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.