Who Ate My Head?

I am a cannibal.

A peace-mongering and relentless cannibal who has eaten himself up in the hunger for something new. Let me explain.

Yesterday I woke up on the wrong side of the bed to find my own bones strewn around. At first, it did not strike me and I frantically searched for a mirror. There was a broken mirror lying on the floor and when I looked into it, I saw a grinning apparition. I instantly knew what had happened. The venom of indulgence had started eating my grey cells slowly but quietly. I yanked off my own head, reached into my brains and set the philandering thoughts to task. They had spent enough time running amok and pretending to be doing something fruitful. Once I set my head back on, it felt queasy at first but the Return of Clarity was much welcome.

I have missed this Island of Contemplation immensely - this little page on the Internet where the sparkling white sands have not been trod on recently. Rid of the mental mutinies, I am back to pitch camp on my island. To my blog.

Update of the day - the USA continues to be The Land Far, Far Away, especially when one returns from the motherland after an unforgettable trip. The time spent with loved ones feels like sand trickling through the fingers. The magic of meeting old friends, hanging out with adorable cousins, a darling nephew, a grand surprise birthday party, unforgettable road trips, Mom's incessant attention, random run-ins into yet older friends, shopping sprees, in-laws' fawning, a riverside picnic, mutton curry, an excruciating tooth extraction, a flight diverted due to fog, a wedding fiesta in Chennai, midnight wine in the cold, watching the PM zip by amidst screaming sirens, more delicious mutton curry, being shooed by cops from a restricted area, overcoming an old fear, corrupting my family by teaching them how to gamble in Poker, smiling endlessly at wedding dinners, gorging on egg chicken rolls with the ever-blissful Thums up, Grandma's smiles, an accident followed by a mid-road altercation, still more mutton curry, beachside languor, and many more myriad components of a month spent in India continue to keep the mind hostage.

Yet I leave it all behind, like many of us, and return to a different rigmarole. What happens to my logic which I take pride in? Are these my thoughts or are these the cannibal's?

The cannibal would not have been born if I had disciplined my wayward thoughts. I would have disciplined my wayward thoughts much earlier had not I been ambushed by the chaotic wonder of my country. In many vacant moments, I question the nomadism which has led to this state of affairs. Hopping from day to day, and year to year, this mind operates like a Time Machine - one that can transport me into any moment in the past and bring it back into life. The same mind can overcome buried fears and break open needlessly shut doors.

The new year started without the realisation of its arrival. I was busy fending off these new symptoms of procrastination and merry-making. Little did I know that these were the tricks of the cannibal, designed to throw one off his guard. Many of you have made resolutions, I am sure. I used to make one every year until I discovered that a new year is simply the same merry-go-round on which we are all seated on little wooden horses. I keep telling myself that "new year's day" is a figment of the collective imagination, merely a reset of a man-made tool called a calendar - a tool that makes us go round and round in cycles. Years come and years go, and we think we grow older. We plan our lives into little boxes of work, holidays and celebrations, hoping that these things will keep us busy enough to overlook the fact that none of us have a clue about where we are headed.

What if there was no calendar?
No media to tell us what's happening in the world?
No rotation of the earth, and thus no day and night?
No dates and deadlines?
No way to plan anything in life?
What if you were stranded on a desert island where the sand was white and there was no ship coming to rescue you?

All resolutions would come to naught.
All plans would be meaningless.
The only choices would be to eat the cannibal or let it eat you.

So let's stop patting each other on the back because a new calendar year starts. For the cannibal is always lurking within. You can see it when you grin.

Weightless

(or, The Last Day at Work)

The gush of wind, in my face
thru' the jagged glass
Destroyed, like Twoface hath
I wonder which one to pass

Far below, the serpentine streets
With sirens, hissing at me
The flames on me, the panic beats
As my clothes burn in glee

The clock is still, as this world ends
The moans have slept, and the crackle roars
This paper and pen, my parting friends
Huddle with me, in this forsaken place

No anger, no grief, but Starbucks taste
and the parting wave of Jane's smile
Yanked from me in fiery haste
as I crawl off the morbid pile

These are the last words I write
On this memo to hell
Bloody smudges and fading light
Make me laugh, make me yell

Here I am, like a dragonfly
Neither wish nor prayer, no fervent hope
Is gonna make me cry
As I look over the charring ledge

Off you go, you A4 sheet
Some random hands you shall meet
I am right behind you
To meet the devil, 100 stories below my feet

- This could have been the last words written on a piece of paper by one of the people waiting to die at the WTC on Sep 11 2001, before they made the painful choice between burning to death or jumping to it. It could have been me. It could have been you. It is as plain as that.

The Great Indian Hope Trick

Until about a few weeks back, I was rummaging around within my head, grumbling that yet again I could not cast my vote in an election in India. Here we are, a superlative diaspora that has taken over every nook and cranny of most countries and corporations in the world, and yet we don't have overseas balloting in place. With this angst, I was twiddling my thumbs, half-expecting to watch the mantle of power slip away and fall into the hands of the BJP and its khaki-clad maniacs, who would again set us ten years back.

But lo and behold! Our gregarious voters have thumped Manmohanism on the back yet again, even if their motives might be questionable. Within a month, the fortunes of the stone-aged and rabble-rousing ilk of the bitter Advani and Modi team has spiralled down into the murky depths of the Ganges.

I am a little late in igniting fire-crackers, so I will let that display of triumph pass by. I am sure that thousands of my compatriots have already danced on emptied streets and burst a million crackers in jubilation. However it's hard to not wonder at the fact that this is the first time in the last 50 years that the same Government has returned to consecutive power after an election. None, not even Indira Gandhi or A.B. Vajpayee, had managed this. More impressive is the fact that Congress actually managed to strengthen itself further by having more than 200 seats this time. Call it the result of fractious infighting in other parties, or the dereliction of the fanatic saffron parties by their bruised allies such as BJD, but the truth is that the BJP is failing even more nowadays in achieving its single objective - to fool all the people all the time. I, for one, am really glad to see their fall. I do not hero-worship Manmohan Singh or Rahul Gandhi, but I would prefer them anyday over the dodo-ist, head-in-the-sand Advanis or Modis who still have not been exempted of the alleged massacres that they have led in the past. Opportunistic as they are, they have also somersaulted on their own "dynastic politics" rhetoric they kept shooting at Congress by hosting Maneka Gandhi and her son from their party. An Indian voting for the BJP is like a German voting for the Nazis in 1933, where either sheer blissful ignorance or boiling and misplaced venom can be the only motivations.

What is even more amazing is how Rahul Gandhi has juxtaposed the possible misplaced expectations that the rally-attending masses of our country has from him, with the opportunities that he had while at the helm of the Congress campaign. Focussing on the correct issues and the right amount of media posturing worked solidly for his team, while his embittered cousin distanced swing voters even more with his Hindu rhetoric. Whether Rahul Gandhi and his ilk emerge to be leaders of substance or not, is something that we shall see unfold over the next five years. However this time, it shall be a much more transparent callibration of the Congress mandate, with no ambiguities of policies now that unwanted ingredients such as the Left and the RJD are out of the soup. 417 million voters put in their ballots this year, and the giant jigsaw puzzle that is the Indian map has shaken itself back into political shape again.

If one is a pessimist who never gives up, then this is the moment to rebrand oneself. For every 75 MPs who have active criminal records in the new Parliament, now there is one IIT-IIM alumni in the Lok Sabha (Prem Das Rai from Sikkim). That is some glimmer of hope. Since none of us are ever going to bring an overnight revolution in the country, the only path of furthering the future is to watch the radicals run home one by one.

It's slow and noiseless progress, almost like a glacier. But I welcome it.

The Grey

My mind hurtled through the highway of my follies, masking each blotch with a better colour. A better colour that eventually turned into blue, regardless of my thrashing around the periphery. Blue is supposed to be the colour of calmness, of the equal sign that sums up all emotions. Sitting there on the tree stump, I huffed and puffed, and let out imaginary rings of smoke into the afternoon air. What was that colour I had seen on the train? Why did it keep dodging me? Why did it refuse to turn into grey? I had no name for that colour. Was it the result of a cosmic joke, or the merger of bitter elements? Was it a constant reminder to me that just around the bend lay nothingness, and that I had no time left? It had dazzled my eyes, and yet had made me place my palms on the window in restless thrill.

I could not have travelled in a time machine, for that fantasy of mine had not been invented yet. Yet the dirt road of time eluded my gaze when I turned round at the top of the hill and looked back as far as I could. The sky beat like the magnified surface of a drum, and the spectrum of some weak rainbows submitted itself to the rule of that colour. It spread out all over me slowly, gobbling every dormant cloud and vanquishing the rays of the distant star that gives this world life. The fingers on my hands. They, which had held so many brushes, giving shape to my imagination and my wildest dreams. Now they were idle, queued up like hungry labourers waiting for a truck to come by and give them back their purpose and will. They had distorted faces of tourists on the streets of Sydney, making their laughter crooked. They had swept across large strokes of thick brushes, catching snapshots of my nightmares in larger-than-life dimensions. They had held the ears of hares as I had pulled them out of my hat in India. They had glistened with excited beads of sweat whenever I had heard applause and cheers of appreciation. All those moments. All those flights across man-made borders, travelling on a shoestring, tasting the water and kissing the soil of each land. All the time, growing wiser by the day and nourishing my obsession with wanderlust.

My dreams had been in sepia, with specks of red thrown into the moments that terrified me. Like the one in which the huge wall of a tsunami raced towards me and I sat on the beach, frozen by my own urge to let myself be swallowed, while desperately screaming at myself to run for my life. The water turned green, then red and loomed over the world like a gigantic spectre of doom. Yet I just sat there, as if I was a part of the earth, my eyes glistening with the tears of forgotten horrors. The yellow blinding torchlight of my future self always woke me up just in the nick of time, saving me from an apocalyptic death, and showing me the indigo around me. That indigo, which like spurts of ink on a new shirt, refused to disappear. They held the memories of the people I have killed and the revolution which I worshipped. Until the Revolution, I had been nothing but a nomad, wandering across the latitudes, earning my bread and butter by putting brush to canvas, and playing second fiddle to Zach, the brilliant conjurer of poor men's fantasies.

Like the spread of oil on water, the colour now beckoned to me from the sky above. Or could I call it a sky anymore? Its eerie shimmer fell across the landscape, as I struggled hard to identify what colour this was. The trees waved in the rising wind, as their shadows also queued up to felicitate this new colour. The Revolution had sprung suddenly on mortal society, led by those who despised the false gods and the enslavement of mankind by the non-existence of free will. All philosophers who died before then, turned in their graves. The revolution made brilliant sense. Remove all borders. Wipe out all religions. Erase all existing currencies and stick to one. The birth of the new world. A world where white, black, red, yellow, green had no role to play apart from returning to the folds of nature, where they came from. Like a microcosm, it spread from mouth to atheist mouth, from idle mind to creative mind, from desperate will to crushing desire. Men and women trooped out of offices, fell out of social orders and disappeared from organised rigour. What led me to it? Was I insane? Or was I just swept up in the promises the Revolution showed? It was not Zach. In fact, poor Zach was simply sleeping in his hotel room, dreaming about his next trick, when I crept up and smothered him to death. I had to do it. His brilliance and my reverence for him was a huge barrier for the Revolution. I had to let myself out from under the shadow of morals. Many revolutions have gone by where the forces, the people who led the mobs, had selflessly fought, waiting for victory in some lifetime or the other. Not for us. We wanted immediate, overnight results.

I am not much of a speaker. But a voice I do have. For those Seven Days of the Awakening, as The Leader had named the Revolution, I bathed in grey every dawn, while the world fought a raging battle around me. I treasure laughter, and mine meant the most to me. I still heard it, as I sat on the tree stump, resounding in my mind like the blaring trumpet of blind ambition. Hundreds of us united in breaking free of the shackles, murdering everyone we saw who was not with us. We swore allegiance to the Leader, who was himself faceless, but always dressed in grey. It was the colour of the new time, and all we saw around was grey. The grey between morals and apathy, the grey between motive and mayhem, and the grey between order and chaos. Day turned into orange dusk, and bloody dusk turned into black rivers of dried up blood. I was on top of the world, just as all the other greys around me were.

Then the Leader showed us a colour I had not expected. He wanted all Creativity dead. He declared the goal of The New Society to be the Uniformity of Will, and the Absence of Idleness. He wanted this to become a perfect world.
The dazzling and overwhelming light of this new colour had hit me then. I realised, standing in the middle of vanquished cities, that I could never paint again. I could never dream of a magic trick again. The grey itself was a nightmare, and was going to be the colour of the tsunami now. And I thought I loved grey.

I had been a fool, but atleast I will not die one.

The dazzling colour, now so eerie, made me forget hunger and thirst. I ran like an enraged madman, over crushed cars and overturned trolleys, through smoke-filled buildings and over moaning bodies, past celebrating comrades and seas of grey.
Each grey I saw reminded me again and again of what I had to do now. I had killed Zach, and now I had to repay.
I ran until I was breathless.

(The shimmer of this colour now was creeping up my own body, as the star sank below the horizon, and the heavens yawned.)
Today is the Eighth Day of the Awakening, and we saw The Leader for the first time. An ocean of grey clapped and cheered. They looked wild, the men and women and children of tomorrow. Did they know what was in store? I then realised that this teeming mass of the new humanity was the tsunami, the one that I always gave into.

As The Leader was about to speak, I shot him. From the top of the tallest building. Straight through the head. A trickle of brilliant red ran down over his grey suit as he collapsed.

Since then, they had been looking for me. I had run into an abandoned train and hurtled it out of the city. I had gotten out of my greys and was now wearing nothing. They were hot on my heels, a furious mob, baying for my blood. I was not concerned about the murder I had just committed. The bigger crime was the killing of colours.

As I sat on the tree stump, I looked up the hill and saw the thousands. They swarmed down the hillsides. I think they have spotted me. They did not look like the ones I had fought with. Maybe it was this colour. I had never seen it before. My eyes flashed with a new fury, and this time they bristled with this new colour. It cracked on my fingers, and glowed on my skin. It made the whole world new.

I start running. Uphill this time. I am laughing loudly. The sky is again throbbing. The mob and its yell is nearer now. I come over the top of the hill, and I stop in my tracks. They are there, panting and waiting for me. All around me, is the madness. The madness I was a part of. I look up at the sky, and scream to the colour. I wonder if they see it.

I won't live long. But I know one thing.

I won't die grey.

The Threshold Dilemmas

Spring's around the corner! That's what I was told a few weeks back, and there is still no sign of it. Not that the cold isn't bitterly entertaining now that we are used to it, but the sunny skies are deceptive every morning.
On such deceptive days, music is a great friend on the commute to work, but since my commute is only a 5-minute train ride, this is what happens nowadays:



One dilemma with being on the threshold of winter and spring is the daily decision each morning as to whether one should wear a sweater or not. Unlike what you may think, a sweater can have different roles to play in life, as shown below:



When you meet someone in the elevator and there is an immediate blank-out of topics to discuss and you realise that the elevator is stopping at every floor, you try the following topics in that order - how the weekend went, how the weather is playing tricks and last but not the least the economy. It seems everyone has mugged what The Economist has to say about the economy. But I think the best way to look at the economy is:



I stole some minutes from work recently and tried to get some alternatives researched on options we have regarding cable TV. I myself do not know why, as the definition of TV in India has morphed into the following in the last few years:



But when no options came up on the TV thing, I resigned ourselves to watching mediocre cable for the time being. The excitement surrounding the upcoming general elections in India will have to be tracked over the ubiquitous news websites at work. These elections will be very interesting, most of all for the BJP, who have been riding high on their own pedestal for the last term. However I think Advani is losing sleep, not something that many would know. Do you want to know why?



It's doomsday for BJP in these times. Perhaps it's my wishful thinking though. However talking of doomsday, "Knowing" is about to be released and even though I am a fan of thriller movies like most of us, what have we learnt from most Hollywood doomsday flicks?



Speaking about Hollywood, Aamir Khan has confirmed in his latest interview that Bollywood movies are still being made with the Indian audience in mind, and that when the day comes when we start targeting the international audience, we won't fare too bad. I am inclined to believe him. In the same interview, Aamir has admitted that he is embarrassed by many of his earlier movies. I am a huge fan of his, but I would have liked him to take pride in all that he has done. Are his roles better now, or are his movies better after 2000? Hard call to make, because if you take his top ten characters and measure them against each other in terms of memorability and impact, the results can be interpreted in various ways. For the sake of reverence, I have not included his all-time classic character of Amar from Andaaz Apna Apna in this comparison. That would have been a crime even Teja would not have committed.



I wish he looked at himself from a fan's eyes and realised that characters like Sanjay Lal, Munna and Siddhu remain as some of his best characters till date. Is he getting deceived by his own perfectionism? Or is he stumbling due to the sheer frequency of having to work amongst mediocrity andf yet having to cross the threshold over into excellence?

Wake up Aamir, spring's round the corner, and so are Three Idiots!

Topsy Turvy

The words unsaid, and the thoughts unfelt
How strange the earth smelt
The truth, you befuddled being
No, it's not what you are seeing.

Enjoy this short story attached below.

Topsy Turvy

Nothing but the Truth

Welcome to the Quirky Week news bulletin, where we bring you the happenings from around this hot oblate spheroid which we call our world!

Aha! In this week's headlines, we have the age-old sepoy mutiny revived in the great democracy of Bungle-desh. This legendary social breakthrough was pioneered 152 years ago in the heartlands of India, the engineers of which were anonymously hanged or selectively shot to fame. A few had never been caught and they were rumoured to have escaped to the marshy capital of Dhoka, the current capital of Bungledesh. It is suspected that their descendants fired the first shots in the mutiny that shook the sleepy afternoons of Dhoka and allowed the Bungledesh government to get rid of under-performing officers of the border guard force who had not managed to get a single Indian officer lynched in the last couple of years. Investigations are still on and the hunt for the corpses goes on, as speculations mount that the mutiny is back as a social trend in the sub-continent.

In the more melodious land across the border, the hit and raging show "Indian Idle" had its first female winner, after centuries of male domination. The show, started by the great Indian emperor Show Jahan, had always had a swaggering fellow win since the majority of voters were idle female voters using their husbands' cellphones to send multiple votes. But as the global economic crisis deepens and more men lose their jobs, the tide has turned finally and female crooners finally got their votes!

Talking of votes, Gluejarat's chief minister N.S. Muddy churned up the heat in the pre-elections fiasco speeches , calling the ruling party's prince charming Royal Grandy a "new fish", while declaring himself old fish. This provoked riots amongst the divided ranks of the Luck Sabha sentries (another mutiny that got nipped in the bud?). The situation came under control only when the ruling Crowngress retorted saying that yes, Muddy was an old-fish, but a flesh-eating Piranha. This in turn fuelled the anger of PETA who filed a PIL against the Crowngress for "unfair and inhuman use of a gentle form of nature like fish to be compared to a monster such as Muddy".

Another Grandy was also hogging the headlines more than 50 years after his demise when one of his nieces' daughters decided to auction off his sunglasses, a birthday gift from Lord Mountbitten, in New York in order to pay her next credit card bill. This angered the entire Indian diplomatic force which has pledged to do all in its power to stop the auction. It created an embarrassing situation for the Indian ambassador to Antarctica who was planning to be one of the highest bidders in the auction so as to acquire the sunglasses to protect his eyes in the glare of the Antarctic snow. Officials from the Central Bureau of Instigation are looking into the matter and have interrogated a number of penguins as witnesses.

Speaking of interrogation, the Mumbai Police managed to beat the 90-day deadline of filing a charge-sheet against Mohd Ghazab, the lone surviving gunman from the November attacks. They submitted a 10,000-page document citing hundreds of witnesses and details. On close inspection, it was found however that the document had 9,990 pages of the script of Ache-ta Kapoor's next movie "Shooutout at Nariyalwala's", which featured Ghazab's character in a central role. The Mumbai High Court reviewed the script and found too many repetitions in it, which compelled them to issue arrest warrants against Miss Kapoor on the crime of mediocrity. Miss Kapoor, who is currently shooting her next tele-serial "Kissssa Khoon Ka" in South Africa, was not available for Komment, umm, I mean, comment.

Not far from South Africa, a bizarre revenge drama occurred in the West African nation of Guinea-Pissau. The nation, thus named after the creation of its capital city pissed off a lot of guinea pigs who occupied that land, saw its army general allegedly blown to smithereens by a bomb planted below his staircase at the behest of its President. This enraged the army which sent its newest talent to hunt down and riddle the fleeing President with bullets. Thus ended the lives of the nation's embittered leaders. Condemnation followed from the African Union which said in an official statement to AFP - "We condemn the changing of the country's fortunes with only two deaths, whereas our other member nations have lost hundreds of thousands of people in their conflicts. The president and general should have ensured that Africa gets more attention in the world's eyes by having more people killed."

Moving east, the new US Secretary of State, Mrs Hilarious Cleanton is on the verge of commencing her first official trip to the Middle East, promising to be true to her name and "clean" up the mess between Izrail and Palestein, I beg your pardon, Israel and Palestine. Few believe in her ability to do so, since analysts believe that the US should first clean up the giant elephant in its backyard - Gluttonamo Bay - before it tries to stick its pies back into the eternal mudpie nick-named the "Riddle East" (nick-name courtesy of our in-house Jordanian weatherman).

In the increasingly funny world of finance, we all thought the worst was over. But AIG posted the largest quarterly loss ever in corporate history, sending the world stocks spiralling down. Its board of directors was seen standing on Wall Street with placards stating that the world was about to end and convincing passersby why it made sense for their government to eat further into their tax money so that AIG could pay off investors in other countries and allow these people to spend less on their home insurance.

In sports, India's Meander Singh Dhoni's approval ratings fell below 99% for the first time in his glittering career as his team lost two 20-20 matches to Old Zealand. At the time of going to press, Meander was seen biting his nails and speaking on his cellphone (rumours say India's erstwhile captain Sourrub Gangly was on the other line) apparently looking for ways to get his ratings back to 110% while his old warriors Searchin' Tendulkar and Surrender Vehwag batted at the crease in the first one-day international.

Ahem...ladies and gentlemen... I am afraid that we will have to end this bulletin now as another snowstorm hits the US city of New York where we are reporting from. Our electricity is limited, our windows are fragile and our women are more panicky.
All due to the economy!

So until next time - be alert, be safe and give Crime a face-breaking reply!

Good bye.