Just An Other Word For Losing!

We all need to have some sort of control over some aspect of our lives. Our parents will invariably come to dominate the earlier parts of our lives, but as an adult pre-marriage, we somehow evolve into an individual who needs to be the ordainer of just one section of his or her life. It gives us a sense of powerfulness, and sometimes it is enough to devour even a bit of helplessness when a loved one passes away. When you take up a task for yourself and complete it with the utmost perfection and, at the same time, without taking any help from any of your friends, it makes you believe in the fact that you are capable of accomplishing things which you were born to do: it makes you believe in your creation. The belief in one’s creation is the greatest joy one can get, although it may depend on what you think you were born to do! Anyway, imagine a person who has had all of this, and is now just about to relinquish that control? Why does the helplessness sink in again? Why does the person feel as though he or she has been transported back through time, to the day when the helplessness first raised its head? To control is not to love, is it? It is to dominate! The opportunity to control is the willful desire to subjugate! Over everything else, to control someone else is to take for granted a chance to avenge your mistakes.

When you let go of a loved one because she has let you know that it is what she wants, you should also believe that if she returns to you at sunset, it is love that is unmatchable. I know relinquishing is just an other word for losing control, but it is a word in its own right and therefore, should mean something else as well. When you find it in you to take control of something or someone, there is a pressing need within you that needs compensation at the earliest. It means that your guilt is driving you to such an extent as to encroach on the freedom of others and impose your own limits on them. Control is lost, or you lose control, only when it should it is yours by right and you have claimed it via duty. On the other hand, control is relinquished when you willingly give up control that did not belong to you in the first place. We must all relinquish control, but never lose it, for it may pertain even fractional aspects of our life – like in the taming of our senses.

And what of controlling a single aspect of your own life?

The greater experience and age of your parents while you’re a little kid makes sure that every little thing in your infant- and childhood is taken care of by your parents. It is the later-childhood and early adult-hood (or adolescence) that makes the difference. Some parents will (obviously) be worried that too much freedom on the child’s part might perhaps lead him or her to misuse it. But denying that much freedom, on the other hand, will leave the child handicapped as an adult who finds it unable to make even the simplest of decisions sans assistance. Here’s what I think is the secret to strike the perfect balance between the two. You have to let your child learn from his or her own mistakes, not from the mistakes of  friends, nor from the mistakes of you – his parents. By leaving your child free to do just this, he or she will be able to establish a very important relationship, that of one between the action and the consequence that follows it. If you leave him or her to learn from the mistakes you committed as a child, he or she will only gain the experience of the consequence and never of the action. This means the ability to associate and, later on, recollect the same event will be hard and there will linger an irritating chance that the child will do the same mistake again. When this sort of an education is meted out, one need not give thought to the degree of freedom being assumed by the child as being his or hers. For, if you think about it, freedom is not yours to give. It is one’s to assume. The right amount of consequentiality will breed the right amount of responsibility, which will fester the right amount of individuality. And the individuality with which you can account for yourself in all your actions is nothing but your freedom.

Honorificus Honoris Causa

Beginning from the quantification of perception, we see, hear and feel the objects around us. We understand animation, we derive motion, we negotiate shapes, and we respond to changes. There is nothing to philosophy if only for our ability to develop opinionatedness and a sense of good and bad, whence we also derive judgment and the skills of decision-making. Just as we have left and right to orient us in the physical realm, we have problems and solutions to orient us in the mental realm. A problem is perceived in its deviation from normality, and in the exposition of abnormality as it were to alert us to one change in particular and in even greater specificity, its incompatibility with normality as we see it. Problems can arise in many forms – as many as we have come to perceive. It is the solution we come to, the one particular decision to alter things as they are and to set them in positions that would resemble in positions they were. We try to reinstate normality as it should be, devoid of anything erroneous, error-prone or error-causing and greatly limitable by one’s own actions as they will be, in resemblance, a redemption extracted as punishment for mistakes committed when they shouldn’t have been. But a sense of direction employed in directional guidance as dictated by sight and monitored by goal must not be completely and exactly mapped with decision-making deployed in problems and the arrival to corresponding solutions. While walking on a straight road, the need to perceive a change in direction is responded to by taking a perpendicular turn at the least. The sense of left and right, henceforth, seem to more pronounced owing to the presence of an original path that now takes up the first slot in the history of the journey. While travelling on a straight road, without having to take any turns at any points of space and time, the journey consisted of an abode and destination separated by a distance consisting solely of linear displacements; in other words, there was a problem, and there was only one feasible solution. But once you have taken a turn, say to the right, then you have a perpendicularity associated with your journey: you have reoriented yourself, and analogously, you have altered your direction in favour of a new solution to the same problem. The presence of an original plays an important in that it gives rise to comparative decision-making and therefore, opinionatedness. The traversal of a straight road gives rise to no such notions because of its inherent inability to deliver comparability. And this is where my theory of nothing, which is but a set of questions that seem to answer themselves at first, is born. Man’s natural need to quantify the objects, changes and adaptations around him is only understandable. Only with quantification comes perception. This is because, at the most fundamental of levels, the changes around us are used to keep track of time. When an object moves from point A to point B, it marks a change of position and gives rise to displacement. Therefore, the quantification of the phenomena around us empowers us with the tool of recollection, which can be put to immense use when we use comparative decision-making. The same problem may have given rise to multiple solutions, but when a problem with only one possible solution occurs repeatedly, the problem can be filed away as a one-time occurrence and the solutions that were used previously to tackle it can be thought of as multiple and, therefore, employed again. This concept, in its turn, brings us to the breakdown of time into logically similar categories. When you leave your home for work, the morning can be divided as:
1.    You at home
2.    You while driving
3.    You at work.
By the logical organization of time periods, alternatively ‘time spans’, you find a sense of progress. When the same tasks are performed on a fairly regular basis, the scenario transforms into a routine and the requirement of a logical categorization becomes suppressed by the commoditized grouping of these sets of tasks into blocks characterized by the observation of relatively progressive changes in a parallel walk of life. For example, when you work at the office, you perform the tasks assigned to you (as conforming to a division of labour). However, the progress is observed in your personal life when you earn money, and in your company’s businesses, which seem to want your work to happen efficiently for them to function effectively. Subsequently, a multiparallelism can be drawn out between all such cases of analogous logic, and the consequences of the principle of induction should become derivably applicable.

In the said cases, quantification has been observed only because it was being looked for. But what about when one desires quantification in some other region of perception but is unable to find it? Does that mean that what I perceive is nonexistent? But that is absurd because the validity of my perception is then annulled.

In trying to come to terms with change and the relativity of existence itself, we have subconsciously but inevitably generated the need for quantification. But of course, the coexistent fundamentality of the very notion is an excuse enough and has, therefore, qualified itself as a positive sign of progress. Our understanding of the people and social machinery around us only deepens our faith in the social pedestal upon which we stand, and thereby also boosts the time we can devote to the understanding of other parallel phenomena. So, pre-quantification, we have change, orientation, progress, and some parameters with which we are enabled to measure them. If these parameters were to be absent one at a time, then the ease of quantification becomes reduced, but on the other hand, even the presence of one of these parameters at times becomes a cause for problem. It is the combination of them that can have any expectations of standing true. However, when something as abstract as any other fundamental elemental constituent of logic, like logic itself, is subjugated to the detection of such said parameters and the establishment of quantified judgment as to point to its place in a mental realm, as it were, becomes very complicated owing to logically overriding incompatibilities. Therefore, in dealing with such terms such great applicability in reasoning, we have to define the most fundamental of these terms such that those incompatibilities arising out of hierarchal disturbances in the logical structure of reasoning itself are not dealt with. In other words, we have to define the smallest units of existence which posses the least amount of elemental reasonability and, therefore, can be parallelized to arrive at a logical conclusion to any statement or problem. What is this concept?

The Room

With the advent of NaNoWriMo08, I suddenly feel a surge inside me, as though the writing spirit that had hibernating within for so many days had been summoned to the surface of my mind, blocking out every thought that didn’t pertain to it. I have been busy for quite some time now with the creation of some blogs for other people and one even for my college’s music club, but that was a welcome change than what I would usually have done otherwise. I have always wanted to do something that others around me wouldn’t do at that point of space and time – and not just because I would stand out. It was because I wanted to know what the consequences of such an action would be. I have always wanted to read the mind of nothingness, the mind of the black hole, the mind of nullity itself. I know you won’t be following me here, so let me elaborate with an example. Imagine a nice dorm room, and imagine that it has been nicely set up with all kinds of relevant infrastructure and paraphernalia. Now, let’s say someone lives in this room, uses it, delivers to it a look and feel that can only otherwise be found in a life form. At the end of it, the room in your imagination must be a room that has housed life. Now, the person living in the room walks out and doesn’t remain for quite some time. What goes on inside the room? Do the shelves creak because something has been left behind? Do they sense a disturbance? Is there some sort of an imbalance? Does the room sigh? One will never know these things because I think The Room is capable of doing this only when no one, absolutely no one, is watching it – either by walking into it or via a camera mounted in a seemingly corner. The Room can, of course, have no corners that it doesn’t know of. So what does The Room do when it does something? Does it come to life too? I wonder how it would feel to chronicle the life of The Room. I have always wanted to write a story along such lines. This thought first had its seed sown in my mind’s eye and my imagination when I realised such a story would require no character development if not for the feelings and the character development of The Room itself. I can have The Room feel anyway I want it to; I could even be so magnanimous as to let The Room assume a mind and personality of its own and battle with, on and on until the day we come to a decision as to this is what The Room has been trying to say all the time. Furthermore, no dialogues. No change of scenes. The props used in the beginning to associate the behaviour of The Room with an event/action we could relate to, and therefore derive opinionatedness and judgment from, will be the same throughout the story. But the problem has always been the beginning. How could one use a few words to imbue The Room with a mind, some feelings, and a tangibility, a feeling that The Room is present amongst us, in such a way that The Room itself inspires me to write more? In other words, how do I become The Room?

I have had a few ideas about that, too. But they don’t seem to embody the inspiration I will have to rely on later on. You might think it is all up to me to script the perfect beginning in order to even be deserving of The Room’s help later on. But then, you won’t be looking at the heart of my problem. The heart is that I can write, yes. Writing is not an issue, but what can The Room come to associate itself with that I can also associate myself with? I can’t readily become the room myself. (Writer’s block and 25 minutes later…) Even if there exists a Room that has a sense of belonging and the very right to exist, the WHY part of it all stymies me. I can’t write a novel just because I’m writing one, can I? I can’t put together a string of words and declare it to be a sentence just by placing a period at the end. There’s a line from the Tool song ‘Schism’ that comes to me: “Right now, the pieces fit/ Because I watched them fall away…”. That is what it is! At the end of the game, I can look upon my creation as a novel only when it is actually one, only when you can expect everything that you’ve put down to come to life any second – be it in a movie, or in someone else’s mind. But The Room always fails to do these things when I write about it. My circumnavigation of the problem of a lack of the ability to spawn spontaneous character development on my part has landed at the question itself. If you know a way, do share it.

I would like The Room to come alive soon.

The Usual

‘ I get up every morning with the alarm clocks warning and take the 8.15 into the city…. Theres a whistle up above people pushing people shoving and the girls who try to look pretty…’

-BTO

Seems like my life is taking a few ideas from this song. Being th not so ideal college student at age 20 I find that somethings are very seriously wrong with my lifestyle. For college I get up early in the morning, early being a time at which roosters shudder to ‘cock-a-doole-do’. Then a drag my half asleep self into the bathroom for the regulars. After about 10-15mins of traditional procedures I come out of the bathroom and get dressed. Next in line is a quick fix. Now the preferred brandy and tonic not being the ‘mot juste’ drink at my age I have to settle for a glass of cold chocolate milk or hot coffee. When I say hot coffee, I mean boiled water with heaping teaspoons of anything I find on the counter in the kitchen. One really dosent question at that hour of the morning. At this moment it comes to my attention that I left the clothes in the washing machine last night, and by now they would be decaying into something far less than hygenic. Runing to the washing machine still with the liquid picker-upper in hand i shout out a few hi’s and hello’s to blokes passing me in the corridor. You see I live in a apartment with 7 other guys, so it gets kinda crowded from time to time. Ok, clothes out and drying, coffee downed like a light beer, and I am ready to get my butt out the door. I go call for the elevator, it comes, and I don’t get on it. You’re probably wondering, something wrong about that sequence of events. You see when the elevator arrived the folk already inside it seemed that my shoes were perculiar, they looked oddly like feet. Turns out that I had forgotten my shoes under my bed. Who could have know? I am certainly not albert einstien but I am not exactly at par with average IQ either. Sadly the old bean doesn’t get properly into form until the late PM’s so with all that was happening at that unearthly hour its no surprise that I forgot to put on the old keds.

(Notice the yawn of a bore and an apparent pointlessness?)

– By Varun Vohra

Some Friendship From The Flea Market

Sometimes I wonder, is there any real truth in life? Is not all our world nothing but perception with our eyes? For if there were any real truths they would be universal, undying as such I believe. Everything that I have been told till date has proven to be selective in its area of application. For example, honesty… always be honest I was told. Yet there have been circumstances in my life where honesty leads to more pain and toil than otherwise. I lie often to my friends, not out of spite or harmful intentions, just out of a want to protect them. Being sufficiently resourceful I am privy to a lot of information. If I tell a friend something he/she wouldn’t want to know it will cause fruitless harm. Instead if I am able to resolve the matter and yield good results then share the news, a much better outcome for all. Don’t you think?

It’s a hard task in today’s world to find people whom you can truly rely on. Everyone (including myself) seems to have a hidden agenda, one that’s not always harmful but always hurts. I don’t mind being used, it’s something I have come to terms with, and we all need people all for different reasons. It’s just that when u discover that you have been used it hurts. If someone were to honestly come up to me and say that I was needed for some sole specific purpose and that was all, I am not sure how I would react. I mean first thing to come to mind would be sound and solid ‘Noelle propesqui’ but after some thought I might actually agree.

You see, the fact that we need other people for various tasks is not a new concept. I mean one can only have so many friends to confide in. What really hurts is when there is a misunderstanding between people. One thinks that the two are friends for the long haul while the other has a shorter functionality in mind. When push comes to shove, for it always does, the one who had more vested in the relationship always loses out.

Anyway, enough about that for now. Today I was thinking why people befriend others. I see a plethora of people around me all with friends, and I can’t help but look deeper for the real links. It seems to be, shocking as my finding were, that people befriend all those they consider valuable. Now don’t misunderstand me, all friends with time become valuable but it seems that people have already evaluated values, before becoming friends with someone. Seems like a flea market where everyone is looking for the best deal, which is to get the most out of their friends. Don’t get me wrong there are still some true naive ones out there but they are few and far apart.

Another thing is the social factor. Being college students everyone is hyperactive on the whole persona thingy. Seems that who you are matters less than who you spend time with. When did that happen? Groups of friends seem to spend time only with one another, generally ignorant of the rest of the world. As fresher’s, no one had a choice so they all had to mingle and find people they enjoy. Seems to me that with time everyone just becomes too lazy or too scared to make new friends. Its like, why take the risk? Everyone knows their place in the college and sees the rest of the college in their respective rolls.

Why? Why are we afraid of taking the chance to get to know someone else? What is it that keeps us in our safety zone of friends and prevents us from developing? Is it the fear or rejection? I don’t quite understand it. I always talk to everyone and keep doing so to form proper opinions on them. I mean there are many sides or layers, or what ever you choose to call them, to a person. Can we afford to miss out on most of them because the upper few weren’t palatable? I honestly don’t know.

You see, I believe that we all have scales for our friends. Some friends we would trust with our lives, others we would loan 10 bucks to. Yet we still call both our friends. Odd isn’t it?

– By Varun Vohra

The Night Of TRebellion

I know that sounds like a misspelling in the title, but that one word was a misspelling that we all celebrated with tonight. Like a reluctant outcast from the law of averages, TRebel set the night apart with a modest beginning that bloomed into two hours of as-good-as-it-gets singing, dancing, and some diaphragm-wrenching laughing and throat-wrenching screaming. Today, the 29th of October, the night after the Festival of Lights, was unforgettable not only for its one-of-a-kindedness but for the gloom that refused to engulf the night like it usually does, and for the glee that stretched on for no reason whatsoever. We’ve all been to many a party and many a get-together, and we’ve all had a reason to celebrate. But when it comes to point of time when you’re dragged in by a routine that has eliminated all sources of change in your life, and has deprived you of those few kicks that you get out of being that someone else whom you always wanted to be if only for the availability of a reason. And all that TRebel did was give us those reasons. And we took to them whole-heartedly.

I’m stewing in the filth strewn on my bed at 2 AM in the morning when Advait messages me on GTalk. “TRebel needs your help” he says. I thought it would have something to do with putting up posters in the college because I was a tall guy and Benjy, who had gone to the campus to put them up, was shorter. But any thing’s something at 2 in the morning, and I asked him what he wanted. And that’s how the celebrations began for me. He wanted me to write the script for a compressed and contemporary version (read: spoof) of ‘Ramayan’, the ancient Indian epic based on love. I quit my AutoCAD work and got down to writing and finishing this ‘TRamayan’ of sorts. It was done by 6 AM, after which I went to bed.

I wake up at 4 PM (read: tea-time) to see a small gathering in the college canteen, with all the college’s worldly-wise putting their heads together to come up with a background score for the play. There was Anne, Chimpu, Nair, Devank, Bala, Advait, Niaz, Piyush, Benjy and TV. And not to forget the unmatchable Sheikh – the President de facto of TRebel. I have never been much of an extra-curriculars guy, but it did feel good and, somehow, wholesome to be part of something that was so meaningless that it had to exist. After handing in the script and collecting my royalties (AED 10), I headed back to my room for an evening of monotonous relaxation that I had so come to enjoy. When the clock was a few minutes shy of striking 7, I headed down and toward the staging area in front of the grocery facing the main gate. I was expecting only a small crowd of some 20-30 people. Unsurprisingly, I was surprised to find a large mass of androgen and estrogen spiced with some testosterone, already with their hands in the air and screaming for no tomorrow. With a ‘WTF’ waiting to explode from my mouth, I ran towards the place to find scores of juniors and seniors alike sitting and standing all over the ramp and the tiling, and even on the grass, gaping towards an empty stage with some disco lights thrown on the wall behind. I’m not sure even the TRebellious had expected so many people. And so the night began.

First in line was the play. For those interested in reading through the script, it’s available for download right here: tramayan. Let me give you guys a walk-through. Ravan (Advait) takes Seeta (Urvi) away to Lanka. Next, we see the royal brothers Ram (Niaz) and Lakshman (MJ) holding hands and walking in the Deira City Centre (a popular mall here in Dubai) when they hear that Seeta had been taken away by Ravan. Ram is dejected and Lakshman is, obviously, confused. When they argue and finally reach a decision, we see that the next thing they do is visit Hanuman (Piyush), a friend of Ram’s ‘from college’. Hanuman, for his part, has his mechanical engineer-monkeys to build a bridge from somewhere-in-south-India to Lanka, the construction of which gets delayed because the monkeys tend to mass-bunk their sessions. When the bridge is finally done, the monkey army which Hanuman has amassed to assist the brothers, and the brothers themselves, alight in Lanka, they find that they need to give Ravan a missed call to summon him to the desolation of battle. But none of them have any credit remaining, and they resort to a call request. You know how Etisalat has no signal and all that, so after a few minutes of waiting, Ravan appears. In a break from tradition, the rest is not as history would have it. The battle is long and boring. When Seeta finally appears in the scene, Ram is excited and jumps to rescue her from bondage. Ravan, seeing this, stops Ram and decides to strike a bargain with him: a carton (read: of cigarettes) for leaving Seeta alone. Ram agrees at first, but decides to call it off because Ravan does not have his preferred brand of cigarettes. Battle ensues again, but this time, Lakshman asks Seeta if she knows of any of Ravan’s weaknesses. Urvi confides that Ravan had to leave a female named Anita to get to Seeta. The monkey army then immediately summons Anita (played wonderfully by Tina) and Ravan is led off the battlefield in a melodic trance. Ram walks off with Seeta, and Hanuman and Lakshman follow behind. The end. Nice na? I know 😛

Well, next in line was a whole lot of singing and dancing, and the guitar guys soon took over the night. I, on the other hand, was already basking in the glory of my first ever script being enacted Broadway-musical style! Their fingers for once wouldn’t stop dancing around the strings and plucking them, and fortunately, they didn’t have to. Oh, and they were Anne (Anirudh), Chimpu (Siddharth) and TV (T V Siddharth) – partially or wholly comprising of the band ‘Magroorz‘ (or, as Shantanu put it ‘Magrooooorrrrzzzzzz’). Hats off to them for an excellent score for the play, drawing on everything from SRK’s ‘Don’, GnR’s ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, Metallica’s ‘Wherever I May Roam’ and Iron Maiden’s ‘Trooper’, and some comical noises thrown in. Shaurya, the bassist fresher, in particular had a guitar whose design was weird: he had a study lamp attached by screws at the lower end of his guitar bridge. Anyway, while moving from one song to another, not one fault was observed, and those few that did manage to stand out like some innocuous foreigner looking to dominate a fault that could be as inconspicuous as it could be made to be, it was lost in a myriad of celebrative moods which won over the tendency to decline and fade. I wouldn’t exactly remember the sequence of songs as they played one after the other, but here are they in some random order (read: how each one of them matched the melancholy of the moment as it would have been, and how it came be when played for no reason at all and, therefore, making the celebration devoid of a reason to even stop for the night): ‘Aadat’, ‘Californication’, ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Socha Hai’, ‘Summer of ’69’, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, ‘CGPA’, ‘The Sutta Song’, and so on and so forth. Here are some pictures to rekindle the memories of those who were there.

Aditya Nair right in the middle!

Oh, and not to forget, our chief guests for the night, an impromptu addition to the night to imbue the formality that refused to exist! Dr. Priti Bajpai, Dean, Student Welfare, at BPDC, and her daughter Bhavika. You should know that Bhavika is a very wonderfully talented singer, and when she sang ‘Saiyan’ (by Kailash Kher) on stage after some people requested for it, Advait’s requests to mute the instruments required no repetition: it was mutual. For a moment there, the TRebellion assumed an officialism, and transformed into something that would happen again soon. If we as students could draw such talent together based on a prolonged whim of sorts, then imagine what we could do if all of us put our heads together for a week. Ah well, all good things must come to an end, and the TRebellion did. I left a little earlier before the close because I had some other tasks to attend to. The night had ended with an open dance floor and MP3s playing into the night. There was also some attempts made at stand-up comedy, only to fail miserably; and the giving-away of goodies to audience members based on some obscure question chosen on the spot by Advait.

And even if each one of those who had showed up might have left the scene thinking such a night will never come again, I beg to differ. Like I said in the beginning, it’s only a matter of a reason. And when you have it, that’s all we need for a start. Good night!

P.S. Look out for the tRebel blog and web page. Coming soon!

Politics In Pink

There’s give and take in every relationship, but in cases of love, it sometimes becomes lost to the vast infinity that is born when you lose yourself into her. Then, there is nothing left to give or take once you know the both of you are two halves of the same soul. But with the increasing youth population, concepts like dating and such social phenomena have brought in greater flexibility and compatibility to a relationship. You can always get the girl or boy you are looking for, with those perfect cheekbones and a heart to match. You tell people that you don’t like them for what they are, and when they ask you back about why the relationship even exists, you answer with what you think is the truth in societal placement that is in itself false. You can never fall in love with anyone based on what you can change him or her into. The truism must remain, and only then can you hope for every day in your life to be an adventure. Dating and blah-blah have never appealed to me, and if ever I meet a girl, I would like to get to know her well, and ask her out only after I’ve made sure for myself that she is the one – the one who can alleviate all the grievances in my life just by looking into my eyes with hers. I know that sounds silly when in print, but I’m sure every single fellow out there has such and such thing for himself to fall back on. Anyway, when I mean “ask her out”, I mean it for life. I don’t give a damn about taking things seriously or taking them slow, and if she had had any such preferences, I should have inferred them beforehand. It is the way I like things because that is how I think nature intended it to be. I am no pagan, nor am I an animal, but is it prohibited to even be anywhere in between? This is not any sort of religious talk but something that is straight from my heart. What I’m trying to say is, if you can’t get at something because it is not what you’re looking for, then there is no point in trying to get to it. This statement may sound so simplistic, but it’s something that is being so dumbly overlooked all over the place. The boys and girls here in my college can’t digest such things, but it’s all they want to hear when they come to me crying about some slight ripples. Like I said, a give-and-take is consciously arrived at and the relationship is not purely based on a feeling of unison (not unity) anymore. You use your partners as tools to cover up the failures in your own life. You use the guy like a mask against your mother when a problem creeps up at home: we are not shields you can use to get things which you don’t deserve in the first place. We are not objects whose many plausible mistakes were committed in order overshadow yours. And not without its share of the guys: the obvious perspective of ‘objects of desire’ will last only as long as you can live a life that you think you are living but is actually not YOU at all. How long can you be someone you aren’t? My god, the time people take to realise this, and to crib and cry about it all the time just makes the whole place look like a one large circus. The only thing missing is an ice-cream shop round every corner. I always thought this phase would be educational in a way that brought out the best in you. I never knew it would be at the expense of the mistakes of others. Perhaps my time will come some day that someone learns from my mistakes.

A Matter Of Fact

I know that’s a copied title, but I’m sticking to it because I like it. Anyway, here’s the link to the newspaper report of a quiz competition me and Tarun Balakrishnan came third in. Surprisingly (but not so now), we lost to two teams comprising of school goers. The winning team was from Indian High School, Dubai, and the first runner-up was Modern High School, Dubai. The winners got all sorts of DVD players and other electronic equipment, or so I hear now. We were just told that the top three teams would get the same Samsung mobile phone, and a memento differing in size to demarcate. This only makes the loss bitter. I mean, I concede we did underestimate the capabilities of these younger academicians, but that was only just after the preliminary round. A beginner’s course in world history, sports and geography was all that was required to get in. And in the Indian system of education, students belonging in class eight and upwards would have that and therefore, we weren’t surprised. Once you qualify for the on-stage event, any quiz will draw from a varied range of subjects and interests the reason for which is to test one’s general knowledge and, therefore, call upon every one of your skills starting from obscure historical incidents to bygone musical eras to contemporary art. All that would finally seem to matter is one’s recollection and a sense of visual projection that allows one to invoke information as if it were on a board in front of you. Furthermore, any seasoned quiz master will tell you that some questions reappear in every quiz event – these questions will seem weird at first but then will become commonplace when you realise that each one of them is tied up with some economic, historical, social or artistic event/incident. All said and done, any such competition will not deserve any special prior-planning or preparing. There is no one absolute book or information portal that can deliver everything that you might come to need. Consequently, and I’m reiterating here, all that’ll matter will be pieces of information you’ve collected in your past and are now able to recollect with an ease that sets you apart from the rest: something like a knack, I would say.

But the school fellows did amazingly well for their own age. I may or may not remember how we college-goers ourselves were at those times of our schooling, but I sure as hell wasn’t that good. I mean, coming up with the name of the world’s smallest independent nation without a capital in a matter of a second would make you seem like a book-worm and as someone’s who by-hearts subject matter rather than understand it, but I guess that’s what threw me off the track. Plus, underestimation is one thing, but winning the tournament is something else. Even if I were to underestimate my opponents, I will have to answer the questions put forth to me in order to gain a lead. However, the thing is that when you finally lose the game to someone you underestimated, the kick in the back is more painful than when you lose to someone whose talent out measures yours. Ah well, it’s never too late. It just comes down to how you take it. And how do I take it? I didn’t lose. They just happened to win. That’s all!

The Preamble Before Poetry

After a long time, I finally had the mood for some poetry today. The days have been short of late with the winter setting in, though here in Dubai, the seasons are only Hot and Hotter. But the noons are pleasant all the same – walking back from the class room to the hostel is no longer requires a sand-proof compass. Anyway, I sat down to write and came up with something so feeble and frail that I myself was surprised: I expected better from myself. In the past, I had even made some money selling some of my compositions to bands.

Nobody Wants The Bad Memory

Over cold coffee
In a silent winter morning
No sounds in the air
The fireplace is frozen in time
When nobody wants the bad memory

The leaves are falling
No women on the streets
A dull silence lingers
My tongue is sour with lime
People blinded me with nothing to see

Walls are white
Dull linen curtains
The sun is behind clouds
The doors are closed at home
I’m lost in frail and sudden decline

Savour the self
Before I wander again
All of me never saw you get in
A last excuse for you in the end
And the last memory has walked away

No more sun
Before the moon and stars
Coffee turns more cold
The last sip of love is bitter
Like when the dead have nothing to say

That place
In the corner of my mind
I’ve been waiting for this to go
Enslaved within me and lost
Save me from the bad memory

O, nobody wants the bad memory!

(That’s it)

Whenever I sit down with my laptop and darken the room to set the mood, I also make sure I forget about my own feelings at those precise moments and hope that whatever I jot down isn’t preconditioned with a mood I come to share with the text. But that doesn’t seem to be the case this time. That actually seems like me shouting out for help there, though I don’t know if it’s good enough [:P]. Writing verbose essays and interpretive articles is much easier when you compare it with poetry. An essay or an article can be defined to mean something, and can be structured to adhere to some rules that come in to the picture when you know who constitutes the audience. But poems are simply open, and not follow any rule of any sort. Poems can not be called rebellious even if they are, for that is the flexibility anointed to them. Even if you are not used to adopting a specific style of writing, you will realise that taking up one anew is necessary when you want to write a poem. When those tunes flow through your ears and into your heart and brain, a song is realised in its purpose and you can then dwell in a virtual plane that seems only to consist of emotions. But the flesh, blood and bones that give it some sort of tangibility, and the listener some consolation in his desperate attempts to quantify something as abstract as this, are the lyrics, a reclusive poem that won’t speak through anything else but a song. Poetry is as open as the poems it embraces. Anybody can write a poem, but when I say ‘poetry’, the things it first brings to mind are the withering leaves of Autumn, the pale loneliness of Thoreau, the silent but stormy spirit of Dunbar, the mockery of Orwell, or even the melancholic triumphs in Tolkien’s tales; just as one could always conjure a tale of sorts, but the first mention of English literature brings to mind Shakespeare. Poetry is a realm, and if you were to journey across it, those places you would like to visit again stand to be the landmarks, those constructions to which a second visit made will bring to light a great difference as compared to your first – pearls of wisdom, a whole new world with its own prejudices, while at the same time leaving room for more. What distinguishes those great works from what a child like myself write today? I have as much verbosity. I have the same settings. I have similar conveyances. I have the same iambic structure. I have the same poetic length. Then what is it?

It is the perfect combination of the above, the deliverance that projects every feeling and mood, every slight turn of events, every monotone and vibrancy, in a manner that you alternate in a trance from mania to depression blended seamlessly so. And when you seem to sink in a valley of exaggeration, it is as if a hook appears from nowhere to hoist you up again, to sweep all prejudices away without letting your image drop off the edge of this world, and to place in front of your eyes a commanding view, and to place in your palms the hammer of judgment. And, therefore, the world is the stage set, and you are but an actor lived. It is the inability to sustain such a combination at all times that sets all of us apart from the likes of Wordsworth and Longfellow. Another element is something I call ‘sight’: it is in fact a question that you ask unto yourself. What do you see? Can you disintegrate chaos to facts logically deductible? Can you bring order upon the world by subduing conflicts? Can you trivialise what is perhaps an overbearingness? Can you accentuate and reiterate to reproduce and, thereby, sustain something that will otherwise have spontaneously faded from all memory? The intuition that seeks out secrecy and employs it to bury other whispers in between lines, the sharpening of the mind’s eye to hunt out the last batch of golden deers from the forbidden forest, the creativity that can daunt escaping shadows, that is what your sight is. When you pick up the pen and sit down to write, you should see in your mind a picture that brings to life some other memories, and you should feel in your fingers the meaning of each word as you pen it down. And that is when a poem begins.

And you have only just begun. You must always take care not to be tripped by a miscalculation, a fault line, a cause for a tremor to ripple away from an epicentre of a point, a cascading of nonsense and the recital of gibberish. At every step, think not of the end but of the beginning. A poem is like a river: it will end by itself when you know that your beginning, your start, the birth of ideas, is sensible and worthy of recognition if left alone by itself. A sense of conclusivity will show up at each step and it will spawn a cycle. As you complete each stanza, you will realise that the beginning has already been marked by a cornerstone by some angel or demon lurking in your subconsciousness and guiding you from one consideration to another, and flavouring it with the mood that will, ultimately, come across as information. Beware of the writer’s block. Concentrate on what is at hand, lest some invisible mace knock out everything that has loyally lingered on in your head, leaving you with nothing more than a few leaves which only leave a signature of the truth you thought you were speaking through the departed.

Poetry will continue to dazzle me, while at the same time, hold me in its unrelenting grasp till I write and write like a madman, who has nothing to lose on the day of release but just another joy. My verbosity in exposition is diminished when I look upon a poem – so simple and yet so intricate. And just when I read it and try to scale its peaks, it disappears in a flash of colours, and leads me on a leash to places I have never heard of before, only to bring me back to reality in the nick of time, saving me from a tide of feelings that I would gladly but ignorantly have drowned in.

A Whole New World

I am a student of mechanical engineering but a journalism aspirant. I was averted from pursuing J for my under-graduate degree due to some personal reasons, but I find that interest now rekindled. I don’t know what the future holds for me after this, but I would still like to hold on to that dream. I’ve been running all over the place asking a whole lot of people, some of whom I am meeting for the first time, about this issue and how I can go about doing it properly. Do I take up mass communication? Or do I utilize my engineering background to do science journalism? Or do I throw all of them away and go for the money with business and economic reporting? Because I believe that as long as there is work to do, then there has to be someone who does it. And all the work in the world can never be exhausted in a lifetime. Today was a hectic day in that regard. I contacted some cousins of mine, asking if they had any friends who are journalists. Some of my distant relatives also received a mail, filled with all kinds of pleasantries at first, and then the questions I wanted answered. It felt weird at first, though. Some of these people I deliberately lost touch with, since I thought they might not be the people whom I will have to meet up with in the future. As it happens, I need them now. But I decided to leave all this behind for whatever came next, and to concentrate on the things at hand. I know I might be come across to be something of a selfish guy at first, but I hope these people look beyond it and forgive my behaviour. Anyway, I then went to my English professors at college asking for their opinions. Somehow, I have always maintained a good relationship with these people. English came naturally to me, which is weird because it is not my mother tongue nor the national language of the country I come from: India. I took up mechanical engineering because this one subject is so evergreen and options up a whole new world to those studying it: you can go from here to wherever you want to go. In the first few months of studying it, I decided I liked the logistics part of it better and to go for a Masters degree in Industrial Engineering. And then, when the LHC opened up in Europe, my brief tryst with nuclear physics called me back. I purchased some books I used to read as a school-going boy, and got down to it. But English has lingered on in my background, whether I did some serious work in it or not. I have always been writing here and there, for the school and college magazines, doing something with the lit. club, and so on and so forth. Even now, I don’t know which part of section draws me the most. I don’t even know what the different sections in English can be. I am not good at story-telling, I can’t spin yarns, I can’t even convey pieces of information without flavouring it with some of my opinions. Sidelining everything that I might want to do with my life, I don’t want to be sitting in a chair some twenty years down the line and interpreting numbers. I want to interpret words and tell people what I make of them, and perhaps leave some open to the readers’ minds.

My fingers begin to twitch at the sight of a keyboard and an empty screen. I sometimes get pissed when the cursor doesn’t seem to be blinking. I can’t write in Notepad because I don’t like the font. I can’t write in Word because the additional editing features distract me. But I also have lost the ability to write with a pen and a paper. Wordpad and WordPress are somewhere in between. I am also interested in photo-journalism, and I know I have the ability to speak volumes though a picture I capture with my old camera. I know writing is where I belong because, even when I am sitting idle and doing nothing about it, I can always get up later and churn out a series of articles. I take ten minutes to think of a thousand words to describe a scenario, but I take much longer than that to polish a piece of metal with a grinding machine at the workshop. Letting go of a dream is the hardest thing anyone can ever do, but the impact is somewhat blunted when you know it can be a sacrifice unto someone whom you care for. But when it is none of them, then whatever you are doing suddenly seems pointless. I have never understood the importance of time and how it never returns until the day I wondered what I was doing with my life. Why do I have to do four years of engineering when I know I could have spent the time writing and not dropping a sweat? Only time will tell. But I also know I am not letting go of my dreams again. And the only time doing which could have been the time for a sacrifice is also well past. No more sacrifices. And when some people can’t understand this, I will have to brush them aside even if it means loss of important resources on my side.

Sometimes, letting go of a dream is all it takes to get it back again. [:)]