Ignorance

Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas. ~John Dewey

Well dressed, well-spoken and with a tone that might put to shame the ancient serpent that charmed Eve are the fashionable people around me who boast of anything and everything, from a tidbit of knowledge scrapped from the edges of a ten rupee quote book to the new brand faith that they propagate in the virtues of the previous generation.

They speak hours about nothing closed in rooms that reek of some artificial scent or the other that brings a bout of sneezing or a cold. The words are worse, praising ones who are absent while closing the eyes deliberately to the ones who slug hard to keep their work-worlds intact. A good word for a good deed is the last thing; but lapses, quicker to find than a daisy in a room full of laptops.

Led by charm, they live and die, lives of exasperation, when the strange lady with cat-like eyes and a lousy mouth comes with her beauty and eat their brains right away. Held transfixed in gazes across those closed rooms, all you need is a call from a friend to distract you for at least a while.

Red rose

“Life is like a movie, if you've sat through more than half of it and its sucked every second so far, it probably isn't gonna get great right at the end and make it all worthwhile. None should blame you for walking out early.”Doug Stanhope

You were like a bird who wanted to fly high;
But your wings were clipped quite early enough.
Your heart wanted and demanded freedom,
But those around you stifled you in four walls.

For love was an addiction, his sweet words solace,
From the cruel world that blossomed your form.
Yet he could not liberate you from the four walls
That ate your happiness and killed you day by day.

Your innocent smile stares from a beautiful picture,
Your perfect face set against your dark shiny hair,
And a pair of glasses only one used to you can spot,
As you stand clad in red, a colour that you'd loved.

You could crumble those four walls with outside help,
But you chose to show your freedom to do it yourself.

Spring is here!

According to the Malayalam calendar, today is the first day of the New Year and the beginning of Spring here. Falling after Karkidakom month that signifies poverty and illness,this month of Chingam is the time of harvest and propserity.

The arrival of Chingam is celebrated with floral designs called pookalams and by dressing up in the traditional handwoven dresses interlaced with gold threads. These simple handlooms give elegance to its wearer.

During childhood, Chingam stood for Onam holidays that saw all of us children running to see the snakeboats gliding across the River Pamba to the beat of the traditional vallapaatu. It also meant onasadyas and waiting for the thiruvona thoni at midnight.


This year, the shopping sprees and festive atmosphere is very much marred by the swine-flu scare. Still, the Malayali spirit in me, decided to remember that it's spring here and Onam, the traditional festival of Kerala is only a few weeks away.

Vande Mataram: Happy Independence Day

This is Sri Aurobindo's translation of the Indian National Song "Vande Matharam". On this occasion of our 62nd Independence Day Celebrations, this song that celebrates the glory of Mother India.

Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
bright with orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving Mother of might,
Mother free.

Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.

Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands
When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands
And seventy million voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,
To thee I call Mother and Lord!
Thou who savest, arise and save!
To her I cry who ever her foeman drove
Back from plain and Sea
And shook herself free.

Thou art wisdom, thou art law,
Thou art heart, our soul, our breath
Thou art love divine, the awe
In our hearts that conquers death.
Thine the strength that nerves the arm,
Thine the beauty, thine the charm.
Every image made divine
In our temples is but thine.

Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,
With her hands that strike and her
swords of sheen,
Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,
And the Muse a hundred-toned,
Pure and perfect without peer,
Mother lend thine ear,
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
Bright with thy orchard gleams,
Dark of hue O candid-fair

In thy soul, with jeweled hair
And thy glorious smile divine,
Loveliest of all earthly lands,
Showering wealth from well-stored hands!
Mother, mother mine!
Mother sweet, I bow to thee,
Mother great and free!

Friend

Many distrust a bond made across boundaries; for the same can turn into a ploy for infiltration. Though my self is not the high walls of Troy, when my security levels were low, you lured me into accepting your offer of friendship.

You asked me questions that I could not but refuse to answer while you wove lie upon lie to create an image of reality. When you had your fill, the life that I had in me was no more; the faith I had in others and myself had vanished and then you disappeared without a trace.

But by then, my life had degraded into empty words and need for somebody to survive. From independence, you brought me on to mass dependence on lies. An addiction, your lying words often lifted the gloom out of everyday though it ended as fast as it started.

Ernest Hemingway

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

You, eager reader, must have read quite a lot of material on how to improve your creative writing skills. While I was attending a writing workshop recently, I had this brainwave. I actually hit upon a brilliant place to generate creative blog ideas.

The professor was discussing Ernest Hemingway’s writing habits. Hemingway chose a quiet room in his house that was neatly cluttered with his typewriter, foolscap sheets for pre-writing stages, an oversize slipper wearing which he stood and wrote and his wastebasket that contained shreds of initial drafts that he improved upon.

On the third day of the workshop, the writing exercise was on visualizing and describing the scene. For me, who is just a hack writer, the writing exercises were a disappointment. At that moment, I could not write anything more than a drab piece of prose that just rephrased what was originally in the article that the professor read out to us.

First, I asked the professor, “May I stand and write?” He said “If that helps”. Then I produced some poor quality writing whose only good point was that I described a person’s bland face coming alive when he smiled. The professor applauded that and wisely ignored the rest, while I sat expecting a word by word analysis of my writing. Well, nothing happened.

In the next twenty minutes, everybody read out their versions of the writing exercise. One was exceptionally well-written and I really saw how good it was, with good illustrations and cleverly planned. Then the clown in my mind started dancing and making faces. He showed me an image of The Carpenters in concert half-clad and inspired.

So to cover my embarrassment of being a writer and not being able to produce a good piece of writing, I started narrating the example of the carpenters and that I needed a good shower to start working on any writing job I have. Bogus or not, I went home and enjoyed some special time in my sacred space and came up with this piece on Ernest Hemingway.

27: Happy Birthday

When the multiplication tables were in
Twenty-seven stood for three raised to three;
Now it stands for the age of this old wine,
The spirit, inside a big barrel called me.

No humble words, the barrel loves to expand,
This spirit grows mellow people say (God knows)
Though it was only yesterday that I was a kid,
Splashing for hours in the mighty river green.

Now the wrong side of twenties beckons me,
For it’s a freefall that all women go through,
From where you slip into the 30s, 40s and 50s,
Wrinkles, complaints and hassles of old age.

A lousy bunch of thoughts on my special day,
That’s me on my twenty seventh birthday!

The Story of a Mad Woman

People said I’m mad when I told them that I could hear voices in my head. I guess many people could. But I could also hear what others thought and could do what they wanted or did not want at all. This could be called a miracle but it’s not. It’s a modern curse when many days are laid waste just because voices whisper in your head and sneer at you.

One day, they tell you, “You are the queen”. The next day, they explode your head with pain. This has made me silent and quiet and afraid of others. I told my folks that I could hear voices. They took me to a doctor who prescribed a long list of medicines and sedated me. When I woke up, their faces had changed into that of hatred for creating so much trouble for their reputation and wealth.

On some days, invisible hands search my body. I wish I could tell someone who knew the same. Someone who could hear voices in their heads or feel the strangeness of being touched by something you cannot see. Until then, I’m only a mad woman who feels attacked by strange invisible hands that move up and down her body or cause disturbances in life.

Some days, these voices made me believe that you, whom I had lost had come back to retrieve you. Instead my life ended that day. For if it was you, you were not an angel as I thought you were but a demon who set in motion the destruction of a person who loved you the most. Whoever you are, I’m trapped in a world of your invisible beams until death.

Palgrave's Golden Treasury

In my college days, I was a regular bookworm who could finish a book in the shortest time possible (a few hours, a night of continuous reading or reading in the college bus). My treasure house was the college library, where the dust-filled corners, I will hunt some good book or the other.

A book that I found there and later bought a personal copy is The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language by F.T. Palgrave. It has a collection of English poems from the Elizabethan Age till the Modern Age.

Palgrave published his first version in 1861 with the aim of propagating the best that is known and thought in the world?. The present edition was edited and more poems added by the Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis.

My favourite from this collection was the poem, The True Beauty By Thomas Carew:

HE that loves a rosy cheek
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires;
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.

But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts, and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined,
Kindle never-dying fires:?
Where these are not, I despise
Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes.

This book is a rare find to those who cherish good poetry. I was so much in love with this book that I must have read it out aloud to many friends (poor things) who were willing to lend a ear.

Difficulty

Some words as harmful; sharing mouthful of advice on how an uttered word is like a sent arrow: whatever you do cannot take it back. But about those who never utter any word and keep hidden inside all the angst of life. What use is such a silence except for earning a name in each friend's list of tramped people?

Even more strange is those who use words to boost an ego that swells up with pride at victories and they use words to kill other's joys as easily as swatting a fly. But how on earth can you live up ideals in a world of contradictions when the meek and the gentle never utter anything about their selves and the proud boast about anything and everything.

No word is wasted; one who seeks the wisdom of a few words finds them useful. For many count their words with time while others exhaust themselves with talk that breeds nothing but contempt and hatred. While you and me seek words to understand the world of our difficulties and find solace in finding faces whose smiles fade and crack with sorrow.

Search

My search for you began someday when I was ten, when I realized that I was incomplete in this world without you. Your face has changed over these years but you have remained a source of hope always. From that first few lines that I wrote, this other self of mine has peeped in countless words that I have scribbled on lost pages. I never knew that the best words that I wrote were the ones I have lost. But still, from memory that remembers quite a lot of images and turns of phrases and scents and experiences, I retrace this verbal journey from nothing to everything and from everything to nothing again.

Most people clearly remember the day they started writing. For me, words came on a day, here in this city on an idle day, when I was standing on the terrace talking to myself watching the distant church tower and the clear blue sky. I thought of a few lines, then the lines kind of repeated itself and I tried to make it as parallel as possible. That's when I understood that this chanting aloud is of no use: I need to write it down. Finally I went downstairs and wrote my first lines though not in English:

You dream of a heaven as a garden,
With roses that stand fresh and fragrant
That are circled by hungry bees.

Distance

After many days, I hear the quiver in your voice as you recognise my voice. You did not expect me to call you say as a way of explanation. Do you know many days have gone since I last talked to you? Years. Months. Days. Hours. Minutes. Seconds. All messed up and long only because I thought talking with you is a pain because of our lost friendship. Why did you call me, you ask expecting a long answer. Just like that is never enough for you for as always you pretend that you can read my mind.

Sitting opposite a friend, the other day, I realised how much you and your friendship meant to me even with all its flaws. You could never be what I wanted you to be nor could I ever attain that perfection you wanted to see in me. Still, there's a joy in the old meaningless conversations that I share with no other. The same laughter and the same tears that gather in two friends who have known each other for long!

The days of longing and desperation are over. The sea of forgetfulness that swept over the land has swallowed with it the countless moments of anger and frustration. With both of us, broken and still happy, we can stay away at respectful distance without harming each other's feelings. For the mutual knowledge and understanding that we share surpass other bonds just because it was bound by trials and tribulations. On days I try to write, your words come as a reason for laughter and tears.

Laurence Sterne on Writing

There are two sorts of eloquence; the one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in laboured and polished periods, an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tinselled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, . . . The other sort of eloquence is quite the reverse to this, and which may be said to be the true characteristic of the holy Scriptures; where the eloquence does not arise from a laboured and far-fetched elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity and majesty.

Ray Bradbury on Creativity

Creativity is a continual surprise.

Goodness

How can silence create so much of love? You must have asked yourself so many times. Is there anything wrong in silence? For those who learn each other with time, love to sit silent and idle by each other. In their togetherness, there are no words nor there are promises. That's something you with your thousand questions will never understand.

But at times, I want to tell how much you mean to me, how the absences of day-to-day life spurs love in me and how I love even when you dream of freedom and of long-forgotten memories. You mean everything to me, even when you are silent, even when you are absent or even when you stop thinking of me.

Sometimes I feel the aura of your grace coming to mind as a picture of all that is good, great and nice- a big heart I have seen except when you are sad and your heart chokes with pain. But with all the goodness that you scatter around minute by minute, you know how to hide your self within those walls of goodness.

Tips for Good E-mail Writing

A good deal of communication takes place in the form of emails that you write to friends, colleagues and clients. In personal or professional communication through emails, you need to carefully follow certain guidelines that will help you write good mails while maintaining the etiquette of email communication.

• When sending a mail to a new email address, send a test mail first. Most of the time, errors in spelling can bounce the mail right back into your inbox.

• State the subject of your mail rather than leaving it empty. This enables easy search and retrieval of mails from a rather crowded inbox. Gmail has launched a feature called Inbox Preview that allows you to glimpse the first line of your recently received mails.

• Use the original mail thread while replying to a previous mail so that the receiver can also track the correspondence in case of any confusion.

• Customise your email by addressing the person. If at all you need to send the same mail to several people use the correct form of address and send it using the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) option. But don’t use the Cc (carbon copy) option unless it is necessary.

• Be precise and to the point. Use simple sentences to convey your message. A long mail is hard to read and remember especially for a person who receives quite a lot of mails a day.

• Write about a single topic in a mail rather than bombarding a single mail with a lot of information thereby helping the receiver to answer the relevant topic correctly.

• Delete the list of previous receivers while forwarding a mail so that you do not reveal a big list of addresses of people without their permission.

• Always remember that the web is a not secure enough to hold all your private details. Think twice before sending that angry e-mail or before revealing that extremely private piece of information in an email.
  

• Sound positive and energetic in your mails rather than depressed and drab.

• Re-read and edit the mail you have written, carefully going over the written matter for mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling.

• Using capital letters in mails is not advisable as such writing is considered as screaming in the internet lingo.

• Use the formatting tools but remember that the receiver may not be able to view the formatting. Take care about sending rich text to people who can view the message only in the plain text format.

• Don’t forward chain letters that are scary or superstitious.
  

• Don’t reply to spams either.

• Reply to important mails immediately possibly on the same day or the next rather than mulling over them for days together.
  

That Summer Long Ago

A long summer of uncertainties, 

Blazed many unquenchable fires, 

Many that burnt and scorched, 

Swallowing words and feelings. 

A thousand dreams buried soon, 

The flow of nature bottled up, 

In thick maroon curtains of silence

That hung quite out of place. 

A mess of life that stopped there,

In that long summer somewhere, 

From where it has moved hardly, 

An inch to gain back its momentum. 

The words have become sacred, 

The spaces no longer accessible, 

But memory brings back dreams,

In words said, words left unsaid. 

A few lines of poetry can't reveal, 

A love that lies dormant in ashes.

The Case of the Missing Po

There is a bird called Po (the one on the right)in my husband' s chidiyakhana. Yesterday, when I went to see the birds in the evening, I found that the cage was open and that Po was missing from the scene. The others were still there, though the cage was left open. All of us searched the entire corridor, where they are kept. We even searched outside though it was pitch dark and raining.

Finally, today Po was discovered in the room next to the corridor. It must have flown and hid there. Hungry and thirsty, it ran and ate seed when given food. Happy that it was only here and that it did not fly outside through the open windows.

Rivalry

Had you not swore rivalry,
My dear dear yellow rose,
Many lives would've escaped,
The tentacles of hopeless love .

You wanted to fare better
In all six pairs of male eyes,
To be fairer, smarter, lovelier,
Than me everyday of your life.

Your trials were not in vain,
But I would say you were,
Fairer, smarter and lovelier
Than I could ever be any day.

Still you crushed the dreams,
Of many embittered hearts,
Through your lies and advice,
Turned the heads upside down.

Looking back, I feel so foolish,
Surpass me in foolery as well.

Celebrating 200 posts

Journal: Serious and Trivial has reached 200 posts. On this day, the not-so-modest author has made a pick of what she considers as the best of her most valuable sacred space: potpourri blog of poems, silences, reviews and definitions of silence. Hope you enjoy them!

Definitions

Forget

Islands

Love

Meditation

Melodies new

My roots strangely

Needs

Our story

Remembrance

Seasons

Silence

Sublimation

Sweet nothings

The Year of the Metal Rooster

Tiny Feet

Tonight

Tribute to Kamala Suraiyya

Twilight Zone

Words

Yellow rose