A Bowl of Elusive

Death has a strange finality about it. It's extra-ordinary. You die and you just cease to exist. You may leave behind a few people to mourn for you if you're lucky. But soon, even they will move on with their lives. You'll just stay behind as a fond memory and a bunch of old pictures. My father died on the 8th of March, 2000. Before his death, he was the only parent I had had for over seven years. But life moved on. I was 10 when my father breathed for the last time. But I couldn't shed a tear. There was just too much crying around me. Amidst all the mourning, I was trying to cope with the fact that my hero was dead. He had literally been the strongest person I knew, both physically and mentally. And he just succumbed to an illness and nobody could do anything about it. Fifteen years later, I don't know whether any of his friends still think about him. I am not even sure whether anyone really knew him during his lifetime. But I did. And today, I...

So, those of you who knew me between 2001 and 2007 must remember what I was like. I was very talkative, often ended up being the brunt of all jokes and frankly didn't give a shit about that. Well, happy days! And if you haven't actually interacted with me since then, you might have a hard time getting used to me now. I don't talk as much. Even though I often say this, it's not true that I ran out of things to say as I grew up. I just ran out of the energy to speak up about the things I had in mind. Now I don't know whether my peers can relate to this or not. Frankly many of my friends actually found their voices as they matured. I, on the other hand, lost mine. After a long hard week, it's Sunday again. So I guess it is time for some soul searching. At 7AM in the morning, here I am, awake and worrying about how I am gonna get through the week ahead. That's my life now. Anyway, where was I? So, I was telling you about how I lost my voice. ...

Jay & Sunayana were high school sweethearts. Were. They live two very different lives now. Jay is now an average young man who has forgotten how it was to be in love. Sunayana has disappeared from the social media front altogether. Jay is not able to trace her on FB and any of her tweets or blogs that he did find were almost a year old. So, not much scope for online stalking. As he swiped through a bunch of profiles of people named Sunayana, Jay asked himself why was he looking for her after all this time. Maybe because he could no longer visualize her smile when he closed his eyes. Or maybe because the other day, no matter how hard he tried, he failed to recall how her voice sounded, the voice that once was fuel to his imagination. It was all fading now and he was fighting to bring it back. Hence, there he was, out looking for a profile picture to remember her by. But he couldn't find one. It's funny that he was feeling like he had lost her, now that he couldn...

Around the year 2011, I suddenly realized that I was a grown up. My last year of college was coming to an end and I had to find a job and start earning soon. It was all becoming very real very fast. College had been a hell of a ride. Not all good (like I have told you earlier) but not all bad either. And soon, I was immersed in another life and never looked back. Not until recently, when a fellow mate from the first year of college accused me of having played a pivotal role in making his college experience traumatic. His message read: "May God forgive you for all the bad that you did to me during our stay at Goa." This got me thinking. As far as I remembered, this was a scrawny little fellow who was bullied very often due to his small size and a knack of getting on people's nerves with his weird behavior. I myself was victimized very often in college and with so much shit of my own to deal with, I never stopped to consider how this guy must be feeling about wh...

Praveer (left), Anjaneya (right) & I: Goofing Around at Miramar, Aug, 2010 There was this group of boys and girls in my college who ruled the scene. They were pretty or rich or both. And I guess some of them were smart as well. If you're having a problem identifying them, these were the guys who still post sepia-filtered pictures on Instagram showing a group of them at some shack in Candolim, sipping wine and cocktails, looking pretty. I think you got who I am talking about. And then there were the "other guys". They were not all that rich or pretty but they had the advantage of numbers. They hailed from in and around the state and they stuck together. They would only speak in their mother-tongue and when in groups, loved to bully people around. They would create fake profiles on Facebook to talk shit about the creamy layer guys, the ones I mentioned in the first paragraph. And then were the other other guys, guys like me. Guys who didn't really fit ...

If you have read my earlier posts, you'd know that I have a rather liberated view about everything sexual. A certain friend and I have had quite a few heated arguments on this matter. She thinks that I advocate perversion in the name of an open mind. But I beg to differ. I just shun the misguidance that is propagated by our culture. I am writing this article after the government's recent attempted ban on porn. A lot has been said about that online, so I will not put up my views on that matter. Instead, I will talk about sex in general and the way our society looks at it. Right from an early age, we are directly or indirectly taught to think of anything related to sex as "bad/immoral". This, actually is the root of all evil, come to think of it. For instance, when you are asked to stay off junk food, that's when you crave it the most. The same applies to almost everything else. The only difference is that junk food is definitely harmful for us whereas sex i...

There are times when I absolutely loathe myself. But then that can be said about any of us, right? Actually I have often found myself being a bad guy. Its not something I do wilfully. I just do. I have a healthy moral compass most of the time, but more often than not, it turns itself off. I do things that are bad and I don't even regret doing them. I just muse about what I did and analyse it like I am doing currently. Another side of it is the fact that I can make incredibly sudden and unpredictable decisions that are borderline illogical even. And then I am forced to live with the consequences. Anyways, to counter it all, I try being good as much as I can. I kinda believe that my mind perceives my life as utterly boring and hence forces me into one crisis or the other so that it keeps getting the exercise that it needs trying to save my ass from the problem it got me into. A bit complicated, ain't it? But that's how life is. At least my life is that way...