Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Enough Reason?


I am not usually the silent times.
I am known to have had the loudest voice and the most thunderous laugh any room.
I used to spend hours lost in songs and their meanings.
I used to love to chat and gossip like an old maid and yet they all loved me.
I used to have the best friends in the world, my little circle of love and trust.
I used to have the most photogenic smile in my group.
Whether it was placing an order for food or talking up a complete stranger it was I my friends used to catch ‘coz I could hold a confident conversation with just about anyone.
I used to be the life of any room with my craziness.
I used to have 10 simultaneous windows open in gtalk with something to write in each of them.
I used to spend many a day dancing on top of my bed to some wild tune.
I was a moderate success in just about any work I took up.
I used to spend sleepless nights rolling in bed musing over that greatest mystery…love.

The only time I talk now is on the phone. I am so silent elsewhere, I fear that my voice would disappear.
I can’t remember the last time my laugh sounded like my own.
I listen to songs endlessly on my phone but would be at a loss to answer which song was playing on it.
I don’t gossip, I don’t bitch, I don’t tease and yet everyone seems to hate me.
I have no friends to speak of, no one to trust and can’t remember what a loving hug felt like.
I don’t get my pictures clicked, the smile is too painful to look at.
If someone talks to me I stutter and can’t think of anything to say to a simple question like “what do u dream of?”
I glide in and out of rooms like a ghost and no one even looks up.
I sign into gtalk and can’t chose one window to open from my 200+ contacts.
I don’t dance , ever.
I got my first feedback with “FAILURE” written all over it.
I have lived through the painful reality of love and don’t even have its soothing illusion to hug close to my heart in a lonely night.

Is it enough reason to be a depressed blogger Mr P? or do I need more?

Sunday, April 26, 2009

and days go by ..

It’s been quite a while since I wrote here, and no the culprit has not been my high flying career with one of the leading software firms in the industry. I have none. I have an obscure corner in an obscurer bay of my company building…the ITP bay commonly known as THE BENCH. Which means while people in projects slog under deadlines, do overtime, miss their own weddings…we put up our feet (literally), lower the (imaginary) brim of our hats and doze off with earplugs streaming the songs we have been listening to for the last 8 months into our ears.
When sleep eludes us we turn to some unread book or unopened ebook.

We sign into chat but are soon found making excuses ranging from an urgent meeting with an absent supervisor to a desperate call of nature in order to go offline, simply because we don’t want to answer the proverbial question—“Whatsup??”

Some of us might be found engrossed in their own world of equations and synonyms, trying to plough their way into a B-school.

And when nothing is left we search obscure topics on wikipedia, like, psychoanalysis, pagan rituals, or in an act of utter desperation, the six wives of Henry VIII.

We recently joined our out of practice hands and rusted heads in a “SAY NO TO PLASTIC” campaign which had us painting posters, even a first grader would be ashamed to call his own and writing slogans that wouldn’t inspire a duckling…
It also had me laughing like I haven’t in a long long time, and had me making friends and chatting up with people like I no longer deemed possible in office.

The campaign got over yesterday, the plastic bags are back and the posters have been lost somewhere in the labyrinths of the office…
but here I am sitting on a desk, sharing a bag of peanuts and a diet coke with my new found friends along with childhood stories and poems… painting ridiculous paintings and trying to make sense out of dumplings of paint… holding discussions on who is the worst painter in the bay and on our views on paganism and Christianity and on long lost tales…

I am sitting here, with a smile on my lips, the proud owner of a shirt marred by dashes of paint and a heart of many shades (which I painted) taped to the wall of my cubicle alongside a brand new poem which came out of nowhere just like my new-found joy.


I want to live in a house by the sea
With whose white spray my spirit could flee

Or may be I would prefer a house on a giant tree
With whose red blossoms my heart could grow free

A castle in the wilderness it might as well be
In whose hidden passages my lost spirit I could see

Or may be my destiny is a quite plantation of tea
In whose green bosom could be the answer to my unheard plea…