Deeper down...

I walk back to my room with drooping shoulders after spending eleven and half hours at office doing material estimation like a machine, opening multiple windows in SAP and running half a dozen code searches before ascertaining the availability of little component in a whole huge piping scheme. Life continues mocking me and keeps taking me to the edge every evening while I languish alone in my room with books and magazines opened around me. My eyes refuse to read the newspaper, I truly feel dead, if ever there was any feeling like that.

Even after spending more than 7 hours in the bed under a blanket I am just as tired as I was the previous evening. The fatigue seems to have a cumulative effect on the mind and the body. No effort seems to freshen me up. As I stand under the cold spray for the customary 5 to ten minutes, there is no effect. I just stand there like a corpse propped up with poles. And then I take out a shirt, a pair of trousers and clean socks. As dead as ever I walk off to the mess for a breakfast and finally board someone's car and go to office. I am scared for driving my bike lest I drove it faster than I could control. I have decided to take lifts till I feel more alive again.

Once I am in office, the reticence to talk to people or socialize return. I work as long as I sanely can and then I go insane. The same things go over my head, over and over again. I don't read mails, I don't reply to them, I am just indifferent to people and why shouldn't I be?

Only I am responsible for the mess I am in today and no one can really bring me back to life, therefore where's the point? where's the point in putting up a facade when I am not that good an actor off the stage?

There is no positivity anywhere... there is nothing good happening.

I have started accepting it now, everyday as I walk back to my room with the drooping shoulders, I am dead. truly, dead.

Relapse

Just when you start taking the wind under your wings for granted, one little jolt grounds you with sudden devastation of getting hit by a sledge hammer. Life is fine as long as you are looking at it within a fixed framework of people, job, salary, expertise and skill. The moment something from the outside probes the walls of the fragile comfort zone you had started building around yourself, the discomfort returns.
The feeling that eats you away from within, leaving behind an empty shell, devoid of a soul; a canister empty of its contents. The contents that have been burned away by circumstances, luck, fear and at times, even misplaced trust and thoughtless ambitions. Groping for the good old past and refusing to accept a dim future, you tread your present like a zombie, confounding every second of a life that would better not be there, since its being wasted anyways. When twenty three years of existence gives you only 3 and a half years worth of memories, there’s absolutely nothing to feel great about. Such a life is a failure.
There will come a time when you’ll not be able to get in touch with your peers because they are much more advanced and socially acceptable than the rustic vagabond that you have made yourself.

But then its too late now, isn’t it. There’s no turning back and you can already see life sporting that mocking grin as the sun rises to herald another day you have to live through to make the journey a day shorter, desperately groping for something to remember, a little conversation, something to remember. Something to take to your grave. Because life, as it is being lived, will not last too long.

As good as it gets...

The last time I saw this movie from beginning to end without moving the mouse to the progress bar was at Sujan and Aney’s Flat, in Bangalore on Deepti’s Computer along with Bhargav and Sikandar. That was the last time we buggers spent some time together before being thrown to corners of two different countries.
But as Andy puts it,
“Hope… is a good thing, maybe the best thing” And I am still hoping that the day will come when all of us will sit around a table and see this movie once again.

This time however I viewed it on Shobhith’s computer in a Hostel room along with Shobhith and Patel. But this time the hope line had receded in the back ground, guess I have already put it into my system…. The fact that hope is probably the best thing.
The lines that caught my attention this time were,
“Some birds just cannot be caged, their wings are too bright”
I hope to fly away someday to a better place, a better neighbourhood… to a better life and not become institutionalized as would be the case if I did hang on for too long.

The one movie that everyone should see: Shawshank Redemption, because “Salvation lies within”.

blah!

And then again.... after the fun comes the time of reckoning.
I remember in Class three I had a teacher called Mrs. Gayner who was probably one of the best teachers one could have when he is in third standard. She would let us go and play around and still make sure we never broke those formations we were made to walk around in.
But that is not the point, the subject of this post is something that she had said in the broken hindi with a thick Irish accent,
"Pehle majaa, phir sajaa".
Sometimes things remain with you for eternity, I haven't seen Mrs. Gayner for more than 14 years now, but everytime I think how bad I feel now that I have to work so much after those carefree days in College, I always come up with that one sentence,
"Pehle Majaa, phir sajaa"!

Honeymoon Travails

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed, questions raised and comments made in the following article are completely my own and should not be interpreted to represent the view of anyone related to me.

1. Why would you, (anyone for that matter) want to go on a Honeymoon with a bus full of other couples who are perfect strangers?

2. What kind of people bark and purr on the first night on honeymoon?

3. How often do honeymooning couples from all over the country, across communities travel in the same bus for honeymoon?

4. How does a Gay Indian man differ from a Gay NRI?

5. How does a Bengali woman drape her saree so that it comes off at every half chance?

6.When do superheroes find superheroes to marry?

7. How do you follow a bus on an imported sports bike without being noticed?

And last question....

8. How do you define a totally mindless comedy?

Your answer lies in the heading... go watch the movie and before you set out for the theatre, please extract your brains and leave it well preserved in the house. Exposing it to so much anomaly can take its toll!

Disappointing silence

The woman is brilliant. That is, she's brilliant considering three things, one, She's from the U.S.A, two, She's a newcomer and this is her first silverscreen appearance and three, she's just a kid!

The storyline is non existent. There is no story, as expected though. The whole film rides on the theme. There's nothing much supporting it. The story of a man falling in love with a girl less than a third of his age is too big a first statement for the director to attach something to it in the form of a well thoughtout story line, proper characterization of the supporting actors or even a thoughtful end to the story. Someone has to tell our man that silence is not a great medicine for all circumstances. The same silence that awed the audience in Sarkar seems overused throughout the movie and even thrust on the actors at certain places. Just like you shouldn't typecast an actor, you shouldn't typecast an art, in this case, the art of using silence to higlight emotions... at times it just doesn't fit.

Jiah Khan impresses alright. But the character is essentially flawed. She plays an estraged kid traumatised by the loss of a father and an extramarital relationship her mother is involved in. The fact that her attraction to Vijay could even be a daughterly inclination has been grossly overlooked to give the movie a 'Lolita' angle. It would hae been a more complete portrayal of the situation had that angle been explored in a couple of scenes.

The character of the wife and her brother looked really stiff. Except for the one places where she loses her cool, Vijay's wife is just another suspecting Indian woman who gives up everything for the family and expects the family to give up everything for her, in turn.

And finally, the trauma of a girl when she finds out about her father having an affair with her friend is also underplayed. There could be two reasons for it, either the person playing the role wasn't upto it or the role itself was weakened to highlight 'the other woman'. Eitherways, these are some points which could have been explored more at the expense of the long Nishabdh scenes which were meant for the audience to track the path of Amitabh Bachchan's tears as they roll down his cheek.

There's no point talking about the man himself for he's made a habit of surpassing all his previous performances in every new film he does and whether its weeping for a seperated wife in Baghban or shedding tears for an 18 year older lover in Nishabdh he does it with equal wizardry.

All said and done, Nishabh would have been a great watch had there been a little more shabdh in it.

Saturday

There was no hangover! I slept like a kid till eight in the morning and since the guys hadn't awakened by eight, I had to sleep for another couple of hours before it was time for the "household" to rise and decide to conquer PVR. Yeah, thats exactly what was decided!

We (thats suhel, Arjun and I) decided on a Goan Lunch at Bernardo's (which turned out to be the best lunch I have had in more than six months. The last time happened to be our farewell lunch at Inchara in Bangalore) and go watch Nishabdh and The Last King of Scotland.

By the time we decide to leave the flat, time was already running out. The lunch was ordered in a hurry and gobbled up in 10 minutes flat.

The other two people would agree that we didn't talk too much while having our lunch, especially after making the error of assuming someone else's lunch to be ours and smirking to ourselves when we figured the truth, while that someone else, rather, the two 'someone' elses considered us to be nothing less than hungry hogs.

Nishabdh couldn't live up to expectations and by interval we were sure that we wanted to watch something else to lift our mood before we went in for Forrest Whitaker's magnum opus.

Therefore, the decision to go in for Honeymoon Travels Private Limited was made and the tickets, procured in a jiffy. I was lined up for my first true movie marathon of my life! (Three Shows starting at 3:40, 5:15 and 8:45 respectively!)

Honeymoon travels wasn't too bad a movie as long as you left your brains at home and sat there to enjoy the mindless comedy, but then again, you would need your brains to appreciate the brilliance of Boman Irani and Shabana Azmi. And if you were planning to get into the theatre for another movie called The Last King of Scotland, you had better run home and get your brains, whatever little bit of it you have.

We walked out of PVR at 11 in the night and I can bet that beside the movies, I probably had the greatest variety of flesh I ever had in one day. Starting with hot and sour fish, Goanese style Chicken cooked in coconut paste and spicy pork, moving on to chicken Hotdog at the theatre and ending the day with half a grilled chicken! Thats a lot of flesh and I can say with full conviction that I enjoyed every last bit of it!

One hell of a Saturday!

A Beginning...

The get away seems to be working perfectly. Imagine how the expectations would shoot when a weekend starts with the teacher's scotch whiskey, two perfect strangers who don't remain strangers the first time they talk. Endless chat sessions about Simon and Garfunkel, Floyd and everything under the sun that we have talked about at lengths in college. Sitting with the tall glasses under a star lit Gurgaon sky, for a moment I thought there are too many other things in life which i am either ignoring or am totally ignorant about... lets hope the next 48 hours help me discover at least something that I might be missing.
A rocking start to what promises to be one of those few remarkable weekends that somehow manage to leave a lasting mark on your life.