faust - the seeker

visiting old selves

2012-01-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

i wanted to hold it. feel the last whiff of the cold wind on my bare skin. i wanted to remember the bone numbing chillness. the complete defenselessness against the harsh winter. i wanted to get lost in the fog and float in the mist.

i walked with the cold December wind in my hair and with a cigarette in my lips. the fog faded everyone out. i felt the iciness settle on my finger tips as i tried to take another puff. the chill crept into my very being. numbing every thought and every feeling.

i tried to breathe and saw the warm circles of air being eaten up. the burning end of the cigarette was the only beacon of light in the darkness of the night. the hissing sound of the burning cloves absorbed my senses and sweetened my frosty lips.

it was the beginning of my trip back home.

Nike. Just Do It

2011-09-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

Its 3 am in the morning. My eyes have never felt heavier. The alcohol drugs my mind and senses. I talk less and laugh more. I make the connection with my eyes and sense a willing smile and an inquisitive glance. Eager to take a ride, I agree to venture out on a drive. In the midst of the drive, under the pretext of being co-travelers, he asks me if age defines certain parameters in life for me.

We reach the destination. He stands in front of me with his face close to mine. I can almost feel him on me. Soon he roves into regions unexplored. My eyes unable to focus any longer shut out on the reality. I am floating in the air with the dizziness caused by the absence of ground beneath my feet. His stubble leaves marks on my face. And his perfume lingers on my body. It passes like a haze.

We leave. And then I hear him sing. His full throated and raw voice reaches out to my numbed senses and I cant stop myself from making a contact with him. I want to touch to remember the embrace. The hands that make music and bring a life into an instrument stroke mine..

It ends in a haze. I have only the memory of voice and touch and remnants of perfume to remember him by. He had asked me earlier in the evening if I believed in the brand Nike. It said just one thing, said he. That was "Just Do It"

First Date

2011-04-23T04:49:00.000-07:00

Its so difficult to put yourself out there. Mark yourself as available and then wait for the judgement to be passed. You are to try to smile to hide the anxiety and excitement. You are expected to come up with witty answers to hypothetical questions. There is a lingering gaze that you cannot return hence you look away after every few seconds. You would love the conversation to just flow instead you realize that the speed of your finishing your drink is faster than the speed at which the words come out of your mouth. There are comments on your good looks. You try to reciprocate but find it hard to say the same things to the other person. You talk about the common passions and the possibility of discovering new places together. It thrills you to see the readiness with which you can make a companion of this stranger.

You are told that you are too shy because what you have not been able to do is to meet that unending gaze. It hits you hard when you realize that you have suddenly turned into porcelain. That suddenly you are so fragile. There is that touch of his fingers brushing yours back. You want to soak in that feeling but you are not able to express because that gaze still lingers. You want to retort with the same flirtatious remarks but are not able to understand what holds you back. Its time to pay the bill and head back.

He holds you close to him as he escorts you to his car shielded by an umbrella against the rain. The moment you sit inside the car he cups your hands. You are trying to make sensible conversation but at the same time try to stall the time. So that he can hold your hand longer. You want that fuzzy feeling to go on. You reach the end too fast than you would have liked to. You realize that he wants to go one step further but something holds him back. You can hear him breathing hard. Breathing in your perfume. You try to give the signals too. But they are too weak to reach him. He just hugs you and gives you a peck on your cheek and you are away.

The moment the car vanishes, you crave for the attention and missed opportunities. You blame yourself for being prudent and not making yourself available. It hits you hard when you get a message that says that you were too shy to take the peck on the cheek as a hint for what could have come. Maybe you should have had those extra drinks as suggested by him to lose the inhibitions. You wonder at the missed opportunities and reply back by saying that the chances should have been taken by him when they were to be had. You further send more messages describing what you would have liked to happen. Even more messages are sent by you when you have finally flown back to other side of the country in the hope that something would elicit a response.

Except for silence nothing happens. You sit in your apartment going over the whole sequence again and again, wishing you could change the end as it came. You stalk the social networking sites to see if he is woken up from the slumber. But there are no signs of activity. The phone no longer flashes with his name on it. Utterly loser like and miserable is how you feel. You have a gnawing feeling inside you that probably being alone is how you will end up to be.

Missing them so much

2010-07-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

I miss the attention. It feels strange to have finally stepped out of the house. Its been days since i felt the touch of my parents. Its going to be longer still before I will actually get to see them. The familiar sounds of pressure cooker's whistle blowing at all hours of the day, the cacophony created by the radio that was turned on for allmost as long as my mother worked around in the house is missed. The sound of my mother coughing while cleaning, the distinct sound of footsteps of each member of the family.

Each day is started with a renewed resolve to see it through. 26 years of staying and living with someone and then moving on to lead a life of her own in the unknown. I seek solace in my house's bedsheets that i still carry from home because the linen has the same comforting smell and the same comforting feel.

I miss looking at the faces, fighting with them and making up with them. I know now why they say that there is no place like home. Its what all that you have left behind. I seek independence from the supposed ties and yet it is these ties whose knot I am not able to unravel. There is no one to ask you for all the hours in a day if you have eaten and if you would like to eat more. No one to hold your back or to listen to your cribs. Independence comes at a cost.

Too much running

2010-06-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Running. running to catch my dance class. running to get myself enrolled for a MA in English programme. Running to keep fit. Running to stay ahead of the race. Running to get the bus tickets for the last bus to shimla. Running to reach the swimming pool on time and running to leave on time. Running my mind to think of all the adverse situations that i can possibly land up in with no one to save me.

So much running to leave me with no sense and feel of things or events that are occurring in life. Running to forget and running to live. Running to escape too. Escape that is the sweetest form of forgetting, which lets you be.

To escape from this heat, dust, noise and also myself.

So It is

2009-10-31T11:08:00.000-07:00

and so it is . i lie cowered in a corner. i have no brains or rather no fundamental values that can guide me through life. i don't understand things and hence i am deserving what i am getting. i need things to be spelt out infront of me. otherwise i don't get them. i am a kid who is yet to mature.
i feel alone but i cannot meet you and talk it out because you can't stand the pretension of being friends. but you can't answer my question either. when i ask you what you want to meet me as, you don't reply to me and draw a blank. but then again since i don't understand things i don't know what i am supposed to construe by your silence.

why does it have to be so difficult? so complicated. why can't things be normal again? if it didn't work out then so be it. why is it necessary that i continue to suffer this silence and the right to reach out to you is denied to me. everytime i ask you to meet me your standard reply is, "why do you want to meet me all of a sudden". you tell me that when you feel alone you don't ask me out for coffee because i won't like it. what i don't like is the fact that with every passing day i lose the connection to you. what i don't like is getting intimate in your car when i am supposed to be moving on. how do you expect me to move on when i sit with you with my face buried in your shoulders and your hands sizing me up.

i won't deny that that feeling of comfort is something that is sought by me every morning when i wake up. but i can't detach myself from you if i continue to be with you like this. the thought that i can't reach out to you kills me from within. why is it that you can't explain things to me if don't understand them? how difficult will that effort be? your replies are strong enough to move me to cries.

why couldnt you meet me? even if it was for the sake of pretension. what will it take to be with you again? i can't even discuss this with anyone. my friends will think i am really stupid to get involved with you. which probably i am. its really difficult to talk these days you know. many times when i am on phone with my friends, i realize that it is me who is pushing the conversation forward. you always said that you feel good when you are with me. you feel like yourself and you want to laugh and be happy. so why is it that now you refuse to see me?

i want this cringing feeling to stop and infact if just writing it down would cut it out then i will sit and type and write till it stops hurting. but no matter how much i write its not going to stop. i am again going to call you tomorrow and ask you - what do you want to meet me as?

Feeling so ignored has never hurt so bad. Even in school when all the girls would boycott me i would walk on my own and alone. i would hide in the girls loo so that no one found me out. now i don't even know where to hide and where to take cover. why is acceptance so hard? what line do i have to walk?

In Memory of Alexander Supertramp

2009-08-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

He tore down the curtain of pretension weaved around him since the beginning of his existence. He took to the road and decided to commune with the nature instead of the humankind. In a life warped by domestic lies, forced expectations and false appearances he hits the wild trail in the search of honesty and truth.

Alex risks everything to see himself in Alaska trying to manage living in a forlorn bus all by himself with only nature for company. He shoots game for food, drinks water from the flowing river and enjoys the wild in its full resplendence.

It pains my heart to see the lonely death he dies in the end. He writes in the pages of Dr. Zhivago - Happiness is real only when shared. True sentiment. He dies by lack of judgment. Not the judgement which aided him to take the decisions which led him to Alaska but the error he made while choosing the variety of berries which were not edible.

His attempts to break out from the makeshift arrangements are thwarted by the rising levels of river which he can no longer manage to cross. His will cannot help him here.

He survived for 100 days in the jungle of Alaska. In his last days while lying on the seat of the broken down bus, writhing in pain, wrapped in the sleeping bag, he looks outside the broken window of the bus onto the clear sky thinking of the embracing arms of his parents ready to receive him and accept him.

In my mind i cannot take off the picture of Alex sitting outside his bus posing for a shot for his own camera. He has a calm almost beckoning smile on his face. No sign of the inner struggles. Just the peace that he felt in his surroundings.

He says in the beginning of his story - " Our parents should not have borne us. They don't know how much pain we will bring to them and how much pain they will cause us. "

He experience people and places, the extent which i cannot match in my lifetime. In the spirit and quest of Alex.

We have a greed, with which we have agreed...
and you think you have to want more than you need...
until you have it all, you won't be free.

Society, you're a crazy breed.
I hope you're not lonely, without me
- Society by Eddie Vedder

Speckled piece of glasses

2009-06-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

The yellow light coming out of the vase shaped lamp illuminated the numerous pieces of glasses dressed on it in a flowery arrangement. The colored light on the pale walls filled my heart with joy. The lamp hung on a chain from the ceiling in the center of a L shaped room. It was basically a piece of glass coated with white cement with broken bits of colored glasses on it.

It was bought from a historical cauldron called Chandni Chowk. This market has its own collection of old and decrepit buildings. Buildings so old and whose walls have so many creaks and cracks that you begin to wonder as to how they still hold up the teeming masses of life within them. A walk in one of its streets of this market is like a walk in a maze. You can lose yourself to the wares being sold here, to the constant rush of feet always in a hurry to move, to the unknown faces looking to strike a bargain. This is one of oldest markets in India.

The yellow light also takes me back to the much cherished ride on a rickshaw across the pink walls of the old city of Jaipur. The literature festival was just about to end and my friend could not stand another session. Much to our dismay we realized that not only that not only were all the monuments shut for the day but the markets also were not doing any business. Left to our own we sat on a rickshaw and traversed the paths of the old city. Seemingly endless pink walls join each other to become a constant companion accompanying you in whichever direction you head. The pleasant breeze that was blowing despite the cold January month was the only music that was required. The pace of life is calm here. You can see people perched on the terrace of their houses engaged in conversations oblivious of your gaze. The rickshaw wallah on discovering suddenly that we were two lost girls in the city took it uopn himself to ensure that we reached the place that we had decided to stop for dinner on time. It was almost two hours since we had been touring the city. More than the dots on the map that we had managed to draw a line across in this city, it was the feeling of feeling the pulse of the city that has stayed in my mind.

Meanwhile this particular lamp continues to tinker my imagination with its hues of light.

2009-01-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

I have been writing continuously now. I need to set goals for myself. Goals that are achievable. Too much had been left on hold. Too much left to be accomplished. As i set out again to rediscover myself and to understand my thought process better. The last year was spent in fighting. Winning some and losing more.

Current state of my mind

2009-01-10T10:47:00.000-08:00

It feels wierd. I suddenly realize that the person with whom i had spent every moment of my possibly utilized time has now decided to be no longer with me. I wake up with his dreams in my head. It feels odd because i feel as if he had a peek into my head, into my soul without my knowing it. And it was what he saw there which made him feel that perhaps i m not "mentally compatible with him". It feels odd because i was not able to gain a similar insight into his thought process. I feel vulnerable, alone. Momentarily i had led myself to believe that i just could be there. It would work out. The feeling of touch, of his hand on my mine. The feeling which made me speechless and my throat choke so that i could never really express how it felt to have his hand on top of my hand or his hand at the back of my back. The feeling of reassurance long gone, a part of me feels amputated. All those times when i could not return his smile, or i could not return his phone call or made him wait in his car for me now come back to haunt me. I am filled with remorse when i wonder what if it was a part of me that really drove him out. It is sad to realize that things had to end this way. That when they did end they brought back with them all the nightmares which i had thought were relegated to the past.

What hurts most is perhaps also the fact that i have lost yet another person with whom i could talk. Talk my heart out and tell him anything and everything. But did i really do that when i was with him? Or has this realization come a little too late. It was so easy for him to say that, "i need a break". The fact that he could distance himself and look at everything and decide what is the best and i was not makes me feel incompetent. It makes me doubt my eptitude. The fact that he could see and decide that it was not right and i could not. Was i blind? More than anything else he made me think. He made me doubt my inner most beliefs and values. I grieve at the loss of what is now gone. I have cried over it like i never have. This too had been anticipated by him. Alas! no matter what i do it cannot bring him back. " I shall be always in his thoughts", says he. But that is not sufficient for me. To not see him around me makes me imagine him around me like never before. I feel his presence all around me, in most inane of things. I hear him in my music, sense him in cigarrete smoke, see him in the empty office chair, feel him in my dreams.

I have now lost two very special people in my life. Lost what could probably have been one of the most contributing opportunities to my life. So what do i look forward to now? It feels to stand for myself again. Not that i m not used to it. But it was so good for a while to know what it is to have someone to share it all with that now i m left dumb. I talk to myself now in my head. Saying it all to him in my imagined conversations. My soliloquies seem to have no end. Its the bereavement of a good human good being. Someone who could think for himself. And of course his experiences. I miss his stories. The void left by his stories tailored perhaps at times to amuse me or tell me about life that exists beyond the unseen at others cannot be filled by anything.

These days i unconciously use the words that he used to, talk in the same way that he used or react to situations like he did. So much so that my way of recovering out of it all also depends on what he had to say to me in response to my urgent messages sent to him telling him about my sorry state caused by him leaving me.

Will it ever be the same again? It has never been easy for me to find myself a guy who can really understand me. So did i actually let someone slip by me who could really understand me in all entirety? Too many questions with unsatifactory and unconvincing answers.

Ordinariness, Mundaneness, Mundanity

2008-08-04T22:56:00.000-07:00

Mediocrity! That is something which i have been thinking for some time now. Recently i came across a few people who were known to me and who have gone on to make a name for themselves (big "names" for that matter). This made me ponder. Ponder hard. If i lead a seemingly normal life wherein i continue following a path which has been oft tread before (path would be going to the office, doing the work allotted to me, following the one or two hobbies that i have, spending time with friends n family) make me an average person. How do i step out of this mediocrity and be associated with something different, something which me makes me appear unlike the others in the crowd that i inhabit? Its a deep craving wherein i want to achieve something which is not ordinary and sundry. A pinching feeling actually which rubs in at the most unexpected of times.

So have i done anything in this direction? Not as of now. I watch this feeling rise whenever i come across another success story and ebb whenever i fall back into my daily routine. In the meanwhile i continue searching for directions and trying to make my life more meaningful than what it is.

Also, an association with very hard to find and connect to - "intellect" is also desired.

No ground beneath my feet

2008-07-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

I have just resigned from my firm in a span of just 6 months. Many people ask me, "Why did you do it"? Their typical reaction - "You should have stuck it out for 6 more months and then quit after an year was over." Work environment, that's it. Is that your sole reason for leaving?

Shouldn't that be a big reason for leaving? If the people around you make you feel like a forgotten piece of furniture. If the work that you do makes you feel that your brain died a long time and its just some automated commands that are doing their job day in and day out. Then shouldn't sit up and ask yourself, what the hell are you doing with your life? Is it really important then to look how long you have survived and for how much longer can you brag the "survivor" tag and show it off.

Instead you should start looking for a new job before you become a poor imitation of your former self. That's what i decided to do. For the six months that i spent working in this firm, 5 were spent looking for other alternatives. I have found one as of now but whether it works out or not is yet to be seen.

So now that i have no ground beneath my feet, i m looking at ways to keep myself busy. I have been thinking of becoming a radio jockey since a very long time. But i have done nothing about it except to talk to myself infront of a mirror and pretend that i have an audience listening to me and appreciating the music that i play for them.

Alas, the search of groundless feet still continues.

Sex and the city

2008-06-29T03:48:00.001-07:00

After a lot of trepidations, i finally saw the movie "Sex and the City". And i am glad i did it, glad that i didnot give in to all the bad reviews that i had been hearing about it. Oh all right some of the characters did look like their time had come, but the essence still remained the same. The movie carried forward the spirit which the entire show had espoused. I somehow always felt good about being a woman after watching this show. Its a liberating experience to be able to see four women accomplish whatever they set out to do in their lives. The freedom to make choices and live by their consequences is a big privilege.

And of course the riot of colours that this show had to offer for me. I enjoyed watching the swish set hopping across the town, not giving a damn about what people thought and most importantly following what their heart told them to do.

Of all the characters i like Carrie the most. Maybe its got to do with the writer part. I connect more to those who connect to writing. The concept of true and perfect love is very romantic and fascinating but i wonder if it really exists. After watching this weekly show there was always a constant feeling that i could feel buzzing in my head - "Conquer the World". I think i will purchase the entire dvd set to watch at a more leisurely pace.

same old cab journey

2007-12-26T09:27:00.000-08:00

i cover a distance of 100 km between my office and my home everyday. Its a journey that i make through traffic jams and mock hills at times and secret forest places the other. I seek faces, the look on the faces of the people when i travel. The looks worn by the beggars when they are trying to sell their merchandise by throwing it inside the small space between window and the car door. The look of despondency on their faces when they realize that this one too they shall have to forego for the next one.

The looks on the faces of the other people travelling alongside with me in their cars. Their movements and actions. If its a VIP then the look of realization that he too must wait along with the others for his turn so that he can cross the jam. The look which shows how insecure he gets at the sight of sharing the same space with so many people. His security guards doing their best to look menacing to show who is actually incharge.

There is also an airport which i cross while on the way to my house. The zooming lights overhead make me look upwards towards the sky, towards these towering giants trying to find a place to land. The huge runway with lights ablaze waiting to welcome these machines looks like a huge procession with millions of never ending lights.

The sun is about to set when i finally leave my workplace. Its a race between me and the sun to see who gets across the border first. Whether it is I who sees the sun against the backdrop of skyscraper or is the sun that sees me zoom ahead of it.