Whispering Shadow

I woke up that morning. I opened the door to my room. In stead of the passageway of my house, I stepped on to a beach. I heard the sound of the waves. I saw a beautiful sun rise, but the breeze from the Arabian Sea didn’t allow my body to feel its warmth. It could have been one of my dreams, but this time it wasn’t. It was for real, the surroundings and my state of mind. Just before I had gone to sleep the previous night, I was sitting on the beach, alone, staring into the vast expanse of darkness that the ocean had become. Barring the sound of waves breaking on the shore and the hymn of the insects, it was silent. After a while, I could hear my heart beat too, as if it was playing along in harmony with the sounds of nature. I didn’t notice the blanket of stars that shrouded the ocean until I decide to lie down on my back. The stars were infinite in number, unmatched in their luminosity and set up a great contrast with the emptiness of the night. The sky itself felt like an endless b...

I am jubilant. I have stayed away from the newspaper for a week. The feeling of nausea due to overconsumption of information has finally ceased. I have even stayed away from the many news channels that crowd the first 50 channels of my television box. So what if the world is slipping deeper into recession and India is anticipating two events (IPL and the Elections) which will see expenditure of 0.6% of our GDP in just over a month? Not much can change within a week. At least nothing that has any influence on me. Why the sudden aversion from current affairs one may ask. I was preparing for a b-school interview. The array of questions that they can ask you is insane. And as a result, even if you consider yourself to be generally well-read, you are never as ‘aware’ as your interviewers are of the world around you, at least you don’t interpret things they way they do. Hence to try to raise the bar, I was reading like never before, reading topics which I would conveniently skip otherwise, ...

41 degrees should be no big deal, especially for someone who has stayed in Dubai for half his life. It is easily around 6 degrees cooler than the average temperature in Dubai and only half as humid. But it has been sucking the life out me over the past few days. Mumbai is warm and humid like never before. And what makes life worse is the fact that you don't have the luxury of an air conditioner at most places you go to for everyday work, barring office, which is literally always 'chilled out'. And the temperatures have peaked at a time when I am celebrating my first weekend with no prior agenda in a long time. I knew I was going to face 'heat' in my interview but beyond that it should have been all cool. How wrong I was. It's possible the worst the weather in the city has ever felt. Being the outdoorsy person I am, I am quite stuck for options. Yes, I can go to a mall or catch up with a movie but it is never as satisfying as going to Marine Drive or sitting on t...

To gate crash at your home on every birthday, getting spare cakes so that you can do more than just eat them. To expect you to listen to them even when they are at their worst and you are not at your best.  To turn tell you how monstrous you looked in that flouroscent shirt. "You should have instead worn the floral one! " To confide in you how cute they found that girl who just passed by to be which was exactly what you were going to tell them. To give you advice, free and unlimited, sometimes unnecessary.   To wish you luck a million times, saying "You will be just fine" before you put yourself to a real test in this cruel world. You even get "Good Luck" surprise parties. To ask you for treats on every occassion. Your birthday. Treat! You won a prize. Treat! You shaved. Treat! To reinstate faith when you think you are being sucked in a black hole. "No it's ok. They won't touch your arm. They will only chop your finger" To fuel your imagi...

On one rainy day, I remember I had taken cover under the natural umbrella one of them formed. It served me well. I managed to come out, not half as soaked as I would have otherwise been. The rains in Mumbai are ruthless on its inhabitants and the trees are the only saviours.  I was indebted.  The trinity used to stand there, majestically, at the turn down the road. I had seen them in their full glory with their brown barks and thick blanket of leaves. Many creatures lived in them - crows and sparrows, pigeons and squirrels, and many more insects and creepie-crawlies. It was a micro-habitat in itself.   Today, it felt different. The shade the trees provided was gone. The chirping of the birds was absent. In fact there were no birds.  As I walked back home, I had hoped to find them watching over the road that leads to the hospital. But all I saw were three stubs, as if they had been prosecuted and sentenced to death - beheading was the chosen method.   The walk didn't feel the same. ...

A good friend told me, “If you are stressed out, sing out loud.” I told her I always did, especially when I had my music on. How often I have seen random people staring at my face and presumably mumbling to themselves, “What’s wrong with this guy?” while I have been humming along my favourite tunes. Oblivious to their remarks, I enjoy living in a world of my songs. My playlist is barely 48 hours long, but I rarely mind listening to the songs on it, over and over and over again.  They can help me change my frame of mind and refocus. There is a song for every mood, a mood for every song. There are few lines that are so close to me that they deserve a mention on my blog:   Song : Yellow / Artist : Cold Play  "I came along I wrote a song for you And all the things you do And it was called yellow   So then I took my turn Oh all the things I've done And it was all yellow"   Song: Carnival of Rust/ Artist: Poet of the Fall  "It's all a game, avoid...

There are movies and then there are great movies - the ones in which you come out feeling different about the life you live, the world you see. You ask yourself questions which you never asked. You wonder if you already knew the answers to those questions but were not willing to accept them. Your mirage of knowing how relationships function is broken, the age barrier shatterred. You wish you can recreate that magic in your life when the chips are down. You give yourself a fighting chance, for salvation, absolvence from sins of every nature. You feel pain. You cry. You learn how to save a life. You believe. You live the moment.  Gran Torino is not a movie, it's a fun lesson in philosophy. Clint Eastwood is both the learned teacher and the enlightened student. PS: Thank you Mr.Iyer for recommending it. I think you should watch it too in case you haven't so far.