Regrets.

Regrets. The worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone. I think it comes for insecurity and from being unsure about things in life. If there was only a definite way to get away from all this but alas, there are none. Try running away from any situation in life and it will be clear to you when the regrets set in. Try getting closer to something and it will, again, be clear to you when the regrets set in. You need a balance and that’s what life tries to teach us all the way through school, college, jobs; from the start to the end. And you will never know where that point is. Where you are happy with all you have and sad about nothing. That’s the way life is. It keeps throwing stuff at you, new things you have no idea about and old things that you had forgotten so much about that they seem new too. And once you go wrong or leave something unattended, unfinished, it’s time for regrets in your future.

It’s the one thing I never want to have in life. Even if something goes wrong I want to look at it as an experience and forget having regrets about it. I really cannot undo the past so there is really no use being sad about it. Quoting a friend, “Having a sorted out present ensures a regret free future”.  Hence, my immediate plan is to sort out what I have now and leave the worries of the future behind. Which is actually quite a paradox. But I really can’t say leave worries of the future ahead.

The Heart and The Shroud.

No I don't really feel like everything is right. I really don't know how 25 is supposed to feel. But looking around I really don't know what to make of anything right now. Reasons are exactly in two categories: one being a set of people who are slamming good jobs, getting married, settling down etc etc. The other being a set of people in which I am too-the confused ones- still looking for better jobs, partying, getting high, doing their stuff with hardly a care of the world.

I don't know which path is right and my heart keeps telling me to do what I feel is right. To me, people are important and thats what's driving me. I like a lot of people in my life, and that means the second one definitely. But is it the right path? Society says the first one is right and now I am caught between making myself happy which would mean utter selfishness n disregard for people asking to be a better societal man and trying to be all grown up , settle down get a good job etc which would mean utter disregard for my own self.

And spiralling down to that same inevitable question at the roots of all problems- is society a norm or a distraction to go forward in life?

Any argument that could start on the basis of the above question will never have an end result. The structure of human society is so complex and has so many layers on itself that it is inevitable that if you start peeling off one bad layer, a good layer will have to compromise too.

The songs, poems, movies, books have always talked about following your heart but is it ever possible to do so? Bound by society, its unwritten laws, shrouded hypocrisy, you can never say or do what you really want. There are always people to pull you down, make life uncomfortable at times for no reason whatsoever. Is it really a crime to want all the good things in life? I know again there would be a darker side to it too, but its really not wrong to think so.

I really feel a bit lost at times about everything, And with time rushing by at such breakneck speed,it seems to be lost forever too.

Yours Forever

All the times you stood by me
Never doubting the way I look.
Cuz I was always your spark
Faltering but there I stood.

Up in your arms
across your sky,
in your dreams
in your daily stride.
Down in the dark
I was your light
and I knew
that you were mine.



And if the stars never showed their light
the darkened sky couldn't hold me back
from being your star in your own skies.
And if the words came to an end
I'm still yours forever
in all those letters unsent.



And each time I made you smile
I felt the glow upon my cheeks.
Always knowing I had a special place
little did I know you would

Leave me alone
turn off the lights
In my dreams
In my daily stride.
And I could just try
Standing aside
But I knew
That you would mind.



And if the stars never showed their light
the darkened sky couldn't hold me back
from being your star in your own skies.
And if the words came to an end
I'm still yours forever
in all those letters unsent.

Firefly.

The dream was to hit the road. Blame it on the books, blame it on the movies, blame it on the soaps and sitcoms and the songs and the poetry. I knew I had to do it someday. Every little brush with the difficulties of growing up strengthened my resolve and weakened my heart. Its another world. It's another song. A song about the last days being tied up,a song about the last days with people you know, a song about the first of many firsts, a song about unraveling, a song about the lights on the buildings far away, a song about leaving behind love, a song about carrying memories on 4X6 pieces of glossy paper.

With the trees and the wind as the theme music of life, the sing song voices of the farmers who'd lend food, the humdrum of rivers crashing and pulling through the rocks, I could be the skin on which rocks could sketch my name and hide so very lightly from the eyes of others.

I could hide, I could laugh, I could see, I could feel. Away from the masks, I would slip mine off and that face which they once knew would be out in the sunshine again, and they will not see me because that face would have been forgotten long back. And the sun wouldn't be as hot as it earlier felt. The winds would be cooler than ever but the road would stretch and I would have to move.

One step,two steps and another five in all.
That's all it takes to make it out of the door.
And once out,there's no twice to it
Because if you look back and you heart latches onto a memory
You will smile and your mind will bend.
The years have taken their toll.
This could have been easy
But now the mind is aged and the heart is weak.
You've lost your trust.
You can't lose your trust.
Especially when the one to trust
Is you yourself.

A firefly.
With no one to guide
And a light of your own.

Waste of a suicide note

Efforts, futile and wasted, lying,
gasping,sucking in the last gasps of air.
Air so heavy with the cries of the men and women and the children
as they prayed to their gods,
redeemers of their souls,
awashed in the grime of human comfort.

31 days and 31 nights
spent in the wakeful hours of dawn
while the children dreamed,
the dogs screamed
the birds rustled
and the men leaned.
smiles agape on the men's faces
the women seemingly selfish.
untidiness let loose.
rampaging its way through blissful streets.

every day being a reason
every night being a reason
the seasons passed in utter anonymity
things were in place
life scattered all over them
protruding in places, rusted in others.
uncovering everything beneath the wishlist
meant people speaking their way into the space again

He could be the healer
He could the massacre
He could be the stranger
He could be the best friend
He could be wishes
He could be longing
He could be Fate
He could let go.

Could he?
Or would he float too?
Alive in the dead man's suit
trapped and suffocated.
writing out pieces of his life on trees and papers
remembrance mattered.

Someone had to notice.
One final sheet.
One final letter.
Written over 3 months
With hundreds of words
enveloped over themselves
taking his life at the last punctuation.
And then the day.
Papers in place
Butterflies scattered all over the room.
Holes in the wall
Eddie rocking the stage
Sleep.
Anger.
Happiness.
Guilt.
Perverseness.
Sadness.
took a moment to crash into the shore.
And then the tide started pulling away.
It pulled and pulled away.
Under overcast skies.
Stars faded into the clouds.
He tasted the salt.
He felt the breeze.
And two things suddenly happened.
Pitch blackness.
Stark whiteness.

They looked at him.
Some of them smiled in gratitude.
Some of them smiled in happiness.
Some of them smiled in relief.

He evolved. And the sheets burnt into oblivion.

Dance and the Indian Man

I am not exactly fond of the clubbing culture. I have been to a discotheque twice in my life and that too very recently,after 25 years of my life. I have been in Pune for the last 2 years and it's only here that I finally made my debut in the scene- Area 51 and MIAMI. Area51 is a disco on its own, unattached to any hotels as such while MIAMI resides in the basement of a JW Marriot Hotel. Area51 seems to have  a lot of the regular crowd coming in while MIAMI seems to be a bit of the uptown crowd. What I observed though, even though Area51 had actual songs playing while MIAMI just played EDM without a single word in between, people danced the same. And that, I found funny and interesting at the same time.

India is home to Bollywood. We are all brainwashed from childhood with a lot of good songs, nonsensical songs , fantastic dance steps and the weirdest of dance steps. Every movie has scenes personified and glorified through songs and dance. And they never seem to run out of dance steps and songs. So in a country like ours, you expect people who shake a leg or two to actually make heads turn. What I found is rather a contrasting view. Of course, heads would turn but not for the reasons mentioned before.

The Indian Man, when it comes to dance is a sight. Whether it is at a disco, a festival etc., the Indian Man has a few particular steps in mind to execute. I am strictly NOT talking about the formal dancers and the dance crews and the kind. The ones that are not part of such parameters; your friend, your friend's friend, the ones you meet up regularly who cant really dance to save themselves, those are the ones I have in mind. Whether he is uptown, not uptown, a billionaire's son, a non-billionaire's son; whether they are dancing on the streets, at college DJ Nights, discos, they all have the same steps to dance. It is actually interesting to observe this trend. I of course am part of it all too. Even the dancers will dance the same steps as the regular guys but you can tell them apart when they dance, that's the only difference. No one on a street festival, or in a disco starts B-boying or doing  a break dance in front of others. It actually sucks that in spite of being a child of Bollywood Land, you don't get to start doing all those steps you saw on TV.

And what's funny is that you an see a side of people when they dance. You get a mental picture of how they would dance in other situations(which wont be much different). At a disco like Area 51, where the DJ is playing a song like Baby Doll or a song like Shot Me Down, the guys are pretty much clueless about which direction to throw their arms and legs in. Take the same situation in MIAMI where the DJ is playing only EDM, just spurts of boom-boom-peow-peow-boom-peow, with not  a word in between, the guys are again clueless. It is just because you don't expect anyone to just break out in dance that will make heads turn and go whoa!! The whole scenario is pretty for some reason to me. The guys just seem helpless everywhere. The girls can do a variety of steps in a single position while the guys repeat their dance routine, mixing and matching steps from the pack they have in mind. This even happened at MIAMI while I was there: a group of people were dancing to the EDM being played. I suppose the 2 guys and the 2 girls got pretty bored with it(I mean, who wouldn't?) and they started singing songs in one of the South Indian languages(Apologies for not understanding which one) to the beat and dancing to it. The whole thing was so goddamn funny that I had to leave the dance floor to get some air.

I encourage Indian Men to dance their hearts out. With steps as varied as the Bollywod movies they are brainwashed with. No restrictions. No routine in the head to follow. Dance your hearts out. Be free. Otherwise, dance loses its meaning.

The Train Of Death

There have been hundreds of books that I have read in my lifetime. Some of them have left lasting impressions while some didn’t. There were some books which left impressions in parts and not as a whole. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude is one of them. The man writes brilliant no doubt. He did get a Nobel Prize for this too. But this book was very tenacious. I felt a hundred years old at the end of it. The story just wouldn’t end. What I discovered later on reading his other books is that they all have a similar theme and a similar sort of characters with similar afflictions, similar names, similar diseases, similar deaths, similar children and generations that wound about seamlessly through the books and made me feel restless as on a dry summer day, longing for an end. But of course, this is my opinion. As Literature, there’s no doubt that his pen painted rather than wrote. But as stories, they could have been more compact.

But I am digressing. This book, One Hundred Years of Solitude had a particular scene where one of the characters with a name that could be confused with a lot of other people in the book itself(but naming processes were such those days!), Jose Arcadio Segundo, is on a train. Even though the picture drawn in the words in the book is a disturbing one; somehow that picture got enhanced in my head to be officially disturbing and morbid to me. The following is the exact picture painted by the author:

“When José Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached. He felt an intolerable desire to sleep. Prepared to sleep for many hours, safe from the terror and the horror, he made himself comfortable on the side that pained him less, and only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people. There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle. Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had. And those who had put them in the car had had time to pile them. He saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas.”

This exact scene has been embossed in my brain and can disturb me pretty much if it’s thought floats in. The level of detail in a few lines has had an impact that no other similar books could produce. But in my head, there are additions to it.

I imagine that the endless train is travelling on an endless track on an endless bridge over endless seas. The night is stormy and purple streaks of thunder ravage the clouds. The water rushes up to meet these streaks and collides in a fury. The water hits the train at intervals yet the train shrieks on through the purple night. Then comes the part written by the author in the picture.


Inside the train, there are dead bodies piled. All the dead bodies of the villagers massacred for no reason ,shoved and piled up without a hint of remorse. Every single villager is in the death heap. Their homes still stand strong and proud in remembrance of them, doors opened, waiting for their owners to return and flood it with humanity. An entire village wiped clean and heaped on a train to be dispersed off into a hungry sea. And in the midst of this foreboding picture there is man who is alive and breathing. I think this is the exact detail that makes my head reel. 

Imagine yourself, alive and breathing in the picture painted above. With not a live soul around you. With nowhere to go. With no place to move. And cadavers all around. Take a deep breath and think of happy things now.