Impressions

Each anxious step became increasingly excruciating as she neared her destination. It wasn't just the weight of the locket that she was carrying around her neck, it was the coldness of its touch, which pierced through her skin and crept into her bones, circling her entrails till the only feeling she knew was a gut wrenching panic. She wasn’t afraid of death, but she was afraid of dying before she accomplished the task that had been assigned to her, that of handing the locket over to its rightful custodian. The locket itself belonged to nobody; it could only be guarded until the time came when its powers would be needed no more on this earth. It was forged from the fire that burnt within the first human soul, and embedded within its tiny oval shaped form was the last remaining life source of humanity. Twelve such lockets were forged at the beginning of mankind, eleven of them perished during cataclysmic events over the centuries. The destruction of each locket marked the fu...

A matter of a few moments, And everything changed, Her laughter as the girl traced the mehndi on her hands, His sense of completion as he thought of her. Anti matter grew within itself, consuming the void within until it couldn’t hold, The world exploded, Apocalypse now, he thought, He never saw the mehndi That had his name hidden in the swirling design. 

My blog is turning out to be like my personal diary, far too few and infrequent posts. So this is my lovely resolution. From now on I am going to work very hard Mondays to Fridays, and save a third of my salary so that I can repay my education loan. And on weekends I am going to paint, write and read; in short become this amazingly creative person. And years later when there is a wikipedia entry about me, the 'London phase' will be referred to as one of the most productive and prolific phases of my life. Of course D would have become a very famous writer/director/producer by then. And there will a mention about how the two of us met at King's College London where we formed a lifelong friendship that led to our famous collaboration on our children's book (yet to be conceived, written. executed and published). And we will be rich enough on royalties to own a home in Cambridge where we could meet once a year to work on future artistic collaborations and exchange reminisce...

It would perhaps be too strong a statement to say that I have started believing in destiny. But I have to admit I have become more sympathetic than I was before to the idea that sometimes it is all about fate. To begin with, I found a camera in Cardiff castle, which I returned to the lost and found section. The supreme irony was I lost my own camera in Cardiff later that evening! And, after months and months of trying to get a job in London, I finally gave up. I booked my flight back home, started packing, gave notice to my landlady, asked some family friends living close to the airport if I could camp at their place the night before my departure, and arranged (or rather my friend arranged) a farewell dinner. And then, out of the blue on my birthday , I was offered a junior admin position in London! Destiny or coincidence? Going by how surreal the past couple of weeks have been, I am more inclined towards the believing in the former. Of course, none of this would have b...

Ma keeps bemoaning the fact that I don’t write anymore. Tui koto likhtish, kobita, golpo…aajkaal aar kichu likhish na (You used to write so much, poems, stories…nowaways you don’t write anything), she complains. Sadly, this is very true and the reason is, I think, a mixture of a grown up horror (in itself a tad pretentious) at the pretentiousness of the solemn poems that I wrote when I was younger and sheer laziness of mind. When you are a kid you can unabashedly think of rhyming words and then ‘construct you poem’ around it (though, of course, you don’t think of the process of poetry writing in such grandiose terms). I remember one of my poems going as: I have a sister who can dance I have a sister who is in France I have a sister who is naughty I have a sister who is haughty… And so on… The cuteness of these poems are ‘awwwwd’ at, and rightly so. And then comes the stage where you have to compose solemn, serious verse pondering on the meaning of life and deep metaphy...

The editor I wrote about in a previous post is an arrogant racist asshole. There is no other way to describe him. J joined the company I am interning in as an intern himself. Luckily for him, the managing editor, D, happened to go on maternity leave. He then took on the position of the managing editor. He seemed nice and friendly at the interview. But, as if the fact that I did an MA in English with a scholarship from a top British university wasn't good enough for him, he felt the need to confirm with me that my English was good enough for proofreading. A little silly to ask considering that I applied for an editorial internship, and if my English wasn't good I wouldn't have made it that far. Then, during my first week, he asked me if I knew what penultimate meant. He immediately apologized, saying that he didn't mean to sound 'condescending', which is of course exactly what he intended to do. Also, when I told him how I played around with words in my disse...

I watch horror struck, along with the rest of the world, as flames lick the rooftops of one of Mumbai’s most famous landmarks. And a part of me dies … the part which still believed in the essential goodness of humanity … killed by the same ruthless predators who are now prowling in the corridors of the Taj. Little parts like these have been dying for a long time now, accumulating within me. They have starting taking over me like a gangrenous growth. I feel afraid. Maybe I am already dead. Suddenly the world around me seems to dissolve, giving way to a vicious cruelty that can surely be found only in hell. Or maybe we are all characters in an absurdist drama, our fragile existence at the mercy of the whims and whimsies of the playwright, a single stroke of the pen having the power to determine our lives and deaths.  Or maybe I am mad, that can be the only explanation for the madness that I see on the television. Maybe hatred is the order of the day, and I am insane in thin...