Smart phone withdrawal

 My samsung galaxy s2 decided to throw a tantrum and give up on me completely a couple of months ago. An easily repairable issue with the micro USB port gave me an invaluable opportunity to measure the level of dependency I had on the ailing piece of sophisticated machinery. I decided to let it slide and take it slow on the repairing process. Here I present some introspective observations.

1. Apathy: The trade off was spectacularly bearable. Specifically they are:

What I did not necessarily miss: The midnight pings from the assorted range of peer pressure induced messenger apps. Surprise! I do not miss being in constant contact with the posse and I could now successfully refrain from sending out the cursory "have you had dinner" every night. Not to sound ungrateful, but I am pretty sure my virtual friends are perfectly capable of three square meals a day without me asking about it. There is also the impulse (also peer pressure induced) to let the world know about the beautifully laid out breakfast which is so much better inside my tummy than on plates peppering the instagram feed. And also the frequent notifications that a person in my virtual circles has found a new place to get drunk and meet the ladies (this might be slightly attributed to envy.)

What I might be missing, but have found alternatives: The beautifully laid out playground of time killer apps and the addictive simplicity fronting the convoluted machinery. I play games on my laptop now, rathering than crushing candies and participating in the violent post modern cultural norm of chucking angry looking birds at pigs. Now I happily kill dragons with my choicest daedric weapons (note: Skyrim reference for the uninitiated and uninterested) dressed like a proper medieval hero.

What I do miss:  My music player! The carefully picked and perfected playlists of my auditory indulgences. That perfect playlist for the morning walk to the office. That perfect poop time playlist, without which the plumbing goes on a self imposed break. That perfect nap time playlist without which sleep is a grumpy girlfriend. That perfect playlist... goes on for quite a couple of blog posts. Woe is me in this regard.

2. Profound perspective on the world: Well for one, I started realising there is a less solipsistic approach to the world. There are people who needed help on the roadside, there are blind people who are in need of a guide through the puzzles presented by the road traffic. Well who am I kidding, there are those well endowed creations of providence (cute girls!). And the trees are brilliantly greener, and that driver who would have had to do a 'Fast and Furious', previously, to avoid hitting me is happily driving away and not at all glaring or yelling at me. All of this appeared in a gush of successive epiphanies. The world is more beautiful though our eyes directly than through the filter of a secondary screen.

3. Conversations: I started indulging in the subjectively prolific exercise of actually talking to people. It is like a MMORPG in itself. The careful real time navigation of choices presented through ones vocabulary, the application of which results in the opening up of more possibilities. It is quite more interesting when this is real time rather than with the time frame relaxation afforded through an electronic medium, no cheat codes in life my friend.

4. Indulgences: Indulgences now differed in terms of the medium and form of acceptance. The laptop screen afforded the luxury of the occasional movie, which are quite nicer than the tedious virtual conversations, thoroughly more entertaining! But for the clincher of the title, the icing on the cake: I started reading again! Whoooo, thorough intellectual and literary orgasm! No amount of extensions to that proclamation would justify the satisfaction.

5. Re-establishing connection with the self: Contemplations and thought trains started bringing in more intellectual goods and sweet realisations. Quite satisfying this, I must tell you my friend, the feeling of actually having fruitful thoughts and musings rather than those induced by somebody on whatsapp telling me that they are going to watch How to Train Your Dragon 2.

All in all, I might still get my phone repaired. But I am pretty sure it is only because a new portable music player of relatable quality is exponentially more expensive than fixing the perfectly good one that my super awesome mega feature filled phone offers.

Evolution of a soul

She had a life or believed she could,
a cause for which she neither knew nor cared.
Never questioned but faithfully followed,
taught through silent breaths of piety and worship.

She was made to and was joined,
through the heart and a glistening thread promised.
Unwavering and unquestioning she had conformed,
the luxuries of thought and question left unheeded.

Promises were made and left unfulfilled,
like ghosts they did haunt her wake.
With the thread she had blossomed and flowered,
With the thread she had borne two fruits.

One was born dark and shadowed,
but nevertheless grew sweet and flourished.
One that was fairly spritely and endowed,
went with the wind to the distant unknowns.

Deliberate and sure, she ever grew so bitter,
until recognition was futile, even for her own.
Never was that face of her seen before,
never was that face of her desired upon.

Sure as her footsteps on the steps of stone,
definite as passing of time and deep pain,
She ploughed on through and thorough,
questions in distress and in vain.

Euphoria: Heaven or Las Vegas

 New year 2014 found me on the terrace of the place I was staying sipping a beer, and more importantly as lonely as a mirage in a desert. It had been only 10 days since I had moved to Bangalore and had not yet laid the foundations for any sort of companionship, superficial or otherwise. You might get the idea that I am not social, but I assure it was not so. I make friends quite easily and lose them easier still. This time around, it being a fresh start of sorts for me, I had decided to take things slower. So with what was like four beer cans for company and a packet of cigarettes to go with it, I settled on the parapets on the terrace of the building as the impending end of another year came ever so near.

 I had stumbled upon this heavenly music a couple of months before, the Cocteau Twins. As uplifting as it was melancholic and absolutely exquisite, Liz Fraser and co. gave me extended company to get through the loneliness. Loneliness induced by the visions of great merriment and the general to do that accompanied the festivities of the occasion. Heaven or Las Vegas washed over me like a tame drizzle on a warm afternoon, accentuating feelings of calmness through the general loneliness. Right from the opening track, Cherry Coloured Funk, the entire album flowed through. I watched as pretty girls being escorted by their male companions, people working their way through the great crowd that moved ever so slowly down below, without purpose but with what was essentially euphoria. End of another year and the start of a new one, resolutions and promises being made, being thought off; Inebriated consciousnesses.

 The songs and the mild alcohol brought contemplations. Sceneries of purposelessness in happiness unfolding in the chaotic night. Quiet and addressing multiple thought trains, I watched on as hundreds of bitter sweet stories were made down below. With the songs, drinks and burning smoke for company I watched on with eyes watering ever so slightly. And yet it was nothing but intense euphoria. 

Cigarettes are a luxury and so is beer. Food is all but a necessity I cannot bear.

Been broke for so long it's not true,
Wanted a good deal, though no, it's not new.
Lot's of people know me and all of them know,
My pocket's as empty as a fallen angel's soul.

Bangalore yet again proves to be a metaphorical black hole subjective to monetary resources. Month after month earnings disappear and no savings grace the bank account with its presence. When an inherent apathy for money and not for what it can buy makes you do nothing to earn the extra cash and at the same time buy all that you can manage in the available time, being insanely broke is just unavoidable. Stacked to the apathy just mentioned is a handicap, a latent inability to manage anything that reaches beyond the range of moving your limbs around. Thankfully time management skill are being inculcated on a regular basis due to current necessities. Jam! Damn! Jam it in the whole idea that managing money doesn't make you less of a hippy. A smart hippy, go on preaching all the wonderful snippets of information and philosophical ideologies that you have acquired through ages of living in the internet. But make sure you have a teeny bit of money left to feed yourself by the end of the month. It is indeed a good idea. Aah well let's see how eight more days of utter fasting fares in the plan. Already skinny as a rail; you did arrive in this place with a round belly. Now's it's more a right handed parabola with respect to the y and z axes.

The management skills ought to be developed before you forget the taste of good beer and the feeling of a smoke in a shelter from the rain. The coolness that envelopes the warmth from the cigarette. So many of your little big indulgences depend on the same cash that you deplore and denounce. Damn, the monologue sounds so freakishly pathetic from a third person's perspective. Who hates money? You have heard somewhere that, if you learn to love money it will come and stay with you, that makes it sound like a woman. So wonder what happens if you lie that you love it! Will it believe you? Trust you enough to move in with you? Make love to you? Well suppose that's exactly what you are doing right now! Making some money off some work you are apathetic about and hoping for hopes best that you will find the <fuck> Indian dream? Oh come on, not the Indian dream, that makes it sound more pathetic. For the want of a better idea, there is no dream. there's just some stupid fiction.

And at the end for all the hopes and dreams: My Bloody Valentine.

Productivity in slavery

Another day comes to an end and questions have been asked about it. Questions of such philosophical gravity that'd make the chicken questions sound superficial. Like how is it that there are people working for 10,000 rupees, like a slave with a headphone attached to their head and no breaks of any timeframe in the immediate chronological vicinity. Well, it's a BPO, people are slaves there mate, came an unfazed answer from the exact entity whose earlier observations where the progenitor for these supreme questions of primary importance.

Aaaah chuck the grandiose literary crap. This guy comes over and says, "God I wish I could quit this stupid job, I am getting paid Rs. 1,20,000 (this in most foreign currency, is such a pathetic sum, and that which would make the heavily web-parodied college dropout/failures working at McDonalds appear to have career) a year and they don't even allow my phone inside the office". I could sympathise. I tried to sympathise. And like any other social human being with the best of intentions, I told the next person I saw about it. Through the conversation that followed I take credit in observing an analogy comparing the working of a BPO to herding cattle. Cattle eats, excretes and lives in general without any particular understanding or constructing perspectives of any manner, and these jobs draw a parallel in terms of the way the conditions in which their productivity is defined. The key difference being the former whines a lot. Forgive me if you think I sound unkind, but it's meant to be an objective observation. The remuneration they are provided from these companies border on just being able to cover food money and in a metropolitan perspective, it would mean, cheap-as-food-poison food.

Tracing it in a very uninformed and technically unsound observation, the thought train took a time machine to the time period when some guys from the west decided it would be a good idea to come colonise India and make blue paint and a quick buck. No matter how much I hate being whiny about such stuff (boo hoo they came like four centuries ago and made my country a slave market place and such), this is the only possible conclusion I could arrive at. An inherent desire to please, maybe? How 'smart' do you think it is to answer calls for another big corporate who's raking in millions and as a consequence earn like a minuscule fraction of it, working like a slave? Forget the amount of money, how about satisfaction?

From another perspective, India is fairly wealthy in man power, so if most of these man power is not ideologically or intuitively endowed to found an 'Apple', 'Facebook' or a 'Google' ( I shudder to draw such examples rather than something more substantial in a scientific perspective, but sadly these are indeed the most valued assets in the entire brightly blue world), how about loving the land and taking up agriculture as a unifying cause. It could maybe feed the world? The corporates being able to feed a section of the society with money, this could maybe feed literally, with actual touchable and eatable food.

Just a thought (or enough of it to fill a blog post with). 

Interrogative pronouns

'Why' is a cheap luxury!

"Here I put something said by somebody really old, in some essay that is also really old, and that makes me educated and wise." 

                                                       - High School Examination style

Inquisitiveness never killed, stories about a cat being killed because he was curious can be restricted to such classifications of cats that are, in my opinion, asinine and not worth giving diddly a squat about (because it died, didn't it? And that too pretty stupidly). Maybe it never knew what the tires on a truck would do to it if it had an encounter on an open road, but it ought to have known that something that fast hitting it, won't lead to an amusing scenario from its perspective. But 'what' is a different situation altogether, certain situations would demand that the person saying 'what' incessantly and with escalating amount of emphasis, be shot through the knees, after you take a bite off their burger and a sip off their cola and to what effect is just plain relief. 'What' is annoying unless used in the right context. How, who and where are other cousins and all of them are called interrogative pronouns. They all beg to be used and re-used, with all their conciseness and brevity, and yet the 'users' would prefer to counter something that did not click in their head with something that had clicked earlier but never actually made sense to anyone except themselves. Well not really made sense, but that which gave off an initial aura of sense-making which would probably vanish as soon as they express it themselves.

Life is like a twitter profile, it is a series of microblogs that are supremely anecdotal. Then a series of discourses start with more anecdotal content, agreements and disagreements, but that is good, that is how it is supposed to happen. It is just a dialogue played out in action. Whatever's been done and is going to be done as a consequence will play out like a conversation. Intense and mutating these actual conversations play out and decrees other mutations in causality. Where is the conciseness and the brevity now? It's lost in translation. It's lost when an action with no sudden apparent consequence produces millions of such actions, thus acting as an inception for a series of events. From cause to effect. Lost in between. What is the entirety of such a discourse? It does not demand or conceive an idea for an end, it's ever mutating and ever functioning. It's just a game of cause and effect.

Life is a question with multitudes of subjective answers that are all lost in translation.  

You said you never loved

Say you never loved

Look into her eyes and see her emotion
Wavering thoughts beneath all her sentiments
Swaying in the lights with all of her discomfort
Take her by the hand and promise to keep her from falling...
And you...

Say you never loved

Watching the flames dance in her eyes
Reflected by those hazel circles I never had a chance
As the beautiful warmth in the night
And embrace all of our emotions
And you...

Say you never love...

Separated by the scent of a love
forgotten by the space and time that we stole
And slowly as we edge right into the fall
formulated by the warmth that we lost
and you..

Say you never loved...

New Age Circus

I shall stop being a corporate clown
When another poem unfurls
And another dawn brings a morn
and the smoke took it all and swore

Take another deep breathe and
Worship all your gods and idols good
But they sure will leave you blunt
You and your silly little cause

I can't speak for another but,
I shall turn away one more time
In a circus, to lead you down the path
Towards a reason

Spread your sails and sail away
See where you get yourself
Never more than what's been said
Back you come to the herd.

Your secrets and spoils hurt
Way to the floor you fall
Latest trends and fashion call
Immaterial is your fall.

I can't take in more of this
Spread your wings one more time
Stray down a path you should
True to a reason stand.

Stuck in Ennui

Coward that I am, shall run...
When there is nowhere left to run, I shall fly...
now the sky is all taken, where shall I run?
only sanity remains, constantly ebbing away.

no more reasons left to remain,
dawning cognition promises to liberate,
emotions long left unruffled and pristine,
until evolve it does through lack of restrain.

Mindless and stricken, the gloating of pain,
gentle and caressed you fall in the rain,
until drenched in the ache, you will lay,
morning comes along, your will it will sway.