Fossil ...

Dragonfly on a distant clothesline, against a bright noon sky.

What will a movie actress who is old, grand mother of a few children, and doing only motherly roles now, feel when she sees a very old, black n white movie song of hers in which shes a gigglish teenage girl, and in which her group of friends are teasing her for daydreaming?

Will she be able to 'remember' what she was feeling when doing that thing? or will the video clip be just a fossil, a dangling reference to memory, written onto many times over?

Can we 'remember' or 'recall' exactly what we where 'feeling' at a point well lost in time? Or are the 'feelings' fossilized by layers and layers of new ones dumped over?

Dig up one of your childhood photos and stare at that innocent looking strange being.

Pronoia ...

Porters at the Dalhousie hill station attending to a little dog who broke his leg.

For weeks I haven't looked at the night sky. It's been cloudy, I've been indoors, or I just did not look up. Walking out from home at 7.00 in the night for something, I look up homeward and see, an unexpected delight, among the frail branches of a tree, rising with lots of mist around, an almost full moon.

Its one of the very blue Mondays and the traffic seems to have gotten worse by just the week thats past, stuck among a long line of vehicles I look sideways. The little girl, who used to beat the make-shift drum, they're not performing now, she's sitting by the wall and is weeping. Tears rolling down her cheeks spotted with some red paint. The little boy, much younger than her, who would twist the fur ball on his cap to her drum beats, is looking on. Slowly he walks up to her, he can just reach her forehead, he leans and plants a firm kiss on her forehead and smiles. She looks up, smiling through her tears.

After having dinner, I am walking back home, alone, and through the buzzing night crowd on the sidewalk. It must have rained and the roads are wet, all street dogs curled up and dozing. And as I walk, it surges up my nostrils sending a warm pleasant wave through my head; roasty smell of fresh ground coffee beans. That coffee powder shop, they're not closed yet.

Am standing at the rails of this mall's floor and looking down. A cute, jumpy little girl, with a teddy bear bag on her back, is pulling her dad along to come to the railing. She perches herself on the railing, looks down and shouts, and shouts, but I hear a lot of bells clinging. It seems her mom and grand mom are standing at the railing a floor down and opposite to us. Her mom hears her but is not quite able to place where its coming from, she's looking in every direction, up, down and sideways, with an eager face. The lil girl, she wouldn't give up. Finally, the grand mom spots her and prods the mom to look at her. Mom looks up at her, laughing. The lil girl's eyes sparkle, and she yells, in such pleasure.

I wake up at 2.00 O' clock in the night, startled, from a wild dream ending in a furious machine gun fire. Eyes opened now, I listen - it's raining outside.

I smile.

The Angel's Call ...

Angel with her trumpet, Victoria memorial, Kolkata.

When you take life, melt it, let it drip into cold water, thread the frozen droplets and form a string of thus derived glass beads, what do you see?

Do you see a bead-string of a treacherous, sickening, burdensome ordeal occasionally dotted with glistening glass beads of happiness, splendor and beauty? Or do you see a bead-string of an elevating, beautiful, rising, energetic magnificence occasionally dotted with apathy, sufferings and misery?

No, am not talking about counting the beads to arrive at a conclusion. But rather about the the sense of permanence, or sense of foundation that we attribute to life, abstractly, and often unconsciously.

I kind of sense, though maybe am paranoid, that most of mankind is conditioned , by numerous forces, to believe that life is not so beautiful to begin with, and that yeah, you try hard, you can achieve happiness, but yeah, your base is misery, from which you should try to get out, and of course, we will help you with that.

Take religions - quite strong elements with their mass influence - and most of them evolved to proclaim that you are originally sinners, or that many of the things you would do can be sins, that sins cause the misery that you are in, and to submit to the supreme authority for redemption, for the promised grandeur, and be thankful that you thus got redeemed.

Religions are not the sole, but just some, such conditioners, that create this image of a miserable lot trying hard to achieve splendor, happiness, well-being.

Would there be an orange color day, ever in the horizon? When the world is won over by a philosophy of life that says its beautiful, that misery is not permanence but just aberrant patches, that mankind is not a miserable lot having to try hard to be good.

Berserk ...

Horse on a brass relief.

Sometimes its like a wild horse running amok in a vast ranch, defying the many attempts to rein him in. One rouge, intense, processor hungry thread running berserk in my brain, never relenting, never letting the neurons to relax. It feeds on all the energy that my body can channel into them, and is never quite quenched nonetheless. Not having a thought train of its own, it acts as a hosting artifact for any, hoping from one thought train to another, randomly, as if its sole purpose is to just keep my brain burning.

Do I catch it ever ? I do, and only then I feel, for a few minutes, what being peaceful is. But it takes a lot, and my hold weakens, and it runs loose again.

And I fall into sleep, tired.

The Oracle ....

"I'm sorry son," ... The Oracle told Neo ... "but in your next life, maybe."

light left on the sky ...

Barbed wire against a faded wall.

He hated dusk, and the faint light left on the sky then. He hated it, for it was the only window that split the day, the unreal day that was the mirage of being, like being submersed in water with an air supply tube in your mouth, and the night, the unreal night that was the mirage of getting lost, like floating weightless in an air-tight dark chamber. But the dusk, the twilight was horrifyingly real whichever way he tried to look at it, and he hated it for being so real.

Come, lets argue ... :-)