Incandasins…

Brick by brick, I construct a wall of iron and steel
The winds howl for want of entry
The storms look for a crevice to seep in
And fill the deep, dark silences within

More magical an evening, there couldn’t have been
When you conquered my fortress at first sight
Trying to conceal my love for you is akin
To the moon attempting to hide from the night

O’ wild unicorn specked in silver and black
Neither in purity nor in grace, I’m no virgin
The light of our love is not for want of fuel
It is a star gone rogue; It can never be the sun

What showers of gold this supernova doth bring
It dazzles and enchants in its last dance of death
After pulsating every hidden desire into a million rays
It shrinks into void, sucking away my last breath

I take a stab at myself with words and falter
You just sit back and watch me misendeavor
We can’t be together and that’s that, you say
You came a life too late to be with me forever

Killing Time...

What started as an innocent enough ‘Do you believe in God’ discussion, ended in me seriously questioning my own beliefs/lack of beliefs. My life’s pattern in these 27 and a half years has been that, I have been slowly defrosting any set beliefs or ideas that I may have developed over the years. This results in my opinions being completely fluid and I end up arguing both sides of any case on different days depending upon my mood and who is at the other end of the discussion and how much this person is pissing me off. More often than not, I end up confusing myself as much as I confuse others. Who am I? What do I believe in? I am sure by now I should have formed enough patterns to have set beliefs and well formed opinions about things. Yet I spend more time floating away (and yes, getting carried away!) with an idea rather than reaching a particular destination. It is like I’m still in the process of gathering enough information and weighing the pros and cons before I reach a conclusion. However knowing myself I doubt if with all of life’s experiences, I will ever reach a conclusion about anything. Someone once told me that life is a rehearsal for a play that will never be staged. That my dear friends, is the story of my life so far!! All this reading, all these confusions, all this talking, all the confessing is of no consequence. But I enjoy it nevertheless, it is what I live for and it is what I look forward to. Just toying with an idea without having to face the ordeal of whether to accept or reject the idea. Like trying out a million clothes without buying even one! The pleasure of not having to choose one and the illusion of having them all! So what’s your point, you say? I don’t know but let’s talk about it, I say!!

She left my heart drunk with a beauty my eyes could never see...

It was a hot dusty Friday morning in Chennai. One of those mornings, where by the time you make it into the bus, find a seat and settle down with a book you already feel tired and exhausted. In any case, the 15-20 minutes that a bus waits at any large terminus is a time for a flurry of small scale businesses. Hawkers peddle everything from fruits to Clarke’s tables. This motley crew is punctuated by beggars of different age, size and minimum wage requirements.

So here I was, settled in my seat waiting for the merciful driver to turn on the AC and start the bus, when a girl of 4 or 5 got into the bus. She was dressed in soiled clothes too big for her, her hair was brown and matted and a bindi was tattooed in between her eyebrows. Might I add she looked unkempt and dirty, wait, make that filthy. She walked lazily from passenger to passenger, taking her time, staring at them until they were uncomfortable enough to fumble with their purses and quickly send her away with some coins. I must tell you at this point that I have no sympathy for child beggars; most of them are overtly shrewd, cunning and manipulative. They have no semblance of innocence; I guess the street makes them that way.

In any case she came up to me and started tugging at the tassels in my handbag. At this point, I must also mention that I love my handbag. It is a beautiful grey bag which has on both sides of it; a black metallic ornament with chamois leather tassels which I may add is very nice to touch. Annoyed by her cockiness, I yanked the bag away and glared at her. She pulled the bag close to her and started playing with the tassels again. At this point I thought the kid had some nerve (!), and asked her if I should call the police. She looked at me with her big brown eyes and said, ‘I just want to play with it’. And somehow when she said that, my rage fizzled out. I remembered the fascination I had for the bag when I saw it in the store and touching the soft fabric in the tassels still gave me comfort. After all she was just a child, a street child at that. There can’t be too much beauty in her life, I mused. Somehow, I was sure she had never had any toys and probably will never have anything pretty. In a sudden burst of inspiration, I decided to give her the ornament with all the tassels. She was surprised when I removed it from my handbag and gave it to her. I told her it was for her, with my most benign smile. She in turn gave me the most beautiful smile and did a little dance with it. She took it around the bus, played with it, and twirled it around her fingers, smiling all the while. Lovely, I thought, I had brought some beauty into someone’s life; I had made a little girl happy. Maybe she would show it to her friends and it would make her day.

While I was congratulating myself about this chicken-soup-for-the-soul-like-incident, the little girl noticed that since I had given her one of the ornaments in my bag, my bag still had tassels on one side, while the other side was empty. She promptly came up to me and gave me back the ornament, without so much as a hesitation. I refused to take it back and insisted that I wanted her to have it. As much as I tried to explain to her, she struggled to attach it back to my handbag. After putting it back, she gave the bag a satisfied look and said; now it looks pretty. Before I could react, with a hop, skip and jump she reached the entrance of the bus, turned back, flashed me a final dazzler and scampered away. I was stunned and not to mention humbled!! That kid is alright, she does not need my generosity. Her life is beautiful and as a mystic once said, ‘She left my heart drunk with a beauty my eyes could never see’.

Genesis – Flawed?

Recently one of my friends said something in jest (I hope!!) and it got me thinking. He said, a woman is old after 25, a man is never old. After my indignation died down, I thought about why women have a procreative shelf life while men do not. Why God or nature created these double standards? I am not willing to accept any philosophical or spiritual answers. Somehow this seems unfair; though I’m sure there is some genius reason behind it as there is behind every aspect of creation. I have other questions too, why are women created physically weaker than men (smaller statures, lesser muscle mass etc) but are expected to endure heavy physical hardships like pregnancy. In spite of this fact, it is also true that women have better immunity when compared to men. When there was a small pox epidemic in my grandmother’s village, more female children survived it than male. My grand mom says that nature has designed it this way so that more women surviving would mean easier continuation of the human race. If this was the case, then why didn’t the same nature have the wisdom to create a longer procreative shelf life for women than men? We need more of us if you guys still need to walk the earth in large numbers. Any theories? Anybody?

(P.S: Please do not tell me things like both men and women are required for procreation. I know that. I am only talking about the right ratio to speed things up. To state the obvious, more women and lesser men have the possibility of producing more progeny than more men and less women!!)

If you love some thing, should you let it know?

Should ‘I Love You’?
I heard someone saying that ‘I Love You’ is the most over used sentence and that he failed to understand the constant pressure to say it to his wife/partner. Maybe because Valentine’s Day is around the corner, but I have been thinking about these tired and abused three little words. From one extreme that thinks “If you’ve said it, you’ve killed it” to the other extreme who is of the opinion that “You should say it to everyone, everyday, all the time”, I have friends who span the whole broad spectrum in terms of the ‘I Love You’ usage.

If ‘I Love You’, then when?
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. Times of this magnitude are commonly encountered in the field of telecommunications, pulsed lasers, but more importantly to calculate the right time to say ‘I Love You’ for the first time in a relationship. Having said that, the right nanosecond varies from culture to culture; for example in the Indian culture, one says it right after running into each other in a college corridor after knocking down each other’s books and sundry items, as evidenced by many a desi movie. On the other hand, American movies and sitcoms lead us to believe that the saying of ‘I Love You’ is a momentous occasion which happens midway in a relationship, after saying which the relationship takes a quantum leap into things like moving in, popping the question, marriage and other murky areas. This dear friends, is the life changing quality of saying these words at the right time, it can change your life for the better or worse.

‘I Love You’: Overuse & Side Effects
Once you have said it for the first time, it pays to understand what ‘I Love You’ is not. It is not an excuse, a threat, a stress buster, an ice breaker or a booty call. For all my married friends who think “An ‘I Love You’ a day keeps the divorce lawyers at bay”, please note that God has given every man and woman a predetermined number of effective ‘I Love You’s. Overuse will result in a multitude of disappointing side effects from indifference to downright hostility.

This phenomenon is not limited to married/committed/non-single people. Every once in a while, I come across people who are in danger of ‘I Love You’ overuse, not to one but to many people. Saying these three words is not like firing a round of bullets at a shooting ring, where with every shot you try and get closer to the target. Remember always that we live in a small world, sometimes too small for comfort. With the advent of newer and better communication technologies, the distance between two of your former ‘I Love You’ recipients is getting shorter by the minute.

Advice from the wise
When it comes to saying ‘I Love You’, I always follow the advice my mother gave me about peeing. Don’t be afraid to say it when you feel like it, forcing it when you don’t feel like it will only result in pain. On that note Happy Valentine’s Day folks!!!

The Illusion of Free-Will

It is true that there is no such thing as free-will. Well at least not in this universe, since everything is bound by the conditions of space and time. Apparently to find the real ‘free-will’ concept in action, one needs to go out of this universe. Since we all have or pretend to have jobs, husbands/wives, friends, malls and movies to go to, we can safely say that getting out of the universe to experience ‘free-will’ is not in any of our immediate agendas.

But not having free-will is not entirely a bad thing as it turns out, because of the Buridan’s ass paradox, yes folks…Buridan’s ASS!!! The assumption of this paradox is that an ass (donkey not derriere) placed between a stack of hay and a pail of water will first go towards whichever is closer to it. Now when the ass is kept midway between both, it will die of both hunger and thirst as it cannot make a rational decision of choosing one over the other. (For those who think I’m talking out of my ass (derriere not donkey) Google it, this paradox is a documented theory!).


So in a way it is amazing how lack of choice or the inability to have free-will actually pushes us into the scheme of things and saves us from dreadful inaction. For all my friends who believe in weighing the pros and cons of different choices before making a decision, come on…who are you kidding? Like the ass we all move towards the choice closest to our experience or our comfort zone.

The next time you are making a big decision in your life and you have various choices in front of you, flip a coin, throw a die or ask your wife. The only freedom is, knowing there is no real freedom. That way you do what comes your way and give a flying duck to the responsibility of making the right choice. (And yes I have the freedom to say flying duck and you have the freedom to assume that’s not what I meant to say…in reality I do not have the freedom to influence your assumptions and you do not have the freedom to stop me from saying illogical stuff).