Another Mortal Life

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.