Train, Set and Match

It's over. A long summer, a glorious summer. I wish it would never end.

I'm writing this at midnight on the 30th of July, 2013. Tomorrow is when I leave for college. Tomorrow I leave behind my friends and Cidade beach. Tomorrow I quit doing questionable activities and driving at 120 kmph on eternal Goan roads in heavy rainfall. I leave behind the sea and sand and fields around pleasant walkways. I leave behind family, I leave behind home. I leave behind that shady KA-registered Maruti with the frisbee in the back. Tomorrow is going to be bittersweet.

I love my college. I love campus life. I love the independence I get in my 3x3 m room over there. I'm excited to see what this new year brings - I'll have juniors, I'll be studying something that I haven't bothered to explore before, I'll be playing as much basketball as I can handle. Yet those lonesome stretches and our hidden cove on the beach will be missed. The eerie, dark Bambolim lane will be missed. The 24 hour cafes and pastry shops will be missed. The beaten-up Santro I've driven thousands of kilometres in this holiday will be missed. The faces of my friends separated by states will be missed. The windy house in Miramar and the painting easel will be missed. The guitar teacher I spent exactly 33 hours this summer with will be missed. The poker sessions and pointless gym hours will be missed.

Why can't anyone see that sometimes you just need the ability to pause? Every few years, take a year off. Grow up in ways other than attending classes and scoring grades. Live life to its fullest in order to make up for the hours you've lost in routine. Travel, explore, rediscover. These aren't words I'm tossing around to add to a word count. These are words I'm tossing around as an ode to days better spent elsewhere.

Always the summers are slipping away. Always.

To the Festival with a Lad of Ten

Look up at the moon, boy
For I need some rest
This weary road has taken its toll on me

We'll be there soon, boy
I know this road best
We must walk the mud road out to sea

We'll arrive at noon, boy
In town there's a fest
I'll get you a top and a candied bee

And even a b'lloon, boy
Let's see if it stands your test
I wager you'll rub it until its air breaks free

You know you're a goon, boy?
You should still be at your mother's breast
So hold your tongue or leave me be

The Raindrop that Falleth

The Raindrop that falleth
And fell through my rose
The rose was a roof under stary bed
The Raindrop hit me in the square of my chest
I saw images later describled biblicle but better
That led the fellows to declare that day my godhood
The Raindrop that awake in me happiness
"On that maximus that your study derives you
This is the moon with undulating plains, even trees and distant hills in view
Yes this is the furthest happiness that holds cannot hold"
My life lived a book today

I wept later, for I would not ever behold as good as that holy day
The Raindrop that falleth was neard by some
Like the turn through the cars endless wheels
But never in that amassed happiness
Althino hill happiness
Would they near the Raindrop and breese
Will you find the god at the top of the tunnel
The true image of god or what you dream him
This whole life a videogame
I know not if this is poem or real

I lived a life in just a car ride
For the Raindrop that falleth fell through me

---

Don't even ask for the origins of this 'poem'.

Highs and Lows

<This post is not intended to be fluid. Fluidity was lost somewhere along the way, probably in between 'there is nothing to do' and 'this was a lot more fun when i had work to do'.>

This void in me knows no bounds. After an eventful year as a freshman in college, I'm back home. And I'm left empty. This has been a year of information. Living with hundreds of other like minds and reaping fields of sown wealth from a matrix of file sharing, there has always been something to do. Difficult course matter makes studying always a good option if you ever seem knee deep in time. So many things come your way on a daily basis: scheduling the perfect time to break your fast so as to have garnered enough sleep - yet to not be so late as to lose out on the last morsels of this timed meal, choosing wisely which hour could use a bunk, choosing wisely whether you should watch a TV show that meets its DC release an hour before an exam, choosing wisely whether to eat something before play or to just go empty and go all out on dinner, choosing wisely whether to eat dinner or to fast until the night canteen opened, choosing wisely an hour to hit the bed so as to get either six hours sleep or eight, nothing in between.

Music was another aspect which developed massively, with the possibility of downloading entire discographies in minutes, and deleting them in seconds if they didn't match up to most compelling band names. Bands you thought you knew well would force themselves upon you with the insistence of your peers, and leave you wondering whether you'd actually ever given any of their songs a listen.

This campus offered me a new life. New people to be surrounded by, new opinions to get perturbed by. New personas to explore, new personas to reject. Even after a year there are more people to be amazed by, or to be let down by. Each person an endless stream of himself-ness or herself-ness. It's like an endless stream of endless streams. Drastic changes in character accompanied different settings. The quiet library worm is a beast in the regular group hangout spots. Who knew moving house a few kilometres would make you a sociologist and psychologist?

Here, there are distractions aplenty. Every week usually had some kind of special night or event or exam or match or online page or controversy. There's always someone to vote for, always something to watch, some beginning to witness the creation of a future symbol. And if this gets overwhelming, you can project yourself inwards alongside the rustling leaves of a truly beautiful day.

Now I'm back home and I'm broken. I don't have access to endless lines of information. The people here are people I've known for eighteen years. Everything is so static, so welcoming, yet more than a little bit disappointing. Yes, I am happy to be back, but even my large to-do list seems tiny in comparison to the time I have before me.

I seem to be suffering from information withdrawal. I match the symptoms shown in Steven Wilson's Fear of a Blank Planet record. The fact that I don't have to bother about life's trivialities such as waking in time to break my fast gives me even less to do. During the harsh heat of April and the grueling exams of early May, I thought being released from the excessive workload would relieve me. But it's just left in me a hole instead. The things that seem 'fun' during exams, like browsing through meme pages on Facebook, seem decadent and drab right now. I guess the exams serve as a sort of foil. My father always told me to take with the sweet a little bitter. I'm currently drowning in rich milk chocolate.

Thoughts Inspired by a Watchman

A friend's birthday, and for the first time in a long while (a week), it was the night mess for me. I've been trying to maintain a healthy sleep cycle, the norms of healthy being 'early to bed and early to rise'. Anyway, on my way back, I noticed the hostel watchman reading off of a small book, perhaps the size of a dictionary. Whether it was a dictionary, or a religious book of sorts, I know not, nor did I ask, for Hindi isn't my forte ("kya pad rahe hai aap" - did I say that right?). The thing that piqued me was how this good man was up at an hour when most of our watchmen are, ironically, sound asleep, reading. Under the dim white glow of a tube-light high above, he sat against the wall cross-legged, and squinted queerly at the small font whose language I could not discern from my position.

The joys of reading! How I wish we could put aside all these troubles, this routine, to just sit in a corner somewhere with a book in our hands! The simplicity, the sheer priceless simplicity of the entire matter! How much I'd give for those holidays to last forever - holidays when I'd be up until four o'clock with a thick A Song of Ice and Fire book or one of the Dune sequels (irrelevant, but I'm talking hardcore Frank Herbert, not his son, the usurper!). A few of you may find the idea dull and boring, but a few more would relish it. One of my dreams, alongside flying and Mars-to-stay, has always been the idea of owning a wooden-floored library, with a thick floor-rug and a sinfully padded armchair, lit only by yellow lights reminiscent of the kerosene lamps of the 1860s.

So a watchman made me profess my love for something on the less technical side. I'll further my claim by saying that I have a deep regard for the arts. Yes, I said something almost blasphemous to the modern-day engineer. How does art - something so careless, so fragile, as to be unbound by physical laws - make its way into the heart of an engineer-to-be? It's simple, there never was a distinction in the first place. The science I fell in love with was romantic, poetic! Mathematics were art, nothing was defined but the obvious. Obvious, naturally-occurring traits developed into transcendental 'laws', all the way from approximately 3000 B.C. to the present day. And what is art if not something so complicated made of something so simple? A few brushstrokes can depict the state of your mind, and a few notes can sing its song.

I wistfully look at how everything has been made so mechanical that we take little pleasure from it - no more visualizing your engineering graphics diagrams, instead follow a set of steps! No need to tackle a problem purely by utilizing basic concepts, for there will always be another who has practiced ten similar problems who can race you to the solution. Yes, competitiveness does indeed have its flaws. We pray more for a number than for joy and hope et al. Not that any of this is bad. No virtuoso is created by giving a man an organ! Yet, I feel that something is missing, something profound enough to discredit any overthought I may have indulged in while writing this text.

It's simple really, and often something that is found amongst the captions in a multitude of seaside, coconut-tree pictures: live life to the fullest! How this rant-like monologue turned into an adolescent life lesson oozing with clichés is irrelevant, but if you do wish to know, here goes: "drill into that problem like it's hiding an oil well beneath it!", "delve into the deepest crevasse of your mind to find the elusive, ever-lost x!", "kick that ball like it's an annoying pigeon on your air conditioner (no offense EPAC, PETA)!", "slide into that solo like it's dripping acetone on a sultry summer noon!", "kiss her profoundly; let an image of you be imprinted upon her momory forever!", "eat that gatta curry like it's a boar from an Asterixian banquet!" You have no problems, brother. Only seas and oceans of unbidden delights.

Anger

I have never been so angry. Frothing, unbridled rage burrows into me. I am angry, hating, loathing my own principles of leading a life. I believed in minimal efforts to get as far as possible. I'm drowning in my own cavern of lies, every day spitting to deepen this monumental karst hole, binging on vanity and self-deception. Wanting to be good at everything, I'm failing at things that matter most, still telling myself that I can pick myself up due to sheer, stupid pride. Need to put some reigns on myself, punish myself. How vain am I to not want to enforce simple restrictions when I've succumbed to the most obvious of temptations. Only an idiot thinks himself capable of more than his fellows because of a few effortless successes, and I am he.

Here I am trying to 'channel' my anger into a safe medium when I am so close to just breaking this computer with a hammer I conveniently have so very close. I tell myself I am cut out for it all, and now the taunting voice goes, "where are the results?" And where are the results indeed. Must end this charade, I'm a broken tool with a superiority complex.

The Sleepwalker

Amr woke from a dream.

Its heightened rate of passing scenes was echoed as translucent screens flowing into the golden sunlit passage before him, blurring out bright moving colors - colors which fused with the dream-images to sometimes blot them out, sometimes enrich them. Cool wind blew, shaking at the suspended images, setting them into a timeless disarray finally lost when coherent reality flooded in. The last scene he managed to get a glimpse of sent through him violent ripples of deja vu, for it was so resemblant of the actual street ahead of him, with its pillared walkways and glistening hardened cow-dung tiles. When he finally blinked away the last few remnants of his fast-fading sleep, his eyes widened, and his face gave way to an expression displaying his shock. His eyes blurred again as dismay took over. I've been sleepwalking again.

He turned, and looked behind him. There was the fruit vendor, shrieking his odd call: "boort-aah-kul! Aayaaha! Boort-aah-kul!" Besides him was the shoemaker, who had charged him nine fils for a pair of wooden sandals. He remembered the transaction with some clarity, he remembered how the shoemaker had spat with disdain when he'd suggested a price of six fils. Further along was a tent he knew he'd walked through. If he went back there he knew he'd find the jolly man with an exposed hairy belly sitting behind a saffron milk counter, laughing at the japes of the mustached, reedy man next to him who would undoubtedly still be staple-fixing cans of sugarteak juice. Amr had purchased a can before the man had staple-fixed it, preferring to avoid the hassle of gnawing at it later with his teeth. The man had smiled, for every staple-pin saved meant a profit. The tent had a sorry lot of jambiya dancers - just half a dozen. Most tents of this size normally paraded over two dozen, along with other missing entertainers like snake charmers and scimitar weavers. He'd walked out of the tent, without pausing to gaze at the dancers who offered to slide a kukri into their ears for a dinar or two, his parched throat absorbing every milliliter of the sweet, cool sugarteak juice which he had drained in a matter of seconds.

Awake and afraid, he walked to a stall with a thatched roof - undoubtedly thatched with palm leaves, for the stall dealt in all kinds of products derived from desert palms - from woven mats and decorative stump-stools to hair oils and facial hair-removing gels. He paused for an instant, pointed at a stool and twisted his face into a tired semi-wince, looking at the shopkeeper. Looking at his garb and drained state, the shopkeeper nodded. Amr grunted as he seated himself on a stool embossed with glass pieces painted to look like rubies, onyxes and aliyas. He asked the shopkeeper for the date, and he just received some sort of guttural rumbling as a reply. This is obviously an Arabic culture, but certainly not what I'm familiar with. I've probably traveled half the world in these few weeks of distorted realities. If 'weeks' still means the same thing as it did during my last waking. It's physically impossible to travel a hundred miles on foot every night, yet every time I wake I'm a thousand miles from where I started.

The last time Amr was awake, he was on some kind of frigid, barren island, mottled with some reddish patches which he later identified as large crabs whose pincers really hurt. There was no one there who he could even approach to inquire the current date. Or the season, for it certainly was cold. For a minute he even wondered how he'd gotten there - he suspected he'd somehow mimicked a feat of Jesus, a particularly popular character from one of the Old Religions, by walking on water. Or maybe it was even colder then, and the water had frozen enough for him to walk all the way to the island. Later, when a shelf of hoarfrost had fallen on his head from a tall conifer, his mind had been brought back into enough focus to remember that there had been a boat. Yes, he'd arrived there on a boat which seemed to be a cross between a dinghy and a throne. He couldn't remember where he'd gotten there from. Or maybe he could back then. But he couldn't remember if he could remember it then, so, still seated on that most uncomfortable stool, he decided to let the matter rest.

And then, as it had done countless times before, his lungs caved in to this intense feeling. A feeling of great longing. An image of endless suffocation passed before him. He was in a sea, an unnatural sea. Green light dawned in a distance which stretched on into time. He longed to be submerged, but in that future miles away, he fought the deathly embrace of a thousand others. He smiled when teeth bit into the skin of his weeping self, and suddenly, when a hand forced its way into his mouth and his groin was punctured by a toenail six feet long, he fell into a deep slumber with his eyes wide open. Amr stood up, blessed the shopkeeper in the only Arabic he'd ever care to know, and walked into the dusty marketplace.

---

This is part of a story unfinished, a sort of preview to something greater.