Chronologically speaking,
Left India, came to USA, raging bouts of angsty home sickness, depression, work, economics, lovely strong cynical economics, love, teaching, gratitude, pain, longing, memories, distance, closing choking compelling distance like being stuck in a room with no corners just a globe of darkness that haunts your lonely dreams, you hear the voices far away, just around the edges, you want to go somewhere to that voice, the faces, the familiar scents of faces you understand, and they are just a memory.. as near as a thought, as far as only a memory can reach. I wake up and realize, that I'm here.. just here... still here, the trap remains, the hope of a voice distorts. Why am I walking here at 9 in the morning? I just need to wake up, and I'll be in a street somewhere there... I just fainted on the road in the afternoon in Nizampet Road and all of this, is just a dream, a dream, a dream that does not know how to hurt.. just a cruel joke some cruel thing is playing inside my head.. because it doesn't know how else to touch me... it just terrifies me, with what? Nothing. It has nothing but my sands of time on it's silky cold fingers.. and it plays.. plays with me.. I play along.. because I'm a slave. I swoon to be enslaved, to the addiction of love, the idea of purpose and other vague nonsense..
Hear songs, lots, but hear this song.. realization dawns (inside my dream of course..) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlDwgYWnJWY
The Proud Indian
If anything, I'm a proud Indian. I'm also an ashamed Indian. But I'm more a proud Indian than an ashamed one.
It took me to come this far to know the value of home. All
this while, I considered ideas of patriotism, religion, caste and home as lines
that divide people. But now I realize that we’re all divided by our uniqueness, we are all individuals and these places are the blocks that build our
identities, they are the mirrors we look into to search for our reflections, dreams and roots. And we are united as much by our differences as by our similarities.
And just the way we work every day to build ourselves, we
ought to work to build our country too. For we are our countries, in little
queer colours that we recognize only when we are out of the picture. My country is my pride, my contribution in return to all the beauty and blooms it filled my life within it-a shame. Even if it’s just to silence my ringing
conscience, I need to make the best of
myself and go back to it, better, stronger and more effective.
No. I'll just wake up. I've been pricked by the bewitched needle.. Please, wake me up, someone, anyone... I want to feel my mamma's cool palm on my forehead, feather light, kind, soft, absent minded-ly loving, so absent minded-ly programmed into loving me, that all the longing songs that the trees sing to the sun is nothing but a little breeze in a storm before the depth of her touch. Her love is universal and unique at the same time. Just like her kindness. A lot of things and creatures were kind to me, but nothing has been kinder than her love, that kept up with me even as I couldn't keep up with my self.
She is my mother, she is in India and she is India. May not be all of it, but a consequence of all of it. For such beautiful people to happen more regularly than once in a millenium, I need to go back and learn to arrange things that way. Because she is my definition of love. And India is what I love. I owe them both, in a queer way. Or I surrender to my conscience the distraction of owing to them either way.. I cannot differentiate. But all that I love, I love because I lost. I'm coming back to speak to them all. In a few years, or a few minutes, or decades away, like sunny timeless kisses by the sea shore the days shall float by.. whether the way it's done with a person that I love or one that I don't is the question... though, no, not really, a lot more lonely than that, but a lot more beautiful than that because the highlights of waking dreams are touched by lustrous truth along it's daisy white edges.
Which voice do I listen to?
