We are suckers for punctuality on this show, due to which you have just a little time to put some powder on that radiant face or spray some perfume on that majestic double-breasted suit.
So now that we are all ready to receive the mawkish queen of reiteration, I might as well make an appearance and deliver my piece. And since allusions aren’t really a language on their own I assure you that I’ll try to speak some English which, I suppose, would make it a tad easier for everyone including my lovely Sunday newspaper critics.
When I was a little kid, I used to have this crazy hobby of collecting stones. I used to pick up stones from all over the place (my favourite haunt was a construction site; they had the best shiny and glossy stones) and put them in these plastic bags and keep them in my cupboard. It was good fun till it started freaking my mum out…so one day, when I brought this circular, absolutely symmetric, black and glittery stone, home and told my mother with a pronounced mysterious drawl to my voice that the stone was going to bring us bad luck and destroy the world MUHUHAHAHAHA, she must have figured that this particular hobby was not doing much good to her imbecile daughter and in the matter of a few moments, the babies of my months’ efforts and devotion were thrown outside, lying like victims of the accident that was the big bad world. I was needless to say (yeah Mr oh-so-smart Alec now that I’ve admitted that there is no need to say it I AM going to go ahead and say it) devastated and bitter. But, that was still manageable…even for a 7-year-old kid. What I couldn’t manage though was the biting feeling that it had been a waste of my time and more importantly a waste of my mum’s. I could have ‘utilized’ that time to do other things with my gazillion friends… And when you are forced to concentrate on unpleasantness like that, you start blocking out the parts that really matter. The ones that were the cause of the dreamy looks of fascination in my eyes, or the ones that made me believe that any thing was after all possible… If She could encapsulate such interesting stories about an ancient age on a miniscule stone, then how much could she do with a whole world…
For a couple of days now, I’ve been waking up from dreams that consisted of people that have been or are a part of my life. But, the strange thing was that they were always set in some vague place…like old forts and riversides. It’s been pretty difficult for me to check myself. I would suddenly find myself thinking about those dreams as if they really happened and confuse it with what was happening in real life right now; because you see, the people were real…
And they’ve always been real. It’s not their existence that’s the problem…it’s mine. I wish now, that I’d realized where and when to fold the page into two. But, as is the case with most of the things that you know you are supposed to be doing but don’t do because it’s less complicated this way; I chose not to realize it. It’s not really my fault though, I’m just a juvenile idiot…I got so carried away by the pats, the smiles, the modified quotes, the rush, the file transfers…. that I didn’t bother differentiating. And when there were uncalled for goodbyes with the deer being sent on a hike, I chose not to understand it… Someoneonce told me that we were just nobodies in here…and damn me for not having listened then.
‘‘They press their lips against you
And you love the lies they say
And I tried so hard to reach you
But you're falling anyway
And you know I see right through you
When the world gets in your way
What's the point in all this screamin'
You're not listening anyway’’
--Acoustic#3, Goo Goo Dolls.
Well, it’s about time too. But, if I try and analyze every thing that I’ve been doing for the last four years then I would choose to regret it. I would choose to be unfair. And I don’t like doing injustice to choices. So I would rather just move on, thanks for all the bananafish. Seymour's still around to show them to me anyway.
In the words of a young man who claims that his momma told him that life is like a box of chocolates, that’s all I’ve to say about that.
I dare say that my head would have been muddled up for a long time but I thankfully experienced some thing yesterday, which saw to it that I don’t dwell upon things for more time than is actually required. It was more like a series of events actually…
I’d just finished an excruciating exam and they’d given us a break of an hour and 15 minutes before we could be belted, squished and trampled again.
My dad drove down to Cubbon Park and we were sitting in the car, eating the Tomato Rice that my mum had lovingly packed for the two of us. Dylan was asking Mr tambourine man to play a song for him. And at this exact moment, there’s no escaping what time it was; it was 12:15 P.M, I saw this family right ahead of us…there were seven people; five of them children (all of them were boys), a lady and another man which I assumed was the head of the family. The H.O.F was clicking photographs and the rest of the family was sitting on one of those benches-that-are-found-in-parks. The kids were doing crazy poses and all that. There was nothing particularly interesting about this whole thing except for a tiny, little detail, which I of course being the kind-hearted writer that I am, am going to disclose to you. All the members of the family that belonged to the sweatier, gory, darker sex, which if you recall, amounts to a total of six people, were perfectly…bald. I nudged my dad and both of us sat staring at this strange group, at the way the sunlight rebounded from their shiny heads, till we started smiling, grinning and finally ended up laughing. Not those loud laughs, or the crack-you-up till you feel like your sides- would- split laugh or even those subtle ones that are marked with politeness. It was just this really pleasant laugh that you do once in a while when you are peacefully happy about some thing. It makes its way through the clutter in your head reaching the epicenter and once it gets there, it starts generating waves in all directions so that by the time you are done laughing, your heads been sprayed with some fresh water and isn’t really that muddled up any more.
I don’t know if you’ve had the feeling of being in slow motion. Kinda like the Matrix bullets funda. It usually happens to me when I’m sitting in the car and looking outside the window. Dad will be speeding up. My mum will be chanting some shlokas under her breath, seemingly soft but loud enough for my dad to hear and figure, my brother will be sitting around doing nothing and suddenly I’ll see the world whiz past by me in slow motion. Maybe it has some thing to do with the fact that it’s night and there are neon lights all around…The world’s still moving…but it’s moving slow, it’s moving at a speed that will make me notice just about every thing…Neon lights, apparent high speeds, music, skylines, buildings, traffic signals, people…lots of people…and thoughts. Like a disembodied entity once observed, ‘Things began to come to him. Not drawn by a pull, but just passing him by almost as if suddenly they'd given him the permission to live in their world.’ It’s not a very nice thing to happen often but to happen when you are on a low, it’s just as good as it gets. Everyone deserves it once in a while, because it involves clarity. Things just have to make sense from time to time. It’s a defective need but that’s how it is.
It’s about concentrating on the tiniest piece in the frame. Looking at a worm crawl past by you, or a flower moving with the breeze, or seeing the way water flows into your open mouth from a bottle or laughing at bald people posing for photographs.
And I think that the ability to do that with any success is something that disintegrates with age. So, I like the way things are right now. I don’t mind the fact that I get to be called ‘juvenile’ by someone at least twice a day. And I’m not giving up on my teenage fantasies at least till I’m 21 if I can help it.
After periodic pleas from the, Pul(r)p(l)ish Fiction fanatic I finally got around to hearing the joke that wasn’t really funny but was told if we wanted to hear it anyway. No, of course I’m not going to tell it you here. Lets just say that it involves tomatoes...and well, ketchup.
So, basically ‘all we have to do now, is to go get that five dollar milkshake’.
‘‘So, if I decide to waiver my chance to be one of the hive
Will I choose water over wine and hold my own and drive?
Whatever tomorrow brings,
I'll be there with open arms and open eyes, Yeah
Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there..I'll be there.’’
--Drive, Incubus.
