My echo, My shadow and Me...

It's the talk of the office now. We are uneasy, working under the ever-inspecting eyes of the cameras installed at the corners of the office floors. Bloody intruders! “What they are trying to convey?" "Simply that you are under scanner. So you are to ensure that you are maintaining the decorum of the office." "But was that not the way things were going in the office before? I have never heard some one doing something unwarranted in the office space." "Why have you forgotten that walls elevators were converted to graffiti boards?" "Some one with a freaky mind must have done that but that does not mean that you will indict every one for that incident." "Why do not you just ignore them? If you are doing nothing that is questionable, why should you bother about those cameras? You will just get familiar to it in a few days." Logically it's true. Unless you are not wrong, you need not worry about the laws and restrictions. But ho...

I thought it was a crazy idea of a crazy man . But after surfing the site for a while, insanity got induced into me perhaps, as I decided to be the 7008th wacky in the network. After some time I found myself with the addresses of five wired fellows mailed to me by the site. Now it was for me to leave the comforts of the virtual world and perform the analogue part, mailing introductory postcards to "the first five". And there I was at the nearby post office enquiring how to send a postcard to an overseas destination. The elderly postman engrossed in assortment of the collected mails gave up task at hand to have a look at the enquirer. "Where are you sending them to?" "Brazil, Portugal, Finland and...," I tried to recall the location of the rest two. "We do not have official international postcards. But you can go for some picture postcards. You'll get them in a stationary shop. You will have to stick stamps of Rupees eight each," he resumed h...

A day's off, after six days of rigorous sameness at work. On the workday that follows (for me usually a Wednesday), you tend to be more receptive to the impulses from the surroundings. I find it difficult to stop myself from going into an imaginative mood, when the bus heading to my work place moves smoothly on the Diplomatic Avenue, embassies and high commissions of various countries on both sides of the road still in sleep. You have options, how you want to utilise the time, rather than sitting idle on the moving vehicle and reassuring yourself the authenticity of Newton's laws of inertia , inertia of rest and motion. You can try to remember the National flags of different countries. You read the name of the embassy on the gate and jump eyes to the flag on top of the building. I believe the subconscious mind will record the two in two related memory cells in your brain. Remembering them will not help much in living your life. But it can save you from many embarrassing situati...

I was trying to go through the daily paper while minimising the shaking produced by the uneven movement of the bus. It's a difficult process but you tend to master things with a little practice...that is specially so when a headline like this catches your imagination... "Removing A Single Gene Turns Rodent Into Fearless Explorer, Top-Notch Team Finds"... This discovery may well prove applicable to humans, the report added... So in near future we can expect this revelation to lead us to some gene therapy that will put the word fear and its synonyms "no more in use", showing them way to "museum of words". But that's not so simple; cells in the "left" hemisphere of my brain contradicted the "right". Just imagine, the therapy becoming a reality. No doubt it will be a costly affair, affordable only to the privileged ones of the society. As a result in a few days there will be segregated between the "fearless rich" and ...

It's long time since I have visited a library...in fact the hustle and bustles of life have almost sucked out of me the power of continuous reading. Now I hardly read more than a page at a stretch. I have got the habit of looking for the five W's and one H in everything I read and get irritated when these are not in the first paragraph. So, rather than reading books now I try to content myself by reading reviews and excerpts...at times you too can try this...for example, here's a line excerpted from Silent Extras by Arnon Grunberg "...I had my whole life ahead of me, and there was nothing to do about it..." I have no idea what led the writer (character!) to this point. But I think Grunberg will have nothing to object if I use my I-drive (imagination drive) to fill the dots at the beginning and the end of the sentence. Of course he will be happy if, in this process, I can amass enough momentum to get out of the "inertia of rest" and turn to the book to k...

Reuters reported from Rome, "A stunned Italian actor had to stub out the cigarette he had lit up on stage after a spectator complained, forcing the theater to change the script of an Arthur Miller play to make it smoke-free...After a 15-minute suspension, the performance resumed with a modified script and a non-smoking protagonist." The report also said Italy has banned lighting up in all enclosed public places since January this year. Just reminded me of the odd scene that arrised the day before when I suggested two of my fellow passengers to stop smoking inside the public bus we were travelling. One of them threw the cigerrate with a polite sorry, but the other, rather young energetic and arrogant defiyed saying I can get down from the bus if I was having problem. When I reminded him the law that prohibits smoking on public places, there were dozens of his collegemates to laugh at me. " Look who's talking". I was the only one that have a problem with smoking i...

What do you do when you find yourself at an impasse? How do you get out of it? Once I read somewhere, one's mind waves usually do not get stuck when on the move. So the best way, it said was to keep moving. I too have experienced it while travelling by train. The objects running on the opposite direction keeps your thoughts moving. If you are moving alone and your compartment mates are not disturbing much then you can rewind and forward your life many times on a train journey, without the danger of getting caught on the odds. But to apply this hypothesis in your day to day life you need a little free space, with minimum obstacle. Because unlike the train, you will not be moving on an assigned track and you will be thinking. That's something rare in cities. I found an alternative to it. Taking up some thing that can be done with less of thinking...rearranging the room...Slowly I clean things with a duster while working on the bottleneck in the mind on the background. The physic...

I have reported many deaths but I was never so close to it. Just fractions of a second and I escaped (!) (yet I have no reason for rejoicing the fact...) It's early winter here in Delhi. As usual I have to force myself out of warmth of the blanket, for the day's work. After I crossed the busy (somewhat) heart of the city, Connught Place , the traffic became scanty and slow moving. By the time we reached the wide streets passing through the head quarters of the Ministry of Defence, the bus was nearly empty with only two of us as passengers. Bus passing through the sunrays sneaking in through the leaves of the trees covering both sides the of the street, the FM radio playing recent chartbuster Hindi song, defence personnels rushing in clusters on the foot path... I was trying to enhance enjoyment by adding some more colours to the milieu with the brushes of my imagination. I was brought back to realities when the bus came to a sudden halt. The driver and his assistant tried to re...

It's one in the night now. Elvis is doing Jailhouse Rock on MTV...It must be colder outside. Standing on my third floor balcony one can have a dominant view of the front lane bellow. I love it. Everything looks smaller than what they are. You can feel superior (!)... The locality (cluster of reinforced concrete structures) is in deep sleep now, except for the milkman at the end of the lane, preparing for his next morning. I can see him (appearing to be a dark point, from where I am standing) moving in and out of his shop and hear the him washing the huge milk containers. Tomorrow sharp at 6 in the morning, I'll find him at the window with a smile (which will force me to smile back at him). I can never think of maintaining a smile like that with mere three hours of sleep. Has he got any sleep concentrate? The night watch man made his entry from behind the darkness on the other end of the lane (you can call it a corridor), striking the asphalt road with his long wooden stick. Mus...

I have had never heard my parents expressing reservations against the fact that one in my core group at the school was a Muslim. That hardly mattered in the affair of the "Group of Five" in my class of which I was a member. We never had to bother about the differences of being Hindus and Muslims except for when we studied them in the class books. But even than have had no idea how my parents, especially Maa (we call mother as), would react to Alam's presence in our house. But will she accept the fact that I invited Aalam too to my house? It's something never happened. At least to my knowledge, never one from the Muslim community paid a visit to our family before this (even though there were no restrictions in our locality). But numerous stories I have read in the news papers and magazines about people from a community treating visitors from the other communities in ways different from the normal were just striking me. Adding to my anxiety was the humiliation I had pas...