The Paranoid sounding-board

Untitled 1

2005-10-28T15:00:00.000+05:30

I stand in the shadows
cancer hangning loose
is it today right now?
or is it yesterday's booze

I call out to no one
I hear no one call me back
to no one I call out
no one says nothing at all

catching onto the fleeting memories
the best years are only pain,
confusion and self abuse,
acid pills and acid rain

quietly bubbling anger
sleeplessness for weeks
turning the hourglass over and over
dreading every second ticking away

out of here seems like a good place
though anyplace else is a vision of hell
time passes funny at times
days months eons all rolled into one

the ones who flew the coop
come back now and again
feathers all polished and straightened
arteries all replaced by chains

wish I could dissapear completely
wish I was formless and massless
a god, offering nothing to no one
no one asking for nothing at all

canned bull

2005-10-02T04:47:00.000+05:30

grammer slinking shagging zilch
reebock freedom ballmer guilt
garage winsome gruesome brass
crassy classy hurricane blast
cymbal timber nightly rights
frag me stab you fender fights
mites and lights and trillion shines
dwarfes and kings and krypton shites
cocks and balls and early dawn
wacko jacko streaming porn
sacred fags and drama queens
wiffs of hell and in-betweens
cunts and cults and glassy piles
clowns and deans and two square miles

dust

2005-09-19T16:54:00.000+05:30

This is a slightly modified dream I had. Enjoy, if you can O non-existant reader.

How did i get here.. did I follow her? She sits in the shadows, ignoring me. My eyes are still dialated from the summer sun. The room smells cool and damp. Dust is suspended everywhere. All this place lacks is a parrot cage and a hookah I think. Anyway, two can play at the ignoring game. I give the ashtray lying on the table the benefit of my undivided attention. It's overflowing... this chick smokes like a fucking chimney, no wonder the other girls avoid her. Finally she offers me a cigarette. I accept if gracefully and hunt for a lighter through my pockets ungracefully and very usuccessfully. I take the light she offers and Whoosh!. The thing is dynamite. I know immediately it's no ordinary cigarette. But who's complaining. By the end of the day i still dont know what she looks like. But she smells like smoked roses dipped in wine.

Four days later. I know she owns me. I avoid my friends, no one must know my existence is now commanded by my dark mistress. Did we have sex? I can't remember. I still don't completely remember what she looks like. I do know that she is a woman. A silent chuckle escapes me when i think of all the girls I used to chase. No, not all... there was ofcourse L. My sweet L. With her it was so different. It was pure somehow. Not the infinite hunger I feel for the dark mistress. With L it was all chocolates and flowers. With her it's all smoke and dreams.

Even though I like to call her my dark mistress, her skin is white as her hair is black. Lying in my room I think of everything I remember about her. Nothing. I dont even know her name. Every moment that I spent with her, every thing I did, has been a replay of what I did with L. Walking on the same roads, looking at the same trees, whispering the same words... same words, different meaning.

L died of course. I imagine a life with her. That is the only time I feel happy. Then the thirst gets to me and go to her like a slave. Time has become funny for me. Weeks hold no more meaning than days do. She is a forbidden object, a sin. Her skin and the smoke is what my life revoles around now. I used to know so many people... can barely recall...

No one has lived here for ages, the old fool tells me. They have opened a fucking tailor shop where she lives. I shout at the bastard at the top of my voice. A few select words should teach them to bugger me. They don't look so old and weak anymore. Who cares, I can take on the geezers. I swing, but nothing connects. My hand is not moving at all. Shit. They more or less throw me and my dignity out.

What should I do? I have become a zombie. After my anger dies down, the need starts attacking me. It becomes so great that it loses meaning. I want something, I don't know what. I think if L. She always knew what I needed more than I ever did. After roaming the streats for two straight days with bloodshot eyes and a dry mouth I make up my mind. I will go to L's old house. I could never be where I wanted to be. Atleast I should die where I want to.

L opens the door upon my approach and smiles like she always does. I can't help but smile. I give her the chocolates and the flowers. So easy to make her happy. We move inside.

another depression log

2005-09-18T03:56:00.000+05:30

i apologise to my non-existent readers for the last post. it turned me off so much that i have not written anything since till now ('obviously' you say, obviously i agree)

The meaninglessness of what anyone says. what does anything mean? everyone in general tends to generate so much bull that within five minutes ,everyone is just building upon the bull (aaaaand all the way to bull heaven we will go brotha!).
people have a terrefic capacity for forgetting whatever the fuck they were talking about and virtually no capacity to say what they feel. what is art? because direct words are so useless, art is anything which can make anybody feel anything without saying it "clearly". only an artist knows how to talk. now this sounds too much like a discourse. i am trying to say things clearly. it's irritating even me.

sometimes i want to say so much so suddenly, saying it is so much effort that i tend to take the path to obfuscation just to shut everyone up.

The wolf. floating 3 cm above the ground. night. i will have the answer to everything if i can make some sort of a pattern out of the craks on the asphalt as they struggle to become visible under the mercury lamps. rain. wet cigarette tastes like cooked shit. i am the connoisseur. too much of an artist to have a life, to little to have art. why doesn't someone just blow the whole shebang up?

the masochist. goes on punching the keyboard. hates himself for it. loves himself for the hate.

the asshole. everyone hates him. he loves it.

the none-of-the-above. no i'm not! yes i am... why don't you take a gun and blow a fucking hole through your head. the wolf considers it. the asshole laughs. not so surprisingly, the masochist hates it.

[Film Take] Dune

2005-07-30T12:22:00.000+05:30

Why am i reviewing a bucket of dung out of hell like DUNE? Well, quite simply put, I saw it.

The problem with this movie is that you can only watch it if you have read the book. Frank Herbert's Dune is quite simply the most magical novel I have ever read and this movie pays a humble tribute to it.

Dune as a novel is so complex and so full of people and events and words like Kwisatz-Hederach and Gom-Jabbar, one would have thought that no director in his right mind would undertake this venture. But David Lynch did, though he hates the movie, (and so do millions of others), I am sure this the best that could be managed in 120-mins and also be interesting.

The things I like about the movie:

The wonderful atmosphere. The future baroque interiors and costumes were almost fully consistent with what I had imagined while reading the book.

The FX. Dont nobody tell me this was the worst you have seen. Although it was bad thechnically, but compared to other movies of the same period, I would say it was pretty amazing. Also the gold-plated space ships and other such bizzare things makes the movie look like a classic.

The Worms. Beautiful.

Things I did not like about the movie:

Paul Atriedes. I think Lynch forgot to read the description of the protagonist in the book. The guy is supposed to emiciated and we all know he comes in shades of grey. But Lynch's Paul looks like a bishonen character, the kind that inspires great yaoi literature.

The wierding modules. WTF??
consider this scene. An unwary Fremen simpleton is holding a wierding module while being trained by the sly Paul. Our innocent fremen says "Maud'dib!". The cry is echoes around the cave and finally the wierding module reacts to teh sound and shoots a killer pulse. And this takes the cake with the icing on top: Paul thinks "My name is a killing word!". Once again... WTF??

And finally the biggest betrayal a movie has ever made to it's book. It rains on Arrakis in the end! Now any humble-Joe Dune fan would know it will not rain on Arrakis for another thousand years, when the God Emperor makes it happen. The worms are allergic to water for heaven's sake!

Anyway despite the fact that there are more things to hate than to love in the movie, atleast the guy had the guts to make it. You think you can do better?

[Book Look] The Word According to Garp - John Irwin

2005-06-22T20:18:00.000+05:30

Most of the one word reviews that I got about this book prior to reading it consisted of, well one word, "grotesque". Now call it my fascination for all words ending with -esque or all words beginning with gro- , I went for it. Fortunately, I was not dissapointed.

Howerer the word I would use for this piece is "funny". The book is hilarious. The protagonist (Garp) is put into so many plausible and yet rarely seen situations, one can't help admire the sheer orignality of the narrative. From his birth (his mother having sex with with a bedridden, mentally decapacitated turret gunner) to his death(shot in chest by a bed-wetting 20 something girl), Garp is a man who does whose life is anything but ordinary. In spite of the deviations from normal life, the distince feeling prevails that the story is autobiographical. It is a rare chance that the situations in the book are close to the author's life, but the characters can quite certainly be. Garp is a writer. And the novel is written in the same manner that Garp aspires to write his novels.

The excerpts that Irwin gives as an example of what Garp writes cannot escape the fact that they have been written by Irwin. And after a while it does seem presumptios, Irwin judging the writings of Garp in the guise of the narrator.

But what gives the book beauty, are the characters. Each one more unique and colorful than the other. There is a consistancy in the characters that is rarely seen. And the number of characters! You have teenage rapists, hulking trans-sexuals, feminist nurses, moralist publishers.... all produced and executed beatufilly.

Death as a subject is treated with great respect in the book. Each dying scene is penned in an excuisitely detailed and graphic description. And you will definitely miss every character that dies, whether carrying shades of black or white. At the end of the novel, there is a long epilogue in which, as the cliche goes, everyone dies.

Overall, (I hate it when I have to use "overlall", but for want of a larger vocabulary....) a beautifully written and rememberable book.

Prologue

2005-06-20T03:09:00.000+05:30

Do you ever get the feeling that your life is more than what it seems? That it all actually means something. I hate what I see in my future. A cog in the system, turning with clockwork precision, unthinking, dispensable, and prone to rust and fracture.

Consider the collective history of mankind, how many have made a mark in canvas called space-time when we consider the projection on the collective psyche of humankind. Integrate our collective consciousness over time and you get the timeless picture of human history, that which matters. In this picture you see the many who created ripples in the continuum. These are not the people who we read about, the latter too were just cogs, dispensable and replaceable. If it had not been them, It would have been someone else; consequences of the force of history, inevitable and unimportant. Those who made a difference are not the shining beacons of history or the milestones in the stream of time. They are the little know or unknown individuals who grasped what was really happening beneath the veil called life. To become immortal in the minds of men is a small ambition. To grasp the puppet strings controlling the universe is the true purpose of the movers, those who shaped what the picture actually looks like today, both above and below the surface.

Lately I get the feeling more and more that my life is a prologue, an introduction to the main plot. Lately, the veil seems more and more transparent. I feel like I am walking on thin ice, one day it will crack and the pressure of my feet will cause a propagation of the fracture and as soon as I achieve yield stress I will see the infinitely larger water body beneath. I might drown or freeze, but more plausibly I will find it.

Maybe this seems like a search for God in the soul of a godless man. But that is unlikely. Those who seek God around every corner are just adding another veil to the the already present several layers. The materialists accuse the religious of being disconnected from reality. Fucking idiots, both of them.

There is something drastically wrong. Part the curtains and you will see. If you do... tell me, because I am still only trying.

The End

2005-06-03T15:40:00.000+05:30

"Sniff"
"Sniff"
"Sniff"
Click

Post Convo Musings

2005-06-01T12:07:00.000+05:30

please do not read the following very badly written article if you are not from IITk, it just might seem a tad bit gay. And this was written in a single stroke, the effects are visible.

I did not attend the convo. In fact I did not meet one passing out senior yesterday. I won't say that I am sad. But it's like something's suddenly missing. It's like a loss of purpose. And the worst part is this always happens with me. I wake up to the facts only when the party's over.

This time though I knew I would feel like this. Two Antaragni's old, and I always manage to feel the same miserable way. There's a rushing buildup to any major event in my mind, and when its over, i discover that nothing really happened. I remember the first year Antaragni. It was the last night, I had done absolutely nothing worth mentioning the past three days and met absolutely no one. I sat down with a bunch of idiots (aka friends) even as the babes were leaving the campus. Everybody was already getting nostalgic and I had not even seen anything to get sufficiently nostalgic over. But I felt the prick. I had smelled the air during the event electric with the excitement. I knew i was missing out on something.

The point being, logic says it will be better if you avoid something like that and not miss it later on because it is too transitory and you benefit more if you stay clear off it. But experience tells me that I should party when a party is on. It feels more like shit if everyone except you had fun.

So what is the connection between Antragni and convo? The night I just described was to Antragni what convo was to the two years I spent with my much beloved seniors. It's only yesterday that i realized how little time I spent with them. I don't want the party to end just now. Seems I was only getting started.

And I should have attended the convo, should have met more of the boys in the final days. Ever notice how the air always seems stiller and hotter after something like that gets over?

Three Degrees Centigrade of Seperation

2005-05-31T09:06:00.000+05:30

"I have to leave"
"Why? Dont you love me?"
"I do, I really do."
"Then what is it"
"It's the heat"
"WHAT?"
"I said it's the fucking heat"
"What does that mean? what heat?"
"I can't stand it anymore, everytime the only thing i can think of is how hot it is. It's driving me nuts. Even being at a distance of like 3 metres from you makes me break out into sweat. It's like you are radioactive. And the problem is not limited to the time I spend with you. It bothers me all the time thinking about the time i spend with you. I wanna run away. I dont't even want to touch you. The voice in my head keeps screaming "RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!". It feels like I am going to explode."
"What the hell? You are a sick bastard. Get out of here"
"Um.. ok.. Just remember I love you"
"Whatever, just get the fuck away"
"I will never forget you"
"GET THE FUCK AWAY"
"Remember the time when we shot those dogs in the balls? wait a min.. oh sorry that wasn't you, anyway, I'll miss you so much"
"YAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!"
"Do you suppose we could maybe get back together in the winters?"

a day in the life contd........

2005-05-29T09:21:00.000+05:30

continued from the last post

It was upto old Trusty again. I had to save her. The only problem was the old not-so-trusty beating in my chest. Doctors said... never mind what the doctors said, don't trust that bunch of bastards anyway.

25 mins into the desert and the beast beneath me is already tired. I can taste my own sweat. The sand and the sun are blinding me and the pain in my chest is a dull throbbing that threatens to get worse. I follow the trail of half burnt fires through the desert. I need a break. Will I be responsible for the death of a young angel if I sleep? But the need is too strong. I give in to the opressive heat. Here in the middle of the desert.... I might be killing myself too.

Goddamn dreams! Fleeting images of magically driven carriages and huge immoving structures. I can still smell the alchemy. I can still feel the soft fabric. Dreams of being old, suffering, dying.I put on my boots and my hat, put the fire out, saddle Trusty, time to get on with the chase.

It's been seven days following the black bastards tracks. Every half-burnt fire tells it's own tale. I read the signs and follow the trail. The last of the dark dwellings is a spot on the horizon. A minute later and the heat waves swallow the spot. There was hardly enough there to feed me, but Trusty needed the food and water more than I did. The hunger hardly bothers me anymore. The only thing driving me is the hope that Nancy is still alive. That I can save her and die in peace.

Then I see him. The black bastard on his white horse. He knows I am there. I see a glimpse of Nancy's red dress, her special bithday dress. I know she is alive. I had always knows she would be alive.

We both dismount and face each. I see the sun glinting in his eyes, the only visible part of his maggot-infested body. The eyes are shining like that of a maniac. Like those of a magician.
An vulture flies overhead and his cry is a reminder that only one of us will remain standing. The silence is complete. It envolops me like a shroud and seems it will suffocate me. A hundred years of killing and I have never been so terrified. The black bastard was by far the only man (if he is a man, indeed who knows what what he is) who can kill me. The only man who has killed more than I have. His eyes are a reflection of the same loathing that I feel for him. Radiating hatred, radiating fear.

I can never tell how I knew the moment had come. My hands were a blur and I shot a million shots in his direction with both my Peacemakers. I remember reloading both guns at least three times. Do I remember what he looked like while I shot him? I remember seeing a blur fifty yards away and bullets whizzing in my direction. I remember asking myself "Do you feel lucky?" I remember answering with the Peacemakers. I remember seeing him fly backwards when all my bullets hit him almost simultaneously. I remember smelling the smoke and feeling the weight of the hot guns in my hands. I remember the sun and I remember looking down at my chest. I remember smiling as I saw my own perforated body and falling down on the sand with a soft thud.

An old man dies, a young girl lives - fair trade

No wonder they call me "dirty". I always get the shit end of the stick.

A day in the life.....

2005-05-29T06:50:00.000+05:30

Goddamn dreams. I can still breath the sand and the dust with the sun scorching my face. I can still feel the hot revolver in my hands. The pillow is soaking wet with my sweat even with the air conditioning at full blast. What was it what was it? This is the third time I am beating the alarm by five minutes. Time to go to work. Time to go to that shithole called my cubicle and that machine called my computer. Time to catch the bad guys.

I get up and feed myself last nights remaining meal. It's cold, it sucks, but I eat it anyway. I get into my brown suit and put on my hostler and my worst expression. I put the gun in hostler and look into the mirror. An old man with a bad expression looks back at me. Nice guy. He's dying. He's alone. He likes it that way. That's the way he's always been.

Old Trusty was just not trusty anymore. The backfiring engine was driving me insane. Ah screw it, last day at the job, I don't need this shit. I reach the station, and after the painful farewell “party” from the boys, I reach the shithole. One look at my schedule tells me that going gentle into the dark night was not for me. The Black Bastard had kidnapped another kid.
Nancy.
12 years old.
Blonde.
Pretty.
Dead in three hours if I could not save her.

Hell of a way to begin a retirement....

“Hey Callahan! I am transferring the Black Bastard case to Pitt. Enjoy the retirement.” says the chief who is much younger than me. I shout something about my gun and the Chief's balls and Pitt's sexual orientation and the case is mine again.

To be contd.

How bad can death be?

2005-05-25T23:48:00.000+05:30

For the past few days, my life has been as close to death as close the the bozos sleeping on the floor nearby are right now. I have not been doing anything, absolutely anything that maybe called even remotely proactive. The only thing i am doing is eating and reading books and watching movies. Nothing wrong with those per se, we all need our shot of culture now and then, but then not all of us have professors and seniors breathing down our necks and deadlines in our nightmares. I percieve deadlines not as markers in time but as a tangible hazardous thing, a line, a razor sharp booby trap that will cut of my ankles as soon as i get to it.
This blog i am writing right now is an excuse i will give myself for not doing what i should be right now. Why in satan's name is life so bad most of the time.
Other Unrelated news: talked to my old friend Gyan on the phone today. Nice to know that I still have friends left who plan to remember me all their lives. Most freindships in the male of the species is limited to Fuck!-why-arn't-there-any-babes-in-this-goddam-place let's-go-to-the-canteen
I don't know but it seems the females have it slightly better in their same-sex bonding periods.
If only I could work out certaing things that seem to be driving me towards suicide right now i could feel better. If only suicide was not so easy. If only death carried a certificate that it's a bad place and could convince me not to ponder about it. Momories haunt me and fill me with loathing for myself. I wonder what eternity smells like?

A Hunger Artist

2005-05-18T03:58:00.000+05:30

I wrote this critique as a part of a very memorable english course i did.

A Hunger Artist

This story, written by Kafka close to the time of his death, is said to be strongly autobiographical. It is the story of an unsatisfied and mostly unappreciated artist who, in his death, found the true reason behind is passion.

Overall the story is abstract to the point of being called surreal. The hunger artist cannot be real and neither can the world that kafka builds around him. This story is a highly symbolic representation of Kafka's own life and his sorrows.

Kafka's style is unique. The characters, location, and period are all unnamed. In-spite of this feature the style is almost journalistic. The story is told in third person and the narrator has no significance in the story. This way, kafka manages to totally avoid the description of anybody's feelings. The tone is always depressing and cold. There is a sense of hopelessness throughout the narration. There is no “moral of the story” that the reader might cling to in hope of shrugging-off the feeling of helplessness that is left by the story.

The story has no heroes. Though we might “like” the artist and “hate” the impresario, both these characters are equally selfish. The artist is a narcissist whose love is not the art itself but its appreciation. The impresario is simply a man who wants to serve the demands of the audience.

The artist is shown perpetually depressed over two things. One of them being the way his audience misunderstands his art and the second is his own feeling of inferiority as he feels his work as “easy”. It is said that the artist was never allowed to stay in his state of fasting for more than forty days(this is a biblical allegory - the rain that fell for forty days and forty nights). The impresario works out the number based on nothing more than economics – the audience simply loses interest after forty days. The artist on the other hand wants to stay in the cage for a longer time. He wants to break his own record(he already know he is the best). He is happiest when people are watching him continuously, when they are eating in front of him, almost as if the more they thing he is suffering, the happier he feels. On the other hand the one thing that he cant stand is people doubting his integrity. He is said to behave like a wild animal when said that he is suffering because he is fasting.

But in-spite of all his self-appreciation, the artist feels guilty about it – he feels it is too easy. Perhaps that is one of the reason he wants to keep going. He wants to test himself to the limit of his endurance.

The story is in two parts. In the first part he is an exhibit, a central attraction and very famous. Then overnight the “fashion” for his art is gone and joins a circus. He is put in a sideshow and hardly anybody is interested in him. Eventually the even the board that showed how many days he had been fasting falls into neglect and everybody loses count of the number of days he has been fasting. One day he dies. Two important characters are introduced here. The overseer is the man who listens but does not understand; and the panther that is put in the cage when the artist dies. The panther might represent some lower form of art here.

The story ties-in with Kafka's life in more ways than one. Like the artist he always doubted his own talent and never wanted most of his works published. The last lines of the artist as he dies are most revealing in this aspect. He admits that he was fasting because he never found that food that he likes. Perhaps this is why he always saw fasting as easy and rejected food even at the end of his fasts. The people always misunderstood the art. This was also the case with Kafka's writing. He was never too popular during his lifetime and indeed even today most of his works defy interpretation.

Apart from the more abstract connotations of his psychological state, there is a lot of reference to Kafka's physical appearance and settings. The cage may be representative of his cramped quarters, and the physical smallness of the artist(even more so compared to the vitality of the panther) is almost surely an indicator of kafka's ill-health and the way he felt dwarfed by his father.

Projection of a temporally linear thought thread

2005-05-09T23:42:00.000+05:30

Walking in the beloved corridors one evening i got around to convincing myself that I am God because I have always been a great fan of Berkeley's philosophy but discovered only recently that i did not actually believe in the fact that i am all the universe and every physical manifestation that is tangible to my senses is a figment of my imagination and my consciousness is all that is and so that whatever i believe in is the truth and the what anyone else believes in is my doubt and deserves to be rubbished and if anyone calls me arrogant its not his or her fault because if i am all creation arrogance follows easily and people really should understand this but I also realize that its not possible for anyone to actually realize anything of this sort because to deny one's own existence is not possible for even the greatest of beings and so i will allow you to place yourself in my place for a minute and assume that you are God(really i vulgar word in this case, but saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent in explaining what i was trying to say if i did not use it) and that its your consciousness that is Life, the Universe and Everything not mine so that you get an idea of how difficult it is to convince people of such a truth but now i think that i don't give a shit about you believing this or not and that the aforementioned exercise is shockingly futile as anything you believe in does not cause a change amounting to one iota in this world because you will still just be a piece of my imagination and the day i die is the day you die and everyone else dies('die' again is a word that can only be applied to me and none other, but again a grand time saver)and considering all things that makes me pretty much immortal so death is not one of the things that bother me.

Sin City!

2005-05-08T07:46:00.000+05:30

"WOW!" Sin City demands that you say that at every step of the way. the gravel blowing car chases, the film noir dialogs, the amplified gun shots, the style, the multiple castrations.... all the elements add up to a movie that is an example of both high art and i-wanna-watch-it-again-and -again entertainment. It calls to mind many things... Pulp fiction(the three slightly connected stories), Kill Bill (the blood and oh-so satisfying violence), Desperado (the cool kills and real men), James Hadly Chase(the cooldbloodedness of it) and all the 20's and 30's detective movies you ever saw.

But Sin City is quite unique. You have never seen a movie quite like it. The characters are brilliant. Almost all the characters fit the bill so nicely that i would not have any of them replaced by anyone else. But a special mention to Mickey Rourke as Marv who takes the cake for the big psycho we all love.

At the end of the movie you wont feel touched emotionally. But that was one thing that I am sure Frank Miller never tried to achieve. What you do feel is satisfied. You feel like living in the days when you could walk down a street with a gun in one hand, a knife in the other and a cigarette in your lips. The all or nothing days....

I read the comics immediately after I saw the movie and again saw the movie immediately after i read the comics. The adherence is unbelievable. Almost no dialog has been altered and almost every scene is lifted right out of the frame of the comic-book. You can keep the comic book and the movie frame beside each other and play spot the difference and lose. In my opinion though the movie does much more justice to the over-sized men and lethal prostitutes than a graphic novel ever can. You have to hear the bones cracking to catch the entire effect.