Mental Skipping

No! this is not about being lazy and not wanting to work out and skipping or working out in the mind...this is about the tendency of the mind to move at the speed of light skipping from topic to topic so fast that the thought is but a flash.

Hav started doing that.the technique is excellent at keeping the mind pleasantly blank ...totally relaxing and still exhausting if you know what i mean....getting totally disjointed thoughts is a challenge in itself...and the challenge is not to make a chain so that you don't start thinking in one direction :D

Kind of reminds me of that lovely song 'comfortably numb'...

so think...your way to blankness

chinese chequers-->green leaves on kashid beach-->prawn curry mangalorean style-->my orange curtains-->process note for DM channel-->a fight with an old friend-->crushed ice-->herman hesse-->dolphins-->kaya skin clinic-->black chicken kurti-->my birthday flowers-->white sandals-->hot coffee-->rain-->credit card bill-->fushcia pink enamel-->call mother-->december holidays-->an old poem-->Hawaiian Shack-->my new tattoo-->5 kg weights-->shawshank redemption-->teen spirit-Nirvana--> the train continues....:)

i want to write but cant find the words

have once aga hit the wall where my blog is concerned...........have taken to reading other peoples blog....meanwhile..........laziness or spiritual malaise..r whatever be the reason............i guess ill be back sometime soon..till then au revoir...

V for Vendetta

Quite simply one of the best movies i've watched......it has a classy almost swaggering finesse...shall return to my local bookstore to track down this book.

David Lloyd's - "V for Vendetta"

the movie is a rendition of the book and tells the story of Evey Hammond and her unlikely but instrumental part in bringing down the fascist government that has taken control of a futuristic Great Britain. Saved from a life-and-death situation by a man in a Guy Fawkes mask who calls himself V, she learns a general summary of V's past and, after a time, decides to help him bring down those who committed the atrocities that led to Britain being in the shape that it is in.

But more than that its about carving your own destiny...

For those of you who don't know the reference to 5th November or the significance of the Guy Fawkes mask which the lead actor wears ,here is an insight...

Guy Fawkes (13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606), also known as Guido Fawkes, the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries,belonged to a group of Catholic Restorationists from England who planned the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.Their aim was to displace Protestant rule by blowing up the Houses of Parliament while King James I and the entire Protestant, and even most of the Catholic, aristocracy and nobility were inside. The conspirators saw this as a necessary reaction to the systematic discrimination against English Catholics.

The Gunpowder Plot was led by Robert Catesby, but Fawkes was put in charge of its execution. He was arrested a few hours before the planned explosion, during a search of the cellars underneath Parliament in the early hours of 5 November prompted by the receipt of an anonymous warning letter.

Guy Fawkes Night "bonfire night", held on 5 November in the United Kingdom and some parts of the Commonwealth, is a commemoration of the plot, during which an effigy of Fawkes is burned, often accompanied by a fireworks display. The word "guy", meaning "man" or "person", is derived from his name.

A must watch for all...

a random excerpt picked up from a book i am reading...

the book is - Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud - Sun Shuyun

a wonderfully educative enlightening and exciting travelogue...answering life's major questions in a span of 10,000 miles

the quote goes ---

"From attachment springs grief
From attachment springs fear
For him who is totally free
There is no grief ,and where is fear?"


just four lines and it says it all..........

A Chance Meeting

I know i have a soft spot for the Sikh community especially because my dad happens to be a Surd.Don't know what it is ...maybe all the surdy jokes i get to hear from different quarters...i have this insane urge to make up for all those jokes by being extra nice when i come across a surd.

as usual i got off at Churchgate after work and made a beeline for the exit which as usual is crowded with pedestrians all jostling each other in an effort to catch the eye of a cabbie who will take them to the comforts of their cozy homes.
I was no exception to the milling crowd.but even through that insane crush i spotted this cab with a surd at the wheel.went upto him and in my usual cordial way asked him if he would go to Colaba.....

to my relief he conceded right away...and in a mad spin of wheels and closing doors i was able to stow myself and my belongings in the back seat.Now you've got to know this...there is this curious habit ...nay necessity i have of listening to music while traveling........ and who could deny me "when i look at the world" by U2.......

yes i know you are getting rather bored with all this detail...but im almost there.........then our nice surdy cabbieman asks me in the most impeccable fluent British accent if i wouldn't mind taking a detour...yes those exact words..."detour" so as to avoid the traffic...

needless to say my jaw literally dropped ...and had it not been hinged to my head by some network of tendon n muscle...or whatever it takes to be there...it surely would have fallen off.Now you are wondering why so much description about my jaw...well make allowances for my poor sensibilities i am still in shock from the encounter.
i acquiesced blabbering some garbled shit like "Not Mind"...yeah i know sounds like i was missing the second half of those two words.

anyway we started cruising...and then i finally got up the courage to ask this magical cabbie why he was driving a cab if he was so educated...( a fact i presume purely from the fact that he actually used a few words i use...have been told often that i have a flair for being verbose)...

i know a person who speaks English well need not be educated.i mean its quite commonplace nowadays...
On the same hand a person with that fluency can always find some manner of desk job and not have to drive a cab. Don't misunderstand i'm not denigrating any profession...just try to reason out the motive of this guy.

wait here it goes curious and curiouser...the Moment of truth that took the wind out of my sails...he said he did it because that way he could study people listen to their interacting and meet all sections of society.i dug a little more and find out to my astonishment...that he was writing a book and was driving the taxi as research for his book.

at this moment i kind of resembled one of those huge fish pulled out of the water and looking goggle eyes and glassy...I'm sure you can understand my predicament.

Am stuck in a cab with a cabbie cum budding author.well he sure wasn't looking like Khushwant Singh, so i was safe to assume he hadn't made it to the bestseller list just yet.Turns out he was a scholar trying to write a paper on psychology and behavior of people in peak traffic hours and their response to adverse stimuli bout Aural & psychological.it kind of flew all above my head. what threw me completely is the fact that he did the exact same thing in different cities across the world --- Paris,Boston,Sydney,the Hague & not to forget the good old London.Mumbai was is current stop and Bangkok was the last in a stretch of 18 months of taxi driving.
i told he should also write a 'taxilogue'........like a hybrid of taxi driving & a travelogue...

He then very gently put me i my place. i apparently was in the outliers of the sample as i didn't behave as the majority and get agitated.I think what he didn't realize i the dim interior of the car was that my left ear was in rhapsody listening to U2.Music does to me what icecream does to children ...enrapture them :)


finally i made it to my destination and as usual i politely asked him how much i owed him and he left me with this parting shot...

"there isn't anything that you owe me...all what we have we owe to the almighty"---a most profound end to an interesting ride.

For the price of Rs 34...a definite steal...







Oh By the way........he wasn't some stuffy old scholar......and i didn't completely embarrass myself by asking him his age.......seemed around mid 30s...

THe Guardian

3:30 am...........some insane crows are crowing in the middle of the night...i just finished reading The Guardian by Nicholas Spark.............the most beautiful story of love beyond the grave........well not really but i feel so because the hero of the story happened to be not some hot looking guy.......but an ungainly slightly clumsy totally adorable Great Dane called Singer...

he died in the end and left a void where my heart should be...sometimes i wonder can anyone love so much???

i guess there must be some people who love crazily like this......too bad its only a few people who get lucky to find them :)

going back to bed and shall dream of goofy dogs sloppily chasing little birds in a garden...


Singer...rhymes with Pepper.......the love of my life and just as heroic.

sometimes i wonder...

Its strange how you meet people and everyone seems to be going through the same phase in life...while staying in different places and age groups...i sometimes feel my life has become all about work and when i look at everyone else they seem to be snowballing through life...why is it that i seem to be stagnating while everyone is cruising??

and then wham! like a bolt from heaven i meet people who are in the same boat...which brings a sense of complacency...i say its not good...got to break free from the sluggish stagnant life......cluttered with routine and mundane things...

and then i ask myself how do i do it........have read numerous help yourself books...which tell you that the way your life goes the way you want it to and is totally governed by your actions and decisions...i guess what they forget to mention is that LACK of action and quick wild wacky DECISION MAKING too are responsible for the way our lives are.........

no i don't want answers to my question...just the relief that comes from voicing them...to no one in particular...acknowledging it...

FREEDOM IS UNCONDITIONAL

Freedom is unconditional........the urge to look beyond the obvious always tempts.......only a few succumb to that temptation ...my friend 'Hector', here serves as a metaphor for the same......

CAGED

CAUGHT UNAWARES........

On the way to Howrah.getting bored on the train.....i spied on these two kids...the little miss muffin..quite caught my attention with her vivacious expressions...:)

LIFE AS A CRAB

I am a 'Cancerian' and have often marveled at, and at times tried to draw similarities between the infernal Crab and me.This time when i went to Kashid i went chasing all over the beach in the hope of capturing one such elusive creature on reel.

I think i must have lost at least 2 kgs running trying to get the best shot.All my fancy zoom and angles were to no avail.These crafty tiny creatures would scuttle away as soon as they heard your footsteps in the vicinity........and even MY imagination balked at trying to approach without legs.......

finally after all the chasing and sideways backwards dancing........(i think salsa might have originated from the humble crab)..i got a shot of one of them.What a shot it was........it was like he sat there posing in the sun for me, flexing his claws like show biceps.......





I sat there looking at him and thinking i'm so like him........elusive at most times but preening and showy when i'm in the mood....MOODS......that's so a part of our complex make-up.But whatever you may say i think crabs are the cutest funniest creatures...all at once shy...swift...softies inside...

Resigned Faces??

finding it very difficult to finish the book...The Other Hand..........it feels like the book has developed a hand of its own and slowly methodically is squeezing my gut in a such a way that all i feel is like a mass of pain....blinding pain like a white hot pincer driven under my nail...

what scares me more is that in such a long time i havent cried like my heart will break and eventhough this book threatens to demolish the dam to those pent up feelings...it never quite strikes with that ferocity...

makes me wonder at times that have i lost the ability to feel totally...to be human and weep like i would die?

if i honestly answer that question id say...I DONT KNOW...

AFTERNOON BLUES

restful lassitude---the view from my room gets better as the days go by......smacks of pure and unadulterated LAZY

Its incredibly unsettling when your choices are wrong...it raises a huge question on your decisions...and although we all say "we dont care what the world thinks about us", we all do care.

i have made some wrong decisions in my time...and as i ruminate on them and look at them objectively i don't see them as a learning experience...the same situation like lightning never strikes in the same place.

my worst decisions have been about people...how can someone whom you thought about in one wa suddenly become a total antithesis of what you thought.i would say now in retrospect ...that i read the person wrong...is that good?
will my decisions always be like this? will i ever be able to see people for what they are?

i guess some of us are just born with it...and foolishly the rest of us believe age and maturity bestows these gifts on us.a clear case of living in a fool's paradise :)

i can only live in hope...and laugh at myself when i stumble...lol

DARK is good!

Some people will argue this world is made up of equal parts darkness and light. Somehow I feel we like creating illusions of light in a world dominated by darkness. My logic follows from a line of thought which states – would we need to emphasize the ‘Light’ so over excessively as we do in our day to day lives if we weren’t petrified of being swallowed up by darkness. I know to most people who have read this post this far this must sound like a whole lot of gibberish.
Maybe it is…but somehow I’ve always noted that periods of pain in my life had made me come alive and take notice of things like never before. In our aseptic, well ordered lives driven by well deliberated goals…we tend to shelve our basic feelings completely if possible. Isn’t it better to not feel than feel only deep heartrending soul shattering pain?
Am reading this book that takes me into a world governed by darkness, each word is dripping with all the emotions we tend to shun like the mark of a weakling…
Pain…trauma…indifference…sheer terror…everything guaranteed to age you in the span of those 378 odd pages.i could cry as I read the book but the magnitude of pain encapsulated in those meager pages is so much that even tears would be mildly insulting. Am just letting it wash over me like a huge waves…never was any good at skimming the surface.
For you interested in celebrating being alive… the book is entitled
THE OTHER HAND by CRIS CLEAVE
And yes I am a Masochist in a way 

NAUTICAL MILES...off Marine drive....9_1_10