one more to the list...

traalala...

The Mime Blog!

...now then, its always nice to see one's ideas take flight, ain't it??


:)

of differences & perspectives...

S.S.D.D

or maybe something new this time for a change!

“कहने को तोह बहुत है हमारे पास, बोलने को शब्द अनेक। आवाज़ हमारे वाणी की जैसे दिल से निकली एक चीख। मगर बिन उपयोग किए शब्द जो निशब्द वाणी से हम कहे सके, उसी में हमारी जीत्

(We have a lot to speak about, and plenty of words that we want to say. Our tone of our voice is like the cry of an anguish stricken heart. But it is only in the unspoken silence of our words that our message is carried. And that silent message is our victory)

...As a group of individuals we have a certain direction and a holistic perspective that we present to the world through our activities. It may not be a likable and a perfect vision that is at all times conformist, but it is nevertheless what we see and what we perceive of our world through our many eyes. Many of the things of life we miss out on, while some we are taught to ignore, but then there are a few instances of life that we speak up for and against, through our dramatics, humour and nautanki to remind people that though ‘Life’ is of myriad hues and although the perspectives are different, in essence it is still the same.

The task is not a tough one, just a walk along a redundant and an over-accomplished route towards reaching out to the world as it is and to share our perspective of the same world.

But what matters is that it is a journey that we are all embarking on together...

...let's see how far we go from here...

:)

दूध में जलेबी...एकदम मस्त life...

sometimes, you know, you just have to give in to temptations...who ever has said that, "Eat to Live, and not Live to Eat." I am sure has never been to India. we are the land of mysticism, legends, beauty, colors and spices, of a million Gods and over a billion and half people...but most of all, we are a land of FOOD!!

हम ज़िंदगी को केवल जिकर नहीं बल्कि उसे चख कर उसके ज़ायेके का मज़ा लेते है । यही है हम भारत वासीयों की पहेचान ।

...We are Indians. we live to eat and there's nothing wrong about it. yes, we are health conscious and even paranoid at times about the way we look and how the world perceives us. but for most of the times, we indulge in food. life is about food for us. our marriages, our funerals, our festivals or be it simply traveling from one part of our foodie nation to the other. for us, it's all about the food.

...and one of the many sheer indulgences that we have to succumb to are Jalebis! mmmm, hot hot Jalebis...

+

= Blissful Nachi. Happy Nachi

better still, put the jalebis overnight in the fridge, and then put them in a glass and top it up with warm milk. now that is pure heaven...and it's resting right here in my tummy!

Yum! Slurp!

:)

the Mime crime...

call it a mimic's spur of the moment decision, but somehow i do manage to get myself into such things...to borrow a quote, "its a Mime Crime!" all it took was a random phone call one afternoon. And then...

S: Hello! where are you man?

Me: hey! just got home...why what's up?

S: come over to the Friends Society na! there's something that's come up...

Me: what?

S: just come over...tell ya when you get here.


Me: no hints or guesses, eh?

S: chal be...come fast.


Me: ok ok ...i am on my way.

...so 15 minutes later there i was at the Friends Society. for the first time in almost 3 years in Baroda i entered past the little gate that i had walked past like a million times by. to the voluntary organization that i was coerced and lured into joining in the past, and had walked away from with equal disdain each time. finally taken into the folds...both S and I...

half an hour later. i had agreed to work on a script for a play on social awareness for the 'special children' whom the Friends Society took care of and for whom they were organizing a sports meet. the next day i was discussing a few ideas with an equally flustered and new recruit, G, and by the end of that day, i was directing a Mime on a social cause that i could respect at a personal level and advocate at a social one along with a bunch of people i had never before met in my time in Baroda. 2 days later, we had a full on performance...a stage, a background score, a mime troupe and an audience!

life can be fast and spontaneous...and creative.

...the actual video of the performance and the performance pictures are in editing and processing. so for a sneak-peek here is a backstage shot of a part of the mime troupe!

Mr Ghost comes to banyan town...no not you Ghosty!

"Nice guys end up as Ghosts."

...just a 'something' that has been a long time in the making, writing and getting done. an idea to unravel and relish the life and times spent in good ol' Baroda and to speak my mind while dripping in a pool of nostalgia...

...some people just have a lot to say. doesn't matter even if they are dead!

:)

at times even i have to be a teacher...

"Did God himself really write the holy scriptures of all the religions? If yes, then why did he write so many of them?"

...kids sure have an uncanny knack of asking the 'right' questions just as much as we adults have the habit of ignoring them and failing to answer them...

one of the many joys of being a teacher is that such moments are not rare and often in presenting themselves to me. and when they do arise, i suddenly find myself in the situation of immense power. the power to influence and mold young minds today that tomorrow will do the same to many others. the power to make and break the fragile harmony of existence at the knife's edge that our society lives by. it would be so easy to dismiss it all off. just one wave of my arm and one shrug of my shoulder and the inquisitiveness would be squashed. the preposterous clamouring of the young minds would be disciplined and life would be much more easier and the syllabus i set out to complete would be followed. and over time, repeating the same attitude over and over again i will eventually be able to chain down the childlike voice of reason that questions everything and blind the curious eyes that see the world for what it is and what it can be. finally to lead them to believe what i want them to believe and to see the world as i want them to see. in black and white.

yes i can do all of this. it would be all so easy and convenient and so self assuring in the sense that i would never have to face a question again that i may not be able to answer and discredit my capacity as a teacher by admitting failure. i am smarter then them after all. i am the teacher.


...or i can choose the other road...


tell them that i am just a human being who is susceptible to failure and ignorance just like anyone else. that i do not know the answers to a lot of things in the world. that the world is not perfect, and i cannot change that fact by saying otherwise, and that i will tell them what i believe to be the truth and that once i have spoken my words they can choose for themselves.

i can tell them that God is most definitely not someone with the capacity to sit down and write words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, volumes and books on religion. God, for all i know, does not even bother with religion. God is too busy looking after his children who are innocuously playing out their lives just like a mother who watches her child play in a park. we rise and fall, hurt and feel joy, and live and die while God watches over us; similar, to the child who runs and trips, laughs and cries, makes friends and breaks a tooth in the park while his/her mother looks on from the bench. she never stops the child from climbing the ladder for the fear of falling. similarly God never stops us from committing mistakes for the fear of going wrong. the mother and God, well, they just carry us back 'home' once the day is over with the same infinite love with which they carried us here.

No, God does not write anything...

"So is that all false?"

...Not really. in fact, i believe the contrary. God may not be dictating to us directly, but there are ways in which we are taken care of and spoken to. a gentle word passed down to us, reminding us to be careful and not to misbehave. to respect life everywhere for what it is and to never undermine our own capacities and doubt our conscience. like a mother speaking to her child.

the true essence of our religious teaching are but words that are passed down to us through the ages by wise people who understood the gravity of the muted whispers from God's lips and who were enlightened enough to give them a voice of reason and love that we all would understand. then over time the words begin to grow faint, and we felt the need to write down those words, just in case we ever forgot them. but in our Babel-istic ignorance we wrote them down in such a manner as to make it more and more ambiguous.

but that is not reason enough to discard them altogether, is it? No, God may have not written down a list of 'do's and don't' for us, but we most certainly have made a chart of how to live a good life. just as how a child playing in the park must not forget the mother's words of advice, so must we follow the loving guidance of God and God's people.

a teacher has to be very very careful. the words once uttered cannot be pulled back and they leave a lasting impression on the supremely malleable intellect of the child. it is my job to guide them towards understanding. i have to teach them to accept failure and never to give up; to strive towards understanding the world and towards maintaining an open outlook; to learn to share and love and at the same time to be smart enough to be able to survive in this 'man-kill-man' world of today; not to become too complacent in thought by acknowledging the existence of possibilities beyond our imagination; to fight when necessary and to back down when required...

and you know what the best part is??

...i myself know nothing about all of this. i myself am groping around in life coming to terms with myself and the world and the complex relationship that we share. i am myself undergoing changes all the time and learning how to 'just about scrap' through. and here i have to lead by example despite being an example in imperfection.

being a teacher most certainly is not easy. cause i have to be honest.

:)

a prayer to soothe our dark hearts...

ॐ भूर्भुवः स्वः । तत् सवितुर्वरेण्यं । भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि । धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात् ॥

And so began creation. From the infinity of darkness came first the tiny shard of eternal light, and from the tiny shard of eternal light came the first sound. “Om!” The sound of life and consciousness; the sound of knowledge and divinity; the sound of time and of creation and of eternity coming to terms with mortality.

It had to be so. But we forgot. Caught in the ethos of time and dimensions, we forgot. Belittled by our own sense of enthrallment at the prospect of understanding life and its creation, we forgot. True, creation began with the words, “Let there be light”, but we forgot the before light there was darkness; an all permeating, all prevailing, all encompassing darkness. And within the darkness lay the consciousness that determined that time was right once again for a light to be lit and for life to be reborn from that light and for time to find materialization. Cause darkness is timeless. For in darkness lies God.

So why fear the dark?

***

℮ = mc²

“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

~ Albert Einstein.

***

...and today when the streets are but extended gutters full of blood with which the drains are finally scabbing over; all the vermin of creation drowning in the accumulated filth of our sex and murder foaming over to our waists; and when all of mankind, too scared to look back over our shoulders into our dark past, instead looks up and shouts, “SAVE US!”

The empty silence looks down and whispers, “No!”...

...a prelude of silence and then, 'Bang!' an overture of gunfire and chaos in this musical of death and mayhem...

Mumbai, the 26th of November 2008.

Happy Independence Day...and parfleche? what sort of a word is that?

managed to get my hands on a typewriter amongst a lot of things 'happening' over the course of the last week or so, most notably my falling a victim to the flu and missing out on my Rakshabandhan being the highlight.

anyways, the past 15th 'happened' to be the 61st Independence Day of India. i could not have been anymore prouder and happier on that day being the incorrigible Indian with a nationalist spirit that flows in ample doles (barrel-full amounts i presume) in my blood which in turn is a direct hand-me-down from my Bengali genes. so i was happy. i was celebrating and championing for freedom...

early in the morning there is no better thing than the daily newspaper. fresh and crisp. you can even smell the ink that was used to print it. the ink that brings to you the news from the world at your doorstep. the quintessential morning requisite.

...that day the papers were all bloated with the news of the nation. 61 years of independence and now we had our 1st Olympic gold, had almost cracked the Ahmedabad bomb blasts and were hot on the trail of the perpetrators and were redefining the motto "India Shining" with our sturdy economy. and then somewhere amongst all the stories of triumphs and victories and heroics there was this tiny bit of news. lost and hidden amongst everything else that was glamorous and desirable. the real inconvenient truth about our nation. a 10 line article about the death of a 12 year old boy at the hands of the field owners/farmers from whose fields he had stolen 4 corn ears. this was the moment of disillusionment for me. 61 years of freedom after 190 years of struggle and war. and this is what it all came down to. the value of a 12 year old boy's life was not even worth that of 4 corn ears. and here we were talking about our 1st Olympic gold medal, our Nuclear deal, our Cricket team and our glamorous life and country. and all not even worth 4 corn ears.

this is my nation. the nation where poverty and hunger forces a child to steal at the risk of death at the hands of the farmer, and the nation where the farmer kills the thieving child who would have otherwise starved to death in any case because he can barely sustain and survive himself. this my dear friends is my country. it is not shining or glamorous or a super power. but it aspires to be all of this. but in reality this is what India is. i still love her. always will. but i also bleed and weep for her.

***

so then i got me hands on a typewriter. and this is what i went tip-tapping about (the complete unedited crap and bulls**t that i hammered out).



confound it! at times life demands a certain sense of volatility of perspective to it. changes we may call it. adaptability to the situation is a must and there are plenty of certainties of the fact that life is paradoxical. and quite rightly so! cause if that were not the case then all would be lost ; and we all know how hard it is to find something that is lost.

for all those who are ardent believers in the fact that it is we/ourselves who are hmmm...oh! the red ink also works! yeah! it feels like an old man to be typing away on this ancient piece of instrument/machinery. the tip tap of the typewriter...a certain joy that i had ceased to enjoy ever since i laid my hands on the first computer and it's keyboard...

there are innumerable things running through this mind. so many thoughts that vie to occupy the mantle of the ones that are to be penned down. a mind itching to say the things that it fathoms out of the depths of its ceaseless memory is a hard mistress. she wants everything at her disposal. but in return all she promises is more and more heartache. heartache cause you know that you can never satisfy her. never truly reign in her inherent infidelity to her own thoughts. the mind cannot be loyal to just one thought. the mind has to change. the mind is volatile. the mind is full of joy, it is the heart that must hurt. but you still cannot stop yourself from loving it. after all, she belongs to you. she is you. and no, i am not a chauvinistic jerk! just a man with a sense of romance that leads him to see the feminine in all the things that he loves.

sometimes all we need is some relief! this need is what changes are all about. insatiable, invulnerable, incapable, inexhaustible, infidel images of us all. the true mirror to ourselves. confessions! why do people confess to anything? a mere justification that we must give to ourselves each time we choose between our instincts, our mind and our heart. a justification to the one that has been left out by the one that has prevailed in its endeavour...

parfleche! what kind of word is parfleche? silly French!

***

it has been a somewhat emotionally volatile week. holidays were abundant and so were the thoughts and emotions.

the strangest superheros...

"why indeed?"

the late night shenanigans of have begun once again of late. the type of random banter that establishes our trademark insane sanity. Saddy & Nachi. the last of the lot of superheros, battling it out to save the world (better than Hancock in all regards)...

what's worse is the realization that the 'T-Kaz' and the 'Whine-Star' might just possibly outlive us and our jokes. can't kill em' ourselves. love em' too much even to see a bee buzz around their noses, we do. hence, the best alternative in that scenario is that we make it quick and end our misery and our little joke between the two of us as soon as possible. or else it's going to be the greatest Joke played on the two jokers that we are.

life is good. the bulls**t is better!

nope, i am not drunk. not tonight. not any night. neither is Saddy. stupid frack does not drink. but a good week passed without any serious 'crap-digging' is as good as having saved the world twice over each day! cause left to us, life would never be so serious and there would be humor to play at all day long. and not everyone get's humor.

...there will be a few laughs this coming week for sure. the cards have been dealt out, the joke's been parlayed. all that remains is for the laughs to follow...


so until the next time that the world needs saving. Adios Amigos!

;)

1801...Heathcliff analyzed & now reborn in 2008...

call it a hiatus of sorts. a 'time-out' it was. but here i am once again 'for-the-moment' as i shall call it. there are things i need to think about. reflections to be made. words to be penned down. none are all too important. so what?

so 42 days have elapsed since the last post...

***

tonight i shall be silent no more. my words shall vent the anger, the hurt. cause tonight, i am Heathcliff...and this is my vengeance.

a misogynist's vengeance against what?

...the love that never was mine? love that only showed itself to me when i felt it not. and then abandoned me when i needed it the most. or is it the world that never seemed to understand? where almost everything is a cruel joke. especially me!

it must be fate then, yes it must be the fate, the one thing that never realized for me the promise that it had so readily showed? was it only a lure into cultivating faith, the one thing, that never must be kindled. the lie of the Almighty's creation. it must be that. it has to be that. the grand lie that led me to believe in change and in life.

they said, "Change".

i said "No".

somewhere along even God said, "Change".

still i said, "No".

but then SHE said, "Change Heathcliff. change for me".


...i changed...

but they all lied. all of them, her & even God. they all lied. Nothing changes. they only seek to torment the sanity of reason's fabric with the false whispers of assurance.

'she says that she loves, but her love remains the one thing that i cannot have.'

is it only her? No, it is everyone. it is they that are the perpetrators of injustice. i am but a tool. a tool of truth's hateful vengeance upon the lying deceitful love. one by one they denounce me as 'mad' and 'irrational'.

'but do they even know what madness is?' ...a malaise, it definitely is not.

I shall have the last laugh. the final killing joke shall be mine. they will pay the price of their sins and suffer...and in them shall suffer I, Heathcliff, remaining forever a mere step away from the soothing hands of madness and to be tormented by the cold hands of vengeance. and in that lies my salvation.


...i am Heathcliff.

***

"my words are but an amateur's feelings on an unparalleled work of literature."

teaching and comprehending the text of 'Wuthering Heights' is something that i must try and accomplish as a part of my latest undertaking as a teacher. Emily Brontë's classic tale sure remains a book that i have loved, ever since i read it first as a kid myself, and it is only now that i have begun to somewhat understand the emotions bound and woven within the lines after all these years...teaching the art of understanding words and feeling the same can indeed be liberating as well as exhausting! be it 1801 or 2008.

for Keshi...with honesty and lots and lots of love...

well Keshi sure manages to ask the right questions. and she sure as hell makes sure to emphasis on the 'honesty' factor as an essential ingredient for the answers! that makes things all the more interesting. anyways, this was supposed to be a comment on Keshi's post. but i thought that it would be equally fine here as a tag thingy. spares me the effort of coming up with something of my own for this post at least. hehehe...so here we go...

Q1: What makes you truly happy?

...truly happy?? i really don't know for sure if there is one particular thing, and cause of that i keep on seeking reasons for joy in each and every opportunity and moment. but i do know that i'd be the happiest as a dad! cause i would be freaking fabulous. the bestest dad in the whole world!

Q2: What can't you live without?

...hmm, having a constantly in transit lifestyle helps get used to the idea of change in all spheres. but i guess that the one thing that i really need in the long run (even if it's on an on-off basis) is quality company. my mind would go crazy if i had to go without a decent intellectual, meaningful and spirited conversation with a fellow mind.

Q3: What's your daily source of inspiration?

...i guess that i feed off the people around me. the fact that each person is dealing with life with it's share of problems, that to each is tantamount as the 'end-of-the-world!', and is yet making the best of it gives me the strength to do the same. life is too short for regrets. yes, shit happens! so what?

Q4: What's your message to the world?

...listen to your conscience! in the long run everything always works out just fine.

Q5: What makes you unique?

...optimistic to the point of making people puke. gutsy to the point that i've never learned to back down. and the fact that i can be brutally loyal and blindly loving and at the same time be patiently vindictive and quietly dangerous when crossed wrong. but above all, the fact that i refuse to be anything short of completely honest and true to myself. the insatiable EGO would never permit even a shard of deceit to itself.

Q6: What flower are you and why?

...i am the daisy! simple enough to grow by the roadside; and yet, beautiful enough to make a child smile and a woman blush...

***

"go figure, eh! "

***

tonight, am going to be hosting a small dinner thingy for a few pals at home. made sure to give the cook an evening off and so am going spend the evening cooking. yay!

;)

of kitty games and birthday songs and inherited humor...

okies, so dad's back to the island and sister's taken off to A'bad for the week. that leaves me and the cat to run amok at home!! not a very happy prospect considering that i am a stickler for cleanliness and that cat is a destructive little wascal when he is possessed by the devil and tries to come up with new ways to outsmart me and defy all 'set' norms. but apart from those moments, he is my little angle. so i'm actually looking forward to the 'week-long-cat-mischief' that is in store for me...

so let the game begin!

:)

***

oh yeah, and mom! nice one with the Dev Das suggestion...agreed i ain't got any girl. but then neither do i have the booze or the money to go sit around at Chandramukhi's. but a nice one nevertheless...now i know where i get my slightly (ok ok completely) sadistic humor from!

love ya ma! oh by the way, sorry about Mother's Day. i completely forgot. but i made up for it by getting dad an extra large cake for Father's Day!

(sheeeesh, i sure hope that you get the heavy as in a 'million tonnes' of humor here ma! or am i gonna get a call i don't think i wanna answer anytime soon)....

***

and a very very very LOUD shoutout for my German brother Timo!

Happy Birthday man!

cheers!

the storyteller...

you know, the last post really happened as an outburst! a need to reaffirm my sanity through the remaining shards of rationality torn asunder by my anger and jealousy. in fact, anger would be a mild word. rage is more like it. and knowing that i am capable of such, it is scary not knowing where such emotions come from. but it passes. and then the tranquility of reason re-establishes itself as the keystone of my day. like i said,

"being prone to my emotions and feeling each and every nuance of it's existence and it's power and sway over me is not something that i am ashamed of. i can feel, and i am proud of it!"

***

i have always loved stories. i grew up feeding on them. they have nourished me from a child to a man and now it is my ardent desire to pass on the same to the next. there is something about our life and our mode of education today that makes us more passive. more impassioned to the world and to ourselves. we see the world through the eyes of scientific rationality and technological advances. it is a world of social averages and anything that is on the verge of extreme is seen as vile. and maybe it is rightly so. but i grew up with a different mindset. yes, i too had teachers who taught me about 'this world' and how to be a part of it within it's definition of successes and failures. but then, i also had 'my stories' that made me see things differently.

...not just stories that told you how everyone came back home and lived happily ever after, but stories that when read between the lines told me how savage we men could be; how beautiful we could be; how vile we could be; how passionate we could be; how volatile we could be; how despite being everything that we were taught not to be we still were each uniquely unparalleled in a world of chaos and uncertainty; where every step we took was equal to ten steps taken by the one's before us, and yet where at the end of the day we found ourselves back to where we had started from. in a world that was staged to exhibit the basest of our habits and where nothing mattered, and yet everything was at stake, and how we have the capacity within us to walk this stage as the Colossus of our times...

sometimes the stories become more than just words...

***

Friday the 13th...ominous? maybe not. have had crazy weird dreams for a while now. cannot exactly remember the details, more precisely the faces. but what strikes as weird is the fact that the objects that were part of the dreams have somehow remained vaguely etched in my mind.

from perfect to perfect...

you know, i was in a perfectly great mood today! ...absolutely perfect, if i may.

one of those rare days when everything seems to be going so fine. one of those days when you get up to a nice cup of tea and the newspaper (for once devoid of any macabre headline on the front page), followed by a telephone call with your favorite person and a movie outing with dad (something we did like after ages)! zap forward to a lazy afternoon spent with cat and books to a nice cloudy and cool evening. you know, the types that make me think that i'd take a lovely little walk to the cybercafe and take a look at the happenings around blogger ville. put up a nice little 'something' and then walk back home, preferably in the drizzling rain. stop by to pick up some groceries on the way and then get home. drenched, but still happy as can be. take a shower. have dinner and then sit down in front of the TV for the Spain v/s Russia game tonight, and cheer for the Spaniards!

simple desires! and everything was possible. and then, i take a slight deviation. go check out one of these damn 'facebook/orkut/myspace' networks, come across the picture of the person i least wanted to see (hell, even acknowledge the existence of) plastered across my home page, and there! the perfect mood goes for a toss! ...a bloody hit out of the park, if i may!

sometimes, all it takes is the reminder that there are somethings that you cannot control, cannot change. cannot help. and those very things happen to make the very differences that lie between your 'i-am-as-happy-can-be' and 'i-feel-like-an-idiot-and-only-killing-somebody-is-going-to-make-me-feel-better' state of mind!

"we men are so susceptible to our emotions running haywire. and it really doesn't take much. just a tiny little reminder. anyways, at least we are rational enough to realize that such occurrences cannot dictate us forever."

so i guess that it shall be as planned. a walk in the rain and then the game! the perfect day must continue...

...so what have you been up to my friend?

Footie fever strikes...again...

...the Eurocup 2008 starts tonight! yay!

No England!!! yessssss...go Raul!!

will be rooting for the Spaniards this year. although i do have a soft corner for the Germans as well. Timo, Hubsi, Rasta Matze, Mitty and my fellow German crazies, shall keep my fingers crossed for Ballack's boys as well!

;)

***

3 movies that i want to watch...

#1: Sarkar Raj

#2: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

#3: Batman: the Dark Knight

...ooooooooooooo!!!! the Clown Prince of crime!! the Joker!! my favorite villain of all, immortalised by the inimitable Heath Ledger...

...but movie mate is missing. she thinks that it is a good time to go absolve herself and wash away her sins in the holy waters at Haridwar. as if ditching me and making merry on the banks of the Ganges was going to be any less than any 'sin'.

***

also, cat likes Dog-food! weird!

:)