Digging up Graves

It just hit me that 2010 has its days numbered... and I mean it'll be single digits soon. And I haven't written anything in a long time; familiar feeling, that. So here's something from the yellowing pages of my old old diary, in the hope that it'll make up for something new.

And yeah, it's unnamed..



A thousand words may speak the truth;
A single letter lies.
A hundred men commit a crime;
A chosen scapegoat dies.

No matter how much good abounds,
Evils lie within.
The preachers preach with all their might,
But cannot conquer Sin.

With love and trust and honesty,
Man a living makes.
To crumble all in one clean sweep,
But a second takes.

Oft I wonder by myself,
Is it worth the price?
The fitful honest righteous life
That really isn't so nice.

Until a part of me protests
To stifle this pretense.
Is any cost too high to pay
For an ounce of innocence?



----- Original composition: 12 September 2006.

That Little List

Isn't it ironic how the busiest time of your life is sometimes the most free, how it takes some really tough situations to see how easy the rest of life is, how things lose meaning the more you try to analyse them, how things lose importance the more importance you try to give them.

Every time you make it through a crisis, you wake up the next morning and the world is just where it was yesterday. And thats just one more in the little list of things that you can live through. And you're still the same person, except that you're not. And the world isn't really the same either, except that it pretty much is... Things change, and they stay the same, and life goes on. And a lot of things that were really big and important and tough just become smaller. Maybe that's why they call it Growing Up. Except we're not the ones growing up, its the world thats becoming smaller.

Or is it?

Isn't it funny how perspective can affect your sight. The one thing that we're all running after in our lives is meaning. We want meaning. We want reason. We want depth. All of that may or may not be there depending on where you're looking from. It might all be there and you just can't see it. And having it all might not be such a big deal anyway. Maybe that's not even what we're really looking for. Maybe we're just looking for something to look for. Some reason to go on. A new bone to dangle after. Motivation to keep breathing. But thats all that it is at the end of the day; it doesn't matter whether you get there or not, what matters is that the wanting to get there kept you alive, kept you going.

And geniuses that we are, we forget this little fact. Getting there suddenly becomes important enough to be potentially disappointing. And then the whole cycle starts all over again. We build it up and up for a great fall. And when we fall, the world falls apart and we break up into a million little pieces and we know that we can't go on.

And then we wake up the next morning, and the world is right where we left it, and we've just added one more to that little list...

Numb

Solitude, Isolation, Vacuum
Reinforcing the solid walls of my fortress.

Impermeable; Unfathomable; Indestructible
The solid walls of my heart.

No feeling, person or thing
can breach my fortress.

And yet the one I fear the most
breaks through.

Stranger in the Night

I met a stranger in the night.

In the hostel lift.

She was scowling; I was frowning. She looked me top to toe and I wondered what she was thinking. Then she turned her head the other way and yawned. I guessed she wasn't thinking much. I turned my head the other way and yawned. Eventually as our yawns died down, our eyes met and we burst into laughter. I smiled goodnight as I walked out of the lift, knowing that we would both smile the next time we ran into each other.

Thank God for giving me little reasons to smile. Thank God for making me the reason for someone else's smile.

Dancing in the Rain

I wish I was that tree outside my window.

It stands still for days on end, doing nothing. But every once in a while, it comes to life, charged with an enthusiasm only God could inspire. And it sways and it swirls and loses itself in the arms of a gushing wind and a soaking rain. Rooted, and yet so mindlessly free. Never leaving the spot and yet, transported worlds and eras away.

And just as effortlessly, it returns to its motionless existence.

I wish I was that tree outside my window, just for that one moment, that one dance in the rain.

Dynamics of bike riding

It takes a certain amount of knowledge, a smattering of practice and some basic physical requirements. Obviously I was missing out on something...

Anybody who knows me would say that I'm a smart-mouth, smarty-pants, smarty-whatever-else-the-hell-they-can-think-of. They'd know that I've driven a lot of other kind of vehicles and have been driving since time immemorial.

So even anybody who doesn't know me can probably guess by now that its the third vital requirement that I failed to fulfil.

There have been times when I wished I wasn't the first one in line in school assemblies, or in the front row of the class photo with the class teacher instead of in the back with my friends. But it never irked me so poignantly until last night.

Last night, I developed a new respect for the "long-legged female".

Taking my baby apart

Screw by screw.

Literally.

Let me start from the beginning... there was a glitch in the display of my laptop. When tilted at a particular angle, the screen would go blank. There are just some angles my display doesn't like! Maybe its just uncomfortable! So help me god... I tried to cure it of its stubbornness.

The operation theatre was a well-equipped lab... the surgeons a pair of networks engineering students. And of course me, lurking in the background, oohing with every creak, aahing with every crumb of plastic that shed. It was an interminable 45 minutes of holding my breath, at the end of which I was staring at the bits and pieces that made up the guts of my laptop.

We tweaked and we teased. We disconnected and reconnected every connection. Checked every wire. Until there was nothing left to do but put it all back together again.

At the end of the day I have some questions.... what makes a surgery successful? How come you don't get any credit for taking it apart and putting it all back together again? So we didn't solve the problem, but we managed not to create any new ones!!! :D