Miasma

It truly is the weirdest thing, to see oneself most clearly when everything around me is out of focus.
I have found myself in misdirection.
Its brilliant, twenty things at once...all abstract yet workable. For the first time the days are too small for the work I want to do in them and I am no longer complacent about whether or not it gets done.

My documentary has a sponsor, which will mean three months on the road...and if it looks the way it does in my head it could prove to be my Everest. My Everest isn't the summit it is the first step and all that comes in between. I have my historian/guide/soulmate if he will have me and thereafter its second star to the right and straight on till morning!
The novel is coming along, my seven year-old-self is holding God in contempt magnificently on paper. She is hounding him for answers and questions with a veracity and flow that was absent before, perhaps because the courage to follow it through was absent in both the object and the subject.
The camera is also proving to be a friend these days, not my usual flavour and it shall never battle my pencil for the latter won before it was ever picked up, but it is new. It is the beast of technology coupled with the beauty of my not-so-rose tainted glasses. I'm taking pictures and have even procured me a teacher, a renown master. The streets of the city offer much to capture and the pencil is coupling and coping well with the intended column. My words are flowing easier than ever before. Only those who know what I'm talking about really know what I'm talking about.

I never knew I was interested in so much....pottery is making an appearance again. I met an old man who - in the span of two hours - showed me how to use the wheel. In 120 minutes he gave me his life's worth of collected copyrights to twist into variable vessels of my own choosing and all this with a smile on his face. My first personalised purchase with my first paycheck will be a pottery wheel.

I'm finally beginning to feel as multidimensional in person as I always did in my head.
In glorious Tinsel Town this is usually the point where, a character in all her splendour is set up for the primordial stumble.
I hope I don't die tomorrow.
Then again, to die - in the words of the boy who never grew up- would be an awfully big Adventure.

An Ode to Narcissus

I believe they call this coming full circle.

I have been thinking a lot about Narcissus, for more than his alleged vanity or the cause for it. I have been thinking of him because I may just have developed a hyperbolic admiration for the symbol. Perhaps it is that simple... self love? Does loving ones' self mean one can't love others or is it the other way around? Considering I find myself inordinately incapable of this degenerate act: 'loving', I must admit the paradox plagues me to no end.

There are three different accounts of the tale in Greek myth but I tend to prefer the archaic, mortal version over Ovid's overtly poetic account - perhaps because it is the only one I have actually read outside the limited sphere that embodies the marvellous merits of Google- Narcissus was basically a jerk and therefore had many-a-man and maiden in love with him. This in my world is termed as possessing more-than-ample doses of the 'Asshole Gene'. That elusive strain incorporated in a man's genetic make-up that allows him to solicit admiration, lust and - yes sometimes even love- on the premise of his being a rancorous beast. This tendency in women is usually accompanied by the 'Saviour Complex' accounting for the not-so-complimentary strain in their genetic make-up that propels them to want to rescue and redeem men from themselves. It goes without saying (still, this is for the cheap seats in the back):

'People don't change.'
Let it be Written.
Let it be Done.

I am digressing from the subject (yet unheard of), Narcissus the Jerk was punished by the Gods (because apparently Gods have always only been there to do just that) for having spurned -in this case- his male suitors in the glorious tradition of Greek pederasty. The man in question being a chit of a dude named Ameinias who was ga-ga over Ass-isus. Narcissus gave him a sword as a gift, basically saying "Well if you'll die without me might as well get on with it" and the poor puppy did just that. The curse was put in motion, Narcissus fell even more in love with himself, this time via a pond and when he was met with the colossal indifference his reflection threw in his general direction, he called on the sword again, this time for himself. The entire transaction was commemorated in the birth of a beautiful flower by the same name - incidentally my favourite - growing out of his remains and doomed to stand at the banks of lakes and rivers staring at its reflection until plucked.

The reason I have been thinking about Narcissus is, once again, Dearest Nietzsche. I have only recently begun reading 'Why I am so Wise' and I must say that I have seldom encountered the pleasure of reading a more profoundly gripping 89 pages. The contents are intriguing:

1. ECCE HOMO - How one becomes what one Is.
2. Why I am so Wise
3. Why I am so Clever
4. Why I write such good Books
5. Why I am a Destiny
6. Twilight of the Idols - How to Philosophise with a Hammer
7. Maxims and Arrows
8. The Four Great Errors
9. The Hammer Speaks

Were it anyone else the blatant self-love reflected in every sentence would probably prove disturbing, but then that is why anyone who loves Nietzsche loves him. Because he sets the premise for the fact that modesty and humility, while very pretty precepts, are inherently dishonest. Pretending not to be good at something that one is - beyond all doubt- good at, is basically lying if one were to tell the truth. Then again pretty lies are based on the premise of disregarding the truth. The cover of the book reads " I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful - of a crisis like no other before on Earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience." Ah, the blissfully brash iconoclast!

The narrative follows to cement the premise, Zarathustra doesn't lie even when he is lying, because he admits to it being the default human setting. House, the new silver screen synonym for Holmes, attests to this with his 'Everybody Lies'. How then, are we to disregard eons of conditioning towards upholding the perverse pillars of humility and virtue...both of which are associated with catalogues of social conditioning? A few days ago I told a friend of how I had been cheated out of a stellar concept during a board meeting, the concept was mine and the individual in question simply entered the room, cutting me off mid-presentation and claiming it as its own. It later on turned and flashed me a megawatt smile. I had two options: I could leave the boardroom and pick a fight, snitch or ignore it. I picked the latter and this time not because of my overwhelming cowardice regarding confrontations of all kinds, but because it was a conscious choice. This individual couldn't probably think up an idea like that if its life depended on it, I knew that I would just need a couple of hours to improve upon the premise .
Was this Vanity or Cowardice?

My friend told me I was a doormat, that I would be breakfast mulch in less then a week. I have a different take: I work hard to keep my cool. Really hard. I meditate, I read, I write ...all in the attempt to improve my person. That fabled improvement can only be made evident if I act different from most of the people surrounding me, it isn't idealistic... it is vanity. Perhaps not in the traditional sense, but somewhere in my head I know what Nietzsche means when he says "But the disparity between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that I have been neither heard nor even so much as seen." I read it and a malicious corner in my abdomen admonishes me for my hoity-toityness, but then I get it. Were I to stay in the doldrums with everyone else I should just quit while I am ahead, buy a pint of face plaster, a pair of stilettos and a brain that stops asking questions. But I need to keep asking something, so that's out.

Nitimur in vetitum
We strive after what is forbidden

Well so be it! The only point so far that I don't see eye to eye with the man on is here 'One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil' Neitzsche has downplayed the pupil grossly. What is so wrong with craving a life filled with questions, there is never an end of answers and the different trajectories that each answer proffers. Why then limit oneself to one question and one answer...which is the only path available to surpass the pupil and enter the realm of the professor- limiting the expanse of question. Now why would I want to do that? Although I suppose this choice may well be a passive-aggressive attempt to retain that venomous strain of humility. If one is predisposed to admit that one cannot ever know all the answers, vanity - however she comes- will always only be a polite acquaintance, never an intimate lover like Nietzsche likes her to be.
Perhaps this explains the man's penchance for Dionysos as the choice Deity - the proverbial God of Wine, Women and Song. The promoter of civilization, a lawgiver and lover of peace — as well as the Liberator, his purpose to free one from one's normal self, by madness, ecstasy and inebriation. The divine mission of Dionysus was to mingle the music of the flute and bring an end to care and worry.
If this be Nietzsche's mission than sign me up, but his account discounts the fall out. Pitting the Satyr (Dionysos) and the Sinner (Narcissus) against the Sainthood may not be the best thing. Although, I must admit that my apprehension draws largely from years of adverse conditioning in the gross glorification of all 'Glory Be' religious genres.

The Man said "Here there speaks no 'prophet', none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power called founders of religions."

Perhaps I am finally ready to listen to plain, intelligent prose over prophecy.

Bread Crumbs

I believe it has been three days since I was thrown.

By what exactly I am not yet sure, and I hope that I do not come across the information any time soon. There is a terse sort of plebeian mystique in not being able to recognise or identify my demons anymore. Several things happened but nothing really happened. I now find myself at an odd sort of paradox pinnacle, only it isn't a pinnacle its a plateau. Everything around me is stale, stable and serene but for the first time, the tidal wave of ideas in my head is threatening to shake me loose from something. I think that something is my complacency.

This scares me.

My corporeal complacency and I share a very deep bond and I have never considered severing it. There have been moments that have forced me to take stock of my laziness and momentarily move out of -what they all call- 'the Rut', but I like keeping the road leading back to Tartarus perpetually freckled with bread crumbs. I have recently been having nightmares. Nightmares where I find myself with a broom and tin pan in hand, wiping the smudged water colors clean. I see myself running around, attending meetings, heading ideas and waiting for paychecks.
I cannot bear the sight of myself like this...losing myself all over again.

Several things happened.

I read a column that brought me to tears sitting at my desk at work so that I found that I just HAD to email Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post. She talked about how life chokes poetry out of us. Of Koyaanisqatsi - a life out of balance. Of how the worlds greatest classical violinist Joshua Bell stood weaving magic at a subway Station in DC but no one stopped to listen, because magic lost the epic battle in time management ;

I met a soul mate, a sixty-something adolescent genius traipsing around the world in his bermuda shorts and safari hat photographing natural wonders and writing books. All the while smiling;

I met a man without a face, a congenital disorder had wiped it off his skull - there was a mouth and a bump where an eye-censor sat and a slit where a nostril used to be. All the while his mind worked and as he drooled into a pipe, leaking out mucus to a small bucket he mumbled and pointed and made scintillating conversation;

I stumbled across the discovery that I can translate photographs and picked up a camera again with the express purpose to finally write that column I've wanted to write for ages, regardless of whether it ever sees the light of day. To write phantom fables through traces of life in chaos;

My friend Tigger realized his calling as the next-gen Messiah who would single-handedly educate all the inhabitants of this country, cure Aids and introduce Democracy to our Land of the Pure...bouncing all the while;

I sent in my first attempt at Fulbright, confessing at length that I had no quantitative skills whatsoever but did they have room on board for a Hobo who wanted to sing 'Ring them Bells' perched atop the Eiffel Tower?;

I found that I may have missed my personal chance at seizing what an acquaintance calls 'Venomous Hope' and I may have misdirected my resentment at him for being right and forcing me to look the realization in the eye;

I went to Government College for the first time accompanied by a colleague and spent an entire afternoon in the music department listening to old tapes of student recordings on the tabla and harmonium- the air was musty, the afternoon hot and the atmosphere ecstatic;

I spent an evening with my driver Karamat and my maid Fauzia at Joy Land, which I visited after almost seven years, sat on an obnoxious ride that gave me a headache and scared the fading night-light out of me and had ice cream and pop-corn over conversation that centered around my procuring invitations to visit the villages of both next Sunday;

I downloaded loads and loads of Bob Geldof and Jefferson Airplane and stumbled across the discovery that songs like 'We Built this City' - though lacking in lyrical merit- are pretty damn awesome to hum in the shower;

I met writer friends for 'coffee' and had a coke, rather late. I managed to stay out till 10:30 and laughed for real;

I wrote a letter to the sky, saying everything and burned it.
Like I said…Nothing really happened.

Cain and Able

Much as I hate to admit it, I feel that I can no longer deny that there is much of you in me.

I am terribly ashamed of pleasure and I am quite sure I have you to thank for it. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, that is until I had to go and defy destiny by presuming myself perfectly capable of being happy by leaving and trying to live my own life. That one promise so inherently conflicts with the premise that I find I am incapable of dealing with it. You always covered your mouth when you laughed pretending you were coughing, not that it was often.
I always lower my eyes.
I try and tell myself it is a sign of misplaced modesty until it occurs to me, 'I hate false modesty'. At least I claim to do so often enough.

I enjoy the company of boisterous, complex and often brash individuals who flaunt their hearts and heads on their sleeves but I never do so. Now I cant’ help but wonder if it is because I am still ashamed. The funny thing is that I do manage to write in a manner of who it is I wish I could be: funny and smart. This usually ends up sounding contrived, manipulative and borrowed. Perhaps because it is.

I like someone.

There... I said it and I have never said it before, so I know how big a sentence it is.
Smaller than almost all the ones I put to paper, but larger than the whole lot combined. I met him last year and I vehemently avoided him like your voice in my head told me I should. I never met his eyes and I was predictably prickly and quiet. You would have been proud. I never shared a single conversation with him, but spent many-a-minute staring at him over the cover of my book. I think he may have caught me on one occasion and the moment he did I was deeply ashamed.
I wasn’t embarrassed, or curious, or playful and flirty…I was overwhelmingly ashamed. Like I was somehow dirty and evil.
According to your established modus ponens I probably was.
You were wrong about me not being a good student, as it so happens I turned out a sponge.

Lucky for me, I can’t really harbor much regret over the entire episode, purely because he could never have been the kind to have been even remotely interested, which perhaps is why I found him interesting. The regret comes purely from the realization that you and I are still inextricably intertwined. More so now that you are away, because you somehow managed to worm your way permanently in my head and have taken up residence in the general neighborhood of my conscience. If they want me, they better knock me down. Because I promise you I’m not easy and won’t be until there’s hollowed ground. Which, we both know, neither of us believe in.

So I am doomed then, aren’t I?

Doomed to never take chances and dance around delicious possibilities.
Doomed to want.
Doomed to wait.

Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

'Mountains will be in labour, and an ridiculous mouse will be born'


I have recently taken to tackling Latin phrases, courtesy an old Latin -to- English phrasebook I found hiding innocuously under a pile of Jackie Collins paperbacks at Readings. The treasure cost me a total of Rs 60 and is proving to be a delight, simply because old cliche's in Latin somehow manage to escape being trite, they take on a new dimension. A dimension that extends language but is simultaneously defined by it.

Respice, adspice, prospice
Look to the past, the present and the future.

Granted this is probably not the best tidbit to begin with. After all, viewed atop my daily pulpit of yells and yoddles, I notice that looking to the past is something I actively avoid, but passively re-invent every day through my writing. This usually means that I avoid the present completely by altercating between a series of 'Wouldda, Couldda, Shoulddas' to conjure and circuit a future that has little or no premise in promise. I believe it was Sean Connery in Finding Forrester who said that 'In some cultures it was considered good luck to wear one's socks inside out'. In retrospect, I can attest to the fact that I took him very seriously.
Only that ever-elusive Irish luck still evades my grasp.

Armed by my own helplessness to find hope, but hoping for it all the same, I now discover that my phantom thoughts and dreams are fast taking on a scarier dimension. They are becoming real-er than they were and not real enough to change anything. I have begun living vicariously through the writings and readings of many-a-ghost writer in cyberspace. In some manner I have always done this in print, but I find that there is an unanticipated difference between the two. Even as my books are littered with untidy pencil scrawls and arguments in the margins the same tenacious tendency extends to interference on this new pixel-platform nebula. Where earlier I was perfectly content to butt-in by scribbling my end on paper, I am now displaying an untidy tendency to pose questions to the ghosts that light-up my computer screen and simultaneously my dormant cerebellum on a daily basis. The worst of it is, that whenever they respond they reaffirm that they are real. This in turn reminds me of how surreal they are, considering they know my thoughts and mind and vice versa, but nothing in the knowing extends to a tangible plateau. For someone who thrives on passive homo-sociality through cyberspace because it scares her in person, this new-found curiosity is debilitating. Now I usually end up e-mailing the writer as I pocket their thoughts for future consumption. This is troubling. Mainly because, even as they respond to my intrusive efforts, with sincere appreciation, a deprecating tendency to humor my pains or mild annoyance at my petulance...we are merely strangers who happen to walk past each other on Cyber street every day. And even though we may share the weather, or the music playing on boom boxes in the corner or skate the streets, we don't recognise each other. Not unless one of us bumps into the other and that defeats the purpose of strolling.

My bourgeois Ghost Town consists of several characters that inspire my curiosity. And in the great words of the recently-proclaimed-Great House, m.d '...since I'm not a cat, that's not really dangerous'. But I feel, Wilson's rebuttal applies in this case, the adage wasn't really inspired to ward-off cats... and I may actually get burned on this one.

One of these beings is noxious in nature, were I to view it as an ambient energy I would probably call it Apathy. It wards off all forms of company and all crevices of sentiment (something I largely depend on). Even its writings have an underlying layer of 'Venture no further, for here be Dragons', which I must admit is what usually inspires my steps to do expressly that. It challenges all accepted forms of... well almost everything, but does so within the premise of established, age-old principles. This tendency about Apathy always draws me, for while I tend to relate to most of its dilemma's I cannot bear to think that the only way to ultimately face them is the path it has chosen. I believe I turn to its thoughts every morning, out of some misplaced notion of medieval chivalry. I am determined to believe that the glass can survive half-full and it is insistent on the fact that the glass was broken a long time ago. That, coupled with its inherent dis-interest in my intrusive presence continues to prove alluring.
Women are weird that way.

The second of these beings is a Wordsmith. It plays scrabble with sentences and ping-pong with prose and poetry. Its thoughts are abrasive, but somehow retain a sibilant tone. It is somewhat of a friend from not-so foreign lands. I call it 'Chai'. For no other reason than the fact that its love of language, its aura of ephemeral lazy afternoons spent in mid-day suns and rain and its smiling tonalities - if indeed smiles can have sounds- conjure up images of what people tell me this addiction is supposed to taste like. I find that I cannot channel the sentiment through the physical social solvent, so I turn to my metaphysical Chai.

The third is a more recent discovery, it is brusque, bitchy and beastily beautiful. It moves at a much faster pace than I am used to and is succinct in any and everything it does. It is also rainbow coloured in my mind, not because it is gay, but because it is a kaleidoscope. It is a bottomless well of boundless energy and, seemingly, no artifice. I generally think of it as Ecstasy, or the closest thing open to the experience at any given time.

The Fourth is a mirage of music and words. Abstract to the point that I feel if I were a scrap of torn paper, it would be the torn, crumpled counterpart of a much-similar parchment. Aged and brittle, denoting that it cannot appreciate modernity, it appears to somehow be caught in the same time-warp in which I usually find myself. Looking perpetually for romance in reality but settling to grasp at the humour in all things as a consolation prize. I call it Tabula Rasa - A blank Tablet.

Living through dead writers is pleasant, poignant even, but living vicariously through people who are already living vicariously through their words is hard to keep track of, even for the likes of myself. The Blog odyssey, offers a foray into the minds of many, some of which you wind up wishing you had access to on a regular basis, until you have to remind yourself that they are strangers. That just because you skim their words every morning and skate their emotions, doesn't link you to them, at least not in any form more tangible than a click convenience on your template.

This is usually the point where I regret my 'Aloneness'. The corner where it begins to border 'Lonely'. Which is probably why I can't help but wonder about the thoughts and dreams of those who I can draw similarities to? Why I cannot let it rest.

Perhaps because all the 'real 'people I meet are anything but.
Still, hope springs eternal in Never-Ever Land.

To Idleness, with contempt

Deblitiating deliberations!
I find that even though I take great pride in my inordinate lack of purpose, being mind-numbingly idle is definitely no fun. Or perhaps it isn't because I am bound by the condition of having to sit upright in a chair without the luxury of taking off my shoes and flying off to meet fairies. I opened my day with Jack Johnson's 'Broken', a shower, a change and trailed my twisted trajectory to work. On the way there was Diamond's 'Forever in Blue Jeans' and some captivating Chet Baker.
I suppose my need to make the books and movies and music paramount priority in my world emerges from the fact that without them, life is just musty. It is, but I would much rather it wasn't.
This oh-so random musing is precipitated by the fact that its 4:18 pm, I have already written a brilliant series concept (Yes I say so myself as will others...for I am Spartacus, Bah!), have finished my bag book for the day... Machiavell's 'The Prince', good but no cartwheels for him. My pencil has scarred the pages with its usual But-I-beg-to-differ / I must digress, Sir! salutations and I am fucking B-O-R-E-D. I spent a good two hours on my novel, wrote neary 30 pages of which I have yet to make head or tail. I also wrote up two chapters on my thesis literature Review section and posted my Fulbright application. I have been tuned in to Duke Ellington for the past hour so I think I've exceeded more than my usual level of existential.
I've scrolled down Daily Times through and through, finally bothering to read the pages I spent a year working on and never deemed worthy of my actual attention. I've caught up on my correspondence and have just spent 15 precious seconds methodically applying lipgloss.

What scares me now is that even though my narration has elapsed it is only 4:26...and I'm stuck here till seven.
Nothing even remotely worthwile fantasizing about, especially considering my last but most recent crush's face has already begun to fade.
Short-term memory symposium sucks!

Project: Contentment

Jaded, Juxtaposed and Juvenile Malang reporting from Catechism Capital : Void of Maladjustment.

To,
Your Inexplicable, Undefined, Unbound Highest Entity, Universal Source of Knowledge and All Things Oh-So Great and Dandy.

Sir,
The many-me's of I, have hereby decided to undertake a mammoth new project, entitled Project: Contentment. With your permission we would like to make slight alterations in our daily regiment of pop-psychology deferrals, pseudo-smartassness and recind our monastic oath sponsoring our allegedly-illegal taps into your monopoly of thought.

This new resolution has been precipitated by our innate social and psychological complex to avoid homosociality and repent for our sins against the Gods of Antiquity. We are fully geared to partake of the Primrose Path of Dalliance (also stand in line) and be mellow and charming to cement our status as members of this race that 'they' call human, as per your permission. We - in our sincere efforts to prove our dedication to this cause - are willing to cut the proverbial Umbilical chord linking us to sage-old principles of Tolerance, Felicity, Individuality, Creativity and Freedom of Choice, Thought and Action.
Forgive us Father & Eschatological Compadre's for we have not sinned against the nature and nurture you have bestowed upon us and ask your express indulgence to do so hence forth.

In order to accomplish this, we have come to the cataclysmic conclusion that we must partake of that most-dreaded social lubricant. We, in all our senseless senses and thoughtless thinking, shall be joining three homosapiens for Tea this afternoon at 2:35 pm.

May you pardon our perjury,

Signed:
Ontological Misdeed Management Program
Experiment#43653764538475683765
Tag:Maria Amir
Planet: Earth

The Beauty of the Beast

It is scary and emboldening at the same time.

A few days ago, my grandmother asked me if I was still applying for Fulbright or if I still wanted to pursue 'this', she called it. I thought about it and said 'Yes'. She asked me if maybe I should apply for journalism, everyone has said it in some manner or another, but she was the first one to come right out with it. They all know as well as I do, that were it journalism on my applications there would be fewer rejection letters and I would even be eligible for a few scholarships. I think I considered it for a total of two minutes before saying, ‘It’s either writing or its nothing’. I don’t know if im being uncompromising or honest. I don’t ‘need’ a Masters degree, I already have one... I ‘want’ one. I want to sit in a classroom again and be pushed to compete creatively. To do what I love to do and do it with others who love it just as much. And that need makes the question subjective, which in turn makes it more than a matter of priorities, it makes it a dream and a voyage. But then again it is a matter of priorities; Do I want to get out more than I want to write?

I suppose for the time-being I shall be sticking to the original premise…I want to write, it is the only time I feel real. Like I actually exist, I breathe. Doodling in my notebooks and my books for that matter, conversing with blank pages, myself and dead authors...is the only time I feel like the Maria I hope I am. The best part is that the moment I find myself in an environment where I cannot navigate my bearings all I have to do is reach in my over-stuffed hamper-of-a-bag, get out my pencil, journal or novel and write and read to meet myself.

That is where the 'practicality debate' makes an appearance. I am not practical and I suppose I really must need to be. That is when all the doubts set in, followed by the perpetual need to prove that I am not stupid or dippy. Every time I meet friends going abroad with scholarships it hits me, your voice… ‘Stupid, Useless, Waste’ and in the middle of the night I grab at the headboard of my head-boardless bed to remind myself that I am out, that you are no longer here and that I am no longer her. Then I justify it somehow in my head by saying I’m an artist, that my applications aren’t the same as those for Business subjects and Environmental education. That I am not doomed to be dumb, because I was spiteful, pathetic and confused in High school. It is rather childish I suppose, to be so terrified of being 'dumb'. Not 'ugly' or 'silly' or 'lazy' or 'useless'...only 'dumb' really truly scares me.
I think about giving up on it all and doing what everyone wants me to do yet again…pick a person and get a move on. That’s when I become desperate and the walls start to cave in and I run around applying and re-structuring my application essays. Gambling my entire future on the notion that I can string a few sentences together. What if I can’t? I can write, but what if I can’t write what people want to read?
I remember how you used to relish taming your horses and dogs, how your face swelled with pride when they were chained, beaten and subdued. I know I will not tame the Beast or water him down to scare fewer people off. Because I just happen to think the he is beautiful. I love him untamed and inexplicable. Thats the only way I can love him.

I suppose I must organize myself and I am working on it, the problem is my…’gift’ -if that is what they call it- only runs on a liberally applied dosage of consistent chaos theory. It doesn’t work when organized, so maybe I need to work on scattering it to the point where it is only mine.

Maybe they, if they choose to take me, need to take me as I am.

Which means I need the courage to begin being who I am instead of talking about it.

Such a girl

I discover with a degree of decrepitude that I do tend to be 'such a girl' on certain things. These days the primary basis of that observation lies in House Md Season three with me acting the perennial shipper fantasizing about Huddy storylines...it doesnt help any that my job description encourages me to prolong my perpetul voyages in La La Land. Its either that or counting off the days till Harry Potter 7 makes it to the shelves and I have something else to obsess about to distract myself from my chronic lack of something to obsess about. One has to be really sad to get their socks off fantasizing about fictional characters hooking up in alternate dimensions.
I am really sad....Ka Ching!

Which is probably why the force is just not with me. Yoda would probably put it like this 'New-found malice in your heart there is young Padawan, leaking is your half-full glass of universal solvent'. No shit, Master. Indeed it is. For once I wouldnt mind fantasizing or crushing over someone in 3-D, real time, with a face and a smile and a fragrance (im not sure if that means aftershave really, but propriety demands I pretend it does). Then again, people are... well people... and even if im not 'as special as I may like to think I am, as do we all' I still am I.
And people always remain people.

It appears my romances or perennial lack thereof are perpetually doomed to a series of long-distance, anonymous correspondences. Perhaps because reality is always disappointing and strangers are somehow vindicated and justified simultaneously in cyberspace and old letters than they are in person. It is a depressing thought being doomed at the other end of a perpetually pending conversation that will never end in an actual meeting, but you know that if it were to do so it would simply End, so you thrive on playing along because it means something is happening, even if that 'something' is a big, fat nothing. Or, as it happens to be in my case, the several somethings that happen to be unabashedly obese nothings.
So, cheers to all my daily one-liners in cyberspace that form the pivot-point edifice of my fantasies and a large part of my composite conversation.
I miss having a best friend.
Then again, that requires work too. 'People work'...the scariest kind.

I came across someone writing this online and it struck some semblance of a chord:

Veritas
The truth, I strongly suspect, is that love is a bit of a twee (maybe even sad) little illusion, a happy story that we tell ourselves to pretend that even if everything isn't all right now, it will be in the future. Maybe. If we hope desperately enough.
We're not talking agape here.
Sometimes, you wonder…what's the fucking point? Why even bother? Does it actually even mean anything?
Nope.
Good night.

I suppose I should be depressed but im not. A gay guy that I don't know somewhere in the world I don't know, Knows what I mean.
That's something isn't it?

Probable problems

I love my problems of late, they are so base and silly that they are refreshing. I am losing time and inclination to drone on about the random wheels turning and tinkering in my mind, at least for the time being. I am quite sure I will get back to it as soon as time manages to fit me in to its busy schedule, pun intended.
My current lists of problems include the fact that I have not managed to find any semblance of decent parking on Davis Road, that all of my creative concepts at Geo are being appreciated but are too bloody long and elaborate for me to complete on time and the fact that the overwhelming combination of Blue and Orange desks, walls and seats is clashing with my contact lenses.
A small ray of light presents itself in the form of packed lunches, there is an elusive beauty to a packed lunch from home. I haven’t gotten packed lunches since I was about eight and the fact that someone bothers to wrap up a sandwich for me in tin foil every day is unbearably cutesy…in a good way…in the best way possible actually. The fact that today that lunch just happened to be a ‘Teenda sandwich’ is obviously anti-climactic but I think I managed to laugh it off quite comfortably in the cafeteria.
Other problems include Bank accounts which need to be opened immediately and procuring my fuel allowance considering I am broke till June and I am notoriously bad at being broke, of which I suppose I ought to be extremely grateful.

Passage perdition of the day: ‘To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real. It is no use starting late in life to say: “I will take an interest in this or that.” Such an attempt only aggravates the strain of mental effort. A man may acquire great knowledge of topics unconnected with his daily work, and yet hardly get any benefit or relief. It is no use doing what you like; you have got to like what you do. Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death and those who are bored to death’ by Churchill, I suppose this ought to make me feel better, here’s to hoping it will serve its purpose.

These prettily, probable problems allow me to focus my energies on a random comment by a random acquaintance in cyberspace who raised my hopes up by telling me he had procured for me, a soul mate. Even though I promptly lashed out at him by pointing out that the entire epistemology centering on the search for such an individual inherently rested on the search and that the find had to be walked upon by the two souls in question, who was I kidding. A soul mate courier service could definitely find a market in atleast one of my worlds. Turns out the fabled candidate in question -deemed appropriate because he was the King of babble to my alleged Queen -is gay. I hereby proclaim that the new corollary for ‘cruel’ is ‘straight’.

This all means that I can put my perpetually pending identity crisis, existential dilemma’s and randomized eugenics on hold and focus all my attentions on an un-opened bottle of coke sitting on the desk next to mine.
Which presents as an actual problem.

"What's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?"

*Disclaimer * : The following tirade has been initiated purely in the interests of venting and is not intended to pass judgment, ridicule and demean any social or income group, even though in practice it does all three. The writer maintains that she is not bitchy, proud or prejudiced but has been forced by the circumstances narrated to act all three for the time being.

What indeed!

I do not know what it is about men in this country that reheeeeeealllly makes it a constant-every waking minute of every bloody day - God awful - swallow arsenic to avoid eye contact - struggle to merely ‘be’ a girl. And yes! I fully recognize that this is a very old rant, met by a consistently nonplussed audience silently murmuring ‘So what, men are ass holes, deal with it woman’ clause. Believe me boys, we deal with it, but that is beside the point for now. For now, the focus of my frustration shall be recollection and narration, which goes something like this:

A new job means new adjustments and new people, both of which I get…within reason. The organization I now work for happens to be a large one and is ill-located, if one is to evoke the defense that a young, twenty something girl driving and parking at the opposite end of Davis Road, walking across the road met by a daily deluge of cat calls is justifiable: it isn’t…but that in no way means it isn’t annoying. My new job allows me to be creative, as part of my work portfolio, in short, all I am required to do is come up with ideas for talk shows, dramas, sitcoms and special events. I discover I am good at this job, quite good. It has been two weeks working here, I still don’t have my employee cards but my boss at Karachi has already offered me a promotion after my three-month trial period. I also realize that this amounts to bragging, and I shall fold on that account. I have never been particularly motivated…at anything, but apparently I still manage to appear so to my employers ‘tis a blessing indeed’, but this time it is different I am finally proud in some measure of something I feel I am capable of doing. This could very well be a direct result of my afore-mentioned bullshit prowess, I seldom talk to people at the workplace, but when I talk about work…I can do it well and at great length.

This is inevitably the point where I should mention that my colleagues are both men and during our orientation I was foolish enough to have deemed it necessary to prove myself rather too quickly. This seems to have rubbed off the wrong way. Today, I walked in to work an hour late, having called the HR manager informing him about the need to wait at NADRA offices to re-issue my original ID card, which I was told I required for my documents to be processed. I was given permission and as I met my colleagues I was told that - considering I was late - I ought to drive them to Bari Studios, Multan Road somewhere ahead of Samanabad.

I tried to inform them -as politely as I could- that driving around the outskirts of Lahore was not really part of my job description and that ‘technically’ my team was meant to observe a recording session the day before when both of them neglected to show up for work. I was informed that since I was the only one who had a car and I “shouldn’t set a bad example by being prissy and neglecting to do my job just because I was a girl”, in short that I should compromise. At this point I tried to evoke the “I don’t get paid till June, my car runs on petrol and I want to avoid driving in Samanabad” defense. This was met with a “Bibi, Rs 200 ki to baat he, aap fikar na Karen mein de doon ga aap ko, Gaari chalaane ki baat rahi to woh mein chalaa leta hoon”.

I cannot accurately decipher how much I regret the fact that I lack the ability to slap people down on impulse. I told the man that I wasn’t taking his money and I really think we should call HR to confirm a vehicle for the trip, at this point he threatened to report my ‘princess’ act to the our Lahore in-charge.

This is the point where I got stupid.

I think it was the ‘princess’ thing that got to me and I mean really got to me. I have met women who manage to make the princess label work to their advantage in the workplace and make it a point of principle to complain about tea, air-conditioning, their seat placement and everything that could possibly come in between. I try very hard not to be one of those, I bring my lunch so I don’t have to ask the staff to run around and get me anything, I even pick up my daily bottle of mandatory IV in Coke on my way to work and the only time I bother someone is when my computer decides to remind me it has a personality, which I find myself incapable of corresponding with. I am definitely not one of those women. I do not know if this sounds vain and I no longer particularly care if it does (even though my hint of an exclusion clause negates the latter) but I find it a constant itch being stared down by truck drivers and rickshaw people. Also this attitude appears to have no class or income distinction, I have been solicited by many-a-manner of person in my office for lunch or with simple random requests like “Would you like to sit in row#3, the AC is cooler there?” Fortunately I have limited experience with pick-up lines, but I find that the supposed sensation of being flattered that I have heard is supposed to follow is distinctly absent. I also find it hard enough to ‘politely decline’ considering that all I end up doing is mentioning “Aren’t all the AC’s the same size, and they are all working why would row#3 be any cooler than mine?”…until which point the expression on the solicitors face registers and I ‘get it’. I can’t for the life of me understand why women crave this sort of attention.

Anyway, coming back to my rant, I decided to drive my colleagues on a road to hell, in terms of both derivative and destination. The journey involved my colleague singing cheap Indian love songs (which I would normally be singing along to under entirely different circumstances) and making comments about how ‘touchy’ women have become. At the point where he mentioned that he may need to take driving lessons to hike up his standards to meet ‘Maria bibi’s’ I seriously considered stopping the car and asking him to step out. But it occurred to me I had no idea where I was and even less of an idea of where I was going so I was stuck. Once we got to the studios and everyone had marveled, pointed at and commented over the girl, who was unwilling to laugh along at their putrid humor or sit and share ‘actress jokes’, shooting began and I met two other colleagues who I considered better company. There’s no business like show business, point taken. By five in the evening I insisted we return to work, because I was not driving in the dark with these two men in my car in a place I don’t know (I obviously did not say this, I just acted like a petulant uncompromising little girl insisting we go back) and was met with a series of rolling eyes. Regardless, they consented and as I was driving back the colleague in perpetual question deigned to make a comment which finally managed to evoke a suitable response from my person. He said that English medium girls from a particular ‘class’ who thought themselves ‘pretty’ often found it ‘hard to work hard’.

I have yet to bite back officially but I will probably end trying to avoid the issue again just to avoid it getting dirty. I wish I wasn’t so scared of things getting dirty. However this one incident has brought to light several things, the first being that no matter how hard I try to pretend that social classes don’t exist and indeed, thrive, in this country branding people under social classes doesn’t negate it from being any less than a caste system. And within that caste system there are very few inroads for connection to be found, especially for women. I refuse to apologize for being educated or ‘pretty’ if that is the indentation people need to use to put me down.

I also refuse to allow middle class morals entirely brand my being.

I believe I just used the word ‘middle class’…funny, I thought that was supposed to be me.

The Last Muse

An Idea is born…

A new thought or an old one wearing a fresh new fragrance garbed in satin. It steamrolls across the canvas of the mind, zooming-in, all guns blazing to a conclusion it is desperately counting upon us to come to. We roll with it as far as we can, before one of us loses the other. Some distant corner intricately cultivates our combined demise, our infinite fall from glory.

It is a study of the self, to derive how we conceive, perceive and deceive our own creation.
How is it born?
How do we kill it?

Why the trembling nuance of an idea hidden within the manifold layers of language and cornered by culture is killed in conception? Why the feeble fetus of original thought is beaten and buried during its oh-so fragile pre-natal phases?

“Dim it down, Cut the corners, Sell it.”

Too Bold
Not bold enough

Too pretty
Not pretty enough

Too wordy
Not wordy enough

Too abstract
Not abstract enough

Too smart
Not smart enough

Too Naïve
Not naïve enough

Too Happy
Not happy enough

Too Sad
Not sad enough

Stupid, incompetent, amateurs…how dare you call yourselves creators! When will you learn?
What you call life flows and follows in the cracks, the valley, the in-betweens, the shallows, the half-times, the breaks, the procrastinating middles of any and everything, the Grey’s.
I, Inspiration as I draw my dying breath ask of you, Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve, of what use are your sight, mind and soul if they are closed to cracks and crevices.

When will learn not to speak to say?

Pretty Poetry

I think I dropped a poem here somewhere
It slipped through my fingers
To creep sulkily into the cracks in the wall

It was rather pretty
A pantomime of colours and dreams
Of happy endings and Everlots

I think it was small
Easy to lose or forget or forego
Perhaps that is why I lost it
Why it no longer felt important enough to linger

I’ve been searching frantically for days
Under my pillow
In my chest drawers
Behind my desk
Under the carpet

It really was pretty
I’m sorry I lost it.

Window Shopping

A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.- Jane Austen

Attaching a new label to an age-old exercise is proving to be an interesting experience.
The misogynistic prancing of random aunties and their sons to inspect young girls, with the foreseeable conclusion of deeming them ‘acceptable’ or otherwise for all practical purposes of ‘holy matrimony’ is definitely an age old exercise in more ways than one.
Considering that I am so emphatically against such rituals, the amiable adaptability I am expressing to my mommy and grandmommy’s wishes is proving to be a surprise, most of all to myself. I am rather proud of myself for having managed to contain all outward signs of contempt, ridicule and malice…all of which are sufficiently active beneath the surface to warrant being put on display.
Perhaps the reason for my apparent detachment is the trump card awarded to all girls but one which very few bother to exercise in spirit. I am discovering with shocking alacrity the fact that relatively sane women (arguably, if there is such a thing) tend to change tack within seconds when faced with what ‘appears to be’ a promising prospect on paper. This usually denotes a degree of wealth, appearance, social breeding with specific emphasis on pedigree and an amiable nature. Common sense, if prevailed upon, would insist that none of the above can ever be gauged accurately regarding another individual, but in my gratifyingly limited experience common sense is not called upon much in these matters.

Having recently relived my Jane Austen fixation, it is interesting to observe that Eastern women are conveniently stuck in what the world recalls as the ‘Victorian Era’. Words such as felicity, prospects, ‘Man of consequence’ and ‘Dainty but willful’ sound pretty coming from Fanny Price, but they lose all sense of grandeur when they are translated in Urdu. A fact which is altogether ironic, considering the latter is usually an instrument for beautification. Nevertheless the crux is the same….money, class and character.
Foolish of us to assume that a pseudo-tea party in the company of absolute strangers can help accomplish an accurate assessment of either. Regardless, it is an interesting exercise to observe. Since the female/object in question is not really required to speak or profess her opinions during the proceedings it allows her free reign to watch at will. The most amusing aspect has to be the fluctuating flitters of language and tone, ‘tis all a prattle of sugar and smiles and winsome wiles’, none of which the likes of I are made of.

But I am determined to continue for the following reasons:

a) Sitting through this blatant, un –called for assessment of my person allows me to hold - in silent contempt- all those that surround me and much as I am loathe to admit it, this is oddly gratifying.
b) There is an added element of merriment in socializing passively without having to actively participate in the proceedings. Especially since every word spoken, by every person at such occasions is akin to critical negotiations at the highest level of political intrigue, which modern television has proven we are all interested in.
c) Such blatant disregard for the feelings of the object (female) and her hoard of orchestrating relatives by the subject (male) and his hoard of critics can only act as a test of character and forbearance, both of which one cannot ever have enough of.

Further, this exercise -if taken in the spirit it ought- is very much akin to Window shopping and since shopping in general is not acknowledged as a masculine pursuit, the picking of preferences and subsequent rejection of them all falls to the female. A reversal of roles proves much more interesting when it goes unnoticed and is conducted secretly in the presence of others. It would do well for us all to simply sit and watch the produce on display, just as we are being watched. After all women are much more critical about the purchases they make.

Best of all, this banner allows for the use of that delightful phrase “Sorry I wont be buying anything today, I’m only looking”.

Cheers!

I cannot believe I feel this alone. I don't know how to cope with it. I dont know how to talk about it and I most certainly dont know what to do with it.
Giving up on dreams is hard. Really, really hard. Hard and harrowing in a way I couldn't have foreseen. It tints everyday in grey hues and for someone used to seeing technicolour - even if its a psychedelic, self-induced, pseudo-acid flashback technicolour - greys are a downer.
What is it in my system that prevents me from busting my ass and just giving something, someone...anything, anyone... my all for one last chance to escape this place? A chance to escape the stillness and the rut.

Its guilt isnt it?

Yep, thats what it is...its guilt. Its guilt in a glass, money in a pill and masochism in a gulp. I don't deserve a break, which is why I wont get one. So here's to a job I dont really want, a life I didnt really choose and compromises which - apparently- we all need to make sometime.
Heres to the real world.

Bah humbug.
And for real this time.

Free falling

For all practical purposes, I suppose we can all claim that our existence is a scam. We are born – almost always- to parents who are not meant to be ours. Either that or they cannot afford to understand us. We live in a world that is – almost always- designed to alienate us. Either that or it cannot afford to adopt us. It is an uphill struggle. Either that or little more than downward descent.
Either way we lose.
Either way we fall.

Perhaps it is the overpowering pressure to ‘be’ more than we are and to ‘do’ more than we can. The notion to keep on pushing to preserve some mythical sense of idealism. To take charge, to cease the inimitable day and stomp our way up the pedestal.

Carp-e-diem is the sentimentalist’s synonym for carpal tunnel syndrome.
One end weighs the fall out, the other the fall.

Myths and Mazes

A new day, a new world or so they say.
It is becoming increasingly impossible to access the corner of my brain that analyses and recognizes the depth of social interaction, the fact that human beings are social animals. Why such an impossible distinction, even if one is to agree that we - like our fraternity in the animal kingdom - are in want of social interaction and interdependence, who is to assume that we cannot make it on our own should the need to do so present itself?
After all, there are several animals that survive, indeed thrive, on their solitude.

Then again there are times when the overwhelming desire for human contact eclipses all solitary comforts. Maybe the soaps do have one thing going for them, their intermittent dependence on the one universal story line…human beings ‘need’ conflict. We were not built to sustain comfort in liberal doses. Being content is the ideal we aspire to, through the means of overcoming conflict and largely overlooking the fact that by proxy our lives depend on the former and effectively end with the latter.

I have never really had conventional goals or conventional means to attain them. For the longest time, 11 years to be exact my ‘ultimate aim’ was to escape, be safe and start over. I have –in some manner or the other- done each and now I am at a loss as to what I want from the rest of my life. The ‘conflict question’ in this particular case presents itself in the all-encompassing lack of overt conflict. At least not the tangible kind, I often have a hard time believing that I crave normal emotions like anger and envy, but I do. It is a terrible feeling being inordinately incapable of feeling things on the surface and to a very large extent beneath it as well. Yes, there are problems and I generally observe these same problems disgruntle, disgust, depress and demoralize those around me…but I fade through them with ease. I thrive on my ability to compartmentalize problems and relationships in the context of a past so littered with pitfalls that it usually makes bitching and moaning -indeed reacting- to a rejection letter, a crush or a catty comment seem silly. How foolish would I be if I managed to survive Hell on earth without so much as a peep and now ended up ranting over prevailing college crises and failed relationships? The thing is, it is supposed to be silly and messy and emotional…but that doesn’t mean it isn’t supposed to ‘be’.

In effect I believe I am asking for the ability to feel pain again. Which -to many- may seem weird, but in fact is a blessing. Feeling pain, and subsequently all the subsidiary emotions that go along with it…allows us to feel everything else. The past month has brought with it some very uncomfortable realizations and I do not know if they are built on solid ground, paranoia or again, my need to create conflict and then camouflage it so that I can have something to keep my mind and self preoccupied enough to escape emotions.
I am loved by many and I am overpoweringly, earth shatteringly, shamefully, gratefully and constantly aware of this fact. I have never been prone to the notion that I deserve such emotions directed towards my person, and much as I seek them out in the form of an odious tendency to say exactly what people want to hear to appear amiable or hide in corners to avoid lying about things I know I cant agree with, guilt remains the overriding emotion at play. Such twisted gratitude raises its own fringe phobias, when there are no battles to be fought to solicit attention, it becomes hard to compartmentalize ones reactions. The overriding guilt perhaps is the vicious cycle of knowing that people seem to treat me as ‘extra-special’…yes, I do realize this is an odd thing to complain about. But when the constant underlining to my days, these days, is feeling a lot like little orphan Annie, who everyone feels obligated to adopt, the guilt really does kick in. I am grateful and gutted by the same notion. And I can’t quite pin point if I manipulate my position, hide from it or exploit it. In all likelihood it is probably a complex combination of all three.

It is a shame: I profess -a little too vehemently to be sincere- to appreciate the finer details in life. The weather, music, colors and fragrances…but I can’t for the life of me appreciate relationships and human contact. Which – they say – make it all worth while. I cannot claim in all honesty that I am content ‘just’ being an artist, dreaming of perfection and never working to attain it because I know it will shatter the myth. And I would much rather have the myth than the maze. Loving people requires telling them the truth and I am too much of a coward to ever be able to do that in the spirit it requires. It means telling those you love when you are pissed off at them and when you feel wronged, without anticipating a reaction or planning your account based on the expected response from their end.
One can’t really do that when you’re consistently more grateful than you are gutful.

Were we to map our lives through myths and mazes would we really have any choices?
Mazes offer structure and stagnation, but in that premise they also provide solace.
Myths offer magic and no means to attain it in the frame of reality.

Even for those as deluded as I, reality does hit and when it does
A messed up maze probably provides more security than a mirage myth.

Jack of None

I have been spending the past few days sipping a series of subjects, none of which are remotely coherent. Perhaps this is the treatise that unemployment offers a person– time…to tread lightly and linger over random thoughts that materialise in the brain barring rhyme or reason. And even though I have only this month to savour the feeling before I get ‘back to work’, the languid pace is refreshing. For the first time in five years, I have the time to read again, the way I used to…uninterrupted.
Of late I have given a lot of thought to the lives of ‘other people’, random strangers moving at their frenzied pace and what it is that defines each of them. This is the kind of random thinking which usually leads to definitive dead ends and takes a hell of a long time getting there, still...it helped me put the proverbial panacea to a problem I have faced for as long as I can remember.
Time is a troubling notion and trying to navigate ones way through its loopholes is even trickier.

I have been reading William Hazlitt’s ‘The pleasures of Hating’ and one of his essay’s ‘The Indian Jugglers’ provides the key to open a door for a question I had long forgotten asking. I cannot count the number of times I have wished for enough time to pursue each idle, speculative, random, abstract thought that occurs to me to some manner of conclusion. To ‘run with it’ towards a definitive end. Hazlitt’s story tells of a local fair side-show, Indian juggler with the ability to juggle - in perfect precision and time - four golden balls for hours on end … seemingly without effort. The jugglers’ life is of little consequence, as are the minutiae of his daily habits: the time he wakes up in the morning, his favourite food or even his name, because his moments of glory are spent juggling. The perfection of his craft is his realisation. This man is at his best and his most complete performing the one task which only he can do.

Some might consider this a trifle: the ability to juggle over everything else one ‘could’ do, but then again, to do something, anything, better than anyone else in the world is no small feat. It brings to mind the age-old question: is it really better to be the jack of all trades than the master of one? Does the ability to do many things fairly well win over one overwhelming outstanding gift?

For the first time I am not so sure, I have always enjoyed the fact that I relish several artistic pursuits. Writing, reading, painting, music…but I couldn’t -for the life of me- pick one over the other. Is this what being a well-rounded individual truly means, to expand your vision but not your vocabulary? To broaden your horizons without perfecting any one of them? And who is to say that a pianist, doesn’t feel complete being just one thing…a maestro. And what about the mediocre pianists who spend just as much time practicing- if not more- but still miss out on 'everything else'? I do not know if I am safer or sorrier for the fact that I tend to enjoy ‘walking’ around life rather than jumping in and swimming its depths. Taking one task and exploring it to its fullest before moving on to the next, rather than flitting back and forth between dozens in the interest of ‘seeing all that I can’.
What is the point of seeing the bigger picture, when the details escape your vision?

I never really could decide how I felt about the extraordinary humans that live among us, I used to think that while I admired them I did not envy them their gifts. One gives up a lot to be ‘perfect’ at something…it is so much easier to be fairly decent at it and pick up a handful of other nuggets along the way to wherever it is we are headed. Then again this could just be fear rearing its ugly head for the umpteenth time. I think to myself, is there no one thing in which I can challenge others and claim to exact perfection. Even though the spirit of competition -or ambition for that matter- has been distinctly absent in most of my person for most of my life.
People tell you it is enough to ‘be yourself’…as if that is supposed to be helpful, some trite manner of consolation. “The mechanical performer undertakes to emulate himself, not to equal another,” Hazlitt says, but then let that performer not care about the skills of other performers emulating him…that is the tricky part. The ‘self’ is nearly impossible to define…is it our opinions, our innate habits, our pet peeves or our preferences? Or is it the projection of every one else’s definitions that we ingrain in our public persona? It is our innate assumption that we ‘could do’ something should we choose to do it, that often stops us from trying. Either that or the need to make it seem trivial and unworthy of our time and labour that keeps us from choosing to do anything at all. Is it easy to dance on a tightrope: let anyone who thinks so get up and try, this is the point where they would inevitably call it a foolish exercise to begin with.

Here in comes the question of ‘greatness’, all of us wish to be remembered after we are gone for our perceived greatness, but there are few willing to go the lengths required to cement, in the minds of others, that one memory which we will not even be here to savour should we be able to leave it behind. Themistocles said that he could not play the flute but that he could make a small city a great one. He did, and that gives one a good idea of the distinction in question. However, one might still say that Themistocles’s Everest remained the flute and that its all relative.

Browning’s poem Andrea del Sarto speaks of the Florentine painter who was so flawless he was forgotten amidst more passionate and less ‘perfect’ contemporaries such as Raphael and Da Vici. Sarto’s failing was perfection, he was dubbed "Andrea senza errori" (Andrea the perfect) and got little recognition during or after his lifetime, even though Raphael himself admitted that his work was far superior to anything he had ever seen or painted himself. Sarto lacked humanity, his images resembled photographs - there was no single error in stroke or stain. Further, Sarto’s life tells of how he lacked the determination and passion that his contemporaries had, he was perfect to begin with and had little ambition to carve his name into the future and even less care to better his work to compete with everyone else. He was content. Perfectly reconciled to live through his life by continuing his work at its languid, perfect pace and has been criticized, by many, for having “a taste for life that precluded him from glory”.

There are few willing to take into consideration the fact that from his perspective, Sarto got the best end of the bargain.

Guardian at the Gate

The truth has fallen
Smashed to smithereens on your meticulously marbelled floor
Why do you come here:
To brand me a traitor
Or save me from myself?

You call me the consumate actress
Hiding in halftimes between my next curtain call and my crippled smile
My love, I am an amateur for all the rest

My knight in shining armour begging me to let you do
what you do best
I suppose I should have told you
All that is false is fact
...that my truth is a glass-eyed tryst and a test

Now you claw desparately at my fort
grappling to hold my granite form for all eternity,
to melt the ice that races through my veins

Would you steal from me the sorrow that I have earned?

Can we just call this what it is:
My lesson learned.

...Anything but

I find the blatant disregard with which we throw around the word 'But' highly disturbing. I also find it impossible to count the number of times I have started a sentence with "…I'm not sure if I should say this…BUT…", and every time the 'but' takes over. Why is it that we always use a 'but' as an excuse to do or say what we know we probably shouldn't?
Perhaps, because sometimes we just need to talk, regardless of the aftermath.

Like I said – I don't know if I should say any of this, but…

Of late I have experienced the enormous thrill that accompanies reading and, somewhat understanding, Philosophy – and yes I realise that this does not sound particularly enthralling. I was beginning to feel frustrated with my search for 'answers' or 'questions' – depending on one's perspective - in religious texts and turned to philosophy as a detour. There are two things that strike me pleasantly about this new search, the first is that it forces the mind to expand – one can actually feel the cogs ticking and turning as every new thought is planted and the second is that it is easy to disagree with when the need to do so presents itself. After Sappho and Plato, I moved on to Marcus Aurelius – the stodgiest of philosophers (and that's saying something) – only to realise that despite all the 'good ideas' there were plenty of 'bullshit ideas' (or so I thought). The silver lining for me personally was that I was free to say, "Okay, so this dude lived bazillions of years ago, times have changed and some of this stuff needs to be scrapped 'cause it can’t keep up (at least not practically)."
Doing so was easy because it wasn't dogma and it wasn't absolute. There was no hellfire and no damnation in dissent. It was all about taking a 'good idea' over a 'belief'. This notion always brings me back to Chris Rock in the film Dogma, when he tells Bethany that Mankind's greatest mistake was taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it. Ideas could be changed, beliefs were trickier. No shit Sherlock.

This is probably the point where sanity and a naturally ingrained sense of self-preservation would generally tell me to heed the 'BUT' and let y'all come to your own conclusion rather than 'go there'. Then again, paper is the only place where I don't 'do' buts, not that this is 'technically' paper.

If we admit that time changes man and man changes society and society changes the rules every now and then – how does one rationally justify hanging on to a 1400 year-old belief structure in the same spirit, when all evidence proves that it is in desperate need of a drastic update. I used to have a theory - one I shared with only a handful of people – that the 21st century would mark the death of organised religion because most of these religions navigated themselves on the bearings of absolutes and the world was becoming increasingly variable. By nature, an entity fights its hardest fight when it knows it may be the last time it can do so. I believe they call it ‘going out with guns blazing’. Islam, for all practical purposes came with a bang, lived with several and it only makes sense that it should choose to go out in the same manner. 'Sense'...no wonder i've always had trouble with the word. This was the theory at least.

The 'New Age' would be all about Humanism – or so I had hoped, but there seems to be little hope of that now. I admit that I have been quick to give up on Islam, the moment I could no longer find an anchor anywhere in it for myself, I sailed away. But God, He proved harder to leave. This is probably why I didn't leave Him. He and I set sail together on my new voyage and I know he nudges me towards safer waters and scarier notions time and again. I know that I have a bond with an entity greater than myself, I just loathe the notion of giving that bond definition. It diminishes both the bond and the purpose of having it.

There is one person who unknowingly smashed quite a few of my moulds for me, without my realising it. During my one-year stint at a national newspaper I met a girl. In some capacities she was my boss, in others my friend and in most my teacher. Burki broke quite a few barriers for me. I am no longer ashamed to admit that I am defensive and can be judgmental when judgment is directed my way, especially when it comes to religious symbolism. The beard, the scarf – these items are often met with a sense of reservation by me, my beliefs and my overall insane persona. It is a double-edged sword – when most of the 'burka's' judge you, you put up your shield and judge back. I have yet to acquire the complete Zen stillness that will allow me to smile at blatant hostility.
But all that changed with Burki and I am glad, for once, to be proven wrong. Burki wore a dupatta, prayed five times a day, swooned over 50's classics like Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald, drooled over Gene Kelly oldies and smiled more than most people I have met in my lifetime. I am quite sure it was the smile that first set me straight. It was one of those pure, honest, ridiculously unpretentious smiles that forces you to confront the bigot within. It coerced me into considering that if there were liberals on the right then there were also bigots on the left. The key was to keep your heart open and your eyes closed. I think I'm getting better at it, then again there are days…

Working in a newspaper changes you. Some integral part of your person that is 'supposed' to react to words like 'gang rape', 'severed limbs', ' bomb blast', '120 killed' and '3- year-old sold' just stops reacting. The words become punch lines and the crux no longer remains what they say but how loud they look while saying it. Bit by bit the quiet, jaded monster in your heart bleeds more and more venom until the headlines become a part of regular dinner conversation. You know the monster has truly won when you can laugh at them. That is when you lose yourself completely- when it starts to sound funny.
It has been eight months since I have been editing Letters to the Editor. I used to find it fascinating at first, having an in-route insight into Pakistan's psyche – now not so much. One can divide letters and letter-writer's in four basic categories: Whiners, Wax-poetics, Waders and Warts. Needless to say the distinctions have been honed to near-perfection after a daily regiment of going over an average of 150 letters per day. The Whiners are easy- these are people who need to complain. It can be anything… bad roads, bad plumbing, bad government, bad electricity and bad policemen. The Wax-poetics are a notch above the rest – these are individuals who write well-posed tirades directed at the establishment, the President, the beards and the bureaucracy. They tend to be honest – left or right – and brutal. Essentially they are the best letter writers, which is why it goes without saying that they're names almost never see the light of day. Then come the Waders – these are the small fry who like to stick to the small stuff like cricket (and yes in the LARGER scheme of things it IS small stuff), investment and television programming. They make it a point never to mention names or anything of consequence and are the most frequently scouted in the column. Last but not least come the Warts – these are almost always the fundoo's, they are the most frequent contributors and the largest in number.
There are a few letters I shall never forget – words on a piece of paper or on screen that have managed to ruin my day, my week and occasionally even quench my morale to the point that it s unsalvageable. One was by a woman who called herself a 'Daughter of Islam', she complained about the Women's Protection Act being passed by stating that women were the chattel of men according to the Quran and for them to be dissatisfied with their 'position' denoted disrespect for Islam, God and the Prophet. She said that women had been given a position by religion and asking for anything more amounted to blasphemy. The other letter was more recent, it came in response to the murder of our provincial social welfare minister Zille Huma's murder for neglecting to wear a scarf. The woman, writing from Islamabad, said that all women who walked among men with their heads uncovered deserved to be raped and then murdered. According to her Huma got off easy.

I saved both of these letters, in the likelihood that one day I would begin to believe that anger truly does breed strength and power. For now I remain a pacifist, which is why the realisation that approximately 92% of our people feel this way is depressing. And I say this after reading letters addressed to what is widely known as a 'liberal publication'.
I no longer know where to direct my attention and my anger. I quit my job yesterday for any number of reasons: I was bored and idle and unable to contribute, I could not be creative, my salary sucked and I was being offered much better elsewhere… I lack passion for what they call the 'News Business'. When I think about it, it has to be the latter at large.

My mother has told me time and again that I feel far too much of everything. That my mind never stops wringing out the depths of every notion and every idea it comes into contact with. She is wrong, too wrong. The problem is that I don't feel 'enough', not nearly enough to do something about anything.
I have struggled my entire life with telling the truth, whether it is about my feelings, my dreams or my reality. Lying for a living seemed the easiest thing in the world at first – it isn't. The tinting and tainting of the truth is one of the most loathsome sights one can ever see, because it is often done without qualm. All I hope for now is the chance to tell the truth by whatever means in speech or in art - the whole unadulterated, un-censored, un-fashionable truth…so-help-me-God.
Today's headlines warn about a 'religious group' going to every bus stop and forcing women to cover their heads. Another item tells of the same group calling in bomb threats to several girls' schools if the students' uniform is not changed to a burka.

You seethe, You simmer, You sigh and then You're done.
I'm done.

Pocket points

Who can tell what it is that drives us?

What is that elusive, underlining presence that gets us through each day? Some of us allocate our time between work and play, other between school and weekends and the rest by alternating their way through parties and pedagogues. I, on the other hand choose to measure my days in tiny units of time - small pocket points that can help calculate how my day went. I suppose I always did this, but watching Hugh Grant stumble though his safe cocoon in 'About a boy' helped me put it in a broader perspective.

It is a fascinating art, if I do say so myself and I obviously do. The ‘they’ might call it a science but the fact that I make it a point not to tally my scores at the end of the day precludes it from being so. I do not know why I do it, count every minute and measure every moment in an obtuse context…perhaps I do it to pass time, or for lack of company, but mostly I think I just do it to feel like my day is special, that these seemingly insignificant, tiny denominators give my life and my days a layer of meaning that noone but I can comprehend or appreciate. I like to think that I dedicate my full attention, devotion and time to the frivolous details and hardly even conceive of such a thing as a 'bigger picture'. It is all about getting through the next breath, the next sentence, the next word and the next half-hour.
That is my plan.
It has its chinks and I’m sure those chinks will result in major fall-outs someday, but for the time being it works swell. In a manner of speaking it is a lot like knitting, which is something I have picked up living with my grand mother…it seems inconsequential, but the fact that time and energy is devoted to every stitch and every second make the minutes seem bigger than they are.

I shall clarify my point because I have so many points to make up for and yes this ‘clarification’ will probably take up most of what may as well end up being my latest effort. For this I am sorry…in advance- NOT!
I woke up this morning with a resounding headache (-5 points) and with the echoes of Hall and Oats' ‘Private eye’ bouncing in my head (another -5). For the record, for those of us who wake up with a new song ricocheting off our skull caps every morning, the nature and words of that song often prove to be a prologue for how the day will go. I lay in bed for a while, long enough to ensure that I would have to run to make it to work on time. So I swung my feet out of bed and stepped on my television remote on the carpet … it broke so that’s another – 5. I limped my way over to the computer and put on ‘Private Eye’ that by the way is a -10. One would think that readily embracing a negative impulse is serious cause for concern.

Next I moved over to my blackboard, wiped off yesterdays Jim Morrison lyrics and thought up my storm for the day. For some reason the most vivid image in my head was the three Greek fates: Cloco who spins the thread of men’s lives, Lachesis who decides their destiny and Atropos who slits the thread when their kaput. Not a cheery first morning thought…Shit, I hope I’m not dying today. That would be a bummer. Negative, glass-bloody-empty-thought…another -5.

The fact that my shower wasn't working and that this just had to be a 'bad hair day' started me off with a –50 by the time I got to my car. However, traffic was actually tolerable that day and this got me back in the game, it is unprecedented and therefore I gave it a straight 50 just to be fair to Lord knows what. So, I officially started my day when I got to work and realised that I had too few letters to the editor and would have to manufacture three new people, each with their infallible set of opinions regarding the Baglihar Dam (5 points) I call him Usman Zahid, the lousy education system (2 points) I call her Hira Malik and the clincher Sherry Rehman getting the shit kicked out of her by a woman who she was trying to win over with a not-so-well-versed diatribe on women's rights (15) I don't remember what I called that dude. This done, I realised I was missing a coke. My day needs to start with a coke at work and the coke-getting-dude was off today, so that's a minus all the points I made on the letters.
As I edited my way through the hours and tried to talk as little as possible, I realised that my e-mail box was surprisingly full and I had 7 new mails, sad as this sounds, it always cheers me up to have morning mail. So that's 7 points. It also struck me that I would have to sit and wait for my boss to put in the rest of the pages for two hours because he was currently out, so that meant I could read. Now this is where it gets tricky and the whole glass-half full-thing comes into play. I have my proverbial fork-in-the-road-for-the-day, I could choose to scrap off all my points by sticking to my guns on bumming out because I was practically under lock-in, or I could embrace the fact that I hardly get the chance to read anymore and Marcus Aurelius in his 'Meditations' is oh-so-bloody wise and condescending that I would otherwise miss out on his ramblings from across the ages.
I am so proud of myself for being an optimist, which doubles my points. Thats points for optimism and for having pride in my person, just incase it required clarification. Then I chose to go and sit with one of my colleagues, since I 'chose' to do this…voluntarily and in good humour which I rarely exercise, I gave myself 25 points and the fact that we talked for about an hour definitely puts me way ahead of my Hyde today. Then my colleague told me that Dr Preston Burke on Grey’s Anatomy was gay. That was low, bottom of the barrel low…this was a man who had occupied a fair amount of my day-dream musings and somehow knowing people we fantasise about are gay always ruins the experience.

Because, were I to make it to Hollywood, manage to purchase a thousand dollar dress, cram up the courage to act smitten and run into him in a secluded hall looking better than I have ever looked in my life, I still won’t stand a chance. There is something distinctly depressing about that train of thought, especially for someone who functions on the perpetual premise of “but, what if’s”. This would constitute a plain ‘nada’. So that was a -50. Pages were finally done by around 8:30, they were more boring than usual which was a -2, but they were done which was a +5.
Driving back home, I stopped at a flower vendor to get what I think are the last Narcissus of the season, (+ 15) and I stopped over at Chatkhara for a plate of samosa chat shared in my own delightful company (+ 30 for flavour, _30 for fat: it’s a toss up). I got home to realise there was no electricity so that was a –15, but I usually use black outs as an excuse to light candles and do my chanting and yoga so that's the 15 right back.
Then, came my low, low point… I watched Top Model on channel V, which I grant is a –250, not to mention the unalterable damage done to my already flailing cerebral faculties. I exercised for an hour, which probably denotes the same amount as the samosa chaat. And I didn’t count a ten-point worth of my winnings or losings, which is the beauty of it all. It is all about getting through the day feeling like something happened by making the nothings feel like the somethings and hopefully, some day the everythings.

I almost made it were it not for that blasted Top Model. I lay in bed at around 4 am and did my last minute re-play.
That’s when I heard it…
…Rain.

Wild Horses

I believe that there is a force that breathes beneath the surface of each and every one of us. It longs to be set free, but civilisation and breeding require that it be contained. Society demands that we tame what is wild in us and we all smudge it in different shades. Some of us work through it, some deny it, some resort to pain thinking that it provides a cure, some cry far too much to be taken seriously, some laugh far too much to sound sincere and others sit in corners and dream of what their lives would be like if they opened the door to the cage that cramps them in.
Then the crevices appear, cracks in a painting that has been silent and still for too long. These are splinters designed only for those who can appreciate them and there are few who can.

Yesterday I watched a film, a film that I think was meant to be seen by me. You know how every director, makes a film for one person, an absolute stranger who will see it from every imperceptible tangent because it was intended for them? The artist hopes the others will like it, but only the trifle few will 'get it'…that's kind of what it was. I always thought 'my film' was the Little Mermaid, but I suppose growing up involves more than a right of passage. I was canvassing the shelves at my Tuesday DVD store when my eyes swam across the title 'Flicka'. The cover bore a picture of young girl racing a horse - by no means original. I haven't watched a 'horse movie' in seven years, because they were all I watched for the years preceding. But yesterday I thought it was time I faced my past. I was ready and 'Flicka', I later discovered, meant 'Pretty girl hiding from womanhood'. I couldn't have picked a more perfect pinnacle to plummet down memory lane. Perhaps that sounds a tad vain…like I said, right of passage.

Traipsing beyond all the 'Daddy's little girl loves ponies' tarp… I admit that I have loved horses for as long as I can remember and my 'daddy' loved them too. I recall getting my first leather cowgirl boots when I was five. We lived in Little Rock, Arkansas and even though it was a week before those boots got to experience the thrill of a saddle, I can see myself scrambling out of my bed past midnight, trying them on and dancing across the room while my parents were asleep next door. I was the five-year-old who raced horses because it was the only thing that made her feel big. I always picked 'My little ponies', 'Fashion fillies' and 'Starlight' figurines over Barbie dolls and throughout my childhood my room was invariably covered in pony bedspreads and wall prints. Then came Pakistan, my father bought land for a farm, he bought dozens of horses and the love affair continued.

My father believed in 'breaking' horses that couldn't be broken. I believed in riding them. He became famous for buying stallions that no one but he could ride and I usually just managed by a very slim margin. I also see the day I began to shy away from horses. I was thirteen and he was teaching me how to 'break' a horse. She was a jet-black, Persian mare, gorgeous by all definitions, and just as flighty. I hear him saying that if I wanted the horse and if I wanted to name her (‘Midnight’ after a Rainbow Bright fillie) then I had to ‘break her’. I distinctly recall hating those words so much I didn't bother trying. He would offer me crops and spurs and I wouls cower away insisting that if I fed Midnight enough apples and sugar she would let me ride her eventually. My father and I were at an impasse, and it went far deeper training technique. I had chosen my mothers emphatic weak-ways and that was not something he could forgive me for any time soon.
But I remember my infatuation vividly. I am not prone to infatuation and Midnight was my first. The sensation was defined by the tingle in my toes and the winning tinker in by brain that kept me awake all night just so I could go to the farm early next morning and see her. It was the hours of conversations spent feeding her apples and sugar and talking about how lonely I felt. It was the kind of friendship that comes once in a lifetime. And she felt it too - I know this, because she did let me ride her. I would sneak out in the middle of the night, during our weekends at the farm, in my shalwar and T-shirt, mount my Midnight, take off my shoes, open my hair and we would run.
And all of a sudden I wasn’t stupid anymore, I wasn’t small, I wasn’t a failure and I wasn’t alone. The heart never beats faster then when it is riding the wind and a girl can never feel more beautiful then when she is racing a horse alone at night with her hair open and her feet bare.

The only thing my father and I have ever shared in common was a love for horses. For ten years these beasts provided the openings and the closings for every conversation he and I exchanged. I would read his books on horse-care to solicit his approval and he would watch horse movies with me to ‘be a dad’. We watched them all, the Stallion series – Black, White, Silver; Black Beauty, The Arab and even random rodeo tapes. We spent hours deliberating the merits of each of the horses in the films, whether the extras would actually make better runners or whether the lead was more of a quarter horse then an Arab. We would go to the farm where he would sit for hours staring off into space and I would scamper off to the stables confessing my sins to my four-legged, secret-keepers.
We seldom rode together, because every time I rode with him it was a competition. And I am notoriously ill-favoured when it comes to competition. I was coerced to ride with saddle and I had to win races. I never won, which kept him happy because it meant that he could still feel big and do so by keeping me small.
Then one day, I won.

It happened out of nowhere, I was riding in the fields by myself, when my father came up behind me and before I knew it we were at a gallop. In less than a blink of an eye I realised I had won. While I was gathering my wits, he told me that it wasn’t a race and that I was an idiot to ride a horse without a saddle. But we both were painfully aware of the shift in balance. Winning changes a lot and that was what ended it. He never forgave me for winning and I never forgave myself for not losing.
I was fourteen, when I realised that I no longer wanted to have anything in common with my dad.

The final thread needed to be severed and I was determined to cut it. I was no longer willing to share anything in common with a man I otherwise couldn’t fathom. I told him to sell Midnight and I got rid of each and every vista of horse mementos in my room, right down to my silver Unicorn earrings. Ponies, stuffed toys, birthday cards…the works. I was an artist, I was sensitive and I was human. It was loathsome to entertain the notion that I shared a shard in common with a man so violent, he bordered on boorish. And so I didn’t.
I didn’t share anything.

Seven years later ‘Flicka’ showed another fifteen-year old vying for freedom and her fathers approval by resorting to the resounding thunder of hoof beats. And all the scape-shots of wild mustangs soaring through the mountains, with a young girl fighting for dear life to ride the gale make sense to me now. I have never cried through the course of a film- though i tend to be a bit of a weeper- but I did for this one. A whole two hours, non-stop. It woke me up. I have battled that hailstorm and I know what that freedom feels like. It is a touch of the divine, like racing through sunflower fields, under blue skies in summer rain. And I won’t give it up.

I have to believe that we are more than the sum of our parts, more than the intricacies we inherit from our parents. That the shared hobbies and eye-colouring are only layers to cover a core that is our own. I need to believe that it is ‘I’ who love this freedom and not my DNA. I need to believe that I carve my own curses and that I am not born into them.

Which is why I called my friend at the Polo grounds today,

…And I told him to saddle me up for tomorrow.