Renaissance

"That is basic human tendency, man! You can't expect people to change it!" "All that may be good for songs and stories. But practically....?" "Yeah yeah. I am pretty sure you don't practice it yourself." "Dude! You are fighting Darwin's theory! Survival of the fittest, man!"

People are rushing. They start rushing when the red shows some sign of morphing into amber. They rush with their horns beeping - like migrating wildebeests. They rush out of the elevator, trying to squeeze their slimy skins out of the just-open doors before the other guy. And they are rushing towards extinction - glorifying it as evolution.

Human tendency is just another name we give to the fences and the walls we place around ourselves. Survival of the fittest? Children crying their hearts out because they haven't been selected to the next round of 'India's next biggest singer - brought to you by Pepsi!'; Young girls trying to desperately seduce a guy and not be dumped by him to win the big prize in 'MTV Splitsvilla' - this, apparently, is survival of the fittest. How long are you going to eat money before you realize that you are eating your own tail?

I can hear the boos from the crowd now. I can hear them calling me a hypocrite. A bundle of contradictions. And if at all I pray, I pray for a cleansing of my thought. I am aware of my fallacies - I am aware of my continual dependence on materials.

சிந்தை தெளிவாக்கு, அல்லால் இதை செத்த வுடலாக்கு.

All you ever needed to know - you already do. The basic truth has been set but convoluted by neo-religion and corporate greed.

The fittest are those that can love. Unconditionally.

She

The pattern on the table looked like a bunch of dead lights on some forgotten spaceship in some crappy science fiction movie. A bunch of women were humming in a hollow way from the stereo - deep space or deep sea? The cars on the road were throwing curious lights on the road - a halogen siesta. And of course, those darn sodium vapour lamps were there too.

I observed the stream of conciousness that was escaping my brain faster than a roadrunner. Nonsense, basically. Spaceships and exploding stars and a lot of humming.

Conversations. I was deprived of them. I was undertaking a mini-vipasana - no talking. I am a listener. I listen to stories from enthusiastic lips. But the only lips that evening were that of a stray cat's.

"So, what do you think of spaceships?" she asked me with those dark eyes of hers, watching me from across the mocha fumes.

"We need more of them. I want something to remind me that it's NOT a small world," I replied.

"But don't you think that their absence proves that it is a huge, huge world?"

She had a point there. Can't help losing myself in your eyes - she was singing along with the stereo.

"Yes. They are huge. And deep," I said with a stupid grin. She feigned innocence. You're my shooting star! Why was I even singing this?

"Are you trying to flirt with me?" she asked.

"Of course not! I am just pulling you in. Urging you to teach me."

"Teach you what?"

"About socks and their cosmic significance."

"Oh no! You are no way close to that kind of evolution. I would have to start from butterfly effect and chaos theory."

"I am listening," said I.

"Meow," said the cat.

Yet another roadside attraction

The tip of the pen was tapping against my lips. A book on the backside of the bill for three coffees? My lips were turning purple - the color of ideas. The pen was already making love to the paper that was as white as the cirrus clouds wisping slowly overhead.

Stories must write themselves. They should flow like the pheromones of pregnant housewives. They can never be wrenched. And no way was I going to wrench one onto the remaining ten inches of paper. But maybe, if I did not make the g's and the y's as virile, it could be done. What if the entire story was in one sentence? That way, I could ignore the periods. Maybe I could murder a few articles too. I never really liked the self-important a's and the hyped-up the's.

"The deal with women's breasts," began the shaman whose beard had, entangled in them, the leaves from last year's autumn, a wishbone and an unused condom and whose robe consisted of a pig's skin for he, like his master, believed in the commutation of the soul from the here and now to the there and then riding on flying pigs which, incidentally, had been misunderstood and had been convoluted into the phrase - 'If wishes were wings, then pigs would fly' - and whose eyes had no glint or twinkle contrary to popular belief but had a dulled look in them owing to, perhaps, the curious assortment of ferns and mushrooms around him, "is that it is a replacement to their buttocks that had once been the source of arousal for the primeval man who, like his paleontological ancestors, entered from behind her and hence has transferred his attachment with two globules to her mammaries."

No periods. No point.

RAGE

Small world? SMALL WORLD?!

It is not a small world, you insignificant mortals! You - stupid crowd! - you live in your claustrophobic, plastic-smiled neighborhood that is as cheerful as the people are in the toothbrush commercials; you meet small-minded, insignificant others; make friends, make love, make an excuse for living and at the end of it, you meet other stupid carbon copies of yourselves and you exclaim, "Small world!"

Were you looking for a well-written piece here with the i's dotted? Well, this is the real me. Not the writer. Not the engineer. Not the son. Not the brother. This is me - naked and crying. I am a hypocrite living in a world filled with liars. I have no principles. I am the Satan!

This is an explosion. If blogs were humans, this one would be bleeding from the eyes. And there is no reason. No pattern. Just a need to kill. An insatiable need to kill the lies, to devour the flesh that craves for these....these Things! Materials. To rip the heart away from its fallacies; to strip life off the rules.

The pillar is broken, the mane is disheveled and the nails sink into the flesh.

Stand aside, Mr Siskel!

How fast can you rattle out a story? One look at someone on the road and stories burst out like the staccato bursts from an automatic rifle. A fourty-something woman crossing the road with two kids. Probably a hard-working housewife trying to make ends meet while she worries constantly over her drunkard husband and her two lovely kids. The kids may probably hate their father, but I suppose they hate losing a family more. They are planning to study harder so that they can earn a lot and keep their mother happy. The mother probably does some tailoring to earn that extra cash.

Every story is someone else's until it is told - that is a line from a play that I watched recently. Coming back from the theatre, I exercised my new-found storytelling expertise on random people. The woman with the two kids was my first victim of generalization for the sake of fictional embellishment. I stereotyped her in order to make her story mine. Her burdens, her sorrows, the pathos - they belong to me now. I feel like the antithesis of one of those Dementors from Harry Potter that suck out happiness from humans.

And now, I have passed on the story to you. It is your baby now. You have to nourish her and give her scars. You have to make sure that she cries and laughs. A writer has no responsibility towards his words. Indeed, any art need not have any point to it.

And now, we come to the crux - that play. It is called Water Lillies. A very interesting ploy - using three seperate conversations to make us understand something. A trilogy - it was called. The conversations were interesting, both on and off the stage. What really let me down was the director's earnest desire to send what has been legally termed as a 'message' to the audience. Why? Why should there be a point to a play? Or a book? Have we been so conditioned with the concept of a climax that we do whatever it is that we can do to bring it to an end? Why can't a play just be?

Barring that, there was nothing else that ruined my day. I was drenched in both the creativity deluge and the rain from above. The sky was golden and the rain was raunchy. And my stories were fast overpowering my senses. Every single person after that woman gave me volumes and volumes of stories. I was looking for patterns. An old man on the street, looking at the passersby hungrily, hoping for a rupee or two. Was he deserted by his selfish son? I have been watching way too many soap operas.

Another thing that I noticed in the play - a certain lilt and tune in the delivery of dialogue. That's me - nitpicking. There was a critic that was sitting next to me, and he whispered in my ear towards the end of the play - "I know nothing about the cast or the director but I bet you that more than half of them are Brahmins." I went backstage and challenged them with this accusation. And every single one of them said in a I'm-not-a-racist-but-damn!-am-I-better-than-you! kind of a voice, "Why yes! I am a Brahmin! How did he guess that?" I was forcefully reminded of the various Malayalees that have asked me how I found out their place of origin when they hadn't spoken a word in Malayalam.

Couldn't resist but show you that there was no point to this post. And nor is there an ending. Do you get the 'message'?