istighasa

qibla-e-deen madadi, ka'aba-e-iman madadi
ya Hussein ibn-e-Ali, rooh-e-ghareeban madadi

sales pitch

Ladies and Gents. Tonight we bring you the ultimate offer in slumberous delight: Sleeping on your left side. At the mere cost of a dull ache in your left arm, you can avoid laying on your back all night. Breathing will be easier and your butt and back will get out of the feeling that they have turned to stone. What more, you'ld be able to curl up your legs whichever way you like. Now what's lying there straight as a plank compared to such nocturnal bliss? However, we do not guarantee against flow of phlegm towards the left. In that case, you might experience heightened pain in your left ear and tonsil. But isn't that a small price to pay for such luxurious comfort? And, ladies and gentlemen, those selling the right side are nothing but absolute bastards!

Birthday '06

Is it true solitude when in teeming multitudes of humankind, utterly silent, with a hush as grave as death upon them, walking down a road with no known destination, you are the only one who can hear yourself screaming? Then, is it any wonder that among the vast crowds, those few faces that could have soothed your troubled mind with a mere glint of recognition, unvoiced but real, remain as cold and expressionless as the rest?

muted rage

ghar mein tha kya keh tera gham jisse ghaarat karta
woh jo rakhte thhey ik hasrat-e-taameer, so hai...

- Ghalib

Of locks and keys...

taaleef e nuskha-haye wafa ker raha thaa mein
majmooa e khayal abhee fard fard thaa

- Ghalib

revelation? realisation?

You don't have what it takes. Admit it, a person with zero ambition, half-baked brains and limited horizons cannot for long delude himself with fake visions of greatness, of doing something worthwhile with his existence. Mediocrity is your lot in life but you refuse to see it. You who finds it hard to survive in an environment where you are protected, bolstered even, harboring dreams of seeing the world, facing it, challenging it? Fat chance. It is your destiny to continue to stumble in the narrow confines of your own head asking yourself over and over again why you have inhibitions about things that seem to come naturally to most of the people around you. And after so many years of looking into yourself, the answer should be plain enough. It is time to toe the line. In your head, you picture yourself as a crazy hippie intellectual who is too cool to care about anything in the world and you think nobody can see through that, no one can tell what you say apart from what it really is, bullshit? Who are u trying to fool but yourself? It is time to step off of any and all pedestals that you may have put yourself at. It is time to get up off of your lazy butt, grab whatever comes your way by the balls and make it work for yourself. After all, it is a struggle to survive. You don't want your inflexibility, your unreasonable stubbornness to be the end of you. That which does not bend is ultimately broken. But then, as you are undoubtedly sniggering away to yourself, who wants to survive anyway?

chaudvin ka chand

chaudvin ka chand ho ya aftab ho
jo bhee ho tum khuda ki qasam lajawab ho
chaudvin ka chand ho....

zulfein hain jaise kaandhon pe badal jhukkey huye
aankhein hain jaise mai ke payale bhare huye
masti hai jiss mein pyaar ki tum woh sharab ho
chaudvin ka chand ho....

chehra hai jaise jheel mein hansta hua kanwal
ya zindagi ke saaz pe chhedi huyee ghazal
jaan-e-bahar tum kissi shair ka khwab ho
chaudvin ka chand ho....

honton pe khelti hai tabassum ki bijliyan
sajde tumharee raah mein karti hai kehkeshan
dunya-e-husn-o-ishq ka tum hee shabab ho

chaudvin ka chand ho ya aftab ho
jo bhee ho tum khuda ki qasam lajawab ho....

Mental space is all that is required to put up something good here!

the day the music died!

August 20, 2006: Formatted drive C: Discovered 2236KB in bad sectors. Reinstalled XP, a pirated version all the way from Indonesia. Bill Gates's genius did not pick up the sound driver. No qawwali, no pink floyd since then. On top of that, most webpages appear in Malay or some other weird far eastern language. Google Behasa Melayu is politely offering to Saya Rasa Bertuah. The system date today is showing 27 Ogos, 2006. Right-click on a file causes the machine to hang and all running programs terminate with a message "Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger failed". And there is no music. And to think that life a week, ten days ago had appeared to reach its threshold of drabness. But no! Seems that like Telenor, the stars controlling dreary and monotonous existences also want us to "Expect More"!

House of Helpers

They push you up against the wall and beat you to a pulp if you dare to snarl back. No protestations, no expressions of dissent allowed in this place. You either come around to thinking like them or you don't think at all. There are set rules and standards that cannot be compromised. You utter foolish and unnecessary words that further incriminate you in their eyes. But do they realise what pushes you to speak like that? To them words have always held more significance than thoughts, effect more import than cause. So, my friend, your indictment is complete. It is you who stands alone again and the decision is only yours to make. Or is it one more sacrifice? There is a gun in your hands but its barrels are empty. They have taken the bullets away. How arrogantly they demand solutions and how conveniently they make achieving those impossible!

little by little

We the people fight for our existence
We don't claim to be perfect but we're free
We dream our dreams alone with no resistance
Faded like the stars we wish to be

Y'know I didn't mean... what I just said
But my God woke up on the wrong side of His bed
And it just don't matter now

Little by little we gave you everything you ever dreamed of
As little by little the wheels of your life have slowly fallen off
Little by little you have to live it all in all your life
And all the time I just ask myself why are you really here?

True perfection has to be imperfect
I know that that sounds foolish but it's true
The day has come and now you'll have to accept
The life inside your head we gave to you

Musings VI

jadanr daang hijjar dee pondee hay
saadi qismet aap koon rondee hay
tekoon kya aakhoon o yaar langah
kehri hasrat dil vich hondee hay

- Hasni Khan

resignation

There is no point doing this when I don't feel a thing. My head is so cluttered with work-related complications and family-related issues and apprehensions about the future that I have stopped thinking too deeply altogether. But then that was always the intent right? Get Hasni to start doing more and thinking less. And I guess this is inevitable once you get out of your self, or are dragged out of it to be more precise, and try to become a part of real life, governed by real rules and constraints, having a real different outlook than the world you had created for yourself in your head. Sometimes it is hard to focus and I drift back in time; but in the real world that is called absent-mindedness. Sometimes I indulge my intellect too but whatever the results of that are are almost always shunned as negativity. Survival is tough and that is the hardest lesson I have been taught yet. But the big question is have I really learnt? Because despite all this conformism that I have been forcing upon myself, there is a sullen, obstinate part of me that puts up a fight every step of the way and I never really can figure out who's the victor: the rebel or the conformist. I do not get this: is this life really worth living like a sheep among a huge flock or is it just my thought patterns that are too rigid? Anyway, there is something in my head that I am definitely not getting a finger on. And I dont even know how to feel about that!

plan of action

koee din gar zindagani aur hai
apne jee mein hum ne thhani aur hai

atish-e-dozakh mein yeh garmi kahan
soz-e-gham haaye nihaani aur hai

baar ha dekhi hain unn ki ranjishein
per kucch ab ke sir girani aur hai

dey keh khat muun dekhta hai namabar
kucch toh pegham-e-zabani aur hai

ho chukeen Ghalib balayen sab tamam
aik marg-e-nagahani aur hai...

Perception

Take a passport-sized photograph of yourself, yes that same one with the fake half-smile that you put on your face just to get the photographer to shut up with his incessant 'smile please', and in which the honest, sincere look in your eyes can be easily mistaken for that peculiar expression which makes itself visible when you're locked in a life-and-death struggle with three days of constipation and you're carefully contemplating that final desperate measure: lubrication. Now invert the picture such that the image is upside down. Please observe how, at first glance, your nose suddenly appears as an excellent pencil-holder and the image looks like a quaint bald man with an asymmetric beard who's been a victim of divine comedy as regards the placement of his facial features. Now hide the nose, mouth and chin of the image with your thumb and for a moment, forget that its your picture, forget that it's been inverted and forget that you're a moron for being doing this in the first place, and concentrate on the eyes. Look at them in a detached manner, as if you've never looked at them before, as if you don't want to look at them either. Are they not the most hideous, unworldly, cruel-looking pair of eyes that you have ever seen? Eyes hovering above black platters that seem to have been placed there merely for added effect. And they say a man's eyes are a window into his soul. But is a window not supposed to show the same view whichever way you look at it? Nonetheless, if you fail to see this as such, you need to alter your perceptions. For doing that, you might want to introduce yourself to Lucy.

Trapped!

Have you ever felt trapped? Its a nauseating feeling. You feel like screaming at the top of your lungs but the sound just does not come out because you know you need to keep up the facade: cool, alert, active. You know what you're getting into is not your thing. But do people understand? No. All they can come up with is fucking advice and 'pearls of wisdom' that only serve to confuse you more. Abrupt breaks from one reality and finding yourself in a totally different picture makes you feel as if someone's got their bloody head stuck up your ass. But who cares eh? Its time to give life some direction, its time to diversify, its time to live up to a hundred expectations. But is this fair? What they don't get is that you're not a salesman. You could'nt sell a bone in a goddamn dog fair if it ever came to it. On top of that, living at others' tender mercies is something that just doesn't come to you. But there had to be a day when your wings were clipped, when you were forced to come back to earth. But do they expect you to live on charity? Every promise has been broken, every word reneged upon. You got a life to make or so you're told. Selling! What in the Lord's name is that? Sales! How would you like to go about on a truck begging khokha-walahs and every kind of goddamn bazari to buy women's sanitary pads from you? What kinda fucked-up thing is that? What kinda diversification is that? Some moron 8th grader could do that. Is there any fun in life? Torn apart from familiarity just so your professional credentials won't have a blank space. Its a pity this world is. Your life is governed by externalities. Is 'internality' even a word? How much say do you have in your life? None. That is because you don't care. You dont care whether you work or not. You don't care whether you become anything or not. You don't care whether people take you seriously or not. Because you don't like to assert yourself. If only you were a born a hundred years ago in the same surroundings, the going would have been good. In fact, if you had been a born a coupla thousand years ago, you might have been one of those loonies people mistook for holy men. But that still is possible, isn't it? Reality check: you're trapped. There is no way out of here and you can't live like this. What the fuck is going on around you? You don't wanna know and you don't really care. At this point, all you need to concentrate on is stifling that scream.

Friday the 13th

On this supposedly inauspicious day this piece is more of a product of the paranoia that comes with the entire ‘its-gone-to-the-dogs’ syndrome than anything else. Even this difficulty I am having in getting started is freaking me out to a great extent. But tonight was to be different with stuff like the Nile crocodile, childhood theories on contemporary political structures and some peasant satire on the agenda. But in a household obsessed with death moods tend to fluctuate without a moment’s notice and normal small talk can take sudden turns toward morbidity. It all started when they told on TV that the eyes in Anne Boleyn’s decapitated head continued to shift around till some seconds after the beheading as if trying to come to terms with what had happened and how her ghost still haunts the Tower of London. And then the regular, everyday conversation on food and obesity and missed opportunities rapidly degenerated into conjecturing on what goes on in a man’s head in the space between when the realization of the end strikes him and the actual moment of demise, in his final moments when he actually feels his soul being torn away from his body, when he is locked in that ultimate struggle that he is bound to lose. Trying to conjecture at the goings on in the mind of a man already on the ferry across the River Styx is extremely frustrating for the living because there is nothing concrete to surmise about. But such frustration could only be a fraction of the frustration felt by the dying man for in his head are thoughts the likes of which he is never likely to have thought before, thoughts that he is dying to express but cannot for all modes of expression fail him, thoughts that are destined to be buried with him for all eternity. Imagine a man being shot like an animal in full view of his children and then dying in a few minutes with his gaze transfixed upon them, trying to speak but remaining unable to do so. What could have gone on in such a man’s head in those few minutes, I do not even dare think about for to my own surprise I still value my sanity. They say time is the greatest healer but there are things that transcend all limitations of time and burn in one’s memory like the sacred flame of Zartusht. Lucky are those whose moment of truth is nothing but a split second because even though all their hopes and dreams are dashed they do not have to face the harsh reality of death full frontal. For death is the scariest thing about life. But what could be scarier still is when life chooses to play tricks on you in the guise of death. There was a statistic in some newspaper a few days back stating that 30% of all people are buried alive. Even though this in all probability is a gross exaggeration, even the thought is enough to lose sleep over. Maybe there is some sense to cremation after all or maybe we should have working telephones buried with us in case they fail to differentiate between death and a coma, or better still, loaded revolvers. But unlike the constitution of this country, the laws of God contain no clauses for necessity. Suicide is a free pass to an eternity of pain. The poor bastard who finds himself alive six feet under with a loaded gun sure has one hell of a decision to make.