It’s hot and busy. People are everywhere. Walking purposefully, dodging each other, bags in their hands or hoisted on their shoulders. There’s a sense of great purpose, an urgency to reach an all important destination. They seem to know each other, some of them, nodding politely and occasionally breaking the stream of human bodies with a firm handshake or a full bodied hug. The rest smile indulgently and pass by. The flow resumes, purpose remains.

It’s hard to see her at first. Hard to notice her. Not because she blends in with them. Quite the contrary, she stands perfectly still- the only constant piece in an ever changing puzzle of faces and limbs and voices, all part of the heaving massive front of mankind.

She stands quietly, almost dejectedly. She doesn’t check her watch anymore. She stopped doing that a long time ago. Maybe it doesn’t even work now. She seems rigid at first glance, stiff, expectant almost. Yet her wispy hair and the look in her eyes reflects a softness. A finger taps against her thigh where she rests her hand. The tapping is not impatient, nor is it timed to some half forgotten music playing in her head- snatches of a song heard long ago. It’s simply a reminder maybe that time still passes by.

She thinks she hears the train coming. Why shouldn’t it? Everybody seems to be getting in and out of them, faces reflecting a light she craves. She thinks she hears it coming, yet she restrains herself from reaching for her bags. Bags packed so long ago, she no longer remembers what’s in them. The outsides are so worn and dusty, it almost doesn’t matter.

She wonders again whether she will get on. Board it and reach that mysterious, elusive destination. Or will she slip off, tumbling onto the tracks and be crushed by it. Crushed by the enormity, by the finality of it. She won’t know till the last minute. She’s dreamed it so. She read about it in her little novels, the ones she kept under her pillow as a girl. Novels she’s packed in her dusty bags but doesn’t remember. You never know till it comes they promised. Whether it will carry you forward, lift you up and take you home or if it will crush you without you even knowing it could do so, believing there is beauty in the pain and honesty in the scream. She no longer remembers which one she wanted.

Once again she thinks she hears it coming but she knows it is not so. The train is late again. It’s been late for so long.
The finger continues tapping against the pale cotton of her skirt. The people keep on moving. Time is fluid here.

I ask not for your pity, but your understanding
I look not for your forgiveness, but your tolerance
I seek not your judgement, but your forbearance
For when the pathways to death open,
Your morality shall hold no sway over me
And mine none over you.



I was listening to music the other day with no intention of writing anything, when these lines just seemed to form in my head of their own volition. The matter of tolerance and acceptance has been one that's led me into many arguments with a number of people-including my closest friends and parents. I remember feeling outraged at quite a young age, listening to my parents discussing some lady who had left her husband for someone else. The tone of judgement that I sensed in their voices felt suffocating to me. It's so easy, so tempting to sit on your high and mighty throne of self righteousness and pass your verdict on the actions of others. So easy to figure out your moral barometer and judge everyone and everything on that scale. Details be damned, viewpoints can be ignored - The throne has spoken, feed him to the lions.
The question of judgement simply boils down to superiority. When you've passed your unfavourable opinion on the lifestyle, actions, relations of someone, you are essentially saying you're better than them.
Intolerance of course, is just an offshoot of the same. Once your barometer is set, anything that doesn't fit in is just not acceptable. And I just don't mean intolerance of the kind that is often spoken of- religious, racial, sexual, political. It's the day to day sneering of our noses, the snide remarks, the disdain we feel when we deem the actions of someone as too different to be correct.

Another thing I've always found interesting is the basis for this scale of 'propriety'. The most obvious is of course religious beliefs(whether derived from scriptures, canon, superstitions, customs). But who says it's just religious people who can be intolerant of things outside their self created 'moral threshold'. Society, education, cliques- so much goes into a person's opinion of what's acceptable and what's not.
But where does one draw the line? What's grey for you may be a bright white for me and black for someone else.
It's not easy being tolerant of people and things that are different from your way of living and thinking. The most obvious way is, of course, to say that as long as your actions aren't harming me or anyone else you should be free to do as you please. But is that too simplistic? Is it too hopelessly idealistic?

Midnight Wanderings

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
- Jorge Luis Borges


A few weeks back, after meeting a friend for dinner, I was about to hail a rick to head back home but something stopped me. I felt this urge to walk instead. I had never walked that particular route so late in the night and I knew it would take me at least an hour and a half to get back. I had been out the whole day and was quite exhausted. Reason dictated it was an ill advised venture but something more powerful than rationality seemed to be at work.

Walking is something I’m quite prone to doing at pretty much all odd hours of the day but something just felt a bit different about that night. I didn’t have anybody for company nor did I have any music to listen to-nothing to distract me or to keep me occupied. Instead I felt a curious sense of attachment to the road I was walking on. There’s something about walking in the heart of a city at night that is entirely different from the daytime.

My senses just seemed heightened somehow. The road had so much to offer that I hadn’t even noticed before. Details opened themselves up for observation. Everything appeared to be telling a story, right down to the litter strewn at the side of the street-movie tickets, old chocolate wrappers all illuminated by the eerie yellow glow of a streetlight.

I noticed old houses I had always driven right past before. Trees obstructed most of the view and walking gave me a chance to stop and look through the gates at the overgrown gardens, flaking walls stained by decades of rain, reeking of neglect but still standing tall. Yet I had never even seen them before. I didn’t just glaze over the homeless man under the bridge. I saw his tiny bundle of possessions, how he was totally oblivious to the passing cars pouring their headlights on his face, seemingly content with his lot, the rickshaw driver fast asleep in his vehicle under an old banyan tree- a newspaper covering his face, dogs exploring the streets- free at last to roam about without fear in the territories they’ve carved out of the man-made landscape they inhabit. I read the graffiti on the walls, read the posters-everything seeming so much grittier, so much more real.

As the number of people on the roads diminishes, a curious sense of harmony in the world starts gaining predominance. Although I don’t know if I can attribute that to genuine peacefulness, or a feeling of resignation and acceptance of the way things are.

There’s something about the night that reveals the extremes of life. You see luxury sedans passing by- music blaring, the road below them lit blue with the lights on the underside of the car. You go by unnoticed, as inconsequential as the homeless man asleep with his tarpaulin sheet for warmth. I realise that most of the time I’m the one who’s whizzing past-seeing but not really observing what’s passing by.
Emotions, moods, feelings are heightened in the late hours of the night-loneliness, love, sadness, camaraderie, anger, joy- all of it comes pouring out, becomes more intense in the dark. People finally drop their masks, their facades of normalcy, whether it’s because of exhaustion, privacy, alcohol or a return to the company of someone they love and trust. People become their ‘true selves’, with all the associated good and bad connotations. The soft fuzzy glow of a halogen light seems to reveal more than the blazing sun on a cloudless day. The neon lights of signboards casting a glow on people lets you know more than the brightest of days.

The waiters, standing under a streetlight, smoking a cigarette after a long day’s work were finally back to being themselves. The girl sitting on the back of a bike, screaming at the top of her lungs felt her inhibitions fall. The night is more accepting of us as we really are-flaws and all. When you’re lying in bed ready to go to sleep, when your guards are down, when you don’t need to project an ‘image’ to the world, when there aren’t a million sounds around you filling your mind, that’s when you see yourself for who you really are.

Why so sad?

Last night a friend of mine showed me a painting he was working on. I had been persuading him to do a self-portrait for ages since portraits are where his real talents lie. After a sufficient amount of nagging, he finally decided to do an oil painting in 3 colours- white, black and grey.
The background of the painting and the tips of the ears and hair were done in the brightest pristine white, the general extremities and silhouette of the face were a dull grey and finally, the inner most portion of the face- the nose, the eyes were done in the deepest hue of black. It was a striking, visually appealing painting but of course the “meaning” behind it was of real interest.

It didn’t really need much explanation to understand what he wished to convey but I asked for one anyway. According to him, the white represented happiness which was around him but he wasn’t a part of it, the grey represented a neutral territory and the black was sadness- which truly defined him.
Now, like as I would to dismiss it as artistic melodrama, this is a person generally devoid of the trappings of self pity that plague the best of us. He has nothing discernibly ‘wrong’ with his life yet this is how he chooses to describe himself. And that too through a medium he respects too much to use frivolously.

It’s something I’ve thought of frequently in the past- our love affair with misery-real or perceived. There’s something so appealing about believing in the undeniable all pervasive ‘gloom’ is your life. There’s a sense of quiet pride about going through whatever it is you’re going through- the pride of the suffering martyr.
Creativity often seems to require the dismissal of happiness, joy and all that warm fuzzy stuff. They’re sometimes deemed just too unworthy and just plain ‘lame’.

And the proof is there, some of the best works of art, in any form –literary, musical, theatrical, visual- stem from pain or unhappiness.

Why is it that misery is apparently regarded as a more ‘respectable’ emotion? Let’s keep aside genuine causes of sadness (difficult as it may be to define genuine from one person to another). What about those cases where the amount of gloominess is simply not warranted by a person’s circumstances. Or when the reasons one attributes their gloom to just aren’t sufficient? Is it a sign of weakness to indulge yourself and succumb? Or is it a talent-being able to dig into a whole reservoir of emotions for the sake of creativity?

And I’m not even talking about the “the world doesn’t understand me” teenage angst. There are plenty of us more grown up than that, who love to wallow in our whole ‘tortured soul’ personalities from time to time.

A character from a movie I saw a while back sums it up pretty perfectly when she says:

“I have so much. I see it all around me but it stops at my skin. I can’t let it inside.”

Often it’s not a question of not being able to, it’s not wanting to.