Tonight I can write the saddest lines. (Love you, Neruda)

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Like the breeze from my window touches me incompletely
and I diffuse, only half-ly, into slow moving frames of us.
Like pieces of me remain, time-trapped, in this moment
doomed to watch us from a distance in soft bokeh lights.
Like you were a dream I almost had, before dreams started to vaporize

These are foggy times. Dark. With only the illusion of a sun.
It will never warm us, love. It will shimmer in the distance,
reminding us of what we were made of, 
hope and love,
and broken sighs.

It does not matter. The length or breadth or depth of what we feel.
Thought is redundant, as are we.
Our lives, our songs, as lost as the love that once was
or was allowed to be. 
You know, you and I, were the cosmos once.

5th August, 2012

I have hidden enough from myself. In the chaos of people, plans, places, I did not heed the one who needed me the most - me. It's time to compensate. To pamper, to nourish, to entertain, to encourage, to hand myself the rainbow of a dream. Again. 

Nothing heals like walks. And weather. And books. And innocence, children and the elderly alike. Sometimes, you don't want to take pictures. Because you don't want to interfere the moment with a lens. So, you just flash a smile, and take only a mental picture. From a distance. The two little boys of exactly the same height in raincoats, grinning, mischief written all over their faces. The little tiny wild white flowers, glorious against a bright, brazen green. The children, doubling up with laughter and excitement on a carousel. The sun, surprising you with a stray gleam on your eyes while the evening rain is still drizzling mildly. And the scent. Of rain. Of earth that has been made love to. Of grass that has been aroused. Of youth and infant, ochre dreams.

There is something wordlessly endearing about the grace of old age. About the stories, sickness and beliefs hidden in those wrinkles. Wasn't he just a stranger to me who had a five-minute conversation with me? Why did I choke then, when he talked about all his kids, and then said with a laugh that he had just one responsibility now, and then, pointed above with his stick? Love can find you anywhere, unaware, off-guard. Isn't love, the place where everything boils down, or melts up to?

4th August, 2012

I saw a small group of protesters outside the tech park last morning. And as I walked towards the company building, I heard receding slogans of 'Anna Hazare Zindabad'. I kept walking like the others, pretending that the sound stirred nothing in me. I thought about protests and revolutions in general, wondering about how the present age has enabled us highly for such things, while surreptitiously taking away from us what it takes to actually participate in them. I doubt my convictions. I doubt if something done with a good intention is necessarily good. I doubt if such things ever bring about a change at the micro level. What, for example, is the freedom that we fought so passionately for? Wasn't it just a shift of power from one group of people to the other? The more I look at revolutions, the more I see a disappointing pattern of dictatorships replaced by oppressive fanaticism, monarchies by pseudo democracies, and so on. And even though things change, I wonder if they ever change for the better. And yet, it's in the nature of the human to fight for a future that always seems brighter. Sometimes I wonder if we, our convictions, our perceptions, our governments and our revolutions are just reagents meant to help achieve a certain equilibrium of chaos.


Yet, individual freedom is something too precious to be kept silent about. May be what we do will be nothing but glorious chapters in history books, may be it will change nothing, but that glory, that story is worth creating. And possibly, it will bring about a difference, a minute part of which will be positive.