Tag: writing

I am an idiot.

It’s hard to dream really,
Once you finally get started,
You are bound to ask
Why
Why
Why
You chose to make love
Over making money
And now you stand naked in front of the people
Asking them to like you
Some of them do,
Some of them don’t,
Why do they not?
You look yourself in the mirror
And find only flaws
Why do they even do?
A question you throw to those who love you.
It’s hard to dream really
There’s one step toward progress
And two steps to regress
Two or three,
What’s wrong with me?
Where did it go, all the glory?
Once dispersed in the air like confetti
And now there are ashes slowly floating down to the ground.
What stupidity!
Now, I weep on my pages
On crazy outrages
Gasping for breath, floundering,
My mind madly meandering.
Maybe I would continue to suffocate,
Maybe I would continue to suffer,
And still, I would be an optimist
Even when the times are tougher.
I will cling on to the rope,
I may never give up hope,
And even when I weep,
I would think of the promise I must keep.
Of course, it’s hard to dream,
No wonder so many don’t.
Idiocy,
Idiosyncrasy,
And I have chosen both.
Sure, I have been upset,
But there have been no regrets,
I never stepped in with an expectation of how everything would be perfect.
And it hurts,
But also it doesn’t.
I would be honest.
I wouldn’t lie
Still each morning I need to remind myself why.
The doors are far behind,
Much farther than I thought
And even if I were to return
I will find them all locked.
So the only option is to move ahead
The real choice is between confidence and dread.
If an idiot is what they have been calling me,
Then idiot is what I would confidently be.
You have your security
And I have my dreams and my heart
I don’t know if it’s a fair trade
But I hope without too much of a fuss,
That it turns out good for both of us.

*

Posted on by saloni 5

Writer’s Block

Days I spent
Thinking
and thinking
and thinking
Finding excuses to procrastinate;
After the lunch
Or Netflix
Or sleep
Or Netflix again
Or read
Or a bit more research
And then ofcourse
Netflix yet again,


So many days I have thought
Passing by the same old roads
Eyes seeing everything new
yet registering every thing same
Time flying by
As I think
more
and more;
Unstructured
random memories
coming from different corners,
How do I weave a story out of them?
Plain and simple
I can understand
and yet can’t translate.


As the clock’s hands tick by
And I think
think harder
sitting by the window
breathing in the air
without mask
listening to the music
without earphones
Memories of green farms and rustling leaves
Blue sky dotted with gray monsoon clouds
As I gaze
And think
I think even more
About the people I have found interesting
The people I want to write about
About the places
About me
About my life
About their lives
About non-lives
About semi-lives
About changing the world
About the changing world
About being immortal in this universe
And yet utterly
Insignificant.

Probably it’s time to stop
And turn all that thinking into prose
I miss the days when the words would just flow
and flow
and won’t stop
pushing me to write
and rewrite
till late into the night
words flowing like music
words moving like dance
words coming straight from the heart
words making an honest art
But now
How do I weave the fabric of my mind?
How do I dye it with the ink of my pen?
How do I?
When there is so much
And when the nib touches the page
The magic disappears.

***

Posted on by saloni 0

On Quitting your Job

It will take some time to carry out the social un-conditioning. The layers run deep. The more you explore, the more you would realize how prejudiced you are. It won’t be easy, to discover contradictory things about yourself. It may shake your confidence. It may rob you of your faith. Your insecurity may grow.

You are allowed to take a call. Mission abort! Mission abort!

But I hope you will keep going.

Remind yourself again and again – why you are doing this. You will have to. It’s medicine – you need to take it every day before breakfast and after dinner. And even then, all kinds of what-ifs will crop up each day. There is no guarantee. The roads are hazy, and from time to time, you would wonder if you took a wrong turn. Don’t worry about the wrong and the right turns. What’s done has been done. Just trust your voice and keep on going.

Sometimes you won’t hear that voice. There may be too much noise inside your head. Clear that traffic. Sit down. Relax. Breathe. Introspect. Your ego might not like it – the rejections, the un-replied mails, the criticism, the other people, the could have beens. You would be scared. Be courageous. Look up and face your fears. When you do, you would realize it’s not that dreadful after all.

fear

Of course, your Plan A won’t work. Many times your Plan B might not either. Allow yourself to be creative. You will conceive a new plan. Remember, there is always something you can do. The idea may not hit you right away, but it will. Tell yourself it will.

If you were your actual manager you would hate yourself. It’s hard to satisfy yourself, harder than your ex-boss because you know what you are capable of doing. And this is something you love to do – of course, it can be so much better! God, it will be hard. Your inner boss is a demon. But hear, hear, be assured that when he is pacified, he has brought the best out of you. He won’t let you rest for long though. Next day there would be a new project, with even higher standards. And no, he would never approve your leaves. And criticism is the only language he speaks.

The most difficult appraisals happen before the mirror. Tell the mirror about the things you did right. The journal you wrote, the little Haiku at the back of your diary, the book you read and what you learnt from it, the interesting thing you got to know from the internet, the way you helped a friend in need, the way you spent time with your family, how delicious your lunch was, how you went for a nice walk, how new ideas struck you and how you took note of them, how you worked on them, talk about your new strategies, how you searched for new opportunities and dared to apply, how the small event you organized went well, how you inspired the people you met and how you got inspired by them, how you discovered that old book in library which you wouldn’t find anywhere else, how you meditated, how you sang and learnt something new, how you enjoyed the rain, remind yourself that all of these count as valid building blocks. All of this is work. Value-added work.

Your inner boss might just scoff, but don’t take him too seriously. Don’t take any of those things seriously that discourage you. Don’t let other men and the man in the mirror validate you. You might not know the whole map, but trust yourself and keep on going the road you are on.

Yes, it’s not going to be easy. Definitely. SO think twice before quitting that job. And if you decide not to, then dedicate yourself to the job you do. Eventually, you will learn to love it. You may feel you have lost something. But remind yourself you have gained something too. And if you do quit your job and decide to follow your heart – Don’t look back. You are doing just fine. Remind yourself of the good things. Work on those good things. And just keep swimming.

*

 

Posted on by saloni 1

The Absurd Struggles of a Writer

When I told my mother that I wanted to be a writer, I expected some kind of disagreement. She was not very delighted but she wasn’t angry either. I got a modest and an are-you-sure okay and soon we both forgot about it. Somehow, sluggishly, I finished college and I obtained a degree that said I was an Electrical Engineer.

Even though I had told a few people that I wanted to be a writer I wasn’t really serious about it. I fantasized about it yes –  Living in a big new strange city, lost and lonely among millions; I am sleeping on the pavements, cold, helpless and yet the fire in my heart kindles and I dream and I dream. Often I don’t eat, often I forget to eat, my writing is all that is and all that will be. I stay in my miserable room devouring two-three books I have, day and night, again and again. But those few books are my life. War and Peace, Madame Bovary, The Ulysses, and oh how I read! Like a demon. My room is built with bricks and rejection mails. And still, I breathe. And still, I write. No one in my family is talking to me. I have no friends. The fumes of my cigarettes and a glass half filled with cheap warm whiskey are my only companions. Yes, it is hard. It is so difficult that almost all kinds of poetry make sense to me. But I am on my way to be a great writer.

The reality, however, is that after graduating out of college I joined a company. We manufactured switchgear, did our bit in providing safe electricity to people. It was a normal 9 to 5 (or 7 or 9 or sometimes 10) job, which I grew to hate within two months. But I could have continued doing it for the rest of my life if it wasn’t for my family.

‘You don’t deserve such a job,’ my mother used to tell me. ‘You should do something else. Do you have anything in mind?’
In my mind, there was a dream that I never thought could ever come true.
‘I don’t know’
‘How about MBA?’ she asked.
Another trending degree that I am actually not interested in studying but I may get a better paying job with it so yeah why not.
A day later, she called me again, ‘How about English?’
That would be wonderful! Wait, what?

No, Ma, you are supposed to force me into choosing a ‘practical’ degree.
You are supposed to be an antagonist so that I could be a protagonist.
You are supposed to say things like – ‘Just because a few odd people praised your writing that doesn’t mean you could be a writer!’  Then I am supposed to leave home, burning with fury and ambition and say stuff like, ‘Oh but you are wrong Ma. I am leaving now. Forever.’ And out of this tragedy, a great writer shall emerge.

‘Why not study writing if you like writing so much?’, my mother told me instead.
You are supposed to resist my dream. You are not supposed to make it your own. What’s wrong with you! What kind of broad-minded dreamy mother are you who sends her daughter to study creative writing all the way to England?

They say that artists live wretched lives. They say they have the worst family. And that somehow contributes to their genius. I have a decent life, a supportive family, so does that mean I am disqualified?

And I wonder…

Do I really need to be Charles Bukowski or is it okay to be the way I am and still be a good writer? I don’t smoke cigarettes and I don’t drink cheap warm whiskey. I haven’t read War and Peace. And no, most poems still don’t make sense to me. Sometimes my own poems don’t make sense to me. I live in a decent apartment. I don’t have money in my bank account but I can’t call myself poor. I can afford to buy books. I have Kindle, Netflix subscription (which I just canceled), and a car to go to the nearby library (which I never drive because I don’t know how to drive). Such is my writing life – not ideal but still privileged, and the only real hurdles I face are mental. Hurdles like questioning whether I am actually a writer if I haven’t struggled enough to ‘know the reality of life’. Hurdles like – Can I ever stop wondering what life would have been as an engineer? As a management student? Can I really be at peace knowing how my social rankings have slipped now that I have switched to humanities, that I can no longer consider myself ‘smart’, that Engineering to me is just a paper in my folder, that I have no knowledge regarding that field anymore, that I never really had any, that I have no idea what I am doing right now, did I ever have any such idea, does anyone have any idea, that I am not designing any kind of artificial intelligence, but I am sitting here writing a dumb book. But I love writing that dumb book. So shut up.

*

Posted on by saloni 4

A Brief Introspection on Blogging,

I can’t say I have not been writing. I have but not for this blog. Didn’t even invite a guest writer in the meantime – if I can’t write for my own blog, why should anyone else? The problem is not that I don’t have anything to say. It’s just that I have been thinking a lot about what this blog stands for.

This blog started because I liked to write. I had found a small audience. I wrote for them, I wrote for myself. It was an easy way to escape. Though now that I look back I can’t tell what exactly I was trying to escape. Many of my posts weren’t properly edited. After revising the same piece about fifteen to twenty times you become blind to errors, especially the most stupid ones. But that didn’t matter, those who read still read and most of them even liked it despite all the mistakes. Some of them have been corrected. Some are still there waiting to be corrected or maybe, most probably, it doesn’t even matter now. I think those flaws have become the characteristics of those writings.

There was nobody to impress, there was no “target audience”, there was no motivation to be “good”, I hadn’t started this blog to have an “online presence”, I started this blog because blogging was fun, my writing was being read by people all across the world. I had no clue how they had ended up here but they did, and some despite being from different countries, different continents related to what I had to say.

What did I have to say?

Theories? Manifestos? Propaganda? I am not that smart to call out on those kinds of bullshit. I talked about lonely parks and lonely nights. I talked about cemeteries and dumb advertisements. Head to Holland, Beer to Bees, there wasn’t a connection, except they were all written by me.

But during those days, Writing was a hobby. Now, it’s much more than that. I thought this blog should show that change. But how? I wondered. Several months have passed. I still don’t know.

I started this blog because through this I could say whatever I wanted to say. Somehow it wasn’t much of a concern that this was the internet. INTERNET. This was PUBLIC. It was stupid. It was lame. It was bold. It was fearless. It didn’t matter if this was about nothing and everything. It was okay and it was still important that I say something.

It’s been a long journey and I have lost that freedom along the way. Freedom to be stupid again. Suddenly, nothing is good enough to be here. Good enough? Good enough? Who is saying this to whom? Who is passing this judgment? Especially here? This was my space. This is where I grew. This IS my space. My old self has been invaded by the new me and today I sit here thinking of her…In doing so, I am about to do what she would have done – Publish this random musing. Who cares? This is our blog, isn’t it?

*

Posted on by saloni 3

I don’t miss home,

Of course I don’t miss home,
Though it’s cold out here but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I miss the warmth.
Of course I don’t miss home,
Yes, I confess that the green bed of my dorm,
The matching duvets and pillows aren’t as somniferous as the violet hues of my room,
The humongous pin board bears such a vast scope for creativity,
But I admit it seems that I have left it all behind on the walls of a small place that I am not supposed to think much about.
But still I don’t miss home,
Not when I look through my tiny window and remember how large it used to be.
I don’t miss home,
I am too happy to bear such delusions,
After all the beauty of my surroundings hasn’t even sunk in,
The notion that I might be sharing same time and same space as this place still lies dangling as a mad hypothesis,
I haven’t properly forgotten the crowds, the dust, the hot weather of the past,
I haven’t even forgotten the sweat, the noise, the boredom, the four walls confining my life,
I haven’t forgotten that the food wasn’t always this tasteless,
I haven’t forgotten that the water used to cheaper than alcohol,
I haven’t forgotten about the time I had to waste,
I haven’t forgotten the anticipation, the butterflies, the apprehensions,
Regarding what that could now be called my present,
I haven’t forgotten much,
Despite being here,
I haven’t forgotten anything at all.
Though the dates in my calendar keeps rapidly changing,
Perhaps I can sit here listening to the same downtrodden playlist,
With my pen and a few things in my head to reminisce,
I can sit here for eternity or so it seems,
I can sit here pretending that the time is frozen.
So I don’t miss home.
I don’t miss it at all.
When I wake up tomorrow,
It would still be incredibly hard to believe
That I am here
Miles away,
In a strange beautiful land,
With strange people,
Under strange circumstances.
Some call it bold,
Some call it cowardly escape,
Some call it love,
Some call it outrageous stupidity,
Some exclaim in disbelief,
Some silently mutter in jealousy,
Some say “You don’t deserve it.”
Some say, “You are worth every penny.”
Some, so many,
All these people in my head,
Who travelled overseas on free tickets with me,
An entire world,
An infuriating celestial miracle,
Obnoxious electrochemical reactions inside my brain,
These people and I,
My room, my pen, the blue blue sky,
Beautiful things, beautiful places, beautiful beautiful faces,
That I peek through my invisibility cloak,
That I look at in wonder,
That I look at with curiosity,
That I look at in boredom…
Happy places, laughing faces,
Of course,
Of course it’s too early to miss home,
Too early to miss the recent past,
Too early to miss the current present.

What is this?
I,
Caught up in a few fucked up tenses,
Trying to make some decent sentences,
Stringing along the pearls of words,
Trying to weave a good fabric through some odd phrases,
Living the life,
Denouncing it at the same time,
Awed, and indifferent,
Amazed and hurt.
How nice! How wonderful!
How enigmatic! How treacherous!
How confusing! How difficult!
A simple question;
A lost answer,
And all this adventure in between –
“What do you want, dear heart?”

***

Posted on by saloni 1

A wasted vocabulary

Words give away, you know. The snitch. Ratting bastards. Force your detachment, a vehement denial or a secret acceptance for a fiction juxtaposed on a non-fiction and yet they would make the forbidden revelations anyway. Tell them not to and they would confess loudly and openly your hitherto secrets even before you could confess it to your own self.

Words give away, the treacherous cartographers! They would shamelessly plot a map of your vulnerability; leaving it for others to discover and explore. Don’t use them on drawing books. They’d sketch and re-sketch your nakedness in all its ugliness.

Words! Don’t know how to handle them! Such confused creatures! Make them too simple and they would convey your message as a cacophonous crow’s call. Coat them with luxurious vocabulary and instead of glorifying the beauty of your thoughts they would fashionably accentuate your dishonesty and pretentiousness.

Words give away! Oh dear! Don’t trust them! The ultimate occupational hazard! Once you let the valves open there is no emergency button to shut them down. Keep these deceptive creatures away – they have several pathways leading straight to your heart, welcoming everyone, sparing none.

Words give away, the misleaders, the irritating fuckers!  Once the chosen ones hit your head, no synonyms can help you. Replace them with all the fancy syllables you know and yet they would stay out of tune until you use that clichéd set of musical notes that you had meant to avoid all along. Words leave you at odd times! They wouldn’t appropriately describe that amazing moment you had so desperately wanted to capture. And yet they would perfectly document the embarrassment that you resolved to forget permanently.

Words give away, don’t trust these babies and if you can still runaway, RUN! But if you can’t. Then welcome comrade! How have you been? Lie back. What can we do? Let us write a poem together. Don’t let someone else read it though. If you do, we would forever be trapped in the act of differentiating between false appreciation and honest compliment. Nothing would ever be good enough. But nothing can be bad either. Nevertheless, stay here, don’t go! Let’s marvel at the innocence hidden behind their maliciousness instead. Let’s watch them catch our ugly truths with infinite gracefulness. Let’s bloom without wondering about the odd colour combination of our petals. Let’s watch them make way for our idiosyncrasy carefully peeking out from the blanket of our sentences. Let’s swoon to the awkwardness of the lyrics that we just penned down. Let’s dance to the sorrow it conveys. Let’s share the tears at the joy it expresses. Aren’t you amazed by these supernatural abilities? Words give away, the lovers. Once they connect with you, there’s no way to break that bond. Words give away, the interpreters, they would translate the message that can never be spoken or seen. Words give away, the saviors! Even with all their treachery, how do we learn to live without them?

~Musings from the coffee shop

P.S. You can find more posts on the musings from the coffee shop here .

 

 

 

Posted on by saloni 3

A writer’s delight

I would like to pour you on to the phrases of my writings;
Carelessly, till the pages are soaked wet with you,
You might worship me or might not even recall my name,
But I would still endlessly use your metaphors in my poems…
Wrapped (or strangled?) in the loving arms of my words,
I would like to place you together with fragments of my utterly diverse emotions,
A careful blend of imagination and honesty,
And noone could ever guess who you could be (not even you).
And I might succumb to the sanity of senescence,
But I would like to make sure that you never age,
Slowly and steadily as you get drenched in the ink of my pen,
I would like to give you a snippet of my ending life
while I take away your mortality forever and beyond.

Hope you don’t mind.

Posted on by saloni 4