Digging for Meaning

The Volvo (not just your average bus) screeched to a halt somewhere between here (Gurgaon) and there (Kasol) in the middle of the night (didn't bother to check time, it was somewhere around hungry time). The screech  put the dhaba waiters into accelerated motion. Towel on the shoulder, slippers under the feet. Hands busy waving away the flies. Eye roving compulsively and furiously over the fat contingent vomited out of the bus, straight into the washrooms. The washrooms lacked soap. (there perhaps was something that resembled a soap near the wash basin, but one can't be sure.) But that didn't deter us to go order food in the restaurant after visiting the washrooms. At a distance, there were 3 portly men. One sitting, the other two were standing. They were intently avoiding each other's gaze. If accidents of timing made one catch another's gaze, both ended up smiling profusely with wild hand gestures. One can only surmize that the gestures were theatrical acts of ...

Two weird things happened today. one. While walking back home, on the way there was a band baja barat going in celebration of Navratri. The bandwallahs had just started the ruckus and people were crowding around at the crossroads where the band was playing. There was a clear difference between people who were clearly excited and stopped there, and the ones who walked away while glancing back from time to time. The one's who were walking away either had construction helmets or were wearing formal clothes with tucked in shirts. Both kinds were migrant laborers. While the first kind were busy building their lives through houses for others in this alien city, the latter were building theirs by sitting at one place for most of the day in air conditioned rooms. People who called this lovely city as their home, waited in excitement of celebrations to follow. Migrants like me walked away eagerly to go home to wash away the day in a nice cold shower. Its weird, this feeling of being a...

It never seizes to wonder, the flight. Up up and away! :D (Yes that's actually how my face looks like throughout the flight) (The first time I flew early morning towards Leh, I couldn't restrain my glee. My hands clutched at the handle not with fear but with hope to tame down my excitement. I would strain my neck to see out of the window. I couldn't help but laugh out loud with helpless blameless happinesss pouring out through my being. Well, many delays and lay overs later, the same excitement grips me on every single flight still.) Within moments you leave all that you have known. People shrink to impossible insignificance of small ants. Big imposing sky scrapers look like lego sets. As you peer down, you skip by distances so swiftly as if you have grown giant limbs and they are so far below that you can't feel them. Jumping over buildings and roads, my imaginary feet running with easy strides. And then comes the best part of it all. The clouds. :D Passing and...

It was a wonderful piece of art, the aghani cap. Lovely patterns and colors. It took a while before it registered with me that it was not just a thing to be stared at but something that could be intimately mine. Mine to wear, mine to flaunt. It sat snugly on top of me. I would force my eye balls right up, as much they could roll and I could see nothing. That kinda sucked, but then there are mirrors you see. I caught myself beaming like a lunatic with that thing on my head. I was 18. It was winter then, and hence no winter evening was to be wasted without the cap. But my gray/black/white T-shirts were so lacking in character that I had to dig a little deeper in my small wardrobe to find winter clothes to go with my afghani cap.Perhaps that is the only year in my life until now, when I was so particular about my clothes and made an effort to look sufficiently disheveled. But this exotic cap demanded me to give myself a little more respect. Thank god for mom, I had a decent sweater to p...

Tonight while walking on the street out of my place for dinner, I saw a guy at a distance standing in the middle of the road. He seemed weird, standing like there, staring at some place. Nodding head at times. Walking and stopping. Looking back. Staring again. Hesitation personified. Gathering faith in his fists. My brain is like an ajax-less 1990's browser. I have to refresh my conscience to join the dots.I was left confused by his behavior. I tried to ignore it and went ahead and put my earphones on to 'the dangling conversations'. A little ahead, while crossing him I saw him a little more clearly. Apprehension was written all over him. His eyes were wide open; mouth half open, as if he wanted to say things but words were not yet ready to come out. I followed his gaze to find they were squarely trained on a window in an apartment nearby. The window framed a silhouette of a girl. she was holding the bars on the window, quite dramatic really. A silent persuasi...

"A favourite pastime in summer is watching the sand dunes whirl and inch their way right through the twisting narrow streets of the old town, to exit back into the desert again." so says an article in Outlook. Must sit there, roll a joint and stare out at the desert again. Pushkar had its charm, but I have never yet given deserts it due. I must spend some time in awe of the magnificent Thar soon. Reminds me of the lovely, dreamy movie 'road,movie' . Its not a movie actually. Its a dreamscape on celluloid. Watching it felt like watching ' 2001, a space odyssey ' when high. Its feels like flying in infinity. over vastness. being part of something great yet being just a mr. nothing. The vast expanses of dry land and blue skys. What a movie.

What is it with some professions and being a crook. Today again, an autowallah fleeced me. after a point, u don't want to waste time arguing and you just end paying up. I had the time and inclination to take this bugger to the Police station. I was about to take his auto's key from him and do the needful to walk towards the police station. But, then something happened, something that always happens at times like these. You suddenly feel a bit of pity+fear and a sense of resignation. Pity cause you are somewhere higher in the scheme of things and hence a bit of fear cuz he has comparatively little to lose and time on street makes him ready to put up an aggressive posture. Sometimes I put on that posture myself and do not let myself get fleeced. Resignation owing to the sheer wastage of your precious time and mood behind this and knowing that most probably nothing will happen of it even if you take them to the police. They know the equation perfectly well too. So they hold thei...

1. on the way from prithvi theatre to home in an autorickshaw, we stopped at a place for a moment to buy some ice-cream. the place had families and kids thronging the area. A group of men -seemingly upper middle class young office goers - passed by, cursing jovially. The autowallah guy got furious. He started saying, 'ye bolteh hain toh ganda nahin hain. garib koi gaali de toh pakad ke peetenge, bolenge kaha se aa gaya gandagi karne..' (If they curse then its not bad, is it? if a poor man would have cursed in public, he would have been beaten up and scolded saying that where have you come from to spread the filth.) 2.* a cabbie had this to say about the recent case where a drunk woman mowed down a few people under her car. "Hindustan ka niyam toh ameeron ke liye nahin hai.. jab tak mamla garam hai, andar rahenge, fir bahar nikal aayenge. 4 logo pe gaadi chadane ke baad bhi salman khan ab ghum raha hai nanga. darna bas hum logonko chahiye." *Source: Gaurav ...

tea. 1. sitting in cafe desert rain, sipping on that apricot tea on a lovely afternoon. with the spoon i swerve the warm concoction. the little apricot pieces play waltz with tea leaves in it. its cold, but sun's rays stream in through the wide open windows. there's a bunch of local kids sitting around, being cool, chilling. some one is playing a guitar. i am 'mainland' indian, so not many people are interested in me. But my companion is french, so she receives warm smiles. She is eating her favourite cookie. i must admit, its quite something. But I prefer sipping on some more varieties of teas before devouring those cookies. Someone just came in having trekked the stok-kangri. we shake hands and swap stories. we laugh at our different accents - german, marathi, english, french - and ensuing miscommunication. 2. A 12 km stretch to a remote village in ladakh wasn't really a road. but no one told us. with the trusty pulsar, we trudged on steep slopes, dangerous ...

Round at the curb towards my home in amboli in andheri, is a little plastic tent on the pavement against a co-operative housing soc.'s wall. (to go ahead to my place, i have to chose to walk either by a huge overflowing dumpster on one side of road, or a roadside orgy of shit. well, usually i time right at the moment to walk in the middle of the road through that distance. ) the place has plastic strewn all over by the tent. the family, it seems, is in the business of sorting out the different kinds of plastics that are dumped. 3 yr olds, 30 yr olds, 60 yr old family members are usually busy separating bottles from plastic bags from plastic objects from... the odd thing is the tenants keep on changing every 2 months while the tent remains the same. i guess. well, i have been here 6 months, and seen 3 families. well, anyways, the object of this post is something else. it concerns the current tenants. it apparently is a family of a couple with more than handful kids and a few elders....

india is a free country. we are free to conform. 1. Khar Road Railway station - 10-15 women are squatting on the platform. curiously all are carrying exactly similar bags. grey squarish bags with black straps. quite fashionable actually in that abstract expensive way. i thought bulk deals only happened in MICA. 2. Santacruz Railway Station - strangely many men are wearing the dirty bronze colored full sleeves shirt. the shirt uniformly not tucked in. the cuffs linked. Surreal. 3. popeye - i don't get this at all... all of a sudden the market is flooded with shirts with popeye pictures.. t-shirts, collared shirts.. they are un-escapable. go to colaba's narrow galli fashion streets, all stalls will have a popeye T. which company is dumping all these popeyes on mumbai's youth? why popeye? 4. grown men in half pajamas and full sleeved untucked plain shirts. so many people adhering to this code. the color of shirt is usually light.. cream or version thereabout. these are mostl...

i came across a video about the number stations, essentially a broadcast of seemingly random numbers or words being monotonously spoken. About 7-8 years back, in the night while supposedly preparing of an exam the next day, fiddling with the radio on my stereo, (used to love listening to foreign stations on short wave. different music, different programmes.. i even got to listen to a russian elvis presley) i had stumbled on similiar gibberish. the feeling of stumbling onto something utterly incomprehensible but of some obvious consequence is awesome. i can't forget this one instance as well. this was a time when i was heavily into astro physics, Carl Sagan , marcia bartusiak , SETI , drake equation , wow signal and what not.. here i am researching in free time about life outside our planet n shit, and lo and behold you hear stream of possibly encrypted data. btw, at that time with a group of friends we were trying to build an interferometer.. so that should give you a perspective. ...

its 6: 50 AM now. its raining pet animals outside. already had a failed attempt at tea with far too much water, and nearly not enough milk. lets not talk about tea and sugar and proportions thereof. i am proportionally challenged. what to do? what needs be done is, to take hold of the umbrella... pry it open. open the door and out of it. presently pleasantly wading through sheets of undulating water. walk through the narrow gully in my neighbourhood of slums. strategically place umbrella so that the water streaming down the plastic/vinyl or corrugated n rusted sheets don't bathe you. on the road to the left, i see a battered auto rickshaw split open. I walk ahead, buy 'the indian express' and sit down at the local tea stall in an august company of folks. two of them working at the stall. one a middle aged man with rouded eyes and round face and a rotund belly. he is preparing garam garam bhujiya! :D :D :D (hot pakoras, if u will.. ) the other a older guy in half pants si...

certain days are meant for writing.. certain days for gazing.. certain others to waste away and some other to walk about.

it was surreal. i was filled with disbelief. like a leaf on a breeze, i was looking here and there, unbelieving the lightness of being. i was 'sitting' on a 'seat' in the local train on the way back from work today! I HAD A SEAT! :D unjostled, un perturbed, the tired body had only the trains sway rocking it to sleep. there was the ungainly scene of a derrière right in front of me, but hey, you can't have it all now, can you? this lone fortune lifted my sodden day to a new high, plastering on my face a unyielding smile. ___________________ this kind of state of bliss makes one do dangerous things. i for one did something today... well, no regrets for what i did, but I will surely be pleasantly (for me) greeted with awestruck faces of ppl tomorrow.yes. i shaved my head. ( i guess, subconciously the reason for me going bald is to see those awestruck faces) god it feels good. the wind forever cool over it. ___________________ bliss. u can find bliss anywhere. on fortuo...

its amazing the way the forests absorb sounds and voices and turn it into a part of itself. so a shout, a shriek, a murmur doesnt remain a shout, a shriek, a murmur but is transformed into a caress, a shiver, a touch of the winds off the palm of the leaves. (hm.. too many ofs.. cant help it.) Once inside a forest, it takes in everything and sets the rules. what it takes in has its edges chopped off, and turned into something fluid and movable. directions become suspect. light breaks and falls in diffused surrender. sounds coalesce and loose their rasp and bounce and slip deeper within our heads. they don't just bounce off your ears, but they travel within and linger and become a part of a symphony which the woods is playing. oh the sweet symphony. what would i give to be able to listen to it whenever i want! The prelude is usually a chirpy welcome song which subsequently gives way to a lingering adagio. The longer you stay, the more moods of forests are revealed to you. i have expe...

on the way back home today, i was startled with a little green and black thing flying in front of my face. i quickly jerked back with a step backwards. it took a moment for me to realise that it was a butterfly. well, it has been quite a while since i had seen one. a butterfly in this gas chamber we call mumbai, should be wonderful sight, a rarity to capture forever in one's heart n head. but, the gas chamber has made the butterfly such a rarity, that like every alien thing, our brain forgets to understand beauty and the first instinct it activates is that of killing or steering clear of the abnormality. lessons to be learnt: 1. dont become an abnormality, atleast in other's eye. don't be a 'freak'. 2. instincts know no beauty. if you must show, educate beauty to others, do it gradually.

just a thought.. i don't understand why all of a sudden a foreign government's election result has caused such high media hype in US. People who don't even know where iran is, are 'protesting' (cyberspace can be a playground for the utterly idiotic and gullible out-of-lifers ) against apparent rigging of election. 'travesty of democracy'.. bull crap, funny how scores of other dictatorships or rigged election elected governments with help of US never get the kind of coverage that iran is getting now. do i see here a ploy by US to create ground for it to go for Iran? hm.. saying the obvious. free press they say.. one can engineer a thought culture just as easy these days, as perhaps it was 100 years back. we haven't become any smarter.. ___________________________________ Social protest as a measure of democracy i think that protests happening at a place are a measure of democracy. well then what about Lalgarh in west bengal? what naxalites are doing, is t...

while traveling. while sitting idle alone. while walking on the road in the middle of night. the crowd of thoughts vanish and what remains are the loose ends of life that need resolved. its beautiful the way thoughts starts untangling the commotion and living behind a crisp reflection of the chiseled self. it requires no efforts from me. they are like strong waves on the beach, which takes away the everyday trivial thoughts (to which we are wedded, beyond our control.), and uplift me into the simple domain of life (as in 'alive'). hence these days i relish the long local train travel, the road back home to Nasik, the walk on city streets after work. The tired body is not a good home for mundane thoughts. As it expels them, the nourishing self-reflecting thoughts swim in and comforts the soul. __________________________________ The excellent trip to Leh has spoiled me. i so thoroughly enjoyed the chance meetings with people, the absolute no planning, being alone at times, that...

i am in dire need of a new thought structure, a new point of view, a new way to look at things around me. I have been through quite a few such iterations. The first prism that I looked through during my school days was pure science. Tales of great discoveries and inventions greatly affected me and instilled in me a hunger that still burns in me, for constant search of new genius, of new things, of inventions of my own, of constantly seeking alternate views, of being the first in the world at something. I acquired (more or less.. more less than more. :P) the tool that would help me in it, namely, REASON. This tool had a great role in defining me, helping me find and appreciate the beauty around. It also led me to a generation of a few ideas of my own, and as such introduced me to the utter pleasure of creation. It helped me understand the physical, palpable world around. Then things happened that introduced me to the looking glass of Philosophy & Spirituality. Reason sets up storms,...