I wrote this peice imagining that rekha is the one who had an affair instead of naseer and even after marriage she is recieving letters from that fellow in naseers presence.
This is written by naseers charecter.
मेरी खातिर उसका ज़िक्र कभी खुल कर नहीं किया तुमने
जब भी उसका ख़त आया, चुप चाप पढा
और शायद मेरे पढने के लिए,
मेरी किताबों के पास रख दिया
फाड़ा नहीं, पर दोबारा पढा भी नहीं
मैंने बहुत कोशिश की
कि नज़र बचाके पढूं उसके ख़त
या तुमसे पूंछुं कि क्या लिखा था उसने
और कई बार तुम्हारे चहरे से
अंदाज़ा भी लगाना चाहा ख़त कि सूरत का
पर चहरे ने कभी कुछ कहा नहीं
ख़त पढने कि हिम्मत हुई नहीं
पर आज के ख़त में लगता है
आख़िरी ख़त होने कि बात लिखी है
क्यों कि चाय आज तुमने फींकी बनायीं
और दाल में कंकड़ भी काफी निकले
Friday, April 13, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
इजाज़त देखने के बाद, रेखा के लिए
कितनी बार तुम्हें मना किया
माया को मत आने दो इस घर में
पर शायद माया से यह तुम्हारा बदला था
घर बुलाकर उसे परायेपन का एहसास कराना
फिर कभी-कभी लगता था
मुझे समझने के लिए,
माया को समझना ज़रूरी है तुम्हारे लिए
उसे अपनाकर तुम,खुद अपनाया जाना चाहती थीं
एक रोज़ auto में
बहुत देर मेरे चुप रहने पर
तुमने दबे होंठों से मेरे मुस्कुराने के लिए कहा था
"मुझे भी bike चलाना सीखना hai"
और फिर ऐसे हँसी थीं जैसे
बच्चे को खेल में जिताके माँ हँसती है
ऐसा लगा था कि तुमने मुझसे कहा हो
"देखो तुम्हारी माया थोड़ी बहुत मुझ में भी है कहीं "
तुम्हें ज़ोर से गले लगाया था, प्यार किया था
फिर तुमने हँसी भरी आवाज़ में पूंछा था
" यह मेरे लिए है, या माया के लिए "
मैंने बिना सोचे बोला "माया के लिए "
"बडे कमीने हो तुम " , हँस कर मेरे कंधे पर से कहा था तुमने
आज लगता है वोह मज़ाक नहीं, सच में गाली थी तुम्हारी ।
माया को मत आने दो इस घर में
पर शायद माया से यह तुम्हारा बदला था
घर बुलाकर उसे परायेपन का एहसास कराना
फिर कभी-कभी लगता था
मुझे समझने के लिए,
माया को समझना ज़रूरी है तुम्हारे लिए
उसे अपनाकर तुम,खुद अपनाया जाना चाहती थीं
एक रोज़ auto में
बहुत देर मेरे चुप रहने पर
तुमने दबे होंठों से मेरे मुस्कुराने के लिए कहा था
"मुझे भी bike चलाना सीखना hai"
और फिर ऐसे हँसी थीं जैसे
बच्चे को खेल में जिताके माँ हँसती है
ऐसा लगा था कि तुमने मुझसे कहा हो
"देखो तुम्हारी माया थोड़ी बहुत मुझ में भी है कहीं "
तुम्हें ज़ोर से गले लगाया था, प्यार किया था
फिर तुमने हँसी भरी आवाज़ में पूंछा था
" यह मेरे लिए है, या माया के लिए "
मैंने बिना सोचे बोला "माया के लिए "
"बडे कमीने हो तुम " , हँस कर मेरे कंधे पर से कहा था तुमने
आज लगता है वोह मज़ाक नहीं, सच में गाली थी तुम्हारी ।
तीखा वार
फ़ोन पर लड़आई ताखिये से कि तुमसे
बिल्कुल बच्चों कि तरह
न चोट हुई
न जीत कि कोशिश
बस डर था कि बगल के बूथ में
कोई यह नादानी सुनकर, हंसी करेगा
फिर पता नहीं क्यों
मैंने एक तीखा वार किया
"अब से तुम्हारी सब चिठियाँ बिन पढ़े फाढ़ दूंगा "
तुम्हारे जवाबी वार का दर्द
अभी भी तुम्हारी चिठियाँ पढने पे होता है
सब कुछ जान के भी
बड़ी नादाँ बनती थीं तुम
तुमने कहा था
"फाढ़ दो, तुम्हारी मरज़ी, तकलीफ तुम्हीं को होगी "
बिल्कुल बच्चों कि तरह
न चोट हुई
न जीत कि कोशिश
बस डर था कि बगल के बूथ में
कोई यह नादानी सुनकर, हंसी करेगा
फिर पता नहीं क्यों
मैंने एक तीखा वार किया
"अब से तुम्हारी सब चिठियाँ बिन पढ़े फाढ़ दूंगा "
तुम्हारे जवाबी वार का दर्द
अभी भी तुम्हारी चिठियाँ पढने पे होता है
सब कुछ जान के भी
बड़ी नादाँ बनती थीं तुम
तुमने कहा था
"फाढ़ दो, तुम्हारी मरज़ी, तकलीफ तुम्हीं को होगी "
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Non-man meets Non-woman part-1
I am a man of interesting stories and strange experiences। Someone who fits in well for well spent evenings but not for well spent lives. Across the dining tables and over coffee mugs, I have often seen them giggling, smiling with joy in my company. Amused they were, with my histrionics and mockery of my foolish self, clumsy and nonchivalrous ways and unconcerned ways of living. But that amusement is not to be bought for a lifetime. Only a few evenings can be spared for it. What do I choose now, the evenings, the lifetimes or my foolish ways. I guess none. I don’t want to choose, I want to be chosen on one such evening when the amusement I offer will be sold for a lifetime.
The woman who will choose such an amusement for a life time will be a person with an extremely sad life, a life lived unloved. Not hated, but unloved. She will be a beautiful woman who doesn’t know how beautiful she is. Perhaps because her sister was more beautiful than her, at least that was what all her relatives felt and eventually she agreed to it or rather made it appear true. She will be a wonderful singer but she would never sing for any body. She would dance like a mad man perfectly beat on beat but only at times when no one is watching or at times when she couldn’t care for gazing eyes. Her present will have no events of great consequence and her past will be a perturbed childhood.
Such nun like loneliness would accept my unmanly ways for a lifetime. Only a NON-WOMAN will accept the NON-MAN that I am. Sadness of a loner will be the breeding ground for a relationship with a sad man, a man or rather a non-man who is sad for not having met a sad non-woman. She won’t be amused with me like others who are not non-woman. She will be amused to see what she always saw in herself, her doubts, weaknesses, insecurities, pains, inabilities. And now she will know and understand that most of them were self assumed. She assumed herself to be a non-woman and kept hiding from a world of men and women. This one evening of amusement with me will make that non woman feel complete; make her know that she was always a woman, it was just that she couldn’t realize it. Men and women are very different. But Non-men and Non-women are not.
The woman who will choose such an amusement for a life time will be a person with an extremely sad life, a life lived unloved. Not hated, but unloved. She will be a beautiful woman who doesn’t know how beautiful she is. Perhaps because her sister was more beautiful than her, at least that was what all her relatives felt and eventually she agreed to it or rather made it appear true. She will be a wonderful singer but she would never sing for any body. She would dance like a mad man perfectly beat on beat but only at times when no one is watching or at times when she couldn’t care for gazing eyes. Her present will have no events of great consequence and her past will be a perturbed childhood.
Such nun like loneliness would accept my unmanly ways for a lifetime. Only a NON-WOMAN will accept the NON-MAN that I am. Sadness of a loner will be the breeding ground for a relationship with a sad man, a man or rather a non-man who is sad for not having met a sad non-woman. She won’t be amused with me like others who are not non-woman. She will be amused to see what she always saw in herself, her doubts, weaknesses, insecurities, pains, inabilities. And now she will know and understand that most of them were self assumed. She assumed herself to be a non-woman and kept hiding from a world of men and women. This one evening of amusement with me will make that non woman feel complete; make her know that she was always a woman, it was just that she couldn’t realize it. Men and women are very different. But Non-men and Non-women are not.
रिक्शे से मंदिर तक
रिक्शे पर मंदिर के सामने
तुम्हारे हाथ छुढाने से नाराज़ होकर
जब क़मर पकड़ ली थी मैंने
कितने घूँसे सीने पे मारे थे तुमने
फिर चुपचाप बैठ गयी थी मुस्कुरा कर
जैसे मेरे हाथ से कोई परहेज़ ना हो
रिक्शेवाले ने भी मुसकुराकर रिक्शा धीमे किया था
तुम्हें gate पर goodnight बोलकर
उसे पांच रूपये ज्यादा दिए थे
आज सालों बाद जब तुम्हारे शहर में रिक्शे से मंदिर गया
तो दिल बहुत भारी भारी था
सीने में तेज़ दर्द उठा
उस रोज़ घूँसे बहुत ज़ोर से मारे थे शायद तुमने
तुम्हारे हाथ छुढाने से नाराज़ होकर
जब क़मर पकड़ ली थी मैंने
कितने घूँसे सीने पे मारे थे तुमने
फिर चुपचाप बैठ गयी थी मुस्कुरा कर
जैसे मेरे हाथ से कोई परहेज़ ना हो
रिक्शेवाले ने भी मुसकुराकर रिक्शा धीमे किया था
तुम्हें gate पर goodnight बोलकर
उसे पांच रूपये ज्यादा दिए थे
आज सालों बाद जब तुम्हारे शहर में रिक्शे से मंदिर गया
तो दिल बहुत भारी भारी था
सीने में तेज़ दर्द उठा
उस रोज़ घूँसे बहुत ज़ोर से मारे थे शायद तुमने
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Honorable Dramatist
Is it arrogance that is making me wait? Arrogance, that I can’t accept anything lesser than you. Or is it the innocence of a strong headed child who sees nothing except for what he has liked once. Words, I thought would make it look small, stupid, disrespectful. Touch was an expression which cannot be replaced by words. May be you understood, may be you didn’t. May be the pretence of ignorance is important for your dignity, honor. Honor! What a trap is that. The honor of not confessing the need to be loved. The honor of not giving in to the desires which make you what you are. Make you the one who is to be loved by none other than me. Yes I know this is arrogance. To Love you for only I can love you. To love you to make you good enough for my love. To love you for you to realize that you are nothing without it. That is what my love does to you. That’s why you are so scared of it. My brutal honesty prevents you from believing what you want to believe for your pleasure. I show you your own face so clearly that you dislike it. Why cant you accept that, that is what is your beauty? Well, yes that is what I call beautiful.
Our definitions are so different!
You mask yourself because you hate to believe that emotions have a mind of their own. They have!! And they should have! You think it’s not honorable to think about yourself when love is what is expected of you, this is a dogma from which you can’t break free. Your masks are to protect yourself from your own vulnerability. You can’t allow anybody to know his indispensability and that’s why you wear those cold eyes to refrain from expressing too much. That’s why so many desired hugs are suspended, so many wanted kisses rejected, so many tears are strangled to death even before they reach your cold eyes, so many soulful smiles are turned into laughter’s of mockery, so many could-have-been-evenings of joy had turned into sleepless long nights, so many letters are written but not sent, so many questions of insanity have been answered with ruthless practicality. Why can’t you expose your madness, your needs, and your hunger for more? Is the dogma of honor to be big to be risked? Or is the sustenance of your enigma more important than its achievements? You are either afraid of your own emotions or you are thrilled by the hope that all of it will be discovered by them without your expression. Or may be not expressing it all is a trick to create the enigma, to maintain the curiosity.
You want to be controlled, but in a particular way which you have decided. You have set the parameters, the equations, the values which will be allowed to be manipulated, governed, and controlled. Beyond that and apart from that you are not ready to share, to allow the control in other hands. But I am able to snatch it. That is what is your complain, your fear. I might control too much to be within your control. You control others by allowing them to control you to a certain extent. The amount of control I snatch from you is more than that limit. When you say, you don’t want to talk, I reply "As you wish" because I know you can’t answer my arrogance with your silence. When you question me whys, I answer you why not’s. When you answer me with indifference I answer you with mockery, mockery at your feigned bravery of attempting to stand it all alone. When you mock at me, I laugh in amusement at this old trick which fails to hurt me. When you pretend to be in love, I know you are guilty conscious. When you ask for favor, I know you are allowing me a chance to feel important. When you ask for my hand, I hold you with gratitude for helping me believe my strength. When you weep in despair, I know that it’s because you could not hurt them enough to feel satisfied. When you laugh in hysteria, I know that you are hiding the pain. When you speak too much, I know you won’t be able to bear even a moment of silence between us. I play the innocent child by not letting you know that I know it all. Though the truth is, that you know it all so well, and that is what makes you stay away from me. The reason why I love you is the reason why I am not allowed to!
I fail to put in words and you deny the expression of touch. The audacity to allow the touch challenges your chastity, the insufficiency of words challenges my intentions. Honor, dignity, respect, conventions are nothing but the devices to massacre, to kill emotions which are not made by human minds. But may be I am disillusioned. Who knows may be my emotions are nothing but age old dogmas. May be I am feeling what I think I am supposed to feel, what I have been taught to feel. I have tried to sustain all my questions by not answering them, if possible by not asking them in the first place. Brutal honesty is a curse. Am I cursed?? Ruthless truthfulness, I thought was a device to unmask you. To let you know that I know you too well to not to love you. Your smile is no more a deception to me. It’s an acceptance of you weaknesses. To me your anger is your rage against your inability to live up to your desires. You laugh among men to make them believe that they amuse you. I know you are amusing yourself by laughing amongst them, a cynic’s laughter, a laughter of a murderer who laughs outside the court when acquitted. I know if I tell you all that, you want shy. You will hold your head in pride for ruthlessly running down those who seek your beauty. They might accuse of playing with their hearts, minds, of making them believe what you wanted them to believe. But I know that they are victim of their hopes. Hopes of seeking strength, heroism from someone they thought considered them a hero. They were not heroes on their own .You created heroes amongst them for fulfillment of your desire to live amongst equals. And in moments of indulgence you at times believed your imagination; you believed them to be real heroes which they were not. They should thank you for giving them the moments of glory in which they will bask through out their life. But they don’t know it; they accuse you of betrayal, infidelity. Oh! The biggest weakness of a man is to not know his weaknesses.
But then again I doubt, am I also an imaginary hero bestowed with qualities which I actually don’t possess just for your amusement. My brutal honestly, ruthless truthfulness, insight is nothing but just a manifestation of your wishful thinking. May be I am just being or believing that I am what you want me to be. Even if this is true, then I thank you with all my heart to have chosen me for your amusement. I wish I was insane enough not to question the reality of my existence for you. Do I exist for you as I really do or your imagination makes me something for your pleasure? Oh! What a great artist you are! a dramatist who has a stage in mind where characters enter, exit wearing masks of your choice, in lights you choose them to be in, on a background score which fits into your feelings. I wish I could stand up to the dramatist you are. I wish I could act well enough, long enough in your mind to let the play go on. !! I beg of you, don’t assassinate the character I am playing. I will improve. I will become better; I will be clown enough, to make u laugh. I will be murderer enough to thrill you. I will be lover enough to gloom you; I will be hero enough to make you victorious. Just don’t put off the lights, let the background music play, let me have some more lines. If not lines, just give me a coffin in your mind to lie down. I will wear a mask on my face that will keep your eyes unmoved for a long time. When you are tired of looking at it, I will become a ghost, a raven, phantom, a messiah, a wish, a fairy, and a witch ....what all I can be after I am dead. Even if I don’t have lines to say, I will be actor enough to amuse you. Just don’t let the curtains fall on me. I don’t mind co actors. Let them do their part .Let them be heroes for your amusement. Those men of honor and courage, who have been bestowed with the crown in the play with in your head, will finally be murdered secretly. Yes, they will be murdered; this is how you write your plays. I know your trick, your plots. I have always known them. Then newer heroes will be born out of your imagination. I just want to be the character which is used as a device to build the subplot for the emergence of heroes and for their murder. That’s how I will live, even in a coffin, or even as a ghost. That’s how I demand my existence.
Our definitions are so different!
You mask yourself because you hate to believe that emotions have a mind of their own. They have!! And they should have! You think it’s not honorable to think about yourself when love is what is expected of you, this is a dogma from which you can’t break free. Your masks are to protect yourself from your own vulnerability. You can’t allow anybody to know his indispensability and that’s why you wear those cold eyes to refrain from expressing too much. That’s why so many desired hugs are suspended, so many wanted kisses rejected, so many tears are strangled to death even before they reach your cold eyes, so many soulful smiles are turned into laughter’s of mockery, so many could-have-been-evenings of joy had turned into sleepless long nights, so many letters are written but not sent, so many questions of insanity have been answered with ruthless practicality. Why can’t you expose your madness, your needs, and your hunger for more? Is the dogma of honor to be big to be risked? Or is the sustenance of your enigma more important than its achievements? You are either afraid of your own emotions or you are thrilled by the hope that all of it will be discovered by them without your expression. Or may be not expressing it all is a trick to create the enigma, to maintain the curiosity.
You want to be controlled, but in a particular way which you have decided. You have set the parameters, the equations, the values which will be allowed to be manipulated, governed, and controlled. Beyond that and apart from that you are not ready to share, to allow the control in other hands. But I am able to snatch it. That is what is your complain, your fear. I might control too much to be within your control. You control others by allowing them to control you to a certain extent. The amount of control I snatch from you is more than that limit. When you say, you don’t want to talk, I reply "As you wish" because I know you can’t answer my arrogance with your silence. When you question me whys, I answer you why not’s. When you answer me with indifference I answer you with mockery, mockery at your feigned bravery of attempting to stand it all alone. When you mock at me, I laugh in amusement at this old trick which fails to hurt me. When you pretend to be in love, I know you are guilty conscious. When you ask for favor, I know you are allowing me a chance to feel important. When you ask for my hand, I hold you with gratitude for helping me believe my strength. When you weep in despair, I know that it’s because you could not hurt them enough to feel satisfied. When you laugh in hysteria, I know that you are hiding the pain. When you speak too much, I know you won’t be able to bear even a moment of silence between us. I play the innocent child by not letting you know that I know it all. Though the truth is, that you know it all so well, and that is what makes you stay away from me. The reason why I love you is the reason why I am not allowed to!
I fail to put in words and you deny the expression of touch. The audacity to allow the touch challenges your chastity, the insufficiency of words challenges my intentions. Honor, dignity, respect, conventions are nothing but the devices to massacre, to kill emotions which are not made by human minds. But may be I am disillusioned. Who knows may be my emotions are nothing but age old dogmas. May be I am feeling what I think I am supposed to feel, what I have been taught to feel. I have tried to sustain all my questions by not answering them, if possible by not asking them in the first place. Brutal honesty is a curse. Am I cursed?? Ruthless truthfulness, I thought was a device to unmask you. To let you know that I know you too well to not to love you. Your smile is no more a deception to me. It’s an acceptance of you weaknesses. To me your anger is your rage against your inability to live up to your desires. You laugh among men to make them believe that they amuse you. I know you are amusing yourself by laughing amongst them, a cynic’s laughter, a laughter of a murderer who laughs outside the court when acquitted. I know if I tell you all that, you want shy. You will hold your head in pride for ruthlessly running down those who seek your beauty. They might accuse of playing with their hearts, minds, of making them believe what you wanted them to believe. But I know that they are victim of their hopes. Hopes of seeking strength, heroism from someone they thought considered them a hero. They were not heroes on their own .You created heroes amongst them for fulfillment of your desire to live amongst equals. And in moments of indulgence you at times believed your imagination; you believed them to be real heroes which they were not. They should thank you for giving them the moments of glory in which they will bask through out their life. But they don’t know it; they accuse you of betrayal, infidelity. Oh! The biggest weakness of a man is to not know his weaknesses.
But then again I doubt, am I also an imaginary hero bestowed with qualities which I actually don’t possess just for your amusement. My brutal honestly, ruthless truthfulness, insight is nothing but just a manifestation of your wishful thinking. May be I am just being or believing that I am what you want me to be. Even if this is true, then I thank you with all my heart to have chosen me for your amusement. I wish I was insane enough not to question the reality of my existence for you. Do I exist for you as I really do or your imagination makes me something for your pleasure? Oh! What a great artist you are! a dramatist who has a stage in mind where characters enter, exit wearing masks of your choice, in lights you choose them to be in, on a background score which fits into your feelings. I wish I could stand up to the dramatist you are. I wish I could act well enough, long enough in your mind to let the play go on. !! I beg of you, don’t assassinate the character I am playing. I will improve. I will become better; I will be clown enough, to make u laugh. I will be murderer enough to thrill you. I will be lover enough to gloom you; I will be hero enough to make you victorious. Just don’t put off the lights, let the background music play, let me have some more lines. If not lines, just give me a coffin in your mind to lie down. I will wear a mask on my face that will keep your eyes unmoved for a long time. When you are tired of looking at it, I will become a ghost, a raven, phantom, a messiah, a wish, a fairy, and a witch ....what all I can be after I am dead. Even if I don’t have lines to say, I will be actor enough to amuse you. Just don’t let the curtains fall on me. I don’t mind co actors. Let them do their part .Let them be heroes for your amusement. Those men of honor and courage, who have been bestowed with the crown in the play with in your head, will finally be murdered secretly. Yes, they will be murdered; this is how you write your plays. I know your trick, your plots. I have always known them. Then newer heroes will be born out of your imagination. I just want to be the character which is used as a device to build the subplot for the emergence of heroes and for their murder. That’s how I will live, even in a coffin, or even as a ghost. That’s how I demand my existence.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Politics of Love-part 2
It’s during these experiments you experience your creative faculties. You learn to create. You have gone through too much to keep it to your self. Your knowledge is too powerful, too magnanimous to be contained. That woman fails to be a human being for you from now on. She becomes a character for you .Just a mere character. That’s the ruthlessness of love, of knowledge. You are in love with not a being but with an interesting character now. With the experiences you had with it and the experiences she had with other men. All the men in her life become your protagonists, villains, narrators…characters. You are the writer-lover now. That’s how love becomes an act of selfishness. It empowers you with the capacity to see beyond the feelings, feelings which are nothing but age old dogmas. The confession box, you were who acquired the knowledge of her guilt, crimes, joys, and struggles, has now chosen to use it for his benefit, for his enjoyment. He becomes a story teller now. You have so many characters, the ones who loved her, the ones she loved, the ones she deceived, the ones she couldn’t, the ones she desired, the ones she acquired…oh so many of them…and above all there is SHE herself. The biggest pain is to see your self as a character in her life. You have to be brutal with your self, merciless like you have been with her. It hurts to be just a character; after all you loved her to conquer her, to be a hero. But now it’s time to grow up, to be more than a hero. The desire to be just a hero is killed, and knowledge is to be given a vent to create masterpieces. If you can do that you conquer your consciousness. And then again the politics of love comes into play. At no time she should know about this aspiration of yours. Your conspiracy to attain your creative heights should be hidden. The moment she knows that you are using her for self actualization, she will become deceptive, untrue in her narration to you. Doors to knowledge will be closed. That is where you have to play the trick. You are a story teller only while holding a pen and not her hand. The moment she sees the pleasure in your eyes when she is narrating to you her tragedy, she will start lying, hiding. She is the one who has inspired you to write, to create. She is the one who has empowered you with knowledge, with courage to see the truth beyond it is seen. She has given you the chance to plunder, explore and experience. And it is she from whom you have to hide it all. She is selfish just as you are, you are there for her only till you serve a purpose. The purpose of comforting, strengthening, and helping her believe what she wants to believe. You have been given a role of a guardian, a sympathizer, a listener not for your amusement but for her pleasure. You are not supposed to be amused by it that is the condition which is placed when she confides in you. Confidants are not supposed to be story tellers. But you commit the crime of being one, and you can sustain it only if you are a smart and ruthless criminal. Love is blind and love is ruthless too.
Beyond this I think GB Shaw should take over, for he understands it more than any body else. I am quoting a dialogue from his play "MAN AND SUPERMAN", delivered by the character TANNER
“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them.”
Beyond this I think GB Shaw should take over, for he understands it more than any body else. I am quoting a dialogue from his play "MAN AND SUPERMAN", delivered by the character TANNER
“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them.”
Friday, March 02, 2007
The Politics of Love
Love is about the curiosity to understand the enigma initially. Then it’s about to live with the knowledge of your discovery. You start up with the exercise of solving the mystery, to know the hidden. To discover, to experiment, to try and to justify your own perception of life, love and god. In the process, your existing perceptions are broken and newer ones are formed. That adds to the beauty of love. That keeps the thrill. That insures sustenance of love and the desire for more. Its about the curiosity to know how she thinks, loves, hates, betrays, tricks, hurts, cribs, plays, selects, survives, fights, tries, loses, wins, assures, inspires... lives. That curiosity even goes to the extent of seeing her sleep with men. Yes it would hurt you but then that sight would tell you what a great choice you made!!
To hear the voice of her orgasmic pleasures with different bodies and attitudes. Sex is not only pleasure. It is the device to know, to hurt, to confess. Your turn would come and the orgasmic pleasures would be taken over by the pleasure of knowledge. Knowledge, that you know her so well, so completely. A slight twist here, an intentional mistake there, a mischief, a crime and she is pleading for more. She will hold your hand but her grip becomes firmer only when you firm your grip. When you know this before holding her hand, then you don’t enjoy the touch, you enjoy knowing it when the grip becomes firmer. That is the pleasure of curiosity, of love. Knowledge to me is the beginning of love. Once you know her whats, you have to move on to know her whys. You then know why she does what she does. She debates loudly because she had a sister who was more beautiful than she was. She fights so ruthlessly because she failed in pre-board exams in high school and then topped the boards. She hides so much because she wanted to love a computer geek but she could not. She betrays so much because she was accused of infidelity by a man whom she really loved. She seeks so much because she was 2 and a half years old when she fell in love with her cousin and lost him to the customs of the world. When you know it all, then she fails to hurt you, betray you. You will rationalize, explain, justify whatever she does. That knowledge is what makes you live with her for ever. Her betrayal becomes a part of your knowledge. Her ways of hurting, insulting become the part of her picture which was incomplete before she did that to you. The more complete the picture, the more beautiful it is. Besides that, you know why she is what she is. That makes it divine, unsurpassable.
And that amount of knowledge prevents you from loving someone else. You don’t have the capacity to love someone else, to know someone else so much. Yes you might still have the impulse to experiment, to try, to even discover, but not for the sake of loving but for the fun of using your knowledge, testing it as an exercise to hone your skills for loving the real women better. All other women become dummies, on which you experiment, test try, learn and prove your superiority by virtue of your knowledge. I don’t know if this is a crime, but this is the truth for sure. A man loves only one woman, the woman who gives her knowledge about herself, about love, about life, about god, and above all, about himself. Rest all women in his life are laboratories.
Love is a journey from knowing the WHATS to knowing the WHYS. If the answers to whats fail to keep your interest, it all evaporates. If answers to whys are not sufficient then it becomes confusing, disturbing, even hurting.
After you have known her so well, the enigma is gone. The divinity is gone, the magic is all so well explained. Now you have the desire to conquer, possess, plunder, play and make her suffer. Not only for your pleasure but also for her to feel complete. She knows that you know. You know that she knows that you know. That is the beginning of conversation without words. No relation is complete without the hurts. There is no relation which is just Love-love relation. It has to be a Love-hate relationship. She knows your weaknesses, and she knows that you know that she knows. But she never speaks of it. Though her eyes have spoken about it so many times. You know her deceits, her tricks and you know that she knows that you know. But you won’t mention it in words. You will mention it when you ram her down when she is layed. That’s the politics of love. She will cry not out of pain of the hurt but out of the knowledge that you have known it all and have forgiven it by knowing everything completely. Similarly you will grumble in frustration while you look at yourself in mirror for being inadequate, and you will love her for accepting you. That inspires you to be lover enough, man enough. You are not lover enough if you don’t try to win her completely. And no man is man enough to be loved by a woman without being hated at the same time. No woman is woman enough to be loved by a man without being punished. That’s the only cute-war known to mankind. Knowledge-love-justice. And the politics of it all.
All the pains, inspirations, crimes, punishments that you go through is what is the achievement of love. That is what love achieves for you. It makes you go through so much. It makes you a survivor. You love to survive. Though you can love without surviving. Its insanity to love and not to survive but insanity is also a kind of survival. Insanity, for some is inevitable, for some it is a defense mechanism and for some it is a device for creativity The experiment on dummies and in laboratories produces brilliant pieces of art work. The accidents with the real subject of love become experiments on dummies. Though the real subject of love is not spared of experiments. But fear of going wrong prevents the researcher or the artist from going to the limits. You write the most dangerous line in the message box of yahoo messenger and keep your finger on ENTER, that insanity of a lover makes him creative. In the moments before he presses the key or deletes what he has written, he giggles, enjoys and creates. The adventure of not knowing what will happen if he sends it. The pleasure of not knowing whether he will send it or not. On dummies, ENTER and on inspirations, its delete.
I will write more in the next part of the post but before that I will quote G.B.Shaw. have quoted this phrase of his so many times and I still keep quoting it because I don’t believe someone other than me has written it.
“The most treacherous and remorseless of all battles is the battle between the artist man and the mother woman”
To hear the voice of her orgasmic pleasures with different bodies and attitudes. Sex is not only pleasure. It is the device to know, to hurt, to confess. Your turn would come and the orgasmic pleasures would be taken over by the pleasure of knowledge. Knowledge, that you know her so well, so completely. A slight twist here, an intentional mistake there, a mischief, a crime and she is pleading for more. She will hold your hand but her grip becomes firmer only when you firm your grip. When you know this before holding her hand, then you don’t enjoy the touch, you enjoy knowing it when the grip becomes firmer. That is the pleasure of curiosity, of love. Knowledge to me is the beginning of love. Once you know her whats, you have to move on to know her whys. You then know why she does what she does. She debates loudly because she had a sister who was more beautiful than she was. She fights so ruthlessly because she failed in pre-board exams in high school and then topped the boards. She hides so much because she wanted to love a computer geek but she could not. She betrays so much because she was accused of infidelity by a man whom she really loved. She seeks so much because she was 2 and a half years old when she fell in love with her cousin and lost him to the customs of the world. When you know it all, then she fails to hurt you, betray you. You will rationalize, explain, justify whatever she does. That knowledge is what makes you live with her for ever. Her betrayal becomes a part of your knowledge. Her ways of hurting, insulting become the part of her picture which was incomplete before she did that to you. The more complete the picture, the more beautiful it is. Besides that, you know why she is what she is. That makes it divine, unsurpassable.
And that amount of knowledge prevents you from loving someone else. You don’t have the capacity to love someone else, to know someone else so much. Yes you might still have the impulse to experiment, to try, to even discover, but not for the sake of loving but for the fun of using your knowledge, testing it as an exercise to hone your skills for loving the real women better. All other women become dummies, on which you experiment, test try, learn and prove your superiority by virtue of your knowledge. I don’t know if this is a crime, but this is the truth for sure. A man loves only one woman, the woman who gives her knowledge about herself, about love, about life, about god, and above all, about himself. Rest all women in his life are laboratories.
Love is a journey from knowing the WHATS to knowing the WHYS. If the answers to whats fail to keep your interest, it all evaporates. If answers to whys are not sufficient then it becomes confusing, disturbing, even hurting.
After you have known her so well, the enigma is gone. The divinity is gone, the magic is all so well explained. Now you have the desire to conquer, possess, plunder, play and make her suffer. Not only for your pleasure but also for her to feel complete. She knows that you know. You know that she knows that you know. That is the beginning of conversation without words. No relation is complete without the hurts. There is no relation which is just Love-love relation. It has to be a Love-hate relationship. She knows your weaknesses, and she knows that you know that she knows. But she never speaks of it. Though her eyes have spoken about it so many times. You know her deceits, her tricks and you know that she knows that you know. But you won’t mention it in words. You will mention it when you ram her down when she is layed. That’s the politics of love. She will cry not out of pain of the hurt but out of the knowledge that you have known it all and have forgiven it by knowing everything completely. Similarly you will grumble in frustration while you look at yourself in mirror for being inadequate, and you will love her for accepting you. That inspires you to be lover enough, man enough. You are not lover enough if you don’t try to win her completely. And no man is man enough to be loved by a woman without being hated at the same time. No woman is woman enough to be loved by a man without being punished. That’s the only cute-war known to mankind. Knowledge-love-justice. And the politics of it all.
All the pains, inspirations, crimes, punishments that you go through is what is the achievement of love. That is what love achieves for you. It makes you go through so much. It makes you a survivor. You love to survive. Though you can love without surviving. Its insanity to love and not to survive but insanity is also a kind of survival. Insanity, for some is inevitable, for some it is a defense mechanism and for some it is a device for creativity The experiment on dummies and in laboratories produces brilliant pieces of art work. The accidents with the real subject of love become experiments on dummies. Though the real subject of love is not spared of experiments. But fear of going wrong prevents the researcher or the artist from going to the limits. You write the most dangerous line in the message box of yahoo messenger and keep your finger on ENTER, that insanity of a lover makes him creative. In the moments before he presses the key or deletes what he has written, he giggles, enjoys and creates. The adventure of not knowing what will happen if he sends it. The pleasure of not knowing whether he will send it or not. On dummies, ENTER and on inspirations, its delete.
I will write more in the next part of the post but before that I will quote G.B.Shaw. have quoted this phrase of his so many times and I still keep quoting it because I don’t believe someone other than me has written it.
“The most treacherous and remorseless of all battles is the battle between the artist man and the mother woman”
Friday, February 09, 2007
No one is Sorry
He cried not out of pain but out of feeling of estrangement. He was hit hard, thrice across his face, for keeping the cooler on while it did not have water. The burning smell of the pump had woken her ailing mother to anger. Her mother could not take another loss to her credit, her operation had already broken the back bone of her husband. Rage of a middle class house wife mingled with illness over powered the mother of a innocent child. Her fingers and the marriage ring left a mark on Pranav's face. The insult of irresponsibility added to the injury of slaps. After a while he was silent, busy with his drawing copy, wax colors and torn out papers. This wasn’t the first time when he felt that nobody loves him.At 11, Pranav was too young to differentiate between anger and hatred.
His mother, Gayatri lay in the other room on a bed in front of a table fan, chanting her dead mother’s name. Her ovaries and uterus had been operated out with the 1 and a half kg tumor. She had been avoiding the operation since last 2 years, believing on her homeopathic medicine though she never took them regularly. An aspiring doctor, she had read her brothers BMS books to become a respected medical consultant in the family and colony. But certainly Homeopathy was not going to help her disease this time, she probably knew it too but kept avoiding the inevitable until the time she could no longer bleed, nor could she put up with the sexual frustration of her husband. The pain kept stabbing her belly and tumor kept swelling while her thighs went through the blood baths day after day, night after night. Finally money was no more a consideration, she nodded yes for the operation when doctor strongly recommended it. Her husband Sunil, was more than willing this time.
Gayatri, staring at the spider web on the dead ceiling fan, kept thinking about her mother's suffering who gave birth to 8 children. She died in the same hospital last year where Gayatri was operated two weeks back. Gayatri hadn’t recovered yet, her wrinkled face, white hairs and a pain filled angry temperament did not correspond to her age of 35. She was going back into sleep when a paper aero plane struck her nose. She opened her eyes and expected Pranav to come for it. He didn’t. she could feel his presence from across the table fan. Tears of remorse filled her eyes. Picking it up she saw on its wings a part of a drawing. On unfolding it a bit she saw a picture of a gun painted by wax colors with all possible meticulous details kept in mind. "He paints well", she thought."Pranav, come take it", she said softly, trying to compensate for the slaps and in an effort to be more friendly she sent the plane flying towards the table fan. While picking up the plane, he looked at his mother’s reflection on the rotating circular steel ball in the centre of the fan. Gayatri kept thinking, how could she undo it. Not just the slap, but all that was to be undone, the tumor, the operationa and the burnt pump. Then looking over she saw Pranav putting his fingers into the fan, touching the steel ball. She shouted uncontrollably "So many times I have told you not to play with fan when it’s on, But you never ever listen tome. That’s why you get beaten up!!". Pranav took his finger out and thought "That’s why, beaten up." He silently took the plane and resumed playing as if he heard nothing.
He had been hearing Gayatri’s moans while he was painting the gun but he chose not to bother about it, out of spite or may be out of revenge. That is perhaps the foetus of a growing up criminal at the age of 11. Today he peed on the bloodstains in the toilet, trying to wash them away. While peeing, an unconscious flash of thought crossed his mind. "She bleeds, but from where? Definitely God is making her pay for what she does to me." He then shrugged on the thought. A chill went through his spine on realising what had just crossed his mind. Realisation of self demise had begin to fill him with contempt for himself when he felt the drops of urine falling on his legs. He went to the bathroom to wash his legs when he heared the sound of a scooter approaching their house. "No this is not his. But he should have come by now. May be he has met an accident, that saves me from him for the the burnt pump."The scooter passed by the house before Pranav could strangle his hatred ridden thoughts to death.
Pranav always heard his dad's approaching Priya scooter long before her mother but today he was extremely conscious about it. He knew all the possible consequences, but he wanted to figure out today’s by looking at Sunil’s face. Sunil came today, not with his usual sound of scooter and horn but with the ring of the bell. He had left his scooter at the repair shop. Gayatri didn’t ask him the expenditure on the repair. she usually used to dig out things before her operation, but now she felt too guilty to ask such questions. Sunil asked, "what happened to the cooler?" Pranav heared it in the other room. He felt like a victim of a conspiracy. A conspiracy, where conspirators are themselves the police, the lawyers and the judge. But he didn’t think of preparing for his excuses. He knew it wont be of help, besides it doesn’t matter. Shamelessness had crept into his character sometime back. He then heard her mother say, "I forgot to switch it off and went to sleep. It didnt have water, the pump burnt". "Good, very good. I will earn and people in this house will spill", said Sunil. Pranav thought, "Why is she doing this to me now, is she trying to prove that she loves me or has she silently signalled to him that I am the culprit and she is playing a good mother to me?" He had developed this habit of referring to his parents as HE and SHE in his mind. That was a child’s silent revenge. Once or twice he gathered the courage to think of them as "Saala", without feeling guilty.
Sunil didn't try to wash away the blood stains by peeing at them. He just stared at them in disgust while peeing. It had been months since he had sex with his wife. "It would take another month for her to get ready, for her stitches to be firmer", he thought. Image of Kiran wearing sleave less blouse caught his imagination, "I could have given her lift today, had it not been for my motherfucking scooter." But then, expenditure on the scooter crossed his mind and Kiran's arms could not hold her thought. Drops of urine fell on his legs. While washing his legs in the bathroom, he could hear his wife cooking in the kitchen. It reminded him of the operation day, the tension, the uncertainity and the loan he had taken. "Lost my bloody fixed deposit, just to keep a ailing cook alive ." Before he could think further, Gayatri called him for dinner.
Power cut happened just when Sunil had put the first bite of roti and daal in his mouth. "Motherfuckers, it’s an every day drama", he complained in anger. Realizing that Gayatri’s frail body was too tired after cooking , he signaled her to rest and went to the other room searching for the candle and matchbox. Pranav had already found them and was about to light the candle when he heared Sunil's order, "You leave it, otherwise you will put the whole house on fire." Pranav now knew that he guessed it right, SHE had silently told HIM that he burnt the cooler. He ignored the command, and lighted the candle. This time it was the ego of a hungry middle class man with a broken down scooter which over powered the father of a child. A hard hit across the face and Pranav had the courage to say "saala" loudly in his mind, before he burst into tears. Candle fell on the torn papers of the drawing copy, with half finished paintings of comic characters, mostly villains. Without caring for the slap and the cry he picked up the candle. "You all dont care for the amount of blood I burn. All these pages could have been steppled to make your rough notebooks. You all keep sucking my blood", he accused without considering the age of the accused. Gayatri called Pranav to the room where she lay infront of the table fan, knowing that its nobody’s fault. If at all it was, it was her's. Pranav moved to the other room, not to seek comfort from her mother but to avoid the chance of blurting out what he had always said only in his mind.
Sunil had been avoiding the sight of those loose papers ever since he entered the room. But now disgust had taken over hunger. He lighted the candle again, put it on the table, picked all the papers, stacked them together according to the size, took out the stapler from where he always kept it, stapled the papers and then neatly placed them on the table. He cared for the meticulous details at work and so did his son while painting. He now observed the paintings and thought how much money must have been wasted in the comics which gayatri allows Pranav to buy every month. He then realized that Pranav had just cried and was qiet now. "Bring the candle here and have your dinner", Gayatri called up from inside the dark room. He picked up the candle and just then power came in. He blew the flame off but before he could put it in the right place, he heared Pranav’s terrifying scream. Then Gayatri’ too. He rushed to that room, to see blood spilled on the wall. Pranav’s finger got stuck in the steel frame of the table fan; he had been moving its wings with his fingers during the power cut. The finger was now chopped off. Sunil switched the fan off, and snatched Pranav’s hand off the fan. Gayatri moved as fast as she could for the bandage, murmuring her mother's name. Sunil picked up his helmet to rush to the doctor, but no, how could he? Bang! Went the helmet on to the table fan. And in all the violence, Pranav kept screaming with flooded eyes as if accusing his parents for his lost finger. The words "Thats why, beaten up" kept hammering on his mind continously.
His mother, Gayatri lay in the other room on a bed in front of a table fan, chanting her dead mother’s name. Her ovaries and uterus had been operated out with the 1 and a half kg tumor. She had been avoiding the operation since last 2 years, believing on her homeopathic medicine though she never took them regularly. An aspiring doctor, she had read her brothers BMS books to become a respected medical consultant in the family and colony. But certainly Homeopathy was not going to help her disease this time, she probably knew it too but kept avoiding the inevitable until the time she could no longer bleed, nor could she put up with the sexual frustration of her husband. The pain kept stabbing her belly and tumor kept swelling while her thighs went through the blood baths day after day, night after night. Finally money was no more a consideration, she nodded yes for the operation when doctor strongly recommended it. Her husband Sunil, was more than willing this time.
Gayatri, staring at the spider web on the dead ceiling fan, kept thinking about her mother's suffering who gave birth to 8 children. She died in the same hospital last year where Gayatri was operated two weeks back. Gayatri hadn’t recovered yet, her wrinkled face, white hairs and a pain filled angry temperament did not correspond to her age of 35. She was going back into sleep when a paper aero plane struck her nose. She opened her eyes and expected Pranav to come for it. He didn’t. she could feel his presence from across the table fan. Tears of remorse filled her eyes. Picking it up she saw on its wings a part of a drawing. On unfolding it a bit she saw a picture of a gun painted by wax colors with all possible meticulous details kept in mind. "He paints well", she thought."Pranav, come take it", she said softly, trying to compensate for the slaps and in an effort to be more friendly she sent the plane flying towards the table fan. While picking up the plane, he looked at his mother’s reflection on the rotating circular steel ball in the centre of the fan. Gayatri kept thinking, how could she undo it. Not just the slap, but all that was to be undone, the tumor, the operationa and the burnt pump. Then looking over she saw Pranav putting his fingers into the fan, touching the steel ball. She shouted uncontrollably "So many times I have told you not to play with fan when it’s on, But you never ever listen tome. That’s why you get beaten up!!". Pranav took his finger out and thought "That’s why, beaten up." He silently took the plane and resumed playing as if he heard nothing.
He had been hearing Gayatri’s moans while he was painting the gun but he chose not to bother about it, out of spite or may be out of revenge. That is perhaps the foetus of a growing up criminal at the age of 11. Today he peed on the bloodstains in the toilet, trying to wash them away. While peeing, an unconscious flash of thought crossed his mind. "She bleeds, but from where? Definitely God is making her pay for what she does to me." He then shrugged on the thought. A chill went through his spine on realising what had just crossed his mind. Realisation of self demise had begin to fill him with contempt for himself when he felt the drops of urine falling on his legs. He went to the bathroom to wash his legs when he heared the sound of a scooter approaching their house. "No this is not his. But he should have come by now. May be he has met an accident, that saves me from him for the the burnt pump."The scooter passed by the house before Pranav could strangle his hatred ridden thoughts to death.
Pranav always heard his dad's approaching Priya scooter long before her mother but today he was extremely conscious about it. He knew all the possible consequences, but he wanted to figure out today’s by looking at Sunil’s face. Sunil came today, not with his usual sound of scooter and horn but with the ring of the bell. He had left his scooter at the repair shop. Gayatri didn’t ask him the expenditure on the repair. she usually used to dig out things before her operation, but now she felt too guilty to ask such questions. Sunil asked, "what happened to the cooler?" Pranav heared it in the other room. He felt like a victim of a conspiracy. A conspiracy, where conspirators are themselves the police, the lawyers and the judge. But he didn’t think of preparing for his excuses. He knew it wont be of help, besides it doesn’t matter. Shamelessness had crept into his character sometime back. He then heard her mother say, "I forgot to switch it off and went to sleep. It didnt have water, the pump burnt". "Good, very good. I will earn and people in this house will spill", said Sunil. Pranav thought, "Why is she doing this to me now, is she trying to prove that she loves me or has she silently signalled to him that I am the culprit and she is playing a good mother to me?" He had developed this habit of referring to his parents as HE and SHE in his mind. That was a child’s silent revenge. Once or twice he gathered the courage to think of them as "Saala", without feeling guilty.
Sunil didn't try to wash away the blood stains by peeing at them. He just stared at them in disgust while peeing. It had been months since he had sex with his wife. "It would take another month for her to get ready, for her stitches to be firmer", he thought. Image of Kiran wearing sleave less blouse caught his imagination, "I could have given her lift today, had it not been for my motherfucking scooter." But then, expenditure on the scooter crossed his mind and Kiran's arms could not hold her thought. Drops of urine fell on his legs. While washing his legs in the bathroom, he could hear his wife cooking in the kitchen. It reminded him of the operation day, the tension, the uncertainity and the loan he had taken. "Lost my bloody fixed deposit, just to keep a ailing cook alive ." Before he could think further, Gayatri called him for dinner.
Power cut happened just when Sunil had put the first bite of roti and daal in his mouth. "Motherfuckers, it’s an every day drama", he complained in anger. Realizing that Gayatri’s frail body was too tired after cooking , he signaled her to rest and went to the other room searching for the candle and matchbox. Pranav had already found them and was about to light the candle when he heared Sunil's order, "You leave it, otherwise you will put the whole house on fire." Pranav now knew that he guessed it right, SHE had silently told HIM that he burnt the cooler. He ignored the command, and lighted the candle. This time it was the ego of a hungry middle class man with a broken down scooter which over powered the father of a child. A hard hit across the face and Pranav had the courage to say "saala" loudly in his mind, before he burst into tears. Candle fell on the torn papers of the drawing copy, with half finished paintings of comic characters, mostly villains. Without caring for the slap and the cry he picked up the candle. "You all dont care for the amount of blood I burn. All these pages could have been steppled to make your rough notebooks. You all keep sucking my blood", he accused without considering the age of the accused. Gayatri called Pranav to the room where she lay infront of the table fan, knowing that its nobody’s fault. If at all it was, it was her's. Pranav moved to the other room, not to seek comfort from her mother but to avoid the chance of blurting out what he had always said only in his mind.
Sunil had been avoiding the sight of those loose papers ever since he entered the room. But now disgust had taken over hunger. He lighted the candle again, put it on the table, picked all the papers, stacked them together according to the size, took out the stapler from where he always kept it, stapled the papers and then neatly placed them on the table. He cared for the meticulous details at work and so did his son while painting. He now observed the paintings and thought how much money must have been wasted in the comics which gayatri allows Pranav to buy every month. He then realized that Pranav had just cried and was qiet now. "Bring the candle here and have your dinner", Gayatri called up from inside the dark room. He picked up the candle and just then power came in. He blew the flame off but before he could put it in the right place, he heared Pranav’s terrifying scream. Then Gayatri’ too. He rushed to that room, to see blood spilled on the wall. Pranav’s finger got stuck in the steel frame of the table fan; he had been moving its wings with his fingers during the power cut. The finger was now chopped off. Sunil switched the fan off, and snatched Pranav’s hand off the fan. Gayatri moved as fast as she could for the bandage, murmuring her mother's name. Sunil picked up his helmet to rush to the doctor, but no, how could he? Bang! Went the helmet on to the table fan. And in all the violence, Pranav kept screaming with flooded eyes as if accusing his parents for his lost finger. The words "Thats why, beaten up" kept hammering on his mind continously.
The Parting words-Part3
Now the pain I was talking about which hit me some 3 years back, was not out of my life in a refugee camp or because of my dad's death in Naxalite movemnet. As it happens, I have never been a part of a great misery. The implicit pesimism has by now made it clear that I am a lover. A loser-lover to be precise. A friend of mine says,"Loving someone is about recognising your own virtues". I think it's true. At least for men. When a man feels man enough for a woman only then he is in a position to love her. Winning the lady adds to the 'enough'part and losing her brings in the scarcity. Unfortunately I fell in love even though I recognised my inadequacy to win, to be enough. The hope was there. Hope of growing and rising up to her beauty. But I had to find out the eligibility criteria, the criteria of being judged as enough. The only way to know whats enough was to become a confession box, to play the confidant. To hear like a student what the aching heart of lady-love has to pour out. I said like a sudent, because that was how I learnt my lessons about what is enough and what is not. I could never be a symapthiser, I never felt what a confidant is supposed to feel or at least what he is assumed to be feeling. I just learned what was being taught to me unknowingly. And the first thing which I learnt was, that being a confidant will never be ENOUGH.Her sadness gave me the role of confidant and she had no other roles to offer. Though being a confidant was not enough but that was the only thing I was good enough for. So I had to wait and hope. Hope for her sadness to come back to her. I say this without any remorse and gulit. Her sadness was my appointment letter to be the gatekeeper of her heart. I waited for her sadness,hoped that soon her heart would cry out and still claimed to myself that I was a lover. Thats a paradox but thats the truth. Love is blind, I had heared. But its merciless, this is something I learnt. Infact I don't believe its blind, it has more senses than the human body, more capacity to see, explore, grow and rise.
PS: Part 4 on it's way..
PS: Part 4 on it's way..
Sunday, February 04, 2007
The mystery
They weren’t cooking that day. I asked mom, if they ran out of gas. She told me that on the day of a family member’s death the stove is not lit. Almost every month I witnessed my parent’s quarrelling because one of them had forgotten to book the gas cylinder. I neither could figure out the defaulter and nor could understand the reason why this happened mostly during the days of unit tests. That day was my last quarterly exam, when I came home and found that Tickoo uncle, our next door neighbor was no more. I was in class 5th then.
Mom had been cooking for them that day. She sent me with the tea kettle to their house while she was cooking Tehri to be sent later. Beena Tickoo, roll number 12 of class 5-A was sitting next to her sobbing mother and looking at tickoo uncle's dead body cluelessly. Even I didnt have any clue about what was happening but I expected her reaction to be different from that of mine. I gave the kettle to Beena's aunt who was taking care of everything. Some 8 to 10 people, mostly ladies were sitting around where Tickoo uncle lay. I wanted to talk to Beena about today’s' paper, she couldn’t take the exam, so I thought she would like to know what was there in it. Besides she was good in English, so she would have helped me estimate my marks in the paper.
I could never feel comfortable with her when Tickoo uncle was around, not even now. I just kept looking at her, sitting amidst all the sobbing ladies, so quietly as if she had been punished for not doing her homework. It regretfully reminded me of one time when she didn't do it but the teacher didn't punish her because tickoo uncle was in hospital. She cried in class that day because the teacher wrote INCOMPLETE in red ink on her notebook. Though I had tried to comfort her then but couldn't, partly because I didn't know how to comfort her and partly because I didn't want to. Now, today with everyone mourning around her, and besides that she probably had a reason to cry, I was expecting her to roll down tears which might again create the opportunity. But she was just silent. Even the silence didn't appear to be a sad one; it was rather a silence out of disinterest.
My mom came in with a Tiffin of Tehri, and the moment she entered,Tickoo aunty started crying uncontrollably. Mom asked me to take Beena to our home and gave me the keys while she held tickoo aunty by the shoulders to pacify her. Beena was very quiet but as I expected, she wasn't reluctant to come along. I was extremely conscious now in her presence as it was one of those rare times when only we two were together. Besides, I was scared she might start crying like her mother did right now and I would be scolded as I was twice by tickoo uncle for making her cry. I thought I should tell her, what I think of death and life after it. But then the consequence of such a conversation was not conceivable in such a vulnerable condition, so I rejected the idea. Then, I took out the English examination paper and showed it to her. I was about to ask her for the answere to the first question when she suddenly burst into tears. I didnt know what to do. Tried consoling her but she won’t stop. Her nostrils flooding and eyes streaming. I was scared like hell, more so because Tickoo uncle was no more and I was scared that his ghost would hold me responsible for this. That was how I thought of death and dead men. I wiped her tears with my hands and then in a moment of anxiety I did what I had attempted so many times. I kissed her at her cheek, out of fear or out of something else which I didn’t understand then. I still remember her wet and warm cheeks on my lips. She stopped crying soon after I kissed her. We both remained silent for some time with the question paper lying there with my answers marked on it. Now she already having cried, I thought telling her about my idea of death and dead men would be a innocuous way of breaking up the awkwardness of the silence and the kiss. I don't know whether only I felt that awkwardness or we both did. I started with what god thinks about us and how I am able to talk to him when I am in bathroom, but before I could say enough she stopped me to reveal that she was sad for not being able to take her English exam. I was stunned, and for a moment ashamed of my insincerity.
After Tickoo uncle's dead body was taken away for cremation, she went to her house telling me how many marks should I expect. I couldn’t remember that figure after she was gone. What I remembered was the wet, warm cheek with a sense of achievement and puzzlement mixed with the fear of Tickoo uncle’s ghost knowing it all. I kept pondering but I could never understand her sadness and her reaction to the kiss. That was my first encounter with the mystery of a women's heart.
Mom had been cooking for them that day. She sent me with the tea kettle to their house while she was cooking Tehri to be sent later. Beena Tickoo, roll number 12 of class 5-A was sitting next to her sobbing mother and looking at tickoo uncle's dead body cluelessly. Even I didnt have any clue about what was happening but I expected her reaction to be different from that of mine. I gave the kettle to Beena's aunt who was taking care of everything. Some 8 to 10 people, mostly ladies were sitting around where Tickoo uncle lay. I wanted to talk to Beena about today’s' paper, she couldn’t take the exam, so I thought she would like to know what was there in it. Besides she was good in English, so she would have helped me estimate my marks in the paper.
I could never feel comfortable with her when Tickoo uncle was around, not even now. I just kept looking at her, sitting amidst all the sobbing ladies, so quietly as if she had been punished for not doing her homework. It regretfully reminded me of one time when she didn't do it but the teacher didn't punish her because tickoo uncle was in hospital. She cried in class that day because the teacher wrote INCOMPLETE in red ink on her notebook. Though I had tried to comfort her then but couldn't, partly because I didn't know how to comfort her and partly because I didn't want to. Now, today with everyone mourning around her, and besides that she probably had a reason to cry, I was expecting her to roll down tears which might again create the opportunity. But she was just silent. Even the silence didn't appear to be a sad one; it was rather a silence out of disinterest.
My mom came in with a Tiffin of Tehri, and the moment she entered,Tickoo aunty started crying uncontrollably. Mom asked me to take Beena to our home and gave me the keys while she held tickoo aunty by the shoulders to pacify her. Beena was very quiet but as I expected, she wasn't reluctant to come along. I was extremely conscious now in her presence as it was one of those rare times when only we two were together. Besides, I was scared she might start crying like her mother did right now and I would be scolded as I was twice by tickoo uncle for making her cry. I thought I should tell her, what I think of death and life after it. But then the consequence of such a conversation was not conceivable in such a vulnerable condition, so I rejected the idea. Then, I took out the English examination paper and showed it to her. I was about to ask her for the answere to the first question when she suddenly burst into tears. I didnt know what to do. Tried consoling her but she won’t stop. Her nostrils flooding and eyes streaming. I was scared like hell, more so because Tickoo uncle was no more and I was scared that his ghost would hold me responsible for this. That was how I thought of death and dead men. I wiped her tears with my hands and then in a moment of anxiety I did what I had attempted so many times. I kissed her at her cheek, out of fear or out of something else which I didn’t understand then. I still remember her wet and warm cheeks on my lips. She stopped crying soon after I kissed her. We both remained silent for some time with the question paper lying there with my answers marked on it. Now she already having cried, I thought telling her about my idea of death and dead men would be a innocuous way of breaking up the awkwardness of the silence and the kiss. I don't know whether only I felt that awkwardness or we both did. I started with what god thinks about us and how I am able to talk to him when I am in bathroom, but before I could say enough she stopped me to reveal that she was sad for not being able to take her English exam. I was stunned, and for a moment ashamed of my insincerity.
After Tickoo uncle's dead body was taken away for cremation, she went to her house telling me how many marks should I expect. I couldn’t remember that figure after she was gone. What I remembered was the wet, warm cheek with a sense of achievement and puzzlement mixed with the fear of Tickoo uncle’s ghost knowing it all. I kept pondering but I could never understand her sadness and her reaction to the kiss. That was my first encounter with the mystery of a women's heart.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
The Parting words Part-2
Its not that I have always suffered from the lack-of-Sad-enough-sadness disease. Some three years back I had gathered hurts which could make me feel sad enough to feel important, proud and happy. But once I realized that I am not the only one living in this glory, believing that I am the chosen hero of the great tragedy that has happened and can happen only to me, the whole aura faded out. I don’t know how and when it happened. Perhaps it happened over a period which involved a lot of Confiding and confessing. Now I regret being a Confidant and a confession box, partly because I could never be the one whom someone would confide about and majorly because my belief in the glorious pain and suffering disappeared after I heard the monotones of trivial hurts in which all my confiders were taking pride. The worst thing that happened was that misery became something to be laughed about and mocked at, this is what happens to every common place thing. The sympathizer in me became a cynic and the cynic became a story teller, telling stories out of confessions on which the listeners would sulk and I would laugh. Its may be because of loss of innocence or loss of conscience, or may be both but the point is, for me there is no real sadness except for the sadness that THERE IS NO REAL SADNESS.
I wonder if all story tellers are suffering from this disease. If you want to tell a story you can’t actually be sympathetic. It has to appear to you like a story and not as something worthy of mourning. You listen to them, you sympathize, and you enjoy the sadness and then celebrate it by writing it down using all your vocabulary and writing techniques. I am not really sure whether all the story tellers are cynic or not but I want to find it out.
So here I am a story teller, a cynic and not-so-sad person. But now the question is whether I am a lover. Of course this question comes immediately to the mind once you talk about confiding, parting words the burning moon, the beer can and the sadness which is three years old.
I wonder if all story tellers are suffering from this disease. If you want to tell a story you can’t actually be sympathetic. It has to appear to you like a story and not as something worthy of mourning. You listen to them, you sympathize, and you enjoy the sadness and then celebrate it by writing it down using all your vocabulary and writing techniques. I am not really sure whether all the story tellers are cynic or not but I want to find it out.
So here I am a story teller, a cynic and not-so-sad person. But now the question is whether I am a lover. Of course this question comes immediately to the mind once you talk about confiding, parting words the burning moon, the beer can and the sadness which is three years old.
The Parting words
The blue light from the Intex speakers of the PC struck the glass panes, and the moon shining on the other side appeared to be burning with it. The half empty Beer Can kept on the monitor was ready to fall any moment on the bed on which I lay watching the fan, the blue light and the burning moon, well not in that particular order. In fact in no order at all. Few days back before saying the parting words, it was said to me, that "Order is important to maintain Sanity". Strangely I don’t remember the parting words, I just remember the insanity and the order which could never be there. I am not drinking out of heart ache or out of loneliness or out of anything at all. The matter of fact is I am not drinking at all. Beer cans were brought here for boredom-Outcome-party some 10 days back, but the celebration couldn’t last long enough for each of the Cans and boredom has since then allowed the can to stay back. So the point is why should I put the Beer can, the blue light, the moon and the parting words altogether in my story? To create the effect? May be, yes. But my point is, that there is no effect at all, its just that I want some effect to be there. I do remember the parting words in the first place, although I was honest about the order and sanity thing. I am not trying too hard to lie. It comes easy. Sustaining the lies is difficult. You can’t live long with the glory of forged hurt.
Recognizing the absence of a "Real" sadness to bank upon is perhaps more hurting than any of my forgery. I have long assumed that a sadness which is sad enough is a sign of maturity, intensity, passion and other big-bang theory kind of things. I feel extremely sad when I see people crying their heart out after Half a can of Beer. Not for them, but for myself, because I feel so small in front of them as there is nothing in me which is waiting to come out so desperately that even a half can of beer would help it. Yes, that beer can belongs to my room partner and now you can understand why the party could not last long enough. But then here is the catch, I said "I feel extremely sad when I see people crying their heart out". So there is something waiting in there. Though I don’t cry out of it but that’s probably because I don’t drink enough.
Recognizing the absence of a "Real" sadness to bank upon is perhaps more hurting than any of my forgery. I have long assumed that a sadness which is sad enough is a sign of maturity, intensity, passion and other big-bang theory kind of things. I feel extremely sad when I see people crying their heart out after Half a can of Beer. Not for them, but for myself, because I feel so small in front of them as there is nothing in me which is waiting to come out so desperately that even a half can of beer would help it. Yes, that beer can belongs to my room partner and now you can understand why the party could not last long enough. But then here is the catch, I said "I feel extremely sad when I see people crying their heart out". So there is something waiting in there. Though I don’t cry out of it but that’s probably because I don’t drink enough.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
For Anurag Kashyap after reading AbbasTyrewala's article
A small peice I wrote after reading the article for Anurag Kashyap by Abbas Tyrewala.I wish he could read it!!Add to it if you want to
seven years,
Bleeding tears,
It makes me wonder
god hears!!
heart broken,
bottle open,
they kept on laughing
you downtrodden!!
gathered hurts,
naked cuts,
and still you try
Bloody guts!!
thrice messed,
hungry zest,
but please, once again
your best
seven years,
Bleeding tears,
It makes me wonder
god hears!!
heart broken,
bottle open,
they kept on laughing
you downtrodden!!
gathered hurts,
naked cuts,
and still you try
Bloody guts!!
thrice messed,
hungry zest,
but please, once again
your best
For Anurag Kashyap and Abbas Tyrewala
If,the news on the front page of the fastest selling newspaper in mumbai can be about the scam involving Farah Khan in the dance competition show on TV, then definitely in such a country Fana is a hit and Paanch is not "Healthy Entertainment".The evil is not in those people who tell Anurag Kashyap that Paanch is too long to be a thriller or in those who tell him that he is not a racing horse yet. The evil is bigger and is beyond the capacity of words.There is something fundamentally wrong with the design, something wrong with our perception of existence.
Here in India most of the people are doing what they dont want to, probabaly because the great Indian middle class has taught its offsprings to think in straight line and never to break conventions. Rebellion is not our way of living for we are so afraid of loosing our securities that we choose to loose our freedom.As a result, the best guitarist of our country is probably writing software in Infosys, and the best writers are dying like innocents in Nazi gas chambers, its just that the chambers are named call centers. We have been the cheap labourers of the world since 16th century, now we have started taking pride in it too.No wonder, the number of Indian entrepreneurs is small, just like the number of Indian films in the international scene.
Coming from a a middle class family of north india, I know how parents coax their children into eigther Engineering or medicine. There is nothing else they know or find anything worth risking their safe paths. I eventually cleared IIT to join the brigade of the 4000 elite Indians just to find that probably that was not the best place for me. In my Alma Matar, I found people who spent three fourth of their graduation in playing guitar, writing stories and doing theatre. But the future of all these people was inevitably a software company.
May be, one odd of these insane souls would leave his job and make" hyderabad blues" but the rest would suffer,every time they see the poster of a Fanaa or read about a Black Friday being dumped.They will suffer because they know that Murder was made while they were writing codes, "Ek baar Aaja" was composed when they were attending calls in the gas chamber. My rage is not against the absence of ability, my rage is against the absence of desire. The desire to sustain the love for beauty.
The evil which forced me to clear IIT,the evil which forced the great guitarist to be a coder is the same which wrote the filthy front page stories,the one which dumped BlackFriday, the one which declared that Paanch is not healthy entertainment.While writing this I have "Langda tyagi Rocks" in my mind, sitting in his office,thinking about the script he has written and wondering why Gulal didnt get the financers.The song "High Hopes" by pink floyd is playing somewhere deep inside me for I know that he is a victim of his hopes and he will suffer like an atheist. An atheist, whose faith gets crumbled every time Allwyn Kalicharan is dumped and black friday is banned.
Here in India most of the people are doing what they dont want to, probabaly because the great Indian middle class has taught its offsprings to think in straight line and never to break conventions. Rebellion is not our way of living for we are so afraid of loosing our securities that we choose to loose our freedom.As a result, the best guitarist of our country is probably writing software in Infosys, and the best writers are dying like innocents in Nazi gas chambers, its just that the chambers are named call centers. We have been the cheap labourers of the world since 16th century, now we have started taking pride in it too.No wonder, the number of Indian entrepreneurs is small, just like the number of Indian films in the international scene.
Coming from a a middle class family of north india, I know how parents coax their children into eigther Engineering or medicine. There is nothing else they know or find anything worth risking their safe paths. I eventually cleared IIT to join the brigade of the 4000 elite Indians just to find that probably that was not the best place for me. In my Alma Matar, I found people who spent three fourth of their graduation in playing guitar, writing stories and doing theatre. But the future of all these people was inevitably a software company.
May be, one odd of these insane souls would leave his job and make" hyderabad blues" but the rest would suffer,every time they see the poster of a Fanaa or read about a Black Friday being dumped.They will suffer because they know that Murder was made while they were writing codes, "Ek baar Aaja" was composed when they were attending calls in the gas chamber. My rage is not against the absence of ability, my rage is against the absence of desire. The desire to sustain the love for beauty.
The evil which forced me to clear IIT,the evil which forced the great guitarist to be a coder is the same which wrote the filthy front page stories,the one which dumped BlackFriday, the one which declared that Paanch is not healthy entertainment.While writing this I have "Langda tyagi Rocks" in my mind, sitting in his office,thinking about the script he has written and wondering why Gulal didnt get the financers.The song "High Hopes" by pink floyd is playing somewhere deep inside me for I know that he is a victim of his hopes and he will suffer like an atheist. An atheist, whose faith gets crumbled every time Allwyn Kalicharan is dumped and black friday is banned.
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