The interred concrete

The interred concrete calls me back.
The interred concrete that scratches the skies,
calls me back.
Standing like the sentinels of doom.

It’s far better than these festering ears
that speak about a lie
that was meant to be left sacrosanct
inside the decadent womb
of a withering love.

These festering ears repeat the lie
these festering ears have mouths that slyly
repeat the lie.

A lie that cuts through my heart
and gnaws at the base of my skull.
These festering ears of a bastard progeny
these festering ears who think with their mouths.

Spineless like death, they squirm their way into my skull
spilling venom, these festering ears with a thousand tiny legs

The interred concrete calls
to scotch on the rocks
and a second death.
Away from these festering ears who know the truth.

Books

Books. They come in all sizes. In all varieties. In all subjects. Serious, funny, quaint, charming, tasteful, cumbersome, spellbinding, romantic, mysterious, horrific, historic, political, religious, spiritual, educative and many more.

What is it that you love in a book?

I love the smell of books. Especially old books which have not been opened for a long time. They have a warm, musty smell that welcomes you, like a cup of scalding hot coffee on a winter evening. The kind of smell that would make you want to snuggle up in a corner and get yourself buried in its pages. New books smell alltogether different. They remind you of a fresh breath of mountain air, the early morning dew mingled with the freshness of young grass, flowers in bloom, the first flush of spring…

Books have dimension. They are a world in itself. A kind of place you can hang around. Explore. Hike. Learn. Discover. Get lost in. A world apart. Like a fifth dimension.

Books are like friends. They are there, when you need them. A solace, a silent listener and participant that transcends your thoughts to another level.

Books are like whores. They need to be circulated, so that the maximum number of people can enjoy it.

But they are like virgin whores. Each experience is a joy that cannot be replicated.

The first, hesitant steps you take…

Unsure, but plodding on, refusing to quit. Mind attuned to one single reality. To put pen to paper. To push limits, despite the voices that scream at you to stop. Despite the taunts, the blank stares, the challening looks, despite everything, you still crawl early in the morning, at 5.00 AM sharp, everyday, day in, day out. Whether you get a spark or not, whether you you have the plot threshed out or not. The ink in the pen pulsates with joy, flowing through your veins. The ink throbs in the veins, mixed with your blood. Words flow, sometimes with pain, sometimes with delight at having been let out into the light. Dark, brooding words full of stench, smelling of birth pangs. Small beautiful words that radiate a warmth of love, smelling of milky skin. Wily, devious words that squirm like filthy snakes, full of muck…

A case for writing in longhand

The next generation of copywriters will surely lose touch with that pristine feeling of ink on paper. The computer screen and the keyboard has taken over. The virgin white paper is relegated to little used office shelves. Though, one good thing is, less trees will be cut, because of this. However, if you go by the sheer pleasure of going through the process of writing, almost all writers will vouch for the age old method of writing in long hand. And thereby hangs a tale (pun intended). For instance, analyze how a writer begins. Let’s start at the beginning. Most writers will start by brooding over when to write, to such an extent that they will obsess about it for days on end. Because, in the back of their minds they know that the only way to start is to actually sit down and do it. But to get to this point, they will invariably go through another process called the ‘fine art of procrastinating’. By this, it usually means, they will do anything to put off the all impending deadline. Neil French, in his own words, hangs around with unsuitable women, loiter around the beach and play pool, just to postpone the moment of confronting a blank white sheet of paper mocking at you incessantly. By the way, he only writes in long hand and he is so good at calligraphy, that he can write copy on to the final layout in 9 point garamond, so finely, that it usually goes to the printer without even a slight change in alignment, let alone a typo.

We digress, though.

Paulo Coelho in ‘The Zahir’ talks about the writer’s block or the ‘fine art of procrastinating’ so masterfully, that one is actually tempted to write. It is time now to assume that the writer has found the perfect mood. That he has come out of the proverbial block and is now bristling with inspiration. Itching to get his hands on a writing instrument. Pen, pencil, chalk or even a tree root, to translate his ideas on to something. One copywriter has claimed that if he couldn’t find a piece of paper to write on, at the opportune moment, he would invariably coerce his lover to allow him to write down his thoughts on to her just-waxed, spa-fresh body. As they say, passion knows no boundaries.

There are others who sit down, takes a Waterman, looks deeply at it, examine the nib, creates a doodle in the corner of the page to see whether the Waterman is in top writing condition, and so on and so forth. A bottle of ink, no less than Parker, will hover around the periphery vision, waiting for the pen to be quenched so as not to lose the uninterrupted flow of thoughts. Next he takes a sheaf of paper. Pure, lily white and unsullied, waiting for its destiny to exhibit greatness and hold it as long as the ink stays true and fast. Ah, how fortunate is this paper, like a virgin bride about to be conceived, embracing and nurturing the seeds of life, so that she can bring forth the labour of love, alive and kicking.

The question is, can a laptop, however slick or expensive, evoke a similar feeling? The answer is obvious, at least to our generation. The future will keep reeling off surprises, all I am hoping is, I will be able to take it in my stride.

For the record, this piece was written first on a white sheet with a proper ink pen.

The strange drops falling from the sky

was met with the wonder of a passsing comet that visited rarely. It was still water, thick, like oil, falling hard on the face of the unrelenting tarmac. The fast cars shrieked, maddened by the drops, swerving unsurely, tyres screaming for mercy. Edit, splice, cut, whatever to escape the huge roads like gaping mouths devouring the tons of steel passing through. Cut to a darkened room floating with women bearing cool beer. And popcorns that came endlessly. The men sat hunched in visual masturbation, eyes locked, going in and out, in and out, penetrating to the depths of the saree clad skin, unwrapping the layers of cloth with lust-filled delight. The eyes became a long membrane of blood gushing passion, snaking into the layers of cloth. Cyclop eyes that spewed pent up emotions. The dark room filled with intertwining membranes, twisting, turning, dancing, brushing, around the milky skinned women. Visual snakes in rapture, engaged in passionate game of make believe. The women floated around, mesmerised.

The other side of the desert

The white burning sand left an aftertaste in my mind. The inexhorable heat hung like a heavy curtain of deceit from all that was cool and beautiful. I wondered at the greyness of it all. White and grey. White and grey. Like the canvass of an artist who forgot to dip his brush in color. The buildings rose in unison, like tombstones that carry interred images, half-dead humans who carry the glory of a  distant past inside their tortured minds. Life went on with clock work precision. Get up, work, come back, drink, sleep. Get up, work…an unending travesty. I looked for the mirage everywhere. Searched for it within the sand dunes as well as between the unfriendly concrete jungles. The painted ladies smiled, without mirth, deadpan smiles that fell like faded flowers. The liqour flowed in abundance. Liquid fire that burned your intestinal tract and left a trail of deceit in the mind. The liqour made the nights tick. In a land without time.

Here time hung inexorably like an unwanted guest who has overstayed his presence. Stark, stale, heavy, mind numbing time, ticking away like a Chinese water torture. The sand dunes crept into the concrete jungles, especially in the night. Creeping eerily, through the agoraphobic windows.

Go back. Hit the bottle. Browse desultorily through the snail-slow net.

A poem falls inside the recesses of my mind

Have you ever had a poem stare at the face of your unconscious mind?

Have you ever had a poem nudge you,  just as you were about to fall asleep?

Have you ever had a poem seduce you, in the wee hours of the morning?

Enough to make you get up from the arms of your lover and entrust it on  the lilly white pages of your work book?

Have you ever had a poem pound at the insides of your skull, seething with frustration,

Enamoured with the joy of being and at the same time, mortified with the fear of annihalation?

Have you ever had a poem, shyly stand at the door step of your mind, wishing to enter

Just as the virgin bride standing at the threshold of her groom’s bedroom?

Have you ever had a poem look you in the eyes and laid bare your skull, every thought, every shred of emotion,

Every shade of fear, unscrupulously examined?

Have you ever had a poem, send you shivers of joy?

Have you ever had a poem, that made you tremble, not with fear, but with the unbearable purity of its existence?

Have you ever had a poem, that shook you out of your mindless daily rut,

And made you sit up and ask yourself this ever pertinent question?

What the fuck am I doing with my life?

How green was my valley

Book lovers all over the world will forever remember this epic saga. Richard Lewellyn’s ‘how green was my valley’ is phenomenal, both in a literary sense, as well as in a social context. The gloom of industrialization casts a dark shadow in the lives of the villagers of the valley. A pristine and beautiful place unsullied by the advent of modernity. Richard Lewellyn explores the cultural, economical and to a less obvious extent, the environmental shock that a coal mine can create in the lives of a band of villagers. A truly sensitive potrayal of their lives and their foibles, the innosence of their cultural upbringing oblivious to the machinations of a society hell bent on making money, and not much else. This book should be the vanguard of today’s environmental activists.

On being passionate about diapers and other things

Passion is an oft repeated word in advertising. God help you, if you are new to the industry. Then people will throw this word at you in the corridor, while you are having a brainstorm session or even in the loo. As they say, you will have to live advertising, eat advertising and …yeah you guessed it right…advertising. That’s the kind of passion you need. I, for one, have spent a reasonably good part of my life in advertising, and you know, at this stage of my life, I should gracefully admit that I can’t delude myself into behaving that my ‘passion levels’ are very high. In fact, it is desultorily low. Advertising is a strange business. And, compared to most other options in life,  perhaps there’s no better job. With the possible exception of being a bartender in a South Sea Island resort or running a restaurant in Rio. It is really fun, but to most of us who never made it into page three, let alone, the last page of a local daily, life was ok. Barely ok, I should say. Not that we didn’t had our share of fun. No. But then, it didn’t have the appeal or the ‘oh-my-gosh-did he really win that award’ looks that the more fortunate, or brilliant, among us usually get. By the loads. Admittedly, these guys had passion. They also had the opportunity of being where it matters the most. While we got stuck to the hinterlands. It doesn’t matter whether you are from the hinterland, but it matters a lot where you go from there. And you bloody well go before you become old enough to be NCD, but left with nothing to show in your portfolio. The thing that creative people strut around with like a feather in their cap. It is the sum total of his worth, measured by a few slides of power point.

Why am I saying all this? Out of a creepy feeling that I never made it? Well, it could be very true. But that’s not all, you know. Because after a certain point you will begin to wonder at the futility of it all. I mean, how passionate can you get about, say, sanitary napkins, or diapers? I do not know whether any bloke out there actually get goose bumps at the mere mention of diapers. I, for one, goes into sleep mode immediately. There is a limit to how much you can deceive yourself. The young ‘uns do not find it so hard, I suppose.

On the positive side, there are a lot of categories out there I would love doing too. Liquor, lingerie, book stores, public service, tourism…in that order.

P.S. Maybe sanitary napkins, after all, could be exciting. Or even sexy. It all depends on the idea.

Economics of discontent

Economic cycles are born out of necessity,  just as political movements are. Over a period of time, we saw the advent of ‘the economics of want’ and ‘the economics of plenty’. The economics of plenty was driven by individualism, by free trade and the innate entrepreneurial skill of man which strived through self-actualization to profit himself and thereby, indirectly others. This was the bedrock of economics then and now. Thus was born the age of hedonism. Innovation spawned many things which were dispensable and despite contrarian views, the economics of plenty chose to ignore these ‘lesser evils’ which are nonetheless avoidable. We are now witness to incredible new discoveries in medicine, in science, engineering, biotechnology, nanotechnology and many more disciplines. We have also seen the worst catastrophes, essentially the fall out of our quest for innovation.

Every age has its cycle, its relevance in the scheme of things lasts only till it’s needed. Then it dies a natural death and gives way to new thinking. Today, we can sense a subtle change in the collective psyche of man, a change from the economics of plenty to the economics of discontent. It’s a truism that too much of something good can actually spoil us. ‘Economics of discontent’ is simply that. A contrarian view that is the direct result of hedonism. It is actually a fluid state of politics, which will act as a catalyst to a new world order or a new economy. It will basically act a sieve to identify the good and phase out the bad. But even this very simple exercise is going to lead the world into chaos. Because, as history has unerringly shown, it is only out of chaos that order emerges.

Will we live to see this new world order?