Paper

There is a lot of poetry around me from the past few days. It has its effects. I had previously published four rhyming lines and called it a poem. Here are many not-rhyming lines. I still call it a poem-

The brushstrokes keep falling on the canvas

Harsh, rough, jagged strokes,

like the edge of a broken window pane

Tender like a dew drop rolling down the broken glass

So sure, so confused

waiting for the next epiphany to strike

Epiphany after epiphany

He makes a ladder out of them and climbs it

building each rung as he goes up

The water, the colours mix under his command

A bit more of yellow here, some more water there

Red and blue make purple...

He is the creator and the destroyer

and the preserver of it all

The small paper universe

What shall I create? He thinks

Something eternal, timelessly beautiful, but gruesome too

For is there beauty if there is no ugliness?

A woman? A breathtaking landscape? My own Monalisa?

Brushstrokes keep falling on the canvas

More unsure now. Less confident

He struggles on, struggles to escape from his pitiful insignificant life,

escape into something ethereal he built himself.

Like cocaine.

The more he tries, the harder he falls

Its natural, isn't it?

And like a madman he rushes on the canvas again,

only to spoil it further.

And then, the final epiphany strikes,

Harsh, rough, jagged, but tender at the same time,

'It is only paper'

And the beautiful universe crumbles down, not in front of his eyes

but inside his heart.

....And the brushstrokes cease to fall.

For those about to blog, I salute you!

Its been past a year since I started blogging and I didn't even realise it. On the fifth of february the last year at around the same time as today, I sat typing my first blogpost. Deja vu!( I have been dying to use this phrase for a long time!).

A big bad year has gone past and a lot of things have changed. My room is messier, if it could possibly be, my hair is longer(way longer), and there has been a steady increase in my typing speed. My cgpa has undergone a very wild roller coaster ride and is at this moment face down puking its ass off in a dumpster. The music in my hard disk drive has increased from the previously boasted 70Gb to a 150Gb. I have become a hell lot better guitarist then I was at that time. I have learnt to play the slide guitar, the harmonica and I can hold a steady drum beat. I can even limp around with a flute. I have met Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia, Birju Maharaj, APJ Abdul Kalam( seen, not met, technically) among others. I have missed a dinner with Kumarmangalam Birla because I forgot I was invited. I have had Hepatitis A , been in the ICU, and have had acute derision towards food for a certain amount of time. I have had a heartbreak. I have had so many mountain dews, thumsups, coffees, ice creams, chicken cheese rolls, rassomlettes and maggi that you could feed a small country with it. I have digested it all. I have painted a lot, sketched a lot and found that I am so intensely passionate about them that I wouldn't be able to live without them. I have had uncountable unforgettable conversations with my friends

( Bajju- "Who is your favourite Indian actor?" Me-" Well... I guess its Amir Khan." Bajju, fidgets for a bit and then blurts out," He is ok yaar, but what do you think about Mithun??")

I have seen the Taj. I have upholded my traditions of-

1. Always doing a Lord of the Rings movie marathon after every test in college.

2. Always having a pizza on the last night of a college festival.

3. Never going out of my room without a guitar pick on me, among others.

I have seen amazing movies. I have seen disgusting movies, probably because I never knew how they were before watching them. I have gained the best, and I am not just saying that, literally the best friends a guy could ever hope to get in his life. And I have tried hard to gain a little bit of their trust. I have also been a first rate jerk and in some cases an amazingly dimwitted buttmonkey.

And I have blogged. I have typed some of the lamest and weirdest things that have come to my mind. Seriously, I hate to read my previous posts. But, done it all with the immense hope, scratch that, immense guarantee that no one is going to read it anyways! Also as I mentioned before, for increase in typing speed.

Thus, I raise this bottle of tomato ketchup( thats the only thing within reach right now)- ...To the blogs that are never read!

Watercolour

This is my latest watercolour. A long time since I uploaded a picture. Tell me how it is!

The Taj and other stories.

After weeks of fidgeting trying to find something to write about, I landed squarely on one topic; and thank God for that. I wonder what writers with deadlines do. The funny thing is, when I started to blog, it was sort of a medium for me to express my thoughts, however insane they would be. No one would mind; it is not like you can force someone to read your blog. Interested weirdos can dig in! But now, I have started to feel guilty if I haven't blogged for a long time. It is something like thinking for hours and hours for something funny that you can put up as your facebook status message. I really envy people who can be brilliant and funny at the same time. I don't mean pjs, I mean real comedy. Good stuff. Some people can say just the right things using just the right amount of words and most importantly at the right time. I can't do that. I have to really sit and think about all the ways I could say something and then try to find which one is the wittiest. For Gods sake, I spend hours building up an sms. So, for the past couple of weeks, as the voice at the back of my head grew louder and louder I started opening the blog and staring at the blank 'new post' page. I read my previous articles for help, and man, do they suck or what! Writing for me is like vomiting. It doesn't come until it is supposed to. ( This was written in desperate want of a better sentence.).

This december, I was in Agra with my family. The whole trip was not bad at all, except for the following conversation I had with my mother-

Me looking at the non veg dishes in the menu card of a restaurant. Mom, eyeing me suspiciously-"Kaushal, can you not eat your chicken-shicken while you are with us? God, the smell is disgusting."

Me, admittedly appalled for she called it 'chicken-shicken' and said that it smelt bad, "Well, if you want me to eat grass and roots and twigs for the rest of the trip, fine by me!"

I thoroughly hoped that I had put enough sarcasm in my voice when I said this, but apparently it was not enough. She took it quite literally and proceeded to order harabhara kababs for all of us. Like, are kababs even supposed to be harabhara? Anyways, that was how I became a temporary vegetarian.( I got rid of it as soon as I came back home. Barbecue chicken. :DD) But being in the home of Murgi and Tandoor and not having it was insanely disconcerting. Also, with due respect to my Punjabi friends and readers, there is nothing much left in Punjabi cuisine if you take away chicken except, maybe paneer. And there is a limit to how much paneer you can eat. I secretly vowed to go back there again just to eat Murgi and Parantha in a Dhaba.

Anyways, being in Agra also meant being in the land of the Taj. The whole city revolves around the monument. I have no idea how they differentiate between places because I have seen so many 'Taj residency' and 'Taj view' hotels that after a certain point of time you start questioning the imagination of the people around there.

After a tiring six hour journey from Jaipur which consisted of a not so fulfilling experience of reading 'The lost symbol', I admit I was not very keen to actually make an effort to go see the Taj on the same day. I was dazed and tired and on an all-paneer diet. I needed my rest. But that was not to be, so I sat swatting flies and stifling yawns in a green rickshaw on the way to the Taj herself. After around ten minutes, the guy stops the Rick and looks at us as with part amusement, part pity." Aa gaya sirjee Taj!"

I get off and look around. There is a narrow street further narrowed down by lines of small-time shops selling marble articles, Kachori houses, laundries, phone booths, travel companies, photo studios, clothes shops and hotels- Most of them 'Taj View's, one 'Taj retreat'. It looks like you could cut off the whole section, scoop it up and keep it in any Indian city, and it would make no difference. Where the heck is the Taj? I look at the rickshaw driver. He is sitting, left palm full of gutkha, mashing it with the right index finger, the idol of indifference. I ask him, where is the Taj? He looks at me with a poker face before pinching up the gutkha in his right hand and depositing it in his underlip. Left hand points up to the lane straight ahead. A bunch of Chinese( or an oriental counterpart; I can't really spot the difference.) tourists seem to be going that way too, so we follow them. We come to this small doorway and buy our tickets in. Now I get a view of the first archway towards the Mahal, but the whole thing is blocking the monument. As I slowly jostle through the crowd, I get pearl white glimpses through the arch; like a teaser, or more so, a Parda- a veil; like the fingers of a beautiful woman peeking through a veil. As I get closer, I get a better view. When I get under the archway, time stands still.

The lady reveals herself. The pearl white skin with a pink tinge shrouded in evening mist, the sheer size of it and the grey-blue skies providing the perfect backdrop for the most beautiful landscape. I stand there taking it all in. For a full minute I don't move. Around me, the incoming race of people has stopped too, all eyes on the Taj. You know, you have seen it so many times on tv, in pictures. Even done a virtual tour on your encarta encyclopedia. The four minarets, the huge dome- the crown- the taj, the glistening white marble and the walkways. You think you know how it is. But, boy, it is way different. Its like the difference between guitar hero joystick and a Fender Strat. That moment I made a vow- I am going to see all the seven wonders of the world. I have six left now...

The rest of the evening passed in standing in a huge queue waiting to get inside the Mahal. We stood outside for two hours to get a thirty second tour of the insides, which were so dark that you couldn't see anything. But I loved the Taj the first moment I saw it.

The only other time I loved it was from the top of the Agra fort the next day. Shahjahan was supposed to be in a house arrest here and he had requested it to be at a place where he could see the Taj. When I saw it from there, I knew it was a perfect place. The yamuna snaked in front of me as I stood there. The evening mist skimmed on its waters. Suddenly someone shouted- " Look, the Taj!"

All heads turned up and people from different nationalities, colour and race held there breaths as one. Up ahead as the river bended out of site, it loomed, peeking out of the mist, the orange rays of the setting sun giving it a halo. Vivid and impressionistic like a Monet, with the mist giving a sfumato. Cameras flashed. The mist grew and as the sun finally dropped out of sight, the fog covered it beyond our gaze. The Taj retired to sleep.

And then all went dark...

When the gig is over....

A post after a long time, and my first experience of blogging from the college computer centre, which sucks.
Anyways, so many things happened since I last blogged. I had my first hospital experience, which sucked, too. An ICU is a very queer place, and is queer in a very bad way. When you are strapped with about thirteen wires of ECG, respiration measurer, pulse rate, heart rate, blood pressure measuring devices which run around your chest and arms, and you want to scratch your butt, well, that ain't gonna happen. And the continuos beep-beep sound of the machines is all that you hear, in my case, for four days. Your life becomes an ICU. Your life becomes a succession of beeps.
I recovered and after a few days came back to my college. Two things which affect the life of every BITSGian awaited me- Waves and test 2( in the latter case, afflict.). This time Waves was more tiring than fun, you know. Infact I had more fun in the pre-waves week than in Waves itself. Had an amazing time right before Waves though. Painted after a month or so, and that felt real good, courtesy the new improved Kala room with a wifi and an A/C, the easel and the free live music provided by the music club. Had an unforgettable trip to Panjim, which consisted of visiting my two favourite shops in the world- Furtado's music shop and the Art shoppee. I played a mexican handmade acoustic guitar worth 35 grand, which was kickass. And Art shoppee is always a bliss to visit. And I got myself sanguine and bistre( they are colours. Sound so amazing don't they.). And I had food at Daily Bread, courtesy Sammy which, again, was kickass.
I will never forget the running around I did for the inaug performance and nearly everything else. We were so damn stressed that a couple of nights before Waves, 3am, Sammy and I endedup laughing our heads out rolling on the floor for no reason as if we were high.
The actual Waves was hectic. I could not watch any events except a couple. I didn't go to the DJ nite, I never do. KK was good. And I missed Parikrama, because I was so tired on the last day that I ended up sleeping at 9.30. The exhibition we'd organised was a hit though.
And then there was Test2. Though I dont want to write about it. It came and it went away.
I don't know if they actually mean it, but the brochures proclaimed that in Waves, the 'winter was never this hot', and it being an amazing culfest and shit like that. I don't know about any of that. What I know is that Waves was a realisation of responsibility. It was a realisation of reality too, stark reality.
I have this queer way of judging how good a programme was. You know, when you experience something truly good- a mindblowing performance, an awesome concert, your mind goes into a high. You forget the reality. Your life becomes the performance. It happened to me while watching Hariprasad Chaurasia and Birju Maharaj, what the heck, even when I saw the Pink Floyd Pulse concert on my laptop, I got 'the high'. And then when the gig ends, you slowly come back on the ground. You suddenly start remembering your problems. Your crappy CGPA, your personal problems, the underlying lack of direction in your whole life. Now the more time it takes for you to 'come back to ground' the better the gig was.
I am still high on the Waves experience...