Words.

It is with mixed emotions that I come back to writing here. I have discovered I have not been writing under the (extremely valid) pretense of being overworked, in the process stealing from myself more than stealing from you.

You see, I genuinely love words.

Words as buttery as ooze and delicious. 

Words as solemn as liquidate and leverage. 

Words as tricky as asinine and indestructible. 

Words as elegant as serendipity and luminous.

Words as powerful as passion and rage.

Words move mountains for me.  And so, I always come back to them. As tired, bored and out of ideas I am, I come back here. This blog feels like home. 

The blog looks different, but if this past month has taught me one thing, it's this - to be open to change, and to have the guts* on following through on the change.

I am not known to be the least prickly porcupine crawling across the forest floor, but a lot of things have changed. And I'm working on myself everyday to ensure they don't change me. 

The dreams are stacking up one on top of the other. And I'm not floundering anymore. 

*Guts is a very graphic short story by Chuck Palahnuik. It's also brilliant, so do give it a read if you find the time. 

Aspiring Writer Problems.

Most Days.

That one time I know exactly what I want to write.

True Story.

The Suburbs.

You know the glow of movies on the big screen? Mumbai suburbia basks in that glow. The glow pervades the rickety roadways and ritzy neighborhoods.

People here are stages of fame; from the anonymous, to the struggler, to the seen-somewhere, to the almost-famous to the has-been. Everyone is beautiful here, every single person. Not to everyone's eyes, not even to their own sometimes. But they see themselves as beautiful, glorified, air-brushed movie stars one day. Turquoise hair color, skin-whitening creams, tattoo and piercing parlors all find their core consumers here. Here, everyone is standing out while blending in. 

Cartographers say Mumbai is one straight line of a city. Maps have absolutely nothing to do with direction and everything with where one wants to go. In the suburbs, the answer to where people want to go is a resounding 'up'. You would be hard-pressed to find a more ambitious bunch of people. 

That's what makes it different from every other part of the city. In Colaba, people are comfortable with their street style and world view. In Chembur, people are comfortable with their daily discomfort.

Here, people give in to the vanity of living in a city as unforgiving as Mumbai. And no one scoffs at them here.

The City Is Wilder Than You Think And Kinder Than You Think.

'The city is wilder than you think and kinder than you think.'
I have never read words more befitting Mumbai.
I wish this piece of artwork found its way to this city someday. It perfectly encapsulates everything everyone has ever said about it.

And yet, like every piece of art, it's imperfect. It's too blatant.

Perfection would have been strolling through Bandra and chancing the poem upon the broken walls adorned with graffiti in those narrow, narrow lanes. The words would be founding calmly leaning against the walls, the type traced through the innumerable cracks. Many would pass by the route daily, and yet, the words would be found by a few. Those who would spot them would slow down, intrigue and a slow smile wrapping their faces. They would stop, read, read it again and eventually move on, with something on their mind that probably hadn't been there earlier.
It would resonate differently with different people. It would resonate. It was spark thought. The element of surprise, of chance; that would have made these lines of poetry perfect.

A lot of these pieces are constructed using 'recycled sunlight'. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds lovely anyway.
Here is a link to the artist's website. It opens to Recycled Sunlight Piece#5. http://www.robertmontgomery.org/robertmontgomery.org/5.html

:)

Shit Indians Say.

Listen up, Indians all around the world!

Original Indian memes are finally here. There's this new page on Facebook called 'Shit Indians Say'(click to visit) and it is absolutely hilarious. :D

Here's a sample :

How can one resist clicking the like button with funny shit like this? :D

The Difference.

The difference between pride and dignity. Ego.
The difference between justice and revenge. Motivation.
The difference between knowledge and wisdom. Application.
The difference between beauty and superficiality. External validation.
The difference between bliss and ignorance. Waking up.
The difference between bitterness and pragmatism. Clarity.
The difference between intelligence and stupidity. Close-mindedness. Not profanity.

There's a liberty that comes with accepting the fleeting nature and breathtaking (in?)significance of the human condition. Forever is word best suited to fairy tales, don't you think?

That Awesome Moment.

Harry Benson: "Brian Epstein — Beatles' manager — had just told them they were number one in America, and I was coming with them to New York, 1964."

Henry Miller's 11 Commandments of Writing.

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Judge a book by its cover.

Head on over to http://bookcoverarchive.com/, fellow bibliophiles. Feast your eyes on this. 

Desinence.

Off late, my thoughts are among the many things I no longer know. If you enter my room, or head, sometime, you'll find me looking at the ceiling, as if the words I need are up there. No, I don't want to say Wow or Goodnight, or any of those expressions with words that should have weight, but hover weightless in everyday conversation. The words I used to write now have different meanings, and the words I use, I don't know their meaning anymore.
I need to keep writing, or I won't know how to speak; to myself.

Someday, I would love to fit words together into a lasting sentence of incredible meaning.
I lace my fingers behind my head, looking not for answers, but for unanswered questions.

The ice cubes are melting. The calender pages are fervently being flipped.
Life needs more life than this.

Tasting Happiness. :)

I love my life because I set an alarm for 7 p.m. everyday, and make myself a quick cup of cappuccino. Just because I can now.
Best. Birthday. Present. Ever. ^_^
*slow clap for gift-giver*

The Younger Daze.

I celebrated my 19th birthday yesterday. 

A day into being nineteen, and here I am. This moment, right here, is perfect. 

Well, almost.

I wish I were basking in the glow of a million candles at my desk while writing with a delightfully scratchy fountain pen; crimson ink staining the pages of a weather-worn diary. I wish I had a coffee mug at arm's reach, deliciously chipped at the right places, and a cup crafted for citrus juices. I am too adrift from myself to tell you my favourite novel, but I'd want it nearby too. I wish I were experiencing a white winter. The blanket of white, the promise of renewal; that's something I'd like to see. I wish for a lot of things, and birthdays only make me appreciate the brief history of time between yesterday and today, then and now, you and me. 

I'm not one to make resolutions, but I'd like to find a great book this year. The figures sketched in its pages might impress me as my own, or might resolve something for me. I wish a book enters my life at exactly the right moment. Like people, they tend to appear too early when I'm too intimidated to appreciate it, or too late, when its significance has been captured more wholly by someone else. I want to be as unsettled by a book as enchanted by it. 

Today I am nineteen, and relatively untroubled by questions of identity and individuality. I know the person I am, and I'm on my way to being the person I always wanted to be. The stupidity of mankind is infinite, and yet, intelligence is what separates everyone. I revel in the sheer magnitude of all I have to absorb this year. 

Happy (belated) Birthday to me. :)

I hope everyone finds happiness this new year. :)

Illusions, Dispelled.

 I was born in 1993, at the cusp of a generational divide. Born into a newly-liberalized India, I lived a life starkly different from what absolutely anyone older than me lived. I lived *with* electronic access to my country’s culture. The family regaled us with stories of life without what seemed like necessities in my life. Every 90s kid will identify.

But it was the regular immersion in literature that was the reason for my self-definition. To this day, I understand my life in the context of Jane Eyre and Raskolnikov, versus Brad Pitt and ‘the Rachel’. In an age of false perspective, where Shah Rukh Khan can appear taller than Deepika Padukone, and where marches are held to stand still, literature helped me gain knowledge in a way that television, or even the internet, never has. 

Books have taken me to places I didn’t necessarily want to go, forced me to confront my prejudices, assumptions, and at the bare bottom, forced me to confront my ‘self’ at an intrinsic level. Words make me vulnerable in a way actions never seem to. For those precious moments, when I’m alone in bed with a book, I don’t feel alone. That fleeting moment, where the author actually connects with the reader, makes me realize that the ability to articulate is a beautiful one. 

I can't believe half of December has vanished. Bombay continues to be a furnace, the morning breeze nothing but an ambush, the evening chill nothing but a glimpse of an actual winter.

Guess what? We got our very first client. (YAY!) I didn't ever imagine my life turning out the way it has.

2011 has been a breathtaking beauty of a year. Personally. Professionally. Every which ______-ally, there is.

I've been excruciatingly happy. I've been breathlessly sad. I've been indelibly excited. I've been morbidly afraid. I've undoubtedly lived.

Within Me A Lunatic Sings.

This song perfectly encapsulates everything I've seen, heard and felt in the past few days :')

Sigur Ros is sheer magic. Nobody can ever convince me otherwise. I love their music and how it makes me feel. :)

A Song for Starlit Beaches.

"There would be birdsong over flooded beach,

and we would be daylight over the shipwreck-sands."

I remember writing a few weeks ago, 'A risk is happiness'. The words echo in my mind, as I return to Mumbai after 4 near-perfect days.

There, the rhetoric of sudden freedom and liberation rings true. Perhaps the sun and sea and the sheer beauty of the place refracts the city gloom out of sight. The laid-back atmosphere there is infectious. I feel a growing sense of calm, something I thought I had grown desensitized to in the past few years, trudging along the corridors of competitive academia and teenage problems.

I feel like something out of a bathing soap commercial. Refreshed. Rejuvenated.
And so I'm back to the daily grind, with no lingering sadness for the sunset on those glorious days.
Perfection, after all, is best enjoyed ephemeral. 

Hitting 7 Billion.

The world's population hit 7 billion today. A number that lasted exactly one second.
The 7 billionth kid is an Indian. Apropos, I think. Gosh, this runaway population growth needs to be stopped in Mr.Plod stopping traffic in Noddy episodes fashion.

FYI: I am number 5, 513,802,182 on this planet.
And here's your number.

'Books' by Dorianne Laux

You're standing on the high school steps,
the double doors swung closed behind you
for the last time, not the last time you'll ever

be damned or praised by your peers, spoken of
in whispers, but the last time you'll lock your locker,
zip up your gym bag, put on your out-of-style jacket,

your too-tight shoes. You're about to be
done with it: the gum, the gossip, the worship
of a boy in the back row, histories of wheat and war,

cheat sheets, tardies, the science of water,
negative numbers and compound fractions.
You don't know it yet but what you'll miss

is the books, heavy and fragrant and frayed,
the pages greasy, almost transparent, thinned
at the edges by hundreds of licked thumbs.

What you'll remember is the dumb joy
of stumbling across a passage so perfect
it drums in your head, drowns out

the teacher and the lunch bell's ring. You've stolen
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the library.
Lingering on the steps, you dig into your bag

to touch its heat: stolen goods, willfully taken,
in full knowledge of right and wrong.
You call yourself a thief. There are worse things,

you think, fingering the cover, tracing
the embossed letters like someone blind.
This is all you need as you take your first step

toward the street, joining characters whose lives
might unfold at your touch. You follow them into
the blur of the world. Into whoever you're going to be.

This poem just seems right on this blog. I identify with it on so many levels. Beautiful. :)

Click here if you can't see it.  Comments welcome :)

Happy Diwali, Folks :D

I'm sure I'll be busy eating laddoos on Diwali morning, but I wish all of you a very very very Happy Diwali! :)
Light up your houses and your lives, guys. Stay happy. Stay awesome. (Awesome loosely translates to be eco-friendly).

My man, \Rajni/, says it best. :D 

This One's for the Word-Crazy. :)

It is common knowledge to readers of this blog that I am absolutely, legitimately word-crazy. I admit my knowledge of words is mainly superficial, I am often unaware of their origin. So I'd best classify myself as a word-scavenger owing to my never-ending fascination with all words beautiful. With a word being added to the English language every 98 minutes, English remains a personal favorite for its resilience and flexibility. What interests me are words from languages around the world that are seemingly untranslatable into English. Here are a few I loved :

Pana Po'o-  To scratch your head in order to remember something.
(from the land of hula dances)


Tartle (Scottish)- The act of hesitating when introducing someone because you've forgotten their name.
(Reminds me of my absent-minded dad)


Gummuservi (Turkish)-  Moonlight shining on water. 
(This made me smile :) )

Esprit d' Escalier- The witty comeback that you think of moments after leaving the situation in which you might have been able to use it.
(We've all been there, haven't we?)


Katahara Itai (Japanese)- Laughing so much your stomach hurts. :D


Zhaghzhagh (Persian)- The chattering of teeth from cold or rage. 

Kyoikumama - A mother who relentlessly pushes her children towards academic achievement.
The word originates from Japan. Befitting, I say. :P


Meraki (Greek)- Doing something with soul, creativity and love. 


Luftmench- An impractical dreamer with no business sense.

Plimpplamppletteren (Dutch)- The skimming of a flat stone as many times as possible across the surface of the water.
(There is a word for this. Yes. :O)


Mencolek- You know that trick where you tap someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them? The Indonesians have a word for it. :D
A similar word is Vybafnout of Czech origin, which is to jump out from behind and say boo!


And the most offensive but the one that cracked me up the most IS:


Bakku-Shan (Japanese)- A girl who looks pretty from behind but ugly from the front. 
Hahahahahahahahahaha!


Share your favourites with me :)