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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.