the other kind of emptiness

the clock mentions it is 10:17 pm or as i'm used to writing 22:17 (hangover from an overdose of loads of Hollywood army movies while growing up!). i'm about to call it a day. some work was finished, some not even started, but as there is nothing that urgent, i guess i should leave. what hurts more is that in order to finish office work on tight deadlines, i happen to lose sight of some very important personal work. and now, one more day has gone!

mind is kind of empty right now. not in the literal sense. there is so much inside that all of it together is not making any sense. so while i can pick and choose and lay threadbare whatever is going inside my mind right now, i don't have the patience. this is the other kind of emptiness. when you are so full with something that it starts meaning nothing. like too much of beauty or money! 

when you have too much of something, you start to drift away from it. fullness breeds emptiness it seems. what do you think?

22:25, Thursday, August the fourth, 2011

today - writing a day in the diary of life

a page from my diary, dated October 12, 2009 at 07:29pm

today.


such a short word can have so many different connotations. (today i met dee.) such a little word and the experiences, the emotions it generates! (today i went to the book bazaar with her.) the single word that captures everything done or thought of, things or thoughts long forgotten as if they never happened. (today we bought so many books and left so many more behind.) 

perhaps the very purpose of writing a diary is to record these many 'todays' that happen one after the other and suddenly you've a lifetime of them looking back at you, making you wonder where has all the time gone. (today we dared to go upstairs in a shady little restaurant that turned out to be a gloriously kitsch example of the 80s middle-class India.) perhaps the idea of writing a diary is to dare yourself, because at the ends of the day when you'll put pen to paper, you won't like to be reminded of how badly you spent your allotted time. (today we lost dee's wallet due to our foolishness.) it is said that when people are dying, they remember their life in detail, what went wrong, what was right, the agony, the ecstasy, all of it rolls by as in a flashback scene from an old Bollywood movie. (today, we laughed, we shopped, we hoped, we dreamed, we loved, we hated, we smiled, we unsmiled.)


so writing a diary entry at the end of the day, something that starts with the word 'today' is almost like being those dying individuals, reminiscing about their lives, maybe wishing for one more chance and preparing for the long night ahead, because no matter what, tomorrow will be another 'today'. (it was a wonderful day, with almost everything that life could throw at us was accepted and lived through, it was a day worthy to be remembered always.)

i don't think i'll ask for one more chance to relive this day. (may our lives be full of many such 'todays'.)

Another year of life begins

It is the 26^th of January, 2011. He is at his bachelor pad relishing a morning of calm. It is a holiday, the nation's Republic Day, and thus there is no hurry to get up early and get ready for the office. Like a rare Sunday morning when he has nothing to do and no one to meet. He loves this solitude.

But this will not last for long. In a few hours from now, the girl he loves and a few close friends will come over to celebrate his birthday which was two days ago. 31 years! He is thirty one years old now! The feeling is still to sink in though. He wanted to write how he's feeling for the past two days. But he couldn't. Maybe because he doesn't know what to write.

And he is writing this with a new gold and silver ball point pen in a new notebook made of handmade sheets of paper. Both of them being his birthday gifts. Also, this morning he started reading Damon Galgut's 'In a strange room.' This book was also a (belated) gift for his last birthday.

He is enjoying the book. It is written in short, clear but somewhat broken sentences. And there are lots of pauses in between. This is exactly like how he likes to talk. To talk less and, to think more. By the way, these pauses of his are legendary by now. (And he takes a pause at the use of the word 'legendary'. He realizes that it has crept into his vocabulary due to Barney Stinson and the amazing proclivity of youth to use superlatives. Youth?) This was an example of the way he talks with lengthy pauses in-between. And that's why he is liking the book.

The maid comes. After doing her chores, cleaning the floor, the balcony and the bathrooms, she is out quickly. He thinks that labor class doesn't get any holidays. What is the meaning of the Republic Day holiday for a maid working in a middle class locality? Last night, when coming back from the office, he saw a guard's cabin outside the swanky and huge DTC millennium park depot. Rows and rows of big green and red buses locked inside the gates while outside in a tiny cabin, a solitary guard sat under the light of a single yellow bulb. He wonders who was guarding whom.

Anyways, he has to start getting ready now. In a few hours, the people he loves will start showing up. He has to get his room in some sort of order, have a bath and preferably something to eat as well. Oh, she is calling him now and he'll talk to her, enjoying the prospect of meeting her today.

Maybe today he'll get a sense of a year gone by, of another new diary, written by a new pen. Maybe he'll write well this year.

joining the resolution bandwagon

the first two days of the 'new' new year are coming to an end. not only is this the beginning of a new year but of a new decade as well. agreed, these divisions of time into moments, months, years, is just a facilitating tool and memory doesn't always follow its cold, logical precision, nevertheless by compartmentalizing our life in time, we can compare where we stand today in relation to our past(s).


normally, my personal favorites for this pensive task are the two days of my birthday and the festival of Diwali. the universally applicable new year resolutions mania doesn't affect me much :D this time though, i'm making an exception.


now, i want to start collecting, transcribing my memories, capturing the swirling sounds and images with my magic wand and storing them in clear glass vessels, one page at a time. the purpose is twofold: a written record of my experiences will help me gather my thoughts better, hopefully help me journey constructively towards my goals (not in the chaotic, haphazard manner i've all my life till now) and secondly, help sow the seeds of discipline and craft that i so desperately require to succeed as a writer.


hope i'll be able to stick to this resolution and bug you with more regular posts throughout the year :)

in moments like these

i wrote this in my diary, this Saturday morning. haven't edited it much :)

it is a grey Saturday morning. there is a faint drizzle going on outside for the past two hours or so. i'm waiting for her at home and we've a lot planned up for today.

her phone is unreachable because of the daily worsening Tata network and i've no idea by when she'll be arriving. till then, it is quite a lazy beginning to the day. just had my tulsi-ginger tea and as had been my 'ritual', was searching for Vikram Seth's book of collected poems to savor it with. Swati's Gulzar book caught my eye, but i wanted to read something in English. couldn't find Seth, but found a collection of Tagore's poems translated in English. the first and only one that i've read till now (its been half an hour) is titled 'Gift'. it is about the poet thinking about a true gift to give to his love, his friend. he thinks about many options, like a morning song, an evening light, flowers, gems, but then he feels everything will wither and lose its charm eventually,

"...And fall forgotten to the dust 

To turn into dust"

later, he finds a solution in nature and offers fleeting moments of epiphany's as gifts to them because,

"Truest treasure is fleeting

It sparkles for a moment, then goes

...No hand, nor word can reach it

Friend, whatever you take of it, 

On your own, 

Without asking, without knowing, let that

Be yours.

Anything i can give you is trifling

Be it a flower, or a song."

(you can read the complete poem on my other blog, here) 

it was this poem that prompted me to record these moments here. moments of Shiva's hymn playing in the background (gifted by a dear friend), of green wet parrots creating a ruckus outside in the faint sunshine of a rainy morning, of warm tea and careful unwrapping-wrapping of a packet of biscuits lest they get stale, of a hundred things to do that are now coming back to my mind as the magic of the moment fades but most of all, i wrote here today, for the beauty that carefully chosen words create, as a thanksgiving to God to be allowed this experience and somehow (i don't know how it all connects!), and somehow to tell her, that i love her, that her love is a miracle which i feel coming true in moments like these.

on observing and imagining

i'm a writer of memory. i write from what i have seen or feel i have seen. howsoever i try, i can never write from imagination and i admire and am jealous of those who can. but even imagination is memory na? you never imagine what you've never felt before.

Feb 16th 2009

Last night, I was going through my old files and found this in my diary. So many things have happened in a year and yet it seems nothing has changed. It seems like a beautiful thought, but perhaps it is not.
.
.
.
21:57 Monday, February 16, 2009

(I’ve missed writing here, these 10 odd days.) Lots of things swirling in my mind. Just finished Murakami’s ‘Dance Dance Dance’. You gotta dance baby, follow the rhythm, go with the flow, the world will take care of itself. When reading a good writer or a poet, I feel connected to the world. To the soul of the world. This happened with ‘Snow’. With this one too. I was barren without words. And these writer’s, writing about their world, were like silent rain falling on my parched surface. I wanted more, to be drenched, to be alive once more. Perhaps I am. Last night, a poem came to me. And I knew it from heart. Two more, half complete, three more, yet to start.

So, am I back with, amongst words again? Maybe, maybe not. I’m not feeling quite right. Something within, I want to work, but so many things are held up at the office that working seems a distant possibility. We all are just going through the motions. There is a wait lingering in the atmosphere these days. Something is going to happen. But nothing happens. “Nothing never moves”, she says.

All the things are one, all the ones are multiple things.

Don’t know what to write, what to say, what to think.

Yesterday was Sunday. Seems so far off now. Had a very good day with her. We roamed around in Kamla Nagar, did little bit of shopping, had lunch at the new Subway, then I went to see her off near her place. After that, emptiness.

I was standing near the ground level window, beside the Media Mart outlet at the Kashmere Gate metro station. There is a window overlooking a little green patch of turf and then the metro premises boundary cuts off the mayhem of Kashmere Gate bus adda. I could see a whole world of people moving about on the other, far side of the window. Going on with their lives, buses to catch, things to sell, talks to talk, and I, with a cup of coffee in my hand observing them, from behind a window. Closer to me, on the glass surface of the window, another lot of people were going on with their lives. Trains to catch, things to buy, talks to talk. But these were ghosts, moving about on a piece of glass.

Or was I the ghost, standing there between the worlds, one real, one unreal and one very real world behind the unreal. I didn’t matter for anybody. Everybody mattered to me. Only she makes me feel alive. When she is around, nobody matters to me. The world is then, as unreal as a phantasm wandering amongst the many alternate worlds.
.
.
.
And then, she has to leave again. The cycle continues.

22:19
…

on writing and not writing

lately i've been complaining to myself why i don't get to actually writing down what comes to my mind. and as my volume is quite high, many of those around me get to hear these complaints quite clearly. then early morning today, i got some time alone to gather my thoughts and wrote in my diary. now i want to share it with you.

"am sitting in my room, alone in the house. it is quite. i've opened this journal after a long time. (well, now it's more of a scrap book and less of a journal.) i don't know why i don't write when it pains me so much not to write. thoughts, words, images start forming within my mind the moment i get up. sometimes even before that. perhaps it's plain laziness, a disease that has afflicted me all my life. and when you live with something for so long, you start loving it. now i hush me up by putting laziness on a pedestal and sacrificing many idle moments on her altar. moments, minutes, times that could have been better utilized. but i guess, to be guilty is to be human. maybe the only difference between man and animal is the total absence of guilt in the latter's concious.

perhaps i don't write because of this guilt. maybe its not laziness, but this fear of unraveling myself in front of me. unraveling not in the sense of removing clothes and being ashamed of the sorry state of this physical body, unraveling in the sense of peeling layer after layer of the pretences i've build upon my mental existence.

to write this journal is to know myself, to feel guilty of things i should be doing and am not doing, to feel ashamed at my robot like existence where am human only in the biped, city-living, internet-using, animal-of-a-herd sense. to write is to be the exact opposite of this animal, and still i shy away from it.

maybe, i don't write 'cos i'm lazy, maybe i don't want to come across the human within me."

tell me, dear reader freind, do you also feel the same?

सुबह, बारिश और मैं / at nine on a rainy morning

9:00

बारिश होती तो बाहर है पर पता नही नींद को कैसे पता चल जाता है के वो और मीठी हो जाती है। सुबह जब से उठा हूँ, बारिश धूप की तरह छाई हुई है। एक गहरी, ग्रे धूप जो रोजमर्रा की चीजों को खुशनुमा बना देती है, काले चश्मे की तरह।

कुछ तो जादू है बारिश में। दिल में जो चल रहा होता है उसको और गहराई तक खंगाल कर बाहर ले आती है। दिल गमगीन है तो बारिश रुआंसा कर के छोड़ेगी ही। और दिल खुशगवार है तो समझ लीजिये के पूरा दिन गुनगुनाते हुए जाएगा। हर शख्स की dominant traits बारिश में साफ़ उभर के सामने आ जाती हैं। गोया बारिश कोई आईना हो जो सच दिखलाता हो हर किसी के भीतर का!

अभी एक घंटे पहले उठा हूँ और बिल्कुल भी मन् नही है ऑफिस जाने का। माँ ने खिड़की पर परदे डाले, तो मना कर दिया ये कह कर के, खिड़कियों से दिखती ये बरसती बारिश अच्छी लगती है। एक प्याली चाय की, बेसन के दो पकौड़े और श्री राही मासूम रज़ा की शायरी का संकलन हाथों में। अभी तक की सुबह का तो यही फ़साना है।

बाहर बारिश और हाथ में शायरी की किताब, कैसे ये दिल रूमानी न होता? खैर, ये आवारागर्दी ज्यादा देर चलेगी नहीं। अभी बुलावा आ जाएगा ऑफिस से के टाइम पर पहुंचें हुज़ूर, काफी काम है आज। पेरिस वालों को जरूरत है दिल्ली वालों की!

थोडी देर में ये कलम नौकरी कर रही होगी। पर हाँ, याद जरूर रहेगी ये सुबह, जब बारिश ने कान में फुसफुसा कर कहा था, क्यों न थोड़ी देर और लिख लो मुझे तुम...

9:15

Who says Silence is Golden?

again a piece from my diary...

December 08/05 21:40hrs.

Here I'm, sitting with Mr. Rahul Kumar Raichowdhury who is currently yap-yap-yapping non-stop in his unmistakbly street-smart indianised version of the queen's english with all the wrong grammar & punctuation-pronounciation that would fill at least 10 episodes of 'the great indian comedy show' & keep your tummy rumbling for days afterwards.
And the best thing is, I've to listen to it with as straight a face as I could keep.
Oh my! What can you do when somebody is hell bent on calling a chemist (that is, kem-ist) with a 'chuck' type ch-emist. And telling you that he knows it is incorrect, that he has been speaking like that since childhood (yeah, chemist as in child) and doesn't intend on correcting this supposed flaw. He in infact is proud of it is another thing altogether...
Okay, time out, I can't do it. I've to laugh and laugh out loud.

I love Rahul. Period. With all his eccentricity & sincere stupidity. He is all that what I'm not. He is positive, cheerful, effervescent, zindadil, khusmizaz, extrovert, makes friends easily and so many other things that i'm not. He is all that & more. He complements & completes me. Through him, I live everything I can't.
Sample this: A 65ml peg of Johnny Walker costs around Rs 200 at Pot Pourri Bar, just above Nirula's pastry shop at Connaught Place. I'm never gonna go there. And that French Onion Soup tastes like shredded-fried onions trashed in plain boiled water. I wouldn't even attempt this. (The only time i like onions is in salad with a generous dose of lemon.) Things like these and so many more.
And how it feels when somebody dies in front of you. Literally.
I'm sorry Rahul. I would have done the same thing, if I was in your position. Watching someone die...I can't.

Accha, I was on the topic of silence. Yeah, who said silence is golden? I mean being silent is a pretty unimaginative thing to do. If you are not silent you can do a lot of things, like putting both your feet in the mouth, like appearing to be not so bright afterall, I mean, ummm, u got the point. Haven't you?

I've been silent for about 10 days. And haven't liked it much. As much as i used to. The last time I blogged, I was all starry-eyed, going to join a far bigger ad agency Uk and the tension and apprehension such a move brings with it.

Well, nothing of that sort happenned. I went there for a day, that is the 1st and came back to De' Hub 2nd onwards. A lot of factors went into this decision and I'm satisfied that I took all the pros n cons into consideration and decided what was best for me. Although sometimes in the past 10 days, there had been that sneaking feeling, which made me wonder, 'what I did'. What was I thinking then?

What took me 10 days to be back? I don't know. Except that I didn't enjoyed this period. Of silence, of introspection & circumspection, but still nothing much. Now that I'm back on track, i would try to be a regular with blogging, 'cause I'm loving it...

dialogue

a conversation between me and my friend aparna
on the 12^th of November, 05

it started with me, asking for her snap thru mail as I’d never seen her…

by the way is stpid si photo ka karoge kya?

im looking extremely stupid in this

love

aparna

yeah u do luk a little crossed here... but then... since when did this create a problem... love adi

i hop[e its looking ok

i was cross coz i hate the sun in the eye

and the sun was blinding

so wen am i getting ur pic

love

aparna

and this is how i look like...
behold my eternal splendour...

(I mailed her an image of Krishna) adi

ha ha
i wish you were really gopal

i could do with his presence in my life

frankly even if you were i wouldnt have believed you

i cant believe he has any interest in my life

next "4 years" is the test of my faith...then my faith is in shades of black or white.....filhaal greys mein hai

the eternal splendour is difficult to believe in times of trouble

(then I mailed her my actual snap)

and here's my present incarnation i'm with my boss'es children at 'har ki pauri' haridwar adi

ure quite good looking so do i have chance once i dump sam

and ur as thin as sam not lesserthan that

thr is something else i noticed will tell you that wen we meet

mmmm wen will that be

yeah, i wonder...wen will we

uh some time soon

dont worry woh waqt bhi ayega

at exactly this momnet in a conversation, i begin to wonder, what now adi

what about now?

us?

wondering is a part and parcel of romantics....poets and dreamers are romantics dear......which category are you in

im in both

i'm the original dreamweaver...

the first one, there was...

and the last one, there will be...

i am, i was, i will...

adi

"im the alpha,im the omega" concept huh?

im sure you were the original dreamweaver...

but what about my insanity.dreams which have over the years have been proven insane...inspite of all that i still believe....my dreams stay true for me..........

have i become introspective or am i just proving a point?

all your dreams, all your desires, all your sanity & all your vanity...

they are as much a part of me, as of you...

however insane, they WILL stay true to you...

every poet, every romantic, was, is and will remain a dreamweaver...

what is a poet without a thought, and what is a thought without the seed of a dream...

i wonder, and yes, i introspect....

adi

uh all my thoughts from ure words

what makes me a romantic i have never understood after every shock i thougth i have landed back on the earth below....

only to look down and see im rising again

as for dream weaving....

a thought or a dream or the intrspection

constant but the poetry gets lost in the pain

and yet from the pain rises the song

a full circle,

a dream taking its revenge

for its not come true either,

questions become self answered

and yet we keep asking them

.dreams or just hallucinations

hallucinations are the unfulfilled dreams

we come back to the weaving

weaving the pain and smiles together

which the world calls fake

i call it true....cause thats what i want

my wants are my ultimate truths

lies are not apart of me

lies are just trying to grab my entity..........

"I am the goal,
the sustainer, the master, the witness,
the abode, the refuge
&
the most dear friend.
I am the creation & the annihilation,
the basis of everything,
the resting place & the eternal seed."
(these words I’ve taken from Shrimad Bhagvat Gita & at present grace my e-mail signature)

I am but a dream

November 12^th, 2005 Adi