Take a sad song, and make it better.

=)

On an entirely different note:

H: "What are you doing?"
C: "Being cool."
H: "You look more like you're bored."
C: "The world bores you when you're cool."

:D
Take thatt.

P.O.B. (ii)

Having image Googled every rhyming word in the last post, and more, I can now safely say that I need to sleep. Having said that, it's especially funny if you get hyper and image Google every rhyming word you can think of one after another, so rash and brash give you results like


Brash chipmunks.

Rash had results I don't want to see again ever.

Product of Boredom (i)

I thought I'd sit here and read.
But my limbs they're weary,
My eyes? They're teary.
I try to hold up, but I bleed.
I thought I'd sit here and read.

I thought I'd take a shot at peace.
But my features they're marred
And I'm spotty and scarred
And the wounds? They only increase.
I thought I'd take a shot at peace.

Sometime tonight I will break.
There's agony and there's pain
So it's time you were slain.
I will kill you to ease my ache,
Sometime tonight I will break.

I'll slap you and you'll be a smear.
Your innards will be juice,
Your wings will come loose.
This is ddmp, dye hear?
I'll slap you and you'll be a smear.


This poem is called To a Mosquito.
I discovered an online rhyming dictionary while writing it.
I think someone should hand me a Nobel right about now. OR volunteer to send this to TeleKids, I think I'll settle for the latter and shed a graceful tear somewhere along the way if it happens. No kidding.

Sudden flakiness of feet and instead of thinking how disgusting the mood is winter's here! Right now at this particular moment I am happy if not exactly content because I am my own microcosm, fuck you Metaphysical poetry. The Haiku Cuckoo's now up on the anti-aatlamo strip of the staircase wall at uni and dear Middle English Literature, I do not see why, I do not see why at all, and since that is more than enough reason to not study, fuck you too.

Yours sincerely, girl who does not like to sweat.



I want hot water and rum and the silly deadly daze afterwards, I've been wanting it all day.

There are people putting up old scanned photographs on Facebook and I was sifting through them, big mistake, now I want to do the same. There's a very old photograph of me in much the same pose as my current display picture and I can't find it. Sometimes I catch myself wondering about whether it's possible to dissociate myself from technology and be perfectly happy; if film burns then there are scanned versions online, if the internet suddenly disappears into a dark abyss then I have prints, but if both fail, what then? One day I will wake up with no record of how I lived, or whether I lived at all. There shall be no pictures to remind me of my favourite t-shirts or the only time I went to the zoo, I shall go the Ghajini way and what then? It's both laughable and scary how dependent I am on there always being evidence, it's not like I need it and it's not like random memories won't keep coming back. But there has to be a trigger. We always need triggers and when there are none everything will be this baffled mass of indifference, that's what unnerves me. Bury a time capsule and there'll be soil erosion, buy a safe and there'll be an ocean to chuck it into, hire a person to record your life and they'll be run over by a car. If you don't want to get rid of something the world will do it for you, and then we have privacy options on websites, it's such a joke, really.

Sometimes I like scaring myself silly with worst-case scenarios because they cheer me up no end, this is mine for today. Contrary to this post I'm very hoppish-skippish right now, if all else fails I know there shall be black grease and a blank surface to draw on somewhere, so all's good. Soon I shall run around pelting people with candies. Ok, no. But winter's almost here, so smaiiile.

=)

Today stands out as the day I paid sixty bucks to watch Helen Mirren naked. It was hysterical.

In spite of all my grumbling about Loss of Private Space, I'm glad Paati's here. She's got this catty sense of humour that definitely wasn't handed down to the Mater, as is evident from all the frowns I get every time I keep Paati up late asking her for more stories, more stories, more stories. But then it isn't Ma's fault that she walks in every time her office romance is being recounted. It may be all Amol Palekar types but I don't think you'd want to watch your mother and your daughter giggling over it, which is perhaps why we do it only when she's around.

Having tried and failed splendidly at studying Middle English Literature from seven to eight thirty, I've spent the larger part of the evening watching Zee Cinema. Television must be brought back into my life, what was I thinking. Sunday Superstar has always been Amitabh Bacchan since God knows when, but will do, the songs are tops and I know most of them by heart. So I sing along and all the while Paati keeps reading out tips from the Tamil magazines she brings folded neatly between the saris in her suitcase. How to have feet as soft as lotus flowers. How to make your wedding sari's zari last. How to treat burns with aloe vera. How to (snide smile) get rid of acne. And then she looks at me and says, it's not bad the way you've turned out, although you keep getting thinner (I gasp on cue), but the marks, tchah, the marks.

And I turn to her and say, yeah, it's like Anthony Gonsalves would say. Pukka eediyatt dikhta hai.

And then we laugh, and she says, you're turning out better than I thought. It's just your Tamil that's ghastly.

And since I cannot explain how much of writing this down has gone the lost-in-translation way, and since she'll always have the last word anyway, I'll stop and haiku some more. It's turning into an addiction all right, mostly because I get to count syllables on my fingers. No laughter please.

Dammit I can't write when there are persons in my room. And now there's a person in it all the time. Not me, her.

Upon us all a little shit must fall.

So newspaper print
and hazy constellations
are not all that fade.

Always I whistle
but you who are a city
will be belching oil.

Still I shall one day
let go and paint your forehead
so you know I live.

My beak it has chirped:
all crows and men are scapegoats
Quoth the haicuckoo.

-

The Haiku Cuckoo has struck. For edification, the HC speaks only in H. Display picture up soon.

:D

It weighs me down how some people can speak and sound beautiful by dint of voice or expression or change of tone or suddenly cleared throat. It's unfair to the people who open their mouths to speak and have the world snigger. I hate smooth voices the way I hate people who don't admit to having phlegm or gas, in the you-wait-someday-you'll-get-mumps kind of way. Give me a world where speech bubbles come out of mouths with running videos showing action sans sound, and I'll be happy as a fruitcake.

This isn't an admission I'm making because there's no silence around me. Admittedly everything's been too loud of late, but I can keep silent if I want to so I'd be wise to quit the whining, yes. But what is annoying is people who should be silent and aren't. I'm looking for a reference here but I can't find it, how remiss, how remiss, I'll go listen to the kitchen now like I've been listening to the sitting room and the parking lot and the university and the pavements. Such strange conversations, if I strung them up and pretended it was postmodern or something I'd win a bleeding Booker. If earmuffs didn't look so ridiculous I swear you'd see me with a fluffy pair all the time, even if they were pink and sweaty. In fact, blast it, I think earmuffs are a pretty good idea.

If I were a landlord I would hand you a flat based on one question only. I'd scratch my behind and yawn obnoxiously and rap three fingers smartly on my belly and then ask, what will you leave behind when you finally decide to go?

And then I'd wait for the answers, because everyone leaves something behind even if they don't know it. They leave their things in the space just like they decide to leave the space themselves. A book with a name on it, a soggy bar of soap, chappals with the soles torn out. Sometimes an earring, something overlooked. Or lurid underwear stuffed into a drawer, just for kicks. I'd definitely give you the flat if you said you'd leave a crayon drawing on the wall. Maybe if you said a Cosco ball, signed, or a family photograph. But if you said A Body and then looked pointedly at me, I'd hug you and cook you your first meal in there.

If I were the tenant I'd stand there and screw up my eyes and focus on your moustache, and wonder whether A Body is a good reply, maybe A Rubber Ducky would work better, which one? Definitely cute over witty, blokes in lungis probably don't want to hear witty. But what I'd leave behind in any case is a message stamped with morning cups of tea onto any piece of wooden furniture I can find. It would say in coordinated circles, HAHA CLEAN THIS BEFORE HE FINDS OUT, just so you can swear under your breath.

Before the Crocodile.

Homage to Munkácsi by Richard Avedon, 1957

Un peu d'air sur terre?

It is a memory that has held over the years: there is always a wick that no one can see and then one bend, holo na, second bend, holo na, third bend, holo na, the sparkler's giving out but that's exactly why we bought the long ones, no? Go in for a fourth bend and suddenly there's a whipcrack jerking back of the body, things explode in light and there is the silhouette of a figure running away framed by an orange eruption. Then there's the smoke.

As a kid I clapped my hands every time I saw a pretty burst of fireworks in the sky, that has held over the years too.

In the mornings the compound always looks like there's been a war fought all over it, white scorchmarks and pieces of charred but still-glittering paper flying around or dangling from bushes like sorry streamers. There is always molten wax from spent candles and this sensation of breathing in a new world. But then the people in this complex, I have realised, are way more expensive than the people in my old building, so maybe it's a new world I'm breathing in after all, a superfancy cracker-buying world where every family has one crate at least of one-light pre-set super rockets, ten at one go, Cock Brand Sivakasi only. See how they fly. That's not to say I can't watch, there will always be incentive to clap. Mostly because it isn't something you can control, clapping. It comes out at the weirdest moments.

Besides, I lit one little charkhi inspite of being Jaded and Weary, and then felt like an idiot for not going cracker shopping, so all's good. Next time I shall go as far as buying those useless glowing matches for the heck of it. Green and red colour only. Maybe I'll use them to light Snakes, which I shall also buy for heck of it. And then, and then, who will stop me, eh?

Moment of the Day.


"Yknoww, it's like, likelike... like... what am I saying?"

Me: "I don't know."

"But that's ittt."

This year I don't feel like fireworks. I don't know why. Some part of me should have collapsed and started sobbing brokenly at this but I don't know why and that is more bothersome. If Diwali comes, can Holi be far behind? It is a hawrawr.

"...dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die."

-Rudyard Kipling, Namgay Doola

Heh.

All around there is a blindness caused by this notion of what the sighted should see. There is a man selling potato peelers at the corner of 8B who demonstrates his product with the confidence of a veteran stage actor, gestures flying wild with a smile on his face, and all you want to do is discuss John Keats. All you want is to repeat every poem you feel. With that feeling in your voice. Stand up on a bench and shout out what one is told are things you shout out generally if you're here. So you say, All You Need Is Love! with bold capitals flying out into the night. Or this: Let Us Go Then, and look around for someone to catch your cue and launch into a recitation. What's the point, really, everyone knows the lines. But they're repeated and then re-repeated till they become, as you'd say, the next Harry Potter. It's just a matter of time before your head hurts and goes ufff at everything.

But since it is such an ageless thing after all (and what's more, a Favourite), we repeat. We repeat and we repeat. And if I catch myself wondering how people can stand not getting tired of all this reiteration, I stop, because this is where I am. Getting an education and blending in and singing along, everyone does it. Doesn't matter if you're a Rebel or a Rockstar or a Loner, you do it all the same. And if you think too much about this cycle you're in danger of having something else repeated to you, words shot at you straight from the brain, lines memorised because they sound bloody beautiful, don't they. But there's no heart in it when you shout it out for the world to marvel at, which is why my kids - if I have any - shall be brought up on a Polynesian Island. No impressive poetry can get at them there. At least I hope not.

Sometimes the world would be a happier and easier place if only there was an empty unlocked toilet at hand when the occasion really called for it.

Would writing in two languages work if I tried really hard and didn't make any grammatical errors? A.Bhatta would've been proud I even thought of this, but seriously, would it?

बाईलिंगुअल स्टोरी लिखना है, yeah yeah yeeeah.

Had another dental nightmare yesterday. Some fiend was trying to extract three teeth without anaesthesia and I couldn't scream because his hands were in my mouth and there was blood and spit all around. Been a while since I had one of those. But then something weirder happened. The cavities where the teeth had been were hurting like nobody's business so I put an ice cube in my mouth, and all of a sudden I was trapped in it.

I was trapped in an ice cube.

Like so.



Now if you've ever looked at an ice cube closely there's this little place in the middle that looks like a lot of fine silver lines have been bundled up together, like a mass of steel wool, only thinner and more intricate. That's where I was. Deep inside this freezing mesh. And everything kept getting colder and colder around me but my mouth was still on fire because the ice cube was outside, not inside, and all the while the cube kept falling through this volcanic-crater kind of vortex. There were flames outside the ice cube and inside my head. And all the while that dratted layer of ice all around me was freezing my fingers numb. But the cube was melting and getting smaller and smaller due to the heat outside. And pretty soon I'd be hurtling through the fire on my own, only I didn't know when.

This morning my mother had the gall to suggest it was a hot flush. The effrontery. The insolence. You'd think she'd know the difference between sweating and feeling so cold you want your blood to be put into a saucepan and heated till it simmers. You'd also think she'd be aware of how old I am. But then, to hand it to her, it's the perfect comeback for all the menopause jokes I've been making this past year.

Old-Fashioned, Bored and Sunday-Stricken. No, this is not an advert.

There is a Fifteen Books in Fifteen Minutes thingie on Facebook, but I don't want to write a note. So I'm doing it here, mainly because I had plenty of time and knew this would take up a nice chunk. Always happens when I make lists. It's been a full hour and I'm still agonising about all that I left out.

All are books I read in school, I guess those are the ones that have stuck the longest. So there, real reason for post - nostalgia. I wanted revisits because there are solid reasons for all the books being on the list. Proper memories and events and things.

Three books I refuse to include are Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World and 1984. Because they're unlistable. They just are. Also to narrow the margin, no series or comics. Except Sherlock Holmes. I'm sorry, but the first man I fell in love with has to be on the list.

1) Peter Pan - J M Barrie

2) The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

3) The Prodigy - Hermann Hesse

4) The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

5) Candide - Voltaire

6) The Sherlock Holmes stories - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

7) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

8) A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

9) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

10) The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories - P G Wodehouse

11) The Moon and Sixpence - Somerset Maugham

12) The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

13) Adrift on the Nile - Naguib Mahfouz

14) The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

15) The BFG - Roald Dahl

I miss all the old-fashioned books I used to read. Now everything is avant-garde and analysable and therefore one book blends into another. Disgusting Nonsense. Time to bring out the MacLeans again.

And now 'tis raining! Heehahaha.

'Tis a layer of fog over the city tonight or I'm a monkey. 'Tis grey and getting greyer and so on and so forth, so 'tis fog beyond a doubt, or the pollution board's facing something very worrisome. 'Tis a sluggish day, mates. 'Tis a sleepy mind and a cranky front the city sees tonight, mainly because 'tis the mood (and the setting) for rain and moving car lights on watery roads. Also, 'tis now an established fact that hereafter I shall go watch cutesy movies just to watch Rahul Khanna do cameos. 'Tis all I have to say.

'Tis also now mandatory to watch this.

Yesterday I happened to be reading Switch Bitch on a bus that was stuck somewhere in Santoshpur at ten in the night, while a dozen bhashaan parties danced their way by. Having shiny pink hands pass you by just outside the window is unnerving, so is the fact that there are forty grinning faces in every truck with the idols, so forty expressions flash by under the streetlights, one after the other. Somewhere down the line I put the book down because I felt all Victorian and didn't want to be the girl reading dirty stories in a bus while goddesses rode by. And it was much too noisy. But then someone flung a handful of flowers into the bus so I picked one up. It was small and white and smelled good, and I put it in between two pages and forgot all about it.

Today I picked up the book again and there it was, the flower, wedged into the best passage in the entire book, only smelling slightly funny. And it made me smile, because it smelled funny, and then I read the passage. If you've read Bitch you probably know why. I don't believe in coincidences, but there is always a pattern to unrelated events if you stretch it long enough.

Contrary to all expectations, I shall pull this blog through for an entire year. And I shall write almost everyday. So there. Make ninety-nine red balloons go by.