Today I went back in time.

To an old haunt.

To an old friend.

To another time.

To a restaurant.

To a conversation in a car, outside that same restaurant.

To a moment.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, I heard a dead Parsi guy say:


"Oh how I want to be free, baby.
Oh, how I want to be free."

Sometimes I wish I were her.

Sometimes I wish I were her.

Sometimes I wish I were here.

Sometimes I wish I were here.

Sometimes I wish I were free.

Sometimes I wish I were me.


"All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow."
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you, and you don't belong to me."

Fast cars. Loud music. Alcohol.

Cliches are so much fun.


"You gotta keep pushin' for the fortune and fame.
You know it's, it's all a gamble when it's just a game."

Stairway To Heaven.
Mama I'm Coming Home.
Livin' On A Prayer.
Keep The Faith.
Layla.
Free Fallin'.
Fast Car.
Cocaine.

Pictures capture moments. Songs, songs are different. They capture memories.


"... just memories of a different life.
Some that made us laugh, some that made us cry..."

I have just discovered that my family were the undisputed lords and owners of over 11,000 acres of land. Each of those acres is conservatively valued at 5 lakhs today. To speed your number-crunching up, that's 550 crores, or $ 140 million. And they drank it all away.

It's enough to drive a person to drink.


"Don't forget this fact, you can't get it back; cocaine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; cocaine."

Of all the oxymorons in today's lexicon, and there are many, from thunderous silence to good shit, nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, is quite so disgusting and evil as

Veggie Delite®

Welcome to the new century.

I feel like punching something very hard. It's a great stress-relief mechanism, to shower gratuitous physical violence upon an object or a person. I wish to indulge myself in it.

Actually, maybe I should have some showered on me. Get beaten. To a bloody pulp. Like half-annihilated and almost dead. The sort of violence where the simplest thoughts and actions, such as BREATHE, BLINK, become tasks of great importance and skill. Where you don't so much begin to wish that it were over, because you're beyond pain, but you wish you could figure out what's actually going on. Beaten senseless. So that I look something like


Except with hair. I have nice hair. I'm half Mallu, you know.

I used to know a girl who would cut herself with a blade. She did it because physical pain was preferable to the other kind.

I'm beginning to understand the concept of Fight Club. Maybe we can start one. Disco Pig's Club of Fun Times. No punching on the nose, I'm all sneezy.

This is exactly the sort of behaviour that leads to schizophrenia and DID/MPD.

Remember the first rule?


"Ol' Miss Lucy's dead an' gone,
Left me here to weep and moan."

The last bubble. It's close to bursting. Anytime now.

Coincidentally, this is my 100th post. Very undramatic.

I've noticed that The Beatles' songs contain a lot of wisdom. You have to listen hard, but it's there.

Sometimes I feel like:

"...been torn apart.
Now he's a court jester
With a broken heart.
He said, 'Turn me around
And take me back to the start.
I must be losing my mind.'"

I spend money like a fool. All the alcohol, all the food, and I keep buying ridiculously expensive stuff for cars that I don't own and rarely drive.

But I read this today. And this one comparison of salaries struck me.

Glen Heroy, 45
Hospital clown
New York, N.Y.
$28,000

John Paulson, 52
Hedge-fund manager
New York, N.Y.$
$ 3.5 billion

Maybe I'd rather be Glen.

"Bring Sally up,
I bring Sally down..."

Random memory, in the misremembered and misquoted words of a fat, smelly Gujarati boy:
"You can get her to sing. I've discovered how. You have to catch her off guard. She was in the back of the car and the music was on, and she was singing along with it. Then I turned the music off, and she was singing and she didn't realise. It was beautiful."

I'm addicted to: G'n'R's version of Knockin', the guitar solo from 2:56 onwards. It's like Slash is in me, and my heart is his Fender, and it's SCREAMING.

Deep down inside, I've always had this unshakeable faith. In myself. That it would pan out. That things would be alright.

Now I'm not so sure.

I'm living in some bubble. In fact, I've lived in a series of bubbles, some concentric. One by one, they've burst. Now I'm on my last bubble, and it's going to pop very soon.

This whole straight and narrow thing, there's no point to it really. I've tried hard to do the right thing, as often as possible. Please everyone, be here, be there. Now the point is, you're so busy making everyone happy, you forget about what's happening to you. When it happens, all the people you tried to make happy are so busy being happy, they can't be bothered. Parents, friends, it doesn't really matter. What matters is self, as in selfish. I wish I were.

There was supposed to be a point that I was arriving at. But I can't seem to put my finger on it. Oh well, much like everything else, I've lost track.

Three things strike me. One written by a sometime team-mate and somewhat friend. One written by an American columnist. And one written for Kevin Arnold.

Prashant Iyengar: "Rostom Marker's entire family was killed in that accident. And there's nobody to mourn his death.. nobody to feel his absence. Makes me wonder...if memory is the pillar of existence.. Rostom never existed."

Mary Schmich: "Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's."

Kevin Arnold: "Memory is a way of holding onto... the things you are..."

Four boys meet.

Twelve years on, they meet again.

One of them is a drug dealer. One of them is a failed engineer. One of them is a restaurateur. One of them is an investment banker. One of them is always drunk. One of them builds cars. One of them builds portfolios. One of them bakes cakes. One of them may be gay. One of them may be dead soon.

One of them looks at the others with amusement. One of them envies the others for what they have. One of them envies the others for what they have become. One of them envies the others for what they can be.

One of them is me.


"We've come a long, long way together,
Through the bad times and the good.
I have to celebrate you baby,
I have to praise you like I should."

Happy Holi!

I know what it's like. I used to work with them. You can make that 68.

......

...I hope you're standing.

Memories of a different time. A simpler time. The magic of YouTube and the right search words.

Sweet memories. They sure don't make them like they used to.

"Bathed in blue, the walls of my memory divide..."

Will someone please take the bullseye off my back? I can't seem to reach it.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Clemens, S.L.

Do this: Sit down. Pass the back of your hand near your nose and mouth. You will feel nothing. Now close your eyes and do it again. You will feel the warmth of your hand on your lips. You will smell your hand. You will be able to pinpoint sounds and their sources more accurately.

When you lose your sight, the other senses try to compensate by amplifying themselves. This doesn't happen with any other sense. Maybe that's because sight is the most important.

Right now, the thing I'd like second-to-most is to learn to take good photographs. Pictures are like frozen slices of time, that you can always go back to. Music may bring memories of a time back, but pictures actually take you there.


"Your looks are laughable, unphotographable
Yet you're my favourite work of art."

Closed books are better than open ones. They stay cleaner.