Dawn

I miss Indian mornings. Mornings back home were a time of peace, quiet and of a drowsy wakefulness that a good night’s sleep brings. Strains of suprabhatam, coffee, agarbattis. The milkman, newspapers and brilliant golden sunlight.

Pandigai mornings were busy. Amma running about in a madisaaru, the kitchen bursting with the aroma of a million dishes, relatives pouring in at the crack of dawn. New clothes, ritual baths, holy fires, gods, vanquished demons and sweets. With no television to add to the ambient noise, every sound had its presence, form the ubiquitous bird calls to the mani adchings in the kitchen.

Mornings in America however are nothing like that. First of all there is none of that brilliant golden sunlight, the sun dazzles in summer, with the brightness of noon, and makes you long for it in winter. Mornings in USA mean sleepless nights, hangovers, dunkin donuts, black coffee (thin enough to make you swear off it) . There is none of the sanctity that the Indian dawn brings. Morning arrives here, like a natural successor to nighttime. Dawn is rational, solely attributed to the earth’s evolution. Mornings in India are spiritual and more than just cold logic, or planets rolling about. Like a reset button, they erase out yesterday. Dawn creeps in so quietly, dark blue then red, climaxing at gold, paving the way to daylight. And chaos.

Haiku*

haiku is hard
five three five it goes
my mind runs

summer here comes
hot days force boxer shorts
ice cream melts

flies drop dead
water hisses flowers concieve for
summer goes then

hunger comes here
somalia is far far away
maggi is repetitive

she sells shells
on the sea shore see
waves drown woman

cherry blossoms crowd
white lilies float leaves green
i step on cowdung

morning brings sunrays
sleep infernally draws closer inwards
buzz not alarm

i master haiku
years work in a day
poisonous mind whirring

*haiku
A Japanese form of poetry, consisting of non-rhyming words, in odd numbers.

*#$%^&(!@~()$!!!

“You look like a giiiirl”...my friend screamed. “Do not” I retaliated…so what if my earmuffs are pink? I mean really, when it is eighteen degrees below zero and the whole world is freezing, the last thing one worries about is colour co-ordination. Apparently not. Winter in America is the real deal. Cold, chilly, damp, windy, sunless and snowy. Not the pleasant drafts of coolness that the subcontinent is used to during this time of the year. Hoary winds, snow and a piercing chill that makes you long for the Indian heat. Snow drafts that get your socks wet if you don’t walk too carefully and thin ice that will make you waltz like a Romanian gymnast on Prozac. However I shall stop cribbing, for spring is here. Nope the leaves haven’t begun sprouting yet, nor have the flowers started blooming in abundant profusion, but hey the sun no longer sets at three, and stays till eight! That’s spring enough for me. Positive temperatures too, now-a-days we get. No more the irritating chill that tingles the ears as soon as you step outside or the numb feeling and dread that comes with the realization of having wet socks. No more dark afternoons and dreary days. No more dressing up, which beats everything else. After six months of wearing layers that would make Pamela swell with pride (haha..pun or no pun..getit?) come single layer clothes days. Maybe even floaters...Hope.

PS: Minutes after this post was written, a snowflake wafted on to the authors nose, causing him to scurry for cover and generally curse the vagaries of weather, in a language that would make a bihari truck driver blush.

Travels and Travails in America

In one fell swoop I lost three hours of my day. Travelling eastward around the globe, unfortunately takes time…literally. Returning from glorious, sunny California to snowy upstate New York was forbidding enough, additionally I also had to cope with the brutal way in which my hours were taken away from me. Often we look at some guy, and think wow he has it all..a great life, career..whatever..California is that guy of places. Since much has already been said and written of the glories of the pacific state, I won’t expound much here, but believe you me when I say, CA’s the place to be.

Riding the metro was fun. Coming from a city like Bombay where riding the metro can be a life or death experience, San Francisco was very very cool. Calm collected, orderly and not crowded. One dwells too little on micro moments of joy that life throws at us to enjoy them thoroughly. Like the rush of the train when it accelerates, travelling alone in a new city, roaming footloose, wherever mind dictates. Not wanting to do the ‘touristy’ stuff that normal mortals do, I decided to see SF my own way. I roamed downtown and its dark streets among skyscrapers, and walked through Chinatown with its pungent aromas and quaint charm. I took the metro randomly, only to arrive at the seaside. The train was all things at once, bustling underground telling of corporate deals and big city life, trudging through dreary suburbs, reeking of an ennui that only urbandom can bring and unexpectedly issuing above ground to merge with the streets and wait for road signals. The last stop was an unassuming square, only the horizon was endless. The Pacific. Somehow I was excited. I couldn’t help it. Here it was the pacific in all its glory at 32 Fahrenheit. Belying its name, the waves roared, surged and hopelessly ever kept crashing. What is it about lonely humans and the ocean?

Little Boxes

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

The life of an average individual is so predictable. Though different in the details, everyone leads the same life in essence. Like Malvina Reynolds says, we are all like little boxes! Sure I may be a 4*4 box painted in orange and you may be a 3.75*3.75 box painted in green, but at the end of the day we are both cuboids!

And the people in the houses
All go to the university,
And they all get put in boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
And there's doctors and there's lawyers
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

Each one trying to find your own niche in the world, looking for essentially the same things. I can bet that 90% of people reading this post will have a similar list, Security, Comfort, Family, Love etc...
There is a said way to go about this. Do well at school choose a good profession and spend more than a quarter of your life slogging towards it and the rest, slogging to keep what you have achieved.

And they all play on the golf-course,
And drink their Martini dry,
And they all have pretty children,
And the children go to school.
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
And they all get put in boxes
And they all come out the same.

Many people whose blogs I follow have been speaking about love and marriage increasingly lately. Not that I'm reading anything into it but we all eventually do want to be settled and not live out life alone. Children when they come along will have their futures planned so that they in turn can be secure and comfortable.
Restarts the circle...
Little boxes...

And the boys go into business,
And marry, and raise a family,
And they all get put in boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

Life goes on..

I do not venture to comment on the integrity or achievements of anyone's life but don't you feel like being a different shape sometimes.
I want to be a cone made out of mount board painted in fuchsia!
I don't want to graduate I want to paint and only paint through my life!
I don't want to care where my next meal is going to come from and whether I'll be able to retain this roof over my head tomorrow!

Well but in the end, we are all little boxes, little boxes and we all look just the same!

I love Peter Seeger's songs which my father exposed me to as a child. This is also the theme song for weeds. Do listen to the song.

Top 10 curses

May your blog be shut down due to excessive comments of a weirdly perverted sexual nature

May aliens invade your loo

May the you have a bout of severe urinary incontinence in public

May you run out of toilet paper half-way through your session

May you be struck down by seventy three different kinds of pox, and be sentenced to serve nubile princesses in heaven as a eunuch

May pus filled pustules invade your body

May you be reborn as Britney Spears

May a thousand crows fart in your eyes

May your underwear turn carnivorous

May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits

* Excessive use and incorrect intonation may lead to backfiring of certain curses. The author is not responsible for any unprecedented eventuality and will not take any responsibility for the curser's mental and anatomical deficiencies

void main()

while(no writers block)

{

continue writing;

else

declare state of extreme boredom;

return comments;

}

Just a technical twist on why I’m churning out crap. Not that my previous posts are intellectual gems or works of revered literature, still. Merely an explanation for why some posts tend to be crappier than others. Lack of material coupled with busyness and boredom..you get it. Still write I must and I do, except that it reads something like this. And you, poor souls have to put up with the rubbish I routinely try to pass off as ‘English writing’. Five lines later I still haven’t managed to convey anything remotely useful or enlightening leading me to wonder, if something is useful, is it enlightening too? Or are they mutually exclusive? Does the reverse apply? On a totally different train of thought why is it called a train of thought anyway? Cant’ one have a busload of thoughts? Or a handful for the more intellectually challenged among us? Thoughts are hardly like trains; trains follow well defined tracks, begin and end at defined places. Thoughts, on the other hand begin er.. do thoughts begin at all? Or end? Or are they just an extension of some other previous thought, iterated to the present time? Thoughts spontaneously come into being and manifest themselves outwardly sometimes in speech, or badly written pieces like this. I started off with a pun on programming and am currently rambling along about thoughts and trains. Which is exactly how thoughts run. Or walk. Or just be.