Maybe:

There’s a crow which lives on the tree just outside my living room window. He knows he’s different. Because I often find him spending time clearing his throat, making strange guttural sounds and then cawing in his own peculiar manner. He sounds like a teenager whose voice is just breaking. He keeps cawing continuously trying to sound normal like the other city crows. I feel bad for him….. ‘cause he sounds desperate in his effort to mingle with the others, sound like them….and not stand out from the homogenous mass. I wish I could tell him that he’s normal because he sounds like the crows in the Himalayas….only that he’s in the wrong place.

I wish I could tell him that I love his voice because he’s different….that it reminds me of my haven…..which now seems some light years away….
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More than three decades, and now it seems like a lifetime. A phase where things do not bother me like the way it used to before. Things are far from satisfactory but I feel calm.
There’s still lot to be done, lot to learn and I think I can roughly chalk out my path ahead. But what refuses to let go of me is this feeling since my childhood….this strange vague sense of longing…of searching for something which is perhaps not there. Usually the feeling is suppressed and lost in the daily grind…so much so that I don’t even remember it. It’s only when I sit by the sea looking at the sky turn orange and then purple that it boils over. Everything around me turns unreal and then all I want to do is run and escape….to some real parallel universe…..

Ghayal Nagar:

An apt sign which I saw behind a truck one night. Wounded city. That’s what I would call Bombay now. Infact for that matter, most cities in India now. Wounded time and time again. Survive, rebuild and then get wounded again. Sometimes I wonder, how long till one gives up and lay waste.

I once took a local at 6 in the evening. I looked at the watch and panicked. Wasn’t this the time when the train blasts had happened.

This time in Delhi, I hesitated before going to Lajpat Nagar to shop on a Sunday at 5 in the evening.

This is what life has finally come to….calculating time and place….wondering what is next.

If not this, then it’s a mad rush to accumulate all things material. You have a house, but you want another house. If not in Mumbai, then in Pune. You’ve got an Alto, but its time for a Chevrolet. A budget of Rs 1 crore for a house is no big a deal anymore. When I turned around and exclaimed that it’s an obnoxious amount, people around looked at me strangely. Watches, Clothes, iPhones, ipods, Macs…..you name it and they all have it. And still wish for more. There’s a mad rush all around you. Mad. Mad. Rush.

The more people crave for these, the more they repel me. Why do you exactly need them? And why a house in these congested, claustrophobic cities and fill them up with the latest bar from those expensive furniture malls?

Or is it just a way to keep away from the reality? That they are all wounded. Wounded souls in wounded cities…….And that’s its okay to be.