P2696

P2695

The water now full of bones,

A skull talks wise and cackles loud.

Creepers crawl, a fight with brawl,

There's more rain and hate in the cloud.

People are all numbered now,

One, two, three, one lakh say, or more.

Who knows, who cares, fuck them,

For the poor there's never any score.

Only if you're rich or famous,

Then only you coax a tear. 

How great was that man,

He drowned in a drain I fear. 

Holy the cow, tits up now, 

Floating as if a rice husk on tea.

But, no no no, don't simla go,

The hill station is under the sea.

Not climate change, holy heads nod,

But angry gods pissing in the sky. 

Relax, we have been too lax, 

To kill other believers we now try.

Hence you fill a form under water, 

So we know where you're from. 

If you are you know who, 

We save you for a holy pogrom. 

Full of it and more, fat ministers snore, 

In dry dream served French fry. 

The capital drown, Yamuna's frown, 

Hopeless when the helpless cry. 

Can't hide, put camera aside, 

Like in other places they did. 

This is the center, upended renters, 

Can of sticky worms inside the lid. 

Shelters like shit, too many to fit, 

We didn't foresee Yamuna like this. 

Diarrheal disease, and vector-borne, 

People huddle and wallow in piss. 

Holy our holes, the government trolls, 

But they too in the wrath caught. 

The flood rushes on, everything's gone, 

The responsible run from the rot. 

On land and on sea, as you see,

Bribed god and men treacherous. 

Phallus in mouth the laity rush south,

Into the waiting three headed cerebrus. 

In one fell swoop, the sordid loop,

The triangle is pristine and green.

The birds are back, nature back on track,

People forget and the repeats begin. 

P2694 People live so many lives

People live so many lives,

That are all so not me.

I could be somebody else,

Now who could I be?

It really doesn't matter, I infer,

In the end, it's a start and a stop.

The interim is a story of fiery storms,

You're a hero or a flop.

People here want to be the top one percent,

Then I'd be a fool to even try.

I'd just sit back in the ninety nine,

Face crooked with a smile very sly.

I'm done with this mad doing,

It's not something I subscribe. 

I'm a leader and I can't follow,

Especially when nitwits lead the tribe.

I'd rather be a zero,

And die a loser like I care.

Let them fight it out, the dimwits,

I'll get out of their hair.

I'll make pots and pan, I can,

Pottery is a splendid art.

I'll play with clay, yay,

I'll ensure a fresh new start.

As far away as I can, I'll travel from, 

The grinning saccharine plastic masks. 

The ugly rituals of masquerade, 

With enough hot tea in my flasks. 

Then a bucolic brook, where no city crook,

I'd live on my serene own.

Far from the sad shopaholics,

Watch the verdant yield I've sown.

I'll work and write and draw,

I'll let my mind roam free. 

I'll die in peace and let the insects feast,

Whatever is left of me. 

P2693

P2692 puff a poot

I don't know what it takes, do you?

Just like that I'm a king with a hat,

Nothing else rings true.

The land is vast and unknown.

But I tend to my shindig and spend big.

Commonsense of the commoner has been blown. 

My pit is deep, I don't sleep,

My mind is calculating a zero sum.

You sow the seed, but it's I who gets to reap.

No matter I think, in a few years blink,

This land will be robbed and full of gloom.

I'd have already left this empty stink.

If you lick my hole, be my troll,

I may puff a poot, a bye to you.

Otherwise plan on dying as a heathen soul. 

P2691 Mustachioed Hooliganity

The newly erected kingdom of India, as it were, is not one of castles, knights, and dragons. Not of facilities, education, healthcare, or employment. No, this kingdom is one of spirit, a shared identity among the shaggy masses who laud the mustachioed hooligans of yesteryear, long before the introduction of the rule of law. Watersports for people of lower castes seem to have about the right amount of silliness for such a realm. This week was filled with celebratory hullabaloo.

This Mustachioed Hooliganity is not quite anarchy, if their press is to be believed, but a throwback to an earlier time, when gods roamed the streets. Anarchy is for young, naive souls who believe in freedom, usually the opposition, minorities, atheists, lower vulgarities, and other obscenities that have not yet discovered how much hard work it takes for the appointed goons to keep them in their place. No, the Hooliganity is, in essence, a kingdom built upon the shoulders of the many mustachioed precedents of the past. Whereas these nitwits that complain descend from disgruntled natives who had done the hard work of civil disobedience and other forbidden acts so that the current generation shouldn't have to, but still do.

The rule of law has always been a tricky thing, especially when you consider that laws are essentially just words scrawled on a piece of parchment by someone long dead who probably had a lot more hair, teeth, optimism, and significantly fewer piles than the present generation and knew less. The hooligans circumvent the obscure parts by not consulting and are hailed as heroes in this kingdom, celebrated for their rambunctious spirit, captured in many a media tale, and their prodigious facial hair, revered in daily mustache-growing debates.

In the Mustachioed Hooliganity, there is an order in the disorder. Here, chaos is a friend, the ever-intrusive guest who shows up at the most inconvenient of times and won't leave until it has turned your world upside down, especially when your money stops working overnight. There's always a post-hoc postmortem offered, usually outrageous, even comical, but straight from Moses. These hooligans live by the commandment: If it's good for the leaders and doesn't kill me right away, it's probably okay'. This is the rule of the mustachioed thumb, permanently stuck up the rears of the citizens who like it. The kingdom of the holy goon-mongers wouldn't have it any other way.

 

P2690

Although I've sketched a future in some of my posts that seems to indicate things may be bleak, but the truth is, I don't know. The future is always a prediction based on models; that's what artificial intelligence essentially does under the hood, a statistical prediction in an ensemble chaos universe of random starts. A weatherman would understand. I am not a soothsayer but I'm emotional; I just react to personal events and circumstances in the country and around the world. When I feel less overwhelmed, and I feel more optimistic about life, I try to write about some of the positive experiences or what has worked in my life that might help others.

One thing is clear to me: India has some brilliant minds that are dying for want of nourishment. And although this post may not reach everyone I could inspire, I'm hoping that someone will deliver the news. The point is that it doesn't matter what caste you are, what your vernacular is, how old you may be, what religion you practice, or how much money you or your family have; if you understand how quadratic equations work, no one can take that away from you. I feel so sad when I see brilliant kids polishing shoes on the footpath in Kolkata. Or a girl that can shame an MIT mathematics undergrad working in a brothel. Our education system is meaningless if we can't bring education to everyone or provide opportunities. 

The point is, there's no such thing as a dull boy. If you're not interested in a topic, your brain won't be focused on it. We are forced into a vocation not because that's what we want to do but because that's what we ought to do, and even that through a corrupt process. Be curious. Don't ever be intimidated by a syllabus or the ignorance of those around you. 

You don't need to go to a good school to learn. Learning is inside the head. No matter where the student physically takes his body, the brain still sits immersed in darkness, and it is the brain that gets enlightened. You have to be your own tutor, and you have to understand.

The only reason you may not enjoy a painting is when your eyesight is blurry. You can't focus when you're not able to have a crisp focus, whether it's a page, the screen, or a face. Try it. Once that comes into sharp focus, your brain will start paying attention.

Every lesson is a pyramid. If you leave holes in a layer and try to skip to the layer that's on top of it, you now have two imperfect and fragile layers in the foundation. When you read a book, if you come across a word you don't understand, look it up and figure out what it means. There's no point in just flipping pages.

The world outside is as good as what you can build in your brain. Try to take an audio book, close your eyes, and try to visualize whatever is in the narrative. This is essential in establishing the visualizer as well as the articulator in the brain to cooperate in comprehending life.

P2689 I brood constantly

I brood constantly. It's who I am. I have ruined a career out of it, and I still have doubts that the diarrhea in the supply chain isn't entirely my fault. I mean, I'm just an ordinary multicellular being going about my life, but no one lets me. There's a tremendous amount of time and money spent on the diorama we call our reality, when in fact most of it is just rental props—stuff that you can own and must pass on after a lifetime. It's amazing how attached we all get to the stage and the knickknacks on it, and how little we value, and strangely, I feel, the real things that matter, like time spent in this life, and not fritter it away in counting the stuff scattered on stage or waste it jostling and fighting for them.

I guess having a defective brain makes me prone to failing to appreciate the beauty in violence, blood, and gore. The money that can be made, they tell me, is a lot. Yes, certainly we must keep up with the tribal rituals and proud traditions, and who am I to say anything? A mere nobody to boot, and then less, and even less, and so on, until the end of the sentence, where no additional information waits for you. Especially when there's no dearth of gurus with bloated bellies and puffed-up chests attesting to one course or another on how to do this or that. And they add that they accept all major credit cards. Bingo, there you go; your life is set. Just one course, and you're on your way.

However, mine are just inconvenient bits of unhelpful language that don't warm the cockles of your heart. In this parasocial mix-up of people that mix in their imaginary living room, lodged in everyone's mind, I assume they serve food and beverages. At least we can distract ourselves with the sound of chewing the food we're putting in our mouth, thus avoiding the necessity of putting anything in or, goodness forbid, a conversation.

My friends have told me that what you write makes no sense and, in any case, that no one reads it anyway. I agree, and I have nothing to say to defend myself. What I write may indeed not make any sense, as often this is just stuff that flows straight out of my thumb. Thumbs, more accurately, as that's what I use to type on my smartphone, and I just have an itch, and once I'm finished, I feel I can relax a little bit.

P2688 Mask

I'm promoting another long comment no one will read to a post. Hopefully maximizing its chance. The topic was fake happiness. Heck, that's the reason I started the Omnibus Omnia on LinkedIn: to discuss topics like this. But no one is interested. Just some bots spewing trite clichés and vomit. People just want to click on the trifles and stay happy with the fiction that's being spun, and LinkedIn is happy as long as it has traffic. And that's why most people have this pit inside that's slowly rotting. People have turned everything into passive entertainment—television—and turned their thinking off. Thinking seems to be work, and the prevalent idea is that if you're not getting paid for it, you don't better do it. I disagree. Sure, you'll make money, but you won't be able to answer or think through life like that and we'll increasingly look like that mask I've sketched, a dystopian dystrophic version of ourselves. 

 

Is not our reality a meticulously curated gallery of societal constructs, artificially erected edifices that shape and restrict the contours of our existence? Our thoughts, our dreams, and our fears—are they not constrained by these invisible fetters, these insidious norms that dictate the rhythm of our lives? Are we not ensnared in this complex web of perceptions, the veracity of which we seldom question, and in our quest to be happy, are we not offering fealty to these phantom realities? The answers are yes, and we are screwed. 

This happiness is the crowned monarch of virtues, the heralded goal of life's hallowed path. Yet, what if the reality we're seeking to be happy with is but an illusion, a grand narrative spun from the loom of collective fictions? What if that is making us unhappy? The issue is that the fictions that we have created to get the world to work have trapped us because we've started believing in them. Most people don't know what reality is today, and to wake them up, it would take peeling an onion several layers deep, and no one's interested. 

This trend of trying to force the appearance that everything is okay all of the time is more than an imposition; it's an incarceration. This modern-day prison is the reason why people lead a contrived, artificial existence. And in leading this life, some of them come unmoored from their real selves and self-worth, which feeds the feeling of being alienated in an increasingly individualistic society. As a species, we are not specially rigged for happiness; that circuit is driven by other survival imperatives.

We are that animal that defecates, fornicates, and fights and also fibs, and we should attempt to strip away the layers of fib, to shatter the mirrors of illusion, and to lay bare the naked essence of our species. Only then can we navigate the labyrinth of life without losing ourselves in its beguiling twists and turns. For it is one thing to be wearing a mask to the world and quite another to be wearing a mask inside, which is the reason for our angst.

P2687 Eink Reader

I do read books on a smartphone, but I don't own an Eink Reader. Well, I did; I had two. But some fiends stole it from me. They had initially posed as the sons of ministers in Assam. They usually do this in India to impress people, especially foreigners and NRIs who are not fluent or amnesiac about these nefarious enterprises. I was conned.

Anyway, long story short, I also got beaten pretty badly with hockey sticks, and a local taxi driver and his friends saved me from getting killed. In 2014, when Modi visited the US, I thought, like many who do now, that India had morphed into a place suitable for business. It has not. It's still the same corrupt shop it used to be, and you need to be a company as big as Amazon or Google or well versed in the Indian ecosystems to get anywhere or to absorb the shocks.

What works elsewhere doesn't work here, and the picture postcards are a lie. Indians are also very power-, race-, and wealth-centric; if you have a white partner, have a BMW, and have affiliations with real ministers, a lot of people will see merit in you, even if there's none. Indian businesses don't invest in startups; you have to come prepared with your own pool of cash, and if you run out of it, don't think it's going to be at all easy trying to raise money in India. All the grandstanding and pledges are brazen, untruthful statements; the government only wants the companies that have money to splurge to come to India so that a lot of that can get funneled into the dark alleys of corruption and nepotism.

You could become one of them. I was invited to cheat Americans, and funds were offered to me to start yet another clandestine operation, given my command of the language and my accent. When I refused I was lectured on the principles of business as they apply in India—an Indianized version of the Machiavellian end justifies the means. Kolkata has in fact become a center for fraud, and these centers are still doing brisk business thanks to the collusion with the powers that support them. I'd rather starve than be a conniving crook.

It's just a bad taste in my mouth when I see that I'm surrounded by people like this who think this is as viable a method of existence as any. And the kind of idiotic history that some of them have been fed, where anyone with white skin is a colonial villain and therefore stealing his or her retirement funds and credit cards can be morally justified, makes me throw up. What kind of distorted worldview people have. This is the reverse side of racism that people don't talk about.

P2686 Sabotage

While it might surprise you, the contrast in body mass index is rife and well in the city of joy, where it's not uncommon to find podgy women with groceries and a USB fan astride a hand-pulled rickshaw. The BMI does average out between her and the puller, a gaunt, almost skeletal apparition, but any suggestions of a wealth gap cannot be ascertained when such trips usually end with the rider refusing to pay or in high-pitched haggling for a few rupees. The lady then galumphs into her palace and continues to berate another mongrel of similar hardscrabble denomination, the house servant, for not being able to read her mind. 

The coils of human feces and the rudimentary sun are placeholders for the joy in the city. The artifacts of globalization and overeating are indigestion, that and a lack of public toilets, bad city planning, prarie dogging, and you get the picture, how to show, not tell, movement. The city is remarkably overjoyed with these and other types of protests that want to show you something isn't quite right, while the police and the enforcement are trying to tell, and allay all concern as mere childish annoyance. More coils. Smelly ones. 

The sun does what it does best: be sunny. But you can't tell; there's a brown haze of particulate human follies hanging over the city that, from a landing aircraft, signals I'm home. Feces floating towards god, or dust, or pollution. And since most of the energy of the state goes into accruing wealth for fourteen generations of beneficiaries, you can't blame them for negligence. At the national level, the leaders do it for their tycoon friends; at the state level, the beneficiaries are state level in their nefariousness, at least a promoter, a serial criminal of some sort, a psychopath of political repute, but certainly not the ordinary citizens. Those fools are use and throw, for votes. And you get them indoctrinated in a political party, and they fight like they're getting a cut of the loot, and the leaders laugh.

They don't. They get promises. Zillions of promises Promises to last a lifetime, at least the term, and then rephrase and repackage them, presto, the fools don't even notice. You dole out the same cheap, trite candies and more of those worn-out promises, but in shiny new covers, say, under a different party name, and they are back again with their tongues lolling out, like obedient dogs. You kill and maim a couple of thousand, and as long as there's no camera, it's as if it never happened, dissents or criticisms don't survive police plus goons. You buy the rest; most have shit their spines in their poop anyway. And that's how things work in a democracy. Easy-peasy. 

And with AI, a surveillance state mixed with state-of-the-art skullduggery will make it impossible for an incumbent to ever need to vacate the chair, no matter what. All kinds of Machiavellian schemes can be hatched to get people to rethink before they think; democracy won't survive; just as a namesake, but as an oxymoron.

P2685

P2684

P2683 I do look like an evil skull

I'm interrupted most of the time by the constant chatter of a self-recriminating critic. That's a crusty old man lodged in my head, and unless I'm really motivated, happy, or into something, I get easily sidetracked. I watched two movies, Nobody and Lucy, on my friend's Netflix.

I haven't been to a movie theater since 2014, and these are the first two movies in a long time that could hold me in uninterrupted thrall. When I'm off my meds, it's like that Lucy girl. It's like I have to keep myself drugged to keep me at a level where I don't fly off. My brain isn't normal; it's a fuming pot of all sorts of blurry juxtapositions of curvaceous ideas that often won't make sense to people who are sane. I can't pretend to know how other brains are, but it's sort of like the brain they depict in movies, where you're manic but not stark raving mad and without the graphics.

And recently, it's been this gnawing cavity pain that waxes and wanes and sometimes throbs with my pulse. I went to the dentist, and he gave me a laundry list of expensive procedures that I could not afford. I ordered some zinc oxide, and I'll try to get that filled myself. The thing with my poverty is that I don't "talk" poor, and if I claim I can't afford one expensive dental treatment, he proceeds to show me something more expensive.

And if your arrangement of canines, premolars, and molars is a feature exhibit that is fit to be on the cover of an archeology magazine, you're in India, in pain, extremely hard up, and you don't know what pain medicine to get: Temporary relief can be found in ketorol DT. It's an NSAID like ibuprofen except stronger, and if the pain doesn't go away, you might be looking at an infection in addition to inflammation. Double the trouble, but unless you have been profligate on antibiotics, an antibiotic regimen would help.

My dental x-ray shows I do look like an evil skull inside. I'm rotten, and something's rotting the bones, and it comes out in the x-ray. I'll be an evil poltergeist when I'm dead. The people who've engineered a slippery and steeper hypotenuse in the past or who intend to keep fondling my aspirational balls in the future better take a look at that skull and think twice. If I ain't a good candidate for an afterlife with a spine-chilling end, I can't imagine who is.

 

 

P2682

P2681 A nobody

Sometimes I feel like I might run out of words. I've already run out of many things, and I'm destined to peter out someday when the claptrap of the word-spool retires, frustrated with the reception. It's a crowded world, a world full of happenstance and probabilities that make jostling and sweating the only reward for the large majority of people.

It's strictly Darwinian and Malthusian; I realized that more in India, where a reasonable way to explain it would be to say that when someone's born, another falls off in the ocean. It's crowded. And the opportunity to work with the existing resources is often deceptively bureaucratic or nonexistent. The whole economy runs on the premise that if you make a rupee from a billion people, you have a billion rupees, but someone has to keep the equations balanced and keep these people at a point where they are in a position to spend that rupee, not if they are fighting adversities that are hidden away by the media, which never has the time to cover any real news. The advertisements of the shining faces of India that are portrayed outside are just masquerading an image that India never was, behind which the government and it's beneficiary businesses siphon tax payer money in the name of public projects to Swiss accounts. It's magic, except this level of collusion is well known and considered a well deserved dowry given to a politician. 

The real India doesn't live in villages, cities, etcetera. The real India lives in the myths that obfuscate the reality of what is real and what is not. What we need is to get out of all this culture-centric baggage, rediscover ourselves, and secure a place in the world. This caste system, these Hindu-Muslim-Christian religious barricades, have to go; if there has to be any fiction that's important, that's the country, period. Let all the old man on the cloud fairytale rest in peace where it deserves, in our libraries and our shared cultures. 

The corruption that continues to erode India is perhaps the only legacy that we seem to be passing on with great efficiency, with morally bankrupt people at the helm, goons festooned with accolades, and a generally well-nourished spectrum of propaganda that has awarded the Indian media the status of a jester. The self-congratulatory style of saying whatever you want to say while keeping your head buried in the sand works well and gets lots of sponsorship, at least.

I don't know why I bother to write these laments. Nobody cares. But somehow something compels me to write, just in case there's a future leader or thinker who might get inspired. Even a nobody has the right to dream good things for the place he calls home, no matter if that place is hostile to him, or doesn't want him. I was born here, and that's something that's not going to change, nor are the impressions of my childhood years that has been formative in creating this neural network I call me.