Music and blah blah:)

It's midnight, around 4 am and all I can see is the silhouette of the fan sputtering dark air on my pale face on my sleeping soul sleeping since eons with the faint taste of music that is blending in Your silence ethereal yet confusing.

raining.

It's night but the sky is blue, a midnight blue and all I can see are stars, silver specks glittering in serene vastness. _______________________ I still speak to my old friends, at length, quite often, sometimes rather too frequently. We usually end up discussing the current state of affairs in our lives, which often translates to sharing our serious and sometimes silly problems, dilemmas and choices facing us. Sometimes we talk of the wonder years, of the city that was once home to us but where nothing is left now but for memories. Amidst the changes, we stick to our memories , never wanting to go home without writing a song, on paper or air. As we moved on, our new experiences and our new visions have left us so much to talk about regarding our present selves, so divorced are we now our lives that we have to at times keep introducing things, ourselves. It seems that surviving in the competition of the world, they have not enough time to read or write, watch a play, attend a reci...

some short notes, which I keep scribbling here and there, and somehow have managed not to lose ___________________________ I sort of love the first line in Robert Evans' movie memoir-- The Kid Stays in the Picture: There are three sides to every story: yours...mine...and the truth What a wicked marvel! _________________________________________ Parched throat of the earth Starless silhouette of the firmament Tricky Sun sucks on dew and glaze Dryly smiling in shades of orange and crimson Prayers submitted to heavens To mend away the losses Wash away the thirsty soil Embellish the lonely skies _________________________________________- I am looking at every bird in the sky with an indescribable glee on my face and child-like joy in my heart. __________________________________________ A walk too long. Symmetrical cuts adorn the feet. Throbbing sensations. Sore Achilles heel. Frail bones, strained muscles Cranky moods, stormy thoughts Impatient expectations, rude realities. Hmpf to the ...

Sometimes just talking to an old friend whom you don't get to speak to or meet very often brings tears to your eyes. Talking to them you realise how far and few such people are who you consider close to yourself, you realise how much you have missed a carefree conversation laden with memories, you realise how much you have missed the lilt in your voice, you realise how much you have missed being with a 'friend' who's not measuring every word you utter and judging you for your traits, your opinions, your idiosyncrasies. Certain aspects of you come alive only in the company of certain people, certain bonds, certain relationships. I realise most of my close friends share a common characteristic - they cannot tell you in person what you mean to them, they write to you just after you've left or hung up to acknowledge that.

Of all the things why a distant thumri? Why is nascent love like a distant thumri? She sat in her suburban habitat, having murdered all cockroaches and having won the battle with the omnipresent dust for the day, she sat back and wondered. She sat back on the borrowed divan with the freshly spread Gujarat cotton sheet with symmetrical black and white squares with a little haziness creeping into their edges. The house was either black or white with a little fuzziness at the edges. There cannot be that stark a demarcation, right? The distant thumri.... There's an allure that is so promisingly enchanting. One doesn't know the source of the melody, but then, for the moment all that matters is catching some strains of that exquisite tune. And, a thumri is not just a melody, it has those words and those words make all the difference. Words set to music have a supernatural status. Take a banal line like "tum aa jao", could be a part of any telephonic conversation anywhere. B...

Yesterday she discovered a forest by the sea. Can you imagine it? The blue, vast, sparkling sea and a little distance away from those sunny shores, a verdant expanse of dense foliage, trees grown together which seem to be whispering something in the distance, with a certain proud disregard for the noon sun. Their shade after all, is dark, cool and beckoning. She stood at a distance and watched the forest. There was a road,a winding road which took a turn into the yawning depths of those greens. A lonely road it must be, for there was no one to tread on it, to explore those turns and twists and revel in that journey. She didn't want to step on that road. It seemed perfect from a distance. What if she took that road, crossed that turn and found a glossy mansion at the end with perfectly manicured lawns and symmetric windows with tassled curtains, flanking a superbly polished door. What if the road became a familiar geographic relief carved out of logical explanations and derviable co...

chocolates? cakes? balloons? err... a jhoola, some maakhan and mishri:) Happy Birthday :)

Close your eyes. You are in a temple. There are twenty others surrounding you but they are silent, like the stony walls of that temple. Hear those bells, a rhythmic clang that slowly seems to be building into a crescendo. That is all you can hear with your eyes closed. You cannot hear the breaths of those twenty pious souls around. Eyes closed, it feels like those bells are talking to you. There is no one but you and that deity, who you cannot see, but can only sense. There is just you and Him. Those twenty people around don't matter. Maybe that is the truth. There is just you and Him. Those twenty people around don't matter.

Sometimes life is just so beautiful. Perhaps because you have realised its essence and touched its core, in some way, for some moments. When you have seen and felt some shade of the Truth reflect in the colors of your face and happiness revelling in your laughter, that which makes you One with yourself, it makes no difference whether what transpires in an another world, where unmasked entities live and where deception and wrongs so common , have no existence, becomes a reality in this material world.

Books that remain with us, in us, are those in which we have found ourselves, a shade here a shade there, in some character, in some situation, or they are atleast those in which we find something that we strive to be. ______________________________________ "This article is not intended to state what I positively believe to be true. but to make a suggestion which I think is well-worth working out...I do not think that it is the duty of the philosopher to confine himself in his publications to working out theories of the truth of which he is convinced...It is a part of a philosopher's work, as it is of a scientist's , to try out tentative hypotheses and examine their advantages and disadvantages" - A.C.Ewing They often question the 'use' of philosophy. I often wonder where we'd be without thought.

the flakes of ice take their last breaths on roadsides, melting under the dubious sun of winter dawn, with last drops of water oozing from them. Soon to evaporate. the melodrama of life begins not at the point where we begin our lives, but at the point where we make that (well-thought) pause yellow and pink orchids and carnations of red stand on the hillsides. Smiling as the semblance of beauty. The tale of callousness of last night’s zephyr echoes in them. Ever unheard. Well, forever unheard. No: tomorrow we won’t remain what yesterday we were or what we’re today. To stop and sit by the riverside to see the rippling or to climb up the cliff to behold the sight of condensed shrunk city, can’t help us bring together the lost pieces of the jigsaw: the music. there comes the night. the coldness- mauve and parched sneak through the silhouette of naked leafless trees, as they glow under moonlight. while the purple blossoms shrivel, my city sleeps warm under the miasma of smoke curling up fr...

Day programs me to work, Night sets my soul free Like a child’s whirligig it spins in your baffling world of waning tranquility, hidden truths. Catches your shadows, and meanders in alleys of eternal wander- hood. Untouched, the quest heads off for a rest some distant mountain peaks, snow-capped, I’ve traveled eleven thousand miles. the music of this night, the crickets’ squeak, this constant brawl among the stars, all are melting in your silence. sometimes our instinct grows so strong that the sky ruptures, sea folds up and the world shrinks into a soft cotton ball… tattered, blaring, inviting a revolution, a thunderstorm. To watch half the truth is a disgrace to the truth itself. Little light, little peace, little dreams, little knowledge, Like an island, like a rover, like a small city in itself, I know it’s the time to step out of this cocoon, out of these shielded walls of care and love, this house, its so many knots, these faces, these so many voices. It’s the moment To travel To...

It comes back to me, very often these days, the blurred vision, from the vacants from where the moths surface every night with such unsurpassed promptness and to where the ants carry and stock their everyday’s meal bit by bit. so religiously. everyday They play hide and seek with rains there. from those forlorn corners of city roads, where once burgeoned the superfluous foliage- green and wild, where stray cattle used to graze, and now stands like a victorious warrior, on a cemented paseo, a pole with a white metal plate welded to it indicating in black the speed limits for vehicles, ever followed or even noticed? the night doesn’t seem a night anymore, when stabbing fuzzily through the thick layers of smoke of the evening’s traffic still hanging over the city, draping it in its cloudy wrap, the neon lights of multiplexes stare back at you precisely at the moments when all you could ever solicit is complete darkness to hide in. or an urge to sleep under the billions of stars above you,...