Day In, Day Out

Day in, Day out
Day in, Day out
Day in, Day out
Day in, Day out
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work

Yawn

Brush Brush Brush Brush
Brush Brush Brush Brush
Brush Brush Brush Brush
Brush Brush Brush Brush
Splat Gloop Poo
Splat Gloop Poo
Slurp Munch Glug
Slurp Munch Glug
Damn Damn Damn Damn
Damn Damn Damn Damn
Damn Damn Damn Damn
Damn Damn Damn Damn

Vroom Honk Screech
Vroom Honk Screech
Sonofabitch!
Vroom Honk Screech
Vroom Honk Screech
Yikes!

Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Lick Lick Lick Lick
Lick Lick Lick Lick
Lick Lick Lick Lick
Lick Lick Lick Lick
Type Type Type Type
Type Type Type Type
Type Type Type Type
Type Type Type Type
Yikes!
Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck
Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck
Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck
Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck
Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry
Lick Lick Lick Lick
Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry
Lick Lick Lick Lick

Vroom Honk Screech
Vroom Honk Screech
Sonofabitch!
Vroom Honk Screech
Vroom Honk Screech
Yikes!

Nag Nag Nag Nag
Nag Nag Nag Nag
Nag Nag Nag Nag
Nag Nag Nag Nag
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Work Work Work Work
Yikes!
Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry
Kiss Kiss Kiss Kiss
Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry
Kiss Kiss Kiss Kiss
Slurp Munch Glug
Slurp Munch Glug

Yawn, Fuck, Zzzz

Day in, Day out
Day in, Day out
Day in, Day out
Day in, Day out

A Pile of Trashed Files and Empty Binders

Carcasses of discarded arguments;
Empty shells of history
   of acts of men and machines.
An unwanted pile of incidents –
   like no one really cares;
   like now no one really cares.
Orphaned bastards of commercial transactions;
A past being buried unremarkably;
To be consigned to flames without ado.
Hope they burn bright;
They have burned many a life.

Code Brown

The baby plopped out of its mother’s womb —
Nameless, classless, creedless, casteless.
No, don’t ask its sex.
No, don’t ask its colour.
We will raise it to discriminate anyway.
A baby is a baby — delicate, innocent, pure.
And before it could get naughty — potty.
Welcome to the human race, babe.
Potty — the last bastion of your form-free self.
Henceforth, you may prejudice
And be prejudiced against.

Shit —
The conclusion of an existential dissertation.
The end of a churning voyage.
The putrid punishment of past sins.

You cannot deny its existence —
In your life, in your bowels.
Howsoever you may hide your fetid crop,
Howsoever you may camouflage your greedy guts,
You can’t escape the daily dump.
While you wallow in it throughout the day,
It wallows within, out on its way.
And when it gets too much to take,
You excrete and sigh away.

Every day millions of tonnes of faeces
Rush through the gutters of human bowels —
Silently, indiscriminately.
There's something saintly about excreta —
It treats all mankind equally.
It doesn't stop in its track
Just because you're rich or famous or fair.
It doesn't ignore your anus
Just because you're poor or unknown or dark.
In front of the noxious altar of ejectamenta,
EVERY–ONE–SQUATS.

Shitting —
The amoral exposure of self,
The crude down-to-earther,
The ultimate equalizer.
The only voluntary involuntary act you will commit
Every day of your life.

The Hindu does it,
And the Muslim too.
The Shia shits,
The Sunni shits.
The Catholic shits,
So does the Protestant.
And I'm sure, every prophet worth his salt
Shat — somberly, religiously.
The statesman does it,
And he did it too when he was a politician.
The electorate does it,
And it does it too after the elections.

The ‘holy’ Brahmin poops.
The ‘lowly’ Dalit poops.
Even the person claiming to be pure,
Poops.
Even the person cleaning all the poop,
Poops.
The twice-born craps,
The once-born craps,
The born-again craps.

The corpulent minister in the red-beacon car —
He takes a dump before dumping the nation.
The mafia don with his balls in the gun —
He craps before he beats you to crap.
Your dimwit boss with a chauvinist stride —
He shat in the office loo before he shat all over your daily happiness.
Your object of lust, the sexy star —
Thank your stars you don’t see her shit.

In the secluded privacy of your restroom
You hide your dignity from all mankind.
You hide from your husband,
You hide from your kids,
You hide from your girlfriend.
But you don’t hide from yourself.
Not copulation,
This is your weakest moment.

Look at yourself —
Sitting in a limbo,
Waiting for nature to take its course,
Exposed to the mercies of the elements.
Where is your vanity?
(Oh, I’m sure you look fabulous!)
Where is your arrogance?
(Oh, I’m sure you’re the king of the world!)
It's laughable that you seek
A clean and sanitized life
When sanity is finally restored
Only after the labored strife.
Coz when you’re finally done,
You clean your own gooey mess.
No one does it for you.
No one does it for you.

Everybody who's somebody
And everybody who's nobody
Begins or ends his day
By prostrating before the lavatory.
And stool is the common string
That runs through all hues of mankind.
The cream pie and the chocolate mousse,
The chicken tikka and the stuffed goose —
Beautiful, fragrant, delights on the tongue —
End up in a heap of distasteful dung.
And that is life, the long and the short of it —
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, shit to shit.

Disambiguation

Life's a merry-go-round,
Mary, go round roll up a joint.

Someone's losing weight,
Someone's gaining weight,
Someone's just not getting the point.

Man and the Megacity

It's middle of the night...half past one. As I drive down the wide, open roads of the megalithic city, I feel intimidated by its cold vastness. These unwavering, unrelenting sodium vapour lamps cast an orange, shadowless blanket on the roads. The concrete buildings on both sides stand at attention like grim medieval knights dressed in burnt orange armour. But beyond the afterglow lies a vast darkness of the unending urban sprawl.

I am not alone, yet I feel helpless.
I am all alone, yet I feel afraid of someone.

The car feels like a refuge...an escape pod with some semblance of deflector shields..an apparition of safety. The world outside stares me down with its dark, invisible eyes. I can feel them all around me. I try to hide from their gaze by focusing on the trailing brake lights of the stately trailer trucks in front of me. The tyres of my car hungrily gulp down the black tarmac of the toll bridge. They understand how I feel. The river below is a limitless chasm that doesn't seem to end. There is a eerie calm under the star-spangled night sky. They're watching you... (I hope they're watching over me.)

I want these roads to end. I dont want to be a castaway in the middle of civilization anymore. I want to reach my destination. I want to be home -- a place where the space is of my comprehension, the habitat befits my courage; a place where the indifferent city does not creep in -- my oasis in the midst of a mortar desert, my atoll in the middle of a dark, electric ocean.

Creatio ex nihilo

Perhaps...perhaps I had a bit too much to drink. Perhaps I needed the courage. Lying on some horizontal surface, in a drunken haze, with eyes wide open, I'm numb, yet aware. I cant feel anything, I cant move a limb. I am acutely aware that if wolves came and chewed on my toes, I wouldn't be able to shoo them away. I feel like a heavy mountain that is made of grey puffy clouds. I wish to pass out, but cant. In this cloud-like floating state, I'm afforded an immense clarity, and I wonder. What is this? Where am I? Where did I come from? Where did all this come from?

Relax. Let the dust inside my head settle down. Or the dizzying heights of extra-cosmic time travel will make me puke.

But wandering is the natural state of a mind - drunk or sober. And I flowed towards flashes of Shyam Benegal's Bharat Ek Khoj...hymns of Rig Veda...there was no existence, nor non-existence, no air, no water, no space, neither life nor death. Where was it? What covered it? There was nothing but formless void.

Creatio ex nihilo.

The simplest explanation that man could conjure up was God -- that God created everything. Even my drunk mind asks a simple question to take the air out of creationism -- Who created God? Kaput.

Alien spores, interplanetary relocation, evolution...nothing really answers the fundamental question -- Where from?

Maya... It's a thought-cloud floating around, engulfing the entire creation. It's a snapshot of nobody's dream. A billion light years in a nanosecond. Its existence is no proof of its existence. It's no one's vision, yet it's visible. It grows from nowhere. It reaches to no end. Perhaps it began where it ends. Perhaps life is a freak of nature. Perhaps nature is a freak of time. Perhaps time is a freak accident. Perhaps there is no perhaps. And I'm none the wiser.

Maybe it's our conception of time that is the root cause of all our enquiry-driven angst. But kya karen? My creaking joints have a metaphysics of their own.

Sleep glorious sleep...

Mediocrity

He is bobbing like an unnamed cork
in a sea of mediocrity.
And there is a tempest of inanity
thrashing him about.
There's a storm of inefficients
lashing him about.

The behemoth of a system --
A spherical rock-mountain of rigidities,
A juggernaut of ghastly proportions --
It pardons those who abide,
Protects those who lie,
Nurtures those who shirk and
deify its mammoth edifice.

Mediocre is the new norm.
It's the garb of official uniform.
Mediocres love mediocres.
And despise everything out of box.
In the warm, cozy embrace of their likes,
Inefficiency is lulled to sleep
with sugar-coated excuse pills.
Ah! You don't recognise
the efficiency of inefficiency?
Cap your imagination buddy.
Or off to Section '84!

The boulder rolls on inexorably.
Dragging the coins
of the unsuspecting benefactors
in its wake --
They who out of humble reverence,
believe -- Mass Is the New God.

If money is the new token of your worth,
Once, I was afraid to die mediocre,
Today, I'm afraid to live poor.

And I'll Live

A mass of clouds
A grass of rain
A stalk of joy
And a lighter vein..

A shock of heaven
A sheaf of earth
A gust of wind
And a baby's mirth..

A heart of gold
A head of steel
A hand of fate
And a hearty meal..

A house of love
A yard of care
A beach of mates
And a silent prayer..

And I’ll live!

I Am God

The Christians say that it took me seven days to build this world. Actually it was so long back that I don’t remember any more. No, I’m lying. I do remember. But if I reveal it and if it’s more than what humans thought, my workmanship would be suspect. Humans will say, “He took so many days and still he produced such an inferior product!” Or, if it’s less, they will say, “He was in a hurry and he made a mess of it all.” The fact is, the only inferior product I ever produced is the human race. Ok, I’m being judgmental. But hey, being God has its own privileges!

I can build this mess all over again within the blink of a human eye. I am an incessant creator, a restless potter, an untiring sculptor. The cosmos is one of my smaller creations, but a cute one. I like the ‘Earthy’ patch on it. Quite interesting! I didn’t actually plan it that way but it’s nice the way it has come out. Though if you look at it closely, you may be disappointed by its apparent ugliness. Is life on earth really ugly? Do all earthlings really think that way? Do they think I can be blamed for their misfortunes?

I have created billions of life forms all over the universe. That’s my garden patch. Full of life! But these humans think that they are somehow special. Of course, every life form in every galaxy has that right. The special thing about the humans is that I have given them the power to judge. It was an experiment that went haywire and the humans were born—my ‘Frankensteins’. I don’t complain coz they can hardly harm me. But they have reasons to complain against each other and they are doing so. Their intelligence and their judgment allow them to take decisions that are not necessarily for their own good. I created all other animals in a way that they control their numbers automatically. There is a delicate balance in nature. But who the hell told the humans that they could go for an expansion? Must have been what they call the ‘Devil’. But believe me, I’m all alone. There’s no one called the Devil. It’s the humans’ excuse for their own frailties and mistakes.

To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no control over the humans. Maybe over their surroundings, but not on them. I can change their environment, but I can’t change the way they think. I am all-powerful, but not powerful enough to control their minds. That’s what went wrong with the experiment.

[2004]

Jazz and Life

We were there to feel the profundity of life…without feeling insignificant ourselves. On the contrary, Jazz gave us meaning. A sense of place in the middle of all this; a sense of importance of the role we are playing; a sense of hope that there is order behind this seeming chaos; a hope that things will be calm and settled and moving on an even keel, just like Jazz.

The piano and the sax alternated now and dueted now; like two lovers having a lovers’ argument, a passionate flirting of a beautiful lady and a handsome gentleman. A love affair of unending youth that age cannot put a label on.

The drum brush and bass guitar were knocking a steady rhythm that closely mimicked my heart. Or was it the other way round? Now the piano and the drums were talking to each other. Piano talked, drums listened. Drums talked, piano listened. And now they agreed and nodded together. This was the art of conversation at its best.

The Woman across the Street

I leaned on the lamppost with a leisurely bend. I languidly placed the cigarette between my lips and inhaled lightly. And that’s when I saw them—those two perfectly sculpted, beautiful feet. Hugged by extremely feminine, strappy shoes, and leading from slim churidar-clad legs. It took me some time and a lot of curiosity to peel my eyes off those masterpieces and look up to see whom they belonged to. I saw the essence of femininity.

[originally written on 28/06/2004]