Some general and (honestly, rather dull) artless updates.

It's been a good run so far, I suppose. Two years since I escaped the many traps of formal education. Two years since the last time the walls came crashing down. A year and three quarters since the jerk from a metaphorical bungee rope. A year and a half, since control was seized, and things turned around. Eight months since the last remaining brick was tossed away. Seven, since I found something I'd been looking for, far longer than I can bring myself to admit. Two months since I was perched on that tiny, perfect little spot that marks the peak between the juxtaposed slopes of ambition and complacency, where everything was in equilibrium. Balanced, synchronised, and accounted for. It's been a month since I began walking down the wrong side of the mountain, and a week since I decided it was time for change. Again. 

Choices lie ahead of me. Two very good ones, because things work out that well sometimes. So what do I choose? On one hand lies the life of a more-than-well-to-do, stereotypical white-collared corporate monkey; while on the other, there is a world of great possibility, steep and rather trying intellectual challenges, the world to turn into my own quirkily-decorated little oyster, and equal measure of risk that comes along with all of this. Not one to err on the side of caution, I'm having a lot of trouble giving due weightage to both halves of the idea of "should want". Perhaps the decision was made long before the question presented itself. 

Perhaps. 

In other news, I am deeply concerned about a few facts that seem to have ganged up against me in recent times, also further urging me to "err on the side of caution". The adrenalin junkie in me is at danger of being slaughtered by nothing more than mere intraocular pressure, and a four year old memory of inopportune surgery for retinal detachment. The zest associated with a list featuring the words scuba, sky-diving, roller-coasters, weightlifting, and taekwondo is now accompanied by an unsettling fear of blindness. Adding to the aforesaid, there is a busted knee, the curse of the desk-job(weakened spine), unusually high myopia, and suspected tachycardia. How I wish this body I came with a part-replacement warranty policy. 

Meanwhile, in the last eighteen months or so, I've been making a place for myself in the world (with more success than I had dared to anticipate), moving out of my parent's house, dealing with the extremely painful job of apartment hunting in Gurgaon, living in three different houses, travelling to four new cities, witnessing quaint beachside sunset drum-circles, partying like nobody's business, catching up with friends I hadn't run into in over a decade or so, realising exactly how much our lives and the times change us even if we all started out at the exact same starting line, reading some of the best pieces of literature I've ever laid my hands on, trekking in the hills, and meeting, knowing, hating and liking a few hundred new people. And learning. Learning and experiencing so much in such little time that it blows my mind a little just bit, collating it all together into this modest time-frame. I'm pretty sure that sometime in the past this was exactly the life I had dreamt of. But there's got to be more. 

I want so much more. 

pentagram-heart.

Beanstalk, at the Galaxy Hotel in Gurgaon has much to its credit; the cinnamon and caramel latte, the artwork on display, the grand piano and live music. Delightful pleasures, certainly, but none as charming as the latte art I encountered at a recent coffee date. 

As if the barista started out innocently enough with creating a chocolate heart, decided that it was too much of a cliche, thence attempted to turn it into a pentagram, shortly before panic struck and resulted in the tangled mess you see in the picture. 

Like a testament, to deliciously dysfunctional romance. 

Swirls of confetti in a wind tunnel with no gravity.

Tonight, the concept of sleep seems alien, just as it was last night. Sometimes when I roll out the past, the present, and the discernible future in front of me and try to make sense of certain things that simply never will, it gets to be a bit much to handle.Thoughts are like swirls of confetti in a wind tunnel with no gravity. On nights like these, everything that did, can, and does matter comes in quick and disorienting flashes; faster than I can fit into its right place. But just when something up there is dangerously close to cracking, one particular memory works its way into the picture and shoves everything else out. 

When I was 17, I met the most intellectually gifted man I have ever known. Over a significant period of time, we exchanged words, ideas, and entire worlds. One day, in leaving, he said something that stands emblazoned in my memory, to this day. "This road you're starting out on, I've seen it, and I've been down it. Being the way you are, it's only logical that you would too. I know the why, I know the how. But please know that through the test of time, living up to your convictions and bearing the consequences will be excruciatingly tough. It would be a long, arduous, unending climb and there will be a lot of pain along the way. It's not a question of "can" any more. Are you sure you want to?", he said. I leaned forward, smiled quietly, and said the few words that keep me sane in times like these. 

"I've made my choice."

So today, what do I have to complain about? 

Six years ago, I made a choice. And that's that. 

There is a light (under the covers) that never goes out.

They ask me why I read. 

I tell them it that makes me happy, but that is untrue. How do I tell them the truth? How do I explain the fact that for most of my life, I've lived in a paracosm. A world of my own creation, because reality was never quite enough for me? That my mind was a box I never stepped out of, and the leather-bound frame of a book was the frame of my only window to the world outside. That its pages were a portal that transported me to lands near and far, to times enveloping the past, the present, and the furthest discernible future, where I learned about beauty, art, society, and the world when my immediate reality was too disappointing, or too insipid, or too predictable for me to step into. That my restless self wanted to run so fast that while the terrain and the training wheels felt like an insult to my capacity, my mind was hyperactive enough to construct cobbled streets, race-tracks and open-fields down to detailing the texture of the dorsal wing of the common swift moth perched on the rusted cross-arm of the gothic street lamp. That I knew people and understood them before I could speak to them. That viewing the world through so many eyes conferred upon me the capacity to be anything I needed to be, and what I could have became only a question of what I wanted. That the world's worth of knowledge and experience is condensed so much better into volumes, pages and nifty little constructs of sentences, for those who lack the patience, capacity, or poorer sense to wade through all the garbage that clutters an unaided experience of the world. That one needn't read to believe, but one must read to weigh, and to consider. That the mind is a machine which needs intellectual stimulus for fuel, and that reading is often a person's best shot at expanding it to its full capacity(or as close as it is possible to get), and that once you're there, there's no going back. How do I explain that reading gives me not just happiness, but everything else that reality is too listless to offer me. And that if it wasn't for this dogged whim of earning a living substantial enough to make my reality half as enthralling as my imagination and paying off the debt incurred in the process, I would still prefer to look out at the world from my window. Because having done that in the past, nothing I've seen since I became a part of it has ever managed to surprise me.

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They ask me why I think so much. 

How do I tell them that knowing the things I know, it's the only sensible thing left to do?

Folie à deux

Like lighted wick, does ardor burn
Too deep, alas, grief can run.
Yearning spouts, much like rain,
Pride to lose,wounds to gain.
Heavy are these words, much debt they bind,
To this leaden conscience of mine.
Blessed is that heart which bends,
Beginnings never know our ends.
Measure by measure, fate will avenge,
Each kindness it could not prevent.

A wonderful thing it is, to live enough, and love enough,
to run down countless roads, and rush past all the milestones,
to see all these splendid sights, and read all those beautiful words,
to have enough, and lose enough, for several lifetimes. Perhaps more.
The further I go, the more I feel, the more I see, and the more I know, but
bittersweet irony, now the thoughts come fast, and the words... not nearly enough.

The Bipolarity Paradox.

If one voluntarily chooses a life of manic depression, where the highs are extra high, and the lows are particularly low, citing the unnatural and overwhelming vividity of all human experience as the motivating factor, and the act of choosing that heightened quality of all emotion over plain old convenience as the guiding rational thought, the following catch-22 situation is fairly inevitable. The erratic behaviour that is a direct result of this disposition will eventually drive away all the people and things that make one happy. However, if it were not for this same disposition, those things would not make one happy enough to want them in the first place.  

Tales of Gain and Loss.

September 1, 2010

10:00 PM

How wonderful a thing it is, to have nothing to lose. Care about nothing. Have nothing, Own nothing. Keep nothing. Only want. And let the "want" define you, in entirety. I miss it.

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September 1, 2011

1:00 AM

The best thing about my life at the moment, is that it is absolutely unscripted. I have nothing holding me back or keeping me in one place. People, places, jobs, the several institutions you are a part of... they hold you down. Everything you love, holds you down. I love nothing. Thus, I am free.

............................................................

Never attempt to cure an addiction through abstinence. Do it through control.
Control is the only thing potent enough to make anything lose its charm. 

The air has been heavy. Heavy with poignance. It's been making it much too easy to float away, and far too difficult to breathe in. So I hole up in a room with endless spools of yarn and the comforting sound of two needles clicking away. The meditative nature of a repetitive exercise is grossly underestimated. Nimble fingers in constant motion, winding strands of wool in intricate patterns, creating more of something new with each move. Knit, purl. Knit, purl. Knit, purl. Weave it all in. The sounds, the thoughts, the dissonance. Bind it in the knots and weave it in, create something pretty, and let that be it. Years worth of grief will hang in your cupboard someday. 

And whenever too much is wrong with the world, I will knit. 

Work In Progress.

I could say that it's sudden abdication. And that it's a cruel thing to do to someone with enough abandonment issues to build a monument out of. I could do the flip and tell you that it's not renunciation, but abject fear in flagrant masquerade. Argue, I can, and you know it. But if I'm going to be honest, I might as well take the world down with me. My mind has been sick before, and so has my heart. And if we're fated to turn into each other eventually, then the promises you made are mine to deliver. Conviction is that simple, and sometimes I wish mine had enough to hold on to. 

On the Comfort of Doubt.

All my recreational distortions of reality, dramatic visualizations, and convoluted syllogisms aside, the truth is that when push comes to shove, I'm simply too decisive for my own good. Always certain, always sure, and very nearly incapable of experiencing doubt. I think part of that comes from a habit of stripping everything down to bare facts, and mostly from keeping it all very black-and-white in the head. But as it goes, the value of things is only known best to one bereft of them. Sometimes, I wish I could just loll around in a comforting stupor of perplexity before having to deal with the reality of things. Alas, as it goes with most of life, I skip ahead. Far ahead of myself, out past the forks in the road, choosing much too fast, much too easily. The decisions I make are never wrong. They just tread upon each other's heels and sometimes, just sometimes, they are meant to bring half my world crashing down. As I continue to skip ahead, I feel like I'm barely escaping the collapse. I'm going way too fast and I'm afraid that soon, in my dazed frenzy, I'll push the big red button intending to charge ahead. And then something would hold me back. 

Fully appreciating the irony of this statement, I'm fairly certain that there will not be a single experience in life that I will enjoy as much as I relish the feeling of being underwater. Given a bathtub, swimming pool, pond, lake, sea or ocean, all I want to do is swim to the bottom, perch myself there, and let my senses explode. The calm that comes with being surrounded by vast expanses of water and nothing else, is a rare and inexplicable delight. It's not calm bound by limits. It's the calm of being suspended in time, space, gravity and countless dimensions. Not the kind of calm that you touch and draw from, but the one that engulfs you in a cocoon and holds you still. Everything is blue, and green, and it paints you into itself. The muffled sounds, the rays of light barely piercing the water and the glimmering surface seen from below make it seem like a whole different world. A disturbingly beautiful one. So beautiful, that every moment I've spent under water, has haunted the years I've spent above it. Thus, the new blogger template. Because what I truly need at the moment, is something to remind me of the existence of that particular variety of calm. The one that holds you still and pervades the senses. I cannot wait to break the surface and dive right in. 

Grey Noise.

As much as a double-edged sword aspiration may be, it works well to have a few of those painted on you in indelible ink. But as far as all wonderful things go, we will hit the plateau sooner or later. So what if the stakes are high, and you now have things to lose, and risks to take, and the world to conquer and turn into your own personal TV room. It works well to stand by and reaffirm a love placed only in unattainable things. For all the countless things that you stand to win over, it works well to make note of the ones you lose. The balance tips much too easily, you see. Our beginnings never really know our ends.

Clarity.

Having spent most days of the past raised to eternity fumbling around for probable cause, or hoping to accidentally chance upon sporadic reasons to justify that which is bound by four cycles of the clock, it feels like a brand new set of your senses have been awakened when dreams are separated by dreams alone, and reality isn't just a desperate attempt to imitate imagination. Reality, after all this time, is imagination. Not through the blurring of lines that separate the two, but as a consequence of absolute clarity. When you view the world through a microscope, everything begins to look like everything else. In the end, it is only when you look very closely that you start to lose your differences.

Midnight musings and other exotic fruits.

It's almost horrifying how good I am at keeping secrets. Interrogate, investigate, poke or pry. Move mountains and oceans, shoot bullets through the sky. Yet I can lie, with not a blink of the eye. However, there is a catch. Aware as I am of its utility, I am finding my capacity for furtiveness to be more than a little disconcerting. Reason being, that I am the one person I know, least equipped to use it. Given to inflated (almost flatulent) concepts of righteousness and honestly, I have no use for this particular talent. Nevermind, I digress. The doubts that I've been tossing around in my head are about something else. What if the secret in consideration is not yours to tell? Does morality follow the law of association? Transitive dependency?

On a related note, I make a great addition to any kind and sort of reunion. Owing to the aforesaid capacity for secrecy, I am made the confidante in more personal/semi-personal equations than one could hope to count. I always have the dirt on everyone's deep, dark secrets. And I get to be the one to spill them when the time is right. Scandals makes an evening, if not life, far more interesting.

In other news, I have begun to attribute the unfortunate state of my social life to reading too much Freud. One can only go so far, classifying people as anally retentive/anally expulsive, and launching into immediate conjecture. The perils of over-educating yourself with things that have nothing to do with your line of misery work.

Also, I was recently discouraged against using any italics in formatting my minor project dissertation. Apparently, it is probable cause  to ascertain that the matter is plagiarized or lifted off an external source. *proceeds to bang head into nearest available wall/desk/mallet.*  Because I enjoy mallets.

The second of my natural talents is also getting me into trouble these days. By virtue of being the most sarcastic person around, I stand the risk of having everything I say be lost in translation. Have lost count of the times I ended up offending people by paying them a genuine, heartfelt compliment. C'est la vie, I suppose.

There is no dearth of things that I hate with the very core of my black, black heart. But there are few things that I hate more than winter. And winter is baring its fangs most viciously these days. Sadly, the second most important examinations of my life are just around the corner, and hibernation is not an option. Neither is active vandalism, it seems. Well, at least something has changed in 3 years. At this point, the only things keeping me sane are hot chocolate, my love of overcoats and badass leather boots, and the faint possibility of a post-exam holiday in a tropical country. Yes, more tropical than India.

If there is one difference that I had to point out in teenaged-me and 21-year-old-me, it would most certainly be that I am no longer angry. Anger is a strange thing. Though it often consumes, it also gives you a certain drive that is irreplaceable. When there's too much of it, it begins to define the person it proliferates in. But when the anger has dissipated, it isn't quite rebirth as much as rediscovery. A lot of things in life take courage, I reckon. It also takes a fair deal to see yourself stripped down to bones, and learn to accept and appreciate what's left. The line between what you will always be and all that you can become, is a thin one. Perhaps that's a good thing, but it is well to know exactly where it lies. The innate capacity to out-reason ourselves into believing anything we want, is and always will be a double-edged sword.

You know life is unnecessarily complicated when..

...you need Venn diagrams to sort out your facebook privacy settings.

Early-Morning Epiphany.

Someone to love,
and something to loathe.

The twin pillars of an urban-dweller's fulfilled life.

The present is never static.
It moves with time itself.

It must, after all
hold on to today
for the fear of tomorrow.