Being Shreyas Sharma...

'Without contraries is no progress'

- William Blake, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'

The man without a face
Wearing layers upon layers of masks, to hide,
To insulate the vacuum inside...

The tub of lard
Moving day in and day out with his girth
To prove to himself his own worth...

The guy with the 'golden voice'
No one but him his fan
His ego a splotch on one that remotely resembles a man...

The overrated underachiever
Undertaking the eternal quest to become a man self-made
Trying desperately to burn-out, not to fade...

The silhouette whose shadow has left his side
Getting drenched in the warm showers of winter rain
Putting on another facade, getting etherized again...

The lunatic inside his head
Still making others around him smile
While the one inside the heart pukes out bile...

"The joker in the pack
Useless for this perfect hand
That you call life, yes you with your merry band...

Its rather convenient for you
'A friend' when you want help. 'a bastard' later
My purpose wasn't your needs to fulfill, your wants to cater...

Ego Ego Ego! That is the label you gave me
So what if I believed I was the best?
There are people who market themselves more, them you never detest...

My life was my own, and so was my gasping breath
And I wanted to live it on my own terms
And now, you leave me to the mercy of the worms...

Fine, all of you can come and visit me in hell
Fuck this life, fuck the world say I
Sometimes I wish I was stillborn, sometimes I wish I could just die..."

Thus on and on continues the fat man
A study in binary oppositions, his story
At times an outlet to his ego; at others, self-deprecatory

Maybe one day you, dear reader, will realize
What he had been screaming all his life had been right
Alone he came, alone he lived, and no fair company he got in his flight...

(20/08/2007)

The Gestation of the New Grub Street Hack...

There was a movie in the early 80s called 'Woh Saat Din' - yes the one which launched Anil Kapoor... Bloody impactful movie, with a concept that was repeated successfully in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 'Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam' - that of the husband reuniting the wife with her lover - in the case, the obnoxious, ubiquitous Prem Pratap Patialewale... Anyway, I digress (as usual)...

A week at IIMC proves the old adage that 'a week is a long time...' - albeit in a more abstract instance rather than the polity-specific one... Activity is the name of the game... 9-to-6 flat out - hell! even Schumi didn't have to go that hard for that long!!! Add to that the amount of cynicism one encounters from one's professors/senior colleagues and all one can see is a bleak, almost-Dickensian outlook. Without the 'humour'. Wherever that was... I mean, seriously, when the first thing one gets to hear when starting out is that 'a journalist always finds a bottle half-empty', what can you think of except - 'yahaan kyun aa gaye yaar!'

But all is not lost. In fact, nothing is. Good bunch of folks around, and the music sessions have started strong. Good weather thus far too - 'the rain it raineth everyday' - or every other day thus far (Trees, folks - the JNU forest gives us the magical spells of rain while the rest of South Delhi is comparatively drier)... The workload is hardly an insight into the Venus Flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) that await us, but I'm not complaining. Yet.

Lets see how things pan out... As long as I get a 2+ package, I'll keep my mouth shut and not trash (bite) the industry (hand) that feeds me... You see, its called OPPORTUNISM...

* * * * * *

Doodling in the Depths of Despondency

The hare and the tortoise
Fused into an egg-head
With yellow bunny chompers
And whiskers of Sylvester the Cat
A bald spot the size of Chhatisgarh
Ears spread wide like an elephant in heat
Twiddling thumbs and fingers
With a voice as if in the dark
That whimpers
And makes the goose pimples prickle your neck
Picking his nose and rolling the raw gold
The financial expert is in the house
ORDER! ALL RISE!

(09/08/07, my first poem in IIMC, about Mr. S)