Addictions

There are shadows under my eyes,

A burden of darkness plaguing the day,

My nights go without a second of sleep,

Disturbed by the echo of the rustle of language,

I can smell the ink and feel the roughness slide through my hands,

I can see the people take form in front of me,

Stories coming alive, and pictures moving,

The whispers reach me and the images glide past,

Zooming across with each letter, each word, each sentence,

Time holding its position, with bated breath,

The dots and signs the dam to the flow in my head,

Feelings and emotions germinating,

The beginning is marked the rest is unknown,

The path with twists and turns and curves unseen,

It’s a storm in the mind; the result is a search in vain,

Once is sane, the reason for the rest isn’t known,

Addiction would be an understatement,

But a book is all that pleases my eye.

Loneliness

Is it the distance, no,

It’s the shadow, so dark,

It’s clouding over the future,

Light is unseen, not a speck,

Not a ray, nothing’s visible,

I can’t find myself,

Let alone you, I’m lost,

I admit, in this haze,

A rainbow this mist,

So colorful, so absorbing,

There’s a storm coming,

Other than life thought,

It’s in my thought,

A fight in my mind,

Against myself, an enemy,

So formidable, as sharp as me,

Knowing what would come,

My eyes roam around,

For help no, for support,

I’m surrounded by people,

Who don’t know what’s happening,

To me, to my being, to my self,

That’s what it is, in truth,

I’m not alone, I’m just lonely.

PS: This is based on a paragraph from Bhavya Kaushik’s book, “The Other Side Of The Bed”.

Half A Story

I sat at the table, wondering about all those formulas, and how I would use them the next day, hopefully I would, if I remembered them. The pictures of the question bank were haunting me, and I hoped I would just clear the paper the next morning, just 7 hours away. All of a sudden, my phone pinged, and my expectation of the solutions made me look instantly at the screen, which was still displaying the menacing circuits.

It was a friend I had never talked with, but I knew of, and so the conversation began.

“Hello, I have read your blog a lot. It is very nice,” she began.

“Thank you, I’m glad you liked it,” I replied, as I always did.

“I wanted to talk to you about something, can I?”

“Yeah of course, but I’m not sure if now is the right time. I have a couple of exams tomorrow, and I’m not sure if i’ll be passing them. So…”

“Karan please, I’m sure it will interest you, please. You could even write about it on your blog, really,” Sharon pleaded.

The latter half of the sentence peaked my attention, and I allowed her to go on.

“It’s a tale about a friend and me; a close friend,” she began. “We used to read you blog together, so that we could score better in English,” she went on.

Now you know where this is heading, I guess most of you do.

“Damn, then I hope you did score well, ‘cause i’ve never quite managed to get good scores in my English exams.”

“We did well enough. But that’s not what the issue is at the moment. It’s something else. There are some screenshots; I lost some of them when I changed my phone, but there are the others. And there’s a story, of my friend and me.”

We all live in a new world, full of technology, and journals are now too mainstream.

So, BEE and Physics slowly hopped off from the background of my phone into the nonexistence of the RAM, and my whole attention was now held by Sharon, and her account. As she went on, I messaged my friend that I wasn’t going to sleep at all, and not because of studies. I would need a wake-up call, if I did manage to get a chance to shut my eyes.

Her next message brought me back to her story, and I wondered what was going to be so special about this story.

The clock ticked on as she went on and on, and after a long hour of listening to her tale, I asked her, “So, what’s new in this?”

That was when she cut to the main part, and it all started happening.

Wow, that was such a new and innovative way of telling a story. I’ve used it more than once, several times, and I still wonder why I use it. Repetition adds to the effect they said; destroys effect after use in multiple books they never said.

It was my first day at college, and maybe his too. But he seemed just like them, bathed in their color, their mannerisms, unlike me. Here I was, from a different place, different circumstances, a different mentality, different ideals, and different ideas.

Damn, does all this matter? No, it does not. We all know that this guy and the girl will fall in love, or at least one of them will with the other, and then there will be drama. So rather than wasting 20 minutes and 2 songs of a movie, and around 50 pages of a book, i’ll just go to the problem.

And another thing, the style of saying stuff doesn’t change, there’s just this blank page which says, Scene 1 and the place. And no, I didn’t have to read it twice to get it.

I knew I liked him the moment I set my eyes on him, and we were best friends as well. But I wanted more. I was quite scared of telling him what I felt, but then my friend told me that I should go further. We hatched a plan, and…

It always works, and there’s always an outcome, and it’s always the same- plain old Bollywood.

“You know something, I like you,” I said to him.

“I know, I like you too.”

“Really? You know what, I think we should go further, and…”

“What? Are you nuts?”

“What? Why?”

“I like you as a friend and not in any other way.”

The typical angry guy who leaves the girl behind, distressed, mopping and moping. But she tries again, and again, and again, until…

He didn’t talk with me for a whole day when I asked him for the 2^nd time. We sat together, and spent the whole day with each other like we always did, but he didn’t say a word to me. The silence stabbed at my heart, and tears dripped down my cheeks, all of it going unseen to him. He apologized the next day, and made me laugh till my stomach ached; he made up for the sorrow with what he did best, make me smile.

And then, I asked him again. All thanks to my friend.

The main heroine never has a say in her own life. She does everything according to what the hero does, or as per her friends tell her. (Rahul Gandhi dislikes this. #NoWomenEmpowerment)

“I know I’ve hurt you with my replies, and my ignorance. And I’ve also thought on the lines you’ve been talking of. We really are always together, just like a couple, and we do everything like a couple,” he said.

My heart raced faster than the Ferrari he brought to college, as he went on.

“But, I don’t like you in that way. I like you very much as a friend, but I don’t think we should go all the way. Maybe I could be your half boyfriend.”

2 points. Number 1: the Ferrari. Such an open exhibition of the wealth of the rich spoilt brat, and yes, a Ferrari in India. We’ve seen loads roaming the roads, haven’t we? Number 2: Half boyfriend. I guess that’s quite an equivalent of a BFF. But we aren’t mainstream are we?

And then…it happened.

The beep sounded, and my phone shut down. I connected the charger, and waited for it to boot up again, but till then she was gone. I began writing this, till my friend called me and told me that it was time to leave.

I would have written about the present and what happens at the end, but as the book is so not mainstream, but then I was too bored to waste another 100 pages, with a wild goose chase in a foreign location, and etc etc.

Well, to be frank, the half boyfriend just deserved half a story, and nothing more. And yes, you haven’t read that before, especially not in another post of mine.

Copies from the self, because copying from others is too mainstream.

PS: All connections made to recent happenings and other manuscripts are incidental and have been used and placed strategically in order to allow you to make the connection. All in good humor though.

Half A Review

Some authors write books for their passion; some write books to spread awareness; some write books to educate; some write because of the readers; and then there is the last class of authors who write to make movies on their books. Well, there are also those who write books just to get criticized, not by the reviewers on the internet or the newspapers, but by people like me, or just me at least.

“Aage padhna hai toh padh, varna kat le.”

Now you know what I’m talking off. This massive 260 page manuscript begins and ends with a bang, like literally, the start because of the excitement and haste to review the book; and at the end ‘cause it ended when I didn’t want it to (way beyond what I wanted it to be).

So, because being mainstream is too mainstream, this book was born. Well yes, it did say the truth, at least a teeny tiny bit of it. Walk in Madhav, a basketball player hailing from Bihar, yes, in bold, italic and in quotes, just for the sake of emphasis. For two vulgar dialogues in the desi tongue; a show of poverty; a display of hordes of people; and a macabre look into the insight of the people there, and their mentalities. His skills in English would make Shakespeare cringe, and that was really expected, ‘cause he learnt it from a famous Indian author, Chetan Bhagat.

With his broken English, this lad manages to get admission into St. Stephens College, in Delhi, in sports quota (which I would like to talk about at length), manages to woo a unhappy rich “chick” (as is used numerous times in the book), and also persuades Bill Gates to sponsor his home-run school. Now, that’s why I is so weak in English, you no?

Enter English teacher, female basketball ace, with features enough to win Miss Universe, the daughter of a rich dad, Riya Somani. So, we know all the clothes she has, due to the bland descriptions of her beauty in each and every type of clothing, and then comes the catch. She does everything the rich way, especially the entrances into the college, (just a BMW), her parties, her dressing, her ideals, and almost the whole of her is a rich brat; but she hates the rich way of life. Now isn’t that so very interesting. Her dream is all the more rich, with her just playing a guitar in a small bar in New York (such a dork!).

Or maybe, that was done to spread a message that we must all listen to our hearts, and not to what others say. Like, really! Just like the Bihar jibe, or the sports quota use. That made me go WOW.

So, we have a rich girl, a normal or less-than-normal guy, and he falls for her, and then there’s the romance, and then…a new term is born- half girlfriend. Read the book to know more, but at your own risk, ‘cause bottom line, its Chetan TheScriptWriter Bhagat.

Continuing, he loves her, and then there’s a drama, there’s flashback, there’s a journal, just like there was a psychologist in another book, and there’s the present which comes back, and then a wild-goose chase, and the end, which was known from the moment Bhagat wrote the first word.

That’s all about the book, and the official review is done here. Now for some fun, and a deeper understanding on the book.

So this is another example of exemplary copying, and it couldn’t be called copying, as it is a new way of lifting altogether.

Scene 1

Guy walks in for recruitment, talks brashly with the recruiters, tells them the truth about his life, about how he wants to be happy, and then gets offered a job, which he happily says no to, and then heads back to his village.

Nobility, with a 3 Idiots-y shot. Well, I hadn’t seen it before.

Scene 2 States

Mother retorts rather angrily to her son, and ignores his friend, who he has brought without informing her. With the Bollywood-y drama and the Hindi dialogues said by every mother in Bollywood, this scene was so innovative.

So very original! At least not copied, because lifting from your own books isn’t termed as copying.

When my as-he-wanted-me-to-quote-him editor Anil read this review of mine, his first reaction was that the review was way too short, and somewhat not precise. He also gave me the title, and from there, it inspired in me a thought.

“This is a half review. And well, frankly, the book is such that it deserves a half review and not a word more.”

PS: Special thanks to Simran, who gave me the book for a day. But yes, no thank you for purchasing it. :P

PPS: The views in the review are just my own, and it is at your own risk to follow them and decide to not decide to read the book.