Null & Void

She was walking around with that huge gaping hole in her heart for over a week now. It felt as if someone had taken a giant bazooka and shot an iron cannon ball right through her chest. It was surprising how such emptiness could weigh so much. For though she felt like a large part of her was actually missing, the void in itself seemed to have an interminable weight which sapped her strength, bore her down, buckled her knees and pinned her to the ground; so much so, that the ground beneath her feet and the world around her collapsed under the weight of her emptiness.

Oh, she had cried. She had cried until the tears poured out, in the vain hope that they would flood her heart, fill the white void and seal the emptiness. And the tears had obediently arrived at her behest, like an all too eager vulture waiting to swoop down on a dying animal and end the ordeal. But they did nothing to kill the pain or heal the wound. Eventually, she told herself that she had to stop crying. But the tears still streamed out in silent batches; stealthily creeping down at the slightest hint of a trigger – a song here, a sign there. They now seemed to have a will of their own and she watched on haplessly as they took over her life.

A funny thing then started happening. She began to notice this other void emerging in the recess of her mind. The tears now seemed to be leaving a new void in their wake. Her suspicion was confirmed when she felt an emptiness take shape in her head - as if reason had deserted its abode, leaving in its place a huge black emptiness.  But in a strange way the numbness in her mind or the Null as she referred to it as, now complemented the Void in her heart.  For when the mind ceased to register the songs, the signs and the memories, the heart knew not what to languish for.

And she woke up one morning, on another grey October to find that the wellspring of tears had now run dry. But the path that they had traced between Null & Void was etched deep in her soul. And in a weird way, as the black Null embraced the white Void, she felt a strange grey wisp of peace settle round her.

Parting of the Protima

Well, I had originally penned this verse almost 2 years ago. The trigger was a rather evocative picture from the Durga Puja celebrations in Calcutta, captured by Shuboda on his website: http://wanderfulwalk.net/2009/11/13/in-the-long-run/

The reason this came rushing back to me earlier this month was, because I had ventured out on my 1st Pandaal hopping spree this year with a bunch of fellow enthusiasts (aptly spearheaded by Simi). We covered 3 Pandaals and I must admit I was completely floored by the elaborate idols and decorations. But what pleased me to no end was the sumptuous spread across the Oh Calcutta, Hangla and Sweet Bengal stalls at the venue. The exquisite, spicy sting of the Jhalmuri, the heavily layered indulgence of the Mughlai Paranthas and the delightfully crisp chicken chaap did their part to contribute to a divine experience of the culinary kind! Also, there is this inexplicable thrill of eating non-vegetarian food (legitimately, mind you) on a Puja day... It almost feels like you're flouting the rules *and* getting away with it : ) Anyway, before I digress and turn this into a food fest, here's the verse I was talking about:

After the telltale conch
Sings victory
And the rich vermilion

Proclaims glory;
With evil vanquished
And a job well done,
Yawns replace trumpets
As the mortals return
To scooters and tiffins,
To life's mundane call.
For, come Monday morning
Even the mighty fall.

There's also this picture that I had taken at one of the Pandaals in Juhu. I was given to understand that it was Rani Mukherjee's Pandaal (...No, I did not spot any Bollywood stars there!). But this is the sort of elaborate set-up that I was talking about.

Flight of Fancy

They gave you wings
To let you fly.
They taught you to dream
To reach for the stars in the sky.
They set you free.
They let you be.
They stood by your side.
They watched with pride.
And when you scaled new heights,
It warmed their heart
But higher meant farther
And that tore them apart.
But words remained unspoken.
Love didn't permit them to say
That you'd found your path,
But you'd lost your way.
For you never turned back
You didn't see their concern
The cage was golden
But you wouldn't return.
There soon came a time
When you paused in the sky;
You've travelled this far
But you can't remember why.
You're suddenly tired
As you stand there alone
You want to go back
But now you can't find your way home.

Concrete Jungle

It’s a beautiful world, the world I’ve seen,
In an unyielding grey and a glorious green;
Made of equal parts foliage and fibre glass,
It’s an elegant mosaic of cement and grass.
Forests may morph into buildings real tall,
But tenacious creepers still crop out of cracks in their wall;
It’s a tolerant world where trees and towers mingle
Welcome to my world, my Concrete Jungle

A Sinner's Soliloquouy

The sky embraces a murky night,
A mob of clouds trample the moon;
The intoxicated trees sway in a trance,
To the winter wind's melancholic croon.

But I embrace a murky fate,
Destiny tramples my life, my dream;
My hopes are crushed; I'm in a trance,
I can hear the death bells scream.

Lightning flashes an ugly smile,
The thunders roll in derision.
"A sinner pays the price of death",
The whole world screams in unison.

But in the gallows, the clouds condole,
With sepulchral tears all night through;
Until my sinning, putrid blood,
Stains the morning dew.

Be a Sport!

The massive gold rush at the Common wealth games made me nostalgic and brought back memories of my formative years in the sporting arena. Not that I had much of a gold rush or even an adrenaline rush for that matter. It was more of a mad rush to try not be the last person left on the tracks, and come to think of it my sporting arena was never more expansive than the school ground.

Nevertheless my earliest memories of sports is that of the school annual sports day in KG 2 where we had to roll a length of paper ribbon into a wad and make a dash to the finish line. Though I was the 1st one to finish rolling the ribbon; in all my socialistic benevolence, I waited for the others to finish rolling theirs as I had the misplaced notion that the actual race could begin only after everyone was done rolling. So I waited patiently with a beatific smile on my face, much to my parents’ consternation and the teachers’ perplexity. A couple of seconds later I saw one girl start running. And in a classic example of those tell-tale irritating kids in class, I turned to complain to the teacher who had flagged off the race with her whistle, except my vision was blocked by another girl who broke into a run; followed by another. It was then that by an early display of herd mentality which prevailed over common sense that I broke into a frenzied run for the finish line.

Now in the 1980s, annual sports days in school were quite flamboyant affairs. The dress code for this particular race in 1987 was blue and the format was a frock / gown. I had gone all out with an ankle length ball gown replica with ruffles which proved to be quite a hindrance while running because it wasn’t quite designed for heavy sprinting or even rapid shuffling of feet for that matter. However here again the concept of relativity made an early entry into my life though I didn’t recognize it then. The 3rd girl who had run past me seemed to have gone one step further than me in designing her dress and seemed to have added a blue veil trail to her ensemble which was well in line with the latest autumn –winter collection but didn’t quite go with her running shoes, because it kept getting under them!!

And that was how I managed to salvage the 3rd place (bronze) in the ribbon race with an amusing insight – Lesser clothes works better in Sports as well.

I then moved onto the annual sports day in 1988. This time I was a year older and much the wiser from my previous exploits. Turns out the school was as well. The school tailor in all his sensibility designed shorts for all contestants (to eliminate any added disadvantage that the attire may confer upon the contestants). My parents for their part had geared me up by giving me the added advantage of a healthy breakfast replete with a glass of glucose and all. When the instructions for the race were doled out, I got to know that the task was to drink a bottle of Thumbs Up and dash to the finish line. This time, my socialistic benevolence disappeared as fast as the Thumbs Up which I glugged down at a speed of 1000 cc/sec. The moment the last drop left the bottle I started running towards the finish line but I didn’t get very far. There is something about idlis, glucose and thumbs-up which apparently doesn’t go well together because my sprint was cut short within the 1st few metres by a stupendous, spontaneous arc of puke which effectively blurred the finish line.

And that left me with the 2nd invaluable insight - Wherever lesser clothes don’t help in particular, lesser food definitely does!

Over the next few years I had tried various forms of sports - the lemon and spoon race, needle and thread race etc. I can’t comment about the skipping race because ironically I had to ‘skip’ the race as I tripped over my rope and fell down even before the race started! As for the sack race and shot put throw, both me in my sack avatar and the shot put orb that I subsequently hurled, ended up travelling the same distance (2 and a half feet, I was told) after which both rolled over unbecomingly to the side of the track.

Anyway, years later I can safely say that I am still in touch with my sporty side-

a) I actively participate in the corporate rat race
b) Play ball with the mails that hit my inbox by proactively bouncing them off to other stakeholders with an ‘fyi&a’ note
c) Attend marathon meetings which begin at 9:00 in the morning and go on till the cows come home.

P.S: I try to steer clear of the sack race at work though, for that’s one race where the last one to finish actually gets the sack : )

‘Gym’micks

There are 13,456 ways to kill a person. By far the most excruciating yet seemingly innocuous method to do so is... gymming (‘working out’ for the uninitiated). Barring Fin-Acc quizzes and Sumo wrestling, there is no mortal activity on the face of the planet that could possibly match up to gymming in making you feel like you died twenty two times in one nanosecond.

I just happen to be one of those ‘obsessively health conscious’ (read suicidal) souls in the universal quest for the 'Utopian anatomical configuration’, which partly explains why I ventured through the hallowed portals of the gymnasium. The other not so altruistic motive which constitutes the rest of the explanation revolves around the preconceived notion that the gymnasium is the breeding ground for the ‘finer species of the opposite sex’. A connoisseur’s delight, if I may say so.

A little impromptu jog and I found myself at the gym, albeit high on aspiration and low on respiration. But all my hopes of a grand entrance were annihilated by the effects of my little jog taking its toll. I mean, dragging myself in looking like I had been to hell and back, while all the while sounding like a cycle pump in action wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. All said and done, I was ready to embark on a soul-searching, paunch-losing expedition and headed directly towards the treadmill with a vigour that would have made Don Quixote seem inadequate. My efforts to do the same however were nipped in the bud by the gym instructor who politely but very firmly insisted that I do a couple of warm ups first. I thus began my first task of bending forward and touching my toes with a ‘huh, child’s play’ look which froze midway because that was exactly how far the tips of my fingers went... midway, just below the knees. I was cognizant of a wide chasm (justifiably comparable to the Grand Canyon) which no amount of finger-wriggling or toe-lifting could bridge. After sustained efforts aided by surreptitious knee-bending (deemed illegal by the moguls of the gym), I managed to complete the ordeal with out actually dropping down dead. I was all set to pack up and evacuate the premises. I’d had enough exercise for the next thirty two years put together.

Being endowed with a rather convoluted cerebral process, I pride myself in being capable of despairing over more than one thing at a time. Added to my abysmal gymming abilities (or disabilities if you may) the absence of that certain ‘finer species of the opposite sex’ was rapidly contributing to my mounting despair. But my despair like my gymming ambitions was pretty short lived. For in all their resplendent glory, and completely conforming to my idea of a grand entrance, there arrived a contingent of the finer species in question. It is amazing what a bunch of strapping young men can do to ones morale. One minute I was charting out a route map to the EXIT sign and what do you know, the next minute I’m back to Don Quixote mode again, ready to pump iron.

That was how I found myself in phase two of the exercise regime. This time around I had to touch the opposite toes with the tips of my fingers. Under normal circumstances, by no stretch of the imagination or my arm muscles for that matter could I have accomplished the feat. But egged on by a curious audience and subtle execution of the art of knee-bending, I came out victorious. I had thus graduated to the awe inspiring exercise machines that seemed to be made up of pulleys, weights and more weights. The task when put in words seemed obscenely simple - grip the handle bar, raise and drop the weights in a vertical motion. But the simplicity stopped right there. For try as I might, I couldn’t pull the handle bar more than two inches downwards. I blamed it on the pulley and tried explaining the laws of friction and other interesting aspects of physics to the instructor but for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, he wasn’t all that convinced. As a matter of fact, neither was my esteemed audience who by then had graduated from a level of curiosity to one of extreme amusement.

Anyway, I found solace in a new drill- the dumbbells. At least that’s what I thought until the gravity of the situation (pun unintended) dawned upon me. All my endeavours of wielding the dumbbells in mid air were thwarted by the fact that the dumbbells seemed to be the ultimate manifestation of Newton’s law of gravity……the only direction they seemed to be headed towards was the core of the earth. But this time I refrained from alluding to the laws of gravity scavenged from the elementary school physics text. Something told me that assimilating the subtle nuances of physics from someone who couldn’t even lift dumbbells wasn’t exactly one of the primary hobbies of either my instructor or my audience. It was somewhere during the middle of these contemplations that the dumbbell slipped from my hand and with stupendous velocity, acceleration and a considerable amount of precision fell exactly on my left foot. The result was profound. There was a unanimous gasp which subsequently diversified into three different reactions - the instructor embarked onto reciting a long list of anti-inflammatory, analgesic sprays to hit the market; my audience was rolling on the floor laughing with unadulterated amusement of the hedonistic kind; and I headed towards the door with a brilliant display of histrionics, successfully conforming to my idea of a bad exit.

My stint at the gym didn’t help me lose weight though I did manage to lose quite a bit of self-image. But one thing I did gain there was some gyan. Here goes:

a) Working out would probably kill me faster than obesity.
b) The finer species of the opposite sex have a weird sense of humour.