Saturday, December 02, 2006

Another Year Passeth By ...

I was trying to add onto the lines for last year ...

Another year passeth by,
We grow older
You and I

I betray it
Grave looks
And taciturn ways

You hide it
A pensive front
Cloaking vacuous days.



Wrote this last year...

Another year passeth by,
We grow older
You and I

I betray it
Stray wrinkles
And wisps of grey

You hide it.
Maturity
On ponderous display...



To clear the air...

The Me is me
The You is too
Two sides of a coin
Or just a different view ...

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Sunday, November 19, 2006

Morbid Post!!

Sorry for the morbid thoughts..


I'm not trying to prove a point
At least not to you
One doesn't risk ones head on a rock
When the rock is sure to hurt you

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Wednesday, November 15, 2006

No time ...

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
-- WH Davies

Here's more on WH Davies and here you can read the complete pome...

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

A quick tale: One ring to fool them all ..

'One ring to fool them all...', she thought, as her fingers slipped over the smooth cold metal and a smile escaped the controlled mask she wore. Resolutely, she suppressed the smile, though conceding grudgingly that it had been a brilliant stroke of genius; just like the book that had inspired it. She had not wanted to let go of her life so easily, "Or maybe I am addicted to procrastination!", she thought.

With half an hour to spare, the finished book lying beside her, she had made the decision. mumbling an incomprehensible excuse to her bewildered room-mate, she rushed out of the room to the Cartier store that lay on the way....

"The ring was beautiful", she acknowledged to herself. It was white and radiant, slender and strong. The strength came from platinum and the radiance from the small diamond that was set in the centre, flush with the metal. One look at it and she had known that it was what she had thought of. It was just the kind of ring she would have wanted him to give, when she was ready.

But the number of people, who were poised to take control of her life, had suddenly seemed too large to her; too large for her to handle each one separately. Of course, they all loved and adored her. She did too and it was this that made matters worse. "Had I not got here I would have probably been already living a decision... Would it have been mine?"... Or would it have been an implicit one thrust upon her by the culture and the unwritten code that she had grown up in and also, at some sub conscious level, grown to like ... She was not sure.

Her fingers brushed the ring again and she realised that it was easier this way... She pictured the questioning look she would get from Pappaji, her grandfather; the sweetest 70-year old she knew. She cringed subconsciously at the tirade of questions that her brave single mother would direct at her, at the first opportunity she got... "Maybe she would see through it...". She silently hoped she would. It amused her, to her surprise, when she imagined the angry look that would escape Arun's controlled countenance. "We are so alike".. but thats what made it insipid and unimaginable! And she silently thought about and pitied the trace of melancholy Arijit would quietly betray, totally unnoticed by others...

".. your attention please. All passengers travelling by flight AI 714 from Los Angeles to Mumbai are requested to proceed to Gate 3A for boarding...". The announcement broke her chain of thoughts... She lifted her hand and turned the ring around on her finger. She peered at the reflections the foyer lighting threw off the intricate cuts of the diamond and for a passing moment an inner voice debated with her about her decision, before it was drowned by a louder one that marveled at the beauty of the diamond. "A thorn for a thorn...!", she pondered and she smiled at the irony of it. Turning the diamond inwards, she clenched her hand. She shut out the doubtful voices in her head with a shrug of her shoulders and gave her bag a tug. It was going to be a long and imaginative flight ...

One ring to fool them all ...


Tuesday, October 24, 2006

@AirJaldi

I'm sitting at this new auditorium in the Tibetan Children Village, McLeodganj, attending the Air Jaldi summit. And the most important thought that I think I am going to take back from here is:

It is not important to just push technology into rural areas. The most important thing is the final application and the model to make the deployment of the technology economically viable. If we do not have a model for that, once the brain behind the project disappears, the project and the technology dies. The blame then, I believe, is fixed on technology!! What a shame that is... The failure of human foresight blamed on the laws of science!!!


I do believe in the bottom-up approach that a lot of people here are advocating.. However, the research community often uses the bottom approach to come up with novel observations for research papers and in the process the finished application just gets forgotten... And more often than not, one success story covers up for hundreds that were not done right (of course I exclude those that didnt work right.. beacuse if everything worked, it wouldn't be called research, right??? )

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Happy Diwali..

As night descends
On waning day
The little lamps burn,
Keep darkness at bay

So let us decide
This diwali night
To emulate the lamps..
"Let there be light..!"

Here's an earlier one...

Let the lamps light
Up your life
And you
Of those around you

And in that light
May you find
Joy and Prosperity
Of every kind..

Shubh Deepawali...!!

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Monday, October 02, 2006

Happy Dussera

As we burn Ravana tonight
May the consuming flames
Give us the light
To find and burn
The Ravanas, we carry
Hidden deep inside

Happy Dussera ...!!

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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Sleep Away

An off-the-cuff, blank verse.. pardon me if it breaks all norms..

Wrapped in a sheet
Your hair flutters
In your gentle breath.
A foot away
I wrestle with 'System design'
And the temptation
Of joining you!!

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Monday, August 21, 2006

Death of a Maestro

"The world comes to die here. It would be a pity if I died somewhere else.." And so, today the sun will set on a Benares void of one of its greatest sons.

I am not a great proponent of Indian classical music, nor do i claim to understand it's nuances. Ustaad Bismillah Khan, however, has always been synonomous with the 'shehnai' ever since I remember.

As a tribute to the maestro, NDTV replayed an episode of the series "Walk the Talk" featuring him. What brought tears to my eyes, was not the news of the death, but the humble simplicity of the man. Clad in a 'ganji' and 'dhoti' seated on a charpai, a 90-year old man in the span of half an hour showed me 'how to live'.

The man who swayed millions to the enchanting sound of the shehnai, who elevated the 'shehnai' from an accompanying instrument to a solo instrument in its own right, felt that all was not lost for this country.

His frank and honest words he showed how greatness and simplicity can coexist, how attitude is not necessary to prove superiority; it showed me how I wanted to lead my life!!!

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Words

Its still me
But its not
How can that be
Maybe I've changed a lot!!

I have been yearning to write for a long time and I have kept postponing it every now and then and suddenly it seems to me as if I never wrote at all. Nostalgia grips me as I leaf through my old lines and I wonder how I had managed to write them all. Silently a yearning takes hold of me, but the frustrating combination of lack of time and inspiration that have killed the Michaelangelo in many a soul, dulls the sharp edges of want and I give up. "Maybe another time", "Maybe another place" ... more often its never... The feelings and emotions that have been jostling to make themselves heard sink back into the morasses of rigmarole and routine.

So you might wonder if this is an effort to break the shackles... an amateurish effort to rise against the professional prowess of "Paucity of Time". It is, but it would be wrong to miss the duality.

The pen is an anasthetic, it hides behind the facade of ink, the wounds; that are their Muse and the kind words of agreement and praise are the balm that unknowingly soothes the hidden wounds. Contorted ways of drawing solace, but I think thats the way the mind often works.

The written Word is also cathartic... it cleanses the mind of baggage that becomes too heavy to bear. It plays on the oft repeated psychological phenomena that sharing pain helps to reduce it. I have still not realised how it works. Maybe there is solace in shared knowledge.

Thats a good start i think. But...

The woods are lovely dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep...

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Slip...

An old piece...07 Jun 05

Muted words
On a cell phone screen
Mark moments
Unheard, Unseen

A careless moment
Is to blame
For disregard
And a reaction lame

'Tis true that
Apologies can't
Wrest back time
However much we want.

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Monday, May 15, 2006

Facade

जब जिस वक्त किसीका हाल बुरा होता है
कुछ ना पूछो यारों दिल का हाल बुरा होता है
दिल पे यादों के जैसे तीर चलते हैं ...

I had thought
"I" could make it work
I know
I was wrong
"We" could have...

Now only the facade remains...

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

What are words...

What are words
Reusable emotions...

Flawed efforts to grasp
In tangibles
Intricate intangibles

Efforts to shackle
In meter and rhyme
Amorphous thoughts
That can never
Fit on a line...

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If our love, was
Bound by words
It wouldnt last so long

Words are forgotten
Words wither
But our love
Just seems to go on..

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Musings

What we have is special
My words
Try to say so
And in the bargain
Accept,
Their complete
Inadequacy to do so...

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Performancing