2Gether aGain

the train to banaras

I was wide awake at three o-clock when the train stopped at Mirzapur, a small town station before Banaras. Sitting on a RAC seat (Reservation After Cancellation, where two people sit on one berth, normally on that one birth one person can sleep since all such trains travel overnight) with my uncle, who was half crouched in a vain attempt to sleep swaddled in a kambal. I was not in a much comfortable position either to sleep either because I was not having any thing substantial to cover me and save me from the incessant chilly air sneaking through the nooks and corner of the window and door of the badly designed and old sleeper class Indian Railway compartment. It was a dead winter night of late January and I had to board this Mahanagri Express from Victoria Terminus in Bombay to attend the cremation of my Grandmother at a very short notice. Needless to say that she was somebody for whom i can't bother about my own convenience and try to get a better mode of travel. Anyway the place i was traveling to was the one place where comforts of live and luxury is last thing on mind of those bohemian Banarasis. And what better way to go there but the ubiquitous Indian railway? where even in reserved second class so many people get crammed up without complaint, though all of them pay more than the price of valid ticket to get in. Its the idea of not worrying about ones own convenience that make valid ticket holders also to accommodate people who do not have valid ticket. For i have seen only a city dweller resent the idea if anyone request him to share his seat in train but a small towner and a villager will never never do that, he will always give the place. I travelled all across the country to to Environment Impact Assessment for one year and i saw this thing everywhere from south to east to north and west. Its amazing to see such resilience among people for each other.

And later on when i mused the i idea of Moksha, i came to understand the reason behind this acceptance of a fellow traveler. In Hinduism most people know that they are visiting this life in body or on this planet for short period of say 60-70 years and then they will move on to embrace the everlasting peach with the Brahma and that why they do not bother about the comforts of life, then what is for them an hours or a days journey? Nothing.

I was uneasy and cold, and had a very serious book as a companion on which I was not able to concentrate. I always felt that summer is a better season than monsoon or winter. For one is always busy saving himself from chill in winter and water and dampness in monsoon but in summer, one can bear heat with much ease without panting like a dog. There is other reason too. In a country like India if one looks from a poor man’s point of view, during winter and monsoon one has to spend money and resources to save himself from cold air and rain. While in summer one only has to shed whatever ragged cloth one is wearing to be comfortable.

I was occupied in my own mental rambling when somebody shouted at her. I turned and saw the most miserable sight. There was this old lady, scantily clad with just one layer of old faded sari on her frail bony body, with crumpled skin hanging from every corner and edge of her body and blisters in her hands and feet. She had melancholic look on her face as if she was perpetually perturbed by the severity of her fate but without any such shed, which might say that she was experiencing any hardship. This is because, I did not see her anxious or troubled in least degree by being shouted at in such extreme cold at 3 O’clock in the morning, carrying three huge (three by four feet) sacks of disposable eating plates patravlli; almost bigger than her own height, in crowded reserved compartment, probably without ticket. Watching her I felt as if I have been seeing her in such suffering for so long that I can see the whole history of creation of unfortunate people like her, their incompatibility with the society, there existence; not even measured on the smallest scale of the life in which we live but all the same dependent of their labor in same degree as we depend on nature to provide us resources.
I was intently watching her, pondering on her situation and ashamed of being part of the society which can allow such a condition to exist and force people like her live this kind of life. I was thinking what makes her go on living this life at her age? Is it because she is unaware of the alternate facets and comforts of modern life,?,…or does her life becomes irrelevant because of these facts…..? Is she living an inferior life just because she is being compared and is not taken subjectively? Or does she really feel this way about herself? She may not ponder about any other kind of life just because of the absence of experience of any other kind of life. And is she really missing something? Probably she is not being reminded directly of other kind of life by any one since the people with whom she deals are only one economic stratum above compared to her own life. And for them she is not a sight of the human misery but another one who is engaged in the business of struggle to make ends meet. What if she comes in contact with someone who is several layers above her in economic condition? Will then she feel something?

Somebody complaints that she is blocking the way to the bathroom, although many people were sleeping in the narrow ally near the toilet. The constable whose voice I heard shout at her, started abusing her since to him it was a matter of another case in the myriad incidents in a train where everyone is reduced to inconsequential object and event. He shouted at her poking those huge sacks with his baton, citing the amount of inconvenience she gave to the people in reserved compartment.

She took all this very calmly there was no reaction in her sad unmoving eyes and on the face, already covered with as many lines as the stilt root one sees on the old Banyan tree. She moved her bag around to one corner and stood again looking at the policeman and then to nothing in particular. I saw only few people noticing her and that too with the most nauseating and pathological expression on their faces. As if they were cursing her because, she being so miserable and coming in their path, was causing moral consternation in them and thus tempering the fine sheen of civility that causes people like her to exist. Her blank stare fixed nowhere in space, told me that she has been traveling like this all her life, in summer and monsoon too without complaining and she knew full well that she can conduct her business like this, only if she neglects everyone as everyone, and even god has neglected her.

Though traveling in India and seeing slums of Bombay I had seen many kind of deprivations I had not seen anything like this. I wondered if I would ever be comfortable eating on those patravlli plates when I go to my native place and attend any ceremony.

PS: is she nihilist? or odes she prove that nihilist are right? or still further am i looking at this whole situation from a nihilist's point of view?

for i am nihilist.

Random thoughts and letters....written long back

Dulcinea mmm well the things I notice everyday are changing now that winter is here again with all its sublime glory but I still fail to get up early and enjoy it everyday. Since I take bath with the cold water irrespective of the season I wait for winter morning and brace up myself to plunge in the cold water shivering before even before I enter. It has become a sort of ritual to me entering the bathroom and trying to evade or delay the first bitter assault on my body. Though Dr. says that for some joy I loose lots of energy ‘cause body has to keep the temp. at 37 oC and water of 15-16 oC takes most of it.

I have never taken bath with hot water. I remember when I was child one day I was waiting for hot water and complained to dad and he said “don’t be sissy, why don’t you bathe with cold water like a man?” from that day onward I never took bath with hot water. My father himself never used to use hot water.

And now It’s a ceremony for me to stand under the shower as if to anoint myself by pure crystalline liquid. Though I wish that this water should have had more viscosity, then... it will move ever so slowly on the body suffusing me of its coldness and purity. I remember seeing milk being poured on Shivlinga in temples and I used to get mesmerize by the sight of white liquid shivering and lyrically covering black glistening rock. That’s what I want to feel while taking bath though its only for 10-15 minutes, in that moment standing naked under the shower I feel that this is what a baby must be feeling , floating in the amniotic fluid connected with the umbilical cord, getting all his supplies and listening to the thumping heart of his mother. But here I have no protection of that womb no divine cord to satisfy my earthly need, no tranquility of beating heart.
Standing still for few moments gives me great relaxation but at the cost of cold. May be that’s why I suffer perennially from cold and slightest amount of dust or the coldness gives me sneeze.

And right now it’s a sort of deja vu when I look out from balcony and see the fog winter is already here.

Last few days and every time when you are not there at evening I get restless as usual. I try to do something but fail miserably. I have found that whenever I plan something and don’t do that I am unable to do anything else at that time. And it gives off itself in the form of growing sense of anxiety. Then I start thinking what else to do and finding nothing of importance I use that time to go over various things I do. During such introspection I am able to detect the pattern of rut in all days. Even having change everyday is also becomes boring. I think Plato had said that “ All things which have opposites are generated from opposites” I also see that there is some or other sort of ‘pretense’ in few things we do. Though its terrifying to have no pretence about oneself, yet I feel that’s what gives us the psychological resource to question all the things we do, all the conventionality surrounding our lives? What do you say!!

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Write me back
Lately you have not written much to me or in the diary which is lying with me

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beside you and anything that happens around me....there are so many other things, which passes through my mind while doing totally remote things. I feel that the ratio of uncertainty in my life has decreased. It’s very much akin to the feeling of love where you see whole universe encompassed in one moment hence you live infinite stable life. But that kaleidoscope never stops churning newer images out of all the thoughts in word and forms that we have assembled in billions of neurons. In a fraction of seconds sometimes I see the images which have no relation to each other. Like I saw a picture of old Red Indian tribal chief with gun in hand with old rickety Mackintosh over his head in National Geography (of which I had made a charcoal sketch) and I imagine him as the old guide from the book “For whom the bells Toll” by Ernest Hemingway, because the description in the first chapter of the book was so evocative. I remember my uncle since he resembles in look and then the shots of my village in the photographs which I took last winter over there… somebody calling my name while in sleep I was persistently being bitten by mosquitoes ..may be my mother and it was my full mane “b h o l e n a t h” while she always used to call me only bhole….. resounding songs which I heard when I was very young and the scent of the body so closely drawn to me that I can see the fine wrinkles beneath the eyes ..rolling eyes in ecstasy …and my trembling heart at the edge of sexual precipice ..so eager to jump ..and still wanting to jump for thousands of time.

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“You are condemned to be free”
When Sartre said these words, world was ruled by the determinist idea. Where everybody thought that everything and every event in this world is predestined. That everything happens with a purpose and no one can change what is bound to happen. In short no one was free to do anything but follow some omnipotent force which designed and controlled everything.

Obviously it was the result of a collective mind, that was afraid to take the responsibility for the things happening in this world. It was the weakness in man that was reflected in this doctrine. After all who will like to blame himself for his failures? To save ourself of our inactivity and moral and other shortcomings we came out with the idea of fate. And with this one word we got all excuses we want.

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The glint, which sparks at the upper corner wall of the room or on a glass windowpane, is a teleporter of senses. It takes me to my school classroom where my immature but jovial mind bored to death by the incessant droning of be-spectacled teacher, tries to find a solace. And while squinting around I see the shadow of wavelike iron bars of the huge customary municipal building window moving slowly on the wall from on side to another, with the faint horn of the car from whose windshield the reflection that being formed. I still remember very clearly the corner 3rd floor room of the building. I can see the road going straight and on right side there were few shops and a big temple with old men flocked on it with dogs, goats, kids and icecreamwallahs and then that stinking fish and meat market whose gate was always strewn with rickety wet basket and pieces of dry wet prawns. After that one open patch and then settlement again. While on the left side there was community hall hosuing a nursery in morning and sewing class for woman in afternoon, then a detour going to the one of the oldest railway track and then Muslim slum adjoined by a bar a post office and kathiawadi tenements called teen (three) bungalow.

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Positive thinking has lots of bearing on the psychology of human being for they are the only one endowed with such faculty. Many times we tend to feel miserable for one reason or the other. And once in that mood we derive a kind of sadistic pleasure in holding ourselves responsible for things, which dose not emanates from us. We feel sorry for ourselves and feel that the pain thus derived or felt is something, which is not disposed to everybody and hence is special. We silently cry at the wretchedness of our being, and take it as an excuse for whatever we are lacking or whatever that is giving us pain.

Sometimes we simply fail to see that by not getting under pressure of that situation, and by simply taking lessens from it and moving ahead, will save us from lots of unnecessary emotional stress. We fail to remember that we had been in similar painful situation before, which passed, and we were again normal for long time before arrival of this new sadness. We ought to remember that there will be time when we will be happy again, when we will be having coffee just like any other day and reading newspaper and seeing silly kitsch serials on TV again and all this will be nothing but a faded memory in the vast landscape of our mind.

But I feel solace does come easily. For in the greatest difficulties of my life I clung to them fiercely believing that they will not remain with me. I will pass this testing time no matter even if I loose something precious from my life because, eventually, these are the part and parcel of life every one of us living on this planet. Another obscure reason was that even if that situation persist, it will become the standard for me and then I will get used to it and I will be needing even greater stress to make me stressful. And I have indeed lost so many things and I lulled in the memory of it for longer time then necessary but I lived through it.

The S P A C E beyOnd me....... and the emptyness within me

I am not everything

I am not everything
For her
I am,
But a small fraction of
All her desires.

But when she feels that
certain things
Should come to her
Without asking
That is what I am to her

She is everything to me though;

‘Cause I am fathomless
And empty
But She can fill me
With tiny part of herself

I’m wide
And border less
But she can encompass me
Even if she just open her eyes.

Neurons Outside III

I shot this pic lying on the ground beneath the pedestal of this replica of Thinker by Rodin in front of our Philosophy Dept. This one is named "El Pensure"
the other Rodin i like The kissers

Neurons Outside II

Neurons outside I

The Life Force: Cronicle of the sEEdEr

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 :-)

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...)

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!

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

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

Now these pictres are from my camera...

What we see and what we think

my new book collection.

But this is the least of all that i am reading. The Butler stax of columbia has all the books i - ever- wanted- to- read -but - never- got -my -hands- on- them. Even (most unknown) Usha Priyanmvada's collection of most melancholic stories from India and (known but unavailable) Anais Nin's erotica from France are available. Kate will be jealous of me since now i have all her diaries at my hand and i will be sending more excerpt that she sent me all these months when i was in India.

Other day i was wondering about the pictures i have posted on this site and the things (no matter how scantily written) i write here.

I feel when we are out side or even at home ....mostly we don't thnik what we see in front of us. Most of the time we are on Auto pilot mode. while mind want to think about other things it makes us do the less important household and other chores automatically. and that is what i have done here. what goes in my mind is not what i see unless i have camera with me.

An Ancient indian Bridge to my heart...but its not this one.....

Metro rail and a cross road to Harlem

visual rendition

I had been to 42nd street and thought about you.

All this exquisite places and foods and liquors reminds me of you, since i am so indifferent to them and you love them so much. I would have loved to be pestered by your demands here :-)
Dq

General Grants Tomb in the park near by