Chillaxing amidst Global Warming

Words fly left...words fly right...fluttering white wings like kabootars across my private blue sky. With the grace of a Lucknowi nawaab I keep clapping as each one of them out ventures out of their cage on their chartered flight path.

The secret to gracefully let them go is knowing the fact that they'll come back to their safe abode. It's too predicably cozy to be missed for the of the uncertainaties of the wild wild world out there. The concept of coziness have been programmed carefully in their genes for generations. That makes me confident that my kabootars will return back to my white pages with the smell of sunshine, clouds and raindrops gathered from the skies.

But what happens if the programme breaks down -- if the uncertainities are too tempting than the predictabilities. Will my blank page remain blank forever ?

Labels: whimzical

I really feel sorry for all the married folks that keep on saying "I've have had my share of enjoyment". Boss, the biggest worry is you are using past perfect tense. And that's what doesn't make any sense to some-one who still oscillates between the question of "To Biye or not to Biye ?".

But my hats off to the rare few whom I happen to meet on occasions where alcohol makes "a sober man's secret a druken man's speech". And when they say "Life's is always on the offering side...it's as a taker we are the ones still confused on what we need...and that's where we put on our sad masks" -- I still feel there's still hope and finish off my peg before calling the waiter for "One more whisky please"

It gives me a sense that there's hope knowing tomorrow there'll be sunrise, chirping birds, children playing amidst grassy meadows, while I nurse my worst hangover.

Certain things never change...till the Armagaedon hits the third rock from the Sun

Labels: rant

After kicking on the frame for more than ten-fifteen minutes, the door creaked open. The torch light focused as a beam piercing the darkness accumulated on the intricate geometries of the hanging cobwebs.

Is this what he was expecting?
Is this what he had sweated for so long?
Is it really worth it?

The questions were clouding him, as he stepped in for further exploration. The inside of the room was much-much bigger than he had speculated from earlier. And there were similar looking containers, rather cubical boxes of different dimensions - all piled up. While some of these containers were arranged in perfect geometry, others lay in random order. Even if that arrangement signified anything meaningful, he was entirely clueless about where to begin.

All he needed was to pick up the correct container, open it with the key he was given, check out the contents and return with the information. The challenge to this simple task was identifying the container among countless similar ones. The task was made even complex by the fact that the key to the container, that he held in his hand, if inserted into incorrect keyhole might mess up the entire contents of that box.

The consequence to that event has never been known but has been estimated to be a dangerous one. He was told that specifically when being handed the key. And he had to get out in time, or else he would require help to get out which was neither guaranteed nor reliable.

He was looking at the endless stack of cuboids, thinking of where to begin in this huge cubic trap, when he just happen to tapp gently on the box he was staring at. May be this reaction on his part was something quite involuntary or may be it was something out the wilderness of instincts. But the rationale was unimportant as the next moment there was a shrill high pitched deafning scream that came out of the box. The combined effect of the surroundings and shrillness of the pitch send a cold shiver across his spine as he stumbled on the neighbouring stack.

The lid of the box where his foot hit, cracked for a spilt second before closing again before oozing out a tiny whisp of vapour that hit his nose. The smell that came out was definitely not of any flower but one of the costiliest musk he had sampled at some airport duty free shop. What was the name starting with R, he was thinking, when he understood the sequence of the stacking. There were storage of sound, smell, vision and may be who knows touch...all he needed to do was to identify the correct set of boxes. So effectively the key he had, even if inserted into one of them will open all the four of them simultaneously. The only choice he had to make which of the senses to go for -- sound or smell.

He decided to go for the sound as he franatically tapped on the boxes from the stack which he identified as the sound storage. After going through conversations in whispers to shouts, nastiest curses to the wonderful music....he heard the female voice he was looking for. He inserted the flat key into the slot and waited breathlessly for the next sequence. As the light from the four opening boxes on four sides glowed on his face, you could see the sense of achievement on his face. Intently opening his senses to the contents of the four boxes, he saw what he was looking for just a few seconds before his timer device reminded him to run for the closing doors.

"You know what I like about you -- not only you get it done everytime but the element of drama you bring in your assignment ", his smiling client said while they exchanged whatever they had in their possesion.He passed on the information the client was looking for and the client gave him proof of the debit transaction to his credit account. The Dreamcatcher said dryly "Peeking into other's brains is not so fanciful as I thought. If it was not for the big money that you offer I would not have done it. For your information I am still working on the best of the visualisations -- the haunted house scene definitely suits the creepiness of my first job. Let me know next time you need me".

And in some other room in the hotel, someone very famous slept peacefully not knowing that the net result of the transaction that was going on one of his treasured private memory would no longer be so private. The irony was that the sophistacated memory probing was discovered by government scientists for criminal investigation. But pretty soon the rouge dream-catchers who found out a way to obtain this technology becane the favourites of all the paparazzis. After all there was no shortage of readers who will pay any amount to subscribe to news sources that let them have a peek at their favourite star's closted life.

The reporter shook hands with the dream-catcher and said "Surely, next time I want you to find out who was the lucky bastard in her high school that our heart-throb actress was sleeping with when she lost her virginity. The fees will be double the usual".

Labels: fiction

Is this what I'm supposed to be doing ?

Never in my job-profile had you ever mentioned ass-licking is a pre-requisite...never. I thought my work was to ensure the crap IT systems you bill your customers obscenely, atleast meets half their demands. And I did it quite well, until I found out that was not the way up the ladder. Lemme tell you one thing straight - It's too crowded at the middle, with anyone strong enough to hold at the bottom. So when the ladder gives in and you pile up in heaps, make sure you've enough cushions to fall on. Don't count me in, for I'll be at the bars, busy in celebration.

Is this what I'm supposed to be doing ?

Never in our relationship, you said that my opinion would be taken for granted. Nodding at all your whims and fancies, now it hurts terribly in my neck everytime I look up. Maybe that's why I rarely get to see the moon. May be that's why I rarely have the desire to fly. But the wings keep on flapping....may be one day when the winds are in my favour....

Is this what I'm supposed to be doing ?

Standing in front of the mirror, seeing my own reflection, nourishing a bit of hopelessness that soon turns to disgust while I roll up the joint. A couple of puffs and I'm again in love with me. Earlier I never thought that addiction was the door out, but atleast it soothes. I'm eagerly waiting for the killer hiding behind the haze to pounce on me someday. With luck I might see my eyes on the steel blade before it takes the plunge down my chest. My throbbing heart will bleed for none. I wonder will there be a flash-back before the eternal black-out. What memories will they play ?

Extracts from How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey :

Fictional characters homo fictus are not, however, identical to flesh-and-blood human beings homo sapiens. One reason for this is that readers wish to read about the exceptional rather than the mundane. Readers demand that homo fictus be more handsome or ugly, ruthless or noble, vengeful or forgiving, brave or cowardly, and so on, than real people are. Homo fictus has hotter passions and colder anger; he travels more, fights more, loves more, changes more, has more sex. Lots more sex. Homofictus has more of everything. Even if he is plain, dull, and boring, he'll be more extraordinary in his plainness, dullness, and boringness than his real-life counterparts.

Real human beings are fickle, contrary, wrong-headed -- happy one minute, despairing the next, at times changing emotions as often as they take a breath. Homo fictus, on the other hand, may be complex, may be volatile, even mysterious, but he's always fathomable. When he isn't, the reader closes the book, and that's that. Another reason the two species are not identical is that, because of space limitations, homo fictus is simpler, just as life is more simple in a story than it is in the real world.

Got to finish the book for more insights. May be I will start writing more readable posts or worse. In any case I now know why I read more trashes than classic. Because despite the twists-n-turns in the plots the characters are always fathomable for intellectually challenged people like me. Definitely makes me feel better now.

Day after day, love turns grey
Like the skin of a dying man.
Night after night, we pretend its all right
But I have grown older and
You have grown colder and
Nothing is very much fun any more.....

Throughout the nonchalant conversation that they were having now, he was desparately trying to avoid direct eye-contact. He knew his eyes will betray the indifference that he was trying hard to potray. The particular table they had been ushered to by the pushy waiter made his job even more difficult. The sole reason he'd chosen this particular bistro over a number of similar eateries was its location by the waterfront.

He had it all chalked out - just count the number of waves that hit the docks while she does the talking sentence-by-sentence...sometimes word-by-word. While she was telling him all about her recent vaccation, he was constantly toying with the spoon and the cup. He thought that would annoy her, but she hardly gave any attention. Defeated in the first attempt, he tried again by looking at another woman over her shoulder. This is bound to hit the bulls eye he thought.

The woman from the other table obviously didn't appreciate the appreciation from someone who's sitting with another woman. Dismissing his stare as a revealation of his poor loyality ratings, the frown on her face threw out an enormous disgust at his direction. As if about to be thrown off he immediately retracted his gaze back to their own table - just directly on his companion's face. Their eyes met for the first time throughout their present encounter.

For a second nothing happened --- she was still talking about the snows and the mountains when she just stopped in the middle of the unfinished sentence. Before he could look away she saw all he was trying to reveal. Before he could look away he saw all she was trying to hide. She sat there for a moment or two, gathered her purse and then left without uttering a single word. He continued to toy with the spoon and the cup for some more time, before calling for the cheque.

He had characterised their relationship by his indifference which had hardly received appreciation from anyone but himself. She was the one to add the coochy-coochy romance flavour to the part of life they shared together. After playing the game for long time enough, finally they came to realise that both of them were just pretending.

Long long time ago there used to be a continent called Atlantis that no longer appears on any of the ancient or modern geographical maps. Even in that ancient times, the Atlantians had managed to attain levels of civilization that could be considered glorious in present day terms. These accomplishments were not merely restricted to inventing the technologies to make the quality of life easier. Their knowledge quest encompassed the development of the human body as well the human mind.

Since they were way too ahead of other civilizations of their time, they thought it best to live in isolation in order to protect their superiority. For more than a thousand years of what they called the Glorious Era of Atlantian Civilization, in their isolated continent they had built magnificent marvels of architecture. They had invented methods that increased the fertility of Atlantis soil ten-folds and devised newer varieties of high yielding crops. With their granaries full, they then sought to understand the how the chemical and mechanical wonders work in unison to make the human anatomy work.

They found out that missing vital ingredients whose absence allowed the weakness in body resistance caused the ailments that cut the life-span short. Using treatments that constituted natural herbs and minerals, they were able to attain longer life-cycles than their peers across the planet. With problems of food and shelter over, they dedicated their longivity to excel in arts and letters. They wrote poetries that could solace loneliest of the souls and they sang songs that could stir cruelest of the hearts into compassion. At the peaks of their civilization the glory of Atlantis was shinning with the glory of a thousand suns.

But nothing lasts forever, not even a glory of a thousand suns. This being a story of the long-long-ago, Mother Earth at that time was constantly trying to get that perfect look by pushing things around. In her scheme of changing looks, the fate of Atlantis was to slowly submerge under the rising sea-levels. When the Atlantians came to understand that their beloved continent would cease to exist, they tried their best to avert the unavoidable. But forces of nature proved too strong for the Atlantians. When they had build the tallest of all their buildings, they calculated that it would be only a matter of few hundred years or rather two-three Atlantian generations before they need to build even taller columns to avoid the immersion of their cities.

Since then they stopped erecting any taller cities and sought alternatives. Most of the inhabitants slowly migrated to other parts of the world where they used their knowledge to uplift human civilization. At the end when water started to engulf their cities only a handful of Atlantians were left in the entire continent who still did not give up hope. They were still spending efforts to determine the alternative to migration from their beloved landmass.

Finally the day of the doom came. Water started creeping in from all sides, cracking the high walls of the dams, breaking the tallest of columns. The last of the Atlantians gathered in their meditation hall at the highest point of the continent and mourned the devastation by meditating. Slowly they felt the water kissing their feet, playing at their waists, reaching for their busts before licking their necks. As they were taking their last breath before engulfed by the oceans, the eldest of them opened his eyes and said, "From now on the Atlantians will no longer speak but only communicate by singing".

And then he showed them the way of survival shortly before he plunged into the depths of the water. Using their power of meditation and love for Atlantis, they transformed themselves to the new marine bio-species that will be known to the world as The Dolphins.