Pick up a pen

Pick up a pen
When your hands are too shaky to hold it still
Because to yourself you have not been true
When damp layers of your soul scrape off and fall on the floor
And you hear the sound of it too

When you've watched the sundown of free thought
Into the obnoxious sea of social obligations
And the burden of time crushes your ambitions
When you realize how powerful the word ambition is
And yet so commonly mistaken
How easy it is to shatter and yet be shattered again
Into smaller pieces

By all means
Pick up a pen
When you are ripe enough to bleed
Or let it lie inside the leather case
For worthier shakier versions of your hands

I sit at the window and look at the city lights outside. It's a typical Bangalore evening with a breeze touching me from time to time. It brings coolness and a faint scent that tells me it must have rained in some part of Bangalore. It is one of those days when you sit down to write after a long interval, and you have none of the excuses that you thought were the reasons you haven't been writing. You have a fucking 6th floor window with a vast empty space followed by the whole of E City beyond. I realize that I have perhaps used the F word for the first time in my writing, and I don't know what makes me inherently so averse to using it more often in language. It is a wonderful word after all and I admire it.

People stop writing for many reasons. I think the most prominent of those is that they change. They change and then invoke the old person who wrote in such and such words and the problem is that *that* person does not have an existence any more. And it is ok. It is absolutely alright. It is essential to keep pace with yourself because others obviously can not. Do you sometimes have a feeling so vast and so powerful that you feel it peels off a layer of you? The more that happens, the more you live, the more miserable or crazy you get, the more disappointments and failures you face, the more you crave for what you do not have, the more scared you feel of unknowns - the more you change. Most people would probably fail miserably to describe themselves if asked to. There is nothing more confusing than seeing changing shades of yourself. And yet, vanity allows us to fall in love with this inconsistency, this sham, this mad, mad life.

I sit here and wonder at the lives being lived in the illuminated tall towers I see in the distance. Do they shelter hearts ebbing and breaking in love, dreams bundled and kept away and forgotten in the much cursed software jobs to be cried over on booze nights, hopes of a better city life being circled in smoke in one of the balconies, people making love as if they will never see each other again, people cooking something with love, people looking at pictures of less-travelled destinations and rousing the lost adventurers in them? Or do they just have some people going through lives day after day without much thought, without any crushing or uplifting emotions of any kind? *That* is my biggest fear of disappointment. Does it bother you sometimes, that the world may not be the way you see it? And then do you laugh at the idea the next moment, at the very irony of it, as if there were such a thing as an absolute definition of what the world is. It is anything you like it to be! Any fucking thing. Just think it, and that is the world for you.

Love

Let me write it down and put it in words. Because that will solemnize it. It will make it sacrosanct, until I touch it again and violate it, only to make it more surreal. Isn't that what words do? They immortalize things, places, people, smells, laughters, the ochre of an ordinary evening, the emptiness of the heart, pride, prejudice(I have to use these two together), and love. I've known the deepest form of love ever since I was a kid. Of course, we all do, you'd say. But I am talking about that passionate love, that hungry, fervent love that most people know in their teenage or adulthood. But I knew it. Ever since I wrote that first rhyme. Ever since I read those first poems that rhymed so beautifully, they made my heart flutter. I would always perfect the way I held the pen, the way I curled up the alphabets. I have had so many different handwritings till I settled for the classic cursive one that I have now. It defines me. Yes it does. In the roundness of that a, in the curve of the f, the swirl of the t, I slip in a little bit of me. I haven't been much of a reader till very late, and I have always been conscious that it shows in my writing. But I have been a writer, always. Ever since I had ideas, I wrote. And to write, I had ideas. I've always had ideas.


I am a bit of a hypocrite, in the sense that I hate when someone messes up with grammar. But I take all possible liberties with it when I write. It annoys me if you ask me to give you a line break or a paragraph change. I need words to flow. Sometimes neatly, but sometimes, in a downhill stream, unrestricted, forceful. And to see them flow is the biggest joy you could ask for. Do you know that feeling? Of being lost and feeling small amidst the rows of a bookstore, and of that immersive smell that inundates your senses, that makes everything beautiful and sacred? That smell of yellow pages? Have you ever bought a book only because it looks old and used and it has on the cover a beautiful, regular handwriting of someone called Nafeesa who read it in 1965? Have you ever had that craving to spend all your weekend dug under piles in an innocuous corner of a large, old library that smells of stories and wars and travel and love and life? Do you know what it is to love? To read a book and then dream about it for nights together? To read a book and then have an urge to share, and to preserve and to just hold it close to your chest for a while and smell it? Do you write your name on the cover in cursive after you've read it? Not to ensure it comes back to you if it's lost, but to make sure it retains a bit of you wherever it goes? Do you?


Right now, I do not write for a purpose, I write for the sake of love, for words, for the sounds and images they will create in your head when you read them. For the sounds and images and smells and ebbs that they cause in my heart as I type them. I write this because I need to. I could carry on with why I need this, but that would defy the point. It's a need, a pulsating ache that will calm me down when I type that final full stop.

I have a dream

I dream of writing songs. I dream of being in the company of musicians and write songs and watch them become music, watch them float in the air, in the sea, and in the pores of the soil and sand. I want my words to add, however infinitesimally small, a meaning, to sunshine and salt, to winter breeze and the taste of sea water. I dream not of a name, no, thats not what I want. I just want my words there, out there in the world, on their own, without my shadows, but with hidden bits and pieces of me, and all that I am, in a secret way. I dream of a day when the sun will shine through a window and someone like me, someone I've never met, in some place I've never been to, would recite a few of those words, with sighs and pauses, with the sun in his face, and gratefulness in his heart.

Letting Life Happen

It has been a hectic blogging spree for me for the past few days. I have met and made friends with a lot of amazing people in the blogosphere. These are friendships that transcend space and boundaries, because when art speaks to you, it speaks to your soul. It inspires you to create. To live. To slow down. To breathe. 

Art is alive. It is not the artist. It is more than what the artist is. Because it is also what the artist wants to be. The artist is human. Art is her attempt at things more celestial. It is her attempt to dream things that are somewhere above her, in a place more glorious and more beautiful than the world she lives in. An artist lives multiple lives, dies numerous deaths. Art is those lives and deaths that are not her own, but that she experiences every day. It is the dance she was too awkward to dance, the song she could never strike that right note of, the painting she spilled wrong colors on, the dessert with an extra pinch of sugar, the verses that never rhymed. Art is the artist's imperfection. It is what makes her go on. She loves what she creates, but it never satisfies her, because she has a taste. For utter brilliance. She explores and pushes her human limits expecting a new glimmer every time. She is always trying. Never, ever content. Art is her child. She suffers to give birth to it, and she is reborn when it is born. She protects it from mediocrity, and nurtures it in details. She knows it is not perfect, but she loves it none the less. Art is the mark of her affair with life. A passionate, ignited affair, the flames of which burn her soul and keep her thirsty all the time.

I am going to take a break. And allow an inspiration to engulf me, till I write my next post. I am going to lay back for a while and allow that inspiration to happen.

Write to Me A Poem

Write to me a poem

about the flame that I am

Let me glow in your joys

and smoulder in your pain

Whisper to me your words

Let them melt in my being

Give them to me in a bundle

and I'll wrap them around me

I'll rove in your verses

over moors and fords

and wait for Highwayman

as the night unfolds

Make me the solitary reaper

and I'll melodiously lament my loss

or let me be the sailor

who killed an albatross

Or may be you would let me dance

over a lovely hill

and I would smile at all who pass

- a golden daffodil

Or if you wish, just paint me

in words of pastel shades

Mix up my existence

with the traditions of your trade

Give me your imagination

and I'll give you my being

Cage me in a poem,

Love, this time, set me free

About Me

Writing happens to me, like love, like the weather. It makes me a million things more, it gives me an adrenaline rush, and at times it induces an enveloping, nurturing calm. Sometimes, I write for myself, and sometimes, just to be read. I love words. Words that are soft and simple and still magnificent in their implication, and the way they are pronounced. I would not be me but for this congenital love for words, and stories. I love everything simple, and everything old and classy. I love the scent of old yellow pages of books, and the scent of the earth satiated by rain. I love beautiful Rajasthani ornaments, Victorian buildings, old, heavy metal boxes that contain secrets, and stories, of lives lived long ago. May be that's why I love all things old, the story part - stories that are hidden in a smile in a black and white picture, in the wrinkles at the back of hands, in the silver of the hair, in large dusty, sound-echoing rooms, in the widespread roots of age-old trees that still stand with enviable dignity; which reminds me, I love trees, and flowers, and mountains, valleys, rivers, deserts, and oceans. They overwhelm me, they whisper to me in the language of the universe,and they love me too, I think. I love having leisure, like now, to sit and write about all things I love, or to stop and smile at a child, to click pictures, to hold an old man's hand and listen to his stories, to stare at the star studded night sky, and relive the fairytales of childhood. I love the distant sound of the namaaz. I laugh, pray and cry a lot. I love being foolish. I love to narrate, if you'll listen.

P.S. The picture was taken by me near the Holsten Gate, Lubeck, Germany.