Cytoplasm

It is not often I sit down to write – to write something substantial. Neither do I sit down to write something substantial all the time. However, there are things that every person cannot help. It might be active or passive reaction but the constant factor here is that reaction, which for me is writing.
When I first noticed the man on the footbridge, in close proximity to my place, he hardly occurred to me. Then I saw him again and never turned back – I was on my way to my workplace in the morning. The third time is the day I sit down to write this.
The usual after-dinner walk was a wholesome affair for me for all the wrong reasons and a perceived healthy routine. I never realized till now that it was a purposive attempt to see the unimaginable or rather the unavoidable aspects that creep through the shadows and stand out starkly under the dim neon haze.
He could be a man just like you and me. He could be a father, a husband, a grandfather or even a ‘nobody’. He could be a deranged, a homeless, a loner or an egoist. Yet, to me he looked a sixty something aged person with silver hair and unkempt beard. Disheveled full-sleeve brown shirt and a soiled crème pant over brown socks and brown leather, affordable quality shoe unworn under his dangling feet, he sat there on the damp staircase after a well showered evening in Kolkata.
There was nothing unusual about him as compared to millions of homeless in this city. Yet, there was a certain control about his stature as he sat on the sideway. That is when a bystander’s presence strikes a passerby’s imagination. It is more so, if the passerby is a voracious reader, affirmer and applier of deductive reasoning as proposed by Arthur Conan Doyle, through his gigantic literary character.
He could be a man kicked out of his home by his children or grandchildren for all the several causes that may be easily construed. He might be a madman whom his family members got tired dealing with. He might be an egoist who just could not take any form of mediocrity by his own standards from the people with whom he dwelled. However, definitely, with mosquito netting, shawl and a well-covered pillow you cannot be just another loner or just another vagabond. You have to be put in that position to be there.
An abject violence of humane society norms it was found revolting to the psyche of a social individual as me.

*****

On Love

What is love?

How easily we utter this monosyllable. How easy it is to profess the same. How difficult is it to realize that. How seemingly impossible it is to get it for the same. Sad but true - as the sandman might say. But then none of us are sandman, none of us are superman - none of us know the answer to the question.

Sometimes love seems like a leap of faith. Sometimes it feels like life itself. Truely, what is life worth unless you have known what it is like to love somebody. What is it worth if you haven't been loved back?

Unfortunatley or fortunately these are unwritten rules which nobody has ever read. So, it is near impossible to figure out. Here, those who tend to differ, mind you, fortune is only perceptual. The ones lucky enough will know the sweet pain of longing. Those who are unfortunate enough will never know the way the first pure love can exist over a lifetime - maybe beyond.

We are only human. And there is only so much a human can realize. I cannot force it.

"Chahe kitna bhi pyaar ki bheekh maang lo, sajde karo ya cheen-ne ki koshish karo - pyaar nahi milta. Par kya tum kisiko itna pyaar kar sakte ho ki woh bhi pyaar karne pe majboor ho jaaye?"

(No matter how much you beg, plead or force for love - you will never get it. But can you love somebody so much that the person can do nothing but love as much?)

Maybe it is true... who knows?

*****

Under the Shadow of Terror

Noise Unlimited

Whatever now remains is like Noise - in its true definition. There are two sides to it.

1. People responsible for their carelessness and unprepared ness - they are generating the noise while curbing the real 'voice' viz. the dictate from the Govt. that media should no more broadcast videos of the attack - is that to keep people from disturbing images or do they know it too well that Indian mind is like black board - a stroke of duster and the chalk of calamity wiped off? Are the resignations, comments, opinions, vague statements sounding like boardroom 'global gyan' ('We will not tolerate terrorist tactics...' and like) worth the hoopla surrounding them? Really, have there been any actionable reactions? Something like, 'we have appointed XYZ to set up a committee which will plan and blue-print for a Federal Intelligence Agency of India', would have meant at least something. I fail to understand how feminine FMCGs could become talk of the hour - lord save the sanctity and sanity of our Media houses. Did they really find, even the person who indulged in such pithy remarks, worthy enough to be splashed over prime time news?

2. People who are subject to these propagandas - they end up taking sides. What have they got anyway? They only have choices and nothing like the best candidate or the rightful leader. They just choose the next best thing and end up where they were by the end of another 5 years. Just like stray dogs - they stray, they are shown the biscuit, they go to the vote machine wagging their tails, they sit waiting like a loyal dog, no matter they get kicked all along, then the 'eater' finishes off and the dog begins to look for another 'eater'. At times they will be stupid enough to follow that same 'eater' around.

The first kind confuses and the latter one is politically, socially and emotionally illiterate enough to be easily confused. In the end we have exactly what my title states and reflect the present state of affairs - Noise Unlimited...

Leopold Back-calculation

Nothing has changed much. People just want to get high before they are on a higher plane. They fail to flatter themselves. It is not that easy. The terror is unimaginable.

I look at these people congregated or rather accumulated at Leopold tonight, and I am unexcited. It is only natural to be egoistic. It is only natural to be nationalistic. But what really matters is – what do you really believe in.

I did my inquisition. The inherent fear of life sustenance is unquestionable (I just hate that I cannot write this in layman’s terms; I wish somebody did). Everybody hid in fear when the firecrackers became gun-shots in reality. I doubt if anyone else would have done otherwise – even with a bullet-proof armor on them.

I wonder what might have happened that day. I can but only wonder. But still, if I have that, I’ll stay with it because that is the only thing I have got to justify myself – about the way I feel. And that is just the way everybody of you reading this feels. So, stop lying to yourself!

Mumbai Burns

I am not Marathi, I am not Mumbaiyya. I am a simple citizen, another unknown Indian, who just happens to be professionally based out of Mumbai. And I feel violated.

I feel I have got everything to do with this calculated inhumanity on display for the last 60+ hours. I have never faced this upfront but now I do and I am going to do something about it. I have to speak out. I am not of that mettle to keep myself closed in the boundaries of a job, a family, few friends and four walls which keep changing.

There a few things that I hate but I hate them unfailingly and it seems it is not going to change for quite sometime now.

I do not accept to live under the shadow of the gun.

I do not want those people walking on this earth who have murder on their minds.

I do not want my near and dear ones to be terrorized.

I do not accept that a country like ours do not have an intelligence net.

But most of all – I hate the lousiness of some people who say, ‘What can I do?’

Money, stature, family commitments, professional pressure, relationships they don’t matter. In fact, when these very things are under fire – I do not believe we have got any justification of sitting back, thanking fate for saving us and waiting for the carnage to get over so that we can get back to work next morning like worms crawling across the dingiest filth on the face of this earth.

I defy those who call this ‘the undying Mumbai spirit’. I call this apathy, indifference and overall irresponsibility as an Indian and as a human being.

More than 190 people dead – that too only officially, three times that injured and an overall atmosphere of unwelcome fear looming ominously over Mumbai. We cannot keep saying that ‘Mumbai has won’; because it hasn’t. The terrorists have won – not once but again and again, and it is about time we put an end to our little day-night therapy sessions over the idiot-box with some politicians and diplomats who have been as irresponsible as us. It is about time we vent our retribution on these maggots.

Terrorists are not cowards. Cowards are only human. Terrorists, however, are inhuman to say the least. They are agents of the virus called terror. Love just won't do.

This is the time when we think, talk and act vitriolic. This is when our attitude should ooze acid against those buggers. I cannot imagine that I have to share the same air with these proponents of the unjust death.

We pride ourselves in unity. I disagree vehemently. We just fake ‘unity in diversity’. There is no such thing, unless we acknowledge ourselves as common human beings, each one of whom has got right to live. And those who don’t have no right to live!

I want to live without oppression – be it terror or in any other form.

I want to live without fear – be it the bullet or the ballot.

I want to live without bias – be it religious or socio-economic.

I want to live free – and my head held high because I know I have done something.

I Justify

Mercurial Mentations

Something never changes – like realization. It is always an on going process that observes, deciphers, hypothesizes, reasons, deduces, believes, rechecks, recalculates and then again begins the whole cycle all over again. It is a mysticism borne in restless spirits which refuses to die out on a single whiff of time. It is a struggle – a struggle to relieve the passion of deconstructions and rebuilding towers of faith on basis of proof.

Whoever uttered the line, “a bird in hand is worth more than two in a bush”, then stands corrected. For, of what use is the bird in hand, if the other two are birds he will never get to know? What is the use of living then? You might as well live a whole life in diapers. However, this is not an inspiring argument. It is rather a truthful documentation of obvious reality. So, the writing stands justified on its, own stead.

Now that I have my point, there remains apparently nothing to be discussed. Discussed? How can I say I am discussing? In this darkened room, my friend lying in peaceful midnight slumber, two eyes of mine trying hard to argue my senses to sleep, effect of late night nicotine, incessant, unyielding rain pit pattering on the glass panes, Colonial Cousins softly crooning ‘Krishna’ through the precariously hung headphones and a glaring screen, what devil does beseech me to seek whatever I know not?

Maybe it is my prime need. Need? Need for what – a constructive deduction to a certain culmination of this writing? Or do I seek acclaim? Ah! Dear me, you should have known by now. Since, the very first cry you strained through your throat, smeared in remains of origins, naked, lay bare before the whole wide world – you clenched your fists, to prove your existence. There you are then. It is the pure need of being accepted as an existent being that you do the entire thing you do. I guess my very existence depends on these black scratches on the whites of time.

These days, in fact these sleepless nights, which I spend regurgitating on the facts and fiction of my existence I find a peculiar resemblance of me to a rhododendron for whatever existed has passed eons by and whatever remains, are decomposed fossils of a self I have left behind in time. In a sense we all are serpents – crawling on our chests, sniffing traces of life to consume on the vast desolate parched extent of a desert. Here, the oasis' have their waters muddied. Yet, no regret at all, for the willingness is ours.

The need basically is of freedom which unfailingly eludes the Ulysses within. It is only for the ones who have already known that from the blithe moment of our conception we have been put into this framework of existentialism, which as frameworks should be, are limited in themselves. We refuse even then. But facts require justification and so I justify. So, you think senses are the routes to emancipation – to freedom? Well you are already there my dear friend – in a web of deceit, which your senses have so cleverly knit around you. You think it is ground you are walking upon? I see you crawling my dear and that too comparable to that of a slug.

All the world’s libraries are not enough for you and you travel places – ‘places’, and yet you know not how far. Knowing knowledge can be dangerous propositions my dear. It is not knowledge you are after, you are after the rat race of knowledge – it is the race that matters, unfortunately always far, far ahead of you as your sixth sense perennially picks up the scent of probability. You think you create? Hardly there son, you are putting things, already there, into place for your comfort. And then you say you create matter, anti-matter, super-matter and what not. Feel not ashamed for that is what, the framework of your existence, has been put to use; and yet, by whom or what?

Questions fly here, questions fly there, not a single answer to be found. Why answers? Why not only questions? Questioning questions is a way of life for us after all. All that matters is a way of life and not life itself. If you haven’t had a way about your life you are never the ‘good’ man, no matter how well you have lived your life. We all are butterflies here. All wearing different colors – or is it camouflage? Either way it smacks of sweet deceit. So, enjoy.

Whosoever discovered or accidentally thought of a whisky on rocks is the omnipresent god in my eyes. Here the working thought is somewhat convoluted, somewhat like this – “All fluids look good when splashed on rocks.” The interpretation can be varied in distinctness and emotional quotient accordingly as the phase of psychological limitation the reader is into at the time of reading the sentence.

Metaphors are no accidental discoveries but natural consequences of a typical human’s inherent preference for privacy. This exists not only in concrete forms of lifestyle but also in intangibles of emoting. Secondary self is one’s tryst with existent entities beyond the outer boundaries of his primary limited self. For, if not that, why must I and you be here? The inner boundary draws the area of reprise for ‘everybody is his own, best consolation, confidante’ and et al’. Questions arise from the bases of answers to them. We lesser mortals, travel far and wide, tracing a round about route, back to the point where our quest originated from. Everything we do we judge more than we believe and there lies the satire of fate.

Enmity is frivolous and as well fictional for whatever happens has got a lot to do with backward aggregating expectations. Expectations in themselves are flawed and hence incorrigible. Misdirected thought stimulation leads to the final leap of faith which finally often ends dumped and caught obsolete in the fleet of time. Doing away with expectations, however, does not help the cause – mind you. What it does is to imbibe cynicism.

I do not allow, for I have known since my conscience has spoken to me, that we all are picking random hearts in our way of life. It does not matter if it is a pitiable bunch of a-day-old violets in a roadside bin or a – “What was that, a fairy in red?” It always that split second which determines the deliciousness of the next experience we relish. Whatever we eat is experience. Prove me salt tastes salty and I will say you are asking only from a human who is taught the language which is a code for communicating amongst them. Metaphorically speaking, there are in fact many – in fact everybody, who knows salt can taste sweet and sweet, bitter. Did you hear me chuckle?

Nomads were ramblers. Rambling is nomadic. We all were nomads. We are all rambling nomadic. No wonder I have much to write and yet, more than a universe to express. Maybe universe is a throbbing heart of some larger form. How would that living be like? Well I guess much like us. With good and bad ‘cells’ sharing the body in a precarious equilibrium, it can only be only as much human as we are. Thoughts are horses and wild ones too. Nomads ride wild horses. Nomadic thoughts saddle my dream horse. I will ride the horse.