Free to fly

Halogen filled red balloons,
Or multi -coloured paper kites,
They fullfill their destiny,
Only when they are set free to soar in the skies.

Faith

Sometimes a little faith is all you need,
Like the flame of a lamp in a dark forest,
Not enough to show you what is waiting at end of the road,
But enough to illuminate your next step.

New country

A new country opens up its boundaries
Every once in a while in my head
Offers a ticket to a new destination
A passport to the unknown
To mingle with strangers in a strange land
Beckoning me with new hope
That maybe this is the country I will end up calling home

Tags

Tags and designations can harm more than help is what I increasing feel these days. Once we tag something, we end up taking it too seriously. I call you my best friend, suddenly makes me or you feel like we need to live up to the tag. Call me your other half, girlfriend, suddenly I need to live up to that tag. I dont mean relationships should be frivolous or not have depth. But why cant they just evolve into something, anything, without expectations and societal definitions. Why cant we give them the breathing space to move in any direction - a discovery which leads to the destination, than determining the destination and then journeying towards it ferociously.

Discovering Jack Kerouac

"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness." 

Borrowed Brilliance

"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.

Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away.  For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home."

Alan Moore (Watchmen)

Good read of the day

"Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expecations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's a part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another." 


Jim Butcher

My world just exploded....

From 2 years of solitude and quiet cups of coffee, one corner of a four sided table shared with 3 people,  watching the evening easing into dusk on the way home, savoring tea with conversations and toast, a close knit and cocooned world of loved ones to an explosion of colors and cacophony in mere fifteen days...

In fifteen days a million toes have nearly missed mine on bridges, trains and crowded platforms, a million stories have hung in the morning air - ready to be typed into a BBM, ready to be shared with willing ears, ready to be buried behind a newspaper. Steaming tea at shanty stalls, persistent beggars giving chase, harrowed newspaper vendors, cursing at passengers rikshawalas, hot and noisy trains and a jostling, bustling city making its way to work.

Corporate bullshit that makes work seem more important than it actually is, the hierarchy of egos and the games people play. I just added a million people in my life - you dont always need facebook...

Mush ado about everything

It is around the corner again. The mush makers are back to being busy. Giant red hearts and when is your platinum day of love? Celebrities ganging up on the first page of the dailies for a week and reminding the husbands, husbands-to-be, boyfriends, boyfriends-to-be and basically anybody and everybody belonging to the male of the species with deep pockets and heterosexual tendencies… don’t you buy trinkets, she deserves a diamond. Of course she does, why just once in a year though?

Jewelry aside, everybody is on the V-day bandwagon these days. Hearts abound in ads for contact lenses and even in the buy one and get one free offers. Love it seems, does conquer it all.

Came across this quote, which nicely underlines the stuff lying uncovered underneath all that sugary fluff and candy floss mush…

“....That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself, but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet”

I mean, you could have J Lo’s butt, a palace with minions, baccarat crystal goblets and white satin sheets, you could quote from the Bhagwad Gita, follow your passion and climb the highest mountain, but….end of the day it’s like the closing scene from the movie Monster’s Ball – when you can come back home to someone with whom you can silently share an ice-cream on the front porch under a night sky,... makes it all a little more worthwhile, a little more than diamonds and passion and chocolate coated candy hearts.

From White Egrets by Derek Walcott - Breath taking

A dragonfly's biplane settles and there, on the map,
the archipelago looks as if a continent fell
and scattered into fragments; from Pointe du Cap
to Moule à Chique, bois-canot, laurier cannelles,
canoe-wood, spicy laurel, the wind-churned trees
echo the African crests; at night, the stars
are far fishermen's fires, not glittering cities,
Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris,
but crab-hunters' torches. This small place produces
nothing but beauty, the wind-warped trees, the breakers
on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens
a galloping mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us
merely receiving vessels of each day's grace,
light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts.
I'm content as Kavanagh with his few acres;
for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea's lace,
to see how its wings catch colour when a gull lifts.

Excerpt from the movie Rabbit Hole

Becca (Nicole Kidman) has been numb with grief since Danny, her 4-year-old, was killed by a car. Now, eight months later, her mother, Nat (Dianne Wiest) — whose son, Becca’s brother, died at 30 — is helping Becca to put away, finally, the little boy’s things.
Int. basement — day

Becca and Nat carry the milk crates of Danny’s stuff down to the basement, and put them in the corner with a few other things Becca has put aside.

Becca stands there, taking it in. Danny’s been reduced to a small corner of stuff in the basement. She lets out a breath, then turns to her mother.

BECCA: Does it ever go away?

NAT: What.

BECCA: This feeling.

They lock eyes. Nat can see she actually wants an answer. Maybe for the first time ever.

NAT: No. I don’t think it does. Not for me, it hasn’t. And that’s goin’ on 11 years.

(Beat)

It changes, though.

BECCA: How?
NAt: I don’t know. The weight of it, I guess. At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under, and carry around — like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: “Oh, right. That.” Which can be awful. But not all the time. Sometimes it’s kinda ... not that you like it exactly, but it’s what you have instead of your son, so you don’t wanna let go of it either. So you carry it around. And it doesn’t go away, which is ...

BECCA: What.

NAT: Fine ... actually.

They’re silent for a couple of beats. Becca nods a little. Nat turns and heads up the basement steps.

Metaphor of the day

Sometimes you stumble across people like ice cubes in the grass on a hot summer day.

No one killed Jessica? The film just did

Rani Mukherjee smoking a cigarette, cursing in the choicest hindi and angrezi abuses, wearing smart casual outfits, having fake one-sided conversations with 'Dad', proud of being a bitch, a ruthless confident woman -someone who wakes up a junior in the dead of the night and tells her, get your ass here, this is no 9-5 job. Yeah see that's how committed and ruthless she is. Another time, wakes up her soundly-sleeping-oblivious-to-the-doorbell maid. The maid retaliates by muttering 'kutti' (crasser than bitch) under her breath. Rani hears it, coolly dismisses it. says 'suna maine, ab coffee banao'. How cool is that?  Not really - its all styling, all swearing, zero soul.

Vidya Balan in the dowdiest outfits, wearing men's shirts, she walks with a slump, like a plump school boy hauling a heavy invisible school bag. She keeps making efforts to reach out to all the witnesses and looks like the invisible school bag stops her from making a sincere effort. Its all half-hearted, just about and almost there. She looks like a zombie who is cross with the director for spending the entire styling budget of the film on Rani.

The performances overall are so dismal, so artificial, e.g. Rani's TV channel supremo, who finally gives her permission to pursue the Jessica Lall case. He says ' I am all for justice, go for it'. He says it pit-pat. He puts in only as much as effort in those lines as much as he must have been paid for a 10 second appearance. Vidya's mother on the other hand is a delight- she over acts quite naturally. Especially all her crying fits.A mother's loss is seen only through some weird spaced out expressions. Compare that with the sensitive portrayal of Waheeda Rahman losing her son in Rang De Basanti through the beautifully composed and rendered 'Luka Chupi'

The movie doesnt create any empathy, we dont feel a thing about Jessica dying. We dont feel a thing for Jessica living too. Who was Jessica? Was she a woman with strong opinions and a life full of possibilities? There is a tepid and badly written speech that Vidya doles out about how in this country the value of a life is comparable to a drink. Rendered in a flat and lifeless tone. Never are we angered or disgusted - the film just doesnt strike a chord. We dont see a miscarriage of justice in the actual proportion that it did, we just see it in minute snippets.

We dont see the raw anger, the helpnesses of the common man against a corrupt political and judicial system. We just see a mild mannered Vidya make a half hearted effort. Ofcourse she makes a half hearted effort so that Rani can go all out and pull all the punches and give us the happy ending. Rani however fails to do that, apart from the sting operation. We also dont feel the heat or the enormity of the public outcry. No goosebump moments here, no leaving the theatre with a feeling like that of Rang De Basanti. The feeling that if we come together, there is still hope.

Such a let down of a movie. A could -have- been- powerful movie that falls flat. Raj Kumar Gupta fails to do justice to Jessica's memory or her case and to tell you the truth to Rani.