Trance

This past day I was sitting on my chair and watching the kings of the sky in flight. I don’t know what the signs of joy are in birds; but I didn’t find any particular reason to believe they weren’t simply euphoric that evening. And certain something in my mind told me this could well be the way they have been every evening of their life. And I wondered why. Why, we think, say and write every day that we are superior to them. We have our share of worries, every kind of them. We worry that it might rain and render all the toil of washing clothes futile; we worry getting chided for getting late to office; we worry a bomb might drop on our heads and blow us off to shreds; we worry about everything and find so very few reasons to cheer about. And some times you are half way through executing that perfect smile at this delighting thing you found, and this assignment that you hadn’t started and was needed to be submitted the next day fucks up that little gesture of simple pleasure.

For the eagle, it finds joy in everything it does. It might not be joy; it could be something else entirely different. Some feeling that the human psyche wouldn’t ever be able to even comprehend or even recognize. But I see them doing circles in the air, soaring high, resting atop the trees, and killing at will with such panache that even 007 might wanna consider learning a thing about élan from them. I fail to see even the faintest tinge of despair in them. I envy them.

How would it feel if you are an absolute sucker at the thing you value the most? The one thing you always found the most inspiring, the most significant; the thing that you thought might well be your passport to success. What do you do?

Right now I’m confronted with that question, again. I’ve had it in my face before and then I escaped somehow with my ego virtually unscathed. But it has remained in me, all this time. And now it’s raising its ugly head again and I feel cornered desperately trying to find excuses, to shield my ego, my verve. I might fail this time and if I do, I do not know what will ensue. I thought I had left that phase of being an absolute loser behind. Guess not. For someone who takes pride in being candid, the possibility of having been a character fraud all this time is despairing beyond words.

I saw American beauty and the fear I’ve always kept inside me like a timid 5 year old that hides its piece of broken marble safe beneath the moss grown plank in the basement, surfaced.It is disturbing and true.

Nothing can be worse than being ordinary.

Murphy and a Can of Kunkumapoo

Murphy's Law: “If something can go wrong, it will; and usually at the worst time.”


Grand Bazaar is nothing like the name suggests. It’s as resplendent as the sty that used to be on the street opposite to where Oliver twist lived. Now, a shop on the Keston road and that too rubbing groins with “style plus” may not exactly be the way you define business acumen but it pretty much gives you an idea how bad things can go. All praise Murphy.

Oh I need to add at this point that the shop is doing good business and will have it that way until the “style plus” think-tank decides to grace it with a grocery section.

Fate, it seems, entrusted with me the responsibility to pour forth all the above said nonsense and the coming ones only ‘coz this past day me and my amigos decided to give “grand bazaar” a visit.

For the purpose of easy comprehension, I shall henceforth refer to them as Calvin and Hobbes.

It was the season of “combined study” (yeah, and it comes every 6 months or so, closely preceding the season of flunk-o-exams) and me and Hobbes were at Calvin’s home for the same reason. Even as Hobbes was desperately trying to figure out the relation between “Wilson line” and thermal engineering by Bellany (by then we had understood there were several “kinds” of thermal engineering, mainly a)Bellany b) Khurmi and c) Rajput and they all had one thing, only one, in common; a lot of shit.), Calvin came in, holding the key of his black won’t-let-you-have-the-Lancer Indigo Marina and we set forth on an expedition that would see us miss VTOLs by inches and millimeters, thanks to our cockpit crew Calvin and Hobbes. Let me give you a fair estimate of how great things were, it was like waking you up from a pleasant dream and driving you in to living your worst nightmare. I don’t know how worse things can get. Yes, and I don't intend to either, if you were getting ideas, arsehole.

After what seemed like a few zillion trillion fucking billion ages the 80 horse driven blackie came to a screeching halt. Down we got and walked we in. We shopped and then we came out. And then, out of the blooming chrysanthemum blues, it happened.
Hobbes pointed to an already yellowing piece of paper glued to the bazaar wall and read out,

“kunkuma poo ivide labhyamanu”

A pair of sullen eyes looked up, now lit by hope, and Calvin looked at Hobbes.

Hobbes looked at Calvin.

Calvin looked at Hobbes.

Hobbes looked at Calvin.

I stood wondering if “kunkuma poo ivide labhyamanu” had somehow revealed to them that they were actually biological brothers or something, even as they continued to exchange the thoroughly somber and totally boring “bhaai….mere bhaai. tum kahan they?” looks. Hell, it was more like, “Hey bub, shall we do it tonight?”

Then to my continued despair, the two ran in like chicks with the fox on hot pursuit and bought a tin of “kunkuma poo”for 70 bucks; which I learned shortly after, aunty had apparently asked for.

My worst nightmare part 2 happened then. Here again, I would like to let you know that I had greatly curbed my instinct to scream at the face of an untimely death and was quite pleased with my stoic self. A few rides more and I would be laughing my stinking guts out if Death himself were to come and tell me, “The end. This program was brought to you by….”

Back at Calvin’s home: We stood at the door, having pressed the bell. Aunty came and opened the door and Calvin pushed afront the shopping bag.

A few moments later, settled as we sat in Calvin’s room, with all the worries in the world and hoping worse wouldn’t happen and at the same time perfectly knowing that it would in all likelyhood, came a voice from the adjacent room,

“mone, ni kunkumam vangichille?”

The “bhaai….mere bhaai. tum kahan they?” looks were there again and moments later, in which time we realized there was only one universal law; Bellany had no idea what it was; and Murphy was a genius, Calvin replied perfectly embodying obedience and respect and all things nice,

“amma, kunkumapoo vangichitundu. athu mixiyil ittu podicheduthal pore amme"

Meandering my way to No-where

I had a ride in a Mercedes today. I sat inside in awe of the big gentle beast; and tried to feel the pride soaring inside me like the flame of a candle just lighted. But that is about the Merc. Let me talk about myself; coz maybe that’s all what I know.

I have completed two and a half years of my college life with another one and a half to go. I have had my moments of success, that of failure and it has been largely a mixed bag of fortunes. But the bigger picture shows the astronaut making idli-chutney in the dingy kitchen of some suburban home. I ought to have known about braking systems and ignition and engines and cylinders and valves and for the love of Christ, brake-bloody-horse powers; and of course without a second revealing thought about it, I say, I know about none.

Yes, my friend. I am a would-be Mechanical engineer.

I claim; and much to my despair, falsely, that I have escaped falling in with the line of a trillion “aspiring” doctors and engineers. And yet, I can’t pick one direction that I would have liked to pursue. Astronomy, language and quite shockingly even history springs up in my mind when I find myself cornered with questions that share the same nauseating theme,

“If not this, what?”

I hear people, peers and seniors alike, speaking of machines and things beyond the scope of my limited intellect with a fervor that I have previously only associated with Gyro Gearloose. God bless them. I don’t envy them, I envy their passion. I see it and the only instance I could remember when I had anything close to that kind of zeal for something, was when I was sifting through the pages of “A brief History of Time.” I know I love everything about the universe, time and the proving wrong of previously believed notions of things being absolute. Those are the things I believe test the human rationale to the point of utter disbelief. There is a subtle beauty in proving things, hitherto believed, wrong and starting afresh on a clean slate; forming every idea anew.

You read what the Pope wrote and what Einstein wrote and you believe science and religion are poles apart. And then you read them all over again and you find them all to be the same simple thing. Both take you closer to absolution. You realize how trivial a thing your existence is and yet how your birth was an unavoidable event in the course of time. You take the calculator to count how many times you went wrong in a day of your life and then you sit back to realize how impeccable the figures that govern the whole universe had to be for it to be the way it is. And they say, if even a decimal had changed in the fundamental figures the universe as we see it wouldn’t have been there, nor we to talk about it. Still, we call ourselves the higher being.

Why are gods always depicted as human, do our “lesser” counterparts have no gods? I wonder how gods would have looked like had lions been able to evolve out like us, or even peacocks for that matter.

PS: I assure you the Merc has got nothing to do with god or religion thereof.