Soliloquy of a Libertine

From Jack, to the Queen of Hearts

2011-01-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

It is said that love can sometimes be magical. But isn't magic most often just an illusion? Sheer trickery? So believed the Jack of Clubs. He believed neither in luck nor in fate. Being in the inner circle he knew that most people who won in the casino did so by cheating. Most games were rigged, and the few times when somebody actually won, that somebody always made sure that he/she lost everything that had been won in the next couple of games. No, there is no such things as luck, good or bad

When he found himself looking into the eyes of the Queen of Hearts, Jack did not think that it was chance that brought them together. Just a play of probabilities. It was bound to happen sooner or later. It could have been any other card. She wasn't special. Just one among the fifty two. But what did catch his attention was that she had been crying. He knew it because of the black streaks of mascara on her beautifully painted white face. She had been through bad times

Jack could never handle more than a few minutes of silence. It had always felt awkward. After each shuffling he always found someone new next to him. Their proximity didn't last for long, but he always had a nice time with whoever was near him.

"Rough game night, eh?"

She did not respond

Then he remembered a joke the Joker had told him

"A man is like a deck of cards, y'know?", he quipped

She looked at him, a hint of curiosity lingering about her eyes. A question mark manifested itself amidst the intricate patterns that surrounded her

"Well,..." he continued, "you need a heart to love him, a diamond to marry him, a club to smash his friggin' head in, and a spade to bury the bastard"

What happened next changed Jack's life forever. For the first time in his life, he started believing in magic. Her smile was by far the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Purely magical!

Night after night, he waited for the games to get over hoping that tonight he would find her next to him again. He started losing his interest in every other acquaintance. Sometimes it took weeks for them to be together again, some times months, and some-lucky-times just a day. He started wishing that probabilities would favor him sooner. It was not until the Ace of Spades pointed it out that he realized that luck is what happens when all probabilities favor one. On every night that he found her next to him, he considered himself lucky. Thus he started believing in luck too. And all one needed to be lucky was to believe in it totally.

He would always have something new planned for her. His lil magic tricks. Not that there was anything magical about the tricks, but the smile they triggered was always magical. Before long, the smiles led to something that seemed even more magical. Love. Pure, undying love for her. She had become the reason for all that he would learn and practice. He cooked up stories, jokes, learned more tricks, and did all he could, just to see her smile

Year after happy year passed, and like all good things, Jack's lucky streak too came to an end. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. It has been a whole year now and there still hasn't been any sign of her. Did jack move on? Perhaps he did. Or perhaps he didn't. What I do know is that he still spends his days learning new tricks. And would jack give up everything he has to feel the magic again? Hell yeah, he would. Which is probably why Jack decided to open up to someone

I found it extremely hard to believe my senses when Jack started talking to me. At first I thought it was either that I was going insane or that I regularly had one too many a glass of scotch on poker nights. But soon enough I observed that the queen of hearts never showed up in any of the games. That's when I decided to write this and put it up on my blog. Maybe, his queen of hearts is out there somewhere. Maybe one day, she would chance upon this blog and read this. Maybe someday, luck would favor him again. I don't know for sure. But here I am, doing what I can for him

From Jack, to his darling Queen of Hearts

The whisperer in the winds

2011-01-04T00:22:00.000-08:00

There! Caught you again. Fighting your urges to covet me, telling yourself that I do not exist, and that I am but a mere figment of your imagination. You really want to believe so. But you cannot. For I am, and will always be...

...the whisperer in the winds, cold and warm, sometimes telling you just what you want to hear ,sometimes voicing out your deepest fear, and sometimes saying things that send goosebumps crawling up your skin

...the keeper of your darkest secret, the slave to your whim and desire, and the master of your sinfullest fantasy. Perhaps your only doorway to ecstasy.

...the bitterness of dark chocolate. The scarlet of fresh blood. Berries, blue and black. The freshness of mint leaves. The sweet red wine on your lips, and the dark enamel on your nails

...the reminder of everything heard and forgotten, of names you just cant seem to place, of dreams you cant remember. I'm everything that's shrouded by the mist and beyond the brook. I'm the yellowed pages of that cover-less moth-eaten book

...the shriek in the rain. The flapping of leathery wings. The silence in the graveyard. The voice in the woods. The distant howling of a wolf. The raven's cry. The echoes in an empty hall. The footsteps on the other side of the wall

...the childhood companion you never knew, the one you secretly grew up with, the one you painfully grew apart from. The one who treasures your every smile and your every drop of tear. The inexorable truth. The only thing that is clear

You sense me lurking in the shadows at the pit of your heart. You find me shackled in a chamber deep down and dark. And then you see me holding the reins of the chariot of your dreams - the one drawn by desires and fears

For I am, and will always be...
Everything that could have been

Cinnamon, Coffee, and Passion Fruit

2011-01-02T23:17:00.000-08:00

Wispy white fumes rise up from the black porcelain cup, hoping that the sea breeze would be kind to enough for once to let them climb. But it withers away the fumes spreading the aroma of coffee and cinnamon, mixed with the salty smell of the sea, and the memories of a skin that smells faintly of passion fruit. Its that time of the day when clouds turn crimson, birds go back to their trees, and memories wake up from where they had been put to sleep. I stir the coffee for a bit with the cinnamon stick before taking it out, wondering if its the amber sky, the cinnamon stick, the sound of the waves, or the strumming of that distant guitar that just woke up the memories. The strumming grows louder waking up more memories. I sip on the coffee which continues to let out cinnamon fumes. I see the guitarist walk past - a gypsy of sorts with long dreadlocks and sun-scorched skin, and a guitar that seems to have stood the test of time and still managed to sound beautiful. Son of a bitch! May be there are things in this world that get better with time. The used cinnamon stick lay wearily on the black saucer, still damp, still smelling good perhaps. The memories loosen their grip on me as the strumming fades into the waves, leaving me and the cinnamon stick alone...and gloomy. And I say this to the cinnamon stick: "Trust me, I know what it feels like, but your job here is done"

The Pinky Promise - Draft 1

2010-08-18T11:34:00.001-07:00

He believed in the words. They were her words and she had them engraved beautifully in nice running letters around the silver ring. "Eternally yours". And now, with her gone, the ring was all he could hold on to and he did so by selling everything else he had. Zeus, Aphrodite, the matador and the bull, the cherubs, the two headed dragon, the giant sea-turtle. He sold them all. Marble statues he had sculpted for her out of sheer passion and love. They were never intended to be sold.

Yes, he was a sculptor. For a living, he made tombstones, and occasionally, a bas-relief or two, or an angel of death for a graveyard. He hadn't made any after the day he carved her headstone. The bas-relief on it had their hands hooked in a pinky promise and the Celtic writing below it read "I will win you back, Carissa. I promise I will win you back a thousand times over if you leave me". Hector and Carissa were both in their early twenties and had just realized their feelings for each other when they had that conversation. They were a very handsome couple. She had asked him what he would do if she ever left him. He had looked deep into her beautiful blue eyes and replied with the promise, and she had made him hook pinkies with her and repeat it. "I promise I will win you back a thousand times over if you leave me". Hector meant every word of it when he said it. Five years later, when he wrote it in stone, he still meant every word. But for this he would have to travel to the dark continent. He would have to seek out the voodoo priests and convince them to teach him the blackest of their tricks. Necromancy. Bringing back the dead. And for this, he needed money. A lot of it

It cost him seven years, twenty one of his favorite sculptures, and a good part of his soul to finally master the dark art. Today was the day he was going to finally put it to practice.

He had made all the arrangements just the way Shaman Bimkubwa had taught him. He had drawn a perfect pentagram with the white ash from incinerated elephant tusks. On each of the five corners he had erected a six foot tall burning torch. Inside each of the five triangles, he carefully drew the symbol for one of the five elements. On the five intersections, he placed the severed heads of five billy goats. And right on the heart of the pentagram, lay the most life-like of all his pieces of work. Lying on her back was Carissa, life-sized, bare naked, and moulded out of earth soaked in goat's blood. She looked stunningly beautiful even though she had reddish black skin, empty sockets without eyes and toothless black gums that showed through her parted lips

Head shaven and skin painted, Hector danced around her like a mad man, chanting the magic words he had learnt. With iron pliers, he pulled out his fingernails one by one and placed them on her fingers, crying out in pain, but never for once stopping the chant. Then he did the same with his toe nails, followed by his teeth. He placed them all carefully on her, planting them exactly where they fitted. He found it harder now to utter the words through his toothless blood-filled mouth. But he wasn't done. He took out a sharpened piece of ebony and started skinning himself, writhing in agony while doing so. Somehow, through all this, he managed to gurgle out the chant unobstructed. He covered every inch on her with his bleeding skin. There was one last thing to be done. He placed one arm on her face to make sure he had the position right, and with the other, he gouged out his eyes. He could stand the pain no more. A cold shadow shrouded him numbing all his senses at the same time

When he regained his consciousness, he couldn't remember whether he had placed the eyes in her sockets or not. The wind felt like fire on his exposed flesh. Every inch on his body burned. All around him was the same shadow. But it wasn't cold anymore, nor did it numb the pain. He lay there waiting in the darkness

It seemed like an eternity before he finally heard her voice

"Hector?"

Her voice was smooth as silk, just the way he remembered it. He reached out a hand with the intense desire to feel her soft touch

"I'm not sure I want to do that" Said her voice

"Why not, lovfff?" Blind Hector found it impossible to speak properly without teeth "It iff I, your Hector"

"I know", said Carissa "I see the ring"

Then there was a pause. One that felt like for ever

"What happened to you?", she continued "you....you're ugly. you look like an abomination, and you speak funny!"

"That iff unimportant" said Hector " You haff been afleep for a very long time. Thingf haff changed a little. But I am fftill your Hector. I lovff you. And I haff won you back. Dont you lovff me?"

She did not reply

Hector found that the darkness made time stretch a lot longer. He had always been the patient one. He could definitely have waited longer for her reply. But his blindness and pain made him unusually impatient

"Dont you fftill loff me, Cariffa?"

She giggled at the way he pronounced her name. Then there was the same awkward indefinite pause again. And then, with much effort, came the reply

"Honey,... I know you love me. I dont know what the hell has happened to you, but you look horrible and scary. You look nothing like my Hector, the one I fell in love with. He had beautiful olive skin, long curly locks and sexy hazel eyes"

"But..." Hector stopped. Not because he didn't know what to say or because he too didnt particularly fancy the way he sounded. He just knew all of a sudden that the things he wanted to say would not make any sense to her

"I'm sorry, sweetie", continued her voice "I cannot do this. I don't feel the warmth for you anymore... Forgive me"

In the pitch-black, he heard her footsteps fade away slowly and he tried to picture her walking away in his olive skin and with his hazel eyes. Then something took over him. Something that strongly felt like the commitment to an unfulfilled promise. He couldn't feel the pain anymore. He smiled a toothless blood-dribbling smile and said, mostly to himself

"Well, that waf jufft onffe. I pinky promiffed I'd win you back nine hundred and ninety nine more timef"

When the sun goes down for the last time

2010-07-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

No thanks to the book I'm working on right now, I find myself waking up everyday feeling like a love sick puppy. Here is a quickie poem scribbled next to a quickie ball-pen sketch. Just felt like sharing this page from my scribble-pad

Rapunzel's plight

2010-04-12T00:54:00.000-07:00

Another collab with Rosh. Poem by Kish(me, of course) and illustration by Rosh. Most often its the poetry that inspires an artist to paint a piece. This time, it happened the other way round :)

Jacque and Jill (Preview)

2009-12-05T00:51:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-26T06:08:00.001-08:00

Liz woke up that morning a bit later than usual. The early Autumn sun was already shining onto 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 little glass wind-chime on her tall French-window swayed in a gentle breeze that swept in, filling the room with that familiar tingling, that had for quite some time now, ceased to be the music to her ears that it once had been. 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 freaked her out no more. 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 police had searched his study thoroughly, but could not find anything significant. They had sent samples of the blue substance for lab 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

"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, Mrs. Laroche" 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.

"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 anytime soon. In this blog, he had written just one chapter of what seems to us like a 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

"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, with an overtly animated left 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 had replied giggling "Isn't it the males that do all the foraging and food-collecting?"

"No, no, no, my dear Liz", David had corrected her. "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 all throughout the aforesaid minute or two. 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

2009-11-19T22:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

Bad bad human!

2009-11-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

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

2009-08-28T00:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-25T02:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-03T08:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-02T10:27:00.001-08:00

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!

DAMN!!...shez nailed me!

2008-06-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

You should refrain from pumping iron, sketching for long hours, and using the comp for more than 2 hours at a stretch, the doc says!!..that about covers everything that i am!!... RSI, he says... Repetitive Strain Injury... Seems iv been straining myself too much and not sleeping enough lately.. Its like some sick bondage-play gone wrong!!.. She(RSI, ofcrs)has screwed up my right wrist, elbow, and shoulder..Think the bitch has gotten the better of me???...NO WAY!!.. I refuse to succumb!!.. bring it on babe!!..is that the best shot u got?

Okay..gotta fight this one the smart way...stay with me, i'l keep ya posted!

More random rambling

2008-03-26T01:49:00.000-07:00

Batman forever...

2008-03-25T04:09:00.001-07:00

It has been a while since i started feeling like a superhero living a double life. Out there, is my alter ego, - the regular guy doing a regular, boring, secure job. But once i don my creative gear, i get transformed into this superhero who saves the day by sketching, visualizing, creating dreamworlds.. The amount of physical n emotional strength that the two parallel lives keep demanding of me has started exceeding what i can handle. My body and mind gives me warning signals.. The time has come and i'm gonna have to choose between the two.. With her ('Robin') by his side adding to his strength and courage, this batman has decided to be batman forever.. Adieu to the trodden path and Bruce Wayne again! The real battle begins

Random rambling

2008-03-21T04:57:00.000-07:00

....its a fact that most ppl dont realize...one can get to know only a very small number of people in a life time. All these social circles and parties give us the illusion that our worlds are crowded...but how many ppl do we really really know?...frankly, i do blieve that one lifespan is too short a time-period to even get to know oneself fully. It's quite natural - even i am pretty apprehensive about letting people share close emotional proximities with me. Happens when you have been bitten a couple of times. Many of us end up living in dream worlds as it seems to be a safer option..and it goes on till perhaps when you come across someone you feel is worth taking the risk for.Look around, and we find that there really isnt much of reality left..people wanna spend their time lost in movies, music, books, ...each of which is infact a temporary suspension of reality - a kind of self hypnosis that we keep doing on a regular basis...the more creative amongst us go for stuff which demands even more involvement..like writing our own stories and creating our own worlds and characters...One has to be either suicidal, or completely boring to want to be realistic

2008-02-12T09:50:00.000-08:00

These are the times when one gapes at the heights of ignorance. One wonders how a person can possibly be so not aware of the causes of the simplest of things happening around her. The ‘her’ in question being the ignoramus in the sketch above. Or could it be that she is just playing clueless? .. or is it plain modesty? .. I know not

The dodo keeps asking me “You are ‘beautiful’…how can anyone stay so ‘beautiful’?” … and me being not so modest a bloke, keeps accepting every compliment thatz coming my way. Though it was with a pinch o salt at first, eventually I took the above compliment too, to my credit, not taking into account the ‘sissy-ness’ of the word. Then it came as a sudden realization-like that 1000 watt bulb that just pops up inside the dark alleys of your mind throwing light at all those minor details you have been missing out on.
I decided to pack my backpack with all the supplies I would need for ma lil expedition, travel through one and all of those neglected alleys, and get to the bottom of the mystery – The root cause of my..ahem!..’beauty’. Every road I explored took me to the same thing. I realized all of a sudden that despite all the thousands of hours of my life that the mean clock has ruthlessly ticked away there were actually 17,520 hours which the meanie could do nothing about… I haven’t missed out on even a single second that passed during the last two years of my life. Topped with a 20 tonne inborn reluctance, I admit that the credit for this does not go to me.

When you keep something that is beautiful beyond description so close to your heart, atleast some of the beauty is bound to rub off on you. Sometimes the ‘beautiful being’ can be dumb enough not to realize that the beauty reflecting off the one so close to her is her own. ..Or, as I said earlier, she could be being blatantly modest. Either way, I gotta tell you guys that ever since she contaminated my life with her presence, every moment ……….has been worth living…every moment seemed to make me grow younger. My dreams seem to be growing every day… and I believe life is all about dreaming… and since my dreams are never gonna cease to exist, they make me immortal. Looks like I’ve found ma fountain of youth, and I got no intention of letting anyone else drink from it. But however, u can always get one of your own… Good luck ;) ..and happy second anniversary to us !!

Amen to that!!

2008-01-25T11:47:00.000-08:00

One more 'today'

2008-01-23T14:13:00.000-08:00

One more 'today'
The first ray of morning light touches his forehead through the curtain drapes. He still hasnt slept. He has been lying awake all night watching her sleep in his arms, her bare-skin touching his, underneath the blankets, and her delicate scent filling up the room. She is still fast asleep. Oh!..she looks so sweet and innocent when she sleeps. He buries his nose deep in her curls and inhales, filling his lungs with the smell thats the sweetest to him. every breath she takes is soft music to his ears. He then plants a peck on her forehead and the trace of that familiar lovely smile spreads across her soft lips. He wonders whats going on in her sub-conscious mind. She flings an arm around him, hugging him tight in deep sleep, pressing her bosom on to his chest. He feels their hearts beating ......next to each other.......for each other.
This feeling he gets everytime she is around is quite indescribable. The wholeness he feels when this feeling fills his soul is unparallelled. Its a feeling so immense, so sincere....and he feels it flowing through both of them. He knows that she too feels the same way about him. If he were to write a book, It would be about her...If he were to sing a song, it would describe her... if he were to make a portrait, it would surely be hers.....If God has sent him only one guardian angel in his life, 'she' most definitely is her. Although he is not perfect, he is the happiest because he has her. It is wonderful to have a heart beating for you. That is the kind of love that makes a man feel complete.
Something glistens on her finger casting an eerie glow on her face. She looks prettier than ever in the faint yellow light that reflects from the little golden ring that he gave her the previous night – the first official symbol of his love for her. And he whispers into her ears, partly to himself "My Aphrodite...you really are my goddess of love".....to which she responds with a semi-conscious "mmmhh...", her half open sleepy eyes fixed onto his....and she gives him a content smile. But before he is done savouring it, she is asleep again.He whispers into her ears again
"To my dear, sweet ' wife', this i must say....I'm falling in love with you more each day"
Everything seems so perfect...so flawless. And then reality strikes its death-blow. He realizes that very soon he wont be waking up next to her, feeling her skin on his, her warm breath on his neck. It took them six long months to be able to spend time together. But they did, against all odds. Those four days were the best he remembers. But very soon he wont be able to plant wake-up kisses on those lips. Very soon she is going to be just a phone number, a voice on the other end of the line, and a name on the chat-window on the computer screen .....and she is gonna stay that way for quite a long time. He knows not how long. Love drifts so swiftly by, without giving a chance to grasp its tranquility. He glooms among all of its torturous sadness, trying to cope with all the lonely days forthcoming...trying not to think of how alone he would feel. He realizes that there are many wars to be waged before they can be together again. He fears they might rip his heart apart and replace it with stone. He hopes that he survives. He fears time and distance might change the person she is and the way she feels about him. He winces in pain as his mind keeps on torturing him. He tries to shake the thoughts off his head.
He looks down at her face again. She is awake now, regarding him with love-filled eyes. Their lips lock in a deep, passionate morning kiss. She looks deep into his eyes and tells him
"When I'm with you, I feel so beautiful, so simple...so uncomplicated...so loved..so........"
".............complete?"
"yeah..complete"
Suddenly he feels strong...stronger than ever. He realizes how stupid it was of him to feel insecure. He realizes he is gonna survive...no matter how long it takes..no matter what hardships he has to face...love is gonna keep him alive for her. he realizes that this bond between them is way too strong to be broken by space and time. He can see all the beautiful days waiting for them once they are back together again. He can see his unborn children – his extensions to her, as he always puts it, giving him more of her to love – playing around....right there in her eyes. Everything seems so clear..including the only prayer he is gonna say every night with her in his arms, just the way he has her now
" O merciful Lord,... Give us one more day..one more 'today' "
(22nd Aug 2006)

What do we call these?..heart-songs?

2007-04-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

Life makes poets out of people at the oddest times. This one once came quite unexpectedly, straight from the bottom of my heart :)

As my journey continues,
Through these roads so abstruse
I find me asking myself always
Where life is taking me at such a pace

If fate breaks me, i wouldnt mind
If time leads me nowhere I'd still be kind
'Coz somewhere during my addled quest,
Our paths met, Life showed me its best !

The man in the mirror

2007-04-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

He has always been there for me whenever I needed him. As years pass by, his face would get wrinkled, his memories would start fading away, his body would grow frail... the only thing which would stay young for the longest would most probably be his heart.. And one day that too would cease to beat. But by then I would have become totally independent....I would have set myself free from all earthly bonds. In this world there is only one certainty – death. But does everything end with that?.. True that our memories and every single thing that we have learnt in this world will die with our brain, coz that is where it's all stored. But what about the core emotions like love, that have no logical connection to the brain. Science puts them as chemical reactions.. I, for some unknown reason refuse to believe so.

All this talk about death reminds me of this poem by John Donne...

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,

For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee does go,

Rest of their bones, and souls deliverie.

Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,

And better then thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Are we indeed gonna wake up eternally?.. That is one thing I'm in no hurry to find out :)

EXPLORER OF THE UNKNOWN REALMS – The prelude

2007-03-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Today, I have been pondering on why I wanted to start this blog. Is self discovery my only motive? Or does my mind secretly want interested people to know me on a different level? If I do, then why am I hesitant to keep a link to this blog elsewhere? Even if self discovery does not prove to be my primary motive, all these questions suggest that I should indeed know myself on a deeper level.

This reminds me of a comparison I chanced to come across in a friend’s blog long back. She had compared people to onions, having different layers. As other people get to know us, they start moving towards our core, layer by layer. Some find their way past quite a few layers, some hardly manage to penetrate a few, and we of lil’ knowledge often live with the assumption that we are at the core of our ‘onion’. And then one fine day, if we are fortunate enough, life proves us wrong, making us strong supporters of “Assumption is the mother of all screw ups”. We realize that there is a lot we don’t know about ourselves. Once this happens, some of us try figuring out ways to get to know ourselves better. Some others decide that ignorance is a bliss and that we should go no further and burden ourselves with knowledge which is not gonna make us any less of a mere mortal. I, however belong to the former group. I feel it’s a necessity to know myself as well as I can and I’m hoping that this blog is gonna help me do that

The black sheep speaks

2007-03-17T14:39:00.001-07:00

After walking this planet ensalved by paper with fancy prints (Yup, u guessed right – Money!!... people live, work, die and kill for it) for about quarter of a century, I have finally decided to give vent to my thoughts and emotions

Its fun to wake up every day and watch a zillion people run the rat-race all around you, and that is exactly what I’ve been doing all these years … watching, I mean. Never bothered to take part in it. Always had better things to do … always had a heart to follow. But still its fun to take a break once in a while and take a seat by the footpath. Helps you realize that you indeed are a superior-sapien

People run frantically at a reckless pace, trying to hoard all the riches they can without bothering to slow down and savor what they have, so that they can enjoy it all together once they are done hoarding

What they fail to realize is their mortality. They believe they are gonna live for ever. But the sad truth is that by the time they are half way through hoarding, they already would have lost a fair share of the most valuable thing they have – time. And by the time they decide to take a look at what they have, they wouldnt be physically, mentally or spiritually fit for savouring it. Time is our most priced possession (the second, i believe is health, though it can be regained to a certain extend. No matter what u achieve, u wont be in a position to enjoy it if you are not healthy in body, mind and soul). Time is the only thing of which any bit lost is lost for ever. The value of everything else is superficial. A recently purchased private jet plane wouldnt mean half as much to the 'rich' Sheik in the Middle East as what the first four-wheeler of a 'middle-class' guy means to himself. And this car wouldnt mean a tenth as much to the middle-class guy as would good food to that starving kid in Zambia who gets fed eventually after a week. I remember a time when one Asterix comic gifted to me by my dad at the end of every month would make me hop around with joy. And then there came a time when even a dozen of my favourite comics a week wouldn’t get me half as excited, though I still enjoyed reading them. Once you become a slave to money, the little things fail to keep you entertained anymore. Every time it takes a little more to give you the same amount happiness. And right now we are living in a world where man's basic necessities are things he doesnt need at all

I’m proud to say that I’m not driven by money. The day I decided to break the shackles, the world became beautiful again. And the day I accepted my mortality, I set myself free again. I am not saying that I'm not ambitious. I'm just saying that my ambitions are not materialistic, and money is not the first thing on my priority list, though i need it to live

A good percentage of the human population believes that “he who has the most number of toys when he dies is the winner” . Then there are the cynics who say that “Life is hard; and then you die; so its not worth your while trying to achieve anything” … and some extreme cases who go “No one dies a virgin, coz in the end life fucks em all”. Blaming life doesn’t help. Life is what we make out of it. It is not what happens to us, but how we react to it that makes life heaven or hell

Life begins with the top chambers of our hour-glasses filled with sand. As the sand-grains of time slip right through our fingers, the lucky few among us realize that the sole purpose of life is living … I said LIVING … not EXISTING. That means savoring every second of it along with every emotion that comes with it, doing the things your heart wants you to do, not screwing with your conscience and keeping it clean, finding love and returning it, and having faith in yourself.

Life is something that falls somewhere between a pleasure-trip and a computer game. It is not just the final goal or destination that matters; but the whole game/trip should be made equally enjoyable. Ultimately its nothing but satisfaction that all of us want out of our lives

A lil' blast from the past

2007-02-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

Before I start posting in this blog, I thought I’d just copy-paste a chapter from a group in the same name – The Soliloquy of a Libertine – that I once hosted. Just to get into that good ol’ philosopher gear ;)

CHAPTER 2: Another Road Not Taken

It was an afternoon in August and I was sitting on the sandy beach of Shangumugham near the Trivandrum Air-port.It's the second best place I prefer whenever I feel that I need to spend some time with Mr. Solitude.The sea was calm and as usual,I was cogitating with my eyes fixed passively on the crimson above the horizon when something which seemed to be a silver arrow dashed across the sky followed by the deafening sound of a jet engine.After a second or two,one morefighter plane of the Indian Airforce dashed through the same path.

The 'Sukhoys' were doing their routine practice rounds.A couple of days back,I had read in the news papers that its with the American f-15s that they are practicing above the Indian ocean, these days.

My mind raced back in time and stopped at the face of a 12 year old boy. The ultimate dream of this 12 year old boy was to soar the skies in ultra-sonic speeds. His notebooks wre filled with sketches of pilots and fighter planes. He even made a couple of comic books with pilots in the lead roles. At young age, children tend to get easily influenced by the stuff that they watch and it must have been the Tom Cruise starrer Top Gun and a couple of other movies in the Iron-Eagle series that inspired this boy. So, he grew up with the dreams of becoming a fighter-plane pilot someday. But at age 16, he developed a slight myopia. Before long he realized that he would have to give up his dreams of becoming an air-force pilot.

But he continued making comic books. Art was his passion, and that made him an ardent dreamer. He created chaotic realms and mystic characters never seen before. His comic books became quite popular in his school

After schooling, he took up Computer Engineering as that seemed to be the most promising option for a good career. Computer engineers were in high demand at that time. But his mind was always after more adventurous and creative things.

For a while he tried to compensate for his 'losses' by signing into the internet in the false name-John Hunt-A naval aviator on board the U.S.S.George Washington- the aircraft carrier as large as the Empire State Building. His job : flying Harrier fighter planes. He continued having fun this way till he realized that the most enjoyable thing in life is being oneself. That is when he gave up being a 'pseudo'.

After graduating as a computer engineer,he turned to the multimedia side since that was more fun. During his eight months' training in Toons India as a 3D Animator, he found a handful of guys with the same mentality,vision and almost the same attitude as his.They decided to start something on their own and together they registered a company called the Mirchiz Studios. Together, now they aim at making their dreams come true.

Now you must be thinking "Wotz this guy trying to prove with this story outta' the blue?". That was just a brief version of the last ten years of my life.Ofcourse it is true that I am happy with the way I am today and the graveyard of broken-dreams is not a place I frequent.But there are times when I ask myself the 'what if'- questions.It is at these times that I think about the roads that were not taken.What if I had undergone a laser surgery and pursued my dream career? But the closest I can get to being a pilot now is when I play one of those flight simulator games on my computer or when I imagine myself to be sitting in the cock-pit of a F-16 while driving my car on the highway all alone.

I am not much into poetry. But Robert Frost is one among the few poets that i admire. His poem 'The Road Never Taken' gives the message that everyone is a traveller, choosing the roads to follow on the map of their continuous journey of life.The poem clearly demonstrates Frost's belief that it is the roads that one chooses that makes him the man who he is.

Many a time we will arrive at points where our road branches into many and being a 'single person' , we can choose only one. Like the traveller in Frost's poem,I have chosen the road less travelled and where it takes me is yet to be seen.And i know very well that one way leads to another and the roads not taken will eventually get too far away to be reconsidered

The traveller in Frost's poem realizes that at the end of his life,"Somewhere ages and ages hence" he will have regrets about having never gone back and travelled down the roads he did not take.Yet he remains proud of his decision and he recognises that it was this path that he chose that made him turn out the way he did and live his life the way in which he lived.

Like all computer engineers, I too could have got into programming and lived a 'secure' life in the IT world. "But I took the road less travelled and that had made all the difference"- is the only line from the poem that I want to hear from my own mouth when I am in my sixties.( In the positive sense, ofcourse!!..c'mon!..I'm always an optimist.) And how do I get there?

Three things to watch for-Speech, Behavior and Action
Three things to control-Tongue, Temper and Temptation
Three things to admire-Honesty, Perfection and Hardwork

This, i was told by a certain wise-sapien, is the secret formula for being a successful person. But other than these, there are three most important things in life that keep us going, no matter what: Love ,Faith and Hope.
I totally agree with this. But which of these is the most powerful?..is it love?.. is it faith?..or is it hope?.. Well, this has always been a debatable question.
Atleast some of you out there must have heard this story.- A mother gives birth to her son. Like all mothers, she too naturally loves him. She has faith in him and has high hopes that he will make it big someday. The son grows up to be an outlaw. He commits a lot of crimes. The mother loses her faith in him. She still doesn’t give up hope. She hopes that he might correct himself someday and things will finally be fine. But then the son commits a murder, gets busted and is finally sentenced to death. The day he is executed, the mother’s hope dies along with him. The only thing she carries to her grave is the love that she has for her son.
Whoever wrote this story wanted to prove that love is the strongest thing in the world. But is it true? I have a different opinion

Now, If what u have in mind is a question along the lines of “Whoz this crack-pot?” ,I guess it’s time for a lil’ self-introduction

I am a warrior set out on a quest to conquer his dreams .On my way I have lost many an armour, many a weapon. Many a time I have been deceived by ‘pseudos’ .But the force which helped me learn from my mistakes and find better weapons and armour to assist me on my quest was the hope that my dreams are gonna come true someday. It is hope that still keeps me focused .Even if I spend the whole of my life chasing my dreams, I believe I am gonna enjoy every minute of it.

What are my dreams?. … isn’t it a bit too early in the game to be discussing my dreams? After all, I’m just 22 and I really have a long long way to go.

- Kishore M (on 24-2-2005)