clench-fist

Don't pour sand in the ocean,
let the wintersun pass by
don't wave goodbye to a jet,
a passenger might cry.

The tiny heart stretches the mind
to a place it doesnt belong
High above a maple tree
singing a hopeless love song

Grief swallows time
or time swallows grief,
a book too well-bound
often, makes it hard to read

just when i begin to wonder
All that's gone wrong in the world
I am struck by the flash
of a silver, silver mirror

My bones go weak,
shivering to the winter shrill
i am struck by numbness,
i find it hard to tell

And days leap to months
while i run aimlessly alone
to catch falling stars
and give up what i own

while the night performs seduction
in her own feline ways
a poet grasps for breath
Sweating in merciless May

Tracing the unworded skyline
of his clueless mind
Before storm decays memory
of a subliminal real time

My monumental romance

With little contemplation and a lot of monument-hopping in the last two days,I can confidently say monuments exhibit curious human traits- human relationships to be precise. Not collectively, but through fragments of memory one lives through in the course of the whole trip. The Jaipur monuments at first intriguedme with tantalizing sights offered by glossy guidebooks, like a cute face leering at me from a friend's facebook album. I wanted to meet him, touch him, experience all that the metaphorical wildlife does to your belly. My curiosity grew reading the generous words published about the monument(s) on the internet. There is never a dearth of romantic bloggers, Is there?. The ones who exhaust all the adjectives in their vocabulary within a word count of 100

Anyway, so I walked up to the guide enthusiastically to unveil the mystery around the monument I had scheduled for the day, this tendency being akin to the act of poking your crush's friends to know about him all that you could possibly know. The first date is likely to go awesome because you've built a stupendous image of the monument in your head. In my case,Jodha Akbar and Hum Saath saath hain forced me to overlook the tedious film production qualities, shepharding my eyeballs to the majestic visuals of the Rajput forts and palaces. I knew i was going weak in my knees. So on the first day when i visited the first monument here, I was essentially hyper as demonstrated by the incessant clicks of my camera.

What followed was the usual dating protocol. Looking was not enough, I wanted to feel the monument-throwing my palms on the walls, pillars and minarets. See it change its colours to the changing sky. As if turned into a possessive lover, I had issues with people thronging my monument. Any click that doesnt emanate from my camera is noise and must be avoided dutifuly. My romance with Jaipur monument picked up both fast and slow. The more i saw,the more i liked and the time it it rained,I felt the fall on my knees in need of a rose to complete the picture perfect.

After a couple of rounds however, i was beginning to get tired of the same stories echoed by a bunch of guides around. The dreamy romance was soon to be obscured by thoughts like How long would it take me to return? What if there are bats on the prowl, How much more is it left to visit?. But then being men of heart we dont stop meeting people and accumulating memories we're to savour in the casket of our pillow. It works the same way for monuments. If one offers ravishing view,the other compensates with its meticulous fine art. Like humans, monuments are not perfect but victims to poverty ill-health, negligence or simply fate.

Mankind is a virtue through the nature of its diversity and complexity. The word monument evokes the same sentiments in me. I fall in love, grow out of it,revisit it with a twinkle in my eye, reliving the rains that are never to come back yet never to be washed away.

#bagpackerdiary,N.India chapter
17.7.11

Diary of a dead gramophone

"As I sit beside an ageing evening
with dreamy eyes and folded palms
My heart races to forgotten melodies-
Of lovers , poets, mimes and whores.
Of multi-coloured bows, hats and cloaks
Their passion curled up in their beautiful souls
Their souls curled up in their passioned songs
Pleading for change like neglected bedcovers
Their vocals mellowed to honey-dew whispers"

In another L.P, you can feel their hormones swell up
Smelling like your favourite curry;
From the neighbour’s kitchen.
You savour the last notes of your favourite track;
Tasting much like the curry hung on your ringfinger.
That sullen, love-struck melody,
Conjures vivid summertime memory-
A walk on the beach under the silvery moon
You, him and Clapton’s croon

And when the world dwarfs you in dismaying ways,
Hope blares from the dying gramophone
To ward dust off from your blue suede shoes
Hurling you to tap those toes once more.
You’re now on the top of the world-
The ringmaster of your galaxy,
The shoeshine of the disco ball
You want to thank god
for the miracle named rock n roll.

"And tired when I sit beside an ageing evening
I no longer see plastered walls and plastic toys
But promissory kisses and long distant calls
Friends smoking in bars and lawns
Such were the 60’s that injected in our father’s vein-
The blinding (vowels in the) songs of fr-ee-d-om.
That held together tightly;
a generation in its flowy pants
and its immortal spirit."

Nightfall

A dungeon awaits at the dawnbreak,
Where dreams enter
Into rocky, rugged crevices
And look into the eye scathingly;
Oblivious to the temple bells
That roar and exasperate
onto the open fields
My dreams, like dead foetus
Flows into it
Namelessly
Leading me to the ocean of lament
In the hastily sinking universe.
At the dawnbreak-
eachday,
The world wakes up
to birds, beasts and bells
leaving me behind to
the sound of
a lonely lonesome tear.

His colours

Violet,
like a primrose growing in
the boulevard of your smile.
White,
When you turn the sky a canvas
and i draw you stars
Green,
The monsoon of our romance,
in the thick of May
Crimson,
the colour of solitude,
shared between you me and the sun
Purple,
The robe of my desire
you arouse me in now and then
Maroon,
When your words begin to sparkle
in the company of fireflies
Grey,
the weight of your thoughts
in the casket of your mind
Pink,
embossed on your palms,
the dreams you blossom every night
Yellow,
a cocktail of your pranks,
fruity marshmellows
Black,
the curtains that are drawn
before our ballet is performed
Blue,
the ocean of your existence,
i dip my toes in.

An evening

I will draw constellation
on your palm someday,
colours i will not reveal,
but leave your senses to fill.
For all the unspoken words,
I'll draw you a star
From the ink of the smile
you showered upon me

The story of half an M.A

This is a time-travel piece. Usually this kind of prose flood New-year editions of the overpriced glossy publications. On this blog, it is not aimed to sound celebratory, loathesome or tear-jerking. it modestly wants to talk about THE Jayenyoo Experience-which was the only buzz word in my processor a year back.

So i remember passing through sullen Bio-tech corrdiors- a place so morbid, likely to interest Ramsay Brothers to shoot their next film. The corridors raking of chlorine led me to a massive auditorium compound. Massive for a University charging measly 200Rs per semester tuition fee. The compound read School of Arts and Aesthetics gleaming on a sprightly sunny day. Nothing aesthetic about the defaced pillars that supported it though. It was our orientation session which left me more intimidated than what i had anticipated. The heavily kohled, Khadi-wearing Professors at once seemed the kinds who could prattle till the end of the universe, theorize about everything the universe is made of-from the fauvist palette of their blouses to How the auditorium can appear more Baroque and less of of hastily-constructed Catholic church. These were the more endurable fragments of the overheard faculty conversations, i am not kidding.

During the faculty introduction, the phrase "absent-presence" gained the widest currency, as four professors announced the news of their sabbatical and how we must make use of the time they're available on campus, in order to capitalize on their "absent-presence". The expression made little sense to me until this March, when Pinky-the cocky storyteller of a professor took a month off from his sabbatical to take lectures of ancient and Medieval Indian art. On the orientation day I also remember guffawing at the blue-eyed Bong professor whose deliberately ill-fitted blouses till date are severely distracting-taking my attention off her subject to scribbling Marlyn-Monroe type caricatures of her in transparent sarees. She is the daughter of Utpal Dutt. So just in case you stumble upon her pictures on page-three, do look out for her grey-blue contacts which will be far more aesthtical than the dirty-yellow ones, she wore on some days.

After the faculty introduction, it was our turn to introduce ourself. The Delhi crowd as expected appeared infinitely catty and smug, as their eyeballs trapezed to in all directions to take a look of who's who in the batch. The Bong gang clubbed together in one corner of the room uttered crisp yet over-deterministic sentences, throwing a reasonable competition to the Delhi gang on the decibel score. The Bongs accounting the faculty, constituted a majority here, reducing the introductions to bong or non-bong classification. i personally never paid heed to regional classification of a batch until the enormous regional segregation experiences in ACJ, not to miss the epic Tambrahm jokes that have now scaled popularity through their online presence.

The experience throughout the year has been more or less the same as day one except I engineered myself to be able to laugh at it. To stop for the pink bougainvilleas that soothe mind fatigued by churning term-papers in an assembly-line-production fashion. The space around the center stretches beyond what meets the eye, leaving enough room to drift away in a more poetic world of bougainvilleas and butterflies.