If i shot myself right through the heart,
took my soul and tore it apart,
cut myself and let me bleed,
and lay it all down at your feet,
would it be any different,
would you see if i were broke or bent,
would you stop and sympathize,
would the tears well in your eyes,
could you know loves not all i feel,
that theres a part of me to heal,
a part that lies in deep conceal,
guess you thought it wasnt part of the deal...
Is a little understanding too much to ask,
or are you just so content to bask
in the glory of your self-understanding,
that you dont realize that it don't mean a thing...

Reincarnation Of The Nomad

In keeping with the nomad spirit, I'm moving- yet again. A little over 2 years- that's the most time I've ever spent in one house(considering that I was home only for 3 months a year during school). The end of an era, I suppose. I kinda liked this place. Nice house in a great location, wasn't too expensive and it offered me all the anonymity i craved. Let's see what the new place has up its sleeve now, shall we?

fickle life

funny old thing, this life..
never know what curveballs it's gonna throw u next..
the one thing u want so bad suddenly hits you in the face n ur so stunned u dont even realize it till its gone..
but life does u favors when ur least expecting it.. or at least, they seem like favors.. never know what price it makes u pay later.. enjoy it while it lasts, i guess....

Unabashedly Love

She's so beautiful it almost hurts
And with every smile it gets a little worse
Bathed in the reflected glow of her eyes
Like an angel lost on her way to paradise

She plays in the cold and laughs like a child
Her face is flushed and her hair blows wild
She talks like music and walks like the rain
She's probably why i'd smile again

But everyday she waves her goodbye
And i'm only left to wonder why
When she's moving around, an inch from the ground
It's like a brand new reason i've found..

A Cold Winter Morning

Echoes of unspoken words
Travelling through different worlds
While you sit on a cold slab of stone
Watching the world from your personal throne

I shiver in the cold and rain
But you're warm, you feel no pain
It's yet another day, but there still isn't another way
And language never had enough words to say

It takes a moment to turn around
But you're afraid you'll break your glass crown
So walk away, you know I won't follow
I guess you know my pride's too hard to swallow.

Back Home Again

Yeah it does feel great to be back home again. I think I know just what John Denver was talking about. Infocom was great, educational and inspirational. It's a big world out there....
Like all college trips, you sometimes wonder why the hell you went in the first place, but those moments aside (although there were plenty of those), it was a great experience. I guess half the fun in these trips is bitching about how poorly it was organized. And I had a lot of fun in that department at least…

Packing. I hate it. I like travelling, i just wish packing wasn't part of it... Well, It's 4 am and I think I'm finally finished with it.. Hopefully.. Now to sleep 2 hours.. Kolkata here I come...

The Masochist

Why is it that I need pain to keep my sanity? Why do I feel incomplete and wasted when there isn't anything to worry about in life? What is it about suffering that makes me feel special, better than the rest?

Maybe it's because I'm so used to having something to worry about all my life that it's so hard to let go and just live a normal life like everybody else. When there is no pain, I need to create it. I could easily let go of painful memories, give up on impossible dreams, and live in the here and now, which isn't altogether bad. But I'd rather relive each of those moments, hear every word, read every letter, keep hoping and wishing for things I know will never come true. I believe the process of pain purifies me, like a trial by fire. It sets me apart, because I know I will be strong, much stronger than anyone can guess. Suffering helps me believe in myself, and remind me of the hero I always wanted to see in myself. I need the pain to be able to reach deep into myself, know myself better.

Yes, I find pleasure in pain. Does that make me a masochist? Maybe. And does this masochism breed and nurture narcissism in me? Maybe. Either way, I don't really think I care all that much, because I'd much rather know me as me, not by definitions of some socially accepted stereotypes invented by society for their own convenience.

Born To Run

Sometimes you feel you're born to run, destined to be a physical and emotional nomad. You feel the need to move on, to leave behind yet another installment of life and start all over again somewhere new. You have perfected the art of detachment, and that of making temporary friends. You get a strange comfort in knowing that the people around them aren't going to be forever, just little longer. You've done nothing wrong, yet you feel the need to distance yourself from your past, to rebuild you life again. But there are some people you wish you didn't have to leave behind- a few real friends that you wish life wouldn't take away from you. But you can't be a nomad and keep friends forever. You have to let them go live their life, nestled in their perfect little worlds. You just brush the dust off your backpack and get back on the road. It does get lonely at times, changing worlds, restarting your life each time, but you learn to live with it. It's the only way you don't feel threatened by your surroundings, so you're not afraid you'll turn into your neighbour. You could try falling in love but that would probably want to make you run even worse. After all, how much heartbreak can you handle? Some call it fear of commitment, some call it instability. I call it life. For some of us are, indeed, born to run. And who ever said nomads don't enjoy life?

Gratitude: a sin?

Most religions try to impress upon us that it is our moral duty to help those in need and be generally kind to others all the time. Going by this philosophy, someone who is kind towards you is merely doing his duty, because by moral standards, he is bound to. If his copy of religious text had a misprint that said ‘punch thy neighbour’, he would have done so with equal zeal. Nobody is grateful to someone who is just doing his job (when was the last time you thanked your janitor for doing an "awesome job on the loo"?), so by feeling gratitude, you are acknowledging the fact that helping you was not his duty but something nice he did for you. And since religion would have it otherwise, you are, in fact, contradicting it, and hence are sinning. So the next time you say "Thank you" to someone, be prepared for the fires of hell!!! :-)    

A Crush

Your irresistible charm
Could even do you harm
So you better watch your step,
Step right over the cracks
You will smile at the world
From deep under your curls
While they're all watching you step
Stopped dead in their tracks

A peek into your thoughts
To understand is all I sought
And now you're walking your way
And I'm begging you to turn back
So what’s behind that perfect face
And that infallible grace
Could you be just a name
Is that the only stake you claim?

"There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask 'Why me?' and 'What if?'. When you look back and see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or forked lightning. If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you, it would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions." From Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne.

Angel in The Devil’s shoes,
Is there a reason for the ways you choose
What did you win, or did you play to lose
When love and logic you abused

You lie around, biding your time
Waiting for someone to throw you a line
But you won’t hold when one comes your way
So what is it really, for which you pray

Deep, dark eyes to reach any heart
Dragon’s jaws to tear them apart
How many lives till you feed your hunger
How many more times till you kill your anger
And where will you go tomorrow when you’re living too fast
Because your future’s determined by your past.

The Nature Of Evil

"What is this great evil? How did it steal into the world? From what seed, what root did it spring? Who's doing this? Who's killing us? Robbing us of light and life. Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known," wonders Private Train in the 1998 war drama The Thin Red Line.

I suppose Train isn't the only one who's ever questioned the nature of evil. I have a million times myself. However, the most satisfactory answer I've got is, interestingly, from the same movie, when Colonel Gordon Tall (played by Nick Nolte) tells a doubtful Captain Staros, "Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything. Nature's cruel, Staros."

I hated the idea the first time I heard it. I was a teenager who believed in the fundamental good of all creation, a humanitarian. There was no way I could accept nature as cruel. It was the kindest thing that existed. It was only man, when misguided, who was cruel to it and to each other. Nevertheless, it was a line that stuck in my head for the next six years or so, when I happened to watch the movie again. And it was all so clear.

Cruelty, or evil, whichever way you put it, is woven into the very fabric of our existence. It exists in every last, purest one of us. Cruelty is part of the great design that is this universe. Colonel Tall's example is wonderful: a vine draped around a magnificent tree, living off the tree, relying on it for everything, yet seemingly giving nothing in return. The vine doesn't wish to be cruel; it's just the way it lives. That's nature, and it is evil. Yet, nature has this amazing ability of imparting beauty to anything. The vine manages to look beautiful even as it reaches into the innermost depths of the oak, robbing it of its nourishment, veiling it by climbing all over it, and at the same time relying upon it for support. Even the oak, infected by this parasite, gains a certain grandeur in this system. It represents the stoic boldness that some men aspire for- to stand tall in the face of adversity, not to be hampered by climbers trying to pull it down.

The beauty of the vine is superficial. Just under the leaves lies a vileness almost unparalleled. It couldn't live without the tree, yet by climbing it veils it from sight. The beauty of the oak is much more powerful- it commands awe in the hearts of men that look upon it. In spite of the vine, it still looks majestic.

Often, as I believe many others have done, I have wondered if the universe was just a series of random events or a well-planned course of events headed somewhere for a reason. I can't say I am too religious a person, so I wasn't too comfortable with the idea of the whole God's Masterplan concept. So I wondered if there was a mathematical expression, an equation that run the world. The various parameters substituted according the situation, correctly weighted, could perhaps yield the outcome of an event, action or even emotion. To a small extent, we already know the immediate cause-and-effect relationships, but what if it were possible at a much larger scale?### If there were such an equation, I believe "evil" would be a very important parameter in it, because I believe it is a fundamental trait of life. It is necessary to sometimes be cruel, and it is necessary at other times to carry on in spite of cruelty inflicted upon us.

###I don't know how sane the "equation" above sounds, but most philosophers I know seem to give us a choice between believing in the "random series of events" theory, or the "God's Masterplan" theory. In my opinion, the universe is a little too well-ordered for so many random events to happen. Random events would completely disprove cause-and-effect relationships. Driving off a cliff and dying are certainly not two random events that occur in series. And if our whole life was nothing but a carefully planned course of events, and that the fact that I'm half-asleep well past midnight trying to write this was not my conscious decision but a pre-planned move intended for some higher purpose, it would make life extremely depressing, dreary and dreadful. Hell, I can't even stretch my legs under the table and feel good about it, because it wasn't me, but something written in a Scripture. But who knows what the truth is? Maybe Douglas Adams was right. Maybe it's the mice.    

Caught Somewhere In Time

Ok I know it's the name of an Iron Maiden song, but there's more to it. I think everyone alive is, in his own little way, caught in time or space, in a life less than ideal, in a time and place less than ideal. Every man alive desires for something more in life.

Not to say that it is a bad thing, to be dissatisfied. Desire is the fundamental character of mankind, or of all life, for that matter. The desire to have better, the desire to have more. Desire is what drives civilization forward. Desire built the skyscrapers, desire propelled airplanes, desire made music, desire created art.

Over the years, prophets and messiahs told man to renounce all desire in order to gain eternal happiness and salvation, and man tried very hard not to desire. What they seemed to miss was that even the want to desire nothing was a desire in itself. In effect, they asked man to desire to be desireless. That's an interesting paradox never adequately debated upon.

Even if man were able to renounce all desire, would that really make him happy? Desire is what separates the living from the inanimate. If we were to give up all our desires, our hopes and dreams, what different would we be from the pebbles we kick? As Tennyson in his epic Ulysses wrote, "As tho' to breathe were life!" To want nothing, to desire nothing, would mean stagnation, and indeed, to paraphrase a book I once read, if perfection were stagnation, heaven would be a swamp!

Caught somewhere in time...
Well aren't we all?