Your problems

Where I went to college, there was a photocopying and printing store across from the main campus. I havent seen the place for about five years now, but I still remember a poster they had on the wall there. The poster had caricatures of people jeering and laughing at a man who was weeping over his broken leg. The caption on it read: "Do not tell people your problems: half of them dont care and the other half are glad."

Food and Shelter

Poverty is a killer. How can you expect people to live a life in which they see no escape from the fear of starvation however far they can (or want to) look into their future? Where will I eat next? What will I do if it snows tonight?

Where have all the Haikus gone?

Blogging has been long forgotten. Or has it? Just because your regular customer has stopped showing up at your diner for breakfast does not mean she is starving to death somewhere. There are a hundred other diners to eat the first meal of the day. And then there is home. Where you can eat in the morning without having anyone else in the world know what you are eating, or even that you are eating. My last post was more than a month ago.

Bridge ices before road

The bridge ices before the road. The free freeze before the chained chill.

Masters and slaves

Where are our masters?
who are our slaves?
Lying by the window
waiting for freedom
as the sunshine mixes
with our drool

Looking back
at the times that were,
horrible nightmares,
dreams we wouldn't dare see in the night

skeletons in our closet
never accepted.
Secrets never celebrated
tails between our legs.

never understood
never laughed at
always stabbed
for breathing the air

who dares kill me tonight
who dares touch me
I shall rip out your guts
from your very soul
and feast on them
till I am one with the darkness

A Time to live

Fatalists. People who believe that all events are predetermined, that no outcome can be changed from what it has been set to be. However, if you think about it, fatalist is a mere term, whose meaning says no more than what we already know.
Almost all people agree the predicting the future is next to impossible. But predicting, anticipating, and preparing for events is one of the most necessary skills. When another car on the highway swerves towards me, I forsee that unless I get out of its path, I'm going to be badly mangled, and I yank the wheel of my car to get away. I anticipate that I will not have a severe food shortage tomorrow, so I don't stock up on food or overeat.
Most things we predict are based on prior experience or trust or both. I've seen the sun rise everyday at the exact time that my TV station predicted. I trust that station, so I will believe their prediction for tomorow morning's sunrise time. I do not trust their forecast of summer storms however, and will carry my umbrella every day.
To be a fatalist, a person should believe that all events are predetermined. Does this mean that fatalists believe in the existance of an all-knowing entity?? Dont think so.

Home and Away

There were a bunch of clowns who lived on a small tropical island which was uninhabited, save for them. They had not seen the rest of the world for many years. Some of the clowns thought it was a blessing that they lived that way, while others felt it was a curse. There were, however, a few buffoons who regarded their isolation from mainstream civilization neither as a boon nor as a curse. To them, it just was.

Moral of the story: Some clowns just dont get it; there's nothing to get.

Bhavani and Uma

Bhavani must have been in her late twenties. She was a large woman. Not fat or plump, but wide and tall, with a blocky face to match. Her skin was unblemished, dark as roasted coffee. She had wiry hair, springy and curly, straining to get out of the short, ragged-tipped ponytail that used to follow her head, pointing backwards but never to the ground. I am sure it a trick of my weak memory, but I cannot help but picture her as having lips as dark as the rest of her skin was. Bhavani had cracked heels, like most women that work barefoot on rough, wet floors washing clothes and utensils.Bhavani would speak little, like most housemaids. It may have been because her dialect was slightly different from ours, but I doubt if Bhavani would care about nuances of pronunciation and accent. She had a beautiful smile. Not because her white teeth contrasted with her skin tone, but because of the strange expression in her large eyes. God knows how many other houses she worked in. She would come walking in the heat of mid-morning, when sham's mother was cooking for lunch, filling the house and the yard with an exquisite aroma. Bhavani would have a smile on her face. The smile rarely wore off. A cheerfulness that I now look back and find myself longing for.

A good night's sleep

There was once a fat young boy with a balding head littered with sparse hair. This young man would never cross the road unless there was a designated pedestrian crossing and other safety features. If the road had no pedestrian crossing, he would walk an extra half mile to get to one rather than risk crossing the road. However, this young boy would always try and rescue innocent lambs from the road if he noticed one in the path of an approaching vehicle. One day, the boy jumped into the path of a large truck that was hurtling down the street towards an innocent little lamb with big black eyes and filthy smelling fur that looked uglier than it smelt. He saved the lamb by throwing it across the street and out of the way of the truck. But the boy himself was run over by the truck. His bald little head was crushed beyond recognition. He died. The ugly, stinking lamb was shocked, and was walking back towards the boy, when it was run down by a sleek, shiny, new silver Mercedes coupe and was plastered all over the road.

Moral of the story:Lamb curry is delicious, but live lambs stink.

Green as the earth

"Desire is the cause of all misery and suffering." A brilliant observation. Siddartha, I think. The desire to live a life that has no misery and suffering causes all misery and suffering. Money cannot buy happiness, true. Most of us are into shit that no amount of money can get us out of. Money is not to blame, though. Its allright to have a lot of it, use it, or even flaunt it. Desire is the problem. We desire for things that money cannot buy. I think that's what gets us all. In the darkness of the night. No desire at all would be the best thing to desire for, but since that seems a little too much to ask of mere mortals like us, we should live with desires only for those things that money can buy. Desire for food, not contentment. Desire for water, not joy. Desire for murder, not revenge. Desire for death, not peace.

What goes around....

There was once a beautiful young princess in a faraway land. Her chocolate skin and dark, flowing hair had many in awe. She pretended that she was lucky to be that way, and all the people envied her for being so lucky. Very few knew that the princess had to spend long, tiring hours keeping up her good looks. But she could not tell them that she worked hard for her looks. When she had tried saying that, it made the people mad, it made them sad, it made them panic. She once again convinced all the people that she was fortunate to be very pretty and that the good looks just came to her. Then, one warm, humid summer night, when the stars had stopped twinkling, and all the people were sleeping peacefully, the princess downed a bottle of blended scotch and drowned in the lake, even though she knew to swim.
Moral of the story: Blended scotch is cheap, but tastes horrible.

On the Double

A tall man lived with his old, frail grandmother in a small, dingy apartment that had peeling paint on some walls, no paint on others, and some walls with gaping holes showing the plumbing and electrical work running up and down the beams inside the walls. Sometimes, one could even catch a quick glimpse of large, ferocious looking, diseased rats running on these pipes. The tall man was so tall that he had to bend down to enter his own apartment. One evening, when the man returned home from a hard days work at his accounting firm, his grandmother was dead and a large rat was nibbling on her toes. The man flung his briefcase at the rat, which shouted a loud squeak and ran away into the depths of the infinite pipes in the wall. As the man stood next to his grandmothers body, deciding what to do next, a horde of savage rats came out of the wall and ate him clean to the bone.

Moral of the story: Everybody's grandmother passes away someday.