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.

I am not sure what infuriates me more - death of humanity or my obvious incapability to get over it or to change the course of events that led to it. A time where being innocent is not enough, where being apolitical doesn't confer immunity, where fate of one's life is being written by the hands of another life, where the GOD plays the pivotal role, but yet fails to be the arbiter, a time where insanity hijacks the entire humanity. Monothiests or polythiests or athiests, we are all in danger, a collective danger. High end tech weapons, an organised group of radicalised brains and a fanatical media coverage - it is not a story anymore that we used to hear to be happening in a distant land- it is for real, happening at our own home. We are in an unprecendented danger both physically and psychologically. 

Like thousand others I was angry, in disbelief, in excruciating shock. I shouted, I demanded..Govt, attack POK (atleast), we ought to give a fitting reply. I am happy that nothing that sort has developed, happy that cold heads have prevailed over our surfacial instant reactions and emotions. Not only that, no religious backlash has broken out in our homeland. Somehow strange and costly way, we are realizing that beyond nationality and religions, we are victims to the same cruelty, hatred and jingoism.

No doubt what happened in Mumbai was tragic, barbaric. However, what might unfurl thereafter could(can) be far worse. Here are my after after thoughts of the heineious attack. 

1. does ISLAM really have a fundamental flaw? I think, the answer is Yes. But again so are the other religions( for example, in Hinduism, the ubiquotous caste system- no two persons belonging to two different castes enjoy equal social position- neither their children will enjoy in future, no matter how pious or faithful the lower caste lineage proves from generation to generation, on principle, on tenets they will never get up-casted.) In ISLAM, church and state are integrated. This got endorsed in large as the entire earlier expansion of ISLAM was through military conquests of another state. Now lets see what it means in modern time. In 21st century, what it(the church and state integration) means is a monothiest religion and theocratic state which is quite opposite to a secular state. Now any transition attempt to a secular state is daunting, an entrenched system of parochial doctrines has to be plucked off. This is the challenge almost all Islamic countries in general and Pakistan in particular, are facing in a modern world. 

2. Pakistan - raison d'être was the religion. Unfortunately, democracy has never got a true chance to grow, thanks to the fundamentalists and the complicity of the military power. I think, it is worse now than it started with. Indeed, it has got all the required elements for disintegration in place by now. Neither the world nor India can let it happen. Pakistan needs to fix the things right. An external force can't impose/exert secular democracy. War is definitely not the answer then. What Pakistan needs are co-operation and assistance.

3. A report on Newyork times (also reported by ndtv) suggests that the psychological impact on children originating to the disturbing images of the Mumbai attack will be long lasting. Their adult attitude and psyche development will likely to be shaped based on this traumatic experience. If one such siege or attack can have such a devastating impact, one can only imagine the psychological damage a full scale war between two nuclear capable countries can yield. Ok, we(my generation) may be ready to die. But I certainly want to say and assure a child that being born is a gift, being human is fortune. We certainly don't want to wipe out an entire civilization and its hope in the process.

4. India- How can we leave our coastal line unsecured?  Indeed, the route that intelligence agencies feel was taken by the fishing boat hijacked by the terrorists — from Porbandar in India’s Gujarat State, then north to Karachi in Pakistan, and then south to Mumbai — follows centuries-old Indian Ocean trade routes.

And we left it unguarded!!! Does this explain why we witness one after another attacks, while there is no single attack on Britain soil after 2005,July attack? Every Indian has his/her own part to play. We can't postpone it anymore. If we fail to do so, a hundred victories in war can't provide us safety. 

5. We have fought three wars already. Definitely our woes haven't ceased to exist. 

I am not a pacifist. I do want the perpetrators to be punished. But I don't see war as a solution to achive this.