Jacque and Jill (Preview)

Jacqueline and Jill could have been sisters. They could have been lovers. Or maybe, they were total strangers. What they were to each other while they had been alive held no significance anymore. Once on the other side, love transcends beyond companionship and passion to its purest form, uncontaminated by memories from the past life, which is life as we know it. The only thing that their epitaphs told them was that they both died on the same day and were buried next to each other. Perhaps they died of some illness. Perhaps they died in an accident; which might have involved something like tumbling down a hill. Perhaps they were pushed down the hill for being lesbians a long time before people started considering it fashionable being lesbian. This too, they had no clue about for facts like these did not matter once you are dead. at least, not to the ones who died. But they couldn't possibly have died of any natural cause, since they were both in their mid-teens and looked very healthy and beautiful. Yes, they still retained a wispy yet human form

At nights, they played around in the graveyard behind the old church atop the hill where they were burried. And from dawn till dusk, they slept peacefully in their graves. Under the moon, they looked like nothing but random shapes swirling around in the night-fog, hardly noticeable. But every once in a while a late night traveller, and there were many during those days, would hear them giggle. Very soon, word spread that the graveyard atop the eastern hill was haunted by evil spirits. It is sad how 'haunted' and 'cursed' are closest that people get to hear about magic these days.

People who lived on the hillside started moving away and in less than a decade, not one occupied house remained in the proximity of the church. The church itself had worn down so much due to lack of maintenance that it looked more like a wayside ill-omen perched on top of the desolated hill. Folks who traveled East often had to take the road that went through the foot of the hill and they did so only when the sun was high up in the skies above them. Now and then a traveler would dare to look up at the granite structure, and the graveyard beyond, and say to himself that there is not a chance under the sun, moon, or the stars, that even a minuscule amount of sanctity remained in that God-forsaken mansion of gloom that once used to be a church

It was against all warnings and advices that Brother Emmanuel decided to move in to his uncle's abandoned cottage on the west side of the hill. As a child, Brother Emmanuel was always fascinated by the books about exorcism that he found in his grandfather's forgotten chest on the attic. He had studied each book just the way he had studied the bible during his days in the old Victorian seminary. He knew each page like the back of his hand, but so far he had never gotten a chance to practice what he believed he had mastered, except for an instance with an Ouija board when he almost established communication with the late John Egerton, the 4th Earl of Ellesmere. But that wasn't much of what one would call a noteworthy incident. Hardly of any significance at all compared to what Brother Emmanuel hoped to do in the abandoned church

(contd.)

Crystalline - A Short Story

Liz woke up that morning a bit later than usual. The early Autumn sun was already shining on her face in a broken pattern through the slits of the Venitian shutter. She stretched her arms and let out a muffled yawn. Though weary, she still looked pretty even as she strained her puffy eyes open. She had wept a lot the previous night. She licked her lips, moistening them, and felt something grainy and sweet rolling between her tongue and lower lip. A tiny crystal of sugar. How odd, she thought. This wasn't the first time it was happening.

The glass wind-chime on her tall French-window swayed in a gentle breeze that swept in, filling the room with a familiar tingling, that had for quite some time now, ceased to be the music that it once had been to her ears. But still there was that certain soothing quality to it that had comforted her during these days of loneliness and worrying. It always brought back to her the memories of better days; and better days, there were many. The days when David woke her up with minty fresh kisses right after he had brushed his teeth and had his cup of morning coffee. There was always a faint minty sweet undertone to his morning kisses and she had reached a point where she could no longer wake up without them.

Then it happened. She could have sworn that he was in his study. He always used to lock himself up in that cluttered insect-house of his that he called his study and would stay in there lost in his research for hours on end. So, whenever he was not seen for long hours, she took it for granted that he was somewhere in that study, clad in that long lab-coat of his, arching over the old microscope perhaps, lost in one of his microscopic worlds.

But on that particular day however, she knew that something was wrong when there was no sign of him way past dinner-time. They always made it a point to dine together, and in their three years of married life, they had never missed out on it; save on the very few occasions when one of them had been out of town. She did not want to disturb his work for she knew of the ardent love he had for his subject - Entomology. In fact so popular was his passion that his fellow-scientists called him the insect-man.

The grandfather-clock in their expansive dining hall struck, announcing the passing of the day, and Liz could wait no more.

She knocked at his door, gently first, and then harder, as there was no answer. She sighed and rested her palm on the handle and the door creaked open a bit. She peered in.

"David?... Helloooo?"

Her eyes wandered about in the cluttered room filled with glass boxes and jars in which he kept all sorts insects, termite colonies, and ant colonies. She had gotten used to the insects by now and they no longer freaked her out. She even assisted him once in a while to rearrange the settings inside his study and to move the heavy racks with the glass boxes from one corner of the room to another. Sometimes for subjecting them to more sunlight and sometimes just to make space for more jars and boxes. She used to tell him that she would be alright as long as there aren't any of his creepy-crawlies running about freely and taking a plunge into her soup.

"David? Darling, are you there?"

There was no answer. He was nowhere to be seen. The window was wide open and there was broken glass, from a beaker perhaps, all over the floor and some sort of gooey cobalt blue substance which was spilt everywhere.

It had been a week now since that horrid night. She had called up his friends, relatives, and reported to the police - not necessarily in that order - over the span of the next few hours after David's disappearance. No information regarding his whereabouts had presented itself. The Gendarmerie had searched his study thoroughly, but could not find anything significant. They had sent samples of the blue substance to Paris for analysis and the lab report that followed said that the substance was nothing but a compound of cobalt and chlorine that is commonly found "as an indicator of dryness in silica gel beads used as a desiccant."

Liz and David loved each other deeply. On the previous night, Liz had cried herself to sleep, worried sick about her husband. And on this day, as she lay in bed inspecting the grain of sugar that she found on her lower lip, she missed his minty-sweet morning kisses more than ever.

The phone rang, startling her out of her trip down memory lane. She picked it up and said hello. The voice on the other end was coarse and heavily accented

"May I speak to Mrs. Elizabeth Laroche?"

"Yes. That would be me", she said.

"This is inspector Anthony Chevalier from the police headquarters", said the coarse voice on the other end.

"Is there any news of my husband?" Liz asked, her heart pounding hard.

"I am afraid not, madame" said Inspector Chavalier in a tone that sounded genuinely remorseful for having to disappoint Mrs. Laroche. "At least not anything of great significance. However, we have tracked your husband's online activities on the days prior to his disappearance and we seem to have found something that you may find interesting."

Liz did not say anything but waited for the inspector to continue.

"Was your husband planning on writing fiction?", asked the inspector.

"No... not that I know of" Liz said with a pause in between.

"Le Science fiction, perhaps?"

"He had never said anything along those lines. He usually tells me everything. At least, that is what I believe."

"We have found a secret blog of your husband", continued the inspector, "which he seems to have started recently. I don't think he had any intention to make the blog public. In this blog, he had written just one chapter of what seems to us like a ...roman de science fiction... science fiction novel. We thought you might want to read it too"

"Yes!... Yes of course", Liz exclaimed.

"You might want to write this down. The URL is lafourmiliere.blogspot.com"

Liz quickly grabbed a pen and started writing on the back cover of a magazine that lay next to the phone

"L-A-F-O-U-R-M-I-L-I-E-R-E", the officer spelt it out for her "It means... 'ant hill'"

"The blog was created using his official e-mail id, which is why we could track it so easily, but we had no choice left but to hack into it. The password is 'forever_liz'. You will have to type it in to be able to read the blog"

The inspector thought he heard a whimper at the other end when he said this.

A few minutes later, Liz was seated at her desk and on the screen of her computer was her husband's blog-page. The title read 'La Fourmiliere - The ant-hill diaries.'

Liz remembered that during the recent years, David was getting increasingly interested in Myrmecology, the branch of Entomology that dealt with the scientific study of ants. Come to think of it, she thought, he was always interested in ants. His favorite bedtime story as a child had been 'The Ant and the Grasshopper".

She also remembered him telling her, during one of their tea-time conversations, his cup of camomile on his right hand. "You know something, Liz. Ants have the most ideal form of society. The solutions to almost every known human problem can be sought out by studying them. And what could be more fortunate than being a male ant? They have nothing to do in life except eat and mate"

"You are kidding me, right honey?", Liz said giggling "Isn't it the males that do all the foraging and food-collecting?"

"No, no, no, ma chère",  David said. "The life of an ant starts from an egg. If the egg has been fertilized, the progeny will be female; if not, it will be male. A fairly large ant colony consists mostly of sterile wingless females that act as workers and soldiers. There are only very few fertile males in a colony and we call them drones. Then there are one or, contrary to what most people believe, more fertile females that we call queens."

This, however, was news to Liz.

David went on. "The winged drones emerge from their pupae along with the breeding females and their only duties in the colony are staying well fed and having a lot of sex", he said with a broad grin, flaunting that dimple on his left cheek that Liz had been in love with from the day they first met.

Elizabeth Laroche stayed lost in memories before her computer screen for a minute or two, and she hadn't noticed that she was smiling. Then she suddenly snapped back to reality. She had to know what was in her husband's blog.

The 'About me' section of the author said 'David Laroche - Entomologist and a very dedicated husband'

There was just one blog entry and it was made on the night before his mysterious disappearance.


Day-1 with the Leaf-cutters

I hadn't yet fully gotten accustomed to my newly acquired parts and the senses that came with them. I find especially the twin antennae to be a pair of fairly complicated contraptions. I had never before in my life had to rely so much on my sense of smell. My antennae helped me sense not only the intensity of scents, but also the direction of them - two parameters I would have to depend heavily on during my life as a leaf-cutter ant.

The pheromone communication, however, came naturally to me. I doubt if ants have much of a free will when it comes to this as most of these chemicals are produced instinctively. It is as though there was only one solution to the problem at hand and that known solution was always one pheromone or another. So, everytime the problem presented itself, the respective gland would produce the respective pheromone automatically. Just the way you close your eyes when someone sprinkles water on your face. It is my pheromone glands that i will have to be thankful to for helping me get through the inspection phase and pass myself off as a fellow-ant.

As soon as I was spotted in the vicinity of the colony, two of the guards came running to me, which I should confess here, quite scared the life out of me. It is quite an intimidating experience when you yourself are just about the size of an ant. I could now distinctively tell one ant from another. It helps when they have faces as large as your own. There was this stout, tough looking guard who immediately started tapping me all over my face with her(let me remind you that all worker and soldier ants are sterile females) antennae while her scrawny side-kick was pacing all around me and touching me at places I would rather she hadn't.

In that moment of horror, i felt all my senses getting suspended and myself going numb, all prepared to get shredded alive. I had no idea what to do, but in that very moment of horror, to my relief, my glands knew exactly which pheromones to produce. The chemicals that I secreted made two inspectors, if I may so call them, act as though I was one of their very few fertile males and they proceeded to escort me into the colony. It was wonderful how well I could communicate with them without a single word being spoken. But to write about ant-instincts in human words is as impossible as trying to explain human emotions using pheromones and a pair of antennae.

It was however too early for me to venture into the colony. Moreover, it was getting to be dinner-time with Liz, and I wouldn't miss out on that even if the fate of the whole colony depended on it. I will always be more human than ant that way, I decided. But when I tried to turn around and walk away, the guards wouldn't let me. Stouty, as I had begun to call her, grabbed hold of one of my hind-limbs, the left one I think, between her pincers while Scrawny started pushing me from the side turning me around in the other direction.

My first impulse was to scream out to Liz at the top of my voice but decided not to as I did not have much of what I could call a voice to begin with. After struggling in vain for the better part of what seemed like eternity, I realized that I had no choice but to let myself be led to the colony. Thus, weary from all the shoving and pushing, and dejected at heart, I marched on calmly with the guards. Scrawny leading the way and Stouty right behind me making sure I did not give them the slip.

Soon I would be in my cocoon of a chamber inside the ant-colony; feasting on honey-dew, fresh fungi, and juicy insect parts, and having sex with females five times my size. All of which would seem like a fair deal to you all, but what has to be known here is the fact that while a queen can live up to 30 years, and a worker from 2 to 3 years, males survive only a few weeks. How unfair can nature be? But this was also the reason why so much of care was being taken to see to it that I arrived at the colony safe and sound. They wouldn't want me to miss my moments of mid-air love-making with their queen.

It was then that the term mid-air caught my attention. All this while it hadn't occurred to me that I too, like every other male ant, was winged, and could fly away at will. Without a moment's hesitation I flapped my wings as fast as I could and buzzed right out of the glass tank without caring to glance back. Flying wasn't as easy and delightful as I had expected it to be. It was like lifting a heavy weight above your head and keeping it there. After a while the muscles around the part where your wing is connected to your body aches just the way your shoulder would. I suddenly felt a burning pain on my right rear limb and I turned my head to see, to my shock and surprise, Stouty holding on to my limb and gnawing at it in a mad frenzy.

I tried to shake her off, but she held on like the leaf-cutter ant that she proudly was. I had no choice but to fly with her into the bottle of the compound that would turn me back into a human. The lid of the bottle was so designed that it would open on a hinge in only one direction, inwards at that, and that too with the slightest of pressure applied. The reason for this was that the compound is highly unstable and when exposed to atmospheric air, will quickly oxidize into an unknown blue compound that can be detected by known measures only to be something vaguely similar to Cobalt chloride. Also it would not turn me back into human once this happened. Once inside the bottle, I got transformed back rather quickly into my former charming two-legged self and came right out breaking the bottle.

On the little toe of my right foot, Stouty, who did not seem very stout anymore, was still clinging on tight, not knowing what else to do now. I picked her up and placed her back in the glass box saying "See you tomorrow, tough girl. Someday you will make your queen proud. But right now it is din-din time for daddy"

Thus ended the first and only post in David's blog

What if David could actually, by means of a concoction perhaps, turn himself into an ant? What if he did turn himself into an ant again the next day? What if all that blue substance that was found splattered over the floor with the glass pieces had actually been the compound that could have turned him back to human? Maybe a wind had overturned the bottle. Maybe it got oxidized and lost its properties. What if David is still in his room, in one of his ant colonies? If he is, how could one tell him from the millions of other ants?

All these questions rushed through Elizabeth's mind. Then she dismissed them as being utterly ridiculous and decided that she wouldn't let emotional vulnerability betray her sanity. She thought however that it would have turned out to be an interesting and informative piece of fiction, had David finished writing it. Something that would have brought Myrmecology within the layman's grasp. She let out a sigh as she logged out from David's blogger account

Later... much later, as the night was at its darkest, Elizabeth Laroche lay fast asleep in her bed, worn out by another day of brooding. In the blue moonlight flowing in through the gaps between the venetian shutter, something small glinted as it crawled up Liz's cheek. A small winged ant holding what looked in the moonlight, like a minuscule diamond, or a dew droplet perhaps, climbed on to Liz's lower lip. He placed the crystal of sugar carefully in one corner of her lips. Then he flew up a bit and alighted on top of her nose where he stood still for a moment as if regarding her. His head tilted a bit first to one side and then to the other. Somewhere inside his tiny heart, he felt a deep- rooted pain. A pain that made him realize that he didn't need a heart the size of a human fist to feel what he was feeling for her right then. A faint smile spread across her lips as a distant dream played in her subconscious mind. The little winged ant fluttered his wings and flew into the dark night outside. Someday this winged ant would thus fly into the darkness and would never be seen again; but on every morning till then, Liz would wake up with a hint of sweetness about her lips.

The Apple of Scorn

I lay on ma back watching the crimson of the West bleed slowly into the grey sky. Like the harbinger of impending doom, a big brown bat circled unhastily about. A distant thunder boomed, taking my mind back through generations to my Neanderthal forefather, lying flat, just as I lay now on my terrace,atop that favorite giant rock of his, bat-gazing too perhaps, and wondering what the rumbling in the skies is all about
Then I thought about the possibilities of him not ever being atop that big rock at all. What if the creator did create man in his own image and all those fossils found in the rocks are nothing but the discarded doodles from his sketchbook? After all, no artist, no matter how successful he would later become, would ever have gotten his self-portrait right in his very first attempt. What if all the knowledge that man ever really needed did come packed in an apple-sized fruit-of-wisdom?
If He did create everything out of whim over the span of a week, and then topped it with a self-portrait, why then did He place the tree of wisdom right at the center of Eden, and that too with a "Do not touch" board, when he could have verywell planted it somewhere inaccessible? Isn't that like placing cookies in a glass jar in front of a 6 year old boy and asking him to keep away from it? Did He, in the back of His mind, want the apple incident to happen eventually? Or was He over-confident enough to believe that his orders would never be questioned?
Well, ..don't get me wrong. I am not here to question Him or His ways. I'm merely sharing a thought that crossed my mind. After all, I thrive upon mysteries for a living and my intention is only to keep my readers entertained

P.S: Photo taken by Rosh from the very same terrace at about the very same time these thoughts crossed my mind

A life less eternal

Bad bad human!

What would happen if people stopped aging? Iv been told that the beauty of life lies in the fact that it is short and that the only reason why we appreciate the little things in life is because we get so little time to savor them. But seriously, what would happen if people stopped aging?

Children would never grow up. A whole generation remains kids for ever (which I don't think is such a bad thing. I would kill to get my childhood back any day!). Maybe after a while they would stop behaving like kids, with all those new things about life that they learn. We'll have a batch of pint-sized baby faced boring old people. And the genuinely old people would never die. Birth control will have to be taken a lot more seriously. And there is a higher chance of the whole species being wiped out by some new epidemic.

All this would go against the system. Everything has to evolve progressively. Older generations need to die off, newer generations need to be born

Well, if that is the case, then life obviously cannot be mere electrochemical energy between the non-living subatomic particles (read the previous post) that our body is comprised of

Or is it?

Then why do new people need to be born? Given ample time to live, would every person eventually turn evil? Or would everyone turn good?

They could all turn evil since there is no more a hell for them to fear. No more the risk of reincarnation as a lesser life form... as a slug, perhaps

Or they could all turn good since they might all eventually learn to coexist. But that seems highly unlikely

People are inherently selfish and irritable. Don't give me that look. They are!! Tolerance is something one learns. When a child is born, the first thing that he does is crying his ass out. He is pissed off because the light is annoying him. He has just been pushed out of his comfort zone - his mother's womb- and he hates it

Then as days pass, he gets used to the light and eventually falls in love with it and the sights it brings. Somewhere along the way he starts fearing the very darkness that he once emerged from and would never want to be put back there again. I could be saying this just because I am claustrophobic and a pitch black room gives me the feeling that the walls are closing in on me (yes, im weird that way)

The first time a child sees something attractive - a toy for instance - he reaches out for it. He wants it even if it belongs to another child. In time, the child is taught to share and care and not to want what another possesses

What I am trying to say here is that human beings aren't inherently all loving and giving. All the so-called values are instilled into us as we grow up because society requires us to be reprogrammed and reconditioned. Some of us get corrupted, while the others continue to be bad

Random bottled genie

Here we are, living inside our tiny bubbles all content that our world is beautiful and that life is fun. How often do we step out of it and look around? We are so engrossed with the pursuit of happiness that we end up missing out the essence of life. Its like zooming into your own body. You start off looking at the skin, alive with blood flowing beneath. You go much closer on a microscope and see the cells, all alive and happy about it. You keep zooming in, into the nucleus, into the atomic level, and then further, into the subatomic level, protons, electrons, ….all of which are non-living . Somewhere while zooming in, life slips through your very fingers and you don’t even notice it. In your search for the base of your life you end up glued to lifeless particles. You are left wondering where exactly you lost touch with the soul or whatever it is that makes us alive. At times you wonder if there is a soul at all or is it all in our brains, with every human emotion a mere chemical reaction. Why then does your so called brain get uncomfortable every now and then when your eyes meet those of the child looking at you from the photo below the article about poverty in the news magazine?..., with his ribs showing, a vacuumed hollow beneath the rib cage for his belly, and with flies all around waiting to lay their eggs in him once his body goes lifeless so that their little white maggots can feast on his rotting flesh. If you knew his name, would you feel better or more uncomfortable? Would it make it easier on you if you knew his dreams? If somebody offers you a doorway into his bubble, would you take it? You pick that book someone writes about one of his kind. A smaller version of his bubble develops inside yours and grows as you learn more about him. But there is only so much you can let it grow. You close the book and the bubble slowly moves out of yours and you watch it linger around for a while and eventually disappear into oblivion. That is the farthest you would ever go. In due time, you get back to wondering whether there is a soul, or is it all in your brains. In our modern world where the vast majority of the people is ‘happy’ in their bubbles and out of touch with everything else, they consider it fashionable to believe in only what they can see, touch, and measure. They live their lives based on the calculations in their brains. They choose to ignore the voice that seems to be coming out of nowhere begging them to feel…to have a life and not what can be described as “secure existence”. Then one day, the voice dies out. They blindly accept the ‘truth’ their brains had cultivated over the years. And in the end, when life seems hollow and flavorless, they join hands with the grumpy old woman who once told you that “Life is unfair”]

Days go by

It was 5-ish in the evening and the day’s heat was still radiating off the cement platform that I had just alighted on to. The yellow signboard read Ernakulam North Railway Station. I looked around wondering whom my friend might have sent to pick me from the station. Having found no familiar faces among the scores of people gathered there, I decided to get off the platform and walk around a bit exploring the place, before giving my friend a buzz. It was her wedding the next day and the last thing I wanted to do was trouble a busy girl with an unnecessary phone call
The heat radiating off the asphalt made the distant palm trees appear to dance a slow serpent-dance to the tune being played on my i-pod, and I walked towards the illusional puddle of clear water that seemed to move away with every step that I took towards it. A small group of sparrows dashed across the sky that had started showing faint traces of the amber that separates day from night. Something appeared on the puddle and it didn’t move away with the mirage. It was definitely not an illusion. A tiny lifeless form, so lifeless and yet looking alive and intact like a freshly fallen autumn leaf. A sparrow. I picked it up to check if there was any life left in it. There was none. It lay there on my palm, hardly weighing anything, its body still warm, grayish brown wings half folded, head falling to a side, and tiny brown beak slightly parted
The i-pod was playing the song by Dirty Vegas that went “Days go by and still I think of you”. I looked around to see several sparrows, lined up on the electric lines and hopping around on the platforms chirping away freely. I directed my gaze back at the one on my palm and the contrast was disturbing. I couldn’t help thinking about what might have been the glory days of this little bird. About how it must have spent its days soaring the sky, escaping hawk attacks, finding a mate, making its nest…Something I had heard somewhere echoed in my head. “every hour wounds…the last one kills”. It is strange how one thought always connects us to another and very soon we find ourselves pulling at a string of thoughts and rolling it into an ever-growing yarn. Memories flashed through my mind of all the kith and kin I have lost on the way. Those warm faces that I will never be seeing again. It feels weird how our times in this world end up being tiny little specks on the timeline. Some of us are remembered for a little longer and most of us are not. Either way, our life span still remains a dimensionless point on the timeline
For a long time people had thought that the world was flat, because whatever was visible to an individual always appeared that way. Now, even though we know that we are living on a sphere, it still looks as flat to us as it did to a cave-man. Maybe it is the same thing with time as well. We always consider time as an infinitely long line moving from left to right. But we live to see only a very small portion of the line – a tiny line segment on an ever growing line. Zoom out further, and it becomes a tiny point on something that goes on and on. So may be if we zoom out enough (zooming out here translates to considering a much larger span of time), our life spans might in fact be tiny arcs (so tiny that that it appears as nothing more than a mere speck) on a gigantic circle. The curvature of the arc is not visible to us since we see only a very small part of it. That would mean that a billion gazillion years from now, I would be on this very same railway track holding the very same sparrow. We are gonna live and relive every moment in our lives over and over again. So the best thing we can do is making our lives so damn enjoyable that it becomes worth living it a million times over.
With that thought, I laid the sparrow back on the asphalt. I will be seeing it again, I thought, self-hypnotizing and self-brainwashing, … all in good time. Same goes for all the people I thought I would never see again and all those magical moments which are now just memories. I am going to relive all of those sweet memories which I thought could only be remembered.
Minutes later I was on the passenger seat of the car which was sent to pick me. The driver looked verymuch like Luca Brasi from The Godfather, only if not a lot meaner and heavier. In fact so mean-looking was he, that I actually SMS-ed the registration number of the car to my girlfriend just in case she never got to hear from me again. I didn't by any means want our Luca to get away with kidnapping and murder. And soon afterwards, after the tension of the moment had subsided and I had gotten comfortable with my chauffeur’s presence, I was gazing out of the window lost again in my dreams

All the world is a vineyard and us, oenophiles

The best things in life are indeed the shortest lived. Life is, by all means, the mistress of tease. She lets you taste the best wines in her cellar... the very best of her pinot noir. You twirl it around in your glass, hold the glass up and examine the wine against the light enjoying its color and density, then you stick your nose in it and sniff in the aroma savoring it to the fullest. But one drink is all you get. Because then she hides the bottle so that you keep searching for it for the rest of your days. It is one search you would never wanna give up on...coz you know the thing about wines. The longer you search, the better its gonna taste when (IF) you find it in the end. Even if the search is futile and you end up never finding it, it still gives meaning and purpose to your life. That makes the search worth every day of your life. It is all those hidden bottles that make life beautiful... and it is the beauty that makes life worth living

The Ride Continues

Its when something snaps that one gets forced to do a reality check n wonder if its time to realign one’s perspectives about life… And something did snap… then some more did… In a cruelly unfair world, it’s a sensible thing to take chances. So I decided to go by the best of three tosses. But I wasn’t exactly taking chances here, coz instead of flipping a dumb coin, I decided to pick three most important and sensible people who know me inside-out, and who’ve always stood by me through thick and thin, and ask them whether they felt I should be re-evaluating my take on life post the current turn of events. Being the first time in 8 years that im actually asking a second person to evaluate my choices of actions, I feared the worst. The first answer turned out to be a definite no…the second one, an even more definite no… so I decided not to bother the third person. And here I am, following the same ol road iv been traveling despite the fact that it has started getting grittier and a whole lot rougher …And then came the most encouraging piece of advice for the day from none other than Rocky Balboa… I have no idea why I ended up picking that dvd from a stack of about a hundred others… very random choice… And Rocky’s piece of advice to his son made more sense than ever.. So here is how it goes:

When you were this small, I'd hold you up to say to your mother, "this kid's gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid's gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew." And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching you, every day was like a privilege. Then the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you're no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know... The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain't you! You're better than that! I'm always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens. You're my son and you're my blood. You're the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain't gonna have a life

Never for once thought Rocky would give me this strong a moment … I guess, given the right circumstances, anything can give u an energy-boost! Every once in a while we get a feeling that we’ve seen it all and that there is no situation that can chicken us out… but there is always one out there. And when that time comes and you find something standing right in front of you, something that ain't running and ain't backin up and is hittin on you and you are too damn tired to breathe. If you find that situation on you, thatz good, coz thatz baptism under fire! You get thru that and you find the only kind of respect that matters in this world, Self respect!