Delhi

Ah, Delhi
Envelop me tonight.
I've seen enough, I've heard enough
I just want to escape from it all
Into your deep deep bosom of misery
Ah, life
Don't be too stern.
I'll take in Delhi for now,
For my misery measures hers
And perhaps our bewilderment,
Not forgetting despair
Maybe it is true
That birds of that same feather, they do flock together

Inconspicuous
And one of you
Hidden in your alleys,
I will breathe, eat and sleep with you
Perhaps miserable places like you
Have a purpose after all.  

Writer's block and some other musings

Writer's block, writer's block go far away from me, Writer's block. I'm going to start writing for my weekly due in tomorrow. I searched the internet and came across a writer who wrote a book on Writer's block and helped save a lot of writers, including a best selling writer who had had Writer's block for 15 years straight. Yikes, that  sounds a bit scary. I'm thinking if I do become something like that I'd probably need to be fed through a pipe in my nose, unable to speak a coherent word or think coherent thoughts either. Be no better off than a vegetable. So I have decided after dwindling and procrastinating, imposing myself with different 'other' priorities and tasks I better start somewhere if I do not want to become like that old hag. I don't know if there is a thrill for when working on a dead line or I get more insight and inspiration to write. Whichever way, it may eventually leave me dry and shrunken like a raisin. I told myself that writing weekly columns in newspaper will brush up my writing skills and also discipline me and I want to see it that way. A successful writer said that once you start developing Writer's block the one thing you should do is keep on writing no matter what, even if the eventual result may be crap-like. Disciplining yourself is also elementary in developing your writing skill. So I have the idea in my head, I have been collecting data for the last few days to add in the column as I usually do and structured where and how I would like to start and then build up the argument. The only elusive part is penning it down. So bringing forth all forces of nature and my annoying habit to, when things are at a climax, become self-reflective and leave it hanging will try to enjoy what I want to write, what others will read from me and what I want to say from here.

So I'll come back here after sometime, till then. At least let me start somewhere.....

Writing from within

You gotta be confident in your writing to get any crap out of your system. But its difficult. I struggle with different forms of insecurity and suppression that sometimes the ‘task’ almost seems impossible to me. As though this is something short of a miracle. The toughest part is cracking the shell. And that shell is multi-faceted and an adaption of my own hell, perhaps. Anger, I feel, if the bubbling surface of a deep cut wound.

“I am a writer” Ahem, louder “I am a goddamn writer!” I still need to practice. I haven’t trained my mind sufficiently to follow suit with my mouth. So excuse the stuttering and stumbling.

I feel as if all this is a task. That somehow I will need to prove myself someway, somehow and when I feel that something stops within me: my want to communicate. This  is an unconscious thing because my mind is not necessarily designed to make a point or to prove myself but rather, to see writing, appreciate writing and develop my own writing from it. For if writing is not to communicate, to relay where body language or facial expressions had given up a little then what good is it?

I just figured that I want my writing to be myself, if it cannot be unique. To be free, where I am not able. To express what I want, what I aspire. To swear now and then so you and I know its still me. Or perhaps to explore a depth which only seems which have long eluded me. My writings will indeed be myself.

The villager

I walked in the village path, 

into an old house where

an old lady sat by the fire.

"Perhaps a wandering soul could

warm herself by your fire?"

i asked.

she poured me a mug of rice wine

and continued to blow into the fire.

I watched her and suddenly a fierce hatred

welled up in me.

One, I could not explain why or how.

She sat and blew into her fire

And resentment for being who she was

consumed me as i drank her wine.

"Who shall i be but this, where shall i go from here?"

she asked, answering my gaze.

i wish i knew how it was to be her.

Oblivious, unaffected and resolute.

Her life began here and would end here

While I, fleeting and inconsistent would remain

I think my resentment towards her

was not being able to be her.

Life- through Delhi

Life, life would be so much better if it started with a nice cup of coffee every morning. Or if I were back home, warm Zutho. I don’t know why I say warm zutho because no one drinks it like that but I guess the thought appeals to me.

This morning started with rain drizzling in through the railings in the corridor. Delhi-rain. Monsoon rain. The other night I woke up to a loud crack and a rumbling above my roof. I thought it might be an earthquake or a drunken husband and wife fighting this late at night. It was the fearsome Monsoon, it was the thunderous proclamation of the skys: that we are mere mortals under its sky. Under this Heat, under this Winter, in the shivering soul shriveled from any form of dignity by the footpath. In hatred, in human divisions and its consequent indifference, its frequent appeals to the Conscience and how that all seems so normal. Indeed, Human is a mortal, flawed.

I seemed to have learned a little. Let go a little. Belittled a little. See patience, touch a little bit of humanity without being condescending. Feel home within this. Whether that may be India’s caste and class system, with the rickshaw-puller­, the vegetable seller and my different face. Or within my own hell and need for another me, like in a parallel universe where the other me is not hurt and resentful, but healed and whole without hatred consumed. This is closer to home, isn’t it? I felt ‘home’ where I went and where I laid my head. But here the heart constricts, I am not the observer any longer. I’ll have to say something sooner or later, give my due. I seem obliged to oblige. Perhaps that’s why the feeling of home and the feeling of being confronted is diluted and still existing.

But won’t life seem better with a cup of chai and kachori from the fat-bellied Bihari across the street. Bare India, bare me and bare you.


Kachori- An Indian snack made of flour and eaten with gravy.
Bihari- Bihar, state. A person from Bihar.
rickshaw- cycle-taxi :)

The reluctant writer

Sat on the metro today,

It’s a long ride up north

To my students and their lives

Someone peered over my shoulder and cooed

“Oh you write poems!

Are you a poet?”

I slammed my notebook shut,

Tightly

And with a stiff nod

Said, “No”

Decidedly trying not to continue the conversation further.

X------------------X--------------------X

Another reluctant moment

I sat

And my thoughts reeled above my head.

Letters forming words

Words forming voice

Voice slowly nudging me

To pen them down;

On a forlorn empty

Piece of paper.

But,

I stopped myself

How could they form sentences?

How could they form daunting

Prose-pieces

Or eloquent poetry

Long, extended

Like an extension of my mind itself.

Thread of my thoughts,

Intimate to me

In pen and paper,

How intimidating.

What if I were compared

To others;

To parents,

Scrutinized.

“Hmmm, you know what,

I think I would change the sentence there?”

“Is this what you mean here?”

“There is a grammatical error there.

Eloquant is spelled ‘eloquent’ and it means

Fluent and effective use of language.”

My throats start to constrict,

The roof of my tongue dries

I feel exposed, too exposed

Like my bones itself jutted out.

No more, no more

I am not deserving 

Insecurity

I seemed to have had it lingering above me like a foreboding shadow; somewhere hovering in the corners. It’s not that easy, it’s not as easy as it looks. Even for those who were pulled into it; somewhere between being unconscious of it and being all too aware too suddenly. Delving into a self-destructive emotion as this is consuming, I would think. A part of you is eaten up, effected.

What makes a good writer? Hmm, I am not too sure yet. Writing gives those few skirmishes of me, left undone and exhumed by different sources a small place to rest. I don’t really know where I began, I’m sure I had a beginning somewhere. Maybe when I was 13, 14 and I wanted to write poems. Maybe at 11, 12 when Mum gave me “Heidi”, and “Little Women”. Maybe the shelves of books at home with so many different stories. Or the journals Mum gave us to write in everyday. But, what makes a good writer? Is it a fine balance between being the observer or the ‘observed’? The depths that comes from those. Someone once said, “You do not know life unless you have lived it yourself.” And perhaps it makes sense too. Sometimes when parts of my life have felt deeper-cut than just living through it, the strain of that cut stayed a little longer, a little deeper and my insights sharper, pain-induced or even darker. Perhaps that’s what makes good writing?

For our lives are not ordinary. They lie in deep emotions, cutting, they are extracted from the ordinary by definition, and by Fate. For another existence would not be real, even a half-peripheral one. A Real writer is never rich, there is a gloom around him and perhaps he’s left to roam the dark corners of empty streets.

Depression, depression. I’m hoping to find something profound out of it, else it might have been a waste of my time altogether. Waste of a life left hanging thinking there was something deeper, darker behind the sun.

If one dwells too long, maybe he or she would be lost. Lost to themselves and to those around them. I have felt the push, desolation and a deep undermining of myself even. It is destructive and yet it is powerful enough to bring Insight into our solitary existences, monotonous, dead and unnerving lives. If there is a line, maybe its very thin.

Yet that line itself is what brings out Exceptionality.