Tuesday, July 28, 2015

I'm in the friends room. Its a room I specially made for the people of my imagination. They come in all structures, sizes, and ways of hanging out (even literally). That is why there are chairs on the wall and hooks next to the chandelier. There are hot and cold corners of the room, too, built much like an organism that burns at proximal and shivers at distal ends. So to feel closer to nature, or 'outside' you sit closer to outside, near to the window. If you feel like escaping into a warm comfort, you come closer to friends (or the boulder demarcating the geographical center).

Well, so much for all I don't say. I have been saying a lot of late. I have been foisting myself on people, and been gratified well. Relationships feel stupid to confine yourselves to, in that sense. Friendships are better value propositions - they have been around for the longest time, and you get them and they get you well, and that's all people need. I might smell like hippie culture - but hey, we are celebrating the golden jubilee of the 60s in the (20)10s. And I'm not exactly talking about a commune here, but being compatible with a lot more people this way.

Still I can't stop feeling violent about this thought in some way.
End.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

rains

i love the rains. of course, i love the sun as much, and the interplay of sun and rain even more. call it the novelty of change, or whatever, i like it. the blue skies turning dark and vice versa are the dual moments of climax during a spell of rain - they don't make movies to excite that way. no wonder why perverts fuck in the cinma theaters while saner folks prefer the embrace of nature.

as for my story with today's clouds, they don't seem to like me so much, because they went away too soon. i could see their grey pregnant bellies as they drifted out, that which was suspended like an endless blanket - the texture of fur and velvet - above only a few minutes back. permeancies are deceptive. i bet the met could have prevented this thought, had i read about the 'expectancy of a short rainy spell' earlier. well, wiser and wordcount-richer, nonetheless.

now that they are gone, let me talk about my special relationship with sunshine. "hellow sunshine" burbles in the head as winds do their thing and sweep the clouds away. my precious now turns into sunshine. our relationship has been very long, of about 30 years, full of adventure and vitamin d. vitamin d is essential so many lively moments we have. sometimes we sit and talk about death too, the other d. vitamin d is also what's wrong with me. it is an anti depressant, hence uplifts one in a positive way, to a positive state. positive people rarely show flight response. i'm stupid enough to be swayed by my own hormones. epic fail.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Nature consciousness - no rape

People talk and act like idiots when it comes to interacting with their own environment. They try to give it their own value system. We are both a selfish and a dominating society, that does not like to be sensitive about other species that cohabit with us. Take our animals, for instance. We anthropomorphize them, often to our advantage. We use their behavior to give rationale to our acts, and we use our behavior to give a human facet to their acts. It is a violence in a sense. Time and again, we prove nothing, but how we have chosen to live in a suspension of reality or in abundance of superstition or in aloofness to everything that's not about our survival and displaying an insensitivity when it is about our survival.

Take an example of fables of animals raping humans. Bears are especially infamous. Hill folk tales abound with a bear having taken a damsel away to his cave and shown care and love, and ultimately sexual advances. Poor bears; they never raped anybody even in their own species, and they get the label of a libidinous abductor.

Or how the behavior of a particular gorilla in Australian zoo was equated to rape, and shown as an insight into our primitive instincts. In science world, such things rarely contribute to a body of knowledge that helps us in understanding our nature, but in the popular world any semblance is received with an enthusiasm that nothing but domain illeteracy can explain.

Dolphins, recently, have been found to 'rape' their handlers. Well, that rape is something more akin to frottage. Dogs do it, to children, beds, balls, poles, your legs, anything. Since dolphin's moments of spiked libido happen in water, obviously the struggle to get away will be harder (and funnier), and it'll make news.

When a dog urinates on a fire hydrant, that is neither an obscene gesture nor an act of vandalism. It is just a dog being a dog. The moment, even the instant, you try to attribute societal motives to the actions of an entirely different species, no matter how close the evolutionary relationship to your own, you have just stepped into extremely murky waters. If the societal motive you choose to attribute to such a species just happens to be human-oriented, you have stepped back out of murky water and squarely landed on a island made of faulty assumptions - in short you are now anthropomorphizing your subject.

"Rape" and "sexism" carry moral judgments. "Grief" does not. Moral judgments should be reserved for people, in my humble judgment. I think it's problematic to impute internal attributes such as will and consent and right and wrong to other animals. It's more straightforward to describe the orangutan behavior just like Barbara did, i.e. "unlike gorillas, they sometimes physically restrain a female and mate with her even as she cries out and struggles."

What I'm about though is saying that these behaviors are not natural in the sense of inevitable either in our closest cousins the apes, or as evolutionary roots of behavior for us. I don't think, to go a bit further, that we have "a human nature," for example: we evolved to be flexible according to our circumstances. We have laid a violent foundation to our interaction with our environment, which falters in the very understanding of it.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

sunday morning ride

I am supposed to start as a professional, on the last day of this weekend, for a change, and I'll do that soon.

Rode out early today. The phrase 'riding out early' (and its derivates) has seen rare use through two years. There hasn't been a single 'trip' to count for, since the pedal through Konkan coastline back in 2013. Since then I have been relegated to love, and my bike has been relegated to a curio piece in the anteroom of homes that we have switched over the years. How guilty I feel about Godiva being raised a city girl (or rather, enduring the city); she is made for a mountains, being an MTB. In some ways today was a commitment to make amends. Sadly my organism experiences new endings and beginnings every week, and claims to be very messed up in times and schedule, which when sorted, would also allow me to get her to taste some Himalayan tarmac. Oh, and fix her first - just a body part replacement and modest servicing needed.

The rainy morning was a great bonus. 'Rainy morning' sees rare use too, in terms of direct experiene. I had 'Delhi' all over me at the end of the ride. Delhi that came from left right, down, and top, in the way of water and grime. That Delhi was washed away in Liril and Fructus.  The roads that get waterlogged invite dodging hence increasing the chances of danger. Thinking of that, I took a circuitous-but-good route (good tarmac that I could recall) that took me next to a large stadia and other large structures - like the Supreme Court, India Gate, etc - that constitute Lutyen's Delhi, followed with impromptu plans of a detour to the river Yamuna via Akshardham flyover, and ended with a topping on the cake called Barapullah.

Riding out in the chaos of rains was fun. Such days make even healthy organisms feel sick. My sickness was in the form of nostalgia. In the days of the early wars, when recording illnesses, causative agents behind diseases (like Meningitis) were rather inaccurately identified, a lot of sicknesses  - and in some cases deaths - would be attributed to 'nostalgia' or 'melancholia'. Memories spilled out instead of sweat and coagulated instead of blood. The human humdrum, the rain, and the ride make for such moments.

A large cluster of kites (cheelein) occupied the skies of Nizamuddin. Slaughterhouses (cut) open early, y'know. Predators on wings encircling the city, watching with telescopic gaze to take a grab at the first piece of meat their eyes meet. Stripping out anthropomorphical/metaphoric context, the sight of these birds in the city is beautiful and welcome, but not the fact that abattoirs sustain them today. Also, a pity to see no vultures formed that large group.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Pining in the pines


More than owning her, I ended up owning things around her. Maybe love was a novelty displaced by other novelties of the social-ness she brought me into, but it correlated with her original complaint, that I have been more about the mountains than about her highness. She got it a bit wrong there. Our individual perceptions can't collude well, even when in love; its what makes us unique and in some way gives us an identity. She considered my novelty worn off, directed elsewhere and considered it over.

Well, comparing love to a coat of paint - that dazzles when fresh and barely catches an eye after going through the elements - is plain wrong. A new metaphor is needed. That of rains is fitting - the ongoing monsoons when Kharif crops are sown inspires me to it. 
Agreed that after the novelty of the fresh rains that had irrigated my fallow heart, the earth got thirsty again, but the seeds dormant inside were sprouting into a plant and taking roots. Oh, why couldn't she have waited for the rain again?

Monday, July 06, 2015

staggering truths

He was single-mindedly pursuing a truth he felt was of staggering importance to the world. The world had no idea of what he was trying to do and was trying to kill him for his trouble. The habitants of "his" world didn't want to be honest anymore, but just an accepted member of the community, bowing and accommodating their way through the rest of the years.

It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a civilization that destroys the dignity of its individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times.

Sunday, July 05, 2015

The Madcap Laughs

What will be if I lose her
What will be if I lose them
What will be if I lose myself
What will be if I lose it - one little bit

What will be if I lose that - that crazy cat


That devolved madcap ...

that sends pigeons into space, 
kills unicorns for the cause of public health, 
traces vague lines in the sand, 
places elephants on the lands of ice, 
brings home tales of great curiosity, 
treats with an empty pocket, 
cheats in a shackled world, 
beats on a forgotten path, 
hears a strange new tune, 
makes queens feel less, 
trails the global average maturity scale, 
forgets to love what he loves, 
and loves to forget what is forbidden...

to him we toast

Learning about the chaos called life


Borne out of the chaos,
a yearning for learning;
first lesson learnt,
is that the road ahead got its fair share of turns;
and people are people;
and lover sometimes act more distant than friends;
and the world around
submissioned through shock
often chooses passivity.

If only I knew my long shelf life - been on the shelf for too long - and better come of some use before hitting the expiry date (of human endeavor). I would be on it, provided that disclosure of information, which is a doubtful/impossible premise in itself.