Don't read if you wish to smile!

Tie me up. Tape my mouth, sack me in a gunny bag and throw me over the wall of a bridge. I swear to the lord, I will not utter a squeak to voice disapproval of an act as benevolent as this. Tear me to shreds and I will oblige. Kick my soul till it dies in me. I deserve no more than a dead soul. Look for my brain, if you find it, look for the part that has some dreams stored in it and pull it out. Now hunt for the memories of a past day or even a year. Please remove it and destroy it so no one can find out how happy I was (and in effect, prove my potential of being happy even now). Use a pair of tweezers if you like, but pick out the little remains of smile from my face, my eyes or even my forehead. Every time I smile or have smiled, I have been on a secret mission. Undercover, if you will. I was told to blend in, to mix into the crowd and look for secrets hidden behind those very smiles. I know they are all disguises. Sometimes the mirror too, lies. I don’t want to be a part of that mission anymore. I have become one of them… pseudo-artists. Masters of the ‘you-will-not-find-me’ clan. The year always ends on a note that jolts me out of reality, or into reality, I don’t know which. I want to slink away in my couch and watch life on a fourteen inch screen. Somehow that is more believable than what I see around me. Every day there is more bright lies and brighter smiles to cover the lies and I hate wearing the glares on the last day of the year. Every bloody year.

Have a lovely new year all ye unfortunate ones who read this disturbing piece, while I find my remote control and bag of chips. Well, Titanic is a good movie after all.

:-s

A weird thought was expressed yesterday. I was speaking to Karishma, a very old friend who is pissed at me for not having kept in touch, and she asked me about some relationship and girlfriend issue. Her thought is that there are two kinds of relationships… dating someone is never the same as loving someone. She was convinced about this and I don’t know if I should be, but I was close to being convinced. I really found it funny in hind-sight that a friend first gets to know the other person and then probably starts dating when there the show of slight interest. If things do go well, they fall in love. Otherwise, two people meet, fall in love, start dating and then things just go right. Another alternative, people meet, start dating, know each other and fall in love or maybe two people fall in love over the phone, meet and then start dating… whatever it is, I doubt they are mutually exclusive concepts (dating and loving). Then again, dating is more frivolous, according to Karishma; and loving someone is a total different ball game. The next link in my chain of thoughts was… have I not grown out of this rubbish yet? Have I not understood that it does not matter what you call it as long as you consider a person to be special and more important than others? Is that not just it? It is! To love someone is nothing but to consider the person special. It could be mother and girlfriend alike. So what’s this ‘dating’ and ‘loving’ business?

All this thought was about thirty seconds worth of my time. I then started watching a funny movie on HBO and pretty much left the thought unthreaded. I just wrote this because I had not posted for a while and I was bored this morning. Do not think too much of it, I would suggest. Cheers!

On a different note, I have had some great times in college. Party sharty, project voject, good fun. There are some random pictures I would like to post. Providing with details would require time and energy… don’t have enough of them both as of now, so hang on till I feel like writing again… Muhuhaha!!!

Catharsis

Have you ever felt like you were never born? There are times when I want to ask my life why it even exists. There are times when I want to ask God to pick up this ‘strip’ of a few days and cut it out of the ‘reel’ of my life so the smoothness is not spoilt. Imagine, you sleep on Tuesday night and wake up on Wednesday next week; and all because the week was going to be a really pathetic one. I don’t know how to complaint about things happening to me when it is not even my fault. Innocence and thoughts of self respect are all questioned in times like this. No, if you are waiting for me to blurt my issue, I will not.

What I have learnt in the process (and this is the most important part) is that taking responsibility is a job that demands responsibility. Stop frowning and twisting your face… you know EXACTLY what I mean. Sometimes it never pays off to be the one doing the entire math. A friend of mine told me, “It’s a thankless job to be a responsible person taking charge”. Now, it’s different when you are running a company or a business because there, you are paying the buggers and they jolly well listen to what you say. But in a class of individuals where each is as important as the next, you can’t be bossing around. The funny part is, you take initiative and if the idea that you took initiative for falls flat on its face, you are blamed. But if the idea works, it qualifies as a ‘job profile’ of the representative. If you do something nice you get three individuals (from amongst those who know you and love you) to come and say, ‘good show’ but if you screw up… fifty faces frowning at yours and fifty voices (which sound like seventy) shouting in your ears about ‘this-is-not-done’ things. It’s not like one gets paid to hear this crap, right? And there are no privileges either. I still have to submit assignments with the rest of the class. I still have to get graded on the shoddy job I have done because I was busy fixing dates with the faculty who could not make it on a Saturday because his aunt’s third cousin’s elder son ran away from home. I still have to be in time for lectures because the attendance is going to be taken by me and it doesn’t matter how late the rest of the class comes because they can shoot their numbers out like I was there to play housie or bingo or something.

Oh forget it! There is virtually no point ranting to a keyboard. No offence to you, dear reader, but in front of me is only a keyboard. I just had so much brewing that it spilt over. I guess, “With great power comes great responsibility”… actually it’s the other way round… but then again, who came first, the chicken or the egg?

From the attic

I mined through my drawers again… lo and behold; I find some of my old poems, again. It has been years since I wrote any of this. Actually, I have just lost that urge to write the way I did but I still look back at these works and wonder if it really was me who managed to write this way… no its not about my ego being converted to a blimp but I just appreciate the fact that I ‘voiced’ my feelings in different ways vis-à-vis others. Probably, I never had a good enough outlet that I could trust but what it manifested into was quite a memento that I could treasure and refer to in years to come.

This one, for example, was written for that one “perfect” woman who I could spend my life writing about. Strange (and still true), I feel the same way even today. For the records, this was written about six years ago. No, I was not seeing anyone then and did not see anyone for years after that. But today, I feel this has come as close to reality as it can… one of my favorite creations dedicated to one of God’s favorite creations.

NATURE AND YOU

We’ve walked a long distance in the sea-wet sand,
A while singing, a while moaning, we’ve walked hand in hand.
Your praise seems so little all the more it’s said,
When you walk on open roads they are like carpets red,
The day would threaten thunder when you hide your face and cry,
When you look up and smile the clouds clear the sky.
When you speak to nature the blue bells ding-a-ling,
When you stand in the open, the mountains seem to sing.
When your fingers slide through your hair,
Giving them a brush,
The dark night would sigh,
The waterfalls would blush.
The moon watches you sleep, the stars staring too,
Would you be dreaming of nature while nature is dreaming of you?

Ah! The sally of youth…and the gifts thus found…

:-)

Lego: bring on the brief!

We were made to write a creative brief. (what?!?!).

Explanation: in the world of advertising, when a client (the advertiser) meets the client servicing executive (the guy representing the agency to the client) and takes notes on why he wants to advertise and what is he expecting the agency to do for him, is called ‘taking a client brief’. The other department, ‘Creative’, requires to know what kind of an advertisement they are to create for the client. When the CSE converts the client brief to a sheet of paper which gives the creative department the relevant information, it is known as ‘the creative brief’.

Our assignment was to write a creative brief for an ad already made. In effect, work backwards to know what influenced the creator to make such an ad. The ad was that of Lego.

The ad:
Two cars (limos if I am not wrong) roll into a compound and black suited men step out in regal style. They make their way to a room and open it with utmost care and walk in. they stare from behind dark glasses at the activities of a five year old who is sitting on the floor playing with his toys. A lady dressed formally (probably the boss of these men) walk in while the men make way for her to come up front to the child. The child looks at her and hands over a simple white box. The apprehension builds and the lady looks at the men before she anxiously opens the box. Just a peak and the light through the box delight the people watching. They are impressed and the next thing you know is this child being hounded by press reporters. He is made to sit in a press conference with a hundred mics in his face and camera flashes all over the screen. He is being loved and respected by the entire country. His picture is in every magazine, on every news channel. He is shown parading through what looks like London, in a sedan and with guards in front and behind.

The screen now has a Lego logo on it and the punchline that reads: "every idea begins with imagination".

Now I might have killed the ad for those who have watched it but that’s the best I could do, so, sincere apologies.

Everyone had their own way to draw up the probable brief. Some wrote poetry and some wrote three lines as their assignment. I don’t know how many others have done what I did. I recorded a speech and gave it some music; something like ‘Sunscreen’, if you have heard the song. It’s a pity I can not play that brief but I can post the text at least. So this is what I said:

I once asked a child, what is your dream… what do you want to be.
He said, “I want to be an engineer”.
On asking him why so, he replied with eyes that had the glimmer of a creator, “I want to build the world”.

Children have dreams, when they grow up they have aspirations. The difference between the dream of a child and the aspiration of a grown up lies in the fact that the child has no preconceived logic in his dream… no rationale… no inspiration from that which has already been created. It is independent of logic, of gain, of selfishness, of winning the race against humanity. The dream to create resides in the area of impossibility and the truth of the dream has more credibility in his mind than the credibility of matured logic in the mind of a grownup. I once saw a child play by himself. He was talking to the floor, to the air, to the light, to the sky, to himself, to the fictitious man who in his imagination was the hero of the world. He was pretending to be the partner of this superman and went around saving the world. He had his own flying car, his own speed bike that could turn into a robot, his own light saber, his own jet that spoke to him and obeyed his commands, his head quarters from where he operated. As I watched our young messiah answer a call on his very own voice activated computer, he jumped up and shouted out to his car. I was watching him as he strapped on his jet packs and took of to the crime scene. Then I watched him as he blasted the bad guys with his specialized ray gun with proton beam mode and then I watched as his mother took his hand and dragged him outside the room to feed him his boiled vegetables. The words I heard from her tore me into shreds. “you look crazy when you keep jumping around shouting to yourself. Don’t be such a retard, you are ten now.”

I stand by it; no man can think like a boy. If each dream that a boy had, was given shape, if each child was given a tool to make his dream a reality, if each little brat was given a chance to be heard, the world would have found ideas that would make these children take over the government, the business, the people… the world. We can not be those dream weavers but what we can do is to give the child a gate to take his imagination one step closer to reality. We take children seriously because the world is built on bricks of thoughts and all thoughts are built on ideas but all ideas start with imagination.

The track I used is called Ave Maria. It’s an old Celtic kind of a song by a composer who’s name I forget. This particular exercise really opened my mind up to possibility. I have always been a nice observer but this is the first time I put it to some creative use. What I was proud about was the fact that I actually managed to pull it off well, all by myself and I like this piece of literature I typed out with no predominant consciousness or any particular reasoning affecting my flow of thought.

Oh well, the grades should be up in a while so, more then, or before that, if I have any other ‘proud works’ to display, which I sincerely hope I do.

Weave your dreams with a strong thread and they will become reality, and this time around, for once, a reality you can possibly handle and take responsibility for.

Cheerio!