Encompassing November in One Post...

We've been through this such a long long time
Just tryin' to kill the pain
But lovers always come and lovers always go
An no one's really sure who's lettin' go today
Walking away
If we could take the time to lay it on the line
I could rest my head
Just knowin' that you were mine
All mine
So if you want to love me
then darlin' don't refrain
Or I'll just end up walkin'
In the cold November rain...

- Guns N Roses, 'November Rain'

And so, yet another November has gone past... Another December is upon us... And here I am, after a month long hiatus, 'come back from the dead to tell you all'... That, as you might have guessed, is another line from Prufrock... I've begun to sound like Bertie Wooster now, harping on his Scripture Knowledge Prize from private school...

The last few days have been spent coughing my insides out... I think the viruses that live rent-free inside me finally decided to stage a revolt against my constant efforts to fumigate them out... And their mutiny seems to have succeeded, with the doctor having advised me to quit smoking with immediate effect... BREAKING NEWS: Shreyas Sharma quits smoking... (Falsified information is not something journalists should convey, but who cares on a blog!)

So anyway, here are three posts I have written during the course of this month, but not actually happened to publish them...

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The following poem was written sitting in a hotel room in Goa with a hangover... Perhaps you didn't know that I went to Goa for 3 days with my cousin Richa and our friend Aditya earier this month... The first night, we visited a little beach-shack called 'Island View'... This poem talks about the experience, and the lunatic's ramblings inside the head...

NIGHT AT THE BEACHFRONT

A beach
A dirty moat with tadpoles around it
Chicken Xacutti at the opposite end of the table
And the old, faithful Red with the Monk and the Coke

There we are
Sitting around a table with a palm tree growing through it
Old Santan making incredulous faces
At the requests we heap on him
'Treble large for everyone'
Feelin’ groovy is the Old Monk

The sound of the approaching tide
Louder and louder
Does it want a piece of the liquid action too?

They leave for the hotel
Its just me and you now, Red
Like it always is
Your comforting touch
As I slip further and further into Euphoria and beyond
La Vita E Bella

The urge fills me
To walk into the dark horizon
To feel the salt all over me
Encrusting my matted hair
Burial at sea
La Vita E Bella

No end in sight
To this resolved crisis
Godot is in the house.

(03/11/2007)

* * * * * *

After the enjoyable Goa experience, and a diwali celebrated with family and Chandru in Jaipur, one came back to the grind of the capital... And as is to be expected in this season, very soon thereafter, there happened to be a wedding one had to attend... It was a fourth cousin's wedding, a supremely boring affair, and doubly frustrating, since one had to drive 2 hours in a maddening traffic jam, all the way to Vikaspuri, then another hour n 15 mins back home... And no chicks to look at even... Damn! So the frustration poured out of my heart the next day in class in this form...

How The Great Indian Wedding is a Farce

Hundreds of people, the best clothes, jewellery, expensive gifts for the groom and the bride, tons of food gulped down greedily and the usual bandwallahs-ghodiwallah-tentwallah nexus. Welcome to the spectacle known as the Great Indian Wedding.

What, though, is the purpose of this ceremony? If you live in Delhi, and have done so all your life as I have, you might be inclined to think that pomp and show was the real purpose behind the whole shebang. Others may lead you to believe that it is a way for all the scattered branches of the old joint family system to come together and celebrate a grand event in the life of the family. Quite acceptable. Then there is the ‘official’ reason – ‘please grace us with your presence and bless the newlyweds’. All three possibilities are equally acceptable or unacceptable, depending on your point of view.

Personally, I question the very basic of this ‘solemnization of vows’ or whatever horse-shit we’ve been fed in our lives. A ‘wedding’, to me, is supposed to be a ceremonial walk around the fire seven times in order to grant a public-license to the man to have sex with the woman. And the gharaatis and baraatis, the family and friends on either side, are just there as witnesses to this official license, so that the woman cannot turn around and scream ‘RAPE’ later. The food, of course, is the bribe that needs to be given to them in order to make them swear the oath. After all, unhone aapka namak khaya hai!

And what of the bride? She is, in most cases, supposed to give herself to a man whom she has never seen. On top of it, her parents were (are) supposed to pay the groom to screw her all his life. Then, she has to bow down and touch the feet of every damn chacha-chachi-mama-mami-phupha-phuphi-padosi-and-padosi-ka-kutta that have come to witness her subjection. Most of whom aren’t even worthy of being greeted when you see them in the street. And then they pass judgement – ‘iss behtar bahu nahin mili aapko’?

Maybe I am too biased against marriages, or maybe I’m over-reading into the situation… But the next time you go to a wedding, which will be quite often in the next few months, dressed in all your finery and carrying an expensive gift for the newlyweds, think – what will they gain out of it and what will you?

* * * * * *

And then, there was the December-syndrome-come-early this time... As early as November 6, the night I returned to Jaipur from Goa, in fact... Life comes full circle every year for me... It has done so once again... Only this time, as I wrote in my old poem 'Another Phoenix', there are no ashes for me to rise from again... Only a little bullet lodged in my head, shot from the lip that I was once attached to...

Why is existence such an absurd series of unanswered questions? Why doesn't the comfortable embrace of death envelope you when you most need it? Why didn't life ever give me a second chance?

Maybe this is what life is about... Its like the cruise on the Mandovi, where I made friends with Troy... Two glowing cigarettes and a discussion on Bill Gates' driver... And then, the show's over folks...

But as I always keep telling myself,
The Show Must Go On...
And so I promise,
I'll face it with a grin,
I'm never giving in...
On with the show...

Coz nothing lasts forever,
Even cold November Rain...

A Vision, A Beautiful Dream...

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Brown dust covering the horizon
Yellow leaves embedded deep in their dry graves
The rocks and the solitary cactus
The beautiful landscape of this painting
Everyday is a little death
'Fear no more the heat of the sun' wrote the Stratfordian
There is no fear, no pain

The red torrents of howling storms
A vision, a beautiful dream
The blue corpses strewn about over the plains
Fate, thy bounties abound
While thou smil'st upon us

When I look into your eyes, Princess
I see my life, played
A million times in an infinite loop
A circus act, jumping through the ring of fire
Earning applause for burning the flesh
For acting the part you have assigned to me

Barren, fallow, waste
Lies the earth under my feet
And rocky contours inside the skull
They talk of Spirituality
And the Art of Living
Its very complicated you see
Breathing in the brown dust with one nostril
And exhaling the plumes of gray with the other
Global (heart)warming

Was this what Cassandra envisaged?
A Nietzscheian God
An Eliotesque land
A weeping Satan
An incarnate of Lucifer
A minstrel Mephistopheles
A sadist
A masochist
A pessimist
And Humble Polonius

Congratulations, fellow lunatics
The beautiful mind
Is now sterile
At last, a worthy existence...

कुछ लफ्ज़, मतलब की तलाश में...

उसके दुश्मन हैं बहुत
आदमी अच्छा होगा

वो भी मेरी ही तरह
शहर में तन्हा होगा...

लोग कहते हैं कि मैं बहुत बोलता हूँ... सब के सब ऐसा कहते हैं, इसलिये सही ही कहते होंगे... कुछ मुझे extrovert कहते हैं, कुछ बड़-बोला... पर कितने लोग शान से ये कह सकते हैं कि वो मुझे सच-मुच जानते हैं? मैं असल में कौन हूँ?

यह ऐसा सवाल है, जिसका जवाब आज तक मुझे खुद नहीं मिला... जब waiting for godot पढा था, तब इस phenomenon के लिए एक नाम मिल गया - existentialism... बस तब से इसी existentialist crisis का बहाना, और साथ ही Prufrock के मुखौटों का वास्ता देकर अपनी सच्चाई से लगता है खुद भाग रहा हूँ... क्या इसका कोई अंत है?

अगर कोई अंत नज़र आता है तो वो है आत्म-चेतना यानी self-realization... लेकिन वो मेरे बस का टंटा नहीं... मैं तो रहूंगा वही escapist/extrovert...

* * * * * *

रफ़ी साहब जैसा फनकार सैंकड़ों सालों में एक बार आता है... पिछले दो घंटे से उनके गानो की playlist बना के चलाता जा रहा था... एक गाने पर आकर रूक गया... गीतकार कैफी आजमी का लिखा, सचिन देव बर्मन का संगीत-बद्ध किया ये गाना उस महान फिल्मकार गुरुदत्त की ज़िन्दगी की सच्चाई है... और शायद मेरी भी...

देखी ज़माने की यारी

बिछडे सभी बारी-बारी...

क्या लेके मिलें अब दुनिया से

आंसू के सिवा कुछ पास नहीं

या फूल ही फूल थे दामन में

या काँटों की भी आस नहीं

मतलब की दुनिया है सारी

बिछडे सभी बारी-बारी...

वक़्त है मेहेरबां

आरजू है जवान

कल की फिक्र करें

इतनी फुर्सत कहाँ

रात भर मेहमान

हैं बहारें यहाँ

रात गर ढल गयी

फिर ये खुशियाँ कहाँ...

पल भर की खुशियाँ हैं सारी

बढने लगी बेकरारी...

उड़ जा उड़ जा प्यासे भँवरे

रस न मिलेगा धारों में

कागज के फूल जहाँ खिलते हैं

बैठ न उन गुल्ज़ारों में

एक हाथ से देती है दुनिया

सौ हाथों से ले लेती है

ये खेल है कब से जारी

हाय

बिछडे सभी बारी-बारी

मतलब की दुनिया है सारी

बिछडे सभी बारी-बारी...

The standing ovation and the aftermath... O-14 rules!

Saturday morning, 0345 hrs… Sitting and typing at Karma’s place… You wouldn’t know of him, he’s from IIMC… English Journalism to be precise… And I can see the aftermath of an Ocean’s Fourteen (ORIGINAL, isn’t it?) meeting all around the room… Bodies strewn all over the place, sleeping of course…

Alcohol does funny things to people… Take our Abhishek Mukherjee for example… Another IIMCian, normally the voice of reason among the motley crew… 3 pegs of McDowell’s Number One later, he was at stage five… Which, for the uninitiated, means he was DEAD DRUNK… Unfortunately for the rest of us semi-sober ones, that meant four hours of non-stop rambling and ‘I’m not drunk man!’… That too without puking, which could’ve helped him… And us… But alas! It wasn’t to be… He kept on and on and on and on… About everything under the sun… Of course, bastard that I am, I kept asking him pointed questions whose answers I knew would provoke genuine mass hysteria…

Then there was Chhoto (name changed even without the request)… How he drove to Ganga Dhaba shall remain one of those unsolved mysteries… Coz as we were to find out, whisky + vodka + weed had made him ride a mental horse… He was better than Mukherjee, for sure, but then, if one were to choose between the devil and the deep-blue-sea, you would be Faustus, wouldn’t you? Tottering along nicely was he, though thankfully, better sense prevailed and Nishant drove everyone back…

And then there was Father Teresa aka Big Daddy aka yours truly… 3 large Old Monk shots and the patented ‘Daaru humesha sach bolti hai’… Trying to impose his opinion on the party regardless of the topic – be it the age old Rafi or Kishore debate or why Tendulkar is still the greatest… With the odd ‘Nain ladd jayihain’ thrown in to emphasize whatever it was he was trying to emphasize… The only ingredient missing was the usual hyperventilation of the ego with an ‘I’m the Best’… But taking on responsibility is his forte, as he would have you believe… With two drunks already among the party, somehow he managed to sober himself down, and take care of them… Hence the name, Father Teresa, in the words of the other ‘Not Drunk’ Mukherjee, Soubhik Dada…

The occasion for the party was two-fold – it was the one month anniversary (or thereabouts) of O-14, and secondly, WE BROUGHT THE HOUSE DOWN at the Hindi Pakhwara function… 10 of us singing the immortal Pyaar Humein Kis Mod Pe Le Aaya… And the crowd rocked… Especially Arnab with his power-packed rendition of Panchamda’s high notes in the song… They say the best judge of a performance is the artist him/herself, and honestly speaking, a) we enjoyed it, b) we rocked!

So at the end of this eventful day, as O-14 sleeps peacefully in this 10’x10’ cubbyhole, this is Big D signing off, with a little advice – know your limitations while drinking, and stick to them… Otherwise the next morning shall carry a double headache – the hangover and the embarrassment of listening to rantings recorded by someone… Goodnight…

Chai, Sutta aur Philosophy ki Kitaab - The Anniversary Edition

One year of struggling for readership on the blogosphere... One year of Bhaval and other regulars’ insightful comments... One year of trying to exercise diplomacy, in order not to be flagged and kicked out of the realm... One year that began with a nightlong conversation, and ended with the annihilation of a few dreams, and the onset of a lot more new ones... “redemption-reprise”, or “Chai, Sutta aur Philosophy ki Kitaab” is ONE year old today...

This is the first post I’m writing on my new laptop... Struggling somewhat with the new keyboard and all... (Waah Shreyas Babu! Naya Laptop! Nayi Gaadi! Aur Naya Profession! Badhiya Hai!!!) Undertook a whirlwind trip to Jaipur the last couple of days, to hang out with the Brother... Eventful doesn’t begin to describe the trip... What with a bus that broke down at 430am on NH8, rains flooding the capital of the desert state and what not... Enjoyment can be measured in two ways, I believe – either by how quickly the time went by; or how slowly, in which case you remember every detail... This trip was the latter... Effectively, I stayed in Jaipur for 36 hours, sleeping time included... And cherished every moment of it...

A year, twelve months, 365 days... How life changes in the seemingly short span of time... From English Literature to Television Journalism, from a Tata Indica chauffeur (Mom’s car, that’s why) to a Maruti 800 owner, from S to no-S and back somewhat... New friends, gone away, yet more new ones now found... Old friends still in the head, somewhere around... A birthday party to remember, with gallons of alcohol and kilometres galore on the car's odometer... Drives to North Campus at night, Marlboro regulars in the rain at the Arts Fac... And the rum, of course... Neat, or on the rocks... Life, they say, comes full-circle... I dunno about that...

All I know is that it has been a pleasure writing this blog thus far... If nothing else, it is my little space in the web universe... A place where I can vent out, criticize, make caricatures, and generally be myself... Whatever you, the reader, may interpret me to be... Asshole, perhaps... This blog is me, inversely personified...

So anyway, time to uncork the champagne and let your hair down... Its a party here tonight!