The Boon

Like a man playing a part playing a part.

Like a million drops of mercury, each reflecting the drops around it.

Like a tree on a river bank – not moving an inch but touching the entire river.

Like the finger pointing at the moon in a pail of water.

Like painting a portrait on a mirror.

Chase your own feet, Man, and let bliss be yours alone until the road gives way.

You can run...

All nightmares and all dreams can be shut down, can be run away from, except two. The first is the eye - the self - and the second is the media, the latter being the reflection of the former as seen in a hall of twisted mirrors. About the former, I would be delighted to write volumes but not today. It is the capacity of the latter to chase and influence one that scares me more. The very thought that my children will be growing up in a world where 11-year olds commit suicide because their parents didn’t let them participate in reality dance shows, where politicians are ready to fast to death for a vote bank without as much as a second thought about the larger picture of national integrity, where Slumdog wins 8 Oscars, where the Nobel is given for serving beer to world leaders, where Kashif Memon becomes a sensation in the name of Bollywood and where children who fell down pits become celebrities for a day, is spine-chilling. The list of idiosyncrasies is endless and if you are looking for the mirth in the media there is always Google. I am not talking comedy. I am talking horror.

A long time ago, BBC made a documentary series on the street life of Mumbai and the nexus of the underworld, the corporate world and the political world in the 90s (the heyday of Dawood). The series was banned from telecast after it received flak from the Indian Government for casting India in an ‘unfavorable light’. A decade later the producers of Slumdog Millionaire won accolades after accolades and paraded the cast (the children among which have already been unceremoniously forgotten) across the world and bagged 8 Oscars. At the first intelligent look it may seem that the Oscars were given to them simply because the next big movie market is India. But if that was purely the case, even Bombay Dreams would have won Oscars, being much more grim and deserving than the former. But Bombay Dreams was not produced by the Fox Studios. Accepted that this could be the ranting of a paranoid Piscean. But how will you comfort your little mind about this following horror story?

When Kashif Memon got up on stage for the first time and danced for ‘Ik Pal Ka Jeena’ I wished from the bottom of my heart that I ‘jee’ for not even ‘ik pal’ more. And when Sharon Osbourne asked her oh so pertinent question – “Is this the only dance or are there more dances?” I went raving mad. But on new year’s eve, while I stood on a terrace watching people dance to usher in the new year, my worst nightmare came true. They all did ‘the Kashif’! And as I watched them, the words of Sharon the Seer echoed in my head – “By the end of this year, everyone will be doing ‘the Kashif’” (as said in the semi-finals episode). And the fact melted in my brain and ran down my spine like cold mercury – they will make you act like them, whether you like it or not, and more horrifyingly, whether you know it or not. They will not sell themselves like hawkers sell their wares and they will not attack your household like common pests. They will lie through their teeth and convince you to walk the plank because your ship is sinking. They will feed their shit to you till everything else that was you is pushed out and you are filled with the same shit as the next door-impulse buying- commie hating-body image conscious-self selling-perennially half empty-sin fearing-human version of plastic money that they will keep swiping. Since the 1950s they have found a million ways of peeping into our heads and plucking out of there, our worst fears and our most guilty dreams, breathing life into them and using them like flies on hooks. They will keep you fed on an image of the world that will keep you happily drugged but will also keep your paranoid adrenaline pumping. Because you buy most when you are shitting bricks. But to the apparently alert, well-read mind as yours, this is just reiteration of known facts.

To give them the credit for creating such an intricately perfect system that will keep milking us forever, would be more than a little unfair. I’d rather believe it is because of basic human nature. We can blame the mirror for the aberrations but not for whole man in it. And knowing this, it is highly entertaining to watch man scare himself into submission to himself to protect himself from himself and to keep himself from taking over himself – an idea for which Orwell invented the word ‘doublethink’.

In writing this, I am not going to advocate a great social change so simple that it can start from oneself. I am not going to abuse ourselves up for being the invertebrate unintelligent bottom feeders that we all are. I am not going to laugh derisively at the colossal comedy of errors that human evolution is. And whatever I do I am not going to upload this blog post.

For My Daughter

I found this while looking through a long-forgotten folder on my computer -

"I sit waiting for her to come, the mills of my mind spinning. Thinking of what she will do, what she’ll tell me, what she is thinking.

She knocks on the door and I shiver. Will she throw a tantrum, will she shout? Will she cry on my man shoulders? Or just look at me and make me wish I fade out.

Pa they call me a whore

They abuse me when I bow

Pa they call me a whore.

When there was light she was my rib. Then was born the artist’s critic. She is my own but I fear her, for I once was in that seat. I feel like an Iscariot, damned to a painful death I bought for myself.

I gave her life and let her go

And to say now she’s knocking on the door

Pa they call me a whore

They abuse me when I bow

Pa they call me a whore.

I want to say sorry and that I don’t think so. That I’ll always be there, now that things have gone sour. But I know its all a waste. She’ll still stand under the blazing sun while I be a shade to none but one.

There is no sun, I think I’ll tell her, there are no heroes. They are just men who, at the end of the honest work of a day, don’t want to go home and say that I lost my heart to a whore. That I lost my war to a whore.

It all happened one fine morning when she came knocking as everyday. So I guess I’ll just wait for her to leave as yesterday and any other day, her own way.

There, I killed it."

Autowriting II

I am in a massively multiplayer game and I can see me playing me. With belief, nothing is inconceivable. That is the single greatest asset and the single greatest tragedy of mankind. Belief is the most convoluted joke God played on us.

Diwali is here. I went out for a walk this evening and saw the play of light and dark that no camera can be quick enough to capture, that only the eye and the heart will capture and carry forever in their deepest abysses.

Auto-Writing I

Im on surround sound now and the winds are playing to me. When I was a little boy, I heard the story of why the snake swallowed the moon and saw it happen on a nearly clear night. And I knew all the stories of the earth were true, none less poetic than the other. For the earth is made of poetry hard and unyielding to the mind. Very supple for the heart. Because in the eyes of poetry the strong and the weak are neither to be envied. Envied be the mediocre. For to the ears of poetry, music is not in your hands. It is in your blood. And blood is that which courses through all. And blood is that which falls as tears. And blood is that which feels love.

A Generation without a Cause

We are the last hippie generation. Genius, it would seem, has its flip side.

There was only one Woodstock, only one Bob Marley, only one Jim Morrison and only one wheel. There might have been a time when humanity believed in slavery, in apartheid, in war and in cut-throat business. But, alas! No longer. We are very far, of course, from the pinnacle of our race, if there ever can be such a thing. But the games people play have changed radically. When wanton development came our way and every man was very much like the one next to him, the ones that were the freaks stood out. And they led the others, unwillingly or willingly. But now freaks are a dime a dozen.

All the limits of humanity haven’t been crossed and all the possibilities haven’t been exhausted but the idea of the very possibility of conquering all possibilities has lost its novelty. Narrow-mindedness, hatred, imperialism, hegemony – you name it and the enemy has been faced and unmasked.

Our battles now are fought everyday – against a recession, against our prejudices, against our bosses and clients. And as a generation we do not have a cause to rally for, because we are all far too busy breaking our own boundaries. And there is nothing wrong in that. Just that it sadly limits a poet’s ground. Our tragedies and downfalls are all personal. And if all young blood does not boil for one cause, that also says a lot about the cause. I am not demeaning any of the causes we are fighting for in pockets and groups. But what are we, as a generation, fighting for? Inner peace? Equity?

There will no longer be legends of men who won battles with their own sweat and blood, men who stood their ground like a mountain in a gale, and men who bordered on the superhuman. Not at least in the terms we are familiar with. The Superman has changed. Evolved. And that is a sad fact for all those like me who like the limitedness of a man for its poetry, for its irony. For when man was created, he was an idea, and the color and form and smell he took on were his limitations. And so he is nothing but them. To try to supersede them is to try to kill oneself. As morbid or undesirable as that sounds let me assure you that it is not the least of either.

We might try to reinvent the wheel, like we did to get the qwerty keyboard, but onward we must go. We might wish to have been born somewhere and sometime else, as any who live to see such times. But it is not up to us to choose not to be the limbo that the next generation shall crash through. We will always speak fondly of being the right mix of love and life, the right mix of rebellion and respect, the right mix of ever and never. Maybe other generations have spoken these words, maybe other men who stood on the threshold of universal change have lamented thus the loss of their poetry, but that does not make our loss any less painful.

And the dirt on the beaten path shall ever miss the tread of the short-lived mortal.

It is just considerably saddening for no particular reason. Like all the other considerably saddening things that make us so endearingly human.

The Ransom

Chapter 1


The knock on the dark door was like a knell. A big black dot on a white page. Announcing the end of a sentence and the beginning of another. He had come. An old stunted man opened the door just a crack and peered out into the freezing ink. No words were uttered, only looks exchanged. The old man opened the door and let the stranger in. The guest walked straight in without expecting to be led. He didn’t need to be. The house was lit only by enough light to see contours in black and blacker. The only hint of any color apart from a grayish yellow was a purple picture of a man and his son. The man stood with a long blade in his hand and the little boy clutched his father’s hand very timidly. The boy’s eyes were transfixed on the lowly creature in front of them, a fotham. The front of its face and its horns had been painted a dull red, redder than the rest. If purple was white in the picture, then this color was the color of blood. Minutes after that picture was taken, the little boy beheaded the fotham and puked and cried and lost sleep for a month and grew up and old and now lay in the bed in the room at the end of the dark hall in the purple house with the purple picture.

The room was lit only by one lamp, and that too was running low on oil. So the flame flickered. Anyone who walked into the room would think this was one of the long nights these men and women sat up for an infamous nizzecher performance and watched the shadows dance like black flames on the walls and got hypnotized by the yellow blurs and told their spouses every sorrow and every truth they had known since their unhappy childhoods. That would not have been very far from the truth, except that this particular nizzecher performance was coming to an end – to an end at least in this city. It would continue in another place and another time after tonight. And it was to help sing the ending credits for this place’s performance that the stranger was here.

As he walked into the claustrophobic space, he sniffed. The air smelt of blood and sweat, not of tears and sorrow. That was because this was the house of a warrior. Ever since the day he decapitated the red-headed fotham and came of age, the man lying in bed was used to the iron smell of blood and the soggy smell of flesh. And that man now lay wrapped almost completely in yellow cloth, smelling his own sogginess and iron. The squatting crowd in the room parted at the door to let the guest enter. He walked slowly and purposefully to the foot of the bed and turned around and looked at the man in the bed for the first time. The man in the bed slowly opened his eyes and looked straight ahead into the eyes of the guest and his head lolled forward so it seemed like he nodded painfully and flinched because the nod pressed out blood from his neck and it spurted out on his own chest. It was dark red blood, straight from a vein. But he only barely flinched. His ego and his race did not allow him more than that.

The stranger did not start. He stood stock still and waited. Eyes stared at his silhouette and whispers rippled around.

Another knell rent the metal air. The stunted man looked only slightly surprised. He dragged his feet out of the room and returned with another man, who entered the room with a little more speed than the stranger and he was shorter than and lacked the liquidity in movement that the stranger showed. He halted beside the first guest and nodded. For the dozen witnesses in that crack of a room, the tall man simply floated to the head of the bed and sat and in the chair set beside the lying man’s head. The whole movement seemed to take an eon but only the shorter man, who had the trained eyes, saw, with a twang of jealousy, how fast he moved. The tall man took the sick man’s heavily bandaged hands in his own and looked straight into his eyes and his lips widened into a smile. It was not a happy smile. It showed very little of his off-white teeth, but the man in the bed felt a cool warmth spread in his hands. Neither man’s eyes looked away or closed. The tall man, hunched in his chair slowly began to straighten up. The man in the bed too rose with him, never letting go of his hands. The tall man barely started to lean when he let go of his hands, one by one, and fell back into the chair. This time it felt like an eon even to the short onlooker. The chair creaked like it pained it to bear his weight. The man in bed sat up and nodded again at the man in the chair, but the man in the chair seemed to be asleep. Only his eyelids fluttered like he was in a dream of colors and noises. The man at the foot of the bed now walked over to the side of the bed opposite to the chair and sat down beside the living mummy of a man and took his hands in his. Even when he had seen his friend do the same thing he had not imagined how damaged the man may be. Now when he almost heard the torn flesh and skin squish in his grip, he almost let go. But he controlled the reflex.

The crowd in the room, with their silent shadows dancing on the yellow walls and their cloudy eyes glued to the tall man, stood like statues and props in a gothic play. The tall man, for his part, lay stiller than them because he was barely even breathing. Only the occasional flutter in his eyelids gave away any sign of life. “…like the flutter of a hunting frosthark’s heart”, they said. And they stared so at him in an unannounced contest to spy the first sign of feeling or motor response in him.

The short man sitting on the bed was now leaning into the lying man’s face. He held his head in his hands and whispered something in his ears. But the sentence was a short one because he cringed at the smell of the man’s brain fluid and straightened up. The man in bed looked at the short man and for the first time, his eyes wore an imploring look. Any man unfamiliar to the history and tale of this city and its peoples could easily have judged that it was a victory of Death, the great leveler. But he couldn’t have been farther from the truth to think that this man, who lay in bed with his skin split and his flesh torn, his heart slowing down, one beat in a long while, letting him suffer every moment of his unwanted existence, was afraid of death. He wasn’t meant to be afraid. None of you have the right or the wisdom to judge the look right now. So, take it from me in faith – it wasn’t fear. The man in bed lay there, eyes wide open and slowly opened his mouth. His cheeks were split and wet blood still oozed out of them as he put his tongue out. Or at least whatever was left of it. It was split into three like someone put it through a shredder. The eyes remained wide open even as the tongue fell back limply and the mouth closed, squeezing more oozing blood from the cheeks. Then the short man noticed what was odd with the eyes. They weren’t imploring; or anything for that matter. They were blank. He looked at the tall man, who was still in his dream of color and ink, and sighed. Slowly he put his hand on the throat of the man with the shredded tongue and waited. He felt the half-dried blood oozing out of the rip under his finger but he waited. An hour later, the oozing stopped. The eyes of the man closed very gradually and a stink began to rise.

The crowd was still in the contest, but now it was to spy the first movement of waking. The stunted slight man was the first to notice that the flutter in the eyelids had stopped. He shuffled over to the tall man and held out the pan of hot perfumed water that seemed to have appeared out of thin air. The tall man opened his eyes very slowly and squinted like he was getting used to whatever little light there was in the room. He put out his hand and took the pan of water that was warm by now. And without any ceremony as breathing in, he put his face into the water. When he pulled it out, his eyes were completely clear. The stunted man proceeded to help the short man wrap the body of the man in bed in a black cloth. The tall man, meanwhile, pulled a pouch out of his pocket and pulled out of it a dried leaf and crushed it. Next he pulled out a stone cim and stuffed the crushed leaf into it and lit up the cim and smoked it for another eon. When the other two men were done, the stunted man showed them to the door. But he did not wait to watch them melt into the cold ink outside. He had other work in the purple house.

But the warrior had passed. He had passed without pain and he would be thanking three men for that, but the three men could not thank him. For the first time in centuries, the men had had an ulterior motive in the visit. They had chosen to commit that crime. But that motive was thwarted too. The warrior and his torn skin and his tormented flesh and cloven tongue and his blank eyes were lost to the next city. And whatever it was they wanted, was also lost with all that.

The Rechristening

I felt like the whole blog was looking effing morbid because of its name. So I hereby rechristen the blog "The Stoned Lemon".

Cyclops Speaks

I hurt myself today,
To see if I still feel.
I focus on the pain,
The only thing that’s real….
…..And you could have it all,
My empire of dirt,
I will let you down,
I will make you hurt.

I am not blind. And that is my curse. After so many posts where I unscrupulously shouted out my gladly irreverent opinions, if those first lines make you think I am writing this to give an intellectual outlet to pains I have suffered and wounds I am licking, you could not be more wrong and more right. I am not whining. I am telling you what I see with my eye. I am telling you what you cannot see. I am painting a rebus for you. If you don’t know what kind of animal that is, don’t bother. That red button on the top right…

To be born blind is to be the luckiest, because you will live your whole life in full knowledge of the fact that a light awaits at the end of the tunnel, but as long as you are in the tunnel, you will be blissfully oblivious of it. To become blind is sad, because in making you blind, the world took from you all that you really owned – sight. To choose to be blind is truly tragic, because you cannot possibly be more stupid. But to have sight is verily a curse. And that is a funny thing about the world - the privileged ones are the cursed ones. It is as if god wanted to justify the privilege to those who do not have it. It is like telling a poor man, “Sure you are poor, but look at that rich guy and see how he suffers because he is rich and has to guard and sustain his richness” – a convoluted justice and a twisted joke that laughs in your face.

Let me describe a scene to you. A man who could see once went to a city of blind people and as he entered the city, he met an old blind man. In course of conversation, the man did not mention that he could see. The old man invited the man for lunch and as they ate lunch, the old man stole food from his plate. And the person who felt the worst in the whole room was the man who could see. Not because his food got stolen but because the blind man thought he got away with it. Because what just happened was so grotesque in poetry and so painfully anti-ironic, anyone with the shadow of a heart would have felt queasy. And our man is, after all, one who has a heart and an eye. When thick black ignorance rams into white hot knowledge, the stink that rises is beyond words. If, even for a moment, you thought what I am talking about is inconsequential or extra-terrestrial, that is only a confirmation of the fact that you, more than anything else, need an eye. One needs to have an eye to smell that kind of stink and grimace.

There are two kinds of people on the planet and they are wall-builders and wall-breakers. And there is only one kind of wall and that is a glass wall. For the wall-builders are blind and they think the walls they build around themselves are rock solid and that they will keep out everything including eyes, but little do they know that the only reason most others cannot see inside their walls is not that their walls are made of steel or mortar, but because they cannot fucking see! In a city of blind men who would need to build a wall? Only a blind fool.

The breakers can simply see and that is why they don’t shatter most walls. And that is another unwritten law among the breakers – “A wall that can be seen through does not need to be broken. Only one that binds needs to be.“ So the builders build away and the breakers sit and watch in amusement. And that is the way of the world.

But our tale does not end there. To just pronounce such dry and weird statements and stop right there and let you think whatever you want is exactly what I would have loved to do any other time but right now, I am not finished.

Those with the gifts are the ones who are cursed. Those who do not have the gift are so many that the greatest mistake a gifted one can do is to love them. And that is the first mistake a gifted one does – love. And once your heart feels for those who walk in their sleep, you want to tell them you are only as good as them. Sure, the sun can nurture and nourish a little sapling to help it grow, but it cannot come close to the sapling as itself, because that will burn the hapless creature’s very core. The sun can only be itself when it is miles away, a warm reassurance of a greater light and power. That is the pain that an eye must carry in itself. A true god’s mortal life is one that goes completely unnoticed - one that is born in the dark, lives in it and dissolves into it but out of the dark explodes into light almost in futile for none sees it.

That is the curse I was born into and the one that shall be my cradle when I lay down to sleep. But, as I said, there is no use describing color to a blind man. I know the next time you see me, you will still see a mortal soul inside a mortal coil, a little mind that thinks it is god. I know the most I may have done by telling you about all this is make you look at me like I am frikkin ET. And completely miss the point. I know the next time I decide to veil the light so it doesn’t hurt you, you will think I’m grey. I know.

So just forget whatever I just told you. It was just a story. Just a rebus. Let it be.