If I'd known...

If I'd known, how savage love is
I'd have shut the door..

Saw "Mr and Mrs Iyer" for nth time today, am not sure how many times more I will see it again.

Truth is, I am in love with the movie,
with the genuineness of the characters,
with Meenakshi's eyes when they open
with the lines "If I'd known.." and "Don't look away",
with the moment they have in train,
and above all with the surreal reality portrayed.

It captures love in its most beautiful form,
when its unintentional, unsaid and unnamed.. just felt.
when the world around seems so far away
the heart skips a beat every time one thinks about it
n that dreamy ticklish feeling is all that matters..

Poornima, the best writer who knows me and for me a very knowledgeable person concerning matters of love (by experience or otherwise), has a different view. I am not sure how highly she thinks of love when she says, "Its an illusion" and at the same time agrees that ".. every illusion that we hold is absolutely real for the time we hold it."

Now, people will say Ashish is a dreamer. Thanks to Reem, a chat pal and a fellow blogger, I already have an answer. She says, "Don't accuse me for being a dreamer, if reality didnt bore me so much, I would have been otherwise.. " My admiration of her attitude is just a question "Why does she even think of being otherwise, when the dreamer Reem is mystery enough for the world?"

Another of my good friends, a mathematician, tries to analyse the power of fiction in her blog. This reminds of a certain "Dead Poets' Society", of which I am surely a fan? Whats there to analyse in a verse, a movie, a painting or a picture? If words were to describe a beauty, whats the need of it?

Some appreciation of Indian philosophy

"If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life...again I should point to India."

--Max Muller

I wonder why not even an ounce of it was taught to me in school.

There and back again

Winter haven
Happy New Year
Joys/Blues of an international flight
Tabula Rasa
There and back again
...

Yea, you guessed right. These are various choices I have for the title before writing this post. Each one has a different story to tell. Can I weave all of these in one post? Lets try.

After having decided to spend the winters here itself, the trip to India, though dreamt of a zillion times, was applied for in a whim. Not very unlike me though. The heartbeat before asking for permission, the glitches while buying tickets, the bickerings over gifts and last night shopping, the ultimate laziness and adventure, the void on the return.. every experience seems like a distant dream now, which my fleeting memory failed to capture. The whole thing happened just the same way as take-off from Delhi airport, plane was already over Iran when my sleepy mind realized I was on it.

The purpose of going home this winter was to remind myself that there is another world out there, which was my own once. And that the last "was" and "once" used in the previous sentence is my shortsightedness. How successful was I? I think I would realize in a few months. The good thing is, there is a strong possibility that I will get this chance every winter.

One outcome of the trip is partial offloading of an old baggage, something that I had been carrying for almost four years now and something which I always hoped will become a part of me someday. But heaviness of the load and the long wait had started itching too bad. So with the dip in the holy Ganges on new year day, I promised myself a search for more realistic happiness without cursing whatever happened.

The new year beckons with freshness and relief, with vision and a belief.