Filtering Through!

Her

2011-12-06T04:37:00.001-08:00

She looked for attention; she looked about herself in a vainly superior way. She was dressed to that effect as well. She wasn't beautiful; in her youth, a time behind her easily by a decade, she could have been attractive. She would have known the desire of her in people she was attracted to, the gift of the youth. It had passed now. There was no debris left of that time. Everything had left her face and body. Aging had transformed her. She had become someone else. It was this transformation that she was ending up emphasizing through this ridiculous dressing up. After some time, you took to her situation. You almost felt for her. Her glances, her longing for a stare at her body, her quick movements on the slippery floor, her constant setting up of her hair with raised hands, she was likable in her thirst for attention. But flesh had betrayed her. Bodies, bodies like hers seem to have been enslaved so many times that the scars of the passage of time cannot be hidden. It is beyond technology. Ugliness could be hidden well, unattractiveness is beyond hiding; it's pure tragedy. What would she want? Was her addition of attention swallowing her or did she feel restored to her previous self through this outrageous behaviour? I imagined her husband.

Dead Soul`

2011-05-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

He had stopped feeling. He couldn't define a physical sensation if asked. He had become automated to a specific order, a repetition that swallowed his time ruthlessly every single day. When he found time, he didn't think. He smoked till his throat hurt. He woke up with a pain in the chest. He disliked everything about himself. On the road, he abused happy people. He looked at happiness in a sort of bored way; he thought it was an act put up with no objective. He felt happiness was a cover for embarrassment. Wasn't he embarrassed? To be of no consequence, to have limited one's powers, to have arrived at one's worst, and having to live, having to schedule a purposeless routine; having to find oneself at odds with one's desires; his desires were dying, he knew. His schedule, the everyday tasks he religiously did, were killing them; and he couldn't fly away. He felt tied. He felt powerless when he tried to think of a release. He tried to put on the mask of elongated lips, shining teeth, roaring laughter. But it evaporated because he found nothing funny; he found nothing to smile at. He saw forced limitations. Limitations imposed by mediocrity, limitations that had lived unchallenged and had now become immensely powerful; limitations that were swallowing him.

He sat and observed the people around him. He saw struggle. He saw the masks. He saw the abuse of "what should have been" by "what had become". He couldn't sleep; when he got drunk, it was harder to sleep. He lay motionless. He had become a motionless mass. When he saw himself he couldn't identify what he saw. His face had become heavy and lined. There was constant strain in his eyes. The skin had gotten dull and blotted. life was wrestling with him and knocking him out in every round; every single blow caught him unprepared. He accepted injury in meek disregard. He accepted everything in meek disregard. The world had closed in on him from all directions. There was no way out, there was never a way out, he thought. He looked down, almost always, and waited for the world, the masks, to crush him into in existence.

Missing the Huge Presence

2011-01-05T03:35:00.001-08:00

Hello Mommy
Where have you been? Missing you. Why don't you meet us? :)

Writing

2010-08-23T01:17:00.000-07:00

The presence of a central theme could actually be found in the act of writing, often in the end; and then one begins anew, with the knowledge of the narrative, uncertainty diminished. It's a hard process though to continue to write while threatened with various aspects of creative misgivings. A masterpiece at the first glance is more often than not unremarkable: learning to cope with that is the mark of the true writer.

Forms

2010-05-10T23:53:00.000-07:00

As soon as I entered the dark, low ceiling ed and confined room I felt a twinge of distaste. A few moments later I was left alone with her. The business for her had begun. I checked her. She stared at me. She sat in a particular way. She was waiting to be stripped, I felt. She was overweight and, what now dawned on me, aged. She seemed twice my age. The effort to look younger had gone in vain; while I felt cheated, helplessly standing there, she moved closer to me, hiding her body in that quick movement; and hugged me. She dragged me to bed and began kissing me. I felt uneasy. The intimacy, the closeness repelled me. I couldn't be rude; but I couldn't oblige either; I tried to find a way out. She knew it. She knew the limitations her body had arrived at; she knew now she couldn't hide them. Traumatized by flesh she offered the knowledge of flesh. She tried to be the aggressor. I lay on my back, elegantly pushing her away on her back. Hands behind my head, I looked at the ceiling. She started weeping, slowly, making no sound; then she rose and looked at me....I smiled at her and thought of a way out again.....flesh....the torments of flesh...I had arrived for flesh...I saw its abuse.

Death...

2010-04-30T23:46:00.001-07:00

A second chance- that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark- we do what we can- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
-Henry James

He was overwhelmed by a feeling of total hopelessness, and for the first time in his life he felt the real seduction of the idea of suicide. He had always believed that consciousness was the supreme value, but what did it profit a man to be conscious if it was only of failure, humiliation and regret.

After a few minutes he didn't have to force himself to sit still, for he liked this, attempting to do something well, to the limit of his ability, on his own terms.

There is that deserted table; blank, properly arranged papers lying there since ages, unused. The fountain pens, a couple, containing the now dried ink, untouched, look dirty, losing their shine, and perhaps power as well. Isn't it a premonition of the deathly shadow of ignominy to come? In the years to come would I hate myself more than I do now?

Didn't she look like the goddess in the moment of death?

What's freedom to you?

"....like the story of the cat, where the couple was arguing about a divorce but the cat thought they were disagreeing about the giblets for its lunch."

Fuck the Gods!

2010-04-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

Dazed

2010-03-05T23:21:00.001-08:00

It didn't make any sense to me hours after it had happened. My senses were exhausted and in want of more at the same time. I looked about myself; there were so much I couldn't understand: circumstances I had worked at creating staring me in the eye unknowingly, and I couldn't relate to them either. I had my desire rewarded, and I wanted more. I was physically at my extreme; so tired I didn't think I could get up and walk half a mile. I wanted to lie down and be like that for a stretch of eternity, dreamily floating in in the truth of my moment. I felt everything else to be unimportant and petty. Everything was irrelevant. Every face I saw, everyone I talked to, every voice I heard, every perception was unreal. Sometimes it gets into your insides and cuts everything there. It's not injury. It's beauty. I felt beauty all about; it was a feeling so alien it dazed me for hours. It gave me promise.
How do we create something that's better than us?
Can we create something that could make itself superior to us.....can we give a life better than our own to something that didn't exist before?
Is Art the answer? Or is it just a frail attempt? I love this feeling of being found and caught: clueless and admiring.
Can I start to try to create something?

On It

2010-01-14T21:33:00.000-08:00

It erases the memory of pain, torments, everyday struggles and accepted failures...and then it takes us flying just like when the enchanting queen Scheherazade tells her husband stories of flying carpets, and he, cruel and waiting to punish her, is in spite of himself enchanted. He's in another world. Scheherazade keeps weaving newer and newer narratives, metaphorically directing the carpet, taking the king into the world he never knew existed, and letting him be there; and he wishes to be there..forever...It's a spell of the carpet. A cruel cuboid three dimensional structure made of harsh cement and brick, without any care for finishing, rises out of the corner of a road, looking up at the manufacturing unit of The Hindu, pleading to be deserted, awaiting us, disregarding everyone else. It's here that a few of us are constantly stuck by a force so engaging, enchanting, delicious that we see the world through the narrator's eyes. And then we, placed there, never for once ask to see for ourselves.......depression is replaced by fantasies in our eyes. It's magic so personal, so touching, so much OURS that detailing it would sure seem belittling it.

A Little Evening...

2009-11-07T03:31:00.000-08:00

She looked at them curiously. The one who wasn’t driving was short, seemingly absent minded, irrelevantly thoughtful and awkward. The one who was driving on the other hand was lively, short haired, well-built and confident. They occupied the front seat in the car, leaving for her the only space which she had comfortably occupied. They oscillated between feigned confidence and immense awkwardness. Used to being confident the driver was far better off than the shortest one, who was now looking out the car searchingly. She thrust her head forward from between the seats and began talking about a boy who had been bothering her. She said he had been a bitter mess up. He was trying to flirt with her; and in doing so he was ending up constantly talking things she didn’t like at all.
“At one point I had this desire to punch him on the nose”, she said, disgusted with the memory of her tormenting time with him.
“Why didn’t you?” the shortest one said.
She laughed. The one driving looked at her for a few seconds, smiling. The shortest, looking at the road ahead, gestured to the one driving, who was now looking totally at her, to attend to the road. Disturbed, he turned to the road, cursing the shortest in his head. The car in which they were travelling belonged to the one driving the car, who drove it as if it were his bike, which was far better than the car he was now driving.
She looked at them curiously again. She started to say something about the hotel in which she was kept when the one driving took a sharp turn for no reason, and she fell back, for a moment appearing to be performing a serious isometric exercise. No apology came from the driver; and both of them began looking at the road for the reason of that sharp turn. There was none.
“You were saying something”, the shortest said, looking back.
“Yes”, she said, both the legs up in the air, trying to collect herself.
Saood spat a few obscenities at fellow drivers, who according to him were driving recklessly. Jasmine looked back. Srikant looked sideways.
Srikant was the eldest among the three and Saood the youngest. They had both looked forward to meeting Jasmine from quite some time now, and so had Jasmine; now all three of them were at a loss of words. Jasmine would from time to time discharge a flurry of compliments, most of them directed at Saood, a careful few at Srikant, who bowed on account of being free, unlike Saood whose hands and legs were tied to the process of driving; he still managed to steal elongated stares at Jasmine every few minutes. The moment he looked back at Jasmine in response to a compliment that apparently seemed to have touched him, the other two panicked; those seconds in which his eyes, bathed in tremendous delight, looked upon every aspect of Jasmine lovingly, the car drove itself. They were on the highway; the car was given a will of its own on moments of love. Everything else ceased to matter. When Saood was touched he was touched. Srikant tried to communicate to Jasmine through his hands that she could compliment him in the restaurant. It was too dangerous here. She misunderstood him and asked Saood to stop the car. She thought Srikant wanted to piss. Srikant went out of the car, cursing Saood, and bought a packet of cigarettes from a shed. Srikant and Jasmine began smoking while Saood inhaled the leftover smoke. They had come to the restaurant now. It was 6pm. They decided they had come early. Saood suggested, in an amphigory, that there was a bookstore nearby. Jasmine’s eyes widened. Srikant seemed to dance. They decided to go to it walking.
***********************************************************
They dispersed as soon as they entered it, each their own way. Something seemed to pull them and they gave in to that force. Jasmine wasn’t to be seen. She must have gone to some remote corner. Saood could see Srikant sitting clueless in front of a rack. Saood called the guy from the bookstore and asked him for certain books. He got his list out. A few seconds later the guy began marking his list with a pen. Then they went somewhere.
Srikant started reading the preface of a book. It was a costly classic. It was about a man visiting an asylum to see his cousin. For the first few days he keeps getting, at a rapid rate, signs of something having gone wrong. A strong premonition of disaster pervades him. People in the asylum, sane ones, don’t take to him kindly. They look at him questioningly. They see him as a peace breaker, someone who destroys balance. When he asks about this to his cousin, who is recovering fast, he doesn’t understand him. He asks if somebody has misbehaved with him. No, he says; maybe because everybody has. But anyway he is made to feel extremely uncomfortable. Every night he questions the relevance of his stay there. Every day he faces refusal. He cannot sleep. He finds everyone maddeningly polite. His mental health slowly declines while his cousin is a couple of weeks away from getting out. In the end, he goes mad. He doesn’t want to come out. He finds his home in refusal. He starts seeking refusal, and talk of leaving fills him with rage. In the end he comes to terms with his condition, with everyone around him disturbed.
Srikant never understood why the narrative touched him some vague but totally gripping way. A feeling of suddenly being left in a barathrum made his head spin. But every time he came here or to any other bookstore he felt attracted to the book. It called him; and he went to it. He felt it page by page, layer by layer, fascinated, and enchanted by its aroma of demolition.
He closed the book. He looked up; there was no one about. Saood wasn’t where he had been a few minutes ago. He stood and began looking for them; he couldn’t find them.
Jasmine went straight to poetry. Poetry as a form, confined and challengingly acute, appealed to her more than prose. Even when she was reading prose she looked for poetic elements in it. She was wearing a green sleeveless top, which emphasized her bosom. She bent to pick the books and perused them standing. The collection bored her. There was nothing new there; besides the bookstore had taken her by surprise; she preferred going prepared. She for the moment picked a random book and began reading the summary. The narrator arrives at an asylum to see his recovering, young cousin. The narrator himself is young and healthy. Once they’re together, they plan to go home together. The cousin, still weak on his feet, shows encouraging signs of improvement. The narrator’s worry is that his recovery might be delayed and he would have to stay longer than he can afford. He has taken leave from his office and cannot extend it; what’s worse he’s ambitious too. All this goes on in his mind while he’s taking the long journey to the asylum. Meeting his cousin, who has come himself to pick him up, allays his fear to a certain extent. He doesn’t like the asylum though. He doesn’t talk to the people there. He considers them mentally ill in some way or the other. His cousin’s effort of trying to get him involved with a few of them fails: a meeting with a doctor, who’s considered wise and engaging. He’s got nothing to do. He has brought a few books but for some reason cannot go beyond a few pages. As time passes he’s only thinking about why people around him are so despicable, worthless and lifeless all the time. He has fuelled in himself so much hate that he begins to see things. He imagines a plot against him. Someone wants to kill, he repeatedly tells his cousin, who’s almost completely recovered. The cousin is worried. The narrator stops eating and coming out of his room. He doesn’t allow anyone but his cousin to come to his room. He threatens to burn the whole room if anyone forced in. he doesn’t sleep.
There wasn’t anything specific written as to how it ended. She closed the book. Something about it gripped her. For a moment she felt lost. Then she began looking for Saood and Srikant.
Saood was talking to the guy from the bookstore. He knew him and respected his opinion. They had both searched in vain for books in his list. They hadn’t found them. Casually the guy noted the name of the books and authors in his notepad, and promised he would have them the next time he came. Saood had long given hopes that he would own the book. He had visited all the bookstores in the city. None had revealed the now magic book. He could have given three times its marked price. He put his hands on the guy’s shoulder and said:
“Get this next week please.”
“Sure sir. We’ll try our best. I’ll call you if we find it.”
“Yes. Sure.”
It had become a joke searching for this book, he thought. Nobody seemed to have it. What maddened him was the fact that the book wasn’t being read. His face turned solemn. He had read it so long ago. He had read it fast, at a small age, and found it plot less. It made no sense to him. But the memory of it now seduced him to no ends. He clearly knew he was wrong. And he wasn’t getting any opportunity to read it again.
Jasmine found them standing together at last. She asked whether they were buying anything. They nodded their heads. They headed for the restaurant.
The time in the restaurant for all three of them was awesome. They were discovering so much of each other; the drunken Srikant, the smiling, shirtless Saood and the tall, flirty, lovely, constantly talking Jasmine. They had not a single moment of awkwardness, boredom or embarrassment. They shouted, behaved well, talked about the love, possession, Saood’s nakedness and a world full of other things. It was a night to remember each other by for all the three of them.

Form Structue and a few dialogues……

2009-11-02T01:16:00.000-08:00

Loss…it’s beautiful. One becomes vivid in passing away. In passing away of someone we see in ourselves an awakened form, beautifully structured, gathered from the debris of memory. Does loss make it vivid and give it form? Is passing away a little life evoked in someone else?
I saw tears in his reddened eyes, put my hand on his shoulder, and patted it slightly. The noise, the crowd, the mourners, the awaited rituals…..and one colossal absence looming before us blindingly. We followed the absence. In heat, chasing it, slapped by the constant birth compressed narratives in our respective minds, at times visual and then in words; we went to it. In chasing we found so much more of him-true, transparent, structured, suddenly prophetic; how did this absence suddenly swallow us? It had evoked such beauty in us, effortlessly, intimately, and in such perfect order that we went inside our pasts: staring at it, when visual, with disbelief.
Then rituals consumed us; they emptied us. Corruption then entered into order, while we were watching flames, and made it debris again. We were at a loss. We had lost. We didn’t know it but we had lost the ability to create that beauty from the debris of experience. We didn’t have the ability, we now saw. We were given it, and then the absence, which had now become inexistent, both inside and outside, took it away from us.
Mourn life!
Enter that debris; take out the absences from it. Give it form. Find structure in it. Isn’t our memory a graveyard of everything beautiful we have constantly failed to evoke?
Or too afraid to go there……………
Lie there my friend, look beautiful one last time.
Up you go as we watch you; we mourn your going.
We mourn life without you!

Ether Twins

2009-10-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

********************

He was wearing a patterned shirt with black and white vertical lines on it; he thought he looked good in it. As far shirts were concerned this pattern was the start and end of his taste. He didn’t waver even slightly to experiment. And he did look good. He perfumed himself. His hair needed no doing up. He hardly had any. He cleaned his spectacles and wore his shoes at the same time. Looking at his watch, while his friend was already waiting below his house, he thought he had at least fifteen minutes left. It was quarter to two, and Junaid was supposed to come at two. He decided fifteen minutes was a lot of time. He removed his shirt decidedly and began looking at his tattoos, one in each arm. One was Hitler’s Eagle, which he had seen on the arm of the hero in an unknown movie about racism; the other was a typically vague saying which instead of eliciting some meaning communicated hilarity among his friends, mainly Junaid and Buttfly. He looked at one then the other, turning sideways, turning his head to get different angles. Contentment came to his face after minutes of effortless movements. He thought he had become a racist and a physical embodiment of that vague saying. He muttered to himself that he was going to get the third done as soon as he managed to collect some money. This time he knew he would do it on his back. Drawn there would be something really shocking and manly; something that would shoot his belief on evolution into the heart of anyone who happened to see it. But he loathed his sagging belly, and to expose the whole back his vulnerable belly would come in the open too. The thought distressed him and he told himself he needed to work out; five hours a day if possible, or swim incessantly. He swam well. The thought of swimming disturbed and in no time erased his repentance of needing a work out. Clancy, his dog, came to him, tongue out and tail between the legs, breathing heavily. He admired it for a few seconds, smiling to himself. Then he bent to hug Clancy, which lifted the upper part of its body to take its master’s tenderness. He murmured some sweet nothings to it and, ordering Clancy to go on with its routine, perfumed himself again. A thought, sudden and explosive, struck him like lightning as he watched himself, topless, on the mirror. He had tremendous amount of smooth hair on his back. He would have to shave them to give way to the third and what he considered the most important tattoo. He tried to look at his whole backside but failed.

*******************

Buttfly said, frustrated, “This is disgraceful. We can’t be waiting below his apartment like this while he gets ready like a lady.”
Junaid, who had been trying in vain to start music in his recently bought fifthhand car, knew Buttfly’s usual impatient outbursts, didn’t respond. He continued to work on the stereo of his car.
“I’m calling him. His cell isn’t switched off?” Buttfly asked.
“No it’s not.”

Sanjay told Buttfly to wait for a few seconds. He was ready. He was wearing his shirt. He also accused both of them of waiting uselessly and coming before the decided time. Buttfly’s face contorted into an expression of sheer disgust.
“This is the problem with second hand cars. Nothing works”, Junaid said, at last giving up his gladiatorial effort.
“True.”
A girl passed by. Junaid observed her. After she disappeared he let out a sigh, which meant he had dismissed her. He said the cracks on her feet were revolting. It wasn’t something a woman was supposed to have at any cost. It destroyed whatever beauty lay in the body or face. The listener, now swallowing the smoke from his fifth cigarette, agreed with the shake of his head. It had seemed an hour or so ago that it would rain heavily. Buttfly and Junaid thought the car would be the best idea. A few days ago they had drenched in the rain, got stuck in an unending line of vehicles struggling to break free. Once they were free they agreed it was a horrible ride back home. No one cursed the rains like Junaid did that day. In his frustration, while Buttfly rode the bike with excruciating struggle, he tried to justify the farmers killing themselves because of dead crops due to no rains.
There was still no sign of Sanjay. Buttfly was hungry and continued smoking made him feel emptier. Junaid had said he was full; he had just had his legendary breakfast, consisting of half a dozen scrambled eggs, four oiled parathas, and a plate full of daliya. But he assured Buttfly he wouldn’t mind having lunch in an hour or so if Buttfly was seriously hungry. Buttfly had confirmed he was seriously hungry, no joke.
Junaid was the tallest among the three though Sanjay always maintained he was shorter than the shortest of Italian models. He was also the fairest. And most importantly, to the consternation of Sanjay, he was having the most number of affairs. Buttfly was having two, one serious and one on chat. Sanjay was having none. He defended it by saying he didn’t have the patience for the rituals of a relationship before sex. Courtship disgusted him. He always made it very clear he only cared about sex. Everything else in a relationship for him was a logical reason why one shouldn’t be in a relationship. He despised the small talk involved; he hated going out for no reason; he worshipped solitude; and he continually complained of people who stripped him of it. Buttfly for his part, on account of being older to both of them, either kept quiet, convinced he was above these judgmental outbursts or shouted disagreement, mispronouncing basic English words, to which Sanjay and Junaid winked at each other so they could laugh when alone.

Sanjay idolized Buttfly’s friend who worked in the army. Junaid idolized Buttfly’s manager. Buttfly idolized both Sanjay’s and Junaid’s age.

“He’s coming”, Junaid said, glancing at the rear view mirror.
“At last”, Buttfly whispered, throwing the remaining cigarette.
Sanjay came in, threw himself on the seat behind them and made a gesture, meaning they were good to go.
Junaid started the car, looked back and stopped the engine.
“Where are we going?”
Both Sanjay and Buttfly shook their heads.
“Why are we deviating from the plan? We were to go have lunch and watch that movie.” Buttfly said, looking at Junaid questioningly.
“Ya.”
Sanjay looked at Junaid and, looking at him, pleaded with Buttfly that they weren’t going to some rotten Hindi movie. As for lunch he said he needed time and he couldn’t have anything before four as he had just had his breakfast. Heavy breakfast, he said; not quarter of what Junaid had had, Buttfly thought. Junaid started the car again and they began moving away.
“So what did you do yesterday? Your cell was switched off all day.” Buttfly asked Sanjay.
“Nothing I was sleeping; I didn’t sleep the previous night.”
“How was the movie?”
“Superb it was”, Sanjay said with some emphasis. “It was boring in the first half but then it just blew off like a bomb. I liked it.”
“Ya.”

Might

2009-08-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword
The Penis Mightier than the Sword
The Penis Mightier than this word
The Penis Might Tear then the Sward

Blindness!

2009-05-20T03:34:00.000-07:00

The child, bored at the prospect of being bored for the next hour, sits at his study. He doesn't want to read. Afraid that his parents might punish him as they have threatened a few minutes ago, he picks up a book and opens it to a particular page. On it there's a drawing of a man carrying unbearable load and walking impossibly on. He doesn't know the context. He doesn't know who that man is or why he has to carry such a weight. He just stares at it and waits for the clock to suddenly show an hour has passed. He thinks the man must be poor; or probably it's some some sort of punishment he's having to go through. For a second, knowing it's a bad thought, he imagines his dad carrying that weight; and in spite of himself finds a vague consolation in the thought.

He though knows his dad could easily carry that weight. The old man in the picture is weak very unlike his dad. He then, again despite himself, imagines his dad with double the weight. Would he find it tormenting to carry all that weight just like the old man, his dad? He thinks he would. He thinks he would come to his dad's rescue and help him carry the weight. His dad would smile, grateful at the help, and proud at his son's strength. It's a deeply satisfying thought. It feels to him like his moment of glory. He re-imagines it. Now he inserts his mom's presence as an audience in the scene. She watches them as he helps his dad and smiles at
him. He keeps repeating the scene, drawing an unimaginably huge satisfaction at every repetition. And at each repetition he adds a new character. At one point the scene transforms into his act being performed in front of his whole school, ending in everyone clapping for him. There's no thirst in him for it to really happen. In fact if it were for real he's not sure if he wouldn't go hide himself somewhere. He's content to keep it within his head, and it's where he retrieves a huge satisfaction from.

And sudden;y he abandons the whole thing. It's as if the chapter or the picture has done it's purpose. He starts reading aloud from a chapter so they could hear him. He observes them and calculatedly pitches his voice.

What's that thought, is it's life lived in him? Or would it come back some time later in some other variation to rescue him again?

Table of Terrors

2009-01-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

It's grdually become, from my resting place, to an area where I'm hunted by multiple narratives...none of them completed, each pretending to be important; and when avoided pretending to be intellectually above my intelligence. One such book is Milan Kundera's "The Joke", which lies hidden somewhere on the table, never appearing, in a constant state of newness amidst chaos; and awaiting someone who would lift it and disappear.
How does one deal with disorder? It's a recurring question to which I probably don't want to find an answer....

Salman Rushdie: A descent

2009-01-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

As a first novel Rushdie's Midnight's Children stormed into the western psyche, causing extreme wonderment and a sense of how far literature could yet, in times of compressed narratives, be stretched. The book was a feat; another non-fiction book by Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, was published the same year and as usual went un noticed; although silently read by Naipaul's very few faithful readers. Now, looking back, both the books seem equally controversial and prophetic. It should have been some year for a reader in London or India. Midnight's Children was a book that did to India what "One Hundred Years of Solitude" did to South America; the beauty of the book was the extremely confident tone in which Rushdie customized English acording to the Indian social or political life. It gave an air of confidence to writers after him arising one after the other, good, mediocre; but all absolutely certain they could write. Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhury, Pankaj Mishra and a lot fucking more have taken tons from that year 1981. I think Rushdie could controversially be called the father of Indian writing in English.

Although there have been many great writer preceding him; one such was R.K.Narayan. There was once a rumour, believable, that he was being consedered for the Nobel Prize; the rumour lasted a good five years. Narayan, whom Mr Naipaul admires alot, captured the Indian way of life through very simple rural lives of individuals, their families, their little concerns in the most magnificent way possible for a writer. But in his heyday there was still this belief among the westerners that Indian writing in English was hardly of any value and was stupidly emotional. One remarkable writer of that era was Nirad.C.Chaudhury, whose "Autobiography of an Unknown Indian" was praised in the western media for its erudition and realistic commentary on indian social customs, family values etc.
Althogh these and a few other good writers were operating at that time, you wouldn't recollect their books or names; what you would rather recollect is names like "Kipling" "E.M.Forster"; this was how it was, just like it was in Africa 2 decades ago; it needed someone to visit the place, bring back experiences in the form of a book. Ernest Hemmingway has been chided by Paul Theroux and Naipaul, all the three have been to and writen about Africa, as a guy who went to Africa to serve his ego, and bring back in the form of books experiences, either untrue or valueless, which could as well be composed fantasizing in the solitude of one's room.
What Rushdie brought in for India was a respectable attention in a global sense. It's a remarkable feat. A line of good Indian writers have since written some truely marvellous books, internationaly recognized. MNC is a ground breaking book because of Rushdie's unbelievable imaginative ambition, and the narrative excesses he covers in the book. About allegory William Golding, a master in allegoric writing, has said that if you're going to clarify your allegory to the exact point of what you want to say through it, you must minimize it and keep it very small. His point was if you spread across too wide you might lose the whole point of allegory itself, in the comprehensive narrative. It's true. Golding's books prove that. His allegories are an Island in "The Lord of the Flies", a Ship in "Rites of Pasage", A church, a School, Celebrity; he covers very small allegorical objects and the precision of his narrative gives his allegories brightened meaning.
Rushdie did the opposite of that. He expanded one allegory to such an extent that MNC became a book, if you read it closely, which was full of thouands of pieces of smaller allegories, unintegrated and living their own separate lives. Rushdie didn't care to integrate the allegories.
If one asks what so great about MNC, what does it say? Nothing, just that 50 years of independence hasn't brought as much developments as it should have, Salim Sinai is cute, he saw his mother's butts while she was bathing; not belittling the book, I'm saying there is an absense of a central integrated allegory, unlike in Golding's Kundera's Coetzee's or Calvino's writings; but his achievement was fuelling the narative with multiple allegories and leaving them unfinished, and in some cases partly superficial. And this is where lies his achievement.
It's no wonder Rushdie was enchanted with Arabian Nights as a kid; you could see the book's influence on MNC. Multiple stories, stories upon stories, entangled narrative.......
After MNC and except The Ground Beneath her Feet, Rushdie hasn't been able to any write anything substantial, promising his first book's narrative promise. Maybe he would never do it. MNC was once in a lifetime book, and the tragedy was it was his first published book. He's been constantly getting rewards for the book since 1981 though. He has tried writing a straight book; the last three books of his (Fury, Shalimar: the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence) have been attempts at fiction pertaining more to realism than magic; but all failures nonetheless.
Naipaul once said that the writers reputation should gradually grow, book by book, until he or his reputation becomes the sum of his books. Rushdie subtracted by MNC will not look as cute as Salim Sinai.
There is a story in Greek mythology in which a writer becomes a donkey because he, as a famous writer, loses his ability to observe, and the Gods punish him by metamophosing him into a Donkey so he would observe and think.

My HE

2009-01-26T05:21:00.000-08:00

He had led a hard life. He was, as it seemed to me when I first saw him, somewhat consumed by a proud sense of physical inactivity. The excess of intellectual commitment, which he had worked out for himself, had made him look at other simple things in strict apathy. As a result he became totally secluded, in which lay his strong mysterious existence. He had once told me that to touch mediocrity was to invite pollution, to invite failure; and I wondered what idea it was that made him feel the opposite of failure. He said that mediocrity of any sort ate you away, and I knew most of the people around him were mediocre by my definition itself; and hence his seclusion. Companionship was absent in his life; he claimed it was deliberate...he said it was the first step towards intellectual delectation. I didn't agree with him then, and seeing him, now.
He drank a lot and almost always smoked; he constantly looked tired. A proud smirk of disarray was drawn on his face, and he knew that. I, disagreeing him in all aspect, still looked up to him. I wanted to see this man, everyday, stuck in an unknown depth of uncertainty.

I had been a spectator many a times when he was abused, awarded ridicule; I acted as if I didn't notice. I saw his expression, he looked like a prey, moments away from being eaten. But then I also saw him violating this very ridicule as if it was just a dream we had both seen, and knew it was a dream. But then I didn't see him as an achiever of any kind. I saw a lack of that flash in him. Maybe he just had this commitment towards demonstration. His idea of himself looked fake, he said so.

Ridicule threatened me. "Escape" to me looked like an answer. He, my man, was far from what I wanted to be, but was tending towards. I could smell his decay.

And I questioned myself. I tried answering. And I wasn't convinced. He was a reward for me and a punishment. Or at least a symbol of punishment; and that symbol, with all my might, I have always tried to rub off.
It felt indelible. And running away didn't diminish the feeling that the symbol was cruelly marked somewhere important in my psyche

Booker Winner!

2008-11-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

When "The White Tiger" won the booker, I thought Naipaul's view about the end of literature, that literature has served its purpose and was to get some other form of replacement, had come true. The first fault was the writer himself. Bald and distraught looking he looked more like a writer of Harold Robin's virtue. What's wrong with Amitav Ghosh's "The Sea of Poppies". The golden era of indelible books had passed by...now it's all "The Inheritance of Shit", "Coloured Tigers" winning the esteemed award..and to add to the insult Indians winning it. There was a time when the committee had to sit for almost a week to decide whether to give "Shame" the prize or "The Life and Times of Michael K"...of course the committee made the wrong decision, but here you couldn't hold the committee responsible for the lack of competition. Deciding the booker prize would never have been this easy, give it to anyone; and no one would question the decision as all the shortlists are equally bad. Booker is slowly going the Nobel way......you have to give it to people every yesr...choose the countries and give it to anyone that seems likely in any sense. This was India's turn...3 years later I'm thinking of writing "The Inheritance of White Tigers". Whoever liked both the books please dig two graveyards..

Throughout the Night!

2008-10-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

At one end I see a small kid who is sitting on some roadside pavement and picking up stones, little ones; and then immediately throwing them away. He doesn't look up, he just doesn't. I watch him, sucking at my cigarette butt, waiting why he's so involved. There is nothing that disturbs him; a bike passing by fails to touch his attention. And there's nobody around. No father, no fucking mother. No one. Who's this little guy? What's he doing? How can picking those littlest of stones keep him absorbed? And why is nobody around?
I hear voices go into my ears. They seem to be coming from so near, I think whether I have said something. Someone shouts from behind me.
I look back, there's no one; I look at the child, he's gone. His focus, his activity, his finger marks on the mud remain; and I stop seeing!
Where's everyone, and it's then that I collapse. Someone tells me I was looking here and there when I fell. I think it was my dad who told me that. I ask him whether he had watched me fall. He says he had. I don't believe it. Who was that child? I can still remember his face, the complete absence of everyone except us two, and endless voices. I need to sleep more, I guess.

Delhi Delights!

2008-09-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

I had the natural advantage. With a gifted eye for cleavages, which aren't captured in normal life and are momentary, I landed in a place of abundance; things were just rosy. I had come to Delhi for training, but professional occurings never consume my curiosity and I sat through the three day training like a bad Picasso painting. Once out, cleavages from all four sides at one single moment caught my eye more than at least 10 times while the walk from office to the guest house, the distance being 2 kms. This is something of a rarity in Hyderabad. Delhi girls wear sexy clothes; and it's very alarming and disturbing for a person from Hyderabad; used to search for either low waist trousers slipping a bit further down and exposing some sexy lingerie or skirts flying a bit above the comfortable zone. The search itself was an effort and would commit a whole day at the right places to get one successful hunt. In Hyderabad low waist trousers, the girls wear, are normally ones that start just below their breasts; so you could imagine what we went through; hence Delhi's surprise. But then there was too little time I had gone there for, most of which was consumed in the training; after we were left and I began the walk to my guest house, my head would spin so fast I had no idea what and where I was looking at. Things just appeared too fast, for a short time, in huge numbers, and disappeared. I was left so frustrated and envious I puked when I reached my room. My digestion was in tatters. My face turned into one that of a serial killer. I had brought two beautiful books to read; they lay forgotten, as if the awards they had won had been stripped off their merit. I tried to get drunk, but the agony of not being able to remember all I had seen didn't let me get drunk. I thought of Hyderabad and hated the thought. Three days passed and I had become monster looking. The president of the company on the last day said something about my appearance, about how wrong it is to look like this or some such shit; I wasn't listening at all. My mind was somewhere else, and it was refusing to return. On my flight back I bid an emotional farewell to Delhi and cursed my destination. As soon as I landed I went unconscious, and was brought home godknowshow. I lay in a hospital for 3 days and the dreams never stopped. Then eventually the serenity pervaded my mind and gave me the calm I used to hold before. I didn't even realise I had become sick. Fuck cleavages, I thought. It's my home, this Hyderabad. Delhi was just too fast, but going nowhere; too smart, for nothing; sexy, but impotently so; full of people but empty within; it disgusts me now to think of it. Cleavages, ya we look for it but love it when we find it. There, we shouldn't because there is nothing else to look for. It's a capitalistic capital.

The Quandary

2008-08-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

These days are passing along in a trespassing like daydream. I feel not at all in control of everything happening around me. Things, both living and non-living, seem to have assumed a posture of undignified absence. I look about and everything changes to the shape of a large middle finger. I look depressed, but no one's watching. I go to my job. I have hardly any idea what I do there. I come home, there's no one waiting. When I'm drunk, I feel I'm someone else. There is an urge to undo all; but confrontation with the urge releases a frightening thin line of fear, which silences me for a while. Nothing seems clear. When it rains I'm afraid I would drown in 2cm deep water. Does fear needs an excuse too?
Last night I met a psychologist. Not formally, he was just a friend. I told him whatever could be compressed inside the areas of language. He managed to look intelligent, but said he couldn't help in any way at all. I was reading a book, 10 hours later, when a perpetual deja vu took me into a state of mind I have had hard time coming to grips with. What state am I in?
I don't have answers. I'm numb.

The Loss of Language

2008-07-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

Most of the days these days pass away in a light momentary flick of the eye; it seems as if their passing away takes me by surprise once in a while and I start struggling for the days...and months I have just missed.......there is neither any respite in memory too....it's just too blank to be referred to. Is this what dying is? It ain't but probably most nearly so.
There is nothing to report but just a few words one has learnt to put in the middle of sentences; beautiful sentences reporting nothing, carrying no meaning, without scope and eventually purposeless. I was talking about this state of intense druggedness with one of my friends whose parents had long ago forgotten to name him. He said it happened to him too, time to time. Sometimes, he said, he thought everything around him seemed irrelevant and unchallenging. The way he spoke about it was so clear a description of what I had been feeling that I almost wished to hug him; then he looked at a dog sitting serenely a few meters away from us; he looked at the dog and said " Last week I hit him with a large stone, and look it's still alive". Of course there wasn't any point in what he said. I just managed to look very calm and observant. After that I asked him what he did when this fit of emptyness hit him. He asked what could he do. After a few minutes, feeling a bit relieved to be away from his nameless presence, I bought a cigarette and pulled in some smoke: my lungs thanked me for the relief I gave them. I started to walk towards home, if there is any such thing. At least I knew where I had to move once the world had relieved me of its services for the day. What when I lose that sense too one day? Nowhere to go back to! Iy could be exciting in a vague sort of way. Am I awaiting that moment? I can't say no.

Solitude!

2008-07-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

On a fake mattress, sitting with all the collected hopes and fantasies of one lifetime, with a mind full of stories, stories of things magically happening and changing the face of whatever HAS BEEN....., one sits and prays the mattress would take off. It doesn't. One waits. He isn't impatient; he is content waiting. And within his contentment is the ghost who knows and shouts "nothing's gonna happen". The mattress never takes off. Eventually......only eventually does the man abandons the desire for magic and looks about himself. He sees the leftover of defeats and abrupt ends ( things cut short). He sees incompletion everywhere. He tries to clear certain bits, but it's exhaustion he feels. So he sits and breathes heavily. The mattress bears his weight, to which he's thankful. He looks about again and sighs......then he goes to sleeps....

Serious Campaigns!

2008-06-09T21:44:00.001-07:00

When one hasn't yet stopped wondering how a thin and weak looking black guy will rule the most poweful nation in the world, that a friend of mine insidiously informed me last evening that he was no longer a virgin. It felt like the betrayel of a lifetime. I was in the extremeties of shock. I asked him the details; he feigned a casual shrug, meaning there was something hidden. The smile in his face seemed to say he had some hidden knowledge no one had ever acknowledged, and with which he was extremely content and a man apart. He implied that but both of us knew it was bullshit. Both of us knew he had no hidden knowledge and had plainly gone to a whore. Before giving any details he started explaining it was the right thing to do, it was a mere need exchange, morality wasn't involved; and if it was then he he didn't give damn. He did what he wanted and paid the person what she wanted in exchange. The passion from him was unasked. I was just interested in knowing where he had gone and how was the entire experience. He said he was given a complimentary bear after the ACT. I asked whether it was frightening, he answered it was. But the desire defeated it of course. I asked how the girl was; he said she was good. I asked whther they spoke anything. He said hardly anything of consequence. Consequence!!!
The wword coming out of him, the emphasis on "consequence", was so laughable that I had a hard time looking at his face for the next half an hour. Would he go again?
He said he didn't have money. He asked me whether I would be interested?
I said HARDLY!

The Final Instalment

2008-06-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

"I will fucking kill that bastard", shouted my friend named Papi, who had been drunk now for two long hours, punching his fist at the frightened air. He had shouted at me. Unfortunately I wasn't drunk. I tried to analyse the cause of his anger. At the very basic level he was angry because I had made an unquantifiable mockery of his favourite Telugu hero ( through whom I actually wanted to disgrace the whole Telugu film industry); and the other parameter was the sudden decay of our relationship, which had started without alerting either of us; the decay had now grown so deep there was an evident effort from his side to block the hole expanding inside both of us. But I somehow seemed to him uninterested, and that caused fury. The disdain in him was so huge he could have killed me there without guilt catching up with hin for at least the next two weeks or so....
Then came the other turn. Next to our table, a couple of drunk youngsters, probably bored with each other and looking out for excitement, approached Papi. They tried to talk friendly at first and then turned abusive. They shoved and I stood up. I tried to get them apart. But the fight had started now. No one was listening to anyone. And everyone was shouting. And Papi was now completely entangled in their arms. I stood up and tried to split them apart. It was tougher then I expected. I forced myself further, and suddenly out of nowhere a punch, fast and accurate, landed on my face. I fell down cursing myself why I hadn't gotten drunk. Sensibility sometimes could be killing with its deep sense of identifying what's embarrassing and what's not. Drunk, I would have felt and remembered nothing. Luckily no serious injury had occured to my face. I was ashamed for two weeks and eventually forgot the defeat in the hands of two drunk youths, that is if it was they who had punched me. Papi surprisingly took me home and fought on bravely. What's the purpose of this narrative shit?
No idea....absolutely none. I just watched the movie "Munich", it's great.

Goa's Molestation

2008-05-30T21:06:00.000-07:00

The trip to Goa in my final semster of MBA was going fine until just ten hours before it was about to end. We had missed the DCH site where Amir, Saif and Akshay( in the movie) sit and talk shit about the beauty of Goa. We were going there just for the fuck of it. The road was immensely curvy, and a smooth drizzle was flying into our faces. The stage was set: a slight stupidity was the only requirement. And then out of nowhere I delivered. Not watching the road, on that disgusting Activa, with a tall shirtless HE MAN behind me, I stared at a probably Israeli girl, whose head was shaven. And then a sharp turn came. Before I could see the road again, I had fallen so badly I thought I had broken my leg. The girl showed some disappointment, at what had happened, with a mere shake of head. What are these Israelies doing in Goa, trying to kill people like us. The trip ended with me limping home, sunburnt, hating beaches and bikinis forever. Deepak who was with me there had a stomach upset during the return, so he passed the better part of the return train journey enclosed in the stinking washroom. Krishna( HE MAN) was the only person satisfied with the trip. Everyone else was tired from the trip, and of each other. There is something about these tourist places, an absence of certain sensibility or let's just say a a character. They seem like celebrity, shaped by the public and eventually packed into annonymity. Goa will cease to be a place people would want to go to in time to come. It's full of dark people trying to speak in unhearable english; trying to sell drugs and prostitues. It's full of people from other countries acting as if they are genuinely interested in Yoga and music. The most beautiful thing eventually is the fakery at display. Everything else apart the beaches, though dirty, were good. I would have drowned; I went so deep inside.