Eighteen, but with the attention span of an eight year old I sauntered into the auditorium wishing almost whole heartedly to be somewhere else. Just the thought of being restricted to one square feet of space for two hours irked me. Just when the two hours went by, I don't know. I've precious little experience of what plays are like but this one play changed it all. Unsuni, so apt and more importantly, so moving. Tracing issues like leprosy, communal violence, the cause of street children and the most hitting one - that of the manual scavengers, the play just left me feeling like one more of those hedonistic messed up idiots who feel their own problems are the biggest and those who've been taught to and who continue to insulate themselves from people whose sole problem is living itself. The play talked about this woman who spent fourteen years carrying upto 10 kgs of shit on her head having picked it up with her own bare hands. Can we even imagine how repulsive that would be? We can't. We're nicely cushioned and tucked away into our own little worlds, living our life with this feigned sense of well- being about the world, soothing our conscience saying "ah it's okay, someone else will pay that kid some money" when a kid taps our car windows at the crossing. We're ignorant, we're indifferent and we're callous. And that one bit of reluctant realization makes you and me just as good as the pile of shit that woman cleared away day after day. Maybe this sounds harsh right now, maybe I won't feel like this by dinner tonight but maybe the realization will get me somewhere.

i'm severing ties
enough veneers
enough covert whispers
enough feigned feelings
i'm severing ties
for good

hmmm...
she wonders and listens
to a song...a hap hap happy song
which only she can hear
it echoes in her laughter
it shows in the things she says
but it's her own rhapsody
and his
months of painstaking writing
out of concern- plain yet strong
out of needs to give and gain
left her with just a sheet of notes
just a sheet of notes
till he set it to tune
now it's a song
a rhapsody
a lullaby
tunes may peak, tunes may plummet
her song may die down
but linger it will
till her hearing will no longer be hers
hmmm...
she wonders and listens
and smiles though her tears

Sitting across the table at yet another one of the pretentious ccds I see someone just as pretentious, someone I know no longer. I did, once. I don't see guts, I see a downright bare desire to dominate all and seek attention. I don't see saucy humour, I see a deviant who is reveling in things which shouldn't be laughed at. I don't see a smile, all I see is a perpetual sneer. I don't see someone who says refreshingly 'hatke' things but someone who makes absurd statements and backs off realizing there's no justification whatsoever. He tells me ragging is fun...oh yeah?! Maybe we should ask someone who got pushed off the fourth floor of IIT- K years back...come to think of it, I bloody well remember the same person whining like a scalded cat about ragging not too long back. He throws around money like he's got millions to spare in an effort to prove god knows what. It's ridiculous. It's endless. The person I knew is gone. In his place I see one more mindless idiot stuck in the world of MCPs who choose to believe that checking out babes on the roads is their due, who choose to refer to their mothers as "just" houswives and who can stand anything but the bare, direct and hard hitting truth from a woman because their ego is just as stable as a wad of cotton candy.

Late nights
Lame smiles
Overworked dopamine circuits
And berserk butterflies...

Some roads have ended. Some storms have died out. Some faces have faded. Now you're wondering which way to choose from the millions of crossroads in your mind. And you won't ever find a way out of them because this is the middle of nowhere. You're standing alone in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a feeble and precariously perched shelter on top of your head. You're standing alone in the middle of nowhere with the rain beating down on your face. But you like the rain, you like the shelter, you like nowhere and you like ambiguity. There's a beauty to it and you take that beauty and accept it because ambiguity is life itself.

A couple of days back we bought my nani a cellphone. She held it in her hand and said "what use is this? I can't call your grandpa with this." She said it with a smile but you couldn't help but see the loss ; my grandpa died eleven days back and they'd been married for almost sixty years. And here I find it hard to stand anyone beyond maybe sixty days. This isn't about mourning his death...he spent seven days in the hospital with one leg in traction, any number of tubes attached to him and his hands tied down. He suffered for a while and went in peace and I'm happy for him that way. But it's what he left behind. It's the death of their togetherness that I'm mourning.