Paradox

(The more I see the less I know for sure... John Lennon)

I try so hard not to objectify

But each time I do, I try

Covering it all up, one by one

Saying everyone's been objectifying everyone

And I realise

I just did.

I look at you and your innocent flight

Your simple and one-minded sight

And I see how and I see why

I'm left down here to see you up there, so high

It's easy, it's plain

Why here I remain

So black bird, winged one

Do you see birds the way I see a human?

Dear black bird

Do you realise I just called you black?

Really, Mr. Freedom

Do you see my slack?

When not busy making depressed chatter

Or took up by some wise clatter

While my thoughts are plain as my space

While my thoughts don't prick this haze

This haze that does surround

This haze that never fails to come around

For black or white or dark or gray

We lost a lot, we pride ourselves - child's play!

But they say you don't gain if you don't lose

Seems I gave up my answers for questions, for turbulence, truce.

Still I hope when I look at them there

I feel some feel, I feel some care

(And wait, I do)

So black bird, winged one

Do you see birds the way I see a human?

Dear black bird

Do you realise I just called you black?

Really, Mr. Freedom

Do you see my track?

So black bird, winged one

Do you see birds the way I see a human?

Dear black bird

Do you realise I just called you black?

Now, Mr. Freedom

Do you see my slack?

Too Good For This Life

(Not cynicism. Just expression. Read without prejudice..)


Came back from a walk

With a friend and his mellow talk

He'll talk friendly, he'll talk nice

When I turn around I see it's lies

I feel too good for this life

Cry-monging, havoc rife

I feel too good for this life

To take it all at the point of a knife

Quit a job and my office room

And their funny circus costume

Felt tired working days

In a rat race, it's a hopeless case

I got a girl, no I had her once

She's gone, she's gone since months

She couldn't, no she couldn't know

That love's just an empty show

I feel too good for this life

To take it all at the point of a knife

But you're born and you pay the price

You're too old when you get wise

I see them fight, I see them hate

Over colour, religion and other bait

These fools, no they don't see

What was before this came to be?

I feel too good to just complain

So I'll go out soak the rain

I feel too good to hear you swear

Throw off that pride you wear

I feel too good for this life

To take it all at the point of a knife

And I'll leave for a different place

When memories, dreams can replace

And on the beach, the summer glows

In the heat of the chilly snow

I could really use getting lost

Taking easy, listening soft

I'm too good for your lies

I'm too big for my size

I'm too young to survive

The hate dropping off your eyes

And I feel too good for this life

I feel too good for this life

Jangle Pop

Few of us would have ever heard of this not-so popular name for a kind of music that has made music what it is today. Fewer still, will appreciate the kind of class artistes like R.E.M. and Tom Petty brought to the music scene of the 80s.


From the bright cheerful 'Shiny Happy People' to the cool-as-a-cucumber adult sounds that featured on albums like Wild Flower. But where did it start?

The Beatles would be a safe guess, for obvious reasons! And you had The Byrds who quickly became a sensation - made a Bob Dylan song more popular than he himself could (need I say more?)! Talking of sensations, The Beach Boys sure had their day! Snazzy sound, peppy rhythms and lyrics that made quite a lot of sense for their sound. And that essentially characterized and led to the Jangle Sound.

Dug up works of a few artistes of the kind a few months back and underrated is one word I have for the genre.

Just the idea of letting loose and going erratic without becoming screechy like the Metal bands of our day and holding it together and sounding good gives me a feel of what the Beatles were in essence with the music before their time.

Here's to the jingle-jangle sounds this morning!

Illusion, Reality and The Space Between

(My first shot at writing something that qualifies as prose. One that was not for a school assignment anyway. The event was scrapped but I got an inkling of arranging my ideas more effectively. Or so I am left to believe..)

What is life, if not an illusion! One moment you’re high and shining, the other moment there you are, laid six feet under. You talk of how “real” things are, when change is all you’ve ever really known. And change is all you’ll ever see.

You go to school and hear all their lies. “The atom’s shaped like a sphere Johnny, not a football!”

And then college changes all that there was to the atom!

No I don’t mean to ramble on to my geeky side. But Homo sapiens from time unknown have longed to explain everything about everything. And while this does us a great amount of good, (God bless Franklin for electricity, Otto for my Ford. You’d think I’d thank Henry but well he’s had enough of that and is feeling bored. And Stevie for my iPod!), we do tend to become excessively presuming in telling which way the wind blows, and well that’s not going too far really. So correction – telling which way the wind blows, with accuracy!

Talking of this, who better to look at for words of wisdom than a 60s singer who made the trip and (more importantly) back! And so here’s Joni Mitchell rephrasing – well, undoubtedly because I can’t do it better.

“I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all.”

Life. I don’t intend to go on about it as some philosopher would, for even the Oxford Dictionary becomes funny when it comes to the word. It leads you to go to page 17 for ‘alive’ and then have you return, laughing as you read ‘living, not dead’!  So, I’ll just go by the said word only because Steven Tyler agrees. “Life’s a journey, not a destination”.

All our young lives we’re told of the beaten path, of doing what is “right”, going the “safe” way and eventually reaching a respectable position, socially and financially. But should life really be centred on an eventuality or even a certain one at that. The question that immediately pops into my head thinking of this is - what next?

Living in a country that’s still getting back up on its feet, where a square meal is the driving motivation for a large percentage of the population, it’s not hard to reason out why people don’t give themselves a chance to do what they really want, to let themselves go.  

And when we’re far down that road, we have an epiphany, well phrased by Mark Twain – “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.”

Growing up, all of us have dreams – dreams that change every day and finally a few that stick with us for a long time. Dreams, some of us keep inside which later turn into fantasies and then into ‘How-I-wish-I-had’s, while some go after their dreams barely caring about anything else. And a few of them actually make it, and the ones that don’t (even though this sounds a lot like the movies) – will not have to wonder all of their remaining lives, “What if”!

These are the very people who manage to take the leap, to try to take control, to see and to try to realise their dreams, put their passion to work, their minds to test and hope for their hopes. A person is often considered a fool for believing in his dreams. But to his wandering mind, there’s no bigger reality than his illusion, nothing so powerful to drive him the way his “illusion” would. For he loses, the sense of illusion and reality in the space he creates and as far as reality goes, it wouldn’t be too trivial to tell that its concept is changing every minute! The second that passed ago knew a different reality, so to speak and quite rightly.

If a person has the kind of passion that would induce in him the confidence to believe, his chances of tasting success would increase manifold. To prove that, let’s observe a simple life example. You have a flight of stairs to jump down directly. Now say you tell your mind you’re capable of doing it, landing on your feet down those 7 stairs, safe and in a single piece, intact. And you jump. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to tell, there could be two outcomes, would it? And now for the other scenario – you take the leap half heartedly, half-mindedly, not believing you will make it and most chances are, you shall fail. If you’ve experienced anything of this sort before, it wouldn’t be too hard to tell that believing makes things easier, increases your chances of making the jump!

And so it goes with everything else we do in our voyage de vie. Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, could have easily had his lights turned off with the 2000 failed attempts he had made at the light bulb (and one can imagine people wouldn’t have had too many nice things to say about that!) and well, there’s no point in telling what would have happened of our lights! Instead he chose to carry on and when he reached his goal, he said, “I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”


As amusingly inspiring those words sound for a 67 year old to say after seeing his loss of over 2 million dollars, it’s not quite surprising why those words seem right off a different time and way of life for our generation, with a little bit of exploration and analysis. In a competitive and absolutely unforgiving world like ours (or one it has come to become), it’s quite literally hammered into us that anything but the gold is a failure, anything other than the ‘correct’ answer is wrong. We lose out on the essence of action in becoming so objective and therefore forget that failures are nothing but signposts to lead us to the right way.

And the worst result that comes from such objective and one-track minded thinking is the attitude to not try anything new. Thoughts and ideas are not the brainchild of only a genius. It’s the step forward that a person takes in realizing these ideas, that makes him a genius. And this is where most people stop for thinking them as impossible, absurd and plain simple illusions. For, even the ideas that seem most obvious to us now must have once seemed absurd. Certainly enough, the idea of men flying in the sky is no exception. When da Vinci first thought of a flying machine, people did not see the strength and prowess of his idea and after the Wright brothers brought that idea to life, the world as people knew it would never have remained the same!

These powerful things, ideas, as we know them are often interpreted to be illusions of the mind – mystical wanderings in which it seeks an abode for all its fantasies. And it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that, people who think these ideas are often considered as dreamers. But what are these fantasies but imagination and what is exploration and discovery, if not imagination! A wise man (needless to say who) once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.

The greatest inventions that Man has seen over the years weren’t the creations of people afraid of failure, afraid of moving away from the convention or being tagged as dreamers. So, let your thoughts flow, and let your imagination swirl – this may just be your only life, or as 50 per cent odds go, finding the answer to that may just not be possible!

How Small Are We

(One of the very few things I wrote years back that still are with me. One of my first attempts at what few would dare to call poetry. Expression is all I'll tag it with and happily at that..)

They talk about money, of making a name
Finding a way into history, of glorious fame
And I hear them

They talk about love and lust, forever and more
Of diamonds and pearls, oceans and shores
And I hear them

Then I look at the stars above
And I see the lights high up
And I see, how small are we

I walk the streets, I watch them all
The rich and the poor
Some flash useless gold; for some
Tomorrow's not so sure
And I see them

Some have a lot to waste
And still you see deaths of disease
With all we've been given
We've been no fair it seems
And I wonder, wonder why

Then I look at the stars above
And I see the lights high up
And I see, how small are we

Post #1

Post #1 has indeed been a long time coming.. But what's kept me from blogging is the sheer thought of the anxiety plagiarism could cause. That someone may steal away what's my intellectual property, no matter how (NON) intellectual it may be.

Going by the wise words I've always been hit with whenever came up the debate about the mind of the east vs the west - as goes for everything we've ever owned and everything we'll ever own, nothing really is ours.

So enjoy your ride on the crazy train...