To and Then Fro (A story)

Little Edward inhaled sharply. Through trial and error, he'd figured out how to overcome the feeling of emptiness within his bowels caused by the fluctuations in the apparent force of gravity, by highly controlled inspirations and expirations accompanied by certain expert contortions of his abdominal muscles. Little Edward reveled in his discovery, and like the true six-year old scientist that he was, he liked to repeat his experiments in order to prolong the pleasure of his find. Hence, at present the small but high amplitude swing in the garden was what seemed to have the major share of his attentions. The swing, possibly unaware of the genius it played host to, continued its to and fro motion, the only way it knew how, and each time little Edward got a momentary glimpse over the garden wall of the sheep in the adjacent fields. Having mastered the skills of elementary arithmetic only recently, Edward tried to apply it to almost everything he saw or felt. There were numbers in his fingers, the stars and the clouds, those little orbs fleeting across his eyes when he half closed them (eye jellybeans, he called them), and even the beating of his heart. In the present instance, he was keeping count of two separate things - the number of oscillations of his swing, and the sheep. It was engrossing work, since he did not get to keep the sheep in view all the time, but only for a fleeting moment when the swing was at the pinnacle of its trajectory. He counted them one at a time, then two at a time, and it left him a little awed, but overall greatly relieved to have obtained the same result on both the occasions.

There were all kinds of flowers in the garden - flowers crying out desperately for nomenclature before Edward the messiah arrived on the scene. And Edward had gratified their wishes to the fullest the way only he could. The 'aunt Tabithas' chatted gaily with the 'grampa Millers' as they swung in the breeze, looked on by the 'little-Johnnys-in-socks' from a separate bed. There were the prudish 'blue chalices' in the middle row that talked to no one except their own kind, unlike the 'Gypsy flowers', who seemed very much at peace with all those around them. His mother had once tried to teach him the 'correct' names of flowers, but he could not for the world understand how such unimaginative names had caught on.

A huge bird that Edward had never set eyes on before suddenly flew down from out of nowhere. Bigger than Edward by at least an arm's length, it had a beak of the most provocative shade of orange that Edward had ever seen. And the splendour of its wings - he could describe that for hours on end if he only knew the words. There were at least seventeen different colours on its feathers, colours that Edward never knew even existed. It seemed to him that the bird had been sent straight from heaven as a special favour for being such a good boy. The bird gazed at Edward with the solemnity and steadfastness of a spaniel in game. Edward smiled at the bird, half-expecting it to be reciprocated. But the bird, apparently unmindful of the favour, turned around leaving Edward to gratify himself with a view of its hindquarters. And lo! All of Edward's enchantment with his surroundings vanished in thin air, and he got down from the swing muttering something about the general injustice in this world under his breath.

Walking slowly with his head bowed, he entered the house. He loved the house - the clear-paned glass windows, the odour-free cleanliness of it all. Last summer, he'd stayed at his aunt's place and there was this smell of food gone bad combined with cheap perfume everywhere that had left him nauseated for days. He knew every nook and cranny of this house as if it were the back of his hand. The china on the mantelpiece, the stains on the carpet, the peculiarities of every chair in the dining hall, and the little plants in their flowerpots so near to his mother's heart - he could see them with his eyes closed. He began climbing the staircase leading to his room upstairs a little wearily, but about halfway up he felt all of a sudden somewhat invigorated and climbed the remainder two at a time, almost in a stumble. On reaching the landing he hesitated for a brief moment, as if deciding which way to go. But he almost immediately made up his mind and instead of going to his room, turned left, towards the library.

The library was the one place in the house that let you savour a bad mood. The dark mahogany walls and the cold, marble floor could stretch a grudge for hours. But he really loved the library, he did, even though he was hardly what even he himself would call proficient in reading. But there was this giant children's encyclopedia in twenty-one volumes with the loveliest colour illustrations that had a life of their own, and that was good enough for him. They were kept in the topmost stack of the third shelf from the door, and he could not reach it from down below. So he grabbed three of the fattest books he could find and lay them one on top of the other in front of the shelf, himself on top of the last book so that his head was only a little below the topmost shelf. But for all his ingeniousness, he failed to grasp the imprudence of having the smallest book at the bottom, and as he reached out for his favourite volume on tiptoe, he lost his equilibrium. He spent a second and a half hanging on to the binding of the book, for it was very tightly stacked, but then fell and the entire stack came cascading down on top of his head. He closed his eyes tightly and braced himself for the pain, yet as the deafening sound of about fifty odd leather bound books falling through a height of six feet on hard ground stopped he discovered that as if by miracle that none of the books had actually hit him, save for an Alexander Dumas grazing his right shoulder. He picked the book up, with something of a tenderness - for it was a great favourite with his father and opened it. The yellowed pages were dented in innumerable places by moths and those tiny, silvery worms that actually ate paper. What distinguished it from all the other books was a faint smell of tobacco from being in his father's study over extended periods of time. Slowly and even respectfully, he brought his nose close to the page, and kept it there for what seemed all eternity (but really the greater part of a minute). When he lifted his head again, he felt almost heady with joy and his eyes felt a little itchy. He got to his feet, tried briefly to undo the mess he'd made with all the fallen books, lost interest, crept back to the Dumas, and on a sudden impulse, hugged the book tight and fell sound asleep.

Alien noises broke his slumber. He opened his eyes slowly - in fact, they would not open at first, as if they belonged to somebody else. He saw or rather heard a young woman sobbing hysterically and a man with a black moustache saying something in a tongue he could not understand at all. He tried to move his head, but it hurt like hell. He looked down at his feet and they seemed strangely far away. Fear gripped his heart as it beat out the rhythm of the unforgotten. He tried to utter something but the words would not come.

Doctor Amarand knew it took all sorts to make up his profession. The wailing wife was nothing new to him. They had found the man on the public road near the pub lying unconscious after being hit by a truck, filled to the brim with alcohol. They had brought him home and laid him out on the bed. Since then, he had oscillated between life and death with a frequency that was simply unfathomable. "Señora", the doctor was saying, calmly, almost jovially, "su marido ha tenido un accidente. Ha sufrido una lesión de la cabeza y probablemente no recuerda nada*..."

Yours sincerely

Jude

[* Madam, your husband has had an accident. He has suffered an injury of the head and probably remembers nothing.]

The Boy in The Bunker (A story)

He looked at the sky - sort of purple. A cloud splattered, purple sky, smeared with grey here and there. The sort of sky that made you feel the painter did an overkill, and if they'd only give you a decent brush, you could tone it down and be proud of the results the rest of your life. It was also the sort of sky that made you wish you could touch it from up close and see if its real. But it wasn't possible - he knew that only too well - he considered himself to be a connoisseur on what was possible and what never was. He'd been up there more times that he'd cared to, on a fighter jet, and he knew that it all seemed as far away and unreal as from the ground. It was just the same everytime. The attainment made you wish you could fall back on the pursuit, while when in pursuit, the attainment would matter the world to him. All of it was such a big bore he almost wished he could die, knowing well that that wish could be granted to him sooner than he wanted.

The smell of the damp earth jerked him to attention once more. Living in that hot, damp ad-hoc bunker three days in a trot now, you did not feel the sick sweet stench all the time. In fact it only got to you when you cared the least about it. He did not understand this - often when he'd take a deep breath with his eyes closed, trying to waken his near-extinct latent senses, and he might as well be sitting in his little cottage by the sea the way it seemed to him. An odourless, insipid atmosphere. The kind that you are so familiar with you almost take for granted.

His partner-in-combat lay sprawled on the ground beside him, face down - the coolest guy he'd met his whole life. A year older than the boy, he never really cared about doing his hair right or brushing his teeth before going to bed, for he never had a mother to tell him that, not as far back as he could remember. And the least ambitious fellow that ever tooted a harmonica. And his harmonica did not just play, it sang! Not something that pleased him overmuch though when the boy once told him, for according to him if singing was what you really wanted, nobody was stopping you from crooning your larynx out. You played because you wished for something different, and he would be mighty pleased if the former were to keep his compliments to himself till the time he knew better. That was him, that was his partner, and he was proud of him, too on the sly. And yet he was quite tender at times. He remembered how once he'd helped him cross the busy street holding him by the hand. He, the boy, was an acutely absent minded fellow who, as his comrades put it, had let his mind wander long ago - so far, that it'd never found its way back. Later, he'd confessed he'd never quite forgiven him for doing that.

"Its that same sky again", he muttered to his partner. "Lucky though, we have a breeze going. It was so beastly hot last evening I honestly thought I would start oozing liquid brain through my nose, I really did" And he made a pretense of inhaling with all his might, as if to hold the flow back, as long as possible. He took out a lulu of a handkerchief from his pocket that was once white but now of such an indeterminate hue as can be only caused by the lining of one's sidepockets shifting in the general direction of one's hindquarters resulting in the person's eventually sitting on it over freshly dug earth, and fanned himself with it. But he quit almost as soon as he'd begun, for the handkerchief was woefully damp from staying in his pocket for so long and his chronic hay fever, of which he'd had his fair share in the past few days.

"Hey, pass me that water bottle", the boy said to his partner almost exclusively out of his right shoulder rather than his mouth. And as such an attitude rightly deserved, he was ignored by one and all, or one rather, for there was noone else within earshot. So as if made self conscious by the sound of his own voice, he turned round and said - "hey, please pass me that bottle of water, would you?" But despite this condescension on his part, his partner did not respond. Oh, he could be an ass for the silent treatment, he could! That, in fact was the whole problem, in his opinion with all the ultracool people in this world. Most of the time they'd give about as much acknowledgment of your existence as a dog would to a flea. So he'd learnt to hold his peace the hard way. And yet, there were moments when he'd feel chagrined beyond all else and rather erroneously put the blame of most of the evil in this world to such attitudes. The problem, he'd then say is not because of the ultracool people there are, who are a rare species in themselves, with very low rate of propagation, god forbid otherwise. But there are these people who imitate them so crudely without actually becoming one of them, and that is where the trouble lay.

To ebb the flow of the rising anger in him, he thought of his girl. The only person he'd want to kiss and throw up on all at the same time. He remembered, oh how he remembered - that tiny pink frock and those saliva coated crimson lips. In fact it made you cry out to give her a different aperture for the purpose of speaking - uttering words as indiscriminately as the incinerators of Auschwitz. He was pretty young back then with cheeks as smooth as hers. He'd been jilted - indeed, he'd have been quite disappointed had it been otherwise. So, since then he'd been carrying around the ghost of her with him wherever he went, so that people he did not even know too well would have had no trouble figuring out who he meant at the slightest mention of her. "She was quite a one to share a good sunset with, wasn't she?" he said. He knew he'd said that rhetorically, and therefore, didn't even expect his partner to answer. " Oh she had a way of taking the sunset and turning it into one huge, wholly agreeable extension of her." He beamed to a passing slug as he said this. For a moment, he thought that he'd almost manufactured poetry and expected that very moment a swarm of admirers to materialize out of nowhere and congratulate him. But none did, and he started to poke the slug with a stick, till it fell down on the ground from the wall it was clinging to, acutely agitated.

Then, as he had nothing better to do, he started practising kung-fu moves against an invisible aerial enemy. He'd been brought up on a staple of movies where the combatants would not lower themselves to the level of guns and other artillery and preferred to use their bare hands instead. As a child, he'd often or whenever he chanced to find himself entirely unobserved, conjure up a magical enemy and pretend to pound his pancreas out. This form of amusement never left him, and later the enemy took up all sorts of forms such as an incomplete homework assignment or the playground bully (not to his face, though). On this occasion it was the heat in the bunker, and with sweat dripping down his face, he was very near to having conquered it. Then, as he was about to go for the finisher, the supreme move which could be executed only when the enemy is half dead already and which involves a 360 degree spin in the air with the right leg extended, designed to shoot the head off the enemy and send blood spewing all over. He made the jump, in fact it would have been his best jump ever, had it not been for that spoilsport of a loose earth beneath his feet. His leg rose a trifle too fast, before he'd actually intended it to and his head fell back creating a torque that the rest of his body simply could not counterbalance. He landed, hard upon his back, right on top of his lying partner, turning him over, exposing his anterior for the world to see. He did not expect a jump or a groan of pain and he did not perceive any. He wasn't even surprised by the pallor of his skin, the blue-black lips, or the bullet wound on the his tunic front right where the heart was. He'd known it all along, the past three days; in fact, it'd all been enacted right before his eyes, he being by no means the silent spectator! To this day, if you asked him which of the two had died, he'd tell you in the same tone that we would normally use to talk about the weather, that he still hadn't quite figured that one out!

Yours sincerely

Jude

The Jesus Prayer - First Post

I am absolutely and positively floored by the idea of the Jesus Prayer. I had been reading or rather re-reading Franny a few minutes ago. I was pretty agitated when I read Franny the first time, this is only the second time I am reading it and for the first time in my life I am typing fast, faster than I could accumulate all my thoughts. Well, I did read Zooey a bit more times, but Zooey is so much safer, the reason why I guess critics like it better. I do all this crazy research on anything I read - all wiki and all that - I do not know at times what I am coming to. It is as if i wanna get into the goddamn body of the person who's in it or who wrote it or such like. I have also decided that this time I would not be changing paragraph and would stop whenever i lose the impulse, however abrupt it may be. And there will be no drafts to this mind you, for it will all get published as it is, bar one single looking over for spelling errors and such trifles. So I was talking about the Jesus prayer. Now this is one aspect of spirituality that kinda appeals to me - I mean really, really appeals. I say that because I could never have a faith on a doctrine that is judgmental. Honesty, truth, love towards one and all, I doubt whether such things move me thoroughly. And I guess this appeal thing that I speak of also stems from a deep, ingrained overpowering greed that I have for more and perpetual happiness, a greed that transcends all the desire for money, luxury, or women. I do feel that it is partly strange that all this bothers me so, for I have been working up quite a pace now on the keyboard. That is because I am a Hindu, a part of the culture that has forever known the merits of the Jesus Prayer. Notice that I do not use 'merits in' which at once renders it so much more beautiful and comprehensible. But there is no Jesus Prayer left in us Hindus now any more than dinosaurs on earth. We have, in our greed to understand the 'nature' of things, even have tried to analyze the meaning of the 'aum'. I wonder why on earth the 'aum' should have any meaning at all. The aum is a beautiful word, in the sense that you have to use up a lot of your earthly faculties in saying it right. I heard that a good 'aum starts right from the bellybutton and moves all the way up in synchrony with your breath. So it is a very involving, engrossing word, not necessarily pregnant with meaning. But what I do not understand is how i talk to people mouthing the Jesus Prayer at all. I mean, its hard enough to read and I have had to pause it temporarily while I write. So how does a person go about his daily business mouthing that I wonder! Maybe they sort of retire from the cares of life to go into the forest or some and come back only when the necessary synchronization has been achieved, when their minds have been properly trained, not before. But i guess to have all that to yourself, I mean the prize - yes, that's the name I use for it and therein lies its true beauty. As the book says - I have not read 'The way of the Pilgrim' because i could not find it online and you cannot certainly find it in the stores around here - maybe I'll look for it at Amazon. this is the first deep breath I take ever since I started to write. It would be so rewarding if the authors of the better books wrote in footnotes exactly what they 'felt' at the time of writing a particular word or a sentence. then we would really begin to understand that greatness is a quality that is totally separate from the person in whom it manifests. Or 'greatness' is too shoddy a word - perhaps 'beauty' would serve us better. But never you mind. The Jesus prayer, Franny says can be uttered by anyone - that includes sinners, people without faith and even people who are secretly embarrassed by the thought of doing it. I mean they can be embarrassed by it while simultaneously doing it - isn't it just marvelous? As I said earlier, it does not behove the world to be judgmental. We live in this goddamn world. Its like you take a bacteria or a germ from your body - you kill it if it becomes a bother to you, but do you grab it by the ear and scold it, or say unto it a sermon to mend its ways? Its just the same with us and this world. If we are sinners, it is okay that we sin because that is the way we were schemed out to be - and if we are a bother to the world we live in its okay if we are exterminated, but whats the big deal about it? But I would like to pray incessantly - that's one thing that I would sure like to do ( I just scratched my shoulder, and incidentally am not praying 'cause I cannot simply do the two things together, the writing and the praying part I mean - its all too much, but I am determined to learn) and I want to see the God I do not believe in at all - would that be asking to much, I wonder! And of course there is the fact that if I was made out to be a non believer that does not infringe my right to meet up with God in any way. So the original Jesus prayer is something like - 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!' which Zooey explains is 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner!'. And I guess you may change this sentence to virtually anything of your choice. I have decided to take the liberty to remove the Jesus Christ thing - not because of any anti-Christian ideology, i assure you, but simply stemming from the conviction that I ought not utter the name of the God I do not believe in. So my prayer is simply - 'Have mercy on me, a sinner!' - a lot shorter. I like the mercy part, for who does not pray for a little charity, and I have retained the sinner part - for its right to call yourself that when you know that you will never be chosen to cast the first stone! So now I depart - back to the prayer, after I publish this and add a footnote that is - I just burped, incidentally - and maybe tell you all about how this thing proceeds in subsequent editions.

Yours sincerely

Jude

[P.s. - For the uninitiated, 'The way of the pilgrim' is a Russian book by an anonymous author that tells the story of a peasant who asks what it means to pray incessantly (the bible) - and travels to many places in search of the right answer. He finally meets some spiritually advanced people who tell him how - to utter the aforementioned Jesus Prayer consciously as ceaselessly as possible, and then something would happen that would sort of miraculously make it an automatic involuntary response of your system. And that will have some rewards therein.]

Ramblings in the ovoid

[Born around 15 minutes ago, in want of some charity!]

"Egg - dost thy mother knoweth thee?

"Wouldst thee ever see light?

"Reclin'd thou art doing nought:

Behold - the Sun shineth bright."

"Thy comely visage of virgin hue

"Faith, shameth thee the whitest swan!

"Sayest thee what wearies thee

That sleepest thou from dusk til' dawn?'

Sayeth the egg unto me -

"Begone - Oh, thou art a pest!

"Bury thy head 'neath the sod

And lay thyself to rest."

Yours sincerely

Jude

Comeback '10

After a brief (that is to say, a zillion years in broadband internet terms) self imposed exile, I have finally made it back past the initial misgivings and apprehensions to this slab of HTML. Its not as if I suffered amnesia or some kinda brain haemorrhage in the meantime; its just that this college thing with all its what-do-you-want-to-do-with-your-life-routine was getting on my nerves so bad that to put all that would go on in the inside of that mass of goo (surprisingly heavy - over a kilo of dead meat - to lug around with you like the hunchback of Notre Dame) beneath my crown into plaintext would be like trying to flush an elephant down the toilet. And I have never been an advocate of doing anything that does not come spontaneously to you (althought I do not also advise the vice versa, for we all live in a 'World' goddamn it, not to mention it having landed me in a soup more frequently than i'd care to admit!), so I'd stopped writing altogether (after all, that was the main motto behind this page - writing whatever comes into my head "spontaneously").

If I am honest, one thing that has deterred me from writing on several occasions is the general lack of readers, i.e. not only readers of my own blog in particular, but also readers of virtually anything but fb updates and tweets. And if I were to refer to my blog alone in particular, that is there too. I mean, what's the point when somebody writes with nobody to read it for them?It is like talking to the wall. Often people with grave identity crises (who would have themselves called 'elites' without bothering to tell the difference between raising themselves to that regard or lowering the comparison to suit their purpose), after fast-frequency hopping between several channels of conversation united by a common thread of jejuneness and discovering a network failure on each do sometimes refer to my blog page only to say that they have seen it, and it was nice! Seen my page, for god's sake! As if I'd designed it! I mean, come on - its mostly white with a few green and yellow bubbles for decoration that would bore a cretinous nincompoop - but perhaps I am overdoing it. There is more to life than that, and even a dimwit like me can see. If I could for once place my finger on the precise things that did matter I'd be a happier man.

I have decided not to have a baby (he he, funny that - for I do not even have a 'girlfriend', and am certainly not hermaphroditic). Not now ( the deciding part, that is), but a decade or more ago - something stemming from pollution, global warming and the general insipidity of life and the gross indifference of us humans towards making an effort to change any of it. However, that is another story, but right now, hypothetically, suppose I did have a child of my own - what then? What kind of values would I teach the budding brain-killer? The more I think about stuff like these, the more befuddled I get. Sometimes I say to myself that I'd teach it nothing at all save for rudiments like 'fire burns', 'food is good', and 'it stings like crazy sitting butt-naked on an anthill'. For the rest, I'd just allow nature (or what's left of it) to run its course. That would, perhaps, be the ideal. But I do not think I shall have the strength in me to sit unfazed were it to smoke pot in the living room at age 10. So I must do more. One thing is certain - I would not interfere with its personal tastes and orientations any more than is absolutely necessary. I would maybe even not so much as say that 'books are good' or 'you should read' beyond a 'this is what a book looks like - if you wanna know what it feels like, too, you must read into it' were it not for such a noncommittal attitude being a serious impediment to conversation. So maybe, I would just contain myself with telling it stuff I like or would do in a given circumstance, and hope that it would learn to take a hint. The kid would then devise its own interpretations for stuff that goes on around, formulate its own code of conduct, and so forth, and never be bogged down by the null and void norms of the society.

On the other hand I do not live on a deserted island. The 'society' menace looms at large and you cannot simply shut it out by adding an extra padlock to your front gate. Worse still, I wonder whether you'd be truly happy doing so, so why not embrace it as it is? We thrive on a purpose. It feels so much better to make believe that we are doing something constructive and our efforts are directed towards a particular goal even though we know, all of us that its ashes to ashes, dust to dust in the end. Without all that, it would be like a childhood devoid of dolls. So we go on playing our own customized versions of 'House', 'Monopoly', and buying new toys to dispel the monotony of it. And this is where society come in. It is the filling station of purpose. The caveman is lonely and tired and thinks its to his advantage that other people come and do stuff to help him out. So he goes to his brother caveman in the neighbouring cave and they decide to live together. Now, when an attack of the ol' gouts prevents him from going out to hunt, his brother caveman is there to lend him a leg o' mammoth to prevent him from starving. But he soon discovers that this arrangement has a price, and the leg o' mammoth must be returned at a later date, for which he would have to work a touch harder. Eventually other cavemen pitch in, and they have a colony. And thus empowered, he learns that instead of going out for food, you can bring food closer to him by manipulating the environment around him, and in the due course he ceases to become a caveman and becomes a producer. In his colony he learns that young so-and-so is a sissy and would do whatever he'd be told to avoid a beating and messing around with old whaddyacallit would land him with a cracked skull. This is why man teaches children to respect their elders, as is the case with freshmen and seniors in college, the subordinates and the administrators at the workplace - a tendency predominating almost every aspect of our daily lives.

To ensure that his neighbour does not chop him in half upon discovering that the meat the former had been saving for the winter has magically materialized on the latter's dinner table, they establish a penal system and a judiciary that sorts such issues in a 'civilized' manner. Other administrative departments like the one for food and agriculture, one for health et cetera spring up. And to administer the administrative departments, the department supreme, whose beauty lies in the fact that it basically administers nothing - the government, is founded. And now is the weird part. This government, composed of so many ex-cavemen, suddenly starts to behave as a single cavemen with an ego problem. These cavemen of the new world, like the original cavemen, also colonize to become even bigger cavemen. But, not without a fight though, for if Tom and Dick fuse to form Caveman III, Tom would not agree to fuse until Dick would agree to call Caveman III 'Tom' as well. And that goes for Dick, too. So instead of a consensual fusion, in most cases, the stronger of the two simply makes a quick snack of the other. Hence, the government teaches its people that its noble to fight for the government, and we behold the creation of another purpose in life, abstract at first, but with implications that affect every aspect of our lives and our lives themselves. Such is the extent to which people have taken this purpose to heart that we are yet to see a single gigantic super-caveman towering over the earth and sailing manfully across the universe.

A host of purposes is served singlehandedly by religion. Religion basically lacks savour in that it has no original purpose of itself. But what it lacks in savour, it makes up in aroma and presentation. Man's inherent stupidity makes it impossible for him to grasp the significance of a thing until and unless its written down in boldface on the largest prehistoric club and powerfully administered to the back of his head (perhaps therein lies the reason why man plans his day by looking at stars). So a purpose is like the cola that nobody cares to drink unless a celebrity (religion) endorses it.

These and various other stuff that are common to all the prevalent societies have given them certain similar make-believe goals to make their sorry lives a bit more fulfilling. So, to return to the raising a kid debate, should I teach my kid the exact same stuff that every other decent kid in a decent home is supposed to learn, or should I inspire it to be an original in everything through unconventional nurture and make a lonesome caveman of it? But then again, if I were to make a lonely caveman of it, what are the odds that it would not colonize of itself? Either way I guess we would have the same result. Perhaps it is the instinct of the caveman to cease to be a caveman after all. But when you have a caveman who decides to embrace civilization when all his friends have left their hunting-gathering outfits a long way behind, the others have a tremendous head start over the former, and the former, after selling off the title deeds to his old cave, and finding the new houses beyond his means is doomed to a life of destitution. This is what I dread, and such is what could easily be the outcome of a nurture gone bad.

So tell me what is the best way to proceed? Should I try make of it a unique and beautiful creature, unparalleled but on the verge of extinction, or a highly stable fragment of the insipid homogeneity deluded to the point of no-return? The reason I ask is not because I am eager to start a family (no way!), but because in the end we all need to raise ourselves the best we can.

Yours sincerely

Jude

Are My days Worthwhile?

[This one I wrote in 2005, on the very same day that I wrote 'A (street) dog's life', and to say that I was not very satisfied with the way my life was turning out to be would be an understatement. Yet it wasn't perhaps quite as blue as the verses say, and I believe on the whole  that its rather unmanly to cry over spilt milk. Here's the poem.]

Gone are the cheerful ways of youth,

Lost is that sunshine smile...

Tell me, as you see me now-

Are my days worthwhile?

Fear keeps preying on my mind,

My dreams have gone astray;

My laughter has a hollow ring-

The colours have all turned grey.

Freinds no longer call on me,

Their trust I did forfeit.

Greed has smothered all my love;

I'm armoured in deceit.

My legs are impaired of their strength

Afore I've trod a mile...

Tell me, as you see me now-

Are my days worthwhile?    

Yours sincerely

Jude

Voyage

[This poem was written earlier today at a poetry contest held within our college. The subject was provided then and there and a time of 1 hour was alotted. This is what I managed to come up with, and if nothing else atleast it will help add to the volume of this particular page.]

Out amid the endless seas

In a ship of blue and gray -

Peter Parker's maiden voyage

To places far away.

The mast is stripped of its sails

Like a wanton who is through;

The deckboards cry in agony

'Neath Parker's wooden shoe.

Whither he hails from no one knows;

Destination lies unknown -

"The journey is all that matters now",

Says Parker, all alone.

"For need we plan our trip, my friends

"When all roads lead to Rome?

"Meet 'ya where the journey ends- 

"Make ya feel at home.

"Look yonder, where the fishes are - 

"The sapphire skies above;

"Raindorps on your fingertips -

"Teardrops filled with love.

"And storms, they pass me by sometimes -

"Troubles, they come and go.

"Weathered through it all, you know,

"'Cause I love the sunshine so."

With that, Parker steers his ship,

Whither, he wouldn't say.

Set out on your maiden voyage...

Maybe he'll come your way.

Yours sincerely,

Jude