I Wonder

Dear Charvi,

Sometimes when the feet haste forward or the fingers tap in wait,

The mind steals a few moments from the ever scarce time.

And it wonders, as mind often does,

How would it be if I faked my own death and started it all again?

Perhaps the burdensome task to distinguish right from wrong will be dispensed with

And the conscience freed to decide its own course and the gazillion voices silenced.

Perhaps I will sail fiercely, unbound and unhindered, in chase of my true purpose.

Or maybe I will prefer to befriend the waves and drift along purposeless.

Perhaps comfort will wrap its arms around me in the candid laughter of strangers

Yet maybe a house in the woods for two will be nice

Perhaps the baggage of emotions will feel lesser while walking in another’s shoes

And I’d leave behind a trail of great deeds or rather be immortalized as an infamous lover

Perhaps I will sleep on a park bench for the want of shelter

Perhaps I will tour the world by working backstage in a concert

Perhaps I will be on TV, a celebrity or an anchor.

Perhaps I will climb the Himalayas and become a Marleyian.

Every now and then the mind does what it is supposed to do

And I wonder, if I were to die would it start all over again?

Shoelace Drift

Anant Muses...

For a second there, I felt a creative block, staring at an empty page with a header on it. It’s funny, considering my brain would ever allow itself to think so highly of me.

But then, I came to think of what this really is about. I realize that all I need to do is let loose the leash on my bulls here, and my brain will unhinge its jaws and begin to devour the many shades of pessimism that form my background as seamless ribbons.

I am certain on the equation here, for I am a servant and I have a captain on the ship. That’s almost all certainty holds for me. The whole blog writing episode came as an unexpected wave in my flat-lined life.

Considering I read this phrase on the ‘Urban Dictionary’, it is surprisingly incidental, meaningful and philosophical.

I have dwelled intently in my past on shoelaces, knots and what-not. It always fascinated me to see how shoelaces formed one of the first few standards for the worth of an infant in this shit-sludge journey we’re all forcibly pulled out for. How inability of tying a decent knot in one’s shows almost immediately proved autism. I couldn't understand the strange sense of delight people (including me) felt on having furnished neat, symmetrical and rightly sized loops of string. Why, a bull-dog shaped fold decided how well a person carried himself. But then, that’s more about knots, and that is a whole other story.

We’ve set out to indulge in the shoelace fiasco here. It is an unavoidable infinity I see on my shoes, an infinity wrapped into a bow, with two possible beginnings to it, for we all know there are absolutely no ends.

Infinity, thus, calls for a sense of unfathomable depth. Let me thus ask you, have you ever thought how we breathe through life?

Wait, you might be throwing your head back to say you have, or rather, there’s nothing to think about in the petty fact. But is breath really that simple an exercise? People who've made millions out of teaching funny ways to breath will surely beg to differ.

You might wish to consider a healthy person, one who lives by the books of the Gods, he still gets to die, doesn’t he? The end is invariant and inevitable. Death is, undisputedly, more absolute than life, at least from this end of the tunnel. So he dies a ‘natural’ death, of old age. Dozes off to an unending sleep. What can one say causes a natural death? The food, the soul, the Gods, the time? Or is it the breath, the unchanging, the unaltered part of our lives? Isn’t the life giving also the most insidious?

I am tempted to say that death, as strongly as life, is caused by breath. Our breath is our time keeper in this world, for when all senses may be lost, one can still count breath.

I could seem to have swayed off-topic here, but I haven’t. What I have attempted to establish is that repetitions, all of them I can perceive, are self-decaying. That seems to me to be the biggest bug of all in this matrix.

So every next breath of yours is inevitably weaker than the last. It takes you closer to your climax. All of this has come out of an imperfect knot on my shoe. I have stopped wearing shoes much at all. Apart from them being too much work, I hate how knots are almost impossible to get right.

It seems that every time I get a smaller loop on one side, or worse, a single looped knot, my shoelaces throw back at me a sadistic grin, relishing the blood off of an incomplete, imperfect life.

Shoelace drift is like fatigue. How things are almost always insidious and we gladly choose one over another to kill us slowly.

One fine day you start off with new shoes. Life seems perfect and variables seem few enough to be ignored in your little universe of control. You walk around with your own air of dope and world around you seems to jiggle in sync with a Bruno Mars’ song.

But the next thing you know, your shoes, they’re far from new!

The gloss of the leather, that took an unduly long hour to shine, looks scraped off by the feet stomping aunts in the Metro; and the cheap, greasy mint sauce stains from the snacks Deli.

The laces which earlier seemed firm and monochromatic, now sag like a witch’s sleeve, mustard from the wet mud.

You begin to wonder why things never stay new. What follows, is the question whether ‘new’ would ever mean anything if they really did.

This, this right here is what shoelace drift stands for. An impending doom on the symmetry, the neatness in life you set to create.Spitting out the guinea pig reality of the free world and its free people.

How we keep switching among the many possibilities in life, trying to achieve a balance that runs just as far from us as we try to near it, till the sweet moment when we’re rotten enough to finally be accepted by oblivion.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

I Chronicle... 

They all look the same at first. Nicely lined in the showcase - each sole clean and each lace falling in a nice perfect bow. And then reality happens. There are days when the shoes tread on rough terrain and others when they simply lie dejected in a corner underneath other dirty footwear. Bit by bit their wear leads to tear. The shoelaces which once lived in an egalitarian harmony slowly begin to slip out of balance. While one end rushes to get out of that maze, the other gets dragged into a dark hole – the shoelace drift.

So that is what you Goldilocks, the owner, wake up to find on one of those rare occasions when for the umpteenth time you had decided to bring a change in your life by starting your day with a morning jog. Another mess. You stare at your old shoes for a good 30 seconds, close your eyes, throw your head back and burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. It is almost manic!  

You draw in a long breath and slump back into your bed.

Those laces have lost their balance. They always do. No matter how expensive they are or what substance they are made of, the shoelaces always lose their balance. And it is incredible how little you do to contribute to arrive at this inevitable situation; time and routine take care of it for most parts.

You throw a pillow on your face to drown out those nagging voices in your head, one chastising you for yet again giving up on your plan and the other urging you to let it go because those laces are too much work and you deserve a better morning anyway.

If only Velcro was fashionable, you would have never faced this problem in the first place. But then you remember that it isn't too easy to get a good grip with them. A solid footing maybe inconvenient at first but it guarantees a quality jog.

You exhale and sit up straight to face the shoe on the ground.

As you pull out the uneven laces from their holes you begin to think. Up and down, up and down your hand moves, and you recall all the porridge you have eaten which was either too hot or too cold…In and out, in and out…..and all the times you had to sit in a chair that was either too hard or too soft…left to right, right to left…..or sleep in a bed which was too high or too low for your liking….until it completely falls apart.

And then you start again. Start afresh. Balance.

You put the 10 minutes worth of work down knowing perfectly well that in a few weeks time you will be repeating this whole exercise again. The futility of this effort weighs heavy on you.  Yet you smile at yourself for having over-thought everything in the last 20 minutes and walk away to the kitchen to make some breakfast of a porridge heated to the right temperature.

The shoelace drift might be inevitable, but it is also essential. It helps to find that balance, the perfect bow. Why are we obsessed with that bow you ask? Because nobody likes to run with the fear of tripping over. 


[Dear Charvi, a spontaneous turn of events gave form to a kind of collaboration which manifested itself into this post consisting of 2 monologues delivered by me and my guest contributor (who also came up with the ingenious topic.). Have a good read.]

Photo by Anant Pathak

Charvi ka Left hand

Charvi ka left hand is just like any other left hand. It has four pudgy fingers, one tiny thumb and a smallish square palm. All in all it is the perfect lateral image of her right hand, that is, her strong hand. It does everything which a good left hand is supposed to do. It shifts the gear of her car, it maintains her tissue-tushy relationship, it carries her books as she gloriously enters her class, it plays the chords on her secret guitar and in many other ways serves her like a good left hand. Charvi ka left hand is much like any other left hand, destined to exist as the side kick to her right hand, except that there is a catch.

There is one thing which sets Charvi ka left hand apart from all the other left hands and that is the fact that it is Charvi ka left hand. Devoid of this advantage, most ordinary left hands go unnoticed in history. But that will not be the case with this particular left hand, not as long as it can be called as Charvi ka left hand.

You see, Charvi is, quite ironically, the queen of the underdogs; the most kickass of the side-kicks. So she knows better than to underestimate the importance of the seemingly less important. And it is with this knowledge that she put apna left hand to the use of the greater good.

Let me give you an illustration. On a fine winter evening, in a place which is nice at that time of the day, Charvi ka left hand, singlehandedly…err, you get my point, accomplished what was believed to be impossible. It righted a wrong. Oh, what a moment it was! In one swift moment it confronted the enemy cheek, shaking the very foundation of her foe. The contact had an irreversible effect for never since then has the evil crept to the surface, all its boldness lost in a flash.  

Besides wielding it as a weapon, Charvi has also been known to employ apna left hand for achieving quite the opposite purposes.  Sources inform that uska left hand possesses mysterious healing powers. This information finds its authority from this one incident where she was sighted bringing an object, long believed to be lifeless, to its senses. At the touch of uska left hand, a soft crooning began to emit out of the object and slowly but surely its form began to glow and heat up. Such was the energy that began radiating from this entity that all those who witnessed this miracle shook out of their stupor and joined the song of the object-no-more.

And yet such sinister happenings cannot be natural. Surely they did not occur on their own accord, simply because one tiny girl wished it to be so. Perhaps it is the odd pattern of her prints. Or maybe the work of a lotion crafted of exotic ingredients. We can only depend upon conjectures and surmises but the secrets which lie behind these activities are best known to the girl herself. What further Charvi ka left hand will do is yet to be seen. However, fear remains that someday there will come a man, the carrier of a ring, who will bind this unrestricted force of the girl and uska left hand only to make the world poorer thus. 

A rare snap of the hand in question.
This photo was taken soon after a young Witch had
blessed Charvi for her services with the
customary black nail paint worn by her sisters.

[Note - ye toh mere baay haath ka khel tha! So Charvi, my love, you have enjoyed quite a break there. Good. Now that you are rested well, embrace the next challenge with all your might.  The title of your next post must be "Inside Out". It is a wide one. Amaze me. I shall keep an eye out for your next post here. See you soon!]

Any Dream Will Do

Dear Charvi, 

The darkness that follows nightfall skillfully conceals the finer details of the world, giving it a mysterious charm. And it is in this dark unknown that the secrets of a million hearts are revealed. After a hard day’s work, as the common folk enter into a deep slumber, their daytime veil slowly slips off and a new world, a world entirely centered on them, begins to unfold.

There are three wise spirits who wander among the masses – invisible, unheard but occasionally felt when circumstances necessitate it to be so. One night, having grown weary of their usual pursuits, they gathered under their favorite tree, silently gazing at the stars above, listening to the sound of deep breathing which was emanating from the houses around. And so they began to wonder, wise as they were, as to what trivialities occupy the minds of the mortals when their stream of subconscious is uninterrupted and is completely their own construct. And thus it was decided that each of them would enter into a human’s dream, see into their souls and discover their desires.

And so the spirits drifted in their separate ways, watching, listening and losing themselves in the dreams of the people. Once they had seen enough, they returned to the tree and spoke of what they found.

The first wise spirit saw the fears of the folks who blamed change for leaving them astray. It was puzzled that the natural course of time, the inevitable, could be such a cause of worry. After all, it is the erratic graph of the heartbeat that proves one is still alive, the chaos of the soul which breeds the rhythm of the heart. A straight line on the graph means you have ceased to be, the rhythm brought to an abrupt stop, the chaos lost in the sameness of the eternal rest.

The second wise spirit kept it even brief. Its heart was heavy with a saddening truth, for it had noticed that those who have nothing, understand the value of something while those who need nothing are blind to everything. And in all this confusion it was nothing that found its right place.

The third wise spirit was disappointed in what it found. The humans, it seems, were too busy basking in the former glories of their forefathers, too involved in retaining their prejudice, that they forgot to find their own true purpose. It seemed that so clouded was each of their minds that no room was left for reason or learning. And yet it was with pride that they declared themselves to be the superior beings of nature.

As the final words were spoken, silence once again consumed the world. When company is scarce, the devils of the heart find comfort in the alleys of the mind. The light was returning in the east. Soon the world would continue to run about its course again, forgetful of their nighttime visions. But as for the three spirits, together they wept for the world.

Forever yours faithfully

A(u)nty