Advice

"Distance, like darkness and disease, amplifies"

Some Are Too Intelligent! Really Envious

Sample 1
Frothing at the mouth like convulsing rabid dogs and neighing horses it was a race and thoughts unreined galloped and sped towards his open arms robes fluttering caught in a sudden tempest a sand storm clogged his mouth and her eyes the sand always a fine sheen of it over every surface yet in the desert troubled thoughts were tendrils of passion that sought his inert form he moved and each movement was a groan from the bowels of the desert the life that he shed like moulting skin far behind lifeless soulless sleepwalking her fervid thoughts that reached out to him in thick coils ignored one step and the next and the next yet he knew not the destination

Sample 2
Meditations - bigoted curs foaming in travail;
Vestment moulded by an impetuous khamsin;
Amative endeavours by ringlets of passion
to ingress an exanimate umbra, futile.

Sample 3
Spilttle glinted on her pearl-like teeth flanked by labial folds of cerise. She thought of his dark, sinuous movements above her prone self. Though the traction traced searing trails on her quivering tissues, the atramentous silhouette that rhythmically shifted above her would remain obdurate. Like a sumpter of moira, with no terminus.

Common comment on all of the above: Exquisite craftsmanship. Humbled by your command over the language/vocabulary. Adopt me, I am your fan, Wowowow.

GAHH!!!

:(

What's in a Name?

Online nicks say so much about a person. We start at the base of the pyramid. That is where the home_alone_with_cam's congregate. Run an eye up to see the cool_dudes and glam_chicks. Then we have the elegant versions, the queens and kings and knights, where the names are distinctly feminine or masculine, but not screaming blatant desperation. And what about the abstruse and the vague, whose only aim seem to be obfuscating the relatively simple concept of claiming an identity? Mysterious, magical, recondite, doubtful personae. Then there are the pretenders. Quite a daring bunch -- for unlike a child named Subbalakshmi who can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but who can conveniently blame her parents for inflicting the torture of having to lug around such an unlikely name on her unworthy shoulders, the pretenders have the self-imposed duty to live up to the name that they have chosen for themselves. Though the desire to be someone else is shamelessly evident in such an endeavour, admiration is due to those who are able to do justice to their nicks.

Those on top of the pyramid are those who choose to be known as who they really are. They are no night riders or street hawks or Paris Hiltons. They claim responsibility for their actions, opinions, creations. Brave enough to discard their masks and reveal themselves as they are, in this parallel universe of masquerades.

PS: Sola Vivit In Illo
because I believe that to be true, (hopeless case seems like)
and also because
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur

Unloved

She was cursed by Love once. Love, in the pale blue flaming chariot, rode up to her and jabbed his fiery fingertips into her eyes, blinding her. Love hated her. So he blinded her.

So, in her blind world, she felt her way around. At times she rested by the flowing brook. The brook flowed with blood, it lapped at her feet and tainted her dainty toes. The crimson in her soul slowly trickled down to join the brook.

Love chided her for being dark and brooding. He twisted his fingers into her hair, his fiery fingers singed her scalp. And her eyes bled with tears. Love was disgusted at this pitiable show of passion.

Her face was tilted towards the warmth of Love. Love shone as a sun in her sky. Then Love shone brighter and her skin burnt crisp, bones burnt to cinders. She did not cry out in pain, for she feared Love’s wrath, she feared Love’s derision.

Love knelt by her and spat on her. “My Love, My Love”, she cried, wretched woman that she was. Love paid no heed, he did not need to.

Then Love draped a dirty, purple rag about her and tied her hands to his chariot with a silky rope that held false promises of tenderness. Her head was bowed and she knelt beside the chariot, as it began to move, slowly at first then picking up speed. Her knees were bruised, she got to her feet and started running.

And then Love dragged her, along the slush of her discarded prayers and devoted offerings. The oil that she had meant to anoint his head mixed with dirt now, coating her skinned knees.

Then they reached the town square. Love paused, theatrically. His face showed contempt and triumph. He had triumphed once again, as he always does. The townsfolk cast their slippers at her and they spat in contempt. The women crossed themselves for finding themselves safe and sound, as far away from her as possible for they feared she’d taint their homes. The men jeered at her for they were angered by her devotion to Love. And for they never found such naked adoration in their wives’ eyes as they found in the blind woman’s. The eunuchs laughed at her, they berated her loudly for letting herself be humiliated thus.

Love then locked her up, in a dark dungeon. His prize catch – the unloved.

Young Thung Who Cares - I do, I think

“Ready to take serious action against wrinkles?”

I nod my head vigorously and look up from Vikram Seth’s ‘Collected Poems’, and Claudia Schiffer goes on to explain how L’oreal’s collagen bio-spheres (?) plump up skin from underneath to bring about ‘visible reduction in wrinkles’. It’s not that I am wrinkly and crinkly and am in dire need of a face lift. No. Yet, I am riveted by the wrinkle-reducing ads and I find myself wondering if they work or not and what would be the right age to have a laser face thingy that supposedly blasts off the surface layer of skin and brings out pink baby skin from underneath. Am I that shallow? Well, seems like it. Am I ashamed of being shallow? Well, not really.

But it sets me thinking: what marks the mental transition from young to not-so-young-anymore? I used to feel that I was an old hag when I was 25. I have grown half a decade older. I guess the moment I turned 30 I told myself that I am not young-young anymore. I have begun to really grow old. Does that bother me? A tad, I suppose, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it.

I once knew this person who went on and on and on and ………… on about his turning 40. He had churned out a heap of poems and blog posts about this very significant event and I remember being mildly irritated by it. Though, I hasten to add, I understood, as I do now, exactly where he was coming from. It’s his utmost concern about his bald spot and his fading youth that really opened my eyes to the fact that men are equally vain about their youth and good looks as most women are, if not more.

What is it about old age that we foolish mortals dread so? Perhaps, we are afraid of becoming less attractive. And why does it matter if we do become less attractive? Why attract? Instinctually speaking – to consummate that attraction. To procreate. Bleeeugggghh. So man lives just to create and tend to the progeny? Then what of the noble ‘purpose in life’ that us stupid lot so earnestly seek? Your purpose in life is to raise your child(ren)? Sounds very much like my mom.

Are we worried about losing our health? Being dependent on someone? But that is too far off, and what does that have to do with wrinkles anyway? Or does the (beginning of) loss of youth trigger some neurological, biological reaction in us? Are we wired to respond to it and recognize this so we can take preventive actions in time to safeguard our health, if we so desire?

Or is it just that we are so conditioned by the modern world that we live in, that there is this very real pressure to look good and be young with flawless skin and svelte body. If we did not have the media constantly bombarding us with lascivious tidbits of firm female bottoms in thongs and muscular male torsos, would we worry so much about one wrinkle that has not even made its appearance? Now, I am not berating the media for this unbearable torture. Give us more, I say, and for obvious reasons.

At the end of it all, the only person who would be concerned about my growing old is me. Those who love me would love me still; the indifferent and the haters would go on being indifferent and hateful.

And that goes for all of you as well. It doesn’t really matter if you grow old. If you want to have the wrinkles nuked, go ahead. If you want to proudly display them, do. A wrinkle or two on one’s face or the lack of it, ultimately makes no bloody difference. So, might as well NOT have any wrinkles, what? Heh!

The Team Leader

And then he swaggers in. His hair is gelled into spikes that gives his face a boyish charm. An unruly schoolboy wearing a man’s clothes. His niceness that I used to find so appealing now irritates me. He wears it like a mask; he wears it well.

His gait is confident, measured: tailored to emit silent messages of his capabilities, his 'leadership skills'. He walks like a man destined for higher things in life, who for the moment is doing his rounds on the training floor; with a resignation that comes from the knowledge that to get to the top of the ladder, one has to start from the lowest rung. The patience of a saint.

I am suddenly overcome by a strange urge to run to him, land a heavy one square on his jaw and scream that he is a loser, a goddamn fake article. It makes me nauseous.

But I see him flash his trademark fake smile, eyes all crinkly and creasing into two thin slits on his face. He croons, ‘Hello sweetheart, how are you?’, and I croon right back at him, ‘I am good, sweetie, how are you?’. I know now that he is fake. Does he know yet that I am too?

Midnight Binge

Working in a call centre does bring about certain less than desirable changes in the body clock. That is anybody’s guess. Well, I am no exception. When I started out on this job I grew progressively weaker, plagued by headaches and my naturally frail constitution did not help matters. I might be blessed with the tenacity of a bulldog, but not its stamina. The long and short of it all is that at the moment I do not eat, sleep or behave in a manner like normal humans do. Waking up at 12 o clock in the afternoon and groaning about the fact that there’s only 2 more hours left till I have to get dressed and climb into the van is not a pleasant thing to do. And I do that every single day, with no exception even on a Friday.

I have also come to believe that normal hunger patterns somehow wither away like a dried up mass of weeds, from us call center animals. Nobody is hungry at the right time. And we all work when we are supposed to eat, eat when we are supposed to sleep and sleep when we are supposed to be doing something constructive like the rest of the world does.

Like yesterday I came home famished. Normally I find a chicken-roll on the table, I warm it up in the microwave and that should be sufficient for a good night’s sleep. But yesterday, I had the usual chicken-roll and two musambis, I still wanted more. Well, it’s just the excitement of a weekend, I thought. But it was not so as I found out half an hour later. Sleep was not about to bless me kindly until I did something about my drooling tongue and mind. So I shuffled into the kitchen and set about making one of the most delicious meals ever. Yum. A huge, I mean huge heap of steamed, buttered vegetables, 10 cocktail sausages fried to perfection and two scrambled eggs. I ate it all. I mean, I am the kind of person who would consider one scrambled egg to be a satisfying meal, but I binged like there was no tomorrow. I was an animal. By the end of it, I couldn’t move. I could barely drag myself to bed and when I did I found myself unable to sleep again. But I ate. Somehow that made me happy. I ate well. I loved it. I yam luving it. I work in a call center. That my bahaana is.

Musings @ Work

Fraud Prevention has caught my fancy of late. Also Risk Management. I trawl the Net and procure tomes of material, print them out and set about reading. Premise being that the wealth of knowledge that I assimilate now, will be of use sometime in the future - when I chair a meeting or when I make strategic decisions that will have far reaching implications. Heh.

But come to think of it, I am not too sure about the wisdom of my choice. Fraud – if I knew how to suspect and uncover ‘deliberate actions with an intent to deceive’ I would have kept away from many a persons and watched my back. Risk – if I knew how to manage that, heck, I wouldn’t even be here reading fraud-risk crap and dreaming about something that might happen in the distant future if a lucky shooting star condescends to drop on my head. If only I knew how to assess the consequences and risks of a few actions of yore!

Sigh. Wisdom dawns only when senescence yawns.

Workspace

I don’t have a cabin. Not yet. But I have a great view from where I sit in the office. I can see the sea, machaa! Can it get any better?

I sit facing a huge glass window and the view is fabulous. When I look out through the window, beyond the greenery, beyond buildings that get progressively tinier, the sea is a blue ribbon in the horizon. Sometimes, on clear days, I can even see ships sailing by. In the night, the view is better, especially so out in the balcony. Catamarans light up the dark black sea in pinpricks of light. And when night falls, you are sandwiched by the starry sky above and the dark sea below. It feels as though you are enfolded by two layers of black starry night.

Penis Power

A colleague narrates a story. About a woman in his previous organization who became a victim of the all too common rumour monster. The lady in question apparently had some domestic issues which she openly discussed or mentioned at work. To stay away from home, she stayed back at the office doing extra assignments that she solicited, got herself involved in cultural activities, Fun Clubs etc. And the rumours started. Loose woman, she’s going around with someone in the office, she’s available… I don’t need to explain. The situation got so bad she had to quit.

The colleague who narrated this had finally ended up helping her get a new job so she could get away from the previous office and start a blemish-free life. She would obviously walk on egg-shells, watch her step, be a recluse, and stop getting involved in Fun Clubs and cultural activities. Then she would probably go back to being the cultured Indian woman that she was supposed to be in the first place.

I am not even going to go into what-if-it-was-a-man chant. It would be pointless anyway. What would I accomplish? Who would I change? The most I can hope to gain is to get my frustrations out by talking about it in a blog that nobody even knows about, let alone read.

Maybe about a couple of hundred years later, one might be able to buy ready-made penises. Stick one on your crotch and then you are immune to rumour mills. In fact you would be lauded for your exploits. A woman with a stick on penis can stay back late at work and she would then be appreciated for her hard work, and not viewed with suspicion. If she dances or sings, she would be appreciated for partaking of the pleasures of life. She would not be suspected of having loose morals as long as the penis stays on.

:(

Earlier, blog templates used to make enough sense to me so I could tweak the code and add pictures and backgrounds of my choice. The new blogger templates, while being extremely user-friendly to manipulate what with widgets et al, make nary a sense. I am completely at a loss. Compounding my pain is that fact that there are so many beautiful templates and whatchamallit style sheets online, and I cannot make enough sense of it all to even utilize it for my benefit. Aargh.

Writer's Block

Now it would be posh for a writer to have it, but why inflict that curse on me? I am just your average bored person scribbling nonsense, reading and re-reading it and feeling smug about those literary accomplishments. Not so long ago, I had gotten into the habit of writing at least one page of ‘something’ everyday, every single day, it seems amazing now, how I could manage to do that. Writing a page a day, people, is not easy. It takes dedication and discipline, I don’t think even Shakespeare would have found it easy to write a page a day, regularly and with consistent quality. And talking of dedication and discipline and yours truly… hrrummpph… ah well, let’s move on to the real world.

In the last two years, I haven’t written anything. Well, save for the occasional jottings. I miss writing. And I am losing it. The thought that I am deliberately and stupidly letting go of that skill brings forth an eerie sense of making the same mistake twice. I have let go of too many things just around the time I began to grasp the essence of it, or shall we say, grasp the essence of how one goes about grasping the essence of it, if that makes any sense.

I am older now. My point of view has changed. I have grown, I have become more accepting, forgiving and emotionless. I have become more tolerant and jaded. Trivialities do not excite me any more, even human beings have ceased to be exciting. Now that’s growing too old too fast, but what the heck.

My life will change again, of that I am sure. May not be for the better and I am not really prepared for that. I hope I will have the courage and that I would have acquired enough survival skills to fight it out all by myself, when it is called for. And till that time, I suppose I shall carry on with my old pastime, walk with this friend, pick up where we left off. And we shall fight this WB monster together.

Elections

Every year the elections pushed the campus into chaos, the normal hustle and bustle suddenly bloated out of proportion - a fat noisy monster stomping around and the students cheering along with him. I never involved myself in the election drama that unfolded, suffering from this very mistaken notion of such silliness being beneath me. (I remind myself of an Opal Mehta who never got a life). However, being a student with voting rights I was dragged into the commotion, albeit the fringes of it, I was courted (as was several others) by aspiring Arts Club Secretaries and Vice Chairmen. By the Final year I grew quite adept in handling this shallow courting ritual, but the very first year I landed in college I was quite taken in by the charms of this pretty student council member boy and how.

His name was Rohit A. Good looking bloke. I won’t go into a graphic description of his various body parts, suffice to say that he was eye candy. Strangely, I was never attracted to him in spite of him being such a hunk, the all too essential spark was missing. All that changed on that fateful day. Sigh. Such a fool as I, never lived or ever will.

I don’t remember what post he was aiming for, but I remember that he lost. My interest level in such things would shame the backside of an ant. I did not bother with such, like I said, silliness. So, there I was, studious nerd, sitting inside the classroom during the lunch break, reading some unimportant book. And our hero saunters in. Project Campaigning. Principal aim – canvassing votes. But of course. He registered in the periphery of my vision, I had a vague idea of what he was up to and I immersed myself deeper into the book.

And after a while, I had this very strange sensation near my knees. I look at my them and I see another pair so close to mine that I could feel the heat of another human body without actually touching it. I look up at the soulful brown (or green) eyes of Rohit A. Ahhhh. His eyes had this watery feel, I would say moist and liquid and inviting if I lapse into a romantic mood. But inviting it was. And seductive.
And umm.. strange. Why are these eyes trying to seduce me? Poor ol me reading a book in the corner?

Then he calls me by my name. It never sounded sweeter. My eyes widen. Did they become moist and liquid and inviting in turn? Sweet Lord Jesus, I hope they didn’t do any such nonsense. He leant closer and inwards, closing in to me, I felt the distance between us shrinking, I felt every aching millimetre of it on my skin. He stopped, his face a few inches away from mine, and eyes still doing the moist-liquid routine. And he just looks at me, smiling, lips trembling. Then, I mistook it for an expression of pleasure that he was in my company, now, I know that he was trying very hard not to burst out laughing. Well, I can’t blame him, it was seduction in an instant and was written all over my face.

I ask him, “How do you know my name?” (of all things)

He says, “I know a lot of things about you”

I did not question him further, I felt quite weak. He must have counted on that too.

Then he tells me about this election that is coming up and how his friends suggested that he stand for it, I say something about how popular he is so he’d win easily and he shrugs it off modestly. Then he tells me that it would mean a great deal to him if I voted him. I listen intently. His eyes are still moist and liquid. I fight this really strong urge to touch his eye and break that watery droplet that he has trapped inside it. Then he bids me adieu. His dazzling smile and perfect white teeth follow me to my hostel and haunt my dreams for the rest of the night.

And on the day of election, I voted for Asif. Why? Because I’d promised him that I’d vote for him. And he got to me first.