Digging for Meaning

A colleague sent an ad that recently came out. Its for Wildstone talc and it aims for making men feel ashamed for using the normal talc which had traditionally been targeted to women. Its very humorous and does a good work of accentuating men's anxiety about their manliness. Perhaps, a sustained effort on this front with a few more players joining in would certainly create enough anxiety amongst men not to use 'women's talc'. It has already happened in a lot of other categories. The reportage and analysis about matters of creation of sub-segments is peppered with words such as 'progress' 'maturity of market'. They are not wrong.. creation of segments is symptomatic of growing purchasing power, increased nucleation of needs.. a movement to western style first-worldliness if you will. But it is also symptomatic of a greater humanistic and social malaise. Sonal talks at her blog about the collective conscience that brands of yesteryears built is non...

dreams and hopes. heavy shapeless things. high on life, we smoke up reality and puff out dreams. they are round and edgeless, because we want them to be likewise. how free and light it felt while smoking it all up. how wonderful and colorful and full of love. and then while we were dreaming, bloody scheming silent slimy serpent of time slithered past us without us ever letting know. and all remained is the slime of memories, that touch of the serpent. just the nagging alive feeling of some dead moment of past and from time to time, the cloud of dreams clear up and we are left staring at the brutal blandness of reality and we are left wondering, 'where the fuck was I all this while?' and 'what the fuck am I doing now?' and 'why the *your favourite expletive* have i not tried flying?' all this while, afraid and dreaming letting the dreams add to itself weight of rust until it gets too heavy to fly. giving up on the fact that reality and dreams...

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...

what good is a cell phone? you stare at it for long. hoping for it to ring. hoping for it to light up with that name.  and its bloody unmoving. and then it makes noise when you don't want anything to do with it or anything else at all. if only it could carry a smile with it as well, instead of the dumb smiley. a real smile. the infectious one. if only it could carry touch, the caring 'i am here' touch. a real tight hold on the silent cowering fingers.

i am a big fan of fresh starts. why? cuz they are fresh, and as with things fresh, they smell nice and juicy.. full of ready-to-ripe promises. start cuz thats the best part of every experience. the attack of a note, the foreplay, the buzz of a conversation... starts define. starts command. why to follow up when starts have all the magic and the rest is only tragic hope and hopeless maintenance? no seriously, why? apart from some abstract certainty it gives us nothing. in turn it erases so many possibilities. worse, it erases even the buzz that stings pleasurably at the mere sight of a possibility on horizon. in exchange for certainty, it plants in our heads and hearts the insects of forever-n-ever doubt. doubt of things past, doubt of things could-have-beens, doubts of future. is it grace in present or is it simply dying a slow uneventful death? hmm... maybe certainty is that valuable. maybe. but until i get tired and my bones get rickety and my eyes stop gouging out with my mou...

hope. faith. submission. uncertainty. bankruptcy. bitterness. disillusionment. no lessons learnt. another fresh start. hope. faith... and again and again and again..

earlier i would never listen to songs on loop. i constantly needed to listen newer and newer stuff. sara tavarez, illapu, Bonobo... give me more, give me more! the thirst for excellence once discovered, is inextinguishable. the genius i was hearing to was evidence of other geniuses out there. its a never ending quest for sublime. the beauty is indefinite and never ending in many shapes and sounds. but then grace sets in with some songs. songs that mean something to you. Songs anchor our lives to certain moments in our lives. within the first note of that song it yanks us through our throats to that time. there's no point in fighting it, its part of you now. instead, swim in it, until it lasts. whatever the memory be, its always delicious. its ok to be a bit masochistic, go ahead suck on that pain. if it weren't delicious, you wouldn't have been remembering it. long live continuous loops.