Like they said it was

To draw a parallel, we live in the America of the 1950's, the baby boomer generation was it called? I don't mean in the way of life or comforts. I mean as a state of mind. Life is good isn't it? I mean even with major economic powers juiced in the global recession, we've fared far better, whatever the reasons may be. We're in a rocking mood. The world is going dizzy about the Swine flu scare, but we couldn't be bothered. We're still crowding the malls, filling the multiplexes, eating out, falling in love with the perfect match, getting married, having babies, buying suburban real estate, being the perfect father, the adoring mother, being the nice couple, wonderful neighbours, living the brand new, great Indian dream. We're a nation on the cusp. Cusp of possibilities. Cusp of glorious opportunities. Cusp of conformity. Cusp of emptiness.

Just around the corner seems to lurk a terrible monster. Doubt. Waking up suddenly one day to find what the fuck just happened in the last 10 years? Did I not want to be something else? The neighbours don't seem so great anymore but only as a reflection of the drab reality of our own lives. It is the age where one can easily make a career out of a job he didn't like to begin with. Paying EMIs on things he never really cared any more than the recent blockbuster movie.

It is amusing how at these times we all start getting more and more interested in astrology. Maybe there could even be a sudden spike in occult businesses. Even to pass the time perhaps but we want to know, we hope to know, that the future is different. Maybe a tad more interesting. A tad more according to our own rules and less according to a collectively compiled code. Codes of behaviour. Codes of ethics. Codes of the right thing and the wrong.

Seems depressing doesn't it? But hey, if we are indeed living in the 50s America, at least the beatniks, hippies and a fascinatingly free age are coming. Maybe by the late 2010s, we once again will rediscover our souls. We will once again be free. There will once again be a new order. An order questioning most orders, an order of true nature. In such times if I regret anything, it will be the fact that once again I would miss it coinciding with my prime. I wasn't there in the 60s when I wished I was in my 20s and once again I won't be. But I guess if that era has taught us anything at all, it is that you can be whoever you want and you will accepted for exactly that.

We only need to make sure that we allow the ushering in of the time far more easily than it was back in the day. Or is that precisely the fun?

The Love DNA

Can love defeat you? Can love overpower hope? And I don't mean adulation, fame, power or any of the likes. I mean love in its most sincere and affectionate form.

I find it is easier to live in pain, in anger, in misery. It is easier to go on with life believing there is no one in the world who likes you, absolutely no one who wants you. It is far easier to battle hate than it is war against love.

Often times I wonder how life would be as an orphan. It is not the most pleasing thought and I don't think I would last even a month, but I'm ashamed to say sometimes it is a comforting feeling. You see, as an orphan I have the license to hate everyone. I am no longer the object of love, the keeper of fragility. I have nothing but a rock against which to rest my head but also which in an instant I can throw at someone and walk. In life there is no greater freedom than love and no prison more claustrophobic. The old saying goes love conquers all. Indeed. Be it pain or anger, hate or reason, freedom or sanity, love conquers all.

Love is not innocent. Love is not irrational. Love is by no means soft. Love is survival. Love is fear. Love will go to great lengths to protect itself. It will surmount the most unbeatable of odds to get what it wants. Love is hunger in search of food. There are no morals in love, no ethical code, no educated boundary. Love can be dangerous, more so if felt against one's will. Love can rage louder than thunder to be heard, it can cause a storm to fight a simple breeze.

Now imagine a soul lost amidst this sea of love. The sails will be no match for the storm, the anchor no compare for the raging sea, strength in the bones irrelevant when facing the tide. And then you realise there is only one way to rise above, numbness. You give up and wait in your violently tossing little boat.

This is the perfect storm of love, which consumes the one it rages for.

Freewheeling

Questions hang over me,

like dark viscous rain

I want to know light.

Parked beneath benches,

of normalcy,

I wait to go insane.

More beyond the boundaries,

I wait to feel,

on the palm of my hand,

The story of your tears.

On a silent,

sad afternoon of sun,

I want to lie down,

till the sky touches down to earth.

In your slowing forming smile,

housed in nicotine burns,

I wait to fall asleep.

When someone calls,

searching for me in the past,

Tell them I vapourised,

into another time,

placed gently within the silence of your womb.

The Automatic Game

What would you end up writing when you don't plan to say anything? That's exactly what I want to find out. I have no plan, no idea why I'm writing this, or where it will go. I am as clueless as you reading this, as to what comes next. Serious. 

Ok, maybe there is a little editing that has gone into it, but it is only so far as to make the narrative more coherent and slightly more bearable to read. No words have been added during the edit, as have no extra thoughts found its way into this passage. It is strictly what they automatic writing. 

Or stream of consciousness.

I have always been fascinated with words and thoughts like these. I mean there must be something holy about spontaneity. Don't you think? Something which comes straight from the heart or whatever region in the body, without adulteration. Without the baggage of social conditioning, without the weight of civil and social mores, without any sort of political correctness. There was be something in such words, no matter how lame or stupid they may sound, that has the potential to save humanity. 

I am actually surprised. I am surprised to find that even though I hammer away at the keyboards, I am still able to make sense. I am surprised at the pace at which the brain can gather thoughts, rummage throught it and come up with something that is intelligeble. This is fun, too. It's fun because it's a game. A game where I'm trying to guess what my own brain is thinking. 

I have to stop here, because I have rewritten this line a few times and that means I'm forcing it and it's no longer spontaneous. I guess the brain caught up with me. So, that's it. 

Game Over. 

P.S. The title came later. 

The thing about Magic Realism

It is described as a genre where magical elements invade the seemingly realistic setting of the story. Most famous proponents include Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass and increasingly in recent times, Haruki Murakami.

But it is not everyone's cup of tea. Not just to write it but to read it even. I immensely enjoyed reading Midnight's Children a while ago and assumed it was right up my ally. However, recently I took to the works of Murakami and found it very difficult to enter the worlds in his later works which were Magic Realism. Instead I picked up his previous more "real" works such as Norwegian Wood and South of the border, west of the sun.

Haruki Murakami is a wonderful writer. And here I must mention the translators as well, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. While I don't know the first thing about Japan or Japanese, I'm sure they are speaking Murakami's words, once you read the words you just know it. The writing is soft for lack of a better word and you feel drawn to it, like it were a handsome woman. Not beautiful mind you but handsome. Yet, his other works present a challenge.

Then I realised being able to read and enjoy Magic Realism is a state of mind. Sure it is so with most things, but more so for something little out of the scope of our normal conditioning. To truly enjoy the experience, one needs to be able to let go, one needs to be in a place where it's easy to accept things. Above all one needs to be free. The resistance mind offers to such genres comes from the resistance to circumstances in life at that point in time. I find myself in a place where I can't accept anything about myself, let alone anything about others. I find it difficult to agree with my feelings, my thoughts and my body even. Masturbating two times, three times a day even, doesn't help. I feel restless every waking minute and probably while I sleep too. There is a deep void in my soul through which every emotion seems to breeze through me, making me feel very empty. I find it easy to take refuge in the drab realness of the world. The world where people fall in love, drift away and struggle desperately to get back, only to find it’s too late. I find it easy to live with real failures than miraculous triumphs. I find it easy to be me than try and be a better person.

I wasn’t always like this and that was when I had read Rushdie’s work and was able to live in it so effortlessly. Maybe somewhere deep down I am someone who believes in miracles. Maybe I long for the day when magic transforms me and I find all my answers. Maybe I one day will be free again.

Saturday night jazz

I did the most ridiculous thing this Saturday. I played jazz on my computer at work and heard it on my headphones. It began fairly well, Miles Davis was getting down to it, a kind of blue, it sounded swell. But about 7 or 8 minutes into it, something made me laugh out loud. I was embarrassed later, too. Get the fucking speakers!

Jazz has peculiar mood about it. It tastes a bit like some sad woman's tears, but she is happy. If you dive deep enough, you can smell it too. It has a strange musty smell. Now I must confess I'm no jazz expert. Far from it, I've heard only very few pieces of it. Yet, even when you listen to it for a few minutes the first time, then a few minutes longer, it feels as if you've been hearing to it all the time.

When I heard it, this past Saturday, I was practically alone in the office. It was late evening, the air conditioning was off and the absolute absence of any ventilation hugged the floor in a stifling embrace. A sad table fan, sourced and dusted from an aloof corner in the office rotated next to me, making me hear the breeze rather than feel it. And there I sat, with sweat lines forming near the base of my neck, trickling slowing onto my mildly hairy chest, head phones snug to fit my ears, listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane disagree over something.

To truly appreciate jazz you see, you need to let it seep into the atmosphere. Let it wet the air around your breath and settle around you. The notes settle down on the chairs beside you, the desk, your hands and so on. You can't hurry it either. The concept fast forwarding, or as we call it these days, skipping forward is non existent. You either hear it, or you don't. It's really that simple. If you decide not to listen to it, that is perfectly fine too. Jazz is an art form where disagreement and non compliance is welcome. It shows in the work of its greatest practitioners, together they disagree, sometimes violently to create something close to perfection. And when last of the melodies flow out of those melody making objects, you can hear the soft tunes still lingering in your ear, the sound of notes around you slowly making its way home, melting, fading away into a far away scene. Then you nod to yourself, then you feel that you have truly been in the company of jazz.

That is when I started laughing. What the fuck am I doing? The soft touches on the cymbals agreed with me. I took off the head phones, still chuckling and hunted around for speakers. To disconnect speakers from another table, pull it threw the stubborn hole in the desk, repeat the same procedure in mine, and then repeat all of it again to replace it to the rightful desk seemed much too much, but the very notion of jazz filling the muggy, dark room felt completely correct. Jazz after all requires sacrifice, in fact genesis of the art form is rooted in the suffering, trauma and angst that pervaded the black culture in the early twentieth century. If however you aren't ready to suffer a little to enjoy the music, that's completely understandable too, come back to it some other time. That is the how every art expressed in pain behaves, if you have no agony you simply have to wait.

Now, how you wonder, could I have discerned all of this on a simple Saturday evening?

Hey, I was in pain. And it wasn't because of the speakers.

It's easy to lose the plot. I can see now. I can totally see it. Bottled emotions of things you can't solve, questions you are afraid to ask cause god knows where the answers might lead you. Rage. Seething rage. Anger at everything around you because who hate yourself. I can see now, how easy it is to go down roads which head to a dead end.

Right wing. Ultra right wing can be very appealing. Nationalism. Communalism. Saffron. Green. Anything shit. There is a silent comfort in blowing someone's head off because you're too damn pussy to blow your own. There seems a strange kind of hope in getting on a plane and blow and crash into something. I don't give a fuck about ideology, I couldn't care less about god, I don't intend to take a piss in paradise but it is soothing. It is soothing because it gives an escape out of the squalor around. It gives something to hold on to. Something to believe in so strongly that you can focus and drain yourself into that. Slowly it can cover up the miserable existence. And that's what it is all about isn't it?

It is like when the word 'fuck' feels like a warm blanket. You like saying it million times. Or whatever the word is for you. It is nice to say it in your head, out loud, to unsuspecting person next to you on the train, to the young mother struggling to comfort her little baby, to your friends, to the ones you love, to the ones who love you. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!

untitled

I'm sitting at my desk, not wanting to be here. A song plays somewhere at a desk nearby and rhythmic thuds of high heels on the wooden floors also creep into my ears.

I'm here but somehow I feel invisible. Or maybe that's what I hoping to be. There is some anger too. There is definitely some anger. But again it is one of those where even you know there is nothing to seethe over. Then I guess that is precisely why I'm angry, because there is nothing to actually rage over. It is strange but when I sit in silence all these thoughts and moods flood my senses but when I sit in front of the monitor to crib, nothing gives. That I guess adds to the anger.

I do not want to be here. There is a silent urge to self-destruct and loose consciousness. I have thoughts of collapsing into myself with tools in my hand and get to my core to fix the malfunctioning moods. I'm so tired that I'm tired of being tired. I'm bored beyond the point of wanting to do something about it.

Ugly images cross my heads every few minutes. As if I'm thrusting my crotch at someone's face. What does it mean? That I have become primitive enough to only feel primordial urges? Frankly, I'm too tired and bored to even care. There is also an urge to break someone's face. It's the Fight Club syndrome I guess. Maybe. I feel angry at anyone who seems happy or is smiling. Again, it's natural isn't it? This is the time where I'd probably not flinch if I had to skin a pig. But can I, even now, skin a pig while it's alive? I don't think so. You understand what I'm saying, do you?

Fuck you. I don't want you to understand. I didn't ask for it. I don't need it.

The end.