Remember?

Freedom is a word I rarely utter without thinking of her…..

It’s almost one of those clichéd little stories you come across every now and then. A story about me and my loss of liberty, a story about me and your loss of liberty, a story about you and my loss of liberty, a story about us and our loss of liberty.

The piper at the gate of dawn shrieks like a banshee, out of some infamous folklore. You took away my flute, just as someone had taken away yours. We both now live inside the rusty cage of golden inhibitions. Amiable, ain’t it? Only if we could play our flutes like we did before….

All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.

A methodological take on the Slumdog movie

Any form of art is an expression of subterranean human effort. You may not feel the rigour while observing it and yet it is there, almost like a tribute to the tremendous power of the human mind. However one might try to conceal the effort, it shows. Art and its aesthetic appeal always suffer from the danger of foppery. This is precisely why the tale of a slumdog fails to reach the benchmark of mediocrity, even when it promises to tie a knot between surreal drama and an otherwise biting reality.

Mediocre cinema we grew up with. It is not of that realm. Strangely enough, it is not from the top drawer either. It tried to take the middle road, one of the most interesting vistas of India explored by stalwarts like Tapan Sinha, Basu Bhattacharya, Gulzar and others. In taking that path, it fails to keep up the rhythm of storytelling and confuses between the genre of real fantasy and fantastic reality. While it uses up the glitz of Bollywood to tone up the movie, in trying to adjust the shades it forgets to make a salutary notation to the touch of entertainment. Moreover, it never tries to humanise poverty to get rid of its grotesque Bollywoodness. No matter how unique the selling point has become, because of this dichotomy, or because how this dichotomy provokes the unique selling point of the movie, the poverty-porn tag is going to haunt it for quite sometime.

Let's talk about the last kiss [of course, it’s the first one too] with an ear-splitting background score. Even within the probable boundaries of magic reality, the kiss looks mawkish. The genre of magic reality transcends the boundary of its own probabilistic domain because of this mawkish outcry of directorial emotion, and the last kiss turned into the act of last rite for the movie itself. It became a hotchpotch of so many stylistic attempts at one go. Apart from some non-profit-organisation-boardroom-humour and cheap imitations of shanty-town-dialect [In Hindi of course; they usually speak idiomatic English, with ridiculous accents, bless magic reality!!!], this movie fails to touch the tip of real possibility.

It is only a concoction of confused genres.

Being or Nothingness?

We have another new year. Another set of days and nights, straight and flat. We have enough sunshine to bask ourselves in cozily. We are supposed to be free. Freedom is said to be our birth-right. It’s fine to be alive, as Tolstoy had said in one of his less pious efforts.

Assuming, we are free to do anything and everything, or that we live under the aegis of absolute freedom, a sudden glitch cracks under the surface. True to the concept of absolute freedom, a unit of mankind clashes with the whole of it. Other people, even your most loved ones use their sense of freedom, to make you captive of it. Of course, some of them want to limit you with open adversity, and the order of oppression takes the form of a primeval war.

The trouble begins amicably. Humane emotions, and their apparent expressions, may deceive you into the abyss of captivity. Remember, Roger Waters whining out his soul to one of Pink Floyd’s rare acoustic ballads? Yes, love and affection can make you feel giddy one moment, and at the very next it’s possible to find yourself into the intrigue yet again with frayed sense of liberty. The beautiful vision of a flaming horizon may actually be the glossiest cover for a blue void. Freedom, the ever-unbalanced coin of human existence, has its other side painted in bleak uncertainty. It may well have been a philosophical stunt!

There’s something in the logic, we all know and simultaneously deny. So it seems that the beautiful world that lies before us like a land of dreams is actually the cactus land of biblical prophecy. What is there to embrace then, what is the meaning of the absurd? I wonder. And I wonder.

Perhaps the absurd is just the part and parcel of our being. There is no escaping from it. There never was. We try to bamboozle ourselves with lovely illusions. Matthew Arnold, that stiff-collared poet, pleaded his love to remain true. That was his idea of salvation, his way of hankering after a diversion from the absurd. And, yet, even after taking the probable pitfalls of this ancient approach within the reach of our wisdom, we just cannot rule out sincerity, its resident ghost. True, there might not be any objective meaning of life, and that truth twists between war and peace like some reeling hallucination. Still there is something that may help us to familiarise the absurd as a part of ourselves. If love becomes one man’s idea of fighting the abstraction of his existence, it might not turn into a feasible notion, but it certainly can be a personal creed for the ultimate celebration of the trivial!

And it might become one’s incentive to live on, and counter the flummoxed reality. Soft now, here comes fair Ophelia, and objectivity be damned. The solution lies within the choice-basket of a set of alternative vectors. We are what we choose to be most of the time.

Ask Mrs Rowling for the rest of it.

Me.Myself.

A tin-full of sardines, gloriously dead, are all. Lifelessness remains a passive corollary to living.
The opium-eater doesn't know what to confess anymore.

That’s about it, I’m afraid.

Just.So.

One or two pieces of a lonely universe
That is all for tonight.
A little stroll perhaps, along the woods
Mine is the kingdom.
Pitch black nights, burnt matchsticks
And a sudden flicker.

Much less is known than not
Like her stare into the rain outside.

Cryptic

Let’s not talk of love or chain, and things we can’t untie. The eyes, they do get soft with sorrow. And, yet, there is a kind of anticipation in the air. I have lost my years almost casually, and you know, just before that awkward moment, I have not had any regret for being myself!

It’s Christmas. The moss-stained and glum stones of Park Street cemetery get greeted by a gust of foreign wind. Do the dead have their country? Or, slightly twisting the words of a self-searching Irishman, must we say, “There’s no country for dead men”! The queer implication of identity, related to a certain domain, has always been an enigma for us, the living often share their problems with the men under their feet. Even when the wired sense of identity transmits itself into reality, the cracked looking-glass is fairly visible inside the fervour of symmetry. So much for the Lord, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

I will not look for another as I wander in my time, walk me to a corner, and we will hunt down the secrets of this life, and may be of this death. Together.

shawkol madhuri lukaaye jaay...

A moment of awkward silence. It’s in page two-forty-eight, damn!—I happen to know it by heart. Just turn over the page. Yes, there it is, sitting pretty amid the yellowish nothingness.
The never-have-beens often take a break from their rustiness to listen to the bluesy notes of what could have been. And, a minor note from nowhere vibrates inside the memory, even when we sweet-talk the beast into its den.
I have lost the ribbons I had saved for someone.

No Coward Soul is MIne?

More than Mira Nair movies, military salutes and extremism, what captures my imagination is a wounded pigeon, just outside the Hotel Taj. Unknowingly, it has become the symbol of survival. I felt like puking everytime the news channels flashed their oh-so-exclusive news coverages.

I'm afraid. And, sad. I want to get away from it all. Compulsively.

November Rain

Behold, I will do something new and it will spring forth. Will you not be aware of it?

The perception of not being in the thick of things is wearisome. I am all confused, canned, and a little drowsy. The girl who used to sing the blues has glided smiles away from the springs of despair.

Janis Joplin, they say, took to weed. She lost her way into the woods.

We do not have a song of experience yet. And we have lost the song of innocence.

Love, levity and leftovers

Like dark chocolate and half-hearted conquests it tasted wonderful. There was something impudent in the air, something that you might even call bad grace. Bad grace—but grace it was that darkened the purest light and cast long shadows. You knew you were in the presence of something other-wordly, something that resembles the crude elegance of the lost violent racks waning away to the contempt of the Augustan order. A faint flicker, of hope, or of its desperate memory, illuminated the shreds of survival, if only for a moment. The queue of nameless faces, sun-baked and rain-soaked, put their bets on the impossibility of a madcap moment. They believed in the unreal, and, for once in the history of make-believe, the man was the moment. Nothing can mend the broken tapestry of a collective dream. And yet, the man put his life on the line for the impossible. He made the prodigal to pine for his home by taking on the red cherry and the stubborn willow. He led the pack without looking at the existential riddles lurking around every corner, without flinching, without even a crease of thought on his forehead. Scarred, battered, and badly bruised, he held aloft the laurel of the victor. It was cruel, excruciatingly painful, and most certainly devoid of the benevolence preached in the gospels. We only cheered, and feared, and trembled at the celebration of pagan dregs within our puritanical bastions.

Gangles was fun. He was mayhem and alas!—he was merriment.
The ghost of a disconsolate fancy shall always pass our mind in long-drawn afternoons, reserved, otherwise, for serene contemplations. And the ghost will never rest in peace.

That instant of supreme awkwardness shall always be Sourav Ganguly's obelisk, standing tall, within the holy grounds of Wilfred Rhodes and Emmott Robinson.