Introspection...

Of Fumes

I still remember the first time I experienced the pleasure of the fumes. CJ and I were in our room in the second year when the fragrance wafted in. I think it was the EMW or some other useless paper scheduled for the next day. We were tensed. But as soon as we smelt it, we looked at each other and said "Dude! Full tension relief" or some such shit almost simultaneously. CJ's gone places and flown to new heights since that day. I got to smoke a whole cigarette only once after that...until today. It was on Om beach and Ooty was my tutor. Hated the taste, the acrid smoke, the feel of that stick made of plant extracts, the whole package basically. But what followed made me forget all that. Some dope rolled some green, and I was lost... Got a tight slap for the whole shitty affair. Thought that it would end there. Apparently not. Today, I went and bought me a cigarette and smoked it in my room. Just like that. Don't know why. Maybe I do, and don't want to speak it out loud, fearing that it might turn into reality, knowing fully well that I thought about it only because I fully realize how real it is. I am afraid of what is real. I am afraid to move on. The cigarette still tastes bad though. Some things never change.

Avoidance

I'm a pusher. I keep pushing everyone away. Not all the time. I do "connect" with a few, pour my guts or heart or whatever internal organ you can picture...out, expecting that because they are my friends, they would see me through all the shit I'm in and will be wading in for a long long time. But then, nothing happens. I mean, they do hear me out...I'm fucking huge for God's sake! Over 85kg and decently tall. Maybe they are intimidated and think that i would smash them if they don't listen to the cheesy nonsense that i spew out of the hugest orifice on my face. But then, they don't speak to me for 3 days at a stretch, and i start thinking that they are trying to avoid me. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. I wouldn't really know. I'm too fucking bad when it comes to judging people. I always think that everybody around me is a good person, with a good soul. I've been told time and again that I need to get out of that frame of mind. I haven't and don't think I ever will. I somehow like hanging onto the illusion that everybody is indeed very good. I think that's one of the bubbles of sanity I can almost indulge in. But even that dream's come to an end. I can trust noone now. Rather, I don't want to trust anyone. I sometimes hate everyone. Guess that's another way of saying that I hate myself all the time. I think that everyone hates me too. I surely know that a majority of people I know love to avoid me. Doesn't fucking matter. What pisses me off is that even GTalk seems to know about all this crap. Everytime I want to chat with someone and I move the mouse pointer over his/her name, they go offline. I know...I'm a fucking idiot. But then, who isn't?

X-Files:Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man

"Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is a... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrapper."

Lost

As a part of the induction program at IIMB, we were required to take a Psychology test in which we were given a picture and were asked to write two different stories about it, within an hour or so. I got a picture of a small boy clutching his forehead in apparent frustration, with a fiddle by his side. This was the first one that I wrote. As for the second one, if I were to describe it in one word, it would be "corny". Hence, it shall not see the code of the blog...

He knew that he could play it - he rememebered doing so, as clearly as he could remember doing everything else. Yet, he stared blankly at his fiddle. He hadn't touched it for a while, but he had vivid memories of using it. He thought back to the times when, with a tweak of the string, he would make people dance, sing, make merry, kill each other; he remembered how he could pluck the chords of their souls by one pass of his bow, of how he could make them love, make them hate, make them laugh and cry, as if there was no tomorrow. "How long has it been since I touched it?", he wondered...

He picked up his fiddle and elicited a note, and it all came back to him in a rush. It made him smile. He felt them, and thought "Oh! How they rejoice!", for he had struck a happy note. He didn't see them, but then, he didn't have to. His brow creased in puzzlement. Something wasn't right. Those who rejoiced were too few in number, and those who did, seemed to dance to a different tune altogether. "What could be wrong?". He plucked another note, this time, one of hatred, for he wanted to test the diametrically opposite one to the one he had just tried, and he reasoned that hatred would always erase happiness. As always, he thought from his heart, the poor fool. He couldn't tell the difference, for the hatred, now that he looked for it, was so much that even he couldn't fathom its magnitude.

There was definitely something amiss. He had selected a few apprentices and ensuring that each of them had learnt to play his or her tunes, had left them to sing the songs that he had taught them and make diverse music, and had gone to sleep. He wanted to wake up and conduct an orchestra of the various timbres and genres that he had created. He had been looking forward to it. But now, he felt none of the tunes he had tought. He had deliberately made up some to contradict each other, just to add to the flavor. He wished to see if opposites could attract in this musical of his. But now, he sensed that they still hadn't come to see how they could add to the beauty. He couldn't recognize His tunes. There was music, people were dancing. But it wasn't His music. They weren't dancing how He remembered.

It was time to go out and see for Himself what had gone wrong . He got up and jumped down from His seat on the roof, and the blast hit Him. There was no music left in the world. It was noise. There were no songs being sung. People who thought they were dancing were just moving as if they were a part of a synchronized performance. He didn't feel the love anymore. Moreover, the noise was deafening and blinding. He tried to shut it out by clasping hands over his ears. It didn't help. He tried to back away, He stumbled. He fell into the crowd. The Fiddler on the Roof was lost...