Suburban Noise Machine

I have moved.

Mercy from the Headstrong

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions

Yes, I can’t make it work. Not with you. Maybe, not with anyone else. Maybe, I’m cut out of a different cloth. Maybe, I’m more leather than lace. Yes, I am speaking your language to make it sink. Maybe, I can resist the wear and tear. Maybe, I’m as cold as you have me picked. But, I’m not yours. There are no maybes about that. I never was.

No, I can’t look pretty for your neanderthal buddies to pat your back on your “achievement”. No, I won’t stop taking the 5am one-way flights to unknown islands, on my own. No, you can’t protect me from myself. I would recommend you don’t even try. I need my time, my place. Your lack of comprehension about this spatial truth is not a peril of my making. Deal with it on your own. Yes, I will always love my cameras a little more than you. Maybe, coz they help me capture life in a far more pronounced way than you ever could.

No, I won’t dress garish and loud for your sister’s farce of an engagement ceremony. No, I won’t dance with your drunk as skunk relatives to prove that am deserving of a rank in their midst. No, I won’t send you pictures of my earrings and ask you if you like em so I can decide whether or not to pick em for myself. I picked my own apartment at 16, I don’t need help picking trinkets at 24.

Yes, I will always be a little clinical and detached. That doesn’t make me less humane, just more real. If you guage the difference(which I doubt, you do). Yes, I would recommend you brush up a little bit on your Strenberg to assimiliate that love is infact a combination of intimacy, commitment and passion. No, I don’t set an IQ pre-requiste for guys I date but I prefer if their’s isn’t entirely a single digit one.

Yes, I am more evolved and liberated than you’d like. Yes, that the a priori to my acceptance of the fact that you are still steeped in sexism and partiarchy. Yes, I do marvel at my own lack of cognizance vis-a-vis you, sometimes. Yes, I have learnt a few home truths.

No, I can’t stay with you and make it work because its too difficult to break away and find someone new. No, I don’t fear the single status. No, I don’t have a rewind button. No, I don’t care about your neurosis right now. Mine is pretty declivitous in itself.

No, you don’t get to judge me. You weren’t around when I was getting tumors removed from my arm and writhing in pain when I was put on mind controlling meds. Yes, I am different. Yes, I am better.

No, I am not enthralled by your messianic susurration. No, I don’t find your Robert Jordan’s-I-am-reborn-to-rescue-the-cosmos bullshit inspiring. Not even entertaining. Not when you run with your tail between you legs everytime you are faced with a real problem. Such as, getting dumped. You are as regular as chums. Please stop convincing of your “higher purpose”. Intelligence bereft bimbettes massaging your ego and whatnot is no yardstick of your emotional intelligence.

Yes, I have more brainpower. No, you can’t compete. You are unarmed. As you always were.

Yes, I did stoop far too low to accomodate you. Yes, you should be thankful.

No, I don’t have a “type”. I ‘d like to think people aren’t bacteria to be classified that scientifically.

No, I don’t taper. I walk out when I feel its not right. No, you can’t persuade me to reconsider.

Yes, you were one night stand. Understand, process, accept. Get over it.

No, I don’t love you and am not apologetic. No, I don’t condone your consistent “bitch-assness”. in the words of one Mr Sean P Diddy Combs.

Yes, I was caught up once. Yes, I am acidic and contemptuous when pushed. Yes, I am capable of absolution and peace. No, you can’t decide when I pick and what.

No, I am not a man’s mind in a woman’s body. Yes, you are incredibly incompetent with your (non-existent) sense of humor.

No, the Universe doesn’t consider you its kernel of wisdom. No, you are not saving anyone, not even yourself. No, I am not a conformist, but that doesn’t make me cynical either.

Yes, I can live without you. No, you aren’t a member of the chemical periodic table with the atomic number 8 assigned to you. Much as you’d like to imagine. Full of hot air, yes, you are.

No, you can’t come back. No, I don’t care. Yes, I’d like my space.

This is release. Depart. Now. I want one of me and none of you.

Paedophiles – 1; Damaged Kids – 0

The fumey city offers a single consolation prize – Its raining again!

Yep, the cipher status that the usual worklife enjoys has been jolted a bit by this sudden deluge and strong wind that almost threatened to carry my umbrella away into the neighbour’s balcony. I suddenly had this weird urge to go to the rooftop pool and swim endlessly. Except, I can’t swim and the poolside keys have conveniently been lost by the Veerappan styled security guard of my apartment complex.

So, I did the next best thing ; which is to vegetate in front of the Idiot Box for the first half of the day (not) praying for the rains to vanish coz I seriously didn’t want to get out of the house and drag my partially broken self around the Mecca of Madness aka The Office. The news was as cheery as the muddy puddles surmounting in my vicinity. 

This is marvellous. Isn’t it?
I mean, its totally knock-your-nuts-off-their-sockets variety amazing stuff.
Or is it?
Currently the score stands as follows:
Paedophiles – 1; Damaged Kids – 0
Fantastically fantastic.
This sends out the right message to all the sex-starved, mentally sick perverts who’d like to frequent the world’s largest mobocracy. We are the most inconsiderate bunch of fainéants you will ever encounter, so, come one and all to the largest corruption murk-de-soliel party ever!
Amidst buying parliament members to establish majority that will enable more inflation of egoes and the economy and acquitting sordid paedophiles, I believe that the local and national government has its hands full so it would be slightly unfair to complain about the bloody dastardly managed streets around my house, or, in fact, anywhere in Mumbai.
Amidst all the clogging, blocking, fettering that always makes for a fairly adventurous commute to work, I found it difficult to focus on the Perv Release Case. But I persisted nevertheless. I have been following this development with utmost focus and dedication that usually eludes me when it comes to my personal or professional life/goal setting.
It’s something to watch the two pale, positively repugnant Brit(and one Indian) symbols of middle age turpitude gleam omniously with a flicker of the most horrible smile and look directly into the cameras of the newshungry photogs. It’s something inexplicable.
This must make child sexual abuse victims and those who’ve spent years crusading against paedophilia a little uncomfortable, mustn’t it?
Then again, what has the larger populace got to lose or gain as far this particularly unfathomable unfolding is concerned?
They shall carry on with their (im)perfect lives, buy the latest in-fad brand of denims, cereals, toilet paper etcetra, crib bout the sudden downpour, go through their sodden days wincing occasionally about the lack of good coffee machines in their respective workplaces and of good mating partners in their respective suburban neighbourhoods. In other words, life will continue with sickening normalacy.
For people like me though, I can’t imagine how angry this will make us as the days pass by and inaction mounts.
This is a major beating for our legal system which in any case is as competent as the Maldivian soccer squad. I wonder if we’ll ever get law right in this country.
However, I don’t think this bothers a whole lot of you folks out there. You or You, or You there, munching on those French Fries nodding your head vigorously to the mediocre music polluting your low iq brain. This is not worthy of being registered on your radar.
This doesn’t bother anyone except those who’ve actually gone through it and continue to live in its shadows hoping for some form of release, someday. As a survivor of CSA* I find it deplorable everytime an offender walks free due to “lack of evidence”. It kills you a little bit everytime someone reminds you that this is one crime that is taken so lightly in this country that its almost weightless. It flies all over the place and people don’t even notice its existence.
What evidence would be enough?
The shame, the agony, the doubts, the self-loathing, the scarring for life?
Those are for people who care. But most of us(you) are largely made of indifference that seems to be our common concern in this life.
Ain’t it funny?
No really, it must be to Allen Waters and Duncan Grant.

Getting Away

Guess I was born to make mistakes
But I ain’t scared to take the weight
So when I stumble off the path
I know my heart will guide me back
.

Growing up is sometimes synonymous with growing away. Actually, most of the times. Growing apart. From people, places and things you have essentially grown to love all your years. Every 5 years or so I transcend everything I ‘ve known in that exact timeframe. And it utterly, completely, totally sucks. I love airports for this exact reason. Something bout leaving – depatures – makes me happy. It may stem from being a self confessed escapist. Or I could run some Jungian or Alderian analysis bout my cracked psyche and whip up an entirely new theory about my predilection for getting away when I am in the middle of things. The calmer the world around me gets, the faster I want to escape it. All bets must be off if I stay within the parameters of any given situation.
At 18, I left Uni to explore what the cliches hanging large in the big bad world. It wasn’t half as dangerous or elusive as it was painted out to be but the experience made me a more “solid” person, in a manner of speaking.
At 21, I went back to complete my degree and realized that my simmering disdain for conventional education was in fact a more here-to-stay variety hatred that would make it almost impossible for me to contemplate studying in this environment anytime in the future. Boxplots and Keynesian theories aside.
At 22, I left a secure job to welcome 6 months of dreaful penury because I couldn’t quite wrap my brains around the whole corporate stoogery that is hardwired so well in most of the middle class populi in this city. Or perhaps, the country.
At 24, I ate crow, went back to the confines of a rickety building that enabled me to understand myself better just by understanding the larger society I was now supposed function within. Hello, Journalist!
At 25, I ‘ve commenced living alone in a city thats alternatively referred to the city of dreams and the city of vultures. Pick, choose, stay or leave.
True, that!
So, at every stage something had to be left behind to make room for something new. Something fresh and less complacent. I am often guilty of bolstering a sang froid that makes most of the congrey I’ve managed to cultivate along the way querulous, frequently. But, this who I’ve chosen to become. This is me. As of today.

Inner Dj’s spinning Erykah Badu – Did’nt Cha Know?
Inner Bookslut is devouring “The Second Sex”. Again. Sigh!

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) disaster.

Things that make you go….WTF?

Are you content with your armchair feminism? The nonsensical reporting on Trans threads on equally ludicrous sites where the debates clearly eschew any real conversations about the real issues affecting a multitude of women everyday and everywhere. The non-white face of the feminist movement.

What will it take for you to be provoked enough to stand up and scream “Enough!”

Really now, what does it take?  Does it take this?

Mugabe’s youth militia has been raping and impregnating adolescent girls in Zimbabwean villages leading to a spike in the population of pregnant teens. Purportedly. I don’t how much can you fabricate such appalling facts. A political analyst reminds me that politics is a dirty game and everything goes. Well, fuck you too, then!

Disparaging, you’d say. But is that enough?  To condemn and then move on without letting splintered guilt pierce your partially dead conscience. Why isn’t someone doing something about this? Robert Mugabe is a monster and that’s a well documented fact and yet there has been no direct action against the man notorious for heaping hell on his own people. Here is someone who is possibly a dozen times more lethal and dangerous than Saddam could ever be, even if that’s a seriously odious comparison, and yet the G8 conveniently has forgotten and chosen to turn a blind eye to all that continues to occur in Zimbabwe. Possibly coz there aren’t oil deposits glimpsing from behind mud thatches that house some of the worst human rights violations in the history of humanity.

What does it take beyond pilfering, massacring, murdering, decapitating, mutilating and just plain annihilating? To ravage an entire people and yet there are those demented conspiracy theorists who proffer their unasked for advice and solicit sympathies for a man who can only be referred to as a mass murderer. And I’m being uncharacteristically kind here.

This probably doesn’t provoke you enough. Possibly coz its not convenient to extend the supposedly feminist thoughts to a real cause as opposed to just plainly posting retarded reviews of equally retarded “progressive” dissertations of failed academics.  

How about this one then?

The enlightened Saudi regime has ordered 350 lashes for a research student whose “scandalous” crime was to communicate with her biochemistry professor over the phone. These phone calls apparently caused the breakdown of her marriage leading to a divorce. The wiseasses interpreting Sharia for the rest of the populace decided that its only fitting that they beat the woman and her “accomplice” black and blue. Perhaps that will drill some sense into women who, shudder, decide to pursue biochemical research or indulge in a little tete-a-tete over the phone and worse still, walk out on their husbands coz, well, they want to.

Yes, you are hollering from every street corner and stop sign, saying that We are liberated freethinkers coz we can choose to be single mothers and thank god for sperm banks, or that we can amass Jimmy Choos for our upscale social dos, we experiment with unconventional (god alone knows what that’s supposed to mean!) living arrangements and relationships but what about the other half? Is this the life they(We) deserve or more importantly, desire?

Feel Good Inc

 

..Coz I’m starting quarter life crisis today. Happy Fuckin B’day to me.

Love forever love is free
Let’s turn forever you and me

Things you can’t count

..inside your head.

 

 

I am not the snarled strings of the spool in my lap

I am not the hours of smoke creating clouds around my head

I am not the shards of Time I fractured with primeval knives

I am not the flecks of red swimming in my eyes

I am not the silhouette that left this room in 1987

I am not the apparition that floated back in 1998

I am not the Passage of minutes soaked in chemicals and sanguinity

I am not the whiff of emptiness that abounds in these vaults

I am not this urbane void

I am not the subliminal lyric I plagiarize

I am not the perspicacity of this transient thought

I go with the flow, I ride with the tide, I got glide in my stride.

R.I.P  Mr Carlin.

” I’m hangin’ in, there ain’t no doubt, and I’m hangin’ tough, over and out.”

 

Arriving somewhere..

…but not here.

Did you imagine the final sound as a gun?
Or the smashing windscreen of a car?
Did you ever imagine the last thing you’d hear as you’re fading out was a song?

Ex lovers and bad coffee. Somehow that train of thought refuses to depart from the my over-cafeinated brain’s foreground.
Moving on is a casually thrown around term. Breakups, getting fired, getting divorced and sometimes all of those together. The most gallantly offered form of intellectual advice is – Move on. No one tells you how but everyone wants you to move on.
Never quite comprehended the concept in its entirety. This obligatory journey of “moving on” – is it an actual, physical movement or displacement or moving on inside my head. What does it take to forget?
Isnt the act of forgetting someone a warmly nurtured antithesis?
You can never forget someone when you are in the middle of making some rather lousy attempts to..well..forget someone.
Then one fine morning you wake up and they are gone. Disappeared into thin air, not their physical existence in your scheme things but your feelings for them. Of what they constituted inside your head. It is just that simple. It happens when you are busy making plans to trek to Tibet or Kinnaur and in between trawling through gorgeous Llahsa landscape shots, it comes to you on a misty Monday night, He is not here. Not physically, not anymore. And whats even more surprising is that you are perfectly ok with not wanting him here.
This seemingly unforgettable article from your past is now its own shadow. It will forever be relegated to that dark corner. Penumbra. You won’t pine or yearn or desire. You’ve ceased to Love. Him. And someone else is drifting into your consciousness even as He is losing shape.
Un-Love.
Love’s left. Perhaps not. Its definitely shifted gears. Its pledging its legions elsewhere and that which seemed that most significant aspect of your life has now become a distant apparition. Its very being is thin air and nothing more.
Transience is Life’s greatest virtue. That everything will change and it will still go on. That is moving on, from where I stand today.
I dislike such vapid phrases like “going with the flow”. I’m not that passive, I’d rather direct the flow that get swept by the undercurrent and then cry hoarse for the next decade about how unfair people and emotions can be.
No siree, that doesn’t cut ice for me.
So, my definition of moving on is decidedly based on my favorite thing in the world – travelling. backpacking in fact. You are always hard up for funds and yet the excitement of discovery keeps you pacing forth with energy indescribable in words. One fine day you are standing dumbfounded at the foot of the mighty mountains looking at Rakcham or perhaps marvelling at the magnificience of Santorini and you’ve moved on.
Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually.