Another Mortal Life

That I don't have a future
worries me once in a while.

That I don't have a present
terrifies me sometimes.

But, that I don't have a past
gives me nightmares.
And very often.



Edit. Edit.
The Other Dimension

I don't have a present..
it frustrates me sometimes.

Also, I don't have a past..
I don't even have a past!
Kya yaar..

:P :P


P.S.: I hate this sexist society.
P.P.S.: I hate the sexist definition of the word 'sexist'. Usually, it won't convey what I meant by the above line! :P

Some of my posts that never saw the light of your computer screen, and some that saw it only once or twice, had something strange yet interesting about them, for me at least. The only thing they lacked was the exact picture of my mood while writing them. The unhappy, annoyed tone of most of them was so overwhelming that the idea of the writer having enjoyed writing them seemed to be quite far-fetched.

But no, I've liked writing all of them. Maybe most often they don't appear so but they've been the best form of indulgence writing has ever offered me.

So , after a satisfying day of work, when I've nothing to do while waiting for a bus, I compose words like.. "I'm now pretty much sure.. that my life is a whore.." I hum them sitting alone at a bus stop, and I love it. But when I post them on this blog.. you say- "Oh! This guy freaked out yet again!". No ladies and gentlemen, No. I'm happier with my life than even the best of my posts could ever suggest.

I was reading some of the old unpublished (or published-then-removed) drafts today. And I came across many lines that I found interesting.. unfortunately, these are the same lines that made those posts seemingly unsuitable for a public blog. The idea that there are others apart from all you Ts, Vs, Cs, Ds, Ns, and the vowels, who read my blog, is quite a discomfort for me. If only I knew who all read it totally anonymously, I wouldn't have to drop many posts half way.

I'm writing this because I haven't written a post like this for months now. Not that I was good at writing a coherent paragraph anyway, but I used to manage to scribble at least something. But during this long dry spell, I think I have developed an inexplicable fear against writing with coherence, flow. These days I seem to dread writing in a fashion where a certain thought would wander through my mind like a free flowing river, and would pick up certain tributary thoughts in the process, while letting certain other distributaries die out naturally. Of course, even in the good old days, this river towards its end never used to remain the same as it used to be at the start.. but it was fun writing along that chain of thoughts then. All my digressions had a certain coherence I loved.

This new found fear has brought me into thinking I shouldn't write poems on the ghazal pattern. (No, I won't stop, but..) Those unconnected couplets, I think, contribute in disturbing the coherence of my digressions. I mean you write a couplet by connecting a thought X to a thought Y, through some weird logic. Then suddenly you drop them, and you try to connect A to B, through another weird logic. Then L to M, then P to Q. Then you shout, wow, it sounds good. But next time when you sit down to write more than two sentences (prose) on some particular thing, you find yourself in a lose-lose situation.. You have a string of thoughts.. XALP.. that itself doesn't make much sense.. and then adding to your woes is the fact that you also can't resist thinking (and writing) about all the YBMQs that come to your mind. All this, while you want to write something about X only.

Trust me, it happens to me everyday. My mind is a pleasant mess. It finds itself finding fault with everything.. and at the same time it finds itself looking for something it can laugh about, in everything. And it manages that, almost always. It's quite weird though. It's like you are standing by the side of the polluted Yamuna, covering your mouth with a hankerchief, and next moment you end up comparing those pollutants with the chillies the dhabe-waalah puts in the otherwise delicious noodles. Your friend would laugh at you, and you would say.. but I hate chillies as much, yaar! You're right. He's right too, in thinking you're a big time uchhaaloo!

I think I can still continue on that. Having some good tributaries and ditributaries to your central thought is just like having well-prepared noodles. I want my thoughts to be long.. they should neither stick with one another, nor should they be reduced to tiny little pieces my fork can't hold. How much of the thought noodles are to be gulped in one turn should be my choice, it should not depend on external factors. Moreover these noodles shouldn't have excess of chillies. Putting those green mosters at an edge of the plate consumes a lot of my time.

Thank you for bearing with me.

Gham-e-ishq yun sataata hai, ki hadd hai!
Koi har waqt nazar aata hai, ki hadd hai!

Hum naa likkhen jo haal-e-dil to bataayein kaise
Likh dete hain to kisiko guroor aata hai, ki hadd hai.

Jhagad baithe the jinse ladakpan mein kabhi
Shabaab unpar yun chadha jaata hai, ki hadd hai.

Ke ishq hoga to ghazal kya mast likhenge hum
Kya socha tha kya hua jaata hai, ki hadd hai.

Chandni would like us to reveal 10 secrets/facts about ourselves hitherto not discussed on this blog..

1. I like tomboys. My second crush was perhaps the most tomboyish of all the girls in my school then. Though my preferences have matured (as has she :P), I still find it quite easy to interact with tomboys.
2. I happen to catch something I call 'Love at Last Sight' syndrome quite frequently.
3. I'm left-handed. Writing and eating are perhaps the only tasks I do with my right hand. This mix of natural left-handedness and acquired right-handedness lands me into weird situations sometimes. E.g. even extending a hand for a hand-shake requires me to think first!
(First time I realized the world was a conspiracy theory was when I tried to hold a pair of right-handed scissors.)
4. I need a constant change. I'd switch from one movie to another, then would come back to first, then would check mail/orkut/blog and after that would finish the second movie.. and this is only the most simplified version of it.
5. My hairline is receding. It's nightmarish. The easiest solution I find for it is to get the hair trimmed as soon as it's 3 mm. Thank God, men have got easy lives.
6. I'm quite short, quite thin, quite weak, quite masochistic, and I generally prefer to keep quiet about all these.
7. I'd prefer a hot coffee to a cold one, even on the hottest day in summers. And I like it slow. It happens sometimes that I get a coffee from insti nescafe, and reach my hostel with a part of it still remaining.
8. This was quite real. Well, most of it was.
9. I like to play songs that people around me don't like. The volume is proportionate to the possible dislike. When I listen to the songs everybody likes, I prefer a low volume.
10. One thing the hostel mess has taught me is 'everything eatable is welcome'. Now that makes my life difficult when placing an order at a restaurant. "Kuchh bhi mangaa lo" is what I tell the ones accompanying me, but if they get insistent I'd prefer something I haven't heard of in the mess for a long time. I mean, I won't ask for anything whose crappier version is fresh in my memory.
[Sometimes, at home, Mom asks which of the food items she prepared was better relatively. How do I tell her that the food I get in the mess has brought my taste-recognition range to such low levels that I can't distinguish between things 5, 10 or 100 times better! ]

PHEW!