The Wolf is back..

The Bag of Peas has been lying in a corner gathering dust!
So it is after a long period that the Wolf arises after being tagged by Thanu. And it is very likely that he will disappear again for a while after this eight-part howl.

So, here goes my Octave:

1. I do not worry about things until I absolutely have to; doesn't mean that I start digging a well only when my house is on fire, but neither do I lay awake at night, thinking about a million 'If-Then-Else' scenarios.

2. I need to answer the 'Call of the Wild' every now and then: I get away from civilization and its commonalities and 'take up the bush' for a period of time. Even if it is for a single day, it helps me maintain my sanity.

3. With each passing day, I worry less and less of what people I dont care about think or say about me. Those who mind don't matter and those who matter, don't mind!


4. I am of the opinion that some rules are meant to be broken, if not, then to be bent atleast.

5. I am a silent Heretic; I do not react openly when opposed, but do what I want to do anyways.

6. I try to look on the brighter side of things...although it is not always possible to do so.

7. I like the cold, the snow, the rain, and an occasional stormy day...it all seems very surreal to me and teaches to be humble in the face of nature.


8. I believe in Mutual aid, Free will, and the Individual supreme...turns out that I am a bit of an Anarchist.

I..

I read 'Karma' s blog and got myself tagged..so here I go:

I am...someone who thinks too much but acts too little!

I wonder...why don't they sell alcohol after 2 am

I wish...I was with someone special right now!

I miss...ten things I already have blogged about, and much much more.

I hear...my own soul crying with guilt that is sometimes uncalled for!

I regret...something too painful to even think about, and also not keeping in touch with someome until its too late!

I cry...when I cannot control my emotions!

I dance..when I feel like it!

I sing...if I know the lyrics, but never too loudly!

I write...only when prodded by others or pressured by deadlines!

I finish.....nothing that I start;except bottles of beer, plates of food, and good books!

I confuse...myself first, and then all those who come to un-confuse me!

I wonder....why some people are more forgiving than others

I am going to..start my own business

I should try...writing my autobiography, but I am sure I'll never be able to finish it

I am scared of...unable to be present when I am needed the most

I need..stability

I tag....Thanu

That warm fuzzy feeling...

Everywhere we see these days, people are being divided on the basis of race, colour, sex, religion, where they live, whom they like and the such. But there are some things which are common to all of us as human beings.
The thing I am going to discuss is one such that makes us uniquely human, makes us realize that despite the bad moods, the fights we have with people and general misfortune, we are still able to have these warm fuzzy feelings.

The triggering incident that made me write this blog entry happend a while ago, when I got an email forward from 'someone special' . The forward was in Marathi and it was about a guy's image of his dream-girl:

(I apologize for the poor visibility, you may have to view ithe image in a new browser by clicking on it)




As I read through the forward, something stirred in the left side of my chest, spread as a warm, sticky thing all over my body, and came out as two shiny, salty things out of my eyes!

Was it grief? was it loneliness?? Hell no! it was something very very beautiful! Something that I had not experienced for a very very long time. And as it was over, I heaved a sigh, relieved that despite bad experiences in the past that make one think it would be a boon not have any emotions, I still have a human heart beating inside me.

I then reflected when I had got such an experience before. Then I realized that such a beautiful thing has happened to me a lot of times, only I was too foolish to acknowledge it being filled with ideas of what is 'manly' and what is not.

I had these 'warm fuzzy feeling' when I visited the Mahalaxmi Temple at Kolhapur after coming to India. I am not a very deeply religious person, but I truly felt like I was at home then! Other instances when I felt 'warm and fuzzy' was on reading the poem 'The March of Paul Revere' when I see a dark cloud with an intense silver halo; when I listened to Beethoven's 9th final moment performed live by OSU symphony orchestra to name a few...

There are several such occasions when a particular sight, sound, smell, taste or all of the above create such feelings in you. In many cases, they may be based on a past experience, or a nostalgia. In other, its just a mysterious chord that gets struck inside you. Whatever may be the cause, the effect is simply amazing

So, if you have some things that make you feel that 'Warm Fuzzy Feeling' , you know what I mean!

Ten things I miss the most..

I couldn't get my usual lazy self to start writing this list almost aweek after I was tagged by ROS. So here it is :Ten things that I really miss.
I haven't been too philosophical and mentioned cliched stuff like India or Friends and Family for there are no words that can do justice to the amount that I miss them!

1. Mo Cushla..somewhere in Middle of America!
Halfway across the continent, yet so close!!

2. Bombay
It is hard not to be in love with the city after you've been raised in one of its suburbs! The city of Cricket and Colonial Mansions and Chaiwaalas and Cuff Parade and Chaat stands and Cafes and one of the BEST Public Transport systems in the World. I love the city too much to stop calling it with its old Colonial name of Bombay. Walking at leisurely pace in Saturday afternoons in the Kala Ghoda art district or Fort or Breborne Stadium, one cannot help but wonder why the name was changed !

3. Gulmohurs
One of the most beautiful trees ever made on this Earth..love the brilliant orange blossoms coming up in the summer. Fall and Spring are lovely in Corvallis too, but nothing beats the beauty of gulmohur blossoms freshned up in the late summer rains.


4. My Hostel
Located in Sion, Bombay in a quiet neighbourhood, this insitution played a big role in making who I am today. First-ever experience of living away from home, the whole Boy-to-Man deal was to happen here. Being in Sion, it was equidistant from Downtown as well as the Western line suburbs and my college in Vileparle. Jump in a bus and you are off! Also it was near to SIES, Sion Hospital, Ruia, etc etc so an excellent focal point for bird-watching. I was there for four years, and those were the best days of my life!

5. BEST
Bombay Electricity and Suburban Transport is one of the best public transport systems in the world ever. You can go from anywhere to anywhere else in Bombay in a maximum of 3 route changes. The buses are really clean and roomy, and double-decked too! Even now I take the double-decker whenver I can, inspite of its slow speed!
There are several alternate routes between any two places and they are fantastic. My personal favourite was 255 ltd from Juhu to Sion and the bus used to travel as close to the beach as possible. I have witnessed many a beautiful sunsets by the Juhu Centaur hotel in the bus, on my way home.

6. Raw Mangoes
One of the best soul-foods ever! It is a waste to make 'achaar' out of them, they have to be eaten raw. You get them directly from a tree-preferably steal them by climbing, or knock them down if you are a good shot with stones-and wash them if you like. Then make a mixture of salt and red chilli powder, take a bite out of the mango and dip the white inside flesh of the fruit in the salt-pepper mixture.
Then take a bite again, savour the taste on your tongue and let your salivary glands hurt a bit before swallowing. Repeat.
Eat till your throat becomes raw and your teeth sensitive due to the sourness!

7. Running
I don't mean running for exercise or runnning to catch a bus or train. I mean the running which one does while not even noticing, at the age of 9 to 12. Growing up in Kalyan, India I always used to run around with friends from the Oak Baug locality and in my housing societies. The buildings were built close and many shared common compound walls. It was a great location to run between buildings, jump walls, balance ourselves from one end of the compound walls to another, all while playing Chor-Police (Cops and robbers) or doing nothing.
I just ran and ran and ran. Ran to buy something my mom asked me to buy, ran to deliver messages for her, ran to the Terrace from my house on the Ground Floor, and always ran home from where the school rickshaw used to drop us.
Now I run to keep fit, to and from lunch so I cannot miss a time-point in my experiment, to catch a bus, between airport gates so as I cannot miss a flight.
However it sometimes feels that I am running FROM something rather than FOR something.

8. Kalyan Railway Station
One place that is active 24 hrs a day and 7 days a week! Being a big railway junction, you can see all types of people. Platforms 4 and 5 are places of fancy as I used to board trains to Pune during Summer vacations. Watching the Sinhagad Express chug in the station is forever etched in my memory..even when I was in India this time I couldn't resist bending at my waist to look at the train coming into sight, as it turns the bend under 'Patri Pul' .
Platform Number 1 is close to heart-and home too in the later years! In 11 and 12th I always chased to catch the window seats in the video-coach (see the following for explanation) in the 6:01 am.
While coming back home, I used to go for a train that'd terminate at Kalyan, and only when it used to dock at Platform number 1 I used to get a true sense of 'coming HOME'

9. My School-New Lourdes English High School.
I still get dreams of my school, the fun we used to have there and all those formative years. The school was in Rambaug Lane 4, and there were sevaral rival schools around. In the later years of my schooling the KDMC made a road to Old Lourdes and Holy Cross schools that used to go past my classrooms-needless to say we used to hold beauty paegeants twice a day!
Now the school has been 'K C Gandhi-fied' to a new building in a new location, different uniforms and different management. Suddenly it is rich and prosperous. I tried visiting my past teachers there in the new school, but didn't feel the same connection as I did for those old, smelly, dim-lit classrooms in Rambaug that we used to share with 'Hindi Highschool' !

10. Afternoon naps..
I love to sleep, and I am certifiably lazy! And afternoon naps in India are a must! May it be on the train, in the bus or at home, they are a necessity in our tropical climate. There is even a poem 'Mad Dogs and Englismen' that glorifies the tropical siesta, and surprisingly it was composed by a British poet of the 'Raaj'
However in America, I just don't feel the need to have a nap. After a long (sometimes liquid) lunch I don't feel like working, but have never felt the need for a nap. Even sleep here comes so unlike the way it used to arrive in India-there I used to drift off to sleep, reading something and pondering upon it as my consciousness would slowly leave. Here in the temperate regions, I am lying on my bed reading, and plop-I am gone the next minute!

Weird Tales II

Blind Jim

Jim was an orphan at All God's Children Orphanage. He was found on a rainy night, on the steps of Our Lady of Good Counsel church; a month-old baby shivering in the November cold. It was soon found that he was blind, probably from birth.

At the age of ten, he was a quiet boy, a bit of an imbecile and the subject of various pranks inflicted upon him by the orphanage's undesirable elements. Rob and his gang were particularly notorious in that regard. They would hide his cane in the morning as he woke up for morning prayers, would steal his food, and other tricks that would cause grave inconvinience to a poor blind child.

One night, their pranks took the edge. The gang managed to stuff a rag in his mouth, overpowered him and wrapped him in a bed-sheet. They then escaped from the orphanage and carried him over to the Ascension Cemetary a block away. There was a hole in the fencing through which they sought ingress, and on depositing Jim in the middle, made it fast and stealthy to the orphanage, howling with wicked laughter at their latest adventure.

Jim was terribly frightened of the boys, and did not resist them for fear of a thrashing. On making sure they had left, he got up to his feet, and started to grope around the surroundings. He realized he was in an unfamiliar territory, far away from the few blocks of town to his blind self was accustomed by the smells and sounds. He became agitated and cried in vain for help. After it dawned upon him that none came, he decided to venture forth himself and determine where he was.

He had never been to a graveyard before, and with whatver knowledge he was exposed to in the orphan home, he did not even know what it was.Therefore the terror associated with being left alone in such places in the dead of night was unknown to him. However he was begining to feel a certain errie feeling, which is a part of human nature. He began to move even more haphazardly, knocking into cruciform headstones and losing his footing over the mounds of fresh graves. His hypersensitive nose took with offense the miasmic odour emnating from the place. Very soon he was tired, and panicked when he bumped his head on a Stella. He ran amok, stumbled on a gravestone, and collapsed into the cold arms of a Stone Angel guarding a long-forgotten grave.

The subsequent morning was a cold, overcast day, and Mr Gomez the caretaker found Jim dead in the arms of the angel. His face was a frozen mask of terror, sightless eyes wide open in fright, as if he had actually "seen" something.

In his twelve years of service, Mr Gomez had never heard any supernatural tales, even rumours about the cemetary..so said his statment to the City Police.

The gift of sight was granted to Jim in his last moments by some agent of the supernatural. To witness what scene of terror was the Dark Benediction made, one is not very eager to know.....there are some questions that are best left unanswered.

Weird Tales-My attempt at horror fiction

#1 The Bell

Friday, April 4th 4:10 p.m.

He had been up very late that day, after burning a pint of midnight's oil in the library on Thursday's Eve. He opened the windows of his apartment to let in some fresh air of the early spring, and heard the sound of bell's going off in the St. Mary's catholic church a block away. It was quite baffling for him, it being Friday and too late anyhow for any religious activity. He paid no attention to it and went on with his business.

Saturday, April 5th, 12:30 am

As usual, he was working late in his laboratory on campus. He had closed the doors and windows as was his wont and it was very quiet, the Department absolutely deserted as late night on a Friday. Suddenly he heard a quite distinct ringing of a bell going off. It stopped as soon as it began, after six or seven gongs, returning the laboratory to its habitual silent environs.
He was quite uneasy now. The University Clock would chime with quite a din, but never had he heard the chimes so loudly in his nearly sound-proof place of work, and furthermore the clock went off only at the hour and not half-past anything. And he had been on campus for nearly four years now, his work keeping him in his lab at all times of the day and even nights. Never before had he heard the sound of any bells at any time. He checked around the departments, peeping in his neighbouring labs as well. There was no source that could explain the eldritch music he had heard a few minutes ago.

Sunday, April 6th, 11 am.

He was driving on Highway 99, from the neighbouring town of ________, where he had been for an errand that morning. Suddenly in a desolate patch of the road, he lost control over his vehicle and crashed in the roadside ditch. For some weird reason the airbags of his old car failed to deploy and he was impaled by the steering wheel. In his last moments of existence, he could hear the distant sound of a bell, going off a Ding-Dong-Ding from the Church of Nazarene, as his requiem.
His final thoughts were the lines of John Donne:

"...and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

To be or not to be.....

How true are the lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet!
Each person has to face this question atleast once in his life, and epistemologically, its just an ' Aye or Nay' type of question. But one's mind, heart, conscience does get ripped apart between these two courses of action.

For those whose life has been one big battle, for whom even the most simple things in life have come after a great struggle, how many of them have stopped at some point to ask themselves the question : "Is it worth fighting for? "
Life is short. You never know when it will end. Then should one spend it enjoying its gifts or should it be spent fighting and struggling for a dream which is born in one momentary lapse of reason? Or to be spent wavering between these two thoughts??

And what do one's dreams matter, in the course of things? What is the worth of the dream even if it does get realized in the last breath of one's life. And worse still, what if the dream turns out to be just an illusion??

It is said that one should never quit till one's aims are fulfilled. But one is not super-human and has limitations of strength patience and will-power...
Then when DOES one quit? And what if it turns out that the El Dorado you were looking for was just around the corner where you decided to turn back? Can anyone live the rest of his days with that knowledge?

And what is wiser? To never quit until one's body and mind is destroyed in the process or take a safe exit and be branded as a coward for the rest of your life? Can everyone afford to be Captain Ahab..

"to pile upon the whale's white hump, the sum of all the rage and hate felt by one's whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it"

Or does one just quit, to metaphorically sleep never for waking again, without any further thoughts to one's conscince:

"....and by a sleep to say we endThe heart-ache and the thousand natural shocksThat flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummationDevoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;"

It was reported that someone saw a person committing a suicide by jumping under a speeding train from the railway track. before the man jumped, he seemed to hesitate at the edge of the track for a fraction of the second, perhaps thinking...

'To be or not to be......'