The green eyed fish

The Green Eyed Fish

Once, there was a small fish. For him, the pond was big. He swam with wild abandon. getting lost was not a concern for him, but an adventure. he knew he could get by with a little help from his friends.
On one such joy ride about water, he experience massive waves carrying him away without his consent. He was scared and confused. What had suddenly happened to this placid and serene lake? He asked as much to an elder saffron crab, by the edge of water. The crab pointed to a long floating creature. It had two arms moving forward and backward, thrusting water backwards which had caused the ripples that caught our fish by surprise. The rest of the body was amazingly still, except for its derrière, which bobbled a bit from time to time. It was a curious creature; it refused to swim below the water. He wondered how it survived outside of water all this while. Our lil fish was enamoured by it. To his astonishment though, at the bank another figure with four limbs and weird angular joins 'stepped out' of it.
He had seen one fish going inside another forever. He had seen a herd of smaller fishes feasting on a big one, which was rendered sans movement.
But he had never seen a creature coming out of another one, the bigger left dead still.
This mystical creature had jumped out of water and stationed itself by the bank on a stone. It smeared itself with ashes. The crab told him, the ashes were of a similar creature who had come there earlier. The crab told how these creatures come and sit there motionless for a long time only to send out bubbles of some sort high in the sky, from time to time. He told of their queer fascination with that one rock to sit on. He narrated how this particular creature had bludgeoned the head open of his predecessor. There were many rocks there, but they always fought for this one only. All wisdom led to waste, corporeal feast.

The fish was scared. Fear leads to awe; Awe to respect. He gingerly swam towards the alien creature. He tentatively looked at it sideways. He peeped out of water and opened his mouth to ask questions to it. But the creature caught it and threw it out of water. Our little fish was gasping for life and jumping with desperation. His little mouth was gaping huge with thirst for life.

The rock on which this was happening, had been a seat of these weird creatures for ages. It had grown smooth and slippery owing to its continued use. It just so happened that the lapping water on the rock made the creature slip and fall. And fall he did, right into the fish’s mouth. The fish couldn’t take it in for it was too big, and couldn’t get it out as well. They both rolled down with the creature’s weight back into water. At the bottom of the calm lake, the duo were struggling; the fish to get the creature out of his mouth, the creature for his life. Flailing limbs eventually stopped. The fish eventually found a way to eat up and gulp down the creature. The fish grew immensely with this diet. All of a sudden, it became the big fish of the pond.

The word had spread. Fish had eaten up the big alien creature. Rumours created legend; Legend lend him strength. He was feared. He was despised. People don’t like things that they can’t comprehend. How did he grow up this big, and why did they not? This irked him, alienated him, and made him angry.

And hungry.

He couldn’t recognise his earlier friends as they appeared much smaller now. They tried to come near to him. He ate them up. He ate up his family. He ate up the entire pond’s fishes and crabs and occasionally some ducks. He grew and grew and grew so much that he was now too big for the pond. Half of his body would now necessarily lie outside the water. So he would have to rotate himself to wet and breathe regularly. One can do it only so many times before asking the existential ‘for what’? A tear rolled down his round big eye. He was eating up the sand surrounding the lake to satiate his hunger. Eventually, it was the sand who claimed him. His scales turned stone. But his eyes forever remained moist. Little birds feasted on this water. There grew fungus and then eventually the eye turned green with vegetation.

Now he sits by the lake. Motionless. Trees grow on his back. Swallows nest in his eyes.

He makes a good photograph.

robber

i feel like robbing something beautiful. a life maybe. steal all the beauty, put my copyright and bury it in my 36 GBs of namelessness.
lets start with some beautiful flowers in all their blue, green and red splendour. the colors are not all too bright and I won't let you play with its simple beauty on photoshop to tweak its contrast and hues. They are beautiful as they are. They are alive. They don't need your definitions. Let me rob you of the pleasure of seeing the flowers in their magnificient colors in punishment of your expectations transgressions.
hmm.. even after stealing its colors, the flower shines with its grace. sublime curves. maybe in my beauty jihad, i should make them wear hijabs and throw black paint over this plate.
but I can only stand still, and admire its grace. grace can never be kept hidden.

breakfast

Eggs!
fried. and as our canteen wallah guy Subhash puts it.. 'Palti maar ke'.
Divine. :D

Well, i am poorer for the lack of MICA mess now. But that doesnt mean, I am going to give up on a dream of everyday sumptuous breakfast. well, even if I were to make my own breakfast, where would i arrange the greens, the portable fan, spacious airy verandah and fellow revelers of a leisurely breakfast?
The single most important thing that bothers me in my current stint at mumbai is breakfast. its not loneliness, its not commutes, its not crowds, it not absence of winter (but, what the duck! how can a place have no seasons :( i want winter! ), its BREAKFAST. or the lack of it.
Double fried eggs come in my dreams. dreams of past breakfast.
The one on goa beach a year ago. while the rest of my friends were still zonked out, i stole away on our rented Activa to a beach nearby to a Portuguesey named restaurant with open patio facing the beach. the wind would suddenly pick up at time and snatch away the tissue papers from table. a gaggle of birds would descend in cacophony and fly away again.. and again.. and again. :P a bunch of teenage girls were getting high on the adventure of trying the beer (flavoured) for the first time. and their race to tell each other stories of their own, how they were so brave and smoked once... and so on. there was a couple on another table. each was reading his/her own book.. and once in a while they would chip up and stare at the sea. with a sigh, their eyes would straight fall back towards the book.
The sun, the sand, the shade, the sea, and the delicious delicious scrambled eggs!

Or my daily morning pilgrimage to gesmo restaurant in Leh. the colorful tinted windows. sweet sweet music. and wonderful hosts. the place was owned by a Nepali guy. utterly diligent and helpful. the waiter was a young guy who always kept on smiling. he smiled more to firang girls :P. they all loved the amazing cookies there.
It became a habit with me to check the notice board at that restaurant, where travellers would post ads for fellow travellers to join in; lifeline for a lone traveller like me. I made so many friends over that board and around those tables. breakfast together and then off to travel!

well, now i yearn for a simple leisurely breakfast. egg in someway for a few days a week. in big airy space with sunlight streaming in. with no one harried or worried about time. If you know such place in Andheri, please please PLEASE let me know. I know its mumbai and it runs after clock incessantly, but there must be a place surely somewhere, where time is immaterial.
please.. suggest breakfast places.

the god is a waiter.

life escapes if you run after it. our destiny is nothing but to wait.
a lesson fell through after having lived a quarter century worth of life. a quarter century. feels like a lot, when u say that. but doesn't really when i ask myself.
a quarter century spent without any respect or regard to act of waiting. always, kicked it out of the way. or if the wait became far too imposing to avoid, i would recede back into a cocoon made of some other time and space.
but even escapes become boring.
waiting caught up with me. there is no escaping it.
i await.
i think, god is a waiter after all. he waits upon us to serve us life lessons. he waits until we appreciate the act of waiting. he holds our life until we calm down from our frenzy. and then hands the reins back to us when we can handle it, that is when the mirage of control is lifted and calm consumes you.
i now understand, so to say, why have i had this desire to work as a waiter since quite a few years. it was freedom i thought earlier. it was the calm emancipation i thought some time later. i think its just aiming for godliness now. :P

getting high

recipe for a saturday night.

7 -8 replays of 'adagio for strings' by samuel barber.
2-3 replays of 'moonlight adagio' by beethoven.
1-2 replays of 'gloomy sunday' by rezso seress'.

+

reading binge of pablo neruda's love sonnets
or Baudelaire's 'Flowers of evil'

+

port wine. (completely optional. might even be redundant).
____
its like a high. i better not get addicted to this.

lost keys

Perhaps, the single most important force that shaped my life is my impatience and greed for newness.
i loved playing synthesizer. i joined classes to learn it when i was in 5th standard. the day I learnt 'papa kehte hai' i was riding my bicycle wildly with joy and hands in the air. no handlebars. triumph. I saw triumph in the fact that quickly i was able to find melodies of any song on keyboards within minutes. then the quest became to play faster songs. then it went to learn classical notations and ragas. (i never paused then to master my fingers, to control, to hold, to pause, to get that exact timing. i was much too impatient.) and that was my undoing. I saw this vast reserve of yet unknown music. the book of notations that my teacher had, was quite expensive. and i wanted all of the notation sheets in it. so i set about writing those notations in my notebook. that took away a month or so. and then my teacher didnt have to teach me, so she kept on supplying me with notation sheets, which i duly copied and tried to play.. without supervision.. she couldn't be bothered. i was trying to play raagas on keyboard only through notations without ever having heard then, and she wasn't bothered to let me know that its futile. i saw notations as this whole new discovery.. i was enamored by it.
soon the class didn't seem a friendly place with others doing something else than what i was doing, the teacher not bothered about me, and the loud renditions of bryan adams on guitars by students.
so i left the class, with half baked understanding of music and very average skill. the thing was, i cannot be bothered by skill. i knew there will always be thousand others who would be good at the skill than me. for me the quest was always 'invention', 'discovery', creation of new. i did infact create a few musical pieces. none were complete.. like most other things in life, they were incomplete. they lacked cohesiveness. and most had a certain sameness.. the kind of melody i knew of then. music was only melody to me. rest didnt matter. i didnt know beyond 3/4th and 4/4th rhythms. anything else was exotic and i tried to play it, but couldnt do so convincingly. i still can't figure out chords beyond the basic major ones. and still dont get its relation with melody mostly.
but in the process, my notebooks (3 of them) with notations, some of my own became quite valuable. some guys who were learning with me routinely used to take them for help. i didnt mind. and then someone took it and never returned. that killed a part of me.. my labour of 2-3 years gone.
and then at school we, a bunch of classmates, tried to play ensemble.. as a band. nobody understood how to get the sound right when 4-5 instruments were playing together. we just played it louder or softer depending on what we heard ourselves.
after that event, a little bitterness left the synth lying without me touching it for quite some time.
wanted to graduate to bigger keyboard where i could play with both hands.. until now i was using sa35.. the small one, and only played melodies with one hand/or accompanying chords with one hand.. never the 2 together.
a few years afterwards, i wanted to get back to synth. so i joined classes again. here the teacher was a unreasonable cocky man. he had taught the army band or something earlier.. that probably was a small stint, but he took that army badge on his demeanor permanently. plaques in his class read. 'rule 1. boss is always right. rule 2. refer rule 1. ' some shit like that. i am a born rebel, how could i remain associated with such dictatorial idiots for more than 6 months. music for me then meant freedom, and here he was never allowing me to question the logic of what he was teaching. i just saw it then as a ruse of prolonging my training and as such addition to his bank balance on my behalf. this was cause, i was quick to learn and mastered compositions (this time, both hands :) ) in a few days, where others used to take weeks. he was trying to put together a band or something and wanted me in. i was happy. but then he said i must buy my own keyboard. it wasn't possible for me then. but he insisted on it and that was my last day at the class.

and for a long time i had nothing to do with playing any musical instrument. then i came to MICA. i was looking forward to reviving playing synth here. but i saw golee playing keyboard and was blown away. he had amazing skills, and amazing humility. there was a lot for me to learn before i could even think of touching a keyboard. first was humility and patience.
but i have started from zero twice already and a third attempt would be a little difficult. chuck with his big heart has lent me his keyboard. but i havent really started playing it yet. hmm.. enough of writing, must start sa re ga ma all over again now.
fickle fickle mind u.. the keys.. the keys..

photography and content

just saw this ted talk about photography.
Edward Burtynsky took photographs depicting oil's expansive role in our societal regression. few things to be noted here.
exhibition.. he chose large scale format. medium as imposing and striking as the content.
content.. the right politics. content/idea comes first. photograph/execution/medium comes later. so often than not, this is what happens. with digital photography, you take gazillion pics and then decide later on, while photoshopping it, what should the pic mean. its appalling as it has crept into professional and serious art photography too. a good photographer manages to restrict the meaning of what he wants to say, while he is bloody clicking the pic. though, one may get away with 'artistic expressions' and altered motives somewhere else... but that somewhere else has become ubiquitous and concrete motives have gone into margins.

well, i am culprit of 'lending meaning' to existing frame as well. ya well, hazards of being a student. i am only learning, and as such you chose stuff and decide frame while the idea/politics is still germinating, not completely clear, however you know that you have some substance. later on when u review, u realize that sometimes u unknowingly have captured something really marvelous, and most other times, its shit, just another addition to pollution of digital imagery.

ramble - I

just saw this talk on TED. Its the usual evangelical white man's talk to other white men about the need for understanding a people as a people rather than a 'problem' or a 'situation'. its about the 'shadow city' as he calls the slums in developing world. its an interesting talk and an earnest attempt in the right direction. However, in their politics to humanize, they tend to absolve the other forces at work. earlier in his talk, he talks how these shadow cities are expanding and more and more people are trooping in, without questioning why is that the case. he talks of how the shadow cities lack basic amenities of life but all these cities are built on hope and freedom. true, but what is making the people uproot themselves culturally, socially, materially and move to inhuman filth-holes in hope of what? while everyone should be able to enjoy his rights, at the same time he need not be elsewhere, far from his home to enjoy those rights and freedom.
compound this with a geopolitical perspective in another TED talk and you see the shape of world we are headed to. with the current system, every third human will be a squatter in a city by next year. Don't you think we have passed the danger zone, with cities housing more people than it ever could. its about time, money made in cities goes to hinterlands where economic and social infrastructure building projects help rebuild lives the way that sustains and helps grow indigenous ways. instead of cursing biharis, help create opportunities in Bihar with the immense wealth that Mumbai generates. if mumbai dissolves as the lone beckon of hope in the process of creating million towns with equal opportunities, every one would be better off. (notice 'lone' .. need to decentralize) If rich cities keep on guarding their wealth against the underprivileged, this will undoubtedly bring red revolutions. developments to watch out for: bangkok v/s rest of Thailand, north-west china v/s CPC. these are the once i am a little aware of. let me know of any other such conflicts that are about to come to fruition.

the economies right now of big cities are oiled with the sweat of the people from these shadow cities. An alternative has to be established where a people (mass) is not reduced to cheap labor oiling excesses (of few). a strategy has to be found out where, the economic system is slowly transformed from the current one to a decentralised one where the big city is not the centre at all. this will only happen with democratic access to resources such as power, energy, infrastructure, water. current technologies do allow for decentralisation and tribalisation to take place towards smaller independent village/ town units...
energy sources such as oil which by their nature require centrality and spoke system (dont know the exact term.. essentially where the source is at one place and consumption at many different places.) only further increase preponderance of imperialism/nationalism.
a truly democratic source of energy such as solar energy will allow for decentralized and independent governed units.
we need more such technologies that enable decentralization and independence for smaller units of governance to see a better tomorrow. the biggest issue would be water. i am hopeful that science and technology will surely come up with a solution.

reduction in distance between cause and effect. the decentralization and small units will help reduction in distance between production and consumption and as such a people will know what efforts have gone into producing what. this appreciation is must if we wish earth to sustain life beyond this century. US fat sob changing cars after clunkers with borrowed federal moneys needs to know the tribal (probably thousands of miles away; who was uprooted from the land where continuous mining has led to his erasure of identity, depletion of natural resources, alteration of geography and consequent socio - economy that might have existed there) whose steel has gone into making the car (his steel because he stayed there.. its another matter that a abstract entity called nation appropriated that resource as its and decided that someone else is more worthy of the spoils than the one suffering.)
_____________
disclaimer: this is only a blog entry, rambling thoughts.. not a thesis.. don't mind inadequate reasoning backup. hmm.. though i do wish i could take this up more seriously to study in detail.

sunday

after a long long time, i spent a whole day at home. fragmented thoughts... letting them be. to do list, letting it be. well, truth be told, the day was spent in hope and plan of spending it elsewhere too.. but that hope and plan existed in that uncertain plain which you know is only an illusion, a dim possibility, and that uncertainty is what gives our existence that vibrating energy. u keep on attempting to change course of time, but someone else has already shaped it in concrete for you.

time. time is like water, i said.. it ever flows. some one said 'bull shit' to this. then i said.. 'time is bullshit, ever present and infinite'. :P and then we missed ek chaalis ki last local. that was yesterday's time. today's time was moody and stuck to my skin a tad too intimately. it stretched with my yawns, it lingered on my open eyes staring with me the ceiling and the spider web in corner. and when i wished my time to be somewhere else, it simply deserted me... i was left staring at the glittering rectangle for hours. and when i was aware of myself again, time slowed down and let me be me. it let me feel my muscles slowly tensing before i move. it let me feel my breath and where it goes and what my nose thinks of it. it let me hold the guitar in admiration and see if it breathes too.

and tomorrow, it will put on its weekday hat with whip in hand. until then, lets just be.