Digging for Meaning

Note: This is from a series of posts that I would be writing about Marketing's assault on our language. (AOL) ______ Sometimes, weird vowel-less sounds (?) stumble out of busyfolks' mouth. When they utter these sounds among themselves, there is an implicit expectation that the meaning is understood. Its amazing really, a fence made of sounds. Recently, I was confronted with this particular sound -"FMOT". It took me  a while to hear sideways and decipher the words hiding behind the capital letters. "First moment of Truth". Most marketing students, including me, would know this as legacy of the store shelf Gladiator - P&G .Its an elegant concept really from a marketer's perspective - it is that decisive time frame when a customer first sees a product in the store shelf and gets sufficiently curious about it to buy it or not. It's a crucial time for the product - 'it's showtime!'  But is it a "moment of truth"? err.. i w...

It was around 10 o clock. I was hungry - about to cook dinner. But for the next 15 minutes, I was stalled by one thing. It wasn't a phone call, it wasn't a neighbor, it wasn't a pressing task, nor nature's call. It was me. I was looking through my music folder, searching for a few good tracks to play. Couldn't decide on anything. Then I turned on the TV app on my PC - nothing interesting was on. I went through my movie folder, but didn't feel like watching any movie. So for 15 minutes, I was scrambling around trying to find sounds that I could hear while cooking. As time went by, I was getting more and more bothered for not finding anything. Then I wondered - why do I need sounds really?  How much time in a day do i spend in quiet by myself? I live alone and yet I am never quite alone. I am either reading something, talking to someone, watching some video or listening to music. Days on end I spend, consuming media - incessantly. I realized something els...

30 its just a matter of a few years. and there I will be. under the glorious arches of 30-hood.  30 The number shines brightly in my head. Its a milestone that constantly barges into my vision, wherever i may be looking. i imagine it to be a small leprechaun like creature that's running around in 2 concentric circles. One around my head - the constant running threatens to add creases on my forehead. and the other around my waist, where the constant running is adding to the roundness of my person.  30  it constantly asks me to look back. 'Look back!' it screams. and then it tries to hold steady my gaze back into my past. Its a direction I have not frequently lingered on. The opposite direction was much more alluring in the past, and now I live content being in the present. But 30 makes me want to take stock of what i was set out for, and what grounds I have covered. I have never been good with appraisal, and this one will be the toughest. (I am happy with my l...

[This is a  ridiculous  story] Imagine. It was your usual Sunday afternoon. 1:49 to be precise . (why should you be precise? its a sunday! sacrilege.) It was my usual Sunday morning. The tea was on boil and i was browsing habitually through the multiple tabs open on my firefox browser. and as is the case with multiple tabs, none was interesting enough to hold me, but they formed a continuum, a circle of curiosity swimming in circles around my mind, and i couldn't break that circle. so i kept on surfing. switching the tabs. scrolling down and then up. then switching to the next tab. clicking on one link or another. then with impatience switching to next pane... furious and numb, simultaneously.  psssss.... the tea was boiling over, overflowing onto the hot plate. I threw my keyboard sideways and jumped into my kitchen. I was about to take the tea pot off the plate, when a bird exploded merely 3 metres from me outside of kitchen window. Poof. no sound. no smoke. ju...

Sundays are sacred days. Not in a religious sense. But in its ability to shift the gear of time, in its ability to lend lightness and calm energy to the air. Lunch happens late, dinner comes early. Tea and kahwaa materialise by their own whim on the sole strength of habit. Movies and novels can and do get consumed. But its the new lazy toys, Picassa and Photoshop, that witness the deceleration of time. Without aim, the tinkering starts. and ends. Today was no different. Saw yeh saali zindagi, a film that could have done without some of its twists and turns. Then collated footage of lightnings for a future project. Uploaded a few pics to my pinterest page and compulsively checked if someone had liked/ repinned any of my pics. Then gave up after a while. Slept. washed clothes. Then saw another episode of Monty Python. Read a short story by Haruki Murakami about a couple who get hungry in the night and rob a Mcdonald's store for 30 of their burgers. an...

A friendship is of the moment. Its envelops in togetherness different souls in that one moment with the shade of joy; that anchors the individuals outside of them, to a person and to a moment. It exists in creating such moments and more importantly imagining and remembering such moments. A friendship has no concern of the past, of the future or of the world outside of the moment of togetherness. Love is something else. The lovers need to anchor each other in their entirety. Their intertwined fingers probe all corners, all recesses of each other's past and their gaze is fixated on a tomorrow of forever togetherness. Friendship has no thirst. It needs no reason. Love has thirst. It needs every reason to exist. From the sparkle of the eye to the lover's tears of childhoods, they need to know all and feel all and hold it in the warm hug of memory.

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 ...

I can never fathom that its already 2010. 2010! shouldn't cars be flying, and armies of clones being produced. and where are our spaceships and aliens? its so unreal. every time i have to write the date, it takes some thinking before accepting that what i am writing as current year is an actuality. that the world is not as fantastical, and won't be for a while. My sense of time  has stuck at 1999 apparently. the world was to end with Y2K or WWIII or famines or floods or meteor strikes. well, the world has had tastes of all these at places, but mostly we are ok. Anyways, so there are 2 theories we came up with to explain it all. 1. mademoiselle sonal jhuj says that this is due to the fact that our childhood was spent in 90s. in school we had to write dates in school note books every day. hence we were always aware of the time. once we got out of school, we were divorced from the practice of writing date everyday. and hence we lost the anchor that the date column was. drifti...

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 w...

music's ability to displace time and our proactive attempts at shape shifting the day. was listening to habib koite. some of his songs just make you feel the dusty warm afternoons. the golden sun - the sweat charmer. the dusty roads and relaxed market place after the morning's hustle bustle. sitting on a chair under shade. but would i ever listen to Habib Koite or ali farka toure in the afternoons in the office? hell no. at that time i absolutely need some morning songs. stomach heavy with lunch, is forcing eyelids to shut. you need some very upbeat happy songs. its as if we are trying to expand mornings until evenings. and then sudden nights where one either parties hard or crashes to bed. crashes.. no afternoons but those of sunday's. but even then all life of the week is supposed to spring out in celebration of that sparse freedom of time. so how can you let go afternoons to 'waste'? it makes one feel guilty. evenings and mornings. thats all we know now.

yesterday I saw ' Coffee and Cigarettes' . Its quite an interesting movie. Not that I haven't seen similar ideas. There's one German movie, essentially a collective of several short ones, about conversations raveling life's facets in various ways. (I don't remember its name.. it was shown in some new movie maker's festival of international cinema in Pune. ) In cofee n cigs, its done with taking conversation over coffee n cigs as a ruse, a common theme through the movie. I though how simple conversations could lend themselves to creation of such fantastic movies. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are easily amongst the most beautifully engrossing movies ever, and what they fill the space and time is with conversations. simple. conversations. (Ofcourse Julie Delpy did help :D . She is simply brilliant, absolutely beautiful. She is so awesomishly godly in three colors: white .) The leisure that this form of movie projects is simply astounding and alludes to an...