Seems to me that I’ve developed a habit of losing stuff and, as if a strange pun of destiny, get back what I lost. And that seems to be the pattern – at different times it was my mobile, jacket, a duffel bag, all finding their way back after being lost.

I set out to write a story
That spoke of a loser
And how he lost.

What is losing, after all
But the temporary misgivings
Of a trampled mind
Where thoughts trickle
Through
Sepia tinted pages
Of a depleted memory

What is losing, after all
But a mere
“Change of owner”
Like they say of Energy
Or the soul
That could only move
From one owner to another

I set out
Searching
For those phantom words
To tell his story
But the words elude me
Much like my fortune
As I keep looking
For my lost words.

What is losing, after all?
Words that just passed
Like the rainless clouds?
Or did the loser just find
A new owner
For the words he lost?

He was a nice looking gentleman wearing an oversize coat and thick mufflers around his neck, who acceded to taking a picture of me and V standing on the edge of Dolphin’s Nose. “So where are you from?” he asked me handing over the camera to V. “I… Er… I’m from…”, I fumbled. V did better. She smiled, as she secured the camera into its case.

It was an incredible moment in our lives. A moment when we realized, we didn’t have an answer to the most rudimentary question of existence – “Where are you from?” Well, let me see. We have moved three cities in two countries in four months, have our belongings lying in five cities across the two countries and have no idea where we would be four weeks from this minute.

Things weren’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be happy days ahead. Family, elders and all that, you know? A fairy tale of the prince and princess living happily ever after. It sure was a fairy tale of sorts, until the day we called bitter-gourd bitter. Ever wondered calling bitter-gourd bitter could bring you trouble for the rest of your life?

Many months after that ignominious moment of getting reprimanded for stating the obvious, troubles continued. “Elementary my dear Watson.”, a well wisher suggested, “Everyone has troubles. Just deal with it.” Deal with it, huh? At what price? A few hundred dollars of happiness would do? Heard they started selling that thing in Wal-mart these days. So I could’ve helped myself, you know, with a few capsules whenever there was trouble.

We are dealing with it alright. But not like the Goody two shoes that we used to be. Although no one knows it that way. Life is simple. People are not. They are high on illusion or hung over on reality. So much so that any attempts at talking them out of their ridiculous assumptions or psychic outbursts only falls into deaf years. We became weary of our condemned routine and decided to find our own way.

We are on the move, although no one knows the real reasons of what we are doing or where we are moving. “Family” thinks we are happy. The indicators are there – we travel, we do the vacations, we shop, we laugh, what else one needs to know if someone is actually happy? For them, we are the good kids who do a lot of traveling on business. To ourselves, we are lost rowing in a sea without a compass and the shore is nowhere in sight.

May be we could still have waited for more time, until the day when the deaf ears would open up. May be, if we could’ve drugged ourselves with a few capsules of Solvomycin from Wal-mart, everything would’ve been solved and life would’ve been back to being a fairy tale. Life is a honey moon. Except that the honey doesn’t taste good at some times, and the moon is hidden by clouds at other times.

“Deal with it, kid”, an elder told me. “It’s the same with everyone”, a veteran confided. “You can’t run away from troubles. You’ll have to come back to it someday”, told a peer. I agree with everyone. Except that they are not me, and they haven’t seen what I’ve seen. But how do you tell the world you don’t bother about it anymore? I guess you just don’t. And that’s what we’ve done. Kept quiet, and moved. “Cheeky, but you did the right thing”, a friend smiled when he heard our story, “Life finds a way”.

We’ve set out to do what we think is our pursuit of happiness. We are moving places, driving in near-zero visibility. We don’t know where our next turn is, or how long until we stop again. We don’t know if we’ll run out of gas, or reach our hitherto unknown destination soon enough. We don’t know if we are alone, or there are other cars beside us. But we do know that we’ll keep driving.

Dear Father,

How I wish to start with a “How are you doing?”. Everybody who leads a normal life does so. But mine ceased to be normal on this very day, 16 years ago. The day when a pang of insecurity struck me like I were stripped naked in the middle of the road on a winter night.

That day they brought you home cold, after you spent a whole day in ice. I reached out to you with my little fingers and felt your unshaven cheek. It felt chill – a chill that ran down my spine and has stayed there ever since. Life was about to change forever.

Four days before, it was Diwali. You were already struggling to hold on to your life, while I sat home beside the window – from where you used to show me ta-ta as I walked out to school every morning – watching fireworks. Fireworks are a mark of joy. But it was my first Diwali without you near me and I didn’t seem like hearing any of the cracking noise they made – it was as if my Diwali was muted. I hoped you’ll be back with me for the next Diwali, and I’ll make up for this time and it’ll be happy times all over again.

You loved me in every way a child could be loved. When you save sweets from your colleague’s birthday party, bring it carefully wrapped within your black Safari briefcase and I run across the living room to tug your legs the moment you return from work, or even while giving me a piece of your mind for not doing my Math homework properly. You know, there was this day when I noted down my Math questions to discuss with you, only to quickly realize you’ll never be back home anymore.

I feel I should’ve told you someday that you were very kind to me, and that I loved you more than anything else in this world. I’m sure you would’ve loved to hear those words from your little kid. But I was barely 12 years old. Hardly old enough to even define my feelings in proper words. I thought when I grow up into my teens, I’ll sit face-to-face and talk with you like the way Men do. I’ll be a man of the house, and we’ll talk family, finance and other such big stuff that grown-ups do. Little did I realize, that those days were never meant to be.

People started feeling sorry for me. “Oh, I’m so sorry”,”it’s so unfortunate”, they would say, whenever I happen to tell them my dad was no more. It felt soothing initially, but now I’ve grown weary of it. Years of repeating my story and listening to how sad they felt for me, has made me thick-skinned to sympathies. Yes, I’m unfortunate, and thank you for being sorry.

On that day when they brought you home cold, a part of me stopped growing up. That part of me continues to be the little 12 year old kid. It longs for your hug, runs across the living room to tug your legs the moment you return from work and dreams of growing up with you. It still lives with you in the same old apartment. And it’ll someday tell you how much I miss you. Miss you, Dad.

“And so saying he chopped off his head with a giant axe and then they lived happily ever after.”

That’s some kind of crap that flows out of your system when you run blank on your biggest passion. Four posts in 14 months, isn’t something to be proud of. And giving myself 101 reasons (excuses) why not to write every time I think about opening Word, all the while searching for that one ass-kicking reason as to why I should actually sit up, open Word and start typing a few pieces of my mind, wasn’t helpful either.

So, after many months of crunching under why-do-such-things-happen-to-me-in-life stuff that I’ve got so used to and moving 12,000 miles away from where my last post came from and giving a million unkept promises to V on how I wouldn’t sleep for the day without writing my next post, I happen to sit up in this hour of evening, looking out of my window at the parking lot, flanked by the autumn colors glowing in the evening sun, switching my eyes between the autumn orange, and the giant Evergreen trees that dot the entire state of Washington, wondering if I’ve at last found my ass-kicking reason to actually write something.

Well, I still don’t know. But I did read temporal’s poessay and his question – “Is there an affliction known as writer’s block? Or is it an overblown condition to camouflage fear, lethargy or lack of discipline?” I know it’s not a Writer’s block. Writers with a block open Word and not know what to type, but they don’t give 101 reasons (excuses) why not to even open Word.

“Just write down a thought – the first thought you have and put it on the page. Slowly, more words will follow and the haze would lift“, says temporal in his poessay. Ah well, that sounds neat. What’s my first thought? There seem to be many first thoughts, the nice ones – there’s V, there’s these interesting things I did and interesting things I should do and interesting things I should have done long back but didn’t, and the ones I don’t want to think about, though they engulf like god-knows-what. There must be something in this world I could write about, if only I could make a word for the thought.

“So friend, despair not…look around and write that first word. Good luck!“, temporal completes his poessay. I don’t despair. I look around. I look at the fading sunlight, the autumn colors diminishing into the grayscale, parking lot filling up as people end their weekday and flock back into their homes, a few work emails waiting to be read, a can of beans baking in the oven. So where do I look for that first word? Have I really found my ass-kicking reason to write something? Well, I still don’t know.

In the age where our most inner and intimate matters have been commoditized by corporations, it’s no surprise that sex is being used as a tool to sell products. Many critics of popular culture use the adage “sex sells” to justify the means. Well, though there may be some truth in it, it’s disgusting if a product that comes with an element of the proverbial “social responsibility” resorts to a juvenile representation of its target market for the sake the one thing all business needs – sell more.

If the advertising guys at Deccan Chronicle think this is what young minds are – one heck of perverts ogling at hoardings of naked woman embossed in newspaper prints all over her body, metaphorically meaning to read the newspaper giving particular attention to detail, or whatever crap that was meant to mean – then there has just been a little mistake. Just that we youngsters have a little more sense than to get swayed by pictures of naked women to buy a newspaper.

What’s more intimidating is that their ad doesn’t even talk about the quality of news – the least you would expect of a newspaper – and whenever they remotely do, it’s again a skin-deep expose. Chennai Metblogs carried a post on similar lines with more pictures. Probably the in-house talent pool of Deccan Chronicle Marketing ran out of concrete ideas to increase youngsters’ readership and resorted to the only supposedly sure-to-work strategy – sex appeal.

An independent survey conducted by research firm MediaAnalyzer states that,

While almost half of men (48 percent) said they like sexual ads, few women did (8 percent). Most men (63 percent) said sexual ads have a high stopping power for them; fewer women thought so (28 percent).

If only 8 percent of women give a damn to such an ad, then was it all about increasing Male leadership? Am I hallucinating or does it really sound awkward? If you still think this would make Deccan Chronicle the-ultimate-choice-of-the-young-minds then take a bite at this MediaAnalyzer finding,

Men tend to focus on an ad’s sexual imagery (breasts, legs, skin, etc.), which draws their attention away from other elements of the ad (logo, product shot, headline). This may be why men’s brand recall was worse for the sexual ads than for the nonsexual ones.

So there goes the sex sells theory. Trying to fit an ad suited enough to market a lingerie brand into marketing a newspaper looks as awful as it sounds. They would do a lot of good to themselves, if the nice folks at Deccan Chronicle could stuff their ad-women with some clothes and talk more about how good their news reporting is, so we know exactly what they sell. We youngsters like to see naked truth in newspapers, not naked women.

Airports are busy places, more busy than you would like them to be. He took a chair on one of those numerous blue cushioned seats that dot the entire vicinity of the airport, taking particular care that the adjacent seat was vacant. The large LCD screen right above his head was showing the day’s breaking news in a near-mute volume. What a job reading news must be, he thought; first, it’s the smily-face-moment of the birth of a big movie star’s son, and the next is a sad-face-moment of a massacre. It was funny to watch the lips move and the head sway to instant emotions and yet hear no sound.
 
The LCD screen got interrupted to display the rescheduled time of his already delayed flight. Long time to go, he said to himself. He turned around and looked at the coffee shop at the far end of the waiting area. Men with red caps bearing the shop’s logo were smiling as they took orders. This thing about making your customer’s day and all that good stuff; they smile, make coffee, and they smile. He tried to look into the shop but as it would be, it was crowded. Airports are busy places, you see; more so, when your flight is delayed.
 
He was back to watching the LCD screen. Television ads were being shown – Golden Spa is the best place to vacation; No tea tastes better than Tata tea; and Canon showed their cameras. Say Cheeese, the ad said, giving emphasis on the extra ‘e’. He knew what that meant, the thing about the Say Cheese.
 
It was a few months back, in that little coffee shop six blocks from his house. He was waiting on a 2-seater table and had asked the red capped smiling guy to come back later to take orders. And there was the banal paper napkin with squiggly stories written all over, the tip of the pen sauntering over it, careful enough not to rip pieces away. He continued scratching the paper napkin drawing figures only the pen could decipher.
 
He jerked his head as she pulled the chair on the other side of the table. “Am I late?”, she asked letting out a wide smile as she slowly placed her handbag on the corner of the table and took her seat. He quickly dragged the paper napkin into his palm, closed the lid of his pen and smiled back at her. “Hi”, he said with an involuntary blurt. “Am I late?”, she repeated, still holding on to that wide smile. “So this is how an animated Say-Cheeese smile looks like”, he heard say to himself. “No, I just came minutes back”, he said trying in vain to match her smile. He beckoned the red hat guy to place their order. That was their first meeting.
 
Whoever heads the department of cosmic intervention in the sky, sends you messages. Messages that are vague, out of the blue – sometimes like the scribbles on a paper napkin – and yet in that moment hold the key to a flurry of events, unlocking such things from memory that you carefully stowed away, never to be reopened. That smile – the Say Cheese one – was just one of them.
 
“Am I late?”, she asked. Suddenly he jerked back from his train of thoughts and looked around dazed until he realized where he was. The LCD screen was back to showing the day’s breaking news, the airport was abuzz with all the blue cushioned seats filled. His eyes fell on her as she took the seat adjacent to his, carrying two cups of coffee she got from the red capped seller.
 
He took a cup in one hand and placed his other hand around her seat. She moved back slightly, her head resting on his arm. Comfort in a little corner of a busy world. He smiled taking a sip of the steaming coffee. She smiled back. An animated say-cheese smile.

The year was 2002. The day was November 18. And I had just woken up into a warm Monday morning cooled by the humming Air Conditioners within the confines of my room at Hotel Poonja International in Mangalore. I lay motionless in the bed listening to my watch ticking the seconds off counting down to the biggest moment of my then life – the first day of work. Hours later, I would start nervously, clad in my new shirt, new trouser, new tie, new shoes and new socks, almost spill a drop of sambhar on my trouser, and take the elevator down to catch the bus to work. To Work! How awfully strange it sounded on that day to say I was going to ‘Work’!

It felt so much like a newborn baby, with nary an idea what to expect out of a career – except that, it should be ‘great’. The nervous pride of beginning a career in a dream company overshadowed the nostalgic memories that were being created in those very minutes. It was still like good ol’ college days, and the first few weeks of training meant I would continue to pour over notes and write exams and wait for results. The 90-member class room – where I always sat in the last row – seemed just another extension of the college-day classes.

And when one such session was in progress we were told not to call the instructors ‘sir’ like we were so used to calling the college professors, but to call them by name; it was the corporate culture, after all. “Welcome to the corporate world”, one of the instructors had told us with an ironic smirk on his face. Life was never going to be the same again.

Well, it never was. Five years later, today, there is just the sepia tinted pictures of those days etched in memory. I do continue to work for the same company where my career was born on this day and brought up this far; where I grew from an anxious kid into the stuff that adulthood is made of. Today, I know why it’s hard to write software, why they call customer the king, and why they taught stress management in college. I know age and energy are inversely proportional, and, needs and responsibilities increase with income. And I also know that choosing the seat next to the emergency exit gives you the maximum leg room in flights.

So five years, it has been. Enough time for a newborn to go to school. And that’s how long it has been since my professional life was born. A stutter here and a stumble there, but it has kept moving nevertheless.

Not many things keep me away from writing, except when I’m down with a prolonged sickness and start seeing the nine (or is it eight?) planets of the solar system rotating around my head every time I cough – which was pretty much all through the day. So over the past two weeks, whenever the planets were not eclipsing my view of the world, I spent time reading some good old classics.

This morning I took my usual seat holding a sweet smelling copy of Somerset Maugham’s Collected Short Stories and turned to page 193. And when I read the line – Madame Coralie powdered her nose and gave it, a commanding organ, a brief look in her pocket mirror – I noticed two strange men hovering around me. One was an old man who wore his pants above his belly, and the other was a young one with a flashy ponytail. The former sat next to me, while I continued reading as if he were non-existent.

When you start reading alphabets instead of sentences, you know you are actually being engulfed with an irresistible urge to slip into what Freud calls an elevated mental state for disguised fulfillment of our unconscious wish. To you and me it is simply called sleeping. So, watching the morning sky fade into a premature grayscale enveloped by water-laden clouds receding down the horizon, I slowly drifted into a peachy bed of sleep. And then I didn’t know anything that happened.

For example, I didn’t know that the bus was stuck at a signal where there was no signal, that sunlight cracked for a second between the clouds, or that the old man who wore his pants above his belly was playing a game of solitaire in his mobile phone.

I opened my eyes, as it was the most natural thing to do after you are ejected out of the comforts of slumber. I glared at the outside world, where my little slumber didn’t seem to have had any impact. The earth continued to rotate on its axis and men continued to walk on two feet. The sun was not visible, but it was there nevertheless.

The bus screeched to a halt just outside our office after going around the world in sixty minutes. “This is the office?” the old man who wore his pants above his belly asked me. I affirmed and nudged him with my eyes to get down, while I carefully closed the Somerset Maugham taking particular care that I remember the last page I read (because I don’t use bookmarks).

The old man who wore his pants above his belly beckoned his counterpart who smiled a wry smile and went behind him, wagging his ponytail. And I walked away playing a random line from the archives of my memory – The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

This is a tagged continuation of the The War Between Bonnie & Billy – Part 1, at JustOrdinary.

The clock ticked past midnight, as her painted fingers reached for some tissue and shred them into the tiniest bits. Bonnie sat upright on the bed, her face resting on her bent knees and half-closed eyes still strolling its way through the disturbed comforters, the moist pillows lying one on top of the other, and a lock of hair fluttering in front of her eyes in the noiseless wind from the ceiling fan.

They made love that day, as they did every day. He was as passionate and never hesitated to show his love for her. In their most intimate moment she had a strange urge to reach out to him. She stroked his back with her fingers and felt his breath. She tugged him close to her and felt the warmth of his manly presence. He pulled her closer and let her bury her face between his arms. And he kept telling her how much he loved her.

Then he got up and moved across the bed to reach out for his belt. He had spent a particularly long time in buying the belt with an extra-large buckle attached to a protruding metal flap for a rugged feel that would suit his oversized Cargo Pants well, and also inflict a good deal of pain when he would hit her. He grabbed the belt and slashed it across her back as she fell on the bed unconscious with one stroke. She didn’t know what happened next. Probably he hit her more, because now that she was awake she felt more pain. Or probably he just made more love.

She continued strolling her eyes around the bed until it halted the moment they fell upon him. He was fast asleep, his back towards her, resting his palm under his ears. She could feel the mild rise and fall of his back with every breath.

She wanted to reach out to him, this time to press her fingers on his back so hard that her full grown nails would pierce his back and blood would ooze out through the shape her fingers made on his back. And she would move the fingers across his back tearing his flesh, tracing a distinct outline like creating a modern art, like what she used to see in the Museum of Art and Painting in her childhood days. She would create a work of art; an artwork made of blood and skin – his blood and her skin; one she would claim as her masterpiece, a dedication to her love.

She moved across the bed, shuffling the pillows to the other side, bent lower over him and kissed him on his shoulder.

* For the next part of the story, I tag Amrita. Am, take over!

“We take your fun seriously”. The caption of BrewHaha was apt to describe the meeting of Bangalore Bloggers. Over forty bloggers from varied professional backgrounds, some with a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (one of them actually queued at Blossoms even before the sun rose for the day) tucked under their arms and a jubilant smirk on their face, made themselves comfortable over bean bags, low-rise chairs, carpets and designer pillows that flanked across the floor at BrewHaHa on a bright Saturday afternoon.

Bangalore Mirror covered the meet in its July 23 edition

It was exciting to see a number of faces hitherto known only by the words in their blogs, including a number of fellow Desicritics. Some of them had suggestions for the Biz/Tech section (me being the section editor) on how we could cover more technological tit-bits and further enrich the section.

The enthusiasm was apparent and before any time lapsed we got into business with a quick round of introductions. Suddenly we began speaking another common language – the language of corporate India – where Mocha Frappes and Cappuccinos meant ‘Have a good afternoon’. The coffee cups began making their rounds as the bloggers – now christened Blogaloreans – went about our stuff.

Blogging is not just a phenomenon. From the days of daily rants, blogging has evolved into a major medium of communication and information exchange that is determined to harness its power to make a difference in whatever ways it can. A few of the bloggers shared their ideas of a Web NGO, Wings – an initiative to help differently enabled individuals take up adventure sports, and a number of other ideas most of which would be formally discussed in the upcoming BarCamp.

The primary aim of the meet was to nail down a list of topics to be discussed in the Bloggers Collective at the BarCamp at IIM-B campus, scheduled for the coming weekend (28th, 29th July). The following are some of the topics.

1. Technical tips for non-technical bloggers
2. What do you Blog about?
3. Social responsibility of a blogger
4. Copyrights and Censorship in blogging
5. IT Laws
6. Mainstream Media versus Blogging
7. Corporate Blogging

These topics are indicative and as is the spirit of BarCamps there would be more of it. I will be co-moderating a proposed debate on Mainstream Media versus Blogging.

This is also the first formal attempt to form a professional community of bloggers in Bangalore. Arun, one of the organizers of the BarCamp conveyed to us that they have formalized certain points with IIM-B for conducting the Bangalore BarCamp every four months in its campus.

This support from the academia and the enthusiasm of the bloggers is sure to take us a long way making this a socially responsible global phenomenon that would not hesitate to raise its voice through this powerful medium and make a difference whenever it matters. And BarCamps are important events to make it happen.