I'd like to

stud your skin
with
a thousand pins
just to hear
you utter
a word.
Perhaps.

Rad is the word!

My dad is a man of few words. Actually, very few words. But as a kid I picked up every ‘cool’ word from my dad. Somewhere along the way, I grew up, life sped past, telephone call charges soared and gradually conversation seemed to cease. We still have our moments. Just a couple of weeks back, he blew me over at the dinner table. He quoted some lines by Samuel Johnson. And then, some more by Somerset Maugham. Was this my dad?!

In the last few months we’ve started a new practice. Every time he comes back after a trip he pulls out a magazine from his bag, The Week and hands it over to me. I take it and keep it on my desk. Sometimes I flip through it. Mostly it just lies there, till the next fortnight when he brings home a new one. He came back yesterday and handed me a new one. “Do you even read it?” I always thought handing me the magazine was an act of getting rid of the raddi from his room. And in the process if one more person benefited, well, Halleluiah! I mumbled something about how I don’t really like The Week. “Oh you must read “Wicked Word,” its usually good.”

“Wicked Word” ha? I was intrigued. I ran down to my room and turned to ‘Wicked Word,’ a feature that takes a look at the English language in a humorous vein. This one was titled ‘Comings and Groins’. An excerpt from Jayaschandran’s article:
Noam Chomsky teaches universal grammar when he isn’t hitting the White House with a sledgehammer. Very few people understand him. He says babies are born with grammar in their brains. I think they are born with the grammar of the groins. We struggle with grammar because grammarians are frigid and testy. They need spectacles to find their testicles.[…]
Verbs never cease to arouse interest: these are action words, like ‘fornicate’. To fornicate is to have sex that is not adulterous. In the bible, adultery is a sin you commit; there is no commandment against fornication. You don’t commit it- it is no crime, you just do it with delight. Do no mix it with formication, which is a neurological feeling of insects crawling all over the body: just ensure the partner is not a creep. Architects can fornicate at work; the adjective ‘fornicate’ means ‘shaped like an arch’.
The verb ‘ejaculate involves an exclamation. Most men ejaculate in private. It wasn’t so in the past. In novels like “Wuthering Heights” and “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”, characters often ejaculated in public, with their astonished mouths.”

The rest of the article continued in a similar vein. Much like Catherine from Wuthering Heights I ejaculated in joyous surprise. My dad was so cool! He had no qualms handing over a write up liberally strewn with innuendoes/words/ideas/acts that most parents would be squeamish about and squirm away from.

Of course this was my dad!
In between growing up and collecting degrees I’d forgotten how cool my dad was.
He still is.
:)

Khaali Pretensions.

A cool February evening. Scrap metal gods riding in on cycles. Tall plastic pyramids rising over the art deco buildings. Mobile toilets the city carries on its feet, railway tracks and pavements. Centre stage: a smorgasboard of culture to tingle your senses. Books, plays, films, art, dance and more. A riot of color. A heady mix of pavements, people, pretensions and paisa.

Amidst this cacophony that was the Kala Ghoda Festival, seated on a wooden pedestal was an urban hermit. A grubby beard that ended in colorful rubberbands adorned his rather emaciated face. A Jansport backpack carried the burden of his worldly possessions. His hair was bundled up on the top of his head in a bun. A few stray matted locks hung over his forehead. When he jumped off his pedestal, his pants precariously hung on somewhere in between his waist and feet. He bore a sign. He was giving away something. FREE! The moment I walked up to him he opened his spindly arms in a warm embrace and greeted me with the most cheerful smile I'd seen in weeks.

I din't know him. He din't know me.
I was free hug number 61.
Those were the most honest three seconds of my evening.
It drowned the din of all the pretensions that floated arounded me.

What's on my calendar?

As I sat wondering what should go up on my calendar for the new month, I tried to guage my mood. I wasn't particularly elated or dejected. That gush of excitement and feverish anticipation of a new year had given way to a placidity that bordered on boredom. The Spartan Tree had lost its sheen. I needed color. The month of hope couldnt fizzle out into a shorter month of complacent acceptance.

That's when I thought of one of my favorite paintings by Waterhouse, "Gather Ye Rosebuds". She's Ophelia. Shakespeare's Ophelia who sings her last song and gives herself to cold waters.

But Waterhouse's Ophelia is different. She's not like Millais' helpless Ophelia who is carried away by drifting waters, with an orgasmic sigh escaping her lips. She's definitely unlike Hughes' demure nymph who looks back at us beseechingly one last time before singing her last song.

She is stunning. She is determined. She is sensual. She is alive.
The rosebuds in her hand spill over....hope spills over. maybe

February: dogged determination?
Two days short of a new month, MNG aka shorty said to me, "we're gonna have a sorted year or atleast a year where we makes leaps towards sortedness..."
Surely Yes :)