Salvation.

...what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

...and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

- Jack Kerouac

You know you're blessed...

....when you pick up the phone at 2 o'clock at night and your lifeline to sanity is still available.

The night I shut my window to Moonlight

Do the 'right' thing
For the 'right' reason
At the 'right' time

Turn off the moon
Shut down the stars
Stand on the Sun
Feel the darkness within

Do the 'right' thing
For the 'right' reason
At the 'right' time

Draw curtains to the window of dreams
Don't let 'em seep in
Don't breathe life
It's futile

Do the 'right' thing
For the 'right' reason
At the 'right' time

Learn, forget
Love, hate
Find, lose
Smile, cry

Do the 'right' thing
For the 'right' reason
At the 'right' time

Outside,
Dawn was cracking through the long night
Birds chirped amongst autumn leaves
Inside,
The night set in
Forever

...

Did the 'wrong' thing
For the 'wrong' reason
At the 'wrong' time

Believed in history
Believed in the power of music
Believed in the rhythm of heartbeats
Believed in the song.
Believed in destiny

Did the 'wrong' thing
For the 'wrong' reason
At the 'wrong' time

Believed in the mysterious ways of life
Believed in my heart
Believed in love.

You live only once
You love only once

You can't kill me. Anymore.

2 less from 2.

After 22 months of gazing relentlessly at a screen, the world appears shallower than I expected it to be.
I go about the superficial routine like everyone else- wake up...get ready...do some useless-needless-worthless-meaningless work...get back...hog..doze off...wake up...with the occasional 'catching-up' of each others mundane tasks of the day- it all seems to go on so smoothly-barring a few hiccups- here and there. Once in a while, I observe my baby's growth. It's better than the neighbouring rejects from the core of Earth. I am satiated. For the moment.

But...
Was there more to it?
Am I missing something?
Now what?
Is this it?

One fine day, epiphany shall arrive...
But...
It might be too late.
Or may be not.

"Blessings are not only for those who kneel...luckily."

Wrong finger. Right guy. Crazy soul.

ART...

...we all have our own meanings to it.

In between the Loves and the Losses...there's reading.

If you had everything in life, where would you keep it?

Humpty Dumpty was pushed.

Shimla

06/09/08-07/09/08

Beautiful.
Painful.

If they, at CERN, are ever gonna come up with a time machine...then, this is the perfect time for it.
On second thoughts, I wouldn't mind apocalypse now either.

This guys pulled off what no other

actor in bollywood can. Attitude. \m/

A classic case...
Once a riddle, it's now an obvious fact.



And then we gave it a personality and discussed semantics with it.

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'""But `glory' doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected."When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.""The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things.""The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again."They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

Quarter of a century...

Old/wise/young....
The question of the hour is:
Where do we go from here?

Of sunrise & sunset
Of dreaming & waking up
Of li'lle things
Of great events
Of cycles
Of bikes
Of cars
Of pencils
Of pens
Of back to pencils
Of notebooks
Of boards
Of CFTs
Of coughing
Of smoking
Of drinking
Of quitting
Of lies
Of truths
Of lust
Of love
Of hurt
Of love again
Of betrayal
Of adultery
Of being juvenile
Of being adult
Of regrets & letting go
Of submission & rebellion

25 years...of all this and more....
Worth it?
Hell yeah!

One year.

Once upon a time...

Oh how I felt so alive.
The fog would engulf me, and I'd hug it back.

Oh how I felt when it rained.
The light of my life grew brighter with every drop.

Oh how I felt when the Sun glowed.
My eyes would open up and take it all in.

Oh how I felt when I'd hear my favourite song.
I'd smile endlessly and hum along.

After a complete year....of white-ness...

Fog gives sadness.
Rain brings tears.
Sun is shut outside.

And when I hear my song, I fail to remember the lyrics.

I suppose a lot has happened in the past one year.

It’s raining my soul, it’s raining, but it’s raining dead eyes.

-Guillaume Apollinaire

It’s raining my soul, it’s raining, but it’s raining dead eyes.

-Guillaume Apollinaire

The hum. The snip.

Y'day, I had a razor glide through my head. The scariest feeling! What if the guy, on whom I'd bestowed my trust, falls asleep....or what if his hand slips?! Well, scary as that was...The humming sound close to my brain surely made me wonder about how much trust we have in our fellow human beings.

It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings.

I thought I lost you somewhere,
But you were never really ever there at all.

It isn't something new to our ears. Green buildings. Being an Architect, it's a part of everyday conversation. But how much do we actually do? Just following the NBCs is enough? A thousand sq ft of ultimate U-value boasting frit glass panels is enough? It's incredulous how we always tend to work our ways around things, without facing them.

A colleague forwarded this piece to me yesterday. A thorough read and I started second guessing, again, the glass facades, the transformers and DG sets being planned around me for the possibly tallest glass box in Mumbai.

The Effluent Society
Gautam Bhatia

Greening India will demand personal virtue and industry accountability, writes Gautam Bhatia
My sister is a ragpicker in New Jersey. Every evening she sorts the family garbage into designated bins: biodegradables in the green bin — picked up by the municipal truck on Wednesdays, recycled glass in the blue bin, for Thursdays, and all other items for Fridays. After 12 years of the routine she is a natural Greenie. Her counterparts in Delhi have a harder task. Everyday 300,000 ragpickers work overtime, sifting through dumps and massive landfills outside the city, pulling out reusable waste out of maggot-filled slime. In a casteless society in New Jersey such sorting can be accomplished efficiently and without a bruising of social status. But in India, the task does not match a middle class job description. The ineptitude and humiliation of the Delhi operation marks it as one of the many scourges of a ‘modern’ society incapable of parting with its traditional truths (That rag-picking provides employment is another matter). Today, every move up a notch on the social ladder is an ecological step in the wrong direction. For years a mug of water sufficed for the elimination of early morning bodily waste. The toilet roll dispenser was a decorative English anomaly. Today it is filled regularly with 230 yards of soft tissue culled from an Uttarakhand forest. In a middle-class house five air-conditioners hum to the tune of eight kilowatts of power — enough juice to light two villages. A driver picks up a fifteen rupee loaf of bread by driving a 3000 cc Pajero to the local market, using up two litres of fossil fuel that took three million years to form deep below the earth crust.
In places around the world a consciousness of environment is prompting many cities into ecologically friendly measures. In Copenhagan, with cycles available for free, most Copenhageners happily choose the non-polluting option. An ingenious system of cycle tracks grids the entire town, connecting every major landmark and district. You merely feed 10-kroner into a public cycle slot machine, and the 2-wheeler is yours for the day. Ride around the city, gliding along waterways, through parks, into shopping districts, and when you’ve had enough, just return the cycle to a nearby cycle lot and get your 10-kroner back. No charge. In the morning while Indian roads create a gridlock of stationary traffic in rush hour, a business executive in Copenhagan is cycling along a duck pond on his way to office.
Naturally, in a country with a per capita income less than the US per capita expenditure on cola, it is hard to justify a lifestyle change on ecological grounds. The Indian city may be overrun by cars, but no respectable Indian is about to give up his shiny piece of metal, just because the five tons of carbon dioxide it produces every year, is the indirect cause of his daughter’s asthma, his son’s eye infection. Having spent a lifetime of savings on the car, a bicycle substitute is a slur on his roadmap to success.
A recent estimate on global energy distribution stated that 40 per cent of the world’s energy is consumed by buildings — both for construction and subsequent use. An alarming statistic such as this should be enough to get the government to adopt a rational policy on green architecture. Yet little effort is being made in that direction. Many recent buildings follow Western models of ‘green architecture’ and make perfunctory overtures to ecology. An adaptation of American standards of ‘greenness’ in India is as good as using the American family as a reliable benchmark for world consumption.
A recent Gurgaon structure cited as India’s first intelligent building is a case in point: Its makers call it intelligent user-friendly architecture. Shining grey, with so much glass exposed to the noon-day sun, the structure could be anywhere - New York, Lima or Manila. Built of materials imported from Italy and erected with American and French technologies under South Korean supervision it is truly global architecture; even though eight times more expensive than the most expensive building in India, its sheer glassiness is impressive. As I neared the entrance one evening, a remote sensor detected my approach and alerted the mechanism in the glass door, connected to the Electronic Identification and Control Center (EICC) that I should be allowed to pass. Sure enough, the plate glass opened and let me in. An e-device and central command panel (CCP), worth Rs 46 lakh had eliminated the need for a Haryanvi guard at Rs 5000 per month. Inside the lobby, as soon as I stopped near the lift, light flooded in all around. And I heard the white noise of six lifts racing down to
pick me up. Activated again by floor sensors, the complicated circuitry, costing some 28 lakhs, was worth it because it defrayed the cost of a 60 watt bulb of light left on throughout the night, and paid for itself in a mere 1200 years. Upstairs, I was in for more surprises. I was told that the double-glass wall had micro-louvers and heat sensors inserted in the glass. At the ridiculously low cost of 2.8 crore. On hot-days, the entire south wall was thus protected without any expenditure of human energy. Outside, on the road below, virtually free human energy floated around and left me wondering how Mahatma Gandhi’s mud house in Wardha would
stand up to such sophistication. Would it even qualify as green architecture?
The issue about who owns the air, the forests, the rivers and the glaciers is now beyond the scope of national boundaries. A dam in southern China can cause flooding in India. A brown haze over south-east Asia affects plant life in the Himalayas. Every time a tsunami hits the coast of Indonesia, I know it is the result of my own wasteful middle-class habits. If only I had not used an aerosol deodorant that morning, many lives would have been saved in Jogjakarta. Every time a cyclone hits Bangladesh and leaves a million homeless, I am filled with guilt. Could it be the consequence of the Freon gas released into the sky by the new Samsung fridge in the study, that saves a 20 foot walk to the kitchen fridge for a cold beer?
India’s protests that regulations to curb climate change are first the responsibility of the West ring hollow when viewed in the larger context of a carbon-free world. The idea of taking action only after we have reached an American level of consumption and pollution is as farcical as allowing a bank robber to completely empty the vault before making the arrest. A 10 per cent growth rate can hardly be a matter of national pride when the country’s rivers, air, and cities are some of the most polluted in the world, and lifestyle indices all place India at the bottom of the list. An altered way of life can only be a small part of the solution. However, an imaginative policy can transfer ecological accountability where it hurts least: amongst the high profit businesses and industrial houses, who are the cause of climate change in the first place. Expenses for waste water treatment, fumigation of industrial and vehicular pollutants, and the management of garbage should be the primary duty of those who manufacture cars, trucks, plastics, rubber products etc., and not merely the job of the irresponsible end user. Without the active participation of people who create - and enjoy the benefits of — India’s 10 per cent GDP, the green revolution will remain a hokey and unattainable ideal, and a mere talking point of international seminars.

I reside in this clogged coccoon, wishing in vain to break free. Meanwhile, His brush paints the sky violet. Greens rejoice; I curse the spoil of my leather.

"..and sometimes my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep."

"Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears"

Euthanasia

The tiny li'le person at the bottom left reminds me of someone.

Sun slipped itself behind the clouds...

Inside, the plot lines dissolve
Glued to their coffee windows

Outside, dews drop off
Smell of first wash down

Never more unwelcome
The silver lining.

The Window

Many a times, I've looked outside this window and wondered like a zonked out pigeon...How on Earth did I get here? What's the way out? Do I need to find it or it'd show itself to me? The answer comes floating upto me like a cloud and disintegrates itself right before I can make it steady enough to let my retina's focus. There are days when I'm closer to it, and there are days when I couldn't be further away. But amongst all this fluctuation, catching and dropping, there remains a constant - this window.

The beauty is...I've willed it to happen.
The beast is...I'm responsible for it.

Sabka Katega

In the seemingly long gone college life I was introduced to the song "sutta na mila" (Zeest). It fit. And so, we chanted the song day and night. And then one fine day, an erstwhile friend introduced "sabka katega"(bodhiTree) in the same flame. I was dumbstruck by the perpetual truth embellished in this gem of a song. As far as I was concerned, bodhiTree had reached the state of highest enlightenment possible for human kind. As I sit here on my desk, I'm yet again reminded of the eternal truth of life -

Sabka Katega...

Din kate na raat...
what brought us together,
might remain unspoken,
what held us together,
might be worn off and broken,
Even if your wave was different,
as I felt was mine,
Now I want our paths to cross,
waiting for my time...
Din kate na raat kate
na subah kate na shaam
dhoop hate na chav hate
na gum hate na jaam
Dekho sabka katega,
sabka katega raam
yuhin katta rahega,
sabka katega raam
teri yaadon main kalki rain bitai thi
meri aankhon main phir se aas bhar aayi thi
shaakon se phoolon toote,
raahon main jiskedil dooba,
namm hua pyaar main uske
pyaar ghate na yaad bade,
yaad bade har saans
pyas main teri jaane kitne kaat chuka main jaam
jaise sabka katega,
sabka katega yaar
phir se subah hogi,
kabhi to tere dar par
phir se tere mann main,
hum rahe har pal
kya hua jo jhooth kaha ki mujhe na tumse pyar
maan bhi jao kat jayega pyar main jeevan yaar
jaisa sabka katega,
sabka katega yaar

So rememeber, you are not alone, sabka katega ;)

Just another day in the life of an Architect...

We think we are invincible.
We are not.

...the sound of my life being sucked into a shrieking vortex of boredom.

Weekend approacheth.

Dear Alice,

I believe it's inhumane to chain you. Your disembodied spirit is no longer required in these premises. With all due respect, please pack up and leave.

Thanks & Regards,
Tamed soul.

Shabbash

Akhir kiski daad du main....
Teri faramoshi ki ya phir apni khamoshi ki?

This day, that year....

It was about this time two years ago that I befriended a person whom I knew would dissolve into time. Crooked sense of humour, photogenic eyes and an infectious laughter. Perfect. But well, guess what...didn't last. And being me, I let it sink into oblivion. Until yesterday when an upheaval in the mildest of senses resurfaced a few patches of 'this day-that year'.

The song of waves, crashing against rocks, echo in my ears from hundreds of miles away. I'd like to believe that the nostalgia ends here.

It has been over one and a half years and its still brand new.

...

I carry your heart with me
(I carry it in my heart)
I am never without it
(anywhere i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate
(for you are my fate,my sweet)
i want no world
(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;
which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-E.E.Cummings

Gloomydum

Overcast sky.

It's cold inside.

Drake whispers in my ears.

Suicide is painless.

Well.....

The gun didn't work.

White

A 7 storeyed glass building with stone cladding here and there, a vain attempt to make it look aesthetically pleasant. Sorry state of 'landscape' around it. Smoking area near the fountain where the Sun makes it difficult to even walk through to stub your ciggie. Orientation was definitely looked after. "Face the main road. Let the Solar factor go to hell. The client will bear the AC load. What's there!" This seemed to be the mantra while designing this, and to that matter all the buildings these days. My office, on the fourth floor overlooks the grand bare Aravali range and another mishap of a building. Oh! and I overlooked another teeny detail, this is the firm that designed this building as well as the other monstrosity I see from my window. And I wouldn't even bother about the interiors of this skull, there's nothing to talk about. It's well...nothing except monochrome. White walls, white ceiling, white window rollers, white sheets, ash stained furniture, dull green chairs, dull green-white-carpet, white and green files, white displays.....possessed by white. The tiny splashes of colour that tried to make there way inside were strangled and thrown on the dead floor of the corridor outside. They were probably wiped out by the guy whose only ambition is to walk to and fro in the corridor with a floor mop. Even on a working saturday, when only our office is devoted enough to come and pretend to work, and the footfall in the corridor goes to around one an hour, he goes around with the same devotion. He's my inspiration to drag on. One fine day, I'll see his face underneath his weary cap and ask him about the secret of life...but till that day, I come and I go. And the white clocks on the white wall tick away the times of people's lives in New York, London and New Delhi.

4 days into the new year...

...Woke up this mornin', got myself a gun.