Sometimes a blog is just what a blog is. The recording of a moment, a sudden attempt to capture what is by nature ephemeral, to grasp at the truth as though it can be held back as it slips through the sieve. Sometimes, a blog is just talking to yourself, catching something that made you smile, pouring out something that would make you burst otherwise, as is, half formed, half lived, half tested. For the heart is what it is. Continue reading What Blog Is
Tag Archives: memoir
The Circle of Life
Kahin To Yeh Dil Kabhi Mil Nahin Paate
Kahin Pe Nikal Aaye Janmon Ke Naate
Ghani Thi Uljhan Bairi Apna Man
Apna Hi Hoke Sahe Dard ParayeKabhi Yun Hi Jab Hui Bojhal Saansen
Bhar Aai Baithe Baithe Jab Yoon Hi Aankhen
Kabhi Machal Ke Pyaar Se Chal Ke
Chhuye Koi Mujhe Par Nazar Na AayeKahin Door Jab Din Dhal Jaye
Sanjh Ki Dulhan Badan Churaye, Chupke Se Aaye
Mere Khayalon Ke Aangan Mein
Koi Sapnon Ke Deep Jalaye
The bridge glows like a jewel in the dark in front of me. Many a time I had crossed it earlier without knowing what a spectacular view it provided to the casual onlooker from a distance against the dark sky and the wide expanse of the bay spread out like a black satin sheet at this time of the night.
When you’re on a bridge you rarely know what crossings overs look like.
Yet, jewel the bridge is not. The hard, glittering, diamond-like effect against the night sky is not static. The light is softened by a dynamism that makes it come alive. Continue reading The Circle of Life
Writing Memoir on Social Media
I’m doing something in the room and The Boy walks in stealthily from behind me and suddenly there is a shower of bubbles in the air and lots of childish laughter. I turn my face and I see a host of bubbles floating up and up and up towards the light, their shiny surfaces catching the light and turning them into iridescent rainbow hues. It’s hard to tell how each bubble will float away, where it will stick and when it will burst.  But together they transform the room.
Actually I’m not just sitting here doing something. I’m writing yet another blog post. It isn’t unusual at all, while I’m writing, for a childish face to peek in and insist on typing a word or two or close a window or want to check out a blinking light below the touchpad. But bubbles? They are new.
The bubbles floating around me make me think of a lot of writing I’ve been doing lately. Light, beautiful, polished, iridescent and ephemeral.
What really has been the end goal of these pieces? To live for a bit, to catch the light, to stick in someone’s mind for a moment and then to disappear? To float directionless, to dazzle and to die? Continue reading Writing Memoir on Social Media
A quiet walk on New Year’s eve
Every New Year’s eve seems like the brink of something momentous. As though we are suddenly standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon looking into a vast uncharted space where anything can happen. A second chance at things left behind in the old year. A significant mark on the graph of life.
I’ve celebrated this significant moment in many spectacular ways in years past commemorating the glory that such a transition is in a way that matched the perceived momentousness of the event.
I’ve spent it on a revolving dance floor in front of the fog machine in Ybor City in Florida. I’ve watched glorious fireworks lighting up the night sky amongst hundreds of people in Las Vegas and Boston. I’ve brought back shiny stars and conical paper caps after parties in Calcutta.
And yet, this year was about a quiet walk by myself along the river towards a train station and a town square near the place I live. All urban, concrete, full of shadows, strangely quiet because of the cold at night.
Continue reading A quiet walk on New Year’s eve
Black Friday sale on a dark night
It was a cold November night. The area outside my apartment complex was pretty dark (as it always was after sundown) in the quiet university town in Florida that I lived in. I quietly locked the door making sure that I did not wake my roommates and proceeded towards my rendezvous with a guy at 2:30 am.
No, he wasn’t a boyfriend or a dealer of illicit substances. He had a battered old car which was a luxury for us those days of early grad student life. Few of us had a means to move about town after 7:30pm in the evening here when the buses stopped. So it was either him or accepting being left behind.
We were going for Black Friday sales at the shopping plaza in town that housed a Walmart and a Best Buy. We had always seen the plaza in broad daylight or in the evenings until then. Continue reading Black Friday sale on a dark night
bottledworder 