Life, Musings, Misadventures, Epiphanies by Arun Raj

Bare! Bare it all, Into that long night. Like a mother, To her baby, a tiger to its prey. Fail! Fail deeper Into the deepest chasms. There, in the unending dark Of the pits of drear, are answers more dear.

<Beware of the night> ...  Somewhere in the night's silence lies peace. A wayward feather drifts aimlessly in the winter breeze. 'Freedom', said the messaih, 'is and is not'. Words trickling unbound through my mind's mazes -  Of witch hunts & bubble teas, failings & mishti dahi. Bare white the canvas of future, but bloody to me. Fair maidens say, 'look to the green side'. Lustful of the free, Mothers of a playground talk. Thoughts - many - flow upstream on rivers of anxiety. Dark truths pushing downstream. I spoke to the sun of a day like today; About taking freedom from a random world. 'Take it all, but not my heart' wished I to my current captor. 'Let me be the wayward feather, the unbound mother, the paint-less canvas.' The sun said to me, 'Freedom is and is not'. ...  

A fickle shimmer of a once bright star - I  Am neither one nor zero - a quantum inadequacy. A presence so insignificant - so much so An attempt to quantify me is banal.  Why so do the unfamiliar many Want to steal my fickle shimmer? I wonder. I fret.  Incessantly, as I flicker through the day,  The days merge into nights & light years pass by. The end - somewhere out there. At the end of infinity times infinity. Ah! Infinite time, we should curse. Right? For no other feels guilty enough for our somethingness. Let's fight time! Let's fight infinite futility. For a definite end to this current particulate existence. Beam me out Scotty, not up, from now. Or, may be I am wrong! The Naive many think death is right, Away from flickering away as a quantum inadequacy. Never fully formed, never fully there. Forever more, forever so, stringed up in a causal loop. The confident Masses think forward is right, Away from a non-zero existence. Confident - more energy is more mass is more

Continued from Part 2: Arjun the Contender ... Arya set his wooden sword back into his belt and bent down to settle himself into position. Like most great champions, Arya had his superstitions. Left leg knee went down first, then switch to right leg knee. In Arya’s eyes the world looked different. His world was now the scene of a live colosseum, where gladiators fought for glory. In his ears, the sounds of murmuring children around him were like a 100,000 strong crowd willing him on, to kill at will.  Shabaaz stood by Arya, pumping him up. “You were made for this! Focus on this moment. Fly like a butterfly & sting like a bee.”, encouragingly Shabaaz said to Arya. Both highly driven followers of Muhammad Ali.  While Arya had his superstitions and Shabaaz, Arjun had his younger brother, Virat, by his side. Virat never left Arjun’s side. Virat was 3 and a bunch of energy and seemed to always hunt for trouble. Arjun found it comforting to have his brother by his side and out o

Every weekend I returned from college, the four of us - mother, my two sisters and I, we had a little ritual. We had dinner under the open skies on the terrace of our home in Kerala. The typical city dweller might awe at this experience, but this was a regular for us. The beauty of most homes in Kerala is that there is space left around the home for plants, coconut trees, mango trees, teak & then quite a bit of strolling space. After dinner, we sat up a little later into the night, after keeping only the necessary lights on about the house, and lay down on the terrace together to star gaze and marvel at the night sky. Mom was the child in our family of 5, she still is. It was Mom, who like a fascinated child would ask a naive question like - ‘What lies beyond these stars?’. My sisters had & still have an aversion to the philosophical and were always the last to engage. It was then left to Mom & I to argue out our versions. Quite predictably, I approached the q

Continued from ... Some marbles from an earlier game, Arjun had started, lay lazily inside the circle drawn for the game. In the background one child intently looked, while Arjun collected & cleared all the marbles in the circle, reminiscing at all the marbles he lost in the match that he had wrapped up with Arjun just prior to Arya reaching the game area. For both Arya & Arjun, the game of marbles was an important part of who they were. Cricket & other common games seemed too insignificant to their marble player identities. For them, the game required individual precision, which seemed a much more challenging task like the games of tennis or badminton. Although both were exceptionally technical players of cricket & football, here they had something more - an arch-rival, someone who they defined their identities around. Legends were drawn against their rivalry often. One legend says, Arya & Arjun kept at a match of marbles for 18 hours at a stretch, and yet no