Questions reel, bumping into each other like giggling children,
Only if life knew better than to smirk at me,
Love, I wish to embrace with all my soul, an’
Distance between hearts is all i get to see…

What do I do wrong, is it the care,
I so don’t pain myself to measure,
Or is it the love itself, so pure,
That they fear will make me make them want me?…

(*to remind me of old times, almost a year ago…)

The cadaver of the red sun, the shadow of the bloody eye
The ire of a thousand thoughts, stifled by a million sighs;

An angst, against all bourgeoisie
Me, my own, for all to see;

A euphoria of pain, am I just the Reaper’s gain?
My voice too silent, in this bullet rain…
But then again…

Freed like the wind, in a moment of brutal glee,
Someone else thought, I had lived enough;
A growing chaos, screeching to a halt
When the sand runs out, when karma is a bluff…

My voice too silent, in this bullet rain…
But then again…

(*rest in peace, you honest soul…)

Description of one of the blogs I visited “I am neither leftist nor rightist. I am a typist.”

So as the number of us bloggers typing away to glory scales new levels every day, methinks, what is it in this medium that the others lack, and why is the proliferation faster than a man rushing towards the loo on the verge of bladder-burst? (ah… a genuinely bad analogy… pat.. pat.. )

First of all, methinks it is the web. When I say web, it is not just the technology. It is the ease of use, ease of publishing and ease of feedback that makes the loop complete. Blogger for word; the carrot that makes even lazy-tashreefs like me to go blogetty once a many while. Halo-scan, shout boards, counters, profile viewers, template enhancers and a whole bevy of such niceties make life much easier and prettier.

But then me also realizes, it is not just the shift of a thought onto a byte and then onto a character and then onto the virtual… it is the need to shout out to be heard (and to shout out even if no one is hearing in particular) is the prime driver.

And then the veritable metamorphosis… Vlogs (video blogs), Mlogs (mobile blogs) and in a few months we will run out of alphabets to precede the ‘logs’. And then it will no longer be a log – or a record or listing of events and interesting happening. It will become a medium of information exchange and real time modification and updation. The precursor, I might conjecture, is already here. We call it Wiki.

An interesting observation: The internet, the web (i.e the hyperlinked spaced sitting above the net architechture), and now blogs are all indicative and have grown out of the single impressive factor of collaborative sharing of experiences. And the next generation of such collaboration is already nested deep in the ideas we don’t even realize are already a part of our lives. Linux, the quintessential case study on open source, is also one of the best examples of collaborative software. And then there is the big daddy of them all, Google. Their search improves as we visit a page more and more, Orkut grows as we add more friends, Blogger expands as you and me write more, and Google Answers is a site run by everyone who answers a question.

This incredible model made possible only due to the omnipresent connectivity and the hyperspace, and it has happened now. And I feel privileged to be a part of this silent revolution. I am not a baby-boomer loathing technology, nor am I a Gen-Z whiz kid who thinks Google is a given and doesn’t understand why the net is so unbelievable. I am mentally baked just right, with the understanding and the sense of awe in perfect balance. Bless the zeros and ones… and bless the future that drives our present making us goal-seek and fulfill our own Pygmalion prophecies.

Words will fail when age talks to me,
A stoop that burdens, not me but my mind;
Is it the path, or the future itself that I can’t see,
Know not, where i walk to, know not what I leave behind…

Wet clothes, dripping hair and a jostling sea of humanity made a very irritable combination. The crowd was describable by only one word:phenomenal. There were people everywhere, orchestrating an almost impossible balance in that sardine can of a train compartment. My whole being was splitting at the seams, mentally and physically.

The self-victimisation demon, who comes-a-visiting at such times, made me become suddenly aware of the ‘misery’ around me. Sweaty people, almost encroaching on my fundamental right to exist, and all the inhuman endurance feats i was made to go through, to earn, what I can shamefully call a salary…where was all this going? why is it that I was so pathetically commensurated while the rest of the world seemed to breeze through in luxury cars? Why was my talent and capability so perennially undermined and my intellect so ungratifying?

When this seemingly wanton brownian motion of my thoughts was rising to an unnecessary frenzy, the train slowed down at the platform and he walked in. Or i should rather say, he crawled in. He was neatly dressed, a crisply ironed shirt, belted trousers and a metallic wrist-watch to match. Only that his trousers were only knee length; because his legs were knee length themselves. Both legs, cleanly amputated at the knee.

He wore specially made shoes which supported him below his knees, and were bound to his thighs. As the whole compartment eyed this spectacle with a mix of surprise and indifference, I woke up from my inconsequential daydream to notice a being who presented such a positive picture. His confidence, his professionalism and his grit almost emanated from his small frame, making me feel guilty, or rather stupid, for complaining, for feeling small, and for contracting my soul into a shell of my needs and my ego.

It was when he neatly folded his umbrella into his bag and pulled out the Times for a morning read, I added a new pointer to the list of things this city has taught me: You are never too small to aspire, enjoy and live life to its fullest, and you are never too big to learn from life itself, everyday…

Questions, questions…
Life itself, bent like the question mark,
An unsolved puzzle, a mystery unanswered;
It’s a life-long prayer, on which you embark,
Till sweet death caresses all answers…

________________________________________

[During the Gujrat riots...]

Anger, scorching hell, fire, melting flames,
Life is the pawn, in these deadly games,
The gulf burns, corpses by the barrow,
Is this man, so cheap, so narrow?
This time even satan won’t take the blames…

Humor, aur Indians? Kabhi nahin… Paan pasand would have made an ad out of our inherent irony, only if we had the inclination to blabber on such inconsequential unimportant topics in those times.

But I have a different view… we have more sarcasm, satire, irony, paradox, and ability to laugh at ourselves than any other people in the world. Need proof? Look at our politics for instance. Nothing describes it better than ‘a comedy of errors’ where microphones are as far flung as the promises made by the politicians, and nepotism and a criminal record are the most essential qualifications. You have Oddvani and his trishul sharpening abnegators (to draw from Jugular Suraiya of the old), Baal Thuggery in the west, Yaloo Ladav and his whole cricket team in the middle, and a heavyweight Amma down south.

Let’s see… After politics, our movies. Comedies are anything but funny, dramas are comical, action movies are a love triangle, and romantic hits are thrillers. Scary movies are short stories, autobiographical movies are scary, and short films are non-existent. You have two options: LOL or Aaaarrrrgghh…

Our judicial system comes next. It is working fine, just that the timelines are a bit skewed (screwed). It might just happen that before the verdict is out in your case, you may, well, die. Not because someone will try to kill you, not because of anxiety, not because of worry. But because of plain old age. The cases take so long to even get a hearing that I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a column in the FIR or affidavit, ‘Until which generation can you wait until your patience wears out and you come back from the dead and haunt us?’

Sports, festivals, celebrities, food, clothing, hairstyles, even girlfriends. I find humor in everything that we do, everything that we are. I can go on and on, but I got a day to laugh about. More laughs later :)