Where do I hide?

Ah! The dull days devoid of death
Ah! The mute mumbles of masculinity
Ah! The floral fragrance of femininity
Oh Love! What smiles you feign!

Ah! The tremble of tough truth
Ah! The fumble of flustered fat
Ah! The chastity of charmed cheeks
Oh Love! What lies you sing!

Ah! The fickle face of friendship
Ah! The loss of lilting laughs
Ah! The shambles of shine and shame
Oh Love! What illusions you weave!

Ah! My mind! Master of mirages!
Ah! The veins with vicious voices
Ah! The echoes of empty eyes
Oh Love! Where do I turn when you hide?

Ah Friend! You smile, you smirk
At my empty eyes, dull days, charmless cheeks
Ah Friend! You choose to bury me
You blur away my shadows even,
I am a dull, unscrubbed cooking pot.

Ek Villain-A Movie Review

Ek Villain is not a good movie. That's the best thing I can say about it. All that I could see through the pretense of acting, story line, script, dialogue, animated peacocks and butterflies was the stereotype of women.
All the women who have any screen space at all in the movie, are well crafted, deep characters.
AWESOME WOMAN NUMBER 1: Shraddha Kapoor. I don't even remember her name in the movie. She is the bubbly, lively Bollywood heroine who breathes beauty and hope into the the dark, black life of our violent villain, Guru.
AWESOME WOMAN NUMBER 2: Riteish Deshmukh's wife, Sulo. This woman is happy with her husband only when he gifts her shit. The other times, when she's not getting gifts, she curses her fate that forced her marriage with such a loser and pushes him out of different places-an auto and their house.
AWESOME WOMAN NUMBER 3: The item girl.
The whole premise of the love story is full of crap. Shraddha Kapoor sees a jailed guy being whipped by the cops. Siddharth Malhotra doesn't even attempt to pull his face into a mild expression of discomfort. His "grunts of pain" come off looking like controlled snorts of laughter. After watching the prisoner being beaten up, our lovely, bright heroine immediately proceeds to stalk him. Then they fall in love. Nice. Smooth. There is something very attractive about killers and gangsters. Sigh! They're so hot!! OMG!!!
Then a whole load of crap follows, suddenly with an item number in the middle that really made no sense. Oh and what's Kamaal R Khan doing in Indian movies? He is by far the most irritating guy in the entire movie. And by irritating I mean that I wanted to do him everything that the Gang does to Frank in the episode A Very Sunny Christmas.

So, in conclusion, don't watch Ek Villain. At all. Ever. Run away from it. Run fast and Run far.

What is a city?

City life, City lights, City lies. Oh breathe in that air, that air that swirls around happy bodies, tingling with the mystery of freedom.
The freedom that comes with individuality brings with it stings of love and loss. A city allows the luxury of falling in love. It is not a luxury, but does the city let that secret away?

 The loss that its smoke forces free thought into, erases all memory of all that once seemed happy. Of all that once reminded the mind of colour. Of all the sounds that were once recognized as a song. The senses begin to perceive jarring noises-distant and disconnected, when did the low hums of cars screech into harsh hammers of hard thuds?

The colours become flashes of piercing light, that blind the eyes. The eyes cannot see in the dark.

Piercing light becomes the only day. The day is dull, the skies as grey as dull thought. The white day morphs into brownness. The eyes cannot understand the light of the sun-it does not seem to disappear. Just like the night.

What does it mean, really, to be surrounded by smoke, stench and stares? Does the city then offer individualism? Of what use, then, is the rainbow of cosmopolitanism? Words, words. No words turn the heads the other away. Eyes continue to trap shivering bodies into a rattling cage. Wordless fear. Wordless lust. Wordless rage. Words, words.
Turn away, but they won't. The languages do not understand the shapes that hang lazily in the sky.

Desperation forces the turn. What do the eyes see? Strangers, with a lie burning in the eyes. A lie that the mind does not comprehend, but perceives. A false identity. A false admission of the lie. A glaze of anonymity.
Holes of black mud tear at the muddy road. The feet dance in the lines drawn by a plan. What is the plan then? Where do the feet lead the wandering mind?

Where does the city lead to?

What are you searching for?

Stillness

I stand on the waves of moving water,
the mud drags past my skin, moving the ground beneath my feet.
The rocks have stayed still,
waiting for the water to return,
for the waves, gushing forward like a warm embrace.
The sea waits with outstretched arms, for the sun
to slowly sink into a deep sleep
Eyes strain towards the sky to watch the dance
of fire on water
The ice cream man watches the child struggle with
the slippery ice cream, it will fall into the sand,
and he will hover till then, the sea breeze pulling
holes into his dull shirt.
People will return, I think.
We will watch the darkness surround us, I think.
We will laugh over the faded colours of memories, I think.

The ice cream man hovers.

I have waited, they will return.

The ice cream man hovers.

I know they will not return. I wait, I stand still.

The ice cream man hovers.

Do I wait with him?

But now there is darkness, and I can no longer see him.

The openness seems closer now, the sand is slipping away.

I wait.

Just the same Things

I hear all around me, all the time,
screams of torment
songs of pain.

But can not poetry
simply be
statements of facts and not
falling drops of tears?

It is always as the society
needs it to be(even poetry)
Always what it needs to
be able to see
Always what it wants to
be able to perceive.

So please, if you're not
in shape,
stand back,hide, let the pretty
shapes flit past you.
If you're not happy all
the time, flee; for they
will blame you for your troubles,
curse you for your silence.
Oh, so you are lonely
now? It is the warm gift that
people love to share.
Plunge into the icy cool depths
of all things fake, smile
while the shallowness drowns
you. Maybe there will be
some acceptance there.
Happiness too.

So I tried now too, to
state the facts, my facts.
But there are none. Just
tired attempts at finding
poetry.

It has long since slipped away.

A Rainy Day - Part II

I hassled the auto driver into the apartment.
I saw my mother and brother at the entrance, looking around worriedly. I waved and smiled at them, touched by how concerned they were, for my safety. I shielded my head against the rain (what a silly thing to do) as I got out of the auto, rummaging in my bag for my wallet. It was then that my mother pointed out to something behind me. I expected to see a pile of hailstones collected in radiant glory as I turned around.
The Peepal tree had weakly collapsed in a magnificent heap of green on the road, blanketing our white car in a confused tangle of green and brown. I let my breath out in a low gasp.
The tree had been severed cleanly, almost as if in a sharp stroke of fury, near its roots. I noticed a deep gash on it's trunk for the first time. The tree had crashed helplessly on the road, and on our car, bringing down two little decorative palms with it. The car and the fallen palms were wrapped in their entirety.
Ripe fruits still clung to the slim branches, lost symbols of a lost life. I wondered where the bulbuls would perch now. Where the crowd of mynahs would gather to busily chatter. Where the cuckoo would coo coyly from. Where the little birds would flit restlessly now.
I stared out of my window. There was no tree, swaying its lush green reluctantly in a slow rustle, like the sound of a flying flock of birds. There was only the grey sky, staring dully back at me.
I looked down to see the tree that now lay tragic in its majesty. Green leaves, fresh from the rain, spilled around her weakened limbs, giving her pale skin a fading sign of life
Slowly the people gathered around the fallen tree, venturing around to the front to get a better view of the crushed car. They sympathized with my mother, gasped at the right places. Little kids pranced around the green, merrily, proudly, retelling stories of the fall that had jolted them out of their skin.
 Help came and cut the branches one by one. Little by little, tiny specks of white emerged from the varying shades of green. The car stumbled into view, with a cracked windshield, a dent on its head. A ragged, ravaged, rusty, radiant 800.
The car was parked away, with plans of repair work being made. It could easily be driven again, some agreed.
Others stared out of their window, their eyes only finding a memory of dancing green. The wood of the tree was hacked away. Her voice had fallen silent.

A Rainy Day - Part I

The auto swerved dangerously away from rippling pools of brown water. White froth swirled around rainbow colours that stretched thin arms to spread slowly along the road. The auto driver peered restlessly ahead of him, at the endless line of loud sounding vehicles, accelerating to stuttering stops. He turned his vehicle around a truck that suddenly jerked forward.
No, wait. Back up. Let me start earlier. For six months, I couldn't sleep...oh wait..i'm quoting an extra line now (Yes! Finally, I quote Fight Club!). Let me just start earlier.
I trudged along the road wearily, hopefully looking into every auto. The grey skies rumbled thirstily. My fingers absently fiddled with the knot that my earphones had tangled themselves into. Auto drivers shook their heads, aristocratically bored at the sound of my destination. Finally, a nice chap nodded enthusiastically which I took to be a friendly "Hop In!"
So now then, the auto driver stopped to crane his head and glare at the truck driver. His neck didn't oblige that twisted turn, so he muttered angrily and shot off on the road. He sped past cars moving in the opposite direction. It's a, what they might call, a 'clever ploy' that the auto guys use. They use a gap in the divider to get to the other side and drive in the wrong direction at top speed, forcing the passenger to bounce around the torn cushion seats, clinging to the the rusted iron rod for support. I chose to hug my bag and since the wind whipped furiously into the auto to sting my skin mercilessly, my big black bag gave me the much-required illusion of warmth.
The yellow cloth-covering over the auto pulled a little away, and let in water that steadily dripped on my head. The chill spread right to my toes. Why didn't I just shift to the right? Or to the left? Oh right....the wind and the rain would catch me right in the face. Large drops of water flew into the auto and created a little stream at the back of my seat. The smell of drain water mixed with the smell of wet mud. My senses were being numbed by the screaming in my ears, the drops that fell like needles and ugh! the smell...
The auto growled in muffled tones as it zoomed merrily away on the wrong side. Frills of brown water raised up around me as i sped past them. The unstable three-wheeler jumped to the beats of the party song and shivered in the rain.
I smiled happily. The auto guy probably thought i was crazy.