a bad mood gone wry

*Grumble grumble grumble*

5.00am

put the alarm off. grumble some more.

"vasuuu, COFFEE"

opening my laptop, sipping coffee. no response from all those people whose walls iv written on. sulk sulk.

take a shower and leave. still dark. watchman asleep. curse away in my head.

empty ricks passing without stopping. curse some more.

take the train and get off at matunga. walk to college and up to the terrace for practice. no one is there.. as usual. curse and grumble simultaneously.

people start arriving at 7.30. giving the cold shoulder.

practice starts at 8am. grumble and cursing has now gone vocal. nothing like spreading a bad mood.

people fooling around during practice. me yelling. people yelling back in retaliation.

more yelling.

aa aante practice starts.

Piu keeps fooling around in front of me

"will you fucking stop it?? are you retarded or something??"

piu sulks. im happy.

"AND WHERE THE FUCK IS NIKKI?"

"its her mum's death anniversary"
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"oh"

normalcy! ( is that even a word?!)

iv been out now, officially, for like 6 months or so... and the question that most people ask me is if i would be, (please note the very annoying future tense) the guy or the girl in a relationship..

iv never quite understood this question

its a GAY relationship... there are no girls!

i think its a persons last desperate attempt to normalize it.. to be able to fathom a gay relationship they would assume there must be a 'woman' and a 'man' in it..

here are 3 misnomers i would like to clear:

1. one guy is bound to be more effeminate than the other. that doesn't mean hes the girl.

2. if the guy who decides to stay home and take care of the kids is called the woman you are probably the biggest sexist i have ever met!

3. each person would have their own view on what a man and a woman would represent in a relationship, hence the 'man' and 'woman' in a gay relationship would be highly ambiguous!



well.. now that that's been said!

freedom

we hear about it from rioters.
my best friend hollers it back at his mom when she grounds him.
its the term we express when people pass away.

everybody talks about freedom - but what is this omnipotent entity that everybody so longs for? and do people actually want it?

freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose - janis joplin

for me freedom is like the sun. stay far enough, but in its presence, and it supports life. get to close and scorch to death.
pure, unadulterated freedom would be one in which a person is completely uninhibited by social norms, political agendas or even personal constraints. a person without the ability to consider consequence. a person so detached from everything around him that he is neither influenced by, or influences his surroundings. a sate of constant, eternal oblivion.
and a world full of completely free people would be like a world full of drifting entities. aimless wanderers, occasionally bumping into one and another but moving along unaffected.
but who would want something like this? who would want to be so free, that his actions have no consequence. his presence makes no impact. his existence would be so reclusive and so independent it were almost as if he never existed.

when ever i hear about freedom i always think back to the season II finale of Greys Anatomy, in which Burke leaves Cristina at the alter. he says that if he truly loved her he would let her go... he would let her be free. the episode ends with cristina standing in her white gown yelling 'im free... im free..' but there isnt a trace of happiness in her shaky voice as she begins to rip her clothes and jewelry off her, whith meridith supporting her from the back.

the most basic of all human needs is to want and be wanted.
god was concocted to place a power higher than ourselves - so that we could surrender resposibilty - be a slave of fate
we spend our entire lives in the pursuit of happiness. but a truly free individual would be one that looked within himself for this. his journey would end with his own self discovery.
by our very nature we are individuals who dont enjoy freedom. we detest it. we shun away from it. we spend our entire lives cowering from it.

so when i hear people screaming for it, i cant help wonder whether they have completely understood what they asked for.... and then, if they truly want it.

the unwanted ideal

the past few weeks have culminated in me reading ayn rands 'Atlas shrugged'. her philosphy of objectivism and philosophical capitalism has transcribed into characters in all her books. they are her ideal people. they are what she feels the ideal human should be. truth be told, i agree with her.
these characters are usually, smart, attractive people. they believe, that there is nothing higher than personal gain. there is nothing higher than the self. ones self pleasure and survival exceeds everything. (before i have ayn rand fanatics tracing my IP address, let me say here that i am a huge fan - of her philosophy more than her books, and how they make me think)
but the more i read (I've not completed it yet), the more the characters scare me. not in terms of their propaganda and attitude but in the way they make me question myself and what this 'ideal human' means to me.
and then the question comes in, do i actually want to reach this ideallic state? do i want to be so aloof and indifferent? the only way to be insensitive to, and im not using this word flippantly, change, is to not let people into your life (realistically speaking - im sure there are other higher ways of dong so). to be devoid of personal human contact would be the only way to achieve this form of ideal. the only way to put yourself before anybody else would be if there were no one else in your life, of importance.
the sacrifice for the ideal seems too much. there are people in my life whom i would not let go off.. whom i refuse to let go off. the reason i am who i am today is no doubt because of what iv made of myself, but also because of the people around me. people who took out time to talk to me. people who put me before themselves. people who's ideals, then obiovusly, differed from mine.
so then are people simply born ideal? is ideal something your born into.. something that cannot be attained?
i cannot help feeling weak when i read this book. weakness. this is what seems to bother me more than anything else. anyone who isnt ideal (and that seems to be something you need to be born into - an aristocracy of the intellect if you may) is weak.
the other alternative is that she is wrong. (my interpretation ie.) i think a middle ground is the way to go forward. to be detached, yet attached. to be independently dependant (if that makes any sense). a sort of quasi-state.. a limbo. i wonder however, if thats possible.

PS: everything said here is naturally my interpretation. she could have meant something quite the opposite.

holla!

Check out this new blog:
goavillage.blogspot.com

its refreshingly different, extremely funny and brilliantly written.

in the 'goblet of fire' (harry potter #4), when dumbledore is giving his farewell banquet speech, now that voldemort is back and cedric is dead, he says something to the effect of:

" if your ever given a choice between whats right and whats easy - stop and think"

for some reason this has been playing on my mind since the ahmedabad blasts.

Patriotism...?

Independence day was about a week back. the flag was hoisted in reverence, as most wore their Indian finery. speeches were held about heroic tasks performed 61 years ago and we were reminded how as a generation we are uncaring and inapt. less than an hour later, i was sprawled on my bed in jeans and a t-shirt watching 'the simpsons', and i couldn't help thinking whether i should be feeling guilty about my clearly inconsiderate lack of patriotism. and that got me thinking about the whole concept of patriotism. the more i thought about it, the more absurd it seemed to me. does any one have only one place they adore? if you haven't travelled then probably, but for those of us who have gotten around, its practically impossible. but patriotism decates that you must be loyal to only one place. it doesn't leave room for the resonable possibility that its citizen may prefer another locale equally, or heck, even more. why must anyone be required to be reverant to an area just because they were born there?
before you start sending me hate mail, let me explain my self. i think patriotism is an excellent way of uniting people of varied backgrounds. i just think that patriotism, as it is being defined today, is horribly misleading and can be quite dangerous. my primary issue with patriotism is the boundary it imposes. not only should no one be required to be loyal to certain man-made demarcations, they shouldn't want to be either. as a person entering the 21st century, poised at the brink of an exponentional globalisation, it seems ridiculous to be going backwards and putting up boundaries just as they are being distroyed. my (other!) primary concern with national patriotism is that it creates divides among land and hence among people. the concept of 'mine' and 'yours' is no longer abstract. it can be quantified. this has lead to, and will continue to lead to regional conflicts in many forms.
my solution, as unreal as it is, is simple. replace national patiotism with global patriotism. let people be loyal not only to their place of birth or origin but also to everyother nook and cranny of this planet. no one wants to harm whats theirs. no one would want to wage wars, whether economic or political, on their own land! no one would want to dump their radio active waste in their own land. no one would want to lead a part of their own land into accepting unreasonable loans. thats absurd! and that is what we should try to achieve.
(the counter argument to what i just said would be that people are inherently twisted, and that in reality no one thinks twice even when comminting atrocities on their own. also global patriotism is extremely 'large' - if you know what i mean- and that fragementation is inevitable. ALSO that if we did achieve global patriotism, people would still need someone to unload their radioactive waste onto and there is a good chance that this might be along racial lines. but like i said, i never claimed for my solution to be the one. what i do know however, is that national patriotism is getting us no where, so why not give this a shot?)

Moving On

Im not one to scan newspaper supplements for astrology or horoscope readings. i do have a set of tarot cards though. they were given to me by a really special friend who said that i might need them someday. being only 10 at the time, i was quite bowled over by her prophetic statement (and romanticized it endlessly in my mind - in most cases i was this huge aviation tycoon and i needed to consult the 'sages' - as i called it - for wisdom!) A couple of months back however, going through every teenagers griefs and pains, i actually was rummaging through some old stuff and found this set again. half amused - half exasperated, i sat on my bed and, with the required questions on my mind, i pulled out a card. It was a '8 of water'. the book told me it translated into, to sum it up, 'to move on'. not sure how 'moving on' had anything to do with my problem or solving it, i put the pack away, assuming the time hadn't come to consult them yet. (my tycoon years would be in need of them for sure!)
But 'moving on' got me thinking. to move from... to move past... to get on with your life. a very interesting article i had read once spoke about death in life (this is not 'a coward dies many times in his life, but the brave die only once' bit). we die at every stage. or we are supposed to die. most distinctively when we go from a baby to a child, child to teen, teen to young adult and so on. but we also die with experience. a death in the family, maybe even a random event that struck a cord. its like a snake shedding its skin, or a pupa to a butterfly. its the same entity, but with time its appearance and characteristics might alter. a sort of darwinian evolution at the individual level. we change with experience to survive. the to need to learn from experience equates to a struggle to survive.
My biggest 'what a load of bullshit' moment when i read the 'move on' tarot, was that i assumed there was nothing to move on from. (my inane explanation was that moving on meant there was baggage to be dropped, but a 19 yr old didn't have any baggage DUH!) but its not about baggage or about some distraught childhood that i might have had, it was simply that i hadn't died completely. that i had gone from pupa to moth (butterfly sound too flamboyant!) without dying a pupa. letting go closes a chapter. letting go is a form of dying. it was many months after i first stumbled across this card, that it started to make sense. my one biggest regret, however, is that this was probably my moment of need earlier foretold, and not the 'tyconic' one i had envisioned!

Georgia V/s Russia (click on the strip)

Citizen Cope

Last night on the way back from my friends place, i was shuffling through my best friends music (i can almost never finish an entire song!) and i came across 'citizen cope'. i'd never heard of them before. and i mean i had actually never heard of them before - most times i think iv never heard of a band, but eventually, once the songs starts, it turns out i know of them . but citizen cope was to me a completely 'new' band. your probably wondering why im rambling on and on about how i first heard them.. but for me the process of finding something new is sometimes cooler than the thing itself (not in this case though!).. but anyways, because i had never heard of them before, i had no expectations or preconceived notions about how they might be... and so it was with a truly unbiased and open mind that i heard them... if you love music you probably understand what im getting at...
ANYWAYS getting down to the music itself.. they are brilliant! if i had to say what genre they fall under, id have to say soft rock.. but thats being very generalist's.. they range all the way from punk rock to jazz-ish to classic rock (im talking santana, eric clapton... not kiss, megadeath.. - they aren't metal).. okay, im saying this with caution, but if you are a clapton-FOB-killers fan ('coz im all of those!) you will love this guy...
my favorite songs are - bullet and a target, let the drummer kick, when the sun comes up, sideways, fame, night becomes day. ('if theres love' is slightly pop-ish.. its k)
just give these guys a shot (if you haven't already) .. for some reason i feel responsible to get the word out about them! my missionary task, if you will! (without the brutality and violence!) cheers!

Happiness (?)

2 months into therapy, my main goal is supposed to be happiness. but what counts as happiness? i remember my first day on AD's. it was surreal. i felt invigorated. like nothing could spoil my day. i spent the first week grinning my ass off!! but then i wondered if that was happiness.. these anti depressants make you happy.. so there is this chemical formula for happiness.. and thats kind of weird... that means some one has pre decided what happiness for each individual should be.. i was supposed to be text book definition of 'happy'.. its kind of INSANE if you think about it.. luckily my pill popping suicidal days are over and im happy... but i cant help thinking what 'happy' am i? am i happy how i want to be? or am i happy by what the shrink wants me to be.. you know... i dont really care! im happy. period. i cant believe i just spent the last 10 minutes coming down to that.. i really love to meander don't i! IM HAPPY, BITCH! (im not even going to bothering proof reading this now! so please forgive me if this doesn't make any sense!)

An attempt at being random

hmmm... randomness.. the necessity to be random... to be liberated from structure.. to write without inhibition.. to be unleashed... a flower child of the 21st century... oooooh so the gay pride parades tomorrow and im really kicked and stuff... im hoping i can go... i have malaria and that totally suxss.. so the gay pride parade.. delhi, calcutta and banglore have already had theirs... bombays is tomorrow... the abolition of section 533 or 33 or something like that, which calls gay sex an act 'against nature'... weirdos.. iv realised that most people don't really care which way you swing.. the only ones whom seem to be all like woahh gay= bad are the fags that haven't come out of the closet... jackfucks... insecure prats.. but i suppose you can't really judge them, you never know what kind of environment they grew up in.. i mean i was lucky to have grown up in one where i could express myself and not worry about the repercussions.. yeahhh..

A guide to recognising your saints

i always thought i knew my taste in movies pretty well. they usually extended to period-films (historical), horror, british comedy and teenage R-rated movies. (cheap thrills!) but off late iv realised that a completely new genre of movies has begun to catch my interest. and that is 'poor-urban-culture'. (u've probably not heard of that genre before, but thats because iv just made it up! and haven't found a decent enough title for it yet!) these movies usually center around gang wars and random violence.
For the past couple of months this particular DVD has been catching my eye, but for one reason or another, id never rented it. finally on a particularly boring sunday morning i decided to check it out. the title itself (a guide to recognising your saints) seemed interesting in itself. a movie that would help you recognise what ever your definition of the saints in your life might be. and thats precisely what this movie is about. the entire movie is shot in flash back about the way tito (robert downey jr.) goes back to the bronx, where he grew up, and starts realising that the people whom he ran away from 16 years ago, were in fact the people who framed him for what he was today (a famous novelist). they were people who had stuck with him emotionally and stayed by all those people whom he cared for, during his years of his absence.
for some reason this resonated with me. i hate stories that have morals, or are preachy in some way, but this movie was neither of them. it simply showed one guys (and its a true story) gratitude to the people he had grown up with. because even in the midst of drugs, mindless violence and mechanical sex, in such a 'hostile environment', environments in which every-one-for-themselves is the order of the day, people still look out for one another and genuinely care. it speaks volumes about human nature.

muzzzzzic

music. an apple a day may keep the doctor away, but music keeps the shrinks at bay. have you ever been in a foreign country, or even among people whom you really don't have much to talk with, but the moment music comes up, whether its played or discussed, everyone has an opinion. it can be something as trivial as a washing powder jingle on the radio that can start a heated discussion. and the beauty of these arguments, if you can even call them that, is that they never turn truly ugly. you can hold a grudge against someone on the basis of their political opinions, but to truly despise someone on the grounds of music is bizarre. john mayer quite aptly said 'hit me with music, brutalise me with music'. the statements open to interpretation (and as my friend just said, relevance - he thinks its out of context here! but that just proves what i just said! people can disagree in an unparalleled cordial manner with music! im probably making a big deal about nothing, but for some reason this just struck while listening to john legend! go figure!)

the barking sage

a wise man once told me, no one no knows you better than yourself. scary, isn't it? just stop for a second and actually think about that. think of all those times you asked someone for advice, your best friend, a confidant, someone close, and to then realise that their answer or suggestion or whatever, was probably flawed or maybe even wrong, but you still went along with it. you went along, trusting their decision rather than your own. and then if you look back at those incidents and their eventual outcome, you realise that you were damn lucky you did in fact listen to them, rather then going through with your own decision. so that brings me, in a stupidly round about manner, to the main point of all this: is the wise man barking? or is there something iv been too thick to realise?