I have never been much of a short story reader, and my exposure to shorts has been limited to Oscar Wilde and Saki, and a few by Graham Greene. But I had heard a lot of Feluda and yesterday I read two long shorts and if they are anything to by, I am going to be spending a lot of time reading Ray in the coming weeks. I also read five Roald Dahl short stories last night and one in the morning before coming to work, and so, yes- next few weeks I foresee myself oscillating between Dahl and Feluda, and my social life (however rudimentary it is today) going up in flames.

I recently finished reading Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and have also started reading Are you There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a wonderful read. Are you There God I have only just started and so no comments as of now. I also finished re-reading The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Kafka on the Shore.

The book backlog consists of 2666, Infinite Jest, Life, a user’s manual, 20000 streets under the sky, Kingdome Come, Quantum and a few other books finished anywhere between 10-50%.

There. I had not written anything for long. So, a round of smug gloating, and a blogpost is ready. Tc.Similar Posts:

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Music he has forgotten. Books are lost. He doesn’t write any more, not really. He spends most of his time wondering if he should write something, and when the answer yes, he spends his time wondering what he should write. Part of him wants recognition, and part of him hates him for it. Part of him spends its time wishing he would not spend the time he spends reading the sort of crap he spends time reading on the internet. Part of him wishes he were as popular as some of the crap he reads. He has an ego problem. And he has an existence problem.

He spends a lot of time thinking about death. And his weight. He keeps wondering why he loses so much weight. And he keeps wondering when he will die. He doesn’t care much about his health, it is not a concern; but the Davidoffs leave him a little more breathless; he has had to downgrade to Classics again; he keeps planning to start running again….but he doesn’t. There is something which is fundamentally wrong with this picture here, but he doesn’t know what it is.

He stands, sometimes, in the balcony in the middle of the night and watches the clouds while they spray rain on his face and shoulders and forearms. He can taste the rain even though it does not touch his lips. It is slightly tangy, a bitter-salt taste of wanting something and not knowing what it is. The rain is the constant stalker-stalked relationship for him, and as always he does not know who he is. The rain creeps in quietly at nights, drumming on his windows, asking to be let in, to be allowed to feel the coolness of his skin, to wash away the salt from his. And sometimes, he wishes to slip into the rain, to calm his feverish body down to understanding, to prevent his sweat from evaporating in the middle of the night, to condense the cloudy haze of memories which come crowding in to his vision night after night after night.

He wishes for the best of both worlds. A blazing sun at midnight.Similar Posts:

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Uhh!Why?

Doesn’t it strike you as morally wrong?

Uhh!

…

Wait a second! Aren’t you an engineer? Why are you selling soap? Dont you think its your moral responsibility to go battle the oil spill? Or be building a bridge somewhere?

I am a Software Engineer, not a civil one. Besides, I didn’t cause the oil spill.

Ahh, so you are UNcivil engineer. Besides, I did not cause the animals. MuhahahaSimilar Posts:

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He takes a deep drag and feels the smoke sear his lungs. They seem to be taking a toll these days, each inhaled puff acts like a line of fire poured down his trachea, flowing through the bronchi, bronchioles, and collecting in the alveoli, swirling like a liquid fire intent on destroying everything that crosses its path- cigarettes have become the pain, and the balm. He shrugs, as, blown by the wind, some ash breaks off from the tip of the cigarette and floats to settle down on the collar of his shirt. He should probably be brushing this away, he idly hears his mind reproach, this might have an ember which might singe his shirt- his white shirt, and leave a mark on it- a cicatrix which will always be a reminder of this evening, which was spent fretting by an open window, scratching other scars of wounds caused god knows when or why. In a moment, the ash stub floats off his collar to the window-sill, meets a drop of rainwater and dissolves. There is no mark on his shirt. He feels almost disappointed.

In the distance, the road like a brightly lit Christmas tree, one festooned with a million disorderly, noisy, fretting and snarling goblins. He watches the frenetic seething of the traffic dispassionately and tries to remember what it was that he was trying to forget- and fails. Forgetting is not just a pastime now, it is almost an obsession, which needs to be indulged, day after day, night after night. There must always be forgetting- even if all that is there to be forgotten has been forgot, the exercise must go on- trying to remember what has been forgotten, and then trying to forget it again. Remembering and forgetting are the sole reasons to survive- hour after hour, beer after beer, cigarette after cigarette.

Books do not interest him anymore. This thought makes him vaguely uneasy. He trudges back to his bookshelf, and runs his finger along the spines of the volumes there, hoping to pick one out to read tonight. If for nothing else, just to prove a point. But he is not really looking at the names of the books, nor are the authors registering. All he sees is a vague blur of colors and sizes- blues and greens and browns and yellows and whites- a lot of whites- books three inches thick and books three centimeters thick…three shelves down he randomly pulls out a book and walks back to the window.

In the faint spray of the rain, he looks at the cover of the book- The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. He has read this. An exercise in loneliness. A vague, romantic desire to make something out of loneliness. He throws the book on the sofa and lights another cigarette. This is just the middle of his book. He has forgotten the beginning. And he is already thinking about the end.

This is not good, he thinks, as he takes another drag, feeling the line of fire draw itself in his lungs. Tomorrow, he will meet his doctor. But tonight, he will have his discontent, and himself, standing in blurred relief against an open window, one half of his face lit by the wash of the light from the road, smoking a cigarette, his face bathed in half-light, half-rain.Similar Posts:

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walks the streets,

on pattering feet, soft as a whisper,

disconsolate, tired,

it looks through windows,

carving greasy lines in the dirt,

lost someone,

to come out, to dance with it,

to rejoice in the drumming of tiny drops.

the wind,

shakes the trees and bangs the windows,

grumpy, frustrated, enraged,

looking for someone she lost,

she tries to break the glass,

wave away the dirt,

she smashes her head, with recoiled violence.

both have seen,

the vagaries and know,

times will never change.

but nor will they.Similar Posts:

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Once there was this girl,
Whose smile I used to wear,
Around my neck, like a thousand colored scarf-
Like kisses around my neck,
And the twinkle of whose eyes
Was like jazz before Christmas…
And she had a treacherously innocent smile…

How many songs have you heard,
About that never-was girl?
Telling stories of her around-ness,
When all was lonely,
How many poems written about her smiles,
And the eyes and hair fluttering like ravens,
Delicious darkness illuminating the dark?

Sometimes, some days,
It rains, like the sky is screaming,
And the wind goes mad, with the soul of werewolf inside,
And heavy drops hammer on dirty windows,
Painting smudged childish crayon drawings-
Cold glass fuses with hot rains to create
Dirty futuristic images, rivulets running across in dirt tracks,
Lines of fortune,
Tributaries of desperate ashes,
Mingling together before being washed away.Similar Posts:

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We were a generation of people obsessed with our knowingly trivial pursuits, perhaps because we knew that we were small, and insignificant- a fact driven home by the vast sea of information floating before us- a vast and unfathomable sea with very few islands of knowledge. And our will to swim was at an all time low. So we obsessed over the number of emails we received everyday on our personal email IDs, even as we pretended to respond to all the emails we HAD received on our work IDs; the number of retweets on Twitter, the number of likes on our Facebook statuses…we were a generation who invented a unique method of protest in the form of walking the streets with lit candles in our hands; and then decided to abandon it in favor of another unique method of protest- sitting at home in armchairs facing laptop monitors and joining online groups and posting online petitions nobody ever bothered to read. Yes, we did manage to soothe our consciences.

In the evenings, we would rush to malls or pubs, trying to soothe our damaged, overworked bodies by playing games of indigent consumerism, and lascivious body-worshipping. Yes, we were petty people, trying to adjust our consciences to our realities; but we were also aware people, we knew that we were floundering because of a lack of direction, but we also knew that floundering did not mean that we had to sink. And we knew that we would recover, sometime, someday (that sounds like a cliché too, be we knew it was the truth)- and so we made the making of money and armchair protests the objective of our life. In the hope that things would be better someday.

Meanwhile, we tried our best to make things worse. We never left one vacuous-eyed, oily-smiling soap salesman go away from our TV screens empty-handed, because deep down we knew each one of them was one of us. And so we tried. We accumulated credit cards, and paid telephone bills; we earned loyalty points and accumulated junk; we bought frequent flier miles and tried to flirt with air-hostesses in return, even when we knew that the professional smiles were masks for personal boredom for doing the same job, flying the same cities day after day, month after month; masks for antipathy. We spent our time wondering why the one girl we imagined we were in love with eternally (eternity, of course, was a couple of weeks) always had imagined herself to be in love with someone else; we always worried why it was out best friend who had to be facing this particular heartbreak, and even she was, why could she not have had the heartbreak with us rather than someone other random jerk. In brief, we were a generation who had lost their way, and enjoyed the fact.

That was the summer of 2010 for us. We made some money, we braved a recession (and adjusted with our compromised hopes- of course we felt we had been betrayed), we fought our armchair battles and won kingdoms in Massively Multiplayer Online Games, and tried to map our life by the ever increasing resolutions of ever-megapixel-increasing digital cameras. We assumed, and we made our assumptions come true. But most often, we confused living with being alive; fighting with struggling and pleasure with joy. But we managed to live with ourselves- perhaps with temporary outages of conscience; but we survived. And that’s a fact proven by that fact I am here to tell the story. Isn’t it enough?

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more than thirty cigarettes every day (yes, we are back there. again)

three beers every night.

five hours of sleep.

and more traveling coming up. (again  :D )
life.

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Nights are spent silently gazing in the dark at the fan which is whirling somewhere up there but is not quite visible to the eye, but whose almost silent whirring is almost audible- sort of like a mocking itch on the conscience of the insomniac night which spends its time wailing for a bitter moon. May be it was all just dirty stories our parents hid from us. Or may be it was all the goodness in the world distilled into a shot-glass full of ninety-six proof whiskey which goes down the throat like a burning streak of fire, and all it leaves behind is ashes.
…

Blue eyes are no good for anything. The only eyes that matter are the ones which are a little wet, a little playful, and yet a little truthful. They smile, and yet they are serious at the same time; they are the eyes of an eighty year old woman who has seen all of the world, and at the same time they are also the eyes of a fourteen year old who has all the world before her…they are eyes who will blind you in their sunshine, and yet bathe you in their warm glow; they are eyes who will lead you to life just when you are gasping for breath, they are eyes who will kill you in cold blood just when you want most desperately to live. Bloody eyes. They are no good.
…

They shut down in a troubled night. Whispered curses thrown away in a vacuous night, shouted protests to oblivion…he doesn’t have a clue which way things turn, but he still makes his bets. One of those days, the winning number is bound to be twenty six point eight. Till then he will keep on gambling.

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We were together-

In the bloodless morning of scarlet sunrises,

And purple morning flowers rose and cursed us,

When we told each other to go.

Hard voices, brittle,

Sounding like knives clattering on porcelain plates,

Murmuring staccato goodbyes; and fragile eyes

Shouting pleas to stay.

Did it rain that day, I wouldn’t remember,

Perhaps there was a thunderstorm,

And the sun cried hot tears,

And a hint of regret was left unwhispered.

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P.P.P.S:And does that soundtrack comment say a lot about our bollywood movies?

P.P.P.S: Isn’t that a lot of post-post-post-post-scripts? Did i say four, or was it five? forget it.

P.P.P.P.S: Ok. That was Azab in the title. and i have lost track of P’s now.Similar Posts:

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and you will probably never have it. at least not tonight in all tonights. it doesnt matter. There will always be a story which went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs.“Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid.” and such it will be. To misquote again: “I’m very drunk and I intend on getting still drunker before this evening’s over.”

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