Dilli Delirium

Crossing past the India Gate, lit up like a bride. Late at night. Time to kill.. for the first time ever.

Stepping out of a car and actually going near the monument after sundown. When I was running through the picture in the car, drowsy and content.. with my father right next to me, lost in his own ruminations of life. And I, not a care in the world, but still as worrysome, little lines furrowed my forehead, but meant nothing more than simple everyday observance from the window. Ah, windows. What is life without them. Just where it’s nice.. not out there and not inside.

 Those precious moments of dependence. Of being taken care of. The slightly warm breeze lulled me into a broken sleep. Passing by lamp-post after lamp-post and one huge bungalow after another. The soft light from the streetlamps were a favourite kind of lighting for my screenplayed dreams.

And my mind hurried to a guy running the length of one empty road after another, rid of people, skidding on turns and crossing roads. While dogs wandering along lonely roads turned towards him and stared wonderingly with their huge puppy dog eyes.

The scene was being played in my mind without loop, unending. Vivid and lucid. The guy running down an empty road. Panting and sweating, he needed to get somewhere as soon as possible. He looked about nineteen.  Beethoven played amazingly in the background and the rustle of the trees, it sang a song of longing.

And he crosses the distance, reaches India Gate and in utter loneliness falls to his knees. And he looks up, I see his back dark, contrasted against the magnificent golden bokeh of the great monument. No reason of rhyme can I see in this expect the sheer poetry.

And I am awoken by screeches and car noises. These beasts of metal and rubber. I sigh and feel the dull pain in my neck which I’m so used to, sleeping there awkwardly. What was I thinking. Oh, yes, of course.

And we get there and park a long way away. Nizamuddin’s not far. A walk around the Gate and we’ll be on our way home. I step out and turn to look. And the place is populated like it was a month of Sundays and holidays packed into one night.

Those little people look devilish from out here. Wait, devilish? My mind is still in the Secret Dreams mode. But they are there. Devil’s horns alight on almost every head. Well, look at that. I’ve seen these before but not so many. Not at night. Not in public. Grown men wandered along the place. Did they not see it? It must be fun. Of course. What do I know about fun.

They were in a place where  the glowing redness defines them all. Alarm and absurdity. It was comical and .. Crustacean, somehow.  Or how it ends up that every sentence I type is a fragment worth revising. The scene was a reality worth revising. What was the almighty doing. Buying one of these? Why can’t I be the one with the horns AND a pointy tail to boot. Muhahahaing between all those people while they ignore me with their merrymaking. Busy and bustled into one huge mess called life.

Little parachute men being propelled into air and then caught into the hands of human helicopters who are their base on ground. Do they fly with these little men? Engrossed in some twisted mechanics of a twisted business?

I don’t stay long but the walk around it is peaceful. But the presence of the human race is always a little disturbing, specially when my Dream protagonist is kneeling there alone. Walking past the ice cream and the kulfi stands, all crowded, we get back in the car.

Passing some out-of-the-world graffiti on the way, which probably would mean something if I could stand there are see it. Street art museums.

There’s  a man with a wooden leg. Hobbling away, a fictional pirate lost in the murky waters of New Delhi? All of them can be turned into different stories of their own but somehow they get stuck in one.

The Railway station is also a year of smelly Sundays. All those lives put into one big boiling pot of breath and blood, slowly stirring on its own.  Somehow it’s always hard imagining a white ghostlike mighty hand turning it over. And causing it to boil to the brink just for the fun of it.

It’s always a prayer that the Man in the sky is a good chef, or we are all cooked. Badly.

Open your heart, I'm coming home.

Putting these rusty fingers to some well deserved exercise.. I decide to type something, anything down. What else does a bored pseudo writer do when her exams are 5 days away and the impending doom can be magnified exponentially by getting into a dreamer, couldn't-care-less mindframe about it.

People commenting on posts out of the blue, spur a person to write a little. But believe me, words pour out on this pixelated whiteness only when the thought of someone reading is not a certain reality. Coming to something to write about.. the First City is something that makes you fall in love with it and clenches you with steely sharp claws which feel warm and feather soft while wincing in wondrous pain.

Living is Delhi has its own twisted renderings. Rather than thinking of home as this pleasant place where I can get away from the bipolar weather and compromised living conditions, it's gotten me to a point when home is not far away. While home I cannot do half the things that I take for granted here at this freedom mongering city. As they say, home is where the heart is. The memories of seven year old weekends stay in the mind as clear as the fact of waking up a little past mid-day after a night full of Dexter Season 5 on the loop.

And the evenings spent on overpriced Tibetan and Lebanese appetizers 10 minutes away can well be the evenings strolling near your home gazing at rocks with extraordinary shapes and picking through discarded treasure troves in your car garage. And I discover I have a great career as an Antiques dealer.

It is reassuring that I do not forget words during the non blogging months in my life. Rather than non-blogging days they are the thinking-about-blogging days and some days it's just blogging. Okay, some hours. Or.. some minutes. I gather I should do this more often but I'm scared of people reading it and sending me to a shrink.

Speaking about Delhi, the best thing college does, except the general awesomeness, is the extra awesome people it gets you to see perform, speak and get inspired by. Poetry and the lack of it. And what that entails. About left brains and right brains. And the blind fanaticism and closed mindedness of those who think not in poetry. It takes special kind of people to not lead the world towards
destruction.

And those are the ones who have a streak of madness in their lives. Someone who looks for order everywhere will destroy the things he does not find fitting into his own little package of the "world" for him. Neat lines cannot run through humanity. Peace is a chaotic but loveable existence where acceptance lives within everyone.

Share. Is a word which might mean different things to different people. A sense of entitlement which is neighbours with your ego  might get in a couple of arguments. But different strokes for different folks.  The world's a village and the village idiot can only blog about things.

And the idiot likes truths scattered in free verse. Rumi and the works. Who, unfortunately, was as I can presume, googled by a number of people after watching a certain movie. Along with the Lizard King. I thought about writing a full fledged post-review for it but passed. Because it doesn't really deserve it. Although I liked the "abrupt" ending, it was something that disappointed "people".

Stories like these are better expressed in a book because a movie is seen but not seen. With the sense that it should be filtered with. I could bash a number of people and things here but the movie was sufficiently awkward and weirdly edited. A strange amalgamation of mongrel music. And NOT in the good sense. It was taking an average person's life and fitting unsuccessfully into greatness. Doesn't work for me. The protagonist, a little more than expected, was believable while everything else remained superfluous and bitter tasting.

Maybe if I watch it for a second time.. I'll skip parts. It ruins the wintery university feeling with their treatment of familiar locations, kind of unforgivable.

People worshipping other people and the concept of being a "fan" or fanatic to the point of crazed devotion is admittedly weird. Never have I worshiped a proper "god" that we talk about living gods.  Thoughts close to the heart being reflected, as I've already noticed, by other people evoke this sense of achievement. And the biggest yet, is that which was put into words. That archetypes should not be made into heroes.

To certain people, traditional gods are the celebrities. Their lives followed "religiously". The next time grandma complains about modern day gods, retort back with the millions following the page 3 tabloid culture on their gods. Considering how it came to be as sacred as it is today, that's a whole different ball game with hidden motives in daylight and blah blah.

This is a messed up place to live in. And if anyone asks me what's the point of studying History, it's definitely finding about how the world became the funny joke that it is today. Till next time. As lines get added to the funniness.

PS - The title is borrowed from the Pink Floyd song 'Hey You'. Old love.