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Falling…………………..

If you ask for the precise moment in time
when it all began,
I shall not be able to tell

For I was always yours,
During the raging storms, the ghastly winds,
Complete in the arms of chaos.
One blob of mercury melting seamlessly into another.

Once you read my thoughts
Out of the tattered manuscript of mind
Your words fell like faint echoes
Before dissolving into an abyss.

Once we sank into that devious darkness
Trying to find our way out of these dark woods
Where we harbored ambiguity.
At the cross roads, you let go of my hand.

So we walked alone for a while, looking for
Deceptive way finders, erased landmarks
Through uncharted terrains, unmapped routes,
Remembering each other only through snapshots.

Searching for the castle we dreamt off, so often.
Our house of cards collapsed one day
with a single touch of realization.
We were lost, once again.

Perhaps it was then, that we realize
We had roamed around in circles
Like two leaves, carried back and forth, by the wind,
Hoping to come back to the beginning again,
To know each other for the very first time.

Communication Breakdown

The human animal is expressive. We started expressing ourselves through pictures, and drawings, storytelling through the generations, wrote cryptic massages on papyrus. Until one day the Chinese invented the paper and Gutenberg invented printing press in Europe. And that was the beginning of it all. Ability to have more than one copy of the same information spread that information far and wide from word of mouth and story-tellers to books and papers.

Hello darkness, my old friend,
Ive come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

A similar revolution came with the invention of the telephone and the Internet, the television and the radio. Each one with its own merits and demerits brought the world into our living room and information at our feet. And communication was never as easy as it is today. Just pick up that phone (mobile ) or just email /chat/ voice chat and there it is – almost anywhere almost anyone is always there to talk.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

And yet, in this era of global satellite connection are we slowly losing our ability to communicate successfully?
Is the message getting across the same way we want it to be?
Are we mis-communicating?
Or have we simply lost the human touch?

Fools said i,you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence.

Face to face conversation has several advantages – eye-contact, face reading, body language. Much is said through the unspoken words. Much is understood without even trying to read minds.
As our lifestyle spins at nerve-racking speed, and no one has any time or energy or the effort to understand another human being.
Telephone, Internet, email and chatting has connected the world but have they really brought anyone any closer?
Are we beginning to grow apart with our inability convey what our eyes speak or our minds read over the phone or chat?
Its just a voice at the other end and that voice sometimes shows a range of emotions that are indefinable or even sometimes misleading.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whispered in the sounds of silence.

But what can we do. The good old letter writing days are over. With globalization, families and relations spread all over the world, relationships are locked up like Genie in a bottle waiting for a chance to get out of the box and face the person in flesh.
As our work, and other errands take us away from our near and dear ones, it becomes a constant battle to keep the flow of communication alive and kicking without any traces of mis-interpretations. That is the curse of the modern mechanized world – where one hears but no longer listens, speaks but no longer communicates.

There is no silence, but then there is no satisfaction also.

Oodles, poodles, noodles, and scroodles

My take on criticing some recent Hindi Movies………….

Love Story 2050
If you a movie buff with serious intentions, then this is puke stuff. Stay away. As for people like me, who can watch any damn junk in order to extract a few laugh out of life this was just the perfect piece of garbage. The title of the movie says Love Story 2050 and so I was pretty eager (in an amused way) to see what kind of 2050 , the bozos of Bollywood come up with. Sadly the entire first half of the movie in set in 2008. WTF…….so I had to hang around even after the interval and watch Harman Baweja , who by the way looks like a clone experiment gone wrong, transported to 2050 by a very funky time machine which runs on the principles of 10^th standard physics. Even I could have invented that one!!!
Anyways from the angular sideburns to v-necked tight-fitting t-shirts to dance moves Harman tries to mimic Hrithik, and comes out as a really poor carbon copy out a Xerox machine that clearly needs repair. I wonder what made Priyanka sign in this movie. Or act this inanely dotty. And yes, what’s with the red hair color? Other than that 2050’s Mumbai seems to have a lot of flying cars and androids with names like “Cutie”, “Sexy” and talking-walking Teddy Bears. So are we going to make funny toys in the next 50 years or the Bollywood directors are just plain nuts?
Boman Irani is sadly wasted in the role of a scientist with a bad hairstyle like Einstein, (oh, the man is turning in his grave). Everything else is a rip off from Hollywood sci-fi movies. To add icing to this ghastly cake there are corny dialogues like “I don’t need luck, I have love” etc etc. Warning : Stay away. Stay away.

Jaane Tu ….Ya Jaane Na.
Old wine in a new and improved bottle. Very nice. Story line is highly predictable, thankfully much less melodramatic. One of the highlights of the movie being the peppy song called “ Pappu can’t dance..” Everything else is innocent teenage stuff (with Archie-Jughead-Veronica-Betty kind of characters) reminding me of my Mills and Boon days and of looking at the world through heart shaped eye goggles. Imran Khan looks as cute as Aamir Khan in QSQT only I wish we didn’t have to wait the next 10 years for him to act in movies like Lagaan, DCH etc.

Race
Whats up B? Do we really have to make movies that has no story, no script and no meaning what so ever? Just a lot of odd twists and turns thrown in at every corner and people killing other people with a proverbial drop of a hat. Its not a good idea to mix Biriyani with Manchurian chicken, the recipe usually is unpalatable. And to have every kind of action flick thrown in, cars flying crashing, people dying and then coming back from the dead, plot within plot, wheels within wheels leaves one longing for a cool-off with a grenade and burning the screen down to ashes. I recommend aspirin instead of the popcorns.

Tashan
Did anyone really get this movie?
The first half an hour of watching this movie severely affected my sense and sensibility and I never reached the end of this gimmick for fear of losing my sanity.

Self and its nemesis

Like so many of you, I have been caught up in the frenzy of the latest Batman movie. The critics are going gaga over Heath Ledger’s stunning/ scary performance of the joker in “The Dark Knight”. After watching the movie, I am left with no doubt about the well-deserving accolades and back slapping he would have received, had he been alive.

He was, in a way, the true hero of the movie. And by calling him the Hero, I shall now (re)define our cleashade notions of a hero and a villain, the good and the bad, the black and the white. Indeed, as is evident in our recent literature, movies, the edges are beginning to blur, the colors are seeping in through the cracks, and characters are increasingly showing tendencies of oscillating between their dark side and their white face. These trapezing of personalities were unheard of a few years back, but then that was before the discovery of psychology with a silent P.

So now, as that silent P is vociferous enough to grab our attention, I blend my passion for psychology and my fixation for Superheroes again. The Greek Mythologies were all about the Gods in the skies who occasionally wavered in the degrees of goodliness, the demons and monsters which were killed by some hero of formidable power.

Even in our Hindu mythology, Ram was the great, do-gooder, the infallible giant of a man while Ravana was the archetypical bad man with no morals. Or was it? Even though the story of Mahabharat and Ramayana, occasionally described the noble righteous man being lured into misdemeanor as Yusdhisthir was, so many times, but there was always a plausible explanation of his fall from grace. Between the good and the ugly, there was the bad, the man wronged by society like Karna or the man trailed by misfortune like Achilles.

And our heroes remained in their imperial throne of honor –their authority unquestioned. Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hide was a weak attempt to recognize the saturnine side of our personality but it had to be legitimatized with an answers, an experiment gone wrong. The reason why Mr Hide existed was not intrinsic but extrinsic.

Bizarre but true, when Sigmund Freud first came up with his theories of an unconscious mind it was thought to be outrageous. His Identity, ego, and super-ego was a preposterous truth that the world took some time to swallow.

It was been only recently, that we have been truly comfortable with the psychology of the mind where good and evil presides side by side and one can over take the other as easily as water over rocks. Not only that, like our heroes, our villains are now cherished, sympathized and understood.

So there it is, our great superhero Batman, which his insatiable drive to restore good and justice in Gotham city and his nemesis the The Joker, the Penguin, the Two Faced, the Scarecrow, the Riddler and an whole gamut of villains who challenge his superhero powers or rather stoke his “Superhero Complex”.

You see, now psychology has a plausible interpretation of the Goodie-too-shoes as well. And hence, Batman is a tormented soul, traumatized by the murder of his parents in his early childhood, venting his helplessness and seeking vendetta by wearing tight-fitting body suits and flying from roof tops at the dead of the night to kill gangsters. He has no personal life, his identity is vehemently kept discreet, and he is a compulsive law abider and enforcer. Now that sounds a little weird and abnormal, not a least bit like the hero we could venerate.

What’s modern psychology done to us? Has it put us categorically in different bottles with different labels and expiry dates? Name tag does not count, the whole lot has a brand name – psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic, schizoid, narcissistic, egoistic, Electra complex, Oedipus complex etc etc.

So now that we all have been cauterized and stamped into shelves and cans where does that leave us? It fogs the line between the hero and the antihero, the good and the bad, and puts it across as a clash of two different ideologies. Indeed, the fist fight in Dark Knight was an arms-race to prove who’s right. Was it the Batman , the incorrigible busy-body who’s compelled to follow rules and order or was it the Joker who said that the world is an inherently chaotic place and everyone could fall from grace under certain circumstances?

The war is inside and hence it continues. Such is our understanding of the dark side of our mind, that ironically the word “insane” is nowhere found in the dictionary of psychology. So if everything has a reason and a clinical definition and being sane is purely subjective, where does that lead us?

Further into the dark, maybe.

How long can a Minute be?

Now that I have a stiff neck and loads of time, I am thinking more and more upon the subject of illusiveness of time. Time as we know it, is omnipresent and irreversible extension of human perception and nature. The more I think of it, more I am perplexed by the fact that a simple word called “Time” whose presence is taken for granted everyday holds such mystery.
From cradle to grave we are affected by the chronology of time. We mature, we grow old, and we die all in the course of this “flow of time”. And yet we do not know what this time is? We have invented clocks to mark the hours in a day, calendars to celebrate years, achieves, museums, newspapers to document the works and happenings of centuries, millennium and eons. And yet we are bound to the hands of the clock like a dog to a lease.
Different people may judge identical lengths of time quite differently. Time can “fly” or “drag,” according to our perception of it. When we are in love, we think time stands still. When we are happy we feel time has gone too fast. On a dull day, time slows down for us. We measure short time in seconds, minutes, hours and then again on a grand scale in years, decades, centuries and eons. When kept waiting at the bus stop, we feel, time has halted forever. When on a holiday in the beach we feel that the weekend went by too fast. When sitting for a boring lecture, we wish to have that invisible remote to fast forward the day. And then again, in human perceptions, we value some of our times more than the others – and distinguish them as moments and minutes. Moment is a minute that holds in our memory forever. And many such moments make our lives. Collective moments of our lives make our history.
Newton, in formulating the basic concepts of classical physics, compared absolute time to a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. This linear flow of time was called the “Arrow of time” by Newton. Time appears to have a direction – the past lies behind, fixed and incommutable, while the future lies ahead and is not necessarily fixed. Then came Einstein and changed our understanding of time forever. His theory of relativity reshuffled our given notion of absoluteness of time. Time depends upon the observer; he said that “The only reason for time to exist is so that everything does not happen at once”. He gave a chance of reversing the order of cause and effect. And that time is relative to the observer. Astronaut in space age slower than their fellow humans on earth is a proven fact. So if time is a pretzel, knotted, tangled and twisted to various shapes can we travel backwards or forwards in time?
We have always been time travelers, in the sense that we are always traveling forward into future. But can we control the speed of this travel. Can we jump from today to 50 years from now and still be of the same age (more importantly alive)? Or go back into the past and witness the rise and fall of empires, turning points in human history? Can we even invent a time machine to do so? Can we go back into the past and prevent HG Wells from writing his book “The Time Machine”? Or can we go back in time to see the earth being formed in a Big Bang explosion? Stephen Hawking commented that trying to ascertain what happened before time began is like trying to find out what is north of the North Pole, and that such questions are self-contradictory.
And it also creates the famous “Time Paradox” or “Grandfather Paradox” which is a problem of round squares. “Suppose you did have a time machine right now, and you could step into it and travel back to some earlier time. Your actions in that time might then prevent your grandparents from ever having met one another. This would make you not born, and thus not step into the time machine. So, the claim that there could be a time machine is self-contradictory.” What would be the consequences, if we had the power to go back in time and change our course of actions at free will? Would we loose our sense of responsibility if we knew we can redirect our fate by altering events preceding and following our present?
And if we have mastered the art of time travel in our distant future, then where are the tourists from the future? Personally, I would like to scoot down a Black Hole and go back to witness some great time in human history, provided I am not dissipated into a million sub-atomic particles. But to keep things simple and logical, I shall conclude with my roommate’s definition of time, “How long is a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you are in!!!!”

"Unbearable Lightness of Being"

So it happened, that last week I graduated and suddenly I discovered that I have a whole lot of free time in which I can do nothing. Now, nothing turned out to be scary word.

There is absolutely nothing to do now. And things that I longed to do during my thesis writing (like movie watching, writing, sleeping, reading etc) proved boring now. Possible because, what we are not supposed to do holds a certain charm for us, and once we loose that charm, those things are no so much exciting anymore.
So, anyways, I started reading this book called “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera. I finished it as fast as I could. I remembered how I had longed to sleep for 20 undisturbed years like Rip Van Winkle and wake up as child ( 20yrs earlier, not later, of course) only to wake up 2hrs later with a terrible cramp in my neck that made me tilt my head at 45 degree angle as I spoke (like Dev Anand) for the next 2 days.
This doing nothing is indeed becoming unbearable.
Then, I recalled one of the lines from the book, “what happened once might never have happened at all”, and I realized that this might be my last chance to unwind. And so, I am going back to enjoy doing nothing and meanwhile I shall leave you with these nice quotes from the book –
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”

“Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.”

“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy:
happiness is the longing for repetition.”

“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

On sex and the city

I was informed about 4 years ago that there is this mega soap on HBO called “Sex and the city” about four single women trying to find love in the big bad world of NY. Along with this simple tag line I was told that the soap definately lives up to its name – all for love and finding “true louve” of course.
Curious as hell, I started to watch. After watching the entire first two seasons I could almost predict what is going to happen next in each scene.
In the beginning it was quite impressive – Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) walking confidently along the streets of Manhattan dressed like a damsel and then bus drives by splashing water on her, while the add on the bus flashes ” Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex.”
Does she? I have no doubts left after finish up all the episodes with patience. All the four characters – Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda, who gets lots of sex and no love. Which brings me to think that if the lead characters where male the soap would have been called ” Love and the city” in which the four lead male characters would get lots of love and no sex.
Anyways, talking about “Sex and the city” I watched four very well to do, good looking, fashionable women whining and cribbing about men in their lives, sighing and crying for the perfect guy with whom they can in love with.
And in their quest, they drop boyfriends at the drop of a hat, dump guys like they dump their twice worn designer dresses.
Holly, golly, rolly, polly……………does this even look anything close to reality? Does this even say anything about what women wants? Nooooooooooo.
Firstly, most women do not have such high standards mainly because they have no idea that such high standards exist.
Secondly, yes behind all the steamy sex, glitz and glamour, they are four women who claim to be independent and yet want men in their lives to make them complete.
Thirdly, where looks kill, flashy clothes and three inch heels say it all, there is no room for intelligence.
So I don’t know if the four girls in Sex and the city got their closer, but I did not get any. Possibly because, I did not wait long enough, to watch the last season, but certainly I did not find it worthwhile.
It amuses me why Carrie Bradshaw, who knows good sex should have anything to crib about.

My unabridged self : cont…….

It has been ages since I opened word document and sat down to write something. And how I missed it. Fifteen minute later I was still looking at the black page – am I just out of touch or did I have my first writer’s block? I sat reading some of my earlier posts hoping to get a head start. A year ago I had written My unabridged self. And now I decided to continue with it again, hoping, perhaps this will lift the curfew in my brain.
I have been soul searching lately. Not an easy thing to do mind you. It is like driving through thick mist at night trying to look at the traffic signals. High beam doesn’t help coz more often its blinding.
So what emerged out the precious time that I spent introspecting, (when I could have worked, instead), I’d say that the process was more rewarding than the result. The result was irrelevant. Afterall, I am what I am. Taking a tour of my own self is like an infinite regress through the neurons of my brain. It is as if I am attempting to solve a problem which re-introduced the same problem in the proposed solution. If one continues along the same lines, the initial problem will recur infinitely and will never be solved.
If I suddenly discover today that I am maniac or a neurotic, there is no ways I could alter it. I could take a few drugs, yes, go into therapy/yoga/meditation or whatever people do under such circumstances, but I’d still remain what I was/ am.
So that got me thinking, why do we want to change? I cant we accept what we are? If we are constantly trying to mould and cast ourselves according to our environment then aren’t we loosing a bit of ourselves every time? Self improvement is a good thing is but provided you don’t lose yourself. And yet again, if we remain what we are, refuse to change we become rigid. Evolutionary scientists call it walking on edge of chaos. Our gene and behavior respond and mutate with the environmental change, but if we alter too much we are in for trouble, too little we become extinct.
As the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland said: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep yourself in the same place”. And so it is with coevolution. Evolutionary changes are required to stay in the same place. Cessation of change may result in extinction. I couldn’t have agreed better.
I am the former kind. I love to change. Versatility is in my bones. In fact I am obsessed with novelty and change so much that I feel inadequate if change does not occur at regular intervals. Monotony is appalling. Mundane existence puts me off and turns me into a rock – cold and depressed. Anxiety attacks set it when things don’t change, and when they do I am over excited.
I am the chameleon that is disturbed and confused if its environment changes too often.

I have a fleeting interest in any and everything, a superficial knowledge about all, I love flitting from project to project as apparently purposelessly as a butterfly dancing from flower to flower. Life is a game which must always be full of fresh moves and continuous entertainment, free of labor and routine. Changing horses in the middle of the stream is another small quirk in the bigger scheme of things. Depths frighten me, but heights makes me elated, which why I love the mountains more than the sea. The sea reminds me of the bottom of the ocean, the endless abyss, which can suck me in like a centrifuge and I might never get out of the whirlpool. I embrace the open inviting arms of the mountains, the mystery, the fortitude, the resilient force, a forbidden territory that my must traverse. So also, I eagerly sink my teeth into any new information, a little later move on to the next table.
How I love the little oddities of this world – the creased abnormalities and anomalies that peaks and wans on the surface of this convoluted tapestry. String theory is believable only when there are no strings attached, – only if you choose to believe in the initial assumption and hypothesis that the universe that we live in nothing more than a hologram. There is always a duality of either/ or and neither/ nor that intrigues me.
Only if we choose to understand that perfection is an exception not a rule – things are supposed to be screwed up and eschewed, like the scientist who designed the best android on earth realized that he has forgotten to put the switch to turn it on.
As I grow older, I feel more and more frequently that like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, I’ve gone some kind of rabbit hole and emerged into some bizarre universe that makes me wonder if I am hallucinating. No, alas, there’s no one to blame for my warped perceptions than myself, coz the world is the same old smug ball of wool. It’s just that I see it differently. I see the world has an unexplored alien spacecraft that has landed into my backyard by mistake. I am a wide-eyed wandered. My world is as dramatic as psychedelic lights in a discotheque. It’s hard to tell where reality ends and illusion begins. They blend-then they separate.
The gypsy woman knows that she is capable of premonition only through a crystal ball, and I know that I am nothing without my mindscape. If every person speaks a volume if you care to listen. Without my mind, I am a caterpillar without its cocoon, a totally vulnerable and insecure green wobbly grub.
I believe, my mind is a giant octopus that engulfs itself. The gnarly tentacles that germinates within the two hemispheres and threatens to conquer the world…………….it starts here, from one atom, one molecule that nourishes like a virus on a living organism and then takes the shape of a troll.
I have that nasty habit of reading the last page first. No, don’t roll your eyes at that, what’s there in knowing the end, when the journey is more important. No one gets out of it alive, so why take life seriously? There is no suspense, no melodrama, only a karmic connections, a series of events – a cause and effect relationship. So what if I know the effect first and the cause later.
So what if I am a quicksilver character, cool and willful at one moment, utterly fragile the next, isn’t it what everyone wants – masquerade for every occasion, a personality makeover for every season? The one word to describe myself would be “ambiguous” I am made of two halves that are at constant fiction with each other. Fighting for space, time and dominance, like two twins in a womb. Until one takes over the other – like phases of the moon and the tide they rise and fall, wax and wane.
One fine day, you might find me benevolent, congenial, chirpy, vivacious and full of talks with energy that fairly snaps, crackles and pops in the air. Other days I am just as gloomy as the winter weather, hibernating in the deeper sub-strata of my mercurial mind. Be sure, it is the “to be or not to be” dilemma.
The conservative stick-in-the-muds put me off. I am all for novelty and variety. And I am a traveler not a tourist. Some days I wander off into the uncharted territories of space, the other days I submerge deep into the darkness of ocean. My horizon is made of elastic – it stretches far and beyond the visible ranges. In the ranges of maxima and minima. At first there were squares and circles and now there is tesseract. What’s next on the menu? You wouldn’t even guess!
The grass always looks greener just across the road. The sky is bluer across other ocean. The sun shines brighter in a different place. What do I seeks? Perhaps some hidden, undiscovered, parallel universe within myself. I am a mental explorer. My mind is my Magnum Opus. It is my lethal half. It is my salvation. It is my doom. It is the megapolis of ideas – of what I perceive of this pale onion world.
It lives coz I let it live. And in doing so, I tear myself away from profound happiness and contentment. If that’s the price I pay for being able to see both sides of coin then so be it. There is no one answer to my questions. There is no right or wrong, simply a collection of realizations.
If you knew the address of Neverland, you would decide not to grow up. Its Peter pan syndrome – growing old but not growing up. Youth never dies, only humans do. That’s my mojo.
A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”
“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Who needs proof when the story is so good?
It rings true like a good china vase.
Both truth and reality are illusions you see.

Embryonic Eye

From the bottom of the pool
amoebae crawls out of their secure nucleus,
looks at the world through their embryonic eye.

Throughout the centuries our frugal existence
have be largely ignored,
our hopes and aspirations smothered.

Now simplicity of our days are dawning,
we shall wriggle our way up the pyramid
to overthrow the empire of giants.

Now is that time.
The time is now.
Our voice is now one – voice of million minions.