Who killed The Rhyme?

He was new to the city and in search of a job. He was tall and lanky and had a week's growth of stubble on his chin. His sunken eyes spoke volumes about his hardships and his ready smile,  if melancholy, suggested pain as a constant companion.The workings of his creative heart, which made him appear restless and aloof gave him an added aura of mystique.People who saw him could see him possessed with ideas beyond his day and principles beyond his age - they radiated off his old but clean kurtas and gave him that presence - solid but stick-like, proud but impoverished.
He was, in the way of his looks, perfect for the job of an upcoming poet.
The problem was, No one was quite ready for his poems.

They spoke of a pain deeply embedded in all of us; the pain of failing to get what we yearn; the pain of falling short of our own expectations; the pain of a god who has forsaken us or a love which has been lost; The pain of separation and the pain of an eternity of forced company; His poems stripped his listeners of any pretence and laid bare their souls for them to look and grimace at; and sometimes cry upon.
Circumstance and conspiracy, those two bullies which serve Time were wielded like weapons by his words, moulded by the cutting edge of his rhyming wit. His poems took your breath away, shamelessly and without a disguise to their hurtful nature.His poems were true.

Everywhere he went with an example of his art, he was shunted aside and excused. Boards of indignant people met and discussed and failed to figure out the source of pain in his poems and the nature of words that so disturbed them.Producers had no use for his ballads of woe in their movies, albums could not be sold on grief alone, Girls could not dance to heady music set to his biting phrases, boys couldnt court girls with such pain; not in this age.He was born with the intuition for heart-wrenching wordplay, a century too late into a fast-world of pleasures, yet he looked ahead into a world of happiness, born out of self-realisation, for the pain in his poems was cleansing and inward-looking, the feeling that those boards and producers and script writers couldn't understand; that which caused them so much anguish and left them with no explanation.

He needed one person to understand him, just one to employ him and after some years and a few more kilos lost, he got them.
One who employed him, and the other who married him.
He now teaches english at the local school, where his daughter studies too.
He is fond of watching football and takes his family on yearly holidays to small hillstations.
He owns a scooter and a mobile phone and takes tuitions three days a week.
Needless to say, he is not a poet anymore.
He is happy and content and happy and contented men don't make good poets.
So i wonder who got to him.. the people who didn't understand him, or those who did; for the former didn't pay him and let him be himself and the latter gave him money,security,happiness and whatnot and he lost himself instead.

Are you a doctor?

I have a medical condition.It has no name.Yet.

The problem is I have a lot of thoughts camping around my idle brain.As a result, i keep wandering from one nice train of thoughts to another, without sitting down anywhere.The result is that hours pass by and my 'to-do' list keeps accumulating, (which gives me guilt trips every now and then)but my mind keeps loitering.

My mother says its hereditary.She also shoots a scathing look at my father, who she is pissed with because he is watching the world cup when she wanted to watch one of those regressive hindi soaps, which are so tedious that their names have to be long phrases.(Sigh, my parents use my illness as a one-upmanship tool).

She also says a good spanking was a good remedy when i was a kid,but i have grown too old for that.

Needless to say, without adequate attention, my condition has aggravated to the point where it has become an alternate world.

Let me elaborate.

Recently i have come across a spate of blog-posts on the well-rehearsed topic of social networking-its propensity for false identities and accumulation of previously unimagined junk(Have you seen the latest facebook app?).Most of the people i have asked are confused about what is really the deal with online-avatars and stuff.What is the parallel universe of online-existence? The freedom of personal space? The modern application of "georgesque" buffer space to all acquaintances (and not just parents, what? you havent watched seinfeld? what are you doing here?)? Dont get me wrong, i head that list of the disillusioned, who get fooled into clicking every facebook notification and re-tweeting everything we pseudo-like.But i am digressing...

The THING is, people are disconcerted about the splurge of social-media on the online scene(if only in the closet), because of the uncomfortable squeaky new untested feel of the virtual world- just that they dont say anything for the fear of being branded dinosaurs(or WTTHFU) .

And my problem is- there is the 'real' world of world cups and balika badhus, there is the virtual world of buzz and tweets and there is this EXTRA world i dwell in, in which i ski the alps, climb the qutab, visit my dead grandparents at their new scientology ashram in california.I am not confused, i am mega-confused.. and that is just the symptoms of my affliction.

Have you ever had the feeling that you are floating in a sea of standing water, (that is the chinese way of saying things-temple of unending peace,sword of eternal sharpness,blog of infitely long bullshit) and random thoughts and images bombard you like a blitzkrieg gone silly?I live like that, every single waking moment of my life.And you know what sucks?

No one can ever know what it feels like, because Every time i sit down to write about it in my blog, it all comes out wrong.

N.B: It must be some disease from the future,travelling back in time, so it is hereditary - from my descendants to me. Thank you mom.

True Love

He was standing on the edge of the precipice with no intention of jumping down.He only wished that he could sprout wings and leap off, to soar into the magnificence of the waiting thunderstorm before him.He wished to dodge lightening as it spiked maliciously towards him; to churn the clouds heavy with torrential rains; to tame the winds that drove those beasts of watery burden across a thousand miles, dredging cargo from the seas to lavish the land with.

He wished to escape the reality of the fact that she had left him.

His hands raised in a welcoming gesture; his eyes closed; with spears of chilly wind tearing his hair, lashing his otherwise calm face; he betrayed none of the turmoil inside him; much like the behemoths before him, waiting patiently to unleash their tempest.He felt nothing, no feeling could be felt in the nothingness that had been left behind, within him.

Not all the water in the sponges before him, nor all in the ocean below could fill it and bring him respite; and so he felt nothing, not even the void; its immensity shrinking to insignificance within itself.

He remembered all of her and yet nothing, it seems.Images, sounds, feelings, emotions were all churning within him and yet not connected to him.It was as if a chord had been cut and he had been set free,beyond all the necessity to live.

He had loved her.Truly.

The clouds, like the great muster of Armies above, like a juggernaut, confident and tumultuous, indifferent to this puny man's indifference are rolling on, much like the suggestions everyone kept throwing towards him, to move on and to let her go.

He did not understand those words, he did not comprehend their intentions, She had gone and he was still here, incomplete without her and incapable even to feel it.

If he were all right, he would think, perhaps about the nature of his love for her, one that in her absence is worthy of the tag of being true.Love, like nothing else, is most valued in longing and separation and tested through loss.

He, would know, then that he loved her, truly and move a step closer to closure.

But he, like many before him and countless yet to come, had loved, truly and would never know closure, perhaps.

And all he wanted to do, here, standing before a threatening storm, was to feel- something, anything- in vain.

His life was over when she had gone.

All he wanted was to live again.

But he had loved her, truly.