Fragmented thoughts of a demented soul

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, no body goes, it’s awful”, perhaps one of the best lines that captures ennui in all its horror. I’m tired of the way things go; I’m tired of my ways of thinking. So stale it has become that nothing fresh comes out. ‘Take a break and wander’ says someone from deep inside. Nopes, too lazy to do that. I no longer believe in lasting happiness provided by others. Perhaps I’m too proud to admit that someone can just shatter me by their indifference, insensitive behaviour or lack of concern.

There was a time moods got changed so drastically that I used to think that I had bipolar disorder. Even now, sometimes I burst with energy and experience ecstasy. Despair no longer shakes me the way it used to. Even drinking has become kind of boring. It would’ve been great to sip rum sitting alone in a corner of my favourite watering hole after the end of a hectic week. But when there’s a slump I prefer to drink to overcome boredom. Now the routine itself has become boring.


“Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal. It’s a meditated act, a non-instinctive unnatural choice” says Italo Calvino. There was a time I walked around scattering such ‘borrowed wisdom.’ No longer. Even the other day I came across with that; my colleague’s husband. He didn’t wait for the bell to toll for him. Four pegs of Royal Stag Whiskey that night, an effort to shrug off the pall of gloom or my excuse to get drunk? No idea. And that person was sitting nearby, the one who is obsessed with the phrase ‘at the end of the day’. Last time he was sitting next to my table and was peppering each of his sentences with an ‘at the end of the day’ in his yellow voice. But fortunately, this time I was at a safe distance. Life teaches, life is the ultimate teacher. Across continents, decades back, in a certain market place a teenager named Florentino Ariza stalked Fermina Daza wondering why no one else’s heart fluttered the way his did at the sight of her. Oh! My…


I had thought myself as an existential hero on the lines of many Malayalam novels that herald modernism and which I devoured religiously as a teenager. Once, while talking, a friend opined how fortunate he was to have read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘The Fountainhead’ quite late in life. ‘Otherwise they would’ve fucked up my brain and ruined my life irreparably’, quipped he.


I’ve things to do. But I’m terribly de-motivated at the moment. Laziness bogs me down. Books get piled upon my table with ‘A House for Mr.Biswas’ being the latest. How much I longed, how eager I was to finish anything and everything by Naipaul as I was taken to ‘A Bend in the River’ just like the proverbial duck to water, a few months back. “THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS.” What an opening line! And that promptly ushered me in. Hopeless romantics lay your hands on it if you haven’t yet, you may get cured. Naipaul, they say, has a cynical worldview. I think it needs to be changed slightly, to clinical. ‘The past doesn’t exist. It’s not an entity; it’s just your memories. Trample upon your past.’ That’s Indar’s advice to Salim. Can’t help thinking of Osho.

What’s it that I’m trying to do by putting it across the blogosphere risking ridicule? What it’s all about? Some may attribute it to inflated ego, psychic disorder, lethargy… ‘How fragile’, some may exclaim. Perhaps one or two may find it even interesting.

Today, as I was coming down from the third floor after having breakfast, the lift, yes the same ‘male lift’, closed in with a “tupa-tupa” as soon as I entered, yes, the very first sound one hears at the beginning of the song ‘buffalo soldiers.’


I know where happiness lies. But knowing alone doesn’t help. Perseverance is the key, the willingness to stretch oneself beyond. “Overcome thyself”, urges Nietzsche. But there are black holes, trying to gobble me down. “It’s no small art to sleep: it’s necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.” I walk around during day time half asleep, pretending to work, and lose sleep at night, during those unearthly hours. Sometimes it’s
dreams that intrigue me. Indecipherable and unexplainable are they. Of the dream I had last night a name remains, ‘Kuppan Paappan’. I don’t know who’s that. It was a part of the sentence written on a wall in Malayalam that means “doesn’t Kuppan Paappan know that everyone will die”?

It’s one of my wishes to hover down on a feminist while she reads ‘Zorba the Greek.’ It will be great to watch her expressions change without batting an eyelid. When I said this to the friend who consider himself fortunate for not having read ‘Catcher…and ‘The Fountain… early in life he nodded in agreement with great interest. But all he wanted was to know their opinion, scrutinizing facial expressions he didn’t seem to believe in. Sane he is, I guess.

I used to smoke a lot. At one point in time I smoked two packets ‘wills’ a day. It had its toll on me, later. Still, I smoked occasionally. But nowadays, it’s come to an end, forever, I think. Zorba’s father, ‘who smoked like a chimney’ stopped it instantly annoyed at his annoyance for forgetting to take tobacco to work. It was then I saw someone overcoming himself with such great conviction.


Change, I need it so badly. It’s killing me slowly, this predictable cycle, my animal like existence. I need to get back to life with a lot of energy. I need to take myself beyond the ‘killing zones of comfort.’ Silence is golden; I’m talking about the silence one feels in one’s mind. A total absence of clamour. But often my mind is a battlefield “where ignorant armies clash by night”. And hence I know how precious it’s to have a calm, balanced mind. For sometimes, though rarely, I reach that blissful state.