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Life in SloMo #1

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You have been getting a lot of time to read these days. You have been reading a lot lately. Almost in a rush to read. In the back seat of the SUV with the tinted window glasses. Finding an empty corner in a railway station as you wait for a stranger train from a stranger place. Cramped airport lounges, sipping on expensive coffee that you do not like. Shuffling between the book and the kindle, shuffling between the books, because you cannot take too much of anything. Looking for distractions. Feed the brain enough material so it does not begin to think.  You close your eyes when there has been too much reading. Try to collect the thoughts, go through everything that you have read. Now that reading has a hiatus, try to make sense of it also. Think, say, of the characters. The boys, and the girls. There have been a lot of girls in your books lately, you realise. Animated people, feeling their anger burn and the heart ache. Characters are not caricatures in your books. They are extant...
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This City Called Imphal

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                It’s been such a long time since I last typed. It is as if the comfort of the room is not enough to write here – it requires the winter to invade my skin, the midnight gibbous moon to show me the words – for me to hit the keyboard with eyes closed, like a pianist’s fingers dancing. Anyway, there cannot be a better time to reflect than the New Year’s Day. Life has been such that every post on the blog has a feel of “everything has changed so much”. This post comes at a time of another big shift – I have moved to Imphal for my district training. This is the first touch with the field and the first instance of application of theory. It has been almost three weeks and the name “Imphal” has slowly started to sound familiar. This post is only about the first few meters in this miles-long journey. A Change of Home Moving to a new place can never be a good experience. Here is something that I wrote during one of the boring lectures r...
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How's It Goin?

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          The life under training leaves little time to sit back and think, lest write about it. You end your day in your bed with a pillow against the wall, light a tiny flame on a candle and let the static of the room invade you. More often than not, there is soft music playing on the Alexa. Books are staring like skulls on the shelf. The nine brief months have left the room strangely foreign – a temporary space between the four walls – you spent too little time there to make it your own but it is the centre of your existence. The need for introspection often overtakes you but you feel it only in the form of exasperation and an evening of depression. You sigh audibly and some of that which is clogging your nerves washes away. Some good things shine. Running calms you. You often try to find someone to go on a run with but you mostly run alone. There is nothing new to that. But you are running more now, and faster. It is one of the things the Academy has done ...
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I Let a Leaf Sit on Me

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I let a Leaf sit on me - it had floated down the window - where its silence offered me some relief from reality. For endless times I had pulled together the two fashions of my head but the distinction of life and dream was brought down rapidly. It had brought with it the part of me that - long hidden - emancipated -  to reality’s frown - but not without a lurch, and some part of me broke into that very known dance that balms the tired hearts who hear not that unknown music. The Leaf was yellow and dead and it flew on the breeze - but salved that slow death  that creates the rot within.  
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The Myth of the Soldier

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             Margaret Attwood once concluded that “war is what happens when language fails”. David Diop further shows in his At Night All Blood Is Black that the language fails with respect to not just the foes but also the friends. In its short and succinct form, the book presents a scathing but mesmerising account of the battlefield and its multiple players. The novel is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye who comes from the French Senegal and is fighting on the French side against the Germans in a European World War II battlefield. His “more than brother”, Mademba Diop, was fighting alongside until he is killed. The circumstances of the latter’s death make Alfa question the sanity of war, its commanders (the alleged “lovers” of war), its soldiers, its morals and, of course, himself. The narration is so personal that the reader but fears intruding into Alfa’s privacy and thoughts.   In the initial few chapters, Alfa presents his recollection of Mad...
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How's It Goin?

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Hasn't life been going exceptionally well? The answer to the question is no. It ain't well at all. Maybe it is.  There definitely has been financial mobility. As compared to this time last year, I have an iPhone, an iPad Air, a smartwatch,  two  Alexa devices (all but the iPhone are gifts), a larger bank balance, some degree of social security ; I am eating better quality food and think less before spending on overpriced stuff .  When I think of buying clothes, I think more in terms of style and less in terms of price – price, really, has become secondary (at least in the initial part of the month) to needs, and needs are new and ever-increasing – unlike the past. I do not think in terms of “chalta hai”.  Today, when I could not find a piece to write on, and I wanted handcrafted paper, I immediately decided to buy a new journal. I hope I  am  happier than I was – and I have much greater confidence (and I do not know if that  stems  from money...
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City Lights

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city lights in a city night sparkle like stars in a concrete sky. silent and subtle, showy, windows of curtained glass, tinted blue and red with gods and flowers, bulging halos round the city's shadows, shrouding a room from another and keeping a night outside. city lights are steady and silent and as adamant as the dead crickets and moths that dot  their thousand and thousand hues - and once and twice a man will peep out to look out, out at the city that's the same in all directions - simmering under its blood red sky. city lights create the empty streets dark and desolate by their absence - hairy mice scuttle in the corner lines with the hurry of a robber and an office-goer, a homeless man sleeps in a shadow and a dead man within him awaiting the lights for resurrection. city lights rule over the desert of rowdy buildings and towers and they zoom in and out with the party music and hubbub, the crowds of sulking citymen in a vitriolic air of hush and quiet going about on their...
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