Category Archives: bark!

The one that got away

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in attempted muse, bark!

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People say that it will get better. People say that things will change. They promise a lot. They paint a rosy picture in your head.

They lie.

You can do it, you can have the empire, without realizing that it is of dirt. You can play with it for a while, make a palace out of sand. And when rain comes, watch it crumble, try to save it knowing that there is nothing you can do.

You can also remember all the moments you were a split second late, the decisions you took too long to take, the memories you couldn’t make. Nothing blows as a candle in the wind. Nothing stays like an amorphous anathema. When your victories are your own, why does it become so hard to accept defeat as your own wayward child- which you nurtured but somewhere, something went wrong?

What is it that makes you afraid? What is it that you’re haunted of? Are you so afraid of rejection that you have accepted it, getting along with your life like it matters not? For how long do you think that you can carry on this charade?

You cannot ever find the time to do all the nothing that you want. Go watch a movie, go listen to a song, sing a melody, try to be happy. Try to discover the heart that seems lost. Indulge it, again. Be prepared to get it broken. If it does, and in all probability, it will, start afresh.
Fall in love. Anything will do. As long as it serves an inspiration to the fear that it will go away, keeping you on your toes, alert, for the storms to come.

It will get better. Things, they will change. I promise you. Do cry, but when the tears dry, come to your senses, over the one that got away.

silence of echoes

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in bark!, jinxed rhymes

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ME?

i am the silent voice that haunts,
i am the sacred silence that daunts.

i am the the chill you feel,
i am the disease that makes you weak.

i am the failure you encounter,
i am the architect of your disasters.

i am the love you lost,
i am the kindle of your past.

i am the ghost that makes you afraid,
i am the fear that twists your brains.

i am the reason you never succeed,
i am the island you can never reach.

i am the pain you always feel,
i am the horror of your screams.

ME?
i am what resides inside you,
i am you,
your guilty conscience.

trying understanding the understood

15 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in bark!, borrowed bark

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We are the product of our desires and the manifestation of a never ending list of needs. The needs are implanted in our minds through advertisements and billboards, but in this life of constant running, do we really care as long as we get a hint of smile across our lips?
Everything blows. In the past, it all took a little longer, the Romans prolonged it for a long time, so did Greece, and we call it culture. Little do we understand that history is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That’s why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices. The only difference is, in the current frame of things, the façade lasts all too shorter than it used to.
We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight. We live in an environment where beggars run for hours to get a morsel and dogs sleep with their stomach full. We see it all, we experience it all. And we move along saying that it is a materialistic world. Great stuff, that, but who is going to take the responsibility to clean it. The streets are dirtier than never before. And when every day I am promised that the dawn is coming, I get afraid. For I cannot see it.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and there is a shine from where you stumble, but does anyone knows how long the tunnel stretches. I ask how many of us are willing to walk through without knowing what’s inside it? Without given the assurance that everything’s gonna be alright. Without given the insurance of a cover if something turns wrong.
What I am talking of here is a very simple thing. But you have to be a genius to understand its simplicity. I am not ranting of anarchy or disorder, I leave that to The Joker, but of looking beyond, breaking the shackles, breaking away for a while, just to experience a very basic thing, to finger ‘living’. What we have become an expert in is that we keep lecturing birds on how to fly. We watch them fly. And then we take credit for it.
There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want. Calvin said it. And the boy defines excellence. Can we again become the kid he is. Can we again be worried about a spaceship in another time dimension than getting sweaty about completing an assignment? Can we be again frightened about the monsters under our bed against crying out loud for a project completion deadline? Can we experience night and day, day and night, like we used to, in a different time, in an altogether different life.
And well, day and night are linked in a way that few things are; there cannot be one without the other, yet they cannot exist at the same time. They are happiness and sadness at the same time. The basis of you existence are determined by them. You yearn for one, are scared of the other. And the true worth of despair can only be understood when you are given the lure of hope. You realize that the joke was on you. All along.

P.S: I have taken some quotes from Lennon and Bill Watterson. They are integrated in here, like the wind to the seas.

Harbor

11 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in bark!, jinxed rhymes

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Dream

I dreamt a dream last night,
It reminded me of you.
I was happy as one could be,
Till I woke up without you.

It wasn’t possible,
I pondered for a while.
You were lying in here with me a moment earlier.
Now it’s me,
And my shallow insides.

Then I thought a little more,
Of what was it that brought me smile.
The dream is a reflection of the subconscious after all,
Was there a hope of something good rotting in the deep contours of my mind?

Does one really have time for happiness?
Does one really care if it’s the day or the night?
We have become so engaged in our own pile of crap,
Slumbering on a couch networking online is living life king size !

Whatever happened to the simple joys of life,
Whatever happened to having fun without being high.
I am trying to discover, to dare find a balance,
Till then, I will remember you my friend,
Who visited me one fine night,
And left without that cursed goodbye.

Of Why India is Resigned to Mediocrity

24 Thursday May 2012

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When India attained its independence, not many gave it even a twenty percent chance of retaining a successful democracy for long. Even fewer believed that the nation of this size could hold up and not break down into fragments drawn by the lines of communalism, casteism, regionalism and language barriers. The reasons of defragmentataion were more than the chances of sticking together. The leaders of the time, chacha Nehru, Iron Man Patel, J.P took these chances and through painstaking work stitched this nation together.

To an outsider, India is and always was an enigma. Its own citizen fails to understand it completely. A Harayanavi is as adept in understanding the ways of a Madrasi as a Rajasthani is of a Bengali. But to hell with it, in the inside we are all Indians. The core fabric from which one is woven reeks of an Indian odour and that makes us unique in our own way, different from the world at large.

Now that we have stayed as a nation for so long, what have we accomplished? We haven‘t attained the level of living that we can associate with a socialist nation. We sure haven‘t had the advancement in economy to be called a capitalist. We have tried hard to follow a middle path and failed miserably in the process- we neither have the economic growth nor the standard of living and yet we act like snobs looking to conquer the world.

Let‘s just look at the facts. Our education system has failed miserably, the number of people living below the poverty line in the nation is mind boggling, the democratic system is in shambles, inflation is rising by the day, the rupee is on an all time low, the number of infant deaths makes your heart skip a beat, the grains rot away while people die of hunger, the black money stashed in foreign banks is the GDP of many a small nations.. the list goes on.

Come to the people living here. And this, my friends, is the hardest part to digest. We, the people of the nation are so proud of our past and what a name India was, the sone ki chidiya, some of us still pat ourselves in the back for it. Seriously? The educated class seldom goes to vote and then sits comfortably in the living room complaining on the deplorable state of things. The lower class is so downtrodden that it sticks on to whatever hope it sees on the horizon. The middle class is so obsessed with making money that it forgets living in the struggle to amass it in its banks. The upper class doesn‘t care. The old is just too tired of having made it so far. The youth is just good enough to make a page on an issue on a social network and thanking himself on doing such a noble cause for the society. One class of children is just too obsessed with becoming engineers of doctors to think of anything else. The other class has it laid it down by their fathers- a politician‘s child will become a politician, an actor‘s actor and so on- if not, unees bees ka hisaab hai.

Our constitution makers were so hellbent on giving no one a lot of power that they reduced everyone with a little power. China was not so different from us fifty years ago but now has the might to make the US bow. We had the world‘s third largest railway network before even the second world war and still never had an industrial revolution. The bubble of economic prosperity came through the reforms in the regime of P.V. Narsimha Rao. Before and after that, we haven‘t had a single policy that facilitates growth. In the time when the governments were a single majority, it never happened. We have a collation for some years now and will continue having it in the future, what can one hope for?

Our nation has always followed the middle path. Didn‘t align to either Soviet or the USA. Couldn‘t succeed as a socialist nor could become a capitalist. Is not the poorest of poor but can never be the richest of the rich. We just are what we have always strived to be, knowingly or unknowingly. Mediocre.

Dear Sir, Mr Director

28 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by in bark!

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Sir,
This is a letter from an ex student who always wanted to speak on these things, but never got the chance. I never had an insight on your views but the interview gets us to a place where I can think about wondering about the institute policies and the college in general. And. I will try to keep it short.

First and foremost, Sir, DA-IICT will always be DA-IICT and not IIT. As you’ve mentioned countless many times in your interview it is evident that you regret not being a part of that premier elite class anymore. I may of course, be wrong. But the point here is it’s a blessing that our college is NOT an IIT. If you would have asked me when I entered this college if I regretted not clearing the Joint Entrance Examination, the answer would have been affirmative. But now, spending four years in the institute, one is sure is glad that’s not the case. Now, if you ask me how do Ifeel notbeing an IITian- I am sure as glad. True, fifteen to twenty percent of the students of IITs are great, starting from academia to arts to sports. But the remaining eighty percent- an average DAIICTianis better. It might seem as a strange statement, but talk to the alumni, talkto the ones who have seen both sides of the coin, and you won’t refute what I have tried pointing out here. At IIT, you are taught being great- but everyone isn’t, cannot be. So the end product being- the cream which is great at everything it does, and the rest- carrying the ‘tag’ of the institution wherever they go, introducing their college before themselves (“ hi! Main IITian.” As if we care, seriously!)

True, the colleges(IITs)had been set up as a part of India’s Five Year Plans to compete with the technological advancements ofEurope and the Soviet and they have done their part beautifully. The fact that the examination for securing admission in them is being merged with AIEEE’s examination is a testament to the fact that they have ceased being what they were meant to be.

They have a solid alumni base- it’s huge- there’s no denying that. But the alumni base of our college is getting there. We have our ex students at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart- you name it.

Our ex students have done well, but here’s another point I am trying to make. These students also won a plethora of competitions- from Imagine Cup to TI. But now, the case is a little different. We haven’t won anything for some years now. When our batch entered the college, it was in the top 20 trying to break in the top 10-15, the graph of the college was on an upward scale. But in the last four-five years, it has been stagnant, maybe even declined. One wonders what is the cause here. And NO, one cannot blame reservation. I’ll go to stating the facts here- most of the students till 2007 batch were dropouts, they came to the college one year after giving their boards. After the reservation, the influx of students from outside the state didn’t change that much, but the majority from Gujarat, whose rank of twenty five thousand made a lot of eyebrows shrink, got it in the first attempt- which is the same as what many of us got in our first attempt. So I don’t think that we have suffered academically because of the reservation, culturally, it has been different, but that’s another point altogether. And when you see the performances, I think it’s the most prejudiced batch- the batch of 2012, which has shown the best result in placements.

It saddens me though, that there isn’t any culture of DA-IICT. As a college, we have certainly failed in that respect. Students and faculties aren’t meant to be the best of friends, by principle, but you see a successful institute, it has a culture associated with it. We had tried introducing the college magazine in a printed form, because it is one of the first steps of an institute creating its own identity. I personally had handed the magazine to you, for a review, which never came. It needs funding, and is important, because it’s something you can take with to your home- in symbolism, romance, and truth.

One of the reasons our college is different from others is the brilliance of the Humanities faculty. Be it Shiv- who teaches a student to look at things from a completely different point of view, fact being many of his students consider themselves blind before they met him. ANS Sir- who has taught us the science of watching a movie, GaneshDevi Sir- with his immense knowledge of the epics, TridipSir- a connoisseur of the discipline called Gandhi. They are fundamental to our institute which offers a single discipline. Now that they are leaving, it sends a very frightening message.

I wouldn’t go into the details of DAC or the student body because people have been trying to voice their opinions on how ineffective these are and what measures can be taken to improve their standing and they have failed. Seems very much like the Indian bureaucracy, doesn’t? And some of the incidents remind a mind like mine of what I read of the Emergency(1975).

I cannot comment on the job you have been doing for so many years now, you must have seen countless like me come and go, you are that experienced. Being a college without a core branch, we have done very well over the years. I thank you for being the premier of the institute which has taught me so much, but ours is a batch of only 230-240 odd, isn’t it an irony that around 220 of them got the chance to talk to you for the first time on their convocation?

Thanks and Regards,

What can one say, the Mahatma is long dead

30 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in bark!, jinxed rhymes

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Thank the Lord they cremated him for good,
Ponder a little, if only you would.

It would have hurt even in the grave,
To reside in a land, lived in by the dead.

There was a time when the industries were set,
The second five year plan was carved for the nation at unrest.
The capitalists then acted as socialists,
The major offices all were state‘s.

With all the trust chacha Nehru stood on,
Realizing the dream of a sovereign republic live long.
The Chinese betrayal took his life,
But worse was Kashmir on a hinge, up to debate.

We have made a progress since then,
Hundred crore scams the norm of the day.
With the nation now guided by a spineless center,
Who can show us the way, the common man banters.

They dystopia is looking down,
Malice in its eyes, carrying a frown.

We now settle the disputes by force,
Justice is nothing till it all does down.
“see! The riots in Gujarat were a mighty show,
Now the Muslims are afraid to strike any blow.“
Such (pitiful) views are endorsed by the party leaders,
Fills your eyes with sadness and throat with hunger.
True, the state is since riot free,
But the destruction left in the wake is for all to see.

The democratic cycle is completing a full round,
Tibet question still looms, as does the Himalayan crown.
The rage of the naxalites is still rampant,
The demands of Nagaland and Telangna still effervescent.

These were the same problems we had in the sixties,
Made much progress, really, have we?
Bending our backs to please the communist neighbour,
As the world celebrated year last, the year of the dragon.

So please don’t get me wrong when I say,
I am sure as glad the Mahatma is dead.

Fear and Love

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by in attempted muse, bark!

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Gilmour makes the transition from someone beyond repair to come back to life, only to head straight – to the shining sun in his epic track “coming back to life”. Many would treat it as a weakness without trying to comprehend, without taking the prospective of the other, coupled with the self. When you lose something very close to you, is it possible to go to life as it was before you shared your existence with it? Shutting down the book and try climbing the ladder to the next chapter might be termed as closure, but what happens when even closure isn’t enough?

I had been living alone before you came. And I have been living alone since you left. And trust me; one doesn’t need to be a nuclear scientist to spot the difference between the two.

Paranoia, for the exile, is the pre-requisite for survival. One might find it hard to relate to, but I understand the words, the meaning it tries to portray, and the message it tries to deliver. For I have been in exile for the better half of my life, hiding not from people, but the self.

One should never judge a person unless he has walked in the other’s shoes, shared the path and felt what the other is feeling. And there were some who walked beside me, expressed the fear in their eyes. The others, like me, hid it in their smile. You might have wondered why I smiled like a buffoon the first time I met you, kept smiling the entire time I felt your presence by my side. I even smiled at you when you walked away. Every smile grounded a different implication, but the root was the same, I smiled from fear.
I liked you since the very moment I laid my eyes on the lady walking down the park, gliding feet, dancing in the dew carefully preserved by the blades of the green grass. And it took the courage of almost every fiber of my body to hold on to the fear of rejection and ask you out. But when this transition of being attracted to you to falling in love took place, I cannot really point out. One minute, I was impenetrable, I had shielded myself from anything that could cause a disruption to the way I lived my life. The next I knew, my heart was beating outside my chest, exposed to the elements. The only fear I felt at the time was the fear of not seeing you again. My heart stopped whenever I came home to find you gone only to kick-start itself again when you returned. For a change, I smiled because I believed in it. For a change, the only fear I felt was of someday not smiling that smile.

When you try to live your life according to a big plan, it’s impossible to account for all the contingencies. And it’s difficult to stay sane when you see that the plan is on a different route from where you stand. Nevertheless, I was happy. But sometimes to calm the nerves of mutiny it was a necessity of drown them in some whiskey, or a little scotch, and hold them with a joint or two. Misery loves company. It treated me kind. The only key was being gentle.

But sanity is growing ever too costly when you’re not around. I will take it if you accuse me of being selfish, that these are mere excuses to indulge in these, which I term as the innocuousness of what is left of my sanity. True, I do it for the self. But more importantly, I do it for you.
All our lives, we keep looking for indulgence. We give all our energy to get to that elusive big red cherry and oh! life would be so much more simple, so much more fruitful if only we could get to that cherry, even hold it for a while. We concentrate so hard on the protagonist that we neglect to pay any attention to the plot or the hidden subtexts. And what happens when we do get to that red cherry? We are ecstatic, no doubt, but for how long does the enthusiasm last? When does the euphoria give way to fear? The fear of not being able to hold on to it anymore. And what if we never make it to the red cherry? Do we live our entire lives in fear of not achieving the goal we set out for?

I have seen them all. And I have felt them all. And if you ask me about the fear I fear the most, it is the one of facing the truth. All our lives, we keep running for the truth, chasing it, acknowledging it, begging for its revelation. One feels that the truth shall set the self free. I say that there’s nothing which enslaves more than the truth. Accepting the truth means the end of hope, the end of the journey. But if you keep running away fearing the truth, you become too easy a prey to the evil of living a lie. I tried walking the on delicate rope of the middle path, but somewhere down the line, the boundaries have been washed in the mist. And I fear if the path I am on will take me to the future or some place in the past. Or will it take me back to where I started from in the first place?

We put too much energy in dealing with our fears of being wrong, of being proved that what we did was in fact, not right. But out beyond the ideas of rightdoings and wrongdoings, there is a field, and I hope that I’ll meet you there. Loving you has been the most profound, intense feeling of my entire life. And it breaks my heart that I have to end it. Not because I cannot face my fear of dealing with the truth, I’m beyond it, I’ve lived my fears. But for I realize, for all the fears I’ve been left with, the only fear I wish for is the fear of losing what we had together. Being with you will require one more effort, one more life, one more starting from the scratch. I have to be born again. But to be born again, you first have to die. Goodbye.

Inspirations: a book (omega minor(Paul Verhaeghen) ). a series (californication).

His Monologue

16 Thursday Feb 2012

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“What kind of idea
Does submission seem today
One full of fear
An idea that runs away.”

I went to her, poured my heart out. It was the hardest thing I had to do. Harder than facing my parents after getting arrested for drug abuse, but that’s a different story altogether. She heard me, she was all smiles. Then, she broke my heart. It was the only one I had got. I was a fool. I wanted to create a pseudo reality in which I could connect to another person. For the world is but dead on the outside. I see people and I see people laughing, and I see people smiling, baring their off white and yellow teeth in that plastic smile of theirs, and I cannot comprehend but the futility of it all. I thought that it would be good to connect, it would be good to get a hang of what normal humans feel, a psychological analysis in which I am the subject itself and I am the analyst. Their isn’t no conflict. I shielded myself from these before. For, paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite of survival. And I am nothing but an exile. I am a child in the body of a man. I make mistakes, but making amends without a repercussion isn’t allowed in the society we live in today. We try so hard to fit in, fit in the social pathos, make a name in something which we have created. Can the society exist without us? In trying so hard, we forget ourselves and this saddens me. People fighting over regions saddens me, people fighting over religions saddens me. Their exists a common misconception that people fight because of conflicting interests. The reality is quite the opposite. People fight because they want the same thing, the same piece of the cake. If they fight for dignity, or self respect, or just for the sake of fighting, it’s okay, but fighting over a piece of land and in which region it belongs, incomprehensible.
Coming back. Forgetting her will take time, I cannot hate her, try as I may, for when you try to despise the woman you love, the love becomes a cruel, solitary vice. The worst I can do to myself is have a conflict with my own mind. I have to have a clear vision and a clear mind. And the eye has to stay dry to see clearly.
I have visited those shoddy dark alleys where I can pay for flesh, feel the contours of the anatomy which they say is so desirable, but they never come close.
The things you lose forever- those are the things that stay with you.I won’t never judge her, because I believe that one should never judge a person, and certainly, never judge himself, before you have seen that person in all possible circumstances, before you have seen himself in all possible circumstances.
So what I remain with is empty handed truth. And. The only truth we have is the one we are capable of believing.
They say the truth shall set you free. I say there is nothing that enslaves you more than the truth. Truth makes you lose all your freedom. Accepting the truth implies the end of the dream, the end of hope, the end of journey. I was a dreamer, I wanted to understand the eternal question: What, after all, is love, and how much are we willing to pay for it?
After years of beating around the bush, I finally understood the question, the answer will require one more effort, one more life, one more starting from the scratch. I have to be born again. But. To be born again, you first have to die.
Goodbye.

A life lived. A life that was. And of course, the Convocation which went.

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

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There comes a time in everyone’s life when the boundaries between white and black begin to fade, the color grey starts having a startling new dimension and the horizon appears a tad closer, from the assuming infinity it has acquired from time immemorial. Times like these, the bonds of kinship re-appear and the feeling of mutual respect gains a foothold in the already fluttering hearts. For some fortunate ones of us, all these combined at a single intangible time, in a single day, when everyone gathered at the barricades of what once welcomed us with open arms- for one last time.
The journey already being the stuff of legends, the gladiators looked erringly decent with the unmistaken air of success, but you could guess, from the body language, what had been so important between the time when everyone had bid their goodbyes and coming back- and again I say it- for one last time.
They say closure is important. Was the two-three day return, an escape from normalcy, a mere closure? It went more and beyond, reliving four years in two days- a mere forty eight hours ! One would expect a tirade in circumstances likewise, but what settled here was an effluent calm, a harmony of poles apart, brought in from messengers all over the country, who all came, to experience what cannot ever be experienced again- for the first and the last time.
One might have been out of his senses the whole time he was there, but you didn’t need drugs for a change to rake-in the high. The munificence of marijuana and the magnificence of scotch only added to the beauty of the occasion. The solemn smiles radiant in the eyes of the beholders only reminded the observant to what he/she is going to miss.
Rushdie says ‘what cannot be cured must be endured’. I disagree. And the bunch of people who have stood by my side over these years would disagree. For there is a hidden middle path. Of not giving a damn. That was what made us, this was what defined us. And these two days were a blatant proof of taking it all in, and returning it with a smile.
As Hank Moody puts it, “Sometimes its better not to touch your dreams. Take it from someone who knows.” We did. We all did tread on them, softly, subtly and often than not, in a hurry and the reminiscence of what all has passed will bring a sad smile. Of not being able to live it all again. For the parting went as sudden as the union. But there were no tears this time, for everyone knew before embarking to the place where dreams had been made that someday, dreams have to come to an end.