UnGrowing Up in Reverse Gear

Beginnings...

2007-10-24T20:50:00.000+13:00

She thought of the smell of spices,
The sound of mustard hissing on oil.
Old women gossiping about the youth's vices,
Watching men returning from the day's toil.

Gone was the clear blue sky from her past,
In it's place were the buildings anew.
She looked for shards of her youth among the debris of the blast,
All she came up with was soot and torn clothes a few.

Tiny drops fell on her face,
She looked up to see the gods from heaven shed tears.
Their tears transformed her place,
Even made her forget her own fears.

The smell of wet rain on damp earth and green lawns,
A smell that remained the same from before.
Rain that washed away the blood and spoke of a new dawn,
Made her wish to lift higher and soar.

She would pick up the broken remnants from the past,
And walk towards a whole new dawn, full of life, full of hope.

p.s:- The photos are part of an amazing collection I found @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/joyforever

Laaga Chunari mein Daag

2007-10-21T21:44:00.000+13:00

Humble readers of yours truly!

I watched laaga chunari mein daag and of course "Fallen from Grace" was an inspiration I drew from that movie.

It was a very disturbing movie but the ending came as quite a disappointment. It is not the love for poignant endings in me speaking, just that it was very unrealistic.

So those of you who have watched the movie, let me know how you would have liked the movie to end or if you agree with the ending.

A curious writer,

Waiting for reader comments!

Fallen from Grace

2007-10-21T20:09:00.000+13:00

A little girl played in a garden,
Brown legs peeping from a spotted frock.
She played games of innocence with little men,
Building castles with sand and rock.

A young woman stood at the fence,
All signs of the little girl wrapped in layers of silk.
Her eyes shone with the same innocence,
Even as he tried to capture moments in a click.

She gathered the crumpled sheets around her,
Like broken pieces of her self, they lay.
She shuddered at the reflection in the mirror,
Seeing little of her former self from an older day.

The sari looked radiant as it fell from her shoulders,
There would be a look of envy of every woman's face.
Only she knew that she had lost her precious innocence,
With the fallen sari, she too had fallen from grace!

p.s:- Inspired by the movie Laaga Chunari mein Daag

The Pink Slip

2007-10-19T01:08:00.000+13:00

He saw her from a distance and even this far away she seemed beautiful, basking in the afternoon sun. She looked almost ethereal in these surroundings and conjured up such passions in him that he knew not existed. He longed to get inside her, feel her wetness ,explore places unknown to mankind. The feeling was one of great exhilaration , a feeling of being on top of the world. He longed to take her to the middle of the ocean and watch the sun go down in her presence. He loved to watch the drops of water, much like beads of sweat clinging on to her body, waiting to explode.
He was so close to fulfilling his hunger that he knew not how to wait. There was nothing between them now. All these days seemed much like the dress rehearsal for the show and he was waiting for the curtains to go up and reveal all on the final day of show time.
She was Apsara, the dancing goddess who was to take him to all the places man longs to see, much less set foot. Apsara, his blue boat. He had readied her for the trip he was going to make two months from today and now as she stood proudly , he felt a pride glowing inside of him. She was entirely his and he just needed the money from his next two months of work to set off on his trip, one he had been eyeing and planning ever since he could remember. He was trying to imagine the look of surprise on his boss's face when he reveals his plans, how his eyes would enlarge , first in disbelief and then utter shock. How he would beg and plead him to change his mind. Change his mind, indeed!
He went into his office, humming a fast number and found the office unusually silent. His usually cluttered desk looked pretty neat. Maybe they are paying the cleaners a little extra to clean his desk. He sat at his chair and that was when he noticed it. The little pink slip sitting among all those files staring at him, even mocking him slightly. He picked it up and all he could manage was a smirk.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist- A Review

2007-10-17T01:32:00.000+13:00

A novel I started after I returned from work and finished before I hit the bed. So, what was so compelling about this story that it made me finish the book in one stroke with occasional breaks for cooking dinner and consuming the cooked?
There were a couple of remarkable features about the author's style. I liked his narrative style, speaking to the reader on behalf of the stranger, his neatly etched out details of events in the cafe in Lahore and a gradual transition to a similar event in the larger, more promising city of New York. The open ended finish keeps the reader second guessing almost till the end.
The scenes where the author describes his conflicting feelings towards "his" country and "the other" country have been well brought out.
The love affair between the protagonist and Erica is at best passable, a mere detail that could have been done away with and would have had no difference to the narrative. The author displays a lot of emotion in his descriptions of his feelings towards Erica, but they seem not to leave any imprints on the minds of the reader.
It is indeed a tale of a man caught between two different realms. It is a reflection of what most people have been ranting in the wake of all the recent atrocities: We love our country, no we dont hate Americans, yes we hate American politics Oh yes, we definitely HATE WAR.

Back to Black

2007-10-02T01:30:00.001+13:00

Some things never change!

Lost Childhood

2007-10-02T01:21:00.000+13:00

Bright red ribbons holding neat long pigtails,
Pleated skirt showing bruised knee,
Sitting on the porch awaiting unread mails,
From lands so far, one can’t even see.

Short silky bouncy hair,
Adorning a bright cheery frock,
Writing furiously sitting on a chair,
Shaking legs wrapped in silken sock.

Memories cloud them thoughts,
Of playing games at twilight,
Of enacting plays thick with plots,
Of very many silly fights.

Each hoping against hope hopen,
Of returning to times of eternal childhood,
Hiding and seeking the other in a den,
Laughing in wonderment at times far too good.

As pen strokes fill white paper,
As waiting hands clutch unopened letters,
They each know that childhood is really over,
To reveal times that may be worse, may be better.

Amidst a deluge of emotions and mental turbulence,
They each embark upon the final journey,
Of leaving behind sweet girlhood in all its innocence,
Graduating into women creating their own destiny.

Pretty women entering a man’s world,
So many aspirations, so many hopes,
Revealing tales so far untold,
Scared and shy, yet marching ahead like antelopes!

A whole new dawn

2007-10-02T00:17:00.000+13:00

Living in a country with quite a record for volcanic activity, I feel like a dormant volcano, erupting now and then, only this time I hope it lasts longer than 6 posts.
You know that you have strayed from writing for long enough when you can't remember your login id and/or password. You are almost tempted to start creating a whole new page, only you have run out of ideas for titles and know you have picked up the two backgrounds that you like the best and html is not really your forte! Also your typing speed has reduced and typos dramatically increased. It also shows that you have not been fooling around with MS Word a whole lot at work. Yippee, you actually have some work to do @ work! Thankfully google comes to your rescue and you are back at the page you left many months back.
A friend of mine even began to believe that I have strayed from writing because this country of cow's milk and sheep's fur is alien to technology remotely resembling internet, that vehicles are powered by wind mills in this country and a man's favored activity is farming and a woman's his wife.
Luckily for me that is not so! I did sight a wind mill today though, and it would have put any of those spinners of the cricket era to shame.
I am reading Woody Allen so I know there is going to be lot of material to write about....umm..not exactly for now. Maybe for the next post.

Loved one duly acknowledged

2007-01-21T10:05:00.000+13:00

The night is drawing to a close and soon enough the hustle bustle of the morning would begin. I have a few more hours of quietude left before the nocturnal bird in me starts to respond to nature's demands of somnia. It is not quite the hour to start off on a book. The mind is a little too slow to pay attention to movie details either. Google seems to be the best alternative thus far, considering the loved one is attending a business conference.
Then at random I type the loved one's name and bingo appears a few promising links. The first one lands in a page which cannot be found and the second hands me out a complex pdf document. None of the terms make any sense. They seem like terms that might have made an entry in any engineer's course books, and self having broken all ties with the degree she acquired, cannot even feign comprehension. The loved one and a couple of his friends, about whom I can write a neat biography, made their appearance in the acknowledgements section. The rest of the pdf was of course abandoned, the excuse being one can't delude sleep a whole lot!

Caught on the net

2007-01-21T09:44:00.000+13:00

She spent the day well, different from her usual unkempt hair, thick glasses, glued to the laptop self. It was Saturday Night Fever, not that movie though a couple of others happened. But before she starts off on her well crafted opinions about the movies, maybe I should pitch in about a significant other event.
A dear friend of mine, with a name so unusual and quite bong if I may say so, was ducking behind folds of anonymity and proclaimed how one would not get to her blog. A mischievous grin was playing on her lips as though she were egging us to do quite the contrary and find her. And find her I did and a little too easily if I may add. It is definitely a great feeling to sneak in on some one's semi private blog and tress pass into uncharted territory. Then you realise that you have been given a more than fair share of presence in her blog and that only makes you wonder how private and secret your life can really get.
The other blog I came across was that of Shekar Kapur's, a movie maker and astrophysicist. I hope he makes a better professor (teaching astrophysics to wannabe geeks is really not that bad a profession) than he does a director.

Snip Snap! Snip Snap!

2007-01-19T04:03:00.000+13:00

Have you ever felt like a 26 year old woman feeling like a teenager all over again? Well, I have and more often as the days go by! This is not a recant of falling hopelessly in love but one of those crazily girlie things that umm well... girls do and do quite often. So maybe you men may wanna stay away from this especially if you have been subjected to more than your fair share of being caught in truly terribly girlie company.
A lovely pair of scissors sat gleaming on the center table, one of those places it most definitely should not be, but where it often sneaks and shows up and just remains till a screaming mom decides to return it to its rightful place. In fact she strongly believes that the scissors holder is jinxed. It never manages to hold the pair of scissors. Gosh, why I am digressing so much? Anyways this time my mom didn't bother with the pair of scissors and my feminine hands minus the feminine nails picked then up and somehow I was taken in by this compulsive urge to put it to some use. No, really I am not cooking it up. My hands almost itched to do something with them and I had to quickly find an object on which I could try out my newly aquired tailoring skills. Whoever says tailoring is always about stitching things up? There I saw a pair of old jeans. Not that the jeans were old just that I had bought it at that phase of life where I had been on an increasing pound spree. So that simply meant another pair of jeans had to be closetted. Soon my hands went working their way on the jeans and trrrr.. there went off a part of the legs, of the jeans I mean. Have I told you my latest ideas about legs? Legs are meant to be revealed, at least a part of them and especially if they belong to the fairer sex ;).
Anyways now I have another pair of capris and a totally aghast dad. A man of the good old victorian days who cannot quite fathom how one can buy clothes and then cut them. In fact right now he is trying to come up with some scheme as to what to do with the remaining pieces of the erstwhile jeany legs. So any ideas in this direction will most definitely be appreciated by him.

Tete-a-tete in the wilderness

2007-01-17T11:56:00.000+13:00

All the jungle's a playground and all animals mere players

Suzy the cute rabbit is walking faster than her tiny legs can carry her. She has been this way the last few weeks. It is after all the Grand Wedding in the Jungle and she is the soon to be starlet. All the treading and the abstinence has yielded fabulous results. The chic look is in as she is all set for the Grand day. But there are still so many of those little details to be gathered and the wise Ms Gif, ahem Mrs is all too busy going on wild wild chases.
And so Suzy decided to catch the Mrs and the other Ms buried in books long forgotten, in the wilderness. The Mrs didn't look too different from the old days and so was the case with the Ms except a few pounds here and there and pretty much everywhere. So a date was set for the Hen Party except there was no party, just loud talking and giggling till way into the night. So loud it even drowned the err-oh-gen-ous noises emanating from creatures in the surrounding grasslands. Not that they seemed to mind. Only the Mr seemed to have had an awful night without his cozy nest. The Mrs and the other Ms were wide awake as twin owls and poor Suzy was once again victimised, only this time she was spared what they chose to call music, inscrutable noises emanating from well fed stomachs in the "silence of the night minus noises from neighbouring grasslands".
Then came the time for the Wilderness Shopping Festival where for every purchase made one would get a skirt made of leaves free, this being the official jungle dress. Suzy eyed the skirts greedily dissappointed that they were always a tad longer than she would like. She nevertheless sneaked in a few of those sexy goodies away from prying eyes and into the safety of her cozy nest.
Then came the time to go back to each of their respective nests and despite all that facile conversation, they each had heavy hearts and were contemplating on how soon the tete-a-tete would resume!

Shhh....Overheard!!

2007-01-17T11:07:00.000+13:00

He said "Don't you assume things my dear coz Assumption is the mother of all **** ups! Just delete the "ups" here. So whatever remains, when sanctified from unlawful carnal knowledge to sacrosanct carnal union becomes the elixir of life".

She replied "Poetic licence you call it and I dont mean to snatch that away from you. So here I declare vociferously that what the one uttered the other typed".

1 2 Vrooom!

2007-01-17T10:02:00.000+13:00

She looked carefully at the piece that she had finally created. Every nook and crany was studied. It had to bear no semblance whatsoever to the other one. That was the abandoned child. This was a new beginning. No one must know they were related. They were just 14 months apart. Soon the local tabloids would fill in their gossip columns with all those ramblings. Ideal for an idle afternoon. No, no she must not sound so much like the other one. That was a dark child, this one with it's wheatish complexion looks different, very different. Yes! That was it! No one would ever know. The truth buried forever in those lost pages.
The scribe starts the journey now, afresh, zipping past memories, odes, sweet nothings, slowly savouring older times, learning to become a child all over again. And so it all begins..............

p.s:- The scribe returns bearing a New Face, erstwhile Ideal Ramblings abandoned!