Of changing the world and other miss conceptions

Growing old is a good thing. It is like cold steel turning malleable, it is like harsh jagged edges of rocks getting rounded by the consistent onslaught of the seas and the winds. Growing older is about replacing my original beliefs about changing the world with uncomfortable thoughts about my own immortality, my own super stardom. Maybe I am not the only superman walking the earth! Maybe I don't have the kind of time I initially thought I had. Maybe I don't have the credits and bonus points in my kitty to go on fighting monsters and hidden enemies of the world forever.

The years as they pass by lend relevance to what the masters have said before... Maybe some bit of what happens in my life is also because of me. Maybe those who have run away have run away because I am the kind of person who makes them kind of people run away. Maybe those who tag along tag along because there is something in me that glues them to me. I am good for some not good for some.

The rage of youth and the extreme urge to bracket others into good and bad, right and wrong, dumb or bright, poor our rich, educated or illiterate, like me and hence good, unlike me and hence bad etc. is giving way to silent consistent probing about myself.

The years ahead will see me taking on the demons in me more often. I realize that when I hate less...I find that there is more space to love. Love is something that helps make life happier, hatred is like a handheld 3g device, it generates to much heat and drains the batteries lot faster. Love is slower, helps you live longer.

A Life Without You?

The mukri of the mosque next to my house shouts into the microphone everyday morning, calling the faithful to prayers. I see the tabela guy escorting his buffaloes to pasture, and I hear the paper guy delivering my morning paper at the door. Nothing much changes here.

This is the twentieth year of you and I.

Like a River

Does it matter which way it goes? It has to start from somewhere and end some other were. Sometimes it runs on the surface sometimes it flows far underground. It sows dreams on one bank and sorrow on the other. What it takes from one it gives back to the other.

I have a beginning and an end. Between the beginning and this end, what I do is of no consequence to me. What gets done is. Until the time my time runs out, in your banks I will stay.

Memory

I remember the smell of burnt diesel from my teenage rail journeys. I also remember the color of your t-shirt, it was saffron. You had cut your hair small and were wearing a hair band. You had done up your eyebrows and your eyes sparkled and caught the light coming through the windows.

We sat close, you liked it that way. I remember the heady fragrance of your perfume as it mingled with diesel fumes. The world outside was greener then, and there seemed to be to many yellow flowers in the fields. Surprisingly, I remember little of what we spoke. I remember the chug of diesel engines negotiating curves and I remember you and I standing by open doors, counting bogies. You counting the bogies and I counting the seconds you cling on to me, living each moment of togetherness, as if it were eternity.

I love trains. Half my lines have trains in them.

Fling

Out of an eternal slumber I awake
And without an inkling of how my life was about to change
I run into you!
A meandering river from desolate places, I now find myself sinking
Into an ocean of unfathomable depths called you.
It is tumultuous
What you do to me.
And you...
You color me blue.