Poetry in motion

Monsoon clouds hung low. Cars, buses and motorcycles clogged the narrow road, din of impatient honking filled the air and I sat by the window of my car staring out unseeingly. The car moved a little, a beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and I saw it - perched on a stone bench, about a foot high, unpolished, granite sculpture of an elephant, its trunk slightly twisted in mid motion, its ears wide open, staring straight at me. Droplets of water glistened in the evening sun's rays.

Traffic light changed, we moved on, the moment captured in my mind in an indelible black and white picture.

Some years ago I might have jumped out of the car, ran back the way and bought the elephant. Yesterday I simply savored the moment.

I have no doubt the sculpture will remain longer with me this way.

Days like this..

Sat through a long boring meeting all bleary eyed, yawning. The yawning was because I spent a sleepless night. So that's nothing new for a certified insomniac like me. Right from childhood my brain has exhibited an amazing capability to context switch - I am losing some of it now - but typically I could switch seamlessly from one thread to another faster than most people. But when it comes to shutdown for sleep it is a different thing altogether.

Thoughts thrash about, skitter and scatter. Dogs howl, the clock ticks and before I know it the early morning light creeps on the sky outside my east facing window. I have spent another night sleepless, my brain still trying to figure it all out.

Human brain is the ultimate frontier.

I often joke that there is so much of me sitting in bits and pieces in systems all over the world, a future technology might be able to reconstruct me. What I am is not just the thoughts that plague me well into the night, but also how I am perceived based on my expressions.

I am just a sum of all my chemical induced behavior.

Guess that gives me the freedom to say 'It depends' to the questions on deadlines I get asked routinely.

Seeking Spirituality

Made a brief trip to Thiruvannamalai for an occasion. The back breaking journey of five hours brought me to the town, late in the evening. Dead tired, I crashed in a small hotel and walked up to a roadside place to eat the lukewarm masala dosa. I couldn't help but notice the young white woman sitting nearby flipping through a book that had some pictures of gods and clearly was something about religion.

Why would this woman want to come to Thiruvannamalai to seek spirituality I wondered. The filthy road, the leering men by the sidewalk, the cheating cashiers and wild stray dogs did not particularly make it seem conducive for a spiritual quest.

I know about the ashram and perhaps there are spots in the town that are peaceful.

I was still left with the question of why one needs to go someplace - is it really external? A guru, a location, an experience - is the journey to spirituality outside the self?

Vertigo

By some quirky neuron connections, when I hear the word Vertigo, an image of Gregory Peck clenching his jaws and staring intently at something pops into my mind. I know Gregory Peck didn't act in Vertigo and the image is from Spellbound but who cares - Greg is the handsomest..

All that went out the door yesterday after a nasty spell of Vertigo. I was sprawled on the bed panic stricken unable to even raise my head. My head was spinning, spinning.. I tried to bring myself to get up and get to a hospital but it was so intense I just couldn't move. The onslaught was sudden and random [unless you count a complicated episode of Lost that I was watching] and it scared the heck out of me.

A day later the feeling still persists and I am now at least walking around albeit gingerly like an eighty year old. Vertigo is an interesting topic to research. None of the websites helped me narrow down what my problem could be.

The whole episode got me pondering about relationships and information. Rewind twenty years ago, we'd have had a lot of people in the house and the doctor who knew me well would have paid a visit home and I wouldn't have a clue of what he was really diagnosing. Now I have all the information in the world, but no one to reassure. Have I really lost anything and have I really gained anything?

Tere Bin Laden

I have wasted many idle evenings in surfing HBO, Star movies and the likes. Thankfully, I have finally discovered news channels are a lot more entertaining than the movie channels and reruns of Friends.

As the news hit the airwaves, at prime time almost all the English media channels in this country had an anchor who was yelling at the top of his voice at some unfortunate Pakistani journalist or researcher who had agreed to be on their show. The jingoist rhetorics without even a pretense of a question was fun to watch. For example, 'should Pakistan be declared as a terror state?' - was one question. The anchor had no interest in really hearing the answer unless it was a yes. His guests didn't oblige him and he didn't bother giving them airtime more than a minute. The cheers in NY or the 'We will hunt you down' posturing from American establishment wasn't particularly intellectual either. But then who really is expecting anything intellectual?

I missed the days when I had discovered the power of internet - my morning dose of newspaper in those days included the headlines from 'Dawn'. Interestingly today when I tried connecting to 'Dawn' it gave me a funny error and made me wait for some security check whatever that is.

The Gotcha blog restored my faith that there are still some people left who can look at a problem with balance and intelligence despite the overwhelming screams of the rest of the country in a different direction.

Another couple of hours spent in reading print media - likes of Guardian, Mother Jones etc. would be a good preemptive strike against any possible invasion to the mind.