Saturday, November 25, 2006

Kabhi aisa bhi ho....


While writing this poem I was wondering about my intention of writing about a day not happening …a day spent doing nothing…and then while talking to someone I realized that how its so normal for me to think about it since I like sleeping so much in morning through afternoon. But then often that happens because I can’t sleep till wee hours of the morning.

I wrote this poem for and about seeing Dulcinea sleeping. Seeing her so many times.....and how I gave up many morning sleeps just to watch ( ....and it used to be an effort for someone like me who has such an aversion to the morning sun) the serene closed eyes and the warm rosy skin shimmering like jelly in the morning sunlight... sometimes I felt I could see the layers of epidermis. It was more delighting to see her on the seventh floor of my earlier home than on the second floor of recent one.

There on the seventh floor my bed (though on the floor) directly faced the door of the balcony on the northeast side with nothing but often bright blue sky framed in foreground with my 3 year old Erica palm...and yes even Erica’s leaves used to be so transparent when I used to see her in morning sky. And so many times it happened that my eyes alternated between the green chlorophyll in the Erica and the pink of the skin.

Those sleepy languorous times In fact were result of two more elements that heightened my joy of being in that room which had nothing but a much happily wrinkled mattress on the rough checkered stone dappled tiles, some cartons in the corner containing my books, and a fish tank which was addition of one of her childish whims that had initially many gutter guppies caught from the pond in her college campus and later 3 goldfishes. And those two elements were the Bacardi Rum without lime cordite and two songs Wonderwall & Don’t Look Back in Anger from Oasis’s album “What's The Story Morning Glory?”
It was difficult for me to understand what was more effective in making those days pleasurable, the two organic beings or those two songs or the single bottle of rum? But the mixture of all those three things was heady. Suspicious and weary of the world outside entire days were spent in that room. In that room where morning crept slowly and afternoon almost never passed, it lingered like a stark white and long wall. Evenings too suffered from hangover before slipping out quietly like a dead fish or an enervated uncovered head.

And I felt I can’t express this in English so I wrote in Hindi. Because sometimes some thoughts are so happy that the more you struggle to describe them the more you enjoy it at your inability to describe them. And that’s why I thought I will express them in Hindi, the same Hindi that gave me so much the same Hindi that made me a poet artist and a lover of everything…but of love more than anything.


I would love to translate this if I get a request :-)

Monday, November 06, 2006

A review i wrote last year for a mag

I just finished reading The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. In fact, I got this book only after seeing Desai uncle (Surat) reading CM's Historical Caesar & Rome related books which she has written almost half a dozen.


Right at the start I knew that this book is meant to be for women. The way 4-year-old Maggie Cleary is described, you immediately come to know that she is different in a way women in our old Indian Hindi movies are portrayed, extremely sensitive, and one who suffers all pain and never expresses it or complaints about it.


Again, right at the start you know that this book is full of women's inner feelings. And especially feelings that very few of them are capable of entertaining lest they want to be labeled as sentimental fools. But yet they are very rare, touching and agonizing feeling. Right at the start you also come to know that this is a story about life and its philosophy because you never know enough of life unless you are on the wrong side of life - that is when you have a life that is devoid of everything...a sufferer’s life, a life of poverty, a life of loss of love…. a life that dies trying to achieve redemption for a guilt that never meant to be a guilt in the first place. And while reading this book we get a chance to live the proxy life of poverty through the Cleary family. Because most of us need money to look even dignified forget about using it to look good. But then there is one thing different in the Cleary family that is, this is story of poor people who contrary to the general expectation don't buckle under hardship of poverty and lose all the sense of dignity and finery of life's behaviors and emotions and its feeling, but stick to them and become even more admirable and lovable. And emerge as people, who give in more to such feeling in hardship when it truly required to be shown. But it’s written in Mills & Boon style...full of sweet clichéd words and diabetic romanticism (though that is how most people love to feel and live and suffer for love) though some of the description and dialogues related to morality and ambivalent desires of hearts (for lovers love to torment themselves on the fickle questions of morality every now and then) and some love making scenes are the one that make this book worth reading. Above all it's the pain the author has inflicted on her characters knowingly, expectedly, unknowingly and unexpectedly that makes the reader keep on turning the pages of this bulky book.


After reading this book I realized that someone who has lived an underprivileged life and has indulged in love luxuriantly would truly admire this book. For the pain you get being good and unprivileged is something you really cherish and sometimes you want more of it as a radical does. It goes for sacrifice too, the more deeply and acutely you feel love and are denied it, the more of that love you want. For what is love if you cannot endure separation and pain and what is life if you cannot suffer its hardship and maintain your dignity?


I think being a semi historical author now must be feeling odd while acknowledging this book. She must have written this when she herself had suffered a bout of romantic delusions and eventually would have decided to paint her own feelings in a sweeping epic saga spanning three generations and a hundred years.


And she has been successful in doing so.


(Right side of the poster also reflects the similarity with the sea beach kissing poster of From Here to Eternity , the most memorable poster ever made for a movie...)

Thursday, November 02, 2006

The GlaSs

Today I sat on the usual 6th floor corner with my share of sky with my share of life and life's fragrance and life’s eyes.

Outside the window some dark hued conifers were growing with nascent fresh light colored leaves at the tip. And I was wondering seeing them through almost impeccable glass, why I can’t see the glass. The solid material glass was there yet it was not there. I was wondering why it was not coming in my way. Why It was obliterating its own being as If denying its own existence and allowing me to see outside. It was not being an obstacle in my joys of life. Why was that glass sacrificing it self for me? Is that glass not aware of its own being or its claim to be naturally in my way?

And I was “trying” to see the glass. The invisible glass. I felt bad for a while knowingly denying its existence and looking beyond it. But I am only a human being, if something doesn’t claims its share of me at some time I am bound to forget to give myself to it too.

It’s only a thought. May be not only!