For Blue

At last, time has broken its own spell,
The words have fallen into place,
And so have the mists they sought to quell,
Here ends a phase, my friend without a face
A relief masks a guilt squirming deep inside its shell,
After all, isn’t an abyss only as deep as its surface?

Busy crowds are where the idle dwell,
Giving in to work’s workless ways,
Maybe I was the task that never went well,
But there’s an unheard voice that says,
Time’s always lost only to be made up in the farewell,
After all, what’s life if not an eternal embrace?

Quaestio

What if love had a heart? Would it know pleasure from pain?
What if words had a voice? Would they still speak so much?
What if time had an age? Would it learn how it felt to be human?
What if dreams needed sleep? Would they wake up to reality?
What if the smile had a face? Would it always look so beautiful?
What if darkness was blind? Would it be able to find itself?
What if tears had eyes? Would they be able to see their pain?
What if pain had a mind? Would it learn to cure itself?
What if a loss knew how to win? Would it someday be able to win?
What if death had a life of its own? Would it make it any easier to die?
What if every answer had a question? Would it answer itself?

What if black was white and white was black?
Would it be any different?
What if I were you and you were me?
Would we still be the same?

In pursuit of a memory

He was about four years old.
Every day, by the time his grandfather was back from college, he would be dressed up and ready, eager for the evening walk, his daily adventure. His grandfather would take him out for a walk and they would go to the park nearby, visiting all those stores on the way, meeting all those people his grandfather knew.

They would walk the calm streets, all the way to the park. His grandfather would sometimes stop to talk to people they met on the way and he would wonder how much everybody smiled at his grandfather, all the while gripping his fingers like his life depended on never letting go. They would go to the park and sit beneath his favourite tree. He loved to play in the park with the other kids but he loved more to be with his grandfather, to talk to him, to pester him to tell him stories and then answer all the questions he would ask.

There would be tales of wonderful lands, of gods who could change their faces at will, of greedy and selfish men who were punished, of good men who would sacrifice their lives to battle evil and save the world. Then there would be the questions. How big was the world? Could he see god if he wanted to talk to him? Where did all the good men go when they died? Why were evil people evil? How could he grow up sooner?

And he got an answer for everything.

How could he know so many stories?
How could he know everything about everything?

That was what he wanted to become when he grew up, his grandfather. Exactly him. To know exactly how much he knew. He would always ask him how he knew so much and his grandfather would always give him the same answer.

Books, he would say.

The park has moved on, the streets have, and time has, but those conversations still thrive, among timeless tales and the trivialities of the world's life, and the little mind still feeds off the wiser one. Nineteen years and scores of those little rectangles later, the old man still knows everything about everything and I'm in the darkness still, chasing the shadow of the wise mind I once marvelled at as a four year old.

On being angry

Anger isn't probably the ideal word to start a blog entry with but there you go. I've always loved ire and the more malleable irate but for today, let anger get its spotlight. I know it deserves more than always being upstaged by more "beautiful" words and being camouflaged by contrived pieces of language and anyway, for once, I find that I love the rawness of it.

"I'm angry."
That beauty again.

Now where does that leave our dear friend irate? In my head, of course. And, for some inconceivable reason, fate always follows it there. Irate fate. One of those phrases that are hard to get out of your mind until you do something about/with them. I don't even remember if I coined it myself or picked it up from somewhere but it reminds me of a failed exercise about an year ago, a tacky, convoluted peice of poetry that has since been confined to the archives. Where is it, I don't even remember what it was called. One of these days, I'm going to have to reconfigure my archives and make them more searchable. There. I'm not about to rewrite it now and so would be prone to reproducing the very imperfections that have rendered it unpublishable for so long but then, you know, people do outrageously stupid things when they're angry.

Love of love, or hate of hate,
How do I relate to this inanimate state?
Unable to placate a debate that never seems to abate,
Powerless to liberate myself from a checkmate this intricate,
I prostrate before an irate fate and contemplate,
Is it hate of love or love of hate?

Compassion for words and exhumed baubles aside, I had fancied a bit of raw writing today with a particular something in mind when I started out but you see, anger is a master of the art of subversion. You might not be able to fathom the extent of damage I have done to myself by "wasting" (I know I'm greedy but sadly, that only makes me greedier) a raw, imperfect piece when it could've been so much better but I know how much the hangover's going to hurt. Stupidity by itself is a not-so desirable yet often harmless trait but when it consorts with the disruptive chicanery of anger, it's known to act not so stupidly, after all. The irony of it. Anyway, innate stupidity aside, I can't risk losing another of my imperfectly developed ideas to its guiles and hence, for all practical purposes, wish to stop here.

Now, why wouldn't I want to stop writing here? My mind's already somewhere else, in another state (geographical, not metaphorical), tripping in a past, in another state (metaphorical, not geographical), dripping with nostalgia. One of those memories I composed one early morning on an orange, secluded beach has just revisited me thanks to the retrievable piece of music I invested it in.

Anger goes rather well with memory and that's where I'm going to take it.
Inflaming memory's memories has always been one of those undeniably addictive pleasures of life.

Ode to a hebdomad

Once in a while, we all have a hebdomad that breaks out of our life, rising above all that went before it and all that come after it, and I just had mine.

[Pardon the occult jargon, I didn't want to call it just a 'week' and place it on the conveyor belt of the production cycle of life and let its memory to be heartlessly trampled by the week that follows it.]

Now, where do I begin? Describing this marvellous 'hebdomad', that is.

There might be a few people from a particular geography of the web that might presume that this is about a particular number. It's a part of it, yes, but I'm a bit more than someone who just hinges his memories of a great week on an inconsequential number. So, first let's get it out of the way. That evening, after a few unsuccessful premature attempts to check my number, when it finally opened up and I laid my eyes on it for the first time, I admit, for reasons that were purely independent of the event itself, it felt good, so good you wouldn't even believe there was such goodness left in life anymore.

You see, life has a way of being lifeless without what went before it. And this feeling, this good feeling that I was experiencing then was the result of a displaced sense of importance, of the love for the nostalgia of the past that went before it and not the gloriousness of the future that it was supposed to point to. For years, I've seen sundays come and go, with a number tagged to each of them, disappearing down dusty lanes of memory without meaning or substance. And finally, finally, there came along a number that redeemed or, atleast, reaffirmed a tiny bit of faith in what went before it.

Alright, there you go. Enough ranting. I enjoyed it because of a sense of redemption in my past, not in anticipation of the future. It holds no meaning to me, not any more. The moment's passed and the past's been laid to rest. Catharsis, of a milder order. Period.

Moving on, conversations are what generally define the quality of a day or a week for me and this one had a few of them. Not even as many as an average week would boast of but there were a few long-lost talks thrown in here and that was more than enough. Short at times, spread out at times, but memorable as always. You don't get much of that everyday, you see.

WALL-E. How many movies have had the good fortune to be featured in two consecutive blog entries of mine? None till now, if my memory hasn't defected to the other side of senility (yet). I was gonna write a much detailed review of WALL-E and all it meant to me but then as always, it fell through. It didn't meet my standards (the write-up, I mean). Well, then, so I'll just try to wrap it up quickly here.

It wouldn't be hyperbole if I called it one of the best movies I've seen in my life yet I wouldn't give in to the temptation of saying that. That phrase has lost its value with the amount of recommendations we dole out these days. It has heart, and art, a rare combination these days. (I wonder if that line's as cheesy as I think it is.) WALL-E's everything you can call a movie. Artistic, witty, mushy, romantic, imaginative, moralizing, dramatic... All it requires is an open mind to take it all in.

So, another aspect of the wonderful week done with. What else was there? Hmmm. I think I've spent more time than expected on this and my mind's losing track of what I had set out to outline. Yes, another one. Something about a caravan. There are very few who would get what I'm talking about but then, that's the point of it all.

What would be a great story if it didn't end well? And since I have already started out by calling this one great, it would logically follow that it did end well, wouldn't it? Right, it did. So well, in fact, that it was the one that prompted me to start writing this. Square one. Freedom. Rebirth. To name bits of it.

I'm a schemer (yes, Mr. Ledger, I am), and these blog entries are my schemes. You wouldn't understand the bits of it you weren't meant to. Why, you may ask. No reason, I might say. Maybe because, for me, details are trivialities. Or maybe, for the irreasonable reason that there isn't much mystery left in life anymore.

Does everything need to have a title?

"In a moment of murderous rage, the rain pounds against my window, splattering across the glass, threatening to engulf me in a film of suffocating stillness but then, wakes up to gravity and slips away tiredly along the surface, conceding defeat."

Interesting lines. Wonder how I came up with them while trying to drive in a torrential downpour, unable to view the road ahead of me. I typed them down in my mobile as soon as I parked the car at home, gleefully, I should add, contented that the trip to the medical store in the deluge had been not so useless, after all. Normally, on a normal day, with me in a normal mood, all such lines go into the vault, the database of disconnected pieces of crafted language that I sometime later, in a fit of inspiration, would try to weave together and produce a blog entry or a poem or a flash video or whatever other piece of 'art', as we might call it. But tonight, I'm in no mood to weave, no mood to contrive and above all, honestly, in no mood to think. A tryst with a few picturesque words and, unfortunately, fewer wordy pictures over the past couple of days has left me exhausted. And writing, no matter how distasteful and embarassing it might be to admit for us writers, is a painful process. So then, let's cut down on the pain tonight, shall we?

Wall-E's out. After a long, eager wait and a resultant weary resignation, that is. Damn Pixar. Yet, we all know what's gonna happen now, don't we?

Darren Aronofsky's new flick, 'The Wrestler' is due to premiere in some film festival this Sep 5th. I know I won't be able to watch it till a year or so when the DVD gets out in stores but what I'm more interested in is Clint Mansell's composition for its score. And for those who haven't heard it from me yet, Clint Mansell is god. People usually hark 'Lux Aeterna' when they hear his name (I was once one of them) but, The Fountain contains better written pieces of classical compositions than any of the ones from Requiem for a Dream or any of his earlier works (barring 'Lux Aeterna', which is a piece of divine brilliance that he may, in all probability, never produce again in his life). It's an album that's pure brilliance, complementing the movie in every sense, every single track exuding ceaseless emotion. Nothing else I've ever listened to in my life comes close. I've been playing it regularly for over an year now and still, everytime I play each track, I unravel something new.

And now, I think I should stop writing before I start talking in cliches. The rain has subsided, I hope. Yes, I can venture out into my balcony and savour the night's balmy radiance for a moment before I collapse into the waiting arms of Morpheus. Oh my god, who talks like that? And who writes like that?
[I tend to use a lot of commas, don't I? Banville's fault, to an extent, I'd like to say. And maybe, even Pynchon's. ;) ]

There's a certain pleasure in writing a blog entry while you're half asleep. It's like getting the best of both worlds, in a true sense. But still, there aren't any awakwardly constructed sentences and spelling errors. Oh, my obsessions.

I think I'm rambling. Oh, but then, don't we all?

To be written

12 33 am. I'm just back from a rainy night's drive. Pure, unadulterated ecstasy, if ever there was one. I'm tired. I have very few hours of sleep available to me before I wake up to the day and I would give a lot of things to be able to get off this chair and slink away into the night but this has to be written.

In a few hours, I might get on a train. After a long, long time. New music's being pumped into my player and my book is ready.

Somewhere, somewhere, a window waits for me.

Déjà vu

I was there. Though I never actually had been.

I got down at the gates and surveyed the milieu. It was late in the evening, the time around which trees start fading away into grey outlines that sway with the breeze. There was the huge wall that ran all around it, just as I had been told. Walking in, there was a sense of nostalgia for all that was there, the imperious gates, the desolute grey edifices, the tall trees and the beaten paths that ran through them. It was all there, nothing I'd ever known but still, somehow, I knew I knew. Exactly as you told me it would be.

Memories lay in wait, fettered in time, waiting to be set free. Unfinished parleys drew me to places that spoke of shadows that had once been, of a dreamy smile that once stole time. I knew not what I knew as I traversed your past, alerting it to my arrival, revising it to my existence. Amid secrets that weren't secret anymore and bygones that refused to stay bygone, I stood smiling, contemplating clocks and chances, as I knew you had once done.

Two smiles. Disconnected by time, connected by a moment.

4 hours, 48 minutes. Plus a moment.

There was wind. There was rain. There was a blue sky too.

There are moments in a sport's history that will someday later come to be known as the ones that changed it forever, the moments about which people will someday proudly proclaim, 'I was there!', and tonight, there were two unassuming gentlemen at the Centre court at Wimbledon scripting one such moment, changing the face of the sport forever. Two maestros outdid one other in turns, like wizards conjuring up spells of genius with their racquet-shaped wands, two contrasting styles at a stalemate. One never gave up, the other never gave in. Fate hung by millimetre-thick threads while sporting brilliance never seemed more than a shot away.

And then, a lash of the forehand sent the ball crashing into the net and it came down onto the grass, lifeless.

6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7.

Wimbledon erupted, and a twenty-two year old Spaniard collapsed on the other side of the net, ecstasy rolling down his eyes. Rafael Nadal had finally conquered Roger Federer. On grass. At Wimbledon. Words I have waited an year to type out. Rafael Nadal was Wimbledon Champion, and that was where the world ended. There were no more balls to be hit, no more runs to be made. He didn't know what to do. Appropriately. For four hours and forty eight minutes on centre court, amid rain delays, gusty winds and with one of the game's greatest legends on the other side of the net, he made the world believe he was something more than just human and it was apt that the glorious moment that it all culminated in showed more than any other that he was just a man. Everything rushed into his head, every single time he had ever held a Tennis racquet, everything he'd sacrificed, dreaming of the day he would hold aloft that golden trophy on the lawns of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Not the father, not the uncle, not even the Prince and Princess of Spain could do anything about the tears. They belonged, rightly so, to the grass he had dreamt of as a little boy in Majorca, the same grass on which he had just fulfilled his sporting destiny.

On the other side of the net, Roger Federer was experiencing something painfully new, the feeling of being the runner-up at Wimbledon. For five years, he had ruled the All England Club like few had ever done before him but this time, as he later acknowledged with a calm smile on his face, he tried everything but it just wasn't enough. There was very, very little separating the two today and the match could've easily gone either way but in the end, it was Nadal's unremitting energy and stamina that produced the very, very little extra that the game needed to produce a winner.

It was perhaps fitting that this game took place at the home of the modern game. Fueled by what is fast becoming one of the greatest rivalries that tennis, or any other sport, for that matter, has known, the sport had been elevated to another level, producing some of the most breathtaking tennis that has been seen in a long time. We would be compelled to go back twenty eight years in time to find something that rivals the beauty of this match when Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe produced something similar in terms of the rivalry and quality. The same match that contained the momentous tiebreak in the fourth set which McEnroe took 18-16. But Borg held on to win that epic match, staving off waves of brilliant shot-making from McEnroe to make it five Wimbledon crowns in a row. The next year's final featured the same duo but this time it was McEnroe who took the crown, capping off a great rivalry with the Swede, ending his five year reign. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

It may well have been that this year's Wimbledon title had been won, or lost, at the French Open final. It's been a well-observed trend over the past few years that Nadal has been getting better on grass than Federer has on clay. And when, this year, on his third attempt at the French crown, Federer could muster only four games while being annihilated in what was one of Nadal's most clinical displays of clay-court tennis, he could've lost more than just that match. Whatever Roger may say, however vehemently he may deny that Wimbledon is not Roland Garros, he offered little today to prove it. No matter the surface, Nadal to him is the puzzle he can't seem to solve, the untiring bundle of energy that negates his strokemaking like no one ever did before, the guy who makes his genius look all too human at times. Look at the facts. Out of thirteen break points, Federer converted one, only one. Not the Federer we know, is he? When was the last time he committed twice the number (52, to Nadal's 27) of his opponent's unforced errors? And when did you last see him scream on court, egging himself on and anguishing at lost points? And when, oh when, did you catch Mirka Vavrinec exhort him from the sidelines?

As you watched the match today, there was an impending sense of collapsibility about the champion, no matter what instinct suggested. Nadal broke him early to take the first set but trailing 1-4 in the second set, there had to be something special about the Majorcan to topple the Swiss and there indeed was. Federer's serve was broken twice and Nadal had the second set wrapped up in 46 minutes. With Nadal serving at 4-5 in the third set, rain forced a delay for the first time, probably coming to the defending champion's aid. And after play resumed, he fought back strongly and took third and fourth sets on tiebreak, neither unable to break the other’s serve. The fourth set tie-break produced the most exhilarating tennis of the match, Federer having to dig deep to save two championship points for the Spaniard, in the end taking the tiebreak 10-8. But later in the fifth set, Nadal's energy started kicking in and he started stretching Federer's serves more with each game and in the end, he broke Federer in the fifteenth game of the set to serve for the championship at 8-7. Federer fought with all his might, dragging the game to deuce before conceding a championship point and then manufacturing what was probably the return of the match to bring it back to deuce again. But then, a magnificent serve brought Nadal his fourth championship point and another unforced error from the champion ended his five year reign, giving the Spaniard his first ever Wimbledon crown.

So, what does Nadal’s win mean for men's Tennis? There will be zealous proclamations of a 'changing of the guard' and questions raised about the 'end of a reign' but it doesn't take too much of common sense to see that it's not the case. Federer is far from a spent force and Nadal is far from unbeatable. But this will change a few things for sure and Federer will know them better than anybody else. His aura of invincibility has finally been broken but actually, it may not have come at a better time for him to reassess himself if he seeks to capture that French Open title that has eluded him for so long. If there has been a single factor that has worked against him in debates of "the greatest of all time", it has been the absence of a real challenge from his rivals unlike the other greats Sampras or Borg who had clear challengers like Agassi and McEnroe snapping at their heels all their time. And now, Roger has that, a true challenger in the guise of Nadal. If he seeks to put at rest all those theories that he has been largely untested by real competition, this is the time. His game on clay is still notches below Nadal's and he has to work a lot to get there but he now knows that it's the Nadal in his mind that's bothering him more than the one across the net. Next year's French Open and, not to mention, Wimbledon, may well be the dawn of a new era in men’s Tennis thanks to this fierce rivalry. Tennis stands to be the winner no matter what the outcome.

Nadal put things into perspective in the presentation ceremony when asked if it was a special win because he beat Federer to win it. He said, 'He has five Wimbledon titles to his name and I have just won my first.' That should settle it. But for tonight and the history that accompanies it, there won't be a more fitting and deserving Wimbledon champion than this young man. John McEnroe would agree.

Epiphany

Ever felt a moment grab you by the scruff of your neck and drag you all the way through the screaming quiet corridors of your life? Through those flashy freeways, the dusty, crowded lanes, the beautiful, dewy green lawns, those scary, dark alleys, those mud filled potholes... And then wake up somewhere you've never been, only to remember that you don't remember anything that preceded this wild, hopefully isolated, incident? Wondering what set off this chain of epiphanies, what dragged you that far, what blotted your memory so it wouldn't betray what it knew? And then, be hit by a thousand realisations all at once? That you're high, unable to know what sent you up there? That you're grinning your heart out to yourself, painfully? That your eyes are hanging from the whirling, kaliedoscopic roof on top of your swirling head? That your feet have started flying off windows you never knew were there before? That your hands don't have a body anymore? That you're shouting your ears off to get out the ball of blue energy bouncing around inside you? That you're looking around blindly for a sense to re-awaken your senses, to enlighten your blunted memory?

Switch off the headphones, slide them off your ears.
The world shall right itself.

The Sign of Four

Right now, I have a lot of things to write. But I know that by the time I devise a way to put them all together in one piece, I'll either deviate into writing something 'more serious' [sic] or get too bored with attempting something on such a huge scale and leave it unfinished, thereby inducing a well known side effect-'an unpublished entry'. And so, in keeping with my endeavour in trying to keep the 'devising' bit out of my writing, I'll keep it more straightforward.

Subject 1 - All right, first things first. I have finally, finally gotten my hands on Nabokov's Pale Fire. Though it isn't mine to scribble in and revel in possession(it's a library book), it still is the book I probably wanted to read more than anything else in my whole wide, little book world and tonight calls for a celebration, which means a faster reading of Pynchon's Vineland. Not to take anything away from Pynchon here. In fact, he's so damn good that I was actually thinking about attempting a comprehensive review of the book which, might not be a big deal for most books but is for this one. [I'm not known for making bets but here's one- I bet 99 people out of 100 will put down this book before they reach the twentieth page. Challenges are invited.] He's crammed more of America into this book than most authors do in their lifetimes. I'd heard a lot about him before reading this but now, nothing's enough. Ah, by the way, there was this unwritten blog entry that was supposed to deal with the quintessential American novel and-behold!-American symbolism in Kamal's Dasavatharam. Sorry to disappoint you here but I promised myself earlier I wasn't gonna digress too much. Maybe some other night. Tonight's for Nabokov and Pynchon.

Subject 2 - Coldplay's new album rocks. It absolutely does. Thanks again Martin. Don't forget to tell the others.

Subject 3 - This is a bit old by subject 1's standards but last week, Lucas Podolski scored against Poland. Twice. Of all the things that could've happened. Oh.

For the sake of clarity here, let me elaborate. Podolski is a Polish-born striker who plays for Germany and I'm referring to the Euro 08 league match between Germany and Poland. Now, you see the irony? To his credit, he didn't celebrate after scoring. And the expression on his face right after tapping the ball home into the net, is what made me write this. Of course, he voluntarily made a decision to play for Germany and everything that happens ensues from it but still, I hope Germany aren't drawn with Poland again. Atleast as long as Podolski's around. And if they do, I pray to hell he doesn't score. There's too much pain in this world already.

Subject 4 - Have you ever felt that you feel like carting your life away to a whole new place only so you can get more out of the place you are in?

Hmmmm, I'll not write more on this here lest I get into a frame of writing people are more than familiar with. I will not. I will not. I will not.
Oh, for god's sake, Dheeraj, have an open mind.

The sixteenth dream

"Those who are dead are not dead
They're just living in my head..."
- "42" [Coldplay/Viva La Vida]

A dream that was once a reality now languishes in memory as a dream, never to be real again. But then again, what is life, if not a dream woven out of innumerable dreams like an ocean that doesn't know where one drop begins and the other ends?

Maybe one day, again, I would show him my report card and a broad smile would appear on his face, there would be another pat on my back, another 'Fantastic!' in the air as an old grey cassette player by the side sang "Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon...". I didn't know then what I had done to make him so happy. But then, I never knew a lot of things. I don't know when that cassette player stopped working and we bought a new one, I don't know when I stopped caring about report cards and I don't know when the word 'fantastic' ceased to be just a word. The ignorance that is all that remains of a lost life.

Today is the sixteenth. Next year, it will be the seventeenth. But then, it would be another day. Another dream.