In the Shadow of the Lights

They lit up the town today for the annual festival. Fairy lights on branches and buildings. And just like every year, I walked in the mellow glow through the back streets. 

Tomorrow, the place will be abuzz.

Today, it's all mine to muse in.

It's so beautiful. Red, green, yellow. Primarily yellow. Like all beautiful things, it makes me very very happy, and it makes me choke up just a little. Not sad. What's that word? Wistful?

I can picture myself. A lone figure stopping in the middle of the empty road, face tilted towards those bright orbs. They don't belong to the regular scheme of things. Yet, there they are for 3 days. Every year.

It almost surprises me that the majority of the present is made up of the past.

It always comes out as an involuntary whisper. “I would not have it any other way.” Always with a smile. Always with a lump. And always awash with those beautiful, bright lights.

It feels like an answer. I wish I also knew the question.

The Tragedy of Being Human

Burn. With shame. With rage. With hopelessness.



Drown. In pity. In apathy. In fear.

Live. In years. In safety. In shackles.

Rejoice. In mediocrity. In the depths of depravity. In the failure of others.



Run. From demons. From conflicts. From yourself.



Fail. To forgive. To fight. To inspire.

Forget. To care. To believe. To strive.

Succumb. To popularity. To acceptance. To normalcy.


Know. The insignificance. The excuses. And the tragedy of being human.

He was one of the men who believe very strongly in moments.

So he waited for 3 years for the right one.

Finally one night, over a cheap dinner, he told her.

The love-song blaring from the overhead speakers drowned out his whispered love-words.

"Pardon?", she said.

It broke his heart to walk away, but there was nothing else to do.

The moment was lost.

And so was he.

Don't date a girl who reads

One of the very first posts I had put up was Date a girl who reads. Then, recently, I came across this piece by a magician called Charles Warnke.

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.

Click-a-roo IV

Not been in a mood to write lately. Here are three pictures I clicked. All by the mobile camera, so forgive the quality.

Aam Street - Mangoes, Mangoes and more Mangoes!!

Hung Colours

(by the way, what is the plural of a capsicum? Is it capsicums or capsici? )

Sandals of Mourners at an Unnamed Boy's Funeral

Taken at Calcutta, June, 2013.

Now is Thy Prophet

Then they were together so that as the hand on the watch moved, unseen now, they knew that nothing could ever happen to the one that did not happen to the other, that no other thing could happen more than this; that this was all and always this was what had been and now and whatever was to come. This, that they were not to have, they were having. They were having now and before and always and now and now and now. Oh, now, now , now , the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Come now, now, for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only now, not anything else only this now, and where are you and where am I and where is the other one, and not why, not ever why, only this now; and on and always please then always now, always now, for now always one now; one only one, there is no other one but one now, one, going now, rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling now, soaring now, away now, all the way now, all of all the way now; one and one is one, is one, is one, is one, is still one, is still one, is one descendingly, is one softly, is one longingly, is one kindly, is one happily, is one in goodness, is one to cherish, is one now on earth with elbows against the cut and slept-on branches of the pine tree with the smell of the pine boughs and the night to earth conclusively now, and with the morning of the day to come. Then he said, for the other was only in his head and he had said nothing, “Oh, Maria, I love thee and I thank thee for this.”

From For Whom the Bells Toll, Earnest Hemingway.

Someday I'll do justice to the professor who took my Interpretation of Literary Texts class, and do a full analysis of this, with word and sentence structures and all that.
Today, I'll just let the words wash over me with the same semi-despairing, semi-elated charm that makes me return to Hemingway over and over and over again.

Arguments of a Suicidal Mind : Me vs. Me

It feels as if I am broaching a taboo topic. After all, I was the "tough guy". The one who never needs help. The who talks other people out of (or into, depends) stupid stuff.

But I'm doing this because it feels necessary. I have been suicidal and/or depressed, on and off for the last one and a half months. I've hurt myself. I've "researched" more ways to hurt myself. A confession, if you want to put it that way. If I was writing literature, this is the point where I say "it felt good to get it off my chest". Right now, frankly, I don't care how it feels. Maybe more accurately, I've been running from myself for so long, I don't know how it feels.

(Literature does come back to me. There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age: youth's burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares; old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.Maybe I've just grown old.) 

So I'll try to be as brutal as possible here. I have grown up thinking killing oneself is a abominable cowardly thing. I still believe so, and if, in case, I do end up doing it, I want mine to be seen as such too.

When I say I'm suicidal, I guess that means I want to kill myself. That would be both true and false.

Why do I want to die in the first place?
I hate myself. It's a dislike born of many years of (maybe unnecessary) self-analysis. 
I feel a burden to people around me. Terribly low self confidence. So low, it doesn't qualify as confidence any more, low or otherwise. 
I tell myself nobody cares. That I don't care either.
I kind of think I have run out of choices to take in my life. Some things have ruled out the options I had kept for myself. (That of course has been a major factor lately)
I am tempted to "start-over". A clean slate. One where I'm a bit less stupid, a bit more stronger.
 
And why again, do I not want to die?
Because it's the same self-analysis that tells me that at least some of that hate is misdirected.
I know I'm useful. Maybe not always. But sometimes, yes. And when I believe those who say I'm a burden, to be fair I have to believe those who say I'm not, too.
If nobody cared, then I would have been gone long back. People do care. And I do too. Maybe too much, sometimes. 
I am here because I did not know what the future held. Same applies now too.

I find telling myself that "I want to live" more often than I say "I want to die".
I want to live. I want to live so badly. I want to be happy. To be normal. To be a little less afraid. To love myself a little bit more. To have a few doubts less. To stop wanting to hurt myself. To take it one day at a time, gladly. 
I want to see what the future holds. I know I can. And no matter what happens, I still am happy with what I do have.
I am strong. I have held on for so long. I've gone through the worst. 

Now if only I could convince myself of it.

Maybe I could just live for my poems and stories.

And miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.