one and one are two
a complicated mass of songs
singing through my hair
and a little whistle flows
through hers.
a symphony plays through
the wintry air and orange flowers
flow down in synchro.
miles of aromas, some shampoo
some morning breath, mingle
in still thoughts,an alchemy of colours,
disintegrating into a
monochrome of endless time.
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Monday, 29 September 2008
Travlegoues of an exiled mind - Part 2
Dilema of Duality
The best thing about being in exile is that you are have enough room to be self sympathetic. You say you love your place, the old village/town, the old air, the lack of frenetic pace. Hey! Hold on. Lack of frenetic pace!! And you love that? Then why the heck are you living in Mumbai? Or for that matter in any of the fast paced metros. Or A, B, C, D or any alphanumeric graded secondary city where at least you have to run to cross the road and not be able to amble across the tar slurping a choco bar. So, you love the lack of speed. But yet every morning you say that the bus is late, you run from your house grabbing the breakfast toast/idli/dhokla/roti roll. You 'wabble' in your ability to do things fast. You are smugly esconced in your pad every night which was possible only by your acquired ability to run fast. Yet, when you are milder in thought (sobriety, sometimes, being the driver of mildness) you pine for that - place of birth.
The 'problem' is we all do that, I do that. The reason is when you have enough to quench your apetiete for - food, success, money, fame, the works - then you start for other things. Call it Heizelberg's pyramid or any other theory. Vivekanada had said 'Do not teach spirituality to the hungry, you will gain nothing and neither will he.' We start to crave for the old road back 'home' when we see that we are STILL not happy with all that we have. And never will. What the comfortable familiarity of those 'left' roads and lands can give you, nothing else can. We do not actually want the smell of the land as such, but a quick runaway in mindspace. Well, MOST of the times. Naipual lives in far away lands and writes about how much ruined and wounded our civilisation is. Jhumpa Lahiri is stuck in the first gen/second gen dilema of every gen of the USA. Kafka ran off to the snow filled mountains of a different country and yet his the smells of his country that drove him to narcissist madness never left him. Heminway wrote in Africa from within the window frame from his American past.
There is no escape.
But for us lesser mortals, self sympathy - and immensely satifying at that - is what a sense of exile can give you. Nothing else. You can't go back home, you can't leave your adopted space. In someway, and very deep down, you actually love your new place. The duality of your origin and acquired surroundings can never let you rest in peace.
Paris is the city of love. But you can't love there, like the Parisians do. Because the air that enchants your senses and stimulates your sensuality should be saturated with mogra. It should be warmer, maybe with a hint of petrol smoke or burning coal. There, necessarily, should be ogling passersby (or even completely static loafers eating peanuts). Because therein lies your need for discretion in holding hands or putting his arm around her waist or her hand in his hip pocket. That makes the sweat of palms exchange each other, that makes the grip tantalisingly taut. But but but. When you are living in Paris, will you not kiss in public? You will. Because that's the 'freedom' you have seen on TV and the movies. You will love that. Yet you WILL pine for the 'restrictive' world of burdensome society to love in.
That's the seething duality that never lets you in peace.
How does that fit into self sympathy? Well that's a fringe benefit you extract from this dilema which you will never confess about. The fact that you will love in Paris and enjoy the pestilent race of your city/town, is disturbing. If you sometime acknowledge even the existence of this duality of thought, your uprootedness is vindicated. Complete and irreversible. Which you will never be able to come to terms with.
TBC ......
The best thing about being in exile is that you are have enough room to be self sympathetic. You say you love your place, the old village/town, the old air, the lack of frenetic pace. Hey! Hold on. Lack of frenetic pace!! And you love that? Then why the heck are you living in Mumbai? Or for that matter in any of the fast paced metros. Or A, B, C, D or any alphanumeric graded secondary city where at least you have to run to cross the road and not be able to amble across the tar slurping a choco bar. So, you love the lack of speed. But yet every morning you say that the bus is late, you run from your house grabbing the breakfast toast/idli/dhokla/roti roll. You 'wabble' in your ability to do things fast. You are smugly esconced in your pad every night which was possible only by your acquired ability to run fast. Yet, when you are milder in thought (sobriety, sometimes, being the driver of mildness) you pine for that - place of birth.
The 'problem' is we all do that, I do that. The reason is when you have enough to quench your apetiete for - food, success, money, fame, the works - then you start for other things. Call it Heizelberg's pyramid or any other theory. Vivekanada had said 'Do not teach spirituality to the hungry, you will gain nothing and neither will he.' We start to crave for the old road back 'home' when we see that we are STILL not happy with all that we have. And never will. What the comfortable familiarity of those 'left' roads and lands can give you, nothing else can. We do not actually want the smell of the land as such, but a quick runaway in mindspace. Well, MOST of the times. Naipual lives in far away lands and writes about how much ruined and wounded our civilisation is. Jhumpa Lahiri is stuck in the first gen/second gen dilema of every gen of the USA. Kafka ran off to the snow filled mountains of a different country and yet his the smells of his country that drove him to narcissist madness never left him. Heminway wrote in Africa from within the window frame from his American past.
There is no escape.
But for us lesser mortals, self sympathy - and immensely satifying at that - is what a sense of exile can give you. Nothing else. You can't go back home, you can't leave your adopted space. In someway, and very deep down, you actually love your new place. The duality of your origin and acquired surroundings can never let you rest in peace.
Paris is the city of love. But you can't love there, like the Parisians do. Because the air that enchants your senses and stimulates your sensuality should be saturated with mogra. It should be warmer, maybe with a hint of petrol smoke or burning coal. There, necessarily, should be ogling passersby (or even completely static loafers eating peanuts). Because therein lies your need for discretion in holding hands or putting his arm around her waist or her hand in his hip pocket. That makes the sweat of palms exchange each other, that makes the grip tantalisingly taut. But but but. When you are living in Paris, will you not kiss in public? You will. Because that's the 'freedom' you have seen on TV and the movies. You will love that. Yet you WILL pine for the 'restrictive' world of burdensome society to love in.
That's the seething duality that never lets you in peace.
How does that fit into self sympathy? Well that's a fringe benefit you extract from this dilema which you will never confess about. The fact that you will love in Paris and enjoy the pestilent race of your city/town, is disturbing. If you sometime acknowledge even the existence of this duality of thought, your uprootedness is vindicated. Complete and irreversible. Which you will never be able to come to terms with.
TBC ......
Saturday, 16 August 2008
untitled
this mind is such a philanderer.
tears, smiles, non-challance -
coy lasses with almost a
cavalier Parisian charm, lure him -
make him swerve, in sparse moments,
from one to the other
with a remorseless elan.
the mind thus cleaves my
sanity, over and over again.
a handsome and dandy parasite
clutching the daisy bunch
which I try to keep in bloom always.
tears, smiles, non-challance -
coy lasses with almost a
cavalier Parisian charm, lure him -
make him swerve, in sparse moments,
from one to the other
with a remorseless elan.
the mind thus cleaves my
sanity, over and over again.
a handsome and dandy parasite
clutching the daisy bunch
which I try to keep in bloom always.
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
untitled
the limit of patience lies
in the start of a scream.
once that is reached you
are impatient and hence criminal.
i am impatient and pensive
i am restive and soulful
i am impatient and criminal.
in the start of a scream.
once that is reached you
are impatient and hence criminal.
i am impatient and pensive
i am restive and soulful
i am impatient and criminal.
Dreams
There goes my little bee
A small wee bit of sleep
Out to search for honey and dreams
A little drop of nectar to feed
Babies and egoes.
Shining in the yellow sunlight
Stripes of clear clouds swallow
Blue skies.
Please let my love grow in
Shards of glass, shine in every mirror
Soak in honeyful catacombs
With all the babies and catacombs.
A small wee bit of sleep
Out to search for honey and dreams
A little drop of nectar to feed
Babies and egoes.
Shining in the yellow sunlight
Stripes of clear clouds swallow
Blue skies.
Please let my love grow in
Shards of glass, shine in every mirror
Soak in honeyful catacombs
With all the babies and catacombs.
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Travelogues of an exiled mind part I
I just went around the world, just a little bit. Saw things that I wanted to see all my life. This is a beginning of a process of posting thoughts that I wish to crystallize over time and mindspace.
It is the sense of exile that is sinking into me like a ikebana bouquet in a fertile soil; beautiful but sinking.
Christian art - Its simple, varied, within a few borders and repititive. It maybe because that it is just one figure that dominates the canvas: Jesus. Then he has his apostles and saints. Kings and queens jostle with Popes for space. Resuurection, the Virgin Mary and angels are spread all over the space as parboiled rice grains spread on tarpaulin - capable of quenching hunger, simplistically beautiful, numerous in form of the same thing.
I just hate Baroque art. Its claustrophobic in shine and excess of detail in cramped spaces. Grandeur is celebrated in gaudy explosions of an artist's sense of paean sining and history recording.
Loved seeing Dali's sculptures and his nauseatingly appealling obssession of the persistence of memory.
The theft of the East amazes me, and the gumption of flaunting them is even more amazing.
This brings me back to the sense of exile. Mental uprooting is worse than the exodus. It also gives a sense of freedom from all moorings. When do say that I belong? It is when you identify your existence with a world around you. I have thirteen different places to say I belong. Yet that can't be, paradoxically. So I belong nowhere. Its a rich emptiness like an aromatic vacuum - scaringly sparse and yet inescapable.
Going from existential angst I go into existential numb.
Will continue/
It is the sense of exile that is sinking into me like a ikebana bouquet in a fertile soil; beautiful but sinking.
Christian art - Its simple, varied, within a few borders and repititive. It maybe because that it is just one figure that dominates the canvas: Jesus. Then he has his apostles and saints. Kings and queens jostle with Popes for space. Resuurection, the Virgin Mary and angels are spread all over the space as parboiled rice grains spread on tarpaulin - capable of quenching hunger, simplistically beautiful, numerous in form of the same thing.
I just hate Baroque art. Its claustrophobic in shine and excess of detail in cramped spaces. Grandeur is celebrated in gaudy explosions of an artist's sense of paean sining and history recording.
Loved seeing Dali's sculptures and his nauseatingly appealling obssession of the persistence of memory.
The theft of the East amazes me, and the gumption of flaunting them is even more amazing.
This brings me back to the sense of exile. Mental uprooting is worse than the exodus. It also gives a sense of freedom from all moorings. When do say that I belong? It is when you identify your existence with a world around you. I have thirteen different places to say I belong. Yet that can't be, paradoxically. So I belong nowhere. Its a rich emptiness like an aromatic vacuum - scaringly sparse and yet inescapable.
Going from existential angst I go into existential numb.
Will continue/
Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Undulating lines
The catharsis of insolvent memories
Seeps out in tears and pretentious smiles
In Pather Panchali
In La Pieta.
Fields of brown singed grass
Flow over the taut bosoms of virgin
Mindspaces
Contemplating coition and moksha.
Semblances of sanity visit
Whistlestopping executives on Divine duties
Balancing up the piled up stones
Pyramids of hopes and supporting lies.
Still there exists my own grasps on reality
Clutching door knobs of rooms
Housing all dreams
Sheathed underneath mommy's saari. Safe.
Seeps out in tears and pretentious smiles
In Pather Panchali
In La Pieta.
Fields of brown singed grass
Flow over the taut bosoms of virgin
Mindspaces
Contemplating coition and moksha.
Semblances of sanity visit
Whistlestopping executives on Divine duties
Balancing up the piled up stones
Pyramids of hopes and supporting lies.
Still there exists my own grasps on reality
Clutching door knobs of rooms
Housing all dreams
Sheathed underneath mommy's saari. Safe.
Sunday, 9 March 2008
Love
If I could clad any emotion
It wouldn't be anger
But love.
But it prefers to be naked
Like a papier mache sculpture
In a chilly sleet.
I try hard to put a cloak on it
But it bares itself everytime
Exposing its gentle, docile bosom to
Virulent winds of wisdom.
Strnagely enough it still has survived
An oddly standing bronze satuette- Green
Amid a purple holocaust.
It wouldn't be anger
But love.
But it prefers to be naked
Like a papier mache sculpture
In a chilly sleet.
I try hard to put a cloak on it
But it bares itself everytime
Exposing its gentle, docile bosom to
Virulent winds of wisdom.
Strnagely enough it still has survived
An oddly standing bronze satuette- Green
Amid a purple holocaust.
Sunday, 13 January 2008
Lunchtime stories
Luncheon was served on round tables
With polished cutlery firmly esconced in
Starched napkins, warm and flaky.
When she started to eat her soup
She found two stories floating in the cream
Croutons of a melted past, downy.
She lifted them to her lips
Noth together on one large soup spoon
They dangled at the egde of her -
Pink lips, like petals of a morning dew stained
Rose, in full lustful bloom.
She strongly told them to keep quiet
But stories rarely know silence,
People all around her ate. Clinking and clanking
Tinkling and tankling, mimicking falling
Jewels on clean bone china bowls.
Stories, as they were, prevented her from
Savouring the presence of the soup.
An unseen tear drop met an unspent smile
Somewhere near the chin, exchanged pleasantries
And disappeared into an essence.
She forced the spoon into her mouth
Chewed the croutons and swallowed.
They tasted slightly bitter, like malt of a rare scotch.
Stories are delicious, smelling of a decadence of an
Alluvial mind on which harvets are all done.
With polished cutlery firmly esconced in
Starched napkins, warm and flaky.
When she started to eat her soup
She found two stories floating in the cream
Croutons of a melted past, downy.
She lifted them to her lips
Noth together on one large soup spoon
They dangled at the egde of her -
Pink lips, like petals of a morning dew stained
Rose, in full lustful bloom.
She strongly told them to keep quiet
But stories rarely know silence,
People all around her ate. Clinking and clanking
Tinkling and tankling, mimicking falling
Jewels on clean bone china bowls.
Stories, as they were, prevented her from
Savouring the presence of the soup.
An unseen tear drop met an unspent smile
Somewhere near the chin, exchanged pleasantries
And disappeared into an essence.
She forced the spoon into her mouth
Chewed the croutons and swallowed.
They tasted slightly bitter, like malt of a rare scotch.
Stories are delicious, smelling of a decadence of an
Alluvial mind on which harvets are all done.
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