Deewane

Uh-oh! July 28, 2009

I just realized that I have spent more years doing something in which I have no desire to succeed than doing something I love because I am afraid of failing.

Sharabi July 27, 2009

Humiliation = Lying in a pool of your own vomit, in a tub, with your pants around your ankles while somebody tries to clean you up and the brother is scrubbing away the bathroom floor.

Mortification = Realizing the next morning that your legs weren’t even shaved.

Promise = Never Again!

. July 27, 2009

Original, myth.

Questions and Fear July 13, 2009

It surged in me like hot foaming milk which boils over the pan and sears on the burner. Gasping for breath I just tried to focus.

Avoiding reality is my speciality! But unfortunately for me avoidance always has a timeline, when you are answerable to others there’s only so long that you can look the other way and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. The parallel universe that I spend most of my time in, though is very relaxing and peaceful, isn’t helpful. It only creates a flimsy wall between me and everything that’s going wrong in my life. But I snap out of it from time to time to break out in cold-sweat and reconvince myself to go back to my world of butterflies and chocolat trees. I realize that may be many people create a haven for themselves which is either palpable or completely imaginary. A safe place where nothing and no one can touch them. May be it’s even healthy to regress to some degree within these nooks of ours. Key phrase being “to a degree” and may be that’s what I lose sight of.

The fear that gripped my throat felt so solid. It sounded melodramatic to even me but also so very accurate!

What do I do to not lose my way to reality again? How do I cease the existance of my second life? The one that’s only in my head? The one that’s as far away from reality as the human race is to finding out the size of the universe? How do I justify my stupidities and why should I care when I know that I am not the first or the last? How do I stop mixing the true with The Truth? How do I know what’s my reality?

What is my reality?

Should I care with a passion about what “others” think? I know it doesn’t matter, most learned AND pseudo-intellectuals will tell you that that’s not what life is about. But will they also snigger if I were to spend the rest of my life in a hole, uncomfortable may be, but happy…may be? What do I do tomorrow? Listen to whom and not run away somewhere why?

Can I? Just disappear? Somewhere?

Time to snap out of it and deal with my other world. Yes that’s what I’ll call it. Not my real or unreal lives but my two worlds. That way atleast one of my world’s is always worry free! And I can work towards making the other one peaceful as well.

I saw for what it really was. Just me. Every other thing remained unchanged. But me. And I can control me. I can control only me!

P.S. It might seem a little bizzare, and since I am not going to read it a second or a third time like usual, then may be also a little random. But there’s something going on/wrong in my life that I could definitely do without, but then again no one said life is going to be smooth (and I, apparently, didn’t learn very well how to deal with the bumps). All I can hope for is that I have strength enough to deal with all the crap which could for sure veer me off course from whatever I thought my plan was. I just want to remain calm and believe that whatever the outcome, my epitaph should never say “She was here, meh!”

ID! July 4, 2009

Happy fourth of July!

P.S. Yes, this is a sub. The real deal will be up ASAP 🙂

Another Vitamin and something about films! July 3, 2009

I swear I am not being paid to promote them (not that I am averse to the idea but if I were then it would be a really REALLY bad PR decision on their part since this blog is read by all of 7 people :P!). But do listen to this,

Now is it good or is it good?

Such a happy tune, just brings an instant smile on my face and fills my head with images of sun-shine, green grass and pretty flowers, and makes me want to hop, skip and jump everywhere. And if it hadn’t been raining for the past 1,748 hours straight, I would have done exactly that (No seriously, though I am not a big summer fan, thanks to the trauma caused by the heat-waves of Delhi but still wouldn’t mind if the mercury were to rise above the 70 degree mark and the sky cleared up once in a while).

So while I wait for the sun to bestow us poor east-coasters (coasters? eh makes us sound like… what else? coasters! The type that you use under coffee cups to keep surfaces ring-free “thank you for the solid description deewane” You are welcome dear reader :P), so anyway back to the point, while I wait for the sun, I will wallow in the general joi de vivre effected by the Music.

Have any of you seen What’s eating Gilbert Grape? Watched it last night (yes, after I had promised that will go to bed for my 8-hours and return all fresh-minded to write about something important, what can I say? I am fickle! *hangs head in shame*, so if you have seen the film did you happen to find Depp’s character achingly and frighteningly honest? Not in the movie I mean, but whoever created that character, to say that he did a great job, would almost be an insult. I think it’s just so difficult to chalk up anyone, any person at all, to strip away the fantasy and to put on paper and especially portray in 2 short hours the, for want of a better word, human-ness of being.

Not many people around me share my love of obscure movies. For most those are not high impact and lack a definite (and hence satisfying) ending. They are never particularly happy and filled with few but witty words and alarmingly “average” characters, who seem to possess no great talent or intelligence but just a yearning for something and may infact be just a little crazy. My brother usually comes away grumbling if I do make him watch any such movie (but boy if you were to read anything he writes (http://eastmancolour.blogspot.com/) you’d think all those would be right up his alley). But, for me, I think it’s not about the story, it’s the people in it, the whole aura of that time and that situation, of being a little mad, of being aware of your madness, of being surprised by yourself, and life. I know I made a transgression from talking about film to talking about self. But may be that’s why I like these films after all. It’s just comforting to know that not everyone has it figured out, not everything “ends” (doesn’t matter whether it ends well or badly), not everything has a message or a meaning or supposed to make you do a 180 degree turn. Sometimes stuff just happens and it fascinates you and frightens you, disgusts you and that’s all and that’s life. Even if, ironically enough, you get to see that only on screen.

I think you can live life through these films, it may sound silly but the sense of freedom that envelopes you as you become one of the character watching the others in real time instead of on screen is indescribable. And “boring” films like these offer the most realistic and achievable existence, with the added advantage of being fictionalized and as a result a more idealized version of life. Ofcourse, it depends on what your definition of ideal is! And since most of us do spend our lives within the confines of society and follow certain pre-set rules, the depiction in these films, surprisingly, seems most unrealistic of all. We have managed to make something as natural as life itself a tedious journey where chunks of it are already chalked out for us and more or less everybody follows the same pattern. This absolutely baffles me since humans have done all in their power to dissociate themselves from all other creatures of the earth but have ended up living as instinctually as them! The truth is that if we were to interpret our lives on a graph with respect to the Universe then it wouldn’t even amount to a minuscule dot! But in that nothingness we have to try and find something. Why? I don’t know. And either we, as a race, have never completely understood or have somewhere lost what we are supposed to be looking for.

O.k. I think since I have been able to put my point across as well as a half eaten earth worm and have most inconveniently veered off from the topic at hand to talk all zen, I’d rather let the films speak for themselves. If you haven’t already been put completely off my kind of cinema then do check out Harold and Maude, Benny and joon, What’s eating Gilbert Grape, Muriel’s wedding, Freaks, Hazaaron khwaishein aisi, The Darjeeling limited, Salaam Bombay, The Little Terrorist, Grey gardens (the documentary), The Reader and In which Annie gives it those ones. These should manage to keep you marveled and frustrated about being a human long enough. Any other recommendation/s are gratefully welcome.

P.S. In the spirit of all things bizarre I will quote something from Henry David Thoreau (from Walden), it’s quite a famous quote, or atleast the commercialized version of it is, what it being in the ‘Dead Poet’s society’ and all, but in it’s entirety the words have an urgency and rawness that Thoreau could not have been clearer about. And I call it bizarre because at first glance and casual reading the whole thing seems intimidating but it simply is not!

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

BREAKING NEWS (or how the eff do I change the font color to a bright red?)? July 2, 2009

Tweet from CNN (and may be the first time twitter seems not completely useless!)

An Indian court on thursday (i.e. today) has ruled that “consensual sex between adults of the same gender is legal in the country”

http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/02/indian-court-gay-sex-is-legal/

Needless to say this is a great victory for the LGBT community in India. There’s a shitload more that I want to write. But since it’s 4:00 in the morning and I have already churned out one post, half-drafted another and totally OD’d on the Vitamin string quartet, may be it’s better that I get some sleep first so I can have atleast one coherent thought! (By all the claims that I am making you’d assume that I should post more often, but trust me, the matter that doesn’t make it’s way here is even more garbage and my continuing tribute to crap-writing)

Do look out for a ton more addendums.

Vitamin! July 2, 2009

I have been living under a rock!

How else do I explain my never even knowing about this, considering that Nirvana had the privilege of being the first band of which I bought an album with my hard-earned (o.k. hard-saved pocket) money and that the music of violinists with unpronounceable names (mostly of baroque era) are something of a guilty pleasure, of which not many people know?

I think it’s absolutely divine and was hooked as soon as I opened Christian Lacroix webpage. Oh, that’s how I stumbled on to this beauty, while lusting after a chiffon dress (it was this simple, gauzy creation with pencil-thin horizontal stripes in the softest red color you could imagine), exorbitantly priced, which I will never ever buy, but will still drool after like Pavlov’s dog, that’s what I wanted to check out and this started playing. I had to find out who this was by and search for a free downloadable mp3 somewhere (hey I may drop designer names like an heiress but I still am very cheap :P). This is Vitamin string quartet, comprised of, and quoting wikipedia here ” a rotating collective of Los Angeles musicians widely known for its tributes to cutting-edge rock acts”.

And as I blast this, full volume, at 1:17 AM (don’t panic, I have headphones on, something I have been doing since I was 14 (i.e. listening to music before going to bed), a habit which will definitely render me deaf in another 5 years) I am totally inspired to take up the violin!

Happy listening!

Edit: Also check out their tribute to Guns ‘n’ Roses’s November rain. One word- N-I-C-E!