Why I write?

Many-a-times, random (habit picked from Kavi) people have asked me a very fundamental question: why do you write?

Most of the times, I squirm out without giving an answer. This blog is an attempt to answer that question.

I write because I vent my feelings.

I write because when I write, I realize.

I write because there is nothing that gives me more pleasure.

I write because I express my love.

I write because I love.

I write because I get hurt.

I write because I want to be published.

I write because I think some publisher somewhere will wake up to this unknown genius.

I write because it is what makes me a man.

I write because I do nothing else better.

I write because if it wasn’t for writing, I wouldn’t have survived my poetry, my loves.

I write because I can’t sleep.

I write because women love it.

I write because seeing me write someone somewhere may begin writing.

I write because I get to meet up with new people.

I write because now my brother writes too.

I write because I reach out.

I write because some day someone will say, “Thank you!”

I write because some day someone will say, “I want to be like you!”

I write because I have to come up the hard way.

I write because I love her.

I write because I dream.

I write because I don’t know which line of mine can inspire someone somewhere to lead a life anew, afresh.

I write to leave my legacy behind. And, nothing else matters. Nothing else makes my existence worth it.

Random rumbles

What is an achievement? Who decides what an achievement is? Teeing off 18 holes? 60 centuries? Stating Game Theory? Coming up with Impressionism? Writing poetry? Composing music? Making love?

Is an old man who wrote a life-changing poem after 50 years of pondering an achiever?

Have we ever created anything that will outlast us? Have we ever created anything that is beneficial to other animals? How big are we? How small?

In the whole scheme of things, the holistic viewpoint, we are a bunch of idiots who’ve managed to mess up the whole planet where we survive. Waiting now for the time bomb to tick.

What if tomorrow some asteroid collides with earth? Low probability, high risk event. Who will help? Who matters?

We’ve created enough nuclear power to take lives of those very creatures whose very lives we intrude. Whose lives we take for granted.

If you tell me that as Homo sapiens, we can only see from the human point-of-view, then I am sorry to say that we are mistaken.

For we, if we want, can see helicopter in a dragonfly, enlightenment in a butterfly, and God in a miner!

For if we manage to inspire a few fellowmen to a plane of peace, brotherhood, oneness, and truth, I think we’ve made it.

We are the only animals who can consciously empower, colonize, defeat, rule, decide, live, co-operate, aspire, dream, realize, kill, love, live, ridicule, mock, laugh, cry, enlighten, attain, devote, struggle, strive, achieve, devote, and write.

What is important in our small, short, mundane lives is the verb that we choose to keep for ourselves.

Life after Zen

I started the so-called serious reading in college. In our first year at college, way back in 1996, a dear friend of mine and I used to go to the library and request for vague books. Poetry collections, selected works of masters, and the like.

I still remember the bewildered looks on the faces of the librarians!

I started reading Ayn Rand’s works. Fell in love with Kira. Still in search for her. Identified with Hank Rearden. And my favorite book character still is Gail Wynand.

Ayn Rand writes with this fervour, as if she had fever while she wrote her works. She had my adrenalin pumping. Every para oozed self-esteem. I rebelled royally. Anti-establishment. Anti-order.

My parents were shocked out of their wits. They cursed Ayn Rand. I cursed them for being second-handers. For being parasites. For being evil.

I smirked and mocked at Zen. I vouched for reason. Nobody had ever come through the book and romanced me so much.

After I read Rand’s all works, I moved on. Now, I love Zen. Because Zen encompasses all. Even Ayn Rand.

Life has altered a lot after I adopted Zen as my way of life.

I forgive. I live. I let live. I hurt. I empower.

I evade cause and effect theory.

I am part of the Universe.

Part of every tree, and every being who suffers. With them I suffer too. From a distance. From parallel lives.

I look at the stars; I look at bees and ants. I see us.

I am just a cog in the wheel. But the cog in the wheel is important.

Miss you, Sajay

I had a friend. An awesome friend. You don’t find many like him anymore. But I have not heard from him for the last four years. We both moved on.

This blog is exclusively to him and our friendship, which still exists somewhere through all the maze of memories made after we last met.

Sajay, where are you? I have been through a lot after you vanished from my life.

I still remember:

• Listening to music at your house late in the night.
• Watching porn, and the Three Amigos.
• Bunking college and doing nothing worthwhile.
• Reading stuff that nobody else did.
• Participating the college quiz competitions and winning both the times! Beating those seniors was fun, wasn’t it?

I still remember your textbook used to be the Mid Day TV Guide!

I remember the two of us grading girls/women in college on a scale of 1 to 10…

Starting physics experiments backwards… Doing dry and wet tests in the chemistry lab and never for the life of us, realizing what the chemical finally was! Running to watch The Mask at Regal.

Most of all, I remember us standing in the queues to get our horrific HSC results, but still being mad for Pepsi… and remember, I went out and bought Pepsi for us… hahahahahah!!!

I want to know what you are up to now. How is Ambli? Is she married? Do you still have her painted face on your bathroom wall tiles?

Have you painted anything new? Is the nude woman you were painting for me complete now? Where are you working?

Man, I am in Chennai currently. Don’t know where I’ll be by the time you read this.

If you ever happen to read this blog, please get in touch with me. Leave a comment with your contact details.

I just want you to know that I am still there. Still the same, old friend of yours. I am sure you miss me the way I still miss your poems and paintings.

My painter girl

She was always a part of my recurring dreams. She was a fantasy. She was who I searched for. Longed for.

She wore a straw hat, to protect her from the sun whenever she painted outdoors, and a pair of rugged jeans. She held a canvas in her painted hands… and walked without a worry or care.

I saw her painting my dreams. She removed my arrows from the Tree of Sorrow.

She saw my poetry like I saw her painting. We never talked. We never had a debate. Not a single argument.

Now, we talk with our eyes; with our touch.

I believe we breathe in rhythm too.

Yesternight, on the beach, the moon whispered to the tide, the tide in turn to the breeze, and the breeze whispered those sweet nothings to us. As we, lying on the sands below, watched the stars above.

She showed me God. Then, she worships me.

On Manoj's blog

In the last five years that I have worked my ass out for others, I feel I have somewhere lost time for myself; my pursuits.

I have not found time for poetry. Words escaped my tongue. Forgot my lines before I found the pen. Not found time to learn the violin. Not found time to take up that course in photography.

I have cried well into late nights till I slept because the thought just crossed my mind and never came back. Because some great line just passed me by and I did not write.

Have always taken imaginary photos of places and people I have seen and always wished “wish I had a camera…”

Today, after seeing manoj’s blog, I saw a man who, like me, can do more than what he has done. He is 36. His pictures talk. I feel that he should not write about those pictures on his blog. They speak for themselves.

But when I met him, somehow, he is caught up in the daily game of survival. Making a living. Meeting him (such an unassuming man) scared me… I do not want to end up like him: waiting for sunshine.

I want to do what I love. What turns me on:

• Make love to her.
• Travel.
• Backpack.
• Meet new people.
• Visit new cultures.
• Soak in the rain.
• Trek old forts.
• Ride horses.
• Hitchhike on highways.
• Rest in kind people’s homes.
• Teach children in schools.
• Take her along with me.
• Make coffee in a Barista.
• Make coffee and love in my café.
• Write.
• Feel the creative urge just like Vincent did.

I hope I do. I just need her to be beside me.

Check out Manoj's blog.

The river

They say
We all end up in the ocean.

Do we?

On their way, some like the Brahmaputra
Lash their fury every passing year
Without a miss.

Some rivers make nations
As they shape their paths.

Some rivers dry up.
But is that the end of the journey?

The river exists everywhere:
In the mountains, in the hills, in the plains,
Combing through fertile fields, and
Lazying through plateaus.
And in the sea, all at the same time.

So isn’t it the same me everywhere?
My past, my future strung like beads in a string?

Am I not just like a river?
On a song?

Today… such a day

Today, another one stands

First.

Like I did.

Today, another one takes

His first step.

Today, another mad man

Knocks your door

For water.

Today, another life

Withers away.

Another way.

Today, another one

Feels lonely like me.

Today, life takes a

New turn.

Another leaf falls away

From my tree.

Today, another orphan is born.

Another made.

Today, another four-year-old goes

To school.

And cries.

Today, another me

Writes Today.

Like Yesterday.

Today, another bridge collapses.

Another crosses one.

Today, I plant a tree.

A thought.

Another plants a flag in the breeze.

The café

Today, we talked at length.

Sharing a hot cuppa of special chai

At Giriraj, Baner.

We talked about her new job

Her future in Mumbai.

How all her friends were happy

About her shifting to Mumbai.

Just four days more.

She will be gone then.

Good for me.

I guess, I am dying in the love that consumes.

I listened (am a much better listener now)

And she went on; me immersed in her.

How I loved this woman…

Boy, I knew I loved her.

If I had ever loved a woman…, I knew I loved her.

She knew it too.

I could sense sadness in her voice

I had never sensed in her before.

I knew I was going to let go. Again.

Like I had let go before,

Like I had let go of Shaheen and Soma.

I feel my love every night and day.

It always makes me smile.

This way, they last forever.

Immortalized in my verses I pen.

So much so that nostalgia will flow,

If I cut my veins.

Everyday I look back.

To every moment; now and here.

To how they all connect, weave, into a pattern

Only I can unfold, feel.

I love every moment I shared with her:

That special chai, the pain,

The hope, the cry,

Those scary, moonlit walks back home.

But most of all, I love reminiscing:

The dinners at her place.

Love, I still remember

You lying on the bed

Waiting for my touch.

And, touch I did.

For, who could resist such a sleeping beauty?

My soft breath on your neck, then, down to your fingers, and back up to your lips

While my fingers softly caressed your back.

And you moaned.

I close my eyes and I can still feel it:

Your closed eyes; your soft breath on my lips.

The day we almost kissed.

Do I regret not kissing you?

No, I don’t.

Because I know, we will.

Some day, when we will walk hand-in-hand

Towards the rainbow

We both dream of – the café.

When we will make coffee and love in our café.

When we leave a legacy behind…

The fence of life

I sit on the fence (sometimes, for years together)

Deciding the side to get down…

The good and the bad…

Call me on…

I sit wondering why life is shit,

Why shit happens,

Why it happens to me at all

All, everyday, every fucking day?

Debts, bills, buried loves…

All haunt me on the fence.

I still sit;

Not getting down.

Now, typing this on a PC

In some God-forsaken office,

I wonder

Did I really earn this all?

Then, I, finally, meet the one…

Who can redeem me…

Get me back on track.

Make me jump off the fence

Forever.

She too is on the fence, herself.

Am I blessed or cursed

To love her?

So then, do I live on…

On the fence of life?

Waiting?

Can I?

For how long?

The blind flautist

At the Andheri railway station, during odd hours of the day, you can hear a melodious flute rendering sounds you stop to listen to. For a moment, it doesn’t matter whether you are on your way to college, school, work, or just hanging out. Whether you love music or you don’t.

Your ears strain in the direction of music, which flows steadily. Every note measured. Every note exhaled and inhaled with practiced ease. You follow your ears to where the old Hindi films’ music emanates from.

You come across this grand, old, blind flautist. He sits on a metal, folding-chair, and plays the flute with grace. I feel that he feels he holds a world class audience in sway. Everyday he hopes for the trains to run late.

Some days you just pass him by because you don’t have the time to stand and stare; in this case, you have no time to stand, hear, wonder, and ponder.

But, he plays on. For money, for daily bread, or for passing time. Or maybe for love of music. Maybe his children threw him out of the house. Maybe his wife died and he plays for her. Maybe he is a fallen angel. Maybe he is a poor, reborn, New Age Krishna.

Maybe, he is a hopelost, rejected musician. He never talks.

Or, maybe, playing the flute is the only way he can convey what he feels inside. What his heart has to say about life in the city of dirt, dust, and grime.

The city where nobody loves nobody. Where each passerby is waiting for his or her own train. Where missing a train can be a life-altering event. Where life is a series of catching a certain train, so that, you can catch a certain bus and so on and so forth.

All he gets in return for hours of his free-for-all, lung-wrenching music is four or five ten-rupee notes, if lucky, and a few coins which were too heavy for somebody to carry around in a pocket.

Vincent van Gogh

"And my aim in my life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!'" – Vincent van Gogh.

'Let them prattle on about technique as much as they like in their pharisaic, hollow, hypocritical terms -- true painters are guided by the consciousness known as sentiment. Their souls, their minds are not there for the brush, the brush is there for their minds' – Vincent van Gogh.

His overriding aim was to express the human spirit.

"[His letters] enable us to know more about Van Gogh's life and mentality than we do of any other artist. The letters form a running commentary on his work, and a human document without parallel." - Dr. Jan Hulsker, one of the world's foremost authorities on the letters of Vincent van Gogh.

That head of his has been occupied with contemporary society's insoluble problems for so long, and he is still battling on with his good-heartedness and boundless energy. His efforts have not been in vain, but he will probably not live to see them come to fruition, for by the time people understand what he is saying in his paintings it will be too late. He is one of the most advanced painters and it is difficult to understand him, even for me who knows him so intimately. His ideas cover so much ground, examining what is humane and how one should look at the world, that one must first free oneself from anything remotely linked to convention to understand what he was trying to say, but I am sure he will be understood later on. It is just hard to say when. - Theo van Gogh to Jo Paris, 9-10 February 1889.

How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone. - Vincent van Gogh to Theo Laeken, 15 November 1878.

More gyan on Vincent

Seek, suffer, and soar

Every once in a while, life calls and puts you on a threshold of greatness. It shows a door and a question mark. You have to leave back every promise, every love you’ve ever had, to pass through that door. Greatness beckons you but at a cost.

You have to hurt the very people whom you loved the most. You may have to go back on promises made without foresight. You may have to relook and redefine your self and what is natural.

There is no light. There is no way. And it’s a jungle out there.

Most of the time, it is us, poets and authors, who take the first step, the first leap. It has to be us to experiment, to experience so that others stay free. Stay out of mess. Stay stable and mundane.

Life calls on us to the pedestal and expects us to fall from glory. Rebel against societal norms and sacrifice our very souls so that we light the path for the next generation that seeks the sea; their final frontiers.

And, yes, we willingly light their paths like fireflies in the dark meadows and sometimes, one of us gives so much experimenting with truths that that one becomes a lighthouse.

A lighthouse that beams out light but has no light within anymore. Us, poets and authors, lose parts of ourselves trying to attain that state. In the process, we are shunned by all till we illuminate and save a few lives here and there. Till we show the shores to the sailors lost and the sea to the adventurous men.

I am being beckoned right now. I have to decide whether to be a lighthouse or a flickering firefly tossed in the wind. I want to be a lighthouse; always wanted to be one. And so be it.

Light travels in the form of waves, they say. No mere coincidence, this is I think.

All the while, while I write this at this time of the night, a man carries a heavy sack of food grains on his shoulders, he bent forward so much so that his spine will one ay crack, to the godown from a truck.

Churning

As I stood listening to the random sounds coming from the TVs of other people’s houses, looking out of my window, beyond the safe grills, I wonder what more exists out there.

I spend sleepless nights wondering why greatness is thrust upon me. When life throws up some certain questions and I don’t know why certain people appear in my life the time they appear.

I have no answers. No advice is valid, reasonable, satisfactory, or enough. And I lead dual lives. I am so afraid that I want life to start anew, afresh. I want to go back and unwind myself along with the clock. The idiot keeps ticking. There is nothing more I hate than self-contented people.

I am afraid of people knowing. Afraid of people not supporting me. Not understanding me. When my own brother doesn’t know what to say; I know he’s never been there where I have been. Why do I love so much so many times?

The answer; I cannot just shrug it off. I cannot leave it for the future. There are people who expect from me. Things that I don’t want to deliver now. My guts are missing. All my theories are buried. And I don’t practice what I preach.

All my life I’ve hated this; the indecisive moment’s decisions. It has caused me a lot of suffering and to others a lot of pain. I write; they can’t even do that.

God will forgive me my sins. I know I committed them knowingly. Help me forgive myself every morning when I see the mirror.

Yet, I choose to walk the path of fire, play the game of dice with god. And the biggest trouble is when I win and god loses sometimes.

For this time, I’ve won. I feel lonely, cold, afraid, insane, peaceless, and churning inside.

Papers in the Wind

You came into my life
Like a fresh breeze from the
Cool, blue mountains on the horizon.

Like a fav tune I’d heard
While passing by a friend’s house
And forgotten.

Like the aroma of coffee at every Barista
I have ever been to.

Like jazz filled my lungs
When I began listening to Miles Davis
After Kenny G.

Like a little girl, holding flowers,
In a rustic countryside
When you zoom past on a bike.

Like the spectacular, life-altering shooting star
We all experience once in a lifetime.

Like bright light to a moth
Burning with love
That consumes itself.

You stormed into my life
And now my body, mind, and soul
Are flying like papers in the wind.

This time…

This time…
The love has gone far inside.
This time…
It has cut me deep.
This time…
It does not wound but heals.
This time…
When love happened,
The jungle bird forgot to sing.
This time…
When I went to the rose, it cried.

This time…
I do not want peace.
This time…
I want no rest.
This time…
I want to be hers. And hers alone.

This time…
I fear nothing.

This time…
I am reading less and loving more.
This time…
There are no poems to flow.
This time…
Love has scored the goal.

This time…
Baby, I wanna love you so much.
So much…
That my love hurts.

This time…
I think, I hope Is the last time.

An essay on enlightenment

I, as an enlightened Master, can tell you that some of my greatest enlightenments have occurred while having sex.

Let's call it communion. That is the better word for it.

No, I don’t feel pompous after using the word enlightenment. You too won't after enlightenment. Enlightenment is what you are. It is the beginning. It is in the mind. Of everything.

Enlightenment is like remembering something which you had at the tip of your tongue and couldn't remember for a long time. It is like insight. It is like being One with all and oneself. When the divisibility between 'me' and 'them' disappears. Like I say and feel you and me are ONE. We are the same. Experiencing Godliness. It is Love. It is all there is.

That's a beginning of realization, not complete enlightenment. I'm not trying to offend you here. It's just that I see spiritually inclined people misuse the word enlightenment very frequently. There are several truths in the world that are within the grasp of common human knowledge.

Unfortunately, most of us spend our capacities in repetitive tasks that are portrayed as essential to us. Perceiving that portrayal to be ultimately true, we let actual reality evade us. It's nice if you feel enlightened. But don't feel satisfied and stop right there; dig deeper. You have no idea where this rabbit hole ends.

What if I tell you that there is no rabbit hole? That I am here at the opening of the hole, at every point in the hole, and at the exit of the hole all at the same time (using it for easy understanding). That the rabbit hole was never there. It was all a trick.

You will realize one day... or night… that there is no day or night… it is all in your mind. Like directions don’t exist.

I would say that the river exists in the mountains, in the plains, and in the clouds, all at the same time. Yet, people think that the river is dying to meet the sea. That the sea is the end, the rabbit hole, the unending, the emptiness, the beginning, and the end of it all…

I beg to differ from this point-of-view. That is all I am saying.