For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

Remember Dharmendra’s character in the Bollywood movie Razia Sultana? He played Jamal-ud-Din Yaqut, a confidante and lover of Razia Sultana, the first female monarch of the Delhi Sultanate. Jamal-ud-Din Yaqut was of Siddi or Habshi descent. The Siddis started coming to India from Africa in 1100 AD. They were valued as soldiers and slaves and many a Nawab, Sultan and even the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries imported them for their services. Now a study by Indian Scientists has determined the precise ancestry of Siddis. According to this study present day Siddis, who are predominantly found in the states of Gujarat, Karnataka and Rajasthan have descended from Africans, Indians and possibly Portuguese. Read more ....... http://indiabioscience.org/nod e/268

Have you ever read a book that has read you thoroughly? The pages that have tasted you. The words that have dislodged the dreaming chaos within you. Have you ever read a book that has crossed the oceans to reach you? Have you travelled on its cloth-bound wings to the shores unknown ? Have you ever searched for a book that has searched for you? Those unknown ones who have searched for you through a book. Have you ever met them in a book whose caresses are borne by the book?

On this endless street of noise where silence and blood jostle thorugh, sweat and smoke mingle, debris of lost love still lingers. I am a "lot of noise" in my head, horns blaring and myself. A "lot of smoke" in my lungs I am, sooty anger and desperation. A lonely pariah he was. A silent spec on that street of noise. His peaceful sleep is what I stole and since then have stored it in the lonely alleys of my heart.

Picture of sun setting at Gandipet. Taken from the top of CDFD Students' hostel. Well that was an age ago when the campus was still in Gandipet

Days have turned into weeks and weeks into months, as I ponder time and again. Wishing from the depths of my desire to change the bleary landscape, of this blank page. Words have poured forth since, the thoughtless, inarticulate words, conveying a meaning of their own. As if violating the theme by their very being. Defying the chisel of the wordsmith denying him the simple satisfaction of creation. Oh these delusions of an exhausted mind, blaming these meaningless words Distorting the truth doesn’t help much. Roaming through the streets, searching…. Walking past that beggar limbless, groping in the dust. An usual sight, failing to evoke empathy. Maybe she was really hungry, she and her little boy. Displaced from the distant land of theirs; had they traveled feeding on the hopes that this city would feed them. Ignored that extended hand. Ignored the slight nudge Ignored that inaudible wail. Time was fleeting or maybe money was. Had not the heart or ...

Through the threshold of the restless night, barged in a deluge. A new day it was brimming with brimless hope, it flooded the desperate world. And then everybody drank. But ignored was the flotsam of the past it carried into this newness. Amidst the proclamation of a new era, besides the figure of the rocketing sensex, atop the claims of a burgeoning economy, dwarfed by a meeting of cultured socialites, sabotaged by the achievements of capricious young I noticed her-sitting on haunches. On the background was her newly burnt house which was the foreground of her misery; old, decaying,dying and yet alive to face a bitter new winter without a family or a shelter. And those rioters whom she had known all along. Those known faces were arabesques of hatred-that primal feeling, but newer were the convolutions. New faces trapped in an older orchestration the politics of “isms”. In new age feudalism: industrialism land grabbing , forced eviction, distraught beings and a new age of desperati...

Have you ever weighed upon your minds the seemingly meaningless passage of time? Or have you ever thought that you could rescind this indefatigable steady mutation of thine happiness, sorrows, values and prime. Isn’t it a shapeless form defying al the tenets of established norm Imbibed with that characterless disposition which has always added to the philosopher’s confusion. Can it be arraigned of the assaults sustained on psyche, fomenting doubt; thinking the thoughts never thought about marring the possibility of happiness much awaited. What if it is absolved for having dissolved that painful lump in the heart or for having smoothened that crease on memory reminding, how you were hurt. How is conscience conformed? In eternal flow of time is it reformed? Art thou of the Kantian type? Then confabulations on conscience’s composition aren’t a hype. Doesn’t this ubiquitous ether Forms that tether Tied to which are our memories poor and rich forming the shape of the self; yet being that...

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. NEIL GAIMAN, The Sandman #65