Yearly Archives: 2011

Nocturnal Talks

What’s the time? Late night? Good. Stop everything you are doing. Go to your terrace. Pity you don’t have one. If you have, forget whatever you were doing. Go to your terrace. Take one bed sheet, one pillow with you. Also, the most important thing: one transistor. Also, don’t take your mobile with you. So go with only one electronic instrument. The Radio.

Clean the roof with a broom. Sprinkle some water so that the heat of the day is soaked up and vaporises into the sky. The sky which has stars. Dark night but shining stars. The word romantic is for gays. The night with stars is just breathtaking. Look at the sky. Give a sigh. Smile. Lay out the bed sheet. Now lie down. Adjust the pillow so that you can see direct up. Settled? Good. Now turn on the transistor. It will be #win if the transistor is old and held up using rubber bands. Now start searching for Vividh Bharti. Don’t rush. Enjoy the noise in between the stations. What a lovely sound it is! The dials doing something electronically, the turning spring inside, searching for the right frequency, with sudden loudness trying to say something to you.

Tuned? Nice. Now listen to old Hindi songs. And imagine. From Devanand and Nootan coming down from the once open Qutub Minar, to older Talat Mahmood songs. From Hemant Kumar’s ‘Tum Pukaar Lo’ via Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Lag Ja Gale K fir yeh haseen raat ho na ho’ or ‘Rasik balma’ to Kishore Kumar’s ‘Woh sham kuchh ajeeb thi, yeh shaam bhi ajeeb hai…’ Keep staring the beauty of the stars of the coldish silent night. Try to hear some sine-wave horn sound in the distance away. Smile. Relive old memories with the brilliant lyrics. Keep looking at the stars. They move. They say a lot to you. Those starry nights. Amazing.

Now savour these moments. I’ll be silent for some time.

Now while its getting further late, close your eyes. Keep the music on though. Smile more. Try to remember her. Smile again. Don’t regret what you didn’t do. Don’t think what you will do. Just stay silent, keeping your eyes closed. And sleep.

Now if you are in a saner city, around 5 AM in the morning, you will hear some Aarti (not RT) going on nearby. Smile. Ruffle your hair and get up. Try to hear from where this sound is coming. Smile. Stay there for some time, yawning.

Enough. Smile. New Day has arrived. Back to life.

Hope is a good thing, in fact the best thing ever

On 27th February when India tied with England, @VenkatAnanath tweeted that he was about to write an article on “Why India is not going to win this World Cup!”. As a knee jerk reaction, I unfollowed him instantly. Although following and unfollowing is not a big deal in Twitdays world but what I didn’t like was the pessimistic journalism. No doubt, these journos/authors/writers are meant to present the truth to the people in the most crude way possible but I have a philosophy that they have a big role to play when it comes to uplift or degrade people’s morale and mood.

It is not only about Cricket, lets talk about optimism in general. As Indians, we people are very optimistic. Since birth, we have been taught to be optimistic. If there is no water from the tap, we assume that one day will come where our Municipality Department will fix everything. If there are more potholes on the road than road, we believe that one day in future we are going to get roads as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks or Deepika Padokone’s leg, if you prefer that. A kid when dreams of becoming a Civil servant, try telling him that he cannot be unless he is some reserved category.

These journos need to understand one thing. India as a nation which is held with the adhesive of ‘Hope’. Their job is to find out the flaws in the current system or point of the flaws in the plans laid out for future. When they start giving their opinions, they put into their bias with emotions which result in something demoralizing.

There was a dialogue in the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ where Red (Morgan Freeman) says, “Hope is a good thing, in fact the best thing ever. And no good thing ever dies.”

The slippers, the clothes you left away

Picture Courtesy: Photoblog MSNBC

A dog, “Leao”, sits for a second consecutive day, next to the grave of her owner, Cristina Maria Cesario Santana, who died in the week’s catastrophic landslides in Brazil, at the cemetery in Teresopolis, near Rio de Janiero, on Jan. 15. Brazilians braced for more rain Saturday, fearing further landslides after walls of muddy water tore through towns and claimed some 550 lives in the country’s worst flood disaster on record.

It is not that I am under some sedation or this blog has turned into a sad dead blog but this picture above was seriously touching. So I couldn’t help but thinking about the loved ones who go away. But it goes like this:

The slippers, the clothes you left away, who is going to use them? Will you come back to regain back your props someday?
Your spectacles are still lying there on the table, your writings, that stationary there is unmoved, will you come back to tell me some fable?
Your wit, that toothless smile was yet so clever, we discussed politics, and well of course Cricket, when will those day come back, I wish forever,
You advice which I tried to always listen, as a mission, I tried to complete your banking transactions, will you come back the next summer season?
Your diary which still holds addresses of people you met, I am amazed by the memory you had, will I ever be able to reach the standards you set?
By the way did you meet other people who left us unexpectedly? If you meet, tell them I loved them as much I love you, I wish them to live that part of after-life very happily,
I am sorry if I ever did something wrong, Sir it was unintentional, I cannot even promise to take care of people you left alive, I am here no, you know it, but I will try,
There is something stuck in my throat, I don’t know what, but I am coughing as I am writing, what effect is this? With your wishes, I did reach somewhere in life. Should I cry or gloat?
Ahh, I am unable to complete this post, so stopping it now, I try but I cannot be ever again your host, out of everyone in this world I miss you the most…

Why should I bother?

‘Not my job’ is the first thing you say when you see a dead dog on the street. Job is to get rid of the carcass by either calling some municipal corporation or D-I-Y (doing it yourself). Do it yourself? Are you insane? You think you can put that body, half rotten, half-open, intestines hanging from one side, and a distorted head falling from the other, to somewhere where the ongoing traffic won’t crush it more.

Bangalore is a busy city. And also sleepy when it comes to traffic at 9 AM in the morning. Now if someone has to rush to office, one will. No matter what lies on the road in front of one’s vehicle. As I was coming to the bus stop in the morning, there was a dog, lets name it Tommy, dead, on the middle of the road. Most of the vehicles were avoiding Tommy but those big buses and all won’t care for a dead dog, and named Tommy.

Now as a sane citizen of this country, anyone could have joined hands to remove the body from the road because, in a way it was disturbing the traffic badly. Also, the holy place called Silk Board was already traffucked ahead. So it was adding ghee in the fire. I could have done it but should I do it? Why should I do it? Not my job. Mornings are not the right time to touch a dead body, that too of a dog, named Tommy. Isn’t it derogatory for a person like me, a Brahmin, to touch a dead dog?

Thankfully, a guy couldn’t handle it more. He looked yet-another-IT-person with fully dressed up to wrestle the traffic and the chores later in the day. He came forward, showed hands to stop the traffic for 5-6 seconds and picked the dead body and put it in between the divider which was the only place he could have done.

I felt sorry for sometime seeing that. That guy then moved ahead as if nothing happened. I adjusted my ear-phones, kept singing to Eminem and concentrated on the traffic which was again in full flow with no dead body to avoid.

Bloody hypocrites we are. What we expect other to be. What we are. What I am.