Life is a bitch. And it is cause you make it. You can’t please everyone all the time, and let it be like that. If someone doesn’t want to as you are now, it’s really not your problem, especially, if you’re young. Life will pass on, and you’ll have the little regrets that you could have done more in the moments that went away in pleasing others. Fuck everyone, really, and do what you think is right.
Get your childhood issues sorted out. Perform well in academics once, at least. Top the shit out of your batch. Play a freakin’ sport and play it so good that everyone fucking claps at your effort, if not your talent or your ability to play it. Sing/dance/play an instrument onstage once, and make sure you do it good. Spectators should freaking get up and applaud their asses away. Because otherwise, you’ll never find out what you can do, where you can be, and the magnitude of confidence you’ll ever have in yourself.
Break your opinion of yourself. Because otherwise, life will keep being a bitch.
You’re only so much away from home when you realize that the thoughts that occupy you have evolved into a strangers’. When I return, the dust on the glass, the soot on the curtains, and the shadows in the rooms, are all uncannily poised, observing me as distant relatives of a past life. Suddenly, you begin to notice your prints around your room – clothes, papers, cosmetics, little trinkets – that were invisible when you lived here, but now stand out in your temporary presence. It is as if my house wants me to know that I’m not to be sheltered as family, but as an estranged tenant.
Your possessions at your place are the first to tell you that they don’t remember owning an owner, however dearly you want you cling on to them. Then, there are the streets. I look at the scenes that appear on the road from the railway station to the Collector’s Office (near to where I live), and I see the local commerce carriers, school children, panwallahs, traffic policemen, hawkers, and the other pedestrians, perpetually going about their determined businesses indifferent of my story – my nervous farewell to Indore, my tumultuous affair with Mumbai, and my fleeting returns to the city where I’ve loved much and lost some.
That’s okay though. I’ll take a smile. Because there are these little things, that never change – conversations.
When my dad cribs about the dinner and mom defends its nutritive value, when my Dadi shouts at the maid till the plates are sparkling clean, and when my friends whine about my not giving them enough time, I feel what home is supposed to feel like.
It’s hard to find people who get you. Harder to find are those who can carry compassionate, mutually-respecting, humorous, and loving conversations with you.
It’s not a violent revelation, but a steady truth, when I say that all I remember of a home are the people who have held me in their curious to-and-fros. That is what I miss of Indore, and that is what binds me to Mumbai.
Conversations make people. They make me.
Out of a Pink Rose bush she is,
out of a naive village she is,
she is a man's fantasy parade,
she is a dreamer's heathen spleen.
She fluttered like a neon flower,
when I asked her to grace my abode,
true to her instinct,
she flinched and clinched,
and hoped to see me alone,
while nobody watching her come in.
We danced the wonder Waltz,
we sand the jaunty Blues,
the gunpowder of ecstasy,
crept in the veins of our melting bodies.
The dove she was then,
the tigress she is now,
her demands for the flesh,
grow by the motley second.
Moments remain,
till the explosion of love,
but she finds me inadequate,
she gets up and leaves.
The steam is burning,
but the heart drowns.
The room is dead,
her smell circles the grief mound.
You learn at 23:
1. Romantic Movies are bullshit.
2. Money is probably everything.
3. There's a deep intellectual person in you, but right now, it just wants more money to express itself.
4. New friends are suddenly untrustworthy. Guys are back stabbers and girls are bottomless bit*hes.
5. It's every man for himself.
6. How to work while being stoned/buzzed.
7. Lying is okay if it serves a deeper, self-justified purpose.
8. Society is another bullshit story. It's okay to do what you want to, till you feel it's right.
9. To respect the virtue of laziness.
10. To find happiness in mediocrity.
11. Using expensive phones is an illusion of appearing big-dicked.
12. Being rich would buy you more books, more movies, and more art. If you were richer, you'd decidedly be more well-read, well-informed and creative.
13. Get Rich or Die Tryin', or Do an MBA.
14. Losing your sleep is the worst thing you can do to yourself.
15. You'd give your left kidney to be a musician. Or, to get paid for what you love doing.
16. Parents are frighteningly responsible.
17. Sometimes, what you write is complete crap. There is no hidden adolescent significance in it anymore.
18. Why Beatles are Kings. And Queens.
19. Love and sex are threateningly symbiotic.
20. It's not always smart to end lists at authoritative figures like 10, 20, 25, 50 and 100.
The night is young,
It doesn't hold promises but.
The Day of my return,
is the Only constant but.
Tomorrow, a demon will rise,
Miserable and impotent but.
Envy beckons for friends who get to stay,
They are veteran nomads but.
Grief is a simplistic escape,
It is natural but.
The guilt of doing less slithers in swiftly,
tis not a revelation but.
Being more is a state of being,
it is no replacement for action but.
Bad poems are emotional diarrhea,
you just ate your heart out but.
You are Shiva's soul,
You are a scenery's flippant knoll.
The creator of all peace,
The doomsday of every discourteous civilization.
You're an earth crystal in the destiny's sands,
The shaken white of the most consequent quartz,
That completes the flawless utopia,
In the maestro's symphony of the beauty of sound.
You are not in me,
But in everything that envelops me,
Like an unrestrained and unconquered force of nature that writes,
Your name in the dew on my Life's Window.
[Ambar - Raghu Dixit inspires this line]
The inscrutable temptations of your eyelashes,
Reveal the resplendent felinity of your urging eyes.
I'd gladly read a 100 Quran, accept a thousand inferior rebirths, sacrificing myself on the altar of your labyrinthine tresses,
In the name of your ancient worship,
Stretched over a 100 generations of my spleenic devotion.
You have a heart of adventure,
And how you rub off on me.
The touch of your skin dances on my body,
Rinsing my thoughts of you with the fresh night's Cologne.
But it's time now to leave this heathen eulogy,
To cower back in the reins of reality.
As the grass stroking on my head.
Gently pushes me to sleep.
...
I wish I was not sitting in this class. I wish I was on the top of a waterfall, poised to jump the life out of my purposeless existence in a white-collar management establishment. A nameless, burgeoning voice is shouting in the halls of my depravedness; spewing out - positional authority, uselessly dissected practicality; traditional, clerical, technical methods to evaluate meaningless, empirical data – a white cloud of perspiring August Noise fills the room like my nightmares throng with sad promises of an average life.
Confused voices, unsure of their cradle and consequence, jet from above and behind, assuming their goals for their dreams. Their smiles are innocent, their minds are drifting, in a pale sea of imposed conformity. They are not to blame, they operate in a delirium. A delirium of a vague rapture, not of a calm trance.
But then, there's always the hot seniors. And so, tranquility sets in.
