Contrary to everyday existence, the evening was one of those when I again got smitten thru my bones by a seraphic apparition resembling a woman’s whose booming laughter sent eclectic tremors through the foundations of my imagination…beautiful, wheatish, simple…the fact that our roving eyes met not once, not a meagre twice but three whole times only lent a luminous hue to an otherwise cloudy evening…but alas! I couldn’t go up to her or even smile back and that is the reason I sit here and record another small, sweet and unsuccessful glimpse into a magical world of smiles, bob-cuts and an eloquent nose…ah! The nose…the olfactory organ that stood out like a beacon of subliminal poise whilst eyes roved about and around to meet and lock and kiss…but the kiss that strangers share can be and often is what transcends into the musty ruins of memory or the freshly printed pages of books written for an audience who have had no first hand knowledge of the experience itself…Coming back, standing by the counter with a head dying to jut slightly around the pillar that blocked my view, I realised that I was already being looked-back at, for the pillar was no pillar because the waiter who was standing there had ceased to stand. And how do I know this? Because I looked straight at her. Her face was impassive. If her lip quivered under the weight of my gaze, my eyes were too fondly locked into hers to have noticed.
I withdrew. Broke the lock and turned my face away. Her expressionless face looking me straight into the eye still floated in my head. To make sure that the image that had frozen in my mind was accurate enough for long term perspective, I turned and looked back.
O! Hungry flames that battle to burn each other to smithereens…
O! Nature’s immovable objects that are struck by nature’s irresistible forces to bring about ultimate cataclysms…
O! Avalanches of a thousand peaks that tumble down in eternal fury into the lap of their own tumultuous fall…
It was the second time. Impassive face meets exploring eyes. Bob-cut hair stood still whilst tall, lanky guy looked on. A pendent, the shape of a solitary, white sea shell hung about her throat. And it shuddered as she swallowed. The eloquent nose still held its poise whilst the eyes played a deadly duel. Had there been a smile, or a semblance of positive societal gesture, the moment would have faded into the crass banality of the Age; into the second-handed wallpapers and coffee mugs of the place. But it didn’t.
Walking now, across her table to the exit, I decided to, or rather impulsively looked back. All I could catch was the sight of her head turning towards me. Our eyes met once again but that was in the midst of our heads turning towards and away from each other. I looked away and walked out the gates…
Sigh
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
All the Right Reasons
Oh my God! Look how they protest! Look how they come on the streets with their placards painted in middle-class anger to shout out the second-handed slogans against a ‘callow, careless’ State. How they stop trains, disrupt buses and show their impotent angst by howling at the ‘solitary soul’ doing an ounce of honest work on the day of National Bandh. At one level, I feel sad; almost sympathetic towards the stupid, stupid common man and his eternal conquests with the daily-dom of routine existence-struggling to pay the electricity bill in long lines bathed in sweat, struggling to get a gas connection, struggling to save and save and save for the next generation, struggling to hold on to their gloriously banal 9 to 5s, and struggling more so to have a decent orgasm at the end of tired, harrowing day! Sad…
But place this against his complacency at seeing 82 CRPF jawans man slaughtered, or the daily rape occurring in the capital, or the sloth of the modern day Judiciary pronouncing sentences for murderers and rapists after decades of debating; and you’d see the how pathetic, myopic and narrow the stupid, stupid common man and his sphere of concerns really are! That social, ethical or moral obligations do not even figure in the A-list of the collective’s concerns is not only noteworthy, but beckons a sarcastic sneer as well! But then Black Gold is a tricky bitch. Somewhat like the modern day incarnation of Cleopatra! If she could hypnotize Uncle Sam to kill a few million Iraqis in its megalomaniacal whim to conquer her, guess a hundred thousand Indians going berserk over her is understandable!
Maybe at the heyday of philosophizing, Marx would be the only one, whose ghost would be roaming about our protest-impregnated streets and laugh the mocking laughter of a true fortune teller at what is happening! The dynamics of economics, of demand and supply and resource and limitedness is what drives Man then…the tri-murti of roti, kapda, makan or jar, joru and jameen …no glory there!
But after all, Marx was whom the Existentialist Sartre had turned to when the meaninglessness of existence had given way to ‘finding meaning’ in the paying of electricity bills, taking the yearly vacation to Manali, Shimla or Goa, watching the evening news and probably breaking windows and burning BEST buses to register hollow protest too.
But maybe there is a catch to this situation: the same age old scenario wherein the faceless, direction-less collective and the power of its numbers has been tapped in by the purveyors of impious ideologies; the ones who realise the awesome strength of number and the flavour of their ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ and use it to implicate their own private agendas, the background of which are very much banally political in nature. So when I realised that most of the states wherein a thorough breakdown of state machinery did take place, where there were bandhs and demonstrations and slogan shouting and tear gas and lathi charges and political shenanigans courting arrest and bus burning and train stopping it reminded me of the ‘Lotus-followers’; the saffron-clad youth belonging to a sect whose growling reminds us of the loud sound of a chocked lavatory just when it is in the process of being flushed! Awe-inspiring it is to realise of how much their growling can really absorb! Almost sixteen states lie marred in the predicament of inconvenience; probably this one single day of (supposed) protest (instigated by a saffron-clad, top-heavy organization constituting the drinkers of their own hypocrisy-flavoured urine,) is a good enough reason for another ten million ‘normal’ people to protest! To come out on the streets and protest against the inconvenience caused, buses burnt, trains halted, flights delayed, shops closed, businesses suffered, hospitals rendered dysfunctional etc etc etc.
But unfortunately they never learn! They are like cattle, like clouds, like hollow pebbles waiting for the tumult of saffron-coloured vomit to come and carry them away into the horizon of irrational protest! After all that has happened too many times to refer to it as a mistake.
True, there has been a price-hike; true the stupid common man’s struggles will only get steeper from here on, true! Inflation has sky rocketed to Andromeda! But to vindicate one’s own lack of direction by being allowed to be lead into a protest whose agendas from with out seem noble, but whose implications from with in stink of the age-old, Great Indian Political manoeuvrings practiced since the days of Nehru and Patel is a sorry, sorry picture!
Point here is not that the “masses” on the streets are protesting. That’s a good thing, right? Else the Government is likely to shit in our backyards, grow poppy out of it, and tax us for smoking weed! Point is, protest is a good thing. But the idea that it is not really protest but cheap political manoeuvrings; which is not only adding to the woes of the fabled and celebrated Common Man, but also exploiting him, in an age old way to score over the exiting set up, is what adds shades of ‘ugly’ to the picture of a burnt bus or an unattended patient!
Anyways, hope O! kind reader that you enjoyed your one extra holiday; and if you were on the streets pelting stones at policemen, you were doing it for all the right reasons…
Peace
Oh my God! Look how they protest! Look how they come on the streets with their placards painted in middle-class anger to shout out the second-handed slogans against a ‘callow, careless’ State. How they stop trains, disrupt buses and show their impotent angst by howling at the ‘solitary soul’ doing an ounce of honest work on the day of National Bandh. At one level, I feel sad; almost sympathetic towards the stupid, stupid common man and his eternal conquests with the daily-dom of routine existence-struggling to pay the electricity bill in long lines bathed in sweat, struggling to get a gas connection, struggling to save and save and save for the next generation, struggling to hold on to their gloriously banal 9 to 5s, and struggling more so to have a decent orgasm at the end of tired, harrowing day! Sad…
But place this against his complacency at seeing 82 CRPF jawans man slaughtered, or the daily rape occurring in the capital, or the sloth of the modern day Judiciary pronouncing sentences for murderers and rapists after decades of debating; and you’d see the how pathetic, myopic and narrow the stupid, stupid common man and his sphere of concerns really are! That social, ethical or moral obligations do not even figure in the A-list of the collective’s concerns is not only noteworthy, but beckons a sarcastic sneer as well! But then Black Gold is a tricky bitch. Somewhat like the modern day incarnation of Cleopatra! If she could hypnotize Uncle Sam to kill a few million Iraqis in its megalomaniacal whim to conquer her, guess a hundred thousand Indians going berserk over her is understandable!
Maybe at the heyday of philosophizing, Marx would be the only one, whose ghost would be roaming about our protest-impregnated streets and laugh the mocking laughter of a true fortune teller at what is happening! The dynamics of economics, of demand and supply and resource and limitedness is what drives Man then…the tri-murti of roti, kapda, makan or jar, joru and jameen …no glory there!
But after all, Marx was whom the Existentialist Sartre had turned to when the meaninglessness of existence had given way to ‘finding meaning’ in the paying of electricity bills, taking the yearly vacation to Manali, Shimla or Goa, watching the evening news and probably breaking windows and burning BEST buses to register hollow protest too.
But maybe there is a catch to this situation: the same age old scenario wherein the faceless, direction-less collective and the power of its numbers has been tapped in by the purveyors of impious ideologies; the ones who realise the awesome strength of number and the flavour of their ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ and use it to implicate their own private agendas, the background of which are very much banally political in nature. So when I realised that most of the states wherein a thorough breakdown of state machinery did take place, where there were bandhs and demonstrations and slogan shouting and tear gas and lathi charges and political shenanigans courting arrest and bus burning and train stopping it reminded me of the ‘Lotus-followers’; the saffron-clad youth belonging to a sect whose growling reminds us of the loud sound of a chocked lavatory just when it is in the process of being flushed! Awe-inspiring it is to realise of how much their growling can really absorb! Almost sixteen states lie marred in the predicament of inconvenience; probably this one single day of (supposed) protest (instigated by a saffron-clad, top-heavy organization constituting the drinkers of their own hypocrisy-flavoured urine,) is a good enough reason for another ten million ‘normal’ people to protest! To come out on the streets and protest against the inconvenience caused, buses burnt, trains halted, flights delayed, shops closed, businesses suffered, hospitals rendered dysfunctional etc etc etc.
But unfortunately they never learn! They are like cattle, like clouds, like hollow pebbles waiting for the tumult of saffron-coloured vomit to come and carry them away into the horizon of irrational protest! After all that has happened too many times to refer to it as a mistake.
True, there has been a price-hike; true the stupid common man’s struggles will only get steeper from here on, true! Inflation has sky rocketed to Andromeda! But to vindicate one’s own lack of direction by being allowed to be lead into a protest whose agendas from with out seem noble, but whose implications from with in stink of the age-old, Great Indian Political manoeuvrings practiced since the days of Nehru and Patel is a sorry, sorry picture!
Point here is not that the “masses” on the streets are protesting. That’s a good thing, right? Else the Government is likely to shit in our backyards, grow poppy out of it, and tax us for smoking weed! Point is, protest is a good thing. But the idea that it is not really protest but cheap political manoeuvrings; which is not only adding to the woes of the fabled and celebrated Common Man, but also exploiting him, in an age old way to score over the exiting set up, is what adds shades of ‘ugly’ to the picture of a burnt bus or an unattended patient!
Anyways, hope O! kind reader that you enjoyed your one extra holiday; and if you were on the streets pelting stones at policemen, you were doing it for all the right reasons…
Peace
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