A flight for light

Dawn – when the world swims through dreamverse, when the early risers walk round the park, when a new day beckons, full of possibilities…

He stands in front of the magic mirror, staring into the eyes of the reflection, looking for answers to questions he doesn’t appreciate, searching for sandcastles…

Realization strikes, the clouds are nowhere to be seen! He needs to fly again, out come the wings…

Looking into the magic mirror, he straps on his wings- a flash of light & he’s back on cloud nine! The night is still young…

Crimson sandcastles - the smaller mysteries shrink down to insignificance, mere specks of dust…

He steps out into the light, the clocks wind frantically, monsters piercing into his soul…

Enslavement is not an option. But to what? Convulsions within, he won’t give in…

He steps into the timeless tavern, and he’s safe again. No more monsters, no more winding…

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who will be the first to fall?”, Too easy, the mirror looks on with pity…

It pours onto the chair and morphs into dreamverse. Suddenly he’s flying, he knows how to…

The dreams start to push their weight around, the monsters can wait…

And so he joins them again, hope and patience kill the monsters yet again…

It’s all falling apart, shreds of timelines past, what-ifs dancing around, no place for the monsters…

They sit on the sidelines, biding their time, as they have for ages, smiling at the irony of it all…

The ring sings the songs of monsters, they come bursting through the gates of the castle…

Alas! Still no room for the monsters, as the flight begins yet again…

From dawn to dusk, he flies over and looks to the earth - his home, his city, his world, his universe…

Darkness all around, the light from the hills is too bleak; he tries to grasp it but in vain…

Deflated, he collapses onto himself, like a human black hole, but it’s all too slow…

Time has stopped. He’s flying but he sees nothing, there’s no light, all sucked into the darkness…

The only thought surrounding his world is “Why”. The answers still don’t show themselves…

Out comes the magic potion, one sip and suddenly he sees the lord of light…

He’s terrified, the darkness had become a part of him and the lord suddenly wasn’t welcome…

He is torn, suddenly paralyzed, his telepathy failing him, the lord far off on the godly island…

He looks with hope at the magic mirror, it morphs into a transporter. Excited, he hops in…

Alas! The lord fails him. Just when he’s about to be consumed, he sees a flicker…

He’s spent by the time he reaches the lord. He looks onto the lord while catching his breath…

The lord ignores him. He’s missed the chance, the darkness is everywhere, there’s no hope…

He feels the darkness piercing his soul, it consumes him completely, nothing left but nothingness….

He wanders into Netherworld, lost souls floating all around him, he senses a strange kind of peace…

He finally meets the lord of darkness, and starts seeking answers right away…

The lord looks onto his youngest child, sporting a wicked smile, and endarkens him…

The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind…

hope may be a dangerous thing, but hope is afterall what we survive on!!

SCENE: WLPD exam hall, TIME: 11 am (guessing :P), 2nd april 2011, the day of the world cup finals, india vs sri lanka.

Basically, on the most exciting day of the lives of my cricket-mad countrymen, i was doing the most boring thing conceived by humans- invigilating, that too in a class full of old guys who were themselves least bothered about the exam and eager to return to their homes to witness the spectacle. But i couldn't help it, i was broke, and needed those 1.5k. So, when you're in such a situation, you would probably want to kill yourself, i opted to bring out the "creative" me, and began writing random stuff. I ended up writing 2 stories, or something like that. Here goes the first one:

Wondrous expressions floating about

pure ecstasy personified, ready to plunge into an ocean of mania

I pause to realize the weight of the moment

it's as if all the pain is gone

tragedy ceases to exist

scores of problems being resisted by a shell of satisfaction.

They're all jumping, they're all bewildered,

crazy if you may, but ultimately human.

The feeling is inexplicable, it transcends love, jingoism, joy

maybe one's too timid to give it a verbal form.

She sits at the opposite corner, still trying to comprehend the gravity of it all,

either unaware or uninterested, she stands out

while others have their souls liberated.

I look at her, study her reactions

she looks back, confused, but happy nonetheless, for all the souls surrounding hers.

Our eyes meet, ecstasy and attraction commingled, the feeling's other-worldly.

While my feet are still in the air, hers pick her up, to her surprise.

They come closer, the connection is spontaneous, the feeling is mutual,

it's like they complete each other

She smiles at him, he smiles at this unbelievable speck of time, wants to freeze it and seize it.

Their souls fuse, they kiss, like they've never kissed before

The moment's heaven, two souls united amidst hundreds of exhilarated ones.

He's finally happy, until his doorbell rings...

the day has just started, the match is yet to be won, the one's yet to be found

He hopes, he lives, he smiles....

Well that came out all wrong, i was thinking about writing on the match that was to come and wrote something totally unrelated :D anyways i then showed it to my esteemed friend shubham moon-dhaara, who's probably going to be my batchmate for 2 more years, although he would probably not want that :) and a certified geek that he is, he treated this piece like a passage in some mock CAT, and framed questions on it! have a look at his end of creativity :)

Q1) What does "they're" refer to in line 7? ---- 2 marks

Q2) What feeling is the author talking about in line 9? ------- 2 marks

Q3) What is the author's tone in the passage? ------- 1 mk

a) excited b) happy c) amazed d) satisfied

No matter how amazed moon's creativity made me, i was still bored as there was one more exam, 3 more hours to kill, and with the match about to start, nothing was helping. So after playing MAFIA with my friends during the lunch break, i went on to write another piece. here goes:

The annihilating blend

He trembled in his dream, as his mind was giving him nightmares- that he was losing her. He looked deep into her eyes, hoping that the love he had for her, he could find it in there. He woke up from his livid dream, in sweat, the deja vu pretty vivid. He confessed her love for her, & said he hoped that one day she would feel the same way. His broken heart had given up, after giving her his all, all he got in return was her last words- It won't work. She said "I can't accept you as mine, as i still have feelings for someone else, and doing this wouldn't give any of us happiness." He decides to end it all, got a gun, & wept his way to her place. He said "Baby i can't leave you for the world. No one can coz you're so wonderful." & looked with fiery passion into her hazel eyes. All the moments they had together were haunting him, breathing fire into his pain, othello came to his mind. Her heart gave in, melted in the heat of passion, she smiled approvingly.

He entered her home, and cried out her name, but in vain, driving him wilder. He was on cloud nine, tears flowed down their eyes, they kissed. He saw her, and his nightmare turned into reality. She was dissolved in the heat of the moment and did not even feel the agony when the bullet passed right through her cranium. His anger now turned into pain, unbearable pain, & he used the last bullet on himself. He stood there, looking at the corpses, blamed himself for it, so he went to the kitchen & turned on the gas, waited for the feeling of death to sink in, and lit the match...

petrichor overdose

...post one month of boredom and no friends around, i finally got a break when 4 guys from 4 different places-mahad, nagpur, pune & mumbai, who happen to be batchmates, happened to be in the same city. after giving my AIMCAT, the reason i was in pune, we met and had a wild night(not really :P). we checked out all the outlets that came our way, almost checked out a hookah corner, hung out aimlessly on the streets of pune till 2 am. all this while rain was falling making the neon-lit streets even more glitzy, and i was cursing myself for being in the rusty old village i am in. next morning i left for the same, i almost missed the bus and had to squash myself in. and then it began...


ours is a beautiful country, with something magnetic in every corner of india, except pilani, to draw you towards it. be it some millenia old temple, or some natural beauty, one can't just hold back. i wasn't on a tour, i was returning back to my family, but the mesmerizing weather kept telling me that i couldn't be more wrong. it was drizzling, and the deliberate opening of my window was sending the drops straight to my service. the beautiful sight of green mountains, and that magical smell of wet soil.. kishore kumar's voice melting straight into my ears, felt like a dream... and though sleep was actually a significant part of the journey having slept late the other night, i couldn't really make out the difference, except that in the dream, i wasn't seeing the greenery but the scenes from raajneeti that were still wafting through my brain, it had only been 9 hours since i saw it. it was like one continuous dream, although i regret not making the most of my fellow passenger, who looked like he hadn't been near a bathroom for centuries,
but still i managed to survive the journey, as all my senses were being given royal service by mother nature and the owner of samsung. what's more, the bus broke down, and although the people got down in frustration, nobody said a word... the view before them just wouldn't let them...
a mountain top covered by a blanket of clouds, in the backdrop of a beautiful river glittering more with each falling drop, in the backdrop of lush green paddy fields stretching miles together.. stupid camera can never capture what the human eye can- beauty. the intoxicated passengers climbed back into the bus and i slipped back into my dream, when my camera couldn't take it any longer, battery low was registered. so my dream turned to more important issues now, like my fellow passenger moving across me towards the window every half an hour to spit out one of the infinite problems of this country, a somewhat old and definetely pervert guy continuously staring at a girl standing right in front of her, i couldn't help but admire his focussing ability even at this age.. the rainy dream suddenly ended with fire, as i stopped right in front of the fire station :P in five minutes i was with family, the dream had ended and it faded away like any other dream, but that artistic expertise of nature i had witnessed is still in there, makes me smile each time it flashes before my eyes...

reminiscing life

... is what i did tonight. the deadline of submission of write ups is tomorrow, naturally i took up the task at the appropriate time- 3 am. nonetheless, i started to write, my first line 'don't know where to begin'. 75 freaking words to describe the time you spent with probably the best friends you'll ever make, was unfair to me. i didn't know how to be precise, for one there's no way to single out the really significant moments from the not-so-significant ones, random thoughts were all around...

i stepped out of the room. the dark pilani sky, takes you to the seventh heaven. the puff intoxicates the breeze, and so the story goes. on a high, i don't feel the pain now. but when life glides down, i climb into a bed of roses- or is it? dark shadows and hushed whispers, i feel scared, i smile. the blood flows out, making me weak, i dream of starry nights, no one to walk with. drained and haunted, i step out into the fork, not sure what to do...

i'm not as smart as kekule, my snakes-grabbing-their-own-tails were not materialising into benzene structures(i'm generally not that geeky :P) i first wrote the last line of the first write up, and began forming on it. funny how grammatical errors can be a boon in such restricted situations. with each memory, my smile turned into a grin...

3 years finally in 2 pages, i looked at the word document and admired the genius that is bill gates.

the dark aisle

... i felt like the phoenix, back from the dead.. i wasn't ready, i never was, never will be.. but the devil yelled out mercilessly, at the right moment like always... i was petrified beyond imagination, wanted to run away from the devil, to a place where it didn't rule, but the devil had cast its shadow and covered every inch of my life, my world. nonetheless, i defied the devil for as long as i could, but soon it engulfed me... there i was, ready to tread the dark aisle. i entered the hellhole, pitch-black, the silence intimidated me, the lull before the storm... scores of the devil's slaves surrounded me, some saw light, and tried to overrule the devil, with little success... they were much more disarrayed, probably because the devil still had a soft corner for them, which they were dead scared to throw away... ignorance is bliss, the darkness soothed me... i sat down, while the devil toyed with me, hurling rocks at me, each one harder than the previous, i was getting crushed, the little resistance i offered to some rocks only made the devil wilder... red-eyed, he smiled at me and threw his last one with all is might, and i collapsed... the pen was going to be on the table then on... the devil looked down at me, his bloodshot eyes filled with contempt, he'd had the last laugh...

Encounter with an older woman

... if you've been lured into reading by the title, let me clarify. The 'woman' in the context is hardly 'older' than me by 6 months.. for the record i'm not even 20. This happened when i'd just spent one semester in BITS, and was still digesting the fact that i'd tunnelled my way into it :) I was travelling by train from vapi to jaipur, returning to my haven sporting the good old BITSAA T-shirt 'devil's haven'.

i was all blah blah blah about BITS and the educated ones looked proudly at me, probably seeing the future of the country in engineers like me :P That was when she turned up...

pure gold. golden skin,golden-brown eyes and hair, pink lips though, but they did just fine...

she brought alongwith her a sudden silence into the berth, as everyone, men, women and innocent children turned to grasp a look, while she cruelly climbed onto her upper berth, not acknowledging anyone's stares... as for me, i was seated right below her, in the lower berth. I was mesmerized enough to die to look at her again, but poor me, couldn't see her.. the tharki uncle (just couldn't find a better substitute for the word :P) had his neck turned up 90 degrees, and kept looking at her, talking shit about where she was headed, and if she needed assistance, he didn't seem likely to offer any... mine was the middle berth, so i quickly made a plan... i finished my dinner, and asked the people in front of me to vacate the seat, they just had to go till surat and hence asked me to climb up and later on come back to my berth... and i smiled my way up to the berth opposite hers...

and then i saw her again... my problem is whenever i see a pretty face, my vocal cord goes for a walk, my sweat beads get hyper-activated, my sense organs and hormones get disorganized and my legs persuade me to bolt... well there wasn't much scope of bolting in the small bogie. I fought with this series of chemical reactions within, as i'm pretty used to them, having spent 4 years in a boys school. I quietly spread my travel bed, or whatever it is called, to lie down... that was when her lips first parted 'do you really feel this cold'...i meekly replied 'i'm very concerned about comfort when i sleep', not trying to disclose that my mother had forced it upon me... i somehow managed to add 'where are you coming from'... she'd hardly been outside mumbai. 'let the train cross surat. then you'll experience the desert winter'. It was december and we were in the sleeper coach.. so the weather was sure to play its tricks, and although she was a muslim, as indicated by her layers of clothing, i knew she was in for some shivering...

and so it happened... she was crouching under her bedsheet, trying to make the most of it in vain... while i sat snugly in my bedroll, reading 'first impression', rather trying to, owing to the dangerous surroundings... and they parted again 'good for you. i won't be able to sleep all night in this cold'... i smiled, wanting to offer her an exchange of the beddings, but i held back, and asked 'who is it you've been SMSing all this time'... it's like she was on a leash and i'd released her, tons of words began to flow through her lips as i watched them, i mean the words, play with my meek brain... i listened on, as she poured out all about her best friend, and how the two hung out all the time, and how she avoided guys, understandably so. From my infinitesimal knowledge of the opposite sex, it seems that all indian girls' prime desire is to marry. She told about the hundreds of offers she has rejected as she didn't like them. She was aware that she was the dominant factor in the decision, and so she kept warding off the weeds, but lately she'd found a guy who looked like hrithik roshan amd earned two lacs per year, she specified the figure in bold. i giggled, the average pay package back home was way higher in my case, and although i was no hrithik, i did garner the courage to say 'you could do much better' which prompted her to show me his pic, the guy did resemble slightly. She also told how her first cousin was hell bent on marrying her, i had an uneasy feeling, but apparently it was common in her community. All this time we were talking, mostly it was her, but i made my own, however insignificant contributions. but then at some point i got conscious, i wasn't accustomed to that amount of talking to a girl, i tried then to focus more on my novel, while she slowly drifted back to her phone and then to sleep...

i woke up at about 9 am and she was gone. i felt dejected, and as i was about to sink back into my sleep's deadly clutches, she returned, having washed her face... droplets of water still glistening on her skin... i managed a 'good morning', and she let loose again. i guess she was lying about not talking to boys much, but at one point she did mention a guy friend besides me, yeah, those were her own words within hours of our first and last meeting, but then i felt stupid. i didn't even know her name... and so the quest began from saints to prophet muhammad to muslims to their long names... i finally asked her as an excuse 'by the way what's your name?'... she looked down and shyly replied "jasmine"... as she looked down, i was way up on cloud nine, although i had 12 hours with no more than 6 feet apart and 10000 words of conversation, i had finally managed to ask the name of the most beautiful girl i'd ever seen... now the loser in me started to fade away as i began making more conversation. meanwhile she too grew comfortable around me, she was relaxing with her legs on my berth, and i surprisingly wasn't nervous, i asked if her best friend had come to bid her goodbye as she was probably leaving mumbai for good... she gave me the red rose her friend gave to bid her adieu.. much to the attention of the passengers seated below, who kept staring at us... she paid for my breakfast and in return, i let her use my cell as hers wasn't working, and that's how i got her number, now don't judge me.. i'd just asked her name, i was going to need much more courage and time to ask her number...

as we closed in on jaipur, she went to her father's seat with whom she'd been the evening before... i felt like i had nothing to do, i waited for her, trying to crawl through the pages of my novel... and then she came back, for her luggage, and asked me for help, which i most willingly offered, i felt like i was being used, but what the hell.. i took her bags to her place but refused to carry the small ones and asked her do something on her own. she smiled...

last i saw her when we were about to get down the train. her face was covered with her dupatta and i could only see her eyes.. i innocently asked 'what's that for? it's not that cold now'... she replied 'those north indian boys stare at me and give dirty looks, they're not like you'...

i could only smile, for the series of chemical reactions had already taken over....

gen..

I must congratulate blogspot for having the resilience it has, i'd created this account two years back and i'm trying to start to write the first probable blog i ever tried.. i'm still no sure what to write about, so i'll just go with the flow, barring the interruptions of gtalk pings and some girls playing with each other on my screen.. sorry if i sound obscene or too drab...

I just came back from my friend's room asking him for suggestions on how to start with a spicy blog, as he recently wrote his first, albeit on a much darker issue.. something about god being dead and humans moving towards inevitable moral doom. He suggested i write, rather project myself and my shortcomings. He puzzled me, as i didn't find any within, except that maybe sometimes i sleep a little more than others, spend more time on sitcoms than on lecture slides, stick to the confines of my room more often more than others... but at other times, i'm just the coolest!!

I live in a building which houses an average IQ level of 140... insane by normal standards... and true to its word. Around here, the "gods" are those who can sit through Hours of lectures unperturbed, who wake up everyday at 7 when the temperature outside is way less than 7, happily casting off their blankets just to give a teeny tiny quiz, those who find it more interesting to finish assignments rather than watch 'friends' just before the deadline. Guys around here have wallpapers to induce, rather keep up the skyrocketing motivation and talk about building castles in the air and laying foundation under them:)

Although i won't do justice if i took all in one fold. There are others, the "lite" ones, who're interestingly very similar.. they can sleep through hours of lectures, they crawl out of their blankets everyday at 7 for the quiz with multiple alarms, but sensing that warm blooded animals like ourselves deserve the comfort of the blanket, curl back in.. they first discuss on how to approach the assignment, meanwhile they check out the new stuff on DC, by that time the 'gods' are done, and as the cut-copy-paste is about to begin, the blanket takes over... they have wallpapers that serve the purpose of calming down the skyrocketing testosterone levels of this building, they end up doing the opposite....

Talks are already around regarding placements and who bags what, the gods silently giggling, the lites uncertain, running around for answers to their already answered questions, and i ask myself. Why is it i feel that i could have done much more in these 3 years?? why do i feel i lost out? I'm sure this statement echoes throughout this building, the gods always on the hunt for more, and the lites waiting. Of course the occasional sarcasm has the likes of me too listed in the former category, which i greatly detest. But why did i fall behind..

The other day i was going through the newspaper, with all the usual stuff, pakistani army with taliban, bal thackeray vs rest of the world, struggling actresses claiming to be cooperative, india's success confined to cricket pitches and how the rich poor divide kept steeping, the times of ideas is one hell of a page.. then i saw myself, i mean i saw myself in the boy in the picture.. smiling.. looking straight into the eyes of the eclipsed sun god, as if desiring his own doom.. the smile all the more gracious, reminded me of lysosomes...