Our uniqueness lies in our contradictory character forces and truths. We are creators, we are destroyers. We are seekers, we are relinquishers. Our fineness is not the smoothness of our character carpets, but the aligned and accommodating patterns of ups and downs, ridges and grooves. We are both -flawed and beautiful, ordinary and incredible. We are human.

We are not a smooth ride with the warning boards signalling a bump on our character road. We can't handover each other a dossier of cracks and bumps upfront because we have none ourselves. We are not metro city streets with its DNA and structural blue-print affixed in every corner and turn. We are dirt terrain roads, rugged and lugged. We explore things while on the run.

Our egos are Himalayan. But there is snow and it melts. Our peripheral proclivities are polar opposite, but there is a core and it hinges them well. Our debates are never ending, but there is a mind and it can reason. Our complaints are monumental. But there is an ear and it can listen.

We are perfect with our imperfections, our flaws are our polka dots, our differences are our orchestra.

It is amazing to surprise others, intriguing to surprise self. I am not a guy of surprises. Too predictable like the sun and the moon or the birth and death, too conventional like mom doing her cooking or school children's homework. Yes, the analogies suck. But so do I in this matter.

It is a quarter to 4.00 am now. And I am wide awake- consciously and actively- eyes, nose, ears, skins and tongue - all sprung alive. My mind fox sharped( I can recall all the five at least). Last time when I was awake at this time was three years back I guess, before catching a flight to Delhi.

The neighborhood is mechanic silent. It is that kind of silence one experiences when a big roaring machine comes to an end. A cricket is incessantly chirping. A lone yell commanding the night. No bark. The pampered pet dogs are deep asleep. And the stray dogs are busy digging either the fox holes by the lake side or the dustbins on the main road. No honk on the nearby street. Truck drivers are away with wives or prostitutes.

Someone is dropping water from an upper floor on a neighboring building. It is still dark outside with a dim bulb hung to a corner of the small room on the parking plot where the watchman lives fighting hard for its way out. Before I could locate the source and know that someone is not enjoying an adventurous late-night peeing, the dropping sound stopped.

Attention back to the room and bed. An envious stare on my desktop wallpaper picture. A baby girl sleeping innocent. One can quake the earth. But she will die with her little smile on her lips - I think. Innocence, your name is happiness.

Wondering what might have triggered this nocturnal sojourn. I went to a big shopping mall yesterday. It dearly cost me. But that's not the reason. I saw lots happy people (or at least they pretended happy). No I don't think that is a reason too. Talked to someone earlier and bragged myself- "I need only six hours sleep. That's it." Got to know that that someone sleeps only a little more than four hours! Damn it. Nocturnals are contagious.

Am enjoying the night though. A silent night has its own charm like a lady in a dark veil. It adds richness to your thoughts and calmness to existence and seduces imagination. I always maintained I can't do anything during this time other than sleeping or cursing if someone break my sleep. But when the world stops throwing surprises to me, I surprise myself. I prove myself wrong. There are humility and consternation when one does it self.

Am hungry. Late night waking has an uncanny habit of stomach craving(I am not married yet. So not sure of other dimension of nocturnal appetites). Bread, butter and a few other stuffs. A cadbary chocolate too. Mid-night butter spreading doesn't sound inspiring, others need to be tossed in the burner or a little more than hand doing. I didn't keep the chocolate. But taking anyway.

A crow has started cawing. Someone is reciprocating with a cough. Poor old men. They always get awake at the slightest provocation of a sound and always the first one to wake up in the family.

Lights beaming through my window grills. It is dawn. A day ahead. And I have things to do.

PS- the writing is looking like a motley of candid tweets. Is this because people bear no makeup when they wake up, leaving only the view of raw and natural self?

I don't know how you are spending your days. Do you still paint the bluish hue of an open sky or the white dove in flight? Do you still craft out a dancing girl out of thrown away papers? Or dream the things that I always wonder and pair them up to a wonderful dream?

Perhaps not.

It is Autumn here now. You can smell the scent of night-flowering Jasmines when you wake up in the calm early morning. The leaves on the plants are emerald green. But I know it won't remain so long. Soon they will grow yellowish and then coral gray before the winds blow them away. A forest without green, a plant without leave- I wonder for what reason. But then you said it happens for the season, not for the reason, they shed not for the fear of an autumn, but for the hope of a spring. I envy the plants- for their despair of an autumn will be inevitably chased away by the abundance of a spring.

The ducks and waders which migrated away have already returned to the lakes and wetlands. They float, they quack, they dive, they rock. I wonder may be they too are waiting for a spring and a prospective mate. Soon they will collect tiny twigs, decayed ferns and torn leaves and call it home. I envy the birds too- for the spring will arrive for them too as they dream it to be.

Someone said the autumn is here for me too. I know it is, tells me to shed the memories, the memories where once you walked, you smiled, you cried, you fought. I know it is, tells me to paint a new face of a spring on the Barista table where once you sat with a coffee mug and flashing smile. I won't lie to you, I go there often, but always return without a new painting in my heart. I still see the me in the reason defeating the me in the season.

The reason without, there won't be a spring.

The reason without, there won't be a hope.

The reason is you.

Yet again I found myself talking to her for length, from the pettiest thing to the "what life wants" depth. Four buses honked passed on the nearby road, her jealous dog cooed nudged and showed his displeasure, the song on my vlc player repeated for the fifth or sixth time, her mom dropped in once and left(she described of her mom's reactive look, "crazy girl with crazy little device" ). It went on..covering her fascination of the New Zealandian landscape and Egyptian desert( here we both admitted that our geography knowledge is pathetic as none of us could figure out in which continent, Europe or Asia-Pacific or something else, New Zealand falls), an imaginary question, "if you marry a rich girl, will you tag me along to your dreamt Europe tour?" ( I said it is a highly stupid question and the answer is, of course, NO), an anecdote at a cottage in a remote hill station where she had spent a night while the wild water of a river kept gushing at a stone-throw distance for all the time. We ended when her mom called her again asking to assist her in the kitchen chore.

She lives in a hilly place with a breezy air and frequent showers and many water falls, with her mom, dad and a teenage brother and a pampered dog, named Tom-Tom. Her flat is on the fifth floor of a government quarter building of the fire service department where her father works. The building has no lift. "The fire service department doesn't believe in the lift concept"- she reasoned frivolously. She is grateful of the stair though, because it has kept her waistline at 26" and still allows her to get up a bit late in the morning. "No morning walk, you see."- she laughed.

She returned home from the university four months back after completing her master in print media. Then she applied for a job sending her resume to all big and small news paper groups. But it is a bad time for the campus leavers with a job market waiting frozen outside. The one or two offers that arrived on her way, came with a dirt cheap salary. So she decided to hang on and take care of the flowers that her dad had planted on the vases and carpeted soils and watch them bloom. She played with Tom-Tom to the extent that he became hostile to her dad and completely became possessive of her. "Probably I won't be able to marry when Tom-Tom is still alive!"- she wondered one day before hanging off my call as she needed to give Tom-Tom a bath.

One day when she took out her dog for a walk, a sudden rain caught them. Rain in a hill always arrives that way, without a sign of warning. Next day Tom-Tom had a fever. So she went to the veterinary hospital and waited for the doctor. "Tom-Tom puffed all the time"- she said later on. The next day, when her dad tried to give medication to Tom-Tom, he bit the daddy's hand. She told in despair, "Tom-Tom didn't leave dad's hand until I gave a big slap!". She consulted the doctor again who advised to send away the dog which she couldn't do of course. Instead she locked Tom-Tom and shifted him to a lonely corner. After that incident and when she had enough of novel reading, she decided to join a college as a teacher. "It is only for the time being until something comes on your way for a media job." - I often consoled.

After more than one month, she exclaimed, "Hey, I am loving this job"! Though she has to study lot her self and that there are a few hopeless students who never bring their text books, it is something she is enjoying. She is even contemplating to do another master in English literature!

Tom-Tom has recovered and behaves well now. Yesterday she talked of the age of her dog.

They say these are petty things to know about, to talk about. May be. But One only needs to know that when he talks, someone is out there to listen, that he won't get a yawn in return ( the reason why we grow distant).

Happiness is made of small things. To listen is to heal.

Somehow I couldn't resist posting this beautiful song.

( Moloya, thank you for the song. Oh, I know you read my patchy blog. I force you to read. Don't I :D

Beach, sorry for the Hindi. )

As I began to write a crucial chapter of my story about a flood rising river sweeping a swath of landscape, the receding world economy shook my office. I had to call off my story writing and focus on code writing!(People let me think, you are being paid for the code, you know, for the code and hidden bugs, not for a gleaming firefly in a fable!)

The problem with IT professionals is that they don't have a definite timetable, at least not in India. It keeps on swaying in such a whimsical way I doubt even a circus master can attune himself to it. No, if you are a statistician, you still can't model this behaviour in your stochastic equation.

I dreamt of and made a resolution of a routine where my story would see a few words per day. But like so many dreams it saw the dust. I hit a doldrums.

Now that appraisal phase is over and I am nearing to the deadline of my code delivery, I am returning to my text editor( btw, text editor is far better and simpler than a code editor, only I wish it had a debug option!).

The primary objective of this chapter is to portray a flood calamity of a biblical magnitude. And I want it to be as vivid as possible, as devastating as perceivable. The chapter aims to -

1. a situation compounded by poverty and inherent human dark side.

2. rob a village of its innocent charm and simplicity

3. let the characters(including the protagonist) experience few incidents, both benign and severe which will eventually dictate and haunt their adult lives silently.

And I guess I started it well. But now that the flow was broken, I am finding hard to put myself in. Like an ex-lover returning and trying to win a second chance and confidence, it is awkward, hesitant and frustrating.

Btw, the abstinence has not been all that bad. For -

1. time again has reaffirmed it is what I love.

2. I have devised a twist in the story which will resolve a logical inconsistency present in the original story idea.

3. I have changed the name of the novel and I think, this truly reflects the story.

It is alright, when I invite and you don't arrive.

It is alright, when I call and you don't reply.

When tears dry, you shall find yourself again.

I shall talk of "My Sassy Girl" and you of "A moment to remember".

It is alright, when I joke and you don't laugh.

It is alright, when I tell a story and you miss the plot.

When the morning rise, you shall narrate why the Sardars grow a beard.

And if I go wry, you'll accuse me of a stone heart!

It is alright, when I verse Milton and you don't rhyme.

It is alright, when I sing a song and you only yawn.

When glooms fade, you will play a Beethoven and I a "November Rain".

I shall dance and you shall pirouette.

It is alright, if you are not here tonight.

For I am holding onto nothing, not even a thousand nights.

[This is what I am feeling tonight. It needs not be a poem outside, but you should know there is certainly a rhyme inside.]

For quite sometime now I have been feeling that I have been living behind an eclipse. A long seemingly never ending one. Sometimes the shadow of a small moon grows so big and appropriately positioned that it darkens the brightness of size of a sun. And one wonders whether there exists a sun at all. No doubt, "there is always a golden ring following the eclipse" - as someone put it. But sometimes things arrive too late to be relevant. And I hope it won't be the case. I hope it won't happen behind a wall of a future cloud and not after when both the x-ray film on my eyes and the canvas in my hands go numb.

I get frustrated on the slightest setback, get annoyed on the most trivial friction. The world is turning out be too nihilistic and too purposeless and I don't know what to be blamed. As if the imperfect world has taken over the better part of the world for all. Suddenly(?) I have found myself to be a pedantic creature looking for the self sufficiency and meaning in every tiny bit isolating everything apart tending to defy the holistic meaning and existence. I feel as if the microscopic approach had defeated the telescopic approach of a life and no longer co-exist.

Consequently, I have been developing a dislike for anything that directly and remotely deals with the facts- history, statistics, news, chart, survey, percentage, absolute figure- anything; all because they represent the actual world, the factual world. And inevitably developing a sense of abstraction over objectivity which hides the naked truth and gives room for hundred interpretations, poems over chronology envisaging and espousing a perfect concept. When truth and falsehood are blurred juxtaposition, right and wrong are never settled debate - I feel accepting one doctrine is the way to be peace with. This can't amount to an escapism.

A few people argue, this is, indeed, a good phase for me, this is when one can turn upside down of a single thing over and over, flip one side to another side again and again and come up with an interpretation hitherto unknown, meaning and essence of it hitherto explained. But I am too confused. Am I a philosopher in the making or on the road of sainthood? Never I have had such a design in my mind. I will be happy if this transition will have happened as a result of a conscious drive, not as a war treaty after a battle over sadness.

I am fighting hard over everything, yet nothing with all my might and weapons. Till now it is all sands and dusts and a blurred vision. But I am keeping my windows opened, nonetheless. Someone said, we can't keep the windows closed and deprived ourselves of new air because of the fear of the dust.

Copyright [09-Aug-2009] by [Nitu Chiring]

Yes, it's a radio wave beamed from a far galaxy. For I am space travelling, time warping..shrinking years into months, scrunching months into days, miniaturing days into tiny dots.

And I have no illusion that my fistful readers( or was it the lone 'I' always? ) have grown into aliens or worse yet, have ceased to exist by now. Who waits and counts his days for a Halley's comet to appear, anyway? If it happen, fine, puff out a solitary wow, stash the experience on a cornered cerebral cell and walk on. If it don't, well, no bother.

Now enough with the celestial waffling.

Blogging has been always cathartic to me. A drainage in melancholy, a smoking pipe in exaltation. Neither a habit nor an incumbent duty. If no rise and dip happen in my day, then nothing happen here as well. It's just like no tremor is yielded unless the earth cracks or quakes in its heart.

For all the patient and inquisitive eyes who still occasionally or regularly peer at this blog, thank you so much.

You deserve it. And I mean it.

Now a small update from my side. No, it's not every one's favourite wedding thingy ( last time I checked, either all the stupid girls have rightly married the wrong guy already or the intelligent one is wrongly waiting for the right guy perenially. I, being neither the right nor the wrong, am looking for a tentacled alien.) After following 100 ways of killing time, which includes laying supine on my bed to giving annoying calls to people, wedging my back to a rust eating bench in certain parks to posing on a broken raft on a scummy lake, I kinda have rediscovered the best way to kill time, to keep oneself straying into a starry sky and thence to nothingness.

And it's doing what I always wanted to do and which I have kept postponing forever. But not anymore.

For three-four months I have been writing a novel- "bricks were mud once". Yes, you have heard it. So, you can clean your wax later :) Not big progress, but a decent start I guess.

Though it's too premature even to announce, almost in its embryonic stage, I am rulling out any future abortion or miscarriage. And I am as excited as a first time legitimate pregnant woman!!

Though I don't know when the first shitty draft will be complete. But I am slowly earning a confidence that I can pull it.

The feeling is amazing. To put down my musings into dialogues and scenes, shaping the things the way I want it to be, the control and insights you hold over the characters, being the reader as well as the writer, story versus exposition, frustrating brainstorming versus surprising ideas.

But it ain't easy. Particularly when after a 750 ml water bottle is drunk to the bottom, when even after three hours I find myself still staring at a blank screen.

But then nobody assumes it is.

And it is a long way before I pen down the words , "The End".

And I am so clueless about how to reach there, despite knowing that where "the end" ends!

But I can tell you, at least for now, it begins with,

"They say their lives were shaped by exactly one moment, that what they have become today is an outcome of a single event. If I am to believe them, then that moment was the moment of their birth in a billionaire house, of winning an enormous lottery sufficient enough to feed their family till a great great grandchild's time, of an accident which they thought would kill them, but left them unscathed while killing everyone else or if they are scientists, then when they ran naked shouting "eureka..". I call them lucky winners. And if you are like me, then the chance is that you too opine that such fortunate moments are as rare as the lightening striking twice on the same spot."

and ends with,

With love,

Nitu

Copyright [05-April-2009] by [Nitu Chiring]

"What? You slept?" 

The way my friend exclaimed, I got to think whether I had violated a de facto norm or committed a social crime.

"Yes, that's what I did." 

"Who was the girl?" my friend was more intrigued. 

Damn it Arjun - you are reading it all wrong!!

This is how 2009 began for me. No hang over, no resolution, no deviation - a normal day in almost any definition. Definitely beyond my friend's logical brain which had been witnessing my reckless and unrestrained way of celebrating a new year eve for almost 8 years. 

I got up early in the morning, scanned through my phone call logs, message box and started making a few calls. After three or four conversations, I found myself at the roof top of our building. The world was still calm, slumbered, hung-over. The tall under construction building to the west of our apartment was ominously numb and silent. I wondered whether a few weary labourers were still sleeping at one of the many rooms beneath a half-erected wall. What does a new year hold to them, mean to them? Soon I sensed another feeling - how strange it's that the people who layout the very foundation of the building will vanish the moment the construction is complete! Will the future residents smell their invisible hands at all? Even for a flashing moment of gratitude? For behind every brick, there is a weaving touch of a nameless, listless wandering hand. A forgotten hand! For every brick will don a thick layer of paints leaving no trace of a history. It is easy to count the visible stars on our sky. But who counts the unseen stars?

The whole thought shook and left me somewhat nauseated. I looked up - to the east as far as my eyes went. The sky was yet to wear its bright blue color. I couldn't find a single star. They all had vanished by then. But I knew they were there, still at their own positions.

A sudden metal thud pulled back my drift. I tip-toed to see the source of the sound. I saw a small boy squirming in pain and a bicycle lying near by. Probably he had hit a bump on the poor road and fallen. An woman was hastily closing by, must be his mother. 

"It's alright, son. You are fine."

I guessed probably this was what the boy's mother was saying while swabbing the child's bruised skin. 

Soon, the boy was on the bicycle, readying for another ride. The mother watched him slowly pedalling away. 

"Don't go far, son"- she wailed.

I watched the wheels spinning..the distinct spokes blurring one by one...soon all became one and transfigured into a thin blade of shades. 

The boy vanished at a turn of the road.

"Wheel of time" - a monologue whisper grew louder to louder.

The boy's mother walked back to her house. I knew she would soon resume her domestic chores. Might be all along she would still be wondering about her son who would reach the other end of the road by then.

Good God, I got to call up more!!

One by one I lined up many..aunts..uncles..old friends..childhood friends..

Started to count the invisible stars...

Can I still draw a straight line?

a few complaints..a few explanations..a few apologies.. 

And a good many chasms evaporated on a single morning.

 

True, we are all busy spinning in a wheel of time....blurring the images around.

But don't count the space between. Count the presence, count the gravity.

We can still draw a straight line. 

Ever wondered how many lines can end at you once you start drawing?

Infinite.

Stay happy, stay blessed.