Digging for Meaning

This was written about a month ago. it was a heavy evening with clouds that refused to rain.  ____ My room is a 12 by 12 feet fortress. Books and loud music keep the outside world where it belongs. Buena vista social club, Sigur Ros and Inti-Illimani create the different layers of the reality that I want to belong to. The alien language reinforces the knowledge that that world is indeed exotic, but not inaccessible. Buena Vista creates a world of siestas, gentle dance and happy café shop conversations; Sigur Ros’s pristine beautiful sounds fills me with contentment and calm happiness; and Inti-Illimani’s simple earthy songs of togetherness promises me a better future. And then ‘Duniya’ from the movie ‘Gulaal’ starts on the shuffle. All the carefully constructed peace is shattered and I return to the anger that I was trying to run away from. The duniya (world) I was avoiding all along comes in with all its virulent malevolence through those speakers; the duniya that makes decepti...

Free time is like a crack in the door of life. With the walls of education and qualifications, we build a career-led life and push out emotion-led life. We fill the life at hand with busyness. you see, busyness adds that gilt to the walls that shine off the fluorescent light onto yourself and you feel that much happier for the moment. The sun wastes away outside, and you crank up that AC and sit inside under the flickering flouroscent magnificence. But sometimes Time plays games with you. it doesn't supply that busy dead buzz. It just hangs there steadfast and resolute. It wants some undevided attention perhaps. Busyness is the opium of the cubicle-dwellers. Can't let go of it. try to live without your cell phone for a few days. What you gonna do, when time stays and stares at you? Through that crack, melancholy starts sipping in. The magnificence, you realise has an un-agreeable stench of loneliness to it. To sit in that gilded chair of importance of some abstraction, you ...