From the Pages of a Long Lost Book

It is curious how one thing can remind you of something completely unrelated--something that is from a different world all together. In the train today, suddenly we passed this stretch where they were burning weeds. The smell of smoke brought back the once-familiar smell of cashew nuts roasting. When we were kids, ma's tharavadu was this veritable haven of everyday wonders--of delightful sights and smells of unadulterated village life that held endless fascination for us city kids.

We would watch enchanted as our grand uncles, the formidable men of the house, would build the fire and toss the cashew nuts in heaps into its crackling goodness. This, of course, was done with great panache of seasoned showmen for the benefit of us impressionable kids. We would then watch enchanted, as the cashew nuts, with which we used to play a caroms till the day before, crackled and spluttered in the fire.

Occasionally, one of the more "grown-up" and hence, more adventurous, amongst us kids would dare thrown a small log into the fire, to be immediately chastised by the real grow-ups. But the immediate increase in respect and popularity amongst us lesser (and younger) mortals made it worth the mild reprimand.

The smell that rose from the fire--a heady mixture of smoke, cashew nuts, and a combination of firewood and dry leaves--was made more palpable with the collective excitement of us kids. And just about when we are about to lose our heads to the smell, someone in the grown-up party will declare that the cashews are just about done. The fire, if it was not breathing its last already, is killed.

And then begins the part that was my favourite in the grand ritual: cracking the nut, and of course, eating it. It used to be so much fun to watch the mighty men of the house go squirm squirm-twitch-twitch-and-jump trying to hold the hot cashews, while trying to get the outer (and now burnt) shell-like skin out, and get to the nicely roasted nutty bit inside. (This, of course, even the most adventurous amongst the kids never tried. The hot embers looked mean enough for all of us to stay away!). The whole house would smell of roasted cashews, and happiness.

Smells are such funny things. They are always lurking around the dark corners of your mind, waiting to jump at you at delightfully unexpected moments with equally unexpected memories. And I'm so glad :)

Conversations

Don't you wish sometimes that you could dive into the depths of yourself and pull out that self that you once were? Become that stranger that you once used to be? So that all your todays are as your yesterdays, and your yesterdays are as today?

Or perhaps, you wonder if you have such depths to pull yourself out from. Wonder that if you try and dive into it, you will only realise the shallowness that is inside of you. Is that so bad--this lack of distance between the surface and the self? The skin-deep being the only presence and nothing else that is real?

Aren't memories a twisted trick that our mind plays on us? Or perhaps it is only to protect us from our own past selves. It is easy to remember yesterday fondly. To think of our past as a long lost friend, with whom we lost touch with somewhere. Someone you can bump into at a curious bend, and feel a surge of happiness, a rush that comes from meeting our once lost self.

Do you wonder? Or perhaps you are so rooted in the details of everyday that you don't have the time for such flights of whimsical imagination. Perhaps, you like to think you live in the reality of today. Perhaps you even believe that there is a reality of today.

What does that make me in your eyes? And what does that make you?

Yappy New Year :)

It's been so long since I wrote something, it ceases to be funny. I wonder what is it about life that overwhelms us so much that we forget to indulge in those simple things things that give us so much joy. Writing perhaps is one of those few pure pleasures in my life. And, somehow, since the past few months, that also seems to have taken a back seat.

To the list of new year resolutions that I made, I thought I should add writing more too. But then I didn't because I didn't want to reduce writing to something that I have to "plan" to do. It should be something that comes to me, something that I do for the sheer pleasure it.

Conversations

The mornings are of purple skies streaked with crimson. They smell of cinnamon and coffee. And of course, of love. One wants likes to think that being whimsical is what one does best. It is when one is happiest.

Complicating Conversation

All of humankind's efforts, everything that we do, is directly or indirectly to escape death--to somehow live beyond the time given for us to occupy this physical space. I understand that this idea is neither original, nor very revolutionary, neither particularly enlightening, but here it is.

We want to be remembered-by someone, for something, after we cease to be. So we raise children, so that someone will carry our names, and our genes, and some broken part of us even when we are dead. We make friends, we marry, and we shun a solitary life, because we want somebody to be our witness-someone to see, and remember that we once were like so. We revere our dead, insist that we show them respect, and in some spaces, even pray to them, their death being qualifier enough for this reverence.

All media is there today because of this one primitive need of humankind-everything- TV, newspapers, radio, cinema, blogs- are in someway or the other ensuring that humankind is not forgotten. They all work to enforce this myth of immortality that we seemingly have achieved.

So we build elaborate discourses on how much we have progressed, how much distance we have covered since human memory stabilized. We are less concerned with where this distance covered leads us to, but we are hoping that it wouldn't be something as banal as extinction. The problem is, that we can only hope.

Minutes of Madness

If I write a message in a tired parchment,
and leave it in a bottle,
will you ever find it, and then,
take me back through the road that leads to today?

If I whisper into the storm,
will you leave a lantern out,
and keep the fire shining
with conversations half-finished?

And if I never say a thing,
will you still assume,
that I still don't care?

And if I scream,
will you ever hear,
the silence that is all around me?

And if you read this,
will you think,
that I'm drunk again?

Life' s a Neurotic Bitch With OCD Issues

Okay. Here's the deal. I'm tired of whining. I'm tired of complaining that nothing is going right. Well, it isn't but heck, life's gotta be a bitch once in a while to feel nice about itself. Sure things are bad, sure people are idiots, sure things could be better, but things will be the way they will be, and people will come around, and see sense, sooner or later.

I have three assignments to submit beginning of next week, each of which require me to read up at least some 500 pages of stuff, and I have not even started. So what am I doing about it? Reading comics online, and blogging. Man, I can't complain now, can I?

This campus can get to your nerves real bad, but I figured I'm stuck here for another six months, so might as well accept the bloody place and move on with my happiness. So I'm taking Lash's advice [I'll probably live to regret admitting this, but well!]

Even if that light at the end of the tunnel is a train, it means end of the darkness, one way or the other. So.

I'm back to sarcasm and permanent poke-fun-at-others-so-that-you-can-feel-nice-about-self bitchiness.

Just so that you know. Cheers!