Sunday, October 29, 2006

teri ankhon ke siwa duniya merakhha kya hai.....

I never thought I will be able to make such eyes. Forget about seeing someone having it and be completely oblivious of the fact.

I saw the movie Safar when I was a kid. The movie is ultra romantic movie reflecting the idea of 70’s romance in India. Right from trash sold on the AH Wheelers on ubiquitous railways stations to the classics by Nirmal Varma Usha Priyamvada and Gunahon Ka Devta by Dharmvir Bharti, they all were suffused with the suffering and agony of love. The love that loves itself being melancholic, the love that loves to suffer. The ever desired, annihilating and almost masochistic love. And so goes this movie too about a cancer patient sacrificing his love.

But that was not the only thing that moved me. There was Sharmila Tagore with big bovine eyes, who played the female protagonist, the classic heroin of that time someone who epitomizes love in the spiritual form. The innocent, beautiful and the striving-to-take-a-leap-against-fate-woman who never flinches twice before sacrificing everything for love.

But then again she was not the only thing that moved me.

What moved me were the canvases in Rajesh Khanna’s spars room, the many canvases filled with sketches of a woman’s head with a reckless but shy laugh, with the face looking at sky chin forward eyes barely open, and a serpentine hair lock on the temple. And the eyes! Yes and the eyes with visible corning eyelashes and all these images in black paint with crest of mountain in the backdrop and the mighty Chinars (eucalyptus) in the foreground. Sometimes she standing, leaning on the chinar with big pallu in her hand wraped around her. But the head always towards sky with a laughter that can fill clouds with. Looking at those sketches during the song “jivan se bhari teri aankein” I could almost hear the sometimes reverberating, sometimes resounding laugh through the valley.

And those eyes never left me. The kid in me became a man searching those eyes. I even looked at them when they were on the cusp of oceanic injection to see if I can see the trace of those eyes. But I saw none, even in the one in which I saw myself more often than I see myself in the mirrors.

I always searched those eyes. Everywhere! And then suddenly they were, everywhere. Without those Chinars, without those snow crests of mountains but with those thundering, booming laughs and surrounded with black black black clouds unfurled in the forms of finest silky tendrils.

I never thought that I will have to cross continents to see them in my minds eye and, manifest them with most primary colors, black and white. And I couldn’t help making them as deep as melancholic as desiring, as ravenous as probing, eternal and timeless.

sukhe patte

Sukhe patte jhad kar mere kadmon tale girte rahein,
Chalna mera, jo gupt tha najron me aagaya

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

ecstasy

Sehnsucht

everytime i think of you, i get flushed with desire
and i remember the goose bumps on your arms and sometimes on bare shoulders
and i ask myself?
am i causing this?
am i the reason behind all this ?
that is happening to us?

i think of it most of the times
and unfortunately i find that
what i am doing is only a reaction!
its your existence
thats causing this all......

.....can i ever get my thoughts out of me...?
like torrential rain...............over you....
just like the rain......you love so much?
but then

why should i do that?
why should i change my form?
and become rain?

i feel i am already going there......
seeping there.............

where millions of rain drops
failed before to go.......

bhole