In Between Oct 16 2009

Of all that is in between
and all that is outside
there is something that belongs
to neither/nor
in which there's nothing at all

As transience seeps
back through hot sand
and removes all traces
of that which was

what matters is what's lost
what is there is not all
a single echo - For? For?

And time witnesses
patiently, as we fill it up again

while lighting a candle and blowing out

An Inverted Reality

When laughter dies an early death, what remains is a menacing silence. But, a picture makes no sound.

Watching the City of Photos, I have begun to see the camera as a box full of contradictions. It is said that it offers possibilities, but I think it offers equal possibilities to those in the frame and to the eye behind the artificially enhanced lens. I almost wonder; woudn’t the city also want a place, in a silent frame, that hides all the noise and reveals only its ageing landscape; as it bears the brunt of its civilization waiting to be lost in an outdated digital frame. Perhaps that’s what the director intended to say when she exclaims- “it’s as if the city never existed except in these frames”

When I raise these questions I am overcome by a feeling similar to that of early photographers who captured light in a box time and again, knowing that it won’t last.

What are we to decipher from an image that speaks of both a dream in the backdrop; and a barefoot reality staring right into the flash of light? Is this contrast funny? Or, is it sad? Is it a philosophical question or an answer to a pair of dying eyes that found immortality only after death?

As the camera whirrs into life, what we capture is an inverted image that forms inside it. It is beauty in it ugliest form. We laugh as we can’t relate to the fact of a skinny, more rib than muscle-show, twenty something young man, evidently on drugs, posing like Hrithik Roshan [or was it Salman Khan]; waiting to be captured in a frame that offers spotlight even if it is for a fraction of a second. And to stop that laughter we need a photograph of famine victims, huddled like a family, looking ridiculous with a colourful backdrop of a majestic tomb of desire, to take us to the gravity of this ostracizing reality? Could we not see the striking similarity between the hungry ribcages of eyes that searched for food and others that sought identity? After compiling lives full of chaos in an orderly fashion, in beautiful luxurious albums, have we failed to notice that while some choose to get clicked for a different life in the frame; others have stopped living outside the frame?

Maybe we assume ourselves to be the inverted reality of an image that is being formed elsewhere, waiting to be developed, while we wait to be washed out like a negative.

*

to fill up


a completely blank sheet of paper
is not just a great temptation
but a task
that once undertaken cannot be undone

the ink cannot stain the paper
as it stains your fingers

it is confusing to decide
whether to do justice to the sacrifice of the tree
or to the words that emerge on the shore of my mind

like those shells on the sea
that are precious only when found

not only is it dissatisfying
to reach the end of the completely blank sheet of paper
[that was]

it is unnerving to realise
that the bullet you thought you'll shoot
had decided to make the pistol itself its tomb

it is then you face the necessity of a
full stop
a comma
a semi colon
or a run on

Letter to a beloved

I write because of an inability to write, to express what I feel for the very fear of not feeling it once I write. This state of irony has made me numb. Not to others only but even myself. My beauty has eluded me. In fact I sometimes feel so old I can hardly recognize myself. It is as if I have caught rust-the rust of routine as Marquez would have said.

Yes, I know I write in the past, but the present has become a thing of the past too. Too many times I find myself doing things I did earlier and swore not to repeat. I keep on finding solutions and yet don’t have any. Side effects of a love withering I guess. It makes me wither too. I see it raining outside but all I feel is a sense of incompleteness. Nostalgia fills you up. But, what I have is not nostalgia. It is future, Emptiness in my future. My lost rhyme of future intrudes my present and my past. Loving for me has become so alien now. I used to make a big deal out of it.

Now, I am caught in the web of my own fancies. But, the mirror is cracked already yet I cannot see beyond my reflections. I have climbed down from the tower. I board the boat to the other side. I don’t drown but neither do I reach the other side. The boat moves round and round and round. It doesn’t sink. And that is why I sit to write knowing that no one can ever read this.

[Borrowed originality]

If [Borrowed originality]

If I could know everything
And know I’ll forget it all

If I knew what it is to be young
And also how to grow old

If I could surge like a river
And look as calm as the sea

If I could be everybody
And know whom to call ‘me’

If I knew an answer
And could still question me

If I knew what the end is
And could still leave this incomplete...

The memento of time

The memento of time

Behind the thump of reverberating beats,
Drumming the mind,
Behind the throbbing ecstasy,
Sighing in naked thighs,
Behind charismatic words,
Hiding lies,
Behind the blinding speed,
Caught in wheels of light,

There is God, there is religion,
There is love, there is sacrifice,
There is darkness, there is light,

As time becomes a beautifully ugly rhyme
The background music of an interlude
A succumbing numbness
Making
Everything defined

360 days forgotten in a single second

An incomplete nothingness
A philosopher’s careless lie



An ‘I’ for an ‘I’
Making the whole world blind.