White Limbo

This life of mine, if life I can call it, has become a strange affair, a kind of a metamorphosis in which every thing has changed.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that it was required of a man that he should share the action and passion of his times, at peril of being judged not to have lived, and for most of my early life I've followed this percept with uncommon faithfulness.

But now of late (the last decade or so) I find myself entangled in a web of days, time passing in a kind of a slow motion, yet seemingly the years flit by and I remain in the same place, unable to flog up interest in the world around me or the people who inhabit it..

I'm much like a meandering river still searching for a sea to unload itself of all that water.

This sort of detachment and apathy sometimes scares me.. but still I doggedly stick to the path
But to what purpose? What end?

I see myself upon the grim mile
The past hunting and future escaping
What was shall not be
Forever shall I thicken this belief

Frozen In Time.

Freezing Time is the only way to grasp Eternity for an hour..

And can eternity belong to me, Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour?

Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,
Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,
In some dread moment. by the fates assign'd,
Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind;
And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last
The speed that spins the future and the past:
And, sovereign of an undisputed throne,
Awful Eternity shall reign alone.

-Last verse by : Francesco Petrarch Source: Triumph pf Eternity (l. 102)

Young Buds

Countless the twigs which tremble at Dawn,
When Young Buds Lean on each other in yearning..
As little by little the night turns around

(The frangipani tree in my backyard at dawn, lyrics adapted from Pink Floyd's : Set the Control For the Heart of the Sun.)

India Is Great

Mera Bharat Mahan....
Celebrating 61 years of Independence.
(Back of a truck on the way to Shimla)

As Jug Suriya wrote in his recent Jugular Vein column

"India is vast space; space to accommodate the clamor of giant cities, teeming with the seething energy of millions and the silence of empty solitudes.

India is space; space to include the pilgrim and the politician, the poet and the revolutionary, the street urchin and the merchant prince, Ahimsa and nuclear might, 3,000 years and the 21st century.

India is the express highway thundering with traffic and the slip road beside it with the sign 'For camels, elephants and bullock carts'.
India is mega dams and factories, call centres and shopping malls, and the voices raised in protest against all these and more.

India is a colour TV, garlanded with marigolds and a picture of Lakshmi on top, playing MTV while grandmother counts the beads of her mala and grandchildren dream of US green cards.

India is the roar and tumult of democracy and the forgotten face of a forgotten neta on an election poster stuck on the crumbling mud wall of a village deserted by all but the ghost of hunger.

India is the faceless anonymity of cities where neighbors don't know the names of neighbours and it is the 'Ram, Ram' of timeless greeting exchanged by strangers who pass each other on a lonely path.

India is the smell of incense and ancient stone, of parched earth when the first drops of rain fall, of the dust and sweat of rattletrap buses, of the sweet, milky tea served in an earthen bowl by a 'chai , chaiwala !' on the whistle-stop railway stations of night.

India is the crowded bazaar where two dozen languages and half a dozen faiths negotiate the day-to-day transactions of buying and selling, and haggling and cheating, and quarreling, and, above all, always above all, living together.

India is much more than a million mutinies now; it is a billion-plus narratives of itself, waiting to be told. Not just once upon a time, but once upon a future"...


India is all that and more to learn and experience

Alone in the Superunknown

Well, it's always been my nature to take chances

My right hand drawing back while my left hand advances
Where the current is strong and the monkey dances

Unmarked Helicopters

Ask the wind that blows
Which one will be the next to go?

I Will Follow You Into The Dark

In the evening
The horizon lights up
Swirls of pink and orange
Fading to blue and purple

There was really something very beautiful about this particular sunset over the Ganga in Varanasi.(where you normally tend to get golden or pale bronzed sunsets)

The title is inspired by a song by Death Cab to Cutie.. and specially in Varanasi having just seen the Burning Ghats it described my state of mind very aptly

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs

If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark