Words

I have cherished words all of my life. With a heart brimming with gladness, with tempestuous eyes or with a soaring spirit, I have loved words. The joy of seeing the teacher’s note on an essay or on the first publication in a newspaper was all an inheritance from words.

The gurgling of the brook, the quaint little town of pines, the soliloquy of the minstrel or the pied beauty of autumn - paint pictures through words. The chant of the ‘Om’ and the ‘I can do it’ self-fulfilling prophecy radiates the incredible power  of words.

The sanctity and serenity emanating from words have mysteriously enriched life in ways indescribable. Spoken or tacit, written or unwritten, words have added meaning and ecstasy beyond words.

Silence

The sun shines,
The seconds strike,
The silica spies
A sylvan stance,
As I sip my swirls
On my silent seat

Surrendering
To my screaming soul,
While I seek
The soul of Silence,
For some significance
In solitary stupor

Surreal moments
When the lips don't split,
Are silently seeping,
Soaking the heart,
In this surfing sojourn

Reflections!!!

Tried my hand at some Urdu expression and the English one just happened!

Khumaar

Ek ajeeb si bechaini

Kuch kar guzarne ki chaahat,

Apne wajood ki talaash

Ya dil ki raahat ?

Dil mein hai hulchul

Man mein laakhon khayal,

Inhe khwaab kahoon

Ya uljhe hue saawal ?

Kahin toh leke jayega

Ye khumaar,

Shayaad hai koi jagah

Gul-e-gulzar

***

Haze

A fuzzy restlessness

To do or die – A desire,

A quest for myself

Or my heart’s composure?

The heart is edgy

The mind  - a flock of reflections,

Are these dreams

Or bewildered questions?

This whirl will lead me somewhere

Through this haze,

Of a thousand flowers

Maybe there’s some place

***

A Walk To Remember -II ....Joy is like the rain...

‘I saw raindrops on my window

Joy is like the rain’ 

When we were little, this was one of the hymns that we would sing at the top of our voices, our cacophonous symphony being conducted by one of the nuns, from our school St. Mary’s, on the piano. It took us a few years, to truly realize the charm of the showers, and the glee that it filled our hearts with.

Shillong is not too far from Cherrapunjee and Mawsynram, both of which had the distinction of qualifying as the wettest place on earth, for several years. So the town itself experienced spells of rain that sometimes stretched into a week. Those would be the days and nights of an unceasing, whining, drizzly kind of rain. The dampness pervaded everything from shoes to books to mattresses. The only thing that it couldn’t dampen was our young minds. They sprang up, as lush as the greens, with its touch. The most enjoyable part of the rains was again and of course, our walks to and from school.

The Coconut

Rugged hair
Browned shell
Takes a lot to break
Let the thought not dwell

Soft inside
Pure and white
Hardened with time
Still feels the bite

Poke a hole
The water trickles
Drop by drop
As the moments drizzle

Trance and Transience

For a fleeting moment
Life bloomed
And we grew wings
And floated like butterflies
For a fleeting moment

For a fleeting moment
Life floated
And we grew petals
And bloomed like flowers
For a fleeting moment

Life's fleeting moments
Life's a fleeting moment
We rejoice, we suffer
For a fleeting moment

A Walk To Remember

Little unstable steps in black Bata Ballerina or Naughty Boy shoes, with hand-kerchiefs folded into wedges and pinned on the chest; little hearts make their first trip across the length of road that will become part and parcel of their lives. That is how the first day of school was like for most of us who grew up in the quaint little town of pines, Shillong.

Most of the major schools in Shillong are on the stretch of road between the bus-stops of Dhankheti and Beat House. St Peter's, Loreto, St. Anthony's, St. Edmunds, St. Mary's and St.Margaret’s are all almost adjacent to each other, separated only by the arterial roads to get to them. Three of these schools are boys' schools and the other three are girls' schools and all but one is not named after a patron saint of the same gender as students it admits. (Here is an exercise in data sufficiency for you …go figure!). So the common ground where these young generations of Shillong meet is on this road. This is also the stretch of road that connects to several major residential areas. Hence, for the students of these schools, this is the road they traverse daily for at least fourteen years of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. Barely 1.5km in stretch , this road remains no more just a road, but a throbbing repository of countless memories- friendly banter, drenching rain and a breeding ground for Shillong's innocent romances.

Accents and Beyond: Of Aces and Full-Stops

A couple years back while my peer Ben was trying to debug a code, he said " It's a bad ace". When I looked at him quizzically, he said ," Oh, its just a bad a$$ in a North Carolina accent"  and I burst out in laughter. It was only after interacting with Ben for quite some time that the NC accent was making sense to me. He would often say in good humor ," Look at an Indian girl and a Turkish girl (my friend Susan) making fun of MY accent ".

After we had just moved to the US I had accompanied Tridib to Cary, NC when he had to go there for a training program. At the hotel, I asked the receptionist the directions to the gym twice, but couldn't understand a single word of what she said in her heavy southern accent. The only thing I could make out from her gestures was that the gym was up the hill we could see from the hotel. To save myself from embarassment, I walked outside, went up the hill and came back after sometime.