The wind blows, the rain pours and time watches!

With the grey skies controlling the rain, squeezing it a little, sloshing some, the sun skidding in somehow and again being threatened by the hues of the sky...

From a distance, I am smiling at the shenanigans of these forces above. This will pass, the rains will pour themselves out today, then the greyness will dissipate, the skidding rays will overcome the gloom.
Nothing will stay, only I will be here even after all is over. I will be a witness to everything, blatantly, non-judgemental ly, unaffected ly, enchantingly, unbiasedly...

Truth: a manyfaced monster!

It is not for one to doggedly argue that there is a universal truth as there isn't any. People bask in their own versions of truth. Let me visit a conversation between two people on a Delhi Metro.
A middle-aged burly man with the travails of life clearly visible on his waistline to another slightly younger man with the skin colour of a yak and nose carved out from the remains of the dome of the Babri masjid.  "Why would you pay for the medical expenses of my father, he is not yours."
The slightly younger man, clearly hurt replies, "It was out of concern and compassion towards him that I was asking about his health, that was so crude and blunt."

A situation of an exchange of truth, the version that stated a fact, 'he is not your father', and the interpretation of which caused an unintended pain. It's the truth that one holds in his mind that translates through the mind of another. One's own truth can only be understood by the person who lives it and can feel every little aspect of it, it stays in the bones of the soul!

The monstrosity of honesty can shatter one's composure. So one makes it wear a face, a face that conceals the viciousness and makes it "pleasant". We keep slipping into this monster and once it overpowers us, a realisation that we need to keep it in our heads makes us sane and bearable. We should keep this brutality within us to protect those who matter!

Truth be told and truth be never told.        

Searching for a soul home

The pace of a megalopolis doesn't match the pace that I am looking for. Prying into lives, wedging to work, losing our minds in this profanity of existence. Some may find their necessities as their motivation to continue the drudgery. Well, that gives a perspicuous account of the existential violence. In this city, one seems to be caught up in the hurly burly of one social event or the other. Today was when the taxi drivers decided to struck work.

One may go about soaking up the experiences this city hurls as inspiration to write, make music, document the fetid contours of it's landscape. And some yearn to look for an ingenuous milieu.
Whatever this city does, it definitely has the ability to rattle your nerves. This quarrel that I keep getting into with myself about the city I chose, helps me to make "poetry".

Till soul home beckons!

'Living in uncertain times'

When I walk in the alleys of the neighbourhood of Bronx, a visual of stark loneliness and defeat greets me. An elderly woman is sitting on a bench, finding herself in an existential cul-de-sac. As I approach her, she summons me to sit beside her. I begin interviewing her, gently prodding her to talk about the effects of poverty and discrimination on her family.

That quiet conversation is a reminder that the inflammatory rhetoric of the black power movement, with its talk of revolution, national liberation and armed struggle, had its roots in bitter experience. And while she tells a story of defiance and pride, it is also a tale of defeat, frustration and terrible destruction. The killing of her son in the gang war, the grinding toll of the Recession, the everyday struggle to feed her family (whatever is left of it), the spread of heroin in the ghettos of northern cities: these are not chapters in a tale of triumph.

And it leaves me in a bracing state of confusion, wondering how much has changed and how the change took place. How will the America of Barack Obama, who represents a very different kind of black power, any different from that of the days of Martin Luther King or Stokey Carmichael? To what extent is it the same America? Perhaps there are some visitors from outside who can help us make sense of it all.

One of 'those' posts

It's two in the night and I am wide awake thinking about how inimical the mind can be. Everything that the brain wonders, has or does not have a meaning. There are situations in one's life which are extremely difficult to understand. The complexity of the human mind is nothing but a mere 'complexity'. As human beings, we have been gifted with a mind which has the potential to either smash us into pieces or build us from smithereens. The choice, the rhetorical 'choice' has to be made. Sometimes, we are incapable of making choices, we end up by the choices made on our behalf by 'Destiny'. 

Now, destiny, is this another facet of our existence that schmoozes us in ways which only 'it' understands. There are always questions but never submissions; always doubts but never an embracing faith; suffering but no respite; pain but no cure: "the 'buts' are the dark clouds that never let the silver linings glimmer." 

P.S: If someone were to ask me, what does this post mean? 

The answer, as they say, lies within.  

 

Ziro - Festival of Music -'13 -- Short Film

http://youtu.be/J8coGzWtwCY

Ziro Festival of Music is not only about great music but a synchoricity of diverse cultures in a locale that is surreal with it's picturesque surroundings. An offbeat and unheard of location, Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh, India brings together the north east with the rest of the country and the world through the universal language of music. It is about cross-pollination between disparate people, ideas, traditions and their  connection through music. The festival reflects the spirit and impulse of the place and as one music enthusiast put it, “...takes you deeper within yourself.”

'Soul, you pobrecito!'

To witness someone’s anguish, pain and suffering can evoke a strong sense of sadness. It is a vicarious experience. It is sometimes by listening to the words of a song and being empathetic with what that person must have gone through. His or her pains and joys and can lay an impact on one’s heart and soul. It is a realization that one likes to keep at bay for it has a ‘senseless effect’: an effect that is shrouded in meaninglessness, like several other things. Usually one is in a reverie and for some reason; calm in that state, and sometimes in a nightmare; deeply unsettled. This so called state is a refuge from everything that is going around. Yes, maybe, these are means of escapism but the truth of reality is so bitter and so sad that one thinks of ways in which one can numb oneself, throw oneself in a vortex of lies and forget the truths of reality.

I am borrowing these lines from a movie:

“Drinking alters your consciousness and weakens you psychically like it creates cracks and bad stuff creeps in to those cracks and maybe never go away.”  This implies to those who drown themselves in alcohol to run away from life. This is one of the many ways. Some do drugs and each one knows uniquely how to enter in a fugue state. It is bewildering and yet fascinating. This is how mind conjures up images, beliefs and actions.

In the end, I ask myself yet again, what is the real truth?