The New Normal

The sunless dawn, the sleepy eyes, awoken by localised sirens,
The time-zone asleep, unearthly the vibes, solemn the faucet runs,
A woody scent, a dusty wink, a frosty itch, a wish informal,
A dewy freshness, a lazy wipe; and thus you welcome the new normal.

Thus you welcome the new normal, thus you welcome the new normal.(4)

A gulp of water, the ambrosia of earth, its taste most appealing,
The blessing of the touch of wind, grazing the sense of feeling,
Stimulating the very existence the gift of untroubled breathing,
And the sight of the abode, sweet abode, ever assuring, ever alluring.

Not knowing where the beginning is, not knowing where the ending was,
The mystery continues, enchanting all, demanding an anxious moment's pause,
Where will you be later today, tomorrow and forever, with eagerness the mind asks,
Why care now? Just follow the safe convention and fulfil those humdrum tasks.

Are you sure this is the way you welcome the new normal?(4)

No, it's gone all bad and decayed, the way of the fathers the way they had written,
Now the ruins stand derelict, underneath debris of old memories forgotten,
Pardoned always are redundancy and paradox, which abound ubiquitously anyway,
Your fate stands ahead, ready to be scripted the way you want it to play.

Untrodden is the road to heaven, with obstacles, many small but one enormous,
Unconquered is the heaven itself, so you set out to rule with spirits pompous,
The way is easy, just be alone, the power of solitude will march you home now and ever,
But you know you can't take them for granted, you might lose them (and yourself) forever

So with doubt and trepidation you welcome the new normal.(4)

The chains of pain, the wails of love, the groans of hunger, the cries of thirst,
Will you be content with just reaching the end? Escaping the anguish? Being the first?
The heaven will be where it's always been, or rather it won't be where it never was,
The road is but a landscape fickle, soak the fullest before without a trace it dissolves.

In the quest for greatness unseen, the desire for the miracle of sprouting big wings,
Why forget the magic of walking on grass? Of swimming in waters? Of all the little things?
So before you lay your eyes to rest and pray to yourself for your soul to keep,
Do you wish to be gratified with you, or do you wish to lay restless and fail to fall asleep?

And with decisiveness and finality you welcome the new normal.(8)

An agnostic's FB reply to his fundamentalist school-friend

"And coming to the point of there being a mosque or not, I think I made it very clear in my status msg that I believe having a temple or a mosque over there is going to be equally useless (or even a church, a synagogue or a fire-temple for that matter). And I have never understood this concept of your god and my god - Greek and Latin might be more comprehensible to me. What Rajiv Gandhi did then and what Manmohan Singh and the Supreme Court do now is none of my concern, because I am content in my (human) life and don't need to worry about what happens on a little piece of land somewhere in UP - It will be like worrying about "who will be staying in my house 200 years from now". Obviously I do not care about the history (Thanks for the offer though).

"The only thing I know for sure is that the Universe (or the Multiverse if that appeals more) existed far before man and his temples / mosques / churches, and it is going to exist till eternity long after the last man is destroyed, and not a trace is left of any of his 'achievements', including religion. For the brief period of time that man lives, if he is keen to divide his race on the basis of the name that he wants to assign to the Universe and its Creator, then I am not interested in being a part of any such division. For holding this belief, I have been cursed and criticised too often, but an agnostic never really cared about others' opinions, did he?"

Let me live one last moment........

Let me live one last moment,
In which I care about what befalls
To a story left untold,
To a wish left unfulfilled.

Let me live one last moment,
Of infatuation, of irrationality, of adolescence,
Of fantasies, of thirsty souls, of broken hearts,
Of reminescence, of tears, of dreams dead.

Let me live one last moment,
In which lies the entire life,
Of me and of the things I have ever loved,
The things, alas, that I had never owned.

Let me live one last moment,
Of stagnancy, of resistance, of attachment,
Of vulnerability, of concern, of respect, of care
For all those dear and near and far.

Let me live one last moment,
Of vicissitudes, of emotions, of unease,
Of trust, of insecurities, of faith,
Of being weak, of being human.

Let me live one last moment,
Of non-rhyming poems, of imperfections,
Of pretenses, of pretensions,
Of conceit, of anger, of envy, of sadness.

Let me live one last moment,
In which is buried the truth of past,
In which dwells the void of present,
In which awaits the illusion of future,
In which I forgo the life I cherish,
In which I forgo the life I could live,
In which I forgo the life I should live,
In which I forgo the life I would live.

Let me live one last moment,
Let me live one last moment.......

Commandments of Sarcasm - II

Thou shalt never stop being sarcastic, public reaction notwithstanding.

Commandments of Sarcasm - I

No matter how much thou art tempted to make it clear that thou art not being serious but merely sarcastic, thou shant use a ;) or 'lol' or 'rofl' or any other intended-to-show-amusement expressions at the end/start/midst of the said sarcasm. Rather thou shalt proceed with the flow even though the converser might think for time indefinite that thou art being serious.

Random Ruminations - V

Change is good; but no-change is better.

Random Ruminations - IV

The main growth driver of the pornographic industry worldwide, is our lack of faith in our own imagination.

The Tale of Three Losses

Part 1: How I lost my dignity.....

Date: 10th April, 2009; Time: 10:00 A.M.;

Venue: Room no. 12, Ground Floor, B-building, Institute of Hotel Management, Catering Technology & Applied Nutrition (better known as Dadar Catering College), Veer Savarkar Marg, Dadar (W), Mumbai - 400028.

Occasion: PI (Personal Interview) for admission to IIM-C

Background: Yours Truly (hereafter referred to as YT) had never seriously planned on embarking on the journey to acquiring the most-hyped educational degree, straight after (presumably) acquiring the second-most hyped one. Nevertheless, when a free, non-poisonous lunch presents itself on your table without any initiative on your part, you start believing that you had desired to obtain that lunch all along. You even start imagining that devouring the plateful of delicacies would be the best thing to happen in your life. Now discontinuing the no-longer-palatable-food-analogy, in layman's words, at the mentioned time and place, YT's sole objective was to get into IIM-C (IIM-A had never really spawned a similar 'ambition' in YT and IIM-B had always had a rigidly entrenched idea about what constitutes 'ambition', while being ignorant about ability and smartness).

The GD (Group Discussion) as usual tried to bring out the animal inside all of the 'aspirants' present, by enclosing 12 of us in a semi-circular imaginary cage and asked to keep shouting at the top of our voices whatever we want to, for around 10 minutes. And as always, a topic (on the lines of 'Success of NGOs implies failure of Government') was given for the sake of formality; everyone of us knew that we were free to vigorously exercise our vocal chords to our hearts' content about what we had for breakfast in the morning, why we left our job at Microsoft/Google/Yahoo/Nomura (and for lesser mortals like YT, Infosys/TCS/Tech Mahindra/Wipro), why did we not eat the previous night, and how-can-anyone-forget? 65%-of-India's population-is-younger-than-30, and somehow connect all these to the 'given topic'. After the expected test of the 'survival of the outspoken', the turn came for each to prove that one is the least worthless of all present there, namely, the Personal Interview.

So, now the real story of the assault on YT's dignity begins (does YT oblige???)

To be continued..........

Sore-throated tweets of a disgruntled song-bird - III

European banks fall short of 3.5 billion Euros tier-I capital. What stress was being tested? That of a stretched rubber-band??

Sore-throated tweets of a disgruntled song-bird - II

When you have a choice between watching a good movie, and studying for some unneeded, crappy test, always choose the former, mainly because you are less likely to fall asleep and waste a couple of hours doing that.

Raajneeti - a review

Usually, you would not expect Naseeruddin Shah to be consigned to a 5-minute mini-cameo in a socio-political thriller, especially after seeing him to be one amongst the eight 'stars' depicted on the poster. Nevertheless, if one wished to see good performances, this reasonably fast-paced attempt at a 3-hour adaptation of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharat, would not disappoint. Be it the GenerationX-esque exploits of the calm-and-collected-and-murderous Sooraj Kumar (played by the ever-so-non-versatile Ajay Devgn - apparently the latest prey of numerology) or the power-hungry Virendra Pratap (Manoj Bajpai, excellent, bravo!!) or his power-hungry cousin Prithviraj Pratap (Arjun Rampal, suprisingly expressive - and impressive) or the latter's younger-US-return-budding-Ph.D-able-to-do-anything-for-his-family-including-taking-a-slap-on-his-cheek-and-falling-to-the-floor-in-one-great-aerial-circle-and-apologising-to-a-corrupt-police-officer-for-no-mistake-of-his bro, Samar (Ranbir with his usual, intelligent under-act) or the shrewdly lackadaisical Brij Gopal (Nana Patekar at his non-violent best) or the silent victim Bharti Rai (Nikhila Trikha, brilliant), everyone plays his / her part quite well.

The opening half-an-hour though makes you feel inclined to develop some self-inflicted bald spots at the prospect of losing your bucks (especially the horribly picturised sequence in the hospital, where the founder of the Rashtriya Janshakti Party, Bhanu Pratap Singh is admitted after suffering a paralytic stroke - the entire scene looks hastily improvised to say the least - and chants like 'jab tak suraj chand rahega, bhanu pratap ka naam rahega' which occupy half of the screen time, contribute as well). But as the movie progresses, the mind-games and more so, the murder-games materialise between the cousins and their families. The film reaches a crescendo at half-time when the plot appears to thicken and the audience is tempted to forgo that extra-large bucket of popcorn so as to avoid missing the beginning of the second half, what with Ranbir Kapoor's character being unveiled gradually as he comes into his own. But with the expectation of the plot thickening comes the disappointment of the realisation that there is no plot in the first place - just both parties taking out men from each other with slightly innovative methods admittedly. But the only motivation to watch by this time remains to see which party is the victorious one in the end, and anyone having a less-than-decent idea of the culmination in Mahabharat would be able to guess the outcome - but, waiting for it is actually less excruciating than one would expect from a three-hour virtually song-less movie. So, that is a reason sufficient, I guess, for granting some instinctual brownie points.

The movie had a chance halfway to turn out to be legendary, but in the end it falls short of being even a must-watch, as one can't help but notice certain deficiencies. Katrina Kaif and Sarah Thompson could have been given much more substantial jobs than just being conscientious good-lookers, atleast one (male) politician could have been reasonably expected to decide that politics is not worth all the bloodshed and could have withdrawn from the mess, Prithvi and Samar's dead dad (some Pratap Singh, can't remember the first name) could have actually held his breath for some time - come on man, he was clearly breathing his way through the whole shot under the white cloth, (at the risk of repeating myself) Nasseruddin Shah's fans could have clearly hoped for him to be assigned some more footage than just being the quintessential surya devta, some nice compositions could have been effectively used in the background (but then, no songs are better than bad songs, especially in the background), some dialogues could have been eliminated or rather, replaced by silent expressions by making use of the talents available at disposal (once Ranbir goes something like - "Pata hai yahaan media ke paas freedom hai, lekin iska yeh matlab nahi ki media us freedom ko leke hum par aatank machae" - Why?!?!?! No dialogues are better than bad dialogues. Period.)

Despite all the flaws though, the urgency with which the audience got up as soon as the credits started rolling, was certainly unwarranted. Good cinematography coupled with excellent performances always produce a cocktail worth trying rather than not trying. And if one gets an irresistible urge to go to a multiplex at least once every month, then Raajneeti should be a pretty good bet, because as the quality of contemporary Bollywood movies suggests, this could be the best non-Aamir Khan-starrer for a long time to come (I would have held high hopes from 'Raavan' if I hadn't had the misfortune to not skip 'Guru').

My rating: 3 / 5.

Random Ruminations - III

Suicide is widely considered to be an act of cowardice. The fault with this argument is the presumed generalisation of the circumstances in which suicides are committed.

A suicide committed to escape from a dull / boring / screwed-up / bad, etc. life (as is generally assumed to be the case) may be remotely considered to be cowardly (although arguably it is an act of pure, self-obsessive logic)

But a suicide committed to escape from a life well-lived has no equal in terms of adventurous bravado.

Random Ruminations - II

Someone should make adhesives for broken hearts.

Random Ruminations - I

I always wondered why people went to temples, mosques, churches, etc. for praying to God (who must either be everywhere or nowhere, right?). Then I got acquainted with the concept of wi-fi and things became clearer.

Life at the crimson paradise

Coming soon.......

Sore-throated tweets of a disgruntled song-bird - I

A trivial thing does not become significant by just taking it seriously.