Closed Door

Nothing really prepares you for a sudden attack. You can be as brave, as I-can-take-the-world-on-anytime sort of a person but nothing will prepare you for a man grabbing your hand, putting you inside the car, locking the doors and rolling up the windows. It's like someone has hit you hard in the gut and you can feel the numbness of that hit seeping in your veins, deadening the organs which come in its path. And it's slow. Everything just becomes too slow for your to comprehend. The magnitude of the situation hits you 10 times in one second. Slowly, accurately, and disastrously. And yet you feel the paralysis creeping in your limbs. Your brain struggling to shut down and give up and yet human instincts coaxing it to stay alert and find a way out.

Those 30 seconds with that man in the car felt nothing less than 30 minutes of being closed in a coffin with no air-hole. Breath came much later, heart regained its normal pace after what felt like an eternity.

It's shameful if it you get this done to you by a fellow human being. Its a disgrace to the apparently civilised society. It's flouting the basic rules of independence and human dignity. And more than anything, it is a disappointment for someone who believes that there is good in everybody.

Beep Beep Beep

Beep, tring, blink. My phone lately has started beating its heart way too much. Its constantly running, doing laps tirelessly, singing what sounds like a never ending opera. And I know the reason. Everyone I know and love is far away. Everyone for whom I want to make the effort of passing a cursory smile has packed up and gone. Technology connects, but it also makes me realise how I've left people behind or how they've moved on. Necessary evil. A thorn, prickling and painfully reminding me of things I've let go off. Come home, now. Everyone. Let's kick technology's pretentious ass someday, for a few hours, and let's connect souls and ideas. Face-to-face. Heart-to-heart. Brain-to-brain.

The Ant

As I sit alone in my dimly lit room, watching an ant taking the last crumb of biscuit that I ate a few hours ago, I realised how alone we all are. Someone is dying alone in this moment, someone is being pushed out in this world, only to be raised in the harsh reality of loneliness. We are born alone, we die even lonelier. What happens in the middle is confusion. Our coming to terms with the fact that we in fact are never meant to be together. With other loners. Because that is not the dynamics we were thrown into. The earth itself is alone. Shunted by other planets. A freak.

And we fight. We kill. We manipulate. We try to deceive the truth with lies. I try to deceive truth with the lies. I fight with loneliness. Just to crawl back into its arms in those unique moments of dawn. When I realise that I cannot fight the nature of existence. The only reason this earth is still alive is because its wrapped in a bubble, isolated from the fog of reality.

It's the loneliness that makes "us" survive. But there is no us, there is just existence of us. Because "we" all are alone. That's why we survive. Our individualities. Our own personal breathing space. My own little room with a dim lamp and an ant crawling across the floor with the last piece of biscuit that I ate a few hours ago.

We Are Such Stuff Dreams Are Made On

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. 
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life
is rounded with a sleep.


~ William Shakespeare (Prospero in The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1)

Scene III Ends

What is it about leaving your home forever and starting a new life?

Nostalgia? Detachment? Grief? Relief? Excitement? Happiness?

It's a cruel realisation of an unclaimed childhood. Where did all those years ago, when I was supposed to be a just another kid on the block?

It's a baffled mind, amazed that there is no sense of loss. No sense of longing.

In the end, it's just plain relief. Relief of a much-awaited exit.

Scene III ends. Exits from left.

Break, Crush, Line

Illusions. All illusions.

I took the pill. Crushed it carelessly. Made a line. Took it in. One, two, three.

You are the worst drug I've ever pulled. Kaleidoscopic nightmare. You blow out the lights I used to make crop circled patterns out of. You make the hazy, monochromatic vibrations in the background fall down with a whimper. As I rise, you pull me down. Clip my wings. Tug on my ankles. You make me black and grey from orange and red.

There is no rehab. There is no way out of the spirals of time.

You are the worst drug I've ever pulled.

What's in a name?

What's in a name?, they ask. Everything, I say. It's the first hem of your soul that you lift for another soul. It's what your parents matter of factly called you when you were born. It's what you sign off your unpublished, sometimes pathetic and sometimes beautifully filled with grief, poems. It's that combination of letters that is printed in your brain and is more important than the combination of letters of your lover's name.

And yet, they aren't unique. Those few letters that make you aren't personal to you. The pieces of your name are snatched and clawed at by thousands, maybe millions of other name hungry souls. Look at the audacity with which we grin at another soul who has stolen your name. "Namesakes" they call them. Thieves in my view.

Another Pooja in Manikaran, Himachal

In Himachal, however, the scale of this name theft is breaking the radar. Ask any beggar girl between the ages of 9 and 12 her name and she will have only one answer. Pooja. Its always the same. P, O, J & A are always arranged in the similar pattern and repeated shamelessly. Has it something to do with the piousness that the word carries with itself or with the goons running that begging racket? Whatever it is, it is heartbreaking to see those intelligent, sometimes unnervingly beautiful girls have the same name.

What's in a name? Maybe, nothing after all.