Waxing Lyrical

Here is some pointless verse for you to munch on. If you must steal the words, have the decency to quote at the very least. This one is called "crash and burn, to the finish".

hay fever rising in real slow burn
sometimes, even flowers tend to rust
those garden colours all slowly turn
sometimes to ash, sometimes to dust

cutting ribbons and cutting ties
one fabric, the other more fabricated
occasions marking truths and lies
in an existence now emasculated

when a man is truly, really hungry
he would gladly eat a sandwich of mould
it will probably make him less angry
than if offered a biscuit of gold

if a bird doesn't see she is pretty
how will she still keep her chin up?
when everything looks so fucking shitty
shittier even than two girls, one cup

out on a limb, in for a ride
the race car driver shows no fear
even as he shits bricks inside
while trying to simultaneously steer

painful pangs of prurient choice
while emotions toiled in the backseat
disdain, blame, fury in a soft voice
tears well up, dry in the ensuing heat

skid marks screech on the track
rash accusations of treatment like trash
now heading in to a cul-de-sac
slam the brakes or go up in a crash

Confucius Say: Roll of Dice is Three

It is almost three years to the date that I find myself moving to Bangalore again with the intent of helping my father in his business plans. And it is with a sense of some more apprehension, a lot more responsibility and now, also some anticipation. While this career shift is welcome, considering it gives me something of a career as opposed to not having one at all right now, it also has its own set of troubles that don't merit detail. Suffice to say that I foresee now a very different life for me than I had ever previously imagined it to be. And how was that, you ask? Instead of an answer, here is another question for you.

What is common between the atmosphere, the bottom of the ocean and the urethra under a bursting bladder? Yep, pressure. And there are many other kinds too, of course. There was a time when I thought I withstood it well, and it was a quality I admired in my pool of few positive traits. But in what I guess is a rather telling sign, I seem to have lost, along with patience, that attribute of mine.

I am being torn asunder, it seems. And try as I may, I don't quite see myself as the vacuumed ball that horse drawn carriages are trying to pull apart. It is far less dramatic in real life, as opposed to the illustration from that physics book, but I still find myself empathising with that useless ball of metal. Only, in my case, I feel much worse than the ball that stood its ground.

I thought I was doing pretty well, telling myself that I just need to come to terms with my responsibilities, whether I like them or not and even if I did not necessarily choose to take them on in the first place. And then, out of the blue come accusations. Not very precise ones, mere allusions for the most part, but accusations all the same. And their vague nature does not help. I cannot be dismissive of them either, since callousness would only add to my list of crimes, and as it is, callous is something I do not wish to always be.

I never thought that I (or anyone outside of a tragic comedy, for that matter) could simultaneously be in so many places that I don't want to be in. Of course, I am not referring merely to physical spaces here. But it seems that a change of physical space, in this case, is the only course of action I can take if I am to preserve what little I think is left of my sanity, which was always on shaky ground to start with. And now that it sounds much like escapism, I cannot help but feel a sort of disdain at my own anticipation.

I guess there are no un-drastic measures to start life from scratch, disowning everything from your past. For better or for worse, the past makes us who we are, and we can't really disown ourselves. But why, oh why, does the past have to keep coming back to haunt? And if it must, it really knows how to pick the time when the chips are down. Find a homeless unemployed man who has little other than the generosity of friends and family to live on, passing his time indolently, making of himself a caricature of the person he once was, and fling upon him his past. Even Chinese torture techniques seem laughable in contrast. Or maybe I am only saying that since I have never been tortured by the Chinese. But right now, I really wouldn't mind the trade.

My Internet Footprint

Is it a personal matter or a public one? What I do to contribute to my Internet footprint, such as a newspaper article or a prize-winning essay, or even this blog definitely counts as personal. But when other people start piling on to it, does it still stay personal? If someone picks up something I contributed to the Internet originally and showcases it elsewhere, giving me due credit, then I guess I can't exactly complain, irrespective of whether I think it personal or public, since I put it out in the public domain in the first place.

But how about the fact that there is a sizable number of photographs of me floating about on the Internet that I had nothing to do with except being in them? No, they are not pornographic sort, so it is not that I am embarrassed about them or some such. They are regular photographs, mostly on Facebook, put there by family and friends. I don't even have a bloody profile on that damned website, and yet, it contributes more to my Internet footprint than all my other actions put together.

I don't have to do a thing and yet it grows, entirely on its own. Like it were some monster, fed constantly by people who I am sure I know but whose monster-feeding habits I surely have no clue about. Insofar as possible, I have even told people, who I see inclined towards such monster-feeding activity, specifically to not indulge in it when it comes to my private monster, a request that I consider only fair to make.

I guess the fact that these same people will, in all likelihood, never come to my blog, let alone read this post, is a good indicator of exactly how much these friends and family actually care about how I want my Internet footprint to be. Since they can't control my actions, they will make sure that I can't control their's. And in what I guess they must think to be perfectly harmless actions, they indulge in freewheeling exhibitionism, not only on their behalf, but also on behalf of others who may not exactly be the very exhibitionist kinds.

I think I am now going to ask people to not photograph me at all. But then again, I don't trust them to actually give in to my demand. And in the name of freedom to click, click they shall. And once clicked, it absolutely must be uploaded to Facebook, lest Zuckerberg come by and give them a spanking for having dared to withhold even a single moment of their lousy (and others' not so lousy, in comparison) existences from his software that was essentially created to separate the hot broads in college from the ugly ducks. Not a very privacy oriented thought to start with, was it?

If any of you arseholes are reading this (and you know who you are better than even I), then for fuck's sake, leave me be. And if you give even half a damn about me, then please remove my pictures from a site that I really and deeply wish to be no part of. Of course, knowing your ilk, you probably won't, either in indignation at the thought of your freedom of expression being thus curbed, or from sheer laziness that somehow vanishes in a whiff when it comes time to upload and tag and share those gazillion pictures.

And now that I have that off my chest, I don't care any more.