Most Of Us Need The Eggs

You know, the thing about romantic love is that it comes uninvited, stealthily, an often unwelcome intrusion into an otherwise smooth flow of things. And then it creates chaos. It is like letting the camel into the tent. You let a tiny part of it inside and before you know you are kicked out, shivering, into the cold and love has taken over the empire of your own essential self. To put it a bit harshly love is a happy cancer that eats away your rational self a little by little, evading all diagnosis, killing you softly in the most pleasant way. Much like tickling your belly and while you are rolling in laughter, poking your eyes out and drilling nails into your palm. I don't know how pleasant that is, but hey at least you were laughing ! Everytime I am in love, rather at the end of it, I invariably feel like Sisyphus. You roll up the rock. Sweating. Panting. While the sun is frying your back. But you keep at it (god alone knows why), perhaps ' cause like I was saying you have already bid goodbye to your rational self.Perhaps you enjoy the scenery for a while. And then you get to the top and are destined to watch the rock, (which has now through your toil become a part of you), the inadvertent horcrux, roll down farther and farther, helplessly like a complete idiot. Why did I do this or why do I do this then becomes that ever reverberating question in the muddled universe inside your head. Like a tape that is stuck, playing over and over. What a heartbroken developmental economist in love might call the vicious circle of love and heartbreak. Frankly, I don't know, even now why we do this to ourselves. Though being a hopeless romantic and the quintessential sentimental fool I  have been brooding over this for quite some time now. Like an ascetic I have looked at others and myself-people in love, young couples, children, beggars, men, women, teenagers,  married, unmarried-marred and unmarred by love. Just to understand love and its dynamics. A friend long ago told me a joke. Recently I was watching Annie Hall (1977), and there it was again at the end of it, where Woody Allen tells about the guy who goes to a psychiatrist. So a guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, doc my brother thinks he is a chicken. He acts like a chicken all day long and thinks he can lay eggs. I am so worried I don't know what to do. And so the doc says, okay turn your brother in tomorrow I'll take a look at him. And then the guy goes, but doc I need the eggs. In the absurdist drama that love is most of us need the eggs. If you think of the absurdity of life as the Himalayas then love is Mt Everest. And this is perhaps the only  explanation as to why we do it. We do it because we cant make sense of it. We do it because it gives us an illusion of sense. Romantic love is the picture of a sumptuous meal painted by a painter slowly dying of starvation. In the end it is an engaging absurd distraction from the larger absurdity that is life. And so we do it. Like Sisyphus. Like Allen's wacko. We do it. In the pursuit of happiness and acceptance. Love and its comfortable delusions.

Musings on Impermanence

So many nights I have looked up, to the sky, waiting for more than just stars and the lonely moon to lift my spirits. The night sky is one thing that has made me keenly aware of my own mortality and also of others around me. The impermanence of everything. How small we are in the grand scale of things. How tiny and inconsequential we and what we perceive to be our problems are. How in the universe we are smaller than dust. So invisible and so mortal. Like the videos they show of flowers blooming from buds and withering away in a matter of seconds. Life as a progressive degeneration of your highly vulnerable body. Before I knew it I was born. Before I know I will grow old. My hair will turn grey, my smooth skin would wrinkle. Since nothing escapes gravity my curves will droop and I will have small saggy bags under my eyes. And everything I so clearly see now will turn hazy. Everything that tastes so differently in my mouth would all be sawdust to my non functioning taste buds. Notes would escape my ears and I may be denied music. Such is my destiny. To wither away slowly.  And I will meet others like me. I will live with them, love them, make love to them, hate them, miss them, remember them, forget them, long for them. And they will do all this to me. And then there will be others. Others that come like shooting stars momentarily brightening the sky of your life before fading away, perhaps forever. Others who come from nowhere and disappear into nothing. Who like shooting stars sprinkle magic wherever they go and make you wish upon them. And carrying your wishes off they go, things of beauty, innocence and wonder. Beyond the ordinary. Perhaps it is them that I'll miss the most when death finds me. Them that I'll carry in my heart. To some I may perhaps be a shooting star. Perhaps. Or so  I wish. A life so short. Battling my own destiny to be forgotten. Strange. No matter how my thoughts stray on starry nights and turn solipsistic they also fill me with a despondent love for my fellow beings. And even when I stand at the risk of alienating myself from them, I love them with a beauty that only detachment can bring. The beauty that can only be found in loving ephemeral things. Things elevated in their beauty by the singular fact that they wont last forever. To be mortal helps me appreciate everything I see and experience. It makes me lust for life, time, faces, sounds, emotions. It makes me fall in love with life. For all that began with me. For all that will end just like me.

On love

I want to love you. Simply and carelessly. Taking you for granted. So I can revel in the comforting notion of you being an eternal entity protected from the vagaries of time and circumstances. No matter how wrong I could be. I want you to be the hammock lying on which I can watch myriad  sunsets and moonrises, day breaks and day ends, time after time, day after day, each day, everyday. I want to sea dive into you, bereft of life support, discover your pearls, your monsters. I want to freefall into you without safety nets. I want to love you like how my niece loves an ice cream on a hot summer afternoon. With longing and satisfaction. Like a blanket on a misty morning. Under which I can curl further into my own dreamy slumber. I want you to be my never ending string. So that the kite that is me can roam unrestrained and yet always find my way back to you. I want to love you like a bird loves its wings. Like a nation celebrating its freedom. I want you to explode in me like fireworks and see the light explode on you when the skies are starless. I want to love you like a secret whispered tenderly. Softly and so close that every spoken word of it reaches  your soul before it leaves my lips. I want to love you like a philosopher and a lunatic. Without the baggage of yesterdays or the tickets to tomorrow. Without conditionalities. With knowledge and acceptance. With so much anger that makes me want to pull out every strand of my hair. With so much sorrow that I cant see through my own despondency. I want  a love that can annihilate me. Agonise me. Drive me insane with happiness. Kill me with its singular intensity. So I know every inch of my unknowable being. A love in every shade of red. In everyway. Everyday. Such is the love I want from you. Chaotic. Anarchic. Imperfect. Immane.

S(h)elfish, Without A Self

There is something more essential than oxygen. Something more primal than hunger. Solitude is that time when you converse with yourself in the language of the cosmos. The problem with the world that glorifies altruism more than anything else is that it often tends to look at any desire to keep anything to yourself as inherently selfish. Even if it is just a part of you. Even if it is only using a part of the limited time you have here on Earth to indulge in your own being. I have always wondered why the society looks at people who live alone with suspicion. So much so if you are a woman. In that case you are perceived to be frigid, lesbian or a home wrecking slut. It is curious how everything to do with a woman is interlaced with her sexuality. Different shades of it. Different extremes of it. Is there anything that perturbs this society more than a woman who is independent and happy by herself ?? I have often felt that the idea that a women neither needs a family nor pregnancy nor the constant presence of some man to keep her happy has always been suppressed violently every time it took root. The subversive mechanisms of patriarchy that thrusts dolls into the hands of young girls and read them fairytales  telling them that all they need to do is to look pretty and wait for a prince in effect reduce all chances of a woman pursuing herself. ' Witches' in medieval times and ' bitches' in our own are only echoes of this tendency to crush the spirit of freedom and independence in a woman the moment it takes shape. But is it really that wrong to desire a ' room of one's own ?'. Perhaps all the sages we know are men cause even in that ancient age women were never allowed to think for themselves, to indulge in the sheer joy of her being. Or perhaps every time she sat down to think there was a baby crying somewhere and she had to thrust her nipples into its hungry mouth or wipe its shit smeared ass. How convenient to designate such pleasures as the singular responsibility of a woman! How easy for a man to chain her without chains saving the price of the metal and using that money and time to indulge in himself! How easy to live in a system that was designed for him to be the master and her to be the stepping stone! Is it 'selfish' for a woman to want a life of her own ? Is it possible for a woman to be selfish when she is denied the right to have a self ?! I find myself sitting here looking at the skies. And though I cannot see it I can sense that glass ceiling invisibly flexing its muscles waiting to push me down the moment I fly high. If only like Katniss I could shoot an arrow into the sky and see it crumble all around me writhing in its own selfish misery. If only.

Snapping Out of It

I don't know why or when I stopped writing prose. When I stopped finding that incorrigible need to archive every curious thought that found its way into my mind for the fear of losing it. Perhaps when self doubt fell head over heels in love with perfectionism, I got so engrossed documenting their romance I sort of gave up on prose. Perhaps some part of me was always afraid of waking up one day and finding myself caught in the dark chasm of mediocrity,bleeding through my fingertips. What is left of a writer who has forgotten to write ? It is like being a song that is stuck inside a mute person. The song that exists and does not. Like that famous leaf that fell in some Amazonian forest, but no one saw and no one heard, so did it fall or not. Strangely even when you don't write you are writing every moment. Only the words are falling on  watered thoughts creating ripples only momentarily before fading into absolute obscurity. So finally I have found the will to rescue the words trapped inside me for once and actually start writing. And god it feels so good already ! I feel like a deer that somehow managed to cross the road despite being baffled by the mechanical headlights of  routine. It is so easy to get swayed by luminous glow of all that is superficial  and keeps one busy but in the end turn out to be disappointingly banal. Perhaps I was merely on some strange hibernation mode waiting for that sudden rush of blood, that unstoppable impetus that would finally push all the chaotic, passionate, much loved, much hated words out of me. I have always believed that creativity is the only ladder from the eternal darkness that is always running after all of us. So here I am snapping out of a hazy day dream and writing my heart out. At last.

Nomad

I have within me,
the heart of a gypsy,
A lust for the dusty roads,
A hunger for strange faces,
Soft pleasantries don't strike me,
Comforts don't swell my soul,
Only the warm wind
on my sun stained eyes,
The tiny pieces of mirror
showcasing a broken world on my dupatta...


Perhaps I might earn a name,
For a heart that always yearns,
Delighting young children,
Vexing adults who stare at me with suspicion,
What do they know,
I only pick the rags of life,
And make shameless love to outcastes alone,
While the night lends us her guarding eyes,
Conversing silently with the stars,
Throwing all caution to the winds...


I have within me the heart of a gypsy,
Roaming in deserts, straying in the backyards of civilisation,
Keeping no trinkets as souvenirs,
Owned by no one, owning nothing,
The eternal face smiling at you
from the back of a magazine....

A Friend To All

A man who is everyone's friend,
Is an ocean dissipated,
Loyalty dispersed, like shallow rains
that scatter everywhere,
Disappearing into the earth,
almost as soon as it falls,
Leaving no mark,
No room for the lingering petrichor,
Making no impression, forming no ocean,
Lacking in depth,
A man who is everyone's friend,
Is a friend of no man,
Drowning his victims with
insincere kindnesses...

A Pocketful

I borrowed a pocketful of darkness,
And coloured your hair,
I borrowed a pocketful of light,
And lend it to your eyes,
I borrowed a pocketful of happiness,
And put it on your lips,
I borrowed a pocketful of sorrow,
And my heart was full of you...

Bittersweet

You came unannounced,
Nothing could have prepared me
for your conquest
Heart, like a primitive fragmented land,
bowed before your
sophisticated civilisational allure,
How was I to know,
Innocence could cast a
shadow of cruelty,
That after your plunder,
you'd leave back memories of deceit,
lingering,
silently, painfully,
In all the lonely corners
that witnessed your exploits,
And I, your prime accomplice-
in my own downfall,
Would disintegrate, disappear,
slowly, as you walk out...