Netherland

Where am I?
Not here. Anywhere but here. Nowhere but here.
Here. Nowhere. Everywhere.

A dream that is a life? A life that is a dream?

They say that some reality is born out of dreams and some dreams are born out of reality. But what about something that belongs to neither, the netherland, the nowhere that exists everywhere?

Frozen, beyond expression, beyond emotion, my knees give way to the ground as life steps down from its pedestal and reaches out to me. The sky learns to smile down at me, the land learns to endure me and the air learns to breathe me in as the world finally wakes up to me. It slows down for once and lends me a glimpse into its clandestine intricacies. Beyond days, beyond nights, beyond dreams, beyond reality. The past and the future crumble into a blank as I step out of time and watch it amble along, history in its wake. Free from callous clocks and taunting walls, it is then, in that nowhere, that my thoughts finally find their words, and my silence finds its peace.

Random Notes

Note 1 -
To capture the essence of its time, to imbibe in itself the everything, the ether that pervades the milieu that creates it, that is what all art aspires to. Take a Goya, a Michelangelo, a Kafka, a Tchaikovsky, a Van Gogh, a Mozart, a Goethe, a Turner, a Dostoyevsky, a Cartier-Bresson, a Matisse, a Neruda, or any other great piece of art, it is redolent of the times that created it, like a grave where a handful of the sands of its time have been scooped up, funnelled through the artist's genius and encapsulated for the future by his vision. It is for this precise reason that the artist exists, to immerse himself in and carefully preserve the vicissitudes of his time, to elevate his work to the pantheon of greatness, of art worthy enough to be called the graveyard of time.

Note 2 -
Is touch mutual? If I touch something, does it necessarily mean that it touches me? Or, if I'm touched by something, does it mean that I've also touched it in return?

Note 3 -
Poetry is like a solitary streetlamp raging on in the depths of a night. It illuminates only the trifles that lie within its reach, leaving the rest of the prodigious night to your imagination.

Note 4 -
One of the harshest realisations you could have in life is when you realise for the first time that time is not a continuum, that you've been lied to when you were led to believe that it flows in a straight line which, of course, it does not. It might seem only just - some might even go so far as calling it poetic - that man's most complex invention, time, should be represented by his simplest, the straight line. But life isn't poetic, nor is nature. And it would be a mistake to expect time to be. After the realisation, your first feelings would be those of fear (as, doubtlessly, many of the first-timers reading this would be experiencing right now), then panic, then (in some cases) relief and finally (in all cases) indifference.

Note 5 -
Life is like an escalator. Once you get on it, there's no getting back. It takes you where it wants to, whether you want it to or not, and delivers you at the end, whether you want it to or not.

Extended Note 5.1 -
Trying to go back in life and time is like trying to go down an escalator which is going up. It's irritatingly painful, and even if you succeed in moving back a little, you never get to stay there for long. And above all that, the harder you try, the stupider you look.

For a little girl

She walked up to me and said, 'Popcorn, sir?'

I said, 'No, thanks', and continued walking towards my car. But I could hear her walking behind me, requesting me to buy because she hadn't finished her quota for the day and the night was already done. I thought about all I'd just spent just before walking there and took out a ten from my wallet and turned around to face her. She seemed to misconstrue that as a donation and said, sternly, 'I don't take charity, sir. If you want to, you can buy the popcorn, it's twenty a pack.' I smiled at her and took out another ten, took the pack and walked away to my car.

And, after our little meeting, here's what our respective lives choose to do with us. I get to get into my car, switch on the AC, pop in a CD of my choice and enjoy a marvellous drive under a velvety bright, starry sky. And what does she get to do? Roam around parking lots pursuing strangers and requesting them to buy something they know very well they don't want. Telling them the sad story that is her life, hoping, praying, pleading. Crushing her own spirit, one word at a time. Fair?

I'm just the fortunate one, and she isn't? Life isn't just? And she's supposed to lap up these philosophical treatises and just carry on with her simply 'unfortunate' life? Is that all there is to it? I live with a little girl who is of a similar age yet knows nothing of that. That life isn't about luxuriously decorated duplex homes, ready-to-be-beckoned housemaids, timely arranged meals, chauffeured sedans and designer accessories. Many of us don't. We've lived life, but we don't know how we'd feel if life lived us. We don't know how it would feel to haggle for a single rupee, how it would feel to never know where your next meal would come from, how it would feel to beg somebody for a trifle and get pushed away, how it would feel to be at the mercy of the whims of a cruel life. We don't. Because we choose not to. Fate, we tell ourselves. That word, that impotent word that life teaches us to fall back on when confronted with a question we don't care enough to answer.

We live in an alternate reality, insulated from the truth, looking at it through tinted windows that glorify us and eliminate everything else unpleasant to our sight. How we remove those melancholic sidewalks from our life, how we neglect the ground realities that permeate the consciousness of the country we live in, how we choose not to know that three-quarters of the country we live in survives on less that twenty rupees a day, the same amount I paid for that pack of popcorn. Do we even care that we live in a country which, at the root of it all, irrespective of what overpaid, Armani-clad executives in air conditioned boardrooms may proclaim, still remains a poor old woman, with an ailing heart? Are we doing all we can? When will we realise that placing a few good apples in a basket full of rotten ones cannot hide the stench?

But let's leave it there. I don't want to digress, and I'm not here to judge. I want this to be just about the little girl, nothing else. What should I have done? Maybe I should have bought her whole bag and helped out her quota, maybe I should have written down my number and given it to her to contact me in case she ever needed any help. I don't know what I could or couldn't have done to alleviate her pain but I can't shake the image off my mind. Burnt into my memory, that look in her eyes. Innocence tainted with anguish. Tears prowling at the edges, sick of life, sick of herself, sick of me, sick of you.

There are many emotions stirring inside me at this moment but I admit, above all of them, I'm scared. Scared for her. Scared beyond everything that has ever scared me. Life takes the best of us and breaks us down, what chance does a little girl have?

Astitva

To exist and yet be unable to do,
To do and yet be unable to see,
To see and yet be unable to feel,
To feel and yet be unable to touch,
To touch and yet be unable to understand,
To understand and yet be unable to know,
To know and yet be unable to say,
To say and yet be unable to mean,
To mean and yet be unable to be,
To be and yet be unable to exist.

That is the semantics of life.

New Year's Eve

Every once a year, a night would turn into a day.
None of the rules would apply to that night, no ultimatums to get to bed, no study hours to be adhered to, no 'lights out'.
There would even be a cake to be cut, to be eaten.
And toffees.
There would be music, friends, and an inviolable licence to stay awake all night. Even to play.
Then there would be the greeting cards. The new diaries. The new almanacs.
The special shows on TV. Maybe even some movies late in the night.
Maybe even a new dress.
Everybody would be there, smiling, jumping around as if life had just begun.

Once every year, I reminisce on those days as a little kid, and try to relive the feeling. The allure of that night and the bubbly elation without even knowing what it is we are supposed to be so happy about. The innocence that pervades memory before you understand time, before you understand life.

It's that time of the year again.

No matter how much we would like ourselves to believe otherwise, it's hope we live on. And this is the one night that, more than any other, exemplifies our amorosity with hope. We all know tomorrow's just another day, we know our lives won't suddenly liven up in the morning, our secret wishes won't promptly manifest themselves on our world, our jobs won't miraculously get exciting the next time we go to office, our worries won't just fade away just as a number fades away across our calendars, but just the same, we wish ourselves a happier and more prosperous year than the one we just had. And believe we will. No matter how young you are or how old you are, however much you might have seen in life to negate this hope, you just can't stop a little bubble from rising inside your heart at the prospect of facing the new year, at the prospect of the unexplored, at the prospect of the new. It's just who we are.

There will be a moment tonight which will belong to nothingness in time, one neither a part of this year nor the next, a tiny void that carries my hopes for everything that lies beyond. I am not dancing, I'm not singing, I'm not even smiling, but I am hoping. So I can slip into it. And live forever.

My December

Decembers come, Decembers go,
As if they never knew me

Never to come back to me again,
Never to know me again

Stranded where they've always left me
I'm left wondering where they're off to

Whether they found me interesting,
If I made a difference

If they would ever cease to leave me behind,
If I would ever get my own December

Little knowing that
As I deliberate its secrets,
Time deliberates on me.

Metaphors

Memory
is like an eye forced to stay awake,
unforgetting, unforgiving.

Truth
is like a conjurer's trick,
unconceivable, undeniable.

Pain
is like the silence of the night,
undying, unliving.

Reason
is like a voice in the distance,
unperceivable, unignorable.

Time
is like a mad man hurtling towards his destruction,
unrestrainable, unsalvageable.

Life
is like a promise to nobody,
unmade, unbroken.

Love
is like eternity squeezed out of a moment,
unending, unbeginning.

Somebody else

I've come a long way, only to realise I'm not myself anymore. Haggling for perfection among conversations with unspoken words, unending waits and unfinished windows, I've forgotten myself somewhere along the way. I've fallen behind trying to keep up, observing life from a distance and living memory's dreams in lieu of reality. I've grown weary of myself, of these unclaimed emotions, these obsessions with reason and understanding, these vain lives inside lives, of all that ties me down to myself. This isn't what I wish to be, nor is it what I ought to be. I'm done confining myself to the question mark.

I want not what I know, I know not what I want. I wish to escape myself, to let myself go. I wish to lose myself so someday I'll be able to find myself again. Big words. Maybe, maybe not. The world won't change for me but I can for it. And maybe I will. Maybe give the heart precedence over the mind, for once. Maybe give in to the otherness of life. Be all I never was. Be all I never knew. All you never knew.

I want to be somebody else. Maybe I can, maybe I can't. I wouldn't know. But then again, weren't we all somebody else once?

Of rebellions and mediocrities

I'm not in the mood to write, let alone write something 'publishable'. Well, actually, I'm in the mood to write, but not the kind I want to publish or even put out into words. I want to write something I don't feel like writing right now, something radically different to the kind of words that are right now fighting their way through my head to get out. I don't want to let them out, and I want to send out different ones in their place. A really hard thing to do and, in fact, something I've always thought of as impossible. I could attempt it, against convention, against feelings, but the absence of the muse would ensure a failure. So, what do I do? Torn between an obligation to myself and a metaphysical authority that claims control over my creative pursuits, I choose (immodestly, if I may add) myself. I certainly don't feel like writing this right now but I'm going to. Maybe, if I'm successful, it will go down as the beginning of a well-documented rebellion against the muses, otherwise will serve as a relic of a failed, and little known, rebellion against the muses.

Right then, the door's locked and the long, random playlist on winamp is already on the way. Let's begin.

It's early morning. Wonderful weather, not too cold, not too warm either, thanks to a distant sun. Not much traffic bothering my feet which, for a change, rest in peace while driving. I'm not alone in the car, but that's about as much as we're going to delve into that matter for our present purposes. Mediocrity, no, something even worse if I dare to call it so, emanates from the stereo. And out of nowhere, I start sounding the horn, for no apparent reason. There are no cars ahead of me on the road that I want to communicate with but that doesn't stop me. I keep doing it at regular intervals, without reason. And, that's all this incident is intended to convey.

And it wasn't just that morning that I did it. The obsession with the horn didn't begin that day, nor did it end then. In fact, I found out I'd been doing that for a long time before I started noticing it myself and decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. Not going too much into the perfunctory details of that tale of analysis and deduction, we'll arrive at the eye-opening realisation. As usual, it was a surprise that ceased to surprise me once it wore out, which, pretty quickly, it did. And, as if purely out of habitual compulsion, I go, "Oh, yes, I should've known! How could I miss it?"

Enough drivel. I was sounding the horn to block out the mediocrity the radio was giving me. And not just for myself, for everybody else around, and, supposedly, the whole world. Yes, that's right, armed with a horn that wouldn't even always function satisfactorily, I had set out to change the world. To purge it of the mediocrity that has become modern music. As if I could block out those sounds by simply making one of my own. Pathetic, I know. Call it whatever you might, that was what it was.

Common sense tells you, and me, I could've simply turned the radio off and let it go or put on a CD of my choice and spared you all of this, and more (or less, depending on the way you look at it) importantly, spared myself of resorting to all these -------- (for lack of a better word) tactics. There's only one thing I can say to all that. Life doesn't always let you do what you think you ought to do, and on the rare occasion it actually lets you do that, you don't feel like doing it and don't. Some sort of masochistic pleasure, I guess.

I've never been one able to appreciate the terpsichorean cadences of modern music and hence accept that my perspective on this issue might be dimmed a bit because of that, but still, I don't see the justification for such abysmal songwriting tuned together into... Now would be the part where I go on a rampage and offer a scathing criticism of the kind of, and quality of, music we're forced to listen to these days but well, I don't need to cos I know you get the point. Once the cat is out of the bag, there's no point dawdling around. I'll save all of the other lines for another day and just type out the conclusion which actually seems out of place without all that preceded it and hence brings what would seem to be an abrupt ending, which I'm prepared to concede. Not every rebellion starts perfectly, it only has to end so.

I'm not the type who keeps saying you can't change the world on your own, because I believe you can, but I prefer to ask myself one question before initiating anything of that sort and that's what generally stops me most of the time. Is the world yours for you to try and change?

Pantomime

All it takes is a moment. A word. A silence.
And you're lost, searching for yourself among the crevices of life.

There are some moments that define your future, some that retrace your past, some that just take an eternity to pass. This isn't one of them, it's all of them.

The world around you is a travesty, and all of a sudden, a pantomime. Time begins and ends, morphing everything around you except you. Words no longer reach your ears, they no longer escape your lips. Everything has ceased to be. All you're left with are faces, faces that no longer recognise you as one of their own.

You can't see. You can't hear. You can't feel.
Drifting through nothingness, clinging to your non-existence, unsure of everything that ever was, you see it approaching. There are no more upsides, no more downsides. No more left, no more right. Just a straight line. Just a straight, undeniable certainty.

You wonder why. Why it is the way it is. And not the way it is not.
How it all came to be just this and nothing else. There was supposed to be more to it, more than just this. You deny the tears in your eyes and try to wish them away. And then, from the bottomless depths of that inescapable pain, it hits you, squarely to the moment, light as a rock, heavy as a feather.

Living is just a habit.
And after a while, just as with every other, you forget why you made it in the first place.

Morning

A denial.
An empty room.
A periodic beep chipping away at the mind.
Blurry blinds, a shadowy ceiling.
Floating words, talking walls.
A broken dream.
A dawning consciousness.

A splash of hot water.
Droplets on a mirror.

150 words on Evam's "Doubles, Triples and Quadruples"

150 words are never going to be enough to properly review (a subjective opinion, of course) any play, let alone one as eclectic and kaleidoscopic as Doubles, Triples and Quadruples still I take it up, candidly convinced of the impending failure, because it's not always that you find failing at something more gratifying than succeeding at it. So then, let the word count begin.

Doubles, Triples and Quadruples is not a play, and to call it so would be to strip it of its essence. Played out in seemingly disparate segments punctuated with interludes where each of the actors address the audience directly "not hiding beneath the veneer of a character" anymore, it's not so much a play as it is an experience. And throw in a few interactive exercises involving the audience and you have a new breed of play where the didacticism of the stage form is replaced by a more accessible embrace of the audience. Not that the audience doesn't like to be spoken down to, but where would we all be if there wasn't some change every once in a while?

Each of the segments depicts the characters at decisive moments in their lives, featuring some well crafted scenes and lively, witty writing that highlights the quirks of human nature, bringing out the humour and emotion in what would otherwise be just another of those unnoticed moments that pass us by. Be it the newly wedded couple arguing pointlessly at the threshold of their marital bliss or the disgruntled, materialistic young man who is inadvertently confronted with his Oedipus complex or the familiar strangers who finally discover each other thanks to a goodbye, everybody is at a point which could chart the rest of their lives.

The performances by the actors in the segments are, needless to say, more than adequate and they deserve to be commended for that but it was the interludes that were the most captivating of the lot. Sure, some of them were hilariously done and had the audience in splits but there was more to them than met the eye. Art is not just about the artist expressing himself but also about him exploring himself through it and these interludes help each of them do exactly that. As one of them put it, it's always easier to "hide beneath the veneer of a character than to come out in the open and bare yourself to a bunch of strangers every night" which is why it makes the play a truly enriching and cathartic experience for all the actors involved and for the audience for being a part of it.

There are many memorable characters, many memorable lines and many memorable performances in this play but none of them is as momentous as the simple door frame that adorns the minimalist backdrop of the stage all through it. It is the motif that ties all the disconnected segments of the play together, sometimes as an active component of the plot, sometimes as an innocent bystander, but nonetheless ever present, reminding us all that happiness in life is never too far away and that to find it, all you need to do is walk through the door.