Soul-Ice-Vending

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing." -

Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

You stay inside your heated house, under a furry blanket with a cuppa in your hand, Ruby and the Romantics promising you your day will come. All that warmth does nothing for the ice in your soul, the frequent sips of scalding Oolong does not seep inside by the osmosis you hoped would happen.


 You step outside in the white cold and run till the wind stings your face like shards of ice, your breath ragged, your fingers frozen, the tips blue and all your blood drained from your body to pump somewhere about in your legs. You meet people on the streets to whom the cold means nothing. They like it, they glow. The cold envelops you, in a white misty bubble that comes out of your mouth and nose and at the same time seems to cover you entirely, cutting you off from the mundane, from the normal, from life in fact till all you have is your body, that thin layer of veined, bluish skin between the ice and your soul. And then it rips into your clothes, into that flimsy, black sweater that had been a gift on a warmer winter, many years ago, into your chest, ribcage, heart. The ice enters to meet your soul-ice like blood-brothers, intertwining into a glorious shapeless sculpture, diamond-like in its hardness and you run. To the cadence of the happy voices of blurry -faced passers-by in bright coats and boots hurrying to homes of fireplaces and Christmas lights and dogs and friends and lovers.


You realize the ice was meant to be there, that this was the natural state, that this was how it had been all along and how it would be and that any other state was an abnormality, that warmth was an anomaly and would soon be corrected.


Why did you get confused along the way? Did someone tell you otherwise and you, in a naive moment, believed it? Did your soul-ice melt in a fleeting moment of love, hearing the lilt and throb of a voice and you thought the thaw would last forever? That the soul ice-creature had finally turned to the soul-Samsa it was meant to be? Maybe.


You pass shops on the way, selling everything conceivable, necessities you had never realized were indeed necessary, the frosted glasses also reflecting beautiful people in their own orbits which would never collide with yours. Which, of course, sets you thinking of all the orbits which have collided with yours and the strangeness and spark and impact of the collisions. Memory thaws your soul-ice again and you start feeling the cold. You remember someone telling you the cold isn't good for you. And chocolates and wine and loud music and computer games and caffeine and sunshine and pavements. Someone else that they weren't good for you. Between the things that aren't meant for you and those that aren't good for you, you have, throughout your life-path, been giving up things that make you burn and giddy and heady and lovely and warm. Till you settle on your meant-to-be-reached, steady-state of soul-ice. And henceforth, you never feel cold, never unhappy, never unsatisfied unless of course some accidental collision with a rogue shooting star out of it's orbit and into yours burns the way through that ice and gives you memories warm enough to defrost that soul-ice long enough for you to enjoy your Oolong and ponder it's strength. And have some left over to feel a Thelonius Monk song.

And in the Human Heart

Conrad Aiken writes

In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive,
The shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves,
In the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices,
I suddenly face you,

Your dark eyes return for a space from her who is with you,
They shine into mine with a sunlit desire,
They say an 'I love you, what star do you live on?'
They smile and then darken,

And silent, I answer 'You too-I have known you-I love you!-'
And the shadows of tree trunks and shadows of leaves
Interlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlight
To divide us forever-

And I wonder

Two Minds. Or Many.

I meant to love you

But got distracted by myself

And then the monkeys came along

And we just had to watch them play

By then we had both forgotten about love

And misery

And melancholy

And togetherness

And loneliness

I meant to tell you

You meant the world to me

But the world means so little

I took one day at a time

And tried years at a go

And nothing changed

We stand still like clowns at a circus

The last show over

The people gone

The pretty horses smoking rings of sawdust

The lights might have faded

But the stars still shine

Please,please,please

Leave me be

I might get along with ghosts

But I don't want to 

 

The Commuter's Musings

'What you don't ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day-because how could you?-is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to forsee the desperation and depression,the sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining children, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you would never ever do. And of course you don't think about having affairs, and when you get to that stage in life when you do (and everyone gets there sooner or later), you don't think of the sick feeling you get in your stomach when you are conducting them, their inherent unhappiness. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning and being someone you don't recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things , then no one would ever get married, of course they wouldn't ; in fact the impulse to get marry would come from the same place as the impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kinds of impulses we try to ignore, rather than celebrate. So we can't afford to think these things because getting married-or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by-is on our agenda. It's something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions at work and the possibility of winning a lottery ticket, and it's not enough, so we kid ourselves that it is possible to enter these partnerships and be faced only with the problems of mud removal, and then we become unhappy and take Prozac and then we get divorced and die alone.'

I had picked up Hornby's How To Be Good from a Sunday market in Delhi I think, a couple of years back and promptly forgotten about it until last week when I found it, Nick Hornby carved out in bright, bold, banana-yellow on the dusty jacket, during one of my very infrequent clean-up fits. I put it in my to-go-to-work bag, to colourize my long commutes to and from work. It's a circus act, these commutes. You wait till the vehicle you are supposed to get arrives. And like most things in life, it doesn't. Then you wait for anything that will arrive and take you anywhere remotely close to where you are supposed to be. You spot the thing, wave madly and if you are lucky, you hop on and if it's a normal day, you just manage to squeeze in. Manipulating your body through a human jungle, you find just enough space to stand on one leg, which you then proceed to do for an hour or so. There are jolts and jerks and all sorts of vehement, violent movements you subject your body to. Sometimes you are flailing about awkwardly, sometimes grabbing just about anything solid and if you have a hand left over, you reach in and pull out a ringing phone. Or a book.

How to Be Good. Well, it's Hornby, so of course there must be no such thing as steps to being good or even any valid reason to be good, provided of course, you can define doing this,this,this is also known as being good. Hornby does not disappoint. It's a rant and while the Angriest Man in Holloway might have actually written a newspaper column, you realize the Angriest Woman in Holloway is writing the book. Having an affair doesn't help. Career doesn't help. Getting faith doesn't help. Children don't help. Friends and family, ditto. Religion doesn't help. Ha! Like Hornby was going to make it that easy. There is no ideal man, there is no ideal marriage, there is no ideal life. But that you already knew. If you get out trying, good for you. If you stop trying, well, just as well since it really does not matter either way.

Someone mistakes you for a handle. Reading time over.

Come evening and you head back. Yet another long commute but there is something lovely about the evening. Something very mellow about the tones of the sky. All those blues and greys and smattering of stars above the traffic signal seems almost romantic. And that beautiful juxtaposition of those birds sitting calmly on the telephone wires, above all the craziness and rush that is the prime-time traffic. You take your book out and read again. And now it's not a rant. All Hornby is saying is that people are unhappy and people are human and there are different ways of dealing with life and sometimes actions aren't meaningful while non-actions mean the world and you can do what you want to and do what you need to but be prepared to accept that often neither is going to be enough. You look up and take in the people around you. There are people waiting to get back to the comfort of home. There are other people really, really not looking forward to that, and clearly wanting to spend more time with the present company. And there is the slightly creepy co-worker who you've begun to suspect follows you home.

It's such a mixed bag, life. One day you are waxing sentimental about your old college days, the next being horrified by front page news of some boy attempting to kill a girl who rejected his advances and then killing himself in the very same college. Then there is love and hate and their interchangeability. You think of some beautiful lines you had read-

Oh yes, I have known love, and again love,
and many other kinds of love;
but of that tenderness I felt then,
is there nothing I can say?

 If one person knew of this tenderness, then by induction, so did others. Given that in parts at least, we are commutative.

Hornby ends with

'And then, I can do this. I can live this life. I can, I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at that wrong moment I catch a glimpse of the night sky behind David, and I can see that there is nothing out there at all.'

But that's just it. There is. Maybe not as annoyingly magical as THAT friend claims it is. Maybe it's a moment, a person, a time-point.

There are the hills. Always. Surely anyone would find the spark on the hills!

The evening deepens. So does the cacophony of car horns. And then suddenly, you spot the vehicle of your choice. It's not crowded either. Perhaps poetry is not dead after all.

The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul

I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all the time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.

Come and See

Well, it's official. The heat has forced me towards a movie binge where I am going to do nothing but imitate the lifestyle of a cocktail downing couch potato.....okay maybe just tomato juice with a celery stick thrown in.

Movies I am going to devour are:

• Natural Born Killers 
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• Naked Lunch
• It's all Gone
• In Bruges
• Lord of War (just because of Jared Leto)
• Blow (Depp, Cruz!)
• Point Break (because I miss Swayze)
• Pineapple Express
• Enter the Void
• Conversation
• Baraka
• The Butterfly Effect
• Hard Candy
• A Tale of Two sisters
• Following
• Kill Bill

Because I am in a trippy mood, not unprepared to be scared and lastly need some gore!

Early Morning Rain

It's the kind of morning which makes you think of an autumn evening. That somber, dulled blue-grey sky which comes right after a brilliant sunset. A stealthy sunrise and the rain clouds roll in immediately. A wayward gust of wind brings the smell of rain. A second gust later, it starts raining. For five glorious, glorious minutes, it's a green, cool, wet world right outside my window. The lawns outside stretch like a field and the man sitting right in the middle of the lawns is doing exactly what I would be if the world was ending and I knew it-sitting and reading in the rain. I close my eyes and at that very, very specific moment, I feel like I am home, on the hills, deep in the middle of a forest. It is, for a second, the kind of morning that gives you all at once an ache in your heart, a taste of sand and salt and a sense of endless time. The kind of morning you won't remember off-hand but unknowingly set as some measure of perfection-saying, to the utter irritation of everyone, I don't remember where but I've seen better.

I Only Know How To Be Young

I can be jealous, naive, mean and irrational
Right down nasty sometimes
I can put your guard up
With big words and a tailored super ego
And then break your defenses with
Some mad, glad loving
My blues will chase yours into hiding
I feel I never will reconcile
The should, must, need and want
I intend to have and to hold
To love and to flourish
To change and to keep forevermore
I expect everything
In a world which doesn't know my name
I am not afraid to prod strangers
And ask them if they are real
If there is a chance
I'll wrench it loose
From it's box
I have been promised change
Fed on revolution
And I'll hold them on to it
I'll pay my dues if they are worth it
There is no need to tempt me
I'll trade you for it, only
Let the deal speak for itself
Keep all pretenses in the casket
There is just no time
What with all the songs that must be sung
And the stars that must be watched
Come gaze with me
I'll show you a sunset
You've probably seen
And tell you a story
You never could have imagined
I'll square the matter
Of Reason's Circle with you
Pre-conceived notions may roam
Prejudices must be slayed
There is a brewery of eternal youth
Next door, if you can manage the walk
In a slim, straight line
Don't peer too far
I am the future
And I am a stark, dark soul
Leave the placebos behind
The truth takes up too much space
And memory
If you project life on life
Do you get more or do you get better?
Come, if you have no answers
If you have answers
Come all the same
Just remember
Doublespeak is Greek to me
I have all it takes
To fix a light bulb
And write a brief history
Of timely actions
I'll call you out when
You start thriving on War and peaches
It may be too early to get up
Although it's never too early to start
And when the night falls
And the sound of silence
Is all I crave
Humour me.

Panama Cut Boy, The Real McCoy

It doesn’t happen often
It seems very rare
That I come knocking at your door
And don’t find you there
You’re always sitting round
You’re always waiting up
And it would be too bad and oh so sad
If it didn’t keep cracking me up
You gotta leave, baby
You gotta run, baby
You better stop, baby
You know I am just having fun
And I’ll go on and on and on
You’ll be the last one in the line
And I’ll be the first one to leave
But while it’s on I’ll lead you on
Say what you want to believe
You’re just a little baby, girl
You’re just so new at this
I got you in my game before you knew my name
I’ll keep you forever with a kiss
You can’t run hard enough
You can’t leave soon enough
You can’t stop, just can’t stop
One look, one touch
It's not too much
It's just enough to make it tough
To ever, ever give up
On me.

Times and Travels

There are many reasons to travel. To get towards something, to get away from something. Or maybe it's one and the same thing. There are also many roads that can be taken. I, like most of my peers, generally take the acceptable one. Am I one to forge a new path? Or traverse a lesser known one? Is it brave to go down the path I want to? Or do I simply become a well-worn character in the well-thumbed pages of a sometime popular book?

I asked someone once: Why are we so hard on ourselves? When all we can hope to find is a bit of happiness and when beginnings and endings are universal and inevitable, then why do we wait, think, ponder, worry, hesitate? He told me: We are perhaps striving to connect with our own reflections. Hence the need for an alien other. All I am looking for is a bit of that alien soul in whose eyes I might see my reflection and understand for once who I am. I have been quite a few things but I have a nagging doubt I haven't been myself yet. I haven't quite found myself. Have I looked hard enough? Have I just moulded myself so well in the role handed to me that it's no longer possible to break the cast? People, places have come easily enough. Perhaps too easily? No, that can't be it. I wouldn't be struggling then would I? There would be some semblance of satisfaction wouldn't there? Sometimes at least?

It's not where you go, it's who you go with. It's not who you go with, but how you feel. It's not you, it's them. It's not, it is. Maybe, maybe not.

Every journey they say is ultimately a journey of love and at the end you find yourself. They being crappy Hinglish films of course. Even disregarding such oracles, I find myself hoping to undertake such a journey. We all do I guess? Generalizations from myself to the wider world don't generally work. So without boasting of the audacity of answering my own questions and without letting the miasma of vagueness swirl too strong, let me say this. Feel is one of my favourite songs. There are certain lines I think have been ripped right out of me after a rigorous soul strip.

I don't want to die
But I ain't keen on living either
Before I fall in love
I'm preparing to leave her
I scare myself to death
That's why I keep on running
Before I've arrived
I can see myself coming

Some things need to change. This might just be the time. Can I be the person I think I can be? Can I take the plunge and come back up? I might lose. Then again I might win. I refuse to give up without a fight. I refuse to keep myself back from fighting. It'll be blood, sweat and tears. Which war has been less?

Journey, Foray. Call it what you will. A tryst with destiny, perhaps?

He warned me: There's a time and place for everything, even for philosophy. I do not agree,as usual.

Bon Voyage et Au Revoir.

The Pleasures of the Damned

There you go
The deed is done
Many times over
Its too late to go back
Or to remember if there was a beginning
This path to hell
Was paved with the best of intentions
Like all others
Look at all those footprints and you'll know
Its better to hang frozen in mid-air
Than walk down there
Us, them
The feeling is the same
Meaningless yet endless
Another time and it might have been different
Isn't that what they all say?
And they are right
Another time, another place
And that relentless sorrow
Would have been breaking dawn
Over that sea you loved
And those very footprints
Of lovers running in the sand
And in that tilting light
We could have carved our names
Faster than the waves could wash them away
Another time and that walk through
That leery, drunken forest
Would have been a dance
A fine balance between a waltz
And an eternal search for the meaning
And definition of us
Another time and you would be strong
You would live alone if you wanted to
Leave if you wanted to
Not give up
Not give in
Now just say these words
And take pleasure in the break
Of those mirthless laughs
There are many beckoning fingers
And outstretched hands
A grasping, gasping ocean
There's nothing you don't know
Yet there's always a new depth to sink to
Celebrate the fall.

Four Beasts in None

Lets not fool ourselves
I am asking for reassurance
So are you
And we both know only too well
Its a lost cause
All that we fear is true
Is,in fact, true
And its an unchanging,unyielding truth
Its beautiful how we spar with silence
Look into the mirror with a smile
And hold up our battle scars
To admire
That bright diamond glass
That we have been trying to crack
Will never give
And the other side
Which we see, feel , touch
But can never be on
Will always shine with that intensity
Which dazzled us in the first place
Its an alley of half-truths
We have condemned ourselves to
Hammering on the wall
Of the dead end
Thinking because we saw it move once
It might move for us again
That war weary flame of hope
Which flits between you and me
Lights the way but only so
We see far enough to know
We have to keep going
The end has come and gone
It followed right behind
The beginning
And we missed seeing it
Because the world called
And we answered like fools
Turning away at that very second
Which might have been the
Making of us
The ship that we heard carried
Ingots and sailed round the world
Left behind a wake that we saw
And followed on the pearl pure logic
Of love
We rode high waves but washed up
Like sand on the shore
Not far from where we stared
We walked ahead
Looking back now and then
To see only one set of footprints
Never asking whose they were
Both sure it was theirs
But terrified knowing
Whose pain would be greater
If it wasn't
A rocky road, a hill in distance
Crossing which
We won and lost the world
Because we couldn't decide
Whose claim was greater.

Arctic Chaos

Rough and heavy and still
Its such a cumbersome silence
That sounds like a dirge
And feels like being felled
In the dark.
The stabbing silence
Wounds over and over again
Till the unsaid words bleed
The silence molests
In a red-eyed frenzy
The screams go unheard
Till the weeping words
Sigh and die out
The silence broods
And breeds
Until the all consuming quiet
Takes a damning breath
Killing truth and lie
In the same, silent stroke.

Purgatory By-Lane

A storm came and went
While we were sleeping
And when we woke up
There was nothing around us
Just two blind beings staring into space
We tried to see each other
Tried to remember
But memory being tricky
Try as we might
We could not put things back
Exactly as they were
And suddenly that seemed to matter most
To place everything right
We mattered less
And as things fell in place
We fell out
Its me and you
And nothing else
Someone more and no one less
And all the storm took
Was replaced
But us
Now
I keep hoping
For another storm
That takes everything away
And gives us back.

Lest I Forget

I have a picture
Of us
Lest I forget your face
And that we were joined
In some passing moments
Of togetherness
A diary
Where everything is noted down
Lest I forget
What you said
And why I laughed
When the world asked
I had no answer
Why I felt the way I did
But someday
When memory fails
And I ask myself
I don't want the truth
So I'll take refuge
In this cover
Pictures and words
Mingling to create
A brand new story
Of how we were simply friends
Who met, talked, laughed
And left.

Post-Ifs

Would you mind
If I say I feel iffy
If I say we are as unresolved
As the Irish question
As inexplicable
As the Bermuda Triangle
As meaningless
As colourless green ideas
Would you mind
If I feel like I am not
Like I never was
When with you
If I say
Our words clash and ring
Like clamoring curfews
Making me feel ominous
Ours is a battle
Though we sing it like a duet
We consume each others words
Air, space and memories
Till someday
We'll be reduced to nothing
Reduced to saying
How we might have made a mark
If we hadn't met each other.

A note in February.

This isn't for you
Just like all those
Meaningless
Incoherent
Attempts at words weren't
Like that
Starry
Blurry
Eyed girl
Wasn't
She wrote it for
No one
Because she
Loved no one
She only liked
Watching the world play
The fool
And you play the world
Laughing your candyfloss laugh
I don't know why
I remembered her suddenly
Why I can't let her go
Of her words
Which weren't for you.

Bengalese

Vir Sanghvi comes a somewhat close to describing a bit of Calcutta and Bengalese


Most modern Indian cities strive to rise above ethnicity. Tell anybody who lives in Bombay that he lives in a Maharashtrian city and (unless of course, you are speaking to Bal Thackeray) he will take immediate offence. We are cosmopolitan, he will say indigenously. Tell a Delhiwalla that his is a Punjabi city (which, in many ways, it is) and he will respond with much self-righteous nonsense about being the nation's capital, about the international composition of the city's elite etc. And tell a Bangalorean that he lives in a Kannadiga city and you'll get lots of techno-gaff about the internet revolution and about how Bangalore is even more cosmopolitan than Bombay.

But, the only way to understand what Calcutta is about, is to recognize that the city is essentially Bengali. What's more, no Bengali minds you saying that. Rather, he is proud of the fact. Calcutta's strengths and weaknesses mirror those of the Bengali character. It has the drawbacks: the sudden passions, the cheerful chaos, the utter contempt for mere commerce, the fiery response to the smallest provocation. And it has the strengths (actually, I think of the drawbacks as strengths in their own way). Calcutta embodies the Bengali love of culture; the triumph of intellectualism over greed; the complete transparency of all emotions, the disdain with which hypocrisy and insincerity are treated; the warmth of genuine humanity; and the supremacy of emotion over all other aspects of human existence.

That's why Calcutta is not for everyone. You want your cities clean and green; stick to Delhi. You want your cities, rich and impersonal, go to Bombay. You want them high-tech and full of draught beer, Bangalore's your place. But if you want a city with a soul, come to Calcutta.

When I look back on the years I've spent in Calcutta - and I come back so many times each year that I often feel I've never been away - I don't remember the things that people remember about cities. When I think of London, I think of the vast open spaces of Hyde Park. When I think of New York, I think of the frenzy of Times Square. When I think of Tokyo, I think of the bright lights of Shinjiku. And when I think of Paris, I think of the Champs Elysee. But when I think of Calcutta, I never think of any one place. I don't focus on the greenery of the maidan, the beauty of the Victoria Memorial, the bustle of Burra Bazar or the splendour of the new Howrah 'Bridge'. I think of people. Because, finally, a city is more than bricks and mortars, street lights and tarred roads. A city is the sum of its people. And who can ever forget -or replicate - the people of Calcutta?

When I first came to live here, I was told that the city would grow on me. What nobody told me was that the city would change my life. It was in Calcutta that I learnt about true warmth; about simple human decency; about love and friendship; about emotions and caring; about truth and honesty. I learnt other things too. Coming from Bombay as I did, it was a revelation to live in a city where people judged each other on the things that really mattered; where they recognized that being rich did not make you a better person - in fact, it might have the opposite effect. I learnt also that if life is about more than just money, it is about the things that other cities ignore; about culture, about ideas, about art, and about passion. In Bombay, a man with a relatively low income will salt some of it away for the day when he gets a stock market tip. In Calcutta, a man with exactly the same income will not know the difference between a debenture and a dividend. But he will spend his money on the things that matter. Each morning, he will read at least two newspapers and develop sharply etched views on the state of the world. Each evening, there will be fresh (ideally, fresh-water or river) fish on his table. His children will be encouraged to learn to dance or sing. His family will appreciate the power of poetry. And for him, religion and culture will be in inextricably bound together.

Ah religion! Tell outsiders about the importance of Puja in Calcutta and they'll scoff. Don't be silly, they'll say. Puja is a religious festival. And Bengal has voted for the CPM since 1977. How can godless Bengal be so hung up on a religions festival? I never know how to explain them that to a Bengali, religion consists of much more than shouting Jai Shri Ram or pulling down somebody's mosque. It has little to do with meaningless ritual orsinister political activity.The essence of Puja is that all the passions of Bengal converge: emotion, culture, the love of life, the warmth of being together, the joy of celebration, the pride inartistic ex-pression and yes, the cult of the goddess.

It may be about religion. But is about much more than just worship. In which other part of India would small, not particularly well-off localities, vie with each other to produce the best pandals? Where else could puja pandals go beyond religion to draw inspiration from everything else? In the years I lived in Calcutta, the pandals featured Amitabh Bachchan, Princes Diana and even Saddam Hussain! Where else would children cry with the sheer emotional power of Dashimi, upset that the Goddess had left their homes? Where else would the whole city gooseflesh when the dhakis first begin to beat their drums? Which other Indian festival - in any part of the country - is so much about food, about going from one roadside stall to another, following your nose as it trails the smells of cooking?

To understand Puja, you must understand Calcutta. And to understand Calcutta , you must understand the Bengali. It's not easy. Certainly, you can't do it till you come and live here, till you let Calcutta suffuse your being, invade your bloodstream and steal your soul. But once you have, you'll love Calcutta forever. Wherever you go,a bit of Calcutta will go with you. I know, because it's happened to me. And every Puja, I am overcome by the magic of Bengal. It's a feeling that'll never go away.

August Rush

Its been a mad mad couple of weeks...In fact I've stopped writing on my other blog....the one where I actually speak..(as some of you well know)...and since its a new day and a new life and I am feeling damn good....I think I'll celebrate by starting a new blog....and what better way to do that than by going back to my old,barely used one...Its just been waiting for something other than obscure poetry....speaking of poetry, I discovered Al Purdy at JNU....someone left 'Poems For All the Annettes' on the desk in the cubicle which I happened to occupy (in the cyber library which I entered completely unofficially)....and I wished, wished, wished I had been born around 1920 and that my name was Eurithe...This bloody Canadian has got me so in love with him that I stopped writing poetry...well till today that is...I only stop writing when I can't stop thinking and well I've had a lot to think about since...well that's another story....Delhi has managed to capture part of my imagination and Delhiites...the delights that they are have managed to decompose the rest of it so things balance out well...Being back at Calcutta even if its for a short period is like breathing in space without the oxygen tank...The roads, the people are darling in their familiarity...Going back to College Street...the well-known voices calling out-Ki lagbe ..ekbar bole toh dekhun...the whiff of old books...books that have some of the most wonderful inscriptions on them....that belonged to some remarkable people...And the old professors ..the old friends...the new ones...Yes would be a nice life if I could figure out what it is that I want exactly....A Splinter in The Heart, A Handful Of Earth or Love in a Burning Building...maybe I'll settle for a sundance at dusk...till then Emu,Remember!

Wonderwell

Those lies whose web I spin
To keep you out and keep me in
Turn from undergrowth to forests
From sparks to wildfires
Of green anger, of black rage
Of despair which you try to cage
Your yes begging me to change
To live, to give, to love
I try to laugh but cry instead
Can the dead mourn for the dead?
Your command is my demand
My wish is your want
If you are right and I am wrong
Why did it have to take so long
To know black holes may meet
But never form a star.