And who gets the blame ? ...

Fresh out of college. Young. Youthful. Inexperienced. Immature. Curious. Not enough adjectives can define what we were, on that 17th day of July 2005. Oh we were scared alright. We were scared of what happens next. The 72 of us. But we did not let one percent of that emotion, on our faces. We thought we were men, and men arent scared. To be honest, we really werent that scared of the future. We were scared of tears. Tears that might just start dripping. We could not let that happen. We did not let that happen.

Its been five years now. Thats a lot of time. Out of the 72, some have been victim to the system. The rest of us, we are still here. Throughout this time, we have lived together. We know what we are made of. What defines us. We know each others likes. We know each others choices. Much like brothers, to be fair. We have seen each other cry and we have seen each other be joyous. We have seen each others as brothers. We have lived together, like brothers.

After all this time, I dont blame anyone at all. The distances that have been etched, are as much as fault mine as theirs. They have loved me their full share, and I have tried to do the same. Magar hamara qasoor nahe hai na. Hum bachay gaye thay, bilkul bachay. What ever moralities of the outside world we know, we were taught in the outside world. No preparatory lectures, no field exercises. Direct experience.

Who gets the blame ? 

We dont belong to flashy groups of friends. What little friends we had, are mere obligations now. We are each others friends now. Very rarely we regret not knowing the norms of friendship. As how the culture prevails. We mess up. We fall. Because we were programmed for one purpose and one purpose only. And we serve that purpose and we feel honored to be doing it. This is the only cover up we have, the only hope that drives us.

After all being said and done. Given the opportunity to go back in time. I would not change ONE thing about this life. The lessons that have been taught by this brotherhood, are ones unknown by many.

To 05-A.

To all 5 of you...

Heh. To ALL five of my valued FOLLOWERS. 


                                  I wont be posting anything. For at least a week now. My internet USB wants to be fed with 1200Rs worth of cards. And right now, if I BUY 1200Rs worth of cards, Id rather eat them myself. :) Any how, as a thought, Ill leave you to this song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W10igWYKi-k


                                  Stay in shades of blue. Till the next time. 

                                 

The air has changed.....

Yes !  The air definitely has changed. Change can be good or bad. But that depends on how you perceive it. What angle are you looking from. What picture you paint of it. Its good if you can bend around it. Its better if you can bend with it. 


Change can be of different variables. Sometimes it happens that things change, and you dont even notice it. Until you come to that moment when you realize, that SHIT, things have changed. And then you can either accept it, or try to undo it. Either ways it is there to stay. And acceptance is the only thoroughfare.


I have experienced a lot of change throughout this year. Ive been in places I never wanted to be in. Ive gone through phases, previously thought of as impossible. It has given me a lot to write about, and a lot more to think about. 


This year started with exams. I was at the hiatus of falling in love, so yeah, didnt care about them. Life was okay. The changes were accepted. Mostly because I had made them myself. I liked the changes, they didnt bother me. The extra puff of that perfume, the extra shopping of new clothes. The new songs I'd figure out tabs of, the new confidence I had in me. It was change and I had made it. I had made it and I thought that its permanent. The hard part is when it comes undone. How to undo the PERMANENT changes..... ? What to revert back to ? How to revert back ..... ? You are pretty much left out on a limb. Cant figure out anything..... and you are just stuck out there.....


The first irregularity I woke up to, was a medical practitioner administering a catheter. TO ME. For those of you who dont actually know, what THAT is, its a device, that .... uhh..... helps disabled people, pee in their beds, without wetting themselves. And YES, its THAT painful. The pain broke up my 7 hour unconsciousness  and WHAT a way to do it. I woke up screaming, covered in blood, tasting sand in my mouth, coughing out dirt, not feeling most of my body, feeling TORTUROUS pain where i could FEEL anything. Now this was a change hard to down. I was sleeping in the back seat of a friends car, and woke up 7 hours later at a hospital. I thank Allah mian, day in and out, that His Kindness was the reason im still here.... 


It was a change from what I had made life of. It was hard to accept. It difficult to not to be able to sit up straight or walk or eat from your mouth...... but then you adapt. You find ways to make it convenient. Because you accept its reality. You accept the change.


One day you find the changes that you've made, have been undone by some other person. They could not have OR maybe they could have prevented it from changing SO abruptly, but shit in your life has changed on someone else's discretion. And they dont seem to give a rats ass about what happens to you. Whether you accept the change or be defeated by it. And they stop caring, JUST like that. That is how change comes undone. That is EXACTLY how it happens. And this is exactly why you should be ready enough, and you should be rolling with the punches. I got socked in the eye. Apparently, I cant be a good boxer. :)


Time heals everything. Time and timely events. Slowly , the regenerative animals that we are, we start regenerating the life before we changed. So in essence , we are changing the CHANGE, by breaking its little tiny pieces and throwing them away. And that is how you heal. You bleed, you clot, you remove the clot. Good as new. Its slow, it takes time. Necessary time. 


What about when you actually manage to come to the first peg ? Well, mostly you cant undo the change completely. Some parts of the change stick forever, just to keep reminding you where youve been. What you did, what you didnt. Its just check and balance. It keeps you in check and balances the oddities. 


And then it happens. The air changes. You can feel the air change. Taste it on your palate. See it form around you. The air starts to change, and compels you to come with it. It can be a new pet, a new friend. Old friends, older pets. It can be anything. It can be coffee in the winter, It can be acting silly on text messages. It can be lassi, on a hot day. It can be Table Tennis on a rainy day. It can be a new interest, or the lack of it. It can be color. Red or a pale fading red. It can be from A and it can be from Z. It can be pretty much anything. But it exists. It shows your ability to accept whatever happens. To come beyond whatever happens. It shows you being human. It shows hope.


Change is inevitable. Acceptance is not. You have to learn to accept. Denial will only get you so far.


For me, the air has changed people. It has definitely changed......

Its time Salman.....

Most of you, at least my facebook friends, might have already seen this. This actually is a note that I wrote a couple of months back. Ive decided to publish it on my BLOG since,......... now i have a BLOG. :) . Ive not claimed this to have happened, and neither do I deny its existence. It happened and it didnt. I wanted to portray TIME and how the situation dictates emotion. Having gone through experiences, I have tried to jot down the feelings to as much accuracy as possible. Have fun reading.


TIME. Time is a weird thing. Sometimes you are on top of the world, living like a king, happy like a kid on his birthday, EVERYDAY..... and sometimes you are in a position where everything seems wrong with you, everything is falling apart. The thing common with both scenarios is TIME. This story is about “TIME”. It may or may not be true, depends on perspective. If you manage to read it completely and get NOTHING out of it, I apologize. It’s just me, a keyboard and my projection of time. A time when it hurts. This is a story, a piece of fiction. A figment of my imagination. Whether you believe it or not.

It was a night. Nothing different about this night. Nothing that could be termed as ABNORMAL. Normal lingered since earlier that day. Work was normal, so was the coffee break. The sandwiches were stale;  that too is normal. The evening was normal; the sun had shied away from the night just at the right, normal, time. The power failure was in time, again the NORMAL thing about today. I had to be somewhere. Not out of obligation, or commitment, but out of sheer WANT. I WANTED to be there. It was her last day in my city. She would fly off to a newer life from tomorrow. I had to see her like I used to, at some expensive restaurant. In the mellow yet compelling light. It would be the last time in both of our lives. After that, we could be dead and it wouldn’t have mattered to either of us. 

She declined dinner. Over the last five weeks, she had become quite the GENERAL. Quick to decide and FIRM to follow. Her declining meant nothing else. Still I knew there lies a special place, in the heart of every FEELING human, that if pinched at the right interval, can lead to a desired outcome. My wish was just to see her like old times. Something to hold on to for the coming lone days of my life. It worked, she agreed on coffee, late at night. She would have dinner with her group of rather ritzy and fashionable friends, and later that evening would invite me over for coffee. I was neither ritzy or fashionable, but I knew how to handle that kind. Not digressing from the subject, I reached there.

This local Cafe is THE place to eat, if you are even mildly HIP. People of all ages and groups come here to eat their rather average food, and feel important. They call it a SPORTS cafe, which is rather ironic, since there’s nothing SPORTY in hanging pictures of football clubs and airing matches. I always have disliked this place, not because of the food, not because of their decor, NOT because of the people who come in here, BUT because of the huge amounts of arrogance in the air. At 12:30, I received a text message. "Come to le grand" it said. I was waiting outside, beside her friends car. Somehow I knew they'd be here. With a heavy heart I entered.

There she was. Sitting at the table just under the stairwell. I saw her, but she didn’t see me. She is pretty, and she knows it. This could lead to problems, had I not been subliminally submissive by nature. I strolled towards their table, in a natural gait. After exchange of curt greetings, we all managed to smile at each other. The smile that we all had, was clearly hiding a hatchet at the back. Shrugging off the weird thoughts, I engaged her in mild conversation. Food was ordered since they hadnt eaten, and by virtue of my luck, I got invited to a DINNER. I did not order anything. Just a fresh lime and 7up. Extra lemons. Life had already given me abundant lemons, of which I had failed to make lemonade of, and thus chose to drown my failure with this fresh lime and 7up.

We chit chatted. Her friends got busy with their own discussion, detecting the tension in between me and her. Sensing an open field, I asked her some things. Some personal things. Would she miss me ? Is this your final call? Any regret you hold? Can I still do anything? Questions of such nature, which she shrugged off very nonchalantly. I had felt like a drowning man, running out of air and the thought of the TIME approaching to actually say "goodbye", pulled me under with a stronger force, and an abrupt jerk. I had thought about it, I wanted to get it over with, but I still couldn’t comprehend it. I never wanted it to happen, but it HAD to happen, and I was having trouble coming to peace with it. Tears rolled down her face, leaving a trail of her mascara. She was a girl after all. This couldn’t be any easier on her too, I thought. The next 15 minutes or so were different. We smiled, laughed, held hands, and thought about our wicked times. Again it brought us to a period of silent disbelief. How could we end up here? We thought we had achieved PERFECTION. But still we were here, saying goodbye for life.

The waiter brought the change. Expecting a heavy tip from the ladies. His expectations were justified. The ladies in their casual attire had ordered expensive dishes and ate just portions of it. People who do that can tip heavily. And they did. We got up. Exited the smoke filled yet populous establishment. It was 2 am. She was quick to get in the car. It was in these last seconds, I realized how much I had loved her. Even in these dying moments I couldn’t help but melt at her smile. She was over me, I could tell, but as far as I am concerned, a part of me was still her hero. I could not think of words, or devise a plan that could set things straight just at that VERY moment. I was thinking hard, my mind ticking, should I beg her again? just this once ? No. But she can listen to reason cant she? ......... A silent voice in the back kept saying a firm "no" to all of my thoughts. At last, the time had come......the car started without a flaw. She smiled, albeit having mascara trailing tears rolling down that chin of hers. She smiled and waved at me.

I waved back. I waved back goodbye to everything NORMAL in my world. I waved back, with a heavy heart, tears, and slumped shoulders, to the person I had believed to be an angel. I waved her goodbye for the very last time, forever..... For eternity. It was TIME to leave......

Eid for some of us....

This is my first ever post as a "blogger". I assumed that title myself since the queen was busy with some petty issue. Im sure she wont mind. :)

Bakra Eid : Eid-Al-Azha. .....As a child it was a day me and my siblings would wait for, VERY impatiently. The suplex performed on that goat, the sleeper hold in place, the shower of blood. It was adrenaline which drove us to parks far far away , to witness such awesome acts of the hero. The hero we call Qasai. We would run off in our new Eid clothes, our mama shouting at us to change. Running hard, we would laugh at ourselves. Our boisterousness. Our valor. Our courage in disregarding the boss. Even though, it was the heightened sense of love that let us off, we thought we had grown enough to tread on our own ways. I would watch countless goats being slaughtered, numerous bulls being conquered, but what i could not watch, was my own Bakra being brought down. That was a sight that i could not watch without feeling a tinge at my own throat. It was not unnatural. It was just human.

Those were the days when this Eid was BAKRA eid. We werent responsible for anything except our runny noses, and scarred knees. Oh I miss those days alright. The ultimate goal of the day was to watch the biggest bull, being wrestled down to the ground and get cut up. That thick red gush would scare the hell out of us, yet our excitement would reach the sky. How we'd wish that one of them got loose. What a sight would that be. We would be heroes in our class. Being witness to such a myth would definitely boost our " cool " rating. But that never happened. The shared stories were reduced to the normal take down, cutting up, hissing wind pipes, jerky legs, the huge skull and the skinning.

Over the years the EID has transformed. I , along with my brothers, started losing interest in the extravaganza that we so dearly indulged in. It was more of a drag. Every goat bled the same, and every shower spewing blood from a bulls neck threw the same red blood, almost the same distance far. It was barely exciting anymore. Slowly it became just a holiday. A holiday when the rest of the city is busy dirtying the roads with bony carcasses and bulging cow stomachs.

The reason for the above rant, is that, THIS time around, I wasnt at home for Eid. I was at duty. Being away for the first time, i hadnt imagined how different it would be and how weird Id actually feel. After prayers, not finding Usman at my right made me uneasy. Not finding my father threw off that nostalgia wagon. It picked up pace when I reached this empty, hollow and cold duty room. I had actually started to MISS Bakra Eid. I could not down this information, untill i had the urge to go see someones bull get slaughtered. Now people, this urge was not like the urge to pick the cherry off a cake, THIS was different. I had to go, otherwise i started feeling suffocated, out of element. I hadnt imagined this happening and mostly hadnt anticipated it. But I realized. Eid-Al-Azha, has its main theme, the slaughtering of animal in His Way, but a slight digression as well. It binds us. As a family. As a son, a brother, a sister or a friend. Its not eid if its without them. No matter how many goats you slaughter, or watch getting slaughtered. Its just not Eid if its without them.

I missed them today. I missed not listening to mama. Fighting with ushi. Beating up hasni. Loving sherry. Mostly, I missed helping my father, today.

Eid Mubarak you all.