noNexistent nothiNg

dreams of new york

oft late, theres this overpowering urge to move to new york

and yea as cliched as it sounds, i figured this isn't for any cliched reasons at all

especially with the unfeasiblity of even the thought!! the place am right now, the denseness and the unsettled entwined so intricately together and am unravelling them one knot at a time... that yep, even the idea of a simple travel from one city to another sounds unsurmountable... "no, can do!"

and like a flash and bolt from the blue, only its more a nudge, a nagging from the blue... i have this... "move to new york!" and yes, i love united states for what it is... and yes, i have enjoyed all my stops and stay there... but it never did figure into my scheme of things... things one calls life, while what we are exactly doing daily... is it really life? is it really living?

another thing, that keeps me pre-occupied oft late... living! i guess i am... not a 100% yet... but i have begun... i de-wire as soon and as much as possible... i am reading books and watching movies like am on a mission...

and i even went to an extent of a tiny makeover of sorts! i play with my son, i cook(!!!) yep... gourmet dinners at that... !! i make small talks with my neighbors (this definitely is a first with me!) i was almost most anti-social person i personally knew! :) so, thats like a star for me!

so, i need, (see... how it already changed to a need??) to move to new york, for all it has to offer... in terms of culture and expansion of mind and for being on the cusp of mundane and magic... the co-existence of nouveau-art and old-world, the tabloids and the literature as true blue as they come... its mumbai, only better!

and i have no idea, how and when and what should i do to get this ticked off my "to-do"... not that its on "to-do"... i have no idea from adam (or eve or whatever), all i know is i should, i have to... and perhaps i will!

i guess i will! maybe soon.... maybe this is destiny becknoning! ah... am such a chick flick kinda chick!! :) serendipity, y'all!

p.s: i took off the comments because of some stupid trolling and hurtful things flung across my way, for those of you, who come by.... thank you, folks! write to me, if you really wish to talk. for the trolls: this is my space, isnt it? and not put up for your pleasure, so, shut up!

1000 to 0 MPH - M theory - my version

commas and ellipses

and you never finish anything

whats with the un-finished ayway?

nonexistent nothing

the uncertainity of ambiguity

the unsent letters

and thought-riding sentences

i should perhaps fill, bags with pencils and pictures

crayons and broken mirrors

toy cars and balloons

things that are real...

life list

i have been dodging showing up here, things have been tumbling more through the rabbit hole than the looking glass...

for the first time in weeks, i feel i can breathe and then some and something which i have been procrastinating for 1000 years is now done...

this a lucid list, in no particular order... 36 things which i would do before i say "so long and thank you for all the fish!" :)

__________________________________________________________________________________

1. Write and publish a book.

2. Take a road trip across the US in a camper

3. Live in Greece for a year.

4. Learn French.

5. Learn to ballet dance.

6. Grow a garden

7. Build my own dark room/ studio

8. Make a film .

9. Take photographs daily for a year.

10. Write regularly for a magazine/newspaper.

11. Buy a potters wheel & kiln and throw pots in the garage.

12. Teach literature.

13. Own a farm house/barn in a village to sneak away to.

14. Meditate.

15. Learn archery & join a archery club.

16. Take a trip to South America.

17. Travel somewhere every year.

18. Grow a rose garden.

19. See the northern lights.

20. Backpack across Europe with my son

21. Go camping every summer.

22. See the election of Pope in Vatican.

23. Visit Prague

24. Renovate the apartment completely.

25. Have a Cozy Family room.

26. Have a library at home

27. Own books and kitsch shop.

28. Adopt a baby girl

29. Learn to drive

30. Learn to bake.

31. Make small investments for Nirvaan

32. Spend a winter in Tibet meditating.

33. See a Le Reve performance in Wynn Resort

34. Take the entire family out for vacation

35. Attend Venice film festival

36. Work in New York for McKinsey

__________________________________________________________________________________

grateful* touche'

heaven does conjure up little something to make you happy,
the trick is to relish the fortune while lapping up the cookie,
the trick is to have faith...

eros, july 2008

p.s: *nirvaan runs up and smack! his-signature kissi wissi :D

threading in the music

Today, I am happy and relaxed. And, yes I still have tons to do at work. I think that’s the good thing. Put me under pressure, I glide. Put me under strain, I balk. And, when it comes to your only child, your first time parenting, even a little looks monstrous and some of these monstrosities slowly suck the life out of you!

He is better today and is his happy devil self again!

The sky is gray except for where the clouds are pulled thin, and then the sun shines through with milky light. Out my window birds arrive: chickadees, pigeons, house sparrows, crows. The alight among the iron railings of the terrace, and preen. Beautiful! Nirvaan gets happy, his four toothed grin radiating glee at them.

This is as close as I’ve come this week, to being outdoors: I even missed being at the School Reunion, the one which I have been looking forward to for months!! So, how do you do this? How do you compartmentalize you heart? I missed being with this bunch, like a hell lot! But, am happy I didn’t go, and stayed home with my son! Does being a woman, makes this easier? I guess.

Watching from my window as the world turns to winter outside. And I can hardly believe it: winter, just like that. The days darker and darker still. Inside, I’m at my desk; an itemized to-do list hanging on the wall in front of me: 104 projects of varying degrees of critical importance to be accomplished.

And it’s intense. That’s for certain. Especially with an infant underfoot!

This not the old jet-set, living of suitcase but at home and work, sedentary yet running, overflowing minutes. I love every single minute of the intensity and the exponential learning that takes place every day as the lens through which I’m looking widens, and then widens again. Its emergent! I love that the word emergent implies that the subject is always in process. Life in process, in evolution!

So right now, on the very smallest scale it comes down to this: to being in the moment, and applying it as broadly and flexibly as possible to all the moments those extend beyond it. It means going into the day expecting surprise; and about being present in the process when things converge—when news feeds, SoWs, code, images, ideas, systems and dirty dishes collide to create a small tear in the present through which innovation pours, like the milky light spilling through the clouds even now.

one monsoon evening from my terrace

"he is just not THAT into you!"

picture credit: Amit Ghosal

Have you ever noticed how your thoughts almost always follow the same patterns, the same path? Even if it’s out of the box for the world, it becomes run of the mill for you. And, the moment something different strikes you, you are either full of wonder or want to dump it, out right!

I miss, the days when the world was a big beautiful world and we had questions for everything. We were learning. We were growing. When did we stop? Why? Do I know and understand everything that needs to be known and understood?

Words collect and gush and then collect again, like little rain puddles. Dirty and beautiful! Then words that snapshot the evening skies and starry midnights, dewy mornings and birds on wire; the words that are prim and pretty! How about those words that gathers like cirrus clouds and wrench the fluttering heart and daggers in your marrow about heart aches and arguments and hurt and bouncing back.

Why have we become so wordy? Where is the simplicity of silence? Why do we devise methods of hiding? From our own selves? Why are we a afraid as a race?

In past week or so, I have been hearing and seeing a lot about cheating-on-your-partner thing. From the web to the Sunday newspaper supplements, looks like media is re-hashing the age old, beaten to death and yet alive issue.

WHY DO PEOPLE CHEAT? Should this be the question at all?

I believe you can never EVER force loyalty and commitment. If you bind them in words and social structure and legal technicalities etc; if they wish to cheat, if they FEEL a need to Cheat, if they according to them are either unhappy or unsatisfied or do not think enough of the commitment, they would cheat in their MINDS. Can you stop THAT?

Can you place a thought-catcher and use it in a court to settle scores? Why even attempt at settling scores? Wouldn’t the self dignity call for walking away from an uncomfortable situation? If someone did not think enough of you before cheating, has the gumption to either lie or accept. Don’t you think, you must not have been important enough? Then, why the fight? To assert the importance? How is money (in case of legal marriages) a reprisal enough of the thoughtless gesture? Though, it might take care of you (in case you are a dependent spouse and that’s why the law)

We don’t own people. EVEN the blood ties! We as a race should stop asserting our ownership on things. On people! Hasn’t helped! Doesn’t help! Will NOT.

Giving up things is easier, people is not. And, I say; as long as you are together, make it lovely. The moment you feel you might separate, let them go! After all, if one of you was to die, you wouldn’t do anything, right? BUT the ego says, why the other over me? It is never over you! It’s a new thing ONLY; it’s NEVER a new thing!

I am trying to let go of all sense of ownership. It’s tough. But, am trying!

handful of sunset

picture: magarpatta sunset from tower 1 wing B

chapel around this feeble heart, buried in the wilderness, it stands mute testimony to time, to space, to cold; misfit verses, rhymeless meanings; clothed in absence... poetry happens, when time melts and conscious hovers, kissing books in the dark

energy-sap

So I fell ill and tried sleeping it off. But I have a year old at home, and this was not the type, I have been waiting for, to catch me unawares; but the “transference-illness”; my son wasn’t feeling well and so… !

I tried sleeping it off but all I managed was perpetually fractured REM sleep. And, I carry on full length dramatized conversations and its more than lucid dreaming. It’s as if my conscious hops on a ledge and begins weaving a yarn, replete with complex characters and emotions. Was “Inception” fact-based after all?

The trees are all shedding, quivering in the autumn air, a hint of chill already in the evening air. Harbinger of cold months heading our way. A year of being a mom, a year of uncertainty – such that I have never known, a year of tumultuous emotional fare, on a perpetual roller coaster of hormones and brain chemistry.

I long to reconnect with my own narrative; the narrative that was solely me! And somehow, that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. The movie has been shelved. The prints half done.

I dream of far off places, full of wanderlust. My reverie includes taking my baby along, showing him this beautiful planet and seeing things his way. Learning together, growing together. Living full!

Instead I have been on a task tackling spree one after another and by the time, I lie down to let sleep rejuvenate me for those next set of tasks, I am bone-tired but sleep doesn’t come sweetly. Doesn’t take me over, like its meant to and this goes one.

But, in all the chaos and the incoherency, I am thankful. Thankful for my son! For my family!

A friend said… “be thankful, it could have been worse!”

picture credit: Niemamowy

ONE

You are one today!

We are sick, you and I, still so much a part of each other, down with stuffed cold, which makes your brain goes hollow!

A year just waved a goodbye and its perhaps been the most eventful year of my entire 29 years on the planet! Watching you grow from a milk like divine-ness to wet-small, big eyed to the little devil you are turning into; has been most satisfying!

You become a mother, your DNA mutates. Your soul literally jumps out and is now trying to maneuver the walker like a bike! (guy, already!!)

And, every time i think of the moment I gave birth, there's this transcendental quality to it, beyond numbness and beyond pain, sort of surreal... and i slowly blink, bam, you are ONE!

Watching you everyday for first 90 days where it looked like a sinking investment... you keep working and loving and all you get back is loads of dirty laundry... to next 9 months, where every week was like a milestone, now you look at me, now you smile, now you hold your head and curl your fingers, now you giggle and hey, thats the first tooth and excuse me, i can talk "mummmma"

As a confession: this last year, i almost always tethered on the cusp of black-hole depression, they have a fancy name for it - postpartum, but i belief its just the mind's rebellion against the lost energy synch! You, saved me!

And, on this day as a pledge to you, who makes me strive towards the best in me: You can count on me... like you do now, always! i do not promise to give you the best of everything out there... i could try, but i do not promise! what i do know, in my very marrow... is that i would never love any other soul as much as i love you!

EVER!

your presence has taught me a new way to living. patience and a new take on things... NOW is what matters!

you are intense and you are gleeful, already we see you staring into space, lost in your thoughts and the very next moment, the perfect infant crankiness... contradiction of sorts! you are cute and you are a rascal, you want to be picked up all the time, sometimes and other times, you want to be left alone. you are this and you are that... above all, you are beautiful!

a very happy birthday, darling!

love,

mumma!

the golden hour

picture credit : Prache Khade

there was a time, the web was my dwelling. those were the times, when we at Avaya R&D were really pushing on products which would help make everyone, "always-On" like literally all the effing time...Unified Communication, the industry calls it!

in walked facebook, twitter and the likes and the communication took another leap! ha, you guys... hello!! i was always here, just wired differently.

when i began this blog (and this baby here has seen avatars like indian mythology at its best!) i did not know anyone in real life, who had a blog and i felt pretty unsure and awesome and then unsure again!! but, i wrote, i wrote because, i subsist on words... i wrote to understand myself and everything around me... i wrote to satiate that insatiable... and it did wonders... twice i almost killed this space (yeah pretty anti-physics that ways... or anti-daily-physics to be precise) and lost some stuff which i logged here.. my dashboard says 180 posts and i know, i lost some 100 more...! i read more than i write and i publish way less then i actually end up scribbling. it did wonders, because in those heady affair beginning days, when theres no response to all your muted passion leashed unto your journal and then suddenly you see things happening and that dear diary bit begins to feel like prayers or self-fulfilling prophecy.... i made friends!! some real kick-ass folks, am proud to call friends... the comments rocketed and dwindled, some kept in touch and some were lots in the ebb of chip-time and digital space... but the presence and the support, the undying belief and never-ending encouragement was truly AWESOME!

since then, the face of personal blogging and social networking has mutated into this big giant of a thing! imagine, if either terminator or matrix were ever to be true!! we would be SCREWED! LIKE ROYALLY!

love as much as i do, this space here... i look up from my sleek fancy laptop and mind gets caught with the quaint splendor of late afternoon autumn light. things basked in golden tint, the distant hills, the skyline and the clear blue sky. a symphony for the senses.

dude, i really don’t wanna miss all this! coming from a generation which will always be on cusp of when things were still Eastman color and an era which did a double-take on mobile communication… I would always nurse this nostalgia for slow and sweet, big family gatherings, train journeys, poetry recitals and letter writings.

Am a self confessed geek, I mean, nerd to the core… I knew my unix shell script even before I was out of college, hacking was the professional mecca, and not your astlavista.com styled hacking, a true blue unix/assembly version.

And, yet I say… we need to get off the addiction… and as a personal bit, I get off the grid on weekends. No blogging, no tweets, no fB.. sometimes not even cellphones! Pretty green, eh?

The fact that I am a full-time mommy to a one year old might have something to do with it! But, all the same… aren’t babies blessings? I know… I named mine just that! :)

moonsick

incessant rains in all sorts of combinatorial falls, all over the place. the universe suddenly feels a damp place, from duotone of green and grey, all goes monochrome grey... skyline, clouds. all.

my ideas, my thoughts, me ... a haphazard mosaic barely stitched together. the threads all visible.

summer is galloping by. Full tilt. Allready the shadows are longer

It has been stormy the past few days: dark skies, cold winds, rain at the slightest suggestion...

the warmth of a fireplace - as distant a dream as moon.

with dreams of perfect pointe' poise and cracks in the universe, am moonsick!

July the 13th - an uneventfully good day!

I’m almost uncertain about how to face this new day and the subsequent ones without that uncertainty hanging over my head. A hello lot of times of uncertainty, and finally, the beginning of really effing awesome new things.

Thank you universe.

the only god is one who can dance - nietzsche

The first time I danced to be alone with my fierce pummelling thoughts, the anxiety in my chest, and the tears slick on my cheeks. The first time I danced with my hair down, floating behind me like a mane. I danced until my mind narrowed to only this: to my feet flirting with the ground and air, making slow sensual love to the music. Reaching the almost instant giddy feeling of freedom that bloomed in my ribcage as I moved faster on those slow gliding moves until I could hear my heart in my ears, surrounded by heat of the momentum and the liquid warble of warm adrenaline!

Picture Credit

CpRyt@NeerS

MDMX ... then maybe not!

Squares and rectangles with light pouring in, raw and bright, the way that new monsoon light does. I’ve been noticing the way windows frame a view, just so.

Today the afternoon light splashes through glass. It makes the walls yellower and my mood softer, even without enough sleep. Where I am sitting I can see the hills from the window, and the concrete skyline. And, this view could turn two ways: either the concrete takes over like a blanket of lichen over a pond; or an Armageddon of sorts and when the dust settles and the first rain hits again, world goes green! I vote for latter!

We are always looking through windows, always seeing a view.

I spend the days indoors, looking out of windows and feeling listless and limited by the smallness of the being and the wants. I’d spent the day inadvertently waiting for something to happen, waiting for the view to change, for something sweet, for delight to find me here in this house were the walls sometimes feel very close and the rooms very small.

I had every intention of spending the rest of the afternoon pacing in the dark rooms of my mind analyzing whatever it was I had missed or done wrong with life, so far, curtains drawn.

Disappointment, if it could have a taste, would be the taste you get at the back of your throat when you jump into a pool, expecting the splash and the plunge, but forgetting to hold your nose. Or it would taste like burnt toast; or getting the popcorn flavored jellybean instead of the lemon one when you pick a yellow one out of the bag. Whatever its taste, disappointment was there on my tongue with the many bitter words I don’t say and swallow instead.

Under the imaginary table in my head I was kicking myself for doing it again: for expecting something, unnamed and remarkable at the end of a day.

Do you ever do this? Expect the world, when the world is already right here, and you are already in it?

I could feel tears at the back of my eyes. They spring up now, often and unbidden, a symptom of the tiredness that has begun to inhabit my body, making the skin under my eyes transparent and dark, and my heart quick to ache.

But, after much clattering of plates and flatware I realized that the only thing I could change was my view. I desperately needed to get out of the house. Right then. Right that minute when the sun was still high and the breeze would bring the scent of warm mud.

As I hiked I found the answers, scattered like last year’s fallen leaves. I realized that what happens with us is something that must happen to many people.

Without intending, it’s easy to become absent, distracted, distant, disheartened. And so there we are. There I am.

I realized I was not mad at all, I found, when I opened and closed the many crammed drawers of my heart.

Instead all I found was a kind of loneliness. A hunger. Shit. It’s so easy to let it slip. You blink, you are caught imperceptibly into life, the clock’s hands go round and round, and zip, it’s gone.

Along the way I noticed how a part of my body would ache, or tighten or complain, and I’d follow the complaint, the ache, the tightness through. I’d listen to it, run into it, and then miraculously it would disappear, and I’d be further down the road with a completely different outlook.

CpRyt@NeerS

Rekha Mausi!

There is an art to waiting, to being present in uncertainty when moments are only whatever it is that they are until the next moments arrive.

+++

Today writing terrifies me and saddens me. It terrifies me because of the way these stories last, the way we tell ourselves stories in order to be who we are, to become who we are becoming. It makes me ache, to see the small uncertain snapshot of myself as I am right: here at the dining room table, overlooking the city skyline and the sky above it overcast; there: as a schoolgirl in starched red and white and a ponytail.

Am walking back to the junior section to pick my sister to go home! It’s dismissal time and the entire campus has that hubbub of “going home” urgency about it. I reach in front of her classroom and bump into this high-school teacher.”Oh, you’ve come to pick up Soma? You know, you should probably take care of her more. She is so fragile!” This was the time, when mom had been transferred to a different city and it sorta had taken a toll on the youngest of us.

I was surprised, floored, overwhelmed. A junior high student, not only gets addressed by senior school teacher, she also knows both of us by names. And, is actually concerned!!

That was Rekha Mausi (Aunty), her niece, was one of the closest classmates forever. So, she was Rekha Mausi to all of us!

I just spoke to her the other day and didn’t want to know the graphic details of her illness.

I knew, we knew! The end was perhaps here. Perhaps merciful! Who knows, who decides! All of us have a deadline to meet!

But, I wanted her to be the same smart, chic, lotsa panache; the silk/chiffon sarees, the unpleated pallu, big bindi and a walk which could show those FTV folks a thing or two; a diva to all our impressionable minds. A role model of grit and fashion!. A combination so awesome! And, the gorgeousness she was. Fearless and a fantastic teacher!

A few generations of us, looked up to her for inspiration, compassion, courage and a certain elegance that defined her!

She left us.

To rock those angels with her belly laughs and giving them a lesson or two on virtues of being a girl, in that husky voice of hers!

“Rekha Aunty, you were always my hero! And, am glad I did tell you this on farewell! Am glad to have been your student and to have been enriched by you!”

Copyright@Neerja Yadav

pristine, he says... and i wonder

picture credit: Sangeeth Sivan

Sangeeth has this beautiful connect with his gear! Almost like a symphony of light and dark..

This life. This aching, beautiful life. What do you want to remember about yours today? What moments do you want to preserve in the amber resin of words?

I sit on the bed in the dark and try to make a circle with words. I want to climb inside the circle and be taken somewhere else, but my fingers fumble with the keys. The words lurch. The spaces between are too large. The crying seeps in.

There are days when I feel like cloudy water in a glass. Days when I feel spilled and lonely, and the color of the sky and the color of the day is like cement, perpetual and repeated as far as the eye can see and all I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep or die...

Amongst the zillion "what ifs" life plaques at you; the scariest is the one which says "what if you eff this beauty up?? " for you can, you know... its actually surprisingly easy!

... to be continued!

CpRyt@NeerS

why, the woods are haunted...

As the sky grows dark, the twilight feels soft like satin, and spirituous like wine.

Fireflies come out, and Venus too, above us blinking from among the pink and pale indigo of heaven. So far up, she twirls, casts off the sun’s bright light, and sends it back to us like a love letter; a secret message. It’s nearly dark and maybe we all make wishes looking up. We see fading contrails; the sky turning to night.

She walked on, walking in a mystical exaltation.

Came to a place where the gurgling water crossed the road in a glittering shallow. She stopped, leaning over to listen to the water, jewel flashes of diamonds and sapphire. With mist, woods had taken on that virginal purity, moon light had taken to flirting ; tickling the running water here and fanning the leaves there, even playing with her hair and those long curved lashes.

She moved on, to a place where an ancient and a narrow wooden bridge bent over the roaring water. The water was particularly fierce here and bending over the bent bridge was a tree, bent and laden with willows both weeping and unsung.

contd...

beyond

She dreams in vignettes
            of black and white,
where mists of reality intertwine

     And he offers a toast
to exiled hopes,
                A glass raised towards
                        tomorrow’s wish

To soar over illusion’s enticement,
Not to settle in the quagmire of what was,
To be cradled instead, in unequivocal hope
                      that love still awaits her heart

             But her past rolls by
    in a silent parade
                A scrolling pronouncement
                         of things that were and could be,

      Sad romances where truth’s
               eventualities portray
    in shadowed recollections
        now smudged by her tears

    And as tears caress the lashes,
                 his song stirs an ache inside
                     of a kiss, of a sigh,

      She knows why…
              she knows how...
        and all she does,
           covets the flame at the end of tunnel...

there is light beyond this, am sure, i very much am!

CpRyt@NeerS

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