Whole Lotta Lavanya and Some Musing on Creativity

Well, an impeding conversation for a job profile that requires 'creativity over single-track thinking' got me thinking as to my own ability to create things from what is at hand. On one level, I felt that it was all subjective and I create as I go along. Then again, there are also exercises in sheer objectivity, as in the case of anything you make that is site-specific. I gave up on that train of thought and caught another. I remember how Salil used to point out that it (creativity) was something that just came through you. I agreed and have spent the last 20 years trying to be a better conduit for the ideas that came to my mind.
Recently, I came across an early teen 'cool' movie of my memories; Footloose...Around the same evening, I came across NASA selling large size posters of outer space taken from Hubble, and so on. It was a cool idea and too bad, Indian Govt departments are not so savvy to 'cool products' but I kinda like the photo they used to advertise them. All big, red, inviting couch and all...

So I took them both, and of course, another pic of Lavanya's and tried to combine them. Now, of course, that you know the ingredients, you might not like the end result as much, but I know I managed to combine three disparate images into one homogeneous, flowing whole. Which is currently my desktop and giving me much peace at night. Which brings me back to my main personal point about cre8ivity, to me and quite a few, it is enough to have managed to do justice to the original idea in our mind. Sure, the world has various constraints that will make it interesting as you go along and even change eventual outcomes, but at the end of your labor, the utmost satisfaction is in having followed that line down to just like it was in your imagination.


Oh, yes; extra points for finding the faint outline of the Jawa in the same image. So long and I'll be seeing you seeing my creativity at the opposite of 'large.'

A Prayer For New Beginnings

Today is zero.

Today the rest of my life begins.

Let me face the days with hope.

I must be all that I can be.

I must leave all that I have been.

This is right in a ‘new start’

Especially when the road behind becomes a wall.

Any step now I might fall.

Within me I must not hurt so much that

I withdraw from participating in life.

[Personal Note to Readers: I already know the limits of my mind, body and soul until this point in life. This predicament cannot change at any point in my life.All I shall have is all that went by me before; my past. It did create me and contains my growth but my past does not stop me from facing future-forwards.

It is my duty to absorb as much ability as I can so that it increases my definition of myself according to my past like a hungry vacuum cleaner draws in all to feed its hungry bag of past debris, literally.]

Bad times won’t last if I can last longer.

I want to see the end of my life.

I want to see how I made out in the end.

I must be there to witness my own scorecard
at the end of this life.

I want to make it a good one since today
I am making an appointment with myself at the end of my life
(and it doesn’t have to be in a restaurant).

Casey Jones Moments

Select the most correct option:

a) The great man is lost in thought.
b) The great thought is lost in man.
c) The great lost is thought in man.

Happy First Birthday

Happy Father's Day

Nappy Father's Day

You could be just another statistic sprayed on the sidewalk. What’s to stop me from cupping my hands around your fragile flame? What’s to stop me licking your gummed flap and sealing your envelope? My sweetest sorrows served up in a silver salver.

War Comes To A Home In The Country (A Script)

Duck: DUCK!

Duck (2): “WHO’RE YOU CALLING A ‘DUCK’?!

Duck: …. Too Late.

[The End]

They say man is imprisoned by legends and he seeks unity within his own legend. If I look at life, it slowly crawls towards the end of mine. Will it be the end of time or am I just a man out of time? Would you forgive me if it was the other way around? In either case, I am still watching the evenings come and go, unrelenting against half standards in a crowd. Shaping my thoughts with repetition; spread-eagled eyes on a sore back pitted again with remorse. Stark thoughts brush my feet in descending flurries.

Grateful Dead & I

Today, I understood why the band calls itself The Grateful Dead and look so happy about it. After all that’s done and gone upon the human heart buried in a damp patch of tears, two green tendril shoots could be seen poking out. These days, when I think of my heart (rather than deep sea adventures) I see roses — dark thorns and red roses and it all makes sense.

Make me gopher power. Make me imprint my plasma upon your ageing mind. The diuretha of my spasmic existence shall fry your home grown brinjals all the way to homily hell. I’ve existed in this two-way torment of your pomp and my circumstance, or my pomp and your circumstance until I went mad convincing myself I wasn’t insane. Now I know there is no asylum for me outside the ones of my own making. Any creature of my sort must make up a birthplace before it can lick its wounds. For years I trembled at every hollow-point gush like a sinner with a super-suppressed conscience before the confessional. But there was no coherent comfort for me to escape and regenerate. Every time I stepped out to where passages were lit with only starlight; I tried.

Only to wake up in the morning realizing it’s easy to loose one’s way and return to civilization in the end. If I was to live, or rather, go on living, I would need to get a map.
Still tired; tired of staring up at small pieces of daylight. They set me up on this path and said, ‘Walk.’ Only each time I fell into these holes in the ground. Some of them had underground water and each time I climbed out, I felt happy just be out. Happy enough to go into the next hole. Times I got more happy than holes and other time I got more holes than happy but I went on.

Every time I felt cheated:
• There is no doubt
• Everybody’s favorite subject
• Silence
• Not that it makes any difference
• Right; no reason it should
• But don’t forget, you asked ‘why?’

A zillion red-spot-headed toadstools littered my path — glinting harsh lights of sun shining around it. Insipid tea never tasted so good. Rock those taste buds back to infinity. Feel the cracks in the packed mud. Why doesn’t it rain before the water bearer?

Gotta go on, get on with it. I’m beginning to loose my own coherence in this mess. Gotta come back from worm headspace crawling into a starched ant on a white Formica table. I like this table clean because I work here. So please…

What I felt was a wavering, an ache in my joints, lassitude and tedium at the burdens of work. A friend suggested I needed an ‘alternative to stress.’ At that time I honestly replied that I would have to find out the hard way. Later, I figured that the only thing I could come up with was suffering in the same room with the same person. (What do you do when all your girlfriends tell you to seek professional help?)
I am the dirt that pours down the staircase when water is thrown. I could stop my joys in life and nothing would change. No one would care, no place will beckon. It’s over. Pretty soon I’ll sell the bike…..break my guns…..burn my notes…..cut my hair.

Life sounds out people and the hollowest end up as marketing executives. No one realizes that more chaps in the same market equals diminished sales. I’m sick of being in the middle and my sobriety brings many recollections of how I’ve been done in by friends. I felt it build slowly, the need to rampage in disgust at my surroundings. I want to write. It’s just when I most need accomplishment. But that’s the good side of things. And it doesn’t fit in with things, except briefly.


The universe wobbles. I can feel the cold on the top of my head. Where it sticks like water on oily hair sheened wet. The ache grows and mingles with a dull throb to the bone. Numb skull skin stretches around the edges of my face and the hollow darkness behind my lips, nose and ears. Not the eyes; eyes give out light and are therefore, sources. Yet, even they too can ache — languid, sweet-sour ache that suffuses your body as you were parchment. Dry as yeast and crinkled to an almost transparent brown. Now you can feel the air around your limbs while your head doesn’t quite fit into the roof of the world. The trembling rhythm of your activity seizes you in speedy fits and taut pauses. The warmth you seek is simply the warmth you need. If you’ve been in similar spaces with yourself, you’ll proceed to make yourself as comfortable as possible without asking too may questions that might interfere with your feeling of interconnectedness in your life and idea of self. Your memories of your life seem chained and end in the past where you are spear-heading a new experience. The fewer doubts you have about yourself, the truer your actions shall be. You belie you can co-exist alongside your fear; each inhabiting the same body in time and space. It’s okay.

Then, like all joyrides, once you start realizing that you must have forgotten about your self back there for a while, you know you’ve peaked. You feel the backward steps. It’s like the moment you start thinking about your present experience, you are back with a bang. Connected with your trail of existence, identity, sorrows, joys and the weird familiar continuity it leaves us all to be hypnotized with. The air around your head is not as thick now and you can see isobar zone-like circular lines wound around yourself depicting your aura. You become isolated in your experience of nature and anything before you that might interest you or give you pleasure. Can anyone be immobilized or transformed by these effects?

No; you are simply indulging in ‘back-of-the-brain’ travels. You can still go on with the task at hand but not without a difference. Namely, the sense of awareness that is different from the one you normally feel. Details are important, as well as well worthy of more attention. Regardless of your duties, you are aware of the deep internal game we all play in our casual states which makes us not give-in and indulge in everything that catches emotion. However, I am equally aware of the important wonder catchments at events and a sense of humor to keep you going when time seems sluggish.

1

Sparrows bursting from the bush ahead like buckshot from a shotgun.

2

The only kind of saddle that can be fitted onto the man-animal is the kind with wheels behind him.

3

They made and remade the promise of better goods in the market.

4

Early Flight: I trilled my wings to gain height.


5

Ganpat the eunuch said, ‘Aise bewde toh maine roj theke pe mare hain.”

6.

He lit up like a young snake w(h)etting the back of his fangs with a forked tongue.

7

You’re like Kashmir to me; I keep hoping there’s no foreign hand behind you.


8

Why are gentlemen fascinated by the stuff that comes out of the center of the corner of their eye?


9


Only a snake can sleep with the children of the sun.

10

Yon Pari (depends on how you spell it)

Lissandra…

Lissandra… red pearls and golden jeweled feet
Lissandra, you came to me
Through the morning dew brightly
Lissandra, would you know me again
When we meet tonight?

I’ve come to the land of dues
Only to find no solution call
Any more lower for my heart
I have no use at all

The waistline decline
And your hand in mine
There really is no end
Just another beginning
Until the next death
Just a bend in the river
Westward chances for redemption
Floating its carnage upstream
Until the next death
Scream, Scream, Scream

A silent casket screamed
With colored and loud squares
Entrances by payment only
Detractors should beware
Television and the medium churned
Turned around and mixed
From raw documentary to
Parental guidance restrained.

Pissing-onna-wall (Answer Nature’s Call)

He was walking down the road
Carrying such a heavy load
Any moment now
Feeling like he’d explode

Everybody must know
A man’s gotta go when
A man’s gotta go
So line ‘em up
Against the wall
Answer nature’s call
And be careful
Where the drops fall

Pissing-onna-wall
Answer Nature’s Call

He was walking down the road
Carrying such a heavy load
Any moment now
Feeling like he’d explode

Pissing-onna-wall
Answer Nature’s Call

It’s nothing new since we came down from the trees
Just to learn that paper brings us to our knees
No matter how safe we keep the young
There’s nothing we can do to help them belong
They must learn anew from a previous generation
So they’re schooled until we’re through
Giving them their gods, telling them the odds
Against them just like you

Long ago, a pre-historic ancestor of man stepped out of a cave and picked up as stick. It took four hours before he learn to throw it away from him. A hundred years of evolution passed before an idea struck — why not throw it at someone. Like that Nub-Dring-Blah who’s dragging She-Gronk into a cave right now.

Thousands of years passed before someone decided to throw something harder. That was it! From there to now, it’s been a mad dash for a stage when man could calmly peel a banana in the knowledge that if someone hurls a stick at him, his sticks will automatically rise up in an offensive defense.

Give me someone for the truth and some one for the pain, and someone for what comes after tears run dry. Like a sandbar on a jagged coastline reef with water foaming on rocks all around, whenever I feel strong I put out poems in bottles. Each next morning, the sunlight glints off the broken glass on the rocks.

Take my base value.
Multiply it by time.
Add experience.
Subtract love.
Divide family.

What you get is the present.
The present would be better off in the past
Right now, my present has its eyes fixed on the distant future.

She left it behind and I figured her thoughts had turned from priests and religion to suitors and sex. After all, a woman approaching 30 has to think!

He checked his watch, 9:30, it said and hugged his ribs. “I wonder how it ever became so finite,” he wondered, “Come evening and I begin to feel my limits. Wonder how did I get to become so finite…”

Delhi Indian Summer

Anyone who has hacked it in a single room tenant-ship without a cooler in Delhi summer will know this. When the heat grips you above the hairline like a numb skullcap, when matka-cool water seems incandescent because it is less turgid than your blood. When lying on your mattress on the floor, you see the heat beating out your bowels and the food-you-had-no-desire-to-eat within into a liquid patina that runs into the bathroom while you lie there dourly. Waves of thoughts beat upon my mind in the dark where I can lay out my prayer mat in the shadows of my skull. Giving thanks to creation which gave me sensitivity to my condition; in time I was to realize that I was in time. And that was the big one.

Life is made up of crabwise movements. With each calamity (mainly emotional) I gained greater understanding. A sum of experience that totals up to experience itself, “Yes, I am and I have been…”

A stupid, young, over-smart friend once told an equally stupid, young and over-smart me that I reminded him of the sea and fisher women. He then went on to make it up to me by telling me how ‘sensual’ they were when they walked or moved.

My blood is going to seep out. It is gonna spread. It is going to wet this bed. Everywhere sheets a closing red patch. Each little bit that pours out could have still been inside my warm skin, trying to live.

I waited till the winds hollowed out my chest. Until I felt nothing but the vibrations of those around me dance through backbone to ribcage. Oh! it started off in the usual enough way; with a hole where my heart used to be.

How To Build Johnny’s Garden

4 cabins
1 dorm subdivided into three
a restaurant on the same level
kitchen garage workshop shed and stores
bunch of trees by a gravel drive
Road visible sign

Awnings for the restaurant
Wheelchair access to the mountains
Food, phone and hot water
Trekking supplies and guides
Photo supplies art supplies anyone?
Reading room and photocopier too.
But no TV!

Malekut's Story

Malekut stood facing the mountains and the sun showed up just in time to catch rainbows off the falling water. He’d driven off the telephone and into the drink. He’d developed a wide shoulder and decided to give it a break. Raking furrows into his painted face, the light inched across the open glade. Pianos played rolls in his head in accompaniment to the smile on his face. The treasure chest besides him smiled back in the sunshine.

Round House By The Ocean

Going crazy
Kissing thru tears
Landslide of freaks
From those missing years

Love on the ice
It can be nice
Come back to life
Father, son, child wife
Your mother is waiting
And you’ve started hating
Your best friends

Schoolgirls will bitch
Your boyfriend isn’t rich
But his hair’s grown an inch
Since you last saw him at
Your round house by the ocean

Balconies of emotion
Selling fossils the flower thief
Soapboxes with hearts on them
Love on the rocks y’know
The way he talks tells you
Tells you all about them
When you see them
Just play dumb
He doesn’t give up
Storm in a teacup
Common malaise
I like your eyes.

Some Things You Just Can’t Control

She couldn’t believe
Her love could retrieve
Her loss from death
So sudden and harsh
The lifeline snapped
He fell over with a crash
But now he’s back again
She knows but cannot explain
He held her hand
And it was cold
His face was muddy
Like he came out of a hole
Some things you just can’t control
Some things you just can’t control

God is in my TV set
God is collected on the road
Where a little dog died
Rub the dust and you’ll see
Where blood soaked through
Just like glue
Now here he is back again
She knows but cannot explain
He held her hand
And it was cold
His face was muddy
Like he came out of a hole
Some things you just can’t control
Some things you just can’t control

I’m Done Before I’ve Begun

I’m sitting late at night
Hoping to get it right
With my accounts in hand
It’s not hard to understand
I’m done before I’ve begun

I’m going down into the ground
I’ll lie down and die without a sound
Hey heroes, I’ve been had
Before I started, ain’t you glad
I’m done before I’ve begun

I’m done, I’m done
I’m done, I’m done
I’m done, I’m done
I’m done, I’m done

When it Comes to Love His life is a Bitch

Don’t make any moves
This silence is bleached
You know the moon
It’s still out of reach
Some days he’s strong
Some days he’s weak
But you can be sure
His life is a bitch

They said he was wrong
But they couldn’t teach
Him to win on his own
So when it comes to love
His life is a bitch

Bouncing off the walls
Screaming down the hall
They tied him down
They locked him in
So he wouldn’t sin
Against the system, mmm…

Where no one goes
He’s lost in a dream
Behind locked doors
How can he redeem
Those who told him that
He could be sure
His life is a bitch.

They said he was wrong
But they couldn’t teach
Him to win on his own
So when it comes to love
His life is a bitch

Got laid off yesterday
Couldn’t start my bike today
I have moments of indecision
Wondering which way
The least failures lay
Got a moment to pass?
I’ve got some topics to flay

It’s easy when you
Know how to survive
It’s crazy when you
Don’t know how
To stay alive and kicking
Alive and kicking

It’s easy when you
Got someone to support
It’s crazy when you
Don’t know how
Long they’ll stay
Alive, alive, stay alive
Alive and kicking

It’s easy when you got
Someone to support you
It’s crazy when you
Don’t know how
They’ll stay alive and kicking
Alive and kicking

What can you be
Thinking in the
Middle of this road
Of doubt, do you stand
All alone and shout

Prevention is Better Than Cure

I was shown mirrors
And the scars are still there
I’ll keep getting better
Coz it’s the only kind you respect
Introspect and I suspect
Prevention is better than cure

Come a little closer
And let me see your chest
To the left, that’s my heart
Coz it’s the only kind you respect
Introspect and I suspect
Prevention is better than cure
I once was a fool but I was pure

--
Prevention is my cure
I was a fool but now I’m sure
Prevention is my cure
All the rest is just pain
Prevention is my cure

Sex

Sex is
Seven seconds
Of protein loss
At four liters
Of body fluid cost

Then we
Fail to see
All pornography
Is meant
To be lost

I’d never
Take chances
Often forgetting
To wear
My protection

Don’t you
Worry about
Anything when
This song is
My connection

Motherland

Let love fill your womb, O mother
Let freedom chime across your breasts
Your offspring who kill one-another
Shall know when time puts them to test.

Ode To Joy

Cross my heart and hope to die
Many’s the time I’ve borrowed your help
Many’s the time you’ve seen me through
This is just to say,
Man, I love you.