Banality

Give me one experience – dazzling golden

Give me something beyond the jargon.

Something concrete, something tangible

Rejuvenating and entirely plausible.

Spacious interiors!  Scintillating performance!

Climate control, GPS, Reverse Assist, and Bluetooth,

Genuine leather, Auto-Driver, and Bose surround sound

Of cosseting material comforts; a preponderance.

WAP, GPRS, streaming videos, e-mail on demand,

Will the dulcet charms budding in the heart never cease to enthrall?

Tantalizing luring thy sting be, Lucre.

Devouring gluttonous thou mak’st man.

Wheedling, voracious, and utterly capricious.

Of the stainless existence,

Of ethics, integrity, and abstinence,

Dignity and love for labor,

Are swamped by thy insistent clamor

For wanton satisfaction,

Corrupt usurping titillation!

Is there a total transcending

A complete U-turning,

A liberation from the vice of hoarding?

Are we destined to spineless shepherding?

Give me a stringed fiddle,

Let the soul flow

With alternate foot tapping,

With accompanying drone notes,

And heavy accents of “Shuffle.”

Sing with me, clap, jig, and weep a tear

At the gentle ballad reminiscent of the yester year.

Rise my soul,

Above menial mentality

Purge thyself of trivia and banality.

Make way,

Here I come Posterity!!

Persona Non-grata

Across the flickering mirage,

The tempestuous gyrations of the nymphs,

Beyond the azure skyline

And beyond the sandy dunes; the sweltering heat

Lies the wondrous wood

Tinkling streams, humming bees

Green – a byword.

Lush vegetation supports and nourishes life

Birds, insects, pisces – a rife!

At once, soothing and ethereal

An abode of angels

Next overpowering and overwhelming

In its sheer ambience; a realm of a ruthless creator-destroyer.

Soft music wafts over the scent

Of mildew, thrush, and pine.

The lumbering brooding oak

Hymns with the wind’s rhyme.

I floated in this haven

And buffeted my soul with

The sight, sound, and feel.

Time trod noiselessly by

Leaving me on uneven keel.

The lyrical environs and dark foreboding

Led me inexorably to the Temple of Doom

And the priest with a skull garland

Approached me with slow menacing.

I could see blood and gore

Of human soul offered to the monstrosity

And the mutilated bodies at the altar of the deity.

The axe swung heavily over my head

I woke up with a start and sat perspiring

On my bed!

Ostracism

This is the story of Dhamni, a tribal woman living in the Deccan plateau of India’s South somewhere in the decade of the 40’s.  Dhamni was married to a pot-bellied good for nothing, who reveled in gambling the night away. They were a childless couple.

On the pond, the women taunted Dhamni. “Keep your distance Vanzoti (Infertile).  Let not your shadow fall on us.  It made her sick and extremely irritable.  “Who do you think you are calling Vanzoti?” She rushed at them in furious rage, throwing down her own pot of water.  Frothing at the mouth and shrieking with blind rage, she hit out at one of the acrid younger one.  But they were all off and in the distance; she heard their mad raucous laughter.  Angry, hurt, and suddenly drained, Dhamni walked to her hut. Her husband was waiting for dinner.  Immediately thereafter, he was going to the ruins behind the temple, where there were four from the adjoining village coming today.  He was salivating at the thought of turning lucky tonight, so he could drink himself silly this weekend and gorge on succulent goat mutton!

Dhamni entered the hut fuming and enraged.  He was about to ask for lunch, but one look at Dhamni, and he started to put on his shirt and leave the hut.

“Where is the dog for Chris-sake??” Dhamni’s tone rang warning bells in his mind.

“The municipal workers were poisoning all strays today. Quite a few have turned turkey at the corner of the street.”

“Oh is it so?  Why don’t you poison me and finish off once and for all?” “I told you to look for that dog and all you can tell me is some cock-and-bull story?” yelled Dhamni.

She entered the sleeping place in the hut and shut its door with a loud bang.

Her husband made good his escape while there still was time!

Dhamni lay on the rug tears welling up in her eyes.  Why did the village women always behave like this?  Even when sifting grain in the lazy afternoons, the women cringed as she walked along and sat at the edge of the room to help them sift.  A pall of gloom would hang in the air in their otherwise animated conversation.  Dhamni could not take the insults anymore. Today, even the stray dog that she had petted, left her.

“Why me?  Why me?”

Her mother was a Devdasi – one whose life is offered to the temple god and one who lives on the alms offered by devotees in the temple. Her hair was rough, matted and extremely smelly. Custom decried that she not wash her hair. Her features were coarse and she was very dark.  But the whites of her eyes were pure and in the eyes was a fondness, reserved for Dhamni, when Dhamni lay with her head on her lap.  People in distress came to her mother and asked her questions regarding many things. She applied kohl to grains.  Within the blackened grains, her mother saw figures which talked to her of the unknown and unmanifested.

During one of her predictions, Dhamni heard her mother tell a prosperous fat lady with loads of gold on her, “Go to the temple on the No-moon night and bury a large fruit in the soil in front of the temple.  But take care, you must go alone.”  Dhamni heard the woman draw her breath in sharply at the very thought. “Follow it word-to-word and you will obtain your desire. A bonny baby will visit your womb.”

And in the blackness of that lonely and ululating night, Dhamni decided to test what she remembered of her mother’s words.  She decided to take the trial by fire.

Is there a Deja-Vu?

An eternal thrall for the human imagination

What do the stars foretell?

Glory, mediocrity, misery,

Facts or bagatelle?

Juggling with celestial idiosyncrasy

Resorting to piffle and prophecy.

While submitting to profilgacy

Delving in to the circumstances of yore

And beyond the nonce.

Reading in to ordain,

Bracing against the relentless callusing rigor

On the destiny domain.

Man’s eternal desire for reassurance and complacence

Leads him to rake the heap of memories and association

And the causality of events and phenomena becomes his indulgence.

Mired in theory of probability

Talk of coincidence and culpability

Reincarnation and Karmic belief.

What does actually reincarnate?

Can the pot which was mud, is mud, and will be mud

Ever reincarnate?

Can the deluge of emotions and feelings experienced in a lifetime

And the actions based on these strong undercurrents

Be ever attributed to a grand conductor sublime?

Beyond the realm of thought

And the power of the mind’s verisimilitude  machinations.

Is this a shibboleth?

Or Janus-faced duplicity

Masquerading as a modern waywardness?

Lost on No-Man Island

The sea was a vast sheet of grey

Gentle, lapping in conjugal sway

Watching its immense expanse

With its ripples and rumble,

Its optical wizardry and overpowering ambience

He felt every sense being assailed

And it’s Benevolence

                Savagery

                Omniscience

Became a part of his self.

He lay on the white sand

And watched the incandescent ball of fire

Slowly rise from the water.

His hands were tied, his face was bloody

The pirates looted and made away with his ferry.

What is with this island?

A silent stalking presence

Engulfing the psyche and squeezing out

every defense.

Rue the day when search set sail

Destiny now the sole wherewithal.

The sea though wore a welcoming visage

A promise of spirit salvage.

The sea rushed forward  thro’

His eyes, ears, and nostrils

And every layer of dermis.

He was filled with a vast felicity

at this resurrection;

A rehabilitated sense of organicity.

Assuming the persona

The artist has to detail the character in his mind first. This is absolutely an act of giving birth to something totally new. This is creation. Nobody but nobody has seen this before, not even the author who must have surmised his plot and the inner makeup of his character totally on his own inputs. So now, what the artist is going to present, has to be fleshed out by the artist himself. But the artist is a living person with his distinct persona. So how does he portray the character with such conviction that the viewers would never thereafter associate that character with anybody other than that artist and his powerful depiction?

The artist essentially lives out the character. And subtly adds mannerisms, lisps, twitches, physical mutilation, voiceover etc. to flesh out the character that he is portraying. A case in point is the absolutely masterful act of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the psychiatrist and a cannibal played by Anthony Hopkins. It left an indelible mark on the viewers. That chilling reality of a cannibal and a brilliant mind gone astray cannot be ever associated with any other artist.

I gave birth to a nine-pound baby, you asshole. I think I can handle it.

The inky black sky was overcast with the light of a flare fired in the air.

A hooded figure appeared on the edge of the bunker with his weapon

She lifted her weapon to him, but was shot by one of her own.

Her stomach was on fire,

The bullet had ripped through the skin and the intestine.

The pain was burning, searing through the body and the mind

She watched aghast her own organs and the blood intertwine.

The others around her were unsure of their reactions to the calamity

Some horrified; some amazed at her sagacity.

The staccato gunfire was incessant all around

And the unmistakable sound and stench of enmity did abound.

But her clasp on the weapon was firm and her focus deadly

Her eyes had the glint of steel and her resolve became her physical self

All torn asunder and bloodied, but with the thread

Authority and righteousness strung together virtuously.

“I gave birth to a nine-pound baby, you asshole. I think I can handle it.”

The pain and the angst in those words, for once, became the epitome

Of what a woman can take and still not be undone.

Scintillating sport - Hockey

His will was broken but not his resolve! After being branded a traitor for succumbing to a goal by arch rivals Pakistan, the viewers and the media led a malicious whisper campaign against Mir Ranjan Negi, India’s National field hockey team goalkeeper . It very nearly wiped out his productive years in international hockey. He was heartbroken and led a life of obscurity for a few years. The scourge of the vilification, however, did not stop pursuing him even when he retreated to his hometown. People eyed him suspiciously and their attitude was distinctly chilly.

However, the rise of Mir Ranjan Negi is veritably the rise of the Phoenix. He decided to mentor a team of woman hockey players. He built a national team out of a contentious lot of 16 players coming from all parts of India. He coached with them painstakingly for long hours, causing a lot of heartburn amongst the teammates. But they never questioned his resolve. The result was that the woman’s hockey team won the Gold at the Commonwealth Games in 2002. This epic saga was captured on the silver screen by director Shimit Amin and Negi’s character was immortalized by the Indian superstar ShahRukh Khan in the movie “ Chak De India”

Catch the wave of euphoria in the stands as capacity crowds at the Dhyan Chand Stadium in Delhi egg on teams – and particularly host India – at the World Cup Hockey being played out between February 28 to March 13 2010!

Life has no design

One cannot fathom how whims arise - what dictates behavior, what guides actions. Again and again, one becomes a witness to the destruction of mind constructs. Then somewhere down the line, one begins to suspect a grand theme, a cosmic orchestration in the unfolding events. But is this suspicion again, nothing more than one’s need to confirm the belief that one can discern a pattern; that one’s intellect can, in fact, decipher a grand jigsaw puzzle? Is there no life insurance then?

Artists and poets have long held the view that life itself has no meaning per se. It is only the human mind’s innate need to make sense of events that leads man to formulate theories to explain phenomenon. They postulate that inherently life and the sequence of events in life have no logical basis and are not interdependent or inter-alia a cause as such. Even the apparent witnessing consciousness is transient and has only a presence in relation to the object of witnessing.

So theoretically, a professor in a college and a convict, a surgeon and a drug addict, a police officer and a murderer - all seem to be the product of whims or desires over which they essentially have no control over their actions and are guided by the immanent situations which they face in life. If that is so, then what about morality? What is to stop a wrong doer from harming the innocent?

The point is why doesn’t he do so in the first place? Why can’t he muster the strength to overcome his basal urges? Probably, he is not the doer in the first place, but a puppet dancing to the tune of the omnipresent intelligence which drives nature – of which he is a part.

Nick and Darcy discover Love

He was tempted outright.

She was warm and willing – and slightly stoned.

He had a jagged edge to himself

And wanted to bruise and chafe and play rough tonight.

She flirted and cooed and talked naughty.

He had driven her home from the party.

And now they were on the street beside her block

The street weary lamppost livened up as he sensed action from the jock.

She was out of the car and curled up to him; her finger running

Over his face and chin

He was smiling, edgy, raspy breathed

The street was empty; the night careened as if shot with gin.

“ Come to my parlour”

“Oh dear do”

He pulled her closer and was about to…

When all of a sudden, his embers cooled

“I can read her mind, and of all womankind”

A nameless weight bowed his heart

“ Just not right, Just not right”

He bundled her off in to her room

And swerved off the porch, his mind a-gloom.

The face in the window

Last but not the least, there was an insane woman who lived in the exactly opposite apartment in our block. She was not really your out-of-sorts woman. Mostly she was quite composed and level-headed. She seldom ventured out of her place. She lived with her husband and two children. The unusual thing was that on a full-moon day, she would let her hair loose, smear her forehead with red vermilion, roll her eyes on and on, and let out an air-rending wail. And she would continue screaming and wailing and rolling her eyes and rotating her neck as if something wanted to be unbound from her being. Her teeth would clamp and her lips would be drawn apart to display her clamped jaw and gums. As children, we were mortified by the apparition and usually watched the drama play out peeping through our windows. Nobody ventured near her on such occasions.

One weekend evening I was alone in my apartment as the others had gone out. I was working over some mathematical assignments and was engrossed in it. From the study room, the door led to the dining area. One wall of the dining room was latticed for ventilation. This was covered with a wooden partition except for a small window the size of a hand-held camera. This was just above the wash basin.

After deliberating unsuccessfully over the math, I walked to the dining room towards the wash basin for a face wash. I ran the water and amply washed my face with the running water hunched over the basin. As I straightened up to towel my face, I could feel the hair on my arms and spine stand up on their roots. For framed against the wooden partition, exactly in the window over the lattice, was the face of the woman watching me!!