Dreams, thoughts and breath

Turbulence; the air just feels so much heavy
Too many thoughts they swirl around haunting,
And all of them choking me and leave me gasping Rumination; the steps that were never taken,
of roads that were never traveled,
dreams that went off with the smallest hint of wind
Submission; nimble wings they were,
was it weak dreams or a weaker dreamer?
Paler I am getting, gasping around for a hint of fresh air. Acceptance : seeing for what it is,
too many things we want to be,
too less of a man we are for it

Destruction; the bittersweet rhyme,
of all the things we could have been
a last gasp for air, do I dare

Resolution - 2016

Well well well, another year, another set of resolutions to be added into the dusty file of last X years.

Well here is me. I wanted to write this on Dec 31'st. But the time taken for that thought to travel from my thoughts to action took me 10 days. But then atleast I am doing it. So hopefully this year's resolutions won't go into that dusty pile.

Well here it goes, inspired from Mark Zuckerberg, yes yes that Facebook guy. This year is going to be "Year of Reading". I think Zuckerberg's intention was to read one book a week, but as I don't have as much free time as him, I am gonna do "A book, a month". 12 books should do the trick. That is more than what I have read in the last 2-3 years I guess. Reading was something that defined me, that fueled me. But for the last 2 years I lost my touch with it and I feel very empty without it. Need to bring it back now. Also I want to start reading more non-fiction books this year.

January : Gonna start with my fav author, Festival of Insignificance from Milan Kundera.

Oh yeah, also I want to write. So technically this year is "Year of Reading and Writing". I want to blog here once a week. Well maybe once in two weeks. Yeah I guess I can manage that. :D

This is something I wrote 2 years ago to remind me how big writing is for me . Why writing is big for me!


And yeah, also, lol, this year is also "The year of fitness". Well let me just put my resolution here instead of trying to put what I am trying to do for that. I wanna run a marathon this year. And let me conveniently omit the distance. :P (FYI, I am not sure if I have even managed a 1 km straight run till now in my life.)

Ahm and yeah travel obviously. Need to go to Hampi like finally. And couple of more places. But then those are adhoc plans. Not putting under resolutions.

So in a nutshell this is it.
a. Read a book a month
b. Blog once in two weeks.
c. Run a marathon.
d. Travel (yes a bit vague, but adhoc is the key here)

Easy peasy, beautiful 2016. Here I come!

For a memory, with a sky full of stars!

Last night me and my colleagues were standing in the office terrace. One of my friends looked up at the sky and said "Hey! There's a meteorite passing!" I looked up at the sky and I did not see the sky that's above me, I saw a night sky from seven years ago. A magical sky full of stars and shooting stars, that me and my friends gazed at from a hilltop, from midnight to the first break of dawn. To that night in Wagamon!"

That should not be a night we should forget easily. So before our memories fade out, let me put that in paper here. A small recap of how it happened.


This is how easy it was to go for a trip those days. But now with the myriad of planning and preparation. Wish it was as easy as those days.

6:30 PM : I was called from the football field and was just said one thing " Macha, nale harthal aanu, let's go tripping somewhere"

7:00 PM : All the muttans have gathered, sub muttans have been asked to come. Bikes are counted, cash is scrapped from here and there. Yes we are ready to go.

Where do we go? Someone suggested Wagamon! Why not? Here we go! I tried to think why we choose Wagamon. That is what we thought we could do there at night, For the life of me I couldn't get one sensible answer.

Anyway I think at that point, at that age, we didn't care, what happened or anything. We just went with the flow.

8:00 PM : The pack leaves Rajagiri hostel, perhaps 10-15 of us, I honestly don't remember who all were there, let me still do a headcount, Podi, Mama, Pothay, Jundi, Snake, Athishayan, Kuria, Nambi, Me and hmmm then who? Hmm Sany? Naa, he was always too big a baby to come out of the hostel at night. Although I am guessing his bike would have been there.  Oh yeah Murshid and Ajith Sivadasan, not sure how those two tagged along. I guess that's it.

8:00 pm - 11ish pm : Me and Podi was on my bike. The ride was exactly how it should have been, the weather got really cold on route, I can still remember my tooth biting, fingers numbers and the air in my lungs freezing! Same with everyone else! All the right ingredients for the perfect ride! And all the fun we could have, we did have!

11-12 pm - We reached Wagamon. Let me give you a picture of how it was there. There was not a single soul there to ask for a place to stay. Not one single shop open. Not even a passing vehicle. Not even a stray light. Just the blowing wind and the eerie night with us in that lonely town.

Now what do we? Someone suggested "Let's climb up the Kurishumala!" (This hill is a very busy place during the holy week season. But in our night of adventure, it was a deserted, dark and isolated place. With God knows what all creatures would be creeping by. But then this did not deter us in anyway. I don't think anyone thought this was an absurd idea.(Now when I think about it, it was as absurd as it can get) So we climbed up, with the moon and our mobile lights showing us our steep uphill path. But with the a spirit of the young and foolish, we climbed it up with ease, with each step higher and higher into the top of the hill at the middle of the night.

With every step we make it started to get more and more colder. We climbed perhaps more half n hour or an hour to reach the top of the hill. It wasn't an easy trek, it was steep, it was dark, it was cold. But yet in the spirit of muttanship, that midnight we climbed up the hill.

We reached on top, but it was incredibly incredibly incredibly cold. We did not even have jackets or even shoes. For variety of reasons we decided we won't be climbing down and will be spending up on the hilltop for the whole night.

But the problem was the cold. Ridiculously cold. Apart from the rocky hill top, there was only two things on top of that hill. A church, closed of course. Then a tiny teeny hut where lotta wood and other stuff was kept. We tried sitting behind the church wall, but not working. We ran into the hut and tried to make ourselves comfortable.

I think we found one sack there which someone tried getting into (Snake if my memory is right). We thought about all possible solutions including a very gay form of sleep that will perhaps keep us warm, lol (we did not do it ofcourse!!!). It was 1-2 am by this time and we had to stay there till the sun slightly shows up. We ran out of ideas and slowly succumbed to the cold inside that hut. But the cold was getting to us. The hut was getting congested so someone stepped out and laid down on the rock looking at the sky. Then he called out to us inside the hut telling "Come here and look at the sky! It's just full of stars."

I thought yeah cool it was full stars, but I am not getting out of this hut. Then the intensity of the calls got high, "Guys guys, come out! You have to see this!"

I went out and peeked at the sky! My oh my! It was indeed full of stars. And when I meant full, it could not have got fuller. It was like every star out there decided to show up that day! Imagine seeing a city from a far point, you will be seeing thousands of tiny lights right. It's like that, but only a million times more beautiful. We all laid down on those rocks, spellbound and kept gazing up. Shooting stars were shooting around sparingly. We all made our secret wishes. I know mine became true. And let me say it again, it could not have gotten more beautiful up there.

Spellbound with this spectacle, the cold could not affect us anymore. We threw away our tshirts and faced the cold bare. And howled like wild ones. That's what we were that night. Wild.

We spent the whole night lying down on that rocky hilltop, gazing up at that magical sky.


When light broke in the skies, we climbed down, we were wild and hungry. Now that the wild part was over, we had to take care of the hungry part. It was 6ish in the morning, no shops had opened. We waited in front of a shop till the shopguy came. We told him our problem and he said wait for 20 mins and he will make us breakfast. We waited and got one of our most memorable breakfast, steaming hot appams, egg roast and piping hot. My My, can breakfast get more awesomer after such a cold night?

Now I don't think any other sky can be that beautiful for me, but still whenever I look up at any night sky, that night at Wagamon always subtly comes up in my mind. And I smile silently in the remembrance of that night.

"International break" the break we hate!

In this column, I am going to introduce a phrase or say two words that me and most of my buddies hate, not just any normal hate, we hate it to the rotten core! In fact I hate it so much that I will refer it here just once and then will start calling it “You-know-what” Okay, here goes, sigh, International break! Phew, there I said it.

Now on to the story, I am in the middle of my weekend and you would think I am enthralled as always at the arrival of the two magical days. But well yeah like everyone else we would definitely enjoy the weekend in a regular way, but not in the special way we all would have liked otherwise. Who is to blame? You-know-what!

Normally the special magic of our regular weekend is to watch our beloved team play, or say watching our rival matches so we can hope they drop points, watching neutral matches just for the love of the game. Else watching players who are in our fantasy team A, fantasy team B etc, also the bets, so watching those matches. Basically watch all the matches we can for any number of reasons or no reason at all. But all in spoil this weekend and you know who to blame.

Another item that gets it rest is our phones, normally the footy watsapp groups will be consistently buzzing with messages, analysis, criticism, rumors, banter(the most enjoyable of all forms). There will be pre match analysis, the postmortems etc etc. But now we have to resort to silly jokes and trolls to keep it alive. The blame is again for the obvious.

And personally for me, my routine after a weekend of football is to read through the many different blogs, look at fantasy team points, set strategies for the next one. See how my bet would work. While driving I always listen to different football podcasts. After all this is done, I will probably be looking at a Wednesday and then the pre match buzz starts to build up. But now Monday blues seem even worse because there is nothing to catch up on, no blogs, no analysis, no podcasts. Sigh! A barren weak lies ahead.

This is true not just for me, but for our whole clan, for whom the beautiful game means much more than just a sport. It is a BIG part of our life, it is one of the thing that makes weekend all the more beautiful, one of the thing that makes weekdays much more bearable. Now you can see why football is a big big part of our life and why we all hate, yes, let me say it one more time, the fucking international breaks! 

Green Diwali!

For a change it felt nice to drive back from work. It was nice because the sky looked so fancy with multicolored crackers lighting it up. Now I am back home and I can still hear the loud bangs and cracks around. Let me look out the window, yes the sky is still lit up. Yes, Diwali is here and we as always proud to celebrate our culture. Last month there was Ganesh Chathurthi and I had a slight aversion to festivities after that, because after the celebration, the leftovers were polluted lakes where the immersion happened. I have heard the same story for Christmas too with the trees being cut down at a massive rate so Santa can come and keep the presents under it.

Ah another bang! That makes me come back to what I was gonna say here, Diwali is here, the festival of lights. I just did a quick google search and found that around 2000 to 5000 crores of rupees is spent during Diwali season by us to buy crackers. So now think about the chemical mix it contains. I don’t want to go into details of what all is in these crackers, but I can assure if you knew the problems that it can cause you will definitely not go near any of these. If you want me to list up problems with the same I can go on long, like Noise pollution, air pollution, health hazards, wastage of money and stuff like that, but enough!

I am not a big fan of lining up stats because I don’t think things like these should be advocated by hard stats but simple logic.  But still for stat hunters I saw figures online like 6000 ton of toxic garbage coming out of this one Diwali night. Also the scale of noise pollution and air pollution that’s happening is just massive on scale. So had fun breathing in the toxic dust? Happy Diwali to you I say.

I mean this is something we could avoid right? I know culture is a big thing for us but I believe nature should be our first culture. It was during the ancient ages but then we just got fucked up. But I think we are educated enough now to realize what we are doing and their consequences. I hope we all can go green on our festivities. Try this for a change http://www.greendiwali.com/
Happy Diwali folks! :D

The railway romance!

The train station has a feeling of enchantment, 

the dust of wanderlust, invisible but felt

the metal doors of dreams are right in front,
dreams of travel that you had,
of distances short and long, 

metal doors with places you have only heard,

you wish you could step in and go, 

but you wait for the train, 

that takes you back to routine

Why is it that you can't follow your dream?
the one to take the road less traveled?

Guess we aren't taught to follow dreams
Our wings clipped long ago in school

Or are we too afraid to break the routine,
and embrace the unknown?




Wrote this sitting in a railway station that will take me home, yet so many trains stopped in front me that could take me to a lot of places, there was a part in me that wanted to sit inside one of those trains and let it take me to wherever it was going. Yet I couldn't do it, there was commitments waiting for me in the grey side of things. People that I want to meet(people I have been seeing all along), work to go to and stuff like that. I would have liked to call myself free and do whatever I wish and I intent on making it work like that. This thought took me to another place and I have decided to travel more, not to be a tourist but a traveler. Hope I can do this. Also check this video out that inspired me a lot. This is how travel should be. I am sure this traveler has a part of Turkey ingrained in him, I am sure he would have touched the soul of Turkey in his travel. I hope all of us can travel the way he did, sooner or later.

An oath to write!

Impregnated by the desire to write,
to give form to new words,
to tie them up with meaning,
and with it, bring meaning to my own,
and to discover me,
I live on with this desire,
Live on so lazily,
sulking the thought of effort,
dragging dreamily  my mind from one thought to another,
I live on with this desire…


Writing is what I dream of, writing moves my soul. I have written before telling how much I want to write, check this write up if you want to know how much I love to write - Why the ink should flow or pixels I say , but I have never written. Yes you know, I am so fucking lazy. Whenever I feel like writing I feel enchanted, but whenever I start to write, I think about the effort required and I very conveniently find out something else to do, like playing Fifa, or watching TV or just mindlessly wandering through my twitter or fb feed to find something interesting. That’s write, no productivity! Productivity takes effort and effort takes real effort. :P

But from now on I am a changed man, I will put in at least one blog a day, I mean WEEK! So here I take the oath to write! It will mostly be my philo drabbing or pointless rants but occasionally I promise to find something interesting and put in here, like beers or football or books or beers :P

So here we go folks! One article a week! :D