reminds me to explore the occult in these ranges
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Sunday, March 01, 2009

Real Fear

"It could've happened to anybody." And with that premises, I walk with fear on the roads of Delhi, just having been a witness to somebody in a miserable condition being pushed deeper into misery in broad daylight. Things aren't the same anymore. The paranoia will set in - not just me, everybody else - after all it's not everyday that you see such things happening right in front of your eyes...somebody being taken down from a distance. My friends have felt fearful walking through crowded lanes in Muslim-dominated areas, much because of the hype machine that has reduced "Islam" to another word for "senseless killing", prejudice. A similar fear is manifest to certainty these days, but not on Muslim, but Hindu/Sikh turf, and walking through those lanes is a dosage of paranoia: you are aware of what these people can do to you, and take every step expecting your doom; your eyes moving like a pinball, searching for their faces every direction; you start hating their kids - cute and innocent - because you know what menace lies inside them; you expect every distraction as a ploy, and walk with pacing steps in a straight line, fearful to look in the that direction only because you're too familiar as to what could be your fate; the roads hint of the few lucky ones who made it through, those hints being as frightful as much as comforting. You walk on, because there are no other options. You live in such a society, and you live with IT, year after year with the same recurrent fear.
But you are certain that it would pass away: those menacing kids sneaking up on you with water balloons a few days around Holi.
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Thursday, February 26, 2009

Airport जैसा

The Metro Stations are a micro-representation of the Airport exits: people come out feeling a satisfaction after comfortable travel - Ay See, Vay See, all that - escalators, lights, the security, the expanse, and to top that a whole army of Rickshaw-wallahs waiting to assault you, much like how the taxi-wallahs do at the Airport check-out. Somebody walking out must get excited over such fact, besides the satisfaction of ridiculing those blueline-farers. It's a sight that - on a mild evening - will get you ecstatic on seeing the drama it holds.

Meanwhile, there exist people in the world who still like songs like 'Dance Pe Chance' (thats the right title, no?); and those who make/like movies such as 'Behind Enemy Lines - Columbia'. Their future generations will be born with defects if they continue with such rubbish.
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Ghazal fnord

These are some of the lyrics to an Indian Ghazal, Mera Kuch Samaan from the movie Izazat, where some poor girl is demanding her romantic baggage back. Apparently her guy pwned her and now she pwns him back with this mindfuck of a song, with an ending on fatalistic lines.
Ek akeli chhatri mein aadhe aadhe bheeg rahe thhe
Aadhe sookhe
Aaadhe geele
Sookhaa to main le aayee thee
Geelaa mann shayad bistar ke paas pada ho
Woh bhijwaa do
Mera woh samaan lauta do.

116 Chaand ki raatein
Ek tumhare kaan ki kaaten
Geeli mehndi ki khushboo
Jhooth mooth ke shikwe
Jhooth mooth ke waade bhi sab yaad kara do
Sab bhijwa do
Mera woh samaan lauta do


made-my-day thing: A website listing Altaf Raja's genre as Pop/World/Reggae
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Mini Capsule

This isn't a suitable moment to be blogging at, both because I'm disconnected from everything thats happening outside and also because I'm physically lethargic owing to the influence of vodka right now. But being spontaneous is a way of cool for me - and Saurabh - who've come under the influence of Jack Kerouac lately. So be it.

I don't have much to write about except that I'm in no control over much of the human factors responsible for myself. Nature is our great equaliser, and treats me like any other person regardless of what I have done or am doing, hence I continue to be an irritant up your life. But when it..Wait...not supposed to give any credulity to a society that I consciously (sorta) detset, because I never set with the aim to affiliate with it anyways. Hence it stays closed: "there is no control, so let things be.
On a derived note, being selfish is almost a virtue. That means that you're thinking about yourself, purely, which eliminates anybody else from the equation. For the sybarite-destructive personality that isn't bad at all - they're only thinking about themselves. Things get bad when people pretend to have some ethic in life while living selfish, selfish + selfless, as ethics have always had to do with pro-social behavior, which in itself is considered selfless; most of us - me included - are on this track currently. Forget about the selfless BS.
Au Revior.
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Friday, February 20, 2009

(Shatabdi) Express Interpretations

This world needn't be this cruel!
It was an ordinary ride back from Lucknow to Delhi, in the most grandiose of our trains, the Shatabdi Express. But Mahatma Gandhi, with his pithy "be the change you want to see" probably gives away that one should expect nothing from us folks, since we turn everything into an example of how things shouldn't be - maybe that is at the core of our nature. By the end of the train journey the corridors of the train seemed a battlezone, with all the things spilled over and crushed and littered, such are the habits of our fellow 'brothers and sisters'.

Firstly, I was greatly vexed by the equation which is expressed mathematically as
Being-an-Ass (directly proportional) Age
This is an underlying philosophy common to most who age here in India, and it beats all logic. They - the middle-aged and onwards - aspire to be as unaccomodating as possible, as if that's a distinction of sorts. Needlessly assertive, insincerely stubborn, subtly greedy, warring...all that.

Nasty critic inside: "Wow, your 6 hour ride seems an epic. Did it really get that revelatory between the sleep and soup and coffee and frooti and chapatis and ice-cream?"
Excited Blogger Me: "Wait, read what follows. Shutup or I'll kill you."

So it happens that the aged generation has assumed that the youth are flexible and easy going. In that belief a plump lady steals my window seat, which was a mere childish desire since she had no reasons. Then sits another girl besides me who has also suffered the same fate as me and been forced to stubbornly part from her seat somewhere by this old man; she kept herself busy with Tinkle comics and Backstreet Boys. Everytime my stare shifted to the countryside rolling by, it was against an out-of-focus plump and oily visage - plump and oily cheeks, plump and oily nose, plump and oily lips, plump and oily chin - the lady, of course. The lady then progressed to breaking off the lever to the seat recliner, which she then politely asked me to operate, assuming that I'd be jovial and amiable towards her amid all this irritation; these assumptions continued all the way till I helped her de-board the train with her luggage at Aligarh.

Also in-duration was a man seated directly behind me whom I'd assumed was huge in proportions, since he claimed to be at discomfort when I'd reclined my seat back, he wasn't ready to budge from being an asshole; some argument to a faceless voice, and I'd gained back my recline where I had decent amount of sleep until the evening sun pricked my eyes and rudely woke me up. By his nature, he seemed a middleman - plain and simple - who was engrossed over the phone throughout and seemed to have a hand in each and every office, pro fixer. Midway, when I was busy with my book, both the plump woman and the young girl on either side of me started giggling. I'm not used to girls giggling anywhere close to my radius so this was odd enough. But there had to be an even odder reason for this. Losing concentration from my book, I heard this asshole screaming over the phone:
"Listen, you file a complaint: 'This man is anti-brahmin. He is an oppressor of the brahmins. He has done several tortures upon us brahmins and we do not want to see him inside our department.'" Somebody speaking such rubbish so vehemently in Hindi in that typical UP tone is bound to be entertaining. I'm presuming this was a campaign against some Muslim employee in a Government office.
I finally turned around to have a glimpse of this man as he was about to alight at Alipur - he turned out a politician.

Yes, there were just this handful of people to infer from. Add to that a much-desired confrontation with the insolent armed policeman at the Metro station which brought back the good old days of my disgust at the Police, and reaffirmed of the dystopia that will arise when we hand more powers in the hands of these idiots.

ps: Delhi seemed a discontent city tonight. why so sad?
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Thursday, February 12, 2009

Uh, friends?

There is a trivial sense of purpose in everything; I can't find any close lowest common denominator of my state when sitting among friends, and the vice-versa. Our paths diverged, right after our basic 'ethics (to not get oneself killed) in a society' were established. And now, rather than see them - the friends - as different in their condition of continuing education, the daily mad dash to the office, or even juggling between both at times, I see us as different people who stayed close. There is nothing sad about this, just my take, and I'm alright with that fact.

But then we are at a loss when it comes to contributing to a friend's life, as we can't critique on anybody or send give right advices - otherwise I'd have been lambasted from each and every side a long time back, for example. In that desperate attempt to feign , we would try building up a set of facts that would lead a third person to believe that we actually made a difference, which is why we throw out everything that could've been said or done (and counted as the 'right thing'). In much of the cases - to no surprise - what comes out is nothing but a projection of our own fears and anxieties born from our own situation, and a solution to ourselves. But that doesn't mean we don't care - we do - just that it's hard to live YOUR life when ours is still ON. Yesss, we have the freedom to obsess us with ourselves. This might be because everybody has 'scraped through' in this age of man bites man (for the gender neutral: man bites man). There are no shining examples of life amongst us today; no certain futures, only anxiety as we cling all the more strongly to any pursuits. It works backward when we start on making inferences on another person's state; we only end up watching our lingering/futile dreams on a huge mental screen.
There is no path; only an ambiguous sense of utility that carries us through.
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Monday, February 09, 2009

Before Sleep Takes Charge

I'm having itchy feet again. Delhi doesn't feel a bit intimate and I'd be better off continuing my state of indolence in some distant tea-stall on any morning. Its into the early hours past midnight, and the night breeze should soon be flowing in, making its presence felt on my feet that rest close to the door. But these winds are bland, not because the winter rains skipped Delhi this time as a consequence of which there is no moisture in the air, but because they don't associate to anything that lies, lives, or breathes around me; they are not a reminder of anything, they don't 'pack' Delhi in their currents; right now I might as well be typing away in a spacepod built to resemble 20feet of my living radius.
The routine is turning into too much of a leisure, and today would be another day when I'll go to bed in a few minutes with an intense belief that the most fruitful day of my life would follow. I wake up to the irritations and irregularities of weather, followed by irritations upon my own self through the day in soliloquies (and the seldom company), and end the day with irritations about the weather again - much like what all the other Delhizens do. My balcony doesn't have a perspective, which somewhat prevents me from dreaming frivolous (that generally comes with things 'vast'). Things are going slow.

Being much homebound, all that I'm piling up is tabs. It will be a personal moment of triumph when the tabs - 26 on opera, 7 on chrome and 2 on firefox - would come to a close; but its hard as a single tab has the potential to lead me into a thousand other pages.
I should write more. Yes.
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Friday, February 06, 2009

Rescuing Nostalgia


I managed to get this very odd scan of one of my older negatives, with almost otherworldy shapes and colors. There were images from Lucknow, abruptly entering into the mountain 'scapes of Nainital, and in between was this one lost frame. Upon bumping the contrasts up and back, I could vaguely make out the details - there was something like the DNA Helix, or bucky balls. And suddenly the memory came up vivid... January 2, 2008, an awesome morning when I was awesomely punctual to leave home early, needing to reach ISBT to tag along with my cousins in their car to Nainital. Being so awesome as to reach there much earlier, I decided to be fruitful with my camera. And this was born - an underexposed child o' mine.
The DNA Helix is a huge boxlike pile of colorful balls atop a blueline, hiding behind the spring-green colors of a DTC bus, and low in the frame is the yellow roof of auto rickshaws that crowd the roads in the morning hour.
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Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Gurgaon (another of its veins)

(before it pushes into my backlog, then slowly fades into oblivion)
It was Gurgaon again, today, and today was very different from the other days. I've only seen the glassy-eyed Gurgaon this far, a ball of modern chaos. But the fibres that bind it came into a closer sight today, when I ran through a great half of it - the older side - from afternoon to dusk, and by the end of the day stood gazing at the setting sun along the highway, the glass facades creating poetic distortions from its reflections, and the neon glows in the foreground creating a surreal atmosphere at dusk, wishing that Guragaon could be frozen right there forever (or until I'd got a camera).

Gurgaon still comes off as an unpolished hub, and a reminder of lots of things gone wrong. The standards of living fall away with the falling sight of the great highway, and where the reflections from the great buildings cease to fall, the routine life feels like a crowded Lucknow market or a vast concrete park. But as long as the roads are good, and the women not being raped, and bloggers not being terminated, Gurgaon will do.

Firstly I'd like to kill the myth that Gurgaon's not connected. It is... at least the hours I was out there, trying to work my way through a dozen sectors. There are many shared Piaggio auto 'things' plying on its roads, charging a flat Rs 5 per seat. Shared transport Zindabad! The best part is that you will be 'adjusted' regardless of how many times its already exceeding its capacity. But though everything is connected, one often takes several fragmented routes to reach to their destination - I had to swap 4 'things' to make a 3 sector jump - maybe I look up more compatible routes. Also came across a nuthead behind the wheels of one such auto, who almost got me and the others killed on several occasions; one who'd curse and shout at anybody at his will; one who stopped and got out of his vehicle midway because he was profusely sweating in the pants; one who almost ran into a motorcycle because he wanted to convey to the biker that his stand hadn't been lifted; one who hounded a non-passenger on the road for dirtying his vehicle floor.

The most entertaining sight of the day was that of first a little hog sauntering past, followed by a large black hog , being chased by a little boy, across an open lot with the IBM and Accenture offices in the background; the sprinting motion of the hog across the barren land was detailed, unusually comic. The boy never managed to catch the hog as far as my sight went - the hog first tried crossing the road, but wisely didn't, then dodged the boy and 'sprinted' back the same way it came from. In the commotion, a feeble dog was also woken up, dead scared. The dog the left in the direction of Accenture building; idiot.
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Sunday, January 25, 2009

A Dragged Moment

The gentle winter breeze,
Picking its warmth from the midday sun.
And the young leaves folding out from the stalk,
Dull already after a day of evolution.
The din of men and their trucks cutting through the passerine's songs and the joys of children nearby,
Silencing the cicadas and the whimsical cows on the hill opposite.

All the while the friends bake themselves,
Trying to work their own sense -
The soul and connections and everything like that;
Their own hostilities manifesting in waves of silence
that crash silently against the common shore,
Sweeping up its own inferences;
A pulsating madness to the spectators.

The present proximity and the distant past
- an unsettling premonition -
It drives them insane.
The most malicious moment gets another birth.
The lone strife all over again.

We forget today, oh recurrent impulses.
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Friday, January 16, 2009

The Outside Equation

The ongoing economic fallout would not have any effect on my decision of studying overseas, that I knew. Moreover, another friend was even more hopeful, considering that people equate the quality of education to the job scene it promises; but because the current job scene is fractured, it would only deter those people from applying, hence create lesser competition. He was particularly hopeful of the Indian subcontinent crowd following this rule.

But there will be another obvious development, as my cousin explained: Those already in the market, are very potential applicants; because this same low will convince them to take off a couple of years from their jobs, knowing that nothing significant would happen in the meanwhile - anything better than being caught in stagnation (stag-flation?). And what better time to change fate to those just fired from their jobs, knowing that its easier to push their resume into schools than companies at this time? So now all the market crowd with unfinished postgrad dreams would be in my competition as well. If I was pitting my hopes on a better-than-average-student resume, then these people even beat me there.
It is troubling.
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Sunday, January 11, 2009

Waxing prosaic in Rishikesh

1700
I'm back to the rock and sands that mark my year. 'Back' is potentially misleading, because this is not a relapse, no coming a full circle...just back in the geographical sense. This is Rishikesh where I was in December the past year, thinking over simple things. Then, after a year of wonderful facts, I'm still thinking, but of things that have mutated into a forcibly greater meaning and context. This is nothing holy or spiritual, just questions arising from my affiliations to the society and present era. India has never seemed this confusing before, and my world has never been this confused about me.


1825
There are only 2 places in Rishieksh worth lounging at: the corner seat at the Devraj Cafe and the last seat at ShivaGanga Beach Cafe. Any place else, and you're either too far from R. Ganga and missing the whole reason of being, or in a place where an unexpected number of goras smoking substances make you feel alienated, cramped and looking for an exit. Right now I'm 'missing my reason of being', since I'm a few seats away from that holy seat at Devraj Cafe. But I'm still overlooking the river, though as a part of a montage of the unpleasant drainage pipes, the dumps, dimly-lit shops and the crackpot sadhus - all this lies right next to the great Ganga (Ganges).

50 minutes later
Gabriella did help unwind a bit. I dug her. She's technically a Lithuanian living in Sweden who claims to belong to no particular country and has her history scribed in Lithuania, Sweden, America and India. This is her 3rd visit to India, 1st to Rishikesh and leaves back for Sweden from Delhi on the 14th morning. Here for yoga - and meditation, which she claims is inclusive - she reminds me of the 'sweet little gone gal' of the 60s beat culture - though a bit restrained and deeper. I and her talk about yoga, its practise, application and expanding its definition, her job, her stay here, her travel with this guy (whom she's taking for a fatherly figure but can't really gel with). And then ecology, conservation, mankind being a pest, mankind being a slave of its own condition - things that I get a better hook on. Been just 6 minutes of her leaving, but I already can't draw her in words now - I'm easily distracted in this place. I don't think that my attempts at expressing my little revealations found much audience in her, but I did get a greater share of her chocolate pastry block which was - really was - too big for her. "You are a big man, you can manage this much!" Wooho! I got free chocolate. It was fate; I was meant to consume you. Talk about taking 'brownie points' literally.
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Thursday, January 01, 2009

Self Amusement

After being here for a while, everything dynamic about Lucknow ends. The strained ways of life seem normal after a while, and I can only chuckle at that at the expense of a direct comparison with Delhi. The lazy and disorganised life here has a soprific effect, much like sitting on a rocking chair in the winter sun. The most interesting scenes in recent times have been at the Daliganj railway crossing where 3 lanes converge at one side of the crossing and there's a national highway on the other side. These days its also been graced with the constructive work of the municipality, leaving behind a huge pit of 8x5ft. Because the Lucknow junta has greater faith in the law of the jungle (जंगल कानून), everybody decides on their own discretion when the crossing gates are closed, and chaos is born: rickshawallahs trying to fit their rickshaws through every space left (and their passengers forced to follow on heels, picking up dust and tire-marks), two wheelers stranded on the train tracks because the line of rickshaws has met with its counterpart arriving from the other side of the crossing, cyclists trying to carry their bikes through on shoulders, the stranded pedestrian hopping between all kind of tires and car owners trying to narrow down the empty spaces to reduce the rickshaw assault. So that is the Lucknow I have recently been familiar to. That, and the pesky assault of the beggars, which is another long story. But I'm far from summing Lucknow, never can.

After giving up on finding any more dynamic character in the nearby markets and squares (चौराहा), I'm starting to look back in a closer radius.
Spent quite some time observing a cantankerous bull right outside the house. He had occupied the center of our lane and started grunting loud, because of which any inbound traffic made its way back scared. Later he stormed towards the garbage dump and occupied a central position from where he could eat as well as fend off other cows, calves, dogs and ragpickers - all it required was to swing his head wildly. Then later there was the fruit vendor (with his cart) in the same lane outside, fending off monkey assault from all the sides. The monkeys had closed in when one of the customers bought them some bananas. Then they fought among themselves for whatever they could catch and ran away happy. I also had a jolly time chasing them away and matching their violent glances later.
And normally I'm eating and eating more just for the amusement of being fat again.
I just had on me ears these couple of plastic thingies that once held my handkerchief taut, and they looked like a bad choice for earrings. Right now they grace my canines, and I look rather like a Mudokon than the vampire I expected to be.

rightnow: blog done, and now I can go have another cup of coffee, and continue with Jack Kerouac's "On the Road".
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