duritia

Soft and smiles; the joy, the warmth

Harsh and wry; the old familiar gruff

In naivety or maybe my own pride & ignorance

Guess I didn’t walk away far enough

The way you were crafted to live

Little did I know; what you search and what you seek

No gilded bars for you, no marble urn, just a simple sieve

And the dangerous smile; lethal mystique

And away you flitted to flowers familiar

And I watched your wings, your pretty wings flutter

And a strange beast was awakened, a being unfamiliar

And the more I saw, the less I could utter

The deep guttural noise it made

The way it turned and twisted

Scared me into accepting a part of me

That I did not know existed

This sorrow is no rain water

Puddling up tonight and gone in the morning

This sorrow is an undercurrent flowing strong

That only the earth of time can consume

And whenever it surfaces ,

It leaves behind exquisite blooms

I want to write about the need of appearances. I have written about it superficially some time back, and yet another incident today, has triggered off the need to write about it all over again, from a slightly different perspective. Once in my good old days (why are only the old days good ?) a senior brother in my hostel told me ’you not only have to be good , you have to show good as well.’ It sounded like a cliché, or a proverb, or a one liner and my cynical mind immediately went to correct the apparent grammatical error in it. But I reined it in and swirled the words within me again. And gulped it in. Sadly, in the world I am living in (out of compulsion), this piece of insulting advice is true.

 Show good . I like an old-timer, I like the word, I like what it implies. I like old school too. Just like old times. I like the rules, the ones I understand or can rationalize. I hate ‘new fangled’. I hate peppy and chirpy and cute and SO FUCKING FULL OF SHIT!!! Ok maybe hate is a strong word.

 Using an example to illustrate (hypothetical): I stay in a hostel, and I have a single roommate. Now as a rule I don’t like the smell of closed ill-ventilated rooms, similarly I don’t like the smell of unwashed (or for that matter washed) undergarments, either strewn around or carefully adorned on the clothesline. And thus, obviously, I don’t like unwashed-just-used sweaty socks as well. So, I invested in a basic room freshener. I come back to room, I divest myself of my clothes, I freshen up and then I use the room freshener. Some people thought I was being snobbish even a bit gay ( the new Indian male fetish)

Keep walking. Keep riding. Keep travelling. What is the appeal of messages like this? Why are these messages touching so many people? There is a strange urge, in me, to leave it all behind, to keep walking and walking and walking till, there is no more ground left to tread.

And you are left with a vast expanse ahead of you, unreachable, awaiting. The sight is like a feast, it is like the first morsel of simple food to a hungry traveller; the eyes drink it in, thirstily… and yet as you stand there, your skin tingles in anticipation, with the breeze tempting and taunting it at the same time- a skilled art, goading the mortal in you to face the fear in you. The chemicals in your body frothing past in your vessels and an impulse seizing you. 10,000 days of learning, all the teachings about nothingness and your mind giddy with fear.