Perfection.

It’s the small things,
The broken gestures,
The winding staircases,
The grandiose plans, that fall apart.

It’s the dying parrot babe,
Eaten by a crow,
Just as we thought we’d
Saved it.

It’s the torn guitar strings,
Playing out of tune,
Tearing midsong,
Without ourselves even knowing,
That we’re playing a song,
That isn’t,
In song.

It’s you. It’s me.

That, my Love, is perfection.
I refuse to settle for
Anything more, nothing less.

It’s the one green streetlamp,
I saw on the road,
As I heard Radiohead play,
In my head,

Before I managed to get a picture of
It.

strawberry fields forever.

It hurts.

I read the prologue of this new book I bought and it’s pretty beautiful how the author has used a bunch of commas and has stretched the entire prologue out into one single solitary sentence and I immediately wanted to try and do the same thing and so, here I am telling you about how today was a weird day, especially because of how I’ve been feeling all morning – broken and detached – just as any death grips album would make you feel, and I can’t quite put a finger on why I feel this way, broken in the darkness, as if within the pale moonlight in a cloudless night where I find myself in a road corner, with a broken mirror fallen in front of me, the reflection on the fallen shards that I see, not me, but a lot more than just me, as I see myself splattered into pieces of skewered versions of myself as if from within a Monet rendition of some form of Impressionism and it is this image that I wish I could paint but my fingers wouldn’t work as they stare out of the shards into my eyes, and as I look closely I get the inkling that the words aren’t even me and the paint isn’t even me and I’m not within the confines of this broken mirror but it’s something or someone else and this someone else knows who I am and that simply makes everything worse because it feels as if there’s this version of me that knows everything there is to know but beyond which there is nothing at all and I can’t seem to make sense of what’s being said and neither can she, and judging by how there’s such an enormous distance and there’s a tiny room I find myself trapped in, in the corner of the street, with a broken mirror fallen in front of me, I can’t simply stand up and walk out and go do what must be done, but the other guy knows what this is that must be done and in the distorted cracks of the broken mirror, he almost looks like he’s smiling and this is unsettling, disheartening, all the while making me feel as if I don’t belong within myself and I hope that I find myself some day, and stretched apart across the distance, it’s like my personality is torn, to a point where nothing is real anymore, and it’s all a broken mirror, in the darkness of the cloudless night, as the clouds pour down on me, and I sit here silently, trying to find myself cry, staring out as the winds blow from the farthest confines of the earth, doing nothing to calm the fettered wounds that bind me to this street corner, from where I know I must rise, and I hope some day in the near future I find myself having the courage to stand up and do just that, until when I must simply stare out into the pale blackness and hope for the noise to arrive and lift the silence all around me away and take it all away, eventually ensuring I could be where I must, when I must, as the winds blow from the distant rain clouds, pouring their blood red sorrow out into this cloudless night under which I lie, simply pausing, staring, feeling, crying.

Privilege.

I’m sitting alone. The only person, in an air conditioned bus, en route Majestic, running parallel to a regular bus on my left that’s filled with a few million people. Okay that might be an exaggeration, but you get my point.

And I feel like a lucky, privileged arsehole.

Maybe that’s what I am. And when I think about it, the people who sit in the bus on the left, jam packed, in this afternoon heat, sweat and bile pooling, are only paying some twenty rupees lesser than I am. In my solitude, I lie here, staring out the large expansive windows, adjusting the air conditioning I paid for with my parents’ money – if I told them I thought this way, they’d say it’s okay. And that it’s justified. And that twenty bucks is an okay price to pay. For “comfort” – but I don’t buy into that logic especially because the freedom they give me to spend, only incentivizes me to spend more, stretching my definition of comfort to larger and larger heights. I spend too much. Especially on food. Sometimes a lot more than I have to. I feel bad. But that’s also because of the Dostoevsky I have in my hand that I’ve just been reading. It’s about the same sort of privilege, I guess. And the fact that I hold this in my hand, and not the rest of the people on the bus on the left (that I’ve left far behind actually), is another thing that feels weird.

Maybe there’s some economic principle to justify why there’s a hundred people on one side, and one single man on the other and the statistical difference between them is a meagre twenty rupees. Maybe it isn’t meagre. Maybe I’m just spoilt.

I didn’t wanna drink that appy fizz.

I just feel miserable now.

Persecuted.

I’m writing again, because I’ve held myself back, too long.
And I have a bunch of things to say,
About a bunch of things that seem,
To be happening today.

There isn’t a voice to tell the people that walk
From one place, to another, that they mustn’t do so,
But they do, for they think,
That they’ll find paradise.

They follow the Pied Piper,
From the darkness into the light,
And I wish I could be the light, for these,
People, that march from the sun,
To the darkness.

They know not, of the pit,
They fall into.

For their death, is right around the corner.
And I scorn them.

I SCORN THEM. FOR THINKING THEY’D FOUND ASYLUM.
FOR AN ASYLUM THEY DID FIND.

And a bunch of these bastards, took up arms, and shot a bunch of other people,
Dead.

And the ones that hated the bastards that did,
Ran once again,
From the frying pan into the hellfire of damnation,
And the new idiots that found them,

Generalised the rest of them,
branded them, as a general clan, of terror causing,
Bastards,
That probably should’ve turned Imagine on,
To “vibe” with John, who is dead
And this song, must end now,
For I believe I’ve found the end of my free speech.

untitled.

it’s been bugging me for a while but i cant
seem to put my punctuations together in the sense that as much as they meant the
world to me in terms of formatting and how new words seemed,
or how they didnt seem,
i feel like they suck the fucking joy out of everything and so here i am on
the laptop notepad
writing what feels like a poem,
trying not to punctuate and sometimes
it still feels like i do, punctuate
and spell things right when they shouldnt be spelt that way
and it feels really fkn amazing when i can justify
everything coming out of me
in terms of the universe finally fucking using me to write
using me like it always did
that bloody demon
staring from the nadir of a black hole
into the depth of my eyes that stare
into the goddamn dicksucking motherfucking scientific knowledge
in double quotes that would be
that i know i do not possess
and here i am, pouring all of my sorrow out
into the laptop notepad
swearing every ten seconds,
saying things that don;t seem to make sense
punctuating accordingly
its a fucking pain
a fucking dildo
i hate the pain that flows out of me right now
i want it all gone
i hate that ive started to make sense
i never could understand myself because it was never me that wrote a song
or a poem but it suddenly feels like it isnt me again
and i love that it does and i love that i can
feel what is in my head and nothing makes sense and let this poem be a metaphor
i love this poem
let this shattered demon be a metaphor for
words that i cant fathom
and the universe
its testing me out
telling me about cats and dogs
and broken fireflies that eat these cats and dogs
that slither between pots and pans
and flowers and trees and plants and hold my broken self
in its arms and tell me no one is broken in reality and i feel like i need to cry
and i know i must but my watergate is upon me and i can feel it
shredding me apart
and nothing makes sense anymore, and i hope my life ends tomorrow
with a label that is just as the firefly flies from the fallen butterfly that cries
of the dogs and the cats in the middle of the night
and my words are not poetry
anymore
they are iconoclastic expressions of broken tyranny and unresolved pride sitting
in a pigeon cage instead of a parrot that should have words to speak instead of me
and i know now that the universe is testing me again and that is a good thing i guess.

Out of Body.

I’m sitting in the Metro. There’s a bunch of people. One of them sitting on my right is listening to something. And it’s really loud. The best part is, he doesn’t know that himself. That’s why it’s beautiful – that he knows he “might” just be loud enough to be heard by everyone around him, and the fact that he isn’t sure only seems to give him the conviction that it doesn’t really matter. Too much noise leakage. Looks like a bad headphone.

I’m trying to focus. It sounds like something I’ve heard before. Really minimalist. Maybe it’s Frank Ocean. I’m not sure. But it’s definitely R&B. He’s looking all around the place. He looks at me too. Through the reflection on the window in the front. The train is underground. It’ll probably be back up in a bit.

He’s got these really sad, reproachful eyes. Like a character from a Shakespearean Tragedy. Pretty Sweet. That’s the Frank song I’m hearing now. He’s not looking at me anymore. There’s a girl sitting in front of us. It looks like he’s looking at her.

A man tries to sit down in the space next to her. Almost as soon as he does, she gets up, and goes across and stands at the doors. She gets off at the next stop. His eyes don’t leave her. Until she’s gone. He looks like he’s absorbing everything and everybody. When I think of how he’s looking all around I think of him in my head as a writer of some sort. Maybe he writes poetry or something. Maybe he’s got a blog like the one I’ve got and he’s about to go home and write out a post like the one you’re reading right now.

Or maybe he’s thinking of building this really complicated narrative, with all of these people – probably picturing the guy at the far end, nodding on and off. A thinning hairline. He’s hugging his bag like it means the world to him. He could also be thinking about the man who just sat down before the girl got up. He’s noticing his pink shirt, and the black jacket he’s got clutched around his hand. Or even writing in his head about another woman two spaces away who sits with a baby in her arms. The baby is fast asleep. She looks weary, and almost asleep herself. She’s got dark patches under her eyes. She wants to fall asleep. But she can’t. She can’t afford to drop the baby. It looks like it’s only a few months old. There’s a bunch of school kids in uniform, sitting on the other side. They’re chattering in hushed voices. He looks like he’s trying to hear what they’re saying. I try too. I can’t hear them. I give up. He probably wrote about me too. What could he have written? It looked as if he knew exactly who I was. Just as I’ve seen these people and known who they were. Could he really have got me figured out that easy? With a bunch of words in a sentence? I look at myself now in the reflection. I can’t see myself. The sunlight is too strong. I can hear his next song. Sounds like Kurt Cobain. Something really grunge-y. Sounds like something off of Incesticide.

I sneak a look at him. His eyes are closed. He looks like he’s thinking about something. Very deeply. He looks sad.

The woman on the PA system announces my station. It’s time to get off. He gets up too, just as I do. And when I walk out into the sunlight receding behind the clouds, that’s when I start to realise that me, and the other guy, are one and the same person.

Revival.

2019 ends. Bringing with it the good old new year resolutions we usually can’t keep up with. But no more of that. I vow, here and now, to actively write right here on the Abyss. For once, I’m doing it for myself, and not for anybody else.

That being said, here’s what happened. So we went out to BEL Road to get some food, and in the Uber on the way back, we saw something really beautiful. The driver had this amazing stack of books in the backseat backflap, and as I stepped into the car, my eyes widened and went all over the place finding everybody else.

The first thing I did sitting in was sift my hand through the books in the shelf, and I found Kalam’s Wings of Fire (which reminded me of that old 2020 vision of India the old man had), and an Arundathi Roy book, and then believe it or not – GEORGE ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM, the SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM AND A BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF.

My mother as usual struck up a conversation and he said he’d kept it there for people to read, and I really thought that was beautiful, and in the emeraldlike reflections off the cold car window, I spent the way back home sitting in the darkness trying to decipher pages off the Animal Farm copy. I wrote his number plate down in the end. My friend told me that was a creepy thing to do. BUT IT WAS FUCKING BEAUTIFUL.

And here I am writing this post ten minutes before the clock strikes twelve and we move out of one decade into another.

I’m going to finish typing this, and go out into the balcony, look right up at the stars and think of all the places I could have been today. Or at least, the one single place I wish I could have been.

But nevertheless, I’ll stop and close my eyes, and picture the distance between us as nothing but a momentary sparse expression of broken glass shards that’ll get pieced back together soon enough, and that the space time continuum shall tear open the way we see this moment, and I’ll find myself where I want to be, and you’ll find yourself where you want to be. And it’ll all make sense again.

It’s 2020 peeps. It’s gonna be a fun year. Lots of shit about to go down. Cheers.

Update: A Series of Profound Occurrences.

Amidst all of the turmoil that has been plaguing my life, or even our nation in its entirety, I finally managed to find some time to type words onto said blog.

First, a moment of silence for the sacred white noise that is this post’s cover image.

So, hello again, and here’s what’s been going on in my life: What with the regular attendance necessity for a certain Model UN I need to attend at the beginning of next week, stitched in with the general anxiety that results from the teachers refusing to hand us our papers, coupled up with the illegal streaming of Bojack Horseman on the Metro Rail every morning, strung in with Moot Court Memorial submissions and everything else that I am constantly procrastinating and refusing to do, such as the preparation of the Curriculum Vitae for a mandatory internship which is at the end of a semester that has flown past quicker than the eagle that scoops up the dead rat from the train tracks, along with the constant prodding of my lack of contribution in certain areas across my day, along with the distance that is making everything ten times harder to do, along with a book review, due in a week, about a book that could be one of my favourite books, provided I actually got around to reading it, exploding my reality and shredding it incomprehensibly apart, I found myself finally ticking off a few of my constant procrastinants, starting with this blog post that has been due for a while now.

Let me retract a bit.

Profound Occurrence One: A few days ago, I was walking back home from the Metro station, listening to the Blonde Redheads on loop when I saw a BMTC bus parked on the street, with a number and a route I don’t remember anymore. As I walked toward the bus, for some incomprehensible reason, I decided not to climb on the footpath, and walk by the main road near the bus instead. As I walked past half the bus, another bus was almost upon me, coming from the opposite direction, and for a moment, I was sandwiched between one bus and the other, and I immediately got nauseous and claustrophobic, which was a usual occurrence.

What made this interesting was what I thought in the seconds that began with the two buses and the ‘Sandwich’ and it happened to be the scenario wherein, if a car had come on the other side of the bus that approached, the bus driver would have avoided the car, and hit the poor lone boy walking along back to his house, rather than hitting the car which would prove less fatal to humanity in general i.e. lesser odds to loss of life, and now when I think of it, I don’t believe I can fathom an explanation to why the bus driver would act in that way. Why would he swerve toward me? Try picturing it, do you see it differently?

Profound Occurrence Two: The boy walked past the two buses and crossed the road to the other end, and happened to find something blue and black and tiny fluttering on the main road. The boy sees the fallen butterfly, slows down for a moment before continuing on his way.

But then, I turned around and went back, and as I saw a vehicle approach (a big truck), I hurried to save the butterfly. I ran onto the road, picked up the butterfly, and turned around and dropped it back on the side of the road, in the nick of time before the truck hurtled past me. That was when I noticed that the butterfly was dead.

The goddarn thing, wasn’t even alive, and if I had risked my life to save it, was there a point at all?

Profound Occurrence Three: Follow me in reverse now, as I go before the butterfly incident, before the Bus Sandwich and back onto the Metro Rail, a few stops behind. Somewhere a few stops before I got out, a woman walked in. Her face, was unsettling. If it would be possible to look expressionless, while at the same time, look happy, content, and at the same time, look sad and devastated, the woman seemed to be pulling that off. Her intellectual capacity had transcended to a point where she seemed to realise the futility of it all, and embrace this monotonous stupidity rather than to try and find meaning. Yes, I overthink, you might say.

But she turned and looked right at me, looking right at her, and shrugged and looked back out the window of the moving train. One stop later, she was gone.

Profound Occurrence Four: The day before the day before Yesterday. I was once again, walking on the main street, listening to The Life Of Pablo this time, and I happened to see a beggar, fallen on the roadside, in all probability, drunk, and completely out of touch with reality. His clothes were torn and the side of his head was sand, as he lay there in the sand and laughed repeatedly. I don’t know what he sounded like, because of said Kanye album, but he laughed like a crazy man.

Profound Occurrence Five: Yesterday, an explosive culmination. The Moot Court Memorial was killing me. And the rest of my team. But we worked on it, in hurried frenzy, and finished on time, two people pawning work off on a third. I was supposed to have left, but I went back, and helped the said third, hurriedly xerox, edit, mail, etc. It had rained. We finally  heaved a sigh of relief, and retreated to buy some food. Just then, the pesticide man burst in on us with his barrage of smoke, making us feel as if we belonged in an ancient Nazi concentration camp. We rushed out with our food to sit in a basketball court to distance ourselves from the chemical clouds. After a few minutes of relaxation, we jump and twist and turn and manage to get to public transit, and I eventually grab my stuff and tumble out, onto the road that led home, into, the rain.

And, with my clothes getting sopping wet, with the bag cover working fine, and with fear of electric shocks leaving me fallen in the downpour with music blasting away in my ears, I run back home yearning sleep. I survived. I’m sure you did too.

Auf Wiedersehen.

I’ll be back again.

Becoming Raskolnikov: Wilfully Antisocial.

Is it possible to remodel yourself in a certain way to distance yourself from the society you live in? Existence is painful, and you eventually get to a point where you get tired of being a faked up piece of crap. You smile at everybody, you force yourself to be nice to everybody and every single defining factor that makes you a person begins to stand in question. There is a violent side of me. I’m being super open here. I believe in disorder. I believe in how it is necessary sometimes for disorder to exist, to tear open the veil of ignorance that drapes over the eyes of every single individual that stands against the edge of the Earth and smiles. But I also hold that it is not everyone that gets the right to instigate.

They called Socrates ‘gadfly’, but they also held that he was an emissary of God. Is this a valid enough excuse? Could I label myself as God’s messenger and use it as a pretext to grant myself the leave to violate the fundamental principles of natural Justice? Call me an anarchist, but sometimes, radical decisions are necessary to restore order in society. There is a reason why the scales of Justice are a balance. Lady Justice stands up there with the veil of ignorance, carrying the balance.

The world is not all good, it is not all bad either.

It is both, and that is the idea I’m trying now to piece together. When we learn of St. Augustine speaking of God granting humans the right to free will, what of the government we seemingly elect, “freely” mind you, a decision we make completely free from society’s environmental effect on you, the voter?

The irony is that we even give out an opportunity to these politicians to tell us why we need to vote for them. We literally allow them to abuse the sacred words that have been the cause for concern, world over, since man ever came out to stand forth. We call ourselves rational individuals and distinguish ourselves from every other living form, but it is the written/spoken word that has given us the right to make ourselves rational. Give dogs proper words, and they would take over the Earth in no time. This I believe would happen because their belief in faith and morality currently stands to be the same, for every dog, which unites them in ways we couldn’t imagine. But that’s an analytical argument for another day.

Words, and our lack of response, our intellectual structure, our physical structure, and Dale Carnegie’s goddarn book, all culminate in our ability to go stand wherever we want and make the people see what we want them to see, and in a way, make them believe that that is the way we want them to see us.

This distresses me. I hate the way we change the way people perceive us.

I’m someone with some one, and I’m someone else with someone else. I’m a different person with different people and the ‘me’ I like the most is my self, that is consistent with my soul, my mind, and every other intellectual aspect that frameworks every individual’s conscience.

When I’m that ‘me’, I’m free.

But, sadly, I can’t be that me with everyone else. There isn’t just a Slim Shady side to everyone. There’s five hundred of them, and I believe there’s one of them I’ve identified to be the most ‘me’.

I wish I could be that version of myself with everyone. Then, I’d probably conquer the Earth.

If we could be one version of ourselves, our most confident, virulent and bombastic versions. The version of ourselves we feel the most comfortable as, then we would transcend the insecure fabric of society and the rest of it. Our lives would flash between our eyes in a millisecond, and we would probably die.

Maybe that is why we are forced to undergo a tumult of changes, constantly becoming different people. I say, figure out what that ideal form of you is, get to it you goddarn fools.

A Dying Return.

I died a while back. I seemingly couldn’t fathom the thoughts that hit me on my head as the rain that would hail down would hit one without an umbrella. At least, that was how I saw my writing process. But it stopped raining. The storms were subsidised. I couldn’t write anymore. Until last night.

Life’s been painful. Painful and unpredictable. I wish I hadn’t stopped writing. But I had to, and let me tell you why, a) I was writing to keep the routine up b) Creativity had hence died

These two reasons told me to stop writing. I essentially gave myself some time. I wasn’t in hurt when I stopped. Everything was fine, until it all started back up again.

It took a few months, and I found myself in a new place, amidst new people, I found myself a part of a new society. And while previously my mental health was at its top notch, I have reason to believe that it was my writing that had kept me going, turning a blind eye against all the negativities, and focussing on the positives alone. Mark Manson and his Subtle Art had grown on me well enough for me to cut out the distractions and fixate on what was necessary.

And then my better half, left. She didn’t leave me and go away, she would never do that, but what essentially happened was, there was a distance between us. A distance that wasn’t there before. While originally my subconscious knew that if there were a natural calamity that sought to destroy the world I lived in, perhaps a sudden tsunami or a sudden earthquake (god forbid), or perhaps even the sudden unquenchable necessity for a hug, I always knew that I could untie the bicycle and get to her even if it took forty minutes. Now, there are no chances of that happening. I’ll have to get a flight to the capital. And the Universe knows that isn’t as easy as it sounds.

This was the spark that lit the fuse that yesterday exploded into a million pieces. The next was the gradual agony of not knowing where I’d end up. Too much was going on, and it wasn’t easy to comprehend. College is overrated. It isn’t as amazing as they make it out to be. But I wouldn’t say it isn’t fun.

To put it in a nutshell, you finally find yourself doing what you’d always wished you would find yourself doing, provided you slogged your arses off trying not to fuck things up. But then, you enter a new ballgame. You think you finally get somewhere where you might just belong, but it isn’t as homely as that. You need to always prove yourself. Especially considering the fact that you find yourself with people, who are at most times, better than you are. You need to step things up.

Anxiety issues that result from a mental claustrophobia, do not always bode well for someone who is subject to a stress-explosive reality on a daily basis. It is a very well known fact that I’m super hard on myself when I’m not on the top. This is especially considering the fact that it is sometimes important to wake the fuck up and sit down and actually study.

I compete, but I never prepare. Most of the time, I still manage to scrape and scratch my way to the top. My mother’s wonderful voice comes ringing out at me stating, “You did all this without any preparation, think what would happen if you opened the book for an hour at least?”

And I usually just smirk at her and sit back into reading Dante’s Divine Comedy and marvelling at the stupendously maddening words held within (I’m usually too lazy to do that too, I just like the idea of reading Dante’s deadly sins, and that’s pretty ironical considering the sloth sin that literally defines my frigging existence).

But what I’m trying to get at is, you suddenly find yourself in a place where you just can’t be lazy anymore. You can’t procrastinate. You need to buy tiny green flip books to fill them up with the things to do on every single particular day. This, eventually gets to you.

This was about the time I started screwing up everything I took part in. The insecurities that were a result of these, were of no help either. You ask the people that know me, and they’ll vouch for how many TV shows I’ve started but never ended. How many books I’ve opened but never closed. How many people I’ve befriended but never remembered.

This landed as an explosion.

You’re a winner. You get lazy. You lose. Pretty simple. But this is what swirls into the vortex that I’m having difficulty getting out of. I read in a book once, the author had said, “You lose once, and you get used to it.”

This scares the living hell out of me. Insecurity appears. You start questioning your previous triumphs. You start questioning everything you Love about yourself. Trust me, this fractures your confidence like nothing else I know can. And you lose, and you lose, and you lose, until you die.

I set expectations for myself. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but when I don’t get there, even though I know I’m at fault, I beat myself over it. ‘Beat’ is an understatement. I kill myself over it.

That’s the second issue. Now comes the third one. All the Nirvana teen spirit that I had had simply died away. I couldn’t sit back and get high over my thoughts anymore (like I always could). And I finally realised one day, that I needed someone to talk to.

I didn’t have anyone. (If you actually got all the way down here reading, you’re probably one of those pieces of shit I forgot about, remind me lol)

That hit me like a truck. Everyone is always so consumed in their lives today that it is sometimes impossible to get them to listen. It took me a while until I found someone. The rant helped.

Two days later, here I am pouring my crap out on the blog. I had had quite a few anxiety attacks until last night. Then I wrote a poem.

Now I wrote this. Take it, throw it away. I don’t care. If you got down all the way here, the world deserves you. Don’t ever frigging change. Because I myself wouldn’t read the entire thing.

Adieu. Until next time.