Self definition: That is pretty much the reason for any sort of being or a ways of seeking a purpose to living isn't it? It could be as basic as the daily morning ritual of washing clothes (seriously I don't know why I have that OCD) or the way a certain word skipped scale in the second verse of that awesome alternative song (and why can't I just listen to music like a regular fan and not break it down to notes!)
Point is, we all need and constantly seek ways to evolve ourselves in order to add a word or phrase to 'who we are.' You know there is addition, when at every given occasion to define yourself you constantly keep adding designations to yourself! From being a professionally defined (or not!) someone - you also become a comic collector, a culinary zealot, a professional farter . . . (how the last one made it? I blame Twitter for it) oh there is also a new one, frequently incepted (Yes I blame Chris Nolan for it).
But think about it for a second here. If the crazy researcher was right, maybe we are all incepted from time-to-time. It is literally a thought you wake up to almost everyday or at every mouse click. I think we are losing ourselves in a self-created and self-advocated matrix of pop culture objects. Inanimate things have a way of finding 3D animation inside our minds and hearts and we somehow begin to live that new Sweedish Thriller (MUST on the noveau thriller circuit), genre-bending world cinema titles (too many to enumerate), Mad Men-esque sitcoms, webcomics, trending topics, music (electronic rock and indie yes) and of course revival of the kitsch. . . it's honestly exhausting.
An idea is truly potent, yes I agree with the dream theory and I think my domino-effect-crumbling architectural flaws in designs are quickly replacing new sights, smells - in my senses leading to greater shift in inspiration than ever before. Fine, I agree I am the flawed searcher of self-definition. So much so, that important people, numbers and dates have begun to fade from my random access memory. You see, my mental hard disk is supremely cluttered and for some reason has started auto deleting past memories to make room for new information. It struck me when I was making a mental wedding guest list and every few minutes I added someone I had forgotten earlier - you know those people called friends who have lasted you through thick, thin and the debauchery (mild!). Not that I am walking down the aisle, just the thought of it!
Seriously, I draw a complete blank sometime and at those times I am only praying that my mind is rebooting with a new installed mental app. Anyway, where was I? Yes, self definition. Till a few years ago, I was simply a journalist. Since then I have begun to say writer when asked what I do and get into this mini mumble lasting a good one-minute of what 'kind of writer' I am.
Recently I had a conversation at a much-needed, de-stressing smoke break with a senior at work and she happened to narrate a certain business jargon mumbled by another someone describing one's boss to be a 'dynamic variable.' It was like a mental click. A light-bulb Homer Simpson moment if you were to call it one. While I agreed with her, bosses are variable dynamics (meaning people who can't make up their mind) But it is true. Self definition is a variable dynamic.
I drew up a list today of the things that I think defined me. Sure enough I hit some 21 points and I knew quite well some are just goldfish-memory akin variable dynamics (yes I will use the phrase again and again thank you) So I cut the crap, talked to my Ma (totally at peace with her self-definition. Mother) and as painfully boring as it might be, I just came out with one - Enthusiast! (and you thought I'd say journalist. It's gotta be a little more cooler than that!)
But it's true. I am an enthusiast, a modern culture bred enthusiast - with the fleeting attention span of Spiderman on speedy pills. I'll find a new like as soon as you go to the mental press with it (some journalism in me) But what is intrinsic to me is that I like discovering new things. I am supremely curious by nature, so I will rummage through the trash even if something finds my fancy. I'll make it popular, till it isn't alternative anymore.
So here's to discovering myself - cheers to the inner Enthusiast! (vanity is pure contamination, but gets you through a dull at-home day!)
My day job has put me to task to interview and transcribe a million and more famous people. Here's something from a meeting from a half-remembered dream
Good morning Poetry, please, sit down,
make yourself comfortable.
Q: You look tired yet fresh faced, how old are you,
if you do not mind my asking?
A: How old is time!
How old is the first breath of the multiverse!
I am as old as existence, as young as now.
I was there when this universe was created,
dancing along the veins of fiery lines.
I am as young as a newborn baby,
a brand new thought leading to the keyboard.
Q: You seem to be everywhere in the world,
what are the things that inspire you?
A: I am everywhere in the world. In a blade of grass,
unseen in the wind that laughs breeze above it.
Inspiration, the dreams that linger on the eye, waiting to float.
The colours which drive beauty into verse.
Life and death, smiling inside the circle.
Inspiration is but a whisper away, my muse is my breath.
Q: You mentioned colours in your previous answer,
if you could be a colour or a scent, what would you be?
A: I would, indeed I am; every colour in the rainbow,
swirling into each other, grinning like a pot of gold.
As to scent, fresh baked bread, morning coffee,
the decay of vegetation, of flesh in a field,
I am all of those and everything that is.
Q: What are your thoughts on prose?
Do you ever get angry with her?
A: Anger, joy, fear, love, hate, jealousy,
all the emotions harbour me, I roam their intensity,
push and pull their waves - prose, I am prose,
the underlying matrix of words.
Q: Don’t chide me for this question.
But do you poetry use drugs?
A: Ah! The sweet labour of nature.
What are intoxicants but aids to obscurity.
Defy them, they still come to me in the night.
Take them, they still lose my expression.
Thank you Poetry, for being so candid here in this little chat,
perhaps you can help me with my cantos later?
Poetry smiles, takes off her microphone and drifts away.
Pause. Breathe. Halt. These are perhaps the most belated words in the human vocab. Well, atleast mine. Its clockwork. To run. Am forever chasing, what I like to think, are cobwebs. You see I, like most thrill-seeking folk who believe they are alternative citizens, believe in keeping life complicated. Its a completely different matter that spiders weave straight lines.
Anyway, its monsoon. Its Mumbai monsoon and its supposed to have created a clutter of chaos. And there is that much more urgency to fight for time to weave my web. But today time waited for me.
I walked. I like to walk. It was my absolute favourite thing to do back home. You see, I'm a small town girl. I had no cobwebs to weave back then, my life was plotted in sectors. But I took the occasional long stroll back home, something that was alternative in the hamlet-ghost town.
Here I'm a rootless tree. Challenged to walk mindlessly anywhere, to any corner without question or direction. You see, in Mumbai, every image even resting in the corner of your eye, inspires. This is the city acid flashbacks are made of. These are the colours that spirals in a cokehead. These are the musings of an lost artiste.
Today I walked. I didn't wait for the cab to take me home. The highway, the whizzing cars, the irritable lot stuck in traffic, the conjunctions of chaos stuck in my head quitened. White noise. I wasted time.
The milk stop, the soul street, the dazzling sign boards, the vegetated lush green of wet earth, the cottage-roofed homes - I saw the city transition to smiling faces instead of cluttered conduits of frowned pollutants.
Itd been a while. I'd been watching life passing by like a back seat driver. Collecting used and dampened match sticks in flip flops at a rain thrashed drizzling dusk. Chasing fire flies in the muddy vegetation off a polluted side-walk. Their abode hides the grime of the metropolitan, tales etched into the memory of the concrete beneath the soles of the walking denizens - narratives of the obdurate elves who pretend to live and work in the expansive cloak of what could be their motherland but is their relative land.
Passing a shop window, I caught a reflection. Glee rested in my eyes. I sensed happiness.
So this is to you Mumbai. I've loved you, hated you, gotten to know you better. You've found me, accepted me, changed me, made me a family, broken me, abandoned me, homed me and given this spider a space for her cluttered cobweb. You let me know its ok to be different and its ok to be like everyone else. You've freed my soul, like a helium baloon, keeping my extended string tied to the displaced ground. I keep losing the shifting focal point now and then, but you leave me directions by my bedside.
So thank you lover. Now back to the many more straight lines I must weave.
I am the product of your throwaway words, My mother's burned-out candles, A violent, beautiful world, An unprescribed strip of TCA, nightly.
I am much less than the glue that holds society together - I am a vine, a weed creeping through the preexisting cracks. I pretend the streetlamps are the moonlight, And I feed on last month's newspapers.
I could be the buoy you cling to, keeping you up, Or the rope pulling you deeper below the surface. I will shrug the salt and debris from my shoulders, And board your sinking ship.
I am knotted together with complexes, Shielded by my opinions, I hold wit as my sword and pull no punches, And wear burn-scars as war-paint.
I don't believe I can change the world, I merely want to shatter the silence. I will break hearts, I will break bones, And I will have my dreams broken in turn.
I'm safe where I am, and jaded, I am weathered and accustomed to being the ground beneath your feet. I never realised how important I was until then. And I despise it.
I have no damnable words to make my voice fit the sorrow. My heart had the audacity to open, and then beat itself to life.
There isn't enough suffering to make anything. pieces of beautiful scattered and kept both and I have no room to belong to his smile.
.We .Or maybe just I are not breathing and the night never ends. Nothing changes,
These eyes used to see imagination's miracles trembling; motion; moons; hands; leaves. infinite. Buddha. words. water. colours.
often I speak dreams now useless and how love must simply sit waiting so refined and unadorned. but I become undefined and more unclear. and I blur in his eyes. and I cant focus.
I move. Grow old. Die Unbelieving. eventually unfeeling. body at rest but soul imploring more...
of anything.......but distance. hate.remorse.pain.fear.ache......elation. anything.........but
. .there is a voice i hear incessantly....caught in my hair.
It takes me to again. and over. and over. simplicity.
I know we have already died numerous times unrequited. and unknown. and these words feel like cotton. feel tasteless and pointless. but they are words, and words are all that stick to my skin. after all the places he touched. my God, i am treading air. living is a chore. loving is a risk. and i want to rip everything away from the world except the truth. which always resided in him.
remember .............. depth is endless. the end is nothing.
and if i can bear the quiet, maybe the residual fire will keep me warm enough to teach me that silence is not so terrible; it is a language that could resurrect us all
Here: Nothing has changed. It's morning and it's light. She wishes her eyes were glued so the sun wouln't stream through her eyes so. It's morning and she's got nightmares stuck under her fingernails and crimson stained lips from the night before. It's morning and she doesn't remember the night before.
Here: She only likes Spring. She only likes the smell of Jasmine and she only likes white dresses with lace. She says I'm tired, tired of the snow and isn't it ironic February takes so long? She says I want birds. I want birds outside my window. She says I want to wake up, and I want to smell fresh warmth. She says, I don't want to remember the last time I felt warm. She says, I can't pretend anymore.
Here: The white walls of her tenemant are really doorways to other empty worlds. Places where everything is the same colour - cocaine/bone/teeth. She stays away from the walls, afraid sh'll crossover, afraid Alice will find white oleander wonderland, afraid she'll never find her way back. Afraid she won't want to. The floor looks like it should creak but it doesn't. The windows look poetic frames and maybe she wants to jump.
Then: She used to sing at the balcony. She used to dance in the kitchen. She used to write letters everyday. She scribbled her life. She hashtagged her soul. She poured thoughts in 140 characters or more. She couldn't write anymore. Pages went empty. Links died. He used to watch her, she remembered. He used to let her veins tear and stain the paper in words that made it all poetic and pretty, he said. You see, he thought, it was art. He told her it was the preetiest thing in the world. But now he isn't here anymore.
Then : It's morning and her skin doesn't feel as soft. Her eyes aren't limpid and brightly honey-dew. The cieling fan isn't spinning. It's morning and there are empty pages strewn on her white floor. It's morning and she opens her eyes like she's been asleep. It's morning and it seems like it's always morning. It's morning and the windows talk to her.
