This life.

Now, culpability juxtaposes itself onto fabricated identity. It will be a night to remember, even though the repercussions will be felt by all and sundry.

I'm overworked. Maybe I'm doing too much for too little.

Am I answerable to you? Perhaps not.

Orestes.

Gotta cut away, clear away, snip away and sever this umbilical residue, keeping me from killing you.
Wow.
Thank you, Karan.

Yes, the integer.

The sweat of my brow stings my eyes and failure looms large. As the hammer hits the metal, I am forced to reflect – what if I don’t get what I’m looking for? Or has it become so indefinable by the platitudes of fate that I sit beside it every evening and yet neglect its presence? Exhausted by the day’s work, I remove my greasy overalls and wash my hands in the rusty, iron basin I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror. God. These laugh lines will soon wipe out any hints that I once had a mouth. I’m aging like a peanut in the sun, but I’m not complaining because I still find comfort in the presence of these lathes and toolboxes.

C'mon, A-Team.

Fuck the naysayers. Fuck criticism. Wash it away with eau-de-toilette.

This is not it. Start over. Start over.

Cultural hyperlinking.

Q. Okay, I do follow you. But, tell me this, in a land so full of psychological and cultural strife, where the odds surpass the means, and where time kills creativity and chokes morality, where do you see the world headed? Is there a Grand Plan for the world? Or will this temporality be forever erased by the Big Crunch?

A. As long as there are no methodical patterns to educational growth, the human race will survive. The moment water stops reaching the branches, and the high-heads are all for how important it is for the roots to remain turgid, we will reach an existential plateau. Where even the loftiest ministrations of our contemporary philosophers will cease to work. As for a Grand Plan or a Great Purpose, I do not think there is one intended, because when we manage to conclude with the Plan, then what? Tread on, thinking that we are alright and perfection has been achieved. That is, undoubtedly, the most wayward of thoughts.

Never classify egos.

As I make my bed in that conversational pause pregnant with implied meaning, I realise that sometimes even the most pleasant of conversations are gagged by a certain no-gooder – Failure to Communicate.

Some shooting-from-the-lip and other memorabilia.

Don’t rationalize everything you say, bubblehead. I mean, whoever thought of saving your ass when you were getting picked on by the neighbourhood bully was being pretty obtuse (or a tad insouciant). Then, you’d extricate your machismo from your ranting-hat and then with a deft flick of the wrist, demonstrate how Exhibit A was perfectly in line with Exhibit B, and how Exhibit B trumped Exhibit C’s ass although Exhibit C was busy sleeping with Exhibit A’s older brother and rattling off names of movie stars before you could say ‘I’m a harangued man with a prescription’. That’s called ‘being tough on talking’; do not prove to me that nothing defeats the male ego – the minute you get confrontational, that’s the end of the line for your hypocrisy. I do not have a hedonistic beef with you, I do not like to pick on your insecurities, it’s just that it’s always that I had a hard time getting around with people who didn’t notice that every day the world turns a little, and that if you refuse to budge from your spot under the sun, you get left behind. Or worse, you don’t get Grandma’s crab-apples for supper. Which, as it goes, is profitable optioneering.

Genuflect, Ayan.

It’s heartening to know that my friends think I’m a spin doctor, although I think I never give them any reason to think so. I’ve had a cocktail of problems come my way after I decided I’m going to quit my current job, but I’m not quite sure whether my handling of them was in any way professional, because fundamentally, the ethic behind a successful work-routine is building rapport and since I’ve failed in that respect quite visibly, I will have to address these areas from the beginning. Suddenly, I’m at that phase of my life where I’ve found myself becoming more of a saturnine character than I would have liked to - it would have been a disturbing snag if not for the fact that I’m taking hits more easily than I did earlier and I’m finding that the previously-allowed-to-run-amok kangaroo temper is more easier to control these days (what with the ‘spring-in-my-step’ and ‘post-punk rock music’ schedules). So, good for me. Till then, I hope this climate of karmic good holds up ostensibly.

Buy me another.

I have my hands in too many cookie jars. And whenever I extract my hands from these jars, I find there never were any cookies there in the first place.

It begins. Now.

Yes. I am the Buddha, the Godhead, the Virtuous Being. But, I do not know why I have blood on my hands.

For him.

May you rest in peace, smooth criminal.

Incongruentia.

As I sling my duffel-bag over my shoulder, I am drawn to a face at the window. By the sleepy light of dawn, I can make out the soft contours of the face of a beautiful woman. I push the trolley towards a stone bench, my eyes not leaving her face as my feet slowly measure the yards. Her eyes, full of promise, follow my movements. As my lips nestle the cigarette between them, I sense her disapproval of my smoking in a public place, this is indicated by a crease that forms on her forehead. Still, her eyes do not leave mine. It is a torrid moment, as both of us debate whether to smile or ignore any desire to assert the others presence. But, I’d rather spend the erraticity of the moment on the visuals, and she knows it. The face is untroubled, yet I can see that it is not without sadness, if she is constrained and fettered, she hides it very well. The wind ruffles the strands lovingly, and she brushes the intruders away. As her hands touch her face, I notice the long, cylindrical fingers and the cigarette stops inches from my lips. The train starts to move, and I’m stunned at my own helplessness, my inability to plow through that inrush of human bodies and board the train. She strains herself to look at me for a last time, cranes her head through the foggy window and then it’s over. And the painful mirth of the moment is inescapable as I walk towards a dingy tea-stall. Even the choicest of humane encounters are replayed by that scratchy, yet earthly record and I look at the tracks still glistening with the dew of this morning and the empty tea-cups thrown carelessly around them.

Love me do, Book Panda.

I love Fort for one obvious reason – it smells significantly of mildewy papyrus and old wrapping-plastic. That is, the slew of second-hand books that the book-wallahs sell. You could go to them and demand your copy of Nabokov or Munroe, and the beaming, ecstatic man would scout around his wares for a minute or two, and then emerge triumphantly from the Cocoon with the said title between his fingers. He’d toss the book to you in a hurry, because some flushed customer would be asking for Maupassant or Frey, and you’d open the book, look fondly at the spotted flyleaf, smoothen the dog-eared pages with much affection, and then take the blessed thing to your face for some olfactory appreciation. And The Fragrance would spirit you to some distant Kafka-esque world, and you’d look at the next customer, red with embarrassment. And he’d nod and smile at you, gesturing his understanding in the briefest of moments.

Choleric, but not myopic.

Pretty soon, the black will darken the white. Starting from the edges, it will flare out quietly, eating at the whiteness slowly, till its fingers reach the centre and chew that out too.

Jupiter knows.

Sometimes, I wish I could take a gun to these foreheads. But I'm not sure whether I'll be content with them biting the bullet. I want them to swallow it, allow it to tear up their internals, and then finally watch the life drain out from these eyes. Damned SIs.

Fyodor, Raskolnikov just threw up.

C'mon, don't be dishonest.

The day that I share this blog with anyone else is the day I I know I have thrown away my cynical garb. Because, it is only within the purview of another person that I will find my circle of trust, even though that is geometrically wrong. Euclid would have boiled me in oil. I will have to remember that.

Eyesores and nosebleeds.

He removes the helmet slowly, and looks around himself tardily, like a victorious general would inspect the spoils of war. It is cold, so he wraps his riding jacket tighter around himself, and listens to the ululating roar silently, tilting his head to one side. Nine times out of ten he had thought about visiting this place, but the Timetable thought otherwise. Relentless in its pursuit of his attention, it would snap playfully at his heels and start climbing up his knees, with a dagger held between its clenched teeth, teasing him, making quiet advances on his patient gratitude. He abandons the distracting thought-motif and removes the leather riding-gloves with his teeth. They are damp, so he leaves them out to dry on the tank. He feels around in the pocket of his jacket for cigarettes and matches, finds a particularly damp cigarette, puts it between his lips and lights it. He waits.

Pathetic tunnel-vision, he tells himself. There is no limit to human de-linearity. One second you're lecturing a rather squalid boardroom about the importance of having weekly cultural debates in the seminar hall, and the next second you're donning a leather jacket and singing to the wind. That's the range of the human emotional projectile.

He checks his face in the flyblown mirror of the motorcycle, and notices that his face is grimier and more weatherbeaten than usual. He adjusts his hair, slaps his trouser pockets for a comb and doesn't find one. None of this makes sense. What kind of temporality does this buy him? None, whatsoever. He''ll ride back to his hostel and fall to his bed, in a heap, exhausted by the day's work. So much of the human emotional is a pupil to subjectivity. He could immerse himself in epistemology or ontology, and yet the next day would find him groggy and unable to pay attention. What is this all-encompassing Purpose these pundits and god-men keep talking about? It is as elusive and as abstract as finding a furry mint in his shirt pocket. Waking up the next day with another reason to pontificate, another reason to lie. In this never-ending wave of belligerence. It may look pictorial and worth dying for one day, and totally unnecessary the other. It confuses him. He looks at the clouds as they move away from him, and it leaves him in a daze.

This morning he had woken up beside a nice girl he had been dating for a month now. 'Oh, lookee, lookee', the voice in his head had told him, without humour. Not much space to roll over, he had looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and not quite known what to make of this. He had confided in no one that lately, he had been feeling strange, an approaching mental breakdown would rear its ugly head soon. Not the noisy, Prozac-fueled ones. The wordless ones, that left his limbs numb and without comfort, and then he would lose all track of time as he sat by the bedstead and looked at his reflection in the mirror, without moving a muscle. Then, his stockbroker would call him and tell him animatedly that his portfolio had outperformed the market. And he would get to his feet and start rummaging around the room for a mechanical pencil, striking off one hedge fund from his laundry-list of market strategies. He tried to find a way around the mundane, and make sure that his days danced about colourfully around the same, but he would lose all interest when some professor with a shiny bald pate would tell him that he could have done better in the mid-term exam. And then he would take to the cigarettes, berating himself for allowing the butt to settle in snugly between his fingers and take another drag.

As he smokes, he hears another Ayan tell him, in another time, in a gin-soaked evening - Uncompromised is what uncompromised was. And he smiles as this Ayan start to fade around the edges. He nods perfunctorily.

Evening, commissioner.

Tonight, I spent an hour looking down the barrel of a Wesson-Magnum. Too bad it drew blanks.

Möbius Trip.

In school, I was always proud of myself for not being particularly mathematically challenged. I mean, the world knows that us brown people have conquered the numbered universe heuristically. It was an epiphany to the West whose only recourse to analytics three centuries earlier were the physiologically-suited mathematicians at Göttingen. I remember when we were shown scribbles on the blackboard and asked to differentiate such-and-such w.r.t. such-and-such or calculate the number of permutations estimated when a monkey is dismembered (okay, maybe, that last was absurd), and I remember me not scribbling the said scribbles into my spiral-bound pad because I was solving the telltale equations in my head, and declaring the answers dismissively, looking at a female classmate out of the corner of my eye, to see if she so much as twitched or showed a hint of approval. The teachers wanted to slap me because, to them, my existence was as gross and incomprehensible as the 'praying' of a praying-mantis.

So, two years later, when a rather irritable feminist supervisor in her twenties, asks me to 'do the math' over a handful of lattes and macaroons, all I can think of are Leibnitz' integrals, Cantor set theory and dyscalculia. Veritable fallacy, uh huh.