Archive | March, 2009

Consideration is…

31 Mar

…slitting your wrists in the bathtub.

Though one may as well have the bai scrub her last pay packet’s worth.

Better sadistic than suicidal, I always say.

And cleanliness, even before Hell.

This Blog Must Be Crap…

25 Mar

hah

……..if this is what people use to find it.

And again:

soggy-diaper

I’m sure there’s someone out there saying poops oops right this minute.  :mrgreen:

To Him For Whom She Waits

22 Mar

The brownie is just an excuse.

Chocolate drizzling over

the scent of freedom,

the elaborate study required of

the menu,

framed against the evening bay.

My legs are bare and ripe for insects,

but the heart hides its sachharine

under soft-cottoned blue.

I’m anxiously pacing my stillness.

Gathering rope to lasso time.

And the nuts they crumble grudgingly,

permitting me a moment longer.

I never miss Bollywood, but the stellar MS

reminds me to be thankful

B-pop is days away.

A spoon waits placidly.

While someone on a bus inhales

sandalwood and fuel fumes

so he may spray-paint his heart

for me.

Hedges nod affably.

The waiters less so.

Oh look, here’s the bill

but a triangle of sweetness

my rich, brittle excuse,

it watches as my fingers

don’t stop.

A bald baby clutches mud

to the growling of her

father and the roar of surf.

It might take a blue-cottoned

girl with a green croc notebook

to tell him

that often,

it’s all we’re left with.

There approaches the

waiter again.

“One chocolate brownie,”

I say,

my first order for the evening.

“How vain it is to sit down to write…

17 Mar

….when you have not stood up to live.”

–Henry David Thoreau

Lately, I’ve been heeding the wise and ignoring the written word for live action. Hence the online absences. Small efforts have been hugely rewarding and blessings are a-plenty. But since my words have long morphed into compulsive exhibitionists, they’ll pop up, I’m sure, for their 5 minutes of hula in the bloglights. Oh look, here they come already!

*************

You and I were meant to write. Like children with goodie bags, we have our clutch of juicy words. They drip-ooze-squish into our sensibilities.

You and I were meant to write. Even if we scratch mere half-pictures into the chalk-dust, for the other, it’s one sketch too many.

You and I were meant to write.  For speech has long been overrated. And the most precious words are deciphered, not intoned.

You and I were meant to write. So our silences don’t get cranky. And crackle at the corners and curl inward to eat themselves.

You and I were meant to write. For all our claims on the nether regions of madness, the world demands one token streak of sanity.

Manivannan Magic

12 Mar

witchcraft_cp

Credits: OJ and her new Panasonic Lumix LS 80. Taken in completely natural lighting.

She pressed crimson lips to an inner page, scribbled a message that held much meaning, smiled mysteriously and then it was mine.

To assert that Witchcraft weaves a spell is to state the obvious. But to denude oneself to the obvious, offer one’s vulnerability on a platter as the words tunnel through your onetime resilient spirit, to let them screech into the cubby holes of your gut and torch craters the size of coffee mugs takes a brave reader, one who is amply rewarded by Sharanya Manivannan’s book of magical verbal imagery.

Maybe it was the time, maybe it was the place, maybe it was the situation I chose to be in: a lone woman seeking anonymity and solitude in a seaside town by the blue Bengal bay. Watching waves and people and bougainvillea nuzzling whitewashed villas, happy to be the outsider in a world content without her. It was a day of soul-searching, of excruciating subtleties, of the drama of frothing, unstoppable words. Of walks and self-hugs and avoiding curious passer-by eyes. Of honesty, wildness and liberation. Of knowing it would end and that madness has its price, but trading in sanity for freedom for just one precious day is sometimes infinitely worth it.

Witchcraft is devourable. It may hollow out your heart and hold up a mirror to the real you, but if you survive its brutally enchanting onslaught, you may perhaps have really lived.

I’m Loving It

7 Mar

pcc

A spot-on e-poster from the Pink Chaddi Campaign. And you thought they were done?

Spread the word, put it up on your web space, get more posters here. It’s a crying shame we need to fight for tolerance, but if that’s how we get to live lives of our choosing, individually and collectively, then so be it.

Wisdom Wears Soggy Diapers

5 Mar

At school one day, matching “things that go together”:

Little C: Sokks and sooos.

Little H: Bat and boll.

Little Z: Bread and butt.

You bet, kiddo. Bread and butt, they’re bloody inseparable. Sigh.

Pithy & the City

3 Mar

Status check: Alive? Well? Happy?

~Routine text message to a friend who’s known to fall off the planet.