Saturday, May 17, 2008

Home

This is from the movie King Arthur. Someone please find me the OST :)

Land of bear and land of eagle
Land that gave us birth and blessing
Land that called us ever homewards
We will go home across the mountains
We will go home, we will go home
We will go home across the mountains
We will go home, we will go home
We will go home across the mountains

Land of freedom land of heroes
Land that gave us hope and memories
Hear our singing hear our longing
We will go home across the mountains
We will go home, we will go home
We will go home across the mountains
We will go home, we will go home
We will go home across the mountains

Land of sun and land of moonlight
Land that gave us joy and sorrow
Land that gave us love and laughter
We will go home across the mountains
We will go home, we will go home
We will go home across the mountains
We will go home, we will go home
We will go home across the mountains

When the land is there before us
We have gone home across the mountains
We will go home, we will go home
We will go home across the mountains




Friday, May 16, 2008

Pain

I don't touch booze. Never stuck my lips against it... my friends do, well, most of them. They say it alleviates pain... will it alleviate my kinda pain. The kind of pain that gnaws with twisted claws, tearing open the fine lining of your internal intestines until it hurts beyond all measure. Lets talk of this pain. In some more detail.

You know that feeling, when you get out of home, hop on cheerfully on that bicycle, and go to school. You GO somewhere. You're done with your tenth standard board exams. You GO to the eleventh standard. When you get over with your twelfth standard. You GO to college. And then, something happens. You realize, you've learnt the art of going on, and on, and on... and soon enough, the act loses an incentive, a motivation, a direction. You're good at it, going on, and on, and on. But then, it dawns upon you, that you've not been able to coagulate your thoughts... you don't know, where to go. But you keep going, and going, and going...

And then, one fine evening after a nice long outing with your closest friends, you find out, that you've lost the charisma. The direction. The intent. The motive. You're this, this nice big power-house of a car, with big wheels and spanking bumpers and a chick looking coat of paint... with plenty of oil in it, but no GPS. No maps. No route in mind. Just a car. One that moves.

What do you do with yourself then? You realize, that this is pain. The kind you've been introduced to, in the initial part of this whatever-of-an-essay. This pain poisons you. You look back, and begin to ponder. Abstruse ideas begin to meddle with your thought process, and you begin to turn perplexed. Has it been going the way you wanted it to? Have you really been doing what you wanted to? What some of your closest people wanted you to? Are you in the process of making some good out of your existence? Or are you, simply, going on, and on, and on... humming across valleys and mountains, conquering peaks that have little or no consequence... are you moving for the sake of it?

Think, think, think. Let the warm thoughts flow out, and onto this whatever-of-an-essay. May be it alleviates the pain. Mom said I shouldn't touch booze. She says its not good, and that my dad never did. So I don't touch booze. I simply drown away all my thoughts, into nothingness, onto my keyboard, typing away uselessly... with no intent in mind. No motive, no direction.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

A Daily Itinerary at Kgp

[Last few days phenomenon]:

Arise, awake and brush your teeth at 11.00 AM. Browse net, check mail, drink some water.
12.00PM. A pickup from Aniket. Go address some very mundane work which has little implication to either of us.
1.15PM. Call up ban, link up with hvs, talk to chus. We all go to eat at a very bong and very bland eaterie in PremB.
1.35PM. The place is shut, go eat at Billoo's, after a detour at Chillie's.
2.45PM. Done eating at Billoo's. Count remaining cash. Decide upon an icecream.
3.15PM. Eaten a large block of icecream, relaxing in an air-conditioned enclosure.
4.00PM. Go to dept, meet guide, do some small clearance related work.
5.30PM. Come back to room, quick mail check, locate skates from akash. Go skating.
7.15PM. Done skating 4.4 kilometres apart from around 1 km within insti.
7.30PM. Hatch plan for dinner with ktj-friends.
8.40PM. Go to az to wake up a bunch of sleeping babez, and get them ready.
9.00PM. Its raining. Subdued, not out.
9.30PM. Finally we're set. We go eat at Mehek-e-punjab.
12.45AM. Done eating at Mehek-e-punjab.
1.05AM. Back to campus, go on a ride to prof's quarters area.
1.30AM. Back to room, quick orkut refresh, quick mail check.
2.00AM. Contact man, get bike(get chased by a couple(of dogs))
2.20AM. Contact chhabra, get a ColdDrink, take chhabra and go to park.
4.30AM. Daybreak, romantic enough (with chhabra). Back to room.
4.50AM. Return bike to man, get back to room.
5.00AM. Contact suma, enquire if she has scooty, go eat b'fast with her@chhedis.
5.55AM. Return to hall, aniket comes into play again. This time wearing a sleeveless torn shirt.
6.00AM. Go on an aimless ride with aniket, wander around in insti.
6.10AM. Karan calls, needs a taxi. We go address the issue.
6.15AM. Farewell to karan, all 3 of us shed a tear. We depart.
6.25AM. I sit down to write this itinerary.
6.40AM. I go to sleep.


Monday, May 12, 2008

The H alliteration


If you have come across the V-for-Vendetta v-alliteration speech, you would have loved to have one of your own too. I tried writing one for myself, with the letter 'H'.

Halcyon hours hoodwinking the harbinger of hostility... hubris hindering humility and harassing the habituate hedonist, His Highness of Heaven the Heckler hyperboles haughtily of the heinous holocaust at hand. Humbled by his harrowing homilies, the hapless heave and hibernate in hazy hinterlands. But not he, the hardy and headstrong. Who heeds not the homilies. Who opines heretically, whose hermetic hovel hath no happiness. It is he, who harbours the will of hegemony, who halts not at hiatus, whose hortatory harangues raise hackles... it is he who shall hew hostility however hazardous, and scale hillocks however high. And it is he, who heckles thus far... humbly and with hale humility, hails Hansraj, "Hallowed be thou! How do you do?"




Sunday, May 11, 2008

A Conversation

An Evening-tea Conversation with the Almighty.
Excerpts:

...and then the lord shot back with a quick rejoinder, "Move on, you prick!". [
prick is technically a loose terminology referring to a 1:18 scale model of the usual sized thing most of us guys have, and you gals don't].

I questioned back... "Where to, O' Highness?".

"Have you not been sticking around in this puddle for a little too long? Don't you find the stench of drying dung an incentive enough to move forward?", said the Lord, licking dry the tiny drop of lemon-tea precariously hanging on a strand of his moustache. It was apparent he was relishing the tea as much as the conversation.

"But it is my fate, O' Highness, and I am mired in this cesspool that appeared from nowhere. I thought I was on the correct road -- even the signboards never said I was going the wrong way."

"There you go again! You know, our conversation is like the London-eye. Its the wheel Ferris invented, and it is faithfully going round and round in circles. Every attempt I make at turning you around gets thwarted by this melancholic rhetor of yours.", said the Almighty, "Listen to me! I never deny that you have been wronged. Okay, maybe you weren't really wronged. Lets keep that for later. But eitherways, you need to get going now! Look, you're standing at the mouth of a bi-forked road. And to add to it, you just said you're stuck in a stinking cesspool. There are two possibilities here on. Either you go left, and continue the way you were, following the colorful and commercial signboards, until ofcourse, you hit upon another lovely roadblock and keep wondering where it came from. Or, you can go right, stop by at the tour-operator's franchise outlet, and enquire if the tour is really as fun as it sounds. The former, as you can well imagine by now, may lead you to Vegas and its scantily clad blondes, but it might as well never lead you out of these hinterlands. The latter gives you the flexibility of opting out of the tour-plan (ofcourse without a full-refund), and trying another vacation trip somewhere else.". There was a shine in his eyes. I knew he had made sense, and I also knew he knew I didn't get most of it.

I shook my head in a sagely fashion pretending as though I understood most of it, and uselessly blabbered -- "You said, that maybe I wasn't really wronged. Are you trying to imply that I screwed up somewhere? What was the shortcoming on my part that necessitated the breakdown?"

There was a broad grin on his face by now. "Hey prick, listen up. There is something fundamentally wrong in your understanding. You see, I am not a stupid mathematician. I didn't not design a world of binaries and whites and blacks. The void created by a missing success need not necessarily be filled by admitting to a failure. Okay, a screw-up is always the most important thing that causes the absense of success. But then you cannot disregard entirely, the precence of an element of uncertainty! Look here, prick... I need to wind up now. You wish to stay in there, surrounded by that sickly stench, fine by me. Try eating a bit of that black greasy thing too. May be it'll help you feel worse. Or if something did get to your head, get out, take a bath, and get moving."

He got up to take leave, placing on my left hand a small rolled up piece of cloth, concealing something. "Its not really useful, but it will make sense". As he turned around, with his usual choir of angels and all, he smirked back... "And do drink up that lemon-tea. Its a nice heady liquor."

I later opened that rolled up piece of cloth he gave me, only to find in it a silver lining on a cloud shrouding the sun.




Saturday, May 3, 2008

Courage



Courage is to smile in the face of defeat.
Courage is to laugh when your reason cries.
Courage is to thank your well-wishers after you fail.
Courage is to believe in dad, when he says its just begun.
Courage is to work, more than ever before.
Courage is to agree, when they say may be you aren't that good.
Courage is to carve a new foundation stone out of an old tombstone.
Courage is to starve your ego, and feed your passion.
Courage is to write battle-plans, when battles are all but lost.
Courage is to look back and learn, before looking forward.
Courage is to sit down and think, when thoughts have failed you.
Courage is to fall, and resurrect before the sixtieth second.
Courage is to listen to comfortably numb, and still feel the pain.
Courage is to tell mom that things are fine, when they are not.
Courage is to clap on the sidelines, while the winner walks away with a pound of your flesh.
Courage is to walk the untreaded path, when every predecessor has failed to make it across.
Courage is to strategize, when strategies have convincingly worked against you.
Courage is to begin at the end, and end it at a new beginning.
Courage is to thank the lord for your skill, after your skill has failed you.
Courage is to stay alive, because you have more than yourself to live for.