Words

so what do you know about the guitar?
nothing.
don’t even know how to hold it properly.
(although i do knew a couple of things, at least the basics and terms and all, but why say when you can’t prove!)
slightly amused, he only said, hmmm.
and this is how i started learning guitar.
🙂

v: that passed the time
e: it would have passed in any case
v: yes, but not so rapidly

i’m posting this sunday post on the next friday. dee is busy with her exams, still eight more to go. as for me, work has been too much and all i could do was to save drafts everyday. blank drafts that will fill up with words and images and wisdom and silliness like love fills me up. as of now, i don’t know how many of those drafts will have something for you, there’s still more work to do. but then again, there’s more of life to live, more of love to love.
c ya soon.
and these two above are vladimir and estragon from ‘waiting for godot.’
god bless.

🙂

coming to office on a holiday has some convenience of its own. i choose my own time, the route to take and the mode of transport too. there are no daily hassles, only the one focussed work that one is supposed to finish. and this is how the saturday has been, so far. but the work has been a little too much.

the day starts with the alarm ringing at six, being switched off, for five more minutes of precious sleep. they turn out to be ninety minutes long. “oh shit! its seven thirty and i’ve to meet her at eight.” life doesn’t give you much time to remember and be grateful for divine grace at this point of time. call her up, she’ll be reaching faculty by around eight. now the people who know me know that i can’t get ready before two hours have passed since my gaining consciousness. i choose to take the shortcut. “will go and meet her first, will get ready later.” its her third paper today, and the one she is really creeped about. “can’t afford to leave her alone in this one.” reach in time to greet her on the way towards faculty. nice pyjamas and crumpled tee shirt look. she is reading. we hug and feel good about it. man, she looks good in black. okay, looking good while walking and reading and all one can do is to walk beside and steer her away from obstacles. like a pole or a car or other human beings. we reach faculty, choose a spot away from distractions and i listen to a constant stream of coleridge’s thoughts on poetry. my time will come too, but that’s still a month away. till then am alive. swati comes, visibly ill, i listen to some of aristotle now. dee shhh’s us up. anu finds us, no more of listening, she is irritated by abhinav, am relieved. nitin comes, all the way from naraina to wish swati, everyone is happy, particularly the little urchin who gets an unexpected ten rupees from him. dee’s up, its eight forty five, time to go. i wish her, kiss her on the forehead, make her smile with some silly stuff. “hope the paper turns out good,”
after all am also tense about her.

proceed towards home, take all the time to get ready, leave by ten thirty. read, dream and think all through the way. see, hear, smell, touch, taste, every sense alive in the true way. compose poems, write them on air and leave them to the wind. thoughts, so many, like children assembled to play.

life, in all its hues. a disabled child, walking with sticks on the way to school. a pretty young lady, dressed in a skirt, off to some outing with friends. words stuck on a page of the magazine, and floating off as thoughts. stories written on faces, numerous, and varied. the auto to office, tiny wheels carrying me and the driver along. gulzar’s poetry in form of songs, kishore da’s voice, and lata di’s spell. people carrying out a living, oblivious of life, osho suggesting my existence is futile, that it’s not life. a man carrying a trapped mouse to release it some place away from home, an eagle on ground, hopping off with its feed. the city of traffic, of pollution and fumes, and the city of trees, of sun shining from the green. the bougainvillea flowers on a concrete wall, the trees being felled for construction of bus and metro corridors, i long to become a gulmohar flower, to brighten somebody’s summer…

…i’ve to write and desperate i’m to reach office, switch on the computer and start, which i do as soon as i can. and now, when i’m at it, i can’t write that poem.

all i can tell you is that this morning, there was poetry in the very air i inhaled, in the blood that ran through my veins. wherever i looked, whatever i touched, it was poetry. it somehow was not limited to verse or words anymore, and suddenly it is everywhere. am so in the mood for poetry today.

do you remember a childhood dream? or a song perhaps? some incident that makes you tilt your head to right and smile a soft little smile? can an experience be so charming that it brings those feelings rushing back? i had that experience, a few days ago. watching a Dutch movie titled ‘Minoes’ brought such a wonderful calm and comfort to my world weary mind that i recommend it for the chronically stressed out amongst us!

this is an attempted review only, but the objective here is to share the feelings generated rather than any analysis of the movie. so, here i go 🙂

Minoes is a modern day fairytale set in a tiny Dutch town. it is the story of a furry little cat Minoes turned into a charming young woman. it is the story of a young reporter Tibbe struggling to overcome his shyness and present some news to his paper. it is also the story of a sleepy little town with its everybody knows everybody camaraderie, everyday lifelike individuals and of a dominant industrialist, Mr. Ellemeet trying to gain political power to further his capitalist goals.

one night, as one of Mr. Ellemeet’s hazardous chemical waste is being transported from the town, which is a hush hush affair as he has to maintain a clean image of being a good industrialist and an animal lover, one of the drums fall off the truck and our heroine, the cat Minoes laps up some stuff from it. the next we see her is as a young woman, dressed in green, with a little briefcase in her hands and hiding up above a tree, scared by a dog. okay, its not us who find her like this, its our hero, the shy young reporter Tibbe who on the other hand has been given a deadline by his editor to submit either a news story by the next day or pack his stuff and leave. the two meet again and a partnership of convenience develops, Minoes with the help of her cat friends will report the news from around the town to Tibbe and he’ll allow her to stay at his place till she figures out how to become a cat again. gradually Tibbe becomes famous and the toast of the town, until he decides to expose Mr. Ellemeet’s dubious credentials. because our crafty villain has maintained a nice hairstyle and a nicer reputation, no one believes him at first. but with the help of Minoes, her cat squad and his landlady’s sprightly daughter Bibi, they manage to pull the plug out of his plans and Tibbe again becomes the hero of the town.

the final question that remains is how and whether Minoes is going to be a cat again, which much to our joy is contrary to what both she and Tibbe have in mind. yes, like all the other happy endings, this fairytale too ends in the brave prince and charming princess uniting and living happily ever after.

based on a children’s book by Annie M.G. Schmidt, it is a movie well made, with Minoes superbly played by Carice van Houten and Tibbe by Theo Maassen. the simplicity of a bedtime story is combined with the theme of finding your real self and standing true to it. highly recommended for children as well as adults, Minoes, as a movie is both heartwarming and fragile and brings that lost innocence back into our lives, once again.

its your first exam tomorrow, and now for a month you’ll be tense, worried, even scared of how you’ll fare. relax, take a deep breath 🙂 and just give it your hundred percent. and as much as i know you, it’ll be much more than a hundred and ten percent.
best of luck dee.
MDFBWU.
amen.

i’ve a new addiction.

once i week i go home to visit my parents and all i do is to watch this new channel, world movies

like the Spanish movie about the Falklands war i mentioned in a couple of posts ago, each one has been a humane experience in their entirety.

last week i watched again a Spanish movie about a young boy and girl who run away from home to find out the girl’s father, as her parents have divorced and the mother has requested the father to sign a document which will allow her to leave the country. the girl and the boy are next door neighbours whose mothers are not on the friendliest of terms. the girl doesn’t want to leave her school, friends and the place she lives in, so both of them decide to travel to the far end of Cuba where the girl’s father works as in-charge of a lighthouse.

the whole movie criss-crosses through a delightful piece of childhood etched against a visual feast of Cuban landscape. the relationship between these two friends, as they leave on a journey far away from home with nothing but pennies in their pockets; the people they encounter on the way, from the funny ticket checkers in the train to the helpful villagers to the scientist out in the wilderness researching on bugs (or was it birds), each and every character so carefully crafted, howsoever little their role is; then the companionship, the fights they have on the way; to the final moment of the movie when they reach the lighthouse and find out that the father has already signed the document, with both set of parents present and fighting, bickering against each other; the innocence and bigheartedness of children starkly juxtaposed against the so-called maturity and pettiness of grown-ups; and the irony that children can find a way to be grown-up but the elders won’t ever be able to be children again; and the final moment of the movie where scared children ran up to the ragged shore, the edge of their known world, and stand embraced tightly, with waves splashing them real hard, sheltering them against the very world they come from; the movie ends at this moment; leaving us guessing what happens next, perhaps the frightened children leap into the sea to run away, once and for all, perhaps they didn’t and grow up to be normal, mature people like us. the end of innocence, come which way.

this morning, i saw one more movie, only half of it though as i’d to rush to office, and again the portrayal of childhood was careful and true. it was titled, ‘summer with ghosts’, i didn’t see the whole movie, so no comments as such, but just the way the director and the cameraman have captured a child’s view of the world made me wonder why do we grow up at all. and howsoever we grow up, we’ll be innately children to some other superior and perhaps mature-in-the-real-sense power. be it god or some other intelligent race.

and yes, last night’s movie, Minoes. a Dutch movie with English subtitles, it was so special that it deserves an individual post of its own. just let me find some time out to give it the due respect. haven’t even been able to upload the Goa pics till now, so you can have a fair bit of an idea of my office schedule.

anyways, do be immersed in dreams, its weekend, and yes, happy moviewing.
🙂
love bless. from UTV. and am so glad that i’ve found this one out. have seen only three and half movies on it and their each moment has been a cherished one.